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On their debut, My Morning Jacket discovered the heavy reverb that would make them legendary. | On their debut, My Morning Jacket discovered the heavy reverb that would make them legendary. | My Morning Jacket: The Tennessee Fire: 20th Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-morning-jacket-the-tennessee-fire-20th-anniversary-edition/ | The Tennessee Fire: 20th Anniversary Edition | My Morning Jacket recorded parts of The Tennessee Fire at Above the Cadillac, a makeshift studio on a Kentucky farm. Located in a tiny town called Shelbyville, the farm was owned by the grandparents of Johnny Quaid, My Morning Jacket’s original guitarist and cousin of singer Jim James. It’s a decent backstory, but then James laid his vocals down in an abandoned grain silo, and now, that’s the only part people remember.
Maybe James could have achieved the same tone in a deserted steel mill a few hours away in Evansville, Indiana, or a meat locker in Frankfort, but that Shelbyville silo helped James—and My Morning Jacket—achieve a sort of supreme rusticity years before Justin Vernon holed up in Wisconsin. For god’s sake, the town of Shelbyville was once the home of the real-life Colonel Sanders.
Its misleading title aside, The Tennessee Fire feels modeled after Kentucky itself—Rust Belt, midwestern, and Appalachian, yes, but always country, and misunderstood by the majority of outsiders. “I was born in East Kentucky/Home of where the grass is dyed/Always down and always out/But my morals always seemed just fine,” James sings on The Tennessee Fire’s solo centerpiece “I Will Be There When You Die”—a sentiment and a song that could’ve comforted a Pineville coal miner a century ago. “Take me out of this hell I'm in/Take me out of this dead-end nightmare/And put me back in a world I can live,” he wails earlier on a “Nashville to Kentucky,” with enough reverb to float him into the same anti-gravity airspace that Sigur Rós occupied that year.
The earnest austerity of “Nashville to Kentucky” might’ve slotted Jim James next to Will Oldham. But it’s the rebel-yell shitkickers like “Heartbreakin’ Man,” “The Dark,” and “It’s About Twilight Now” that foreshadow where My Morning Jacket would go next on At Dawn. The band hadn’t yet solidified their lineup or toured enough to have the confidence or awareness to recognize their future in extended guitar jams; only one song tops out over five minutes on The Tennessee Fire, and most are under three.
This relative innocence makes The Tennessee Fire the breeziest of My Morning Jacket’s opening trilogy of “harmony and folk shit” records, even if it’s the most uneven. You can hear hints of the restlessness that would eventually lead to 2008’s scatter-brained Evil Urges, which James once compared to a Super Mario Bros. soundtrack. But there’s no overarching theme here, just a band trying on sounds without knowing what they’re doing or expecting anyone to pay attention.
If The Tennessee Fire only hints at the festival juggernaut My Morning Jacket would become, it’s because they rarely sound like an actual band on these songs. James has always been the focal point, and here he plays the high-lonesome crooner that could’ve lived at any point in the past century. This is a drinking-alone album, and the lyrics are startlingly bleak when you tune into them: James mostly anaesthetizes himself amongst the lowdown friends and lovers who leave him for dead, dreaming of “casino bars, tight whores, and Tinseltown.” “I think my mother would kill me/If she knew what I was about,” he moans on “I Will Be There When You Die.” This band never deals in outright anger or aggression, but on The Tennessee Fire, the bitter, aluminum aftertaste of that silo reverb says what James can’t bring himself to.
The Tennessee Fire remains more suited to revisitation than reassessment—its legacy as “the one before At Dawn” feels secure. This reissue comes stocked with the requisite alternate takes and demos, but the most important song from this era isn’t actually included. Technically speaking, the band’s biggest hit is their cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” included on Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh, a collection of odds and ends that preceded their breakthrough At Dawn. It’s easy to see how James related to “Rocket Man” in 1999— one guy trapped inside a metal box, burning up his fuse all alone. | 2019-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Darla | August 3, 2019 | 8 | 93bdb642-7dd4-411d-be97-340700be6f85 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
With top-shelf beats and assists from A-list contributors, the South London rapper’s new mixtape aims to show American listeners that there’s more to British rap than grime and cameos on Drake singles. | With top-shelf beats and assists from A-list contributors, the South London rapper’s new mixtape aims to show American listeners that there’s more to British rap than grime and cameos on Drake singles. | Giggs: Wamp 2 Dem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/giggs-wamp-2-dem/ | Wamp 2 Dem | Giggs’ new mixtape arrives at a time when his profile has never been so high yet his reputation, at least in the U.S., has never dipped so low. A couple of guest spots on Drake’s 2017 playlist album More Life may have elevated the South London rapper to new levels of global renown, but the reaction of American audiences to his work—and in particular the Batman-referencing verse on Drake’s “KMT”—has proved tepid verging on hostile. “His flow is wack. It doesn’t go with the beats he’s on. His mixing engineer did an awful job with his vocals and he’s got some weak bars,” a 17-year-old rap fan told Noisey UK when the music website set out to investigate the biggest Anglo-American culture shock since U.S. audiences started taking Gavin Rossdale seriously.
American criticism of Giggs tends to focus on two particular aspects of his performance. Many U.S. rap fans scoffed at the idea of a British rapper talking about drugs, guns, and gangs, as Giggs does on “KMT,” responding on Twitter with the timeworn clichés of tea and the Victorian empire. Others dislike Giggs’ brutally spartan rap style, comparing him unfavorably to Skepta, an MC who operates in an entirely different style of music. They may both hang out with Drake in London but Skepta is a grime don, while Giggs is the king of road rap, a name recently coined for the heavier, trap-infused style of modern British hip-hop. Giggs has said that Wamp 2 Dem—pronounced “W’appen to dem?,” a nod to the Jamaican patois that is omnipresent in South London—is meant in part as a rejoinder to the first charge. “What I did care about was people wasn’t really respecting England, like the hoods and shit,” he told Beats 1 host Ebro Darden. “I didn’t really like the disrespect of what man’s been through.”
Wamp 2 Dem displays Giggs’ talent for painting brutally dark London scenes with a sparse lyrical touch peppered with enough British slang to keep Genius in advertising dollars for the foreseeable future. On paper, Giggs’ lyrics often don’t amount to much. But he writes perfectly for his own voice, a pitiless, bassy mutter that oozes like tar slopping out of a barrel, infusing lines like “Man ain’t really too confirming/None of these vermin” (from “Gully Niggaz”) with an ominous force. True, some of the lyrics on Wamp 2 Dem may be decidedly charm-free—“Moist Pussy” is about as artless as the name suggests—but you are left in no doubt that Giggs’ native Peckham is far from the Mary Poppins utopia that some stateside listeners clearly imagine it to be.
The beats, meanwhile, show Giggs’ knack for mining the best in transatlantic rap production, a skill that dates back to his breakthrough track “Talkin’ da Hardest,” where he owned the instrumental of Stat Quo’s “Here We Go.” Production on Wamp 2 Dem comes from Florida duo Cool & Dre, Atlanta’s London On Da Track and Zaytoven, and Londoners Donae’o and Footsie, among others, and the overarching feel is of American trap bluster soaked in icy South London rain. American audiences may not find anything especially new here—particularly compared to the spikier, more frenetic sound of grime—but the beats on Wamp 2 Dem are finely tuned for Giggs’ crawling South London menace.
Opening track “Gully Niggaz” is perhaps the best example of this simpatico voice and production fusion. The beat samples Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” an idea that sounds on paper like the kind of contrasting musical blend we should run to the hills to avoid. (In fact, it’s the second time Giggs has taken on the Tchaikovsky ballet, after the 2015 Dizzee Rascal collaboration “Nutcrackerz.”) But the classical bed sits well with Giggs’ bruising monotone; helped by a fantastically heavy, pitch-shifting drum pattern, it adds just enough musical polarity to really lift the song. “Ultimate Gangsta,” which follows, pulls off a similar feat, marrying an eerie string sample to a nervy beat made out of gunshots and hi-hats, over which Giggs and 2 Chainz exchange tales of gangster life.
This high standard barely dips over Wamp 2 Dem’s 13 tracks, which are helped by sympathetic production and guest turns that do more than just take up space in the credits. “Times Tickin’” joins the dots between Giggs’ London hustle, Jamaican dancehall, and American hip-hop, thanks to a commanding guest turn from Popcaan; “Gangstas & Dancers” sees Giggs join forces with Lil Duke and Young Thug on a chilling, detuned beat; and London MCs Footsie and D Double E lend “Outsiders” a wonderfully paranoid energy. But don’t be misled by the A-list guests: Wamp 2 Dem is very much Giggs’ album, where his voice dominates and his aesthetics rule; it is Giggs in excelsis, whether he is being hard, crude, introspective, or playful. By the time “Ruler” closes the album in an epic, almost operatic fashion, the rapper has already made his point: London life isn’t all bangers and mash, British MCs don’t just make grime, and Drake fans who dismissed his performance on “KMT” have a hell of a lot of catching up to do. | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Island / NO BS Music Limited | October 18, 2017 | 7.5 | 93c7c793-5f02-4e81-8704-1ed389437e4b | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Fueled by existential dread and exacting sound design, the New York electronic musician’s second album for Dais is gratifyingly menacing and masterfully executed. | Fueled by existential dread and exacting sound design, the New York electronic musician’s second album for Dais is gratifyingly menacing and masterfully executed. | Hiro Kone: A Fossil Begins to Bray | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiro-kone-a-fossil-begins-to-bray/ | A Fossil Begins to Bray | Nicky Mao knows her way around a modular synthesizer, but she isn’t a techno person. She doesn’t really come from an electronic music background, either. A San Francisco native who also spent significant chunks of time in Hong Kong, Mao came of age in the Bay Area punk and DIY scene, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York in 2001 that she fully engaged with electronic music. Even then, it wasn’t dance music that caught Mao’s ear; instead she gravitated toward the dissonant sonics of groups like Gang Gang Dance and Black Dice.
Nearly 20 years later, Mao still likes aural discord, but now she’s the one manipulating the machines. As Hiro Kone, she’s spent the bulk of this decade honing her craft, repeatedly delivering passionate, politically charged bursts of crunching electronics while gradually moving from rudimentary synth and drum-machine experiments into the arcane realm of modular synthesis. (That particular affinity is something Mao picked up in part from frequent collaborator and former Coil member Drew McDowall; the two teamed up on a 2018 EP called The Ghost of Georges Bataille.)
Mao’s latest album, A Fossil Begins to Bray, continues that evolution, yet it also feels like the start of something new. Mao has upped her production game to a point where it no longer sounds like she’s experimenting. The music here is determined, confident, and occasionally downright threatening. Mao has never been shy about her politics—a casual browse through her Twitter feed might turn up thoughts on the BDS movement, Black Lives Matter, wealth inequality, American militarism, police brutality, or a number of other hot-button progressive topics—but A Fossil Begins to Bray feels like the first time that her rage and her dread have been fully harnessed in her music. The LP is the best thing she’s done.
A Fossil Begins to Bray has been billed as a rumination on absence, and more specifically its power in the face of what Mao describes as a “time of looming and unrelenting techno-fascism.” Faced with a world that’s full of noise, much of it downright terrifying, many artists have chosen to embrace chaos or indulge in full-blown escapism. Mao, however, has gone in a different direction, stripping her work down to the studs and leaving only a sturdy, focused framework that packs a hell of a wallop.
That wallop hits especially hard on “Fabrication of Silence,” a track that pairs sternum-rattling bass drops with ominously looming synth oscillations and razor-sharp sound design. “Feed My Ancestors” is another hard-hitting tune, its booming kicks veering into techno territory as slithering static and moody pads add a palpable sense of fear and apprehension. There’s a subtle ferocity to these tracks, yet Mao never lets the music run wild. A Fossil Begins to Bray may be menacing, but the album’s composure never falters.
Much of this can be credited to Mao’s extreme attention to detail. The droning “Iahklu” is a wonderfully grim exercise in controlled chaos; the unintelligible vocal snippets are a particularly unnerving touch. The album’s most technically accomplished offering is probably “Submerged Dragon,” which lives up to its imposing title. Creeping sheets of static and distortion stand in for the creature’s sinister breathing, which intermittently erupts into ferocious blasts of terrifying, Lightning Bolt-esque noise. In the hands of a novice, it would be easy for a track like this to fall flat, but Mao has clearly gotten to a point where her electronics have become a natural extension of her artistic vision.
At times, that vision becomes more cinematic. The brooding “A Fossil Begins to Bray” feels like the soundtrack to the surveillance state, its lurching synths, wispy waves of static, and mournful, vaguely North African strings steadily sweeping back and forth across the song’s churning underbelly. “Akoluthic Phase” takes a similarly widescreen approach, spiraling skyward in a flurry of thundering rhythms and dark synth crescendos. The magic of this album may be in its details, but A Fossil Begins to Bray certainly isn’t afraid of going big.
Mao’s alias is an Iroquois phrase that roughly translates to “I have spoken.” It’s a fitting moniker for an artist as outspoken as she is, but on A Fossil Begins to Bray, her music finally matches the intensity of her message. Mao’s success here stems from her ability to block out excess noise, focus on what’s important, and leave the rest on the cutting-room floor. Absence may have been her inspiration, but A Fossil Begins to Bray is all about essence.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Dais | November 12, 2019 | 8 | 93cb076e-db91-4f08-a1c7-3100003c3d0e | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Covering two sides of the multifaceted Nigerian pop landscape of the 1970s, these two first-rate compilations from Britain's Soundway touch on disco-tinged club music and heavy riff-rock, with a strong undercurrent of funk being the thread through it all. | Covering two sides of the multifaceted Nigerian pop landscape of the 1970s, these two first-rate compilations from Britain's Soundway touch on disco-tinged club music and heavy riff-rock, with a strong undercurrent of funk being the thread through it all. | Various Artists: Nigeria Disco Funk Special / Nigeria Rock Special | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11694-nigeria-disco-funk-special-nigeria-rock-special/ | Nigeria Disco Funk Special / Nigeria Rock Special | Earlier this year, Britain's Soundway Records returned to compiling West African music after a four-year break. Not that those four years were spent lounging about in their pajamas--they reissued 45s from Colombia, Barbados, Nigeria, and elsewhere in that time, put out a couple LP reissues of vintage Afrofunk albums by Sierra Leone's Geraldo Pino, and put together funky comps of music from Colombia and Panama. And the label's founder, Miles Cleret, also spent a lot of time in Nigeria laying the groundwork for a stunning series of compilations of the country's pop music.
The first dropped a few months ago-- Nigeria Special, which focused mostly on highlife and assorted other mildly funky sounds from the 1970s over its two discs, was up to the extremely high standard the label set for itself early this decade with its Ghana Sounds and Afro Baby compilations. And now they've followed it up with two more discs, this time hitting the discotheque and the rock scene to bring some seriously funky music to a wider audience than it was ever afforded in its day.
Like his compatriot Samy Ben Redjeb of Analog Africa, Cleret painstakingly researches every song he wants to reissue and tracks down the musicians, making sure to properly compensate them for using their work-- there's a whole crop of reissue labels popping up now that do this, and it's sort of mind-blowing that it took so long for it to become the norm. Soundway's refreshing ethics aside, the real reason to pay attention to them is simply that Cleret has such good taste-- his intrepid journeys into the heart of West Africa's record industry yield thousands of records, but he's good at being judicious with his track choices. You're getting the cream of the cream here, and your ears won't be the only parts of your body that notice.
Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound of the Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-1979 offers nine tracks of deep, quite well-produced groove-- by the late 70s, Nigeria was home to plenty of high-tech studios to give the country's musicians the sheen they required as they kicked their funk into a new disco gear. Cleret makes the unusual (for him) move of repeating someone else with his inclusion of Joni Haastrup's "Greetings", which previously appeared on Strut's now out of print Nigeria 70 compilation, but if you'd heard the song you probably would've repeated it too. This is one of my favorite Afrofunk tracks, with a great psychedelic intro featuring flailing flutes and distant calls from Haastrup that sets up an absolutely sick dancefloor beat that would require a truckload of mirror balls spinning in unison to do it full visual justice.
Otherwise, Cleret goes way off the beaten path. I'm a huge fan of the SJOB Movement's first album (1970's A Move in the Right Direction), but I didn't even know they had a second one. Nevertheless, Cleret sources a slamming disco-funk jam with an avalanche of a synth hook called "Love Affair" from it. Bongos Ikwue & the Groovies' "You've Gotta Help Yourself" is four boiling minutes of wah-drenched guitars, jazzy trumpet, and lyrics that reference "God Bless the Child" in the chorus. T-Fire's "Will of the People" has some of the heaviest drums I've ever heard. This is definitely disco-era funk, but it's still very gritty-- you'd never mistake any of it for Silver Convention or Chic-- and the Nigerian bands tended to add liberal doses of jazz freedom and rock crunch to their dancefloor mixture.
The opposite could be said for Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria, where the fuzz guitars, trippy vocals, and heavy riffs are spiced with liberal doses of bottom-heavy rhythm. Nigeria's rock scene rose mostly from the campuses of the nation's universities in the wake of the Biafran War, and the bands came from all over the country but were especially common in the East, which had suffered the most from the war. The members of BLO (it was an acronym of their first names) had played with Ginger Baker in Europe for a few years, as had Joni Haastrup, whose rock band Mono Mono is also featured here. These were two of the country's biggest rock bands, and BLO closes things out here with "Chant to Mother Earth" (another Nigeria 70 repeat), a slow, lysergic crawl toward some sort of bliss, chemically-induced or otherwise.
There are a couple of nasty psych-funk instrumentals, including Ofege's "Adieu", which has a great organ lead and a fantastically tangled guitar solo-- Ofege was a very prolific band, and their Higher Plane Breeze album provided one of the Nigerian rock scene's iconic images with its cover shot showing one member squatting amongst his bandmates, middle fingers raised high and proud toward the camera. If you're a dedicated collector of this music, you'll recognize the names Tunji Oyelana, the Funkees and Ofo the Black Company (the heaviest of them all), but it's amazing how many utterly obscure but great bands Cleret turns up here. The Hygrades? Colomach? Tabukah 'X'? The Elcados? These are not familiar names, even to collectors.
None of those unknowns disappoint, either. The Hygrades' "In the Jungle" is a dynamic heavy funk-rock instrumental with a brilliant guitar part played by Goddy Oku-- the guy made his own guitars and the wounds he could squeeze from them recall Hendrix at times, but with Carlos Santana's pinpoint tone control. The Elcados' "Ku Mi Da Hankan" has a great, breezy three-against-four rhythm, Colomach, who were actually a Malian band visiting Nigeria, offer a strange, minimal psychedelic chant with an Afro-Cuban rhythm, and Joe King Kologbo & His Black Sound mix hectic traditional rhythms with a heavy psychedelic chorus for a truly singular track. The most explicitly rock track, Question Mark's "Freaking Out", is still pretty funky, but it's definitely an oddity-- the vocalist sounds like he could have sung for the dB's, and there's an almost punk edge to the playing.
If you're already a fan of funky West African music, I recommend these sets to you without reservation. Go get them. More broadly, anyone into funk in general or the subtle permutations of vintage global pop music would be well-advised to dig this as well. From the royalty structure to the sound to the packaging to the research and of course the music, Soundway gets it right on these compilations. Afrofunk fans could hardly have asked for more. | 2008-07-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-07-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | null | July 7, 2008 | 8.2 | 93cb09ad-c549-4ef0-988e-e8e2b71ecefe | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Recorded with a 60-piece orchestra, the Radiohead member’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is as lavish as its high-fashion, old-money backdrop. | Recorded with a 60-piece orchestra, the Radiohead member’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is as lavish as its high-fashion, old-money backdrop. | Jonny Greenwood: Phantom Thread Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonny-greenwood-phantom-thread-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Phantom Thread Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | Since the start of his career, the director Paul Thomas Anderson has exhibited an acute sense of how music can shape a film’s narrative—how cues and leitmotifs come to define not just individual scenes but the entire world being built from scratch. (The Gen-X angst of Magnolia would not be the same without Aimee Mann’s ballads, for example.) Since 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has composed the music for each of Anderson's films. The collaboration between the two has only strengthened the distinctiveness of Anderson’s work: The frantic string compositions of There Will Be Blood and the stoner-rock grooves of Inherent Vice are essential to those viewing experiences. On Anderson’s latest feature film, Phantom Thread, Greenwood’s music appears across the majority of the film’s 130-minute runtime, elevating the director-composer partnership to a new level.
Set in mid-1950s London, in a world of high fashion and faded glamour, Phantom Thread is among Anderson’s most luxurious and romantic period pieces. It follows a tumultuous courtship between the renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a waitress and model named Alma Elsen (Vicky Krieps). Greenwood’s compositions are as lavish and lush as the film’s old-world beauty: Aided by a 60-piece orchestra, the scope of the score far exceeds his previous work for film.
Working with such an opulent backing band allows Greenwood to craft truly ornate pieces. He has said that a principal reference point was Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings—the kind of cerebral, minimalist, and “obsessive” baroque music that would fit with the film’s hifalutin mood. But there are also touches of popular jazz and big, bodacious string recordings (inspired by Ben Webster) in the background of the score, to give the film’s setting its appropriately grand feel. The resulting songs are intense and almost comically rich—the sonic equivalent of a caviar and foie gras sandwich.
This is best evidenced by the score’s strongest song and one of the film’s main themes, “House of Woodcock.” It’s the first Greenwood piece to be played in the film, and it soundtracks the morning beauty routine of Reynolds Woodcock: pirouetting piano chords and plush string arrangements move in beautiful, choreographed unison as Daniel Day-Lewis shaves, brushes his hair, and dons a crisp dress shirt. Like slipping on a gorgeous piece of clothing, hearing “House of Woodcock” will make you feel like a million bucks. The same can be said for “I’ll Follow Tomorrow,” where Greenwood’s gorgeous and melancholy piano playing accompanies a thrilling night ride in a luxury car.
But Phantom Thread is not only about beauty. The film’s narrative is even more concerned with obsession and neurosis, and Greenwood renders extravagance in claustrophobic terms. In pieces like “The Hem,” the itchiness of the fast-moving strings can feel cloying and melodramatic. On Phantom Thread, Greenwood is best when he’s subtler, which allows his music to melt into the film more easily. Take “Never Cursed,” a light, almost ethereal string composition that plays during a feverish sequence where Daniel Day-Lewis’ character falls into a hallucinatory illness as his team of seamstresses repair a wedding dress. The swooping, ghostly sadness of Greenwood’s music is pitch perfect here.
Ultimately, the biggest issue with Greenwood’s score is that its sumptuousness can be overbearing: The orchestra whacks you over the head from scene to scene as it telegraphs one emotion after another. The score can run counter to some of Phantom Thread’s most cutting points, and it vanishes during the most important scenes. So much of the film looks at how minuscule gestures, done wrong, can destroy not just routine, but tradition: A slice of toast buttered too loudly or a stitch out of place is equivalent to a disaster. If only Greenwood’s score were as attentive to that sense of restraint. Still, it is impossible to deny how ambitious this experiment is. It further proves Greenwood’s chameleonic skill as a composer—one who can jump across time and space to give sound and life to any kind of situation. As a standalone suite of songs, like a tuxedo you only dust off every now and then, it is beautiful, but only appropriate when the occasion demands it. | 2018-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | January 16, 2018 | 7.5 | 93cc9383-b02a-4d53-b4dd-daa882b1a545 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
Where the Kashmiri rapper’s debut album was a fist-waving call to arms, Azli is a desolate post-mortem of a revolution stalled. | Where the Kashmiri rapper’s debut album was a fist-waving call to arms, Azli is a desolate post-mortem of a revolution stalled. | Ahmer: Azli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ahmer-javed-azli/ | Azli | The future looked bright for Ahmer Javed in the summer of 2019. The Kashmiri rapper—who goes by Ahmer—had just dropped his debut album to rave reviews in the Indian press. Produced by Indian hip-hop pioneer Sez on the Beat and pulsing with righteous anger, Little Kid, Big Dreams was a sometimes funereal, sometimes incandescent record about growing up in one of the world’s most militarized zones. Ahmer hit the road, performing to packed club crowds in Mumbai and Delhi—not a regular experience for independent artists from Kashmir. Momentum building, there was a sense of bigger things on the horizon. But the newly re-elected BJP government in New Delhi had other plans.
On August 5, the Indian government abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, stripping the union territory Jammu and Kashmir of both statehood and the special status it enjoyed as part of its uneasy accession to India in 1947 (it was the only Muslim-majority region to do so at Partition). In the name of national security, the hard-line Hindu nationalist government then proceeded to turn Kashmir into an open-air prison: Thousands of additional troops were rushed in; a total communications blackout was imposed. So many Kashmiris—from political leaders and activists to 15-year-old kids—were detained or arrested under draconian security laws in the next month that the state ran out of space in its jails. In the streets, right-wing Hindus celebrated the verdict, sometimes by attacking a nearby Kashmiri.
On his sophomore album, Azli (Urdu for “endless”), written in Srinagar in the midst of the crackdown and the COVID-19 lockdowns that followed, Ahmer paints a vivid portrait of the mental and emotional trauma of these terrible years, the latest episode in an unending cycle of violence and tragedy.
Like Little Kid, Big Dreams, much of Azli is given over to a grim accounting of the scars of occupation and militancy. His debut record’s anger and despair were tempered by a strong undercurrent of faith in the universe’s moral arc and the power of peaceful protest. Three years later, that faith hangs by a thread, moral certainties shredded by the realities of life under Hindutva authoritarianism: state-supported pogroms, young Muslims being tortured and shot on camera by cops and security forces, collective punishment and apartheid policies. On Azli, the 27-year-old sounds tired and embittered. His voice is ragged, gravelly, as if he’s rapping through a mouthful of ash and smoke. At times—like on the wish-fulfillment fantasy “Kalkharab”—he teeters on the edge, caught in the throes of delayed-onset trauma. If Little Kid, Big Dreams was Ahmer’s fist-waving call to arms, Azli is a desolate post-mortem of the collateral damage from a revolution stalled.
The music—composed by Ahmer, who also co-produces along with a small group of young Kashmiri and mainlander producers—is relentlessly oppressive: Blown-out bass thunders and pummels like distant artillery, minor-key synths keen in funereal harmony, all filtered through a haze of menacing distortion. Snatches of Kashmiri folk song drift in and out, brief flares of light and joy that are quickly extinguished by the storm clouds. Even the brief moments of respite—like the birdsong in the background of an interlude featuring a verse in Koshur (the language of Kashmir) by resistance poet Madhosh Balhami—only serve to highlight the rest of the record’s nihilistic mood.
In front of this grim backdrop, Ahmer intertwines personal and familial struggles with Kashmiri history into compelling witness testimony, documenting physical and psychic violence barely acknowledged, and waiting for justice that is unlikely to come. Rapping in Hindi and Koshur, he grapples with the corrosive effects of his own anger (on opener “Gumrah”), and the shared psychic wounds of growing up in a society where thousands of young men have been disappeared by the state (“Nishan”), all trace of them erased, their families left waiting decades for closure.
“Janaza,” whose title refers to the Muslim funeral prayer, takes aim at another way the Indian state denies closure to Kashmiri families—the secret burial of those killed as militants to prevent funeral processions that often evolve into protests. The three-minute track starts with a distorted vocal sample of a man wailing in Koshur, dogs barking in the background, before a chorus of disembodied voices accompanies Ahmer’s pointed, incisive rhymes about being gaslit by the state. “Aaj phir ek janaza par laash abhi mili nahi/Phir goliyo ka shor, sunna main, chali nahi (Another funeral today, but the body hasn’t been returned/I heard gunshots but they want you to believe no bullets were fired),” he snarls, his tone deadpan but dripping with angry disdain.
Another highlight is “Rov” (“Lost”), a song about the many losses that accompany decades of conflict—of both loved ones and the capacity to love—that revolves around Faheem Abdullah’s haunting, heartbreaking vocals. “Nyuham janaan adijan mea soor goam (They took my beloved [son], and my bones became ash),” he sings, distilling 30 years of intergenerational trauma into one evocative line.
If there is a redemptive thread on Azli, it’s in the way Ahmer and his team of collaborators—young Kashmiris like prxphecy, Junaid Ahmed, and Hyder Dar—sprinkle odes to Kashmiri art and music throughout. Two skits feature Madhosh Balhami, the Kashmiri poet who was imprisoned and tortured by Indian security forces for the crime of singing elegies at militants’ funerals. And pioneering Kashmiri rapper MC Kash (Rousan Illahi) triumphantly returns on “Kun,” making his first appearance on a record in almost eight years.
Kash is an inspiration to Ahmer and other Kashmiri rappers, who grew up listening to his defiant anthems like “I Protest” and “Take It in Blood.” But since grabbing international headlines in 2010, the rapper has been repeatedly targeted by Indian police, who raided his studio, shut down his shows, and eventually forced him into early retirement. To hear him pop up at the end of pugnacious resistance song “Kun”—his verse preceded by a cheeky “Did someone call my name?”—is a poignant reminder of the strength of Kashmiri resilience in the face of occupation, constant dehumanization, and endless violence.
This resilience finds its fullest expression in “Shuhul Naar” (“Cold Fire”), an almost seven-minute Kashmiri folk-rap ballad that transmutes the painful reality of erasure into an iron will to resist. Over lightly strummed folksy guitar and strings, Junaid Ahmed sings of finding strength in defeat: “Na rudum me naav, na rudum zameer/Jaise jee utha hun zinda phir se (They erased my name, they erased my conscience/It feels like I’m alive again).” Ahmer’s voice too, loses much of its venom. “Ye mere haqooq ka naara (This is my broken, shattered war cry),” he raps, with the world-weariness of much older activists who have seen their beloved revolutions falter and fail.
“Kehne nahi wala ye zulmi zamana, kya sehlegha tu aur kya sehne nahi wala/Par kaash, hota ye sach/Hota na sapna ye bas (Tyranny won’t command us and we won’t be enslaved again/Alas, I wish this was the reality/I was this wasn’t a dream),” he continues a few bars later, capturing the enduring tragedy of Kashmiri resistance and resilience. Under the occupation that the world forgot about, resistance stems not from hope or blind optimism, but from sheer determination. | 2022-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Azadi | July 1, 2022 | 7.6 | 93cfc1ce-ff73-443b-850a-7ca332bd7ede | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Compiled from a marathon run of shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, this live set is a joyful, relaxed, and abundant journey through Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ personal rock’n’roll history. | Compiled from a marathon run of shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, this live set is a joyful, relaxed, and abundant journey through Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ personal rock’n’roll history. | Tom Petty / The Heartbreakers: Live at the Fillmore (1997) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-the-heartbreakers-live-at-the-fillmore-1997/ | Live at the Fillmore (1997) | By 1997, Tom Petty had achieved his wildest rock’n’roll dreams and then some. He’d released nine albums with the Heartbreakers as well as two million-selling solo albums; morphed into an improbable MTV favorite with a succession of delightfully idiosyncratic videos; toured internationally with Bob Dylan as Dylan’s opening act and his backing band, simultaneously; and he’d played the role of Charlie T. Wilbury Jr., the kid brother in the classic rock supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. Even with all of that, and perhaps because of it, he was restless. After decades of playing arenas—venues where “you do feel compelled to play them the most popular songs,” as he told critic Joel Selvin—the music business hamster wheel of album-videos-tour-album felt uninspiring. This is the point at which, historically, bands either self-destruct or break up. Instead, Petty decided they’d play 10 shows at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Auditorium, which expanded to 20 shows by the time the tickets were done selling out. The Heartbreakers hadn’t played live in more than a year when they got together for a couple of rehearsals beforehand, coming out with a list of almost 60 prospective entries for the setlist, everything from bluegrass to covers to, yes, some of their hits. (“We do like those as well,” Petty told Selvin.)
The 20 nights were a joyful, relaxed, and abundant journey through the musicians’ personal rock’n’roll history, mixing the beloved covers they’d started out playing alongside thoughtful revisitations of the songs that got them here. It was a Hall of Fame-level set by a band who still had a lot more history ahead of them. Petty and the band played the music they loved in front of a Fillmore audience that combined devoted fans (many who returned night after night) alongside everyday Bay Area rock’n’roll devotees. There were special guests, inside jokes (Petty referred to the band one night as “the Fillmore House Band” and the promoters quickly made up hats), live broadcasts, and given the history of the building, probably a few ghosts. The last six shows of the stand were recorded professionally, and it’s from there that Live at the Fillmore (1997) was assembled.
As is de rigueur these days, there are multiple configurations available, but it’s the 4xCD deluxe that’s most of interest, as it provides the essentials, the rarities, and the special guests—57 tracks in total, 35 of which are covers or guest performances. But those numbers don’t adequately convey the strength of the release. Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care. The first two discs present a version of the core set that evolved after the first few nights, the third disc showcases special guests the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and John Lee Hooker, and the last disc presents the back half of the show, the energetic and emotional coast to the end. It feels like it all could have been one single performance, and it almost could have been, given the extent of the band’s output across those 20 nights. They played close to 30 songs almost every show, about a third of which were classic rock—including Little Richard (“Lucille” or “Rip It Up”), J.J. Cale (“Call Me the Breeze”), the Rolling Stones (“Satisfaction”), and even “You Are My Sunshine,” which Petty mentions he’d learned at summer camp.
It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard “Free Fallin’,” the epic opener of 1989’s solo release Full Moon Fever: Here you get to hear Petty rediscover his own composition, to hear the Heartbreakers act like the finely tuned machine that they were (even with new drummer Steve Ferrone behind the kit), and to appreciate a huge song in the intimacy of a small club. Elsewhere in the set, someone in the audience yells a request and Petty responds, with some measure of disbelief: “Did somebody just say ‘Heartbreakers Beach Party’? What key is that in, Benmont?” and the Heartbreakers proceed to perform a song they’d never played live. It doesn’t matter that the song is a silly in-joke, a non-LP B-side written to accompany a 1983 MTV special that hasn’t been seen since; the band plays it with attention and care. It’s a hilarious, fantasy moment that could never happen in an arena, but it’s exactly the serendipity you hope for in this kind of setting.
McGuinn had long been one of Petty’s personal heroes, and although this isn’t the first time they’d performed together, it’s a great document of their affinity and connection. Hooker (whose Boom Boom Room was across the street from the Fillmore) got invited over to delight both backing band and audience, connecting the dots from the Mississippi Delta to rock’n’roll, and specifically the marriage of the blues and the British Invasion that Petty and the Heartbreakers embodied. Like McGuinn’s set, this isn’t a vanity appearance; everyone on stage stepped up, and that motor was purring by the time they get to “Boogie Chillen,” as guitarist Mike Campbell, Petty on harmonica, and then (as Hooker introduces him) “the 88 man,” keyboardist Benmont Tench, get a chance to stake their claim.
One of the best moments on the release isn’t a special guest or a rare cover, but in the chorus of “You Wreck Me,” from 1994’s Wildflowers. It’s in the lead-in to the first chorus, not lyrics, just a “whoa-oh-oh/yeahhh,” but the crowd sings along perfectly, on time and in tune. It’s genuinely affectionate, warm, and almost tangible. “You Wreck Me,” an absolute gem of a song, was still a new addition to the Heartbreakers’ set. This moment of call-and-response, energy reflection from the band to the crowd and back again, is emblematic of the intimate charm this release captures. “I just want to play,” Petty said before the shows. “We want to get back to what we understand.” What Petty wanted was connection, that intangible ingredient that you can’t fake, predict, or force. It vibrates out of every track of this set. | 2022-12-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner | December 6, 2022 | 7.7 | 93d4610f-5d73-4b3b-b355-ce3e1ce7579f | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
The gritty and elusive Hempstead MC caps off a decade of profound influence with more photographic narratives, gnarled slang, and evocative soul samples. | The gritty and elusive Hempstead MC caps off a decade of profound influence with more photographic narratives, gnarled slang, and evocative soul samples. | Roc Marciano: Marcielago | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roc-marciano-marcielago/ | Marcielago | After stalled apprenticeships with Pete Rock and Busta Rhymes, Roc Marciano arrived with 2010’s self-produced Marcberg, a grayscale triumph which blended elements of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Dah Shinin’ into an intricate and nearly impenetrable statement of purpose. Landing just before iTunes began ceding ground to Spotify, Marcberg showcased an auteur who never broke character, an unsentimental diarist nevertheless obsessed with thread counts and lacquer finishes. The drums snapped and the samples felt three-dimensional; when Marci described the temperature, you felt it in your knuckles. Hazily rooted in blaxploitation slang, cocaine-’80s touchstones, and outer-borough ’90s grit, the Hempstead provenance of Marciano’s bygone New York makes sense once you consider that the Notorious B.I.G.’s childhood home currently rents for $4,000 a month.
