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On her first official mix album, the Tokyo DJ unveils an intricate, inspired playing style whose value system differs from the typical dancefloor mix. | On her first official mix album, the Tokyo DJ unveils an intricate, inspired playing style whose value system differs from the typical dancefloor mix. | Various Artists: Powder in Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-powder-in-space/ | Powder in Space | In the 19th century, as unions throughout America pushed for the eight-hour workday, striking workers from coast to coast crowded the streets chanting a slogan for a better future: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will!” The last part of that slogan, the eight hours devoted to “what you will,” remains one of the labor movement’s most radical demands. The idea of leisure time for all, a space in the day to pursue whatever you want—be it something or nothing—is worth fighting for, especially as it becomes more elusive and harder to fulfill. Because in those hours you’re not toiling away or passed out, beautiful things can happen. The music of Momoko “Moko” Goto—aka the Tokyo-based DJ and producer Powder—is a testament to that.
By day, she works in the accounting department of a technology company in Shibuya. Doing mostly data entry and clerical work in a windowless office, she’s unable to listen to music until she takes lunch or when she makes her way back home. It’s at night, back in her apartment, she’s able to finally listen and create. That act of post-work creativity seems like a release from the pressures and banality of of the day. And holed up in her spartan home studio—a pair of synths, two drum machines, a turntable, a pile of records, and a laptop—she’s crafted one of the most vibrant and versatile catalogs of dance tracks in recent years. Even though she’s a genre hopper—her small and growing discography reveals someone curious about every imaginable vernacular expression of house or techno—Goto’s music is united by one overarching goal: Making the most of the hours she steals away from work and sleep, turning that time into pure positive energy. It gives her a music a very particular mood—a sort of focused and concentrated languor; a feeling of utter, electric relaxation.
The same philosophy is evident in her DJ sets, and with her latest release, an hour-long mix called Powder in Space, made for Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space label, you’ll find everything you need to know about one of the world’s most interesting DJs and producers. Her mixes have a different set of values. They’re interested in what you might expect, like creating avenues for dancing and crowd pleasing, but she also spends a lot of time tinkering with tactility and texture. There’s almost a certain touchability to the music she selects on Powder in Space, like in the soft, downy noise and scratchy synths of the opener, Samo DJ and Hidden Operator’s “Захват Сзади Rox,” or the chunky woodblock percussion of Don’t DJ’s “Southern Shore.”
By creating a space that feels physical and close by, her playing toys with a listener’s sense of expectation. Even though the set, like all good mixes, flows in smooth, uninterrupted locomotion, surprise seems to await at every corner. That Powder can pull of a feat of casual DJ daredevilry like a three-song sequence in the middle of the set—moving seamlessly from galloping beats to sweaty noise music and then glitched-out breakbeats—speaks to her powers of control and invention.
But the best part of this series of songs is the pair of original productions she’s snuck in: “Gift” and “New Tribe.” Each, in a microcosm, explains what makes her such an arresting talent. The former, with its kaleidoscope of drum-machine pulses and strutting keyboard chords, is that Platonic ideal of vibrant leisure her music aspires to. The latter is a doozy in its own right—a daunting acid track that climbs and climbs until it breaks through storm clouds to be greeted by a chorus of angels.
More than anything, the real pleasure of this mix comes from how it invites us to slow down and appreciate the handiwork. It’s a patient and novel sequence of songs that beckons listeners into Powder’s headspace. Tucking into this one-hour mix—whether piecemeal or in its entirety, in the background or in a bout of focused listening—is all about carving out a sense of possibility and making Powder’s fantastical vision of downtime a thing of reality. | 2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Beats in Space | February 16, 2019 | 8.1 | 91e10310-52ce-4413-981c-6440b18d4d52 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
If you only buy one dubstep album this year... | If you only buy one dubstep album this year... | Burial: Burial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9138-burial/ | Burial | The past 12 months have witnessed a flurry of reminders that dubstep can be more than just an intricately sculpted deathmask for UK garage's sarcophagus. Skream's 'Request Line", fluttery and propulsive, was the sub-genre's most enchanting love letter to grime yet. Pitch's "Qawalli" went in the other direction, its distant low-end tribal thud and ghostly shards of accordion rejecting rigor mortis futurism in favour of necromantic fluidity. And then there's Burial, whose music is somewhere between these two poles, and also somewhere else entirely.
The most immediately striking aspect of this heretofore unknown producer's eponymous debut is that its beats are reminiscent of "proper" 2-step's frisky agility; except Burial's rhythms are nervous not joyous, their fleet-footed insubstantiality evoking the fear and dread of dubstep. It's not the delectably programmed beats that stick in your head, however-- else Burial would simply be Horsepower Productions redux. Instead, the success of this music lies almost entirely in its unexpected and unabashed emotionalism. Above the edgy beats hover layers of lugubrious synths, passing over one another like successive waves of blue and purple rainclouds. (The beatless "Night Bus" actually samples rainfall to heighten the effect.) Combined with its tense, busy rhythmic arrangements, the effect is reminiscent of the more cinematic late-90s techstep of Hidden Agenda or Dom & Roland.
Burial also sporadically resurrects the 2-step practice of sampling and fucking with female vocalists: On album opener "Distant Lights", a bleated "Now that I meet you..." drifts from the swirl like Brandy caught on the other side of the looking glass. This is Burial's best trump card: The handful of tracks with sampled vocals stand well above their brethren, possessing an almost manipulative quality of quivering emotional directness. Far from speaking of final resting places, the overriding vibe is one of homelessness and rootlessness, and the nagging feeling that something important has been mislaid. Thematically and sonically, the closest reference point is Tricky's eerie, foreboding "Broken Homes" (ironically, Burial's own "Broken Home" is perhaps the album's most upbeat moment, sampling a winsome reggae crooner); I'm also reminded of the black eyeliner melodrama of parts of DJ Shadow's The Private Press. Some may scoff at such middlebrow reference points, but it's these resemblances, rather than any fidelity to inner-London dance music, which makes Burial's music such a viable crossover candidate.
If anything, Burial is weakest when he conforms to the undemonstrative grimness of dubstep proper: The Spartan, assymetrical groove of "Spaceape" (featuring the MC of the same name) might sound impressively muscular over a soundsystem, but it's also the album's only genuinely unlikeable moment, and some otherwise interesting tracks such as the brooding "Southern Comfort" are dragged down by an air of tight-eyed stiffness, as if afraid of the open expressiveness which the album's highlights revel in. More generally, what prevents Burial from being quite as spectacular as its strongest moments promise is simply its inconsistency-- what we have here is a brilliant EP padded out with sketches and noble failures.
For the future, Burial would do well to concentrate on deploying these amassed secret weapons simultaneously, as he does on the astonishing "You Hurt Me", where a spiralling 2-step rhythm, foreboding Middle-Eastern drones, a disembodied diva plaintively moaning the title and a too-fleeting but essential sampled "Drop!" coalesce into a groove that's unnerving, mournful, and compulsively physical. Shepherding together so many familiar musical impulses, it's how Burial spins them into webs of torturous beauty that can make this music so compelling. | 2006-06-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-06-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | June 21, 2006 | 8 | 91e90525-6b2e-455e-a23a-9d30d2f453d3 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
On Shut Down the Streets, the New Pornographers' Carl Newman is writing autobiographical songs for the first time, about the birth of his son and the death of his mother. Though for the most part, the most heartfelt, eloquent statements here are expressed musically. | On Shut Down the Streets, the New Pornographers' Carl Newman is writing autobiographical songs for the first time, about the birth of his son and the death of his mother. Though for the most part, the most heartfelt, eloquent statements here are expressed musically. | A.C. Newman: Shut Down the Streets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17200-shut-down-the-streets/ | Shut Down the Streets | When Carl Newman of the New Pornographers rebranded himself as the more authorial-sounding A.C. Newman for his first solo record, 2004's The Slow Wonder, indie's foremost creator of over-caffeinated pop-rock signaled a small but important change in direction. On his own, Newman took a deep breath and a couple of steps back from the hopped-up band dynamic of the Pornographers; as A.C. Newman, he was presenting himself in the mold of the thoughtful and introspective pop composer. Wonder and 2009's Get Guilty weren't all that removed from the Pornographers in terms of sound, especially in light of that band's contemplative and somewhat draggy 2007 transitional effort Challengers. But Newman's solo sensibility has been steadily marching toward full-fledged "mature" singer-songwriter-isms for a while now, and the process reaches its full fruition on Shut Down the Streets.
Not only is Newman writing autobiographical songs for the first time, he's announcing it in interviews, underlining the impact that the birth of his son and death of his mother had on his creative process. "There were all these things that just seemed so mammoth, and I was trying to make sense of them," Newman recently told Exclaim! "But at the same time, there's also this subtext of, 'Everybody goes through this. This is so earth-shaking, it seems so impossibly sad and, at the same time, happy.' I didn't want to portray it like I felt like [I] was the first person that's gone through this." The happy/sad divide doesn't only exist in the songs that address fatherhood (the sweetest being the dad-to-son advice-dispensing "There's Money in New Wave") versus the songs about death (the wistful title track). This dichotomy also appears in the space of the same song; on the enchanting "I'm Not Talking", Newman sings about the fear of loss that accompanies getting the family life you've always wanted, over the album's most robust melding of acoustic strumming and lush synths. "Until there's a reason to think I have a shot at redemption/ Until then I'm not talking," he says, hoping to beat out a cosmic jinx.
In the press materials for Streets, there's a defensive aside about the critical prejudice against so-called "dad rock," which in this context refers specifically to music explicitly exploring the joys and melancholy of early parenthood. Streets belongs in the company of records like Wilco's Sky Blue Sky and the Walkmen's Heaven that similarly touch on grown-up themes of responsibility, aging, and the never-ending fight against fucking up a good life you've worked long and hard to establish as middle age looms.
These are worthy, if terribly un-sexy subjects for a record. Newman has never been a lyricist comfortable with direct and easily discernible statements, even (or perhaps especially) when he's writing openly about his own life. But the most heartfelt, eloquent sentiments on Streets are expressed musically. Even if you ignore every word he sings on Streets, the album telegraphs an unsettled sense of contentment. "You Could Get Lost Out Here" includes references to "roots in the ground" and uses a wilderness metaphor to describe the disillusionment that lingers in the background of any long-term relationship. But it's the music-- a sad-sack cowpoke waltz graced with stunning steel-guitar-- that truly makes "Lost" a heartbreaking plea not to let hard-won love unravel.
It's no surprise that a writer as precise and tasteful as Newman would be precise and tasteful with the musical aesthetic of Streets. He's zeroed in on late-70s psych-tinged and synth-accented singer-songwriter records-- specifically referencing the Gordon Lightfoot song "Daylight Katy"-- as an inspiration for the album's "acoustic baroque" sound. The material on Streets that sticks to this vein is most successful; unfortunately, Newman can't sustain the mood over the course of the whole record. Where the album falters, ironically, is with the most Pornographers-like songs, particularly the too-clever "Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns", which never quite takes off, in spite of a springy bassline and backing vocals from bandmate Neko Case. "Strings" is another non-starter, piling on layers of keyboards and guitars in ways that feel out of place on what's otherwise intended to be a quiet, late-night-with-a-sleeping-baby record.
A would-be song cycle, Streets finds Newman opening up like never before, but it's ultimately stymied by a lack of nerve. Newman's melodic gifts continue to serve the emotional core of his songs well, but he pulls his punches with opaque lyrics and too many wheelhouse-sticking power-pop cuts that keep Streets from achieving the impact it could have had. | 2012-10-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / Last Gang / Fire | October 10, 2012 | 6.8 | 91ee6ac2-2a91-47d5-ab37-fe9b394c9291 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s latest is a patchwork of new and old material with some gorgeously off-the-cuff strummers and unvarnished folk songs that start to detail his curious shape as a singer-songwriter. | Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s latest is a patchwork of new and old material with some gorgeously off-the-cuff strummers and unvarnished folk songs that start to detail his curious shape as a singer-songwriter. | Field Medic: Floral Prince | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/field-medic-floral-prince/ | Floral Prince | About three months ago, Kevin Patrick Sullivan posted two songs to SoundCloud under the name Paper Rose Haiku—a Kratom-influenced alter ego that he described as “a cowboy [crying] through AutoTune over a trap beat.” Newly sober, Sullivan considers Paper Rose Haiku an anomaly, a demon that emerged during an unfortunate relapse, existing only to be exorcised. In truth, it’s more of an inversion of what he’s been doing for years under his more well-known moniker of Field Medic. Frequently shirtless, flamboyantly mulleted, and aligned with emo-rappers like Bladee and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Sullivan often sings of the acute sadness that follows when pills and sex fail to keep his baseline sadness at bay. He just does these things in an astringent, high-lonesome wail over fingerpicked, open-tuned acoustics, captured on hissing 4-tracks—a clash of both the authenticities and affectations of purist folk and SoundCloud rap. Floral Prince is the first Field Medic release Sullivan attributes to the “full-time freestyle” approach encouraged by his therapist—and like Paper Rose Haiku, “full-time freestyle” isn’t so much of a break with his past, just a cooler way to describe what he’s been doing all along.
A patchwork of unreleased material, previously available singles, and his YouTube “field medic show,” Floral Prince is functionally similar to 2017’s Songs From the Sunroom, a compilation that marked his signing to Run For Cover and included self-explanatory songs like “do a little dope (live)” and “fuck these foolz that are making valencia street unchill.” Despite Sullivan wanting to sidestep the pressure of making the follow-up to his proper debut, 2019’s fade into the dawn, Floral Prince isn’t noticeably different in its content or fidelity. Horns seep into the mix of opener “-h-o-u-s-e-k-e-y-z-” like ink into water, maintaining fade into the dawn’s pleasing mix of orchestral frill and lo-fi ingenuity, while the live percussion of “HEADCASE” is produced to sound like the drum machine pitter-pat of “henna tattoo.”
Floral Prince’s immediacy comes from a nexus of improvisation and strict ground rules—minimal rewrites, recorded to 4-track or a phone, usually with a limit of three takes. But Sullivan’s too much of a formalist for Floral Prince to ever go fully “based.” The songs that would seem like the result of his first-thought best-thought policy—i.e., the ones where he talks in very plain terms about his bodily functions, drinking habits, and sex life—are the ones where Sullivan’s writing fits into more of a structural grid. “i want you so bad it hurts” and “it’s so lonely being sober” might be litmus tests for new listeners, even though “I even started doing pushups/And my dick’s harder than ever” is the sort of unvarnished truth that should be heard more often if earnest folk music is meant to be a quotidian artform.
And yet, if Floral Prince has any flaw, it’s that reducing the overall “field medic show” to a collection of songs inherently restricts Sullivan’s personality from fully coming across. About half of the album consists of gorgeous, off-the-cuff strummers that feature Sullivan’s most poetic writing; they’re also the songs that sound like they could be written by other people. Conversely, “talkin johnny and june (your arms around me)” deftly holds space for Field Medic’s tendencies towards twee and debauchery, a rare instance of a song that taps into Johnny Cash’s life story without resorting to hagiography or caricature. “it’s so lonely being sober” likewise reflects on the assumptions that arise when hard-living artists write about getting clean. People usually expect a newfound clarity and gratitude, not the self-pity that arises when the inspiration doesn’t come immediately and your friends are still out partying because they’re on the same timeline.
Immediately after, “better way” makes the case that he’s moved onto accepting whatever comes next; it feels just as real despite its more universal lyricism, as the best Field Medic songs strive to live in the present, rather than trying to build a universe. “We do whatever we want because we have nothing better to do,” Sullivan jokes to Great Grandpa’s Alex Menne (credited as Pickleboy) before debuting “talkin johnny and june (your arms around me)” on the “field medic show.” As with Songs from the Sunroom and fade into the dawn, Floral Prince doesn’t question whether Field Medic can be done justice by the album format, just whether he needs to in the first place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Run for Cover | October 24, 2020 | 6.9 | 91ee6b07-4431-46ba-90eb-90fe957849ab | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Nature takes center stage on the experimental guitarist’s latest album—a response to climate crisis blending fractured melodies with recordings of severe weather and emergency broadcasts. | Nature takes center stage on the experimental guitarist’s latest album—a response to climate crisis blending fractured melodies with recordings of severe weather and emergency broadcasts. | Daniel Bachman: Almanac Behind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-bachman-almanac-behind/ | Almanac Behind | Daniel Bachman records often sound like collaborations with nature, blending his instrumental guitar compositions with sounds from his native Virginia. From the cicadas on 2013’s Jesus I’m a Sinner to the rain, insects, and frogs that punctuate 2018’s The Morning Star, field recordings from back roads and front porches bring Bachman’s surroundings to life and strengthen his connection with the state’s rural folk tradition. But the closer he observed the natural rhythms around him, the more alarmed he became at the changes he noticed: dying trees, drying creeks, flash flooding, and wildfires.
On his latest album, Almanac Behind, nature takes center stage, sometimes overwhelming the music completely. Whereas last year’s Axacan generated a sense of dread by weaving thunderstorms and emergency radio broadcasts into its sonic fabric, here panic sets in as the seams rip apart. Nature is no longer aestheticized; it is real, immediate, and dangerous. Instruments struggle to be heard over pelting hail, and melodies are drowned out by windstorms. “People that are familiar with my work over the years may be wondering why my music has taken such a drastic turn in theme and composition recently,” Bachman wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread. On Almanac Behind, his answer is that artistic expression, his music included, risks futility in the face of overlapping climate crises.
Instead of addressing the global scale of these crises, Bachman chooses to stay local. Almanac Behind crafts a composite thunderstorm from weather events in northern Virginia. Wind chimes softly clink in the background as a digitally manipulated slide guitar attempts a halting improvisation on “Barometric Cascade (Signal Collapse).” Soon the guitar is lost between radio frequencies as an emergency weather report cuts in. The relaxed front-porch atmosphere of Bachman’s earlier albums is transformed into a narrative of survival through the ensuing storm, from gust front to supercell to flooding to blackout. On album standout “Flood Stage,” radio static dramatically slows to create a pulsing beat that backs a dissonant pairing of harmonium and slide guitar. Even this relatively placid track turns unsettling as rainfall rises in volume until it breaks into the harsh “Inundation.” Throughout Almanac Behind, these instrumental interludes only serve as brief respites on either side of another disaster.
In a video for “540 Supercell,” Bachman explains that summer heatwaves harden the soil of waterways and river beds, causing both floods and fires. As a wildfire roars into life on the album’s second side, a hand-cranked radio tunes into a smoke inhalation alert on “3:24 AM KHB36 (When The World’s On Fire).” Its monotone voice is distorted and spliced, engulfing Bachman’s version of a Carter Family tune in hair-raising warnings that the air is unsafe to breathe. All seems to be well again on the closing “Recalibration/Normalization” until the guitar warps into a low drone and the same wind chimes from the album’s opening reappear. In fact, Almanac Behind is a loop that can be played seamlessly on repeat: a reminder that the catastrophes it describes are not singular, but cyclical. Amid the violent weather and Bachman’s fractured melodies, we hear the warnings loud and clear. | 2022-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Three Lobed | November 21, 2022 | 7.8 | 91efecd2-5945-4b05-8f2f-3c84afb1ed0a | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Wald marks a new beginning for Pole, the solo alias of the Berlin producer and mastering engineer Stefan Betke. His early albums from the last decade were dub-inspired ambient landmarks, but his new music is more spacious and open, though texture still reigns supreme. | Wald marks a new beginning for Pole, the solo alias of the Berlin producer and mastering engineer Stefan Betke. His early albums from the last decade were dub-inspired ambient landmarks, but his new music is more spacious and open, though texture still reigns supreme. | Pole: Wald | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20880-wald/ | Wald | Wald marks a new beginning—maybe even a new new beginning—for Pole, the solo alias of the Berlin producer and mastering engineer Stefan Betke. It is his first album in seven years, and its predecessor, Steingarten, was itself a kind of reboot. Early on in the Pole project, Betke was remarkably productive: In just six years he recorded five albums, and the first three of those were instant classics, despite the fact that they were all essentially variations on the same theme—an alchemical fusion of dub bass and static crackle. But with albums four and five, as Betke sought to escape the strictures of his own signature, he seemed to find only detours rather than a viable way forward (2001's R, featuring remixes from Burnt Friedman and Kit Clayton, has held up rather well; 2003's Pole, featuring the rapper Fat Jon, has not). A four-year break followed, and it must have done him good, because Steingarten, in 2007, was among the best work of his career. Abandoning the midrange murk and omnipresent white noise in favor of crisp sounds, elastic rhythms, and vast space, it felt like vacuum-sealed krautrock, and as a celebration of texture and tone color, it was exhilarating.
Perhaps Betke's unwillingness to repeat himself explains why he followed Steingarten with yet another extended silence, one broken only in 2011 with a trio of EPs, Waldgeschichten (German for Forest Stories). That title, like Wald, refers to the walks in the woods where Betke apparently looked for inspiration. That image may bring to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, whose foggy swirls of classical samples were inspired by the Black Forest and its role in German Romanticism. But the two artists' impressions of the woods couldn't be more different. Where Gas is either dark and claustrophobic or starlit and idyllic, Pole's Wald evokes porous thickets and branches stripped bare by the elements.
As is customary in his work, texture reigns supreme. Instead of melodies, there are clusters of tone—glassy drum-machine pings, brushed metal, scraped flint, the atonal shimmer of a guitar being strummed above the nut. In "Käfer", a junkyard guitar provides the semblance of a through-line across a landscape of crickets and electrical interference; a synthetic melodica takes the lead in "Moos (Live)", and wheezing organs lend both color and a viscous sense of substance to many of the album's tracks. Only in "Myzel" and "Fichte", whose chiming leads are faintly reminiscent of Autechre, does a melodic sensibility begin to creep back into the heavily abstracted landscape.
The three songs designated as "Live" aren't concert recordings, but live-in-the-studio updates of tracks previously released on the Waldgeschichten EPs. That method—recording in real time, both hands on the mixing desk—is Betke's enduring debt to dub. Those dub mechanics have a lot to do with the music's flexible rhythms and odd syncopations, which contribute to the mercurial sense of flow: There are almost always more elements in play than you can track, and whatever silvery filament you choose to focus on, your attention will soon be hijacked by something else. Still, there's nothing hectic about the listening experience; thanks to its relaxed pace and gently abstracted shapes, Wald is every bit as contemplative as the forest walks that inspired it. It has an unfettered sense of motion that, for an artist who was once, by his own admission, stuck in a rut, sounds like the sweetest kind of freedom. | 2015-09-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pole | September 15, 2015 | 7.6 | 91f00fa5-7f14-446f-ad22-45bd7307b7c9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Albany emo band offer us a fuck-up’s masterpiece, a hero’s journey following a guy who might conquer the world if he could leave his couch. | The Albany emo band offer us a fuck-up’s masterpiece, a hero’s journey following a guy who might conquer the world if he could leave his couch. | Prince Daddy & the Hyena: Cosmic Thrill Seekers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-daddy-and-the-hyena-cosmic-thrill-seekers/ | Cosmic Thrill Seekers | In the Prince Daddy & the Hyena universe, Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor is the greatest album ever made. Not the greatest punk album, or the best of the decade—the greatest ever, better than Pet Sounds, OK Computer, and Illmatic put together. They’ve also namedropped American Idiot and The Black Parade in almost every interview for their boisterously extra second album Cosmic Thrill Seekers, a “Disney soundtrack written by a punk band” tailored to a very specific set of aspirations—they’ve made a fuck-up’s masterpiece, a hero’s journey following a guy who might conquer the world if he could leave his couch.
It’s worth noting that Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and Titus weren’t taken seriously before they bumrushed the rockist canon—they were, respectively, a pop-punk institution in a steady commercial decline, avatars for a widely discredited form of emo, and a band most known for playing suburban New Jersey pool parties. Prince Daddy & the Hyena start from an even greater disadvantage—for one thing, they are called Prince Daddy & the Hyena, and they are leading figures in a punk-rock subset often known as sparklepunk, weed emo, party emo or even “meme-o.” A counterbalance to artsy, cerebral acts like The Hotelier or The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, these bands played riotous basement shows with songs about self-medication, anxiety and self-medicating anxiety as pleasurable and fleeting as a plate of Bagel Bites or the Bagel Bites theme song.
Cosmic Thrill Seekers is a concept album in three parts, albeit one with a plot engine about getting high and watching TV—the final act, where one would expect some kind of moral revelation, hinges on consecutive tracks titled “C’mon & Smoke Me Up” and “Klonopin.” “You tried to put a documentary on the galaxy on,” Kory Gregory shrieks, defacing the lovely acoustic guitar progression opening “I Lost My Life.” The song recounts his experience taking LSD-laced Sour Patch Kids and spending years wondering if he’d permanently fucked up his brain chemistry. Before coming down, he watched The Wizard Of Oz and saw it as a metaphor for his own life; he was impressionable and innocent enough to see this revelation as uncharted territory for punk-rock songwriting.
Throughout the album, the band flaunts a previously inconceivable range—careening from proggy musical theater (“Dialogue”), to brassy Broadway punk (“Ursula Merger”), Irish drinking interludes (“Dream Nails”) and grim sludge (“Trying Times”), cramming an entire weekend of Fest into 40 or so minutes. The hooks are shameless and Sum-41 snotty, each one like mashing a nuclear-option big red button. Gregory’s bloodied vocals are an acquired taste even for the band’s fans—he sings like he’s rejecting a tracheal transplant—but they are a perfect vehicle for his hyperbolic self-loathing (“I’m pretty fucking confident that I’ll die the next time I’m alone in my bedroom,” or “pretending to sleep, don’t bother talking to me”).
Despite the inherent divisiveness of Gregory’s vocals and his misanthropic tendencies, Cosmic Thrill Seekers aspires to personal revolution and communal uplift—members of Strange Ranger and Remo Drive contribute vocals, while Diva Sweetly, Oso Oso, and Kississippi all appear in the video for “Lauren (Track 2).” Gregory and Kississipi’s Zoe Reynolds actually got engaged on stage at Fest. Gregory calls it a “selfish” album, though the music suggests otherwise: Cosmic Thrill Seekers may be intended as Prince Daddy & the Hyena’s masterpiece, but it’s clear that it depicts a guy Gregory is no longer interested in being. | 2019-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Counter Intuitive | July 11, 2019 | 7.5 | 91f53b64-caed-47d0-9230-2227422d3b59 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Sonny Smith continues to excel at simple, low-stakes music done extremely well, with clever touches that don't reveal themselves on first listen. | Sonny Smith continues to excel at simple, low-stakes music done extremely well, with clever touches that don't reveal themselves on first listen. | Sonny and the Sunsets: Hit After Hit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15324-hit-after-hit/ | Hit After Hit | The ridiculously fertile San Francisco garage-pop scene is full of people who crank out vast amounts of music and who sound like they're having fun doing it. And much of the time, Sonny Smith seems to be making more music and having more fun than anyone else. About a year ago, his band Sonny and the Sunsets released the sweet, inventive album Tomorrow Is Alright, and Smith then followed it up with his "100 Records" art installation, in which he wrote and recorded an absurd 200 songs for 100 fictional bands. While he was at it, he issued an EP for one of those fake bands, Earth Girl Helen Brown. And now, after that furious burst of activity, we get the Sunsets' sophomore album. That's Lil-Wayne-in-2006 levels of productivity.
But Smith never sounds like someone rushing to crank out literally hundreds of songs. His songs have an enormously appealing loose, homespun quality-- muffled, refracted, self-aware takes on the starry-eyed, innocent sounds you hear coming from oldies radio. Smith's voice is warm and laconic; you can practically hear a goofy stoner grin on his face a lot of the time. He allows himself a few guitar solos, but unless the song is an instrumental, he likes to keep them to three seconds or less. A lot of the fun in his records is hearing him interact with his backing vocals-- wordless ooh-ahh harmonies on some songs, equally flat female interjections on others. The whole thing sounds like something they could've bashed out in a long afternoon, killing time waiting for a midnight screening of Rock 'n' Roll High School.
This, then, is simple, low-stakes music, but it's simple and low-stakes music done extremely well, with clever touches that don't always reveal themselves on first listen. Plenty of tiny instrumental flourishes show just how deeply Smith and his band have studied their oldies-radio fare: The lightly tribal floor-tom rumbles on "She Plays Yoyo With My Mind" [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| , the nifty little surf-guitar riffage on "Home and Exile [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ", the heartbroken jangle on "Pretend You Love Me". And Smith has a lyrical mischievousness about him, too. One line on "Don't Act Dumb" sums up four decades of lovesick garage-rock frustration in a few words: "I'm in love, love with you baby/ I am dumb and so are you." And "Teenage Thugs" has to be one of the first punk songs in history that doesn't identify with juvenile corner toughs but with the grown adult weenies who are afraid of them.
Many of Smith's defining qualities-- his self-deprecating lyrics, his easy way with melody, his ability to make bashed-out and idiosyncratic music out of ancient forms of pop-- unites him with another wave of Bay Area bands. In Smith, I hear a lot of the Bay Area pop-punk of the early 90s-- bands like the Mr. T Experience, Samiam, even very early Green Day. And like MTX frontman Dr. Frank, he knows how to convey confused-teenager feelings in smart, adult ways. With Hit After Hit, he's made 11 more charming and knowingly primitive bursts of sunny fuzz. He's got plenty more left in him. And as much fun as it could be to watch him grow as an artist, part of me hopes he stays his lane and keeps making these sugary jangles forever. | 2011-04-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-04-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 15, 2011 | 7.7 | 91f55f2d-50d2-4842-ac98-093935b986b8 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Bon Iver’s first album in five years takes an unexpected turn toward the strange and experimental. But behind the arranged glitches and processed voices are deeply felt songs about uncertainty. | Bon Iver’s first album in five years takes an unexpected turn toward the strange and experimental. But behind the arranged glitches and processed voices are deeply felt songs about uncertainty. | Bon Iver: 22, A Million | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22420-22-a-million/ | 22, A Million | There’s a line deep in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice wherein Doc, a small-time stoner-sleuth, considers the dissolution of the 1960s, wondering if the decade wasn’t merely “a little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness.” It’s a funny way to think about time—that an entire era can be nudged back into the ether, erased. But on 22, A Million, the extraordinary third full-length from Bon Iver, Justin Vernon echoes Doc’s somber pondering. These are fluttery, skeletal songs that struggle against known trajectories and then threaten to disappear entirely. 22, A Million might be musically distant from For Emma, Forever Ago, the collection of aching folk tunes Vernon debuted in 2007—mostly gone are the acoustic strums, replaced by lurching, electronic gasps born from the Messina, a doctored combination of the Prismizer software plug-in and some hardware that was invented by Vernon and his engineer, Chris Messina. But the albums share an ideology. All things go, taken back into darkness.
22, A Million is certainly Bon Iver’s most difficult record; it’s the work of a songwriter who seems to have lost interest in established, easily deciphered forms, a possibility Vernon has been hinting at for nearly all of his career. In 2006, Vernon, then living in North Carolina, was emotionally razed by a perfect storm of shitty turns: his band broke up, his relationship dissolved, he came down with an acute case of mononucleosis. He did what any reasonable person with an eye toward self-care would do: decamp to his family’s hunting cabin in rural Wisconsin, drink a gang of beers, watch endless hours of “Northern Exposure,” and write a batch of lonesome, yearning folk songs on his acoustic guitar. His high, brittle falsetto gave these pieces an otherworldly quality, as if they had blown in on a particularly cold wind.
For Emma, Forever Ago was, in its own way, an experimental record—Vernon’s vocals and phrasing are deeply unusual; its stories are impressionistic, fractured—but because it’s so heavy with heartbreak and loss, it feels intimate, authentic, easy. 22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential. The album opens with a high, undulating voice (Vernon, singing into an OP-1, a combination synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer) announcing, “It might be over soon,” and goes on to examine the idea of impermanence. Nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known. Inasmuch as his lyrics are narrative—and they have always been more connotative than exegetic—he seems preoccupied with whether or not a life has meaning. “Oh then, how we gonna cry? Cause it once might not mean something?” he asks on “715 - CRΣΣKS.”
Kanye West once called Vernon his “favorite living artist,” and has long professed a deep and unexpected admiration for “Woods,” the closing track from 2009’s Blood Bank EP, and an obvious precursor to “715 - CRΣΣKS,” itself a kind of warped a capella jam. “Woods” featured no instrumentation, but is merely five minutes of Vernon singing through Auto-Tune, in ghostly harmony with himself. In retrospect, “Woods” feels like a revelation: it was not only an unexpected affirmation of pop’s future—artists aggressively distorting their vocals, feeding their voices into machines in order to build spectral, nagging songs that reflect alienation, arguably the reigning sensation of our time—but of Vernon’s own trajectory.
Plenty of beloved contemporary artists, from Dylan to Neil Young on, have ditched the supposed purity of folk music to push the work harder, to make art that’s less reliant on a tradition and invests, instead, in the strangeness of the present moment and collective uncertainty about the future. Trading on preexisting pathways—it’s too easy. Vernon isn’t alone in his hunger for true, tectonic innovation, for songs that seem tethered to and reflective of their actual time and place: Radiohead has been mirroring anxiety about the encroachment of electronics and virtual living since Kid A, a record that also required them to warp if not abandon their beginnings as a guitar-rock band.
Beyond its sonic striving, 22, A Million is also a personal record about how to move forward through disorienting times. Vernon occasionally employs religious language to express his anxiety, some explicit (“consecration,” “confirmation”), some more plainly vernacular (“So as I’m standing at the station,” “I could go forward in the light”). He samples two gospel tunes: Mahalia Jackson’s live version of “How I Got Over,” from 1962, and the Supreme Jubilees’s “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” from 1980. There is a song titled “666 ʇ,” and another titled “33 ‘GOD.’” A bit of marginalia in the album’s liner notes (“Why are you so FAR from saving me?”) is attributed to Psalm 22, though in the King James Bible, that imploration is for help, not salvation (“Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”). Either way, Psalm 22 opens in medias res: its author is undergoing an urgent crisis of faith. So is Vernon?
Maybe. Musically, Vernon resists not just verse-chorus-verse, but all the ways in which Western cultures have come to conceptualize narrative. As kids, we’re taught how stories work, and we use that rubric to organize and make sense of the events of our lives. But the imposition of structure can be violent; perhaps, Vernon suggests, the idea that we are organizing events at all is patently nuts. So when he ventures a line like “We’ve galvanized the squall of it all,” from “8 (circle),” it feels like a mission statement. There is solace in resisting formal structures, in both acknowledging and embracing a certain amount of chaos.
It’s the same story on “00000 Million,” the album’s haunting closing track, where Vernon samples a wobbly line borrowed from the Irish folksinger Fionn Regan: “The days have no numbers.” Pitted against the record’s obsessive numerology—each song has a number in its title—it lands like an admission of defeat. There’s resignation in his voice, which gives way to desolation. The song’s lyrics will be familiar to anyone wondering if they’ll ever actually start to feel better, while still continuing to do something they know is hurting them: “If it’s harmed, it harmed me, it’ll harm me, I let it in.”
For a while now, Vernon has been building songs in a modular way, and there are moments here (like the meandering last minute of “21 M♢♢N WATER”) where it feels as if he could’ve jiggled the pieces together a little more—where his disavowal of connective tissue feels less deliberate than random. This is evident, in part, because he is exceptionally good at writing melancholic laments in the highly structured style of ’80s soft-rock giants like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby (Vernon has covered Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and Vernon and Hornsby have collaborated on several occasions; “00000 Million” feels like it could have been recorded by either).
“8 (circle)” is the most immediately reminiscent of Vernon’s last record, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, itself now recognizable as a clear midpoint between Emma and here; it’s also the album’s most conventionally composed track, with the smallest amount of vocal manipulation. Elsewhere, Vernon’s vocals are filtered until they begin to actually dissolve, as if they have been dunked in a tub of lye. The song’s stunning emotional peaks—I come to a full stop every time I hear Vernon sing, “I’m standing in the street now, and I carry his guitar,” his voice steady and deep, as if he’s announcing himself to someone he loves—are so plainly beautiful it’s hard not to mourn, briefly, for the Bon Iver of yesteryear.
But 22, A Million sounds only like itself. There are precedents for all of Vernon’s moves deep in the histories of rock‘n’roll and rhythm and blues and electronic music—and, more immediately, on newer records by West, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Chance the Rapper, Francis and the Lights, and Radiohead. But this particular amalgamation is so twitchy and idiosyncratic it feels truly singular. Its searching is bottomless. | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 30, 2016 | 9 | 91f66335-cfd0-4b78-ab0c-3bb85120a7c8 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Released less than a year after their debut full-length Light Up Gold, Parquet Courts offer five new songs about heartbreak, rebellion, depression, and trying to deliver weed on a bike. | Released less than a year after their debut full-length Light Up Gold, Parquet Courts offer five new songs about heartbreak, rebellion, depression, and trying to deliver weed on a bike. | Parkay Quarts: Tally All the Things That You Broke EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18563-parquet-courts-tally-all-the-things-that-you-broke-ep/ | Tally All the Things That You Broke EP | The language of Brooklyn's Parquet Courts focuses on the mundane minutiae of the everyday: Even when they’re stoned they’re not just simply starving, they’re walking around Ridgewood, Queens weighing the consequences between roasted peanuts, licorice, and Swedish Fish. Often it seems they don’t want you to take any of their shit all that seriously, either. But just like Steve Malkmus was mis-labeled the slacker king, Parquet Courts singer/guitarist Andrew Savage can sound like he’s murmuring lyrics from deep within a futon. Some of the first words you hear on their shining 2012 full-length debut Light Up Gold are “I didn't come here to dream or teach the world things/ Define paradigms, or curate no living days,” and here there’s a little speech bubble in the corner of the artwork for the new Tally All The Things That You Broke EP that says “Got damn it’s just a bootleg!”
But that excuse is scratched out in red marker, and instead, front and center, are five “Self-Evident Truths” taken from each of the five songs of the EP. Parquet Courts, if for only some brief minutes on this collection, actually spend some time caring about, you know, stuff. There’s even a song on here that nods to the subversive punk directives of bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag and is diametrically opposed to anything resembling a “slacker” anthem.
Released just over a year after Light Up Gold, the droll post-punk of the band's debut rolls onward for these five songs about heartbreak, rebellion, depression, and trying to deliver weed on a bike. Levity remains Parquet Courts’ strongest suit, obviously. They’re the young wise fools of New York (by way of Texas), and their sound openly recalls all the frayed and wiry post-rock of the 80s and 90s, though their southern twang and sharp satire push them away from being revivalists. Savage’s delivery of the anxieties running through his mind is just as thrilling as the spidery guitars that run beside them. What separates him from his Gen-X forebears is that none of what he does feels typically cool at all—he has a way of masking honest songwriting in crooked wordplay and a joke about the munchies. At his most honed, he’s a two-bit philosopher on “You’ve Got Me Wonderin’ Now”, suggesting that “Toothache’s better than heartache” and “Seasick’s better than heartsick,” but some heart-breaker has him second guessing his own platitudes.
The rhythm section is wound tight on the Tally EP, whether snapping against each other to get totally wired (“Descend (The Way)”) and stumbling into each other to get totally weird (“Fall On Yr Face”). Even when they stretch it out for five minutes on the shuffle-punk of “The More You Use It”, they stay focused. That's the song that hurls out a succession of anarcho-individualist platitudes (“Say something without the words they fed ya! Find something they didn’t tell you to hunt for!”), any one of which could be stenciled on a DIY zine. If you ever doubted that Parquet Courts gave shits, this is their exonerating testimony. Savage sends each line out to the back of the club every time, all underneath sugary post-punk revival guitar lines courtesy of Savage and his longtime associate Austin Brown.
All this leads to the finale, an ambling snooze-rap that sounds like a bunch of kids doing a loving but remarkably faded tribute to the Beastie Boys. The song trails a weed courier on his bike as he cruises through the streets of New York, seeing paths in all directions, walking up stoops in Union Square, and ringing hundreds of apartment buzzers. All’s well for our hero until he gets busted on Wilson Ave. in Bushwick by the 83rd Precinct. He’s left handcuffed in the gutter as Savage lets out the last of the “Self-evident Truths” Parquet Courts detail on the cover, “The powers that be choose to surveil the poor.” Unfortunately it drags meaninglessly on for three minutes against some dog-whistle guitar feedback—a sloppy way end an otherwise stellar EP. That "jam" at the end does, however, remind us that Parquet Courts are still just loveable ne’er-do-wells, content to be starlings of the sardonic slipstream just as much as they want to rise above. They don’t waste the involuted micro-analysis that comes with THC—the wan, specific observations about love and life—they actually use it. | 2013-10-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | What's Your Rupture? | October 3, 2013 | 7.5 | 91f70b45-9b37-4d6b-b1d1-656be1ed3fe6 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
The Rotterdam quartet makes sparse yet atmospheric post-punk that draws inspiration from all things dreamy and twee. | The Rotterdam quartet makes sparse yet atmospheric post-punk that draws inspiration from all things dreamy and twee. | Lewsberg: Out and About | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lewsberg-out-and-about/ | Out and About | Out and About, the fourth album from Rotterdam quartet Lewsberg, is a collection of hypnotic, talky post-punk that hinges entirely on atmosphere. It’s music for small rooms with weird lighting, old churches where you have to sit on a bench, graveyards where you are always standing under a tree. It is also poetic but in an extremely self-aware and twee kind of way, doing things like meditating on the difference between “dog” and “god” or describing a weirdly sexy interaction with a doctor.
Out and About plays like a mumblecore flick. The characters walk around musing about the meaning of life, winking after every sentence. They are prone to cerebral concepts, bringing in geometric optics into the song “Angle of Reflection,” but they find a way to immediately make it sound chill. They bring in an organ; a lonely drumbeat, practically unchanging; a crisp bassline, soft and almost out of focus. All of it flickers like a candle in a nightclub bathroom where you’d maybe hide out to avoid someone. Vocalists Arie van Vliet and Shalita Dietrich turn the environment into something spectral, intimate. “So there’s nothing new and I’m easily bored,” sings Dietrich, before following it up with “All I have to know: Would you do it once more?” She’s being deliberately cryptic, a mood that permeates the whole of the record.
As musicians, Lewsberg pulls from the best of everything twee, dreamy, and naive. Out and About is a little Stereolab in the Stunning Debut Album primordial era, when things were more lo-fi and guitar-oriented. It’s also a little VU, if Maureen Tucker got to sing more, or the Moldy Peaches in leather jackets. “An Ear to the Chest” has the album’s best guitar moment, a pristine break in the middle that is almost erotic, unbearably lovely. “Communion” is a song that is possibly about being friends with Jesus Christ: “Bless the lord! My soul/Watch his body from above,” sings van Vilet, the music growing scuzzier in the background.
On Out and About, Lewsberg are self-possessed, in touch with their aesthetic. They write songs that are funny, sweet, and weird. The music is an ever so slight sharpening and varnishing of the band’s past work. More so than melodic or lyrical choices, Lewsberg now focus on the small universe of a song, how different textures can alter the full effect. The violin on “Going Places” is like a small mouse running through some grass. Standout track “A Different View” pirouettes around like a toy ballerina in her miniature box, delicately atmospheric. Lewsburg are masters at conjuring these moods, capturing idiosyncrasies and turning them into intricate pop. | 2023-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 12XU | October 6, 2023 | 7.3 | 91f8001b-d5b4-4dc2-81ac-30cd83f290c2 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
With two covers and two originals, the psych rock band of Genesis P-Orridge expands rather than fortifies the definition of classic rock'n'roll. | With two covers and two originals, the psych rock band of Genesis P-Orridge expands rather than fortifies the definition of classic rock'n'roll. | Psychic TV: Alienist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22425-alienist/ | Alienist | At first glance, Psychic TV bandleader Genesis P-Orridge would seem a most unlikely champion of nostalgia. As co-founder of trailblazing ’70s noise act Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge became the unwitting progenitor of industrial music—just one of several milestones in a multi-faceted career defined by a rabid dedication to non-conformity. And even when P-Orridge switched from Throbbing Gristle’s collagist technique to song-based structures with the formation of Psychic TV in 1981, the subversive streak remained intact.
But as this latest installment in a series of covers-themed releases proves, P-Orridge has long harbored a romance for musical tradition. You can go all the way back to Psychic TV’s first album Force the Hand of Chance to hear hints of P-Orridge’s childhood affinity for early, pre-rock forms of pop. That album, in fact, begins with P-Orridge singing, “You caress me with simple love,” over an orchestral string arrangement. Looking back, it appears as if P-Orridge was being totally sincere, but in the wake of Sid Vicious’ “My Way” and with the corpse of Throbbing Gristle still warm, the song must have come across as ironic at the time.
On Alienist, P-Orridge and the current incarnation of the band come to celebrate the past. Given P-Orridge’s history of provocation, Psychic TV aren’t interested in preserving anyone’s comfortable idea of the status quo. Nevertheless, the band’s renditions of singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson’s "Jump Into the Fire" and ’60s psychedelic outfit the Creation’s “How Does It Feel to Feel” stay faithful to the sonic character of the original versions. Still, the very act of picking those two tunes expands rather than fortifies the definition of pop music. It also says a lot about the band’s unwillingness to pander to the obvious—even as they play with nothing to prove.
If Psychic TV sound like a bar band on these covers, it’s a bar band that puts a lot of thought into its choice of songs. Since 2009, Psychic TV have recorded covers of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine,” Can’s "Mother Sky," and Captain Beefheart’s “Dropout Boogie,” releasing the covers as 12-inches once a year with new original tunes as B-sides. Alienist presents two covers and two originals that together clock-in at 34 minutes—long enough to qualify as a full-length but slanted closer to the mixed-bag personality an EP.
P-Orridge and drummer/producer/band director Edward O’Dowd (formerly of the Toilet Boys) don’t make very many radical alterations. The archetypal ’70s-guitar churn of “Jump Into the Fire,” for example, is panned to the right side of the stereo field, just like in Nilsson’s original. But keyboardist John Weingarten’s left-panned piano rolls burst with color and vibrancy where Nilsson’s merely served as an accompaniment. On both covers, in fact, the band oozes with an unguarded joy that’s downright life-affirming.
Meanwhile, the two original songs provide contrast. “I’m Looking for You,” a space-rock dirge, hovers in the same darkly reflective mood for almost 12 minutes, with P-Orridge sounding sinister, weary, and wise all at once. And on the title track, Psychic TV give us an organic version of electronic music as P-Orridge—a somewhat warbly but nevertheless convincing singer—muses about alienation in a robotic monotone over an upbeat dance rhythm played on live drums.
The term “rock and roll” all too often functions as a mantra for reinforcing boundaries, shorthand for “Weren’t things better back in simpler times?” The suggestion that the past was somehow better, more innocent and purer lends itself, consciously or not, to conservative social ideals. That Psychic TV can reach to the past without appealing to such regressive attitudes is just one of the qualities that give Alienist its charm. That they still sound vital and wide-eyed doing it makes it a triumph. | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Dais Records / Angry Love Productions | September 30, 2016 | 7 | 92042a4b-7bde-4d94-87f0-6c254c0524ce | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The singer’s new mixtape is a playful and adventurous flex, full of errant, shapeshifting compositions that flirt with choral music and Afrobeats, schoolyard chants and squeak-rapping. | The singer’s new mixtape is a playful and adventurous flex, full of errant, shapeshifting compositions that flirt with choral music and Afrobeats, schoolyard chants and squeak-rapping. | FKA twigs: CAPRISONGS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fka-twigs-caprisongs/ | CAPRISONGS | Pop stars reference crying on the dancefloor with such regularity that you wonder if DJs are out there spinning the audiobook to A Little Life. Last December, apparently unable to resist the temptation, FKA twigs released “Tears in the Club,” a metallic R&B and trap collaboration with the Weeknd in which she attempted to shed the memory of an ex and announced, “I’ma drown in the beat now.” Both the A-list guest and the single’s digestibility furthered speculation that she might drift from her usual meticulous, avant-garde creations. Would her upcoming mixtape, Caprisongs, launch a more exuberant and radio-friendly sound? Was twigs finally embarking on her “main pop girl” era?
Well, only in a sense. Caprisongs is a playful and adventurous flex, with guest features from the likes of Jorja Smith and Shygirl and executive production from El Guincho; twigs has framed it as a “journey back to myself through my amazing collaborators and friends.” The project’s title is not a riff on the kids’ juice pouches, but on being a “Capricorn sun”—a driven, in-control type of bitch. The songs are errant, shapeshifting compositions that move quickly, flirting with choral music and Afrobeats, schoolyard chants and squeak rapping. If you’re anticipating any straightforward hits with Dua Lipa, don’t: “Why Don’t You Love Me,” the much-awaited collaboration the duo recorded in 2020, is not on the tracklist. But the mixtape does feature life-or-death dramatics from a stan impatient for its release: “OK twigs,” they snap, “I’m tired of listening to it on YouTube.”
Caprisongs begins with the click of a cassette player—a framing twigs uses to swerve in whatever direction she desires. On opener “ride the dragon,” her purrs are met with a gargled, screwed reply, like having phone sex with the gremlin under your bed. The two voices build a slow momentum, winding around each other until click—the tape scrambles forward, jumping into the universe of what feels like a new song. Within a few seconds, another click: “So if you … reallywannakissme?” twigs accelerates.
Rest your head for a moment and you’re in a new location. “ride the dragon” goes out on a vaguely Asian palette of strings and flute, then the next number, “honda,” proceeds with the celestial harmonies of a Western church choir. The song is built on a delicious contrast, between heavenly background vocals and a beat that stays low to the ground, full of crisp clicks and clatters. twigs breaks her sentences into two-syllable bursts—“Baby. We can. Roll it. Mway. Smoke It. Honda”—while Gambian-British rapper Pa Salieu keeps things frisky: “Would you still be a freak even when we turn 50?”
While twigs is best known for her wispy, classically tuned falsetto, on Caprisongs she slips into a lively array of voices. “Everybody knows that I want your love/Why you playin’, baby boy/What’s up?” she chants on “oh my love,” with the speak-talking sass of Cher Lloyd. You can envision her with her hip cocked to the side, popping a lollipop out of her mouth. Over the misty “lo-fi beats” of “lightbeamers,” she shoots up her voice like she’s squeak rapper 645AR and then loosens slightly so she starts to resemble Jeremih. Elsewhere, twigs sounds a hell of a lot like Charli XCX: glitchy wails materialize midway through “meta angel,” a cherubic, slow-rocking number about craving validation from a higher power. On “darjeeling,” twigs deploys Charli’s spry, fricative cadence, counterbalancing nicely with Jorja Smith’s plush vocals.
Smith’s performance is a standout on Caprisongs; the rest of the collaborations yield mixed results. The Afrobeats single “jealousy” is the most easygoing song of the lot, but seems basic in comparison to everything else; Nigerian singer Rema’s appearance is nice but unremarkable. The gospel-tinged “careless,” with Canadian R&B singer Daniel Caesar, features some divine harmonies but is ultimately too slow-moving and tasteful. More fun-loving is the Shygirl-assisted “papi bones,” which sounds like a hammy SoundCloud remix of Y2K dancehall, air horns and all. If twigs’ objective was to stop overthinking and simply try out ideas in the studio, then “papi bones” preserves a nice spontaneity.
Caprisongs’ nine guests, in addition to its already peripatetic approach to genre and cadence, makes it a lot to take in. Then come the voice memo recordings that serve as interludes: peals of laughter, somebody strumming an acoustic guitar, some woo-woo sermonizing. (“The universe fam/The universe is so powerful.”) The snippets feel gratuitous, like one of those year-end Instagram dumps, full of in-jokes and private realizations without enough context to be significant. The mixtape winds down with a nutty astrological reading that sounds like it was conducted by Amy Poehler in Mean Girls and results in the most awkward transition of the project, wherein twigs recites her chart placements (“Sagi-moon, Picsy-veen, Capri-sun”) then, immediately on the next track, confesses she once wanted to die.
Over a year ago, twigs filed a lawsuit accusing her ex-boyfriend of abuse, and her 2019 album MAGDALENE was, in part, about the racist vitriol she experienced from outsiders in a prior relationship. She has spoken about her desire to be written about as her own entity, not attached to a partner: “My work was so beautiful. It was so much louder than my love life. It is so much louder.” Caprisongs is the sound of twigs in the driver’s seat as she traverses her own curiosities and instincts; there is no man looming over the music, no weighty public narrative dictating its terrain. It is intrepid and light, the image of a woman attuned to planetary alignments but casting her own fate.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Young | January 17, 2022 | 7.8 | 92200546-4b16-481a-bf50-e666de5ede7b | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Rave Age sees French producer Pascal Arbez returning to maximalism in a timely fashion. The album's title addresses youth culture's embrace of intense electronic music, while the singles here echo the audacious moments of 2005's OK Cowboy. | Rave Age sees French producer Pascal Arbez returning to maximalism in a timely fashion. The album's title addresses youth culture's embrace of intense electronic music, while the singles here echo the audacious moments of 2005's OK Cowboy. | Vitalic: Rave Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17259-rave-age/ | Rave Age | Much of the current wave of aggressive, pop-oriented dance music can be traced to 2005. That year, Madonna's late-career foray into Eurodance, Confessions on a Dancefloor marked the last time she'd be ahead of the curve, while French Touch veteran Alan Braxe attracted indie types to glittery hedonism with his stellar singles comp The Upper Cuts. Meanwhile, the teeth-grinding one-two French electro-punch of Justice's antagonistic Waters of Nazareth 12" and Daft Punk's oft-maligned Human After All now sound strangely prescient.
Vitalic, real name Pascal Arbez, fit in with those last two artists in the middle of the last decade. Four years after releasing the stacked Poney EP, he dropped OK Cowboy, a dizzying collection of loopy, buzzy electro that would work for any 2010s HARD Fest attendee. If that album was a series of bright, loud firecrackers, then 2009's Flashmob resembled a slow-burning candle, as it found the French producer adding shades of sultry disco to his palette. It was a fine album, but the low-key aesthetic and lack of big singles lessened its impact.