For a few years, it seemed that Marcberg and its follow-ups would endure as brilliant aberrations, suggestive of an alternate timeline in which Mr. Smith and Life After Death were never released, and gloss never visited hip-hop’s birth city. But as rap labels cratered and New York City’s primacy waned, his records became foundational texts for a wave of neo-classicists from declining industrial burgs. Among the immediate disciples of Marci—marketed less like rap stars than outsider artists—are Buffalo’s flamboyant Griselda collective; Newark’s Mach-Hommy; Crimeapple, a Colombian-American oddball from Hackensack whose flow lands a good half-beat behind the snare; and Marci’s Hempstead neighbors SmooVth and Hus KingPin, whose drawling rasps are more Corleone than Wu-Tang. Even more than their mechanics and taste in samples, these rappers owe Marciano their narrative scopes. The scenes rarely develop into full sagas, but they’re photographic in their detail.
Marcielago serves as a capstone for Marci’s decade, a mix of evocative soul samples and stripped-down loops paired with his trademark gnomic flow. There are few hooks or melodies in any traditional sense, and he prefers soft percussion when he doesn’t forgo it entirely. He remains an artist for whom scene-setting remains the platonic ideal: You’re never left wondering what kind of sauce bathes the filet, or what show’s playing on the fuzzy TV in the corner. Sometimes, his narratives seem shaped by the dictates of the rhymes themselves. On “Richard Gear,” the arrival of a borrowed Sentra renders a victim’s t-shirt magenta; on “Choosin Fees,” a “lady of the evenin’” elicits the theory that “if we had babies they’d be heathens.”
The opening verse of “Puff Daddy” is an exemplary study in narrative economy. It’s also the one track on Marcielago that might sound at home on another artist’s record: The distorted piano chords and Bad Boy-referencing title feel nicked from the Griselda playbook, itself so heavily predicated on Marciano’s work. But when Griselda frontman Westside Gunn appears on “Boosie Fade,” the contrast between the two vocalists is electric—no torch-passing moments here. Marciano’s ground-level camera homes in on the subtle details that tend to elude his contemporaries, and he remains the most colorful character to appear in front of his own lens. | 2019-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 7, 2019 | 7.5 | 93da8a90-e734-4e95-8669-d68a8d73bf5e | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
With shades of late-’90s New Orleans and mid-aughts trap, the Detroit rapper’s newest mixtape casts an ominous spell even when his writing isn’t at its strongest. | With shades of late-’90s New Orleans and mid-aughts trap, the Detroit rapper’s newest mixtape casts an ominous spell even when his writing isn’t at its strongest. | Talibando: War Lord | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talibando-war-lord/ | War Lord | Since the days when Doughboyz Cashout were the hottest names in Detroit rap, the city’s cold and direct drug-dealing chronicles have owed a lot to Atlanta trap forefather Jeezy. These days his influence is everywhere: The way Peezy rattles through tales so economically. How BandGang Lonnie Bands and Masoe convey menace and moral stakes at the same time. How Los and Nutty’s lyrics are descriptive enough to script a seedy crime drama on Tubi. Similarly, Talibando—one of the young guns of a loose collective of Detroit rappers that also includes Babyface Ray and Veeze—has a patient and pragmatic edge to his rhymes that screams Jeezy. His newest mixtape, War Lord, may not be as emotionally complex, but gels because of his sharp ear for beats and cold-eyed intensity.
The catalyst of War Lord is the production: skittish and ominous instrumentals that pull as much from late-’90s New Orleans and mid-aughts trap as Michigan heritage. On opener “Birds Talking,” Flee and Finn’s laser-beam beat sounds like one of the Cash Money homages you could find on Real Boston Richey’s Public Housing, but at nearly half the speed. “Still scorching, 400 Degreez, just like Juvie,” Talibando raps, acknowledging the reference point. Later, producer 2 Side’s bassline on “Chitlins” is chilly enough to suggest there’s a slasher around the corner, and Talibando’s unusually uptempo delivery carries shades of Detroit rapper Damedot’s mafioso sensibilities. The few brighter beats don’t kill the spirit, but they feel out of place, like when Talibando is nearly drowned out by the jolly soul sample on “The Way It Goes.” The Babyface Ray-assisted “Swim Team” is an exception thanks to two verses packed with fun details: Ray cites The Irishman (“My boy paint houses just like Jimmy”) and Talibando competes to be the fastest bill-thrower at the strip club.
I do wish Talibando had more standout individual lines. It’s not always evident, because War Lord runs on vibe rather than writerly ability, but some tracks call for the chops. “Deja Vu” features the kind of brooding, piano-led beat that Icewear Vezzo always makes work because he’s the colorful lyricist that Talibando isn’t. Sandwiched between Veeze’s wisecracking wisdom and Lucki’s attention to detail on “Millions,” Talibando fades into the background. His lyrics hold together better when there’s a narrative. Even when the plots are half-baked, he moves them along fast enough to stay exciting: “I think the feds doin’ a stakeout, it’s time to move everything/We need to switch up the safehouse,” he raps on “Steakout.”
But what War Lord is missing in intricacy, the tape makes up in atmosphere. While they’re in your earbuds, Talibando’s hard-nosed kingpin raps will make you want to thump your chest. If your idea of feeling good is riding around in a Jeep with roof off like Nino Brown in New Jack City, or cackling on the sidelines of a high school basketball game like Birdie in Above the Rim, then this is feel-good music. Talibando is not Jeezy but he’s internalized an essential part of his approach: Rap as a mood piece. | 2023-02-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire | February 10, 2023 | 6.8 | 93df3549-8627-4b4e-974e-3c8b5f24edc4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Returning to the series of instrumental self-portraits he began in 1979, the German experimental rock pioneer, now 86, sounds reflective and at times melancholy, braiding peacefulness and pain. | Returning to the series of instrumental self-portraits he began in 1979, the German experimental rock pioneer, now 86, sounds reflective and at times melancholy, braiding peacefulness and pain. | Roedelius: Selbstportrait Wahre Liebe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roedelius-selbstportrait-wahre-liebe/ | Selbstportrait Wahre Liebe | Hans-Joachim Roedelius has led a remarkable life. He was born in Berlin in 1934 and appeared in films as a child. During World War II, his family moved to rural Germany to escape the fighting, and they were impoverished after the war. Roedelius was conscripted into the East German army as a teen, and later attempted to defect to the West; he successfully made it across in 1961, after two years in an East German prison. When he began making music in the late ’60s, it came out chaotic and primal, but over the following 50 years, both solo and as a member of Cluster and Harmonia, Roedelius has been one of the most influential and prolific members of the original wave of German experimental rock. His music is charming and pastoral in one moment, amorphous and mysterious the next. It is defiantly delicate, quietly radical.
Some of Roedelius’ most lasting work on his own has been his Selbstportrait (Self-Portrait) series, from 1979-80. Realized with minimal equipment—mostly Farfisa, drum machine, and tape delay—the original trio of releases is intimate and beguiling, bringing to the fore the complexities of his musical personality. Self-portraits can be a connective thread between what we know of an artist’s life and their creative work, offering a glimpse into how they make meaning out of their experiences, their body, and their imagination. The music on Roedelius’ self-portraits, grounded and gentle, shows an artist moving forward from a tumultuous past into a peaceful, stable present, with whispers of melancholy barely audible but consistently implied. It’s hard to extricate his life story, with its escapes to the countryside punctuating moments of social upheaval, from the music he makes.
Forty years after those definitive recordings, an octogenarian Roedelius returns to the Selbstportrait series. Selbstportrait Wahre Liebe (True Love) is remarkably similar in style, tone, and timbre to the original trilogy. As sentimental as his compositions can be, Roedelius continued to push himself into new sonic territory during his fifth decade of making music, primarily through collaborations with innovators like drummer Jon Mueller, C.M. Von Hausswolff, and Stefan Schneider of To Rococo Rot. The nostalgic bent of Wahre Liebe, his first solo release in nearly a decade, reveals a willingness to come full circle.
On Wahre Liebe Roedelius is able to conjure many different moods without deviating from the round, bell-like tones of the Farfisa, an instrument he returns to after years of primarily working with acoustic piano and digital processing. “Geruhsam” is airy and buoyant, with a slow, playful melody that intuitively unfolds over bouncing organ pulses. “Winterlicht,” a plaintive piece performed without conspicuous overdubs, fills a similar niche as “Inselmoos,” from the original Selbstportrait LP, with its rubato tempo and overtly romantic flourishes. There’s a nebulous feel to “Nahwärme,” in which tones shimmer and bubble in waves of blissful ambience. Such disparate moods are what makes these self-portraits so insightful and fascinating; each piece reveals new aspects of Roedelius’ musical personality, adding new layers of emotional complexity.
The album’s final track, “Aus weiter Ferne,” makes for a strangely irresolute ending, removed from Selbstportrait’s sonic origins but very much in its spirit. The 15-minute piece, by far the series’ longest, drifts in and out of wispy dissonance, slowly pushed forward by a hesitant, improvised melody and droning organ. The music is undefined and hard to grasp, moving through strange, disjointed chordal patterns. These are echoes of darkness, an acknowledgement of the irresolvable complexities of growing older, of reflecting on a life lived in its entirety. It may not be a satisfying ending, but it feels true, like an acknowledgement of pain that seamlessly flows from peacefulness and back again, obscured by time and memory. From that seed of ambiguity blooms the wisdom of Roedelius’ accumulated years. | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Global / Rock | Bureau B | April 28, 2020 | 7.8 | 93e3ff6c-8026-4be7-b314-593b9c8fcebf | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
On his first solo LP in six years, the noise architect lingers inside a series of haunted scenes, animated by the surreal sounds of homemade instruments. | On his first solo LP in six years, the noise architect lingers inside a series of haunted scenes, animated by the surreal sounds of homemade instruments. | Nate Young: Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nate-young-volume-one-dilemmas-of-identity/ | Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity | At various points during Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity, it becomes difficult to tell what Wolf Eyes founder Nate Young is doing, or how he gets the seemingly alien sounds that shape his first proper solo album in six years. What are those robotic rhythms of “The Weeping Babe” or the liquid ripples of noise that drip between the beats? Is that actually a pedal steel wrapped around the scattered piano chords of “Vents of Blue,” or is it only a sculpted ray of feedback? The textures on these nine tracks are uniformly familiar and strange, just skirting the rules and roles you might expect, as if you’re taking a long walk through a world where the rules of gravity occasionally start to bend.
This is not a new sensation for the music of Young, who has been turning traditional instruments like his voice and guitar inside-out for two decades with Wolf Eyes. “When I first started playing music, I started with a guitar, and someone stepped on it so that was over,” he quipped to FACT in 2013. “So I started looking around for whatever else I could play.” On Dilemmas, those “whatever elses” are modular synthesizers and a panoply of homemade chimeras—distortion units appended to discarded tape decks, triggered hammers that tap frame drums and metal pipes, circuit-bent orbs of unknown provenance. There is some guitar, as with the strangled solo that twists and juts and claws around the beat of “Dribbling Insane.” But even that strikes as exotic, the contrast highlighting the surreal nature of most everything else here.
These nine pieces hover in their own worlds for four or five minutes at a time, establishing both a mode and mood in their first few seconds and then lingering there, as if breathing the air Young has made. This is intentionally framed incidental music, snippets of would-be scores fleshed out into fascinating little songs. “Crumpled Body” stares into the distance and ponders the void, curves of noise rising repeatedly through a torpid industrial beat only to vanish and begin again. “In the Shadow Of” exists as an endlessly cyclical sunrise, with fluorescent tones peeking over horizons of organ haze and receding as if they were never there at all. On the gorgeous and wistful “Vents of Blue,” piano chords and pedal steel function as the conjoined ends of an ouroboros, one sound always passing through the other. It reflects the sensation of staring at stacks of old family photos and feeling lost forever in the reverie.
Young has hinted at that kind of slow-motion diligence before on his solo records, inward turns from the triumphant paroxysm and managed chaos of Wolf Eyes. But where 2013’s Blinding Confusion seemed to kowtow to Young’s reputation for harsh sounds and sinister moods, Dilemmas is guileless and honest. He sorts through confusion, sadness, anxiety, and urgency with instrumental candor. These songs feel like private meditations on themes, his emotions articulated through methodical exploration of the instruments at hand. In that way, they recall the mid-1960s Takoma landmarks of guitarist John Fahey or the sparkling wonder of computer music innovator Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 debut, The Expanding Universe. Nothing on Dilemmas lands like a high or a low; on the album and within each track, there’s no clear climax or dénouement. These are pure states of being, subtly evolving testaments to the continuing evolution of a true architect of the modern avant-garde. | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Lower Floor / Warp | February 20, 2019 | 7.7 | 93e6d46a-c6d8-4ef2-bfd5-549a58cab931 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Chance the Rapper compatriot Towkio sometimes raps great, vivid tales about his life in Chicago. Sometime’s he’s funny and weird. And sometimes he falls victim to cruddy trap beats and generic lyrics. | Chance the Rapper compatriot Towkio sometimes raps great, vivid tales about his life in Chicago. Sometime’s he’s funny and weird. And sometimes he falls victim to cruddy trap beats and generic lyrics. | Towkio: Community Service 2! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22138-community-service-2/ | Community Service 2! | Situated on the corner of Chicago’s Western and Addison avenues is Lane Tech College Prep High School, the largest high school in the city’s public school system and the alma mater of Savemoney member, Towkio. Or, as he is also known, Preston Oshita, on-and-off again star quarterback for the Lane Tech Indians—a factoid that the Savemoney crew rapper discretely references on Community Service 2’s best track, “Intro (My Calling)”: “I break the huddle, yeah/I run the spread.”
“Intro (My Calling)” is one of a few, vivid standout tracks on an otherwise colorless EP. Over a frenetic footwork beat, Towkio takes the listener on a hyperspeed tour of his city. It’s a narrative rich with details that are brought to life by Towkio’s incomparably earnest voice. He takes the tone of someone trying not to lose his temper while pleading his case. “Before that Paypal, I had them custies, I fronted out back/Call that the steakhouse, call my cousin, bet he vouch that,” he implores. Too soon, the earnestness cools and is supplanted by an altogether different Towkio than the heady 20-something that laid down starry-eyed rhymes on 2015’s *.WAV Theory**. *In its place is a pushier rapper who insists he “ain’t playin’ fair” and is prodded along by an aggressive beat from Smoko Ono replete with over-stylized bass drops that harken back to the days when EDM invaded trap.
Variations on that same beat continue throughout “G W M,” “Therapeutic,” and “Feel Me Doe” to varying degrees of success. Same goes for the lyrics. “Feel Me Doe” stands out above the rest thanks to Towkio’s staccato delivery that softens and slows across the final verse as the beat recedes beneath it. And “G W M,” despite its laundry list of celebrity callouts, entertains every so often–like when Towkio connects lean to Bill Withers, or references astral projection. More of that weirdness could’ve given this album the singular point of view it deserves.
The soulful, hush-hush side of Towkio that’s in full swing on Chance the Rapper’s “Juke Jam," only appears as an echo on “Tear Drop.” And Oshito, though meaningful in moments, too often mistakes platitudes for poetry: “The truth is your face, no filter.” Broad strokes don’t make for lasting impressions. What does is an anecdote grounded in a place and time. “We used to roll at the rink/I used to talk way too much/You used to know everything,” to quote the aforementioned “Juke Jam.”
*Community Service 2 *ends on a high note with the delirious banger, “Work 4 Me.” On the track, copious amounts of cacophony give way to catchiness. Producer Peter Cottontale's beat crashes sirens into cash registers and lets the resulting clang ring out like a bell at the beginning of a boxing match. It arrests the listener just in time for Towkio to punch his way through the intro, alternating the emphasis between three words—work for me, work for me, work for me. It’s jolting, as if the wires within the song crossed and put the vocals on the fritz.
The record could’ve fared better had Towkio delivered the same kind of energy and specificity that he brought to the EP’s bookends. Instead it failed to complete its thought. Only when Towkio avoided abstractions and zoomed into what was happening on the corner—at Addison and Western, inside the huddle—did the music reward fully. | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 20, 2016 | 6.5 | 93ed6bc6-2012-44a9-9919-0aa41858b4b3 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | null |
Michael Benjamin Lerner spent two years learning about vintage synthesizers and forgetting about guitars and drums. Though he sought a new sound, the resulting Ad Infinitum sounds surprisingly like classic Telekinesis. | Michael Benjamin Lerner spent two years learning about vintage synthesizers and forgetting about guitars and drums. Though he sought a new sound, the resulting Ad Infinitum sounds surprisingly like classic Telekinesis. | Telekinesis: Ad Infinitum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20837-ad-infinitum/ | Ad Infinitum | Michael Benjamin Lerner spent two years learning about vintage synthesizers and forgetting about guitars and drums, but the resulting Ad Infinitum sounds surprisingly like classic Telekinesis. Lerner's flirtation with synths and machinery began on his 2013 album Dormarion, hinting that that he might someday trade indie pop for synthpop. As far back as his 2009 debut, he pled for the attending physicians of "Calling All Doctors" to "replace my heart with a machine." With Ad Infinitum, the operation is complete.
Detailing his transformation in a piece for Medium, he says he spent much of the past two years amassing and learning how to use a collection of vintage synths, as well as hook them up with newer technology to make new music. "This proved to be incredibly time-consuming and, at times, a ridiculously difficult task," he writes.
All of that ridiculous difficulty was time well spent: he has made some beautifully textured music with moods that recall the original '80s heyday of synthpop. "Edgewood" sounds like an outtake from Speak & Spell and the instrumental "Ad Infinitum, Pt. 1" recalls the grandeur and evocative melodrama of the first side of Disintegration.
Lerner also produced the album—a first for him—with some assistance from Eric Elbogen of Say Hi. But the problem with taking on so many new responsibilities is that something's got to give. In this case, it's the lyrics. They're often vague and seem like they were the final pesky pieces that he fit into the process. He utters the word "forget" in more than half of the songs with lyrics, and "future" on three separate occasions. Though Lerner has learned well how to make these sounds, he doesn't elevate the form enough.
"Sleep In", with its light hip-hop beat and elfin ba-ba-ba-ba-ing is Ad Infinitum's most innovative track. Lerner gets in his own way on this song though, when he employs an actual Speak & Spell machine. Whether it's a nod to the aforementioned Depeche Mode debut or not, it feels forced. (Though it doesn't induce as much of an eye roll as Limp Bizkit's Speak & Spell experimentation, it's not quite as cool as what Robyn and Röyksopp do with the machine.)
Despite all of this, the songs still sound very much like Telekinesis. Lerner's songwriting is direct and even with all of this gadgetry he has a knack for a simple, effective melody. The harmony on "Farmers Road" is locked in tightly, and "Ad Infinitum, Pt. 2" feels like it's threatening to break into "Shining Star" in the chorus. The tunes are sturdy, and depending on how ambitious Lerner is with this tour, he could easily put any of these songs into his comfortable power trio arrangement. He could even do them on an acoustic guitar, as he is wont to do.
Lerner has reportedly said that he started collecting vintage synthesizers because he felt like he had already gotten all of the songs out of the guitar that he could. The songs he summons from the synths offer proof that there were more songs left in him, but he's still digging in the same mine. Ad Infinitum might be the sound of an artist challenging himself, but it's not the sound of an artist challenging his listeners. | 2015-09-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 10, 2015 | 6.4 | 93f7a1a1-2065-4cd8-8867-45c7aaa86c83 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
Brighton's the Go! Team show signs of evolution on album #3, as their stylistic range broadens ever so slightly. | Brighton's the Go! Team show signs of evolution on album #3, as their stylistic range broadens ever so slightly. | The Go! Team: Rolling Blackouts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15048-rolling-blackouts/ | Rolling Blackouts | You have to wonder if Ian Parton ever regrets naming his recording project/collective the Go! Team, let alone affixing it with an exclamation point for guaranteed bonus exuberance. Few bands have gone to such great lengths to forge a connection between their name and their sound. Since its inception, the group has reconstructed sounds that are all about inspiring motion-- cheerlander chants, rollerskate jams, breakdance beats, cop-show chase themes, 90s mosh-pit rock-- into a brass-blasted wall of squall. But the side effect of constant movement is fatigue-- in this case, on the band itself, which charged through its 2007 sophomore release Proof of Youth with the same gusto heard on its dazzingly 2004 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike. Compounding the exhaustion on Proof of Youth is Parton's unwavering deference for high-pitch-frequency productions that sound like they're blaring out of an old Zenith, tenuously walking the line between ingratiating and just plain grating.
From the outset, Rolling Blackouts provides little relief: opener "T.O.R.N.A.D.O" announces itself with all the subtlety of an air-raid siren, as lead MC Ninja wages a losing battle against a torrential blitzkrieg of horn breaks and scratch effects. The song essentially serves the same function as the opening themes to the 80s action shows Parton was raised on: it's the Go! Team advertising itself, an instant reacquainting device to remind you of what you're tuning into. But thankfully, Parton proves much more willing to change up the script. His cut-and-paste aesthetic is still very much in effect; he just uses it to assemble more varied and satisfying songs.
There's always been a latent appreciation of 60s girl-group pop buried beneath the Go! Team's hyper-funk ballast, and that quality is given more time and space to shine here, whether in the Motown-by-way-of-Tokyo sweep of "Secretary Song" or the "Ready Steady Go!"-worthy "Ready to Go Steady". Most successful of all is the band's wonderful collaboration with Best Coast's Bethany Cosatino on the fuzz-pop delight "Buy Nothing Day". But even the typical jump-rope exercises ("Apollo Throwdown", "The Running Range") are leavened by acoustic-based sonics and congenially melodic choruses. Meanwhile, Parton's sound world now absorbs everything from endearingly schmaltzy soap-opera soundtracks ("Yosemite Theme") to Yo La Tengo-style dream-pop reveries (the title track). Of course, "Back Like 8 Track" closes the album by returning to the group's familiar schoolyard terrain. Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one. | 2011-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | February 3, 2011 | 7.5 | 93f8cfd1-1483-4684-982f-54e67262c354 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On their first EP of new material in six years, Wolf Parade aren't asserting themselves to the world so much as reintroducing themselves to each other. | On their first EP of new material in six years, Wolf Parade aren't asserting themselves to the world so much as reintroducing themselves to each other. | Wolf Parade: EP 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21948-ep-4/ | EP 4 | In a literal sense, Apologies to the Queen Mary* *has become 2005’s most essential record; shorthand for a set of qualities that defined a year considered to be indie rock’s artistic and cultural zenith. If you’ve been nostalgic for those times—and it seems like plenty are—it’s easier than ever to empathize with an already wearied Dan Boeckner when he slurs his first words on Wolf Parade’s debut LP: “I’m not in love with the modern world.” And yet, the hyperspeed production, distribution, consumption and coverage of music allows Wolf Parade to make a comprehensive “triumphant comeback” despite only taking six years off. Hell, even the release strategy of *EP 4 *is similar to the one used by the stars: the short-lead, quick drop of highly-anticipated material.
*EP 4 *is no “appointment listening", though. Its 12 minutes of new material almost immediately got overshadowed by Chance the Rapper, Brand New, new Ariana Grande singles and whatever Kanye got himself into last week. This likely worked in favor of Wolf Parade, since *EP 4 *feels ancillary to their return rather than the focus. This isn’t the sound of Wolf Parade asserting themselves. It’s Wolf Parade reintroducing themselves to each other after Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner built massive catalogs that now makes their original band a supergroup in reverse.
Wolf Parade had originally promised something with a “heavy glam vibe,” suggested Krug was taking the spiritual lead here—in all aspects, vocally, sartorially, lyrically, he’s the theatre kid in Wolf Parade and, moreover, his songs are the ones that work best with crowd participation. Turns out those reference points were simply meant to signify a leaner, more trebly and immediate version of Wolf Parade, scaling back on the thick, proggy arrangements that defined the lesser-loved At Mount Zoomer* *and Expo 86**.
It’s much easier for Krug to find his “Wolf Parade mode”: he simply has to be more reined in than Sunset Rubdown, Moonface or Swan Lake, which means writing songs that are about three minutes instead of six—“Mr. Startup” and “C’est La Vie Way” are satisfying, jittery New Wave that could’ve just as easily been attributed to Boeckner. The streamlined, aerodynamic sound of *EP 4 *has much more in common with Boeckner' work in Operators, Handsome Furs, and Divine Fits.
Enjoyable as it is, *EP 4 *does seem like smart risk management, a test run that confirms that whatever the group comes up with won’t be a Pixies-style disaster. As such, the rewards are modest: “Floating World” pleasantly hovers, never aspiring to the moon launch of “Yulia.” The frenzied midsection of “C’est La Vie Way” recalls “Fancy Claps”, but only briefly before pulling back. The most instantly lovable parts are the “2005!” sonic easter eggs: the second verse of “Mr. Startup” works the hi-hat on the 2 and 4, which defined the sound of mid-2k indie rock almost as much as the word “angular.”
But EP 4 is missing the friction between Krug and Boeckner that allowed Apologies to the Queen Mary to instantly combust within Isaac Brock’s compressed production: the cadences, mannerisms and subject matter between the two frontmen are almost indistinguishable here. More likely, it’s the general sense of yearning that has yet to be rediscovered, the ambition to transcend *something *that defined not only *Apologies to the Queen Mary *but many of its celebrated peers in the Class of 2005. Maybe that will come in time: even if Wolf Parade aren’t in love with the modern world, they’re learning to live in it. | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wolf Parade Productions | May 26, 2016 | 7 | 94000073-0b7f-49ec-b49f-2da04408cf39 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their debut album, the UK rock group separates themselves from their peers, imbuing their post-adolescent rage with wit and, crucially, a self-effacing awareness that they may never succeed. | On their debut album, the UK rock group separates themselves from their peers, imbuing their post-adolescent rage with wit and, crucially, a self-effacing awareness that they may never succeed. | Shame: Songs of Praise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shame-songs-of-praise/ | Songs of Praise | On Sunday afternoons, one of the BBC’s oldest running shows, “Songs of Praise,” fills certain British living rooms with the angelic choirs of the country’s church services. It is an institution—traditional, stuffy, and royally approved. The fact that Shame’s debut LP shares the name indicates the quintet’s sense of humor. Songs of Praise threatens to storm into those god-fearing living rooms like an uninvited black sheep, staining the image of safe Britain with post-punk hymns of disgust. Emerging from the same South London pub that housed the squat-chic reprobates Fat White Family, Shame are also indebted to the Fall and Gang of Four. Like FWF, they’re cocky enough to reanimate their ancestors’ corpses.
But in their fight to distinguish themselves from every other white male British guitar band, Shame imbue their post-adolescent rage with wit and, crucially, an awareness that they may never succeed. From the opening murky “Dust on Trial,” frontman Charlie Steen is fixed on the idea of remaining unheard: “What’s the point of talking if all your words have been said?” He preempts the inevitability that British critics will herald them as saviors of the scene by rejecting the construct. “The idea of a rock star is offensive,” he told the Guardian in a profile that was splashed across the paper’s front page.
Steen is uneasy with inspiring anyone besides his bandmates and he doesn’t seek your pity. “I hope that you’re hearing me,” he bawls eight times on “Concrete” but then self-lacerates one track later. “My voice ain’t the best you’ve heard/And you can choose to hate my words/But do I give a fuck?” he asks on the anthemic pop of “One Rizla.” He gives a fuck, but only about not giving a fuck. Shame don’t consider themselves special or important. Their sound isn’t all that inventive, their anger isn’t all that new. The latter, however, is as hot as a blue flame. It grows brighter as Steen repeats lyrical phrases again and again on almost every track until you’re forced to register his anguish.
If Shame belong to a generation of mobilizing British refuseniks teetering on an uprising, Songs of Praise is its soundtrack, whistling like a kettle coming to the boil. From beginning to end, its motorik riffs course through you the way a vat of dirty water journeys from a grimy cistern into an overrun toilet bowl. Steen’s knack for sordid imagery exalts him beyond his peers. Knowing the limitations of his gender and genre, he’s fine-tuned a charisma that hoodwinks you into listening to his enchanting tales from the underbelly. On “Gold Hole” (an indelicate descriptor for vagina), he tells the filthy story of a lecherous older man having an affair with a younger girl. “Sweat stains the wrinkles/Tongue touches the hole,” he roars, with a mix of Ian Dury cheek and the comical menace of Begbie from Trainspotting. “She feels so dirty, she knows that it’s wrong/But she feels so good in Louis Vuitton.” The luxury brand has never sounded less aspirational.
Steen is a playful vocalist. He spits in fits on “Lampoon” and “Tasteless,” he screams and pants nonsense on “Donk,” he narrates like a bored pervert on the standout “The Lick” (think Blur’s “Parklife” for a youth born too late to care what “Vorsprung durch technik” meant), and he laments tenderly on ballad “Angie,” an ode to a girl who committed suicide. While searching for the source of his fury, he conveys that there’s more layers to his ilk than meets the eye. Shame’s three years’ gigging experience has bolstered his confidence while earning them a reputation as the most thrilling new hope in London’s burgeoning guitar scene. Translating that to record is no mean feat. They made it in ten days. It’s taut but it’s also a shambles; cramped and ready to rupture with the despair of five unruly lads.
It’s a question of whether this brutish machismo is worth even a fraction of what it used to be, or if it’s needed anymore in rock‘n’roll. Look closer, though, and you’ll find a savvier model of man that speaks out against womanizing and has little interest in debauchery. “I may be cursed by company but at least I get to speak/And my tongue will never get tired,” threatens Steen on “Lampoon.” Does 2018 call for more white male aggression? No. But Shame aren’t asking you to worship them, only to listen to their unholy racket and feel provoked into shrieking or moshing along. “I am trying to exist/In a momentary cyst,” goes “Friction,” anticipating that when the bubble containing that puss-filled rage of young Britain bursts, everything’s gonna get a helluva lot uglier. | 2018-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | January 17, 2018 | 7.5 | 94091ec2-2d27-4e7d-8cee-da4af2385d27 | Eve Barlow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eve-barlow/ | |
For a quarter-century, the Canadian chamber ensemble has made hold music for awaiting a revolution. Suddenly, on their seventh album, they sound hopeful it could come. | For a quarter-century, the Canadian chamber ensemble has made hold music for awaiting a revolution. Suddenly, on their seventh album, they sound hopeful it could come. | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godspeed-you-black-emperor-g-ds-pee-at-states-end/ | G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! | For a band boasting so many members, Godspeed You! Black Emperor spent an awfully long time straining beneath the weight of their own concepts. During their first decade-long phase around the turn of the millennium, they were a proudly shambolic chamber ensemble making post-rock protest music; the specific quality of the strings or seamlessness of the samples mattered less than the apocalyptic alarms their gestalt sounded. The work suggested a stirring Dada pedigree, where the feverish expression of some revolutionary idea mattered more than the nuances of execution. Indeed, the sheer audacity of the enterprise and Godspeed’s unwavering commitment to unarmed musical confrontation felt truly awesome, making 1997’s F♯ A♯ ∞ and 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists motivational landmarks. But how much staying power could such willful imperfection hold?
Since Godspeed’s return a decade ago, they have dutifully addressed that question by making records that, by and large, sound more sophisticated and better played while maintaining their political ballast. During their time away, Godspeed recruited a powerful new drummer, and its members woodshedded in a dozen different projects. Their records since 2012 have been rendered with a combustible mix of force and detail, allowing Godspeed to lift their insurgent ideas rather than be saddled by them. G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!—their first album in four years and the fourth in this second phase—not only epitomizes this new dynamic but also emerges as a timely career triumph. The four suites of music here sound incredible, capturing the grandeur, aggression, and power of their symphonic punk with perfect clarity. And it feels incredible, too, as it endures passages of oppressive darkness to step at least toward a new dawn.
State’s End could initially be seen as some outburst of hope, especially as the wealthiest parts of the world vaccinate ourselves out of one crisis. The opening 20-minute suite feels like fight music, after all, a battle anthem built around a blade-sharp riff and marching drums; it fades into a victorious afterglow, where a dance for strings feels like a sigh of relief. And there is no moment more radiant or galvanizing in Godspeed’s discography than the third piece’s finale, “Ashes to Sea or Nearer to Thee.” It’s hard to hear it without smiling, without imaging yourself winning a race or beating back whatever long odds you certainly have. The string-and-static dénouement, “Our Side Has To Win (For DH),” possesses the same aspirational romanticism as its name, with Sophie Trudeau’s choir of violins arcing ever upward.
More than glibly hopeful, though, State’s End feels honest about the nonlinear shape of progress, or how winning the war to build a better world inherently entails a lot of devastating loss. Recorded under cover of masks, these four pieces exist in a world of anxiety, where any optimism is always backlit by some danger. The opening riff emerges from a long prelude made by sampling the signals of shortwave radios; it’s a pointed reminder of the multiplying distractions you have to overcome just to get in the fight, let alone win. And the third suite only reaches that righteous climax after 15 minutes of assorted anguishes—more sampled cacophony, lachrymose strings, a disoriented rhythm section that pulls itself together long enough to play a dirge that begins to feel like a nervous wreck.
And though “Our Side Has to Win” ultimately drifts toward redemption, it first weeps like an elegy. The band works through impossible emotional burdens in the same steady way as composer Gavin Bryars or his spiritual descendants in the Stars of the Lid, teetering at the crooked line between salvation and suffering. With the exception of the resolutely downcast “Fire at Static Valley,” these pieces function like a series of ouroboroi, defeat and victory locked in a cycle of mutually assured destruction and rebirth. There is enough momentum here to break that spell, or at least aspire to it.
Maybe State’s End hints that Godspeed have grown soft as they near the 30-year mark. They’ve won prestigious prizes, after all, and opened arena-filling tours. Their sound skews more pro than am these days, and they’re more into inspiring resolve than simply telling us the car is on fire, with no driver at the wheel. But no, they realize that the government is still corrupt, that the machine is still bleeding to death. They have smartly recognized that, in 2021, none of this is any more shocking than the sight of a 10-member punk symphony.
They no longer need to chart out the financial ties between record labels and warmongers on album covers or soundtrack endless doom when there’s Twitter. Instead, they’ve opted to acknowledge a world of seemingly infinite struggle and offer a well-earned, well-timed score for continuing the fight. Godspeed You! Black Emperor spent a quarter-century making hold music for awaiting a revolution; why shouldn’t they bask in signs of its potential sparks now, however limited or fleeting they might be?
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. | 2021-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Constellation | April 5, 2021 | 8.1 | 94110669-3a62-449d-9c64-f14950f467da | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
An eclectic star of the Japanese beat scene tilts toward the aggressive spirit of gabber and hardcore, largely leaving behind the stylistic markers of footwork. | An eclectic star of the Japanese beat scene tilts toward the aggressive spirit of gabber and hardcore, largely leaving behind the stylistic markers of footwork. | CRZKNY: GVVVV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crzkny-gvvvv/ | GVVVV | Japan’s juke community refuses to slow down. About a decade after an Osaka-based DJ launched the Booty Tune label, marking a starting point for a new twist on the Chicago-born style, Japanese creators of all sorts have tried finding their own mutations. While these producers generally remain respectful of the sound’s origins, often collaborating with Midwestern juke heavyweights, much of their best work has come from the instinct to warp it in new directions.
Hiroshima producer CRZKNY’s career has been marked by a particularly eclectic approach. While his catalog boasts plenty of dissected samples and frantic beat patterns reminiscent of RP Boo and Traxman, he’s also created slow burners and politically-tinged sample collages. Alongside Foodman, he helped organize the influential 2012 scene overview Japanese Juke&Footworks Compilation and the darker Atomic Bomb Compilation series. Last year, CRZKNY dropped the three-disc Meridian, featuring an album’s worth of minimalist juke countered by another of grungy tracks that suggested Keiji Haino spending a winter by Lake Michigan. On his latest release, GVVVV, CRZKNY frequently abandons juke entirely in favor of gabber.
It’s not a totally random pivot. CRZKNY’s juke has always leaned towards the aggressive—see his claustrophobic contributions to Atomic Bomb, or watch him physically wail on a piece of equipment at a live performance. Still, this album moves farther than ever from skittery patterns and vocal samples in favor of blown-out four-on-the-floor bass drums, embracing the stark punch of the early Rotterdam scene, with little time for any Technicolor flair. While the actual BPMs come in on the lower end of the spectrum (about 170, a mere warmup at Thunderdome), the spirit of gabber pounds through clearly on tracks such as “Guts” and “Peak.” These are forceful numbers that only slow down when CRZKNY cuts the beat to build tension, which makes the inevitable return slam all the more potent.
Mostly, then, GVVVV barrels ahead. While small differences pop up between songs, the album overall settles into a pattern of distorted drum hits plowing through everything, which can prove tiring when taken all at once. Still, the gabber-inspired highs show CRZKNY knows his hardcore. “Fuck” is the most intimidating beat here, a warped-out smash accented by an acid bass line. CRZKNY fades that sound out briefly midway through the track, underlining just how forceful the combo sounds. Check album closer “Void” for a similarly delirious mash-up of cracking drum machine programming and acid bass, resulting in another of GVVVV’s most upbeat moments. The jolts of euphoria that cut through this LP, like the distorted yelps on “Scum,” remind that hardcore and gabber weren’t simply punishing dance variants, but a real source of joy for many.
GVVVV is a serviceable hardcore album with some nice nostalgia brushed on. Its strongest moments are those that draw new connections between gabber and juke, often landing close to average footwork speeds. These less intense moments ultimately aren’t all that far removed from CRZKNY’s noisier creations—they just have a different beat structure. The potential of this approach is even clearer on songs where distinct rhythms collide, such as on “Cell,” which introduces a breakbeat cutting against the main pound, or even the warped vocal sample that shows up on “Club.” Flashes of inspiration like these suggest exciting new avenues for CRZKNY and his peers as they move between footwork and the harder corners of dance music. | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | CRZKNY / GOODWEATHER | March 13, 2018 | 6.6 | 9415868a-2cf9-43cc-9f1d-b92ca479da07 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | |
Much-derided and hyped UK band takes an unexpected, and rewarding, left turn on its second album. Portishead's Geoff Barrow co-produces. | Much-derided and hyped UK band takes an unexpected, and rewarding, left turn on its second album. Portishead's Geoff Barrow co-produces. | The Horrors: Primary Colours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12998-primary-colours/ | Primary Colours | Hype works both ways: Just as it encourages the overestimation of underdeveloped bands, it can also result in the knee-jerk dismissal of any upstart act with the (mis)fortune of being plastered on the cover of NME before the debut EP's even been recorded. Of course, East London quintet the Horrors didn't do themselves any favors by presenting themselves in a conceptual wrapping that seemingly had all the staying power of last night's mascara, mining a well-tapped vein of ghoulish American garage-rock, prancing around in cartoonishly goth get-ups, and putting on sloppy, self-sabotaging 15-minute sets, all for the amusement of their celebrity guest list. But the band's media-saturated ascent distracted from the fact that the Horrors had actually done their homework: Their 2006 debut EP featured covers of two Joe Meek-produced, Pebbles-approved classics and on the subsequent tour, the band's pre-show PA mix included tracks by the Seeds, the Cramps, and Gun Club. And after struggling to keep the shock-rock shtick fresh over the entirety of 2007's Strange House full-length, the Horrors were smart enough to recognize garage-rock's aesthetic limitations-- and that the very sort of garage-rock purist who would appreciate a good cover of Screaming Lord Sutch's "Jack the Ripper" had probably already written them off on the basis of their poofy haircuts.
And so the Horrors' desire to make campy, B-movie-inspired punk-rock seems to have died along with Lux Interior. Their second album, Primary Colours, contains no haunted-house Farfisa organ drones, no blues-rock riffing and no songs about graveyards or murderers, a change reflected in their choice of producers; where Strange House was helmed by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, the expansive sound of Primary Colours was fashioned by the trio of Geoff Barrow (Portishead), Craig Silvey, and video director Chris Cunningam. The recently released first teaser from Primary Colours, "Sea Within a Sea", sees that production tandem's cinematic sensibility in full effect, with eight minutes of steely Krautrock propulsion that recasts lead shrieker Faris Badwan as a lovelorn crooner. On first listen, the song seems antithetical to the Horrors' patented goth-garage gimmickry; but the amazing thing about Primary Colours is that, by the time "Sea Within a Sea" appears as the album's come-down closer, the transition feels like a natural outcome.
There is, of course, clear precedent in transforming gothic gloom into psychedelic drone: After all, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine-- all of whom loom large on Primary Colours-- were all big fans of the Cramps and the Birthday Party. But unlike downcast contemporaries like Crystal Stilts, the Horrors translate the influence of those avant-rock icons into swaggering, mass-appeal pop music: "Three Decades" may lean heavily on MBV-style flange-pedal contortions, but its driving momentum and Badwan's full-blooded delivery lend it an anthemic, open-road abandon, matched by uncommonly optimistic lyrics: "Forget your regrets/ Don't lose your purpose, this is your heart!" The song provides the first glimpse that, beneath his vampy visage, Badwan fancies himself a romantic. "Do You Remember" may sound like a readymade soundtrack for student-disco one night stands, but within its decadent, Suede-ian glam groove is a promise for long-term commitment, and in the beautifully brooding ballad "Scarlet Fields", the Horrors appropriate the melody of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" but use it to convey hope instead of resignation.
The Horrors' shoegazer makeover aside, the real story here is Badwan's growing confidence as a singer, and his willingness to sound more scared than scary. Primary Colours loses its radiance when he reverts back to bogeyman type: "New Ice Age" sounds like a musty Strange House holdover, while "I Can't Control Myself" is a rewrite of Spiritualized's "Come Together" that-- in the absence of Jason Pierce's gospel choir and backing orchestra-- simply grinds its repetitive riff into the ground. But such regressions are a distant memory once we get sucked into "Sea Within a Sea", which, after you get beyond the "hey, we bought a Can record" novelty, proves to be something much more than a mere clinical exercise in record-collector rock. Rather, the song plays out as an analogue of the Horrors' own spiritual rebirth, its hypno-rock pulse turning more ominous and intense before a synth-triggered denouement introduces a melodic levity that breaks the song's air of despair and completes the Horrors' aesthetic liberation. For a band that's endured no lack of skepticism for their pre-fab packaging, it turns out the freakiest thing about the Horrors is that they're for real. | 2009-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | May 7, 2009 | 7.6 | 9417afbf-77bb-421d-998d-6d32e27b8832 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Releasing a live album of freedom songs on this election day is a deliberate gesture for Mavis Staples; it's a well-deserved one, too, capturing the longtime social justice warrior's ferocity and approachability. | Releasing a live album of freedom songs on this election day is a deliberate gesture for Mavis Staples; it's a well-deserved one, too, capturing the longtime social justice warrior's ferocity and approachability. | Mavis Staples: Live: Hope at the Hideout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12387-live-hope-at-the-hideout/ | Live: Hope at the Hideout | However tomorrow's presidential election turns out, Barack Obama's candidacy is itself a victory. That's what Mavis Staples-- a longtime social justice warrior who marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and soundtracked, with her Staples siblings and father Pops, the civil rights movement-- would likely tell you. Releasing a live album of freedom songs on this election day is a deliberate gesture, but maybe a more nuanced one than people might expect. Staples (like a lot of us), may fervently hope for an Obama win and would probably be the first to enumerate the items remaining on the civil-rights task list, but the gospel/R&B/pop legend has always favored King's peaceful progressive-Christian theology that privileges the "good news" over the agitating, even when good news is scant and there's plenty to agitate about.
Sounding like a charismatic preacher, Staples frames her performance for the audience, "We've come here tonight to bring you some joy, some happiness, inspiration, and some positive vibrations! We want to leave you with enough to last you for maybe the next six months". The crowd that converged on Chicago's cozy, laid-back Hideout this past June are enthused, but polite (and probably a bit awestruck), as she launches with gusto into protest-era standard "Eyes on the Prize". For its well-mannered, highly expectant air, it could be an Obama rally.
Subdued audience aside, Staples-- even at 69-- is a geyser of ferocity and depth. Her voice gets a little grizzly performing "Wade in the Water" in the sub-basement of her (already low) natural range, and she requests crowd participation to bolster her understandably weary pipes on finale "I'll Take You There", but her energy is gobsmacking. Following a raucous rendition of "Freedom Highway", which the three-piece band plays as a runaway bus on a rural road, culminating in much cymbal smashing and jubilant howls, Staples apologizes, "I get so all up into it. You know, when the spirit hits you, you've got to move!"
But Staples is no saint. In contrast to her demure, choir-backed performance on 2007's superlative studio album We'll Never Turn Back, she sounds lusty and provocative over "This Little Light"'s scruffy guitar riffs, veering often in the same phrase between outrage and "joy-- joy, joy, joy!" "Light" and blues moaner "Down in Mississippi" support-- like most great R&B-- he tenet that the sacred and secular, spiritual and carnal aren't mutually exclusive, and that passion is passion whether exercised as faith, anger, love or lust. Considering that these days Staples' fans probably include just as many of the godless as the church-going, her knack for translating religious experience makes her music ecumenical and inclusive unlike, for example, much contemporary Christian rock. That said, probably the most overtly religious number on her setlist, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", a traditional song closely associated with the Carter Family-- and the first Pops taught his Staples brood to perform-- receives the Hideout audience's warmest embrace.
Throughout the performance, Staples' band and trio of backup singers are ideal support players-- tight, professional, and mostly unobtrusive, never threatening to upstage Staples the way some of Ry Cooder's (admittedly spectacular) Never Turn Back production fireworks do. Of course, Staples has never been one of those velvet roped-off divas. If Live: Hope at the Hideout captures something her studio work doesn't, it's her approachability, her genuine audience rapport. Like all the great politicians, Mavis Staples has a gift for the common touch. | 2008-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | November 3, 2008 | 7.6 | 941a0161-2a56-47d5-a4e2-2f77b746c428 | Amy Granzin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-granzin/ | null |
On their eighth album, the Followill brothers desperately cling to a sound that has stopped working, trying to write songs that soar but capable only of ones that wallow. | On their eighth album, the Followill brothers desperately cling to a sound that has stopped working, trying to write songs that soar but capable only of ones that wallow. | Kings of Leon: When You See Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kings-of-leon-when-you-see-yourself/ | When You See Yourself | It’s hard to pinpoint when Kings of Leon stopped enjoying themselves. They were never the most profound band of the aughts rock revival, but they were the ones who bought in most completely, dressing like the group from Almost Famous and living like an audition for a Behind the Music special. Yet once they achieved their hard-fought arena stardom, the obligations of running a rock band as a major enterprise sapped any residual freedom and impulsivity from their music. Their records grew bigger while the personalities behind them shrank. It’s been 10 years since the last Kings of Leon song anybody wants to karaoke, and the band is still chasing the shadow of their mammoth late-’00s hits.
The group’s eighth album, When You See Yourself, briefly teases what a winning Kings of Leon album could sound like in 2021. Surprisingly light on its toes, opener “When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away” is bright with pinging polyrhythms. It’s the most jubilant the band has sounded in years, and while it’s not their normal lane, it suggests there might be a path forward in shamelessly pilfering from the perkier, neon-painted corners of contemporary alternative. This band has been old beyond their years for so long, maybe it’s time they skewed young for once.
But When You See Yourself isn’t that kind of album. It’s the only kind of album Kings of Leon know how to make anymore, which is a minor variation of the last one, and the one before that. The most, if not only novel thing about this album is that it is the first album in history available as an NFT, a cryptographic way to sell art and music online. Forget about the Southern Strokes or the Southern U2. They’ve now spent most of their career as the Southern post-Antics Interpol, a band desperately clinging to a sound that’s stopped working, trying to write songs that soar but capable only of ones that wallow.
Lending to that unwelcome sense of déjà vu is returning WALLS producer Markus Dravs, a Brian Eno disciple who’s engineered records for Coldplay and Arcade Fire. As a For Your Consideration Grammy submission, his work is impeccable—almost every track sounds like an expensive technical feat. But in practice, his production competes with these songs more than it complements them, eclipsing them like skyscrapers oblivious to any lakefront view they may be blocking. The mix saves the worst of its wrath for Caleb Followill, whose voice it continually finds new and cruel ways to bury. On “Fairytale,” Followill’s unloved yowl is reduced to a red wine stain trying to stand out against a busy carpet.
Followill has never been an easily decipherable vocalist to begin with, but the lyrics that are audible place him inside a dreary mid-life rut. On the cosmically forlorn “Time in Disguise,” one of the record’s many tracks pitched at the tempo of mid-period Coldplay album cut, he can’t shake his own obsolescence: “Close your eyes and what do you see?/Is it a man or masked machine?” Even more dejected is the country-hued “Supermarket,” where Followill promises “I’m going nowhere, if you’ve got the time.” Followill is 39, but from these songs, you’d think he’s workshopping one of Rick Rubin’s end-of-life albums.
Is this what anybody wants to hear from this band? While Kings of Leons’ early albums left plenty to nitpick—namely the repulsive 1970s sexual politics—they had a guy’s-night-out energy that could be infectious if you bought into a particular fantasy notion of masculinity. When You See Yourself, on the other hand, packs in all the carnality of a weekend run to The Container Store. It’s hard to imagine the wild-maned early incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t sound all that thrilled about it, either.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | March 9, 2021 | 4.8 | 941a8403-c76e-431b-a39e-7b6f7b563ec1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The German house producer’s sound is warm and welcoming, fusing four-to-the-floor grooves with the spacious atmospheres of Jamaican dub. | The German house producer’s sound is warm and welcoming, fusing four-to-the-floor grooves with the spacious atmospheres of Jamaican dub. | Move D: Building Bridges | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/move-d-building-bridges/ | Building Bridges | Germany has an impressive, almost counterintuitive, record of mixing dub with electronic music, from Basic Channel’s icy minimal techno to Pole’s spectral glitch. Move D—aka Heidelberg’s David Moufang—is a lesser-known figure in this line of Teutonic dub explorers, working the crossover between dub and house music on tracks like 2006’s “Silk Dub,” and employing subtly shifting repetition, echo, and space to devious effect.
The songs on Building Bridges, Moufang’s debut album for Will Saul’s Aus Music, were recorded between 1999 and 2019, and they largely share “Silk Dub”’s mixture of undulating 4/4 beats, echoing effects, and basslines that sit somewhere the funk imperative of disco and the spacey wanderings of dub. Within these limited parameters, however, Moufang manages to wring impressive variation, from the dubbed-out French touch of “Cycles” to “Perpetual State,” where house music is a dilated, glitchy memory found in the suggestion of a drum pattern.
It helps that Moufang’s sound is warm and welcoming by nature, a mixture of light melodic touches and gently pulsating drums that reeks of indolence on a sunny day. There is something particularly well rounded about this album—a smoothly tactile quality that glides like well-varnished wood under stockinged feet. Only on the title track, a collaboration with the American house producer Fred P, does this sonic benevolence spill over into something cloying, as a voice makes banal pronouncements about people coming together that end up sounding trite, to the detriment of the crystalline drum production.
Luckily, this doesn’t detract too much from an extremely elegant album that makes its mark with whispered tonal shifts rather than bothersome handbrake turns. “Cycles” is a wonderful musical tease, distilling a sense of perpetual motion out of a handful of subtly modulating sonic ideas and a rippling bassline, like peak Motorbass; “One Small Step” (featuring Jonah Sharp and Thomas Fehlmann) is a leisurely paddle of guitar noodle, submersed bass, and percussive sound effects that could soundtrack a dolphin’s waking dream; and “Perpetual State” suggests house music slowly dissolving over a crackling open fire, helped along by a spidery suggestion of melody.
This strain of caramel-smooth production has little to do with the raw speaker-rattling sound of classic 1970s dub productions. But what Move D has done, much like Basic Channel, Pole and the Orb before him, owes plenty to the genre's exploration of the spaces between infinite shades of reverb. Building Bridges represents the exquisite suggestion of dub, the airborne arrival of the Jamaican sound upon German shores in a breezy triumph of experimentation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Aus | July 8, 2019 | 7.4 | 941ce86e-aad7-479a-8cc0-0efa40ad938c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Cross-cutting sample collages, beat tracks, and free improv with wryly surrealist DJ banter, the Chicago musicians’ fictional mixtape celebrates the revolutionary promise of pirate radio. | Cross-cutting sample collages, beat tracks, and free improv with wryly surrealist DJ banter, the Chicago musicians’ fictional mixtape celebrates the revolutionary promise of pirate radio. | Damon Locks / Rob Mazurek: New Future City Radio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damon-locks-rob-mazurek-new-future-city-radio/ | New Future City Radio | Since the broadcast spectrum was cordoned off and commercialized a century ago, pirate radio stations have been sending their signals like phantoms through the airwaves. Sequestered on anonymous city rooftops and boats anchored offshore, unlicensed amateurs reclaim their slice of the ether in the name of freedom of expression. By its very nature, pirate radio is illicit, boundary-defying, and hopeful, a David-versus-Goliath story of resistance to corporate consolidation. A decentralized network of low-wattage transmitters provides a blueprint for alternative modes of communication and, perhaps, better ways of living. Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek’s concept album New Future City Radio imagines a clandestine broadcast from a not-so-distant future, playing up pirate radio’s utopian impulse in order to raise alarm bells about the present.
Locks and Mazurek have worked together since the late 1990s in the subsection of the Chicago music scene where jazzy improv meets rebellious post-punk. Locks became the vocalist in the rotating cast of Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra before leading his own massive group, the Black Monument Ensemble. Both projects recently found a home with Chicago’s International Anthem, a label better defined by politics than genre conventions. Though it’s nominally a jazz label, any given release might draw from Latin music, hip-hop, or gospel. As Locks and Mazurek’s first duo project, New Future City Radio fits squarely in this milieu, blending sample-based electronica with improvisatory jazz and adapting Afrofuturist themes of Black liberation and revolutionary spirit. Like labelmates Angel Bat Dawid and Irreversible Entanglements, they are clear-eyed about the state of the world but insistent on the potential for change.
The album takes the form of a mixtape recorded off the radio during an unspecified crisis, juxtaposing full songs with snippets of beat tracks and DJ voiceovers. Its announcers address the collapse of society with cool professional detachment. In one vignette, listeners can win theater tickets by answering the question, “What happens if we just let things run their course?” The topic of a call-in talk show is “El edificio está en llamas. ¿Dejaremos que se queme?” (“The building is on fire. Are we going to let it burn?”) Despite impending disaster, the duo’s music is defiantly optimistic. On lead single “Yes!” Locks describes the forces of darkness arrayed against us only to introduce his plan: “You ask me if I can form myself into a giant robot and swallow up this black hole and free the entire universe?/My answer to you is, ‘Yes.’”
At their best, Locks’ ultra-busy collages and authoritative vocals combine Guillermo Scott Herren with Gil Scott-Heron. The micro-chopped samples of album standout “Flitting Splits Reverb Adage” are a throwback to One Word Extinguisher while his bassy stream-of-consciousness monologue about cosmic villains sounds like a space-opera take on I’m New Here. Mazurek’s samplers and synths also join the fray, but his trumpet, on songs like “Your Name Gonna Ring The Bell” and “Droids!,” more forcefully imprints his style, elevating workmanlike lo-fi backing tracks with exhilarating improvisation. At times, these elements come together perfectly, as on “The Concord Hour.” After a Welcome to Night Vale-style voiceover (“Brought to you by Redistribution and Preparation. We reconfigure, recalculate, and never replicate”), driving synths and electronic percussion propel chanting voices until all dissolves in favor of a plangent trumpet solo.
The pirate-radio conceit simultaneously buoys and constrains an album bursting with ideas. Its themes help rapid-fire changes in direction cohere, but fully fleshed-out tracks sit awkwardly within a headlong spin across the radio dial. Brilliant snippets like the celebratory, reggae-driven “New Future” beg for further development. Meanwhile, “Twilight Shimmer,” at 10 minutes long, occupies fully a quarter of the running time but merely drifts prettily along a lazy river of bird chirps and languid horn lines. This makes for an uneven listen. But when Locks and Mazurek hit on the right frequency, New Future City Radio hums with a sense of possibility. | 2023-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | July 28, 2023 | 6.9 | 94200975-0316-4e9d-ae7e-eb00f9caad61 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Monk Parker traffics in a twilit Americana, drifting between Phosphorescent's sun-drunk aphorisms and Castanets' moonlit chill. He has worked off and on since the '90s under a variety of names, but How the Spark Loves the Tinder feels more ambitious and more fully realized than any of his earlier work. | Monk Parker traffics in a twilit Americana, drifting between Phosphorescent's sun-drunk aphorisms and Castanets' moonlit chill. He has worked off and on since the '90s under a variety of names, but How the Spark Loves the Tinder feels more ambitious and more fully realized than any of his earlier work. | Monk Parker: How the Spark Loves the Tinder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20920-how-the-spark-loves-the-tinder/ | How the Spark Loves the Tinder | Monk Parker's How the Spark Loves the Tinder is fall music—languid, heart-wrenching, suggesting pangs of transition. Singing unhurried minor-key songs burnished with horns, weeping organs, and steel guitar, Parker traffics in a twilit Americana, drifting between Phosphorescent's sun-drunk aphorisms and Castanets' moonlit chill.
The man at the helm here is an itinerant writer and musician named Mangham "Monk" Parker. He went by Parker Noon in the early '00s, when he was based out of New York City and played with his then-girlfriend in a duo called Parker & Lily. After their breakup he relocated to Athens and launched the Low Lows, a rotating collective of musicians with its name taken from a Parker & Lily album.
For the last five years Parker's lived in Austin, where he put together his latest band. The credits to How the Spark Loves the Tinder list 20-some players and several recording studios in New York (including NY Hed, the studio run by Jon Spencer collaborator Matt Verta-Ray) and Austin (including Parker's home), and it feels more ambitious and more fully realized than any of his earlier work. Perhaps that's the reason for Parker's current moniker and why Spark is billed by his label, UK-based Bronze Rat, as a debut.
Parker's lyrics read like poetry, with images of floating stars and nighttime winds and endless skies. "Idle in Idlewild", at seven-some minutes the longest song on the album, contains this perfect triplet: "Some strange April/ When all the stars stall and stay still/ And the days fly by." Parker practically gives each word its own breath.
The arrangements are rich in color and nuance: Opener and lead single "Sadly Yes" builds from a dirge to a big, brassy climax over nearly six minutes, achieving hard-fought catharsis while a Theremin-like wail cuts through. A mournful, elegant suite of clarinet and strings opens "I Am a Gun" before it segues into a kind of chamber-country waltz. There's an extended moment in the middle of "The Happy Hours", a song ostensibly about existential dread in Rapid City, Iowa, where horns and strings assume a density as vast and uplifting as an orchestra.
For all of this life-affirming beauty, the album's operative emotional state is resignation. Parker's songs find solace in the ability to accept defeat—lost love, unfulfilled potential—and present this ability as a form of wisdom. This is the sort of mind state achieved only from age and experience. Far from depressing, the exquisite dejection of How the Spark Loves the Tinder is almost celebratory. After all, you can't fight the changing seasons. | 2015-08-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Bronze Rat | August 20, 2015 | 7.7 | 942414b0-da47-4b05-8371-936684dda84a | Jonathan Zwickel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-zwickel/ | null |
The techno DJ and leftfield beatmaker pivots to Balearic dream pop on her debut album. The tone is disarming and sweet, using nostalgia as a foil for spiritual fatigue. | The techno DJ and leftfield beatmaker pivots to Balearic dream pop on her debut album. The tone is disarming and sweet, using nostalgia as a foil for spiritual fatigue. | Avalon Emerson: & the Charm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avalon-emerson-and-the-charm/ | & the Charm | Avalon Emerson, former software developer turned Berghain DJ and acclaimed techno producer, gives off the enviable aura of someone who’s good at everything. When she describes her musical database management in precise schematic detail, or excitedly reveals how much she’s learned about the septic system at her rural pandemic retreat, you can practically see the mental flowcharts unfurl. She’s admitted that she’s “not really a singer,” but for Emerson that’s just another in-game challenge to unlock. Her debut album is a self-described pop record credited to her new collaborative project Avalon Emerson & the Charm, and she sings almost the whole time.
The lucid dream-pop ditties of & the Charm take in the misty-eyed gaze of Japanese city pop, the slow-mo fireworks of shoegaze, the gentle sea spray of Balearic house, the jangly collage aesthetic of Saint Etienne. The other members of the Charm include wife Hunter Lombard and friend Keivon Hobeheidar, a lineup that recalls Marie Davidson’s partner-and-friend pop trio Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu. It’s just my job to notice this stuff, but Emerson’s project shares a remarkably similar origin: An internationally successful DJ and producer, pummeled by jet lag and burnout, eventually takes refuge in a few close confidants and a new creative avenue that’s simultaneously more “pop” and more niche. In Emerson’s case, pandemic restrictions enforced a pre-planned break from touring and, perhaps, opened more time for home listening. “My idea of a perfect record is a Cocteau Twins record, things that are soft and beautiful,” she told Pitchfork. Daytime Avalon: Lightness for the summer, for a world that spent a year or two away from the club, for sunrise first thing in the morning instead of last thing at the end of the night.
So this is music that sounds familiar by design, songs that want you to feel like you’ve heard them before. Emerson aims directly at the idea of imitative music with “Karaoke Song,” actually a song about karaoke songs, co-produced with Nick Sylvester. In another sense, the idea for & the Charm came from a series of covers compilations that London songwriter and album executive producer Bullion produced for his Deek label, featuring stylized reconsiderations of pop and alternative classics: silver-voiced balladeer Westerman singing Simon & Garfunkel, a chanson version of Joe Jackson’s “Stepping Out,” that sort of thing. Emerson recorded a kind of shadow entry in this catalog, the cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Long Forgotten Fairytale” that opens her 2020 DJ-Kicks mix. Its video features road trip footage Emerson and Lombard shot while driving from California to New York in summer 2020, as the pandemic settled in. Occasionally an image from the new album appears to evoke the scene through their windshield, or maybe a rear-view glance to Emerson’s childhood in Arizona: “Hot dunes, an oasis”; “This desert isn’t your friend.”
If Avalon Emerson seems like she knows everything, & the Charm wishes it could know less. The lyrics to “Sandrail Silhouette” or “Hot Evening” play out like someone reminiscing in the incandescent glow of vintage photographic slides, hinting at details just outside the frame. The music feels a little intentionally maladjusted, a little out of step, because instead of bending tempos or pitch in a DJ mix, Emerson is playing with the emotional timing mechanisms of nostalgia. Within the bittersweet isolation chamber of “Entombed in Ice” or the idyllic memory of air travel on “Dreamliner,” you might perceive something of the pandemic mood, a wistful spiritual fatigue combined with the faint glimmer of unrealized possibility. An album about memory is also an album about forgetting, about past futures forever unexplored.
The more reflective, inward-looking style of & the Charm misses some of what characterizes Emerson’s best club tracks: the confident fluidity and lively sociability of someone who DJ’d a lot of big parties before assembling beats at home. Within the conceit of the solo singer-songwriter album, under the circumstances of the pandemic, Emerson is stuck—“worse, California-pilled”—and we’re alongside her for the duration. Her not-really-a-singer voice gives the album its distinctive personality: sweet and disarming, hermetic and a little tentative, not really like Marie Davidson, who was effectively mean-mugging part of the time, but more like Arthur Russell in the way Emerson’s not-really-singing imparts a spontaneous sincerity.
Sincere, self-taught, conceived under the auspices of the crisis everybody wishes they could leave behind: No wonder Emerson herself expected this music to turn out a little cringe. But & the Charm is so tranquil and unconcerned with impressing you that it’s faintly disconcerting. “Hang the cowards, hang the DJs,” Emerson muses at one point, like a cheeky, self-deprecating nudge at people who’d rather not reveal their full, flawed selves in their art. Not everything feels effortless: The wubby synth bass licks on “A Vision” upset the balance of Emerson’s featherweight vocal, and the pretty but inert “The Stone” could have been an interlude. But it’s well placed to gather one’s breath before the exhilarating “Dreamliner,” one of my favorite songs this year. Not coincidentally that’s the track that lands closest to Nighttime Avalon, one of those satisfying four-on-the-floors that peel up at the edges to let their romantic psychedelic glow seep out. Who needs a chorus?
All this, of course, would have been far harder to pull off after the banger techno LP that Emerson surely still has stashed away in her brain. When you’re famous enough for a following and not so famous that you’re bound to disappoint the casuals is really the perfect moment for a record like this. And & the Charm feels right on time in general: for club culture going pop, for new albums from club-goes-pop progenitors Everything But the Girl and Alison Goldfrapp, for last year’s new project from Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, for a new Rae Sremmurd song (and a semi-official Jason Derulo track) sampling Y2K soft-rock radio queen Dido, for Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj’s remake of Alice Deejay. The vibe is luminous pastels, elegant sway, adult-contemporary electro, and an uncombed, unselfconscious attitude that circles right back around to being cool, and Avalon Emerson’s got it.
Correction: Bullion is not credited on “Karaoke Song”; it was co-produced with Nick Sylvester. | 2023-05-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Another Dove | May 1, 2023 | 8 | 94253143-7397-4513-a378-23fa1908f72b | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it. | Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it. | Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters/ | Fetch the Bolt Cutters | It happens to most of us at an early age: the realization that life will not follow a straight line on the path towards fulfillment. Instead, life spirals. The game is rigged, power corrupts, and society is, in a word, bullshit. Art can expose the lies. The early music of Fiona Apple was so much about grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world. Did it teach you to hate yourself? Did it teach you to bury your pain, to let it calcify, to build a gate around your heart that quiets the reaches of your one and only voice? Fetch the bolt cutters.
Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound. No music has ever sounded quite like it. Apple recorded Fetch the Bolt Cutters both in and with her Venice Beach home, banging on its walls, stomping on its ground. Self-reliance is its rule, curiosity is its key. Fetch the Bolt Cutters seems to almost completely turn the volume down on music history, while it cranks up raw, real life—handclaps, chants, and other makeshift percussion, in harmony with space, echoes, whispers, screams, breathing, jokes, so-called mistakes, and dog barks. (At least five dogs are credited: Mercy, Maddie, Leo, Little, and Alfie.) All of this debris orbits around the core of Apple’s music: her voice, her piano, and most of all her words, which have always been her primary instrument. It creates a wild symphony of the everyday.
In the past, Apple has said John Lennon was her god, and she wrote lyrics and melodies on par with the finest pop songs ever recorded. But Fetch the Bolt Cutters feels more conceptually akin to the revolutionary risk-taking of saint Yoko Ono—a woman who once wrote, “I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back.” Fetch the Bolt Cutters does something similar. It contains practically no conventional pop forms. Taken together, the notes of its found percussion and rattling blues are liberationist.
Apple was moving towards all of this with 2012’s The Idler Wheel. Even after the fury and eloquence of her initial three-album run—manifestos from a voice of disenchantment who knew even as a teenager that she was “too smart” for the world—Idler Wheel still felt like a breakthrough. It was the first Apple record to realize the breadth of her potential in the ecstatic reach of the music itself. On the corporeal “Daredevil,” she sang of “gashes” that gave her “lift.” But on Fetch the Bolt Cutters she calls the gashes out by name: “bullies,” “it girls,” “wannabes,” and, above all, toxic masculinity.
Apple said, in a recent profile in The New Yorker, that she worried she’d constructed “a record that can’t be made into a record,” but that shakiness was merely a symptom of a feat of total abandon. The whole album flies. The opening song, “I Want You to Love Me” seems to offer a thesis for the meaning of life: to love, to connect, to get “back in the pulse.” She sings, scats, lightly raps—and proceeds to curl her voice into an extended-vocal contortion à la Yoko or Meredith Monk, over a Reichian piano loop, signaling an avant-garde inclination. Apple sings about time and meaninglessness, and how “while I’m in this body I want somebody to want.” She sings about knowing that one day she will die. The song echoes the beautiful open letter she wrote in 2012 about her dog, Janet, who was then dying: “I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her [...] in the last moments.” Apple reportedly “tapped” on a box containing Janet’s bones during the recording of the album.
There is a tendency among songwriters, as they get older, to refine—to use fewer words to allow for easier melodies. But to refine is to reel back, to withdraw. Apple does the opposite, reimagining her music to accommodate even more words, more of herself: “You’ve got to get what you want/How you want it/But so do I,” she sings on “Drumset,” grasping at every self-determined syllable. A number of Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ rough-hewn tracks sound like they might collapse at any moment, only to pick themselves up with a smirk of cool relief. The incantatory “Relay” includes a fluttering ambient noise jam recalling no one so much as O.G. punk band the Slits. Across four distinct movements, the madcap “For Her” pivots from a cabaret tune to a march to a swooping blues ballad to a one-woman choir of antagonizing angels. It is the definition of uncompromising. Apple’s indictments of men are also cutting as ever—“Your face ignites a fuse to my patience,” goes “Cosmonauts”—but her vulnerabilities are more daring, too. In a single word, her voice can dive from a ragged scream to a whisper so intimate that it barely exists outside of her.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters can threaten the status quo and it can be outrageously funny, often at once. The long-reigning queen of self-isolation proclaims, “I told you I didn’t want to go to this dinner,” to open a song called “Under the Table,” as in: “Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up.” “Rack of His” turns the experience of, well, getting played by a musician, into something hysterically subversive: “Check out that rack of his/Look at that row of guitar necks,” she daydreams, before cutting to the quick: “I thought you would wail on me like you wail on them.” And on “Relay,” after listing off a series of things she resents about an ex, she offers a critique of our hyper-socially-mediated world so savage it practically demands a standing ovation: “I resent you for presenting your life like a fucking propaganda brochure.” With her humor comes a playfulness that is still genuinely disarming to hear from a woman who wrote a song about herself and titled it “Sullen Girl.”
The title track, and the album’s peak, is a work of musical bildungsroman, like a teenage girl’s diary, detailing the futility of fighting your way through a friendship, crying, and the secret power of a Kate Bush song. Apple sings of how the cool girls in school damaged her self-esteem, how the strength of your mind does not guarantee the fortitude of your heart. The energy centers of the song are reversed—the verses slink with gravity, the choruses are steadied and light. “Fetch the bolt cutters,” Apple sings like a spell, “I’ve been in here too long.” She has always strung words together like armor, but “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” feels designed to protect us. However you interpret it, the line, the song, and the album speak the language of transcendence. In 1996, on “The Child Is Gone,” Apple alluded to how the world can disconnect us from ourselves: “I’m a stranger to myself.” On “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Apple narrates this experience, reclaims it, and resists it—a revolt against the very idea of being controlled.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters includes Apple’s first songs discernibly addressed to other women. “Shameika” also chronicles her formative years by way of a pep talk to herself and an ode to the middle-school classmate who emboldened her with only a few fleeting words: “Shameika said I had potential.” The torchy barroom burner “Ladies” is an anti-jealousy anthem and it is pure comic genius. “Ladies! Ladies! Ladies! Ladies!” Apple toasts, imploring the new girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend to “please be my guest!” to whatever she may have left in the back of his kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets: “There’s a dress in the closet/Don’t get rid of it/You look good in it/I didn’t fit in it/It was never mine/It belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine.” Fetch the Bolt Cutters is full of audacious scenes like this, where Apple narrates, in vivid detail, experiences we just don’t typically hear in songs.