Three years later, we have Rave Age, Arbez's third proper LP as Vitalic. The title seems to address youth culture's current embrace of big-box electronic music, and the record looks toward past glories, too. Rave Age's first two singles, "No More Sleep" and "Stamina", bring to mind OK Cowboy's more audacious moments, right down to the latter's cheesy "Crank it up!" vocal sample. "Rave Kids Go" aims for a similar mood but the slow buzzsaw builder is anchored by a rare lead vocal, courtesy of Michael Karkousse of Belgian outfit Goose. Karkousse's vocal initially recalls the kind of smoky vocal take you'd hear on a Chemical Brothers album but when he moves from sleazy to shouty on the song's bridge, it comes across as forced.
The streamlined vocal cuts don't all work, but at least Arbez seems engaged on them. The gritty "La Mort Sur Le Dance Floor" features a snotty performance from French singer Rebeka Warrior that should be avoided as long as Crystal Castles are going, but "Under Your Sun" fares better thanks to airy, hollow production and a perfectly competent high-register touch from fellow countrywoman Owlle. The standout from the pop cuts is "Fade Away", featuring an arena-scale tender take from Shitdisco's Joe Reeves. It works in part because it's the most straightforwardly gorgeous thing on the record, but for me the real appeal is how its structure parallels Saint Etienne's head-in-the-clouds remix of the Drums' "Forever and Ever Amen".
And that's the album's biggest problem: Rave Age makes you wish you were listening to other songs. The closer you listen to the wobbly hip-hop textures, overly-busy techno, and generic dark ambience, the less the album needs to exist. Maximalism has frequently been Arbez's thing-- it's the quality that made him rise to some sort of prominence to begin with. But on Rave Age, he does too much of everything and sounds mostly like a whole lot of nothing. | 2012-11-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-11-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Different | November 7, 2012 | 4.7 | 9223c69a-a89a-436b-bf45-630f096ad8b4 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The latest album from the star of UK road rap is an entirely new and impressively unconfined sound with Nines still grounding himself firmly in his past. | The latest album from the star of UK road rap is an entirely new and impressively unconfined sound with Nines still grounding himself firmly in his past. | Nines: Crop Circle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nines-crop-circle/ | Crop Circle | As groups gathered in parks or on balconies across London on April 20th—otherwise known as international weed day—to enjoy one of the hottest spring days on record, chances are, for rap fans, the soundtrack to their Friday evening came in the form of Nines’ sophomore studio album, Crop Circle. The theme of its accompanying short-film comically pivots around the hyperlocal weed economy of Nines’ housing estate, suggesting the timing was no coincidence. People took to Twitter to brand the release superior to J. Cole’s, reflecting London’s newfound ability to harvest and enjoy its own product over North-American competitors. “Nina wid da Nina” has used his year of mysterious silence to eclectically develop the icy neck-chains, boastful similes, and smooth Ma$e-like flows which have always formed the core of his aesthetic.
Born Courtney Freckleton to a Jamaican father and Somalian mother, Nines grew up on Church Road Estate in Harlesden, an infamous part of North West London known for its violent crime and concrete housing blocks. Since 2012, as the frontman of the Ice City Boyz collective, he has put out four classic mixtapes and a multitude of street anthems. The release of his highly-successful first studio album One Foot Out, after signing to XL, allowed him to become one of the only commercially viable kings of road rap. This loosely defined genre, shouldered through the late-2000s and early-2010s by the likes of Drake’s favorite Giggs, as well as C Biz and K Koke (two local rivals of Nines), and perfected most recently by young-gun Fredo, relies upon the hardline, weathered authenticity of its artists. Being an actual gangster—one who needs to prove little but, regardless of recognition from the masses, does everything in their power to retain their reputation on the roads—is a prerequisite. This is in stark contrast to the energetic temperament of London’s more performative MC-led movements, like grime or the teething UK drill phenomenon.
The 26-minute film also called Crop Circle, which Nines wrote, directed, and stars in, was released out of nowhere three days prior to the album. It is an impressive venture, proving that he has spent a year in the wilderness developing his multi-channel personal brand. Interwoven with trimmed threads of music, it serves as a collection of light-hearted vignettes about life on Church Road Estate. And while it won’t win a BAFTA, the comic scenes allow Nines to make himself more accessible, more vulnerable. This striving to connect with the fans is characteristic: after being sent to prison in 2013 for drug offenses, he posted his prison number online and encouraged people to write to him.
The album’s lead single “I See You Shining” was previewed to the world earlier this month. Its fun-filled video starts with Nines waking up to a bowl of chunky weed buds in a West Hampstead mansion, and features wild scenes of him levitating cross-legged, cooking up drugs in a snow-filled kitchen, and playing penny against the wall with the mandem. The song’s contagious, celebratory bounce makes it impossible not to dive headfirst into the remaining 15 tracks—although it is a shame that its playful tone is not replicated elsewhere on the album.
Throughout most of Crop Circle, Nines leaves the care-free party behind. Instead, he switches between contemplation and showboating, confessing to his life as a successful musician who still craves the financial rewards of industrial-scale drug-dealing: “I just made six-figures off of streams/Still dealing with the fiends ‘cause I got bigger dreams,” he admits in opening track “Picture in a Frame.” Many songs starts with the booming words of “Zino Records,” a touch that has always acted as both a symbolic wax seal for Nines’ music and a reminder that despite his glimmering braggadocio, the loss of Zino, his older brother who was gunned down in an alleged gang beef a decade ago, keeps him grounded and wary of his past.
Nines has traditionally been at his best while demonstrating an ear for the most precise, ethereal beats. This skill is perfectly applied in “Liz”—slang for money, his favorite topic, referencing the image of Queen Elizabeth II on British currency—whose delicate piano keys paint the picture of a reflective late-night car ride through the city. But the most impressive thing about this album is the way Nines has dared to take listeners into unchartered territory through a mature selection of soulful, melancholic as well as dancefloor-friendly tones, all made possible by the delivery of appropriately chosen features. Singer Ray BLK outshines everyone on “Rubber Bands,” which includes a verse from fellow Ice City Boy Skrapz. On “Oh My” the cheeky, contagious chorus from Tiggs Da Author alongside teenage south London driller SL, adds punchy schoolboy wit to Nines’ authoritative mumble raps.
It is refreshing to be able to sit down and sample such a patiently curated venture from a character as openly likable yet still intriguingly reserved as Nines. Crop Circle perhaps lacks some of the standout street anthems that have, in the past, propelled him into hood stardom. But the result is something entirely new, an impressively unconfined body of work. It doubles as a snapshot of London’s cross-pollinating music scene and a signal towards the rapper’s maturation as he continues to transition from being a homegrown talent into an increasingly reputable MC on the world-stage. | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | XL | April 28, 2018 | 7.5 | 9224dd14-1f57-4186-a201-dbfa903e3c55 | Ciaran Thapar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ciaran-thapar/ | |
Brooklyn trio Sannhet is an instrumental powerhouse. On So Numb, they shake loose of their black metal and post-rock roots, making heavy music with their own beautiful language. | Brooklyn trio Sannhet is an instrumental powerhouse. On So Numb, they shake loose of their black metal and post-rock roots, making heavy music with their own beautiful language. | Sannhet: So Numb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sannhet-so-numb/ | So Numb | The primary way of classifying the Brooklyn trio Sannhet is as an instrumental powerhouse. They have worked with black metal and post-rock, but neither of those genres define them; they harness extreme sounds while bringing a level of approachability to their music, with great emotional depth. Like many of their New York peers—Krallice, Tombs, and Yellow Eyes, for example—they use familiar forms to move into uncharted territories. On their third album, So Numb, they’ve left the sonic properties of black metal behind without dispensing of its forward motion, and shaking loose has helped them come into their own.
Guitarist John Refano relies less on repetitive tremolo passages, introducing more detached playing that compliments and also exists outside the rhythm section’s orbit. There are some traces of Sannhet’s metallic past—on the title track and parts of “Sapphire”—but Refano has switched an outright aggressive tone for a lusher sound that’s more suited for spacier breaks and tender melodies. Sannhet’s edge is drummer Christopher Todd, who has shifted from asset to primary drive. It’s no coincidence that the album begins with only drums on “Indigo Illusion,” working up to a climax instead of rushing right off.
Much like Todd’s former Flenser labelmate Ignat Frege of Wreck and Reference, he is active in a small space, bursting forth with fluidity that emphasizes power instead of complication. He takes the repetitive tom lull you find in a lot of Neurosis clones and makes it as energetic and urgent as a d-beat march. Once he breaks up AJ Annunziata’s solemn bassline in the beginning of “Sapphire,” he turns and makes Refano’s delicate riffs into forceful cries, adding energy without whipping nervous speed into the guitar.
More often than not, the drumming outpaces the guitar work, but it helps Refano take on new patterns that couldn’t be conceivable with their former blackened lockstep. Refano and Todd have always been the band’s core—Annunziata didn’t join until their 2013 debut Known Flood—and So Numb illuminates their interplay. “Way Out” is where they’re all clicking three steps ahead of everyone else: Todd pushes Refano’s melodies to ecstatic heights, which also veer in and out to make Todd rushing through even more alive and jarring.
So Numb celebrates constant activity, even in slower tracks like “Salts” and “Fernbeds” (featuring additional guitar from Planning For Burial’s Thom Wasluck) that emphasize Refano’s dreamier textures. “Sleep Well” reverses the dynamic, as Refano ascends into a squalling mass and leaves his bandmates locked in a noise-rock groove. Like the record of the record, “Sleep Well” is packed with lust for life, even when it turns more conventional. It’s not just a combination of sounds that makes So Numb an exceptional heavy record: it shows how comfortable they are pushing and working off each other. There’s a human element to how they squeeze raw emotion from industrialized creations. It flows with affirming beauty, despite how Annunziata has said the record draws from quite a bit of turmoil.
Sannhet is an all-consuming live experience, draping themselves in television static and flitting bars of white light while swallowing the audience in loudness and dexterity. When they played Show No Mercy’s SXSW showcase in 2014, it was a rare moment where I thought: I didn’t know you could do that with music. (The showcase was put on by former Pitchfork editor Brandon Stosuy, and his wife Jane Lea and son Henry are pictured on So Numb’s cover.) At that show, Sannhet’s references to black metal, post-rock, and overwhelming volume were familiar. But how they took all that to reach their own kind of ecstasy was bewildering. So Numb is where they’ve brought that totality to record; it is instrumental heavy music in Sannhet’s own language. Using recognizable words and expressions but elevating how they’re used, Sannhet is better categorized by what they evoke rather than what they play. | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | August 24, 2017 | 8 | 922534ce-75a9-4c46-944b-b7d7de6a9cc0 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Ivana Carrescia’s latest project blends pop melodies with rich, moody, turn-of-the-millennium deep house. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re both dancing and floating in space. | Ivana Carrescia’s latest project blends pop melodies with rich, moody, turn-of-the-millennium deep house. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re both dancing and floating in space. | Isola: EP1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isola-ep1/ | EP1 | The Las Vegas-born musician Ivana Carrescia’s voice flits about the edges of her club tracks like a benevolent ghost. She sings in a downy falsetto that rarely rises above lullaby levels, and she whispers as often as she sings. Her lyrics are mostly just scraps of snapshots, pieces torn from a larger whole and tossed to the wind: the taste of salt, the color blue, flowers in the rain. Much of her time behind the mic yields only wordless expressions—coos, sighs, wisps of tinted air. The first time we hear her voice, 30 seconds into her debut EP’s lead track, “Ischia,” it takes the form of a single reversed syllable, glinting like an apparition before it disappears into velvety dub delay: the echo of a shadow of a specter that haunts a decades-old memory of the dancefloor.
Carrescia used to record under the aliases Ivana XL and Eddi Front, writing wistful, reverb-laden songs for acoustic guitar and piano. Singing of angels, bad breakups, and the Lone Star State, she evoked the watery melancholy of Cat Power and the retro fantasies of Lana Del Rey, her voice faint as a sun-bleached photograph, her upright sounding like it had been through a hurricane or two. She reappeared in 2016 as Gioia with a strikingly different proposition, wrapping breathy singing in abstracted atmospheres and electronic throb—a homegrown style not too far from what Kelly Lee Owens was doing around the same time. But Carrescia’s debut outing as Isola marks an even bigger shift, embracing the rich, moody sound of turn-of-the-millennium deep house.
As she did on Gioia’s lone EP, Carrescia wrote and recorded her Isola debut in collaboration with Godmode head Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor). Working remotely between Vegas and Los Angeles, the two exchanged ideas, condensing and arranging their sprawling raw materials—improvised synth jams, homemade soundbanks, tape manipulations, ad-hoc vocals—into streamlined forms. Like Godmode releases from Shamir, Yaeji, and Channel Tres, EP1 stakes out a middle ground between pop and dance music, pairing the melodies of the former with the enveloping flow of the latter. But Isola’s music might be the most unreservedly club-focused of her labelmates’ output—or at the very least, the most narrowly focused on a specific set of references.
She lays it all out on the table with “Ischia,” in which virtually every element is a fine-tuned tribute to Luomo’s 2000 album Vocalcity, from the dubby chords to the snub-nosed bassline to snippets of breath that drift like confetti. This brand of smooth, sophisticated deep house used to be a minor cottage industry, epitomized in tunes like Tom Middleton’s Cosmos remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Chocolate”; it’s been out of favor for so long, it’s a treat to hear it revived. But “Ischia” isn’t merely a good imitation. Hypnotic yet constantly evolving, it strikes the perfect balance of propulsive groove and heady atmosphere—the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re dancing and floating in space all at once.
“Two Birds” sets its sights on trip-hop, while “La Notte” and “Canis Major” are largely amorphous sketches for voice and piano, but the bulk of the EP is dedicated to recreating late-’90s house and techno at their most immersive. “Ricorda – Tell Me” takes the deadweight bass thump and dub-techno chords of classic Rhythm & Sound and spins them into an eight-minute journey in which, despite the fundamentally repetitive form, no two bars sound alike. “Any Day” is structured around cascading chords that suggest a “Good Life”-type anthem is about to kick off at any moment; instead, the duo plays with expectations, building toward a climax and then pulling back, leaving Carrescia’s voice twisting in the wind just when you expect the drumbeat to drop. As laborious as the writing process may have been, the results feel fluid and spontaneous—linear but perpetually shifting, moving with the gyroscopic surety of a dancer weaving her way through a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.
The EP reaches its own climax midway through with “Said It Again.” Following the drop-less “Any Day” and then the vaporous “Canis Major,” the song’s chest-caressing sub-bass and crisp, tick-tocking house beat come as an almost physical relief. Pastel chords add depth; Carrescia’s wistful vocal (“And in the nothing night, I cried for you/And in the morning time, I flew the field”) is her most emotionally direct performance on the record. The mix of elements faintly recalls Bodily Functions-era Herbert, another deep-house staple of the new millennium. The whole thing exudes a kind of weary glamor: The synths and voice have the texture of rumpled silk; muted horns shimmer like reflected sunlight on the skyline. I’m transported back to Sunday-morning taxi rides home from the club, ears still ringing. Isola’s music is alive with these moments; at once nostalgic and visceral, it feels populated by the spirits of life-changing nights on the dancefloor.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Godmode | October 2, 2020 | 7.7 | 92255146-1c07-42f8-873f-174190c803cf | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
While two quality full-lengths and an EP haven't reserved him a spot on indie's marquee yet, Cass McCombs still possesses a prodigal glow, and this is his first release for Domino. | While two quality full-lengths and an EP haven't reserved him a spot on indie's marquee yet, Cass McCombs still possesses a prodigal glow, and this is his first release for Domino. | Cass McCombs: Dropping the Writ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10768-dropping-the-writ/ | Dropping the Writ | Cass McCombs sings and writes songs, but he's not a singer-songwriter in the conventional sense. Always willing to play the angles, McCombs sounded more like a spotlight-friendly frontman than a singular songsmith on 2005's dense, multi-layered PREfection, hiding behind walls of reverb and a hodgepodge of musical stylings rather than crooning directly into the mic. Even on threadbare debut A, McCombs cross-pollinated folksy shuffles with art-pop tropes, daring listeners to earnestly connect with his gorgeous yet arcane ballads. A less challenging artist with the same skill set set would probably be polishing his mound of gold records right now, but McCombs revels in ambiguity, not accessibility.
While two quality full-lengths and an EP haven't reserved him a spot on indie's marquee yet, McCombs still possesses a prodigal glow. Named after the parliamentary procedure in which the head of government requests a dissolution of parliament, Dropping the Writ suggests a reinvention for McCombs both in its title and the fact it's his first release on Domino. Of course, McCombs doesn't know the meaning of the word "sell-out," so any jitters surrounding his label promotion should be allayed. This is, after all, the same nut who only disclosed his debut's lyrics if fans were willing to personally mail him a SASE. Still, although the gussied up Writ doesn't find him morphing into a more indie-appealing form like Josh Ritter or Spoon, it's hard not noticing some edge has been taken off the curio's sound and mystique.
From "AIDS in Africa" to "Equinox"'s infamous line "Silverfish quilting testicle/ Despotic owl conducts the wolves," McCombs has beckoned listeners to dissect his oblique lyrics with the rigor of a piece of high literature. Hell, the guy could even pass for a Faulkner or Steinbeck in recent press pics. Writ, by comparison, feels lyrically straightforward, with the occasional idiosyncratic line thrown in merely for flavor. Opener and origin story "Lionkiller" sets a rare tone for McCombs-- he's content to talk about himself. "I was born in a hospital" he sings, echoing A opener "I Went to the Hospital", before unveiling other self-mythologized details of his upbringing over a rolling "Rawhide"-style riff.
The lyrical elucidation here extends to the music, as McCombs whittles PREfection's overgrown genre exploration down to easily digestible folk, chalk full of the Americanisms you'd expect from an acoustic-toting Yank. His Smiths and Cure tics have all but vanished, and even on McCartney-esque tracks like "Pregnant Pause" or "Full Moon or Infinity," the cheery anglo pop's undercut by the sort of detached dreariness typically reserved for Elliott Smith tunes. For the most part though, McCombs is content to lean back and strum away, gazing at the stars rather than his shoes. Yes, a couple unorthodox moments occur, such as the squawky melismatic "No me-e-eans yes!" chorus of "Petrified Forest" or the arpeggiating falsetto on "Deseret", but Writ mostly avoids conspicuous ideas. Maybe McCombs is trying to prove he's not dependent on eyebrow-furrowing eccentricities, but Writ, with its cut and dry approach, lacks the replay value of his previous releases. While this album may help broaden McCombs's close-knit circle of music-hungry fans, the indie renegade aspect of his music is sorely missed, even if his remarkable raw talent keeps this effort comfortably afloat. | 2007-10-10T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-10-10T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | October 10, 2007 | 6.6 | 922b9f41-705e-4cee-94ee-82d5f337fb67 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
The former Megafaun drummer uses a resonant, melodic palette of gamelan, thumb piano, and metallophones to achieve gemlike tones and ambient atmospheres. | The former Megafaun drummer uses a resonant, melodic palette of gamelan, thumb piano, and metallophones to achieve gemlike tones and ambient atmospheres. | Joe Westerlund: *Elegies for the Drift * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-westerlund-elegies-for-the-drift/ | Elegies for the Drift | Milford Graves was a mentor, among a host of other things: percussionist, professor, autodidact, herbalist, acupuncturist, vegan, and the inventor of his own martial art. Born in Jamaica, Queens, he was at the vanguard of ’60s free jazz in the New York Art Quartet, embarking on a visionary journey until his death in 2021. He played all kinds of drums with all kinds of things—tire irons, pestles, the branches of trees—and developed a style based on the human heart but overturned the pleasant falsehood that it beats in 4/4 time. To see him perform—too many arms splashing out, a whistle or a microphone in his mouth, or all this and more—is to witness the great yawp of the universe vibrating in one mortal frame.
For four decades, Graves taught at Bennington College, where Joe Westerlund was one of his pupils. Westerlund is a Wisconsin native who has had most of his music career in North Carolina. He began as the drummer for the austerely psychedelic Americana band Megafaun in the 2000s and went on to add his subtle, murmuring time to many projects, especially with the Justin Vernon camp (that’s the Wisconsin connection) and the Sylvan Esso/Mountain Man camp (the Bennington connection). It was at Sylvan Esso’s studio that he recorded Elegies for the Drift, his third album of solo percussion, a year into his new life as a teacherless student.
Graves was not the only role model whose loss, or imminent loss, Westerlund was grieving as he developed the album. There was his ailing father-in-law, for whom he hung the cosmos in a mobile with a silvery, slowly spinning miniature, “Prelude to Quietude.” And there was his friend Miles Cooper Seaton, who had died in a car accident the year before. “The Circle,” which incorporates Seaton’s voice and a hailstorm Westerlund recorded after he learned of his passing, is seven cleansing minutes of what sounds like rain beating on little bells and gongs. It’s the centerpiece of an album that belies preconceived notions about how solo percussion sounds.
Emphasizing a resonant, melodic palette of gamelan, thumb piano, idiophones, and metallophones, Elegies for the Drift moves in periodic waves, in small impulses and intimate suggestions—nothing so pat or pushy as beats. “You can’t put a dang-danka-dang and call that the swing rhythm,” said Graves. For him, swing was survival, a way to keep moving by any means necessary. Westerlund does not put a dang-danka-dang. With warm electronic impastos, impressionistic colors, and a songful mien, Elegies for the Drift is mainly an ambient record. It’s significant that “The Circle” has little obvious relation to Seaton’s music in Akron/Family, any more than the rest of the record overtly resembles Graves, who taught individuality above all else. Westerlund has found his own tonic, yogic yawp; he learned his lessons well.
A few months after Seaton and Graves died, Westerlund was invited to Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to play with the Kasai Allstars, a sprawling collective uniting a number of groups in the Kasai region. This trip resulted in two of the album’s most dynamic tracks. My favorite is “Carolina Yin,” with its hovering, dripping, gemlike tones, though “Kinshasa Yang” is also terrific, coming as close as the record ever does to dance music. “This is all we teach to outsiders, but you’re free to take this and make your own music,” Westerlund recounted the Kasai Allstars saying about the instrument we call the mbira or ikembe in certain people’s hands and the kalimba or thumb piano in others, writing the conflicts of cultural transfer right into the name.
The story echoes how Graves came to develop his martial art, Yara, which was inspired by African dance and the praying mantis. He studied, learned as much as Chinese practitioners would teach him (which wasn’t everything), and fused it with himself. In this light, Elegies for the Drift shows how the long lines and sharp limits of mentorship serve to divide exchange from appropriation, to give a conscience to artistic connection, which takes root ungovernably—say, between a charismatic New York jazz drummer and a young Midwesterner with patient hands—with an almost biological force. | 2023-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Psychic Hotline | March 10, 2023 | 7.6 | 922e83b3-d2ec-4e34-9c52-6847b19dca68 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
On their debut EP, and the third release from Oakland’s Club Chai, 8ULENTINA channels breakbeats, synths, and recorded objects into an unusual kind of dancefloor interiority. | On their debut EP, and the third release from Oakland’s Club Chai, 8ULENTINA channels breakbeats, synths, and recorded objects into an unusual kind of dancefloor interiority. | 8ULENTINA: Eucalyptus EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8ulentina-eucalyptus-ep/ | Eucalyptus EP | Nimble movement between genres and the decentering of Western cultural narratives are hallmarks of the Oakland-based club night, radio show, and label Club Chai, run by 8ULENTINA and the producer FOOZOOL. Linking dance music to ritual, the event is named for the tea ceremonies familiar to both from their respective backgrounds, and the sounds the pair and their associates embrace run the gamut from lo-fi electronic dance music to all manner of non-Western pop. The collective aesthetic can be a bit kitchen-sink, but this range is tied together by a forward-thinking DIY ethos that involves both fostering real community ties and challenging listeners to engage actively and mindfully. 8ULENTINA’s work in various media distills these qualities, sometimes to manic effect. In this collection of tracks—the artist’s debut release as a producer, and Club Chai’s third as a label—their measured curiosity and embrace of interiority grounds this squall in a singular perspective.
8ULENTINA’s approach to sound is sculptural, rounding or sharpening samples without erasing their raw materials’ links to particular places and times (whether drum programming pulled from Middle Eastern music or original recordings of objects or vocals). “Metal Clip,” the opening track, lays down a tempered metallic beat, off of which spin muddled string and flute melodies. It’s a lovely listen on headphones; the titular clip sounds lend subtle textural bite to its spacious melodic arcs. “Wander Flute” centers on a dulled but pummeling heartbeat of a rhythm that leads to a single flute tone, fluid and clear. 8ULENTINA’s tracks parse ideas in phases, injecting thoughtfulness into a compositional process that could just as easily be gleefully accumulative.
Though there is room to breathe throughout, the energy of Eucalyptus cycles, relaxing and then tensing. “Soiled” is built around a clipped breakbeat, its pacing made all the more frenetic as those drums, interlaced with little synthesizer squelches, assault and recede. Such intensity never overwhelms, nor does it prize the dancing body over the wandering mind. The EP concludes with the keyboard-driven “Mint T,” with vocals from Organ Tapes, a standout and marked downbeat shift. The scratchy distance of Organ Tapes’ laconic vocals belies the gentle complexity of 8ULENTINA’s production, which is warm and evocative.
8ULENTINA invokes processes of self-care and healing in their notes on the release—concepts that make sense in context of the greater Club Chai project, but that are perhaps more elusive within sound itself. How might, or can, such a framework exist within a club track? This idea has circulated loosely around experimental subcultures the past few years, perhaps too often in the form of cheap verbiage produced by corporate promoters and publications. But Eucalyptus is a compelling and elegantly scaled (which is to say, only ever-so-lightly conceptually driven) argument for the possibility of music containing and even generating such practices of care. Genuinely experimental in form, the EP nonetheless seems distinctly attentive to the ever-looming possibility of exhaustion for both listener and maker and the small-scale practices of aesthetic sustainability that keep us running—an unusually generous creative offering. | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Club Chai | March 12, 2018 | 7.5 | 923611c9-9173-4519-9f0a-f9e963ea3871 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
On her first solo album in 14 years, the former Belle and Sebastian singer indulges a gently psychedelic fantasy of California fleshed out with gospel vocals and a Tom Petty cover. | On her first solo album in 14 years, the former Belle and Sebastian singer indulges a gently psychedelic fantasy of California fleshed out with gospel vocals and a Tom Petty cover. | Isobel Campbell: There Is No Other | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isobel-campbell-there-is-no-other/ | There Is No Other | Twelve months ago you would have gotten long odds on Isobel Campbell returning in 2020 with an album of dashing, adventurous, and even rather funky indie pop. The former Belle and Sebastian singer may have scuffed up her musical palette in the 2000s with a trio of releases alongside onetime Screaming Tree Mark Lanegan, but she nevertheless remained frozen in the public eye as the ethereal voice of cardigan indie, an impression hardly helped by the two so-gentle-they’re-almost-not-there albums she recorded as the Gentle Waves.
But Los Angeles, where Campbell now lives, loves a comeback, particularly one as unlikely and triumphant as There Is No Other, Campbell’s first solo album in 14 years and among the best things she has put her name to since leaving Belle and Sebastian. There Is No Other may remind listeners of Campbell’s illustrious past—her nebulous whisper of a voice has the effect of Proust’s madeleine on a certain breed of indie-pop fan—but it also suggests the hitherto untapped potential of a musical magpie, taking in everything from synthesizer sleaze to gospel-infused soul.
Psychedelia is a touchstone—Campbell has spoken of the record’s “dreamy, otherworldly feel”—but she taps the gentle Californian psychedelia of “Incense and Peppermints” and Friends-era Beach Boys rather than the acid freak-out of Syd Barrett’s solo career; the kind of psychedelia you could take home to meet your parents for tea, muffins, and meditation.
Indeed, the gilded specter of California hangs heavy over There Is No Other. But this is the California of dreamy sunsets and Laurel Canyon bongos, as seen through the eyes of an outsider, rather than the more humdrum reality of America’s most populous state. “City of Angels” is an ode to a city Campbell finds “seductive yet overwhelming,” while “Boulevard” is her reaction to L.A.’s homeless crisis—not that you would notice the angst amid the two songs’ campfire-and-red-wine vibe. The former is particularly lush, a mixture of gently picked acoustic guitar, finger cymbals, and chirping cicadas, the melodic warmth inviting you to pull up a seat and toast a marshmallow.
Elsewhere, the vibe is closer to Glasgow-gone-American. “The Heart of It All” and “Hey World” add sweet gospel vocals to Campbell’s pastel tones, bringing to mind Primal Scream’s experiments on Screamadelica—sincere and evocative if not entirely convincing. In the album’s most unlikely move, Campbell covers Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” replacing the song’s signature guitar riff and driving rock drums with lightly distorted synth and drum machine, bringing a delicious nonchalance to Petty’s automotive anthem.
That Campbell gets away with this broad palette is thanks to her empathetic arrangements and clever songwriting—the pocket chorus of “Ant Life” has the kind of understatement that only experienced writers would dare. She has a knack for making everything sound utterly effortless, as if the songs came to her during an afternoon nap. A 14-year gap between solo albums might suggest struggle and toil, but perhaps the best compliment you could pay this picture postcard of a release is that you would never suspect how long its creator had been away.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Cooking Vinyl | February 6, 2020 | 7.6 | 92377d0b-0635-4e55-9d07-1c162c3a27ce | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Using Mellotron and electric organ, the Canadian minimalist teases echoes of Baroque music and post-rock while honing in on the idea of the drone as a phenomenological, time-bending experience. | Using Mellotron and electric organ, the Canadian minimalist teases echoes of Baroque music and post-rock while honing in on the idea of the drone as a phenomenological, time-bending experience. | Sarah Davachi: Let Night Come on Bells End the Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-let-night-come-on-bells-end-the-day/ | Let Night Come On Bells End The Day | Few artists would want to be defined by their earliest attempts at original work, but in the case of Canadian minimalist Sarah Davachi, her sandbox phase is instructive. As a fan of the Romantic tone poet and pianist Frédéric Chopin, the young Davachi took his tear-jerking chord progressions and distilled them into her first compositions, with everything subordinated to these shifting tonal elements. Her motivations haven’t changed much since those early experiments in tone and texture, even if her methods have. Like Henri Matisse, whose paintings turn still life into inner life by prioritizing color above all other elements, Davachi drills down into a single instrument at a time, cracking open a vast spectrum of harmonic variation to reveal new expressive possibilities.
On Let Night Come on Bells End the Day, her fifth full-length release in six years, Davachi limits her palette to Mellotron and electric organ across five pieces which, like the best drone music, offer a fleeting glimpse of the infinite. Her albums derive their individual character from their respective sets of instruments, varying according to her systematic exploration of the range of available timbres. Vergers in 2016 was composed on the EMS Synthi 100, an analog synthesizer from the 1970s, while last year’s All My Circles Run was entirely acoustic, focusing on overdubbed strings, organ, piano, and voice. Davachi’s ability to leap from instrument to instrument, framing their individual temperaments while listening for unexpected affinities, isn’t a fluke; one of her first jobs was as a guide at Calgary’s National Music Centre, where she would arrive early to spend time learning a new instrument before conducting tours.
Throughout her many releases since 2013, Davachi, who studied electronic music at Mills College, in California, has tended to center herself in meditative, durational drones, drawing comparisons to the deep, dense planes of Éliane Radigue and Kevin Drumm. But once you’re absorbed into the hazy vistas of Let Night Come, ornate melodic whispers begin to peek through. On “Mordents,” she hints at a childhood spent straight-backed at the piano as a baroque melody wends its way towards encroaching chords, each note decaying into harmonic fog; tones mingle like drops of moisture in the air until all is enveloped.
Grander still, “Buhrstone” unfurls itself like a post-rock epic, each chord change building up to an urgent, breath-catching ecstasy; after seven minutes, the climax echoes the soaring heights of Sigur Rós or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Through the familiar wobble of the organ and the Mellotron—a 1960s keyboard that utilizes magnetic tape—Davachi also paints a subtle homage to classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes, and the Grateful Dead. The trail of organ reverb in the final seconds of “Mordents” even feels like an abstract approximation of a rock ‘n’ roll ending: a flourish at the end of a black angel’s death song.
The fifth and final piece, “Hours in the Evening,” is a sensory nerve-jamming of sustained, pearlescent tones that nods to her chief influence, the minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, whose practice had a transformative effect on Davachi as a music student. Like her forebears, Davachi has an innate understanding of drone music as a phenomenological, time-bending experience. The beauty of drone, after all, lies not in its duration but in its ephemerality: a single, conscious moment both collapsed and extended, disintegrating right before us. Let Night Come on Bells End the Day is loyal to that momentary perception of the sublime. | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Recital Program | April 17, 2018 | 7.5 | 923fd08f-2ded-4e98-93b4-cd78ffeed813 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Having shed the beardy affect and folksy shuffle, the band could now slip mostly unnoticed between Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots, but their newly palatable sound could really use more quirks. | Having shed the beardy affect and folksy shuffle, the band could now slip mostly unnoticed between Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots, but their newly palatable sound could really use more quirks. | Mumford & Sons: Delta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mumford-and-sons-delta/ | Delta | Modern rock isn’t dead—it’s just weightless. Save for the occasional nostalgia act attempting to rattle the terra firma, most radio-ready bands in the ailing musical genre have recently ditched the riffs for glassy keyboards, echo-soaked percussion, and vocal affectations as wispy as the white trail of an e-cigarette. Even Arctic Monkeys—a band that spent much of the past 16 years wielding six-stringed weapons with such old-fashioned macho swagger that they dressed up like goddamn greasers to promote 2013’s AM—have packed up their guitars and launched themselves into zero gravity, lunar taquerías and all.
The reach for streaming-algorithm brass rings has often been prescribed as the cause for this sudden dip in aggression and subsequent sonic flattening—but there’s precedent at play here too. Much-maligned British polymaths alt-J have spent much of this decade sanding down Radiohead’s Kid A-era abstractions to resemble smooth, uninteresting steel, and Coldplay’s influence also looms large, years after they finally managed to escape their own post-Radiohead shadow. There’s a revealing sequence in the just-released documentary Head Full of Dreams as the band performs at the 2001 KROQ Weenie Roast; sandwiched in between ultra-masc acts like Sevendust and SR-71, their sensitive pop-rock is met with boos and debris hurled at the stage. Fifteen years later, the cultural tables have definitively turned.
And no big-ticket rock band in the last five years has carried Coldplay’s influence quite like Mumford & Sons, the previously shuffling folk-rock troupe led by Marcus Mumford, who unwittingly led the EDM-reactionary “real music” movement in the early 2010s. Revisiting the band’s first two albums of largely unremarkable Appalachian-isms, it’s surprising to recall the level of vitriol that Mumford and Sons were met with practically upon arrival; as evidenced by Sigh No More’s “The Cave” and Babel’s “I Will Wait,” they were occasionally capable of turning out a moderately pleasing tune, and Mumford’s own contributions to the soundtrack for the Coen brothers’ gloriously melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis was proof of his inherent musicality.
But as time passed, Mumford & Sons got tired of sounding so out of time. 2015’s Wilder Mind ditched the washboard percussion and loud stomping for clean, streamlined, and positively Coldplay-esque rock music wallpaper-y enough for Zach Braff to disappear completely in; the following year, they gamely hopped over to Johannesburg for an EP of the same name, recording with African musicians like the Very Best and Baaba Maal. Delta, the group’s fourth proper LP, picks up where Wilder Mind left off, with a slightly altered approach; they’ve swapped producers, replacing Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford with indie-mainstream Svengali Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Adele), and they’ve incorporated some electronic gewgaws and rubbery beats into their anthemic music.
You could conceivably slip most of Delta’s 14 songs in between recent hits from Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots, and whether that’s a good thing is totally up to whoever’s listening. But Delta is also the strongest collection of songs Mumford & Sons have released to date; the cool-handed atmospherics and dreamy melodies here simply suit them better than any other sonic guise they’ve worn, from the cresting crescendo of opening track “42” to the rippling chorus of “Woman” and “October Skies”’ aching emptiness. Close your eyes while listening to the simmering mid-tempo pop of “Picture You,” and you can practically imagine Chris Martin belting it out in front of a massive crowd.
More than anything else, Delta evokes Coldplay’s 2005 album X&Y—and not just in its predilection for gaseous choruses and moody melodies. Coldplay’s worst album is notorious for its imposing length, and the 61-minute Delta is similarly a slog, as Mumford & Sons’ new sound takes on a dull, beige quality when consumed for too long. When singer-songwriter Gill Landry shows up in the middle of “Darkness Visible”’s stormy pianos to recite an excerpt of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (yes, really), the dramatic finality is undercut by the fact that there are are four more songs that follow. But at least Landry’s poetizing lends some personality to the album. While Mumford & Sons have never sounded as purely palatable as they do on Delta, they do so at risk of achieving total anonymity—the aural equivalent of unflavored Alka-Seltzer dissolving in a glass of milk.
Somewhat bewilderingly, the album’s strongest moment comes when Mumford & Sons evoke their folksy roots: the moonlit ballad “Wild Heart,” buried in Delta’s back half, which showcases Mumford’s lovely vocal talents over brushed drums, tinkling piano, and a quietly strummed acoustic guitar. “No one is better armed/To tear me down with a slight of the tongue,” Mumford murmurs, addressing not his fiercest critics but the give-and-take that is passionate, complicated love; it’s an intimate, revealing moment on an album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity. | 2018-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Gentlemen of the Road / Glassnote / Island | November 20, 2018 | 5.8 | 9242fba2-b4a3-4b68-bc44-691a55fd4c46 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Trevor de Brauw is the guitarist for the stalwart instrumental rock band Pelican. His solo debut collects six open-ended, marvelously textured guitar instrumentals written during the last decade. | Trevor de Brauw is the guitarist for the stalwart instrumental rock band Pelican. His solo debut collects six open-ended, marvelously textured guitar instrumentals written during the last decade. | Trevor de Brauw: Uptown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22855-uptown/ | Uptown | For almost 20 years, the guitarist Trevor de Brauw has anchored the stalwart instrumental rock band Pelican. His chiseled riffs, stretching skyward from a crust of doom metal toward the wide skies of post-rock, have long been its real hook. As prolific as that band has been, de Brauw has kept busy with a litany of side-projects, too, from his new trio RLYR to the slow-motion creep of the drone collective Chord. Still, as late as last summer, de Brauw confessed to a lack of confidence in his guitar prowess, doubtful even of his ability to reproduce songs onstage. Making music, he said, was an emotional and mental necessity, not some chance to flex his technical abilities.
That compulsive approach is critical to Uptown, de Brauw’s solo debut. Instead of serving as a showcase, Uptown instead collects six open-ended, marvelously textured guitar instrumentals written during the last decade. Sure, there is a certain level of wizardry here, especially with guitar loops that wrap into Moebius strips of sound or the army of ways de Brauw warps the signals from his six strings. During the record’s tremendous finale, the twelve-minute beauty “From the Black Soil Poetry and Song Sprang,” de Brauw manages to conjure and control a symphony of guitars by himself. The piece suggests the choir-like calm of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail or Growing in its prime a decade ago.
There’s sophistication, too, in the ways that de Brauw patiently peels layers apart or puts them together. “Distinct Frequency” is little more than three minutes of a powerful drone and a broadcast of what might be the evening news, pitted against one another. But de Brauw pulls them apart so slowly that the music is dramatic and demanding, as if always on the verge of some major revelation. But Uptown is a subtle record, and both signals just fade into silence.
Indeed, the complexity and real delight of Uptown stem more from its commingled, nuanced emotions than its instrumental execution. These six songs are, alternately, messy webs of anxiety and comfort, frustration and hopefulness, fatigue and energy, together always pushing past simple binaries of happy or sad, light or dark. The deliberate chords of “They Keep Bowing,” for instance, seem at first caustic. But as they decay, they blossom into something beautiful, with individual notes suddenly circling above like halos.
Likewise, “Turn Up for What” (who said solo guitar records couldn’t have a sense of humor?) transitions from chimes and bells into a loud electric groan into, finally, a riff that aims for liftoff. The boundary between each phase is fuzzy, implying that each state is linked to the others. Like the intertwined loops and nested layers, there are no discrete or easy feelings to Uptown. It is, de Brauw says without a word, complicated.
The world of solo guitar records isn’t really the domain of urgent, timely statements. They are, more often, practiced steps on a continuum, sometimes speaking only to like-minded practitioners and listeners. Despite its long gestation, though, Uptown feels surprisingly necessary and somehow reassuring. There’s confusion and clarity within these songs, an understanding that these ideas and emotions only make sense in the presence of each other. During Uptown, the darkest parts sometimes allow for flickers of light, though other times the darkness swallows the light whole. It is an apt soundtrack for the start of 2017, then, when signs of pending apocalypse and revolution seem to bleed into one. | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | The Flenser | February 10, 2017 | 7.3 | 92508e98-e5d2-42e9-8b2c-1177cfb4494f | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
In their mix of soulful grease and punky grit, Seratones feel like a natural, rollicking complement to The Alabama Shakes. | In their mix of soulful grease and punky grit, Seratones feel like a natural, rollicking complement to The Alabama Shakes. | Seratones: Get Gone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21859-get-gone/ | Get Gone | Seratones would be just another pretty-good-not-great rock band without frontwoman AJ Haynes' powerful voice leading the charge. Their first LP, Get Gone, brandishes playful guitar hooks that swing in at just the right moments, but Haynes is the band’s best asset, lighting these otherwise-conventional songs on fire.
In their mix of soulful grease and punky grit, Seratones feel like a natural, rollicking complement to The Alabama Shakes, but it’s not quite fair to call them a ripoff. Where the Shakes go for the groovy soul of Muscle Shoals, Seratones instead veer toward swinging Southern garage rock. Get Gone’s guitars crackle with the heat of the band’s native Louisiana. In his earliest days as a Squirrel Nut Zipper, Get Gone producer Jimbo Mathus specialized in fast-and-loose tunes that sounded like they might fly apart at any moment, an energy the Seratones often capture well (though some extra occasional grit wouldn’t hurt, either).
Haynes attributes her vocal prowess to learning to sing in a church choir from a young age, and she shows off her quivering high notes right away on opener “Choking On Your Spit,” balancing it neatly with a sneer at the song's recipient. When she belts that she’s seen the light “Don’t Need It,” you believe it. She slinks a little lower on the more blues-inclined title track before cutting in with sharp, cathartic “Ooh-ooh!”s for the song’s chorus.
The band is at is best when it’s playing fast and tight, as with the bright, soaring “Sun.” They lose momentum on the drifting “Tide” early in the record before picking up with the punchier “Chandelier,” and closing track “Keep Me” is pretty, but it feels like a sleepy, anticlimactic close to a record that otherwise vibrates with energy. “Kingdom Come” begins with an impatient patter before dipping into chugging guitar riffs, combining for a track that oozes anticipation.
Haynes' charisma is palpable through almost every song—even the giggles that bubble up on “Kingdom Come” inject the record with a genuine joy. She ends that song with the line, “I’ll be your best, believe me,” delivering the last two words like a slow punch to the gut. She does so much work on Get Gone that you wind up hoping she follows through on her promise. | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | May 12, 2016 | 6.8 | 9252fd53-59a0-4c56-93f1-d239a0e6b205 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
On his debut EP, the Kansas City singer-producer shows off both his extraordinary voice and his remarkable facility for wringing maximum sentiment out of the most negligible nonsense phrases. | On his debut EP, the Kansas City singer-producer shows off both his extraordinary voice and his remarkable facility for wringing maximum sentiment out of the most negligible nonsense phrases. | 1010Benja: Two Houses EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1010-benja-sl-two-houses-ep/ | Two Houses EP | There are a few definitions for the word boofy. In Australian slang, it’s used to describe those who are big, dumb, and strong. It can also refer to the volume of a hairstyle or the puffiness of an object. It's not far from the Britishism “bouff,” which describes the accumulation of wealth (i.e. the “Bouff Daddy” as popularized by the grime rapper J Hus). But for 1010 Benja SL, “boofiness” means something altogether different—and it’s a very serious matter.
In the the Kansas City, Missouri, singer and producer’s breakout song, boofy is a sensation between love and jealousy (“Boofiness/Half in us/Often makin’ walls small”) that makes romance rich with contradiction. It’s also a very silly sounding word. It’s hard to keep a straight face when saying it; even harder to make it the subject of something so sincere. But Benja does wondrous things with nonsense language. His extraordinary voice, thin and raw and redolent of Timberlake, pours a titanic amount of emotion on “Boofiness.” Accompanied by bouncing piano and chorus-line handclaps, cursing the “bougie buddy bitches” he must vanquish, Benja turns a ludicrous word into something pretty beautiful.
Benja’s voice makes all that possible: The set of pipes on this guy is shocking. Precise and powerful, he can extract a wellspring of feeling from the goofiest of lyrics. Take, for example this bewildering turn of phrase on “Tragic X,” a highlight from his debut EP, Two Houses: “Precious face, wholly emotive, yeah/Shoo, shoo, shoo, little mosquito/Little nightmare, don’t wake me.” He glides through the line with confidence and verve, stretching syllables to their limit, doing vocal backflips before your ears. Only listening to the song again is it possible to glean the strangeness of his seemingly free-associative writing.
This linguistic playfulness is just one part of what makes his music so interesting. His sound is both erudite and buggy, flickering wildly between neo-soul, boom bap, grime, garage, and ambient collage, sometimes within the frame of a single song. He’s also, as you might expect, “mysterious”: Biographical details are scant, besides the fact that he grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has a loose affiliation with the label NON WORLDWIDE, which has released music from Arca and Mykki Blanco. This all lends Two Houses an undeniable—if somewhat predictable—allure. (Another enigmatic pop artist? You don’t say.)
Looking past the mystery, Benja’s debut still ranks among the most promising new projects of 2018. There’s a streak of bona fide mad genius running through his production technique: On the EP’s opener, “Fairwater,” the grand horns and colossal backing vocals strike the perfect middle ground between Timbaland and Elysia Crampton. In “Easy Going,” the contrast between an imperial march with a flute-like instrument is striking. And on “Tragic X,” the song morphs and mutates and grows so many times—from a wave of silvery synths to a whispered interlude to an earthshaking finale—that it becomes a little world onto itself. It’s all held together by his remarkably expressive, agile voice. (His awe-inducing humming, part Kid Cudi and part choir of angels, is particularly resplendent.) While Two Houses is by no means perfect—the wooden and very conventional Auto-Tune on “Hadit” and the generic rapping on “Only One” are the most glaring missteps—it still does a great job of previewing the scope of Benja’s skills. Each song presents a little doorway of possibility, offering a hint of what might come next. It’s clear that he’s on the cusp of doing something stunning. | 2018-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Young Turks | November 7, 2018 | 7.9 | 92542bf5-03dd-4584-b93e-08920993158c | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
On his tenth studio album, now reissued with rarities and B-sides, McCartney grappled with emotions too big to neatly fit inside a pop record. | On his tenth studio album, now reissued with rarities and B-sides, McCartney grappled with emotions too big to neatly fit inside a pop record. | Paul McCartney: Flaming Pie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-mccartney-flaming-pie/ | Flaming Pie | Flaming Pie, Paul McCartney’s 10th solo album, arrived at the tail end of the Beatles’ mid-’90s renaissance. The remaining Fab Four members instigated this revival with the release of their long-gestating documentary The Long And Winding Road, which was given the generic title Anthology by the time it ballooned into a multi-media retrospective in 1995. Due to a stroke of luck, the release of the documentary and its accompanying rarities compilations coincided with the rise of Britpop. The time was ripe for McCartney to deliver an album steeped in Beatles lore, and that’s exactly what he claimed Flaming Pie was.
Upon its release in May 1997, McCartney maintained that his immersion in the Beatles’ past inspired him to up his game, to make an album in the vein of his old band. Even its title was a nod to an arcane bit of Fab Four lore, derived from Lennon’s claim that he had a vision of a man on a flaming pie declaring that his band would henceforth be known as ”Beatles with an ’a’.” It was a canny marketing method, a tacit acknowledgment that perhaps his recent albums weren’t quite up to snuff while also snagging listeners whose interest in the Beatles may have been rejuvenated thanks to Anthology and the new breed of Britpoppers. It also was a bit deceptive. Flaming Pie sounds as similar to the Beatles as Oasis, which is to say not much at all; it’s recognizably in the same melodic vein, but all the production frills don’t recall Sgt. Pepper’s and the tone of the album is decidedly reflective, suiting a man taking stock of his life upon the cusp of his 55th birthday.
Back in 1997, this wistful undercurrent was criticized as solipsistic—in the original review for Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis dismissed the album opener “The Song We Were Singing” as a self-congratulatory “boomer reminiscence”—but a dive into the rarities-laden Archive Edition of Flaming Pie reveals that the album represented the end of an era as well as a creative rebirth. According to McCartney, he was told he could not release his solo album while the Anthology rollout was underway, so he kept tinkering with the songs that would comprise Flaming Pie while working on other projects—Standing Stone, his second long-form classical piece, for example, and a fairly tedious 1996 single called “The Ballad of the Skeletons” in which he jammed with avant-garde icons Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, and Marc Ribot.
Elsewhere, he sat for the interviews that formed the heart of Barry Miles’ authorized 1997 biography Many Years From Now and spent a chunk of 1995 living out his DJ fantasies via the Westwood One radio show Oobu Joobu, whose 15 episodes were condensed and edited into six B-sides for various Flaming Pie singles. He tagged along with his wife Linda whenever she promoted her line of vegetarian meals and cookbooks, sometimes stealing away to write a new song.
All of this activity fed into Flaming Pie, whose origins are more piecemeal than the finished project suggests. Trawling through his back pages led to pulling two songs from his archives: the melodramatic pomp of “Beautiful Night,” which he attempted with Billy Joel’s band in 1986, and "Great Day," which dated all the way back to the early ’70s, sharing a partial melody with “Big Barn Bed” from Red Rose Speedway. A couple of loose blues rockers cut with his old friend Steve Miller back in 1995 (“If You Wanna,” “Used To Be Bad”) were short-listed along with a pair of unreleased George Martin-produced outtakes from 1992 (“Calico Skies,” “Great Day”) and then he enlisted the services of Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra leader who shepherded the two “Threetles” Beatles reunion tracks for Anthology.
After the first solo session with Lynne, the McCartneys received bad news: Linda had breast cancer. Paul decided to carry on and complete the album because “the thing about those moments in life is, there’s no option but to get on with it, ‘cause the other option would be to just lie down and go to sleep, which isn’t an option. So you’ve just got to get on with it, you’ve got to do things, you’ve got to go to the doctors, keep the thing going, keep running the shop. You get on with it, and this is me getting on with it.” He wound up writing two songs after Linda’s diagnosis, neither of which are heavy with grief. “Really Love You” grew out of a funky jam with Ringo Starr, and “Heaven on a Sunday,” a lazy slice of jazzy yacht-rock, only hints at his love for Linda through its refrain “If I only had one love, yours would be the one I choose.” Comparatively, the delicate finger-picked “Calico Skies” and “Little Willow” are infused with a sense of loss and mourning, floating along upon a bittersweet breeze that neatly complements the sepia-toned reflections of “The Song We Were Singing” and “Somedays.”
These sweetly sad songs are the ones that linger, and they’re served well by their earliest incarnations as home recordings and demos that serve as bonus tracks on both the double-disc reissue and companion 5-CD/2-DVD edition. As nice as it is to hear these hushed, unadorned rough versions, McCartney feels most comfortable when he’s crafting an entertainment, which Flaming Pie certainly is. Maybe they don’t sound like the Beatles, but with their stainless steel gleam, "The World Tonight” and “Young Boy” were ornate singles designed to grab attention whether heard on VH1, adult contemporary radio, or the soundtrack to the forgettable Robin Williams & Billy Crystal comedy Fathers’ Day. The casual but tangible chemistry between McCartney and Miller may be in service of featherweight compositions, but they made the final cut instead of the more interesting throwaways “Broomstick” and “Looking For You”—B-sides both, presented and accounted for on the reissue—because the easy-rolling guitar duels offer some welcome air among the album’s heavier numbers. Individually, they feel thin, but they help make an album that captures multiple sides of McCartney’s personality, a record where his craft, silliness, sentiment, and charm are in balance.
Maybe McCartney achieved that delicate equilibrium on Flaming Pie because he was indeed "getting on with it," coming to terms with his wife’s illness by making an album that celebrated those he held dearest. He’d continue to play with Ringo for many, many more years, and he’d work with longtime engineer Geoff Emerick a while longer, but Flaming Pie would be the last time Linda sang on one of his records, the last time George Martin wrote him an orchestration. It was also the first time he found space for his son James on a record, giving him the guitar solo on “Heaven on a Sunday,” a gesture that gained poignancy over the years. Most importantly, Flaming Pie gave McCartney his first US Top 10 album in 15 years, giving him the confidence to try newer and weirder things as he headed into the new century. Some of these albums were good, some were bad, but none of them had the same heart as Flaming Pie. It may have its flaws, but it’s one of the rare McCartney albums where he grapples with emotions too big to neatly fit inside the confines of a pop record.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 1, 2020 | 7.5 | 9254b978-ea9e-46e3-9451-104b6405bc6a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
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 gem of No Limit Records, one that’s as much a flex of power as it is a musical triumph. | 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 gem of No Limit Records, one that’s as much a flex of power as it is a musical triumph. | Master P: MP Da Last Don | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/master-p-mp-da-last-don/ | MP Da Last Don | Halfway through the 1998 direct-to-video movie MP Da Last Don, Master P inexplicably begins to speak with an Italian accent. It actually might be Cuban—it’s never made clear if it’s supposed to be a homage to The Godfather or Scarface and I’m 99 percent sure Master P wouldn’t know the answer either. Regardless, he stars (as well as co-writes and co-directs) as an aspiring basketball coach and youth mentor named Nino, who learns that his Italian-looking father and mafia boss Salvador Corleone has been killed. After learning of his father’s death, Master P acts completely normal and starts to rock banana-colored suits and chain-smoke cigars like a comic book villain. At a high-ranking mafia sit down, in a room full of Tony Montana clones, he lays out his plans to take over the seat at the head of the table. He comically asks, “What, you got a problem with that ’cause my skin is a little darker than yours?” Everyone is extremely pissed and a war for power breaks out within the family.