This is all in keeping with the feminist reckoning that has swept through culture in a post-#MeToo society. But Fetch the Bolt Cutters is never didactic, even on (the potentially triggering) “For Her,” which Apple wrote in the wake of the shameful Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings. For an artist whose early career existed under an all-seeing male eye, Apple wrote the song “Newspaper” from an unmistakable female gaze. In its lyrics, she feels “close” to another woman due to their shared past with an abusive man, as she observes his cruelty and lies from a distance. It’s a nuanced way of addressing a systemic problem. “It’s a shame because you and I didn’t get a witness,” she sings, but this song makes us all one, as do the brutal lyrics of “For Her.” “You know you should know but you don’t know what you did,” she sings, and later: “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” This is another side of Fiona Apple. It is not easy to sing along. But it demands that you listen.
She calls men out for refusing to show weakness, for treating their wives badly, for needing women to clean up their messes. Where The Idler Wheel explored a form of self-interrogation—“I’m too hard to know,” she crooned—on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she unapologetically indicts the world around her. And she rejects its oppressive logic in every note. The very sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters dismantles patriarchal ideas: professionalism, smoothness, competition, perfection—aesthetic standards that are tools of capitalism, used to warp our senses of self. Where someone else might erase a mistake—“Oh fuck it!” she chuckles on “On I Go”—she leaves it in. Where someone might put a bridge, she puts clatter. Where she once sang, “Hunger hurts but starving works,” here, in the devouring chorus of “Heavy Balloon,” she screams: “I spread like strawberries/I climb like peas and beans.” There is nothing top-down about the sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “She wanted to start from the ground,” her guitarist David Garza told The New Yorker. “For her, the ground is rhythm.”
There’s considerable power in how Apple entertains so many of these wild, inexhaustible impulses. “Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you shush me!” she chips back on “Under the Table.” She will not be silenced. That’s patently clear from the start of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. In gnarled breaths on its opening song—feet on the ground and mind as her might—Apple articulates exactly what she wants: “Blast the music! Bang it! Bite it! Bruise it!” It’s not pretty. It’s free.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | April 17, 2020 | 10 | 94255877-925d-432a-85e8-1341bea0ec6b | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Producer Bryant Canelo’s latest album is filled with ambient memories, distorted house skeletons, and spoken-word rants. It’s not so much exhausting as it is exhaustive. | Producer Bryant Canelo’s latest album is filled with ambient memories, distorted house skeletons, and spoken-word rants. It’s not so much exhausting as it is exhaustive. | Loretta Aberdeen: PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loretta-aberdeen-phone-phreakerdollar-phreak-back/ | PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK | Like anyone who spends quite a bit of time staring at inanimate objects attempting to figure them out, Loretta Aberdeen (aka Bryant Canelo) seems slightly suspicious of technology. As Lampgod, Canelo makes abstract, hip-hop productions, stitched together with played-to-death soul tapes and drum machine loops that seem to disintegrate as you listen to them. But under his Loretta Aberdeen alias, he makes work that is noisy and repetitious; he dares you turn it off, and freely admits that some songs “can also be too long for your enjoyment.” The terrain of his latest album, PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK, is made up of ambient memories, distorted house skeletons, and spoken-word rants. It’s not so much exhausting as it is exhaustive, allowing Aberdeen to examine both his vulnerability and his distance from it.
Aberdeen obscures himself in clouds of beeps and minimal drum hits, clearing the air only to startle you with sudden declarations. Album opener “LUXCORE” is an icy landscape formed of otherworldly material; it’s digital firmament. As the song progresses, Aberdeen keeps hyping the track by saying, “Check it out, now.” It’s eerily disembodied, yet strangely immersive. His repetitions begin to have the effect of mantras, and the blistering, almost orchestral peals of distorted guitar that compete for your attention provide the track with a quasi-mystical character. It’s like looking at the human trapped in the machine.
Aberdeen ensconces you deep inside this sprawling consciousness-warping device, measuring your perception by messing with it. “MOLLYMAN” begins with Aberdeen humming, “Didn’t know I could love somebody/Didn’t know I could love someone like this” to a series of squeaks. This earnest proclamation leads into club-ready drum patterns, and the next set of lyrics fit this new setting: “You make me dance/Bring me up/Play it sweet/Make me move just like a freak/Mr. Mollyman, Mr. Mollyman hold up.” Here, dancing is only hinted at; it’s a track that feels closer to walking outside of a club than being inside one. Or to put it another way, it feels more like being in the head of someone preparing to meet a new lover at the club, the soundtrack to their imagined future made more abstract due to its distance from concrete reality. Like in “extra,” a song about fighting outside the club, Aberdeen is focused on manipulating the outside world’s sound so that it sounds both real and unreal, an inescapable hallucination. By bringing in the bass drum at odd intervals and looping together hollow-sounding reeds on “MOLLYMAN,” Aberdeen shows he is more interested in skewing with what you perceive than making you move.
This fixation with the mechanics of listening gives the album a hypnotic power. “BOOK,” flickers with electricity buffeted by static and scattered hi-hats. It sits somewhere on the scale between progressive electronic and noisy improv, and it evokes images of disintegrating cities with desolated architecture. The jittery “cinerama” feels playful and enervating in equal measure; it’s intriguing even if it never becomes immersive. The floating “STARR” sits right in the middle of that scale. At first, it’s easy to get lost in its warm, heady progressions, but the addition of a propulsive beat somehow turns what was once an engaging walk into an aimless hike.
In the liner notes for PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK, Aberdeen says that when he was young, he got good at computer hacking, but what he was really interested was phone hacking or “phreaking.” He says that “a toy whistle that came in a captain crunch box” produced “a certain frequency that [could] be picked up by payphones to make free calls.” The founders of Apple were also avid phreakers, and received cash to create “blue boxes” that would allow the user to make free phone calls. Steve Jobs actually credits blue boxes for Apple’s existence. What was once a harmless bit of computer fun led to the creation of a multinational conglomerate that not only has the power to evade any sort of regulation, but also the ability to surveil many users of its products. Perhaps Aberdeen is right to distrust the digital. Technology manipulates memory the way it manipulates our data; we may think we are getting a deal because we can shitpost or send messages to faraway friends, but the forms we occupy are as limited as the protections we have over the content we send. Is there another way? Through his music, Aberdeen refuses to format himself in a way that can be easy to consume. If you hack his phone line, you’ll only hear static.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Off Center | September 14, 2020 | 7.1 | 94289573-bfe3-446a-bf48-79652c668309 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
Casey Veggies desperately wants to create some kind of narrative on his debut studio LP, Live & Grow. There are some catchy pop moments but the project feels weighted down by sampler-platter production and vague, trite lyrics. | Casey Veggies desperately wants to create some kind of narrative on his debut studio LP, Live & Grow. There are some catchy pop moments but the project feels weighted down by sampler-platter production and vague, trite lyrics. | Casey Veggies: Live & Grow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20893-live-grow/ | Live & Grow | California rapper Casey Veggies desperately wants to create a storyline on his debut studio LP Live & Grow. His father—"Big Joe," a former Jay Z bodyguard—appears on the intro track, "I'm the King", praising his son's mixtape efforts and ability to balance school with his artistic ambitions. He closes out one of his monologues encouragingly stating, "Watch him work," and then Veggies hops in on his verse: "A lot on mind, and I try not to show/ Yeah, that's part of life, you live and you grow/ She suckin' me slow." The lines, among many others on Live & Grow, don't exactly broadcast personal progress, and the presence of Veggies' father only exaggerates the near-comical contrast between the title's stated thesis and the nature of the album.
Still only 22 years old, Veggies' career stretches back to high school when he founded Odd Future with Tyler, the Creator (who appears on and produced "R.I.P."). He's since moved on from OF, released five solo mixtapes, and launched the Peas & Carrots International clothing line. His biography alone demonstrates that Veggies has, in fact, lived and grown. Throughout the album, however, he often shies away from specific details, rendering the title more of a distraction than a mission statement. "New Face$", for example, is about Veggies' journey to fame—a road that inevitably includes many hiccups and fake friends—but he reveals very little about the trip. He offers possible insight ("New foreign chick and she famous/ She cashed me out and we dated"), but quickly abandons the thought in favor of played-out tough talk.
Veggies' vague lyrics are mirrored in the production, which flips between styles like a major label rap album of 10 years ago might. Tyler, DJ Mustard, Iamsu!, Hit-Boy, Top Dawg collaborator THC, and more contribute work, and there are genuine pop moments ("Tied Up", "Wonderful") alongside somber smooth cuts ("Sincerely Casey", "I'm Blessed"). There are even two takes on California's mainstream sounds: hi-hat-slappin' Northern California hyphy ("Backflip") and bassier L.A. post-g-funk ("Actin' Up"). It's a capable roster, but Live & Grow is more of a platter than a platform, and Veggies never gets to settle into a sound he can develop.
He is at his best on the more California cuts. "Backflip", for instance, is an instant earworm. Nonetheless he is still upstaged by YG, who delivers a more vulgar, memorable verse than Veggies by actually addressing the song's female subject. Veggies just speaks for her, and doesn't seem to see her as anything other than an object of his own success. This self-interest, instead of self-examination, comes through further on "Wonderful" and "Tied Up". On those tracks, as on many others, the respective hooks and verses don't relate very much at all. Flat lines like, "I spend every day like it's my birthday," fail to tell us about his lifestyle or to even communicate a mood.
Without any real lyrical flourishes to make his character interesting, the listener is left with Veggies' work at face value. He relies too heavily on end rhymes, doesn't vary his flow often enough, puns too obviously, and regularly leans on cliches. The lack of variation makes more sincere moments, like "Aw Man", difficult to wade through, as well. The song should be the center of his bildungsroman, but when each line is delivered with a near-identical cadence, hashtag lines sound as important as confessionals, minimizing the song's gravity. It's melodic and quite catchy at times, but Live & Grow is less than the sum of those parts. The album's title isn't misleading as much as it is as trite as the music it contains. | 2015-09-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | September 28, 2015 | 5.7 | 942a2171-707e-4e3e-a167-da72b9af7326 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Unlike fellow quirky UK songstresses La Roux and Little Boots, Florence Welch moves away from the Lily/Amy template by building her career from the bottom up. | Unlike fellow quirky UK songstresses La Roux and Little Boots, Florence Welch moves away from the Lily/Amy template by building her career from the bottom up. | Florence and the Machine: Lungs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13372-lungs/ | Lungs | More than any of this year's Radio 1-approved UK pop ingenues-- including the likes of electro-bots Little Boots and La Roux-- Florence Welch marks a clear break from the contentious-yet-fruitful Lily vs. Amy era. And that's not only because this self-professed "real geek" is a redhead who'll take harps over horns. Whereas Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse worked their way through the tabloids while breaking down life's troublesome bits into startlingly candid profundity on record, Welch aims for little but the outer reaches on her debut LP, Lungs. Welch hovers high above her native London's seedy back alleys-- and she's looking skyward.
For this glittery free spirit, matters of the heart aren't simple, everyday occurrences-- they're as grand and mysterious as the big bang itself. "The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out/ You left me in the dark," wails Welch on the audaciously huge "Cosmic Love". Lungs is a cloud-headed introduction to Welch's world, where It Girl hype, coffins, violence, and ambition combust on impact; it's a platinum-shellacked demo reel drunk on its own hi-fi-ness.
Instead of giving this gothically pale 22-year-old with megaphone vox some classy pop-soul to work with à la Duffy or Adele, Lungs takes the smorgasbord approach. Welch bursts mouth-wide over garage rock, epic soul, pint-tipping Britbeat, and-- best of all-- a mystic brand of pop that's part Annie Lennox, Grace Slick, and Joanna Newsom. A lesser talent might fall prey to such veering stylistic change-ups (cough, Kate Nash, cough), but Welch powers through, her ear-snapping alarm call of a voice making Lungs sound like the work of a courageous artist rather than a group of well-paid producers. Of course, well-paid producers are still involved-- specifically, James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco, Arctic Monkeys), Paul Epworth (Bloc Party), and Stephen Mackey (Pulp).
Mackey is seemingly responsible for setting-up Welch's rock'n'roll bona fides, chalking up credits for the faux-shock White Stripes rip off "Kiss With a Fist" and the swinging and sinister "Girl With One Eye", which finds the singer in a gouging mood. Meanwhile, Ford and especially Epworth help their would-be star find a more unique sound that-- more often than not-- is overflowing with twinkling harps and breakup language writ large. Welch catapults off of Epworth's immense tribal drums on two of the record's finest, darkest opuses, "Cosmic Love" and the spooky stunner "Blinding". Ford's frothy, orchestrated style compliments Welch's theatrical bent on the swelling "I'm Not Calling You a Liar" and lilting single "Dog Days Are Over". Thanks to Welch's refreshingly immodest talent and vocal abilities, she not only conquers but thrives on the myriad bells and bobs pitched her way by her equally showy producers.
"Seems that I have been held in some dreaming state/ A tourist in the waking world, never quite awake," begins Welch on "Blinding". The song is about Welch's desire to put her girlish dreams away and face reality, but it conjures a place that's frightfully untouchable all the same. When notions of big-budget music become increasingly rare and name-brand artists are giving fans intimate concerts from their bedrooms via YouTube, Florence Welch's zeal for all things bright and/or shiny comes off as its own act of rebel defiance. Coming to her senses isn't an option. | 2009-08-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-08-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | August 13, 2009 | 7.2 | 942d046a-7a8a-41b5-84e0-f447e2d50fc6 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
On an adventurous new album, the guitarist blends improvised performance with quixotic touches of found sound. | On an adventurous new album, the guitarist blends improvised performance with quixotic touches of found sound. | James Elkington: Me Neither | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-elkington-me-neither/ | Me Neither | James Elkington once confessed, “There’s a master plan somebody understands/And I wish that one was me.” And yet, the British-born, Chicago-based guitarist has always played like someone who knows exactly what he’s doing. His penchant for tasteful flourishes have led to collaborations with artists like Jeff Tweedy, Joan Shelley, and Richard Thompson, while his adventurous ear and graceful melodies have benefitted a diverse cast of experimental combos, including Eleventh Dream Day, Tortoise, and Brokeback. But on his solo albums, including 2017’s Wintres Woma and 2020’s Ever-Roving Eye, Elkington has presented himself as a songwriter rooted in the stately mold of classic British folk rock, filling each with songs you could slot alongside the autumnal gold of Pentangle and Fairport Convention.
After the release of Ever-Roving Eye, Elkington envisioned his next album as a collection of solo guitar instrumentals. But as work stretched out, he hit a wall. Narrowing in on his 50th birthday and unsatisfied with his labored over progress, he began to wonder what other territory he might explore, looking to, as he puts it in the biographical notes, “un-paint myself out of the corner I had painted myself into.” So Elkington abandoned the project and started each day by recording a new improvisational piece, letting go of formal composition in favor of looseness and unfiltered ideas drawn from his subconscious. The result is Me Neither, a record that augments Elkington’s winsome folk with quixotic touches of found sound.
Opener “No-Shows” sets the tone with a looping acoustic guitar melody set against chiming bells and resounding echoes that function like ersatz percussion. From there, Elkington layers on washes of fuzzed guitar and noise from a train roaring down the tracks. It’s a fitting welcome into this altered space, like Bert Jansch sitting in with Broadcast. Further surprises roll out in quick succession: the fluctuating waves of static distortion in “A Message for the Janesville Kings”; nearby chatter, gurgling water, and bird song in the jazzy “Look Spectral!”; something that sounds like whirling bicycle spokes on “Cup Cape.” These extra touches create an air of expansiveness, a sense of the world these songs inhabit. The outside finds its way in.
Elsewhere, Elkington employs the more pronounced songwriting that marks his first two solo albums, albeit sans lyrics. “The 100-Faced Magma” and “New Red Masterpiece” are delicate instrumental ballads, evoking the patience of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, while the title track dips into ambient country expanses, conjuring lonely highways and vast desert expanses, Elkington’s arcing acoustic guitar strums beset by far-off electric guitars that land somewhere between Neil Young and Robert Fripp. Most captivating is a skeletal and spooky reading of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All.” Sweeping aside the operatic grandeur of the original, Elkington communicates the heartbreak of the lyrics via a single austere guitar line, carefully plucked out and punctuated by breathy pauses. Like so much of Me Neither, it’s over before you expect, a brief but charming moment that vanishes just as you begin to recognize it. As a sideman, Elkington’s prowess has come from his ability to slide into a song and fill it out. With Me Neither, he gets a chance to pull compositions apart. From there, he arranges the fragments into a fascinating and gently kaleidoscopic whole. Following the master plan, it turns out, is overrated. | 2023-12-08T08:30:26.219-05:00 | 2023-12-08T08:30:26.219-05:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | December 8, 2023 | 7.5 | 94314c9b-d602-4b69-9179-4c4acd2e8008 | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
The Russian duo’s frenetic approach is more techno egg-and-spoon race than tech-house marathon, packed with improbable sounds, intriguing blind alleys, and eyebrow-raising quirks. | The Russian duo’s frenetic approach is more techno egg-and-spoon race than tech-house marathon, packed with improbable sounds, intriguing blind alleys, and eyebrow-raising quirks. | PTU: Am I Who I Am | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ptu-am-i-who-i-am/ | Am I Who I Am | The music of Russian producers PTU is a ragtag collage, the gleeful antidote to sensibly beige tech-house or the cynical opportunism of corporate EDM. Originally from the southwestern city of Kazan, the duo of Alina Izolenta and Kamil Ea found wider attention thanks to star DJ Nina Kraviz, who included their track “A Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day” on her stellar fabric 91 mix. There, its tightly wound mixture of found sound, thumping drums, and kaleidoscopic IDM suggested a brilliantly overactive musical imagination. PTU take no great innovative leaps on Am I Who I Am, their debut album for Kraviz’s трип (Trip) label—rather, they ride roughshod over the usual boundaries. Their idea-rich sound is packed with details borrowed from four decades of electronic music: a breakbeat here, a rave squelch there, and a healthy sprinkling of oddball found sound and jacking-techno vigor.
PTU’s production largely relies on dancefloor fundamentals like galloping BPMs, distorted four-to-the-floor kick drums, and abrasive synths. But in a genre famed for repetition, their hyperactive tracks refuse to sit still. Ideas that would form the backbone of other producers’ EPs are tried, tested, and tossed aside as PTU scramble for new pastures. Their frenetic approach is more techno egg-and-spoon race than tech-house marathon, a crazed trolley dash to EDM’s efficient weekend shop.
The 12 tracks on Am I Who I Am slip by in 45 giddy minutes, with little opportunity for tail-chasing repetition. “I Heard You Breathe” teases a breakbeat that rings tantalisingly out of reach, like the bell of a sunken ship that can be heard only at low tide. “How Does It Feel” drops a jittery jazz sample that lasts just 20 seconds, but its use is telling; like jazz musicians, PTU are improvisers, and their music crackles with the unstable energy of spontaneity. As a result, they tend to move in zigzags. “Skyscript” lurches from straight-ahead four-four beats into a nightmarish coda where an organ drones in anguished stupefaction. “Over” begins with a bouncing Joey Beltram hoover riff, which is then abandoned in favor of moody bass surges and the tinkle of a triangle, before being overtaken by a strangulated vocal chorus. Not until a minute in does the track find its feet, kicking into propulsive techno.
But PTU don’t just have any old ideas. They have great ones, packing Am I Who I Am with improbable sounds, intriguing blind alleys, and eyebrow-raising quirks. The wandering bass line and “Star Trek” door swoosh on “The Pursuit of a Shadow,” the cutlery rattle and chipmunk vocal on “Former Me,” and the ghostly spectre of polyrhythmic rave on “After Cities” are the work of two people in love with electronic sound. And yet this music is the opposite of a functional DJ tool. There’s nothing practical or workman-like about songs like “Over” and “Skyscript”; they are awkward, spiky, and strange, oddities held together by the kinetic energy of imagination. | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Trip | June 20, 2019 | 8 | 94348f83-dc97-42c2-b216-ce72ffda0757 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The electro-pop duo’s first album in five years muses on bodies, blood, and a girl’s coming of age; it benefits from the group’s newfound musical maturity and more exacting editorial eye. | The electro-pop duo’s first album in five years muses on bodies, blood, and a girl’s coming of age; it benefits from the group’s newfound musical maturity and more exacting editorial eye. | Purity Ring: WOMB | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/purity-ring-womb/ | WOMB | Purity Ring have always been obsessed with bodily viscera, with blood and guts and bone. Vocalist Megan James sings of love as a kind of vivisection, pleading with her partner to cut her open, to make a protective cradle of her skeleton. WOMB does not break this pattern, but it narrows the band’s focus to the eponymous organ. The blood they’ve always sung about is now a more specific kind: On “i like the devil,” it stains bedsheets; on “femia,” the narrator wakes “in a sea of dark liquid.” There is a sexual awakening afoot here, but equally, a reckoning with existence in a brand new sort of body. Over the course of these 10 glittering pieces of synth pop, Purity Ring experiment with a conceptual coming-of-age narrative. In each song we meet a young woman, feel her nascent passion and holy shame, and cast our eyes to the horizon as clouds gather, spitting lightning. We fear for her. We wonder if she’ll quell the storm or find herself swept away in it.
By pure coincidence, I’d recently picked up Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a quarantine project. It can be a jarring read; for every piece of timeless insight, there is some startling mid-century slap in the face, something like, “Some women become homosexual after the trauma of abortion.” But listening to WOMB, I could think of nothing but de Beauvoir’s portrait of a young girl on the cusp of her first period, who feels “danger in her insides” and struggles to imagine herself the equal of the coming crisis. “She is surprised,” writes Beauvoir, “to be both that heroine and that flesh.” WOMB’s protagonists are bleeding, yes, but they are growing powerful, too: wreaking carnage, learning to fly.
Taken together, WOMB’s songs begin to suggest the outline of a singular character: a girl coming to see herself as heroic, capable of rising to the challenges of her new body and her new role in the world, and subsumed by the weight of what that entails. Violence is abundant in these lyrics: cannibalism, death by drowning, blood coursing Shining-like through hallways. Corin Roddick’s production is no longer crystalline and clear, as it was on another eternity, but grittier and stormier, synths surging like the sea. The sleigh bells of “peacefall” become funereal, tolling as James sings of someone who rode a “bicycle into the light.” (She delivers the line so prettily you’d be forgiven for fondly imagining a scene from E.T. before the more tragic, literal interpretation arrives.) A gasp like an iron lung opens “vehemence,” foreboding bass bellows across “i like the devil,” and minor-key arrangements abound. If Purity Ring ever decide to launch a second career scoring horror films, WOMB would make for a compelling resumé.
WOMB is some of Purity Ring’s strongest work, a confident and singular statement from a band often imitated over the past decade. James’ voice often sounds high and fluty, like a girl’s, save for a single verse, on “pink lightning,” where it is manipulated in the opposite direction—belly-deep, guttural, for once the monster instead of the damsel. It is a provocative moment on a record that imagines a young girl in flux, a heroine coming to grips with flesh.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review inaccurately suggested that James’ voice had been digitally manipulated to sound higher. In fact, it was only pitch-shifted to a lower register. | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 4AD | April 6, 2020 | 7.3 | 943c074a-2830-4571-adca-9c16e63c7101 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Assisted by Steve Albini, the Australian-born, Iceland-based electronic musician summons a gargantuan, apocalyptic din—one that is occasionally tripped up by its own bombast. | Assisted by Steve Albini, the Australian-born, Iceland-based electronic musician summons a gargantuan, apocalyptic din—one that is occasionally tripped up by its own bombast. | Ben Frost: Threshold of Faith EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-frost-threshold-of-faith-ep/ | Threshold of Faith | Threshold of Faith, the new EP from the Australian-born, Iceland-based composer Ben Frost, opens with a cheeky bit of studio debris. Before slamming you with exquisitely rendered kick drums and buzzing, synthetic avalanches, we hear something more quotidian: an engineer (presumably Steve Albini, who recorded Threshold), letting Frost know that “we’re rolling.” Like the four clicks from the drummer or a count-in caught on a room mic, this bit of ephemera is the type of thing one encounters on countless rock records, often left in as a point of scrappy pride. One does not expect it from Frost, though, an artist whose reputation rests on his immaculate, austere touch.
It’s an interesting moment—you might not assume this music was even recorded in a studio, much less with microphones. Frost’s textures live on the cutting edge of the digital, often overlapping with the gargantuan palettes so popular in our post-Michael Bay Hollywood. Taken at face value, Threshold sounds like it could exist entirely in the computer, an object expertly constructed in the endless world of software automation. But when you consider his obsession with the physicality of sound, its presence, depth, and force, the pairing with Albini makes sense. Both as an engineer and a musician, Albini is an icon for a type of inscrutable purity, as arresting as it is emotionally cooled. Ben Frost fans here may nod their heads in recognition.
Once the music begins, though, it’s impossible to discern, or even care, how it was made. Frost has a knack for grabbing attention, and you can’t ignore the lurching assault of the opening title track, which heaves, crumbles, and explodes with enough bravado to soundtrack the apocalypse. I couldn’t help but be reminded of [this infamous Godzilla trailer recut with a Wolf Eyes song; Frost would sound great in a monster movie. But as the piece unfolds, new layers emerge. Over six-and-a-half minutes, “Threshold of Faith” descends into its own storm, moving from heroic vistas into a garbled, snow-blinded melee. Distant choral pads, a glistening upper-register sheen, submerged piano, and groaning harmonies all stack up into a geologic crescendo that extends into infinity. “Eurydice’s Heel” continues this mood by trimming some layers and opening up space. The recurring bass dives call back to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack for Sicario, while the cavernous drones on top could have been made in collaboration with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Both that group and that soundtrack share with Frost a tendency for bombast, however: a humorless view of the world that risks veering into deflating self-seriousness. Throughout Threshold, Frost continually brushes against this barrier. Whether scrambled or restrained, there’s a preciousness and an egoism here that’s difficult to shake. As impressive as Frost’s music is, he seems always a bit too eager to impress, a sure turn-off. It’s less a matter of the parts Frost writes, which are often lovely and/or awesomely grand, and more in the way he frames them. The atmosphere that this music breathes feels finessed to the point of airlessness: The dulcimer plucks of “Threshold of Faith (Your Own Blood)” merge into a sustained mass that practically insists on awe, while “All That You Love Will Be Eviscerated - Albini Swing Version” bathes in high-end reverb trails and pregnant pauses which feel strangely unearned (the titles don’t help). We hear exactly who Ben Frost wants us to think he is but get precious little view of the man behind the persona.
This doesn’t mean it’s all for naught—“The Beat Don’t Die in Bingo Town” is a tasty 2:36 of fluttering exhaust, the kind of beauty-in-decay detritus that Arca expertly wove on Mutant. “Mere Anarchy” uses wounded pitch bending and rich, simple chords to close things out on a more open-ended tone. Nonetheless, for all its hubbub, Threshold of Faith feels oddly hollow, a work by hemmed in by its own presumptions of importance. | 2017-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mute | August 4, 2017 | 6.8 | 943eaa48-1f4f-40d9-bbad-7fcc8f78f57e | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
The Oakland rapper’s new EP slows her throwback 1990s jams to a leisurely West Coast pace. | The Oakland rapper’s new EP slows her throwback 1990s jams to a leisurely West Coast pace. | Kamaiyah: Keep It Lit EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamaiyah-keep-it-lit-ep/ | Keep It Lit EP | Almost two decades into their career, an artist might get the itch to reinvent themselves with an alter ego, a genre left turn, or a drastic makeover. Not Kamaiyah. On her second EP this year, the Oakland rapper cruises on the synthy ’90s R&B sound she’s fine-tuned from the tender age of 9. Why mess with a classic recipe? “This some real Maxwell Park, uptown Bay boy Bay girl shit,” she announces in the opener. Kamaiyah has flirted with mainstream status in recent years, ultimately opting for timeless old-school production over the latest stylistic craze. Thematically Keep It Lit is reminiscent of her 2016 debut, the dynamic hometown tribute A Good Night in the Ghetto, if it were edited to fit a Sunday morning radio hour.
As if reclining in a drop-top with velvet seats, Keep It Lit moves at a West Coast pace. Aware of adversaries who “run their mouths like water,” she flicks them away like flies descending on her lobster plate—fighting back a chuckle in her charming Oakland drawl. Beyoncé proclaimed “best revenge is your paper”; Kamaiyah makes a case for blissful leisure as a contender. The laidback tone induces a highway hypnosis effect that threatens to make the EP’s first half sound like a single nine-minute song. Instead of captivating wordplay, she repeats “keep it litty litty” throughout as a sort of failed incantation. Just as the hazy pianos and 808s start to feel lethargic, Mistah F.A.B.’s antique slang and comical intonation jolts you awake: “Gee willikers, jiminy crickets, and them shenanigans.”
Though the EP often feels like producer Blakkat searched up “1990s backyard barbeque type beat,” Kamaiyah’s percussive vocals add texture and bounce. She strikes gold when she melds her Too $hort-like bars with melody-driven R&B croons. A devout fan of the S.O.S. Band, TLC, and the Temptations, her smooth vocals offset lackluster lyrics. In Kamaiyah’s throat, even a simple “mhm” morphs from a filler word to a soulful affirmation. “I’m young, Black, fine, and wealthy,” she attests on “Know the Vibes.” You truly will be tempted to roll your window down and scream it during rush hour. The EP’s catchiest refrain, however, belongs to Mac Dre’s 2002 track “Dollalalala Lotsa Paypa,” which Kamaiyah interpolates on “The Mac.” Slowing the frenetic chorus makes the song sound like a slow + reverbed cover, but her silky voice redeems the track.
“I don’t feel like I learn from the new people. I feel like the old people, if you study them, you’re legendary,” Kamaiyah told Los Angeles’ Power 106 in 2019. This resistance to changing with the times manifests in the stagnancy of this record: Even when the instrumental is original, it feels borrowed. Supremely influenced by the ’90s, even calling 2Pac her father, Kamaiyah is well aware of her debt to the aesthetic that helped her earn prominence in her early 20s. Trapped in its amber, her own ideas are engulfed in homage. | 2022-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Keep It Lit | December 20, 2022 | 6.5 | 944110f7-6f19-45a7-ba62-b71639abdb2a | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
Cardi B’s remarkable debut places her, without a doubt, in the pantheon of great rappers. It is both brazen and vulnerable, filled with wild amounts of personality, style, and craft. | Cardi B’s remarkable debut places her, without a doubt, in the pantheon of great rappers. It is both brazen and vulnerable, filled with wild amounts of personality, style, and craft. | Cardi B: Invasion of Privacy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cardi-b-invasion-of-privacy/ | Invasion of Privacy | Cardi B is the new American Dream. Her rags-to-riches story is a product of living life out in the open, the answer to the question of how to be famous in the modern age. The Bronx-born MC parlayed a stripping residency into a social media empire before landing on reality TV, where she soaked up the spotlight as an aspiring artist making the most of her face time. After taking her official rapper turn with a pair of mixtapes, she broke out with the world-conquering “Bodak Yellow.” It’s an open secret that strip clubs are a cultural hub in rap, and that strippers are often among the best rap A&Rs, and Cardi pairs that same intuition with punchy barbs. And yet there are still those who deny her obvious talent, who regard her success so far as a fluke—led by the close-minded few who still refuse to give a woman her due in rap.
Invasion of Privacy is an emphatic response to those skeptics. The album is showy and upfront, at once brazen and vulnerable. On her assured and outspoken debut, Cardi shuffles from pop-rap to designer trap to sing-song ballads and strutting promenades. She is rap’s answer to Tiffany Haddish: funny, curious, and absorbing. Cardi’s rants can be as biting as they are mesmerizing, as much an invasion of your space as they are an immersion into her world.
Forged in the same fires that wrought Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” intro, the explosive “Get Up 10” sets the tone. The take-no-prisoners screed is an opening salvo of epic proportions, lining up foes to drop them, digging a stiletto heel into the throats of her challengers. Cardi raps with fire and force, a born star who's grown accustomed to being told to dim her light for the sake of others. Each new triumph rejects such a ridiculous premise, and each naysayer has seemingly only granted her more power.
Cardi is a great talker, but her voice itself is its own instrument. It wraps around each word; her accent and inflections forge each syllable into a snap, making every utterance feel novel. She wields her voice like a weapon, and she can make even the mundane seem glamorous with a particularly choice phrasing. This specific economy of language is the core of her appeal, and every verse is imbued with its impact. Some punchlines are laugh-out-loud funny, others are immensely clever. A few are both. “Write a verse while I twerk, I wear Off-White at church/Prolly make the preacher sweat/Read the Bible, Jesus wept,” she raps on “She Bad.” Cardi finds the soft center of a complex idea and then presents it in the most direct way possible.
Her writing is often convincingly diametrical: She is one thing and her beau/hater/adversary is another, but it’s the relationship between those two things that conjures the imagery: “This that collard greens, cornbread, neck bone, back fat/Get it from my mama, and you don’t know where your daddy at.” Her practiced abrasiveness is a defense mechanism constructed over time, so when she raps things like, “’Fore I fixed my teeth, man, those comments used to kill me/But never did I change, never been ashamed,” she’s showing you the inside of her armor.
In addition to honing her natural tendency toward pithiness, Cardi is becoming a complete MC. She plays clever word association games like mixtape Lil Wayne (“I came here to ball, is you nuts?”) and finds her place among New York’s more dynamic and prolific punchers like Cam’ron and Jadakiss. Cardi is quickly improving as a technician, closing the gaps in her writing and tightening up her flows. Even more impressive than her sharpened rap skills, though, is her rapidly expanding range.
On Invasion of Privacy, Cardi emerges as a first-rate song-maker, crafting mousy indictments and cautionary tales as easily as club gyrators and flex anthems. She effortlessly covers quite a bit of ground, dressing down no-good boyfriends, considering her come-up from pissy elevators to walking red carpets in tailored gowns, or rallying twerkers everywhere to spontaneously pussy pop for guap. She raps with the transparency of someone who has shared the ugliest aspects of her life with strangers online, but her songs now have the curatorial instincts of a specialized Instagram feed. The Chance the Rapper-assisted “Best Life” rehashes early career controversies and remixes an iconic Tupac poem into an origin story. “Be Careful” fires warning shots for a cheating boyfriend. Amid the larger-than-life showboating on “Money Bag”—where she, among many other things, parks a Bentley truck in a Versace driveway—Cardi lets slip the lingering effects of poverty: “I been broke my whole life, I have no clue what to do with these racks.” Everyone dreams of a life on top, but there’s no guidebook for how to handle it when you get there.
If there was ever any pressure to live up to “Bodak,” though, Cardi never shows it. Instead, she takes every opportunity to force-feed her doubters crow. “I like proving niggas wrong, I do what they say I can’t,” she raps gleefully on “I Like It,” as she flips boogaloo into Latin trap. Cardi’s raps have always exuded confidence and charm, but with Invasion of Privacy she seizes her seat on the rap throne through punishing, unrelenting taunts. She’s fully self-aware and seemingly unstoppable. “The coupe is roofless, but I get top in it/I’m provocative, it’s my prerogative/80K just to know what time is it/Cardi rockin’ it, go buy stock in it,” she proposes on “I Do,” a freeing Murda Beatz-produced closer with SZA that champions independence. She exceeds her hype and does so casually.
The production on the album is sumptuous and varying. A record daring enough to produce the buzzing “Bartier Cardi,” the R&B-infused “Ring,” and the quiet prowler “Thru Your Phone,” Invasion of Privacy never shrinks away from a potential risk, delivering hugely satisfying payoffs. With Latin trap sensation Bad Bunny and reggaeton star J Balvin in tow on “I Like It,” Cardi reworks Pete Rodriguez’s classic into a cross-cultural block party, bilingual and welcoming. Similarly, the Project Pat-sampling “Bickenhead” reimagines the original as a get-money anthem, leaning into the same inflections and cadences, but with a female-focused Cardi spin.