Master P is adamant that he only wants to be the Don so he can give back to the community and clear his father’s name of something the movie never mentions. He spends most of the 46-minute runtime making no progress toward either goal and instead murdering anyone who mildly irks him. Really, he only makes the community worse; while trying to split time between his new gig as a mafia boss and being a youth basketball coach, the entire team gets caught in the middle and they’re all assassinated except for Silkk the Shocker. Master P is broken up about this and ends up in a warehouse shootout with the family. He kills them all and wins the war, but victory isn’t sweet like he thought it would be; he breaks down in tears and is apprehended by the police. At this point, I guess, they ran out of money because the rest of the story is resolved with a title card: He gets sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in prison, but escapes on the way there. No one changed. Nothing was learned. It’s pointless. It could only come from someone as powerful as Master P was in 1998.
That year, Master P’s self-made New Orleans-based independent rap label, No Limit Records, was at a musical and promotional peak. Defined by their camouflage gear, iced-out military tank logo (including the gold-plated one that was driven onto a basketball court in the “Make ’Em Say Ugh” video), cover art designed by the Houston graphic team at Pen & Pixel, and the year-round release schedule, the No Limit roster—which included homegrown stars like Mia X and Mr. Serv-On, P’s younger brothers Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder, and high-profile free agent signings like Mystikal and Snoop Dogg—was untouchable. A mid-’90s deal P signed with Priority, which gave No Limit an unheard-of 75 percent cut of sales, allowed him to put his business plan into hyperdrive: Flood the market with albums and use each record as a vehicle to cross-promote the entire roster. Sources vary, but of the 23 albums No Limit put out in 1998, more than half either went gold or platinum. The movies were essentially advertisements. Shot in a couple of days on a shoestring budget, MP Da Last Don was a way to promote Master P’s 1998 double-disc epic of the same name.
MP Da Last Don is Master P’s best album, while simultaneously representing the astronomical heights No Limit reached and the corporate approach that contributed to the label’s sharp decline. P liked to consider himself an entrepreneur first and a rapper second, and those ideologies sometimes clashed. By 1998, No Limit was cranking out albums on an assembly line; a handful of them were written, recorded, and completed in a couple of days. (Yes, it’s rumored that Tupac made the Makaveli album in a week, but sorry, the twin brother duo Kane and Abel are not Tupac!) There was very little quality control; P compared selling albums to selling cologne, as if they were nothing more than a product to leverage into brand investments. That sentiment is unsettling, though somehow P’s albums like 1996’s Ice Cream Man and 1997’s Ghetto D never felt soulless. MP Da Last Don doesn’t either, but you can feel the shift in Master P slightly creeping in. Especially considering that Da Last Don was billed as his retirement album, which was part shameless promotion (he never actually retired) and part genuine desire to focus on turning No Limit into a conglomerate with multiple revenue streams.
But Master P is, in fact, the type of businessman that you only hear about at the movies. The stories sound like folklore, and they could be since so many have been shaped by P’s self-mythology: In the days before the Priority deal, Jimmy Iovine offered P a million dollars to sign with Interscope, and he walked away from it. When Jive told him that No Limit couldn’t sign red-hot New Orleans rapper Mystikal because he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, Master P busted out his checkbook on the spot. That time when P sat down with Suge Knight at Mule Creek prison and negotiated the multi-million dollar buyout of Snoop Dogg. He added a couple hundred thousand just to make Suge happy.
Long before Master P established himself as the ultimate rap salesman, he was Percy Miller, born and raised in New Orleans’ Calliope Projects. In interviews, he describes his upbringing as so poor that he slept on the floor and some days only ate corn flakes and water. Around 1989, Percy, his wife Sonya, and son Romeo relocated from Calliope to Richmond, California in the Bay Area. There, using $10,000 from an insurance payout—the result of a medical malpractice incident in which his grandfather died after receiving another patient’s medicine—he opened a record store called No Limit.
At the record store, he sold gangsta rap records by local Bay Area stars like E-40, JT the Bigga Figga, and Spice 1, and soaked up their hustle. Soon enough, at a Jack in the Box in Richmond, he ran into his childhood friend King George. Good news: They both wanted in on the rap game. Few in the Bay respected P as a rapper, though. This was years before André Benjamin graced the stage of the 1995 Source Awards and declared “The South got something to say!” to a symphony of boos, so, of course P blames the bad reaction on his Southern drawl. That probably has some truth, but also his early records sound like cheap N.W.A. and Ice-T demos. He didn’t hit a stride until 1994’s The Ghettos Tryin to Kill Me!, an album P and George hustled $6,000 to make. The album cut of the same name is the record’s signature track; over a soothing G-Funk beat, P in his bluesiest melody coos, “Sellin’ dope is the only thing I know how to doooo.” In his verses he raps about a common thread in his work: Reality-based reflections on the street hustling that trapped him every time he tried to escape.
Out of the trunk of his car, Master P sold tens of thousands of copies of The Ghettos Tryin To Kill Me! Using that money, he recorded the two albums that led to his monumental deal with Priority: a Bay Area compilation tape called West Coast Bad Boyz and his 1995 album 99 Ways to Die. The next era of No Limit commenced as relationships in California deteriorated (he fell out with King George) and Master P reconnected with his Southern roots.
Back in New Orleans, Master P recorded a 30-second commercial on a beat that he brought back to Richmond and fleshed out into the legendary track “I’m Bout It, Bout It.” Produced by KLC, a DJ turned producer who was a favorite of P’s No Limit recruits Mia X and Mr. Serv-On, the sped-up synths of the instrumental were dark and grimy, unlike the laid-back West Coast funk P was comfortable with. Meanwhile, he ran into his lost cousin Mo. B Dick, a producer and slick crooner, in a club in Dallas. At the time, Mo. B was making music in Morgan City, Louisiana with a clique called Critical Condition. P sent for Mo. B Dick to come out to Cali. Then, after some pushing from Mia, he sent for KLC as well. He rented out an apartment for everyone in Hayward, California that they called “Three niggas and a broad.” It was there that KLC and Mo. B Dick formed Beats by the Pound, the not-so-secret weapon of No Limit that shaped the next era of the label’s sound.
By 1998, Beats by the Pound grew to include Craig B, O’Dell, and Carlos Stephens. The production collective were the masterminds behind nearly every hot No Limit album that hit the streets between 1996 and 1998, for example P’s Ice Cream Man, punctuated by a revamped club-ready version of “Bout It, Bout It,” and instant classics like 1997’s Tru 2 Da Game by TRU (Master P, Silkk, and C-Murder) and Mac’s Shell Shocked in 1998, the best rapping to ever land on a tape stamped by No Limit. Their sound was versatile yet consistent, centered around thick basslines, steely synths, and punishing 808s; they could easily go from R&B grooves to New Orleans bounce to an early iteration of Southern trap.
Beats by the Pound are the catalysts of MP Da Last Don. Because Master P has never exactly been ’94 Nas or Scarface on the mic, the beats have to be immaculate, and they are. There’s a Mafia-movie theme to the record, though the funk of the Pound’s instrumentals makes me recall Blaxploitation gangster movies—a world filled with pimps, prostitutes, and the type of majestic furs Yaphet Kotto wore in Truck Turner.
Check “Get Your Paper,” where Master P brings the Bay Area back into the fold by trading “Uggggh” ad-libs with E-40: The Pound’s beat goes from a mind-melting electronic intro to classic G-Funk bounce. It sounds like it should backdrop a strip club on the moon. On “Welcome to My City,” the electric guitar riff has an effect that resembles the wah-wah pedal you could find on the Shaft theme, blended with rattling hi-hats and P and Mac on top of their game. The funk is out of control on “Black and White” as well, that plucking of the bass strings is hypnotic—too bad it’s consumed by Master P shouting some afterschool-special struggle raps.
Master P’s more introspective side is the glaring flaw of Da Last Don; he’s not a good enough lyricist to make his fairly general thoughts about social and world politics compelling. “Dear Mr President,” where he pens a letter to POTUS about the conditions in the hood, is probably the worst one. His heart is in the right place, but the verse is bad. “One nation in God we trust/But then you say Saddam ain’t gon’ fuck with us,” he raps like he just watched an episode of 60 Minutes. It’s confusing why Master P even made “Dear Mr President” or “Black and White.” The only reasonable explanation was that they were the songs intended to straighten up his image for future No Limit brand ventures.
It’s not to say that Master P can’t get deep. There’s been a dark vulnerability to his music since the days of The Ghettos Tryin to Kill Me! It’s just more effective when it’s told through personal stories; his bellowing voice can convey such pain and paranoia. On the opening lines of “More 2 Life” he sounds exasperated as he shouts, “Jealous niggas wanna see me dead, hoes wanna steal my bread,” over a KLC beat so smooth it’s therapeutic. His vignettes are vivid on “Ghetto Life,” lifting traumatic memories from his past: the death-fearing nightmares that kept him up at night, the cramped project apartment, and the idea of suffering while society moves along. It’s some of the clearest and most evocative writing of his career.
But this is Master P. The dude who made “I’m Bout It, Bout It” and “Make ’Em Say Ugh.” What really takes Da Last Don to new heights are the records where he and his No Limit crew turn up over thudding Pound beats. “War Wounds” belongs on the No Limit posse cut shortlist. Fiend sounds like he could crack a coconut with his fist; Silkk’s mouth is moving faster than his brain and he’s never been sharper; Mystikal’s verse is unhinged. And P pierces through the swirling beat with his trademark ad-libs that sound like he has phlegm in his throat.
Of the softer tracks, “Ghetto Love” is the most memorable. It’s produced by the most soulful member of the Pound, Mo. B Dick, who flexes his sampling chops and drops in a mesmerizing Nate Dogg-style sensitive gangster hook. The P verse is solid, but Mia X’s is even better as she claims she’s so loyal to her man that it doesn’t even matter if he cheats or goes broke. And you can’t talk about Da Last Don without mentioning the Master P and Snoop records: Their shining moment together, “Soldiers, Riders, & G’s,” opens with Snoop smooth-talking (“Greeting niggas and niggetts”) and Master P punching through the Pound’s thunderous funk.
No Limit never again had a year like 1998. To be fair, has anyone? MP Da Last Don went four times platinum and, led by Master P’s relentless approach, the label sold almost 15 million records that year. But the art couldn’t keep up with the business. Beats by the Pound were burnt out, churning out beats at an unsustainable pace. Coupled with financial disputes and a growing feeling that they weren’t getting the credit they earned, the crew, minus Carlos Stephens, bounced in 1999. The soul of No Limit was gone—it was now the corporation Master P always hoped it would be.
MP Da Last Don may not certainly be the greatest No Limit album, but it’s surely the most definitive: A long, sprawling, and flawed record that’s as much a flex of power as it is a musical triumph. It’s a snapshot of a moment, one in which Master P the CEO landed on a Forbes list between the Rolling Stones and Robin Williams, and simultaneously Master P the rapper was filming low-budget gangster movies where he got a blowjob and two characters killed within the span of minutes. Not even Master P could make that up.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | No Limit / Priority | November 21, 2021 | 8 | 9259a8b9-2561-4394-8d71-a963314e40e4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The New Jersey producer’s third album is the first to extensively feature his own voice, which sounds nothing like the buttery crooning that often populates house music. | The New Jersey producer’s third album is the first to extensively feature his own voice, which sounds nothing like the buttery crooning that often populates house music. | Joey Anderson: Rainbow Doll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joey-anderson-rainbow-doll/ | Rainbow Doll | Joey Anderson hails from New Jersey, but there’s always been something a bit alien about his house and techno creations. He's got a unique rhythmic sensibility—likely stemming, at least in part, from his background in the club scene as a house dancer—and his tracks often veer from dance music’s typical linear structures; they might start on an off beat, or embrace an unusually contemplative mood. Even those descriptors fail to capture the full complexity of Anderson’s singular production style, which is inherently soulful, but also dark, psychedelic, and a bit unsettling.
Rainbow Doll, his third full-length, heads further down the proverbial rabbit hole. His work has always felt deeply personal, but the new album is the first to extensively feature Anderson’s own voice, which sounds nothing like the buttery crooning that often populates house music. The vocals recall someone like South African artist Portable, but Anderson’s pipes, while similarly affecting, are thinner and less polished. He’s more Robert Smith than Robert Owens, and much of his singing on Rainbow Doll resembles the gloomy goth and post-punk of the 1980s.
“Beside Me” is one of the LP’s most prominent vocal cuts, a standout in which Anderson plaintively moans, “You’re always there/Beside me” amid galloping percussion and crystalline synth tones. It’s not a club track per se, but with its sci-fi undertones, it suggests David Bowie working with the sound palette of Chicago house. Anderson goes even bigger on the propulsive “Cindy,” which simultaneously feels like a string-saturated lover’s lament and a trippy, synth-soundtracked vision quest.
Weirder still is “Live It,” where a dubby vocal snippet and funk-punk bassline calls back to the avant-garde, post-disco sound of early ’80s outfit Liquid Liquid. “Heaven Help Us” pulls from the same era, but this song—one of Rainbow Doll’s few instrumentals—references the hypnotic guitar loops and Krautrock chug of Manuel Göttsching’s influential E2-E4. An obvious highlight, it’s likely the first time one of his productions could be called twangy, and Anderson’s addition of warm pads gives the track a loosely Balearic sheen.
Rainbow Doll does have a couple more straightforward dancefloor offerings. With clacking drums, a sturdy bassline, and tweaky acid blips, “Bounce With It” feels like an update on the classic Trax formula, and the sparkling melodies and jaunty rhythm of “Can Not” close the LP on a loose, lively note. Both would likely be effective club tools, but in the context of the album, they’re somewhat forgettable.
Although Anderson has had a few breakout club tunes over the years—songs like “Press Play” and “Above the Cherry Moon”—none could be described as massive anthems. His music has never been overly concerned with hands-in-the-air revelry, as his tracks tend to be thoughtful, introspective, even a little sad. One gets the impression that he’s more concerned with excavating the inner recesses of the mind than triggering sensory overload. With Rainbow Doll, Anderson digs deeper than ever before.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Acid Test / Avenue 66 | March 19, 2020 | 7.4 | 92613a5a-f29f-4bc2-8921-eb610e7fd9e4 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
James Hinton, the Brooklyn-based producer who records as The Range, doesn't do anything new, but his music crackles with the air of discovery. Potential recalls the optimistic rave moment when the right combination of people and the right DJ could make you feel like you were part of something that mattered. | James Hinton, the Brooklyn-based producer who records as The Range, doesn't do anything new, but his music crackles with the air of discovery. Potential recalls the optimistic rave moment when the right combination of people and the right DJ could make you feel like you were part of something that mattered. | The Range: Potential | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21563-potential/ | Potential | James Hinton uses samples like he invented the entire concept. The Brooklyn-based producer, who just released his second album as the Range, doesn’t do anything with the technique we haven’t heard before. Quite the opposite in fact—the songs on Potential touch on instrumental hip-hop, dubstep, twinkling electro-pop, and more, and they’re defined above else by their immediate familiarity. But Hinton dives into his samples with the verve of a producer who just this morning discovered the jolt of creative joy that comes from flipping a vocal fragment just so and finding a way to repeat it that brings a cascading wave of emotion. His work may not feel new, but it crackles with a sense of discovery.
Hinton got to this point by honoring the act of listening. Most of the tracks on Potential were built around samples of people he found singing on YouTube. But he didn’t focus on the pop stars, or even the viral sensations, but the amateur performers whose work survives deep, deep down search holes, the videos that were uploaded in a rush of expression and were subsequently seen by almost no one. As he described in an interview with Pitchfork, Hinton found these videos, assembling phrases from them that had a certain musicality but also carried an ineffable feeling. Though he transforms the voices with the usual techniques of pitch-shifting, echo, reverb, and so on, you can get the tiniest sense of the individual behind each utterance. Pay attention to the feeling of yearning in a young person saying “Right now I don’t have a backup plan for if I don’t make it,” in “Regular,” or the extra tug of effort around each R&B-inflected phrase in “Superimpose.” The voices feel anonymous but somehow closer because of that; they are faces in the crowd, just like us.
Around these voices, Hinton crafts songs, full of house piano loops, clapping drum sounds, and tightly sequenced synth patches. This is music designed for uplift, with carefully plotted builds yielding to big choruses, and it taps into electronic music's sense of possibility not by pushing things further, but by simplifying and paring back. Hinton brings to mind specific eras not from direct reference or slavish devotion to genre, but by striving to remember the historical moment when a specific element of sound first clicked—the squelching synth in “Genius of Love,” the ghost vocal loop in “Xtal,” the piano in “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt.” Because of this bedrock positivity (and, probably, because so many of the voices come from the UK) it also obliquely recalls the optimistic rave moment when the right combination of people and the right DJ could make you feel like you were part of something that mattered.
All of this positivity means, naturally, there’s not a lot of darkness to explore in this music. The only pain present seems like the kind that that music is able to zero in on and explode, which is certainly not true of every kind of pain. At times, this uniformity of mood threatens to blunt the emotional pull of the album, but then there’s always a clever turn-around or defiantly catchy vocal loop to snap attention back in place.
Perhaps unusually, Hinton tracked down the forgotten sources of his YouTube samples and signed them on for a share of his publishing. It may or may not lead to financial gain (though it’s pretty easy to imagine many of these tracks sounding good on TV in any number of contexts), but the gesture affirms the interconnectedness of life at this moment, how watching a random homemade video on YouTube can be thought of as a collaborative act. Hinton has an ability, not unlike the Books when they first hit the scene 14 years ago, of making shopworn techniques in sound manipulations seem strangely fresh, and Potential is the kind of music that makes you think about what your own part in a seemingly passive musical transaction of music might mean. | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | March 11, 2016 | 8 | 927dfd90-fc54-489f-a099-3f457326f14c | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Retreating from the experimentation of Gigaton, Pearl Jam delivers a comforting blend of agitated fist-pumpers, roiling ballads, and yearning mid-tempo anthems. | Retreating from the experimentation of Gigaton, Pearl Jam delivers a comforting blend of agitated fist-pumpers, roiling ballads, and yearning mid-tempo anthems. | Pearl Jam: Dark Matter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pearl-jam-dark-matter/ | Dark Matter | When a veteran artist turns to a young-gun producer for a shot of contemporary savvy, it usually signals a desire to revamp their sound or embrace a new era. Sometimes it works: Jack White brought some bluesy grit to Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose; St. Vincent nudged Sleater-Kinney in a sleeker, icier direction. And sometimes it doesn’t; remember when Danger Mouse tried to steer RHCP into an album of lush space-funk? But generally, at least, a spirit of reinvention animates the proceedings.
Pearl Jam, though, seem to have hired Andrew Watt to help them sound more like… Pearl Jam. The 33-year-old producer, who was born a few months before Ten was recorded, made a name working with Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber but has since become a sought-after studio whisperer for rock elders, slickening up recent Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop albums without embarrassing his heroes. He even produced Eddie Vedder’s last solo album. With Pearl Jam, Watt seems to have served more like an accountability manager. “He really kicked our asses, got us focused and playing, song after song,” guitarist Mike McCready told an interviewer, emphasizing the album’s heaviness; Vedder told fans he believes “this is our best work.”
Alluring testimonials, but the reality is less dramatic. Dark Matter plays like another solid late-era Pearl Jam record, reliable but not revelatory, with the requisite well-honed mix of generic fist-pumpers, roiling ballads, and mid-tempo gems where Vedder gets a chance to howl and yearn and babble in the upper registers as only Vedder can. As ever, he evokes a potent balance of pain and perseverance, but the album is marred by boilerplate rockers that try to confront fascist dread with platitudes and banal expressions of resistance.
The title track, in particular, makes for an uninspiring lead single. A grinding, metallic rocker that’s sophomoric in its simplicity, it feels indistinguishable from the band’s legions of corporate-rock imitators. Vedder’s railing against right-wingers and press suppression seems well-intentioned: “No tolerance for intolerance or/No patience left for impatience no more” is a nice sentiment, but doesn’t exactly hit with the same provocative thrill as “I’ll never suck Satan’s dick!”
The punk quickie “Running,” a fast blur of sewage metaphors and Guitar Center-core power chords, isn’t much better, while “React, Respond” thrashes and shakes like a Vs. outtake with the eccentricity sucked out. Again, Vedder is animated by righteous rage, but a frustrating vagueness dogs the lyrics, as though he’s speechwriting for a DNC keynote: “The light gets brighter/As it grows/The darkness it recedes,” he sings in “React, Respond.” It’s hard to imagine anyone but the most devoted heads differentiating these songs from deep cuts on, say, Backspacer. They’re “heavy,” sure, but not in the way that leaves a real impression.
The promotional emphasis on these high-octane rockers seems baffling, because the heart of Dark Matter—the songs that remind you what made this band so special in the first place—are the slow-burners. The searching, six-minute “Upper Hand,” in particular, is a centerpiece. After a long, ringing fade-in reminiscent of Joshua Tree-era U2, it blossoms into a bluesy cousin of “Yellow Ledbetter,” and a launchpad for some of McCready’s most soulful soloing to date. It surely ranks among the best Pearl Jam songs this century. “Wreckage” is both world-weary and hopeful, the kind of generous midtempo ballad that could belong to any era of the band’s discography. Its layered tapestry of backing vocals delivers a climax worthy of the arenas they’ll play this summer.
Then there’s “Waiting for Stevie,” which originated when Vedder and Watt were idly waiting for Stevie Wonder to show up and record a part for Vedder’s last solo album. Despite the red herring title (the lyrics seem to be about depression and self-doubt, not Stevie Wonder), the song is a meaty, anthemic rocker of the kind the band has largely shied away from this side of Y2K. It has already become a favorite in the PJ fan community, though its tinny, compressed production gives it an unpleasant sheen and suggests that live versions will be superior.
As Dark Matter draws to a close, survival seems heavy on Vedder’s mind. “I’ll be the last one standing,” he sings on “Got to Give,” a Who-like bundle of ringing power chords where the singer sounds more and more like Roger Daltrey the higher the song builds. “Am I the only one hanging on?” he wonders on the somber closer, “Setting Sun,” an elegy seemingly for a departed friend.
Who can blame him? At 59, the man has outlived a shocking number of his grunge contemporaries. It’s been two decades since Vedder eulogized Layne Staley on “4/20/02,” three since he destroyed his hotel room after learning Kurt Cobain was dead, and still, seemingly every time Pearl Jam returns with a new album, another grunge icon (most recently: Mark Lanegan) has suffered an untimely demise. This band’s longevity is a wonder. They are unwitting standard-bearers for a long-passed movement. Their inessential albums feel like luxuries in a reality where their peers never got to make an inessential album. On this one, they fall short of reinvention, which also means they are still—improbably, unmistakably—Pearl Jam.
If Dark Matter has an overarching theme, it’s the search for hope and perseverance in a shattered world—and that’s a world where the existence of any new Pearl Jam album, even an uneven one, is a small miracle. | 2024-04-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Monkeywrench / Republic | April 23, 2024 | 6.4 | 927e708f-7852-4cb6-b049-48ab790e37f1 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The Queens-born, Punjabi American rapper revels in the hyper-referential code-switching of his work in Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys while bringing newfound focus to his writing. | The Queens-born, Punjabi American rapper revels in the hyper-referential code-switching of his work in Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys while bringing newfound focus to his writing. | Heems / Lapgan: LAFANDAR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heems-lapgan-lafandar/ | LAFANDAR | The idea that Heems should need to prove his rap credentials to anyone is absurd. As one third of late-aughts/early-2010s alt-rap deconstructionists Das Racist, the Queens-born, Punjabi American rapper helped redefine hip-hop for the internet era, combining incisive, hyper-literate commentary on race, rap, and identity politics with irreverent jokes about smoking weed and George Costanza’s penis. After the group’s dissolution in 2012, he showed he could also be sincere and emotionally vulnerable, documenting the trauma of the post-9/11 years on 2015 solo album Eat Pray Thug. His last full-length—Swet Shop Boys’ 2016 album Cashmere—was a landmark of code-switching diaspora rap that bridged the gap between Queens, Hackney, and Delhi’s Chandni Chowk.
But throughout his career, Heems has struggled with the labels—joke-rapper, hipster, the Indian guy—that have been forced onto him, fuelling the perception that this working-class Queens native who grew up on Nas and the Lost Boyz was somehow an outsider to hip-hop. “The worst rapper on this track, third coolest,” he rapped on Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire’s “The Last Huzzah!,” a sardonic riposte to haters that nonetheless hinted at a little insecurity. On the Lapgan-produced LAFANDAR, his first release in six years, a re-energized Heems sets out to finally put those doubts at rest. “I really wanted to make a real rappy-rap album,” he said in a recent interview. “So I could once and for all finish the ‘can he rap?’ conversation.”
On that front, LAFANDAR delivers. This is the sharpest Heems has sounded in a minute, dishing out tongue-twisting quotables in rhyme after rhyme, all delivered with his signature nonchalant swagger. There’s a focus to his writing here that has eluded him on earlier solo outings. All the glorious messiness and anything-can-happen eclecticism of Das Racist and his early solo work on Nehru Jackets and Wild Water Kingdom is still present, but there’s precious little of the erratic non-sequiturs and self-indulgent irony that bogged down parts of Eat Pray Thug (he’s not repeating the word “clarity” like a broken record and passing it off as a bar anymore).
“My dough nuts, ich bin ein Berliner,” he raps on “I’m Pretty Cool,” referencing Kennedy’s classic anti-Communist speech (and a classic German jelly donut) in service of a gleefully juvenile wisecrack that’s classic Das Racist. On “Kala Tika,” he takes the very Indian trait of mixing up our “v”s and “w”s and runs with it, effortlessly switching syllables to hilarious—and hypnotic—effect. There’s a sinister timbre to his voice on the coke-rap-adjacent South Asian posse cut “Going for 6” (featuring Sonnyjim and Abhi the Nomad) that oozes cartoonish menace, a version of Heems you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark street. The record’s diverse collaborators—ranging from Sir Michael Rocks and Cool Calm Pete to Saul Williams and Fatboi Sharif—all bring their A-game, and Heems is at his most inventive when trading bars with his fellow emcees. His chemistry with Your Old Droog is palpable on “Sri Lanka,” where he plays the wise-cracking smart aleck to Droog’s broody boom-bap drawl. Elsewhere, on “Obi Toppin,” he sounds thrilled at sharing a track with an early idol. “Yo check me out I got a song with Kool Keith,” he declares over a mangled soul sample, and you can’t help but smile at this charmingly guileless humblebrag.
Heems’ dense verses touch on everything from the trauma of America’s forever wars to anti-immigrant xenophobia and post-colonial schadenfreude (“Fuck the queen, white woman with my nani jewelry”), but the most thrilling lines are the ones that feature his distinctive brand of hyper-referential code-switching. Signifiers of his Indian heritage (lassi, Sufi poets, the Bollywood film Pyaasa) sit in easygoing camaraderie with New York name-drops (Canal Street, former Knicks power forward Obi Toppin), as Heems celebrates the kaleidoscopic diversity of his many, many roots.
In Lapgan, Heems has found a like-minded cultural magpie. On his last album, History—the first release on Heems’ label Veena—the Chicago producer stitched together samples from South Asian film and folk music with classic hip-hop instrumentation. Given the opportunity to work with a musical idol—he cites Nehru Jackets as a key influence—Lapgan goes all in, sampling not just obscure records from South Asia (such as a flip of a lullaby from a 1982 Tamil film), but also Levantine folk and English post-punk to create beats every bit as eclectic as Heems’ bars. Lapgan’s production positions LAFANDAR as a spiritual successor to Bollywood-sampling hip-hop classics like Madlib’s Beat Konducta, Vol. 3 & 4: In India and Dan the Automator’s Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars & Sitars. Only this time, it’s the brown guys in charge.
Beyond all the high-minded narratives about identity and multiculturalism, LAFANDAR is a record about rediscovering the pure joy of rapping—the sheer thrill of bending words around a beat with skill, style, and a wicked sense of humor. After all that Heems has endured over his 15-year career—the divisive backlash to Das Racist, label troubles, struggles with mental health and addiction—he’s happy just to still be here, rocking up to the mic, rhyming Assata with enchiladas. It’s one of hip-hop’s smartest, zaniest oddballs taking a long overdue victory lap for having outrun all the shit that was keeping him down. And it’s definitive proof that Heems is, as he once declared on “Michael Jackson,” “fucking great at rapping.” | 2024-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Veena Sounds | February 28, 2024 | 7.2 | 928d61cb-1e4b-4b5f-bd63-9b644a0e7d05 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The Auto-Tune crooner catches everyone’s attention and promptly squanders it again. | The Auto-Tune crooner catches everyone’s attention and promptly squanders it again. | T-Pain: 1UP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/t-pain-1up/ | 1UP | How many times can we be surprised by the strength of T-Pain’s voice? Back in 2014, clips of the multi-platinum, Grammy-winning artist singing without the aid of Auto-Tune for NPR’s ”Tiny Desk” series quickly went viral for their deft display of vocal control, proving that the man who soundtracked our high school proms and parties with pitch-corrected pop anthems could command a room with his God-given croon. Now, five years later, he’s shocking us once again, this time by winning a reality singing competition that required him to shroud his identity in a furry cyclops costume and belt Sam Smith ballads. The show’s judges guessed the identity of “The Monster” was a former R&B star, like Jamie Foxx or Tyrese Gibson, or even Darius Rucker. No one considered the Rappa Ternt Sanga, who, upon shedding his mask and on the verge of tears, explained, “I didn’t get a chance to enter the game with my natural voice...this helped get my voice out there.” It only took a few performances dressed like a nightmarish Monsters, Inc. character to do so.
This isn’t really T-Pain’s fault. With the massive success of his early singles like “I’m Sprung,” “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)” and “Buy U a Drank,” he ushered in a new landscape for pop music that’s still going strong today, influencing everyone from Paul McCartney to A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie to harmonize through an audio processor. Thus it’s hard to separate T-Pain from the technology that he reintroduced to the world (it first infiltrated pop nearly a decade earlier on Cher’s 1998 smash “Believe”) and continues to lean on heavily. By the same token, his refusal to try anything new on his recent albums has stifled his ability to capitalize on the goodwill he’s garnered. His newest project, 1UP, is no different, with many of its 12 tracks sounding like they could have come from his 2005 debut. As a result, what starts as a fun ride down memory lane quickly turns into a grating slog by a trendsetter who frustratingly still hasn’t gotten his due.
Things start out relatively strong with the opening title track, which sees T-Pain strike a more serious tone than usual. Over filtered synth plucks and stuttering snare claps, he harmonizes from the other side of the phone to a friend in jail, wondering what placed them on opposite ends of freedom. “Phone smell like tears, how my dawg get up in there,” he sighs. Its barreling energy and introspectiveness recall the work of fellow crooner Future, who took T-Pain’s digitized sound and made it darker and harder-hitting to critical and commercial success. The profundity pretty much ends there, though. A few songs later and we’re at “U Up,” a prototypical T-Pain love lullaby that captures the feeling of running across a picture of an ex on social media and wanting to text them after one too many whiskey sours.
“U Up,” although nostalgic, is representative of the predictability of 1UP, which by and large incorporates the same snap sounds used on past hits like “Buy U a Drank.” The album is filled with rehashes of old material, whether it’s the chest-bumping camaraderie of 2010’s star-studded DJ Khaled collab “All I Do Is Win” on the party anthem “It’s My Dog’s Birthday” or the gentle keys of 2008’s “Can’t Believe It” on the ballad “Be Your X.” Many of his bad habits as a lyricist still linger, too, as he often crosses the line between being playful and juvenile, like on “Here It Comes,” which opens with the painfully clumsy line, “I put the hurt on the derriere,” or “Keep This From Me,” where he devotes the chorus to brazenly cussing out a partner’s parents. Features by Canadian singer Tory Lanez and rapper Russ, known for their simplistic and sometimes crass approach to heavy subject matter, don‘t help.
And then there’s the Auto-Tune, which, by the end of the album, is suffocating in its repetitiveness; not even a lighter-flicking Lil Wayne, Pain’s longest-running collaborator, can help breathe life into the project on its final track. Rather than giving his vocals a go minus filters or switching the production to lean into the acoustic nature of his viral performances, T-Pain instead relies on a tired formula.
The one saving grace of 1UP is that he still knows how to craft earworms, most clearly encapsulated by the song “We All We Got.” Its impish melody and sing-along hook draw my mind to another artist heavily influenced by Pain, Tierra Whack, whose most-recent project Whack World acts as a more decadent and straightforward version of his songwriting, with its warbled choruses and short runtimes. “We Got” follows a similar path, essentially functioning as one big chorus and thus making it a breeze compared to other tracks on 1UP, many of which stretch over four minutes long. Maybe this is the groundwork for Pain’s next project; if he can’t take cues from himself, he can from others like Whack. | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cinematic | March 6, 2019 | 6.1 | 9293b246-c3f2-4f6d-95f0-4f146ab4efbb | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Mark Lanegan again teams with UK electronic vets, with guest spots from Spiritualized's Jason Pierce, Mike Patton, Richard Hawley, and Gibby Haynes. | Mark Lanegan again teams with UK electronic vets, with guest spots from Spiritualized's Jason Pierce, Mike Patton, Richard Hawley, and Gibby Haynes. | Soulsavers: Broken | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13558-broken/ | Broken | For most of the 2000s, Mark Lanegan has been a wandering samurai in search of a master. He released only two solo full-lengths and an EP this decade, and those have been handily overshadowed by his hired-gun work with Martina Topley Bird, Melissa Auf der Maur, and the Baldwin Brothers, as well as his collaborations with Greg Dulli and Isobel Campbell. He could easily take the lead on any of these projects, but Lanegan seems to think we'll like him better in small doses. That, or he's planning a sort of Yojimbo double-cross that will pit the Twilight Singers against Belle and Sebastian.
Who knows where Soulsavers would come out in such a melee? The British duo-- Rich Machin and Ian Glover-- are something of an unknown quantity, especially on American shores. They formed in 2003 as an electronica outfit specializing in remixes for bands iike Starsailor and Doves. Their distinguishing characteristic seems to be their fascination with American traditional forms, texturing their songs with buzzy threads of blues, gospel, folk, and jazz. Reportedly, touring behind their second album, It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land, shifted their priorities even further, away from programmed beats and toward live instrumentation to create a cinematic atmosphere on Broken, their third album and second with Lanegan.
If How Far You Fall was formatted to fit your screen, then Broken is in CinemaScope. Spaghetti-western strings swell and shiver on "Shadows Fall", guitars grind vigorously on the Gene Clark cover "Some Misunderstanding", stray synthesizer blips shoot through "Death Bells" like sparks, and a lone piano provides an almost gothic solemnity on the Palace Brothers cover "You Will Miss Me When I Burn". The record features a sizable cast that includes Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, Mike Patton of Faith No More, Richard Hawley, and Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, and Australian newcomer Red Ghost, aka Rosa Agostino. Entering late in the album, she makes a good supporting actress, her smooth voice a nice compliment to Lanegan's rougher textures on "Rolling Sky". Perhaps she'll get more screen time on the sequel.
Lanegan, however, remains our main protagonist, roaming Soulsavers' musical landscape mostly in isolation. His miles-of-bad-road voice is an obvious match for Soulsavers' gothic Americanisms, and he sounds like just another instrument in their arsenal, communicating meaning via sound more than lyrics. That's a good use of him, especially when his lyrics veer toward Biblical overstatement, as on "All the Way Down" when he sings about "crystalline dawn" and "six white horses." Also, there's this gem from "Can't Catch the Train": "Sure as the shovel is blind, deaf, and digging/ One day you're alone at the end of your road."
And that's perhaps the problem with Broken: Too often its soundtrack atmosphere is too thick, its arrangements as obvious as a painted backdrop. The strings sound too much like Morricone, and "Wise Blood" recalls the quieter moments from Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman's score for The Last of the Mohicans more than the John Huston movie. On "Unbalanced Pieces" the whispered backing vocals dogging Lanegan have all the spooky effect of a horror trailer, and the menacing bassline is both seedy and Bad Seed-y, which only reinforces the unflattering comparison with the recent soundtrack work of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. In trying to literalize the often dismissive term "soundtrack rock," Soulsavers emphasize the former to the neglect of the latter. | 2009-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | V2 | November 6, 2009 | 6.3 | 92989cf4-70b9-4d73-b6c4-b03df7e032c5 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Simone Schmidt and company navigate interior and exterior life with country-inflected improvisations that stretch out like a long summer afternoon. | Simone Schmidt and company navigate interior and exterior life with country-inflected improvisations that stretch out like a long summer afternoon. | Fiver: Fiver With the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiver-fiver-with-the-atlantic-school-of-spontaneous-composition/ | Fiver With the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition | The contemporary musician’s to-do list only gets longer and more obtuse in the name of Engagement and Content: write funny tweets, gaze into the TikTok abyss, maintain a carousel of fresh photographs, sprinkle it all with carefully maintained parasocial politeness. Simone Schmidt has never really played the game. And why would they, really? Outside of projects like One Hundred Dollars, the Highest Order, and Fiver, their work has also included a long commitment to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty; over the past year, they’ve dedicated time to Toronto’s Encampment Support Network, a mutual-aid organization addressing the failures of city officials in treating unhoused residents with much empathy or urgency.
Fiver With the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition returns to a project Schmidt established nearly a decade ago and expands it with an eponymous ensemble that’s smaller than its substantial name would suggest. The group squares the free-for-all sensibility that animates improvised music with the commitment necessary for a searching interior journey. Together, Schmidt and the band render their spontaneity into songs that embrace the discomfort and delight of feeling out of step with society.
The album stretches out like a long summer afternoon, flitting between airy splashes of light and protracted shadows. Opener “Yeah But Uhh Hey” drifts forth on light cymbal splashes and brushed percussion, with Schmidt making a casual introduction in their cool, smoky warble. Schmidt’s bandmates, whose recent credits include stints supporting Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s comeback, abstain from flashy solos. Instead, the group reach their most sublime moments with ear-catching details.
“June Like a Bug” unfolds over plodding drums, its fluttering saxophones balanced against piano parts that glint like a watch face catching the sun. Schmidt sings as though they’re pushing their entire being against the heavy weight of summer; it’s a slow, cathartic release. As if by sleight of hand, Schmidt leads the group into “Jr. Wreck,” a mild admonition that acknowledges how the world is sometimes stacked against you: “There’s no paper notion/That won’t fold or tear when it’s pushed into life.”
Building off loose guitar twang, pianist Nick Dourado’s light touch presses the songs toward gospel. On “Jr. Wreck,” “Sick Gladiola,” and “Death Is Only a Dream,” choral vocals recall both heavenly choirs and their soft-focus earthly counterparts in pop groups of the 1940s and ’50s. As Schmidt and company skate toward these edges, their music feels carried by an all-encompassing spirituality. “Death Is Only a Dream” becomes divine as Schmidt surrounds their grief with their awe of the universe. As Schmidt smudges the boundaries between waking life and dreaming, earth and cosmos, they find another duality in the pain of an excruciating loss, singing, “So with no end I too am blessed/My love for you, infinity.”
Schmidt also makes pointed observations on equity and loneliness. In “Leaning Hard (On My Peripheral Vision),” they draw on language from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to acknowledge their shared distaste for white moderates who rely on complacency to enforce a “negative peace” instead of meaningful justice. With “Sick Gladiola,” Schmidt unfurls the disappointment of dried-up California dreams in a tender barroom twirl. A neglected houseplant in the check-out lane—“Rootless and blooming for nothing, not even itself”—becomes a fine metaphor for feeling pitiful.
Schmidt’s latest work with Fiver emphasizes their multiple identities: musician, citizen, and community caretaker. “For Your Sake,” the album’s closing track, epitomizes Schmidt’s unwavering dedication to a person’s right just to be. “I would be there for your sake/For your sake in mine is doubled,” they sing. Schmidt sees everyday reality with clear eyes, while still acknowledging the wonder and beauty inherent to it. To borrow from Pete Seeger, who celebrated the power of regular folk for the better part of a century: Take it easy, but take it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | You’ve Changed | May 10, 2021 | 7.6 | 92992a4a-6963-4e62-90ca-a95f8604ff59 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Pixies! Do not reunite! Please! Think of all that you have to stay dead for: four legendary albums, ever-strong legions ... | Pixies! Do not reunite! Please! Think of all that you have to stay dead for: four legendary albums, ever-strong legions ... | Frank Black & the Catholics: Show Me Your Tears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/777-show-me-your-tears/ | Show Me Your Tears | Pixies! Do not reunite! Please! Think of all that you have to stay dead for: four legendary albums, ever-strong legions of adoring hero-worshippers, and maybe the single most firmly entrenched reputation in the history of alternative music! Just consider it... it doesn't need to end this way...
But maybe it's no use; without even knowing for certain if the rumors of a supposed reunion will become a reality (the band and label have neither confirmed nor denied our inquiries), it's almost a truism in rock that matters of a band's sterling reputation inexorably descend to the lowest depths of the lowest common denominator. The worst part is that, with his latest misstep in the company of The Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, it's hard to think that lowest common denominator isn't Black Francis himself, sitting at the bottom of the barrel, waiting for the rest of the Pixies to finally arrive (Joey, as a member of The Catholics, would seem to be a shoo-in). It's bad enough that Frank Black can't seem to work hard enough these days to encourage what little confidence his name still instills in the hearts and minds of his few resolute followers; the Pixies shouldn't have to gently follow him into that good night, too.
But there's no need to even bring the Pixies into the picture; the scene presented by reality-as-we-know-it is grim enough. Good ol' fashioned Catholic guilt ought to have set in on Black by now for coasting on the fumes of his reputation in the baffling quest to reach some bland ideal of jangly, Midwestern shit-rock, but no such luck. He's still belting out bar-ballads for the type of bars he and his peer group are old enough to frequent. And there's no end in sight, either; any songwriter of Black's caliber could churn out homogenized roots-riffs and schmaltzy sentiment to last call and beyond. Heed the keen insight he offers on "Horrible Day": "It's a good day/ No, it's a horrible day/ And for the first time in my life I just don't care." In the battle of Frank versus the bar, my money's on the bar, and Frank's is, too, evidently; the next round's on him.
Now, it might be fair to suspect that I'm holding Frank to artistic standards that he never held for himself. First of all, even if that's true, why shouldn't we expect artists (in general) to perform to their demonstrated ability rather than sincerely offering up pieces of the comfortable little rut that they've been apathetically carving out over the past few years? If it was just a question of failing to live up to the Pixies, no one would need a review to predict the obvious, but it's so much worse than that; paling in comparison to the Pixies is expected (and it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise), but Tears isn't even a good Catholics album.
The excellent first half of Pistolero-- particularly the dazzling crescendo of "Western Star"-- is everything that the Catholics can and ought to be: rock as large, expansive, and over-romanticized (like right now) as the western skies hanging over the rural-route honky-tonk dives whose atmosphere they so readily evoke. Considering how little has changed in their dusty, trail-worn aesthetic between then and now, the listless songs on this album don't indicate maturation, or evolution of the band's sound, just lack of interest.
Only "Everything Is New" offers any sort of highlight by (not without some irony) most readily harkening back to some of the pent-up energy and easy melody of earlier Catholics material. It's comparatively slight next to the blustery faux-rockers on Tears, and flatter than the cloying sentiment of the more somber tunes, but that's because it may be the only track that doesn't need to compensate for the simple desire that, in all other cases, just isn't there. The elegance of the melody is superbly understated; it doesn't seem like much at the time, but it does its work like any good pop song, and you may well be humming it long after the final coda. Even if there's little more to recommend, it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Still, it's the single, tiny bright spot on all of Show Me Your Tears, almost insignificant in the long twilight of Frank Black & The Catholics, and it's getting pretty dark down at the bottom of the barrel. | 2003-09-23T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-09-23T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | spinART | September 23, 2003 | 5.4 | 929e5c46-1b94-416a-b24e-c0774dab42e3 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
The eccentric New Zealand singer-songwriter turns his skewed pop sensibilities toward soundtracking a five-part melodrama of his own making; it’s intermittently gorgeous but frustratingly foggy. | The eccentric New Zealand singer-songwriter turns his skewed pop sensibilities toward soundtracking a five-part melodrama of his own making; it’s intermittently gorgeous but frustratingly foggy. | Connan Mockasin: Jassbusters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/connan-mockasin-jassbusters/ | Jassbusters | Since the late 1970s, New Zealand has produced an array of skewed pop savants, from Martin Phillipps to the Kilgour brothers, Chris Knox to Lorde. But is there another Kiwi who has inveigled themselves and their peculiarities into the modern indie-rock stratosphere quite like Connan Mockasin? Carrying the air of an alien beamed down to earth, Mockasin has popped up alongside some of indie music’s most revered figures: James Blake, Charlotte Gainsbourg, MGMT, John Cale, and Dev Hynes, to name a few. No matter the artist, he brings a surrealist bent to the proceedings. He’s a naturally helium-huffed crooner, and his songs meander like a stroll in the park, his warped guitar lines as knee-bending as a good curveball pitcher.
But his proximity to bigger pop acts hasn’t done much to alter Mockasin’s approach to his own music. Five years after Caramel, Mockasin’s third album, Jassbusters, finds him to be just as squishy, unmoored, and diaphanous as he was when he debuted with 2010’s Forever Dolphin Love. On Jassbusters, Mockasin and bandmates drift in and out of songs shaped like murky pools, full of submerged pulses, noodly reveries, and murmured lyrics that briefly bewitch and then wiggle right beyond remembrance.
While its title might titillate, “Charlotte’s Thong” instead wanders a far different path. The groove is slack, unformed, and stoned as an early-’70s country-rock session; as the band nods along, it summons memories of Fleetwood Mac and Michael Nesmith, Mockasin’s guitar lines by turns lethargic and tart. It’s appealingly hazy, but Mockasin’s marble-mouthed delivery (is he singing about thongs or songs?) comes dangerously close to dissolving into gibberish.
The album is apparently intended as a companion piece to Bostyn ’n Dobsyn, a “five-part melodrama” directed by and starring Mockasin. But it’s hard to imagine any plot or visuals making the album cohere any better. Does it matter who Momo or Con Conn actually are? The bits of dialogue that crop up (“You can do anything to get good grades,” or “Your grades are slipping, every subject except for music”) don’t help clarify matters much.
As a result, a strange, slow fog settles in over the course of the record, which comes to feel like an album-length exercise in torpor, clouding over some unabashedly gorgeous turns by Mockasin. He has James Blake and his fragile falsetto take the lead on “Momo’s,” a languorous song that floats like exhaled smoke. “Last Night” also moves at the speed of deep breathing, a gently tapped ride cymbal providing the subtle pulse as Mockasin does his best Brothers Gibb quiver. It has all the makings of a heartbreaking, slow-burning soul ballad, were it not for the weird squeaking-balloon sounds that continually disrupt the setting. “Con Conn Was Impatient” also smolders, even as Mockasin’s pleas slowly crumble into ululations and wordless ash. Rather than convey a sense of melodrama, Jassbusters often feels like the wispy, lite-rock tribute that Ween never got around to making. | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | October 15, 2018 | 6.7 | 92a04a7d-ce87-48ec-8bd5-3d8b22965456 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Just 18 minutes with Kenny Beats shows Rico Nasty evolving. She remains one of the heaviest hitters in the no-rules arena of rap. | Just 18 minutes with Kenny Beats shows Rico Nasty evolving. She remains one of the heaviest hitters in the no-rules arena of rap. | Rico Nasty / Kenny Beats: Anger Management | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rico-nasty-kenny-beats-anger-management/ | Anger Management | On a hot afternoon in the Indio, California, desert, Rico Nasty glided onto the Coachella stage dressed in a grand black and neon green tutu gown; the stones that scaled her long ponytail shimmered as she sent the audience into roars. Rico didn’t have to yell the words to the opening song, “Trust Issues” to stir the crowd—her conviction is the heartbeat of her mighty sound. With a swelling fanbase and constant stream of radical musical breakthroughs, the 21-year-old is brimming with mega pop-star promise. She’s punky, femme, cool-headed, and audacious with the growing ability to integrate her multi-facets into her work. Over the last year since the release of Rico’s debut album Nasty, she’s been letting down her guard a bit. With her latest EP Anger Management, she revels in her latitude.
It’s a joint release with her friend and close producer Kenny Beats. The two joined forces in 2018 after Kenny stepped away from a career as an EDM DJ to pursue his dream of becoming a rap producer; already, their fruitful link-up has produced some of Rico’s most bone-crushing tracks, like “Smack a Bitch” and “Countin’ Up.” Those songs, in particular, signaled the progression of Rico’s hardcore sound. It’s become less about the punch of her throaty vocals and more about the new flows she’s mastered over peculiar and far-out beats. Rico’s stretching her voice without limits, placing her in the zeitgeist of rap music’s increasingly rule-bending state.
On the EP, Rico and Kenny have a brilliant dynamic in the studio. And while working in tandem, Rico’s discovery of refreshing tempos and clear emotion (especially the guitar-led track “Sell Out”) spotlight on her role in setting the bar high when it comes to innovating. Consistently bringing her best requires her co-creator to do the same—she and Kenny elevate each other.
Though short, Anger Management feels like an arrival. For nine tracks and 18 minutes, Rico activates the energy she first tapped into on Nasty, offering scores of fresh cadences, pacing, and sentiments. She starts off the EP with her signature grit and intensity, and in true Rico fashion, every word comes from her chest. But that fiery energy is heaviest at the beginning. Midway through, “Big Titties,” featuring Dreamville rap duo EarthGang, feels like an abrupt segue.
The gripe isn’t with the sound of the song. It’s just that after such a rousing interpolation of JAY Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” on the previous track, “Hatin,” there’s a desire to hear more of solo Rico. Thankfully, throughout the rest of Anger Management, she shares the degrees of her angst and presents a thoughtful portrait of who she’s growing to be. During the EP rollout, Kenny tweeted from his account: “Listen to Anger Management from the start to the finish! Its like a temper tantrum. Starts off panicked. Thinks it Out … finishes calm.”
She begins this thoughtful wind-down with “Relative,” a transition into Rico’s more inner thoughts. Her fury has long been a part of her music, but here it seems she’s beginning to process in real-time with a maturing emotional outlook. For just a little over one minute, Rico savors its warmth and grooves about dealing with disingenuous people post-fame. The jazzy piano chords feel very early ’90s New York—enchanting but minimal like the backdrops used by earlier MC’s known for storytelling like Method Man or A Tribe Called Quest. But Rico’s reimagination of the nostalgic sounding track illuminates her range. She’s still hard, but contemplative, too. “I be gettin’ money, now everybody my relative/Talkin’ bout, ‘It’s all love,‘ like I don’t know what jealousy is,” she raps.
Being direct and honoring rage can be especially tricky to navigate for black women as this bold expression remains unjustly used to label or dismiss us. But in the spirit of reclamation before the closing track, Rico’s uses the song “Sell Out” to face herself. “The expression of anger is a form of rejuvenation,” she says. It’s a quick one, but it’s one of the most important moments here. Instead of softening her truth, Rico suggests that the journey of healing and self-actualization is personal and nonlinear. It proposes that our internal seething is worth exploring and in some cases, critical and necessary to confront in order to be or feel free. Anger Management is a hell of a rap-production slapper, but most of all it’s a turning point in Rico’s evolution. | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | May 4, 2019 | 7.6 | 92a69aeb-ca46-46e2-9ebb-d28adf0362f0 | Lakin Starling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lakin-starling/ | |
The young European produer Chevel takes a bold, confident step away from the dancefloor into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design on his latest album. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it. | The young European produer Chevel takes a bold, confident step away from the dancefloor into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design on his latest album. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it. | Chevel: Blurse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21129-blurse/ | Blurse | Chevel is a young European producer with fashionable friends—he's had a long working relationship with fellow Italian Lucy—good DJ bookings, his own label (Enklav), and a fair amount of hype. He also has something a lot of precocious upstarts don't: a deep and evolving catalog, counting 15 singles and now three albums to his name. His latest, Blurse—out on Lucy's excellent Stroboscopic Artefacts label—is a bold, confident step away from the dance floor material he's been honing and into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design.
Blurse opens the way a lot of techno records do—with a grimy, compressed kick drum—and that's about the last time Blurse proceeds the way a lot of techno records do. The second kick arrives nearly a second later, an eternity on a dance floor. By the 90-second mark Chevel seems to have lost interest in the kick drum entirely, taking a mid-track siesta with the swirling harmonics and buzzing synths/insects. The drums come back—they almost always do—but these kind of aberrant structures define Blurse, which sees Chevel continually chart his way to abstraction and back again.
Blurse, then, is kin to a certain strand of hypnotic, percussion-heavy dance music that sits at the edges of house and techno, the kind only touched by adventurous and skilled DJs. There are elements of Pearson Sound's coptering drums, of Objekt's cryptic architecture, even of the spacey suspensions of early dubstep masters such as Loefah. And, impressively, Chevel never veers too far into the avant-garde; Blurse, with its hard gray surfaces and dubby quivers, is always identifiable as techno in some mutated form. Chevel is walking a tightrope here, maintaining structure while unmooring most of a track's conventional building blocks.