“I started winning when the whole world was doubting on me! Think imma lose with my little baby counting on me?” she tweeted after she revealed she was pregnant on last week’s “Saturday Night Live.” It’s a bar that could’ve easily found a home on this album. Invasion of Privacy embodies that tenacity and that relentlessness; plainspoken and raw, with just enough polish. Such a fighter’s spirit is endearing, and, to a certain extent, galvanizing. She took an unconventional path to get here, and yet everything seems to be going according to plan. Cardi never had any interest in converting her haters to fans; she’d rather just show them all up, and her debut is her greatest and grandest kiss-off yet. Bet against her at your own peril. | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | April 10, 2018 | 8.7 | 9442106f-33bf-4306-b3e5-8e181b507f8d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
After snagging everyone’s ear on Kendrick’s “LOVE.,” the 22-year-old TDE signee Zacari struggles to hold our attention. | After snagging everyone’s ear on Kendrick’s “LOVE.,” the 22-year-old TDE signee Zacari struggles to hold our attention. | Zacari: Run Wild Run Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zacari-run-wild-run-free/ | Run Wild Run Free | Before 22-year-old singer/songwriter/saxophonist Zacari Pacaldo was a Kendrick Lamar collaborator and Top Dawg Entertainment signee, he was a fishing guide. Right after graduating high school, the California native started working summers at Alaska’s Katmai National Park so he could afford to attend Musicians Institute’s certificate program in Los Angeles, eventually becoming a fly-fishing, bear-tracking outdoorsman. But back in L.A., Zacari’s music career was popping off, and by 2016, he was already contributing vocals on tracks for TDE heavies like Isaiah Rashad, Kendrick Lamar, and Ab-Soul. The following year, when Zacari ended up on Kendrick’s heartfelt DAMN. track, “LOVE.,” his tender falsetto brightening up the otherwise grim album, people were clamoring to find out more about the relatively unknown artist.
Now two years after his DAMN. breakout, Zacari has finally unveiled his debut Run Wild Run Free EP, a project he says is indebted to his time spent in nature. “A lot of the sounds and tones are drawn from my experiences in Alaska,” he explained. “I want the project to feel like a breath of fresh air.” It’s a concept that’s already been broached in the pop sphere by Pharrell protégée Maggie Rogers, whose viral hit “Alaska” is buoyed by lilting drums and carefully placed samples collected during her own cathartic visit to the state. Throughout Run Wild Run Free, Zacari tries to establish the same feeling of clarity and weightlessness. But ultimately, Zacari’s EP is too burdened with clumsy songwriting and bad advice.
Zacari’s songs are riddled with the kind of empty platitudes that would be posted up on a “inspirational” Pinterest board. On “Lone Wolf,” Zacari repeats the provocative line, “If I didn’t know myself, I’d be alone,” over and over again, but fails to explore the idea in depth and instead boasts about owning Gucci loafers. On the title track, his voice wavers like he’s trying to emulate the vulnerability of “Rich & Sad” king Post Malone: “Yeah, I'm an animal, yeah, I'm radical/Yeah, sign of the horns up, I'm radical.” Zacari just ends up sounding like a floundering rapper who can’t think of a different word to rhyme with in a freestyle.
“Young and Invincible,” featuring Lil Yachty, is equally cringe-worthy. Zacari offers a Nickelodeon-dad vision of rebellious young people: “Riding around the town, bumping our music loud/Emptying bank accounts.” As if the song couldn’t get more anti-establishmentarian-lite, a voice that sounds like it’s yelling over the intercom announces, “Will Lil Yachty please come to the principal’s office.” This gag might have worked when Yachty was still the king of teens (he turned 21 in August), and if he sounded like he had an ounce of commitment to his goofball class clown character. “Don’t listen to the rules,” he sings in a dour, Eeyore-ish voice. And then when he finally gets to the mic-drop moment, he sheepishly offers “Fuck Trump, get rich,” his words trailing off like he couldn’t wait two more seconds to run out of the recording booth.
Zacari’s songwriting has occasional bright moments. He’s most successful when he intentionally employs repetition. On “Don’t Trip,” the hook quite simply goes: “Whatchu trippin’ on, trippin’ on, trippin’ on me for?” But the chugging hook mimics the rhythm of cyclical arguments he describes, while the hazy groove soothes the friction generated by his lyrics. It’s a respite.
The closest that Zacari gets to recreating the magic of Kendrick’s “LOVE.” is on “Ten Out of Ten.” His agile, sentimental falsetto is heartfelt, the tender background vocals pooling up against rugged drums and intermittent found samples. But Zacari kills the romance with clunky lines like, “Top of the morning/She gives me top in the morning,” immediately followed by a incongruously gorgeous vocal run. It’s a common failing of “sad” pop stars like Khalid and Billie Eilish, prioritizing a captivating mood ahead of the lyrics. On “LOVE.,” Zacari proved that he could establish a vibe. With his debut EP, he’s yet to show that he’s capable of much more. | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment | March 22, 2019 | 6 | 94494740-24a0-470d-9c77-9b901bf2d4d8 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
On his 12th studio album, Steve Earle bids a final farewell to Guitar Town-- his nickname for Nashville and the title of his infamous 1986 debut-- and celebrates his move to the decidedly un-country town of New York City. | On his 12th studio album, Steve Earle bids a final farewell to Guitar Town-- his nickname for Nashville and the title of his infamous 1986 debut-- and celebrates his move to the decidedly un-country town of New York City. | Steve Earle: Washington Square Serenade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10710-washington-square-serenade/ | Washington Square Serenade | On his 12th studio album, Steve Earle bids a final farewell to Guitar Town-- his nickname for Nashville and the title of his infamous 1986 debut. Very literally bids farewell: On the opening track, "Tennessee Blues", Earle sings, "Won't be back no more, boss, you won't see me around. Goodbye, Guitar Town." The song chronicles his move from Nashville, where he launched, wrecked, and rebuilt his career, to the decidedly un-country town of New York City, a change that surely would wreck most careers in a business that equates the rural with roots and the urban with uppitiness. But Earle long ago shed any concern for Guitar Town's unwritten rules and continues to define himself as everything the establishment is not: He's a singer and a songwriter, an avowed liberal who plays prison shows and campaigned heartily against Bush, and-- perhaps most impressively-- a rehabbed artist who wrote himself a second career chapter that was even stronger than the first.
So his move to Clinton Country doesn't seem too far-fetched. Hell, it almost seems inevitable. Besides, he really, really likes New York. Washington Square Serenade, in addition to taking its title from a Greenwich Village park, contains not one but two paeans to the Big Apple and its people: "Down Here Below", about the divide between the haves in their skyscrapers and the have-nots on the subway, and "City of Immigrants", which features local Brazilian group Forro in the Dark. On every song the city's influence can be heard, whether in a stanza about Joe Mitchell or in the clangorous percussion that mimics the sound of a busy street.
But does New York City love Steve Earle back? His municipal muse seems to have led him into downtown traffic: Despite his transparent inspiration, Washington Square Serenade turns out to be his weakest collection of the 00s, which is saying a lot considering his last two lackluster albums. Those two odes to the local underclass are two of the worst offenders. On "Down Here Below" Earle speaks the verses like he's at an East Village open-mic night, and the effect is so grating it makes the sung chorus seem like an oasis, even if it does sound like it's been sutured in from another song. Earle takes a different tack on "City of Immigrants", inviting Forro in the Dark to provide backing vocals over vaguely ethnic city rhythms. With ludicrous lyrics like "City of bone/ City of skin/ City of pain/ City of immigrants", the song presents a redundantly romanticized view of the city and its multicultural communities. When Forro in the Dark start singing "We are all immigrants" over Earle's vocal countermelody, the song transcends the self-righteous and achieves the ridiculous.
The rest of Washington Square Serenade ranges from good ("Days Aren't Long Enough", a duet with wife Allison Moorer) to merely serviceable ("Red Is the Color"). Disappointingly, the closing cover of Tom Waits's "Way Down in the Hole" (better known as the theme to The Wire, which features Earle in a small recurring role) sounds slick rather than haunted, especially compared to versions by the Blind Boys of Alabama (Season 1), Waits himself (Season 2), and the Neville Brothers (Season 3). Listen for Earle's version on Season 5.
Earle gives a decent performance on "Way Down in the Hole", but what makes his version nearly unlistenable-- and what ultimately sinks this album-- is the production by John King. The former Dust Brother fits most of these songs with a matte surface and programmed beats that sound instantly dated (in fact, they keep reminding me of Billy Bob Thornton's atrocious cover of "Ring of Fire", a comparison no artist should ever court). On softer songs like "Come Home to Me", these beats distract from Earle's simple sentiments, and on faster songs like "Down Here Below", the banjo-and-beats breakdowns can be laughable. Worse, they clash against Earle's rough-edged voice and the mostly acoustic instruments and live drums on "Jericho Road" and "Steve's Hammer (For Pete)", two of the album's best tracks. Ultimately, these beats are a very obvious means of evoking an urban hubbub, as stale as calling New York "the city that never sleeps"-- which he actually does. It's just another wrong turn that gets Earle even more lost in the big city. | 2007-10-12T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2007-10-12T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | October 12, 2007 | 5 | 94497a94-55a0-4a17-b4eb-2c93182dce52 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On their first official duo project, longtime collaborators Kedr Livanskiy and Flaty trade their customary dance influences for atmospheric dream pop steeped in folk, goth, and trip-hop. | On their first official duo project, longtime collaborators Kedr Livanskiy and Flaty trade their customary dance influences for atmospheric dream pop steeped in folk, goth, and trip-hop. | Kosaya Gora / Kedr Livanskiy / Flaty: Kosogor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kosaya-gora-kosogor/ | Kosogor | Across nearly a decade under the alias Kedr Livanskiy, Moscow’s Yana Kedrina developed a dark, ethereal style of techno and electro pop on records like Ariadna and Your Need. With 2021’s minimalist Liminal Soul, her music turned colder, further whetting the hard edges of her outsider house. But Kosaya Gora, Kedrina’s new duo project with longtime collaborator Flaty—an IDM-inspired beatmaker and member of the GOST ZVUK crew who contributed mixing and production to Your Need and Liminal Soul—marks a sharp break from either artist’s previous work. Kosogor delves into haunting guitar-driven dream pop, at once dreamily distant and deeply intimate. Kedrina transitions seamlessly from dance music, setting her voice against a gloomy, atmospheric backdrop.
Recorded on a mobile setup in remote Russian villages, Kosogor’s moody soundscapes are simple and soaked in reverb, evoking an imagistic, Dean Blunt-like. Elements of trip-hop and goth, and even hints of their techno backgrounds, flesh out a sound steeped in dark folk. Kedrina conjures hazy images of motorcycles and demigods and baptism in the forest; she croons across the ambient pop of “Empty Realm” in an invented elvish dialect, and on “Dorogi Freestyle,” she sings from the perspective of a god-like figure “come down to earth from high.” Her rural fantasies play out like modern-day myths whose subjects feel just out of focus.
The album shines when it focuses on Kedrina’s voice, no longer an accessory to a beat but an essential part of the storytelling itself. “V Pole Na Vole” is Kosogor’s highlight; Kedrina’s voice is powerful yet at times vulnerably imperfect, ringing wistfully over a beat that calls back to her electronic roots. The music exists in a liminal space, playing with immateriality in both form and lyrics. “We forgot those words/That we wrote on the sand/They were carried away by a wave a long time ago,” Kedrina sings on “Muzika Yoln.” Some songs, like “Empty Realm” feel deliberately thin and incomplete; the simple “Voy Veter” sounds like something heard in a dream and forgotten upon waking. This haunting atmosphere generally works in Kosogor’s favor, but not always—the grinding trip-hop of “Motorcyclists Die” feels more directionless than psychedelic, and lo-fi closer “Milly” is pretty, but peters out without a sense of conclusion.
Kosaya Gora doesn’t mark a complete break with Kedrina’s previous work; it maintains the same dreamy repetition, hypnagogic pop influences, and reverent loneliness, but Kosogor’s sparseness feels like she’s zeroing in on something more personal, however blurrily. | 2023-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | 2MR | March 20, 2023 | 6.7 | 9450d9fe-9249-4cef-9637-f5547bfc8d28 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The synth-pop soloist recaptures the moody appeal of his earliest releases on this low-stakes collection of covers. | The synth-pop soloist recaptures the moody appeal of his earliest releases on this low-stakes collection of covers. | Black Marble: I Must Be Living Twice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-marble-i-must-be-living-twice-ep/ | I Must Be Living Twice EP | Black Marble has flourished by returning repeatedly to the sacred well of synth-pop. It’s Immaterial, the 2016 second album from Chris Stewart’s duo-turned-solo-project, drank deep from all-timers like New Order and footnotes like Iron Curtain, securing a place in the canon by excelling within established standards: vintage synths, melodic basslines, liberal reverb, melancholic undertones. Last year’s Bigger Than Life, though, did little to advance on that template except by cleaning it up, rendering Stewart’s music sparkly and bright without developing his songwriting accordingly.
Seeming to sense that something went awry, Stewart attempts a reset with I Must Be Living Twice, a new all-covers EP. Some of the covers, which include songs by Wire, Grouper, and Lives of Angels, are Black Marble live staples, and Stewart has said that the EP exists mainly to get his versions onto tape. Despite the low stakes, or perhaps because of them, I Must Be Living Twice sounds like Black Marble rewiring itself back to what worked in the middle of the decade. Its lo-fi approach infuses the covers with the familiar charm of his early albums, making the EP a satisfying release, if a minor one.
Most of the tracks fit neatly within the Black Marble sound. Stewart adds fluttering arpeggiated synths to “Johnny and Mary,” Robert Palmer’s 1980 synth-pop classic, but largely echoes Palmer’s plaintive vocal performance. His approach is less distinct than that of Todd Terje and Bryan Ferry, who put their sublime twist on “Johnny and Mary” six years ago, slowing the tempo to a crawl, with Ferry’s decadent rasp making Palmer sound upbeat by comparison. Still, there’s room for all three versions: Palmer’s original is for the club, Terje and Ferry’s cover is for the bedroom, and Black Marble’s take is for the wistful loner, staring out the window at sheets of rain.
Other choices are more questionable. It’s a fool’s errand to cover “Emma’s House,” The Field Mice’s debut single, an already-perfect twee-pop anthem. Stewart, with a toylike synth patch subbing in for the original’s acoustic guitar, creates an even quainter version of a song that embodies the bookish introspection of the Sarah Records and C86 sound. A softer, twinklier take on “Emma’s House” seems beyond parody; it already requires a knitted sweater and a piping hot cup of Earl Grey for full enjoyment.
The first few years of Black Marble were special thanks to Stewart’s ability to transcend artifice and goth posturing with fantastic hooks and inventive arrangements. Though he’s not working with original compositions here, he does seem to have regained his sense of the sonics that complement his music best. There’s nothing revolutionary or essential about this collection of mostly safe crowd-pleasers. But as Stewart reloads before the next album cycle, those enraptured by Black Marble’s moody soundscapes will enjoy his return to form.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | August 17, 2020 | 6.9 | 94528b24-1bcc-4439-91e9-eff79b24dbdb | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Tough, upfront, and often bruisingly physical, Fog FM is the New York producer’s most substantial piece of work by a considerable margin. | Tough, upfront, and often bruisingly physical, Fog FM is the New York producer’s most substantial piece of work by a considerable margin. | Anthony Naples: Fog FM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anthony-naples-fog-fm/ | Fog FM | American house and techno are in a remarkably good place right now. The underground is thriving, bolstered by a network of labels, club nights, warehouse parties, and off-the-beaten-path festivals, all with a staunchly independent spirit that’s a world away from the high-flying, big-ticket milieu of commercial dance music. It’s an especially welcome development given that house and techno’s well-defined parameters, combined with a retro-fetishizing reverence for the past, have sometimes left the music feeling cautious and conservative. But a new generation of artists is finding ways to tweak familiar templates, carving a zig-zag path between respect for their predecessors and a determination to do things their own way.
Within this cohort, Anthony Naples is becoming something like an elder statesman (in relative terms, anyway). The New York electronic musician broke through in 2012, at just 21 years old, on the strength of “Mad Disrespect,” his debut single—in fact, the very first production he ever completed. The resulting flurry of interest yielded a remix for Four Tet and EPs on European labels like The Trilogy Tapes and Rubadub before culminating in a debut LP, in 2015, for Four Tet’s Text imprint. Over the years, Naples has continued to build out his rough-around-the-edges approach, balancing unvarnished sonics with canny dancefloor instincts. Resident Advisor’s Jordan Rothlein called Naples’ debut “not revolutionary so much as perfectly suited for its context,” which could also describe his approach in general. He’s primarily a craftsman, rather than a shredder of rule books. And on his third album, both his instincts and his technique are in top form.
Naples’ albums have largely skirted club fare: Body Pill balanced its dancefloor cuts with slow-motion studies for scratchy samples and overdriven machines; last year’s Take Me With You, for the psychedelically inclined Good Morning Tapes label, was an expression of honeyed ambient bliss. But Fog FM is techno through and through. Contrary to the album’s name, virtually everything here, save for two beatless palette cleansers, is tough, upfront, and often bruisingly physical. Burly sub-bass tugs at the lower limits of your perception; intricate drum patterns are carved out of compressed white noise. Naples layers competing rhythms in ways that create friction and throw off sparks; the atmosphere is frequently nervous, turbulent, suffused with clattering sounds that are all the more menacing for the fact that you can’t quite make out what they are or where they come from.
Fog FM goes plenty deep, too. That’s immediately apparent on songs like the title track and “Lucy’s,” which avail themselves of the resonant chords of dub techno, one of dance music’s most inviting forms. Intimations of depth also play out in less obvious ways; there is always more here than meets the ear. In “Unhygenix,” a highlight of the album’s back half, a skipping, hissing groove reminiscent of Thomas Melchior’s blissed-out minimal house bounces away against a shimmering backdrop. Even the heaviest tracks have an unusually enveloping quality. “Benefit” is caressed by dissonant squeals that twist like tendrils of guitar feedback, until, two-thirds of the way through its eight-minute run, a cooling synthesizer progression is applied like a balm, taking the edge off.
At more than an hour long, Fog FM is Naples’ most substantial piece of work by a considerable margin, but his insistence on wringing his grooves for all they’re worth keeps the album engaging as a front-to-back listen in a way that isn’t true of most techno long-players. In fact, the slipperiness of his arrangements plays out across the album itself: It’s the rare dance full-length that foregrounds its heaviest cuts and then gradually leans back and loosens up.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Incienso | June 24, 2019 | 8 | 9454e84c-2939-40e2-af40-294f42140be6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Promising Brit-folk singer/songwriter finally has her Mercury Prize-nominated Alas, I Cannot Swim-- recorded when she was just 17-- issued in the U.S. | Promising Brit-folk singer/songwriter finally has her Mercury Prize-nominated Alas, I Cannot Swim-- recorded when she was just 17-- issued in the U.S. | Laura Marling: Alas, I Cannot Swim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12134-alas-i-cannot-swim/ | Alas, I Cannot Swim | The fact that bracing Brit-folk singer/songwriter Laura Marling was just 17 when she recorded the Mercury Prize-nominated Alas, I Cannot Swim has become every much the bit of biographical shorthand as mentioning Lily Allen's famous dad or Robyn's late-90s U.S. stardom. It may seem at first unfair given how many pubescent rockers come down the pike, but artists who mine a folkier, more personal vein, like Marling or Conor Oberst or Patrick Wolf, do tend to open themselves up to greater scrutiny-- yet are also more readily rewarded with touts of prodigal genius. Such clearly heard, lyric-driven music almost can't help but assume an aim towards profundity regardless of its actual goals. When such striving stumbles, we call it "precociousness" and assume the neophyte will continue to hone his or her introspective powers with each passing year. But is this always a good thing, to encourage a young artist of deep feeling to continue burrowing more deeply?
The thing I worry about with Marling is that she's already being heralded for evincing wisdom beyond her years-- what happens when the years catch up? Will she feel compelled to keep turning more and more starkly inward, and sacrifice her charm in the process? Lyrically, Alas is a sober document, but its best songs don't demand an abundance of explication or poetics to work their sad-eyed magic. Liking Marling best when she keeps things at the level of teenage romance may sound reductive, but young love is one of pop's bedrocks, and clearly the young songstress can tap into reservoirs of immediacy that a team of balding middle-aged guys crafting expert teen-pop chart-toppers can't as easily manage.
As a vocalist Marling may evoke the grown-up weariness of Beth Orton, but the superior first half of Alas is consumed with depictions of decidedly youthful ardor, whether it's the young man in "Ghosts" who "went crazy at 19" from his inability to escape the memory of past loves, or the general teenage fatalism conveyed in "Old Stone" and its refrain, "10,000 years and you're still on your own." Marling flashes wit in "Failure" in her realization that a once-worshipped rock singer's "songs were pathetic," and the accompanying music of the album's first act admirably matches her heart's cynical but still intense effusions, whether it be the tense gallop of "Ghosts", the swelling melancholy strings of "Tap at My Window" or the genuine electric momentum of "You're No God".
Almost perceptibly "maturing" before our ears, however, Marling spends much of the record's second half mired in vague symbolism and unfortunate logorrhea, with her music frequently seeming to grind to a halt from the strain. That's not to say Marling lacks the facility to put across complex thoughts and feelings, only that she needn't confuse wordiness with depth, which is just the sort of thinking that leads to groaners like "the gods that he believes never fail to amaze me" or "the sky and I, we've had our fights, and I'm coming 'round to rain," which damn near ruins the otherwise lovely and gripping "The Captain and the Hourglass".
It was a mistake for Marling not to find a place on Alas for "New Romantic", a song from an earlier EP that ended up lending two thoroughly inferior tracks to her debut long-player. Instead of the gothic stiltedness of "Night Terror" (which has nothing to do with cobras, sorry), "New Romantic" finds Marling bemoaning her "lonesome gait," but also worrying about things like being thin and turning into her mother in far more pragmatic terms while reminding us (and herself) that "I'm still pretty young." Hopefully, 90s baby Marling will remember there's nothing wrong with this assertion for at least a good little while. | 2008-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Virgin | August 28, 2008 | 6.8 | 945ac1fc-c8a5-4c53-9683-ac99b93cd8f9 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
On the group’s fourth album, carefully controlled minimalism gives way to a playful expressionistic streak, suggesting a utopian balance between social harmony and personal freedom. | On the group’s fourth album, carefully controlled minimalism gives way to a playful expressionistic streak, suggesting a utopian balance between social harmony and personal freedom. | Horse Lords: Comradely Objects | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horse-lords-comradely-objects/ | Comradely Objects | It makes a certain sense that three of Horse Lords’ four members would decamp from Baltimore to Germany. Their relentlessly repetitive instrumentals owe an obvious debt to the West German art-rock bands of the 1970s, especially Neu! Beyond that surface-level similarity, they have a predilection for the formalized systems and brute functionality that govern all sorts of 20th century-German art: from the serialism of composers like Anton Webern, who ordered his seemingly chaotic miniatures according to extraordinarily precise rules, to the minimalism of designers like Walter Gropius, who taught a generation of followers that form should always follow function. Horse Lords, whose albums are filled with joyous and hypnotic grooves, aren’t nearly as difficult as Webern, or quite as spartan as Gropius. But like those two, they make art in which things happen for a reason. When they shift from one polyrhythm to another, it’s clear that some logic is at work, even if you can’t always apprehend its mechanics.
Yet they have a playful expressionistic streak as well, which has never been more pronounced than on Comradely Objects, their fourth album, recorded just before the transcontinental move. Take “May Brigade,” which begins in typical Horse Lords fashion. The bass, drums, guitar, and saxophone all sound like they could be playing in different meters, each offering a different short and simple ostinato. Somehow, the disarray coheres. You can marvel at the ingenious ways in which the lines bolster and accent each other, fitting like boards in an elaborate parquet floor. Or you can simply coast along on the rhythm they create together. This is what Horse Lords’ music does; the system is working as it should.
Then comes the rupture. Andrew Bernstein’s sax gets caught in a stuttering fit, breaking away from the rigid rhythmic grid. Soon he is full-on wailing, in free-jazz mode, conveying feral individual abandon instead of precise communitarian discipline. Owen Gardner follows suit, his guitar going from choked post-punk staccato to full-throated Pete Cosey psychedelia. Through these outbursts, the rhythm section keeps its cool, dutifully engineering modifications to the same restrained groove that opened the piece. On The Common Task, their previous album, Horse Lords began more overtly hinting at these tensions: between chaos and control, the expression of the individual and the community of the ensemble. They come to an apex on Comradely Objects. The effect is like a paint splatter across a sheet of graph paper.
The presence of a bona fide instrumental solo is an admittedly minor variation of the Horse Lords approach, but their music is all about minor variation, from measure to measure and album to album. Listeners who have struggled to appreciate previous releases will hear more of the same in Comradely Objects. Those who are attuned, who find that the band’s smallest pivots can induce a feeling approaching euphoria, will encounter the album as a carnival of delights. With guitar bouncing antically from one stereo channel to the other and an acid-house synth bassline that threatens to swallow the other instrumental tracks whole, “Mess Mend” would murder the right dancefloor, perhaps the first track of its kind for a band more likely to induce thinking about moving your body than actually doing it. “Zero Degree Machine” likewise indulges heartily in visceral pleasure, culminating with a guitar riff that’s like Mdou Moctar and Thin Lizzy meeting on the surface of a scratched and skipping CD.
Like the original krautrock bands, who often positioned their music as a liberation from the previous generation’s fascism, or a model for a utopian future, Horse Lords present theirs in expressly political terms. For a sympathetic listener, it’s possible to hear Comradely Objects as a catalog of ideal societies in miniature, with each voice working to support the others without losing the freedom of its own idiosyncrasy. Freedom only strengthens solidarity, and vice versa; neither ideal can exist without the other. Even “Plain Hunt on Four,” the Comradely Objects track that swings furthest toward rigorous collectivism, maintains this delicate harmony. Each instrument toils at two or three notes, offering fragments that would have little meaning on their own. Together, they form a tapestry of tiny changes. Appreciating it requires focused work from you as a listener, too: This is not a groove you can coast on. Zoom in and it flickers with activity; zoom out and it is austere to the point of bareness. For eight minutes, save for the nearly imperceptible shifts in each voice’s rhythmic relationship to the others, almost nothing happens.
Almost nothing. Every so often, a bit of white noise rises softly through “Plain Hunt on Four,” sounding like wind on leaves. This gesture has no easily articulable relationship to the rest of the music, otherwise so meticulously arranged. But it is beautiful in its way, and even more so for being essentially gratuitous: an offer of generosity and respite where neither was strictly required. Why is it happening? Surely those are reasons enough. | 2022-11-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | November 11, 2022 | 7.8 | 945c24cf-f6d1-480e-a3b5-7f85c714e1b8 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Glasgow sextet brings a healthy dose of dub to its spiky punk-acid-disco fusion, to party-starting (and occasionally political) effect. | The Glasgow sextet brings a healthy dose of dub to its spiky punk-acid-disco fusion, to party-starting (and occasionally political) effect. | Golden Teacher: No Luscious Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/golden-teacher-no-luscious-life/ | No Luscious Life | Since 2013, Glasgow’s Golden Teacher have released a string of singles and EPs courtesy of the city’s unofficial patriarchs of underground music, Optimo. The sextet fits squarely into the aesthetics of label head JD Twitch, which means basically anything that makes the body whip: disco, industrial, EBM, Afrobeat, post-punk, and dancehall, with a touch of Arthur Russell and Cabaret Voltaire for good measure. It made perfect sense when Twitch matched them with dub-punk legend Dennis Bovell for the unhinged 2015 12” Golden Teacher Meets Dennis Bovell at the Green Door. Bovell’s credits run from the Slits and the Raincoats to Linton Kwesi Johnson, and he was adept at twisting the band’s spiky punk-acid-disco inside out, with results that evoked the lysergic connotations of the band’s name.
But as the group’s debut album proves, they can warp, distend, and freak every single component of their sound all by themselves. The seven extended tracks here are as disorienting and as exhausting as a half-marathon through a funhouse of mirrors. Named for a popular strip of clubs and restaurants in their hometown, “Sauchiehall Withdrawal” touches so many bases that it might just approximate what it’s like to walk down the street on a Saturday night with a dozen clubs all blaring different types of music: cosmic disco, acid, punk, and dub, all grafted to a tireless Fela beat. But the political lingers just beneath the surface of this dance party, in lines like singer Cassie Ojay’s question, “I’m always working so hard, and for what?” She’s not always so pointed; in the title track, she manifests and dissolves back into the extraterrestrial dub, her voice rendered just another sound to stretch and manipulate, along with horns, chimes, and hand drums. Even when Ojay’s delivery doesn’t quite make sense, as on the queasily downtempo “The Kazimier,” she conveys a heavy atmosphere.
Ojay shares vocal duties with Charles Lavenac, and while her tracks are the most enchanting, Lavenac’s flat, half-spat, half-whispered delivery has its own appeal; he often sounds like !!!’s Nic Offer buzzed on Buckfast. On “Spiritron,” he mewls an interstellar love story in earthy tones, singing for spare change and praising his beloved’s ripped jeans, all against a shimmering curtain of blips, acid squelches, disembodied coos, and restless punk energy.
As distinctive as Golden Teacher’s dual vocalists can be, too often the group lets the grooves do all the talking for them. “Diop” offers the freshest wrinkle to the post-punk template, paying tribute to the bewildering mbalax of the Senegalese griot Aby Ngana Diop. These Scots may not have the chops to turn out the kinds of rapid-fire polyrhythms that Diop’s band can hammer out, but they manage a dizzying three minutes by tweaking their electronics. They contort almost every element of “What Fresh Hell Is This?,” but the effect feels a bit more familiar, not too far from the kind of dub alchemy that Holger Czukay achieved as a producer in the late ’70s with tracks like Can’s “A Spectacle” and “How Much Are They?” (from his trio with Jah Wobble and Jaki Liebezeit). Head-spinning as such songs can be, they also reveal the band’s limits. As much as Golden Teacher absorb the adventurous dub sounds of the past, their exuberance can’t quite make up for the fact that sometimes they still sound like students. | 2017-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Golden Teacher | November 14, 2017 | 6.9 | 947d5aeb-072e-4c11-a1bd-5d40ba54fad1 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Over the years, as I've become more and more adept at picking out which CDs from my collection to ... | Over the years, as I've become more and more adept at picking out which CDs from my collection to ... | Smog: Sewn to the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7280-sewn-to-the-sky/ | Sewn to the Sky | Over the years, as I've become more and more adept at picking out which CDs from my collection to inflict on my friends, they've become more and more adept at finding swift, comical ways to write them off as crap. Most of them revolve around the central phrase, "You spent money on this?" But a few specific releases have given birth to fun, pointed catchphrases. Gamelan music has been christened "Thai pot-banging music," and any mention of Will Oldham prompts my friends to deadpan something about bleeding mules.
My friends react similarly to the works of Smog, donning a laidback expression and muttering about death and sex in a baritone. But I've only ventured to expose them to his more recent, cleanly produced records. I do this because I realize that the early efforts of Smog will earn the harshest indictment my friends can cast upon an album: a resounding "Fozz!"
"Fozz," a dramatized version of "fuzz" (best said in a heavy Eastern European accent), is serious business. So far, only a few select recordings have elicited the angry retort. The first, and the one responsible for originating the term, was the lo-fi classic Bee Thousand. Since then, the term has been applied mainly to such diverse albums as Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, Boredoms' Super Are, and any record with Steve Albini on guitar.
Whenever I play these guys a "fozzy" record, I'm confronted with the question of how I can like something so badly recorded. It seems obvious to me: it's the songs! Of course, different production techniques are highly effective in subtly altering perceptions. Crystal-clear, wide-open production can leave you feeling larger than your body; lo-fi fozz, when used properly, can make you shrink into your own mind, and leave you feeling trapped and claustrophobic.
Such is the case with Sewn to the Sky, Bill Callahan's 1990 debut full-length, freshly reissued by Drag City. The album presents Callahan as equal parts singer/songwriter and grating noise generator. Using little more than a guitar, a "dumpster portastudio," and his own shaky voice, Callahan constructs what could best be described as a "wall of fozz," a dense amalgamation of brutally strummed acoustic guitar, various types of analog hiss, and ambiguous junkyard percussion.
Sewn to the Sky captures Callahan at a pivotal moment in his career, experimenting with the textural explorations that define his early instrumental work, and the compelling songwriting that would go on to become the focus of his recording career. The record's 20 tracks run the gamut from pure guitar noise experimentation on tracks like "Souped Up II", to fairly structured songs like "The Weightlifter". But even the most structured tracks here are decidedly scrappy-- guitars are slightly out of tune, blasts of hiss come from nowhere, and Callahan's voice wavers in and out of key.
Though none of Sewn to the Sky is as refined as any of Callahan's later recordings, there are hints at the kind of oddly humorous, well-constructed songs that have now become the hallmark of Callahan's work. On "I Want to Tell You About a Man", Callahan sings, "I want to tell you about a man/ You won't see him on the MTV.../ His name is Jesus Christ/ Don't make me say it twice."
Sewn to the Sky is by no means an easy listen; there's very little that warrants the term "melody." At times, the album is just plain jarring. But while not always pleasant, its strength lies in the fact that it is deeply mood-altering. Sewn to the Sky doesn't end with your speakers-- the dirt, the claustrophobia, the awkwardness, and the unsettling terror of the record seem to seep out into your surroundings, leaving you shaken, disturbed, and insecure.
The fact that Bill Callahan managed to construct such a deeply affecting record out of chaos and noise is impressive enough, but the fact that he did so one year before Slanted and Enchanted, and three years prior to Bee Thousand, is nothing short of prescient. By reissuing Sewn to the Sky, an album that can no doubt be considered a lo-fi landmark, Drag City has proven that Bill Callahan is not only one of America's most talented songwriters; he is also the godfather of fozz. | 2001-03-31T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-03-31T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | March 31, 2001 | 8 | 948261e9-da3d-4d30-918a-7acaa492fe31 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Active Child's Mercy feels like the soundtrack to a beach that is never too far away, so the taste of salt is still on your tongue. It is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica. | Active Child's Mercy feels like the soundtrack to a beach that is never too far away, so the taste of salt is still on your tongue. It is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica. | Active Child: Mercy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20710-mercy/ | Mercy | There's an unmistakeable vibe on Active Child's Mercy -- insouciant and imperious, with Pat Grossi singing in a rich Michael McDonald-esque upper register over shimmering plastic guitars. The group began as a solemn project, a choirboy playing harp and singing in a feather-delicate voice over clicks, but as the project has drifted, Grossi has explored more escapist sounds. Mercy, surprisingly, feels like the soundtrack to a beach that is never too far away, so the taste of salt is still on your tongue. It sounds like...yacht rock.
"Yacht rock" probably isn't a tag any musician seeks out, since it carries more weight as parody or flat-out insult than genre descriptor. But there's something loose and happy to the energy, particularly on the album's first half: "1999" is built around mid-temp pianos and the soft clicking of unobtrusive percussion. "These Arms" boasts a slinking, slow-dancing drum line, as does "Never Far Away", where it pulses behind rounded, coke-straw guitars. The fried electronics of "Mercy" add a jolt to the slightly sleepy, all-around lushness. All of these sounds are secondary to Grossi's voice, which does not sacrifice body for altitude; operating in and around the falsetto, Grossi less resembles the fragility of How To Dress Well than the aforementioned McDonald. He has a strange way of condensing out of his chest voice into his head voice, like a rising updraft, and the split between the two is astonishing.