There's fun to be had in the details, too. The end of "Watery Drumming" features wildly rippling echoes as what sounds like an actual clock keeps time. "Down and Out" consists mostly of short, pitched percussion sounds and little stabs of an electric piano; skipping around the track with your mouse you're as likely to find utter silence as anything. The gorgeous "Loop #33" sees gooey, molten synths rise from beneath the cracks in the percussion.
Concrete melodies are a little thin on the ground, so Blurse can sound homogenous. The record sometimes lacks the dynamism of works by the aforementioned artists, at times bordering on ascetic and clinical. But this style, which results in a lot of short, compact tracks, lends itself well to the album format. Which might be the point: Chevel has released two EPs and a 10-inch this year, all of them showcasing his steady progression but aimed more squarely at the dance floor. Blurse has the precision of a practiced producer and mischievousness of a rogue. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it. | 2015-09-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Stroboscopic Artefacts | September 28, 2015 | 7.7 | 92a8454d-5c23-4c1b-b9a0-6e07cfb8cd32 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On the duo’s generation-spanning double album, Fela Kuti leads in spirit while the baton gets passed down the family tree. | On the duo’s generation-spanning double album, Fela Kuti leads in spirit while the baton gets passed down the family tree. | Femi Kuti / Made Kuti: Legacy + | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/femi-kuti-made-kuti-legacy/ | Legacy + | Fela Kuti, the Nigerian activist and Afrobeat pioneer, became famous in the 1970s with an inventive mix of Highlife melodies, Yoruba chants, uplifting jazz, and funk infusions. A dynasty has since steadily carved itself out. For years, Fela’s sons Femi and Seun Kuti have carried the torch, with the latter inheriting his father’s former band, Egypt 80. It’s a legacy that continues to keep fires alive at home in Lagos while the genre’s influence spreads far and wide, from inspired foreign bands like Antibalas reinterpreting Afrobeat in distant continents to hip-hop samples in songs by Missy Elliott and Nas.
Legacy+ is a celebration of that status quo and a nod to Afrobeat’s future. Fela’s eldest son Femi Kuti, now 58, has spent years performing after Fela’s death. Femi’s own eldest son Made, 25, did not witness Fela in person, but the spirit of the music and the weight of his inheritance was enough to direct his musical path. What Legacy+ offers is a merging of Fela’s legend, Femi’s unrelenting struggle, and Made’s extension of the genre: three generations of Arobeats in one place.
Fela’s political ethos and sound echo throughout Femi’s half of the double album, Stop the Hate, in polyrhythmic drum patterns dressed with commentary about government accountability and its debilitating effects on the masses. “Na Bigmanism Spoil Government” cheekily strikes at the core of class politics in Nigeria. “Come on, tell them, let them change their ways,” Femi instructs his band, with the help of deep horn grooves. Afrobeat demands that you move to the rhythm, even if your heart is straining with the gravity of the message.
Femi doesn’t always punch up. Building an improved society involves labor from the community, too. “Set Your Minds Free” redirects his sermon to the people. Leaving space for instrumentation, his yearning picks up as he admonishes his countrymen: “Don’t let them confuse you. Don’t let them deceive you. Don’t let them think for you,” he says—it’s part-grating, part-melodious, by design.
Where Femi can drift off into poignant pining, Kuti stands on strong storytelling and delivery. He’s still towing the family theme of freedom, justice, and responsibility. But there’s a renewed energy to his offering. At just 25, Made didn’t experience Fela Kuti’s brilliance in person. But he’s inherited his flair for experimentation. “Blood” leans closer to funk in its production, as Made explores the conditioning that allows citizens to accept bad governance. On rare occasions where he stops addressing the government, his attention shifts to mundanities: “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful,” he emphatically repeats on “Young Lady.”
The Kuti family has long delivered on the thankless task of holding a mirror up to Nigeria’s dysfunction. With Made’s emergence, that responsibility isn’t leaving their household any time soon.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global / Jazz | Partisan | February 20, 2021 | 7.8 | 92aa5f67-b4b9-4d69-916e-4b08c43228ae | Joey Akan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joey-akan/ | |
The Berlin sound artist explores the creative potential of vibroacoustic research, composing ambient music for therapeutic mattresses that transmit ultra-low frequencies directly to patients’ bodies. | The Berlin sound artist explores the creative potential of vibroacoustic research, composing ambient music for therapeutic mattresses that transmit ultra-low frequencies directly to patients’ bodies. | Florian T M Zeisig: Music for Parents | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florian-t-m-zeisig-music-for-parents/ | Music for Parents | For Florian T M Zeisig, ambient music is as driven by ideas as it is by immediate feeling. As one half of the Berlin new-age duo OCA, the sound artist has used samples cribbed from YouTube synth demos to explore the hidden aspects of contemporary music production. His 2020 solo album Coatcheck made a similar attempt to shed light on invisible labor, weaving field recordings captured during his job as a coat attendant at a Berlin nightclub into a stark meditation on nightlife’s structural underpinnings. On Music for Parents, Zeisig turns his attention to the domestic sphere, crafting a series of compositions through the lens of vibroacoustic therapy.
As a therapeutic method, vibroacoustic treatments use low-frequency harmonic pulses to address chronic health issues. Established by the Norwegian sound therapist Olav Skille in the early 1980s, the relatively experimental practice has been used to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and depression with varying degrees of success, and the practice lives on as a wellness technique that’s especially popular in Scandinavia. In addition to therapy sessions with alternative healers, a variety of pillows, mattresses, and massage tables come fitted with speakers and transducers designed to blast ultra-low, 20-60 Hz sound waves at their respective points of contact. The effect is something akin to the rattling sub-bass of the TR-808, but directed toward specific areas for holistic bodily treatment.
A student of Alva Noto at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Zeisig has long been interested in composition that tests the limits of human perception. During a visit to his hometown in Bavaria, he discovered that his parents had purchased a vibroacoustic mattress in hopes of improving their chronic sleep issues, and he became fascinated with the mattress as a medium for site-specific composition. After nearly two years of research, he emerged with a collection of tracks that combine the soft, mid-range tones of ambient music with the rich, low-end frequencies that are essential to vibroacoustic perception, presenting the album as a gift to his mother for her 60th birthday.
Zeisig’s use of vibroacoustic therapy’s low-end frequencies serves mostly to complement his foundation in the ambient tradition. The album’s opening track, “Dad Is Painting Again,” starts with a gentle flourish of cricket chirps and aquatic burbling before slowly introducing sub-bass frequencies mirrored by synthesizer tones. Soft, reed-like synth lines sweep through the mix at steady intervals as the track alternates between natural samples and distinctly digital keystrokes. The piece feels like a clear continuation of Zeisig’s earlier work with OCA, which channelled the spirit of Japanese environmental music into a careful study of the Alesis QS6 synthesizer on their album Aging. But beyond the arrangement’s careful restraint, the track nonetheless leaves listeners guessing as to exactly how it might be informed by the composer’s relationships with his parents, despite their obvious presence in the album’s backstory.
The album has presumably a different effect in headphones than it would if encountered lying on a vibroacoustic bed, but the musical content remains the same, regardless of the medium through which it’s experienced. Tracks like “Giving/Receiving” and “Dip Pool” make attempts to capture the furthest limits of the audible spectrum, with warm pads and organ tones that add a resonant, full-bodied feel. The former uses glistening textures and gentle gusts of white noise to achieve a delicate, ASMR-like effect in the upper register, while the latter leans into the voluminous low end associated with vibroacoustic listening. While these pieces are attuned to the knotty specifics of their technological parameters, the album feels like a missed opportunity to say more about these technologies, or about ambient composition in general in a moment saturated with digital media.
Ambient music has long defined itself in opposition to commercial background music, and a similar tension exists today amid the sheer abundance of ambient listening options. Ad-supported platforms have made albums like The Disintegration Loops and Music for Airports more accessible than ever, while mobile software applications like Calm and Endel promise endless relief through mood-altering playlists and generative algorithms. Functional listening has become a million-dollar industry, and even the cognoscenti are not immune, judging from the popularity of albums like Mort Garson’s Plantasia and Hiroshi Yoshimora’s GREEN. While less commercial than their app-based counterparts, these albums show that there’s a real audience for this kind of holistic, new-age approach to ambient composition, and Zeisig’s work builds on this tradition.
Comparisons with the sustained popularity of ASMR on YouTube feel apt; vibroacoustic therapy also promises to induce new kinds of bodily feeling. While Zeisig doesn’t make any claims about the album’s ability to induce ASMR (though he’s mentioned it in the liner notes of earlier releases), Music for Parents presents an equally compelling case that there are still untapped possibilities for ambient composition that lie beyond the perceptual limits of the ear. But by using this technology in pursuit of the same functional ends already so common in ambient composition, Zeisig risks papering over what’s genuinely unique and exciting about vibroacoustic listening with ambient clichés. A minor statement from an artist doing exciting work within the art world, Music for Parents remains a static proof of concept in place of what could be a more meaningful engagement with its premise.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Métron | February 4, 2021 | 6.6 | 92abf2e2-637a-4946-801e-1f2740f807ee | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The Detroit rapper pays tribute to Van Gogh’s most infamous moment, extending his own recent prolific streak with a chaotic, creative album that switches styles like outfits. | The Detroit rapper pays tribute to Van Gogh’s most infamous moment, extending his own recent prolific streak with a chaotic, creative album that switches styles like outfits. | ZelooperZ: Van Gogh’s Left Ear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zelooperz-van-goghs-left-ear/ | Van Gogh’s Left Ear | On December 23, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, deep in the throes of psychosis, cut off his left ear and gifted it to a woman working at a nearby brothel. His friend, the artist Paul Gauguin, who had spent the previous nine weeks living and quarreling with him, painting and debating the nature of art, had seen enough, and left the yellow house in Arles, France they had shared. Within two years, Van Gogh would be dead by his own hand. This is the man—and the moment—around which Detroit MC ZelooperZ’s latest album is built.
But Van Gogh’s Left Ear captures more than just a tribute from a young artist to the Dutch master (ZelooperZ painted the cover’s homage to two of Van Gogh’s most famous works). During the 63 days Van Gogh and Gauguin spent together in the yellow house, the former created some of his most vivid and introspective works, while the latter witnessed his friend’s descent into madness. The historical events offer a spiritual precedent for the chaotic creative energy that permeates Van Gogh’s Left Ear, as ZelooperZ flits from track to track with boundless verve, exploring the limits of his own abilities.
Truly fearless rappers often embrace multiple styles, adopting the flow du jour just to prove that they can—think of Jay Electronica’s nimble triplets on the “We Made It” remix at the height of Migos-mania, or the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Notorious Thugs.” ZelooperZ draws from slightly different influences; throughout the LP you can hear echos of Young Thug’s warped falsetto (“Hostile”), Polo G’s emotive croon (“Bluez”), or even Flint’s funniest postman Bfb Da Packman (“VanGogh’sLeftEar”). And it’s plain to see on “Bash Bandicoon” just how well he vibes with Danny Brown’s goofball gangster energy; as absurd as the Crash Bandicoot-sampling beat is, it’s clear they’re having fun.
The production on Van Gogh’s Left Ear is just as varied and hectic; the tracklist shifts from Detroit gutter bop (“Battery”) to Japanese video game (“Bash Bandicoon”) to Buffalo mafioso movie (“BadMan”) with minimal transition. But ZelooperZ manages to tie it all together, his oddball charisma shining through no matter what the beat sounds like. It’s a rare rapper who can make myriad styles and sounds feel definitively their own.
Even in his earliest work, which seemed somewhat derivative of Brown’s style, ZelooperZ’s hyperactive, unpredictable personality stood out. And while he—along with the rest of the Bruiser Brigade—spent much of the early ’10s in their leader’s shadow, ZelooperZ has been on a prolific run lately. He released two LPs in 2019, Wild Card and Dyn-o-Mite, and in 2020, he released three: Gremlin, Moszel Offline, and Valley of Life, each better than the last. Though it would be a stretch to call Van Gogh’s Left Ear cohesive, it’s likely his strongest album to date. With each release he’s barreled forward full force, an artist possessed by the energy that drives him to create in the first place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bruiser Brigade | July 27, 2021 | 7.6 | 92ad1a17-2829-4575-9b1a-5967f5d8f113 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On the third album since his Justin Vernon-assisted 2018 comeback, the mischievous singer heaps on the Auto-Tune, but his songwriting has more in common with his Southern-fried soul of the 1970s. | On the third album since his Justin Vernon-assisted 2018 comeback, the mischievous singer heaps on the Auto-Tune, but his songwriting has more in common with his Southern-fried soul of the 1970s. | Swamp Dogg: I Need A Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swamp-dogg-i-need-a-jobso-i-can-buy-more-auto-tune/ | I Need A Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune | Swamp Dogg was born after Jerry Williams Jr.’s first LSD trip. The Virginia native had come up on the 1960s soul circuit, writing songs and working as an in-house producer at New York’s Musicor label. But the psychedelics, combined with a newfound love of Frank Zappa, birthed Total Destruction to Your Mind, his wild 1970 debut under the new alias, where cranial expansions battle with dives into the gutter. Swamp Dogg got weirder as the ’70s rolled on. On the cover of Rat On! he’s depicted riding a rat as if it was bronco, an absurd image countered by the pointed protest “God Bless America for What.” He didn’t hesitate to title an album Gag a Maggott, where the lone love song was called “I Couldn’t Pay for What I Got Last Night.” In this trickster guise, he both celebrated and satirized soul music’s conventions—and America itself.
These records weren’t hits, but they were underground sensations, building a cult that sustained itself until 2018, when Joyful Noise released Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, an album whose indie-rock pedigree (Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon plays throughout and sings on “I’ll Pretend”) and novel use of the pitch-correction software helped kick off a late-career comeback; he followed up with 2020’s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, a country-soul excursion produced by Ryan Olson of Poliça, who also played on Love, Loss and Auto-Tune. I Need a Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune is clearly meant to evoke his 2018 breakthrough, and it’s duly slathered with the titular effect. Yet rather than venturing further out, Williams retreats to familiar territory, playing the kind of Southern-fried soul he’s sung since he created his alter ego.
He dedicates the album to the Flamingos’ Tommy Hunt, a longtime friend who once fronted him money to release Swamp Dogg’s 1989 album I Called for a Rope and They Threw Me a Rock, and the music likewise pays tribute to the R&B circuit they called home back in the ’60s and ’70s. The album is filled with fellow soul survivors, with Willie Clayton cheerfully duetting with the Dogg on “Cheating in the Daylight” and Guitar Shorty playing on the slow-burning “Soul to Blessed Soul.” Larry “Moogstar” Clemons, who has played in incarnations of the Zapp Band and Cameo (and produced a fair share of Love, Loss), and Norman Whitfield Jr., the son of the Motown legend of the same name, are behind the boards alongside Williams, creating a clean sheen for their tight, immaculate grooves. Strip away the vocals and I Need a Job slots squarely within the modern retro-soul wheelhouse, all traces of grit sanded away.
Vocals are the selling point—they’re referenced in the album title, after all—and Auto-Tune provides the distinctive, potent ingredient in the stew. Who knows why Swamp Dogg is drawn to the vocal pitch correction software. Maybe he likes the manipulated sound; maybe he realizes he has a bankable gimmick; maybe the computer helps disguise the wear on his aging voice. Whatever the reason, he loves Auto-Tune. He cranks the dial ’til his voice undulates like rubber, accentuates key phrases with hiccupping glitches, uses the extra-smooth textures to help sell his slow jams.
But where Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune could be audacious, I Need a Job is often conventional. Despite the prevalence of the effect, I Need a Job largely adheres to the rules of traditional R&B; in fact, it’s one of the straightest sets of songs Swamp Dogg has released. Having dampened his perversity, he offers few twists on genre tropes and winds up with a set of cheating and sex songs that feel merely reassuring in their familiarity. No wonder Willie Clayton and Guitar Shorty seem right at home; this is the kind of music they make.
A Swamp Dogg album that travels the straight and narrow still provides pleasures here and there; Dogg’s evident glee in playing with Auto-Tune does give the record a kick. Plus, it culminates with a freakazoid cover of Joe Tex’s classic 1967 “Show Me” that’s all frenzied rhythm, canned horn stabs, and unhinged altered vocals; it’s the one number here that ties together the past and present with flair. It’s hard not to wish the rest of I Need a Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune was that imaginative. Even so, delivering a good old-fashioned soul record to a new audience of Bon Iver fans can’t help but feel like a good ol’ Swamp Dogg prank. | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Don Giovanni | February 28, 2022 | 6.2 | 92add2d1-dc91-4fd5-8f57-0dea4841381a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The singer-songwriter and pianist writes quietly epic songs about heartbreak, determination, and loneliness. | The singer-songwriter and pianist writes quietly epic songs about heartbreak, determination, and loneliness. | Erin Durant: Islands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erin-durant-islands/ | Islands | There is precious little information available about Erin Durant. She was raised in New Orleans, and now lives in Brooklyn. Complementing those anodyne facts is a beguiling flash of insanity: She refuses to perform on a keyboard, and instead carts her 232-pound stand-up piano to shows around New York City, a Sisyphean folly that earned her a New York Times story in 2015. The tyrannical determination of the image is softened by Durant’s tender connection to her instrument, which is evident from her second album, Islands. Her 2016 debut, Blueberry Mountain, was recorded in her bedroom, a DIY setup that muted that vivid symbiosis. With TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone on production, Islands polishes Durant’s sound to a resonant and gently rollicking gleam, brightened by dulcimer, guitar, brass, and woodwind.
Durant’s songwriting is fine-boned and small-scale, and her lyrics are quietly epic. On “Highway Blue,” she stands in a room where she once danced with a beau, her imagery as beautiful as their vanished love: “Now it’s just an empty room/Like cigarette smoke left as an evening dew,” she sings, marveling that “electricity still plays our records” even though their spirit is long out the window.
Durant lets these moments come and go without stretching them out, and this everyday quality points to her strengths as a writer. She starts “Rising Sun” full of certainty about how “making mistakes” and “costing the game” is “the only way, I think.” But as the song goes on, she crumples in real time, admitting she’s “so tired and a little drunk” and begging to be held, her confident front falling like a dropped beach towel. In the near-seven-minute epic “Good Ol’ Night,” she tells the story of her abandonment with a gimlet eye for details: one minute the “crystal chandelier is turned up bright,” the next, she’s “intensely lonely, sleeping in the car.” The picaresque narrative earns the boozy mariachi band that sways in halfway through.
The careful detail of her writing is sometimes obscured by the blinding brightness of the music, and weakened by the songs’ relative structural similarities. “Take a Load Off” is a gorgeous invitation to trust in friends that could do with less pedal steel and fewer syllables. The devastation of “Islands”—in which Durant takes advice to go on vacation, only to find the suggestion was an excuse for the advice giver to disappear from her life—doesn’t register easily amidst the sweetly swaying arrangement and Durant’s cooing voice.
As Bill Callahan once sang, Durant finds that “all this leaving is never ending.” As people, places, and time all slip away, you begin to see why Durant might lug a piano around as an anchor. On the final song, the lulling desert drone of “Another Town,” she rues those who “whisper in the wind/Thinking it’ll come back again,” and promises to seize any second chances that may come her way with hand-waving, love-pledging impetuousness. More of that spirit in her future songwriting will be the making of her. | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Keeled Scales | June 11, 2019 | 6.7 | 92b06378-0d53-4c27-9c3a-ddc5f6afd10b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Compton MC Boogie has a slyly giggling voice: His lyrics are plainspoken, funny, and sometimes poignant, and listening to him expound on his life is why you tune in. His new mixtape, The Reach, is a little darker, and a little more outwardly emotional, than last year's The Thirst 48, which kept the energy casual. | The Compton MC Boogie has a slyly giggling voice: His lyrics are plainspoken, funny, and sometimes poignant, and listening to him expound on his life is why you tune in. His new mixtape, The Reach, is a little darker, and a little more outwardly emotional, than last year's The Thirst 48, which kept the energy casual. | Westside Boogie: The Reach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20768-the-reach/ | The Reach | Boogie is from Compton, with a slyly giggling voice that makes him a spiritual cousin, of sorts, to Devin the Dude. He has Devin’s gift for observational humor, for singing his own choruses, and for making songs that seem light but can cut deeper than you expect. His voice is light and unassuming and his flow gathers in clumps around the beat, like he is punching it affectionately in the arm rather than riding it. He has a lisp he does nothing to disguise on record, which adds up to a certain image: This is a guy who doesn’t really care about how he appears, someone comfortable with his own thoughts, with being himself. On last year's Thirst 48, that guy—shrugging, diffident, wry, full of little jokey insults like "Man I swear Twitter turned lying to a talent”—seemed like someone to watch.
His follow-up, The Reach, is a little darker, and a little more outwardly emotional, than Thirst 48, which kept the energy casual. The beats were quiet, tinged with some subdued horns and a general vibe of electric relaxation. The Reach opens with an expansive and melodramatic sample from Route 94’s "My Love", with Jess Glynne’s already-deep voice pitched down. It’s a wider-reaching sound than anything on Thirst 48, and Boogie sounds like he’s amping himself up a bit, trying to raise the stakes on his music. His lyrics are uniquely clear and instantly legible—on your first listen through one of his mixtapes, you generally come away having absorbed every word he’s said.
This might seem like a strange or minor point to focus on, but it feels like part of Boogie’s appeal: His lyrics are plainspoken, funny, and sometimes poignant, and listening to him expound on his life is why you tune in. "Further" is a meditation on the effects of cyclical violence, and he sounds musing, hurt, and confused in turns. On the interlude "God’s Work", he remembers his mother’s eviction, sneaking back in to sleep in the apartment, eating dry cereal. "Even when I’m quiet I be turnt/ And I ain’t trying to cause no riot with my verse," he raps, in what feels like a Boogie Manifesto.
The production gleams with lots of warm horns, drums that sound like dripping faucets, and ribbons of vocal samples. It’s rap that sounds like it’s peeking out the window at the world, which is a feeling Boogie reinforces sometimes in his lyrics, which bristle with protective fear for his six-year-old son. On "Make Me Over", he is an aggrieved single dad, fretting about an environment that feels studded with threats large and small.
There are moments where Boogie sounds silly, getting excited about girls on Instagram, annoying retweets, and people who buy followers on Twitter. If his ear for rapped hooks sharpened, he might land something like a calling-card song: "Bitter Raps", a loose stream of insults and half-hearted gripes from Thirst 48, is the closest he has. Like his first tape, The Reach feels like a lovingly small-scale project, something to keep you good company in the privacy of your earbuds rather than at a party or in open spaces. | 2015-06-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-06-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 30, 2015 | 7.2 | 92b3090a-778a-4836-8fae-2fad5e3d5629 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Playful, maximalist, and flirtatious to the core, Isabella Lovestory’s debut album is a defiant celebration of sexual agency. | Playful, maximalist, and flirtatious to the core, Isabella Lovestory’s debut album is a defiant celebration of sexual agency. | Isabella Lovestory: Amor Hardcore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isabella-lovestory-amor-hardcore/ | Amor Hardcore | Isabella Lovestory doesn’t care for subtlety. She moans all over “Golosa,” her electrifying 2020 single about fucking. Amid talk of leather and expensive fragrances, she throws in a line about her butterfly tattoo. Her lover’s into it, she sings, but what may seem like a tossed-off lyric becomes fully realized in “Mariposa,” a hypnotic reggaeton track where she demands a guy spread his legs like the titular insect. The Honduran-born, Montreal-based artist has always been this coy, knowing how to wield reggaeton’s swerving grooves as pure sex appeal. She’s likened the genre to a mating call, and on her debut album, Amor Hardcore, she domineers every track to deliver 30 minutes of seductive excess.
Such hedonistic indulgence is prismatic in Lovestory’s hands. That’s been obvious even in her short career, which includes the trance-y hyperpop romp “Tranki,” a kaleidoscopic reggaeton track on Mura Masa’s last album, and songwriting credits for K-pop girl group LE SSERAFIM. Lovestory opts for stylistic cohesion on Amor Hardcore, wasting no time delivering heightened feelings. “Cherry Bomb,” for example, is a cunninlingus anthem that’s all whirring synths and booming dembow riddims. “Fashion Freak” is more runway ready, and its glossy synth melodies capture the unimpeachable thrill of looking glamorous. “It’s fun to make a character out of yourself and exaggerate your obsessions,” she told The FADER two years ago. The sinister laugh that appears mid-track is a wink and an invitation.
Sex-focused lyrics have always been central to reggaeton, but Lovestory cranks up the drama. Take “Exibisionista,” where she repeatedly declares her exhibisionist kinks over blaring synths. As she whispers and taunts, the track’s murky atmosphere becomes intoxicating, like a delirious night spent entertaining one’s vices. She lives out her fantasies on “Colocho,” too, where she sings about being eaten out by a curly-haired cowboy. Album closer “Keratina,” which is an ode to both keratin hair treatments and ketamine, has gunshots and a swaggering hip-hop beat that conclude the album with a consummate thesis: “La vida es más divertida si eres pervertida” (“Life is more fun if you’re perverted”).
These playful, maximalist caricatures of sex are half the fun here, and one of the major reasons Lovestory stands out among her peers in neoperreo, the club-minded underground reggaeton subgenre that has become a haven for queers and femmes of all genders. “Gateo,” which features one of the scene’s foundational artists, Ms Nina, is perhaps the album’s best expression of the movement. The two don’t simply exchange verses—they hype each other up, flaunting their assets and asserting their excellence atop a thrashing beat. More than anything, the collaboration serves as a reminder that despite the genre’s male-centered narratives, women have always been present in this movement, and will continue to thrive.
The eclectic influences that inform Lovestory’s music make her right at home in the expanding world of reggaeton. She grew up listening to Y2K pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, but also loved the Cure, Crystal Castles, and iconic reggaeton duo Plan B. In her love for brash 2000s pop is a trace of electroclash artists like Maria Daniela y Su Sonido Lasser, but then a track like “Sexo Amor Dinero” arrives and has its eyes set on the future. Co-produced by her boyfriend, the Chilean experimentalist Kamixlo, it features chugging metal guitars and pounding industrial beats. Even when she invites others to play, like on the posse cut “Tacón” or the tempo-shifting highlight “Hit,” Lovestory remains the star. It’s not just the candor of her lyrics that makes her unforgettable, but the magnetic fearlessness. Amor Hardcore is a testament to the power in knowing what you want. | 2022-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | October 24, 2022 | 7.2 | 92b32043-6222-4f98-9f4e-65f93642cc0c | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Zach Condon reunites with his old Farfisa on his fifth album, but otherwise he remains cozily ensconced in his twee wheelhouse. | Zach Condon reunites with his old Farfisa on his fifth album, but otherwise he remains cozily ensconced in his twee wheelhouse. | Beirut: Gallipoli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beirut-gallipoli/ | Gallipoli | Beirut’s Zach Condon came up in the tender landscape of mid-aughts indie rock and has been chilling there ever since. After nearly four years freewheeling throughout both New York and Europe, he is back with Gallipoli, which is neither named after the World War I battle nor a reference to the terrible Mel Gibson movie (also about the World War I battle). On Gallipoli, Condon is still doing the same exact thing he’s been doing the past 13 years—creating roomy, Elephant 6-indebted indie pop that sounds more or less like a readymade soundtrack for a young film student trying to front as an auteur. Those who can’t get on board with Condon’s penchant for twee won’t change their minds with this album, either. However, for listeners who appreciate indie pop at its most wide-eyed, this record does just that. Gallipoli doesn’t really break any new ground, but consistency works in Condon’s favor here. Beirut’s fifth album goes down about as smoothly as vanilla soft-serve in the middle of summer. It’s perhaps a bit light on content and about 10 minutes too long, but Gallipoli ultimately is well-produced and sweet to boot.
Gallipoli can be best summed up as the Beirut album where the organ is king. The record’s backstory is extremely in line with Condon’s ethos: Basically, he had this Farfisa sitting in his parents’ house in Santa Fe. He decided he needed said organ back in his life. He obtained the organ. Around that time he started sketching out Gallipoli. What ends up bubbling to the surface is an album loaded with starry 1970s affect. These 12 songs are warm to the touch, bathed in an FM-radio glow, and stuffed to the rim with elements of indie rock at its most naive. The record feels like backwards time travel both to the heyday of Laurel Canyon psych folk and to the alt-rock days of yore where you could put a ukulele in a song and not have people roast you incessantly. These feelings converge on the album’s indulgent eponymous lead single. Its plunky organ and clear-cut horn section have the overstated elegance of the Mandarin Duck fluttering its wings in a pond. Then Condon begins waxing poetic about being “spared from the sorrow,” and “southern winds scattered clouds from the cove,” letting you know with a wink and a raised eyebrow that he is indeed a learned man.
The album’s atmospheric tracks work best. These are not terribly memorable lyrics (and Condon has even said so much himself). This is particularly apparent in “Family Curse,” which is vaguely about family dynamics but in such a way that is pretty much inconsequential. What is really interesting is embedded in the track’s texture: The seed of a vintage-sounding drum-machine loop slowly blossoms into a full-flowered orchestra. The ambient track “Corfu” is a surprising highlight. It is tinged with Balearic rhythms and includes one of Gallipoli’s most compelling uses of organ stoking. One of the shortest songs on the album, it sounds like the kind of sun-kissed psych that would be paired nicely with an activity like drinking a tallboy while someone rubs sunscreen on your back.
Sometimes Condon’s penchant for meandering dreaminess really drags. Gallipoli is largely an album of background music, and its wallpaper qualities can invoke eye rolls and boredom. On “I Giardini,” Condon sings so far in the back of his throat he sounds Muppet-like, and texturally, things are equally unsatisfying. The resonant piano and plodding percussion feel especially drawn out, far beyond the song’s pretty standard four-minute runtime. Then there’s “Landslide,” which is overwhelming in its perkiness. Pretty much entirely in a major key, the track has an essence that can be described as “hey-ho indie pop man of the highlands meets The Sound of Music,” which is a bit of a head-scratcher.
Beirut’s music will always remain rooted in the 2006 that birthed his first album. No matter what Condon releases, his discography will forever be associated with nostalgia for a more innocent era of indie rock. There’s nothing wrong with continuing to make music that pines for a cultural moment that has already passed. Condon’s constant obsession with anachronism occasionally yields lovely, even compelling results. Other times, listening to his music feels like talking to friends from high school you’ve lost touch with. There’s good stuff here, but ultimately, it’s hard to be excited about something that feels so seriously entrenched in the past. | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | February 4, 2019 | 6.6 | 92b7a84e-647f-493c-beff-2b7efe4726cd | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The Los Angeles rap collective espouses an all-caps message of self-love on a debut album split between effortless cool and empty platitudes. | The Los Angeles rap collective espouses an all-caps message of self-love on a debut album split between effortless cool and empty platitudes. | BROCKHAMPTON: SATURATION | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-saturation/ | SATURATION | The first thing that BROCKHAMPTON would like you to know about them is that they are an All-American Boy Band. The patriotic first half of the phrase speaks to their diversity: They include both black and white, queer and straight members. The second half speaks to their lineup. Instead of “the shy one” or “the bad boy,” the L.A.-based collective comprises rappers, producers, singers, directors, designers, and creators. And in place of standard-bearing coolness, BROCKHAMPTON maintain an attractive aesthetic of self-expression. They confidently wear bright outfits, and even all-over blue body paint, in videos. In interviews, they speak often of self-belief. The group attempts to imbue its music with the same reckless, all-caps self-love, yet on their debut album, SATURATION, BROCKHAMPTON are unable to determine the best way to communicate that sentiment. Songs waver in sound and substance: from trap to acoustic, from unfettered declarations of individuality to self-help ballads. On SATURATION, insistence often outweighs execution.
BROCKHAMPTON’s stylishness is their greatest asset. The album’s second track, “GOLD,” isn't about much, yet it is easily the project’s most appealing and assertive outing. It features nearly all of the collective’s vocalists, showcasing them one by one over a futuristic boogie of a beat. Founder Kevin Abstract delivers the hook, in which flaunting a gold chain is akin to godliness. Rappers Matt Champion, Ameer Vann, Merlyn Wood, and Dom McLennon follow suit, each one delivering his strongest flow on the album. “GOLD” is the exemplar of BROCKHAMPTON’s message of self-confidence, where effortless cool is a default setting.
Were they not so insistent about it, it might not be obvious that BROCKHAMPTON are attempting to up-end hip-hop. “I’m just super into redefining things,” Kevin Abstract once told director Spike Jonze. “I want to make people confused, like, ‘Damn, I’ve not heard anybody like this in a rap song—like, ever before,” Wood declared in 2016. The group’s most subversive moments on record, however, come from their production, which is handled entirely in-house, literally; all of BROCKHAMPTON lives together in South Los Angeles. On another standout, “BOYS,” Champion, Vann, and McLennon deadpan over a swirling beat, creating an inviting contrast between the production and their delivery. But as far as what they have to say, Champion’s “Y’all say y’all got bitches/But y’all bitches make my dick soft” does not exactly “change what it means to be a man,” as Abstract said in that same 2016 interview.
Still, on “BOYS” and other beat-driven standouts like “FAKE,” “FACE,” and the horrorcore-adjacent opener “HEAT,” BROCKHAMPTON’s disruption is convincing. They scatter moments of self-deprecation and fear amid the platitudes. “HEAT,” in particular, with its blown-out bass and frantic vocals, explodes with id—a moment of catharsis for both the rappers and the listener. McLennon’s “I hate the way I think, I hate the way it looms” sounds more proud than afraid.
When they shed their aggressiveness, however, SATURATION becomes sappy and the collective’s lyrical weakness reveals itself. Slower tracks like “TRIP,” “MILK,” and “SWIM” closely resemble the naivety of Kevin Abstract’s American Boyfriend. Lamenting the perils of suburban life on “TRIP,” Abstract sings, “Today Imma be whoever I wanna be”; Ameer Vann echoes, “Trapped in the suburbs/We suffocatin’.” On “MILK,” Abstract switches to an uplifting message—“I gotta get better at being me”—but it comes off more like a motivational GIF on Instagram. Throughout, BROCKHAMPTON often mistake honesty for ability, and confession on its own is not necessarily artful.
SATURATION is best when BROCKHAMPTON live the life they preach. No member is a particularly good rapper, but they make up for their weakness when they ride the pristine beats with exuberance. “FACE,” for example, is so clean that a clunker like Champion’s “New times are coming just like a virgin” easily skates by unnoticed amid Vann and McLennon’s superior verses and JOBA’s gentle hook. But when they veer toward more indistinct territory—whether that means vague self-affirmation or songs that sound like Blonde karaoke—their ambitions sound too much like pipe dreams. | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | June 24, 2017 | 6.5 | 92c12912-1447-4e1c-85ed-0e832c232e5f | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
After two albums of cheerily frivolous indie pop, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of Christmas tunes. | After two albums of cheerily frivolous indie pop, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of Christmas tunes. | She & Him: A Very She & Him Christmas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15970-a-very-she-him-christmas/ | A Very She & Him Christmas | Look away, all those who would claim to loathe Zooey Deschanel, for her cultural saturation point is nigh. Even now the fates have begun chiseling her porcelain visage onto the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Mount Rushmore (preferably capturing the bewildered look she gave Billy Crudup at the end of Almost Famous), honoring her decade-long career as Twee Personified. Starlet of successful indie flicks and failed blockbusters (Hitchhiker's Guide is underrated), elegant shiller of cotton, remarkably infuriating Top Chef cameo veteran, and faithful companion to what passes in 2011 for a rock star, she now brings us The New Girl, a ludicrous Fox sitcom that is, at the very least, less wantonly shat upon than Whitney. (Still, though, if you ever have the opportunity to train a pit bull to rip someone's throat out merely by your uttering a "code word," do make that code word "adorkable.") Ah yes, and there's She & Him, her Instagram-folk outfit with the quietly excellent M. Ward, proud parents of two cheerily frivolous full-length records many people took remarkably seriously, and why not. And now, a Christmas album. Various deluxe editions come packaged with a hat and/or mittens.
If any or all of this enrages you (including her perfectly competent, bizarrely derided delivery of the National Anthem at a World Series game the other day), you oughta find other stuff to get enraged about. (Seriously, no worse than B- for vocal, and, okay, D+ for the dress.) Even if you don't buy into her It Girl/sex-symbol campaign, let us admit that Zooey's dainty, bright, appealingly low-swooping voice is Good for an Actress, and that's only, like, 15% pejorative. But A Very She & Him Christmas actually isn't hateable enough. Whether you come to praise or bury it, you're looking for something ultra-campy, overloaded with rampant corniness and gratuitous special guests, the holiday equivalent of Jenny Lewis' cover of "Handle With Care". Nah though. No Ben Gibbard, no Will Ferrell, no Mark Wahlberg, nobody. Lots of guitar-and-vocal skeletal sparseness, reaching for transcendent Charlie Brown melancholia but arriving instead at something merely dour. She sings, "They know that Santa's on his way," as though "Santa" were actually a plague of locusts. She should've recorded this while drunk.
Oh, now, though, these songs are fine, fine. "I'll Be Home for Christmas" has a nearly erotic rockabilly sashay, and M. Ward solos with economical dexterity throughout, and improves the record exponentially when his grumbly vocals first kick in on the shuffling "Christmas Wish"; their voices are lovely when intertwined, and at least offer a whiff of transcendent melancholia. Your crucial jam here is ordinarily immensely problematic yuletide sexual-predator anthem "Baby, It's Cold Outside", America's first taste of her vocal talents via Elf, the gender roles now swapped so Zooey bars the door and M. wonders what's in this drink; she blows through her lines in a zippy Eleanor Friedberger jumble, finally loosening up.
Most of the rest is just retightened Don't Fuck It Up competence, alas-- nothing you could call sacrilege, especially given that any Christmas-themed song that does not explicitly praise the birth of Jesus is technically sacrilege. Her "Blue Christmas" is alright but can't touch Porky Pig's; her "Little Saint Nick" is alright but can't touch John Denver and the Muppets'. They add an extra beat to "Sleigh Bells" so as to feel all musical. They attempt to redeem the irredeemable "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and nearly succeed; they attempt to add gratuitous gravitas to a solo-Zooey "Silver Bells" and fail. (Step away from the ukulele, first of all, and it's hard to sell the line, "And above all this bustle you hear," when there ain't no bustle.) "The Christmas Song" closes us out similarly too prim and grim, but it'll nonetheless ably soundtrack quite a few Xmas-morning marriage proposals amongst happy couples who also knitted each other sweaters to complement their reindeer-besieged wool pajama pants. (Cotton, make that cotton.)
It'd be nice to make even more cheap children's librarian jokes, but they played this one too safe. For a record whose immediate cultural precedent is Pomplamoose's Hyundai ads, this should have been way more polarizing. Savage the Kinks' "Father Christmas", excavate Paul McCartney's mega-twee "Wonderful Christmastime", give Vince Guaraldi's grave a few spins, something. No, for schadenfreude proceed directly to Scott Weiland's A Methadone Christmas or whatever it's called; A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough. | 2011-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 28, 2011 | 5.3 | 92c5c012-aa23-4f00-b4f2-c74b22db6ae9 | Rob Harvilla | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-harvilla/ | null |
Led by 19-year-old Jana Bahrich, the fiery emo duo tackle big existential questions and turbulent emotions in four short songs that throw off promising sparks of brilliance. | Led by 19-year-old Jana Bahrich, the fiery emo duo tackle big existential questions and turbulent emotions in four short songs that throw off promising sparks of brilliance. | Francis of Delirium: Wading EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/francis-of-delirium-wading-ep/ | Wading EP | On their meditative new EP, Wading, Francis of Delirium confronts grief, acceptance, isolation, identity, change, failure, and self actualization—all within the confines of four short songs. Frontwoman Jana Bahrich and drummer Chris Hewett cast an equally wide net last June on their first EP, All Change, but it felt more like a pilot run. Not everything landed, but they generated sparks of brilliance that catch fire on their more ambitious and cohesive follow-up.
Growing up the child of parents that taught overseas, the now-19-year-old Bahrich shuffled around as she grew up, living in Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland before anchoring in the verdant and frankly magical-looking country of Luxembourg. Its capital, Luxembourg City, is supposedly one of the top 20 “highest quality of life” places to live, so it’s comforting to know that even in a place so idyllic, the human condition remains the same.
Wading feels like a rage room, where Bahrich bounces between guitar freakouts and poised harmonies in a quiet-loud-quiet-loud formula. We get a glimpse of her internal monologue as she approaches post-adolescence. Her delivery ricochets over long-winded verses as she works herself to the point of exhaustion. Whispering, screaming, speak-singing, her voice is perpetually sparring with itself as she spins pain into anthemic and invariably catchy “sad angry” music. Whenever Bahrich isn’t center stage, Hewett delivers punchy rhythms much like The National’s Bryan Devendorf. The resulting sound is raw and effective.
Bahrich gives these songs everything, but whenever she leaves herself too unguarded, her safeguards trigger in the form of a scream or sudden change of pitch. On the standout track, “Let It All Go,” a linear story about being at a party with her partner at the relationship’s tipping point, her words begin to race, her voice hurtling towards Wading’s powerful apex. What follows is a fleeting moment of acceptance and clarity; “Let it all go, I’ll let it all go,” she echoes in a devastating refrain. The good ol’ Freudian id punches back protectively with the plaintive howl of her next line: “But aren’t you tired of being alone?”
All of the tracks deal with some sort of contemplation, whether it’s working through the end of a relationship (“Let It All Go”), wrestling with different versions of oneself (“Cause every second is a moment I’m fighting within every part of me” on “Red”) or self-gaslighting (“What if I should be losing everything? What if I’m to blame?” on “I Think I’m Losing”). As a lot of us have started to realize this past year, when you’re abruptly plucked out of your environment, it’s easy to lose sight of your own identity, overthinking how much of it was tied to friends, partners, and acquaintances to begin with. Who are we once those interactions disappear, or shift into new ones? Wading may not hold all of the answers, but it starts by asking the right questions. Running just over 14 minutes, the EP is short enough to digest during a walk around the block, but it feels like the blueprint for something grand.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dalliance | April 5, 2021 | 7.4 | 92d09b57-7d35-4046-a321-fe1e9314339c | Jerry Cowgill | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jerry-cowgill/ | |
R.E.M.’s long misunderstood 1994 album isn’t clarified by the bonus material on this new reissue, but the original songs remain strangely oblique, full of glam rock poses and sly subterfuge. | R.E.M.’s long misunderstood 1994 album isn’t clarified by the bonus material on this new reissue, but the original songs remain strangely oblique, full of glam rock poses and sly subterfuge. | R.E.M.: Monster (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rem-monster-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Monster (25th Anniversary Edition) | At the time of its release in 1994, Monster was too strange and sinuous to grasp. The once-underground band had recently garnered huge mainstream success with accessible, drowsily sad songs like “Everybody Hurts” and tightly-strung mood dioramas like “Losing My Religion.” But now every time a guitar tone rippled through an R.E.M. song it threatened to consume it entirely. Michael Stipe’s voice, when intelligible, sang in low, burred tones about sex, marketing, possessive crushes, and the constant reinvention of the self to appear more appealing to the subject of one’s possessive crush. Just as often his voice would echo off of itself or dart between radioactive blooms of guitar. For new fans of R.E.M., Monster didn’t sound like anything on the radio, and it certainly didn’t sound like 1992’s Automatic for the People. It sounded like something that had to be put back where it came from.
Despite debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts, Monster is primarily known as a used record. The blurred bear illustration on the front cover became a recognizable orange swell in every used record store’s dollar bin. Why did fans and non-fans alike quietly reject Monster? For one, Monster was a fatal attempt to return to the band’s roots—to the taut, sparkling rock they made in the '80s. By the time they recorded Automatic, the band had traveled far afield musically, into pastoral realms where the strum of a mandolin guided processionals about death and suffering. They hadn’t toured in five years and they worried these quieter, more introverted songs would result in them playing slow, gloomy sets sitting atop stools. They needed a dramatic shift. “We smashed [the acoustic guitars] against the wall and told the string players to go home,” Stipe said at the time. Peter Buck had recently switched to playing Les Paul guitars, and the sounds he pulled out of them made his amps buzz like beehives. They were going to write an album full of punk songs that would be fun to play live. It was supposed to rock.
Some of Monster indisputably rocks. A lot of it wobbles sideways like an amoeba, including the two songs that blossom from near-identical tremolo riffs, “Crush with Eyeliner” and “I Took Your Name.” One song, “Tongue,” sounds beamed in from a piano lounge on the moon. (During the 1995 show included with the 25th-anniversary reissue of the record, Stipe introduces “Tongue” by saying it has “a little bit of a ‘Luscious Jackson, roller derby’ vibe to it,” which nails it.) Another, “Let Me In,” written after the suicide of Stipe’s friend Kurt Cobain, is more funereal than almost anything on Automatic, a storm of overcompressed electric guitar chords that resembles the sound of the ocean when you close your eyes. Another, “King of Comedy,” is driven by an unusually harsh and rickety rhythm track, sounding like a machine barely held together by screws and breathing large plumes of exhaust.
It’s hard to determine how Monster got this way and the demos included with this reissue aren’t edifying. The band declined to throw in any embryonic versions of songs that actually appear on the record; we’ll never know if or how “King of Comedy” was assembled piece-by-glitching-piece. Most of what is included isn’t even as heat-damaged as “Crush with Eyeliner” or “Circus Envy.” Instead, the demos here tend to be lost instrumentals and riffs for which Stipe never ended up writing lyrics. Some of them sound like instrumental sketches for an actual return-to-our-roots R.E.M. record—the comfortable jangle of the demo “Uptempo Ricky,” its bassline like a searchlight playing over introspective minor chords, could have resembled one of phantoms looming out of the mist on their debut album Murmur had it been completed and recorded by early-R.E.M. producers Don Dixon and Mitch Easter.
But the 1994 Monster as-released tends to outright reject R.E.M.’s past. It reaches beyond their own history, into darker, more seductive forms of rock’n’roll. They moved away from the punk and classic rock tropes that formed the gnarled sound of their younger grunge contemporaries, foraging for a more flexible style and manner of performance practiced by figures such as Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop: glam rock. Glam would allow R.E.M. to be loud and crude but in such a theatrically exaggerated way that the crudeness had double and triple meanings trailing like shadows behind it. It emphasized the primacy of image as well as its inherent artificiality, using empty-headed rock’n’roll as a vehicle for poetry and subversion. If R.E.M. had to be a popular rock band again, if they had to commit their ideas and performances directly to tape with minimal overdubs, they would also find a way to undercut the idea of a “popular rock band” at every turn of Monster, creating a record that has a simultaneously playful and hostile relationship to its own image.
Consider the music video for “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, the first single from Monster. Stipe was popular enough at the time to be recognized on the street, but for the entire first verse of “Kenneth,” the band is filmed from the chin-down and anonymized. Even when we finally glimpse Stipe, debuting his newly-shaved head and wearing a green T-shirt with a small red star on it, the camera loses focus and lingers at senseless angles that fail to contain the band’s performance. It feels like we see more of the garage and the varicolored lighting they’re playing in than we ever see them. Just like the record, it’s very ridiculous and kind of pointless and all about its own ridiculousness and pointlessness, something “cool” that also deliberately indicates the quotation marks hovering around “cool.”
Buck described Monster in an interview as “the first record where we dare to be really dumb.” Stipe would also end up classifying Monster as obvious and silly, likely because, a few exceptions aside (“Stand,” “Shiny Happy People”), R.E.M. were used to making music that was oblique and shrouded in fog as a forest edge. Monster was far less guarded about what it was. Stipe came out as queer during the promotional roll-out for the record, and there’s a queerness to his presence throughout the record, an impish unreadability that morphs through different perspectives, as if coming out of the closet made him realize there were whole new sequences of closets to tumble through.
As he tried to fit words to the increasingly bent and echoey sounds coming out of Buck’s amp, Stipe began to write in character. The characters that populate Monster are like funhouse mirror warpings of the self, appearing at times larger than life—the narrator of “I Took Your Name” is Satan—and at others frail and distended as an insect, as on “Tongue,” where Stipe sings in falsetto to convey the perspective of a woman who knows she’s being used for sex. “King of Comedy” unreels like the mission statement of a particularly un-self-aware advertising executive, exploiting everything imaginable for whatever money can be harvested from it. “Make it charged with controversy,” Stipe sings, underlining the constant flow of sex and capital with something like a smirk, “I’m straight I’m queer I’m bi.”
That lyric, incidentally, is almost inaudible in the original mix of the record. For the reissue, producer Scott Litt, always dissatisfied with his initial mix, decided to clear away the woolen guitar overdubs that clotted over Stipe’s voice and raise its volume across the record. Stipe’s voice is uncannily clear at this altitude, shrugging off all of its old echoes like loose clothing. “Star 69” reveals itself as a song about some kind of telephonic extortion revolving around burning down a warehouse for the insurance money, though arguably the original mix better reflects the song’s plot by having Stipe’s voice quadrupled so it resembles a network of conspiratorial echoes.
The instrumental shifts in Litt’s remix are, at best, pointlessly diverting, like the little Polynesian auroras of guitar he places underneath the chords of “Crush with Eyeliner,” making it the closest R.E.M. have approached surf rock. But at worst, Litt’s remix can be clueless and distracting—and it’s often both. Removing the shimmer of tremolo from the chorus of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” erases one of the band’s most compelling hooks. “King of Comedy”’s remix reveals that it was only a coherent song by the grace and economy of Litt’s original mix; the new version sounds like it’s been sunk underwater and is short-circuiting. And the overwhelming guitar distortion that papered “Let Me In” like wet leaves, Litt mutes and decompresses, giving a song that once seemed like it was drowning in the rain of its own grief the naked and unfinished quality of a demo.
What Litt misunderstands about Monster is that the inescapable excess of Buck’s guitar tone as well as the slipperiness of Stipe’s vocals are what make the record special; when you invert these effects, it starts to be indistinguishable from any other R.E.M. record. Monster is supposed to be brazenly proud of how alien and strange it is, the kind of record that would find it hilarious and Warholian that it was resold so many times to record stores that it became a near-worthless object. It can’t be defined, down to the album’s title, slippery as a shadow lurking in the background of a horror movie, elusive, gone as soon as it’s recognized. It’s like a Cheshire cat as a rock record, always shapeshifting around a fixed and somewhat sinister grin, saying true things with an ironic uncertainty and saying ironic things as if they were absolutely true. It’s just like Stipe sings in “King of Comedy”: “You can lie as long as you mean it.”
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 | 2019-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Craft | November 4, 2019 | 8.1 | 92d0c4b3-a5f0-45a4-81b2-e5c5e27d4aea | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
Following his bandmates Syd, Matt Martians, and Steve Lacy, the bassist of L.A.’s the internet steps up with his solo debut. He’s not yet a natural leader, but his musicianship is self-evident. | Following his bandmates Syd, Matt Martians, and Steve Lacy, the bassist of L.A.’s the internet steps up with his solo debut. He’s not yet a natural leader, but his musicianship is self-evident. | Patrick Paige II: Letters of Irrelevance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patrick-paige-ii-letters-of-irrelevance/ | Letters of Irrelevance | Letters of Irrelevance, the debut project from Patrick Paige II, the bassist of the L.A. collective the Internet, arrives at the end of a strong string of solo releases from his fellow band members Syd, Matt Martians, and Steve Lacy, along with the promise of a new record from the group. Unlike his bandmates, whose individual stars rose following their respective solo releases, Paige’s debut—a muted, soulful, profoundly introverted record that focuses more on loneliness and neuroses than the Southern California good life—isn’t going to do much to make him a household name.
Closer to an intimate, handwritten diary of demos than a true solo album (“Writing is the only place I feel safe enough to be vulnerable/This is basically straight from the journals” Paige raps on “The Best Policy”) Letters of Irrelevance captures Paige’s accomplished musicality and expert bass ability but does little to reach outward to its listener. This is bedroom soul, but not like Keith Sweat or Jodeci—instead, it’s music made at three in the morning in your childhood bedroom as your mom sleeps two doors down; lyrics written while dusting off old yearbooks and pondering the whereabouts of lost friends; bass licks honed during long nights alone in a dorm room. The album’s slightly self-deprecating title, Letters of Irrelevance, exemplifies its interiority: This project is for no one but Paige himself, a form of therapy for a sad and overactive mind that finds solace not in people but in the thump and hum of the electric bass.
Like much of the Internet’s work, Letters of Irrelevance is a musician’s album. It lingers over slow grooves, jazzy chord modulations, dusty soul samples, and layered harmonies that take from fellow L.A. bass virtuoso Thundercat. After an all-instrumental SoundCloud project, Prelude, released in 2016, Paige finally steps behind the mic and proves himself to be a competent and self-aware, if still developing, rapper and singer. He perfectly nails D’Angelo’s halting, breathless delivery on the groovy “Voodoo,” an album highlight and clear homage to the neo-soul pioneer (and his bassist, the legendary Pino Palladino), and raps with detailed imagery and palpable feeling on the Syd and Kari Faux-featuring single “On My Mind / Charge It to the Game,” as if he were reading a letter (“Decided to write a verse because I don’t know how to communicate/I hope you’re doing good in school and keep up your grades”).
It’s clear how important Paige’s bass playing is to the Internet, and how vital, in turn, the band is to him. Paige handles his bass with a guitarist’s dexterity and a hip-hop producer’s ear for rhythm, yet his music lacks the dynamism and depth of his work with the group. He brings some much-needed funk and fun to the ForteBowie-featuring “Do My Dance” and the Sareal and G Perico-assisted groove “Get It With My Niggas,” but songs like “The Best Policy,” “Red Knife,” and “Ode to Inebriation” are almost indistinguishable in their boilerplate instrumental soul and rushed, revealing rambles of verses. They feel like what they are: shy, probing attempts by an artist usually relegated to the background to command a song for the first time.