"Midnight Swim" marks the beginning of Mercy*'*s more active second suite; weird and crystalline, the song conjures an alien beauty—like jellyfish in underwater caverns—and rides a thin line of eeriness and pulchritude. From here Mercy takes a decidedly more dance-y turn, maintaining the relaxed vibe while amping up the tempo. "Temptation" is sexy, carried on the strains of organs in lieu of harps, one hagiographic instrument swapped for another. It's a stronger sound, yet still casual; like the album itself, it seems just shallow enough to wade into and just deep enough to linger awhile. Mercy is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica. | 2015-07-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Vagrant | July 6, 2015 | 6.4 | 948571ce-43b1-4a43-bb56-8f9df7055a8b | B. David Zarley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/b.-david zarley/ | null |
Katy Perry’s bubbly, cliché-ridden pop feels especially unsuited for life in a pandemic. But despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing chart-topping formulas. | Katy Perry’s bubbly, cliché-ridden pop feels especially unsuited for life in a pandemic. But despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing chart-topping formulas. | Katy Perry: Smile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katy-perry-smile/ | Smile | Between rows of Spandex at Forever 21, in the back of a cab coming home from the bar, after losing your headphones at the gym—in a pandemic, all the ideal templates for listening to Katy Perry have disappeared. No more can the pop star’s songs seep into the background of a normal social life, clunking around in your head before you even know their titles; you have to actively opt into her new album and launch yourself willingly into its suffocating glitz. Smile is meant to be a “picture of RESILIENCE & GRATITUDE,” Perry writes in the liner notes. Those capital letters—the sense that someone is shouting at you—come through in the music. “Yeah, I’m thankful/Scratch that, baby, I’m graaateful,” she croons in the title song. “I am resilient!” she belts on another, six times in two minutes. “It’s not the end of the world!” she promises over a flailing disco beat, before launching into a pseudo-rap about a fortune teller and “flipping off the flop,” whatever that means.
These songs wink at global devastation the same way commercials for online car dealerships and door-delivered Chick-fil-A do—in these challenging times, convenience and the power of positivity will get us through. Pop music, and Katy Perry in particular, have used this tactic before. “Put your rose-colored glasses on, and party on,” she cooed on 2017’s Witness, an album of what she called “purposeful pop,” designed to yank the listener into a newfound social consciousness. She performed the lead single at the Grammys wearing a pink rhinestone PERSIST armband as an image of the Constitution rose behind her. She jammed the album with whomping bass and assertions that a woman could be both “feminine and soft,” “a babydoll with a briefcase,” and promoted it with a 72-hour livestream, therapy session and all, staking her activism on the idea that all vulnerability is radical. In one clip, she sat cross-legged on an immaculate white couch and apologized for her history of cultural appropriation. The camera panned to a flickering display of the album cover. “I’ll never understand, because of who I am,” she murmured. We were meant to connect the dots between parceled honesty and political stances, between an oddball “diss track” against Taylor Swift and a broad stance on female empowerment.
Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. “They tell me that I’m crazy, but I’ll never let them change me!” she sing-shouts on “Daisies,” as limp EDM beats fill the background. The relentless spangle on Smile can seem jarring as Perry attempts to both nod to and avoid the pandemic-shaped elephant in the room. “It’s no funeral we’re attending,” she scoffs on “Not the End of the World.” There’s a song about postponing crying to go out and dance; there’s a separate track about dancing while crying. These are big-production tracks primed for maximum drama—shrieking electro violins, skittering beats, flecks of dubstep and disco—but the clumsy lyrics hamper any emotional payoff.
Clichés are practically baked into Perry’s brand, but when she deploys them as cutesy callbacks to her past songs, they present more evidence that she hasn’t really grown. “Have you ever lost, lost the light in your life?” she asks over “Teary Eyes”’s twinkling opening chords, a dumbed-down take on her infamous, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag.” “Took those sticks and stones, showed ’em I could build a house,” she sings on “Daisies,” echoing the chorus of her 2012 hit “Part of Me.” The production strips down on “What Makes a Woman,” with soft electric guitar and light organ notes, but the lyrics feel snatched from the Witness era. “Could spend your whole life but you couldn’t/Describe what makes a woman, and that’s what makes a woman to me,” she croons in the chorus, an update but not necessarily an improvement on One Direction’s “You don’t know you’re beautiful/That’s what makes you beautiful.”
Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas. The Charlie Puth co-write “Harleys in Hawaii” is standard, breezy pop: a gently writhing beat, the word “baby” breathed over synths, vowels contorted so that “hula” rhymes with “jeweler.” “Tucked” is an understated highlight, a bass-blasted track about summoning the memory of a lover whenever she wants. Katy Perry has always excelled at packaging small moments of intimacy; it’s what animates the fleeting moments of post-party panic in hits like “Last Friday Night” and makes “Teenage Dream” one of the best songs of the last decade.
And then there’s “Never Really Over,” which accomplishes maybe what Perry wanted for the whole album: the glistening machinery of a big-budget pop song, calibrated for catharsis. Zedd’s production sounds a whole lot like “Closer”-era Chainsmokers, but his titanic drumlines build toward release as Perry hurls confessions over blooming synths. “Thought we kissed goodbye/Thought we meant this time was the last,” she sings, an ode to a relationship that refuses to wither. This is the version of Katy Perry pop can hold space for—one where her packaged self-probing leads somewhere and amounts to something. In spite of, or maybe because of, her promotional spectacles—Left Shark, the whipped cream bra, teasing her baby’s name with a single release—she’s long been able to comfortably assume legions of people will listen to her music, without even asking themselves why. The unspoken question of Smile is: Why now?
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | August 28, 2020 | 5.7 | 9489d914-e320-4edc-ba7a-343cef2b1075 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion film, built around Alexandre Desplat’s instrumental score, embodies the movie’s spirit of cherishing rather than fearing difference. | The soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion film, built around Alexandre Desplat’s instrumental score, embodies the movie’s spirit of cherishing rather than fearing difference. | Various Artists: Isle of Dogs (Original Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-isle-of-dogs-original-soundtrack/ | Isle of Dogs (Original Soundtrack) | “He’s extremely specific,” composer Alexandre Desplat explained in an interview several years ago about his working relationship with Wes Anderson. “Every single shot, every single line, every single camera move, and every single moment of music is precisely designed by Wes.” This will come as no surprise to followers of Anderson’s work. Indeed, a thorough, painstaking, sometimes fussy attention to detail has always been the defining feature of the director’s craft—the widely imitated, much-parodied hallmark of his unmistakable style. One can be certain that Anderson carefully oversaw the composition of Desplat’s score for his new film, Isle of Dogs. How could it be otherwise? Sound, for him, is not extraneous or incidental. It’s an integral component of his artistic vision.
Isle of Dogs concerns the efforts of a plucky 12-year-old boy, Atari (Koyu Rankin), to retrieve his beloved “short-haired Oceanic speckle-eared sport hound,” Spots (Liev Schreiber), from an offshore island dump outside the fictional near-future Japanese metropolis of Megasaki City, whose despotic mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) has banished canines from city grounds after an outbreak of infectious snout fever. In short, it’s a classic Anderson romp. A marvel of intricate stop-motion animation, the film astonishes with every frame: each tuft of fur and thread of fabric, each morsel of food and scrap of garbage, looks handcrafted, color-coordinated, and meticulously arranged. A miniature bento box prepared with patience is so richly detailed it seems edible. A kidney transplant performed in full looks so real you can hardly help but squirm.
Anderson may be a brazen aesthete, but he isn’t superficial. And so while Isle of Dogs is about the rousing exploits of man’s best friend, it’s also about companionship, fraternity, and such old-fashioned virtues as working together to overcome adversity and practicing empathy in times of bitter strife. The music reflects these themes. Desplat’s score, in its synthesis of contrasting styles, embodies the film’s spirit of teamwork, of cherishing rather than fearing difference. The eastern instrumentation appropriate to the setting—the taiko drumming arrangements by Kaoru Watanabe that bookend the film in particular—is complemented by Desplat’s own sensibility, which is rooted in the Hollywood tradition. But what derives expressly from Japan has not been co-opted irresponsibly. Desplat pays homage with earnest fascination and respect.
This is not so much Japanese music, to put it another way, as a westerner’s idea of Japanese music. Desplat’s score draws on the conventions and cliches of a broadly exported popular culture, creating something that will ring true to American ears raised on anime, Studio Ghibli, and old Akira Kurosawa movies caught on TV. This is in keeping with the film’s somewhat controversial conception of Japan—not as an authentic country, but a fantasyland devised by an admiring outsider. In the Anderson diorama, the most sensible tribute to Kurosawa is the appearance of music from both Seven Samurai (“Kanbei & Katsushiro—Kikuchiyo’s Mambo”) and the more obscure but equally superb Drunken Angel (“Kosame No Oka”). And when all else fails, he can always cue more taiko drumming. The instrument runs through the picture like a kind of shorthand.
Conspicuous contrasts abound. Most notable, perhaps, is the interpolation of Prokofiev’s decidedly un-Japanese orchestral suite Lieutenant Kijé, which seems to have been used only to emphasize the wilful incongruity: Anderson wants to make clear that he’s not interested in consistency or verisimilitude. At times, the orchestra seems to veer suddenly from a Japanese motif to a blatantly American flourish, and sometimes back again. Those saxophones and clarinets tend to flair up with the jazzy verve of one of Henry Mancini’s scores for Blake Edwards, as on the irrepressibly buoyant “Second Crash-Landing + Bath House + Beach Attack” (an accurate title that encapsulates well the energy of the movie). The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s sweet, understated “I Won’t Hurt You,” meanwhile, returns Anderson squarely to his wheelhouse of pleasant mixtape-ready deep cuts from post-war American rock bands.
“Technique can only go a small way toward explaining the effect of a film as intricate and vivid as this,” the critic Dave Kehr wrote of Rushmore in the late 1990s, “with its simultaneous sobriety and eccentricity, its love of grand gestures and its respect for the tiniest fluctuations of emotions, its underlying sadness and great, bursting hopefulness.” This, Kehr felt, was “the stuff of poetry,” and Anderson’s poetic streak has only become more pronounced since then. Isle of Dogs is a film and a soundtrack of grand gestures and tiny fluctuations, of sadness and hope. It affects the mournful quality of Japanese theatre, then zips into the mid-century L.A. exuberance of giddy brass and woodwinds and drums. What’s most evident throughout is the warmth and thoughtfulness behind it all. | 2018-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | ABKCO | March 28, 2018 | 7.3 | 948c8346-e01b-4bc1-be4d-7c639462117f | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Wax Idols' intensely personal new album unspools like a clever synthesis of new wave and late-'80s post-punk without sounding like a pastiche of either. At a relatively brief nine tracks, it's a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects frontwoman Hether Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter. | Wax Idols' intensely personal new album unspools like a clever synthesis of new wave and late-'80s post-punk without sounding like a pastiche of either. At a relatively brief nine tracks, it's a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects frontwoman Hether Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter. | Wax Idols: American Tragic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20859-american-tragic/ | American Tragic | As the frontperson and creative force behind Wax Idols, Hether Fortune has cultivated an aesthetic of icy cool—punk rock bravura shrouded in multiple layers of gothy frost. The last Wax Idols record—2013’s sophomore effort Discipline + Desire—was an exercise in sustained tension informed, at least in part, by her training as a professional dominatrix. As a result, the record played like an extended tease—tantalizing the listener with heavily eyelinered pop stylings but still keeping things at a cool remove, always stopping just shy of delivering the kind of massive hook that could have potentially knocked everyone out of their collective creepers.
In contrast, American Tragic is a much more empathetic affair, fully stocked with songs that bear the trappings of gloomy post-punk and the appropriate gray shades of goth, but wraps them around words that articulate real human feelings. While previous Wax Idols tracks sometimes felt like excuses to show off an aesthetic, Tragic manages to unpack a number of complicated ideas, particularly about how much our personal identities are defined by our relationships. And while it would be easy to attach a personal narrative to songs like "Goodbye Baby" and "Lonely You" (based on the fact that Fortune reportedly went through an ugly divorce prior to making this record), the album strives to be much more than a classic breakup record. In the end, it’s a record about getting over.
The album opens with "A Violent Transgression"—a bit of reverby melodrama in which Fortune sets the tone for the record by singing "This is an absolute negativity/ A sudden, irrevocable plunge" before ultimately concluding that "Desire/ It’s violent." The violence of wanting—both wanting in and ultimately desperately wanting out of a relationship—lies at the heart of American Tragic. The most compelling tracks are those that deal with the queasy malaise of missing something you know is ultimately bad for you. On the glorious "Lonely You"—a bit of Anglophilic guitar pop that sounds like some long-lost "120 Minutes"-worthy single that never was—Fortune pauses to pine for a lover that is better left in the dust. "It was a sorry gilded cage/ That bound our hearts together," she laments, "Now I just want to push the weight of you away forever." Elsewhere, on "Goodbye Baby" the notion of a collapsing romance is both devastating and empowering: "I’m not wasting time/ I’m taking my heart back/ I’m taking what’s mine."
If Fortune sounds newly empowered here it’s for good reason. American Tragic is, in every way, a very personal missive. She wrote and recorded everything herself (except the drums, played by Rachel Travers) and the collection unspools like a clever synthesis of dark new wave and late-'80s post-punk without ever sounding too much like an obvious pastiche of either. "At Any Moment" approaches Sky Ferreira levels of mainstream pop accessibility, while "Deborah" gives a twist on the classic doomed heroine ode ("Had you pegged for a gay boy but you were just a playboy") and wraps it up in Cure-like guitar lines and a sprinkling of drum machine handclaps. On the other hand, "Severely Yours", with its references to sexual power dynamics and submission ("You can be the Marquis tonight"), is a little too on the nose for someone who has already mined this kind of territory so thoroughly in the past (and there should be a moratorium on non-ironic references to crucifixion and martyrdom for any kind of goth-approved record that isn’t actually Pretty Hate Machine).
Mostly though, Tragic avoids living up to its namesake by sidestepping cliché and never overstaying its welcome. At a relatively brief nine tracks, the record is a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter—here offering everything from slow burn dirges on romantic grief to perfectly executed synth jams about emotional freedom. As a result, it’s not a surprise that she increasingly draws comparisons to women like Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux—powerful forces who knew how to strike a perfect balance between authority and vulnerability. By opening up and shedding some of her icy veneer on American Tragic, Fortune places herself in very good company. | 2015-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Collect | October 20, 2015 | 7.6 | 948f886a-47f5-4f8f-9a51-6bcaf09c39d4 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Composer and producer Anna Meredith's wild music blends synthesizers and acoustic instruments. She makes it feel as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe. | Composer and producer Anna Meredith's wild music blends synthesizers and acoustic instruments. She makes it feel as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe. | Anna Meredith: Varmints | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21527-varmints/ | Varmints | On her debut single "Nautilus," Anna Meredith sounded drunk on power and spoiling for a fight. The 2012 cut was the acclaimed Scottish composer's first mainstream release after nearly two decades in the classical world, where her adventurous work often met with sedentary audiences who were polite at best, and openly contemptuous at worst. The track's imperious brass fanfares, artillery-fire percussion, and earth-quaking bass seemed designed to pummel and intimidate listeners. The song was so monstrous in scale that the EP it helmed, Black Prince Fury, and 2013's follow-up Jet Black Raider, trembled a bit in its wake, like going from a Jeff Koons or Louise Bourgeois sculpture to a roomful of sketches.
The track won Meredith the response she was after, but her prospective debut album kept getting put on the back-burner in favor of paid commissions. Almost four years later, Varmints also opens with "Nautilus," and actually lives up to its huge opening gambit. Meredith's electronic work has often drawn from the soundtracks and sci-fi iconography of classic arcade games, and her EPs often stuck within their characteristic limited polyphony. Here, blending synthesizers with acoustic instrumentation, she makes those 8-bit quests and battles feel completely visceral and real, as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe.
Although Meredith wanted to escape the concert hall's stuffier conventions, Varmints still exploits every inch of these rooms' dynamic range, from womping bass and juddering low-end to piercing, starry heights. (It's important to point out that she's not abandoning her day job as a composer.) Her trademark as an arranger is intensely detailed maximalism, but with a keen sense of pop phrasing that keeps things limber, like Max Tundra before her, or Battles circa Mirrored. Matching "Nautilus" for pure muscle is "R-Type," a mass of screaming arpeggios that evokes the do-or-die auto-fire moments of a classic intergalactic shoot'em-up's final level. "The Vapours" is equally bonkers, and sounds like a roomful of overheated machines on the precipice of exploding, while "Shill" thrashes like a herd of angry bull elephants romping in a lake.
Meredith knows the pleasure that can come from pushing a little bit too hard, and the record's few low-key, borderline-ambient instrumentals ("Honeyed Words," the lovely closer "Blackfriars") serve as welcome respites from the madness. Meredith is equally capable of subtler assaults, which she wages with miraculous and exhilarating builds: "Scrimshaw" starts out sounding melancholy and graceful eventually bursts into an unrelenting cosmic endorphin rush. On "Last Rose," Her plaintive, piercing vocals intensify the song's sense of loss. Her crescendos don't always lead to a drop, but she makes you feel the hunger in every one.
All of these skills feel like they could serve as key ingredients of great pop songs, and, wouldn't you know it, Meredith can write those, too. The three here seem to deal with the various stages of a break-up: "Taken" feels like "R-Type"'s more muted sibling, driven not by brute force but Meredith and collaborator Jack Ross' confident "yeah-eh-eh-eh-eh" chorus and a skittish bass line. With different production, "Something Helpful" could be a massive rave-up; as it is, Meredith strips out most of the low end and spins it into a sweet and unguarded ultimatum. "Dowager" starts as a spinster's lament, its queered vocals and crystalline guitars aligning it with Wild Beasts circa Smother, but eventually finds strength in the idea of a widower who "plays by herself."
Meredith's diverse array of classical commissions has included making music inspired by MRI scanners, performing body percussion pieces at the BBC Proms, and conducting five disparate ensembles connected by satellite hook-up. Perhaps fairly, she worried about becoming the "novelty movement girl," but then, those were all works written for commissions. Her first wholly indepedent project reveals her to be one of the most innovative minds in modern British music: She wears her obvious theoretical grounding lightly and never lets it obstruct her ecstatic quest for new ideas and deranged stimuli. And Varmints is a knockout, the kind that makes you see cartoon stars. | 2016-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | PIAS / Moshi Moshi | March 7, 2016 | 8.4 | 9497f547-2d2d-4898-9094-a08eb4013535 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The Flaming Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms promotes redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reduces Wayne Coyne to background noisemaker. The Würms' six-song LP could easily be considered the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror. | The Flaming Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms promotes redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reduces Wayne Coyne to background noisemaker. The Würms' six-song LP could easily be considered the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror. | Electric Würms: Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19598-electric-wurms-musik-die-schwer-zu-twerk/ | Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk | Flaming Lips fandom in the 21st-century requires agreeing to the terms of this transaction: in exchange for receiving a non-stop stream of new, consistently adventurous music from your favorite band, you have to put up with Wayne Coyne’s Instagram skeeziness, and all the #freaks hashtags, exclamation-point abuse, and Miley Cyrus tongue-wagging selfies that go with it. Seems like a fair enough trade-off, but even those fans who are most tolerant of Wayne’s social-media madcappery had to be thinking “really, dude?” last spring when some especially ill-advised photos led to accusations of racism, and the extremely acrimonious ousting of long-time Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock (the fallout from which continues to spread).
In light of this, the debut of the Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms couldn’t have come at a better time. By promoting redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reducing Coyne to background noisemaker (with Nashville psych-rock outfit Linear Downfall playing the role of an absent Michael Ivins), the new project effectively doubles as a form of damage control, redirecting our attention back to the ongoing evolution of what has been a remarkably productive and intriguingly unpredictable phase for the band. Even that Teutonic album title—which apparently translates as “music that’s hard to twerk to”—offers the guarantee of a Miley-free zone.
Given that Drozd has long been the de facto musical director of the Flaming Lips, the Würms unsurprisingly stick to the post-Embryonic playbook, to the point where the new band name is practically immaterial, and Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk could just as easily be the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror. And when you consider how much Coyne’s voice was fused into the textural mist on that album, Drozd’s soft, childlike coo doesn’t have much opportunity to distinguish itself amid the shock-treatment synths, radio-static guitar fuzz, and stellar-drift drums. Oddly, for an album that cheekily presents itself as a long-lost ’70s prog cut-out bin artifact, Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk’s most notable characteristic may be its 29-minute brevity, offering a tasting-menu sampler of the various modes the Lips have been exploring for the past five years. It’s almost as if the Lips have formed a cover-band-medley version of themselves.
So in lieu of prog’s multi-sectional intricacy, each of the six tracks here lock into discrete themes, from the mirage-like space-age bachelor-pad smear of “Futuristic Hallucination” to the Live-Evil-era Miles (by way of Yoko Ono’s Fly) psych-funk shriek of “Transform!!!” However, these four-minute spurts are too free-ranging to establish a melodic logic, yet too steady in execution to achieve maximal freak-out potential; with its creeping rhythm, quavering vocal, and steampiped-synth exhaust, “The Bat” is very much sonically of a piece with The Terror, but feels insubstantial outside a similarly elaborate context.
Ironically, focus arrives in the form of a cover of Yes’ hyrda-headed dinosaur-rock colossus “Heart of the Sunrise,” which simply lops off Vincent Gallo’s favorite build-up and the arpeggiated closing act and condenses it into a pure and simple four-minute star-gazing ballad, with Drozd doing an eerily spot-on Jon Anderson. (That said, the attempt at writing a modern-day Yes song—“I Could Only See Clouds”—is less satisfying, with a placid central melody that never fully adheres to the intrusive Howe/Squire-worthy contorto-riff.) But it’s not surprising that the Würms find their greatest success the further they venture from the Lips mothership and the longer they stay the course. With the Neu! hypno-rock pulse of “Living,” the band turn in both their headiest jam and most dramatic song, with Drozd’s ghostly voice sounding like a final transmission to mission control before he and Coyne thrust themselves into the coldest, darkest reaches of outer space—or, at the very least, somewhere with no smartphone reception. | 2014-08-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | August 8, 2014 | 6.5 | 9498b297-4523-466a-9eb0-6b1afe3315f2 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. | Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. | Bryozone: Eye of Delirious | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bryozone-eye-of-delirious/ | Eye of Delirious | Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe.
A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space.
Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams.
The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens.
Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear. | 2023-03-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Muscut | March 20, 2023 | 7.6 | 949aade0-a7ee-4fa1-8a68-11d9725c28a7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
A tribute to their hometown of Los Angeles, this covers album spans genre and style, showcasing Los Lobos’ versatility, taste, and strength as a rock’n’roll band. | A tribute to their hometown of Los Angeles, this covers album spans genre and style, showcasing Los Lobos’ versatility, taste, and strength as a rock’n’roll band. | Los Lobos: Native Sons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-lobos-native-sons/ | Native Sons | Consider Native Sons an autobiography told through other people’s words. Los Lobos designed this covers album as a tribute to their hometown of Los Angeles, selecting songs they believed would represent the soul of the city, taking pains to incorporate the different sounds and cultures that lie within its urban sprawl. Sticking largely to music written and recorded prior to the band’s formation in 1973, Los Lobos dodge nostalgia by side-stepping recognizable tunes in favor of ones that showcase their versatility and taste, elements that have distinguished the band throughout their long career.
Cover songs always loomed large in the history of Los Lobos. In their earliest days, they made their bones playing weddings and parties, building muscles they’d flex when they made the leap to Hollywood punk clubs in the early 1980s. Aligning with the rootsier side of punk, they signed with the indie label Slash—home to X and the Blasters; in the liner notes to Native Sons, saxophonist/keyboardist Steve Berlin says the latter band was “not just inspirational, but aspirational”—and earned a nationwide cult upon the 1984 release of their major-label debut, How Will The Wolf Survive. When director Luis Valdez brought the story of pioneering Chicano rocker Richie Valens to the big screen with La Bamba, Los Lobos were the natural choice to perform Valens’ songs on the soundtrack.
“La Bamba,” a Mexican folk song turned rock’n’roll raver by Valens, gave Los Lobos a No. 1 hit when their version accompanied the film’s theatrical release in the summer of 1987. A fluke in the grand scheme of things, the song gave Los Lobos mainstream recognition, which they built into a viable career, keeping them on the road for decades. As they closed out the 2010s, this touring schedule made it difficult to find time to write a new record, so they decided to cut a covers album. When the pandemic forced them off the road, they took the time to create a cohesive collection, canvassing friends and colleagues for song suggestions and adding a sweet new original to the mix.
Native Sons deliberately casts a wide net, bringing in songs from different genres and different corners of Los Angeles. It opens with “Love Special Delivery,” a 1966 track by the Chicano rock & roll band Thee Midniters. Many other Mexican artists are saluted, from the hopping “Los Chucos Suaves” by Lalo Guerrero—the guitarist widely acknowledged as “the Father of Chicano Music”—and Willie Bobo’s romantic “Dichoso,” to “Where Lovers Go,” a dreamy end-of-the-night instrumental by the Jaguars that closes the album on a wistful note. “Farmer John” is also associated with Mexican rockers the Premiers—they brought it to No. 19 in 1964; it would later be included on the classic 1972 compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968—but Los Lobos revive the frenzied tempo of the original version by Don & Dewey. It is one of several R&B tunes that give Native Sons a walloping dance beat.
Between the margins of Chicano rock and R&B, music that conveys the pulse of Los Angeles to many of its residents, lay rock groups who embodied a a different kind of Southern California sound. Apart from splicing “Bluebird” and “For What It’s Worth” into a Buffalo Springfield medley, Los Lobos stay faithful to these original arrangements, which doesn’t mean they’re replicating records. They’re relying on their collective strengths as a rock’n’roll band, sounding less ornate than the Beach Boys on “Sail, On Sailor” and leaner than Jackson Browne on “Jamaica Say You Will,” even if they retain his honeyed harmonies. The same keep-it-simple aesthetic also means they take “Flat Top Joint” at a faster clip than the Blasters and explore jazzy detours during a long vamp on War’s “The World Is a Ghetto.” Even when they’re playing songs from other artists, Los Lobos sound like no other band.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | August 10, 2021 | 7.2 | 949ea51e-d051-4189-acbb-5ea5b824270d | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On Mezzanine, Massive Attack tried to escape trip-hop. They nearly tore themselves apart and made its defining document instead. | On Mezzanine, Massive Attack tried to escape trip-hop. They nearly tore themselves apart and made its defining document instead. | Massive Attack: Mezzanine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22703-mezzanine/ | Mezzanine | “Trip-hop” eventually became a ’90s punchline, a music-press shorthand for “overhyped hotel lounge music.” But today, the much-maligned subgenre almost feels like a secret precedent. Listen to any of the canonical Bristol-scene albums of the mid-late ’90s, when the genre was starting to chafe against its boundaries, and you’d think the claustrophobic, anxious 21st century started a few years ahead of schedule. Looked at from the right angle, trip-hop is part of an unbroken chain that runs from the abrasion of ’80s post-punk to the ruminative pop-R&B-dance fusion of the moment.
The best of it has aged far more gracefully (and forcefully) than anything recorded in the waning days of the record industry’s pre-filesharing monomania has any right to. Tricky rebelled against being attached at the hip to a scene he was already looking to shed and decamped for Jamaica to record a more aggressive, bristling-energy mutation of his style in ’96; the name Pre-Millennium Tension is the only obvious thing that tells you it’s two decades old rather than two weeks. And Portishead’s ’97 self-titled saw the stress-fractured voice of Beth Gibbons envisioning romance as codependent, mutually assured destruction while Geoff Barrow sunk into his RZA-noir beats like The Conversation’s Gene Hackman ruminating over his surveillance tapes. This was raw-nerved music, too single-minded and intense to carry an obvious timestamp.
But Massive Attack were the origin point of the trip-hop movement they and their peers were striving to escape the orbit of, and they nearly tore themselves to shreds in the process. Instead— or maybe as a result—they laid down their going-nova genre's definitive paranoia statement with Mezzanine. The band's third album (not counting the Mad Professor-remixed No Protection) completes the last in a sort of de facto Bristol trilogy, where Tricky’s youthful iconoclasm and Portishead’s deep-focus emotional intensity set the scene for Massive Attack’s sense of near-suffocating dread. The album corroded their tendencies to make big-wheel hymnals of interconnected lives where hope and despair trade precedent—on Mezzanine, it’s alienation all the way down. There’s no safety from harm here, nothing you’ve got to be thankful for, nobody to take the force of the blow: what Mezzanine provides instead is a succession of parties and relationships and panopticons where the walls won’t stop closing in.
The lyrics establish this atmosphere all on their own. Sex, in “Inertia Creeps,” is reduced to a meeting of “two undernourished egos, four rotating hips,” the focus of a failing relationship that's left its participants too numbed with their own routine dishonesty to break it off. The voice singing it—Massive Attack's cornerstone co-writer/producer Robert “3D” Del Naja—is raspy from exhaustion. “Dissolved Girl” reiterates this theme from the perspective of guest vocalist Sarah Jay Hawley (“Passion’s overrated anyway”). On “Risingson,” Grant “Daddy G” Marshall nails the boredom and anxiety of being stuck somewhere you can’t stand with someone you’re starting to feel the same way about (“Why you want to take me to this party and breathe/I’m dying to leave/Every time we grind you know we severed lines”).
But Mezzanine’s defining moments come from guest vocalists who were famous long before Massive Attack even released their first album. Horace Andy was already a legend in reggae circles, but his collaborations with Massive Attack gave him a wider crossover exposure, and all three of his appearances on Mezzanine are homages or nods to songs he'd charted with in his early-’70s come-up. “Angel” is a loose rewrite of his 1973 single “You Are My Angel,” but it’s a fakeout after the first verse—originally a vision of beauty (“Come from way above/To bring me love”), transformed into an Old Testament avenger: “On the dark side/Neutralize every man in sight.” The parenthetically titled, album-closing reprise of “(Exchange)” is a ghostly invocation of Andy’s “See a Man’s Face” cleverly disguised as a comedown track. And then there’s “Man Next Door,” the John Holt standard that Andy had previously recorded as “Quiet Place”—on Mezzanine, it sounds less like an overheard argument from the next apartment over and more like a close-quarters reckoning with violence heard through thin walls ready to break. It’s Andy at his emotionally nuanced and evocative best.
The other outside vocalist was even more of a coup: Liz Fraser, the singer and songwriter of Cocteau Twins, lends her virtuoso soprano to three songs that feel like exorcisms of the personal strife accompanying her band’s breakup. Her voice serves as an ethereal counterpoint to speaker-rattling production around it. “Black Milk” contains the album’s most spiritually unnerving words (“Eat me/In the space/Within my heart/Love you for God/Love you for the Mother”), even as her lead and the elegiac beat make for some of its most beautiful sounds. She provides the wistful counterpoint to the night-shift alienation of “Group Four.” And then there's “Teardrop,” her finest moment on the album. Legend has it the song was briefly considered for Madonna; Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles sent the demo to her, but was overruled by Daddy G and 3D, who both wanted Fraser. Democracy thankfully worked this time around, as Fraser’s performance—recorded in part on the day she discovered that Jeff Buckley, who she’d had an estranged working relationship and friendship with, had drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River—was a heart-rending performance that gave Massive Attack their first (and so far only) UK Top 10 hit.
Originally set for a late ’97 release, Mezzanine got pushed back four months because Del Naja refused to stop reworking the tracks, tearing them apart and rebuilding them until they’re so polished they gleam. It sure sounds like the product of bloody-knuckled labor, all that empty-space reverb and melted-together multitrack vocals and oppressive low-end. (The first sound you hear on the album, that lead-jointed bassline on “Angel,” is to subwoofers what “Planet Earth” is to high-def television.) But it also groans with the burden of creative conflict, a working process that created rifts between Del Naja and Vowles, who left shortly after Mezzanine dropped following nearly 15 years of collaboration.
Mezzanine began the band’s relationship with producer Neil Davidge, who’d known Vowles dating back to the early ’90s and met the rest of the band after the completion of Protection. He picked a chaotic time to jump in, but Davidge and 3D forged a creative bond working through that pressure. Mezzanine was a document of unity, not fragmentation. Despite their rifts, they were a post-genre outfit, one that couldn’t separate dub from punk from hip-hop from R&B because the basslines all worked together and because classifications are for toe tags. All their acknowledged samples—including the joy-buzzer synths from Ultravox’s “Rockwrok” (“Inertia Creeps”), the opulent ache of Isaac Hayes’ celestial-soul take on “Our Day Will Come” (“Exchange”), Robert Smith’s nervous “tick tick tick” from the Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night,” and the most concrete-crumbling throwdown of the Led Zep “Levee” break ever deployed (the latter two on “Man Next Door”)—were sourced from 1968 and 1978, well-traveled crate-digging territory. But what they build from that is its own beast.
Their working method never got any faster. The four-year gap between Protection and Mezzanine became a five-year gap until 2003’s 100th Window, then another seven years between that record and 2010’s Heligoland, plus another seven years and counting with no full-lengths to show for it. Not that they've been slacking: we've gotten a multimedia film/music collaboration with Adam Curtis, the respectable but underrated Ritual Spirit EP, and Del Naja’s notoriously rumored side gig as Banksy. (Hey, 3D does have a background in graffiti art.) But the ordeal of both recording and touring Mezzanine took its own toll. A late ’98 interview with Del Naja saw him optimistic about its reputation-shedding style: “I always said it was for the greater good of the fucking project because if this album was a bit different from the last two, the next one would be even freer to be whatever it wants to be.” But fatigue and restlessness rarely make for a productive mixture, and that same spark of tension which carried Mezzanine over the threshold proved unsustainable, not just for Massive Attack’s creativity but their continued existence.
Still, it’s hard not to feel the album’s legacy resonating elsewhere—and not just in “Teardrop” becoming the cue for millions of TV viewers to brace themselves for Hugh Laurie’s cranky-genius-doctor schtick. Graft its tense feelings of nervy isolation and late-night melancholy onto two-step, and you’re partway to the blueprint for Plastician and Burial. You can hear flashes of that mournful romantic alienation in James Blake, the graceful, bass-riddled emotional abrasion in FKA twigs, the all-absorbing post-genre rock/soul ambitions in Young Fathers or Algiers. Mezzanine stands as an album built around echoes of the ’70s, wrestled through the immediacy of its creators' tumultuous late ’90s, and fearless enough that it still sounds like it belongs in whatever timeframe you're playing it. | 2017-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Virgin | January 8, 2017 | 9.3 | 94a20a1e-a3ba-4a98-9f68-7c3c4618445d | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | |
Born in the Echoes continues the creative resurgence ignited by the Chemical Brothers' brilliant last full-length, 2010’s Further. In contrast to that album's loved-up euphoria, Echoes is a grab bag: Festival fillers and club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made. | Born in the Echoes continues the creative resurgence ignited by the Chemical Brothers' brilliant last full-length, 2010’s Further. In contrast to that album's loved-up euphoria, Echoes is a grab bag: Festival fillers and club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made. | The Chemical Brothers: Born in the Echoes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20721-born-in-the-echoes/ | Born in the Echoes | "The future? I’ll see you there!" These words come in the middle of the latest album from London dance music survivors the Chemical Brothers. It could be a sly nod to their influence on this decade’s global electronic boom. Back in the mid-1990s, acts like the Chems, Fatboy Slim, and the Prodigy were primed to vanquish guitar rock once and for all while ushering in a squelching age of rave. It didn’t work out that way and, soon enough, Limp Bizkit were dragging their knuckles all the way to the top of the charts. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ radical mix of acid house, hip-hop, and shaggy psych was deemed just another pop fad. But now, with EDM festivals drawing millions of fans around the world and spiritual big beat descendants like Diplo and Hudson Mohawke helping to shape the Hot 100, it’s clear that the Chemical Brothers were both ambassadors and soothsayers. And they’re still around. They deserve to gloat.
Then again, the line could also suggest something more sinister. It’s taken from a spoken-word performance by iconoclastic 76-year-old Canadian poet bill bissett, whose idea of "the future" involves scentless flowers, two-headed babies, and other marks of a hellish apocalypse; for every hit of ecstatic futurism, they seem to be saying, there is an equal and opposite dose of reality. Meanwhile, the music of "I’ll See You There" finds Rowlands and Simons once again tripping out on the past, as howled backmasking and frenzied drums criss-cross in an effort to once again capture the headiness of their own psychedelic pop ur-text, the Beatles’ "Tomorrow Never Knows". All of which leads us to the eternal present—the now—which happens to be a place that suits the Chemical Brothers quite well.
Born in the Echoes is the pair’s eighth album and it continues the creative resurgence ignited by their brilliant last full-length, 2010’s Further, which served as something of a career reset following a decade of flagging potency. But whereas that album was marked by extended dancefloor workouts, seamless DJ-style transitions, and an overall feeling of loved-up euphoria, Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.