Over solemn keys, boom-bap drums, and intricate, alternating bass and guitar plucks, Paige talks to his dead mother on the heartfelt album closer “The Last Letter,” letting his grief flow with uncommon, deeply felt candor: “Surprised that I could even write this, with dry eyes/I could’ve ended California’s drought alone with my eyes.” Instead of tackling a third verse, Paige steps away from the mic and rips an emotional and piercing guitar solo, letting his sadness and loss ripple out for over a minute. It’s the logical way to end an album by a skilled performer still learning to utilize his voice the way he does his instruments. After all, words, in Patrick Paige II’s melancholy, carefully constructed world, only go so far. | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Empire | May 18, 2018 | 7.5 | 92d3e830-a1e1-4b5d-9b30-d3820aee749d | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
I wouldn't say she was a lost cause, but my girlfriend needed a music doctor\n\ like I needed ... | I wouldn't say she was a lost cause, but my girlfriend needed a music doctor\n\ like I needed ... | Air: 10,000 Hz Legend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/80-10000-hz-legend/ | 10,000 Hz Legend | I wouldn't say she was a lost cause, but my girlfriend needed a music doctor like I needed, well, a girlfriend. That is, desperately. Call it a perfect match. She'd spent too many years clubbing to have more than a passing knowledge of non-techno music, and I'd spent too many years shucking to have more than a passing knowledge of monogamous sex. The results have been fast, effective, and largely painless. She's taken to the Pixies, and I've taken to, um, lots of sex.
Air's debut, 1998's Moon Safari, is not only a pop classic of retro-futurism; it also provides a damn fine soundtrack to the otherworldly act of sex. Needless to say, we became well acquainted with the album, which both of us were already fond of to begin with. Their soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, 2000's The Virgin Suicides, was a similarly fluid pour of analog synths, but the album was a less pop-oriented, more minor-key affair. And if you've seen the movie, you can understand why I wouldn't want to do "the beast with two backs" while listening to its irrevocably-linked score.
So would Air's official follow-up to Moon Safari be a return to coital form? I'll let my girlfriend do the talking:
"Weird."
That would be the opener, "Electronic Performers." She wasn't necessarily turned off by the deep bass thumps that rip into electronic handclaps. Or the occasional heavy rapping, like the landlord at your door a day after the rent's due. And it definitely wasn't the radar beeps or the fluctuating machinations of the keyboard. I think it was the vocals. Accompanied by a natural piano, a distorted voice sings, "We are the synchronizers/ Send messages through time code." And it is weird, like something Dean and Gene Ween would come up with. But with lines such as, "We need to use envelope filters/ To say how we feel," the track is also an oddly beautiful lament.
"The Radiohead voice!"
Yes, a whispery version of the fitter, happier Macintalk voice makes an appearance on the love song, "How Does It Make You Feel?" But a real voice-- resident keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr.-- sings the ELO-inspired chorus. The beat, meanwhile, is cut from the exact same mold as The Virgin Suicides-- from the dark, ambling pace all the way down to the angelic voices coalescing in the background. But whereas that album-- and "the Radiohead voice," for that matter-- remain serious to the end, this song concludes with a funny moment. After listing off his feelings, the male computerized voice receives an abrupt retort from a female computerized voice: "Well, I really think you should quit smoking."
"It's like rock-n-roll."
"The Vagabond" makes you wish for a full-length Beck/Air collaboration. But at first, it's all Beck: a harmonica solo, folky acoustic strumming, Beck's distinctive, marble-mouthed vocals, and tolls ringing in the background. You'd think he donated a b-side from Mutations. That's when Air's laser-gun atmospherics shoot forth. The drums that kick in midway are also decidedly more similar to Air's previous work. Beck even ends the number with his trademark falsetto and a cackling laugh a la "Hollywood Freaks," so yes, she's right: this is rock-n-roll. But then again, a moment later she said, "Honey, isn't rock-n-roll a weird name?"
"Is this the same album?"
By the halfway mark, "Lucky and Unhappy," the poor girl had been thrown for more than one loop-- not to mention "Radian," Air's most overwrought Bacharach-inspired track to date. And now here was this untraceable throbbing, this eerie computerized whirring, voices of different distortions, and an acoustic guitar to ground it all; then a skittering beat and a swirling orchestra; and even later, static popping and off-key keyboards.
Songs from the album's second half provided little relief. "Sex Born Poison" pairs a vocoderized voice with the Japanese vocals of Buffalo Daughter; then, for good measure, adds what sounds like digital Ping-Pong-- or maybe the noises "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!" makes while Little Mac is popping King Hippo in the gut and mouth. After opening with a thick electro-pulse and digi-congos, the chantey "People in the City" reaches a simple acoustic epiphany-- think the Beta Band's "Dry the Rain"-- before descending into muddled feedback and heavy electronic gurgling. And the final number, "Caramel Prisoner," is an ambient come-down-- kind of like a rollercoaster coming to rest with a bloody, broken-nosed Fabio aboard.
"I like it, but it's kind of all over the place."
I'm a little scared to admit it, but we're on the same page here. The barely cohesive 10,000 Hz Legend is both a concern and a relief. There's only one truly catchy song-- the Low-era Bowie-esque "Radio #1"-- but it doesn't have quite the same bounce (not to mention single potential) as "Sexy Boy." So you probably won't hear any of these songs on the radio, and I can say with absolute certainty that this won't be Details' album of the year, as Moon Safari was. I don't say this because it matters, but rather to indicate that Nicolas Godin and Jean-Beno\xEEt Dunckel have steadfastly refused to be pigeonholed. For better or worse, this is not Moon Safari Redux.
The obvious comparison that my girlfriend should have made is to the Chemical Brothers, who took a similar stylistic leap on their last album, 1999's Surrender, even though staying the big-beat course would have been the easier and more profitable thing to do. But for some reason Spike Lee's work also comes to mind: there are plenty of hits and misses, but the experience is worth it for the invigorating knowledge that this critically established artist isn't afraid to take his art in new directions. Plus, my girlfriend and I love that Spike always slips a hot sex scene into his films. | 2001-05-28T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2001-05-28T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks / Source | May 28, 2001 | 7.6 | 92d5381c-76ee-4b32-9945-05becfda31be | Pitchfork | null |
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The latest album from Wiz is a bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness. | The latest album from Wiz is a bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness. | Wiz Khalifa: Rolling Papers 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiz-khalifa-rolling-papers-2/ | Rolling Papers 2 | There was a time when a loosely buttoned, snapback-wearing Wiz Khalifa was making undeniably fascinating rap music. Eight years ago, when Wiz released Kush & Orange Juice, he did more than just stroll into the studio late at night, ask for a beat with some cowbell, and recap his day with a few weed puns thrown in. The appeal was the creamy flow, the ear for the smoked-out production that perfectly backed his exotic imagery, and a legitimate charisma that made him feel like an approachable star. Shit that should’ve been corny wasn’t, and instead, you wanted to experience his seemingly problem-free life for yourself. Within the last couple of years Wiz has got comfortable, enjoying his life as a father and rap superstar with a loyal fanbase. On his latest studio album, Rolling Papers 2, that comfort strips the album of all ambition—a bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness.
Sometimes the most fun music has low stakes. Playboi Carti’s recent Die Lit refreshingly didn’t set out to be a groundbreaking genre-changer but it’s impact rivaled all the self-serious major-label releases that screamed classic from the rooftops. The issue with Rolling Papers 2 is that, over the course of its absurd 25 tracks and 90 minutes, it feels like there are no stakes at all. Wiz is going through the motions aware he’s existing relatively pressure-free—similar to his mentor Snoop Dogg, who pops in on “Penthouse” to spit the same lethargic verse he’s been spitting since 2005. No matter what, as long as Wiz is still talking weed his fanbase will still scream for him and he’ll remain a star: the downside of depending so heavily on fans who don’t want you to change.
He falls back on old ideas, hardly taking any swings. “Ocean” nearly sounds like it was recorded in 2010, with longtime producer Cardo that’s reminiscent of Kush and Orange Juice’s “Mezmorized,” but it’s wasted on Wiz lifelessly making his way through what should’ve been an album standout. He also reconnects with Curren$y on “Mr. Williams/Where Is the Love,” but the chemistry the two had on their 2009 collaboration How Fly seems all but gone; and Curren$y’s once unparalleled descriptive ability to make the most basic picture become vivid is replaced with a half-assed, bitter verse about a woman who went to Dr. Miami (“She got a million dollar mouth/She was born with it/She went to Dr. Miami for the rest of the shit.”)
When Wiz isn’t rehashing old ideas, he’s forcing new ones. On “Real Rich,” Wiz gets an unusually weak Tay Keith beat that doesn’t have the bounce that catapulted Memphis’ BlocBoy JB into becoming rap’s Shoot-dancing superstar. His formerly calm and collected flow like he just faced a blunt solo in one sitting is instead drowsy leading you to wonder what happened to the artist whose presence magically transformed “We Dem Boyz” into an immortal club anthem. Then, Wiz falls further away from his comfort zone, creating the clumsy and downbeat “B Ok” a love ode nearing the bleakness of Drake’s “March 14th.”
Wiz feels most significant on Rolling Papers 2 when he takes advantage of the album’s length and endless funds to put some shine on unsung artists he genuinely appreciates. He calls on the late Pittsburgh rapper Jimmy Wopo to spread his contagious energy on “Blue Hunnids” and is eager to display his latest discovery, a California-based twin brother R&B duo named the MXXNLIGHT—who are given three songs here. As a booster and mentor to younger artists he’s excited about, Wiz tells us more about him than any track based on ideas from his 22-year old self ever could.
In some ways, an unexpected outlier of an album (for instance, Wiz singing Lil Tracy-esque country songs) would have been preferable to Wiz ambling along, hands in pocket, blunt behind ear through Rolling Papers 2. If anything, the album elevates the case for how difficult it was to make Wiz’s older music, where a slight tonal change could throw the whole thing off kilter. But really, Wiz should know better, all of his peers from that late ’00s boom (Drake, Kid Cudi, J. Cole, etc.) try things, have interests, have goals, even if they don’t come close to meeting them. But Wiz is just there, emotionless, still asking for some damn cowbell. | 2018-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | July 26, 2018 | 4.2 | 92de872f-bfc6-447d-a0cb-18a8c81fe360 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Newcastle band’s oddball indie pop makes a pitch to those unsure whether to fret over civilizational decline or their own minor burdens: Why not both! | The Newcastle band’s oddball indie pop makes a pitch to those unsure whether to fret over civilizational decline or their own minor burdens: Why not both! | Hen Ogledd: Free Humans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hen-ogledd-free-humans/ | Free Humans | In one sense, Hen Ogledd’s third album is just what you’d expect from a low-key clan of indie-pop darlings: It has shabby guitars, crafty hooks, and sing-songy campfire melodies, all warmly interwoven like a winter cardigan. Should you wish, you could listen to Free Humans on those terms alone, filing it among the dainty troves of labels like K Records.
But in another sense—the one in which Free Humans is not only a catalog of heartbreak and minutiae, but also a sci-fi odyssey warning of political isolationism and climate apocalypse—it starts to feel quite unorthodox. Hidden in its lullabies are bouts of galactic anxiety and wry jabs at spacejet-setting one-percenters. A song called “Space Golf” berates the elites as they blast off to gentrify Jupiter; “Time Party” rallies us to “Bomb the banks! Shrink the economy!” Free Humans makes a pitch to those unsure whether to fret over civilizational decline or their own minor burdens, and the advice is emphatic: Why not both!
The record’s multitudes should surprise nobody familiar with the ever unpredictable Richard Dawson. Before Hen Ogledd, the Newcastle bard was known for mythic solo masterworks that his devotees could chew over for years. By contrast, the band he assembled with outré harpist Rhodri Davies, multi-instrumentalist Sally Pilkington, and art curator Dawn Bothwell has now released two bite-size albums in as many years, while Dawson’s homegrown project with Pilkington, Bulbis, spawned some 49 ambient and kosmische EPs in lockdown.
Despite sometimes having the air of a kitschy sideshow, Hen Ogledd is now its own thriving community: Each member illustrates some corner of Free Humans’ doomed dystopia before passing along the mic, like class nerds presenting a meticulous school project. The loose end-of-days theme gives rise to interstellar dance soirees (“Time Party”), ancient rumblings of extinction (“Feral”), and—in an improbably romantic finale of pumping drum machines and prog-folk fireworks—a mass exodus into a “very big ball of light” (“Skinny Dippers”).
Nothing about this silly-serious concept is as wonderful as the band’s delight in it. Take a simple couplet from “Space Golf,” which envisages the lives of the rich after they steal away from Earth for good: “Infinity pool on Ganymede/You took so much more than you need.” You can practically see the lightbulb flashing as that ludicrous rhyme pops into Pilkington’s head, presumably while she peruses a list of Jupiter’s moons. Likewise, from “Crimson Star”:
Those were the best days of my life
I was a singer in a band
Aboard the first of the big cruise ships
Touring the seven planets and their moons
Circling TRAPPIST-1
This is Dawson leaning precariously into his Douglas Adams caper, synths swooping beneath him like a magic carpet. As with much else here, it’s a perilous leap of faith performed in a tone of utter humility, in this case while channelling the textures and emotional beats of lavish ’80s sophistipop.
The band’s kids-in-a-candy-store approach to modulators and electronics leads to some questionable indulgence (the gear credits read like components of a Flaming Lips song-title generator: Bassman, Orbit, the Depths, Bubbletron, Randy’s Revenge...), but in good twee-pop fashion, the unit shambles along with a camaraderie that brings us in on the antics. Songs like “Farewell” are the backbone, crammed with dense and rousing songcraft; other highlights, such as “Bwganod” and “Skinny Dippers,” are more like gas giants, vast and nebulous enough for funk, offbeat synthpop, and sweary Scotch poetry to swarm around their rocky core.
For all its knotty themes and interludes, Free Humans is guided by a childlike innocence: the betrayal of a planet condemned and abandoned by its rich, and the unexpected relief of its liberation. Our intuition of a climate catastrophe has fuelled many such visions of a beautiful apocalypse, as the culture writer Al Horner notes; they can manifest in everything from stories of post-pandemic biodiversity to verdant video games like The Last of Us. It’s easy to see why these apocalyptic fantasies might appeal to an anarchic bunch like Hen Ogledd (not least Dawson, who loves both gaming and UFO conspiracies), but at its heart, Free Humans is a passionate rebuke to both fatalism and futurism. It’s the sound of four cosmic souls resolutely staying put—not wanderers but wonderers, still in love with their own bizarre planet, and baffled by the senselessness of leaving it behind.
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. | 2020-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | Weird World / Domino | October 5, 2020 | 7.4 | 92e066b8-55e0-4381-85b1-22a8dce70a99 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
On their first collaborative album, Seattle producer L’Orange and North Carolina rapper Solemn Brigham craft spirited, old-school rap that owes a hefty debt to Madvillain. | On their first collaborative album, Seattle producer L’Orange and North Carolina rapper Solemn Brigham craft spirited, old-school rap that owes a hefty debt to Madvillain. | Marlowe: Marlowe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marlowe-marlowe/ | Marlowe | L’Orange is a rare specimen of one of hip-hop’s most endangered species: the loop digger. Over the last five years, the Seattle producer’s dusty, sample-based beats have caught the ears of classically minded MCs from all over the country, but he tends to avoid selling them piecemeal, preferring to engage in album-length collaborations with rappers like Kool Keith, Mr. Lif, and Jeremiah Jae. For his latest such release, L’Orange has teamed up with the largely unknown North Carolina rapper Solemn Brigham under the name Marlowe. True to the producer’s form, it’s an album of austere rap that evokes the turn-of-the-millennium underground: There are no synths, no hooks, just bars, bars, bars over a collage of vinyl chops.
For a new duo, the pair ignites an impressive number of sparks during the first half of the self-titled album. “Demonstration” sounds like a drugged-out after school special about the dangers of wack MCs (“I don’t change the clothes, DB minus the old,” Brigham boasts). A sumptuous soul flip forms the foundation of “Tales From the East,” over which Brigham lays down the kind of breathless, jam-packed lines that encourage rewinds (“Me, loose chain on the door off the hinge, don’t peek”). “Palm Readers” plunges into rap’s psychedelic deep end, with layers of tremolo-soaked guitar and heavy panning. Standing on this shifting ground, Brigham issues mission statements like, “Just to dig crates for the brakes, tryna move thangs.”
As thrilling as these high points can be, Marlowe lacks the consistency of the classics it seeks to emulate. While the album barrels forward with remarkable momentum in its first half, the duo starts to flag just past the midway point. L’Orange’s production is solid throughout, but the kitschy snippets of dialogue he wedges in between songs begin to feel on-the-nose, homages to Madlib that devolve into mere mimicry. And Brigham doesn’t quite possess the versatility or magnetism to carry all 17 of the record’s tracks. While he’s a reasonably adept rapper, his wordplay and lyricism are lacking; despite hinting at other topics, he has little to offer beyond braggadocio. Listening to Marlowe, it’s difficult not to wonder what Earl Sweatshirt’s technique, milo’s personality, or Chester Watson’s energy would sound like over these beats.
Most contemporary hip-hop producers operate in mercenary fashion, selling their creations à la carte to the highest bidders, though the pendulum has begun to swing back in recent years. Some of the best-known producers in popular rap, including Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, and Noah “40” Shebib, have become sought after for their ability to architect full albums. L’Orange might eventually achieve a similar status within the traditionalist set, if he ever finds a foil capable of doing his instrumentals justice.
While both halves of Marlowe approach their collaboration with plenty of enthusiasm, Brigham doesn’t seem to be that MC. Still, for a certain type of listener, their nostalgic album will scratch an itch that few other rap records in 2018 could reach. If you’ve worn out your copy of Madvillainy—as these two obviously have—you could certainly do worse than give Marlowe a spin. | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | July 25, 2018 | 6.7 | 92e6a070-8659-4026-95bb-f3006c3c042d | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
The Canadian R&B singer’s sleepy, erratically experimental third album proves that good old-fashioned love songs and heartbreak ballads are still his strong suit. | The Canadian R&B singer’s sleepy, erratically experimental third album proves that good old-fashioned love songs and heartbreak ballads are still his strong suit. | Daniel Caesar: Never Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-caesar-never-enough/ | Never Enough | Life after Graduation humbled Kanye West. Struggling with invasive tabloid coverage amid the death of his mother and a broken engagement, he mused, “Do I still got time to grow?/Things ain’t always set in stone.” Daniel Caesar would later cover “Street Lights” on one of his early EPs, 2015’s Pilgrim’s Paradise. Though he was barely 20 when he recorded it, Caesar’s version (retitled “Streetcar”) captured angst beyond his years. He ditched the electro-R&B but retained the emo confessionalism, backing his falsetto with piano, drums, and guitar. It was a preview of the minimal, ethereal tone of his full-length debut, 2017’s Freudian. The music that followed wasn’t as polished or poetic. “I wanted to free myself from replicating Freudian,” Caesar told interviewer Tom Power in 2020. His new album, Never Enough, poses the question: What if ChatGPT wrote half of 808s & Heartbreak?
Traveling far afield from the gospel arrangements and acoustic ballads that defined his debut, Caesar has collaborated with Justin Bieber, T-Pain, and Free Nationals, picking up pieces of their sounds along the way. He’s erratically experimental on Never Enough—Auto-Tune, pitched-down vocals, random rap verses, Frank Ocean-like ad-libs. “Shot My Baby,” a bluesy tale of infidelity turned manslaughter, is the most intriguing departure from his typical autofiction. He’d been working on “a country-bluegrass type album,” he’s said, but switched directions when longtime producers Jordan Evans and Matthew Burnett weren’t sure what to do with the music. Instead, he lands on woozy psych-R&B that sounds like sleepy karaoke, or else the kind of music you hear in the background of ABC crime-drama trailers.
The album is, in a word, sedated. Many songs open with about 20 seconds of eerily muted or distorted synth. The Slowed + Reverbed midsection of “Ocho Rios” accentuates Caesar’s melancholy and lyrics about prescription pills. “Toronto 2014” romanticizes life before the money and the Grammys. Yet no matter how hoarse or comatose he sounds—“You’re my saving grace… grace… grace”—propulsive drums, divine strings, and gossamer harmonies help to camouflage the weaknesses.
Never Enough leans into the superficially cerebral subject matter of 2019’s Case Study 01, which sampled a theoretical physicist and dedicated a song to a brain lobe. That album was about as pseudo-academic as it gets. But if you’ve ever taken a scenic late-night drive, put on Channel Orange, and were unlucky enough to be accompanied by a suitor hoping to seduce you with Maslow hierarchies and Jordan Peterson quotes, Never Enough will give you flashbacks. “Do I titillate your mind?” Caesar asks on “Do You Like Me?” (Would you believe me if I told you it was co-written by Raphael Saadiq?) Lyrical absurdity peaks on “Vince Van Gogh”: “Used to be ugly, now I’m a handsome Charlie Manson/Wrapped in a Snuggie.” And lest we forget this completely original red-pill observation: “We’re stuck in the Matrix.”
Three standouts, “Always,” “Let Me Go,” and “Valentina,” prove that good old-fashioned love songs and heartbreak ballads remain Caesar’s strong suit. The back half of Never Enough taps into the bedroom R&B of 2018’s “Who Hurt You?” But in a departure from Caesar’s previous duets with women, all of the features on the main tracklist—Mustafa, Omar Apollo, serpentwithfeet, Ty Dolla $ign—are men. “Homiesexual,” an ode to male toxicity, is the most harmonious. “I never meant to make you cry, my girl,” Ty Dolla professes to a lover who’s already moved on. Since he monopolized the Auto-Tune, Caesar balances the track with lustful vocals: “I-I-I know you like it nasty.” When he’s not over-intellectualizing his emotions, Caesar can be disarmingly raw. If only he didn’t write like a cyborg the rest of the time. | 2023-04-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | April 13, 2023 | 6.6 | 92f3b317-cd17-4602-8fba-3a750c5f5c56 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley produced left-of-center disco classics for Sylvester and others and pioneered the uptempo disco variant hi-NRG. He also composed all-synth soundtracks for gay porn films, which are collected here. Even with their primitive, glitchy programming, these synth pieces are supremely sultry, reveling in freedoms long denied. | San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley produced left-of-center disco classics for Sylvester and others and pioneered the uptempo disco variant hi-NRG. He also composed all-synth soundtracks for gay porn films, which are collected here. Even with their primitive, glitchy programming, these synth pieces are supremely sultry, reveling in freedoms long denied. | Patrick Cowley: Muscle Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21120-muscle-up/ | Muscle Up | Like Arthur Russell, another cult hero whose status rose years after he died of AIDS, San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley was known during his short lifetime for left-of-center disco; with songs like "Menergy" and "Megatron Man", he was the prime architect of the uptempo electronic disco variant Hi-NRG, later popularized by hits like Dead or Alive’s "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)". Also like Russell, Cowley’s roots were avant-garde; where Russell's lineage came from experimental classical composers like Christian Wolff, Cowley drew inspiration from early Moog masters Tomita, Wendy Carlos, and Tangerine Dream. Unlike Russell, however, some of Cowley's work reached the mainstream: What Giorgio Moroder was to Donna Summer, Cowley was to LGBT pioneer Sylvester—the mustachioed background figure who contemporized a disco diva’s hot soul with cool technology.
Yet unbeknownst to even most of his disco fans, Cowley also created synth compositions in the even-more-underground medium of gay porn. Muscle Up is the second of two releases compiling this work, spanning time spent as a student at the City College of San Francisco to the period shortly before his death in 1982, when he scored his final smashes with Sylvester, Paul Parker, Loverde, and other Bay Area acts. As with 2013's School Daze, it takes its name from a real 1980 porn film, released by L.A.'s Fox Studio, that Cowley soundtracked. The music here documents an important cultural shift: As Super 8 gave way to VHS, DVD, and digital, much of gay and straight porn music alike would be synth-centric.
Like porn itself, electronic music references reality while signaling a fantastical break from it. For gay men born in the '50s like Cowley, synths suggested a refuge from repression, an escape hatch from a world where police entrapped, beat, and jailed them; where they lost their jobs or unwillingly severed family ties. This is one of the reasons why synth-disco milestones like Summer's "I Feel Love"—a track Cowley further intensified in his legendary 15+ minute remix—resonated so strongly with gay dancers of its era: Synth music was dream/sci-fi music, and it competed with R&B at the bathhouses where its suspension of time and space heightened the otherworldliness of unlimited sexual expression central to pre-AIDS gay experience, as if every man-on-man encounter after Stonewall and before Plague was a trip to the moon.
Appropriately, the first track of Muscle Up, "Cat's Eye", begins with a whooshing interplanetary-wind sound, and the ominous processional tom-toms that follow lets us know that sex is about to happen in the furtive way animals anticipate an earthquake. Cowley's keys ape ceremonial trumpets much like the pseudo-horn fanfare that opens Devo's Duty Now for the Future. That was 1979; this piece was allegedly recorded in '75. The recording is crude and there's a moment of cacophony when two martial drum patterns crossfade and collide, but even this accidental frisson suggests porn's glitchy, clandestine low-budget production values.
As a former drummer who switched to synths (but plays everything here besides didgeridoo and a bit of bass), Cowley comprehended both discipline and exploration. There's little on Muscle Up that sounds robotic; "5oz of Funk" echoes the syncopated beat and bass from Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You". Only once do machines keep time, on a 1975 instrumental demo version of "Somebody to Love Tonight", a song that Cowley revisited four years later with Sylvester, yielding understated but profoundly aching results. Even at this stage, it's supremely sultry, simmering with desires then considered utterly vile beyond the San Francisco bubble.
Today, the city's technology occupies a different kind of frontier, one often driven by motives not entirely artistic. And so it's instructive to hear what one guy then just blocks away from where Twitter now resides created with far cruder but perhaps more sensitive, pre-digital tools some 40 years ago. Rather than clean precision, he gets dirty invention, overheated homage. Instead of considered silences between notes, there's the strong suggestion of one man's impulsive sweat and spunk and stink. Cowley's interplanetary sex music is paradoxically earthy for the same reason his parallel cosmic club grooves were so righteous; because it reveled in freedoms long denied. | 2015-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dark Entries | October 27, 2015 | 8.1 | 92f4a117-cfe6-4c6d-a70c-3e2ed4bc371a | Barry Walters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/barry-walters/ | null |
After two stellar EPs, this post-dubstep duo again turns club and R&B influences into something, like Boards of Canada or James Blake, best enjoyed alone. | After two stellar EPs, this post-dubstep duo again turns club and R&B influences into something, like Boards of Canada or James Blake, best enjoyed alone. | Mount Kimbie: Crooks & Lovers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14412-crooks-lovers/ | Crooks & Lovers | Mount Kimbie are two friends who met in college, didn't exactly have the same taste in music, made some field recordings, dumped them into Fruity Loops, and started working. Their first two EPs, Sketch on Glass and Maybes, came out on the British dubstep label Hotflush, but didn't sound like much like their peers-- and that's one of the reasons they were so good. No pomp, no anxiety, no apocalyptic drops, no airhorns. In a recent video interview, Dom Maker-- one half of the group-- talked about his appreciation for TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is probably not the way to impress dance-music purists, but it is a way to prove you're creative enough to ignore genre purity. It's why Crooks & Lovers is highly anticipated by such a small community of listeners-- and also why it has such a good chance of being appreciated by a larger one.
If they have forebears, it's a group like Boards of Canada, who used machines to make music more convincingly pastoral than most folk bands. The funk on Crooks is too intimate to be whored out to clubs. It's beat music for hearth and home. Beat music for your cycling commute, or for gardening. The snare on "Before I Move Off" is the cluck of someone's tongue against the roof of their mouth. When "Carbonated" climaxes, the sound of rain comes into the mix-- and a sprinkle, not a downpour. Even the titles are humble: "Mayor" (and not "President" or "Dictator" or "King"); "Ode to Bear"; "Field". And in the rare moment when the music gets agitated-- like on "Blind Night Errand"-- they still avoid being grandiose. Dubstep's signature bass wobble turns into the burp of plumbing. A big synthesizer sweep sounds like the air conditioner turning on. The surprise-- to me, at least-- is that despite the politeness of the overall sound, it's still detailed enough to sound even better loud than on headphones.
Nothing on Crooks stands out the way "Maybes" or "Sketch on Glass" did, and though it may be a generous fan's rationalization, I'd just say this just makes it an album rather than a single or an EP. Recording a full-length at all is a rare gesture in a genre where a producer-- like Joy Orbison, for example-- can release 10 or 15 minutes of music and still be considered one of the best of the year. Dubstep-- and dance music in general-- is a musical hemisphere whose "great albums" often don't seem to have any self-awareness of how an album can work, but Crooks, for what it's worth, does-- it rises, it falls, it rises again, and it ends. Thirty-five minutes, frequent sparkling, no fuss.
When an interviewer from The Fader said he'd tried to search for Mount Kimbie on Google Maps but couldn't find anything, Kai Campos-- the other half of the group-- explained, "It's a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time." Not a cloud-scraping peak where the sunsets burn pink and white for miles, not a metaphor for the grandeur of creation, just a small town with reliable public transportation-- a beautiful, small, and clever answer for a beautiful, small, and clever album. | 2010-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | July 23, 2010 | 8 | 92f4e030-a69b-4365-9e2a-0975fc8c3ffd | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On his new mixtape, the Buffalo rapper Conway spits clearly enunciated, precisely worded bars, but it often feels like he’s holding something back. | On his new mixtape, the Buffalo rapper Conway spits clearly enunciated, precisely worded bars, but it often feels like he’s holding something back. | Conway the Machine / DJ Green Lantern: Reject on Steroids | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conway-reject-on-steroids/ | Reject on Steroids | Midway through his new mixtape, Reject on Steroids, the rapper Conway snarls, “They want me on Freshman cover/But I’m a seasoned vet,” and he’s got the truth on his side—XXL asked him to apply. Aside from the occasional shout-out on Dipset epics, Buffalo, N.Y., was a complete non-factor in hip-hop before Conway and the MC Westside Gunn parlayed years of mixtape hustle into a recent deal with Eminem’s Shady Records. XXL might’ve leaked its Class of 2017 to Conway; on “The Vision,” he makes very specific complaints about rappers with painted nails and dyed, beaded dreads getting New York airplay, “like that shit’s normal.” He then threatens to solve this problem by emptying very large guns in their direction. Reject on Steroids—a quasi-sequel to Gunn’s Hitler on Steroids and preview of their Griselda on Steroids tour—is muscled-up new hip-hop for people who don’t find a lot to like about hip-hop’s new wave.
If you recognize the first proper track as an instrumental from Black Rob and the Lox’s 1999 track “Can I Live,” Reject on Steroids will be right up your alley. Conway doesn’t have a whole lot of concern for “real hip-hop” moralizing; he probably doesn’t care about Playboi Carti or XXXTentacion’s dedication to craft. He’s just pissed that Hot 97 would rather play them or Ed fucking Sheeran, when the commercially viable, local goon rap that once defined it still exists. The appearance of Prodigy, Raekwon, Jadakiss, and Styles P at the Griselda on Steroids stop in NYC is a reminder that those guys went platinum, so why not Conway?
Conway brags that he’s been called a combination of Biggie, Sean Price, and Beanie Sigel, but there’s far more of the latter two given his disinterest in pop hooks. Given Green Lantern’s involvement, Reject on Steroids something of a 2005 throwback, evoking aspects of Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, The B. Coming, and We Got It 4 Cheap—intimidating, adrenaline-pumping projects that seemed like they existed in separate lanes. They converge in Conway, a street-level hustler who’s “come a long way from that fork and pot,” but not above stunting in a Tesla X and $4,000 shoes. He takes great pride in his rapping, but not in doing so for the sake of riddlin’; he speaks to Blogspot-era nostalgists who still check for guys who make entire tracks out of NBA punchlines (“Spurs”), mock Murder Inc. weed carriers, and reference “The Wire.”
Whatever your definition of “mumble rap” might be, Conway is the exact opposite, spitting clearly enunciated, precisely worded bars with just the right amount of satisfaction in their cleverness. Half of his face is actually paralyzed; Conway was shot in the back of his head in 2012, which caused him to develop Bell’s Palsy. He simultaneously glorifies and downplays this tragedy by saying it only “twisted my jaw,” though it now seems to give him an accent and sneer that could not be more suited for his self-impressed style.
But while Conway’s actual voice makes an impression, his voice as a writer doesn’t stand out as much. He’s not as distinctive as a lyrical stylist as Ka or Roc Marciano, though Reject on Steroids fits alongside their recent work as the New Sound of Old New York. The haunting, nearly beatless “Priest” is all but a Rosebudd’s Revenge B-side. But those seasoned vets are well into their late thirties and beyond, and Conway has major label backing. Judging from the work he and Westside Gunn have dropped since the Shady signing, it’s hard to imagine them being coerced into making compromises. The appearance of guys like Benny and an astoundingly corny Royce da 5'9" verse (“Lyin’ until you got a 12-inch nose, now you got three feet”) do serve as stark reminders that Conway could have easily landed in endless developmental limbo or, worse, marketed for syllable-counting Slaughterhouse fans.
We get occasional glimpses of how “The City of Good Neighbors” followed the path of so many other blue-collar, industrial cities into an unexpectedly blighted urban war zone. But “Through It All” doesn’t offer much of his come-up beyond the usual moral failings of frontrunners and gold diggers who weren’t there from the start. Perhaps it’s the nature of the project, but it often seems like Conway’s holding something back, just in case he has to tell the story all over again for the first time on his Shady debut. For the time being, Reject on Steroids feels more like a light workout than an Olympic victory lap. | 2017-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | July 8, 2017 | 6.8 | 92f9911d-e2ed-430a-be4f-61ea621f9406 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The rainbow-colored pups of Rebecca Stern’s documentary are in concert with the Dan Deacon’s score, which teases out the heart underneath the ostensibly garish world of creative dog grooming. | The rainbow-colored pups of Rebecca Stern’s documentary are in concert with the Dan Deacon’s score, which teases out the heart underneath the ostensibly garish world of creative dog grooming. | Dan Deacon: Well Groomed (Original Score) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dan-deacon-well-groomed-original-score/ | Well Groomed (Original Score) | If you were making a documentary about people who dye their dogs neon hues and trim their fur into the shape of the Cheshire Cat, Dan Deacon would be the first person you’d call for the score. Since his arrival with 2007’s Spiderman of the Rings, the Baltimore producer has wielded candy-coated synthesizers and jewel-toned vibraphones with radiant joy, combining conservatory-honed classical minimalism with the all-night-rager energy of a Jersey Shore DJ. His music is bright, pastel-colored, pumped full of the boundless energy of a puppy who’s just been let off its leash—and, increasingly, it’s got a lot of heart. Frankly, it’s hard to believe it took him this long to do something with dogs.
The score Deacon composed for Well Groomed, Rebecca Stern’s documentary about creative dog grooming, manages to be both masterfully restrained and shot through with glee. While the action on screen is indisputably strange—it’s hard to get over seeing a dog whose tail has been turned into E.T.’s glowing finger—the tenderness of the music humanizes the women who cut, style, and dye their way to the Groom Expo in Hershey, Pennsylvania, instantly giving them a sense of dignity without so much as a whiff of patronization. The approach makes Well Groomed perhaps the most emotionally direct album he’s ever released.
Deacon largely works with the same textures he’s been using for much of his career: pulsing vibraphone à la Steve Reich, whirring arpeggios via Philip Glass, big breezy chord progressions from Michael Rother. But where his previous impulse was to pile on layers until his songs collapsed and turned inside out, here he leaves plenty of space for the individual instruments to speak for themselves. He recorded the members of his ensemble individually, giving them abstract vocal instruction rather than written scores. His touch is remarkably gentle. Where a song like “Super Zoo” might have burst into a thousand ecstatic pieces on one of his earlier records, here, he pushes the elements together slowly, allowing the song to emerge rather than explode.
Film scoring is an inherently complementary art, so it always risks feeling incomplete as standalone music. With some minor exceptions, Well Groomed does not have this problem. Perhaps because Deacon’s music is built from constant motion, very little here feels static or incomplete; even the more complex tracks, like “Scissors Down,” manage to develop from stillness to dead sprint with incredible efficiency. He responds to the turns of Stern’s film in kind: “Jurassic Bark” bounces between chords with a touch of impatience, anxious for the party it seems to sense coming, while M.C. Schmidt’s doubled-up piano runs in “When They’re in Color” sound like Bach stumbling through Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms. You don’t need to see the luscious close-ups of Muppet-colored fur being trimmed to laugh at the scissor sounds in “Snip Snip,” just as you don’t need to know who is “Overwhelmed” to be moved by the delicacy of the piano, which Deacon refracts like a memory through sharp layers of echo and Steve Strohmeir’s lacy guitar work.
From the outside, the world of creative dog grooming seems garish, cartoony, and of dubious taste; it’s not an art that lends itself to instant appreciation. Stern’s film shows that it also requires incredible attention to detail, a seriousness of purpose, and an imagination strong enough to look at a dog and see a rooster. It’s as if the music here recognizes something of itself in the dogs on screen and reacts accordingly. And by trimming away some of his own quadruple-dyed layers, Deacon gives us a clear glimpse of the good boy underneath.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | August 27, 2020 | 7.4 | 92fc0c63-288b-4836-8f64-49ad6e6a3211 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Variously lively and listless, the latest entry in Mach-Hommy and Tha God Fahim’s Dollar Menu series highlights the flaws in the formula even as it celebrates their bond. | Variously lively and listless, the latest entry in Mach-Hommy and Tha God Fahim’s Dollar Menu series highlights the flaws in the formula even as it celebrates their bond. | Mach-Hommy: Dollar Menu 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-dollar-menu-4/ | Dollar Menu 4 | Each cover of Mach-Hommy and Tha God Fahim’s Dollar Menu series features the head of a famous basketball player and a pile of money. The unapologetically Photoshopped images evoke Who Framed Roger Rabbit in their mix of cartoon physics and real bodies, a blend reflected in the pair’s whimsical yet grimy wealth raps. The irony of the titles reveals itself quickly. More Michelin star dinner than Travis Scott meal, this music toasts to inaccessibility and distinction, Fahim and Mach celebrating exotic foods and winning investments. Variously lively and listless, Dollar Menu 4 highlights the flaws in the formula and in Mach and Fahim’s long-running partnership even as it celebrates their bond.
Though it’s credited to Mach, Dollar Menu 4 is functionally a continuation of the first three Dollar Menu tapes released in 2017, as well as other collaborations like 2018’s Duck CZN: Chinese Algebra and many features on each other’s songs. Fahim and Mach both work in the lineage of gritty mafioso rap refined by Raekwon and AZ in the 1990s, deconstructed and mutated by Roc Marciano and the Alchemist in the 2000s, and polished by Griselda Records (with which they both were once closely affiliated) in the 2010s. Nothing particularly special happens when Fahim and Mach rap together, but they approach the woozy soul loops and textures of their niche from oblique angles.
Their constant proximity and frequent collaboration have produced a casual compatibility that’s on display as their verses on songs like “Shukran Don” and “Macabre (A5)” wind around each other like DNA strands. “X10ded” is deliciously easygoing and skillful, their symmetrical flows tracing a fuzzy funk loop peppered with faint drums. “We having fun,” Mach declares in the opening seconds.
That jovial mood only manifests in the music in flashes though. The more they rap together, the more Fahim and Mach’s music reveals its workmanlike qualities. Unlike Clipse, Ghost and Rae, Prodigy and Havoc, Vince and Earl, or Armand Hammer, there’s rarely tension or contrast in their exchanges, their songs never building into noteworthy images or turns of phrase, or generating a shared mission or mythology.
Under the microscope, many of Fahim’s verses are bland filler about rapping (“Most of these rappers suck like sipping through a straw”) or making money independently (“Gotta a few main incomes with hustles on the side”). His flow can be unpredictable, drifting out of meter or abruptly ending and then suddenly locking into place, but he always trails Mach, who lands standout lines with both ease and force. His opening lines on “Macabre (A5)” don’t just wander away from the percussion; they rage against it, his imagery delightfully hallucinogenic and colorful: “Blowing cephalopods out the ride with the macabre/No Decepticons so its best to silence the crowd with the barrage/So I leprechaun my neck and cloud up the iris of his eye.”
Sadhugold and Fortes’ smoky production, which resembles the kinds of beats Tha God Fahim likes to dump on Bandcamp, helps right this unbalance. The drumless loop on “Food Grade” sways like leaves in wind, matching Mach, Fahim, and Your Old Droog’s wistful verses. And the triumphant horns and crisp percussion on “Maras DonDurmas (Rosewater)” buoy the gilded boasts. But overall these songs underscore how deeply intertwined style, form, and purpose are. Without a driving theme, Fahim and Mach sound aimless and mechanical even when they’re dishing out intricate rhymes left and right. | 2022-09-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mach-Hommy | September 1, 2022 | 6.9 | 92fd0093-439e-418d-8489-b91c61e88220 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The 18-year-old viral rapper’s mediocre new album doubles as an endorsement for New York collective Surf Gang’s excellent production work. | The 18-year-old viral rapper’s mediocre new album doubles as an endorsement for New York collective Surf Gang’s excellent production work. | Matt Ox / Surf Gang: OXygen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matt-ox-surf-gang-oxygen/ | OXygen | The main thing Matt Ox has going for him is that he has never treated rap like a stepping stone. For a white rapper who went viral at age 12—mostly because he looked like Tom Hanks’ son in Sleepless in Seattle went to middle school and got really into Finally Rich—that’s a miracle. The bar is in the dirt, I admit, but in an era where artists get drunk on viral fame and spend eternity trying to recapture that feeling, Matt Ox seemingly has no ambition other than making fun rap music. The Philly native, now 18, has been extremely fortunate, though. His breakout single “Overwhelming” and his debut OX were enjoyable enough, though these releases often felt more like showcases for Working on Dying, the impactful beatmaking clique who shaped contemporary landmarks like Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake. The same pattern holds on OXygen, Matt Ox’s new collaborative mixtape with the producers of the New York-based collective Surf Gang.
For years now, Surf Gang have been a constant in New York’s underground rap scene. I’d argue Polo Perks’ Punk Goes Drill, produced mostly by crew affiliates, is the apex of sample-drill beats; the lush soundscapes they’ve made for out-of-towners like BabyxSosa and RealYungPhil are noteworthy too, and their local live shows and DJ sets are consistently a good time. Like Working on Dying, Surf Gang use Matt Ox’s elastic, somewhat anonymous voice as a steady base from which to wrangle a bunch of cloudy and absorbing beats. Take the Evil Giane-produced “WTW”: The staticky instrumental sounds like it’s short-circuiting, and the sporadic Stone Cold Steve Austin-style glass shatter FX up the disarray. Harrison and Eera’s instrumental on “Fast” is an intoxicating blend of frosty synths that recalls Gud’s production on RX Papi’s Foreign Exchange and dreamy Goth Money-like mayhem (especially the gunshots). The tape is loaded with mesmerizing production touches like Evil Giane’s throbbing club rhythm for “Real Rage” and Harrison’s drum patterns on “Pack It Up,” which fire at the pace of a difficult Dance Dance Revolution routine.
As for Matt Ox, he doesn’t do much to distract from the beats. The closest he comes to stealing the spotlight is on “Pack It Up,” where his frequent pitch alterations and vocal switch-ups come off strained and unnatural—you can feel that you’re supposed to think he’s being eccentric. But while he’s obviously fluent in the language of Playboi Carti, the Atlanta rapper he feels most aligned with is Key!, especially in the way Matt attempts to swing drastically between moods by raising and lowering his volume. But Key!’s yo-yo vocal fluctuations were always intended to convey how emotionally volatile his songs are: angry and loving and joyful and paranoid, all at once. Meanwhile, even when Matt Ox alternates between scratchy shouts and stoned murmurs on “Duff,” it’s numb. Not even his scattered roars on “Wormhole” have any genuine rage to them. It’s like when a toddler starts yelling curse words they’ve heard from their parents.
The idea to mesh a chaotic rapping style with Surf Gang’s hazy sound is a good one: Their beats are an open range where a gifted rapper can roam and find their weirdest self. Matt Ox just isn’t that person. I wish these beats were in the hands of someone who could take advantage of the freedom to come up with something like Hook’s explosive, improvisatory flows or Bktherula’s impulsive yet nimble emotional shifts. Instead, OXygen is much like OX: a glorified audition tape for producers who one day will help a better rapper to realize their vision. | 2023-04-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Surf Gang | April 26, 2023 | 5.8 | 9301a2bd-d8c2-4dd3-80a8-f423361a218e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
GLAQJO XAACSSO is a fittingly obtuse name for London producer Patten's debut EP. The record-- full of scrambled sounds you know from elsewhere-- feels like it could exist in a parallel universe. Nothing feels too holy for Patten to throw into the blender. | GLAQJO XAACSSO is a fittingly obtuse name for London producer Patten's debut EP. The record-- full of scrambled sounds you know from elsewhere-- feels like it could exist in a parallel universe. Nothing feels too holy for Patten to throw into the blender. | patten: GLAQJO XAACSSO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16008-patten-glaqjo-xaacsso/ | GLAQJO XAACSSO | GLAQJO XAACSSO is a fittingly obtuse name for London producer Patten's debut EP. The record-- full of scrambled sounds you recognize from elsewhere-- feels like it could exist in a parallel universe. The sensation of this music, which does have a peculiar thrill to it, can also be a frustrating riddle: At times, you'll want to dive into the waveforms and pull the fragments back into a right order and find some sense.
The collection's probably more engaging a concept or idea than straight-up listen, but there is fun to be had in the way the beats spin your head. Less concerned with the relentless drive into the future than some of his peers, Patten's forging a sound off the beaten path, cherry-picking past sounds and twisting them.
Much of the record finds Patten looking toward 1990s Warp acts. "Blush Mosaic" takes Boards of Canada's icy synths and softly pushes fast-forward, revving something glacial into something manic-- the aural equivalent of a stop-motion nature video. Vocals drift in and out as rhythms weave around each other. It's one of the record's strongest statements, and a track where Patten's sometimes unfocused energy comes together to make something engaging, trippy, and destroyed.
On "Fire Dream" there are shades of Plaid and Autechre, especially in the pale analog synths. Patten matches that patchwork with powdery hi-hats and head-knocking beats. It's not only piecemeal scraps of Warp influence in the music, though-- there's a general influence in attitude and approach. Even the baiting LP title seems like the kind of brick wall Richard D. James or Chris Morris would erect. That approach carries over to the source material: Nothing feels too holy for Patten to throw into the blender.
On the strongest moments, like "Blush Mosaic" and "Fire Dream", the bent circuitry is visceral and engaging, but there are instances where those loose rhythmic threads don't knot together so well. Take the motion-sick "Out the Coast", where the beats collapse into each other and don't quite blend with the rest of the action. It feels like there's something good buried within, but the effect is jarring and disorientating (not pleasantly so).
A problem with his whirlwind approach is that each idea's so quickly processed it can leave the results feeling too breathless or rushed. A nice moment passes so quickly that it immediately becomes a dot on the horizon. There also isn't a great deal of contrast on the record. And not a lot of warmth. It's here Patten strikes the biggest contrast with the artists he might be referencing or reminding you of: A great deal of music on that IDM spectrum that Patten picks apart has heart to it. On his Come to Daddy EP, for instance, Aphex Twin closes the record with the gorgeous "IZ-US". Likewise, Squarepusher, at his busiest on "Port Rhombus", pulls away the rhythmic carpet to reveal a lilting, lush guitar. There are no moments like this for Patten, and for all its movement, GLAQJO XAACSSO feels a little frozen. | 2011-11-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2011-11-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | No Pain in Pop | November 7, 2011 | 6.7 | 930c69ac-17c8-4ce6-8ba1-81131080fb03 | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
Longtime vocal contributor to the likes of Zero 7 and Massive Attack returns with her fourth solo album, a user-friendly, electronics-free easy-listening session featuring a little Beck and a lot of ballads. | Longtime vocal contributor to the likes of Zero 7 and Massive Attack returns with her fourth solo album, a user-friendly, electronics-free easy-listening session featuring a little Beck and a lot of ballads. | Sia: Some People Have Real Problems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11158-some-people-have-real-problems/ | Some People Have Real Problems | Each of Sia Furler's albums has been released on a different label, but it should come as no surprise that her fourth, and most promising, comes on Starbucks' label Hear Music. (It also should be no surprise that Hear Music has helped make this her most commercially successful record.) The Adelaide-born English crossover, who has worked with Jamiroquai, Massive Attack, and Zero 7, has been a likeable, clean-voiced accessory for years, but she got her first (independent) big break when "Breathe Me", off 2004's Color the Small One, was featured in the final episode of Six Feet Under and caused a minor that. Some People Have Real Problems tries to be something else: brazen yet fun, sophisticated yet goofy. Composed in large part by Sia in conjunction with her supporting instrumentalists, the songs are full of bounce, springtime, and California cool. And Beck is featured on two tracks, "Academia" and "Death By Chocolate". But it doesn't help.
From the start, Problems nods to both Sia's résumé and to her neighbors on the latté bar: Feist's playful, smokey ballads and Zero 7's drum-and-bass slugs. "Little Black Sandals" screams failure just by mentioning a pair of shoes in its title (see: Katherine McPhee) and the R&B reaches are dreadful. "Lentil" is brave and explorative by rhythm and melody, inserting a pinch of Regina Spektor-via-Tori Amos into the mix. Still, the chorus is too bland and the rhythm too slow. This andante dullness is prevalent on the album, as if Norah Jones were going about stealing Feist's audience.
has potential, but where this song could actually use the heat and the punch of percussion, there is none. "The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" is stellar, but like Esthero before her, Sia so often concedes to choruses that are rote and thin on the ground, packed full of airy, electrified harmonies. I want soars, climbs, and surprising bridges; instead there are puffed up harmonies and a tad of decoration from the brass and keys. The anticipation of the chorus is enough to play the song on repeat for a couple of days, but the chorus is still there, irritatingly memorable, and, in fact, it seeps into every part of the song, dominating the subtle inventions of melody and Sia's clear talent for deft hops around the scale. "Electric Bird" is a winner, though it, too, has stock elements in its alternatively languorous and rushed lyrics, pumps from the brass, and tricky shifts into minor key. "Playground"'s all click-clacking and hand-clapping and more overused vocal multi-tracking. I'd venture to say Sia has not penned a single song without this feature.
The perfect balance-- and the potential that few of the tracks reach-- is uncovered on "Soon We'll Be Found", which is sexy and balladic, yet dark and raging. It's surprising, colorful, and complex. But there are too many attempts at this type of song, and not enough of the springtime fun suggested on the ridiculous cover. If Sia spent more time at the piano, and/or hired Robyn to write her a couple of tracks, the results could be marvelous. But as it stands, Sia is not aware of her potential-- or rather, her options. | 2008-02-27T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2008-02-27T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Hear Music | February 27, 2008 | 4.8 | 930d9945-4bad-4c4d-8c8f-9b646cd7f673 | Pitchfork | null |
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The lush, veteran noir-soul band-- reconstituted as a five piece-- here reconciles its well-established affinities with a more pastoral presentation. | The lush, veteran noir-soul band-- reconstituted as a five piece-- here reconciles its well-established affinities with a more pastoral presentation. | Tindersticks: The Hungry Saw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11462-the-hungry-saw/ | The Hungry Saw | "Too many deaths and betrayals, too many lies," sings Stuart Staples on the seventh Tindersticks album, providing a handy episode update for those finally just joining the Nottingham noir-soul sextet. But, as it appears in the context of the breezy piano-rolled folk lullaby "The Flicker of a Little Girl", the line sounds less like an advertisement for Tindersticks' signature brand of sorrow than a repudiation of it-- that after nearly two decades of pondering love and all its attendant emotions (jealousy, misery, numbness), Staples regrets to inform you he's all out of regret.
But then Staples hasn't so much turned a new leaf as had one turned for him: In 2006, half of his band turned in their resignation papers, most notably Dickon Hinchcliffe, who, in the most reductive rock-speak, was the Richards to Staples' Jagger (if Keith was a violin player and wrote a mean brass arrangement). And amid a career marked by label changes, Tindersticks-- reconstituted as a five piece-- once again find themselves with a new North America benefactor: Constellation Records, whose godspeed-dominated roster is becoming increasingly populated with former major-label-bankrolled eccentrics (Vic Chestnutt, Carla Bozulich) seeking artistic refuge and a second (or third) wind.
Ironically, Tindersticks' first offering to the most notoriously non-conformist indie label this side of Dischord is an album that feels remarkably in tune with contemporary British pop music's neo-soul slant. Though for Tindersticks, this is hardly a product of calculated trend-spotting: The band have been leavening their blue-eyed/black-lung balladry with classic soul touches-- warm Hammond organ tones, tambourine-rattled rhythms, female back-up singers— as far back as 1999's un-ironically titled Simple Pleasures, an album that, at the time, seemed to pale next to the string-swept dramatics that defined Tindersticks' epochal first three albums. But nine years on, that move seems brilliantly prescient-- to the point where, now, it's not a stretch to envision Staples selling The Hungry Saw's first single, the nocturnal soul knockout "Yesterdays Tomorrows", to Amy Winehouse and retiring a happy man.
Naturally, that song appears second on the new album's tracklist (following a typically solemn introductory piano piece), because Tindersticks have always been a second-song band, opting for low-key opening tracks before delivering a bold follow-up strike-- from the devastating "A Night In" on 1995's self-titled second album, to the simmering "Heard It Through the Grapevine" strut of "People Keep Comin' Around" on 2001's Can Our Love… to the raging pocket symphony "Say Goodbye to the City" on 2003's Waiting for the Moon. But in The Hungry Saw's case, the early appearance of "Yesterday Tomorrow"-- with its booming drumbeat, lustrous organ tones and brassy accents-- seems designed to assert that Hinchcliffe's departure has not diminished the band's cinematic scope. With that business settled, the record turns increasingly more restrained, as it reconciles the band's well-established soul affinities with a more pastoral presentation, in the spirit of Staples' recent solo efforts.