Like fellow '90s innovators Daft Punk, the Chems have managed to last more than 20 years in part because they are smart enough to prioritize mindless immediacy. The two upper middle class boys bonded while studying history at Manchester University at the height of the city’s ecstasy heyday; they would read Chaucer’s bawdy Canterbury Tales and then head over to The Haçienda and flail about with 1,000 of their new best friends. They quoted British novelist Evelyn Waugh on an early EP title and then sampled roughneck New York rapper Keith Murray on their ageless classic Dig Your Own Hole. Simons recently returned to the world of academia (and will miss this year’s Chemical Brothers tour dates because of it), while Rowlands recently summed up the duo’s objectives thusly: "We're just really into making funny sounds and putting them into some kind of order that makes sense … Not every song has to be the meaning of life."
So on Echoes we get Q-Tip spouting motivational pizza box rhymes over rubberband basslines on future sports montage soundtrack "Go" followed by St. Vincent staring into the suicidal void of a performer’s high on "Under Neon Lights", which peaks with a guitar (or is it a synth?) solo that searingly recalls "Bulls on Parade". We get the viscous funk of "Taste of Honey"—replete with buzzing bee cameo—next to the taut title track, which features a coolly distant vocal from Cate Le Bon and sounds like a worthy tribute to the late, great psych auteurs Broadcast. Then Beck shows up at the end to help Rowlands and Simons create the finest New Order song in ages. "Wide Open" makes the inevitability of losing it—life, love, inspiration—sound terribly triumphant, and just as the track hits its climax, Beck wisely gets out of the way, making room for undulating waveforms that bristle and burst with all-too-human imperfections.
Talking to Spin about his Big Beat contemporaries in 1999, Ed Simons suggested, "There’s surely going to come a time when those kind of tricks—all the drops and builds and rhythm changes—aren’t going to trigger the same responses in people." Of course, the same could be said of today’s insta-nuke dance tracks, the ones that try to cheat death by just running away from it really fast and really hard. And, to be fair, the Chemical Brothers have deployed plenty of drops and builds and rhythm changes across the last two decades. But Rowlands and Simons’ version of the future isn’t one of narrow-minded annihilation; there are levels to it, along with paths that connect everything from the Fab Four to "Funky Drummer" to Phuture. Part of a fast-moving culture always looking for the next high, the Chemical Brothers remain steadfast—eyeing the past and future while living in the here and now. | 2015-07-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | July 15, 2015 | 7.8 | 94a9c3e2-ffbf-4d7a-99f5-0f52d0e96943 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The band whose Ayrton Senna EP helped define last summer's bright, beachy sound gains momentum with a beautifully surging, shimmering trance-pop LP. | The band whose Ayrton Senna EP helped define last summer's bright, beachy sound gains momentum with a beautifully surging, shimmering trance-pop LP. | Delorean: Subiza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14147-subiza/ | Subiza | Delorean helped define the bright, beachside vibe of last summer's indie landscape, but they also deserve to be placed in a broader context. On their new album, Subiza, the Spanish four-piece deploys the build-and-burst tempos of 90s house and techno music, and they do so explicitly, never shying away from arms-in-the-air piano bridges or incandescent raves. This music is proudly informed by the resiliency and vigor of classic club music, and its title (named after the Basque town in which the album was recorded) recalls the famously nightclub-centric Ibiza and the Balearic dance music that originated there.
Delorean's musical growth isn't far removed from the evolution of Primal Scream. Like Delorean, Primal Scream were a dance-rock band with more traditional, rock-leaning origins (Delorean formed as a no-frills indie group) who ended up embracing druggy dance subculture. Over time, Screamadelica became a part of the 1990s pop firmament to the point where it no longer sounds like a blending of much of anything. Depending on which ways the trend-winds blow, observers may one day question why Subiza was ever labeled as anything more than uptempo indie rock.
The band definitely has that pedigree, crafting four- and five-minute verse/chorus pop songs. Singer/bassist Ekhi Lopetegi has a slightly pinched, accented delivery that lends intrigue and emotional resonance to lines like "Would you ever make yourself this decision I've made?" (from "Grow"). Sonically, Delorean borrow from chilled trance and piano-heavy Italian house, but like any music fan in 2010, their interests are varied. The pitch-shifted chipmunk vocals that orbit "Real Love" are drawn from hip-hop; the warped female voice that echoes "Maybe" during the refrain of "Grow" is lifted from dubstep. There's more than a little Merriweather Post Pavilion in the whirring rave of "Infinite Desert". The band even runs a club-heavy blog, and when they're not playing live, their massive DJ sets feature faintly familiar house tracks that hit a perfect nostalgic nerve.
Delorean's 2009 EP, Ayrton Senna, was recorded in-studio, but for Subiza, the band made a conscious move toward electronic production, laying down dozens of tracks and building the rhythms on sequencers and drum machines. The overall sound remains similar to Ayrton Senna's totemic dance-pop, but Subiza feels tighter and more congealed. What the songs lose in clarity (ratchet those vocal levels down a bit, guys), they gain in cohesion: Subiza is uncommonly bound by tempo and mood. While hardly modest, Delorean have toned down their anthems, so that much of Subiza feels like a very tiny, very personal rave.
Subiza sounds like a simple and straightforward record. It's bright and quick and full of easy sentiment. Its songs bleed in and out of one another effortlessly, but it's also surprisingly varied. It contains few obvious singles, yet its winning moments-- those piano breakdowns, the "Get up/ Get up/ Get up" bridge of "Stay Close", and the resplendent chorus of "Warmer Places"-- pile up and leave you dizzy. Synth-pop, Balearic disco, indie house: Call it what you want. Delorean just make beautiful, modern pop music. | 2010-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | True Panther | April 22, 2010 | 8.4 | 94ad1581-56a2-416c-9660-5fed373c3cda | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Ex-members of Arcade Fire and the Unicorns team for a record that's closer to the latter's skewed art pop than the former's stadium anthems. | Ex-members of Arcade Fire and the Unicorns team for a record that's closer to the latter's skewed art pop than the former's stadium anthems. | Clues: Clues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13036-clues/ | Clues | Back in 2003, Alden Penner was a member of the Unicorns, one of the first bands to draw serious attention to Montreal's thriving indie rock scene. At the same time, Brendan Reed was the drummer of Arcade Fire, and performed on that band's debut EP. Just a year later, Arcade Fire exploded in popularity just after Reed's departure, and the Unicorns imploded and disbanded before ever recording a second album. Though Penner and Reed have been active in the time since, Clues' self-titled debut marks both artists' return to the spotlight since their crucial early efforts in building Montreal's well-deserved reputation as one of the best arts scenes in North America.
Given that Penner is the primary songwriter in Clues, it should come as no surprise that the band's music bears a stronger resemblance to the skewed art pop of the Unicorns than the heart-pounding stadium anthems of Arcade Fire. Penner's guitar style remains hyperactive and colorful, but his songwriting has become more ambitious, adapting his former band's sense of faux-mystical whimsy to arrangements implying danger and adventure, resulting in music that often sounds as if it were intended to be the soundtrack of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The songs that most closely match this description are easily the most rewarding. The riffs in "Cave Mouth" swing and slash like an enormous battle ax; "Remember Severed Head" and "Approach the Throne" marry grandiose melodic themes and urgent, adrenaline-pumping rhythms. In these tracks, Clues hit upon a magical combination of Chavez's razor sharp chord progressions, the quasi-Medieval melodic sensibility of late-period Helium, and the oddball drama of the Danielson Famile.
The band is less successful in its quieter moments. Though about half of the album rocks outs with a twitchy, childlike enthusiasm, the remainder is deliberately static and lethargic. They are particularly fond of sequencing lulls before their most aggressive moments, as with the long, repetitive quasi-folk number that gradually builds to the manic burst of energy at the start of "Cave Mouth", or the tense ambience that carries through the opener "Haarp" until it erupts into a punk-rock payoff in its final minute. On a conceptual level, this is fine, and they are more than capable of evoking a spooky atmosphere, but these slower passages are simply not as pleasurable and well-realized as their frenetic rockers. These cuts also highlight the band's flaws. Just as Clues exaggerate dynamic shifts in their more rocking compositions, they also push their stillness to unfortunate extremes, resulting in seemingly interminable tracks that overwork threadbare melodic themes. Penner's thin voice is not flattered by the slowness either, as it nudges him to sing in an often-annoying nasal whine that sounds a bit like someone doing a mean-spirited impression of Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue.
Aside from these problems, Clues is a very assured debut with a fully formed aesthetic that exploits the strengths of its players while pushing them beyond their established comfort zones. With any luck, Penner will be able to stick with this project for a second album-- there may be some excellent tracks on this record, but it mostly hints at better things to come down the line. | 2009-05-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-05-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Constellation | May 20, 2009 | 6.4 | 94ad6d45-88f2-42dd-ad8e-4e569ebf9ad1 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
These reissued electronic works by the ’70s Moog pioneer marry the fantastical and the everyday, the whimsical and the occult. | These reissued electronic works by the ’70s Moog pioneer marry the fantastical and the everyday, the whimsical and the occult. | Mort Garson / Lucifer / Ataraxia: Didn’t You Hear? // Lucifer: Black Mass // Ataraxia: The Unexplained // Music From Patch Cord Productions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mort-garson-lucifer-ataraxia-didnt-you-hear-lucifer-black-mass-ataraxia-the-unexplained-music-from-patch-cord-productions/ | Didn’t You Hear? // Lucifer: Black Mass // Ataraxia: The Unexplained // Music From Patch Cord Productions | On July 20, 1969, Mort Garson began his 45th year on Earth hunkered around a television set with family and friends. It was, after all, the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but for Garson, the moment held special significance. Having been asked by CBS to compose a six-and-a-half-minute piece to accompany their coverage of the moonwalk, he spent his birthday soundtracking magnificent desolation. “The only sounds that go along with space travel are electronic ones,” Garson opined on the eve of the event, watched by 600 million people globally. “I used a big, symphonic sound for the blastoff and a pretty melody for the moon.”
Garson, who composed until his death in 2008, hadn’t always specialized in scoring feats of human endeavor. A classically trained Juilliard School graduate, the Canadian composer’s bread and butter was turning out jingles, TV themes, and the occasional hit like Ruby & the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come.” Encountering the then-new Moog synthesizer—and its inventor Bob Moog—at a convention in early 1967 flipped the script entirely. A smitten Garson forked out $15,000 for one of the first models ever made and turned his Laurel Canyon home studio into his personal mission control center.
Reflecting on the state of electronic music at the time, musician and author Thom Holmes said, “No one really knew what direction to go in. The Moog did not come with an operator’s manual, literally.” As the ’60s fell out of view, and with no handbook to rip up, Garson could only be impeded by a lack of imagination. Luckily, he was a futurist invested in the radical potential of electronic sound. His modular explorations—fine-tuned on the cozy pocket symphonies of his 1976 opus Mother’s Earth Plantasia—conjured up a synthetic sphere where far-out filters and raw electricity went light-years beyond any lunar surface. “He was really fascinated by the newness and what this machine could do and how it sparked his creativity,” his daughter Day Darmet recalled. “I think it woke him up from a world of commercialism.”
Originally only available at screenings in Seattle, Garson’s soundtrack to 1970 oddity Didn’t You Hear? doubled as one of the first all-electronic film scores. Without context, vocalist Tom Muncrief's histrionics on the title track are jarring. But they are just a blip. “Death Talk and Jeep Approach” and “Sail! Sail!”—which foreshadows the corroded synth doom of Iggy Pop’s “Mass Production”—more than make amends. On the former, Garson summons an eerie tundra of panned whooshes and pitch-shifted bells the likes of which would have made the BBC Radiophonic Workshop proud. On a gentler note, the cutesy arpeggios of “Walk to the Other Side of the Island” is a hint of wholesome themes to come.
Owing in part to the box-office success of movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Witchfinder General, the occult crept into pop-culture consciousness in the late ’60s. Majors like Capitol and Warner Bros. capitalized by releasing schlocky, spoken-word LPs like Witchcraft – Magic: An Adventure in Demonology. By 1971, Garson offered up some credibility. Marketed as a feature-length interpretation of esoteric phenomena, Black Mass saw him adopt the moniker Lucifer for an experiment in supernatural electronics. Titles like “ESP” and “Witch Trial” leave nothing to the imagination, but, like peaks “Solomon’s Ring” and “Exorcism,” they furnish the mind’s eye with imagined visuals, pairing rich melodies with white-noise bursts and contorted clangs.
Though listeners are assured Black Mass “takes its subject matter seriously,” there’s a classic Garsonian comfort to the screwy spirit underpinning it all. It’s a niche Garson resumed when he became a tour guide to the paranormal for a second time in 1975. His sole release under the name Ataraxia, The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions of the Occult) is a trove of dark ambience (“Sorcerer”) and a nostalgia bath of bubbling basslines (“I Ching”). Influence-wise, it’s a textbook case of give and take: The unearthly, new-age skulk of “Deja Vu” is essentially “Tubular Bells” 2.0. Opener “Tarot,” meanwhile, has the kind of driving 32nd-note pulse that John Carpenter would wield on his Halloween theme three years later.
But the crowning glory is the first-time issue of Music From Patch Cord Productions. Raiding the archives, it spans subtly alternate takes of Plantasia tracks (a thrilling, extra-syncopated “Ode to an African Violet”) and hallucinatory sci-fi tunes like “Son of Blob Theme.” The album’s stylistic outliers are also their best. The disco funk of “Dragonfly,” which plays like a dreamworld duet between Pac-Man composer Toshio Kai and Yellow Magic Orchestra, exists whole planes apart from “Cathedral of Pleasure.” A paean to physical empowerment, the latter calls to mind Jenny Hval musing over Pino Donaggio’s wistful main title from Carrie.
Looking back, it’s obvious Mort Garson was a jack of many trades and a master of one. At the dials and keys of his beloved Moog modular, his marriage of the fantastical with the everyday eluded comparison. Whether for outer space, or the quiet domesticity of home, he zoomed out to places unseen, or honed in on the familiar, bringing it to levels unconsidered. And just like he did on that momentous day back in 1969, Garson, Lucifer—whatever you want to call him—still guides his listener to not simply see the future, but look beyond it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | November 12, 2020 | 7.8 | 94b7aea7-4358-49cf-8cdc-d2a56a0dc906 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
After rocketing into the stratosphere with his first album and struggling with second album syndrome, Australian producer Flume scales back with a lithe, quirky, understated EP. | After rocketing into the stratosphere with his first album and struggling with second album syndrome, Australian producer Flume scales back with a lithe, quirky, understated EP. | Flume: Skin Companion EP I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22687-skin-companion-ep-i/ | Skin Companion EP I | The stakes were high for Harley Edward Streten. In 2012, the Sydney, Australia-based producer, who records as Flume, released his self-titled album as EDM was reaching peak cultural saturation. Flume’s beat-oriented sound—experimental enough for comparisons to L.A.’s Brainfeeder scene, pop enough to best One Direction in the charts—was so quick to catch fire that even Streten seemed shocked by his ascendency. “There was a lot of hype,” he told Complex recently. “It exploded in Australia first and then the rest of the world was coming on board and it was quite a process.”
This was only one year after his first live show, and Flume—then 21—had a legitimate hit album and the attention of music’s biggest names. Over the next 36 months he would remix Lorde, Disclosure, Sam Smith, and Arcade Fire. So, when it came time for him to drop Skin, the burden was heavy to prove he was more than just the flavor of the moment. “I struggled with the pressure of having the successful record after the first record,” he said. “Second album syndrome. I’m living proof; it’s very real.”
Streten’s way of dealing with astronomical expectations, as it turned out, were equally large ambitions: if Flume was a beat maker flirting with pop, Skin was a pop record with an experimental sense of rhythm. The sixteen-track album was stacked with legacy giants and alt-pop darlings, among them: Beck, Raekwon, Vince Staples, Little Dragon, AlunaGeorge, MNDR, and Vic Mensa. Some songs, like “Tiny Cities,” were successes. (Beck recast as a future-pop Beach Boy was an unexpected win.) More often, however, the features roster seemed a cagey distraction to Flume’s more left-field impulses.
Skin Companion 1, is billed as the first EP, presumably in a series, that will feature music recorded from the same sessions that produced Skin. But while that album emerged from a sous-vide of industry hype, its companion isn’t nearly as overdone. Of the EP’s four tracks, only one, “Trust,” features a guest vocalist—the Preatures’ Isabella Manfredi—and she’s here because she makes sense for the song, not to generate buzz. (The Preatures, like Flume, are New South Wales natives.) The result is a glitchy and glossy R&B-inflected tune, somewhere between CHVRCHES and Natasha Kmeto, with all the punch of Skin standout single, “Never Be Like You.”
The remainder of the album features more airy successes, similar to the shorter cuts on Skin. “V” rattles and clatters for under three minutes, blending organic percussion, disembodied vocals, and elastic synths; the sound is surreal and meditative, like playing pick-up-sticks in a zen garden might be. The EP’s most straightforward track, “Heater,” is restrained compared to the Glastonbury-ready productions on Skin. It could work as a festival experience—there’s a mellow mid-section drop—but the compressed synths invite enthusiastic head nods, not dancing. The EP closes with “Quirk.” Etherial and unstructured, a soulful vocal sample drifts atop percussion that never quite reaches Arca-levels of avant-garde. Flume's album art, which looks like weaponized, net-art ikebana, does an accurate job of capturing a sound that is as biological as it is mechanical.
Had something like Skin Companion 1 came out before the release of Flume’s sophomore effort, fans would probably be questioning Streten’s muscle: these are subtle productions, more Gold Panda than SBTRKT. But now that we’ve seen Flume’s version of laser-focused hit making, it’s nice to him in a painterly, if insubstantial mode. After holding his breath for four years, it was time for Flume to exhale. | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mom+Pop | December 14, 2016 | 6.6 | 94bfec45-bdca-4a98-b8cb-03569cfd2a1c | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
The all-drum band Rattle's self-titled record has an admirable sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting. | The all-drum band Rattle's self-titled record has an admirable sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting. | Rattle: Rattle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22169-rattle/ | Rattle | Is there a harder sell than the all-drum band? It’s one thing to see a purely percussive group live and get swept up in their visual dynamic and the room’s collective energy, but listening on record demands a certain level of dedication—a need to reset your internal pulse, maybe—or just plain masochism. Undeterred by the hard sell, Nottingham’s Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley took a break from their respective regular bands Kogumaza and Fists to unite under the onomatopoeic banner Rattle in 2011, galvanized by the demand for imagination inherent in such a project.
That doesn’t mean Wrigley and Brown are big on showmanship. Their sound is sparse, exposing and exploiting the specific qualities of each drum in their kit, building up clean and agitated patterns from skittish rim taps, roiling toms, and the snare’s metallic tang. The ghostly notes that bleed from their reverberations become the starting points for their vocal melodies, as they chant fragmented lyrics that could be about an impending catastrophe and the subsequent new world order—the call to leave your homes on “Trainer (Get You)” (maybe named in tribute to Shellac drummer Todd?), their ominous observations that something’s “Starting,” the electromagnetic event of “Thunder,” and the sparsely sketched portrait of a world leader who wants to “ruin it and rule in a ruin.”
Rattle doesn’t really offer any such threat to the status quo. Too many of its songs lack any sense of dynamic, shuffling around stop-start beats and wordless vocalizing that drags once you’ve realized it’s going nowhere. The duo are yet to come up with any particular spell—lacking, say, the violence of fellow Brits Shit and Shine, or the transcendent quality of Steve Reich's percussion compositions. They've also left some gaping open goals: “Starting” never actually gets off the blocks, and the clipped intonation of “Dulling” is… just that.
But there are some inventive moments here. Often, Wrigley and Brown coo in the colorful looping pattern made famous by Dirty Projectors, stumbling over themselves as the excitement mounts. The addition of cabasa and vibraslap gives “Stringer Bell” a strangely danceable groove, and “True Picture” brings to mind Autolux’s Carla Azar marching to tUnE-yArDs’ beat. The duo’s sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting are to be admired, even if they’re not necessarily traits that will convince anyone but ardent early-Reich fans that drumming records are worthy of a place on their shelf. | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Upset the Rhythm / I Own You | August 20, 2016 | 5 | 94c07f48-6b58-40b8-a60a-8dfad60acd7a | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Twin brothers Taiwo and Kehinde Hassan, aka production duo Christian Rich, have crafted beats for everyone from Vince Staples to Earl Sweatshirt to Lil' Kim. Their debut album, a loosely conceptual record with a sci-fi theme, is a good illustration of their understated talent. | Twin brothers Taiwo and Kehinde Hassan, aka production duo Christian Rich, have crafted beats for everyone from Vince Staples to Earl Sweatshirt to Lil' Kim. Their debut album, a loosely conceptual record with a sci-fi theme, is a good illustration of their understated talent. | Christian Rich: FW14 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20874-christian-rich-fw14/ | FW14 | Twin brothers Taiwo and Kehinde Hassan, aka production duo Christian Rich, placed their first beat on Lil' Kim's 2003 album, La Bella Mafia. Seven years later, mentor Pharrell Williams appeared on The Decadence, a nimble set of club bangers designed to introduce Christian Rich to a bigger audience. Along the way, they've crafted beats for Childish Gambino on Because the Internet’s "Crawl", and for J. Cole, on Born Sinner’s "Sparks Will Fly"; in 2013, Christian Rich landed four tracks on Earl Sweatshirt’s breakout Doris, and most recently, the duo composed "Señorita", the menacing lead single from Vince Staples’ exceptional Summertime '06. On the surface, their production work hasn't been particularly groundbreaking, and their debut album, FW14, doesn’t make an immediate impact. But midway through the record, near the end of the JMSN-featured "Fast Life", a bright flurry of drums move FW14 from mostly contemporary fare to an international sound closer to their Nigerian roots. It's another subtle shift for a group that's built a strong career on understated creative turns.
The album is loosely conceptual, with references to traveling through space and time and a premise derived from sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, and director Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film, Interstellar. Musically, FW14 brings to mind The Love Below, the André 3000-led second disc of OutKast's award-winning LP. The pace and influences are similar, and both albums take their time reaching their destination. It drifts comfortably through the cosmos, and a song like "FACE" benefits from a wafting ambience.
The album thrives on a technical prowess that grows more refined over its length. FW14 features several collaborators whose names might be more recognizable than the group's, even if they've spent several years crafting hits for Top 40 radio talent. But on FW14, and working with Vince Staples and singers Jack Davey and Niia, the group chops their vocals and re-filters them through the arrangements, keeping the producers at the forefront.
The music centers on glossy EDM grooves while mixing in jazz, global dance, and '70s funk. Thematically, FW14 feels like a romantic jaunt through the universe, following the ups and downs of a couple with common relationship struggles. Through songs like "Real Love"—a nostalgic R&B number featuring vocalist Angela McCluskey—and the GoldLink-assisted "Compromise", there’s a prevailing intimacy in the album’s second half. The aforementioned "FACE" delves into unconditional commitment: "Let’s go half in life," goes a line from the track. "I don’t need so many things to myself." FW14 has a gentle touch that grows more intoxicating with each listen, an album that moves calmly without much commotion, gradually taking shape. | 2015-09-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lucky Number | September 3, 2015 | 7.5 | 94ccf98b-c468-471c-a71d-b55d0c401d23 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Collected on a new anthology, the two albums from the supple-voiced ’70s singer-songwriter mine the internal turmoil of coming of age. | Collected on a new anthology, the two albums from the supple-voiced ’70s singer-songwriter mine the internal turmoil of coming of age. | Laurie Styvers: Gemini Girl: The Complete Hush Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurie-styvers-gemini-girl-the-complete-hush-recordings/ | Gemini Girl: The Complete Hush Recordings | For half a century, Spilt Milk was remembered as a footnote: a lost Laurel Canyon-adjacent curio, a promising start by a vanished songwriter, or most commonly, a victim of critical overkill. At December’s end, 1971, the critic Robert Christgau—writing in the same early iteration of his “Consumer Guide” reviews column in which he rewarded Hunky Dory an “A-”—harpooned the dozen-song debut of Laurie Styvers, a 20-year-old University of Colorado student who had stumbled into a major-label deal while a teenager living in London. “Normally, I ignore records as rightfully obscure as this one,” he wrote, squaring up to an album that had been out on Warner Brothers for a month. He called Styvers trite, “pretty-poo,” and fashionably troubled, then hoped she choked on her own money. “Oh shut up, Laurie,” he concluded. Of the hundreds of records Christgau reviewed by that rubric across two decades, Spilt Milk was one of just 15 to earn his “E” admonition: “proof,” as he put it, “that there is no God.”
But in his rush to year-end judgment and jokes, Christgau missed a sharp and idiosyncratic snapshot of how it feels to try growing up, especially when everyone else (sneering older critics included) tells you that you’re doing it wrong. Escaping to the country to take drugs and cavort, grappling with dawning traces of mental illness, navigating real love within a presiding ethos of free love: These are the multitudes of Styvers and her Spilt Milk, a piano-driven wonderland that invoked the buoyant pop side of Laurel Canyon vogue to frame a complicated internal portrait.
After a 50-year absence, Spilt Milk and its more settled but only slightly less striking follow-up, 1973’s The Colorado Kid, have been lovingly restored as a single generous set that alternately suggests the opulence of recent Weyes Blood and the precision of vintage Aimee Mann. What’s more, rigorous liner notes by producer Alec Palao portray Styvers, who died in 1998 after a long battle with hepatitis, as a fascinating person, not just Christgau’s punching bag or someone Stephen Malkmus liked to put on mixtapes, as he did in a 2006 Rough Guide. “What I’ve been through all these years has made me who I am,” a 21-year-old Styvers sings during one of her second album’s little stunners. Now, at last, we know a bit about who she actually was.
When Styvers, then Laurette Stivers, was still a teenager, her family left Texas for Swinging London, where she fell fast not only for the era’s extravagant fashion but also its interweaving folk and rock scenes. A student at the private American School, she entertained new chums with songs, fell in with the local cast of Hair when it opened there to royal adulation in 1968, and soon answered an advertisement to join Justine, the band of two schoolmates. Their fascinating, self-titled 1970 LP is a flower wheel of acid-folk idioms (and, these days, a collector’s item), its cataracts of harmonies and twisting riffs twirling in the open space between the then-recent debuts of Led Zeppelin and Pentangle. In Justine, she was but one of five singers.
Feather-haired industry lacky Hugh Murphy produced Justine and purportedly recognized the makings of a star (and, unsurprisingly, a sporadic romantic partner) in Styvers. After several members of Justine, Styvers included, were busted for drugs, she returned to Colorado, where she’d vacationed as a kid, and wrote songs of idyllic escape and long-distance longing. When she briefly split from school for London, those endearingly plaintive tunes became the core of her Murphy-produced debut, Spilt Milk.
Styvers was a veteran pianist, most often accompanying her athletic voice, which could track from a whimper to a roar in a single breath, with insistent keys that steadily billowed. But she doesn’t play piano once on her debut, yielding instead to arranger and multi-instrumentalist Tom Parker. The decision is, at least, sadly fitting for an album defined by its constant search for a sense of self. During the sashaying “You Keep Coming Home in the Mornings” and the slowly soaring “All I Ever Had,” Styvers tries to resolve her role among assorted lovers, attempting to parse trysts from commitments. She tries to dissuade herself from mercurial emotions at large during “Leo Loves You,” a hymn of failed rationalization for anyone who’s ever worried they feel too much. And during the brooding “Gemini Girl,” she acknowledges her privilege—the pretty white woman from a family working in oil, raised in London with vacations to the Rocky Mountains—as a way of hedging her relatively minor romantic complaints.
More compelling, though, are Styvers’ solitary protest songs, anthems not only against social expectations as a young woman from a middle-class family but against civil society at large. “Open Your Window” and “Eat Your Cornflakes” wrestle with the reality of a woman’s domestic work. “Instead of playing housewife, you should be playing concert grands,” she sings, as Parker—apparently altogether unaware of irony—dashes out a brief, flashy solo in response. Then there are Styvers’ back-to-the-land stunners. “Pigeons” is her Randy Newman-like number about despising the city, while “Imagine That the Lights Have Gone Out” wants to check out of capitalism through a mix of downers, Ram Dass spirituality, and silence.
Such gentle strains of resistance coalesce on opener “Beat the Reaper,” the tune Malkmus liked to recommend. Telling an effortlessly charming tale about a stoned weekend in the woods with friends, dogs, and lots of MDA, Styvers maintains a childlike glow as she coos about partying until dawn, “smoking or drinking or playing guitars.” It all sounds so pleasantly Dionysian, a rager somehow as gentle as a lazy river. You’ll probably want to join Styvers and her friends at the rented countryside house they indeed called Beat the Reaper, to drop out of whatever rat race to which you are hidebound and lounge, quietly, amid their orgiastic excess.
During a triptych of alternate versions and demos appended to Spilt Milk for this reissue, Styvers at last plays the piano on some of these songs. She is less exacting than Parker, but there’s modest charm to her touch, a sense that these sentiments needn’t be browbeaten. When Styvers is in charge of telling her own story, you can get closer to it, feel that it’s hers. How might Spilt Milk have taken shape had Styvers and not a series of hired men been behind the keyboard and mixing board, had she taken charge of these sessions like the audacious Judee Sill, a California contemporary who also made two early albums for a big label and then vanished?
Styvers did manage to commandeer the piano for much of her second and final album, The Colorado Kid, ceding the seat to Parker only three times. And there’s only one co-write with Murphy. This burgeoning resolve creeps into every element of these 11 songs, like a vine that’s finally found what it needs to sprout and spread. If Spilt Milk was Styvers sorting through the damage and delight of her past, on The Colorado Kid, she was digging into the present while cautiously turning toward her future, saying plainly what she might want and need there—particularly, a dependable partner invested in an equal emotional give-and-take.
The insistent and bewitching “Take Me Into Your Arms Again” is a plea for permanent forgiveness, as she works to cut ties with her libertine history. “White Flowers”—Styvers’ incredible parable of blooming after the fire, beginning meekly and exploding into a massive chorus—is a parallel devotional. She turns away from “the bodies of men you don’t even know about.” Later, she even makes demands for herself: “Come stay with me for a few weeks,” she sings, her voice cool and assured in this new role of authority. “I’ll get you to mean what I want you to mean.”
The arrangements, too, are newly daring. Howling saxophones flirt with dissonance toward the end of “There’s Still Time (Follow Your Heart),” a brief break from Styvers’ spirited repartee with an electrifying quartet of background singers. She invokes samba on “You Can Fly Me to the Moon” and drifts into shadowy psychedelia during “Gather the Grain,” a hymn for independence inside a close relationship. “You be you, and I’ll be me,” she sings, as if nodding to Murphy, loosening his grip. “We’ll gather the grain as we reap.” Chrysalis issued The Colorado Kid in Europe, but Warner Brothers never bothered to release it stateside. Perhaps they assumed that Carole King’s Tapestry, which Styvers had absorbed while writing, made it redundant, flattening the experience of piano-playing women to one. The month of The Colorado Kid’s release, King played for 100,000 people in Central Park; it’s hard to imagine that Styvers’ music couldn’t have found some fans within that throng.
In the reissue world, the temptations to aggrandize tragedy and rewrite history loom large. Does what’s been newly salvaged stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the songs we already know, the singers we already cherish? For Styvers and Gemini Girl, the answer is no. She was a fan and acolyte of King and Joni Mitchell, but her own records, however interesting and winning, lacked the singular vision of those influences. She wrote at least a half-dozen stellar songs that have now been retrieved from history’s dustbin, but they were very much part of her era’s singer-songwriter tide. Spilt Milk deserved better than “rightfully obscure,” but, as reissues often reiterate, such is the music industry’s churn-and-burn cycle.
By most reports, especially those of Gemini Girl’s liner notes, Styvers took it in stride. She did not spend the next quarter-century pining for what might have been; she settled in Texas, rescued animals, and cared for dogs with her dad. “We’re gonna find a cabin/And throw the rest away,” she sang at the end of “Heavenly Band.” At least, it seems, she found some version of that. | 2023-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | High Moon | March 11, 2023 | 7.8 | 94cf8271-68d9-4dd9-86dc-74139394fef2 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Phonte and Nicolay continue in the vein of Leave It All Behind, crafting musically and emotionally sophisticated R&B. | Phonte and Nicolay continue in the vein of Leave It All Behind, crafting musically and emotionally sophisticated R&B. | The Foreign Exchange: Authenticity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14781-authenticity/ | Authenticity | The narratives surrounding the Foreign Exchange's albums often overshadowed the conversation around the music itself. On their debut, Connected, it was that rapper Phonte and producer Nicolay constructed their tracks through back-and-forth Internet correspondence, having never met by the time their album was released. With their follow-up, Leave It All Behind, it was that the group had committed a total about-face, Phonte having traded rapping for singing. In both cases, the results of such improbable experiments were astonishing. But unlike Connected, which seemed to lose steam with time, Leave It All Behind had a different trajectory. That album grew only richer and more impressive as the years passed, revealing itself to be a remarkably complex, mature R&B record.
Now there's a third Foreign Exchange album, Authenticity-- but this time, there's no gimmick. What's more, it is about as far from "cool" or "edgy" as any music can be: It's an adult contemporary record that is actually musically and emotionally sophisticated in the vein of Van Morrison, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Everything But the Girl. If there's anything yoking these artists to one another, it's adulthood-- not just in the aural placidity but also a lyrical fixation on the politics of relationships. As with Leave It All Behind, this topical concern is very much intact. But musically, this is a much more refined album. Leave It All Behind insinuated a break-up-- if not one that's already happened, then one that's just on the horizon; Authenticity is undoubtedly the aftermath.
Nicolay has successfully synthesized the polished, straightforward constructs of Connected with the labyrinthine soul arrangements of Leave It All Behind. The music on Authenticity may initially sound remedial and elemental, even saccharine, but further listens reveal new intricacies. What kept pulling me back in was the album's final track, the somehow elliptical and conclusive "This City Ain't the Same Without You". Over a trickling keyboard pattern and a breezy guitar strum, Phonte and guest YahZarah echo the song's title into the ether with a lingering hook. It urged me to keep revisiting the album, and each time around, another song would stand out, until I soon began to admire all of them. But as with all albums possessing this level of depth and detail, that's how this kind of thing works. At a brisk 40 minutes, Authenticity reaffirms that sense of accomplishment, cementing the Foreign Exchange as one of the artists at the forefront of contemporary R&B's avant-garde. | 2010-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Foreign Exchange | October 27, 2010 | 7.6 | 94dce0a0-67fb-4435-9958-1e50be8d4730 | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ | null |
Burna Boy’s fifth album takes in the view from the top, fusing his adventurous pan-African pop with memories of 1990s hip-hop, advice from Virgil Abloh, and a little victory-lap stunting. | Burna Boy’s fifth album takes in the view from the top, fusing his adventurous pan-African pop with memories of 1990s hip-hop, advice from Virgil Abloh, and a little victory-lap stunting. | Burna Boy: I Told Them... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burna-boy-i-told-them/ | I Told Them... | “I told them I’m a genius” is succinct and grand as an opening salvo, and Burna Boy is nothing if not grand. This is the lyric that introduces I Told Them…, the Nigerian superstar’s fifth album, and a callback to a comment he made in June, when he performed for 60,000 people at London Stadium, becoming the first African solo artist to sell out a venue of its size in the UK. The line implies either a savvy album tease or quick work recording the subsequent song, but it also positions him as both giant and underdog: an artist who simply had to succeed in order to prove he could. “I told them I’m the realest… for some reason they didn’t believe it, so here we are,” he purrs over a glissade of guitar and congas, with satisfied nonchalance.