Of course, Staples' bruised baritone has always formed the emotional core of just about every Tindersticks song. However, the band's most arresting moments have come when Staples' vulnerable voice seems on the verge of being swept up by the musical maelstroms stewing around him, and, with few exceptions, The Hungry Saw doesn't really try to test his fortitude: with their smoky, solitary atmosphere and muted string arrangements, "The Other Side of the World" and "All the Love" are textbook Tindersticks ballads-- and beautifully rendered ones at that-- but they don't ever go for the throat like their closest antecedent, Waiting for the Moon's stunning orchestral set piece, "My Oblivion".
Instead, The Hungry Saw's temperate approach feels like the work of a band who are grateful for a new lease on life, but not sure exactly what to do with it, proffering brief experiments that amount to little more than amusing curios (the self-explanatory "The Organist Entertains") or instrumentals that sound like guide tracks waiting for a vocal supplement (the tremoloed psychedelic samba of "E Type"). The laissez-faire feeling seems most pronounced on "Mother Dear", a fog-covered hymnal guided by muffled organ tones and a subterranean drum stomp that-- just after Staples utters the line "it's not so serious, after all"-- is mischievously interrupted by arrhythmic blues riffing that suggests the band has a sense of humour about their downcast demeanor. It's immediately followed by "Boobar", which for its opening 20 seconds, suggests another solitary Staples serenade about lost love, before slowly blossoming into a wonderful Spectorized call-and-response finale. If The Hungry Saw teaches us anything new about Tindersticks, it's that these moments of levity no longer serve as brief, incongruous respites from the bleakness, but instead form a series of steps toward an end goal of contentment-- as epitomized by closing track "The Turns We Took". The titular line is completed by the words "…to get here"-- "here" being a soothing, string-swirled Velvet Underground groove over which Staples catalogues a lifetime of cruel twists and-- perhaps speaking for the entire band-- decides there's no shame in walking the straight line. | 2008-05-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet / Constellation | May 1, 2008 | 7.1 | 9319297a-072b-4076-9dc5-8078a1fbe8c4 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Louisville-based foursome White Reaper traffic in bouncy pop-punk, full of stuffy-nosed sneers and bubblegum-blowing vowels, that recall classic acts like the Dickies. At their best, they locate that revered midpoint between "nerd" and "numbskull." | The Louisville-based foursome White Reaper traffic in bouncy pop-punk, full of stuffy-nosed sneers and bubblegum-blowing vowels, that recall classic acts like the Dickies. At their best, they locate that revered midpoint between "nerd" and "numbskull." | White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20794-white-reaper-does-it-again/ | White Reaper Does It Again | The Dickies are a great band: trailblazing, deceptively sophisticated, vastly enjoyable, and wholly underrated. It's hard to imagine White Reaper not sharing this opinion. White Reaper Does It Again, the cheekily titled debut album by the young, Louisville-spawned foursome, traffics in much of the same elements that the Dickies pioneered in the late '70s: bouncy pop-punk underpinned with classic songcraft; hockey-rink-ready keyboards. In particular, White Reaper's singer/guitarist Tony Esposito sings almost exactly like the Dickies' Leonard Graves Phillips, all stuffy-nosed sneers and bubblegum-blowing vowels.
Luckily, the Dickies aren't the only influence on Does It Again—nor does the album's derivativeness in any way dampen its snotty, romantic charisma. On "Friday the 13th"—the only song on the album in a minor key—an ominous opening by keyboardist Ryan Hater sets the tone for a campy horror-meets-new-wave mash-up. And on "Candy", Esposito and company splice in some Sweet-style glam-rock swagger. "On Your Mind" even goes so far as to directly lift the melody from the original power-pop wellspring: The Who's "The Kids Are Alright".
It's all pulled off credibly, though, with plenty of perspiration and wild-eyed reverence poured into the pastiche. Bassist Sam Wilkerson and drummer Nick Wilkerson are brothers, and rhythm is clearly in their DNA; "Wolf Trap Hotel" simply rages, shearing off all subtlety in a flurry of adenoids and adrenaline. But even when things get as breakneck as they do on "B.T.K.", Esposito's hooks are piercing, precise, and endearing. And when, on the slower, more supple "Sheila", he lets himself cut loose, his vocals approach full-on croon.
Barring a couple of forgettable, filler-feeling tracks like "Don't You Think I Know?", the biggest drawback of Does It Again is the production. It doesn't sound bad, but the washed-out reverb and pushed-to-the-front keyboard creates a distance that the band sounds like they are constantly fighting to push through. Songs this punchy should land effortlessly. Still, Esposito's yearning and dissatisfaction come through clearly: "I've got it bad, you know/ Give me a double dose," he sings on "Pills", and it doesn't matter what he's singing about. It's our job to fill in that blank. White Reaper knows how to work that ambiguity, just as its navigates its unabashed influences to locate that perfect midpoint between "nerd" and "numbskull." | 2015-07-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | July 21, 2015 | 6.8 | 93225b05-26dc-42de-9bb2-f1f3ddfe9a17 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The grunge mainstays return with another record full of unexpected twists, turns, jokes, diversions, and ideas. | The grunge mainstays return with another record full of unexpected twists, turns, jokes, diversions, and ideas. | Melvins: The Bride Screamed Murder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14313-the-bride-screamed-murder/ | The Bride Screamed Murder | From the first 90 seconds of The Bride Screamed Murder (the sort of trashy B-movie title perfect for the group's school-binder-metal MO), it seems like this most recent incarnation of the Melvins-- longtime mainstays Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, backed by Big Business' Jared Warren and Coady Willis-- is content to stay the course and follow the return-to-form lead of their last two albums. That said, staying the course isn't exactly what the Melvins are best known for, so while the transformation of "The Water Glass" mid-track from state-of-the-art sludge into an honest-to-goodness marching song is unexpected, the fact that the Melvins opted to switch gears isn't a shocker. After all, it's following those sorts of counterintuitive impulses, for better (various B-sides from their 1997 AmRep singles collection) or worse (their Leif Garrett-flavored cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), that make this band worth a damn as it proudly trudges into its third decade.
Unfortunately, The Bride Screamed Murder is one of those cases where taking the road less traveled leads to nowhere. Some fans might beg to differ, of course. They'll roll with the punches offered by indecisive three-in-one tracks like "Inhumanity and Death” and "Electric Flower". Maybe they'll view the arch grunge moves of "Hospital Up" as a pithy meta-commentary, and get a chuckle out of the tune's Spinal Tap jazz odyssey rooster-crowing coda. They might also get a kick out of the twerpy ending to "I'll Finish You Off", where someone's scat-tastic be-bopping leads to the "My Sharona" hook is banged out while "My Generation" is sung over it. When it turns out that such an ending actually foreshadows a lugubrious Flipper-like stumble through "My Generation", what was a brief moment turns into a seven-minute-long joke.
However, if that all doesn't sound appealing to you, you'll probably hear The Bride Screamed Murder as an album full of unfinished sketches and lazy doodles masquerading as proper tunes. The digressions will either come off as failed experiments or unfunny jokes, a handful of good ideas undercut by either their context or their brevity. Any patience engendered by the Melvins' countless good works will be tested by those willing to slog through this scattershot mess. The Bride Screamed Murder is the sort of album one might expect from a long-in-the-tooth group trying to rediscover its purpose and rejuvenate itself. That it comes on the heels of what seemed to be the band's rejuvenation makes it all the more disappointing. | 2010-06-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-06-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Ipecac | June 4, 2010 | 5.2 | 932a9ad1-e625-427e-95d5-9ce0ece94bcb | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
After three blockbusters, the megastar turned introspective on her fourth album, plumbing the depths of depression. Considered a disappointment at the time, it’s become one of her most beloved LPs. | After three blockbusters, the megastar turned introspective on her fourth album, plumbing the depths of depression. Considered a disappointment at the time, it’s become one of her most beloved LPs. | Janet Jackson: The Velvet Rope (Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/janet-jackson-the-velvet-rope-deluxe-edition/ | The Velvet Rope (Deluxe Edition) | You don’t typically stand outside an actual velvet rope unless you have a pretty good idea that what’s past it is worth the wait. Listeners went into Janet Jackson’s sixth album, 1997’s The Velvet Rope, eager to breach the facade Jackson had put up in public for decades. Behind her fixed grin, so broad she compared it to the Joker’s, was pain. Have at it, went the messaging.
The three preceding albums (all blockbusters) that Jackson cut with former Time members Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—1986’s Control, 1989’s Rhythm Nation 1814, and 1993’s janet.—were all bold statements. They said FAMILIAL INDEPENDENCE, SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, and SEXUAL LIBERATION, respectively. The Velvet Rope was no less conceptual, but its statement was more like a testimony, as its concept concerned introspection. On the title track, the album’s first song, she invites listeners “behind my velvet rope” to take a look inside her mind. “I needed to do this album for myself, for people to know what was going on with me,” she told the Washington Post in 1998.
Twenty-five years after its release, the culture seems more amenable to Jackson’s invitation than ever. And so Jackson and Virgin are offering more Rope, having recently released a deluxe edition of the album commemorating its silver anniversary that contains B-sides and a slew of remixes from the era. It all sounds fresh for something a quarter century old, thanks in part to the resurgence of retro-leaning house music in contemporary pop and Jackson’s refusal to chase trends (the closest the record comes is a slight dusting of skittery Timbaland influence on some of its syncopated percussion).
The Velvet Rope’s apparent influence has been referenced enough that the album represents a standard for maturation in pop stardom. It is frequently cited by fans as their favorite Janet record. At the time of its release, though, it was a relative disappointment—its U.S. sales were just half of janet.’s six million copies. That was bad news for Virgin, which had just re-signed Jackson for $80 million, the largest record deal at the time.
Today, the album can be approached without the constrictors of expectation that a megadeal brings. Its artistry can be taken on its own terms, but it’s important to remember just how brazen it was at the time for Jackson to release a frequently downcast album working through depression—one that had few obvious singles on it. The chill on The Velvet Rope’s first single was audacious. “Got ’Til It’s Gone,” featuring Q-Tip, was not a smash. In a retrospective interview with The Boombox, Jam described pop radio’s shunning of “Gone” as a “surprise” but chalked up the icy reception to the Afrocentrism of the accompanying video, which depicts apartheid-era South Africa and features Jackson with her iconic natural, asymmetrical ’do.
Jackson described The Velvet Rope as her “most personal” album, and in ensuing coverage, it was compared to the work of Joni Mitchell, whom Jackson asked personally for the right to sample “Big Yellow Taxi” on “Gone.” (The notoriously cantankerous Mitchell agreed, perhaps because years before, Jackson had praised Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm in an interview—the album’s “best review,” according to Mitchell.) On The Velvet Rope, Jackson sometimes holds herself accountable with a grasp as tight as Mitchell’s but she generally paints with broader strokes. She gets lonely. She feels empty. She’s scared to fall in love. It’s as though Jackson took to heart what Kris Kristofferson told Mitchell after hearing Blue: “Joni, keep something to yourself.” The overall effect, much like Mary J. Blige’s 1994 classic My Life, conveyed real pain while leaving enough space for listeners to slide their own experiences between Jackson’s words. It’s a pop approach to soul-bearing, optimized for consumption. Jackson ponders the human need to feel special repeatedly on The Velvet Rope—though doing so as a celebrity on a much-hyped album is tantamount to pop-star existentialism, Jackson assumes the same status as her listeners for most of the album. That is, until the final interlude, “Sad,” in which Jackson murmurs, “There’s nothing more depressing than having everything and still feeling sad.” It’s certainly ironic, but having nothing and still feeling sad is undoubtedly more depressing.
On The Velvet Rope, Jackson’s then-secret husband René Elizondo Jr. received his first songwriting credits, though Jackson told Rolling Stone in 1998 that he’d been a co-writer on “almost all my songs since Rhythm Nation.” She nonetheless kept up the velvet rope around their marriage, which wouldn’t be confirmed publicly until the announcement of their divorce in 2000. (The Velvet Rope was their last full-length collab.) And though Jackson revealed all sorts of would-be private matters during the album’s promotion—taking coffee enemas to clear “sad cells,” a nipple piercing, her tattoo of Minnie Mouse giving Mickey a blowjob visible on the November 1997 cover of Vibe—there was “one incident” that occurred when she was four and a half years old responsible for some of the trauma exorcized on The Velvet Rope that she refused to detail. This era was not a confessional free-for-all. It was considered, modulated, art-directed revelation. The stakes were clear, though, especially when it came to the further sexual exploration that began on janet. In the words of Ayanna Dozier, who wrote the 2020 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Rope: “There is great power in Janet using her status as a Black popular artist to openly trouble our social interpretation of Black women’s sexuality and the respectable images that informed what images of Black womanhood were acceptable in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
There’s a near military precision—like that which influenced Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 aesthetic—to the task of probing Jackson’s mind. As much as The Velvet Rope is a departure, it is very much a Janet Jackson album—kaleidoscopic in its range, stitched together with interludes, perfectly tailored for her small and sweet voice. So much of what goes on is all in her narrators’ heads—she forges a relationship with an internet stranger on the frenetic “Empty,” replays abuse on the furious “What About,” looks back in regret at a halted relationship in “Got ’Til It’s Gone.” Before she gets tied up, blindfolded, and anointed with hot candle wax in “Rope Burn,” she’s “Lyin’ here wearin’/Just my imagination for you.” The production can be effectively blunt. “Empty” is full of clattering percussion—it was often labeled as jungle-inflected at the time, but it’s clearly a precursor to footwork from today’s perspective—and “I Get Lonely” is sparse until its blaring chorus.
The Velvet Rope is plainspoken but not without nuance. The slow jam “Anything,” which features exhaling synths that recall quiet-storm chestnut “Moments in Love,” by Art of Noise, lines up a litany of demands (“Hold me/Kiss me/Show me/You wanna be with me…”) before getting to the point and submitting: “I will do anything/You ask me to/Anything/Anything.” It’s not merely an anthem fit for a bottom (as Jackson has said she is)—it’s a bossy bottom anthem. With a handful of words, Jackson illustrates the complexity within even the most seemingly straightforward sexual power dynamics. The message of “Together Again”—“You don’t have to hold on to the pain to hold on to the memory,” as recited in the preceding “Memory” interlude—plays like the product of enlightenment after deep processing of grief. It’s almost easy to overlook the tragedies that inspired it—perhaps the single most joyous piece of (commercial) art about AIDS, which killed several of Jackson’s friends—and get lost in the stomping, radio-friendly beats, intentionally recalling the music Jackson heard at Studio 54 as a child. Sonically, it’s the most bubblegum moment on the album, but as an expression of hefty introspection, it more than earns its place. And if that’s not Diana Ross-y enough for you, there’s “My Need,” which is based on a muddied sample of “Love Hangover” simmering in hi-hats.
Whereas Rhythm Nation and janet. both addressed racism explicitly, The Velvet Rope, self-consciously edgy as it was, took on homophobia in “Free Xone,” a rave-up in the half-song/half-track tradition of janet.’s “Throb.” The sound is somewhere between “Housequake” and “Batdance” as Jackson sets a scenario in which a guy is shunned for his sexuality (“That’s so not mellow,” she mutters, upholding the inherent values of the regularly chill Velvet Rope and referencing the Archie Bell & the Drells sample at hand). But Jackson spends most of the song’s time rhapsodizing a “free xone” with “no rules” and “one love.” “Free Xone” is more invested in imagining utopia than complaining about social ills. Also, quite controversially, she kept some of Rod Stewart’s gender specificity intact in her gently bumping cover of “Tonight’s the Night” (“’Cause I love you girl,” she sings as he did), leading many in the press to speculate if this marked a coming-out. MTV asked if it bothered her that the pro-queer sentiment might alienate some listeners and Jackson responded with a shrug: “Not everyone is going to like me and not everyone does and I understand that.” Having the biggest record deal on the planet was not a reason to avoid risks—it was a reason to take them.
The original album only tells some of the full story, though. Included in the deluxe reissue is vital ephemera, including the heavily played “TNT Remix Edit” of “I Get Lonely,” featuring Blackstreet. As Teddy Riley, the most influential producer of early ’90s R&B, worked on it with Timbaland, the most influential producer of late ’90s R&B, the skittering fast-slow rerub represents a formal passing of the baton. Historic. Also included is the “Jimmy Jam Deeper Remix” of “Together Again,” which reimagines the song as a ballad (as it was reportedly conceived initially). The “Ummah Jay Dee’s Revenge Mix” of “Got ’Til It’s Gone” puts the song in the hands of Dilla, whose remix of the Brand New Heavies’ “Sometimes” inspired Jackson’s original. He outfits Jackson in some woozy harmonic work, nudging the song into more avant-garde territory.
The included house mixes are a who’s who of ’90s major-label remixers with underground roots—Frankie Knuckles, David Morales, Armand Van Helden, Masters at Work, Tony Humphries, Tony Moran, Jason Nevins—that indicate the unlikely club reach of The Velvet Rope. Via these pepped-up revisions, the self-consciously mellow album’s first four singles all went Top 10 on Billboard’s club play chart, with two of them (“Together Again” and “Go Deep”) hitting No. 1. By not including the Roni Size remix of “Go Deep,” though, the set forfeits the opportunity to draw a line from Janet’s filtration with drum’n’bass to the contemporary mumble jungle represented by the likes of PinkPantheress. Oh well, find it on YouTube.
The Velvet Rope’s press cycle was uncommonly long, and as it went on, people wrote and wrote about its relatively disappointing chart performance. The dek on David Ritz’s 1998 Rolling Stone piece read: “After being told her album was a flop and her tour was a bust, she did what she knows best—she worked harder.” The ensuing tour, directed by Jackson herself, was credited as pulling the era together (rumors of its bust, according to Ritz, were greatly exaggerated). The two-hour show was nonstop spectacle, a blur of Jackson’s hits and outlandish costumes that found The Velvet Rope material perfectly integrated into her catalog. If anything, the album’s songs rounded out the taste profile with some sour.
To hear Jam tell it, no one at Virgin pushed back on the relatively difficult material. “They loved the record. They knew it was gonna be tough to get, but they really championed it,” he told The Boombox. Its creation alone meant success for Jackson, who reported that she had purged demons through her art. “I never liked myself before. I hated myself. I can honestly say that I like myself now,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. Incidentally, “Got ’Til It’s Gone,” the supposed flop first single, is now one of her most played songs on Spotify, with 75 million streams. It has more listens than most of her No. 1 singles. This suggests that it’s not that she picked the wrong song to lead the album, it’s that the whole creative venture was ahead of its time. We’re still catching up. | 2022-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin / UMe | October 15, 2022 | 9.4 | 9331f344-6944-4e1b-9878-2898bc71d108 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
The prolific Norwegian producer and electronic musician explores space and silence on a pair of powerful, absorbing records—one solo, the other with experimental metal vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter. | The prolific Norwegian producer and electronic musician explores space and silence on a pair of powerful, absorbing records—one solo, the other with experimental metal vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter. | Runhild Gammelsæter / Lasse Marhaug: Higgs Boson / Context | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lasse-context-gammelsaeter-marhaug-higgs-boson/ | Context | Lasse Marhaug plays enthusiastically with others. During the last three decades, the Norwegian noise musician, avant-pop producer, and provocative graphic designer has worked on around 1,000 albums. Admittedly, many of these records were relatively low-stakes affairs, straight-to-tape live sets that he mastered or one-off rendezvous eked out in tiny editions. But Marhaug is also a repeat collaborator with Jenny Hval, having co-produced Blood Bitch and Apocalypse, girl, and the creative foil for Kelly Lee Owens’ LP.8. His erstwhile group Jazzkamer made some of the century’s most indispensable metal investigations, too, pushing minimalism to maximum intensity. Despite that torrent of material, Marhaug rarely issues proper solo albums—just one, 2010’s punishing exploration All Music at Once, during the last dozen years. He thrives, it seems, on an exchange of ideas, the heat of feedback.
But two fascinating new albums—the scrupulous and disorienting solo work Context and an absorbing duo record with ultra-dynamic metal vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter, Higgs Boson—offer fresh insight into the mind of one of experimental music’s most active forces, capturing a compelling mix of intimacy and power. These are wildly different records. Marhaug is locked in a kind of cosmic tug-of-war with Gammelsæter, his rapturous electronics pulling her toward earth as she explores particle physics and the unknown with a voice that exhilarates even as it unsettles. By comparison, Context is quiet and staid, even when it hisses, churns, or jolts; it is a careful soliloquy concerning the nature of sound from someone best known for just letting it rip. Together, they are galvanizing reminders of how space and silence can be as compelling as what eventually rushes in to overtake them.
For the last quarter century, Gammelsæter has often been unfairly reduced to a curious footnote in the history of American doom, even becoming a Jeopardy! clue. As a teenage exchange student in Washington state, she formed the short-lived and great Thorr’s Hammer with Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson years before they became Sunn O))); her depths-of-hell voice made their EP, Dommedagsnatt, feel like an abyss was opening at your feet. (Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, do it.) It became a much-reissued cult favorite; the fact that Gammelsæter went on to study at Harvard, earn a doctorate in biology, and direct a string of Scandinavian biotech companies only abetted later intrigue.
Higgs Boson isn’t Gammelsæter’s first album since those Evergreen days of yore. It is, however, her most focused and riveting. Though Gammelsæter is famous for a stentorian bellow, she can also summon a whisper-soft coo, a theatrical sibilance, and even a sing-song ease. She brings all these facets to bear at once here, putting them in play with one another and Marhaug’s contortions.
Listening to opener “The Stark Effect” feels like furtively navigating a musical hall of mirrors, as Gammelsæter’s many vocal guises—the devil here, an angel there—emerge from corners you cannot see, then slink behind them. It is mesmerizing and terrifying in equal measure. So is “Hadron Collider,” where Gammelsæter speaks in a scientist’s steely voice about energy until she slips into a droning wail, as if tormented by the findings of her inquiries. “Propeller Arc” is a wondrous bit of trunk-rattling bass music for the apocalypse. She barks like a military commander in the foreground, while her voice drifts with seraphic wonder in the rear. This versatility and control put Gammelsæter in league with the likes of Meredith Monk or Diamanda Galás, pioneering singers capable of communicating more with tone than words themselves.
The key to making all these aspects of Gammelsæter’s voice work so well together is Marhaug’s facility for layering. During “Ondes Da Fase,” Gammelsæter’s sound is a composite of low drones and hissing highs, blended but discrete like the strata of sandstone. It stretches across the entire track. But phosphorescent hums and a faint beat echoing in the distance add dimension; I find myself focusing on these other elements, playing a game where I’m peering around Gammelsæter’s voice like a curtain. In “Static Case,” her interlocked whispers, roars, and incantations pirouette across squelching circuits and glowing noise. The song moves like a slow wave, resting long enough at its nodes that you sit in suspense, wondering what will come next. That’s a fitting sensation for a record that asks questions about the framework of our universe—and admits the answers might make for existential terror.
The underpinnings of this success become clear on Context, Marhaug’s set of seven spare but captivating instrumental pieces. Recorded in the Oslo studio he used for most of his career before leaving the city for Norway’s far Arctic reaches, Context was meticulously edited from hours of improvisations. Listening to it after Higgs Boson is like marveling at some gothic mansion, then somehow seeing the ornate framing behind its walls. Bursts of harsh noise, slivers of angular static, rumbles of punishing bass: Though the sounds here are every bit as intense as Marhaug’s past might lead us to expect, his patience and appreciation of space mean the results are newly delicate, the fragile skeleton of a once-formidable beast.
The marvel of the set is “Context3.” From start to finish, a massive bass thud repeatedly decays in a sequence of seven smaller hits; curdled electronics, tea-kettle whistles, and serrated drones all curl around the beat, like invasive vines crawling up that mansion’s aging foundation. The sounds clash as they compete for room, while the oblivious rhythm pounds on. They wear one another out and fade away in an epic drama condensed into six minutes. Where “Context4” feels like a scene of endless winter, “Context5” conjures the pervasive fatigue of a city soundscape and subsequent retreat. These pieces work so well because of the care Marhaug took in positioning each part, in letting tiny gestures—a subtle boost in volume, a tiny tone slipping through silence—shape a larger narrative.
With an artist as busy as Marhaug, it is tempting to see his work as scattershot or offhand, ideas executed in unapologetic sprints. In the past, it could certainly feel that way—All Music at Once, after all, felt like an expulsion of ideas, fast and ferocious. Hearing Marhaug’s evolution through this pair of entrancing records is inspiring, a parable of blunt tools being slowly sharpened into surgical instruments. Both alone and with others, Marhaug is no longer just a Norwegian noise musician shocking through sprees of abrasive sound; he is a painstaking producer, using space, time, and silence to give such abrasive sounds more power. In doing so, he’s rightfully helped restore Runhild Gammelsæter to much more than curiosity status and established a promising new platform for his own considered ideas. | 2022-08-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | null | August 31, 2022 | 7.6 | 93452aae-ef28-4f6c-852b-22a23984c4c7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
We’re used to the kind of power-pop that San Franicsco songwriter Tony Molina makes by abiding certain rules and forms, but the songs on Dissed and Dismissed slyly toy with expectations. | We’re used to the kind of power-pop that San Franicsco songwriter Tony Molina makes by abiding certain rules and forms, but the songs on Dissed and Dismissed slyly toy with expectations. | Tony Molina: Dissed and Dismissed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19081-tony-molina-dissed-and-dismissed/ | Dissed and Dismissed | “Please note that this album runs just under 12 minutes,” the promo page for Tony Molina’s 12-song Dissed and Dismissed warns. “Just so you know.” It’s a worthwhile heads up: Hearing a Tony Molina song for the first time can be a bit disorienting. We’re used to the kind of power-pop he makes abiding by certain rules and forms—three chords, three minutes, a chorus that repeats enough times for first-time listeners to be singing along by the end—but the songs on Dissed and Dismissed slyly toy with expectations. Take “Nowhere to Go”, the crunching slacker anthem that opens the album: Two sing-songy verses followed by a harmonized, Thin Lizzy-esque solo that feels like a build-up to something… but actually just turns out to be a finale. Most of the songs (which range from 26 seconds to an epic minute-and-a-half) on the album proceed similarly. And yet, somehow, ”album” is the right word here. Dissed and Dismissed is more fully realized—and packs more of a punch—than plenty of records five times its length. Call it a half-a-half-hour of power.
Molina’s been a staple in the San Francisco hardcore scene for years now—he’s played in the bands Ovens, Caged Animal, Dystrophy, and Lifetime Problems, to name a few—but his solo work lets his sharp pop instincts shine. Initially released in early 2013 as a tape on the small Bay Area label Melters, Dissed and Dismissed became an instant cult favorite, quickly selling out its first pressing. (Later in the year, he also released the taut, self-explanatory Six Tracks E.P. as a part of Matador’s Singles Going Home Alone Series.) Now, to bide the time while he records a new full-length for Slumberland and in hopes of reaching a larger audience, the label has reissued Dissed and Dismissed.
Molina’s music combines Ted Leo’s taste in riffs, Rivers Cuomo’s record collection circa “In the Garage”, and Robert Pollard’s attention span. In one of its most subdued moments, Dissed and Dismissed includes an acoustic cover of the early Guided By Voices song “Wandering Boy Poet”, and it feels like an obvious nod to the kindred spirits who believe that a song that exceeds two minutes has long overstayed its welcome. There’s a crucial difference in the ethos of these artists, though. The brevity of early Guided By Voices tracks conveyed a certain shrug, Pollard’s demeanor always seeming to say, “I got bored with this one before I could write an ending or mix it properly.” Brief as they are, though, every one of Molina’s songs sounds finished—these are complete thoughts. The melancholy “Can’t Believe” moves through a whole sunset of tonal hues; it’s the shortest song Teenage Fanclub never wrote. Another highlight, “Don’t Come Back”, begins as a pop-punk song, ramps up to a bubblegum-hardcore breakdown, and then ends in a blaze of of signal flare riffage. It works because it’s confident, polished, and deftly executed—not in spite of any of these facts. Combining near-comic concision and hi-fi production lets Molina have the best of both worlds: These songs have a slacker sensibility, but they’re not afraid of occasional brushes with virtuosity.
Dissed and Dismissed ends just before it starts to feel formulaic. Molina’s not reinventing the wheel here, but a guy who’s clever and/or self-deprecating enough to screenprint photos of Thin Lizzy on his “Tony Molina Tour 2013” t-shirts is probably not bothered by that. These songs are too satisfying to make their limits feel like gimmicks. Only time will tell if Molina pushes beyond the stylistic boundaries he’s created for himself here. His next record comes out later this year. Maybe it’ll hit the 15-minute mark. | 2014-03-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-03-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | March 25, 2014 | 7.5 | 934b0d7d-27f4-4680-b767-a462f3aa394c | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The former Walkmen member wrote each of these songs about a specific person, forming an archive of memories that comes alive in his elevated songcraft and dynamic voice. | The former Walkmen member wrote each of these songs about a specific person, forming an archive of memories that comes alive in his elevated songcraft and dynamic voice. | Hamilton Leithauser: The Loves of Your Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hamilton-leithauser-the-loves-of-your-life/ | The Loves of Your Life | In a goofy teaser clip for his new album, Hamilton Leithauser seems to state the obvious: “Writing and recording music by yourself can be lonely.” This is only the former Walkman’s second solo record, following 2014’s Black Hours and a collaborative LP with Rostam. But The Loves of Your Life is far from a solitary work; it is filled with people—both those firmly planted in Leithauser’s world, and those who’ve wandered through by chance. Each of its 11 songs was written about a specific person, and while some names and details have changed, the album is a celebration of community and the relationships that make one possible. It’s an archive of memories that comes alive with the help of Leithauser’s elevated songcraft and dynamic voice.
Leithauser’s recording process likewise embraced community. Alongside pros like pianist Jon Batiste and pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg, you’ll find Leithauser’s wife Anna Stumpf, their daughters Georgiana and Frederika, and the girls’ former preschool teacher, Lacrisha Brown, all credited for backing vocals. Leithauser layers their voices expertly throughout the record, in melodies that breeze around the songs and occasionally build into a full-bodied choir. He plays tricks with his own vocals as well, burying muted harmonies and delayed echoes around the edges of the mix. On the brooding “Til Your Ship Comes In,” his voice is in full force, hitting a high Rod Stewart rasp in the chorus and warbling out like warped tape elsewhere.
The Loves of Your Life examines an assortment of relationships for which Leithauser conveys deep affection. He loves these characters and wants to understand them, even on “Here They Come,” about a friend hiding from reality in the darkness of the Union Square cinema, or “Isabella,” about a “wide-eyed” Manhattan party girl who dropped out of college long ago. The skyward melodies of “Isabella” mimic the muse: a hopeless romantic staving off adulthood with endless late nights. Leithauser doesn’t denounce Isabella, but attempts to comprehend her dreams, her loneliness. “I wanna be there with her,” he sings, “’til they all go riding home.” The coda grows and grows, Leithauser’s in-house choir lifting it up until it floats away.
On “Til Your Ship Comes In,” the sense of being surrounded by familiar faces feels like an intervention; anyone who’s dealt with a self-destructive friend or relative will recognize the theme. “You’re kidding me, right?/With that dot in your eye,” Leithauser growls, watching police lights flash in the street. The layers of vocal tracks have an encircling effect: The subject is locked in a room with people who care too much to let them out. “Everybody wants you in a different way,” Leithauser sings. A dozen voices strong, the refrain feels particularly indicting: “We call you by a different name.”
Leithauser’s knack for melody is stronger than ever, particularly on “Isabella” and the big, bittersweet “Wack Jack,” which chronicles an unresolved conflict that drove one party to walk out for good. Caleb Cressman sits in on pedal steel and Batiste lays down a nimble solo, but Leithauser does the rest: drums, bass, guitar, mandolin, synthesizers, Wurlitzer, and vocals. “‘Years from today, when your name is just a name/And my love is a couple candles, twinkling on your cake,’” Leithauser sings, quoting the lost friend’s parting words, “‘That burn won’t hurt you anymore/But I’ll still keep your picture lying in a drawer.’” It’s the kind of remark that ends fights instantly: calm, vicious, poignant.
The Loves of Your Life feels like a neighborhood that’s deeply familiar, yet so packed with life that new details emerge on each stroll. You’ll find rainbows streaking through oily puddles, lipstick-kissed cups, breeze-blown magazines, a glossy red Silverado. If you walk long enough, you’ll also get to know the people that live there. Leithauser would like you to meet them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Glassnote | April 14, 2020 | 7.6 | 934b7185-2c01-493d-ba4e-39786cb2c637 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Beneath the thick veneer of droll affectation, this London-via-Scunthorpe band writes with uncommon poignancy about the nature of art, ambition, and success. | Beneath the thick veneer of droll affectation, this London-via-Scunthorpe band writes with uncommon poignancy about the nature of art, ambition, and success. | Blue Bendy: So Medieval | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blue-bendy-so-medieval/ | So Medieval | In a parallel universe—one where indie rock reigns supreme and continually seeks out poets of deadpan absurdism—critics are already celebrating So Medieval like a promising novelist’s debut splash. The blurb touts “a tale of musical ambition and romantic anguish, told through continental capers involving raw halloumi, a Formula One audiobook, and the ‘shitpost sagas’ of once-in-a-generation voice Arthur Nolan.” Our expectations are pegged to Blue Bendy’s chatty UK peers—Dry Cleaning, Squid, et al.—then sharply raised as we learn the band has “coined a formally daring new language,” perhaps positioned “between the indie disco and the next morning’s social media scroll.” Emblazoned on the back cover of this literary-musical opus are quotes from Jarvis Cocker, Yung Lean, and for some reason Zadie Smith.
In reality, the vagaries of hype have mostly eluded this London-via-Scunthorpe band, which says a little about their admittedly niche appeal and a little more about the British music media’s imperiled hype apparatus. Thankfully, the lack of actual acclaim has done nothing to deter Nolan from flooding his songs with gnomic brags, eccentric alter egos, and the non sequiturs that are his loopy lingua franca. Blue Bendy’s debut EP, 2022’s Motorbike, was two years late for the critics’ anointing of monologue-rock darlings, but unified just enough inputs to feel dizzyingly new: handclap indie-pop swarmed by Warp-inspired synth ad-libs and a preponderance of too-online slang. Fretting he might be “the only one swagging in the deep,” in a world “powered by Unreal Engine,” Nolan presented a persona akin to the Wedding Present’s David Gedge getting initiated into Drain Gang during a game of Fortnite Squads.
With So Medieval, Blue Bendy return to the province of realism, using their underdog status as a springboard to defiant, high-stakes art-rock. The story loosely follows a “memelord type” narrator throwing it all in for the band after a rough breakup. His chronicles of misery and mischief can rise to emotional rapture (Nolan calls this “dying on the mic”) or plunge into endearing hysteria, as on “Mr. Bubblegum”: “I can handle being the third-best guitar band in London,” he cries, “but baby, just let me be first at something.” Neither the melodrama nor the hubris are lost on the 27-year-old frontman, who takes a moment, on “I’m Sorry I Left Him to Bleed,” to reassure us he is in on the joke: “I’ll get better somehow/But for now I’m just the boy/You made feel like Kendall Roy—wow.”
When he is not wowing his own zingers, Nolan writes touchingly about life in a band seized by music’s contradictory demands: Success is important because it lets you make more art; art is important because it has nothing to do with success. On “Cloudy,” Nolan dramatizes the grind through a series of absurd quibbles (“I’ve got beef with a monkey account”) and indignant pleas (“We’ve been struggling for miles/Where are my memetic flowers?”) in a tone so relentlessly silly you sense he is desperately serious. The band sounds embroiled in the same scrap for a shot at majesty, sharing the Black Country, New Road playbook of minimalist-classical hooks scaled for folk-pop magnitude. The precious and grandiose converge throughout the album, each part a foil to Nolan’s dual personality. Guitarists Joe Nash and Harrison Charles slingshot between folksy humility and post-rock gusto, while synth whiz Olivia Morgan alternates sly Stereolab filigree with baroque-pop extravagance.
Nolan recently told The Quietus his “favorite role to play is drunken self-importance,” entreating us to take his voluble first-person with a pinch of salt. But an unmistakable air of ambition whistles through the album, from the forthright proclamations down to those quiet-quiet-loud structures and antic singalongs like “The Day I Said You’d Died (He Lives),” aptly described in its own lyrics as “a last big pump for the feels.” Perhaps to cover his tracks, Nolan satirizes this very ambition in such a way that pathos is never far behind. “Joe, pinch me,” he sings on “Mr. Bubblegum.” “We’re in the hands of Zara’s styling team.” Ambition, in this case, to be dressed by Britain’s twelfth-favorite clothing retailer. “Darp 2 / Exorcism” at first sounds like a fatalistic climate anthem—“It’s the car, it’s the planet, it’s everything/Come along if you’re sad to be seen”—but appears, upon inspection, to largely concern the indignity of getting dumped.
This nearly irritating self-awareness—in tandem with a lack of any edifying message—is a large part of Blue Bendy’s unlikely appeal. Nolan’s bandmates have said the lyrics are secretly “all very on the nose,” which to me suggests some of the formal abstractions and mustache-twirling metatextuality might be a cover for roguish misdeeds. But in the yarn of a Blue Bendy song, the cheeky flâneur and would-be bastard can comfortably live under one hat.
At the climax of “Cloudy,” Nolan’s narrator quits his day job for the band and alights on the slightest and sweetest of brags: “Please, for me, don’t cry,” he trills. “I made it all the way up here to the microphone, didn’t I?” Even if Blue Bendy are not to be chosen ones—are angling for little more than a perilous existence in indie-pop’s margins—Nolan suggests plugging away at a dream is a righteous pursuit of its own. This is a nice idea that he immediately flips upside-down, skipping into the sunset with a comically cynical coda: “Write a song, write a song, write a song… to drive to!” On paper, the notion of a Blue Bendy hatchback anthem sounds ludicrous. But as the band settles into its begrudging largesse, Nolan sounds, for a moment, as if he has made it. | 2024-04-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | The state51 Conspiracy | April 16, 2024 | 8 | 9350be5e-0871-4fd9-9c48-e1eb5264c0c1 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
This deluxe reissue is the holy grail that fans of Tim have dreamt of: a new mix that instantly becomes the best and most definitive album in the Replacements’ catalog. | This deluxe reissue is the holy grail that fans of Tim have dreamt of: a new mix that instantly becomes the best and most definitive album in the Replacements’ catalog. | The Replacements: Tim (Let It Bleed Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-replacements-tim-let-it-bleed-edition/ | Tim (Let It Bleed Edition) | By late 1984, the Replacements were transforming from a shoddy Minneapolis barroom punk band into the biggest prospect in the underground alternative rock scene. They had just released their third album, Let It Be, a title that both paid homage to and took the piss out of the Beatles, which, you could say, basically summed up the Replacements’ whole thing. Whereas the Mats always hated things like parents and school and loved things like beer and getting fucked up, Let It Be offered a wider range of dynamics, tempos, and chord progressions in its nuanced songs about gender, longing, and frustration. (This was amid the joke songs about tonsils and boners.) The perfect “I Will Dare” adopted the jangle-pop shuffle coming out of the UK, the smokey “Androgynous” is glam rock without the stomp, and the spare coda, “Answering Machine,” is a yearning electric folk song, essentially the first solo Paul Westerberg track ever recorded under the banner of the Replacements.
Except for rock purist Steve Albini, who loved their snotty lo-fi records but soon found the Replacements “irrevocably lost in the maudlin cabaret of Westerberg’s folk music blatherings,” critics adored Let It Be, ranking it No. 4 in that year’s Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll. It sold well, attracted offers from major labels, and has long been regarded as, if not the best Mats album, then the most authentic Mats album. It was the pivotal moment before they “went pop” and signed to Sire, before unhinged guitarist Bob Stinson was drastically sidelined, before Westerberg took the reins of the Mats and set out to launder the strains of traditional pop through his drunken band of losers. Let It Be was a live wire, the product of four childhood friends who never graduated high school or got driver’s licenses, whose innate talent was matched only by two things: their fear of success and their desire to drown that fear in a case of Schlitz.
In comes this essential reissue of the Mats’ fourth album, 1985’s Tim, to trouble the entire narrative. The toast of this box set—which, like Let It Be, also cribs its name from a far more successful album—is an unbelievable new remix of Tim that doesn’t just challenge the notion that Let It Be was the Replacements at their peak, but usurps it to become the best and most definitive album in their catalog. Helmed by famed Ramones engineer Ed Stasium, the remix is jaw-dropping: Gone is Tim’s muddy sound, the tinny reverb on Chris Mars’ drums, and the thin low-end that masked Tommy Stinson’s bass. Every instrument is louder and closer, the mix is much more spread out, Westerberg’s sneakily complicated rhythm playing and chord voicing comes into sharp focus, and there are even a few extra Bob solos. If the previous treatments of Pleased to Meet Me and Don’t Tell a Soul were welcome surprises, this is the holy grail that fans have dreamt of. Finally, no more of the obligatory caveats about production that have plagued the album for almost four decades.
It’s now abundantly clear, both in sound and performance, that Tim is really among the best albums ever recorded…ex post facto. It’s the apex of the Mats, how they should have sounded, how they did sound, how they should be remembered sounding. As diverse as it is dynamic, Tim is full of diamond-sharp songs about the mess of young love, old love, loneliness, dead-end jobs, amphetamines, and alcohol. Rarely does a remix raise a crucial epistemological question about a small Midwestern rock band who would stumble through a bunch of pop and country covers if the audience asked them to play their “pussy set,” but here we are: Should this new remix be considered the real and definitive version of Tim?
Like the CIA one day revealing who really and definitively killed Kennedy, I’d argue it’s complicated. Here is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Replacements: They were drunks and losers because their press releases said they were drunks and losers. So they wore the mask, played the clowns, and became lost in the version of themselves that got banned from SNL, didn’t play ball with the label, showed up wrecked to gigs, put out a mix of Tim that the band themselves didn’t much like, sabotaged their career at every turn, and by the late ’80s softly melted into a Westerberg solo project. Even if Westerberg thought he could be as big as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—or even contemporaries who caught major label deals like R.E.M.—there was always some Midwestern fatalism dragging him down. He led a band caught in a perpetual cycle of fear, self-loathing, drinking, and destruction that amassed a cult fan base who loved them precisely because of this cycle. If you saw a Mats show, you knew they weren’t ever going to be superstars, but a part of you knew that the Mats were right and everyone else was wrong.
The reason this Let It Bleed Edition tastes bittersweet is not because of what should’ve been, but what could never have been. The box set—which also features a re-mastering of the original mix, demos from an aborted session with Westerberg’s hero, Big Star’s Alex Chilton, a pretty good live set recorded at Chicago’s Metro, and extensive liner notes from Mats biographer, archivist, and compatriot Bob Mehr—is another path not taken by a band defined by and loved for its wrong decisions. The Replacements were so innately talented and alluring that they should have been playing arenas and climbing the charts every year, but then they wouldn’t have been the Replacements. Tim, especially this remix of Tim, offers a painful glimpse at a butterfly effect, one where the Mats were maybe slightly more put-together, had a slightly larger audience, and Westerberg was slightly more recognized as one of the best songwriters of his generation.
Among Westerberg’s afflictions were his congenitally malformed pinkies, a condition called clinodactyly, which forced the self-taught guitarist to write in open tunings. There was also something wrong with the ulnar nerves in his arms that caused him pain every time he bent his elbows, which prevented him from being too showy of a player. His infamously excessive drinking aggravated his pleurisy—the same chronic illness Tennessee Williams gave to the frail young Laura Wingfield in his 1944 play The Glass Menagerie—which shredded the singer’s voice just as it was borne from his inflamed lungs. But chief among Westerberg’s afflictions was being a burnout punk who loved the ornate elegance of pop music and the slick sound of ’70s AM Gold.
“Little Mascara,” an underrated song toward the end of Tim, is a blueprint for modern pop songwriting, worthy of rigorous study by anyone looking to understand what gives a pop song momentum and what keeps a listener engaged from measure to measure. Inspired by Southern gothic stories like those of Williams and Flannery O’Connor, “Little Mascara” was the first fictional character study in the Mats catalog. The bouncy mid-tempo number describes a struggling mother pining for the love she deserves from the deadbeat father, left always with only a little mascara running down her cheek.
But the beauty of “Little Mascara” is what’s under its hood. The intro is retrofitted to become the chorus, the second verse is half as long as the first (the canny move of songwriting committees everywhere), each pre-chorus is different, and each chorus ends better than the one before it: the first circles back to the verse, the second modulates into the bridge, and the third finally pays off with the climax. It’s the kind of thing that Carole King or Quincy Jones or Jack Antonoff would marvel at, and that’s just a few of the 50 tiny choices in “Little Mascara” that give it this narrative propulsion—a beginning, middle, and end just like the short story Westerberg tells in its lyrics.
The Ed Stasium remix of “Little Mascara” also contains the most drastic change from Tommy Ramone’s original mix. The outro is a whole minute longer, stretching out the climax into the fireworks of a lost Bob Stinson guitar solo. Bob, who still worked part-time as a line cook and would send out for drugs the few times he was in the studio, only ended up on a handful of Tim songs. The two written for Bob were once thought of as the album’s weakest: “Lay It Down Clown” and “Dose of Thunder,” the former about how Peter Buck of R.E.M. liked to score speed, the latter about scoring speed more generally. Once neutered and non-committal, the pair of rockers now sounds exciting and full-throated (and fascinatingly bizarre, like how “Lay It Down Clown” suddenly modulates keys in the chorus). For every attempt at sublime control on Tim, the Replacements—and specifically Bob—were still in danger of going off the rails.
The tension between danger and vulnerability is the crux of Tim. On the other side of the spectrum there’s “Swingin Party,” a wry, loungey ballad inspired a little by Rodgers and Hart, Nancy Sinatra, and a lot by Buffalo Springfield’s “Flying on the Ground.” (In Bob Mehr’s 2016 indispensable biography Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, Westerberg said of this song, “If you steal from everybody, nobody can put a finger on you.”) It’s become one of their biggest “hits” in the streaming era, thanks in part to Lorde’s version, a formidable match for Westerberg’s gothic humor. There’s also the unsparing “Here Comes a Regular,” the wrong kind of drinking song. Channeling the stasis inside local Minneapolis bars, Westerberg reluctantly recorded the track alone and cloistered away behind the studio’s sound bafflers. It’s cold and cutting, maybe the first time the mask of the Replacements really came off.
What remains so great about Tim, and is emphasized over and over again on this new remix, is how Westerberg delivers each song as if it’s the last thing he’s ever going to do. Wrapped up in the mythos of the Replacements is the idea that these are his last chances, a few final attempts to write the arena anthem or the greatest love song of all. The opening scream on “Bastards of Young” and its chorus—the Biblically inspired, often misheard “Wait on the sons of no one”—remain an undiminished gravitational force. Westerberg loves symmetry in his lyrics, too, giving them an aphoristic quality while singing as if his mouth is filling with blood. “The ones who love us best/Are the ones we lay to rest” is quickly followed by the gut-punch: “The ones who love us least/Are the ones we’ll die to please.” But just as foundational to Tim is “Left of the Dial,” which uses a song written by an old flame fading in and out of the radio as a symbol of transience, bliss, misfortune, and resignation. “Bastards” is a last-ditch effort at winning; “Left of the Dial” is that ghostly acceptance when you lose.
The original Tommy Ramone (née Erdelyi) mix of Tim still has a lot of character, charitably speaking, as the newly remastered version included in this box set shows. It’s not that it’s unlistenable, but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where you’d prefer to put it on over the Ed Stasium mix now. The Stasium mix sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, like Tommy is jumping around your living room and Westerberg is spilling beer on your carpet. It ranks high among the most revelatory revisionist looks at an album, up there with the release of Iggy Pop’s 1997 mix of Raw Power, or the Beatles’ 2003 stripped-down version of Let It Be, or even Metallica’s 2018 remaster of the notoriously muddy …And Justice for All. All three of those bands tower over the Replacements by several orders of magnitude, but in the fantasy world of alternate histories, you can imagine this version of Tim growing in estimation, another perfect, pathetic twist of fate for the Mats.
Outside of the live show here—its quality somewhere between the rip-roarin’ Live at Maxwell’s 1986 and the hissy bootleg of their 1984 CBGB showcase catastrophe—the last missing piece of Tim is “Can’t Hardly Wait.” Though it eventually appeared as a suited-up standard complete with a bandstand of horns on 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me, Westerberg worked on the song all throughout Tim’s recording process and was unsatisfied with every version he tried. There are several takes and demos of “Can’t Hardly Wait” included here, including two that were previously released, and a new acoustic rendition featuring cellist Michelle Kinney, who was then the studio manager where the Mats were recording. But listening to a new alternative mix of the “‘Tim’ Version,” hearing the same vim and vigor as the Stasium mix, is devastating, like watching a replay of refs blowing a call that cost your team the game. This was the single, this was the hit, the song that could maybe could have changed everything. Why did they have to lose? “Our ambition is to be the biggest worst band in the world,” Tommy Stinson once said. Here’s their very last chance. | 2023-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | September 23, 2023 | 10 | 93569317-1b79-457e-a485-ae5163f8979e | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
Highly promising young songwriter continues to show why he's one of chillwave's rising stars. | Highly promising young songwriter continues to show why he's one of chillwave's rising stars. | Washed Out: Life of Leisure EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13438-life-of-leisure-ep/ | Life of Leisure EP | Did our parents give us too much self-esteem? Not that long ago, message boarders could diss and dismiss boring new bands (insert your least favorite post-punk revivalists here) for sounding like "a copy of a copy of a copy." Fast forward just a few years, and that's exactly what some of the most exciting new bands sound like.
Pastiche and intertextuality are as ancient as postmodernism-- not to mention disco, hip-hop, and the remix-- but childhood memories, in particular, are present now like never before. Today's blockbuster movies are based on yesterday's beloved toys; today's wars and political battles are sequels, too. It isn't surprising that music would reflect the zeitgeist. What's striking is how an international cohort of rising artists has successfully translated this culture of watery VCR transfers and Fisher-Price cassette rips into 1980s-inspired psychedelic music.
Names like Ducktails, Reading Rainbow, VEGA, Pocahaunted, and, especially, Memory Tapes tell you a lot about where these disparate reminiscers are coming from. Arguably, more than genre tags like "glo-fi" or The Wire critic David Keenan's "hypnagogic pop," but those labels can be useful, too. Washed Out, the solo project of Georgia (via South Carolina) multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene, fits in almost too well with the balmy lo-fi synth atmospherics of peers like Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Small Black, the higher-fi jj, or the darker, heavier SALEM, as well as the more guitar-based Real Estate, Best Coast, and Pearl Harbour. Washed Out's debut Life of Leisure EP, out digitally now and on 12" early next month (another release, the cassette-only High Times, arrived September 15), isn't at the top of its class, but Greene so far is one of this fledgling aesthetic's most gifted students.
Focusing on romantic nostalgia and homespun textures, Life of Leisure does with 80s soft rock and synth-pop what Glass Candy and Chromatics did with Italo disco a couple of years ago, only Washed Out evokes summer afternoons indoors rather than the Italians Do It Better crew's early-a.m. urban stalking. Out-of-sync PBS-theme synths and videogame lasers meet funky horn breaks on opener "Get Up", as Greene's slurry vocals suggest deep pain. A sampled sax sighs mournfully behind a chopped-up voice, Cut Copy-pasteable beats, and some more indistinct singing on "Lately". Life of Leisure's six tracks, whether poppier and more approachable like "New Theory", or moody and alarming like "Hold Out", tend to cut off suddenly, which gives the EP an appealing, unfinished quality. Like hearing a work in progress: Greene has only been making music under his current moniker for a couple of months, so don't come flaming me if his live shows suck or his Dave Fridmann-produced sophomore album flops in 2013.
More than some contemporaries, though, Washed Out submerges a sense of intense feeling within its 80s-fantasy electronic ether. Greene's "copy of a copy" distance, then, comes across as a form of emotional repression. The yearning-in-utero effect is strongest on woozy centerpiece "Feel It All Around". With blurry singing, cheap-sounding synths, and a humid, syrupy flow, the track suggests an 80s synth pop hit that won't come straight out and cop to itself-- or a young man in love, too tongue-tied (or too stoned?) to admit it. "You feel it all around yourself," Greene echoes. As for what "it" is, the song never says.
If this review itself reads like a "memory of a memory" (to sample another phrase from Keenan), blame "Feel It All Around". Days after the filing of a final draft packed with trenchant insights drawn from the similarities between the track's choral drone and 10cc's 1975 hit "I'm Not in Love", it came to light that Washed Out's signature tune is actually based around a loop from Gary Low's 1983 single "I Want You". The words you're reading changed; the rating didn't. "You're soooooo... fine," it sounds like Greene's finally able to bring himself to say on finale "You'll See It", one of the EP's loveliest and most tuneful tracks; "Don't you fight it." OK, I have to go fast-forward through NutraSweet and Sylvania commercials to watch the TV movie of Alice in Wonderland with Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle now. | 2009-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer | September 16, 2009 | 8 | 9356f933-e0eb-4844-a94e-35f82aaa2538 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On her second album, the mysterious Brooklyn rapper begins to pull back the mask with vivid reporting about the trials and triumphs of her home and the resilience of black womanhood. | On her second album, the mysterious Brooklyn rapper begins to pull back the mask with vivid reporting about the trials and triumphs of her home and the resilience of black womanhood. | Leikeli47: Acrylic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leikeli47-acrylic/ | Acrylic | No one ever sees Leikeli47 unmasked. The omnipresent balaclava or bandana of the Brooklyn-bred rapper may bring to mind Pussy Riot, with whom she once collaborated, or MF DOOM, who she has cited as a forebear. The enigma helped make her 2017 major-label debut, Wash & Set, a thrilling curio that hinged on a sleek, shadowy mix of rap, house, neo-soul, R&B, and dancehall. “I don’t rock with you, homie/I don’t go out my circle,” she chanted menacingly on “O.M.C.,” a gothic highlight. Leikeli has shouted out Grace Jones in song, proclaimed “Kelis is god/So is Beyoncé,” and anointed herself “notorious in Brooklyn, just like Biggie.” Still, despite the references and boasts, Leikeli remains slyly unpinned and underground.
Leikeli’s second LP is called Acrylic, a substance that is at once feminine—in relation to long, polished nails—and resilient. “When you smell the acrylic, you know just where you are,” she recently said. “You know you’re in the hood.” Acrylic celebrates black life and black love with song-length homages to her native Bed-Stuy and the person she became there. Leikeli shouts out Brownsville with spitfire tenacity on the standout “Iron Mike” and nods to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station on a lovers-rock-tinged ballad of subway romance. Her flow is always gripping, her details novelistic: An aunt sells candy from a windowpane, an extension cord snakes across a hallway, and the lights flicker in an E train tunnel.
Acrylic is also a matriarchy, populated by independent women raising children alone. The album’s opening sketch, “Walk-Ins Welcome,” delineates a clear line between the abrasive man in his ride and the woman he’s dropping at a salon busy with “appointments on my line/nail trappin’ Cinderellas.” The song conjures an army of Leikelis rapping in schoolyard solidarity “bout that bag,” snapping their glittery fingers together. Though the subsequent title track feels delightfully campy and of a piece with “Walk-Ins,” it’s also about racist cops pulling up to her block, mocking them if only in tone. “Acrylic” adds immediate realism to an album that, in turn, reflects on the crisis of toxic water (“We don’t need to be shot up to be filled with lead”) and the perseverance that being surrounded by gun violence and drugs necessitates. On the hushed and vulnerable “Droppin’,” Leikeli raps, “I got a story to tell... I’m the baby from the dumpster.”
Still, Acrylic is wildly fun. “Girl Blunt,” which has rattled on Issa Rae’s HBO comedy “Insecure,” is a trap anthem for a generation of stoner girls “on the honor roll.” The minimally ecstatic “Full Set (A New Style)” reworks an iconic ballroom sample into a fierce loop, and the runway banger “Post That” reimagines the severe poses of voguing within self-loving selfie culture. “The way she make them angles hit/She like Bill Cunningham with dat shit,” Leikeli raps, velvet-smooth, referencing The New York Times’ late street-fashion great before name-checking photographers Richard Avedon, Andrew Dosunmu, Herb Ritts, and (with effusive joy) “Anniieee Leibovitzzzz!” Bar after bar, Leikeli is composed and cool, with subtle sugar and swag.
Across 19 tracks, Acrylic sometimes becomes exhaustively long, distracting from highlights like the grandiose, lushly produced “Roll Call.” At the center of Acrylic, it’s a meticulous ode to historically black colleges in America: “Drumline always there when we need ’em/Howard Homecoming, where we meet up,” Leikeli raps, shouting out HBCU attendees from Thurgood Marshall to Erykah Badu. Its marching-band bravado and awe-inspiring scope suggest Beyoncé’s festival-set-cum-high-art performance at Coachella in miniature.
The art for Leikeli’s “Roll Call” single included a Malcolm X quote—“The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”—on a handmade sign, plastered to the front of a nail salon in East Flatbush that was protested after footage emerged of its staff assaulting black customers. Despite near-total anonymity, Leikeli47 is becoming a resounding voice of black womanhood. By Acrylic’s end, she raps with Nicki-like, upticking swagger: “Chewing gum, chewing gum, chew/Why would I say what I could just do?” Without providing easy answers, she leaves a trail of clues. Slowly, steadily, she pulls back the mask. | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Hardcover / RCA | November 26, 2018 | 7.6 | 935b0058-c22a-405f-b8f3-868eb83e6a72 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The long-delayed second album from Tinashe includes a handful of bulletproof bops but has arrived as a fragmented vision of the popstar’s many talents. | The long-delayed second album from Tinashe includes a handful of bulletproof bops but has arrived as a fragmented vision of the popstar’s many talents. | Tinashe: Joyride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tinashe-joyride/ | Joyride | Tinashe first announced Joyride back three years ago. It was right after the release of her major-label debut, Aquarius, an ambitious statement of dance pop, experimental R&B, and understated ballads that allowed her personality to shine through it all. Since then, her airy soprano was a proven vessel for Top 40 fodder, and her music videos and live shows revealed a performer in the mold of pop music’s greats, some of whom have gone on to tacitly acknowledge her as such. Joyride, then, would ideally nudge Tinashe closer toward becoming the household name that her unflappable single “2 On” and her telegenic charm all but fated her to be.
And yet. Following an elongated stretch of PR nightmares, canceled tours, and a stopgap companion mixtape, Joyride arrives with less than half of the seven singles released in promotion for it. This is a partial blessing—a clean slate was necessary after misfires like the grossly misjudged Chris Brown feature “Player,” or last year’s stilted and label-mandated pop ballad “Flame.” But in keeping with its confused rollout, Joyride stands as a fragmented vision of Tinashe’s talents, roving between forward-thinking R&B, paint-by-number pop, and airless filler with little sense of direction.
But this is still a Tinashe album, and those don’t come without some bulletproof bops. She takes center stage on “Ooh La La,” which coasts on a sample of Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s 2002 slow jam “Dilemma.” The track’s recurring squeak of a mattress and bump-and-grind beat make for a breezy, summer-primed R&B sex song that’s among her best. Joyride succeeds elsewhere when it draws from the same hypnagogic R&B that once earned her praise, like on the floaty, seductive “He Don’t Want It” and the So So Def-indebted deep cut “No Contest.”
The brooding title track, meanwhile, fleshed out with spacious production and a dramatic strings outro, is one of the most complex arrangements ever to appear on a Tinashe song. It was the impetus for the album—one that Rihanna momentarily purchased as an option for Anti while Joyride was in A&R purgatory. It’s stacked with an all-echoed-vocals chorus, menacingly delivered verses, and cavernous drums, nodding to Kanye’s Yeezus as much as Rihanna’s Rated R. It could have easily set the tone for an album of darkly experimental of pop-R&B, brazen and at the vanguard.
Instead, Joyride simply treads water. The dancehall confection “Me So Bad,” with a crooning Ty Dolla $ign and lazily on-brand French Montana, is the upbeat, just-fine radio grab that just might blare out of cars all summer. But in context, the song sounds like it was beamed in from a different album altogether. Lead single “No Drama”’s brash, rapped verses and lopsided beat flag it as a successor to the no-fucks pomp of “2 On,” only this time it’s hobbled by a dismal Offset verse and a joyless, repetitive chorus. The album feels flattened in a way that does Tinashe a disservice; her usual free-flowing variety of styles and textures feels oddly at a distance among Joyride’s grab bag.
The disjointedness is a shame, because Tinashe’s voice throughout remains as syrupy and adaptable as ever: She climbs to the highest reaches of her falsetto on “He Don’t Want It” and later drops to a deep, grainy tone on the hard-bitten, electric-guitar ballad “Salt.” In both instances, she sounds relaxed, even soulful. The artistry of her voice lies in those moments of versatility and charisma, but they’re too isolated across Joyride to land with the kind of impact they deserve. | 2018-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | April 19, 2018 | 6.8 | 935ba893-8b56-4b55-ba2f-951902d5b9a2 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Beauty and chaos intermingle in these early-1970s touchstones of avant-garde folk. The French-Portuguese singer’s unearthly voice and searching lyrics made them cult classics. | Beauty and chaos intermingle in these early-1970s touchstones of avant-garde folk. The French-Portuguese singer’s unearthly voice and searching lyrics made them cult classics. | Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes: N°2/Âme Debout/Paix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/catherine-ribeiro-alpes-n2ame-deboutpaix/ | N°2/Âme Debout/Paix | The first three records by the French-Portuguese singer Catherine Ribeiro and her inventive, psychedelic backing band Alpes are the types of elusive record-collector gems that feel like transmissions from another world. These new reissues from Anthology Recordings mark their first official release in the United States, and, up until now, their legend was due in part to their scarcity. Kim Gordon, one of Ribeiro’s most vocal supporters, recently noted that she only discovered Alpes’ 1971 sophomore album, Âme Debout, around a decade ago, possibly hipped to it by Jim O’Rourke. A lot of people arrive at Ribeiro’s music with similar stories. You hear this unearthly voice emerging from somebody’s speakers. You listen to the wild, visionary music accompanying it. Suddenly you need to know everything.
Ask Ribeiro, and you won’t find many answers. The accompanying liner notes sketch her life prior to Alpes’ debut, 1970’s Nº2, in stark terms: “It was an immense pile of waste and solitude,” is how she summarizes her formative years. In her 1999 memoir, L’Enfance, Ribeiro dives deeper. She was born in Lyon, France during wartime. Her brother died as an infant. She spent an inordinate amount of her youth hiding in the darkness of a makeshift bomb cellar. Before she immersed herself in music, Ribeiro was an actor, appearing in Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 anti-war film Les Carabiniers. In her most memorable scene, she watches her soldier husband display a series of surreal, beatific postcards from the war. The message was simple: Look how we suppress and miscast the brutality of our lives; look how we reenact that violence on others. Ribeiro swore to never make this mistake in her art.
With Alpes, Ribeiro filtered nihilism, anger, and empathy into triumphant, multi-layered collages, galloping and stuttering as though the acid had kicked in midway through a hike at sunrise. “Peace to those who howl because they see clearly,” goes one of her iconic lyrics. Ribeiro does just that, but her voice is such a versatile instrument that it cannot be limited to one mission. She laughs, she caws, she screams, she mourns, she barks, she brays. She sings about suicide, about motherhood and madness, about doomed affairs between Eastern European women and politicians from imagined countries. The music—which calcified into the sound of an identifiable avant-garde-leaning psych-folk band throughout these three LPs—touches on the swirl of 1960s rock and the theatrical swell of 1970s prog, stretching both genres to their most impressionistic extremes. As a group, Alpes can sound eerily beautiful or demonically possessed, sometimes whiplashing between those modes as if satirizing the entire scope of rock music.
Prior to the formation of Alpes, Ribeiro mostly sang folk songs. Among her first recordings was a French translation of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” In her home country, where solo singers were still more fashionable than bands, she summoned a backing group called 2Bis, featuring multi-instrumentalist Patrice Moullet. Their music rattled and buzzed like something wild in a too-small cage: You could hear Ribeiro trying to break free. When she rebranded as Alpes, Ribeiro fully embraced chaos. Nº2’s “Poème Non Epique” spans 18 minutes as she intones with ferocity against Moullet’s rumbling backdrop. Inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (and the hallucinogens Lowry reportedly ingested to complete it), Ribeiro aimed to make music that spoke to her “cravings for freedom, for incomplete epiphanies, for spontaneous careless decisions.” Smoky and uncontainable, Nº2 finds her embarking on that journey like she’d been waiting her whole life to take it.
From here, her music would grow more disciplined and more boundless. Moullet would remain the only consistent member of her band, alternating between gorgeously fingerpicked classical guitar and noisy, invented instruments like his “cosmophone,” which looks like a lyre but sounds like a buzzsaw. Âme Debout, the sparsest release of the three, peaks with its ballads at the beginning and end: “Diborowska” and “Dingue,” acoustic laments that Ribeiro sings in a frayed, desperate tone like she’s trying to tear them apart from the inside. At the center of the album is a series of tracks titled “Alpes” that feel improvisatory, almost drone-like, save for one thrashing element (Claude Thiebaut’s restless percussion in “Alpes 1,” Ribeiro’s unsettling growls in “Alpes 2”). The crescendo resolves with the wordless “Aria Populaire,” a prayer that forecasts the emotional clarity to come.
If Âme Debout was the sound of a band finding its footing, then 1972’s Paix is when they become airborne. It stands as Ribeiro’s masterpiece because it comes the closest to containing her multitudes, housing her most beautiful composition (the love song “Jusqu'à Ce Que La force de T'aimer Me Manque”) and her most wildly experimental. The music is driven by an incessant rhythm, echoed by Patrice Lemoine of the prog/space-rock band Gong on organ (maybe the sound that most directly time-stamps this music to its era). Throughout, Ribeiro gazes toward the future. The final third of the epic title track resembles doom metal in its descending bassline and Ribeiro’s spectral vocals. But instead of building to a roar, it simply sustains, melting into the closing “Un jour... la mort”—a nearly half-hour piece that’s alternately ambient and explosive, earthy and weightless.
For all its hallucinogenic qualities, Ribeiro’s work, as you dive deeper, proves to be less of an escape than a magnification: She zooms so deep into her psyche that all its turmoil appears as stillness. Unlike some cult acts, Ribeiro’s career has continued long after these quietly influential albums. Among her later recordings are faithful covers of Edith Piaf’s songbook: music that, even at its most traditional, Ribeiro can’t help but scour for its latent mayhem. Listening back to her early work, you can hear her challenging herself to find the darkness within traditionally beautiful sounds—the horror that’s always on the other side of awe. “Calm is not of this world,” she commands in “Dingue.” “What’s the point of being calm? I want to go crazy.” It’s the legacy she created, a mantra for the legions of disquieted minds who heard themselves in her voice and howled along. | 2018-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 15, 2018 | 8.3 | 935db03c-214d-4b16-8da6-d9b4a6ae6948 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Milk 'N' Cookies formed in the early 1970s in Woodmere, Long Island, a short drive from the bustling proto-punk scene in New York City. Their output, collected on this Captured Tracks anthology, was a precursor to U.S. power pop, and they helped create the "tough glam" aesthetic that continued to rear its sequined head from the New Romantics to hair metal to Britpop and beyond | Milk 'N' Cookies formed in the early 1970s in Woodmere, Long Island, a short drive from the bustling proto-punk scene in New York City. Their output, collected on this Captured Tracks anthology, was a precursor to U.S. power pop, and they helped create the "tough glam" aesthetic that continued to rear its sequined head from the New Romantics to hair metal to Britpop and beyond | Milk ‘N’ Cookies: Milk ‘N’ Cookies Box Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21485-milk-n-cookies-box-set/ | Milk ‘N’ Cookies Box Set | Music, the world's universal language, is for everybody. The music industry, however, is a loosely regulated crap shoot which, while occasionally lifting a creative genius to godlike status, leaves a trail of decimated bands under its boots. For every Nirvana, there are a dozen Mudhoneys; for every Marc Bolan there is a Jobriath; an artist of essentially equal opportunity that for whatever reason—timing, money, plain old shit luck—gets left behind on the path to superstardom. However, if those artists are lucky, they can accumulate years and years of goodwill among music fans who excavate and polish these diamonds in the rough.
Milk 'N' Cookies are the latest such group to benefit from this history-revising eye. They formed in the early 1970s in Woodmere, Long Island, a short drive from the bustling proto-punk scene in New York City, where the New York Dolls reigned supreme and their brand of glam-influenced gutter rock was already beginning to burn out under its own brilliance. While most of the local bands around them were steeped in stadium rock, Milk 'N' Cookies, still in their teens, decided to record 4-track songs influenced by the British glitter rock of the era—T. Rex, Bowie, Sweet, Roxy Music, et al.—and perhaps unwittingly became precursors to U.S. power pop. They have a major hand in creating the "tough glam" aesthetic, a sort of blend of UK androgyny, N.Y. grit and L.A. glamour that continued to rear its sequined head from the New Romantics to hair metal to Britpop, and beyond.
In their very first photo shoot, Milk 'N' Cookies sport long manes of brown hair, wearing novelty bowties and clutching teddy bears, yet the songs compiled on their first LP, reissued here by Captured Tracks, are all about girls, sex, and letting loose, still slightly scandalous subjects for suburban America at that point. Frontman Justin Strauss uses a sing-song, breathy voice, like a lovesick schoolboy taunting his crush on the playground. It's not emasculating at all, more of an assertion of desire that makes every Milk 'N' Cookies song seem ripped from a teenager's diary (which they very well may have been).
Somewhat self-prophesying, "(Dee Dee You're) Stuck on a Star" addresses a girlfriend more interested in chasing a famous popstar than seeing her boyfriend's band, and the song launches the compilation on a strong note, with searing riffs from the kind of super-dry guitars and wobbly bass that scream "'70s garage" to hardcore fans. The pop sensibility is immediate: Milk 'N' Cookies rarely lets up on powerful melodies, and it's a potent throwback to a time where bands put out albums in which literally every song could be a conceivable single. The band's only official single, the mid-tempo "Little, Lost and Innocent," coyly begins with the line "She was underage/ And so was I," which is so much more disarming when sang by well-scrubbed all-American boys who would not have looked out of place in the pages of a vintage Tiger Beat. The barely legal theme reaches its apex with "Rabbits Make Love," which even has a six-bar breakdown of heavy breathing by Strauss. Despite all this heavy panting, petting, and leering, Milk 'N' Cookies never feel sleazy, just funny and playful and sexy.
After a few years of delayed album releases and relocations to London and Los Angeles (the minutiae of which are rigorously documented in Milk 'N' Cookies' 60-page booklet), Milk 'N' Cookies star ultimately fizzled, which is a shame; tracks like "Just a Kid" and "Tinkertoy Tomorrow" are tight and delicious, and hint at a career that could have rivaled the best power pop bands of the decade. This career anthology is about as complete as a collection can get, compiling pretty much everything the band ever committed to tape. A few very rough demos by guitarist Ian North are concise and enjoyable, the kind of sound that indie pop bands like Television Personalities would release on purpose less than 10 years later. An entire surviving band practice tape from 1973 is also present, which is a little trying to get through, but there's also a scorching demo of a song called "Randy Slut," which rescues disc 2 from diehards-only purgatory. For the non-connoisseur, Milk 'N' Cookies may not hold an immediate appeal, but for even the most casual '70s rock enthusiast, this collection is nothing short of essential. | 2016-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | February 8, 2016 | 7.9 | 93635a9a-3f18-4a8f-bddc-fb799122c2a6 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Mark Kozelek’s latest diary entry of an album amounts to a rote and barely listenable slog of hackneyed impersonations, petty grievances, and prideful nostalgia. | Mark Kozelek’s latest diary entry of an album amounts to a rote and barely listenable slog of hackneyed impersonations, petty grievances, and prideful nostalgia. | Sun Kil Moon: This Is My Dinner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-kil-moon-this-is-my-dinner/ | This Is My Dinner | Someday soon, Mark Kozelek might write a gorgeous tune about exactly how miserable he has been for the last four years. In February 2014, Kozelek released Benji, an exquisite album that guided a lifetime of riverine melancholy into a pool of intimacy and empathy. He spun the details of his life into gold, turning idle thoughts about Led Zeppelin into an anthem for outsiders or a trip to a Postal Service show into a wry reflection on aging. The record sparked a renaissance for the former Red House Painter, who, in the previous decade, had made his most notable music by singing the songs of others.
Kozelek has long been notorious for scolding talkative crowds and fans who stared at their cell phones as he sang, but, amid that revival, something seemed to crack in an irreparable way. He soon called a North Carolina festival crowd hillbillies and demanded they shut the fuck up, sang new songs that called two female music journalists bitches for doing their jobs, and wrote a tune called ”War on Drugs: Suck My Cock” after he overheard what he dubbed their “beer-commercial lead-guitar shit” during his own festival set. Meanwhile, he made two new Sun Kil Moon albums that took the popularity of Benji as a license to tell us everything about his life. More diary extracts with soundtracks than proper albums, 2015’s Universal Themes and last year’s Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood were painfully mundane, non-transcendent documents of Kozelek’s touring existence and his confessed obsessions.
This Is My Dinner, Kozelek’s third album as Sun Kil Moon since Benji, is at once the apogee of that approach and the nadir of his career. It is a day-by-day, flight-by-flight, fit-by-fit chronicle of a 2017 European tour that amounts to a rote and barely listenable slog of hackneyed impersonations, petty grievances, and prideful nostalgia. Kozelek speaks, sings, and sighs 8,000 words across 90 minutes in an authoritative display of musical manspreading, built on Kozelek’s fundamental belief that everything that happens to him, from the disappointment of a canceled tour stop to the elation of great Italian food, is worthy of the world’s attention. Assuredly, it is not.
Kozelek isn’t the only songwriter who has had success with this mode of exhibitionist expression, of course, where the tiniest detail or circumstance plucked from day-to-day activity can offer an unexpected insight about life, loss, or emotion at large. After the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, Phil Elverum turned the act of taking out the day’s garbage into a moment of quiet desolation—and a jolting reminder as to why he had to keep going. Last year, Julie Byrne used the image of crossing the western United States to express a core of existential restlessness. Vivid songwriting, whether hip-hop or country, can hinge on these lived-in details. But during This Is My Dinner, Kozelek treats his songs like status updates on a Facebook account he again tells us he does not have. You often hear about bands leaving room for the singer, building up the lyrics rather than blocking them out. In this case, you wish that Kozelek had left any space at all for what sounds like a subtle, sophisticated backing crew, anchored by the expressive drumming of the Dirty Three’s Jim White. But, no: This is about Kozelek.
Recent themes return—Kozelek’s travels of Portugal and Norway, his anxiety over mass shootings, his subservience to his moods, how he understands pain better than the rest of us, his issues with his dad, how much meaning he extracts from boxers. What’s different here, though, is just how much we learn about Kozelek’s former virility and how losing it seems more bitter than sweet. He tells us about the time a promoter called him indie rock’s Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball star who claims to have slept with 20,000 women. He tries to dazzle with bygone tales of all the ménages à trois he’s had in Copenhagen and how he just doesn’t need them anymore. He vividly recounts escaping down frigid Oslo streets after a fan’s boyfriend caught her giving him a handjob and sucking his thumb. “When you’re in your 20s, in my opinion, nothing should be off limits,” Kozelek, 51, sings. Listening to This Is My Dinner is like going to a 25-year-high-school reunion and sitting beside the sad, divorced, and bloated former jock who tells you a dozen times about his game-winning touchdown at homecoming, then winks every time a pretty classmate walks by.
Not too long ago, the party line on Kozelek held that it would be beautiful enough to hear him sing the telephone book. Time and sadness had pockmarked his tenor in ways that conveyed hidden emotion in every word, the way music lurks in the recesses of a record. But here, amid this largely hook-less morass, he sings like even he’s worn out by this mode of maudlin revelation. During the 12-minute “Linda Blair,” he compares the sound of a sick baby on a plane to the possessed Exorcist character, wishes for her health, and then impersonates her cough repeatedly for cheap laughs. Near the song’s end, which you begin to doubt will ever come, he sings a fragment of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” again and again, his voice nearly drowned by the band he’s built, as if he’s given up. During the 13-minute “Soap for Joyful Hands,” he tells us, at length, about how he likes socks, how he washes them in hotel sinks on tour, and how he wrote a “captivating song about washing socks in hotel sinks. Who else can give you that?” In a song that is barely more interesting than the phone book itself, Kozelek sounds listless and bored, his falsetto more juvenile whimper than elegant wisp. Another urban legend, debunked.
Despite this seemingly interminable prosaic mire, there are some affecting moments here, instances where Kozelek’s hyper-specificity is again heartrending. Over seesawing piano, he croons about wishing he’d hugged Elliott Smith the last time he saw him in Sweden. During the title track, he recalls a previous Norwegian tour where he got the news that his cat was dying; he calls the promoter who bought his flight back home so he could kiss her one more time by name, thanking him for that act of kindness, his voice still catching with feeling after all these years.
But then he yells an anecdote about telling an irate fan that he hopes he gets hit by a bus, blaming his outburst on a lack of sleep and demanding a free pass for being an asshole. That sudden pivot illuminates the gulf between honesty and vulnerability, between simply detailing the bad things that happen in your life and actually extracting some self-reflection from them. Kozelek spends most of This Is My Dinner drowning in the divide. Art need not atone for the sins of its creator, of course, but Kozelek sings of his issues and experiences with devilish bemusement, as if he’s telling you this is the way we all should be—unhinged, self-righteous, proud of it. It is, by and large, theater of and for one.
Against all odds, his shuffling ode to “David Cassidy,” written en route to Barcelona the day after “The Partridge Family” star died, is sweet and endearing, a frank confession of inspiration from an unlikely source. What’s more, Kozelek shows some self-awareness here, twice checking himself out loud from indulging the sort of tangents that dilute so much of This Is My Dinner. The tune smartly teases the melody of the “Partridge” theme, “Come on Get Happy,” by nestling it into the guitar’s radiant folds. But then, as though on a dare, Koz & the Boys tack on an unnecessary cover of the song itself, followed by a ragged beer-commercial rendition of AC/DC’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer.” Equally earnest and disdainful, Kozelek holds single notes for 15 seconds, daring you to turn it off. On an album where he seems to delight only in the sound of himself, you don’t need extra encouragement.
The four-year landslide of Kozelek from the heights of Benji to the abyss of This Is My Dinner is a sort of necessary parable for how not to behave in a society where people who are not straight, white, moneyed, old men are getting overdue seats at the table. He insists there is revelatory poignancy and power in the banality of being unpleasant; if there is, it is only by virtue of counterexample, illuminating examples of how not to act in this world. During “Copenhagen,” Kozelek misinterprets innocent conversations with a female fan outside of a venue he’s just played as an invitation to a tryst, then pins the mistake on the woman when he realizes he was wrong. During endlessly episodic opener “This Is Not Possible,” he inconveniences those at his beck and call, musicians or hotel employees who stand idly by or re-fire the stove to make sure he still gets his tagliatelle after a late sleep. And during “Candles,” he scolds the flight attendant who simply asks that he follow the rules and close his laptop before landing, even if he is not done with “this perfect song I was gonna sing to my audience.”
Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation. Kozelek capitalizes on playing the victim, on the theatrics of being lampooned for just telling it like it is, man. For a guy who admits, “My life is pretty good overall” while complaining about, of all things, bicycles in Copenhagen, he sure has a lot of blame to offer for anything that’s not quite copacetic.
These songs are not merely about a European tour; they are about Kozelek’s belief that he is apart from and above the rest of the world. He wants you to listen and feel bad for him, to suffer along with the travails of a moderately successful touring musician who is starting to ponder Viagra as a viable option and (by his own admission, multiple times during This Is My Dinner) cannot figure out anything else to do with his life other than write these long songs. You’ll feel bad, all right, and probably even laugh—but not for the reasons Kozelek hopes. Someday soon, he might write a song about that rejection, too. | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Caldo Verde | November 14, 2018 | 2.8 | 93682040-0152-4cb5-882e-aeab652a7d2b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On the third volume in his solo series, Black Thought once again demonstrates the power of his dense, winding freestyles and stretches into new, more vulnerable territory. | On the third volume in his solo series, Black Thought once again demonstrates the power of his dense, winding freestyles and stretches into new, more vulnerable territory. | Black Thought : Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane & Able EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-thought-streams-of-thought-vol-3-cane-and-abel-ep/ | Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane & Able EP | One of the most hair-raising moments in the Roots’ extensive catalog is “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” a muscular showcase for Black Thought. His feverish extended verse hits like a crash landing, every word a plume of flame. In the six years since the last Roots album, Black Thought has turned the intensity of “75 Bars” into his calling card, transforming freestyles and guest spots into athletic events. Streams of Thought Vol. 3: Cane and Able both continues that tradition and attempts to depart from it.
The record largely stays true to the format established by volumes one and two, privileging formless energy over structure. Roughly half the songs here are composed of one dense, winding verse. The EP also continues the convention of Thought working with one main producer. After 9th Wonder and Salaam Remi, here he teams with storied Bad Boy producer Sean C of the Hitmen, who provides a textured but unobtrusive canvas on which Black Thought can think out loud.
He’s got a lot on his mind. Personal relationships, his legacy, and race are frequent subjects, mostly in quick flashes. His writing has become showy lately, sometimes undermining its sharpness. Too often, that tendency leads him toward filler, as on “State Prisoner” where he goes full Rap God: “In conclusion, I wanna clear the confusion/Any rumors the artist you’re currently hearing is human.” Likewise, “Thought vs Everybody” begins with him on a throne (which has become a recurring image of him lately) and runs the theme of greatness into the ground. “Am I a journal or journalist? Herbal eternalist/Olympic tournament level genius author, affirmative,” he raps. He sounds more stoned than omnipotent.
The record is more interesting when the Herculean feats of lyricism take a back seat to introspection. “We Could Be Good (United)” places his marriage under a microscope, acknowledging the strain that the Roots’ grueling schedule can place on a relationship. “Magnificent” is an origin story of sorts, establishing a slope for Black Thought’s ascent from mortal to deity. Through hip-hop, he recounts, he went from drug addiction and self-harm to pride, a transformation he likens to Detroit Red and LeRoi Jones becoming Malik el-Shabazz and Amiri Baraka. “Nature Of the Beast,” a somber collaboration with Portugal The Man and The Last Artful, Dodgr, features him delicately singing of alienation and stage fright, a rare moment of vulnerability.
The record’s highlight is “Fuel,” another team-up with Portugal The Man and The Last Artful, Dodgr, that finds Black Thought seeking penitence. The lush, gospel-inflected production stretches out his cadences, making his performance less streamlined and mechanical. He remains guarded, but you can feel the weariness in his voice, the hesitance in his word choices. That ability to use words as textures as much as tools has always been a hallmark of his style; without that internal balance, a hip-hop band never could have worked. Ultimately, it’s that ingrained instinct that saves from Vol 3. from falling prey to the same monotony and excess as an Eminem or Royce album. Though “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)” is powered by Black Thought’s exquisite prowess, it still moves like a Roots song.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | October 19, 2020 | 6.9 | 9370071d-cafa-4057-b49f-f9653153516d | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Baltimore band mixes its own spin on new wave with highly charged drama courtesy of bellowing lead singer Samuel T. Herring. | Baltimore band mixes its own spin on new wave with highly charged drama courtesy of bellowing lead singer Samuel T. Herring. | Future Islands: In Evening Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14177-in-evening-air/ | In Evening Air | Future Islands have described their first full-length for Thrill Jockey, recorded after relocating to Baltimore and falling in with Dan Deacon's Wham City collective, as "post-wave." Taking cues from early Devo and New Order and replacing the dance-pop movement with rich characterization and storytelling, they've found themselves at a pleasant distance from most formal genre comparisons. Their music is playful but steeped in subtle detail, with both emotional heft and a pungent sense of theatricality.
Playing together since their college days in North Carolina but not truly finalizing the band until 2006, the trio seems comfortable bouncing ideas off each other while remaining anchored in their individual roles. J. Gerrit Welmers' synth work reinterprets those crystalline new wave textures and enhances them with feedback and buttery depth, sometimes accented with sparse snippets of programmed drums and rusted samples. But Future Islands avoid cluttering their music, allowing bassist William Cashion (a Peter Hook disciple if there ever was one) to direct the ship with his undulating plunks and strums, stringing the rest of these mercurial details along with him.
Any talk of Future Islands is bound to come back to scene-stealing frontman Samuel T. Herring, a dramatic, verbose showman eager to spin each one of these lush but simply-stated orchestrations into something grander. At times wailing like a cross between Tom Waits and the Sea Captain from "The Simpsons" (nicely exemplified at the stirring peak of "An Apology"), occasionally adopting a strange British patois to augment a sort of sing-speak, Herring's presence is over-the-top in just the right way. He often seems overwhelmed by tragedy (usually waxing cryptic about lost love), and brings a great sense of damage and loss-- as well as welcome spots of humor-- to each acrobatic performance. But what he uncovers in the patches of calypso, sci-fi movie noise, and circling synth patterns is often surprisingly heartening. Drawing from a few different traditions while making them their own, Future Islands prove here to be a well-versed group of wild, woolly storytellers. | 2010-05-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-05-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | May 6, 2010 | 7.6 | 9373f604-5399-4e1f-8c09-5e7b73ee501c | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The Field follows his breakout album with one that splits the difference between more of the same and new ideas. | The Field follows his breakout album with one that splits the difference between more of the same and new ideas. | The Field: Yesterday & Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13142-yesterday-today/ | Yesterday & Today | As with any artist whose singular sound wins an admirable cross-section of hearts-- especially in a time when fewer niche artists are rewarded with attention from outside their scene-- it's hard to envy Axel Willner as he follows his debut, the 2007 breakout From Here We Go Sublime. Offer a complete revamp of his paradoxically mist-light-but-brick-dense mix of ambient and trance? He'd be accused of selling out his smitten fanbase. Pack Yesterday and Today with six slabs of self-parodic more-of-the-same? He could await the entitled mewling about wheel-spinning and diminishing returns.
So it's unsurprising that Willner's taken the easiest route. Yesterday and Today calculatingly comprises three songs that extend the known rush of Sublime-- the barely there hissing drums; the short, soft vocal samples swept into grandly corny pastel clouds; the poignant you-call-those-melodies? abstracted from the emotionally-manipulative fakebook of post-rave cheese-- and three very different potential future directions for the Field discography. It sounds like a hesitant record, made by a man stuck between the rock of new non-DJ expectations and the hard place of an artist's desire to grow without being compromised by an audience whose needs he can only guess at. It's also quite good, despite the possible failure of nerve on its creator's part.
Good or no, though, it's doubtful the new-old stuff will convince those un-seduced by Sublime. Willner's tracks are so formally simple that's it not necessarily wrong to claim that if you've heard one then you better dig a lot of edge-of-perception variations in woosh and chug to get through a whole record. But then the rickety claim that "there may not seem to be much going on but..." has tripped up decades' worth of critics trying to sell verse-and-chorus kids on bleeps and loops. Let's say this to the suspicious: If the sound-qua-sound of a Field track's first minute doesn't trigger near-synaesthetic glee, it's guff to promise any mind-rearranging revelations five minutes later, or even many of traditional minimalism's "holy shit!" moments.
The length of Willner's tracks, their did-he-or-didn't-he? shifts in mood, and their easy to miss addition/subtraction of instrumentation via the volume knob suggest background music, and maybe that's the best "in" to the Field's world. You can certainly let the a trance-ish synth swoosh and near-inaudible plinky piano of opener "I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet" (a subtle advance rebuke to peanut-gallery griping?) wash over you and be satisfied. Of course that might mean you'll miss Willner's genius deployment of a single rising chord in the final minutes. And if you've been gripped by "I Have The Moon" for its duration? Well, there's your nape-tingling bonus.
It's also not clear that the aesthetic curve balls will please Sublime partisans. Korgis cover "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime" is more or less a snooze, a looped line of (gasp!) full vocal over a dapple of static-ridden soft-pop and swelling strings-and-cymbals, a pleasant diversion as the B-side remix to an indie rock single, but filler here. Better is "Yesterday and Today", truly tweaking Willner's trademark and suggesting the fruits of the Field's cross-genre jaunt across America, rubbing shoulders with four-man bands in our finer rock-centric ratholes. The chunky, lengthy bass-and-drums outro thankfully sounds less like punk-funk and more like a tribal DJ tool from a Masters at Work set, albeit replacing MAW's gussied-to-hell layers of horns and chants with a nostril-dilating blast of pine-scented Kompakt ambiance.
But then there's the appropriately named, implacable, acid-tinged "Sequenced", a nostalgic cruise straight into the murky neighborhood of 1970s/80s Europe's half-remembered pioneers of O.C.D. keyboard-play as an end in itself. Despite the late introduction of a (there's sadly no other adjective) spangly melody, it's by far the darkest thing Willner's ever waxed. And though it features the album's most insistent rhythm, it's too slow for dancing, more like what a post-JDF producer would play during a casting call for his kitsch discosploitation movie. It's also the key to understanding why those who kvetch about the Field failing as "dance music" are missing the point. Like those repetition-happy German/French/Italian pioneers, the Field's making music more suited for passively-received images than actively moving bodies.
It's impossible to tell where Willner will go from Yesterday and Today. One might hope he continues on from the title track, adding weightier rhythms and making a few no-bullshit dancefloor singles. Or you can imagine a double-disc of deep-listening mid-tempo head-nodders taking "Sequenced" to prog/concept extremes. Whatever the evolutionary next-step, the hope is that Wilner can keep the feel of the Sublime-ish half of Yesterday and Today without stooping to third-time's-killed-the-charm recycling or willfully denying the pleasures he can provide so easily. That's the kind of tall order that's felled artists more time-tested than the relatively young Willner, and so for now I'll just wish him luck while very much enjoying the rich mix of retreads and possibilities we've got. | 2009-05-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt / Anti- | May 28, 2009 | 8 | 9376e1f1-0bad-443c-9cda-45730cd6319c | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Three decades into her career, one of country music’s most reliable and empathetic songwriters offers a profoundly intimate record, full of hushed revelations. | Three decades into her career, one of country music’s most reliable and empathetic songwriters offers a profoundly intimate record, full of hushed revelations. | Mary Chapin Carpenter: The Dirt and the Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-chapin-carpenter-the-dirt-and-the-stars/ | The Dirt and the Stars | More than three decades into her career as one of country music’s most reliable and empathetic songwriters, Mary Chapin Carpenter can set an identifiable mood with just the sound of her guitar. She favors open tunings on acoustic instruments; chord progressions that never quite resolve but let in enough light to feel at ease. In her lyrics, and even just her song titles, she gestures toward words of comfort and self-affirmation: We’re all right. I have a need for solitude. It’s OK to be sad. The magic of her music is how every texture at her disposal—from her gentle fingerpicking to her smooth and precise singing voice—can communicate these messages just as clearly.
Chapin’s 15th studio album, The Dirt and the Stars, is devoted to this elusive gift, how a quiet sound can summon a world of associations. In fact, there’s an entire song about it. It’s called “Old D-35,” and Chapin dedicates it to John Jennings, the guitarist and producer who worked with Chapin on her 1987 debut Hometown Girl through her commercial breakthroughs in the ’90s. Singing to her old friend, who died from cancer in 2015, Chapin finds a sense of peace in the music he left behind: “As long as there are songs that sound like rain on an old terne roof,” she sings, letting her accompanists finish the thought with a fragile, descending piano line.
With such a careful and attentive sound, it is doubly impressive that Chapin and her band recorded the album entirely live in the studio. It is one of the most intimate records in her catalog, and the entire band seems locked into the introspective intensity that marks her best songwriting. In the opening “Farther Along and Further In,” they join slowly with pedal steel and mandolin and a lapping drumbeat. When they lock into a groove near the end of the song, Chapin lets out a sudden, whispered exclamation. It is less the sound of a bandleader losing herself to the music than the lightbulb flash of a good idea arriving late at night, when no one else is awake.
The lyrics are populated with these kinds of hushed revelations. “There’s no day that’s useless,” Chapin notes in “It’s OK to Be Sad.” As if putting her own advice to use, she spends these songs singing about hard wisdom and dark spirals, looking for patterns in the ways people fall apart: “All broken hearts break differently,” she reminds us. There are two explicitly political songs: “American Stooge,” a tragicomic character study, and “Secret Keepers,” a heartland rocker about women forced to keep their stories of abuse to themselves. Set to one of the album’s most upbeat arrangements, the dissonance is intentional, the sound of private thoughts surfacing among people who understand.
Chapin has a gift for finding universal wisdom in these deeply personal struggles, and these songs strive for clarity in the face of darkness. In the closing “Between the Dirt and the Stars,” one of her most vivid and beautiful songs to date, Chapin allows herself refuge in scenic memories from a teenage road trip. “If we’re lucky, ghosts and prayers are company, not enemies,” she sings. Her band sprawls into a lengthy instrumental coda with a climactic guitar solo by Duke Levine, suggesting a kind of spiritual catharsis. But Chapin’s thoughts keep turning to an old song playing on the car radio, somewhere deep in her psyche. “Everything we’ll ever know,” she sings, “is in the choruses.” And so she keeps listening, learning, driving on.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Lambent Light | August 26, 2020 | 7.7 | 937b2b86-2a01-4fb0-b098-6fc7bd572c87 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Tapping directly into the great lineage of batshit bubblegum pop, Baltimore art kid Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings is one of this year's happiest, catchiest, and weirdest records, repeatedly hitting pleasure centers with track after track of gleeful, electronics-infused hyperpop and candy-coated sound experiments. Plus, you can mosh to it. | Tapping directly into the great lineage of batshit bubblegum pop, Baltimore art kid Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings is one of this year's happiest, catchiest, and weirdest records, repeatedly hitting pleasure centers with track after track of gleeful, electronics-infused hyperpop and candy-coated sound experiments. Plus, you can mosh to it. | Dan Deacon: Spiderman of the Rings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10207-spiderman-of-the-rings/ | Spiderman of the Rings | I first saw Dan Deacon play live in August 2005, just after I moved to Baltimore. The occasion was a "bridging-the-gap" measure at a local loft space to foster unity between the city's art-damaged noise kids and its breakbeat-loving club kids. By the time I arrived, a balding, baby-fattened fellow with a patchy Brillo frizz of beard was unraveling a mess of electronics on a table in the middle of the dancefloor. And once all the plugs were plugged and the jacks were jacked, this man, Dan Deacon, turned himself on.
What came out of the PA was a barrage of cheap-sounding, rainbow-hued, breakcore-tempo electronic noise. It felt like I was hearing my entire childhood record collection of cheerful kiddie 45s sped up on a hotrodded Fisher Price record player. Deacon himself was dancing along with a joyous palsy, singing through a scrim of squeaky effects. In a night where I'd shown up wanting dance music, Deacon had completely upended my expectations. He also made me a fan for life. A small handful of the grouches stood with incredulous arms folded across their chests and everyone else proceeded to freak the fuck out, almost as wildly as Deacon himself. Welcome to Baltimore.
"Wooody Wooodpecker", the opening track from Deacon's Carpark Records debut Spiderman of the Rings, combines everything awesome-- and potentially alienating-- about Deacon's music into 3:50 and sticks it right at the beginning of the record. Here, he loops and distorts the famous cartoon character's convulsive laugh over a sizzling synthesizer crescendo, a needling 12-note keyboard melody, and mechanical percussion that winds to a point where a human drummer's tendons would snap. It's like Deacon's switch got stuck somewhere between "irritate" and "captivate" and he decided to never bother fixing it.
Despite its cacophonous electronic surface, the best of Spiderman of the Rings hits the pleasure centers with a string of great pop singles. "The Crystal Cat" could almost be a straight-up surf-rock tune until the moment when Deacon's leader-of-the-pack goon croon becomes a grotesquely twisted helium shriek and the drums explode like illegal fireworks. "Okie Dokie" is basically "Wooly Bully" rewritten with Deacon's handmade tone generators and ring modulators.
See, Deacon makes "noise rock" that taps directly into the great lineage of batshit bubblegum pop. Spideman connects at various points with Kasenetz and Katz, Sam the Sham, happy hardcore and gabba techno, "Surfin' Bird", the twinkly melodies of an infant's mobile (the unexpectedly gorgeous "Big Milk"), the Ramones, Koji Kondo (composer-in-residence for the Nintendo Entertainment System), Max Martin, and Daft Punk. On an earlier EP, 2006's Acorn Master, Deacon covered Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash". That spastic take on a rock'n'roll classic feels with hindsight like an obvious run up to Spiderman.
But there's at least one song on Spiderman that betrays his deep background in more cerebral electronic and avant-garde music. Deacon is a core member of Baltimore's Wham City crew-- a Baltimore loft/show space and arts collective-- and the 12-minute "Wham City" is this album's centerpiece. In this tribute to his friends and his former home, you can hear hints of all sorts of hypnotic beats, from Neu!'s motorik percussion and Kraftwerk's synthesizers to Steve Reich's mallets and Terry Riley's keyboards. But as a sing-along-- or chant-along in this case, one of the catchiest of the year-- it also hints at a deep love of old "Sesame Street" records and a full collection of "Muppet Show" DVDs. Even when Deacon goes epic-- and pays tribute to the hardcore experimental composers he studied in college-- he can't resist the urge to play up to your inner child.
Like all the kid-friendly stuff that informs his sound-- pop bands, candy ravers, Carl Stalling, noise bands in stupid masks, rap music reduced to a bunch of catchy catch-phrases, and jumping on your bed with friends-- Deacon doesn't care about looking cool. (Rock magazine stylists will never get within 100 feet of the guy.) And if you're down with the cause (Wham City fliers flatly stated "no jerks"), Deacon wants you to join him in adding silly joy to a world that's been feeling pretty drab. This fearlessness in the name of trying to make people happy spills onto Spiderman of the Rings like neon poster paint. The album deserves to make song-and-dance man Deacon a superstar, or at least as much of a superstar as the Dean Martin of self-soldered electronics can be. | 2007-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | May 11, 2007 | 8.7 | 937dc085-aba1-4385-bd02-7fffb5237cc0 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
After two albums of jazzy, humid club cuts, the British producer moves beyond the dancefloor with a stunning concept record about his grandparents that incorporates ambient and modern classical music. | After two albums of jazzy, humid club cuts, the British producer moves beyond the dancefloor with a stunning concept record about his grandparents that incorporates ambient and modern classical music. | Leon Vynehall: Nothing Is Still | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leon-vynehall-nothing-is-still/ | Nothing Is Still | Every time Leon Vynehall releases new music, you’re guaranteed a fundamental level of coherence. The British producer is a quiet, cerebral guy, and his long-form statements communicate rich themes and a solid sense of structure even though they’re largely wordless. His 2014 breakthrough, Music for the Uninvited, explored house music’s queer history and Vynehall’s own childhood memories, like his mom’s handmade mixtapes and N64 games. Sultry follow-up Rojus, from 2016, used ornithological samples to trace the arc of a single night out dancing.
On Nothing Is Still, his first studio album for venerable UK label Ninja Tune, Vynehall mines a piece of family lore: his grandparents’ emigration from England to New York City more than 50 years ago. But instead of using the story to frame another collection of jazzy, humid club cuts, Vynehall changes course. More deliberate and expansive than any of his other releases, the album moves beyond the dancefloor by incorporating traces of ambient and modern classical music.
Nothing Is Still isn’t a radical reinvention—it relies on the same sumptuous palette Music for the Uninvited and Rojus used—but it does deconstruct Vynehall’s established sound. The parts that make up lengthy bangers from earlier in his career, like “It’s Just (House of Dupree)” and “Blush,” are distributed across multiple songs, forcing you to focus on individual elements: the breathy sax drifting through “Movements (Chapter III),” the lusty grunts peppering the woozy “Drinking It in Again (Chapter IV),” the disorienting throb of “English Oak (Chapter VII).” Although it’s less engaging on a track-to-track basis, this approach yields an album that works through a much wider spectrum of emotions. Rojus was supposed to soundtrack an evening from start to finish, but it ended up hanging in place like a thick fog; Nothing Is Still swells and recedes. At its most intense—like the menacing second half of centerpiece “Trouble - Parts I, II, & III (Chapter V)”—the record can hit you like a punch to the back of the head.
That trade-off between moment-to-moment scintillation and holistic satisfaction is the crux of Nothing Is Still. It’s designed to reward a degree of investment that goes beyond the passive listening experiences that define the streaming era. Vynehall described Rojus as “functional club music,” a phrase that gets at that record’s strengths: Each of its tracks can be isolated and embedded within a marathon DJ set. It’s hard to come up with a similar phrase that cuts to the core of Nothing Is Still—a “multimedia narrative experience,” maybe. (The album is being released alongside a series of short films and a novella co-written by Vynehall.) That’s a much less evocative set of descriptors, and its hollowness reflects this album’s higher degree of conceptual complexity.
The implicit connections between Vynehall’s compositions and his grandparents’ move to America are what make Nothing Is Still sparkle. The graceful, swelling strings of opener “From the Sea/It Looms (Chapters I & II)” suggest the ebb and flow of a transatlantic voyage. Interludes “Birds on the Tarmac (Footnote III)” and “Julia (Footnote IV)” evoke the sonic clutter of a Manhattan morning—doors opening and closing, cash registers ringing, scraps of conversation—with layered, repeating passages reminiscent of Steve Reich. And after subjecting listeners to the anxious, noisy climaxes of “Trouble” and “English Oak,” Vynehall doles out a treat: the stunning “Ice Cream (Chapter VIII),” which starts as a play on the Field’s looping reveries and ends with birdsong layered over crashing waves of sound. The track feels like walking from the park down to the shore with a soft-serve cone, letting yourself be soothed by the rhythm of the tides.
I spent much of my time with Nothing Is Still thinking about a recent sonic statement of purpose by Vynehall’s contemporary, Sam Shepherd, another young British producer who imagined himself moving beyond the club sphere. 2015’s Elaenia, the first full album Shepherd released as Floating Points, found him making a sharp left turn from the house and techno of his early EPs into tranquil ambient jazz and piano impressionism. It felt like a slab of music meant to be digested as a whole; it wielded silence and texture instead of groove and melody.
Shepherd and Vynehall seem too progressive to believe that an association with dance music has somehow limited their prestige, but it’s also easy to imagine either of these bright, ambitious, insatiably curious artists wanting to do more than making people move. Like Elaenia, Nothing Is Still invites the listener recalibrate their expectations of the artist behind it. Vynehall is more than a producer with a great ear for texture and a nostalgic streak—he’s a storyteller, one who demands and merits our full attention. | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | June 20, 2018 | 8.2 | 93801373-355a-488c-a432-6533051de92b | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Musicians' lives don't naturally translate to compelling movies, but in the right hands, they can make for powerful albums. On Okkervil River's autobiographical fourth full-length-- their most emotionally devastating yet-- frontman Will Sheff masters both self-reflexivity and twisted confessionalism while his band ramps up to an unhinged aggressiveness that was only hinted at on previous releases. | Musicians' lives don't naturally translate to compelling movies, but in the right hands, they can make for powerful albums. On Okkervil River's autobiographical fourth full-length-- their most emotionally devastating yet-- frontman Will Sheff masters both self-reflexivity and twisted confessionalism while his band ramps up to an unhinged aggressiveness that was only hinted at on previous releases. | Okkervil River: The Stage Names | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10509-the-stage-names/ | The Stage Names | Despite biopics like Walk the Line and Ray, musicians' lives don't naturally translate to compelling movies. The relentless repetition of touring, the fleeting nature of creativity, the mundane conflicts between bandmates and hangers-on-- none of it seems all that visually or narratively interesting.
Fortunately, in the right hands, that life can make for a powerful album-- like The Stage Names, the fourth full-length from Austin group Okkervil River. This sort of self-reflection should come as no surprise from the band responsible for both "There Is No Hidden Track" from 2004's Sleep and Wake-Up Songs EP and especially Black Sheep Boy, an album based loosely on the exploits of doomed folk musician Tim Hardin; what does surprise is how much they can accomplish with this confessionalism, which is at its most potent on opener "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe".
As frontman Will Sheff howls hysterically about the lack of plot contrivances, epic endings, and dramatic camera angles in daily routine, the band becomes increasingly unhinged and aggressive, careening wildly from pent-up verses to explosive something-like-choruses-- an unexpected turn for an ensemble more associated with brains than brawn. Near the end, it all finally and artfully falls apart, leaving Sheff to close with the clincher about "a calm clicking, like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching up some bad movie." Life gets two thumbs way, way down.
Interestingly, Okkervil River's career is in the midst of a trajectory that perfectly mirrors a traditional narrative arc. Their first two albums, Stars Too Small to Use and Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You Meet, formed the introduction; Down the River of Golden Dreams was the exposition; and Black Sheep Boy initiated the rising action. The Stage Names, if not the climax itself, at least significantly thickens the plot, seeming just as artistically unsurpassable as Black Sheep Boy did in 2005, and even more emotionally devastating.
With his fondness for dizzying wordplay (who else writes in parenthetical asides?) and lyrical ambiguity, Sheff may seem like the ultimate indie pessimist on the rollicking r&b number "A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene" or the caustic relationship deconstruction "Plus Ones", but actually, he's just a realist who captures scene conventions and rock'n'roll marginalia even as he sees the void beyond them. The mercurial River sound looser and louder than they did on Black Sheep Boy, especially on the dramatic ebb and flow of "Title Track", and the tenderly rootsy "A Girl in Port". In fact, Travis Nelsen's explosive drumwork and Jonathan Meiburg's backing vocals often lend The Stage Names the immediacy and recklessness of a live recording. Their energetic imprecision-- one of their most commanding features-- coils effortlessly into Sheff's self-reflexive lyrics; few groups can so nimbly or inventively use music as an extension of lyrical themes or vice versa.
Fittingly, The Stage Names ends with "John Allyn Smith Sails", a document of failure so complete that the main character can't even succeed in killing himself: "I was breaking in a case of suds at the Brass Rail, a fall-down drunk with his tongue torn out and his balls removed," Sheff sings, embodying doomed poet John Berryman (his birthname gives the song its title). "And I knew that my last lines were gone, while, stupidly, I lingered on." Berryman seems to be indie's new romantic failure-- he also inspired the Hold Steady's "Stuck Between Stations". Craig Finn had the Minneapolis connection; Okkervil River essentially rewrite the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B" as a suicide note, turning the song into a joke so grim it's hard not to laugh.
Ultimately, The Stage Names shows how a vastly talented "mid-level band" (Sheff's words) sees itself, but there's no bitterness here, just overwhelming self-doubt and perseverance. Despite its density (they fit worlds into just nine songs), the album remains exciting and accessible, albeit highly sobering. It's about the folly of popular music and its attendant lifestyles, but these songs are so good and so moving that they only give us stupid, stubborn hope. | 2007-08-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 6, 2007 | 8.7 | 9380906e-63d6-4453-bd7e-9e1177fce96e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The L.A. duo's second album seems to be reporting from three simultaneous decades of rock history. But having a great record collection and having some idea what to do with it are two different things, and on W**e Are The Ambassadors Foxygen have internalized enough of the music they love to start toying with it. | The L.A. duo's second album seems to be reporting from three simultaneous decades of rock history. But having a great record collection and having some idea what to do with it are two different things, and on W**e Are The Ambassadors Foxygen have internalized enough of the music they love to start toying with it. | Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17552-we-are-the-21st-century-ambassadors-of-peace-magic/ | We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic | Before you play a note, your band begins as a series of decisions: Which bands inspire us? Who do we want to sound like? What are we going to call ourselves? These early triangulations often lead to everything else falling into place: bass lines, vocal affectations, guitar tones, production, album-art style. They say a lot about the band you intend to become. Sam France and Jonathan Rado, a duo from L.A., decided at some point that they would be called Foxygen. Yes, they were still in high school at the time. But when you pair that name with the unwieldy title We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic, you get a certain picture: goofily endearing, kid-brother types, the kind of guys who will probably embarrass you in public if you let them. Which makes the assured and witty We Are that much more surprising.
France and Rado have been playing together for years, and they've apparently spent that time working through their relationships to their record collections. Faced with the terrifying bounty of the rock menu on their 2012 EP Take The Kids Off Broadway, they seemingly shut their eyes and ordered everything at once: The songs stumbled through styles like there was a demented drill-sergeant producer in the background yelling, "OK now, Memphis soul! Now, when I say, Merseybeat-era Beatles! GO!"
We Are, by contrast, has more poise, rifling with effortless cool through retro-rock quotes and mannerisms-- France's gulps and sobs draw directly from the Mick Jagger of "Let's Spend the Night Together" at one moment and channel the thousand-ton boredom of Lou Reed the next. Meandering organ pokes through on "No Destruction"; flecks of "Under My Thumb"-style guitars pop up on "On Blue Mountain". In the lovely "San Francisco", France paints the city as a place where "the forest meets the bridge," and the grass scent of the Kinks' We Are the Village Green Preservation Society wafts by (even their album title is an echo of that one). Having a great record collection and having some idea what to do with it are two different things, and on W**e Are The Ambassadors Foxygen have internalized enough of the music they love to start toying with it.
As you spend more time with We Are, you begin to notice some of that playfulness manifesting itself, like the pitched-down vocals counting in the opening of "On Blue Mountain", a song that rattles through multiple tempo and key changes without seeming disjointed. The warbly "Oh Yeah" can't seem to decide what kind of homage it is, veering between a yearning Captain Fantastic falsetto chorus, Blood Sweat & Tears symphonic soul, and an "aww-yeah" breakdown that is a near-direct quote of "Mr. Big Stuff". The echoes are blurred further by producer Richard Swift, a talented singer-songwriter with a meticulous ear for period detail. He follows the band's songwriting cues wherever they lead, and Ambassadors seems to be reporting from three simultaneous decades of rock history.
France, meanwhile, has become a sharp storyteller and lyricist, reeling off lines that feel like insults even if you can't parse them: "I caught you sipping milkshakes in the parlor of the hotel," he yawns on "No Destruction", before delivering the piercingly direct (and already heavily quoted) stinger "There's no need to be an asshole, you're not in Brooklyn anymore." On "Shuggie", he sighs "I met your daughter the other day, that was weird/ She had rhinoceros-shaped earrings in her ears," an arresting image that in context evokes an odd sense of sadness. The call-and-response chorus of "San Francisco"-- "I left my love in San Francisco/ (That's okay, I was born in L.A.)"-- hits like a joke even if the target isn't clear.
Slipped between the air quotes are proclamations that ring with personal truth: "We can live on blue mountain like livin' in a sunset/ We can live honestly and true," goes the chorus to "On Blue Mountain". On "Shuggie", France sings "If you believe in yourself, you can free your soul." He sings it in a warbly, affected voice, pulling a face at the sentiment slightly, a trick he repeats at the album's coda, where he keens in an off-key choirboy voice: "If you believe in love/ Everything you see is love/ So try to be what God wants you to be/ And say that I love you/ Again." It's one thing to give your band and your album a silly name, and to play dress-up with rock history while tweaking the formula. It's another thing entirely to mean it; the more time you spend with Ambassadors, the more clearly that commitment and joy comes through. | 2013-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 22, 2013 | 8.4 | 938b1ff9-01db-49ad-8545-d2d43e2bda8c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On his ninth studio album, the Man on the Moon has never sounded more checked out. | On his ninth studio album, the Man on the Moon has never sounded more checked out. | Kid Cudi: INSANO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kid-cudi-insano/ | INSANO | Near the middle of “Often, I Have These Dreamz,” the first track of INSANO, Kid Cudi recalls a dream of falling back to Earth. The song’s thundering drums fade into the background and guest DJ Drama barks an ad lib (“Cudi, talk to ’em!”) before Cudi proceeds to stumble through the most milquetoast fantasy imaginable. “I have these dreams of me falling through the sky, you know what I’m sayin’?/And uh, somehow, before I hit the ground, I start flyin’... I fly back up to the sky, you know, high as fuck/High as fuck, past the planets,” he says, practically mid-bong rip, before diving into a verse of empty product placement and cliché mythmaking.
Cudi has attempted to sell himself as both an underdog and a superstar since the blog era, but the more he parlays his late-aughts musical clout into the worlds of film, television, and fashion, the harder this image has become to take seriously. His failure to meaningfully evolve as a musician isn’t the only reason INSANO is a bad record. The best Cudi songs have at least enough sense of direction and confidence to convince you to buy in. Even his much-maligned psych-rock album Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven had some passion coursing through it. Here, that yen is gone—he’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore.
To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs. Classic Cudi moments where he grapples with his demons, like “Tortured” or the XXXTentacion-featuring “X & Cud,” are retreads of stories he’s told better and with more conviction elsewhere. What’s left are flex and rage raps that are somehow hollow and overwrought at the same time. On “Keep Bouncin’” and “Cud Life,” his staccato flow is undermined by his drawn-out slur, a vocal affect that doesn’t make the bland boasts about white Benzes or faceless groupies any more interesting. “A Tale of a Knight” is part autobiography and part anonymous bacchanalia, hampered by more annoying vocal tics and production I can only describe as Hans Zimmer trying to recreate the beat for Young Thug and Gunna’s four-year-old “Hot” after hearing it from a passing car at rush hour. The more Cudi tries to spin these songs as effortless and fun, the more labored and rote they sound.
The beats and guests don’t offer much respite, either tripping him up or fully outclassing him. DJ Drama’s omnipresence marks INSANO as a Gangsta Grillz project, but Cudi’s raps are too meandering and generic to earn that title the way bolder auteurs like Tyler, the Creator and Westside Gunn have recently. Travis Scott is the next most prominent presence, and not because of his two forgettable features. Beats are handled by old partners (Plain Pat, Dot da Genius, WondaGurl, Clams Casino) and a handful of newer faces (BNYX, Take a Daytrip), but many sound like they were made with Scott’s maximalist slog UTOPIA in mind. The blown-out 808s and general cacophony of the rage aesthetic don’t play to Cudi’s strengths and tend to drown his voice. In the few spots where things level out, he either sounds out of place (the inexplicably hyphy “Electrowavebaby”) or gets lapped by another artist: On “Rager Boyz,” Young Thug lands the album’s most colorful line (“How your hat say White Sox and you from the Bronx?”) with a shrug.
Though he was far from the first rapper to do so, at his peak Kid Cudi provided an outlet for emotional vulnerability and mental health awareness in the genre. For millennial and younger rap fans, his status as an alt-Black kid who enjoyed indie rock as much as he did Bape and GOOD Music represented a fresh vision of mainstream celebrity. But he’s spent the years since 2013’s Indicud rehashing old ideas to the point of self-parody (when his new ideas aren’t fizzling out in their own ways), creating overindulgent and sloppy albums that have soured much of the goodwill he’s coasted on since 2009. He’s hinted that he may be ready to retire from music at 40, and on the unfathomably boring INSANO—which, coincidentally, represents the last album in his contract with Republic—it sounds like he already has one foot out the door. | 2024-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Republic | January 19, 2024 | 4.6 | 938f1f88-ca7b-4c15-bc9a-24706c1c4518 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Massachusetts songwriter Cooper Handy’s naive, bizarro-world pop is a portal to a dimension weirder and more vivid than this one. | Massachusetts songwriter Cooper Handy’s naive, bizarro-world pop is a portal to a dimension weirder and more vivid than this one. | Lucy: The Music Industry Is Poisonous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-the-music-industry-is-poisonous/ | The Music Industry Is Poisonous | Cooper Handy, aka Lucy, has been making bizarro pop music since 2010, when he was 16 and living on Cape Cod. He started as a teenager messing around with GarageBand plugins, then cut his chops in the Dark World collective, Western Massachusetts’ answer to GothBoiClique. (He left the group in 2016, not long after the FADER published a photo of the crew drinking Dunkin’ shirtless.) Now based a few hours away from the Cape in the town of Hadley, he’s become inescapable within a certain East Coast DIY set, showing up on bills at every basement venue and semi-legal artists’ loft you can think of. There’s a reason for this: His surreal songs exist on their own planet. The Music Industry Is Poisonous, his ninth record and second release of the past year, is one such offering.
Handy’s music is naive and free-associative, written with the exploratory excitement of a little kid flipping rocks in search of bugs. Over frenetic drum machine and synth on “Turn Page,” he catalogs his elementary school teachers: “My first-grade teacher was Mister O/My second-grade teacher was Miss M/Third-grade teacher was Miss W,” he sings, sounding as if he were perhaps under the influence of a hypnotist. The equally strange “Like a Weakness” laments the “bad boy lifestyle” and waxes poetic about “growing up/been a great kid.” And on “Rock, The,” where one percussive effect sounds suspiciously like the sound of a computer trash can, he’s sad because a friend doesn’t want to “play” with him anymore.
It would be easy for this kind of writing to come off as trite, but The Music Industry Is Poisonous often feels like a trip to a dimension more vivid than the one we currently occupy. It’s a sensation underlined by Handy’s explanation of his band name: “Maybe a loose cigarette maybe psychedelics maybe that hominid from the Australopithecus afarensis species. Love Unity Communication Yes.” But he’s not so much of an alien that there isn’t a blueprint for what he’s doing: Compare, for instance, the Moldy Peaches’ love songs about playing video games, or Alan Vega’s Farfisa Elvis impersonations in Suicide.
Part of the joy of listening to this record is in the fun Handy clearly had making these songs—they sound effortless, one-take, fueled by a first-thought-best-thought ethos that doesn’t bother to check itself. Even so, The Music Industry Is Poisonous is sometimes too goofy for its own good, so wide-eyed and unserious that it verges on twee, or worse, a comedy bit. Album closer “Lucky Stars,” though, feels labored over in a way that the other songs don’t. Drum machines shuffle in the background as detuned pianos recall evenings on the couch, watching old cartoons with friends. It’s a proper ballad; you might even call it romantic. Best of all, Handy’s lyrical hook riffs on “Maps,” the Yeah Yeah Yeahs classic. “They don’t love me like I love me,” he sings. You kind of don’t believe him at all.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Dots Per Inch | May 11, 2021 | 7.2 | 938f4764-bd20-4a5e-878a-8a1c6ec17254 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The bass clarinet and synthesizer duo and the Oakland guitarist collaborate on an immersive quartet of tracks that feel like still-life paintings of the same object from slightly different angles. | The bass clarinet and synthesizer duo and the Oakland guitarist collaborate on an immersive quartet of tracks that feel like still-life paintings of the same object from slightly different angles. | Golden Retriever / Chuck Johnson: Rain Shadow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/golden-retriever-chuck-johnson-rain-shadow/ | Rain Shadow | Jonathan Sielaff, Matt Carlson, and Chuck Johnson share an apparent aversion to sharp edges and hard surfaces. For more than a decade, Sielaff and Carlson’s Portland, Oregon, duo Golden Retriever has used the unusual pairing of bass clarinet and modular synthesizer to make music that flows like liquid. Unbowed by their instruments’ limitations, they create an illusion of fullness, using just-intonation systems to pull ghost tones out of thin air, arpeggios to suggest mirage-like harmonies, and overdubs to weave narrow bands of tone into shimmering expanses. Oakland, California, guitarist Johnson also knows something about making his instrument sound like something it is not. Though he got his start playing fingerpicked acoustic folk in the American primitive tradition, his 2017 album Balsams turned the plaintive sound of the pedal steel to blissfully ethereal ends. And in the duo Saariselka, alongside Marielle V. Jakobsons, he eked even more weightless atmospheres out of his slide and steel strings.
Rain Shadow amounts to a meeting of like minds, with a twist. Though Johnson and Golden Retriever have occasionally appeared on the same bills, they’ve never actually played together, not even for the making of the album. While Golden Retriever habitually mix real-time improvisation and subsequent editing, this time all three musicians hunkered down in their respective studios, composing and then swapping their individual parts in a three-way round robin exchange. Golden Retriever performed the final mix and arrangement on two of the album’s four tracks, while Johnson took on the other two. It’s a testament to the musicians’ collective mind meld that no song bears the obvious signature of any individual; it’s impossible to say who put the finishing touches on any of these uniformly luminous instrumentals.
One of two 13-minute tracks, “Empty Quarter” opens the album with a soft chordal blush of unknown provenance, the pedal steel sailing gently over the top; multi-tracked clarinets rise in the mix, answered eventually by electric current from Carlson’s modular. There is no melody, just strands rippling and swirling like seaweed. But some imperceptible transformation takes place along the way: The sound thickens and congeals, its individual elements blurred like the texture of frosted glass.
These songs differ principally not in method but in tone. In “Lupine,” the album’s most lyrical and sentimental track, twinned clarinets and pedal steel twist in slow-motion counterpoint against a glowing, major-key backdrop; the closing “Creosote Ring” takes similar elements and turns them pewter gray, like rain clouds pierced by harsh sunlight. All four tracks feel like parts of a series; they might be still-life paintings of the same object from slightly different angles, or photographs of a grassy field captured at dusk on four consecutive evenings.
Given this uniformity, it might be hard to say just why the long “Sage Thrasher” is the album’s highlight, but it is; there’s a sense of mystery that the other songs don’t have, elements cruising into earshot like prop planes in the distance. The first five minutes feel like swimming through honey, then the body of sound seems to turn paper-thin before expanding once again in all directions, like a physics model of an alternate universe. From modest beginnings, the piece builds to high drama, with the enveloping buzz of an orchestra tuning up—an orchestra of fluorescent tubes, bowed metal, laser beams, and brain waves. It coasts out on a two-minute denouement, dissolving slowly into white noise.
At times it would be nice to hear more variation, more detail, more friction: There’s a moment in “Lupine” when analog distortion adds a faint dusting of grit, a welcome counterbalance to the song’s overwhelming consonance. But the relatively concise album is a warm and immersive listen, and it feels timely. Created in isolation out of choice, rather than dictate or necessity, it’s an example of music’s refusal to be locked down. On Rain Shadow, notes bleed across the stave, pass through walls, and are transformed by good old musicianly telepathy; all that is solid melts into air.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | May 22, 2020 | 7 | 938fffcc-cde2-48fb-b45c-605eb8805754 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their first full-length collaboration, legendary UK producer Adrian Sherwood and dubstep producer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch, tap into Sherwood's '80s dub-punk productions and Pinch’s 21st century tracks, namely the '90s genre known as downtempo. | On their first full-length collaboration, legendary UK producer Adrian Sherwood and dubstep producer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch, tap into Sherwood's '80s dub-punk productions and Pinch’s 21st century tracks, namely the '90s genre known as downtempo. | Sherwood & Pinch: Late Night Endless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20151-late-night-endless/ | Late Night Endless | "There’s more warmth and space in dub, more than in any other music," UK producer Adrian Sherwood told Time Out back in 2013. "It’s uncluttered, yet if it’s a good production, people can hear things that aren’t even there." Sherwood should know. Situated in London in the late '70s when punk, reggae, industrial, Afrobeat, electro, and hip-hop began to entangle and crossbreed, Sherwood was often in the producer’s chair to help dub out the results. His credits range from punks like the Fall and New Age Steppers to Lee "Scratch" Perry and industrial hip-hop band Tackhead. And his remixes—be it for Sinéad O’Connor or Skinny Puppy—accentuated both the sharp and corroded edges of the beats as well as the space in-between. The work he rendered in Brit-Jamaican mash-ups as Creation Rebel, Dub Syndicate, and African Head Charge on his On-U Sound label in the early 1980s remain the headiest amalgams of dub some three decades later.
Collaboration lies at the heart of Sherwood’s work, be it with Pop Group’s Mark Stewart or The Voice of Thunder by Prince Far I, so it makes sense that in the 21st century, he’s gravitated towards a new generation of producers who also favor the concuss of Jamaican bass, primarily dubstep producer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch. Dub oozes from Ellis’ production portfolio and he, too, favors collaboration, be it with old drum and bass producer Photek or the likes of Shackleton. Ellis and Sherwood’s collaboration stems from a 2011 DJ night at London superclub Fabric and singles followed.
On their first full-length collaboration, Late Night Endless, the two draw on their formidable pedigree, yet at times the album feels cluttered with sound. A lumbering drum pattern underpins "Shadowrun", sounding like a jungle 12” pitched down, hinting at Pinch’s dubstep heritage while "Music Killer Dub" draws from Sherwood’s lengthy CV. The voices of Jamaican legends like the Congos and Lee "Scratch" Perry—with a sample of now-deceased reggae-punk icon Mikey Dread—all intermingle on the springy track, squelches and gurgles spurting out every few bars. Daddy Freddy’s well-deep growl rumbles underneath "Bucketman" as the other sounds push into the red and back. "Gimme Some More (Tight Like That)" might have the most telltale dubstep wobble of the set, infused with menacing horror soundtrack synth chords and growling dancehall vocals sped into chipmunk territory.
On the back half of the album, the collaboration settles into a flat middle ground somewhere between Sherwood’s '80s dub-punk productions and Pinch’s 21st century tracks, namely the '90s genre known as downtempo. A female vocal sample talking about birdsong, another sampled voice asks "Did you get lost on the trip?" gets tossed with a little diddle on piano, all of it wedded to a soggy drum track that is uncharacteristically generic for the two. "Precinct of Sound" also sounds staid, a voice croaking "sound" as alarm-like sound effects swirl around, lasting barely two minutes. If the hand drums of "Africa 138" had a bit more space, and didn’t have to tussle with another disembodied vocal and guitar line, the beat might have stuck. The most classic dub-sounding track of the album, closer "Run Them Away" best blends the two producer’s formidable skills. Though coming as it does at album’s end, the otherwise lovely chorus—sung by Sherwood associates Bernard Fowler and Bim Sherman—sounds like an exit strategy. | 2015-02-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-02-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Tectonic / On-U Sound | February 10, 2015 | 6.8 | 93955d5e-9241-48e2-928c-fd4040f4ef19 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Chicago rapper’s first milestone is a careful step in his legacy-building business. It's an obvious turn inward, but Vic also digs his heels into new political ground. | The Chicago rapper’s first milestone is a careful step in his legacy-building business. It's an obvious turn inward, but Vic also digs his heels into new political ground. | Vic Mensa: The Autobiography | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vic-mensa-the-autobiography/ | The Autobiography | It only takes a minute into his debut album for Vic Mensa to say “I told you so.” The 24-year old Chicago rapper has been obsessing over this moment for years. He’s actually talking to his parents and friends, which makes the moment all the more endearing in its lack of snark. It’s goodwill he carries through the rest of The Autobiography, an unimaginative and over-promising title for an artist’s first major milestone, but one that’s not overly lofty in describing Mensa’s album-length character building.
With its long windup and veteran industry legend No I.D. helming the ship as executive producer, The Autobiography feels like a purposeful statement of intent, a careful step in the Vic Mensa legacy-building business. Mensa has the industry trappings of a nascent star: JAY-Z’s personal and major label backing, deep roots in the Chicago hip-hop scene that graduated artists like Chance the Rapper and Joey Purp, an opening spot on a Justin Bieber tour. Part of the appeal of Mensa’s debut has been its purposefully and grandly shrouded expectations. Last year, Vic publicly scrapped plans for an album called Traffic, this in the middle of leaning ever more into his punk rock image while espousing a burning activist bent. He was there in 2015 protesting the Chicago Police Department’s killing of Laquan McDonald and then joined in last year at Standing Rock as a conspicuous quasi-celebrity voice against the Dakota Access Pipeline. As his name has grown, Mensa has lent it to progressive issues and made music that reflects that commitment. The Autobiography is an obvious turn inward, but Vic also digs his heels into this political ground.
Perhaps Mensa has been less urgent in developing his artistry, but The Autobiography gathers up all his charms, including his most compelling case as a genre-agnostic vocalist alongside some missed-the-mark rock crossovers. “Rollin’ Like a Stoner” is a big, clunky Kid Cudi homage about addiction, the titular chorus more than a little corny, but the angsty sentiment entirely sincere. The simple pleasure of hearing Vic’s versatile raps makes it easy to forgive him for the type of low-hanging lyricism he dabbles with throughout. “They say, ‘Vic, are you okay?’/Dude, no way,” he sputters here, and at another point he just belts out an unadorned “Rockstar life!” The Weezer feature on the next song, “Homewrecker,” must have been years in the making, but it’s really just Rivers Cuomo wailing out the song’s title on the outro. The follow-up “Gorgeous” is a more petty song about cheating, but it’s also less cumbersome without the burdens of the winding storytelling featured on “Homewrecker.” Even though he’s nurtured his singing voice into a powerful soulful rock tool, the Internet’s Syd helps Vic out on the hook, a surging electronic affair built on plodding piano changes. Even when he swings and misses on the power pop outings, The Autobiography never casts Vic out of pocket despite all the mood switching. Still, it’s his rapping that got him here.
As much as he is a naturally voracious emcee, Mensa is also writerly. His bars can sound productively picked at and pored over, or clunky and pent-up when overly pampered. (The cover of The Autobiography shows Mensa sitting on the ground, pen in hand, surrounded by crumpled up paper, a trite advertisement that he’s been taking this whole thing super-duper seriously.) The Autobiography splits those tendencies down the middle, casting its star as a remarkable, easy-to-digest rapper with an affinity for half-baked wordplay. The sound of Mensa’s rapping never grates the ear, but he also says stuff like “It’s hard to put this shit in words/It’s like Macklemore at the Grammys, man/I just feel like you got some shit you didn’t deserve.” There he’s rapping heartfelt about the death of a close friend, and that awkward, years-old rap industry reference sounds entirely out of place, especially on a song that’s otherwise an accomplished storytelling feat, each verse a chapter written by a mourning Vic, the looking-down-from-heaven victim, and the guilt-ridden murderer himself. The-Dream pops up here and then on a later reprise, his voice sounding hauntingly angelic over the twinkling hook.
Tracks like “The Fire Next Time” and “OMG” cast Vic as the cypher-ready emcee he originally built his name on, just with pricier, star-level production, and in that latter case, an expanding rolodex in the form of a Pusha T feature. Still, there’s nothing here better than that beginning moment of the album. “Say I Didn’t” is triumphant and expensive, a red carpet for the rest of the record. The Darondo sample has been beaten to death but sounds fresh in the hands of a troupe of producers that includes No I.D. and BOOTS. “You used to hate to hear the phone ring/Now you can’t wait to hear the phone ring,” Vic raps at his once dubious father, tacking on an affected, “Ain’t that a beautiful thing.” It’s an unpretentious way of saying he’s come a long way without needing to tell the whole story, just that things are better for him now. He might smack you in the face with it, but Vic’s style leaves nothing to interpretation. As long as he’s clear where he stands, that dramatic lucidity suits him just fine. | 2017-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | July 31, 2017 | 6.9 | 9398ff07-f100-4a3d-96b2-2cd5943a1c03 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
On the follow-up to 2020’s WOMB, the duo is torn between looking back and moving forward. Mostly, they add layers of polish to their familiar electro-pop sound. | On the follow-up to 2020’s WOMB, the duo is torn between looking back and moving forward. Mostly, they add layers of polish to their familiar electro-pop sound. | Purity Ring: graves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/purity-ring-graves/ | graves | Eleven years ago, when Purity Ring released their breakout single, “Ungirthed,” the pairing of dirty South-style rap beats and twee synth pop was remarkably novel. Even during the heyday of witch-house artists like SALEM and oOoOO, nothing quite compared to the contrast between producer Corin Roddick’s whimsical grit and Megan James’ macabre yet sweetly sung lyrics. The Edmonton, Alberta, duo had captured lightning in a bottle, and they continued to harness its spark across three albums.
That’s not to say Purity Ring have never tried new things. In 2015, their sophomore album, another eternity, seemed meant to counter any accusation that the 11 songs on 2012’s Shrines were all variations on one great idea. Roddick added fluorescent EDM synths and stately piano to his 808-driven rhythms; James began experimenting with a more explicitly pop-oriented cadence and elocution. WOMB, their moodier third album, was in many ways a beefed-up return to form—girded with rich atmospherics, heavier synths, and processed vocal hooks on par with contemporary chart-toppers.
Two years after WOMB, the graves EP is firmly rooted in the same subtle reconfiguration that comes with each new Purity Ring release. Some songs even sound outright regressive, which isn’t always bad. James has said that the title track “has been haunting us for eight straight years,” and its bouncy trance chords and glowing piano clearly recall the euphoric rushes on another eternity. The touches of 2010s nostalgia are charming, but less so when “nthngsfine” and “unlucky” evoke an overproduced and undercooked Shrines. When James breathily sings, “How lucky you are to be so unlucky, breaking onto the rooftops over Waikiki,” amid clouds of effects and reversed synths, it sounds both convoluted and ill-fitting. Simple compositions and evocative lyrics were integral parts of Purity Ring, and without them, the music feels more like a glittery spectacle than an immersive pop world.
With every layer of polish shellacked onto their core sound, the people behind Purity Ring’s genre tropes and dark poetics grow increasingly obscured. James has always favored evocative abstractions in her lyrics, but there’s less to grasp here than before. Small illustrative moments appear (“You sailed away on a sunken boat,” goes a memorable line in “neverend”), but they’re often undercut by non-sequiturs (“This city’s fucked but how’d you know about the side road”) or throwaway refrains (“Spinning like you never end, just do it again let’s do it again”). “watersong” is a fine little ditty with an interestingly choppy synth line and sticky melody, but it’s riddled with vocal quirks and half-baked lyrics that interrupt the song’s easygoing flow. At best, James’ angelic lilt can elevate her words beyond meaning. At worst, her over-pronunciation, heavy vocal processing, and awkward word choices can kill a track’s momentum and leave it thematically barren.
James and Roddick occasionally find their stride, and even occasionally set foot in new territory. After their familiar pop pastiche takes on a palatial quality in the first half of “neverend,” the song slips into a broken and emotive electronica that brings to mind early-aughts glitch-pop producers like Dntel and Schneider TM, with James’ incomparable voice gliding effortlessly through the noise. “soshy” tries out a 4/4 dance beat with Roddick’s time-stretched synths and pitched samples, and the snappy, sumptuous arrangement pairs impeccably with James’ gentle singsong. It ends up feeling like a “Hold On We’re Going Home” or “Passionfruit” moment on a Drake record, treating us to an unexpected side of an artist that outshines some of their best-known music.
Closing the EP is a short, sparse piano instrumental that sounds unlike anything else here. Played by hand and recorded intimately, “xsalt” feels like a huge breath letting air into Purity Ring’s hermetically sealed electro pop, expanding its frame and shaking out the settling dust. The melody is quaint and tender, with inconsistencies that make it sound improvised. You can hear the wooden creaks in the room and the pillowy impact of each key being pushed down. Simply put, it feels authentic and alive—a revealing piece of music on an EP otherwise awash in effects and affectation. | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Music Fellowship | June 7, 2022 | 5.8 | 939ac62a-f294-465c-8e6a-45ea85eadfdc | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
Balancing the grotesque and the beautiful, the Pittsburgh group's Kickstarter-funded new album may be their most accessible to date. But if this is psychedelia, it's only in the sense that each song replicates the intensity of the trip: the suicidal lows and the love-is-everything highs. | Balancing the grotesque and the beautiful, the Pittsburgh group's Kickstarter-funded new album may be their most accessible to date. But if this is psychedelia, it's only in the sense that each song replicates the intensity of the trip: the suicidal lows and the love-is-everything highs. | Black Moth Super Rainbow: Cobra Juicy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17134-cobra-juicy/ | Cobra Juicy | No one believes themselves to be evil. The killer keeps pet pigeons. The thief drops change in a bum's cup as karmic reimbursement. Even Lucille Bluth would occasionally shed a tear if she could spare the moisture. Maybe Baudelaire put it best: the Devil's greatest trick is convincing people he doesn't exist. But Baudelaire never dealt with Ikea parking lots, petroleum executives, or Reddit trolls.
Tobacco's greatest trick is reminding people that not only does the devil exist, he keeps a Pittsburgh address. Since Black Moth Super Rainbow came to attention with 2007's Dandelion Gum, the band's demon-throated frontman has mastered the art of sounding sinister. He's so upfront with his intent that the group's new Kickstarter-funded album Cobra Juicy has a song called "I Think I'm Evil". He also named himself after the most pernicious herb since hemlock.
Of course, you can point to any number of metal bands or horrorcore rap groups who have brandished the triple six as a way to sell records and satisfy their evil urges. What's unique about Black Moth Super Rainbow is the balance achieved between the grotesque and the beautiful. This is not as easy as it sounds. Descend too deeply into darkness, and you run the risk of becoming fright-night schlock. Lean too delicately on seraphic chords and melodies and you lack menace. And should you lack the pop sensibilities, your satanic majesty's request can get exhausting. Examine the more underwhelming moments of the Odd Future catalog to see what happens when N.E.R.D. never quite meet nihilism.
From jump, Black Moth Super Rainbow have been unfairly tarred as gimmickry. This stems from several reasons. First, there are the names sounding straight from an un-purchased Adult Swim pilot. Tobacco, Iffernaut, Ryan Graveface, Bullsmear, and the Seven Fields of Aphelion. Ex-members include Father Hummingbird and Power Pill Fist (who presumably left to join Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade). Then there's the band's semi-anonymity and penchant for shrouding themselves in darkness, wearing masks, and performing backed by 80s aerobics videos. Yet it's mostly the voice. Tobacco uses a vocoder on every song. This isn't the Teutonic turtle-necked modulation of Kraftwerk, the mad-scientist whimsy of Bruce Haack, or the funky lothario of Roger Troutman. This is when the robot supposed to solve your problems goes awry; it's the musical equivalent of the animated automatons at Itchy & Scratchyland attacking the Simpsons.
Slot Black Moth Super Rainbow as psychedelic at your own peril. There are no yawning guitar solos and the songs rarely slink past the four-minute mark. Black Moth Super Rainbow triangulate early Beck and the Air of the "Kelly Watch the Stars" era. But neither cognate flashes the crooked smile of Cobra Juicy. Even the title itself seeks to pair the contradictory ideas of vitamins and venom.
Opening track "Windshield Smasher" features vocals that sound like gorgons moaning, paired with synthesizers that sound like they got bubble gum got stuck in the gears. The drums snap like the trap floor at a hanging. They are a band explicitly antithetical to the idea of Rap Genius. They've always been purposely obfuscating, but Cobra Juicy's lyrics are even more difficult to decipher than usual. It is pop as Rorschach blot. You hear what you want bubbling out of the murk. Yours ears absorb toxic effluvia about kissing gasoline and shattering glass. Devil's Night finally gets the soundtrack that D-12 could never deliver.
"Hairspray Heart" finds Tobacco wailing about "sucking all the poison from a snakebite" and "a fucking diamond falling from my fucking eyes" over freeway underpass-dirty drums and rainbow sherbet synths. "Psychic Love Damage" is swooning ballad that might be the closest BMSR come to romantic, but even then, the lover's smiles "wreck" him. "We Burn" channels folk singer era Beck, if he was abducted and forced to entertain Xenu and John Travolta.
Other than would-be mission statement, "I Think I'm Evil", "Gangs in the Garden" might be the song that best encapsulates the helter-skelter aesthetic. There is synth bass, a beat that could soundtrack a robbery at a roller rink, distorted guitars, and vocals that channel the voice of the snake in the Garden of Eden. All this would be schtick if not for Tobacco's ever-improving pop gifts. Wait for the bridge at 1:20 of "Blurring My Day" when the chaos relents for a few seconds like a confession metaphysically wiping away weeks of sin. If this is psychedelia, it's only in the sense that each song replicates the intensity of the trip: the suicidal lows and the love-is-everything highs.
This might be BMSR's most accessible effort, but if you couldn't get past the vocoder and voodoo before, it's unlikely that you will now. This is a cult, one large enough to raise over $100K to fund this record-- led by a man advocating cutting Kool-Aid with cyanide and always inviting new members. | 2012-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rad Cult | October 26, 2012 | 7.6 | 939f9015-a0b0-49f1-af44-b772027c3fee | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
The New York producer once known for muscular house and techno continues to drift into the ether, channeling ’90s chillout and dub techno into his singular vision. | The New York producer once known for muscular house and techno continues to drift into the ether, channeling ’90s chillout and dub techno into his singular vision. | Anthony Naples: Orbs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anthony-naples-orbs/ | Orbs | As he prepared to close his first decade of making music, Anthony Naples reached an impasse. Having established his club bona fides with a growing catalog of tough, distorted house and techno, the New York producer had indulged his appetite for ambient with 2018’s Take Me With You; then, the following year, he answered the atmospheric zig with a floor-friendly zag, Fog FM, that returned him to his body-moving wheelhouse. But the closure of nightclubs in 2020 gave Naples time to think; he suspected Fog FM had been too “obvious.” In retrospect, he said, “I was afraid to make the music I’m making now.” So with 2021’s Chameleon, he took a hard left once again, this time into an unusual fusion of post-punk and downtempo that was some of the most beguiling music of his career.
Where Naples used to be a dance producer who occasionally dipped into home-listening fare, he has increasingly come to look like a downbeat maven with a side hustle in rugged club jams. On Orbs, his first album in nearly two years, he continues to keep dance music at arm’s length. Orbs shares Chameleon’s measured tempos and wistful air. It also shares that album’s hybrid instrumentation, mixing electric guitar, bass, and acoustic drums into a dreamy, ethereal sound that weaves between ambient and post-rock. But the new record is smoother and lusher than its predecessor. And where Chameleon often felt guarded, Orbs glows with newfound confidence.
Naples once wondered if people might think an uncharacteristically colorful set of chord changes was “cheesy,” and on Orbs, he leans into ’90s chillout—a sound also tinged with the faintest hint of uncoolness. The slow-motion dub groove and woozy pads of the opening “Moto Verse” call back to the Mo Wax label’s Headz 2, a pair of 1996 compilations that mapped the era’s downtempo landscape. “Orb Two” goes further, sinking into shimmering pads and a lite-funk bassline that wouldn’t be out of place on Kruder & Dorfmeister’s dorm room make-out staple The K&D Sessions. (Or, more generously, Air’s timeless Moon Safari.) A low-key trip-hop revival has been bubbling away for a while now, but what’s surprising about Orbs is how unabashedly frictionless, even frothy, it can be—particularly coming from a guy who used to pile on the distortion and tape compression. By rescuing outmoded sounds, Naples provides a buoyant counterbalance to underground electronic music’s self-conscious darkness.
He eases into a more customary set of reference points on the album’s back half, where featherweight, slow-motion dub techno comes to the fore. The vibes are wispy, but the emotions cut deep. There’s hardly anything to “Ackee,” at least on paper—just a languid descending bassline answered by twinkling chords, all of it wrapped in a gentle fog. But there are things happening out of earshot: shimmering chimes and scraps of melodica, and imperceptible micro-rhythms that flutter around the stolid, four-on-the-floor kick. “Scars” and “Strobe” offer similarly enigmatic takes on ambient techno, and with the closing “Unknow,” Naples swirls together all the album’s influences—and a few more—into one of the most bewitching songs he’s ever made.
The gloomy electric bass and backmasked pads fall halfway between DJ Shadow and the Cure; soft tendrils of clean-toned guitar have the warm, reassuring feel of the Durutti Column, yet the snare drum echoes like a gunshot across a frozen field. The net effect suggests something like Balearic goth—a weird amalgam that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow does. As in the best of Naples’ work, it’s impossible to tease out the different strands; the emotional crux of “Unknow” is a subdued melodic riff that might be someone humming, or maybe a muted trumpet, or maybe both things digitally soldered together. Yet it’s not all so sweet: An abraded synth periodically cuts crosswise across the track, an intimation of ominous forces lurking in the wings. You can hear an echo of his corrosive club instincts gnawing away at the margins of this tranquil reverie. Naples once worried that he had let others’ expectations unconsciously guide his music-making into “obvious” places. “Unknow” is the gorgeous capstone on an album that demonstrates the singularity of his vision. | 2023-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ANS | June 7, 2023 | 8 | 939feb88-cb6b-4b10-a7a2-17ecbfcd287e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
An encouraging, comforting voice permeates O.K., Gabrielle Smith's second album in her solo project Eskimeaux. O.K. invites us to view the world through Smith's eyes, and somehow it feels as if Smith is lending her ear to you rather than the other way around. | An encouraging, comforting voice permeates O.K., Gabrielle Smith's second album in her solo project Eskimeaux. O.K. invites us to view the world through Smith's eyes, and somehow it feels as if Smith is lending her ear to you rather than the other way around. | Eskimeaux: O.K. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20434-ok/ | O.K. | The most appropriate word to describe Gabrielle Smith's solo project Eskimeaux might be "togetherness." The band founded Brooklyn songwriting and art collective the Epoch in 2011 along with several of their friends, but this sense of mutual support and do-it-together philosophy has long been a part of Smith's M.O. She originally formed Eskimeaux in 2007, all the while happily joining her peers' and fellow collective members' bands—Bellows, Told Slant, and Frankie Cosmos. Smith's songs reflect this type of profound concern for the well-being of those around her, an eagerness to take a backseat when others need her and a longing to still express her own sharp meditations on love and loneliness.
Several of the songs on O.K. are new versions of previous recordings, but this time around Smith has scaled back to outline each melody in clearer brush strokes. Where certain tracks on 2013's Igluenza were monotone or drawn out, they graduate to fully formed pop on this release. Before, "I Admit I'm Scared" felt flat despite its visually compelling lyrics ("Everything I said spewed like sparklers from my mouth/ They looked pretty as they flew but now they're useless and burnt out"), while here it's one of the album's strongest moments. Subtle harmonies slowly coax Smith's gentle alto into a confident soar over Felix Walworth's galloping drum fill. She casually divulges secrets as though her arm is already on your shoulder, her quiet relatability spiking upwards at the climax ("If I had a dime for every time I'm freaking out/ We could fly around the world or just get out of your parents' house").
This encouraging, comforting voice permeates O.K. It may not always come in the form of a soft whisper in the night, but somehow it feels as if Smith is lending her ear to you rather than the other way around. Whether she's letting you know that it's okay to be scared and sad—notably on danceable bedroom pop number "Alone at the Party"—or tenderly confessing how important you are ("The Thunder Answered Back"), the sweetness isn't saccharine, it's sincere and intimate. And when the entire band accompanies Smith on the latter track, she serves gut-wrenching doses of candor: "It must feel like fucking hell/ To be a patchwork of yourself." Smith is a hyper-aware observer, able to pinpoint others' despair just as well as her own.
Sonically, O.K. is the most fitting pallette for Smith's work. In the past she's played around with drum machines and broken synth beats, which weighed her down in gloomy, droning noise. This LP finally matches Eskimeaux's illuminating presence. She slips from sparse indie-folk to ethereal pop throughout the record, each arrangement rich and meticulously composed. The band never overpowers Smith's celestial vocals, and she's able to keep up with the slow-burning tension when it eventually detonates. Walworth's attentive drumming is a welcome addition that swells and retracts to complement Jack Greenleaf's twinkling synth arpeggios.
At face value, it's easy to mistake Smith's nursery rhyme name-dropping and misty-eyed warmth for childlike naiveté. However, she's no Pollyanna—she's simply acknowledging the darkness and aiming to move past it. O.K. invites us to view the world through Smith's eyes. The unassuming strength of her vision is what makes that invitation so worth accepting. | 2015-05-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | May 11, 2015 | 7.5 | 93aaf837-26c2-4c34-b422-c76ba0fa5f3d | Tess Duncan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tess-duncan/ | null |
The Chicago duo experiments with how many wayward impulses fit inside conventional pop structures on their expansive and thrilling second album. | The Chicago duo experiments with how many wayward impulses fit inside conventional pop structures on their expansive and thrilling second album. | Ohmme: Fantasize Your Ghost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ohmme-fantasize-your-ghost/ | Fantasize Your Ghost | “I want to tell you quietly, but I’m afraid you won’t hear it,” sing the members of Chicago duo Ohmme in the first verse of “Spell It Out,” braiding their voices tightly together, as they almost always do. The song’s narrator is trying to get through to a thickheaded partner who won’t shoulder their fair share of domestic labor, and the hints she’s dropping aren’t working. Singer-guitarists Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham make the tension audible in cyclical guitar figures, and a pensive string section hovers over the proceedings like a summer rain cloud that may or may not burst. When it opens up, the downpour is gentle. The strings become sweeping and romantic, and the narrator finally spells it out: “What ever happened to you wanting to be there?” The dishes are only the beginning of the problem, it’s clear. Fantasize Your Ghost, Ohmme’s second album, tells you things quietly. Like the obtuse partner of “Spell It Out,” you’d do well to listen closely.
Cunningham and Stewart formed Ohmme in 2014, emerging from Chicago’s fertile scene for left-field improvised music. (Cunningham works for the company that produces Pitchfork Festival.) Though their roots are in the avant-garde, they have connections in many of Chicago’s less foreboding musical corners: they’ve lent backing vocals to Chance the Rapper and string arrangements to Whitney, played in bands with Jeff Tweedy and Vic Mensa. Their 2017 self-titled EP, and 2018 debut album Parts, established them as a virtuosic and wildly inventive indie rock band, pursuing their experimental inclinations across bright and punchy songs, with noise freakouts and placid vocal harmonies sharing equal space. The two songwriters operated as if one, sharing nearly every lyric and lending steady accompaniment to each other’s improvisatory guitar excursions.
Even at its most exuberant, Parts felt sealed off from the outside world, mirroring the tight quarters of its cover photo. Fantasize Your Ghost is more spacious, and the duo experiments with how many cock-eyed experimental impulses can fit inside a conventional pop song. “The Limit” picks up the thread Dirty Projectors left hanging after Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan, fooling you into believing that melodies of dizzying baroque complexity are actually sugary singalong hooks. The lurching riff and brain-melting feedback of “Selling Candy” come across as celebratory rather than confrontational, thanks to the light touch of drummer Matt Carroll and the sly humor of Cunningham and Stewart’s lyrics, which reminisce on childhoods spent wandering a city filled with hot dog vendors and streets imagined as hot lava.
For all the liberating chaos of their guitar playing, Ohmme have always had an affinity for quiet and an improvisers’ commitment to listening and responding to each other. (Few bands whose genre tags might include the word “noise” could pull off a Tiny Desk Concert; Ohmme’s is a marvel.) The back half of Fantasize Your Ghost gives extended space to the band’s meditative side. “3 2 4 3” is restrained and hypnotic, with Carroll channelling Jaki Liebezeit’s trance-funk groove and Cunningham and Stewart repeating an elliptical mantra: “Different today, but I’m the same.” Ohmme are a powerhouse live band, and it’s easy to imagine “3 2 4 3” evolving into a sprawling Can-style jam with multiple fiery peaks whenever they’re able to take this material on the road. For now, the climax is more subdued: a stab of strings and a wordless vocal harmony, stretching forever as the band glides on.
Fantasize Your Ghost ends with a juxtaposition. First, “Sturgeon Moon,” the group’s most dissonant piece of music by far, a scorched and metallic landscape that sounds like it was improvised from scratch, recalling early Sonic Youth at their most apocalyptic. Then “After All,” a magnificent pop song with the easy melodic elegance of a Brill Building gem, whose lyrics acknowledge the surprising about-face with a wink: “After all the commotion/After all, I need to plant my rose.” Cunningham and Stewart’s vocal blend is at its richest and sweetest, a single glowing sound that never loses their individual variances of inflection and pitch. They are like instruments in a string quartet, an effect heightened by the appearance of an actual string quartet, swooping in to take over for them in the third verse. Stewart and Cunningham seem capable of almost anything, a surplus of ability extending in so many directions that the music might feel scattershot if not for this grounding factor. No matter the surroundings, it always comes back to those two voices, singing together.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | June 8, 2020 | 7.5 | 93ac41ba-fac5-4786-bb61-d6ed67f850dc | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Fifty years after the three-day concert made rock’n’roll history, a gargantuan, 38-disc set attempts to tell the full story of the event for the very first time. | Fifty years after the three-day concert made rock’n’roll history, a gargantuan, 38-disc set attempts to tell the full story of the event for the very first time. | Various Artists: Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-woodstock-back-to-the-garden-the-definitive-50th-anniversary-archive/ | Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive | The mythological status of 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival can sometimes feel overpowering. The festival is the ultimate expression of the 1960s. Moments from the three-day concert have crystallized as symbols of the era, with details like Richie Havens’ acoustic prayer for freedom, Roger Daltrey’s fringed leather vest, or Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” held up as sacred countercultural relics.
Partly to blame are both Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary film and the accompanying triple-LP soundtrack, which multiple generations of fans encountered through older relatives or at midnight showings at revival houses. The truth about what happened on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York is vastly more interesting than the myth, but for years, there was no counter-argument available.
With the festival’s 50th anniversary, producers Andy Zax and Brian Kehew made the case that this was the time to set the record straight and get it right. As Zax writes in the liner notes, “If we’re still thinking and arguing and opining about the meaning of Woodstock after half a century, shouldn’t we at least have a set of baseline facts about what happened there?” The result is the limited edition 38-CD set Woodstock - Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive. (Several abridged versions—10xCD, 3xCD and 5xLP sets—were released in June.)
Over the course of the set’s 432 tracks, producers Zax and Kehew unveil an exhaustive, end-to-end reconstruction of the festival in precise chronological order, the result of 10 years of careful research, audio reconstruction, and debunked myths, as Zax relates in the 88-page liner notes. But the true revelation of this release is simply how great the newly restored recordings sound. Zax and Kehew approached the mixing by referring to photographic documentation, which allowed them to situate the performers within the mix based on where they were standing onstage. Comparing the original soundtrack to the 2019 product is like switching from black and white to Technicolor: The compression and flatness that choked the life out of the original release is gone. The result is a sonically welcoming experience that is as immersive as you could want; it is a joy to listen to.
A glance at the complete lineup drives home the fact that there was an abundance of talent onstage at Woodstock. The stretch from late Saturday night into early Sunday morning stands out in particular, beginning with Creedence Clearwater Revival at 12:30 a.m., then Janis Joplin (who took the stage to an enormous roar at 2 a.m.), Sly and the Family Stone, and the Who, finishing as dawn broke purple behind the stage, with Jefferson Airplane (who were on the orange acid, as opposed to the brown acid featured in the now-infamous warning over the PA), providing what lead singer Grace Slick proclaimed “morning maniac music!” at 8 a.m. The experience of hearing these sets back to back is extraordinary. As ’60s rock chronicler Ellen Sander says in the liner notes, “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more fabulous, it did. It was like being in the heartbeat of a mythic beast.”
Almost all the artists involved allowed their full, actual sets to be included this time around. (The lone exception was Jimi Hendrix: The owners of his catalog held back two songs from his set.) John Fogerty complained for decades about Creedence following the Dead, but their set turns out to have been 50 minutes of high-octane choogle, including three recent Top Ten singles. The Band’s set, originally rejected by the group because “it wasn’t totally up to our standard,” proves to be delicate, gorgeous, and heart-wrenchingly evocative. Crosby Stills & Nash substituted tracks from a later Fillmore East performance on the first Woodstock album, but their set at the festival was better, transmitting an ebullience and energy that feels more like they’re singing together for the first time in Joni Mitchell’s house than onstage in front of half a million people; both “Wooden Ships” and “Long Time Gone” have an electric depth that still resonates 50 years later. And the Dead’s longtime assertion that they were a disaster is greatly exaggerated, even if 40 minutes of “Turn on Your Lovelight” is a little much, even for Deadheads.
Also restored and contextualized in this release are all the legendary stage announcements from production team members John Morris and Chip Monck—each one of which, writes Zax, might serve as “the start of a miniature novel”: Louis Price is summoned with a number to call in Washington, D.C.; Wheat Germ is told that the bag containing his medicine is in the possession of Holly; Edward Shea needs to meet Barbara at the car right away. Special mention goes to the idiots who climbed the lighting scaffolding and spent the festival being admonished twice an hour by an increasingly annoyed-sounding Monck. The mundanity and humanity of these details draw you in, and it’s a much more believable scenario than the Wadleigh documentary with its triple-split-screens and jump cuts. Ultimately, the announcements are the mechanism that places the attendees within the story. As the Who’s Roger Daltrey astutely (and affectionately) notes, “The stars of Woodstock were the audience.”
The one negative of this project is its inaccessibility. Rhino only manufactured 1,969 box sets; each one retails at $799.98, and there are no plans to make the 38-disc version available on streaming services. For those with smaller budgets, the 10xCD version is still worthwhile, as it’s the first Woodstock compilation to feature every artist that appeared at the festival, and was assembled with the same intent of conveying the experience of the three days. What the 38-disc box set succeeds at is not just righting the record, or presenting a mammoth set of live songs, but in creating an environment that effectively transports the listener to that muddy pasture in upstate New York. In the spirit of the original event, that experience should be extended as widely as Woodstock’s influence.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Rhino | August 2, 2019 | 8.2 | 93b159d3-2f6e-40d7-ab41-588a841075e7 | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
Songs: Ohia fans, consider this a test of faith. The unstable, minor-key discomfort of Ghost Tropic\n\ is long gone ... | Songs: Ohia fans, consider this a test of faith. The unstable, minor-key discomfort of Ghost Tropic\n\ is long gone ... | Songs: Ohia: Magnolia Electric Co. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7333-magnolia-electric-co/ | Magnolia Electric Co. | Songs: Ohia fans, consider this a test of faith. The unstable, minor-key discomfort of Ghost Tropic is long gone, and for the first time, Will Oldham comparisons will be shelved by critics in favor of, god forbid, Bob Seger. The wailing, desperate spirits that plagued Jason Molina through his earlier albums have been banished, mostly; others have come to help him light candles against the darkness, and now "something's got to change." So he's left the quiet sorrow of Didn't It Rain sucking the diesel fumes of 70s roots-rock by the shoulder of a lonely stretch of highway, consciously emulating his ancestors in a long line of working-class heroes. No matter what you might think of Seger (and pretty much anything would be justified), or the earthy bombast of the time, such simple honesty as Molina's is always in style, and the results are rarely less than excellent.
It may simply be the natural progression from the slightly fuller sound of Didn't It Rain, but the overt desire to move on preoccupies Molina. If the last album was a lamentation on finding home in Chicago and the sheer inertia of blue-collar hand-to-mouth, then Magnolia Electric Co. is about finding the strength to move, to grow, and to leave it all behind. "While you've been busy crying about my past mistakes/ I've been busy tryin' to make a change/ And now I've made a change," is Molina's righteous cry in the early moments of "I've Been Riding with the Ghost"; it's this bittersweet sentiment that forms the lingering heart of this album. But then, with the unearthly call of steel pedal strings and the line, "See, I ain't gettin' better/ I'm only gettin' behind," the motivation for this need to pick up stakes becomes evident. It's beyond just a noble determination not to succumb to the stagnation of poverty or routine, and when the first hints of an underlying fear crack the façade, the effect transcends the allegorical simplicity of gallant idealism to something far more moving, something almost indescribably human.
These themes are echoed even more poignantly on the title-says-it-all opener "Farewell Transmission", perhaps the most powerful Songs: Ohia tune yet: "I will try/ No one ever really tries/ I will be gone/ But not forever." This stirring mix of melancholy and hope which Molina consistently finds in his lyrics is swelled to epic levels by the driving alt-country pride and a painfully plaintive refrain. Molina's fixation on the symbolic romanticism of the moon and the darkness might be predictable, but it continues to impress as he segues from heartaching confessional to oblique metaphor in a single breath.
When Magnolia Electric Co. hits its stride in tracks like these, and others like "Almost Was Good Enough", it soars over Molina's previous work, but it's not an unqualified success. First, although the rotating lineup of Songs: Ohia players recasts familiar faces Jennie Benford as Backing Vocal #1 and the Mi Sei Apparso Come un Fantasma musicians as The Band, Molina's brought along Lawrence Peters and Scout Niblett as Guest Vocalists #1 and #2, respectively, and he turns the reins over to them on "The Old Black Hen" and "Peoria Lunch Box", to decidedly mixed results. Neither singer seems to connect with the written material, leading to slightly flattened deliveries of what might otherwise have been breathtaking in Molina's broken drawl.
Niblett does all right for herself, still managing to infuse "Lunch Box" with a sort of haunting (if off-key) resignation, but Peters is more problematic. His fatherly, Haggard croon is a little more upbeat than the subject matter, and he sounds an awful lot like someone who should be saving his tears in the beer bottles he keeps in the back of his burnt-out pickup (with his dog) while he drives down dusty country roads, and the thunder rolls, and the lightning... whatever. Depending on one's tolerance for that hardcore country-soaked vibe, he's either extremely impressive or just awful. But either way, he's not Molina, whose voice you bought this disc to hear.
Aside from that, the music doesn't always support the strength of Molina's words, especially in the gratuitously stormy "John Henry Split My Heart", but that's less a shot at the compositions than a testament to the wrenching sincerity of the lyrics. It takes a colossal effort to back Molina's candor, and given what a departure this record is for the band, it's not surprising that some of the songs get bogged down here and there. It's also not much of a problem; in the end, the more obviously misguided moments will be long forgotten, left in the roadside dust. Magnolia Electric Co. is the sound of change. It may be uncertain whether this is the journey of a man moving towards what he wants to become, or away from what he has been, but it's a great ride regardless. | 2003-03-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-03-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | March 12, 2003 | 8.2 | 93b67f3f-87e1-40a9-b23b-31f5ccad1d0d | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
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