Burna Boy has increasingly little to prove: The peripatetic musician has released a slate of juggernaut hits that have made him Afrobeats’ biggest global star, and has spent 2023 selling out stadiums across the world. Each of his moves registers a massive ripple; weeks before I Told Them dropped, “City Boys” became a viral TikTok challenge. The “Big 7” video, which partly documents Burna Boy’s introduction to New York pizza via Brooklyn rap icon Busta Rhymes, had 10 million YouTube views in less than a month. Belying the faux-exasperation of his station, I Told Them’s chill acceptance of his global footprint translates to an even broader musical slate as he blends—and links—his influences: Caribbean dancehall, UK drill, U.S. hip-hop, Ghanaian hiplife, Nigerian highlife, Afro-Cuban percussion, and, yes, Afrobeats. Through this process, he steps further into Afro-fusion, the pan-African genre he’s claimed for his music. His undeniable voice—low and warm, raspy and pooling with intensity—is the unifying force. That, and some well-placed tenor saxophone that conjures a rare Cheval-Blanc by candlelight, signals his desire to push forward beyond the imaginary borders he’s traversed.
I Told Them is enough of a swerve that Burna Boy thought it prudent to create I Told Them magazine, an intriguing and well-put-together document that shades in the backdrop of his Afro-fusion project. (Its tagline: “The magazine for Afro-fusion music, life jewels, and big vibes.”) In his editor’s letter, he writes that now felt like “the right time to reflect and make a progress check of sorts on things ‘I told them’ from the last decade.” But it’s also clear that, as he strays further from Afrobeats as a sound (and after his own criticism that Afrobeats “mostly” lacks substance), he wanted to reassure fans that he’s still grounded in his roots—to “explain the process,” in his words—showcasing Nigerian chefs, fashion designers, and entrepreneurs. The message arrives most explicitly in an intersecting history of juju, highlife, and hip-hop in Lagos written by Benson Idonije, the veteran Nigerian music critic (and Burna Boy’s grandfather).
Contextualizing I Told Them, the album, is a valid project as Burna Boy further explores the ’90s U.S. hip-hop he grew up loving, preemptively hedging skepticism even as he infuses the songs with Wu-Tang Clan members, boom-bap beats, and a Brandy sample (on the ebulliently 1998-sounding “Sittin on Top of the World,” which also features 21 Savage delivering his best Mason Betha flow). Released from the wallpapery niceness that sometimes characterized 2022’s Love, Damini, Burna Boy explores the spoils of his talent and renown, weaving triumphantly through wealth, women, weed, and, on the J Hus-sampling “City Boys,” creatively rhyming “ice cream” with “disgusting.” Throughout his victory lap, he experiments with form to winning effect. On standout “Giza,” Burna and young Nigerian powerhouse Seyi Vibez craft an international mobster movie over a beat that smolders like amapiano turned inside out, and on the sax-reggae joint “Tested, Approved & Trusted,” a man has never pleaded more sincerely for a woman to “jump upon my body like animal” mid-wine.
There is a sense of self-reflection, too, after a “Virgil” interlude that captures the late designer Virgil Abloh philosophizing extremely Virgilly about how Burna Boy can further connect with the masses. “Big 7,” which pours some out for Virgil and posthumous collaborator Sidhu Moose Wala, the Indian rapper who was murdered in 2022, makes being “wavy since morning” sound like the most beautiful thing in the world—despite its lyrics warning everyone away because he simply can’t talk to them in his altered state. Moments like this, including the easy minimalism of “On Form” and the self-reflective, Kwabs-sampling “Cheat on Me,” featuring the London rapper Dave, are emblematic of Burna Boy’s growth, reflecting his hope to translate “the temperature of the times” into his music, as he says in a conversation with RZA in I Told Them magazine.
Still, he has a notorious, if occasional, inability to stay out of his own way. On “Thanks,” he falls into the superstar’s trap of taking criticism as a knockdown attempt, coming after some Naija fans for a perceived lack of support and allowing J. Cole to devolve into an eyerolly, self-referential bromide against PC culture. It’s misguided, particularly on an otherwise fascinating track that chops his vocals into a flanged and skittering mini-cyclone of guitar and beats. An underdog needs a powerful opponent, but creating one when the world says he’s winning is beneath Burna Boy’s talent, particularly after a reverent interlude, “12 Jewels,” in which the longtime Five Percenter RZA enumerates the life tenets toward which a man should aspire. Fortunately Burna Boy is dextrous enough to evade his own traps, and that emotional range is a huge part of his appeal—that he can believably move from lashing out to roadman fuckery to spiritual deliverance, as on the acoustic-guitar devotional “If I’m Lying.” “Every day, I just dey give thanks for life,” he sings. “Know how to move ’cause I know how to sacrifice.” Burna Boy has more than established himself; I Told Them is an adventurous promise that he won’t become complacent. | 2023-08-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Spaceship / Bad Habit / Atlantic | August 30, 2023 | 7.8 | 94e12107-d960-495a-94d7-6f33fedac1f0 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The beloved Scottish indie rock band reissues their 1993 sophomore album, a fan favorite, one that exemplifies the band’s communal songwriting and their indelible romanticism and pop instincts. | The beloved Scottish indie rock band reissues their 1993 sophomore album, a fan favorite, one that exemplifies the band’s communal songwriting and their indelible romanticism and pop instincts. | Trashcan Sinatras: I’ve Seen Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trashcan-sinatras-ive-seen-everything/ | I’ve Seen Everything | Is there any indie rock band more lovable than the Trashcan Sinatras? There are of course bands that are beloved by more people, and bands who have been loved for longer. But the community that formed around this bookish, hermetic Scottish group seems to transcend the standard relationship between fans and their favorite rock band, especially one whose brushes with the mainstream were so infrequent. The Trashcans’ still-perfect debut single in 1990 was called “Obscurity Knocks,” a fitting title for a band whose legacy would be carried, not to mention funded, directly by their own audience, long before the advent of Patreon and Bandcamp.
In the beginning, most critics discussed the Trashcans in the context of “the new Smiths,” and while their jangle-pop melodies and punny, sometimes melancholy lyrics do share a resemblance, the comparison was more to suggest this band could serve a similar purpose in your life: quote their lyrics like dialogue from a favorite film; sing along when you are at your lowest; devote yourself to scouring record shops for every import single and B-side; listen to their work and feel like it is purely your own—with no interference from the outside world.
The Trashcans’ second album, 1993’s I’ve Seen Everything, is generally the fan-favorite, and this new reissue, embellished with six excellent outtakes and a hardcover book titled The Perfect Reminder, is an ideal gateway. This is a specific type of album: If you are the kind of person who argues Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk over Rumours, or Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy over After the Gold Rush, you will find the slapdash energy of these 14 songs to be instantly appealing. What you hear in these recordings is not the sound of lightning in a bottle but rather the wild, thrashing energy of a band trying to catch it, which makes those perfect moments when they do—the wordless chorus of “Earlies,” the trumpet-accompanied refrain of the title track—sound even more thrilling.
To follow their debut—1990’s Cake, 10 expertly crafted songs in under 40 minutes—the Trashcans established a new process that would span the rest of their career. Working at their in-house studio Shabby Road, they took their time, slowly amassing material among several primary songwriters within the group. There’s the de facto frontman, Frank Reader, whose expressive voice is one of the band’s defining features: It can be smooth and melodic, occasionally showing the bond with his sister, the folk singer Eddi Reader. Or it can carry the rough edge of Paul Westerberg, giving a sense that he might sound prettier on a day when he wasn’t so broken up about things.
The other members—guitarists John Douglas, with a deeper, trembling delivery, and Paul Livingston, who contributed some of the finest songs on this album, plus bassist David Hughes and drummer Stephen Douglas—are equally essential, and they speak to another element of the band’s charm: They work best as a team, elevating one another to places they could not access alone. (Fittingly, Ray Shulman, of the 1970s prog rock band Gentle Giant, produced these quietly complex pop songs). Often, their dynamic brings into focus the spark of creation itself. Power-poppy highlights like “Easy Read” and “Bloodrush” are introduced with decoy hooks that feel transplanted from other, equally catchy songs; the uncharacteristically grungy “Killing the Cabinet” and “One at a Time” end with chaotic, jamming codas, letting out the demons before moving onto more polished material.
Despite the experimentation, these songs are built to lodge themselves in your head, and every individual part—the bassline in “I’m Immortal,” the vocal harmonies in “The Hairy Years”—feels designed to get the crowd singing along with them. And once you do, you might notice that the lyrics, sung mostly by Reader in a thick Scottish accent, are just as thoughtful as the melodies. They love wordplay—“rehearsing” followed by “reversing the hearse”—but even more, they love playing with expectations. The heroic-sounding, minor-key “Hayfever,” an obvious single, seems to promise a star-crossed romance, and yet, Reader can’t seem to get past the introduction. “Hello, I’m Harry” go the opening lines, as well as the chorus, placing the opening scene on loop before speeding through the action: “The rest,” he concludes, “is chemistry.”
Is it any wonder a band like this—so subtle, so self-aware—never took off? The years after I’ve Seen Everything are a bleak but familiar story in indie rock. The follow-up tanks, their label gets acquired by a major. The band gets dropped, falls off the radar. And while this would be the end of the story for most groups, it’s around this point that the Trashcans really get going and the community pitches in: Since their comeback with 2004’s Weightlifting, they have shared a symbiotic relationship with their fans, thanking supporters by name in the liner notes and rewarding them with a steady stream of live albums and demos collections.
In the liner notes for one of those demos collections, Livingston notes that “Easy Read,” the opening track on I’ve Seen Everything, was inspired by the time a bouncer wouldn’t let him into the club, so he came up with a lie about needing his keys from a friend inside. Somehow, it worked. It’s a small victory he translated into one of the band’s most triumphant songs: a sweeping string section, an ascending chorus, and a lyric that seems to capture the hazy romance of their own music: “Over the moon and under the influence,” Reader sings as the band rises to a climax. Upon the album’s release in 1993, Livingston looked toward the future. “I think we’re always going to be doing this,” he predicted in the original press statement. “Even if everybody started hating us and our record company chucked us off, we’d still write songs and make records for ourselves.” After all, anybody can lie their way into the club for a night. Starting your own takes guts.
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. | 2021-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Last Night From Glasgow | September 25, 2021 | 8.6 | 94e44a3d-ea7c-45f1-b19a-dd9448421853 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
This 2015 live set at the Brooklyn all-ages venue captures Conor Oberst’s reunited punk band digging into its scrappy, DIY roots. | This 2015 live set at the Brooklyn all-ages venue captures Conor Oberst’s reunited punk band digging into its scrappy, DIY roots. | Desaparecidos: Live at Shea Stadium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/desaparecidos-live-at-shea-stadium/ | Live at Shea Stadium | Desaparecidos make scathingly political music, yet their most popular song is also their most positive song. In fact, says Conor Oberst while introducing “Mañana” toward the end of Desaparecidos’ new (but technically quite old) album, Live at Shea Stadium, “It’s the only positive song we’ve ever written.” “Mañana” is also the one song of theirs that could be accused of not aging particularly well. The recent 20th anniversary reissue of Read Music / Speak Spanish reanimated Oberst’s hellish visions of escalating gentrification and drone warfare, so what of the wonderfully idealistic and naive anthem that allowed for the possibility that things might actually get better? It’s worth noting that onstage in June 2015, Oberst does not dedicate “Mañana” to the recent protests against police brutality in Baltimore and Ferguson. He gives thanks to their “kindred spirits” in So So Glos, the scrappy and mostly apolitical Brooklyn punks that established the all-ages venue Shea Stadium and welcomed Desaparecidos into their orbit. This salutation makes for the most telling moment of Live at Shea Stadium—this is not a quasi-celebrity band doing an underplay but one that earnestly wants to give a DIY space in Brooklyn equal billing.
From the moment Oberst allowed himself to get roasted on his own album, he’s wrestled with the impostor syndrome that comes with his method-acting approach to art. Freewheelin’ truth teller, yeoman troubadour, inscrutable mystic—these were all pretty easy to square with his public persona. But being Desaparecidos’ frontman has always been the most difficult for him to pull off, even if there’s no doubting the sincerity of the hard-left ideology that animates most of their music. “Man and Wife, the Latter (Damaged Goods)” and “Greater Omaha” have accumulated no nuance since 2002, nor has “When the President Talks to God,” the 2005 Bright Eyes song most lyrically similar to Desaparecidos—but they’re as blunt as they needed to be, particularly at a time when Oberst was one of the few major indie acts willing to face blowback for opposing America’s post-9/11 jingoism. He gave a shout out to the Socialist Review on an otherwise drugged-out synth-pop album in 2005 and capped off a “Bright Eyes return to form” press cycle by interviewing with Jacobin Magazine.
Yet the mere fact of Being Conor Oberst in 2002 allowed Desaparecidos to mostly bypass dues-paying, “get-in-the-van” punk bona fides. They were able to complete one full tour for Read Music / Speak Spanish before the obligations of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Statistics and so forth resulted in their quiet disintegration. The Shea Stadium show documented here served as the release party for Payola and one of the few live dates Desaparecidos would honor in 2015, when the bulk were canceled as Oberst recovered from a battery of ailments. So from the moment they rip into “The Left Is Right,” Live at Shea Stadium fishes for the one compliment that short-lived, erratic punk bands hope to hear about themselves—you really had to be there.
Though Payola was in many ways the work of a tighter, more confident band, it lacked the urgency of its frantically composed predecessor, sounding like an album cobbled together over several years rather than a week—which it was. Throughout a well-balanced setlist, the beer-muscled energy of Live at Shea Stadium brings its source materials closer together in spirit; “The Left Is Right” and “Underground Man” are held together by a centrifugal force missing from their studio versions as well as, really, Oberst’s entire recorded output in the preceding 13 years. Aside from “Anonymous,” they jettison most of the time-stamped, topical, and theoretical material that made Payola feel somewhat quaint in 2015, when protests and police clashed in the streets as a literal matter of life or death. The looser approach also benefits Read Music, as “$$$$” stretches out to six minutes and imagines an alternate future where Desaparecidos got further into Sonic Youth rather than T.S.O.L. Conversely, any song that requires multiple pedals or a slower tempo or a solo falls apart immediately; one’s allegiance to the source material will ultimately determine whether “City on the Hill” sounds charming, or like a demo banged out by a band that, hungover the day after a gig, looks like what Oberst once called “hammered dog shit.”
It’s unlikely that anyone minded on that night—the crowd wasn’t a pack of revolutionaries in waiting, but a packed house of friends, VIPs, and well-wishers on a scorching June night in Brooklyn. Surely, some felt empowered by the fact that Oberst spat exponentially more venom at Joe Arpaio, the Pentagon, and the American healthcare system than he ever did at himself. Many more likely just pointed their beer towards the stage and tried to hoist up the wildly off-key whoas in “City on the Hill.” Live at Shea Stadium almost certainly isn’t meant to stoke anticipation for LP3 or reappraise the political valence of “The Underground Man” in the Joe Biden presidency. Instead, it’s a rare opportunity to avoid evaluating Desaparecidos’ political prescience and instead see them as they’d wanted to be seen: a scrappy punk band among many in 2015.
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=628729011/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true | 2022-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Freeman Street | April 12, 2022 | 6.5 | 94e6f494-5137-4a0c-b5af-cbeb92f9696c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Pakistan-born, U.S.-based musician draws on the migrant’s deep well of loss and longing, weaving traditional South Asian musical forms into lushly textured folk, ambient, and dream pop. | The Pakistan-born, U.S.-based musician draws on the migrant’s deep well of loss and longing, weaving traditional South Asian musical forms into lushly textured folk, ambient, and dream pop. | Slowspin: TALISMAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slowspin-talisman/ | TALISMAN | Five years ago, Zeerak Ahmed was going through a rough time. The Pakistan-born, U.S.-based musician, artist, and academic—who performs as Slowspin—would spend hours in bed, struggling with a constantly aching throat and a heart that felt “unbearably heavy.” Unable to sing, she would exhale slowly in drawn-out musical notes, trying to ease the pain and center herself. It wasn’t until months later, jamming at her friend Shahzad Ismaily’s Brooklyn studio, that she found the Urdu words from an old Sufi kalam coming unbidden to her lips: “Hamari, kuch yaad bhi hai hamari (Do you have any memory of us)?”
That moment of serendipity—inherited poetry emerging from subconscious depths and surfacing on a sea of improvised sound—gave birth to her new album TALISMAN. Recorded over three days of exploratory sessions at Ismaily’s studio and three subsequent years of painstaking production, TALISMAN draws on the contemporary migrant’s deep reservoirs of loss and longing—for a homeland that has changed in their absence, for the lost certainty of a non-hyphenated identity—and connects them to the devotional yearning of Sufi saints and Bauls, minstrels who have wandered South Asia for centuries searching for a path to the divine. Over 10 unhurried songs, folksy finger-plucked guitar, ambient synth washes, and empyrean strings coalesce into lush textural soundscapes, windows into the shared dreamworld of seekers across the ages. Ahmed’s lilting, incantatory vocals—often melancholic, sometimes incandescent—guide us down this mystic’s yellow brick road, a charismatic presence offering succor to fellow pilgrims on their journey into the unknown.
Opener “Holay” begins with Ahmed’s voice swirling in sun-dappled loops, drifting in leisurely counterpoint to co-producer Grey McMurray’s resonant piano and Alison Shearer’s ethereal flute, while Greg Fox’s drums rumble in the backdrop, like distant, arrhythmic storm clouds. The Urdu lyrics, borrowed from an old dadra (a semi-classical Hindustani vocal genre), speak of separation from a lover gone far away. Ahmed hails from Karachi’s muhajir (literally, immigrant) community, Muslims from across North India who were uprooted in the bloody chaos of India’s Partition and displaced across a freshly drawn border. She draws on that inheritance of generational trauma here, and through the rest of the album, as she repeats the song’s heartsick refrain, her voice shading each repetition in overlapping hues of meaning and emotion.
The ghosts of ancestral loss and displacement also haunt tracks like the lovesick “Piya”—centered on Ahmed’s wounded vocals and the raspy scrape of fingers sliding down a guitar’s neck—and the more distant ache of the meditative “Lilt and Forget.” As the record progresses, the red-hot pain of loss gives way to the dull throb of acceptance, and a grim determination to forge new paths into the unknown.
“Trails” brings Lovecraftian, new-weird visual imagery into conversation with these old-world dreamscapes, as Ahmed’s woozy falsetto traces a luminous path over staccato drums and grandly sweeping synths, a lonesome presence wandering a labyrinthine maze. Sinister tension rises on the Hindustani classical-tinged avant-pop of “In These Eyes You Reside” before giving way to a newly assured sense of self on closer “Belong,” as Ahmed reclaims her many identities and far-flung roots.
On lead single “Hamari”—sprung from that first sentence emerging unbidden in the jam room—TALISMAN’s many threads of personal and familial history, cultural inheritance, and syncretic devotion come together in perfect harmony. The lyrics borrow from a Purbi devotional poem originally written by Muslim Sufi poet Nawab Sadiq Jung Bahadur Hilm, invoking the Hindu god Krishna, in an example of the cross-religious syncretism that once characterized the subcontinent’s cultural traditions. Ahmed came by the song through her Hindustani classical gurus, in the form of a thumri—a light classical vocal style—from her family’s original homeland of Uttar Pradesh, now across the border in India.
The thumri itself is a form on which many of the conflicts and tragedies of contemporary South Asia left its mark. Originating in the 19th century in the decadent, slowly collapsing empires of North India, it was sung by courtesans as they danced for audiences of aristocratic men, blending erotic titillation and devotional desire in equal measure. Though their lives were circumscribed by patriarchal notions of honor, caste, and class, these courtesans found space for artistic self-expression in the thumri, with its emphasis on imbuing phrases with multiple meanings. This proto-feminist history is inscribed in the form, but it’s been obscured by over a century of patriarchal sanitization in service of competing religio-nationalist projects, which pushed the thumri to the margins of the Hindustani classical canon.
Ahmed’s recent academic and curatorial work has focused on female folk musical traditions in South Asia, and her experiments with thumri and dadra on TALISMAN are strongly informed by that archival work. By taking the thumri and recontextualizing it for contemporary music—ambient, dream pop, guitar-based folk—she is excavating this buried alternative history. These centuries-old songs and traditions send down fresh roots into new soil on TALISMAN, still aching for home but open to new possibilities for growth, new histories to write. Much like Ahmed herself, and millions of others in the South Asian diaspora. “They tell me not to plant things where they don’t belong,” Ahmed sings in understated defiance on the closing “Belong.” “What if that’s all I know?” | 2023-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Slowspinspace | May 24, 2023 | 7.8 | 94f07bdb-ff54-4133-8b6d-92bc982dd55c | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
On this hybrid album of jazz and Afrobeat, long-time Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen makes the complex sound effortless. Rarely has percussive innovation sounded this downright satisfying. | On this hybrid album of jazz and Afrobeat, long-time Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen makes the complex sound effortless. Rarely has percussive innovation sounded this downright satisfying. | Tony Allen: The Source | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-allen-the-source/ | The Source | Making your way through the formidable back catalog of long-time Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen—one that spans nearly half a century—is a revelatory, sometimes head-spinning journey. Allen’s work has traversed styles that on the surface have little in common beyond his unique rhythmic presence. In the past 10 years, for example, Allen has tackled everything from Afrobeat (on solo album Film of Life), dreamy French pop (with Charlotte Gainsbourg), downbeat indie rock (with The Good, the Bad & the Queen), and techno (with the Moritz Von Oswald Trio). This range is a testament to both Allen’s redoubtable drumming skills and his ability to rein in his percussive ego in support of the job at hand.
Curiously, though, for a drummer who absorbed so much of his percussive knowledge from the work of Max Roach and Art Blakey, there was little place in Allen’s catalog for actual jazz until 2017. In May of this year, he released a tribute to Blakey and his Jazz Messengers on legendary jazz label Blue Note. That EP, which saw Allen filter Blakey’s hard swing through his own Afrobeat elasticity, serves as a brilliant precursor to The Source, with which it shares label, musicians, and influences. More importantly, The Source shares a fascinating musical hybridity with the Blakey EP. It’s a continuation of the cultural back-and-forth between African music and jazz that, decades ago, saw Blakey absorb West African musical influences on albums such as 1962’s The African Beat, and Allen mold the influence of jazz into the Afrobeat sound.
But The Source isn’t a jazz album, per se: Allen’s drums don’t typically swing so much as jitter and jiggle, with boundless syncopated rhythms that sound like a giant squid menacing a drum kit. Nor is it an Afrobeat album, with Allen’s band comprised largely of Parisian jazz musicians plus Cameroonian guitarist Indy Dibongue; Damon Albarn makes a low-key contribution to “Cool Cats.” Rather, this is an album that straddles jazz and Afrobeat in an elegant push-and-pull that sometimes edges closer to the former, sometimes wanders closer to the latter, and often sits joyfully in the middle.
On “Wolf Eats Wolf,” for example, a scratchy Afrobeat groove—all sputtering, percussive organ and ecstatic brass riffs—gives way to a wandering trombone solo. Album opener “Moody Boy” goes in the other direction: a scattered, jazzy introduction that sounds semi-improvised, dissolving into chicken-scratch guitar rhythm and tough funk drums. The hybrid tone of the band is hugely important to this mix, with the Afrobeat licks of Dibongue’s choppy guitar style balanced by the more classically jazz texture of Mathias Allamane’s double bass.
Freed from the role of support act, Allen is the unequivocal star of The Source, wallowing in the wonderful freedom of rhythmic expression. His unique drumming style rarely resorts to repetition as it alternately responds to and drives changes in the music. The result is a percussive masterclass, from the nervous energy of “Bad Roads,” where Allen’s mongrel rhythm puts a jazz beat onto an Afrobeat motif, to his deceptively complex skills on “Tony’s Blues.” On the latter, a drum pattern that initially appears out of joint pulls into glorious rhythmic focus with the introduction of the other musicians, who play in careful staccato dabs. In this mix, Allamane proves vital, his melodic bass riffs anchoring a musical blend that at times—as on the aptly named “Push and Pull”—threaten to float off into the ether. The one time Allamane is set free, his solo on “Cruising” is a joy, a rock solid bassline loosening into elastic bent notes, like a plastic packet slowly melting on a fire.
What saves The Source from being an album uniquely for drum nerds is the songwriting. The 11 tracks here—all written by Allen with saxophonist and long-time collaborator Yann Jankielewicz—may understandably not live up to jazz standards like “Moanin’” and “A Night in Tunisia” that appear on A Tribute to Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers. But there are some fine musical motifs, including a delightfully itinerant chord sequence and jump-cut riff on “Push and Pull,” the moody, merry-go-round melody on “Tony’s Blues,” and a playfully menacing riff that emerges four-and-a-half minutes into “On Fire.”
Perhaps the greatest attribute of this album, though, is how it makes the complex sound effortless. The Source may draw on Afrobeat and jazz to create something intricate and expansive, but the results are never contrived or academic. In this, The Source mirrors the musical skills of Allen himself, a man who tackles rhythmic mazes like a walk in the park, making this release both a fine addition to his catalog and a load of genre-bending fun. Rarely has percussive innovation sounded this downright satisfying. | 2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | September 6, 2017 | 7.7 | 94fb794c-3b8b-4585-a848-619fb1f38a3a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Houston rock band’s third album captures a certain kind of painful, melodic bliss that comes in the wake of a crisis. | The Houston rock band’s third album captures a certain kind of painful, melodic bliss that comes in the wake of a crisis. | Narrow Head: Moments of Clarity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/narrow-head-moments-of-clarity/ | Moments of Clarity | Narrow Head’s previous album, 2020’s 12th House Rock, had a grim outlook. It was a document of total depression, its lyrics populated by apathy, self-loathing, and substance abuse. Accordingly, it sounded dirty and grungy, calling back to ’90s alt-metal with a hefty dose of numb shoegaze. Around the time that album came out, vocalist and guitarist Jacob Duarte was in crisis, dealing with friends dying and the “spiritual trials” that come with it. The re-evaluation of his perspective and priorities prompted by that experience fuels Moments of Clarity, the Houston band’s third album.
While that last record called to mind an inward angst, Moments of Clarity is anthemic and explosive. The tones are bigger and smoother, Duarte punches his lines and elongates his vowels, and the Britpop-ish sneer he tended to sing with on 12th House Rock is gone, replaced with a blissful coo. “The Real,” a big highlight, feels, if not quite ecstatic, then at least emphatic, as Duarte sings: “How good does it feel/To be you, to be real?” The electronics-tinged “The World” has that effect too, as Duarte imparts advice to someone more lost than he is. “The Comedown” offers this conclusion to kick into gear its mammoth outro: “You should know I’m getting older/I lost myself and it feels so good.”
Confusion and angst sit alongside revelations like these, creating a muddy emotional mix. “Trepanation” is Duarte imagining, or begging for, a hole drilled in his skull. “Fine Day” and “Moments of Clarity” are bitter breakup songs, while “Breakup Song” is serene and accepting. Even the aforementioned chorus on “The Real,” when taken in the context of the rest of the song’s lyrics, could easily read as sarcastic—it’s the earnestness in Duarte’s voice that sells it as otherwise. He pulls a similar trick on the stirringly poppy “Sunday”: “Fall in love, see things through/And I know I’ve had enough of it.” Is he pledging to the idea or writing it off? These contrasts and ambiguity create a tension that pays off with the release of each big, triumphant hook.
Tension and release are key to the instrumentation too. In the vein of alt-metal bands like Quicksand and Helmet, upfront, weighty bass guitar gives everything a steady drive, pinning songs down while guitars lurch from restrained verses to unleashed, enveloping choruses. “The Real” and “Trepanation” do this best, the former driven by its momentum and the latter its simple yet burrowing vocal melody. “The Comedown” goes for the slow-boil approach, pulling the tempo down and taking almost two minutes to kick in with an absolutely crushing guitar sound.
Generally, the heaviness on this album is more about creating or sustaining a vibe than it is a source of vitality. There are tastes of a more biting heaviness on “Trepanation,” “Gearhead,” and particularly on “Flesh & Solitude,” which features screamed backing vocals and churning guitars. These are highlights of the album, platforming its darkness in the same way the catchy parts do its light. The musical middle grounds between these poles are where the album is weakest—“Breakup Song,” “Caroline,” and “The World” aren’t particularly memorable, musically or otherwise. But at its best, Moments of Clarity is an effective illustration of the process of clawing your way to some meaning, knowing that otherwise you’ll be destroyed. | 2023-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | February 14, 2023 | 6.6 | 950cdbdb-625d-4d6d-87da-cbb865469411 | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
Following their Internet hit "Go Outside", Cults prove they have the dexterity and songwriting to make a varied and memorable album. | Following their Internet hit "Go Outside", Cults prove they have the dexterity and songwriting to make a varied and memorable album. | Cults: Cults | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15432-cults/ | Cults | When Cults' "Go Outside" first appeared on the web last year, it spread like wildfire. It was catchy and sweet, the kind of sing-along that felt like it was pulled from the air, with a sentiment perfect for anyone stuck in an office or addicted to the Internet. But how many communal sing-alongs can a band make before the approach goes stale? Cults have opted not to find out. "Go Outside" is on their debut album, and it still gives you your entire recommended daily allowance of vitamin D, but its dreamy drift is just one side of a band that proves it has the dexterity and songwriting chops to make a varied and memorable album.
Much has been made about the speed with which Cults signed to Columbia, as if they're the first group to release a debut album on a major. That kind of rapid ascent isn't anything new, but the speculation that came with it-- online chatter pronouncing them destined for the one-hit-wonder bin-- now looks grossly off the mark. At the center of the band's appeal is singer Madeline Follin's youthful alto. She has a tone that creates the impression you're listening to a precocious tween fronting a band well versed in Phil Spector's Back to Mono and three decades of climactic indie pop. The 1960s girl-pop element of their sound is pretty evident on the surface-- "You Know What I Mean" even borrows its verse melody from the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go"-- but what they've done with it is pure 21st century, cutting it with synths, guitars, and softly integrated samples.
The samples, of cult leaders speaking to their followers, could have been a distraction had they chosen to make a big deal out of them, but they're woven tightly into the album's sonic fabric and processed to varying degrees of decipherability, which turns them into an effective textural element. Those voices bounce around in the intro to "Oh My God", originally released last year as part of Adult Swim's singles program, but subtly remixed for the LP. The music hasn't changed here but the beat is amped up, and the bass has been moved forward in the mix, giving the song a much more powerful groove to support its melody. And if Follin's lyrics aren't necessarily deep-- "I can run away and leave you anytime/ Please don't tell me you know the plans for my life"-- she delivers them with relatable and affecting conviction.
This taps into a vein of petulance that runs through the album. "I don't need anyone else," from "Never Saw the Point", may read as a tossed-off line, but in a strangely positive way, it feels like the record's main message. Even the eternally sunny "Go Outside" ends on the lyric, "I think I want to live my life and you're just in my way." These are teenage sentiments, the kind of things you feel dumb for saying and thinking once you've navigated into your mid-twenties, but they're also universal sentiments during that stage of life when you're trying to figure out what kind of person you're going to be. Cults' use of elements borrowed from traditionally teen music-- girl groups, 50s prom-pop, bedroom indie pop-- plays along with the lyrics to create a little world where one minute Follin is singing a frustrated "fuck you" ("Never Heal Myself") and dreaming of escaping the next. Even the more formal pop explorations play to teen melodrama. The surging Spector pop of the record's anthemic opener "Abducted" compares falling in love to being kidnapped, and gives the other Cult, Brian Oblivion, a brief lead vocal to play the abductor.
At just over a half hour, Cults feels like the perfect length-- just long enough for the bus ride to school (or to work). But more importantly, it executes what it sets out to do masterfully while allowing the group room to grow and mature. They've also set themselves up to take their sound and subject matter in any number of possible directions in the future, and that's a good position for a young band to find itself in. Cults built up a lot of goodwill last year on the strength of just three tracks; on their debut album, they've rewarded it. | 2011-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Name Of | June 6, 2011 | 8.5 | 950f92dd-fff4-47aa-86e7-14c83889f9d3 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The new album from Tigers Jaw is their major label debut, but it’s also the debut of a major label, as the first release on producer Will Yip’s new Atlantic imprint Black Cement. | The new album from Tigers Jaw is their major label debut, but it’s also the debut of a major label, as the first release on producer Will Yip’s new Atlantic imprint Black Cement. | Tigers Jaw: spin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23096-spin/ | spin | Few emo hot takes pack more heat than “In Reverie is the best Saves the Day album.” Following the band’s evergreen classics Through Being Cool and Stay What You Are, and preceding an ongoing back-to-basics course correction, it’s a complete outlier—the sole album Saves the Day released on the major label DreamWorks, shifting from Lifetime worship into midtempo, floral power-pop and intricate jazzy chords. It was an album that alienated old fans and failed to gain new ones in equal measure. Tigers Jaw’s Ben Walsh recently called In Reverie his favorite album of all time. That’s a hell of a hot take and seemingly a statement in light of spin, which is not just Tigers Jaw’s major label debut, but the debut of a major label.
As the inaugural release of producer Will Yip’s Atlantic imprint Black Cement, spin might be seen as a trial balloon for the commercial viability of revival-era emo and a purity test for those who’ve been around before “the emo revival” had a name. Though, if there are Tigers Jaw purists, they would’ve jumped ship three years ago. 2014’s Charmer was transitional, with 60% of the band’s original lineup deciding to amicably bow out, perhaps to follow the muse of witch house, but only after they finished recording. Described by the band as “equal parts Fleetwood Mac and Brand New,” Charmer was certainly more polished and subdued than their giddy, pop-punkish self-titled debut and landed in Billboard’s top 50, standing alongside Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, Title Fight’s Hyperview, and Balance and Composure’s The Things We Think We’re Missing as proof of Will Yip’s credentials as a producer and A&R in terms of visualizing the new sound of alternative rock.
Charmer sounded like a bold reconfiguration, but compared to spin, it was a dry run. The perspective and songwriting of Brianna Collins and Walsh have matured; at the very least, the band now has a clearer idea of what Tigers Jaw 2.0 is meant to accomplish. spin is 12 confident, minor variations on the Tigers Jaw style that withstood the past three years—the jangle of old indie rock, the stylization of new indie rock, and the simultaneously introspective and community-minded concerns of the fourth-wave emo bands for whom they’re something of an authority figure.
The stereo-panned acoustics that introduce “Escape Plan” are not the first time Tigers Jaw have overtly referenced the Microphones, though it blooms into an expansive crescendo that shows how Bleed American and The Glow Pt. 2 have comfortably coexisted as primary 2001 influences in this scene. With its unusually steady vocals, “Blurry Vision” is the most beautiful exchange between Collins and Walsh, reflective of the more wistful, empathetic tone of spin.
While many of their peers are reasserting the grungier and brattier variants of the Buzz Bin, Tigers Jaw remain above the fray but true to their roots. The shoulder-swinging rhythmic drive of their earliest days is maintained regardless of Yip’s even-handed production, as “Bullet,” “Brass Ring,” and “Guardian” hit cruise control at 75 mph. And for all of the balance and composure shown throughout spin, Collins sounds fully aware that she’s written Tigers Jaw’s best melody for the chorus of “June,” barely concealing her enthusiasm to get through the verses so she can dive right into it.
The exuberance of “June” almost qualifies as experimental within the new iteration of Tigers Jaw and especially spin. As with Charmer, most of the highlights come early, leaving spin to feel just as front-loaded, albeit with a longer and stronger front. Stuck towards the end, “Window” or “Same Stone” come off as vaguely redundant. Still, in light of Walsh’s statements on In Reverie, Tigers Jaw might not be interested in the same grandiose ambitions of some of their peers. As with Saves the Day, Tigers Jaw is a band rooted in pop-punk and emo trying to evolve alongside their fans in a logical way. And by staying the course after their risky pivot rather than retrenching, they’ve done their heroes one better. | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Black Cement | May 18, 2017 | 7.2 | 9512a84d-01ab-4958-8963-bd6ce038affa | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Los Angeles–based musicians explore the spaces between their respective styles, yielding an ethereal, richly textured fusion of neo-classical and musique concréte. | The Los Angeles–based musicians explore the spaces between their respective styles, yielding an ethereal, richly textured fusion of neo-classical and musique concréte. | Sarah Davachi / Sean McCann: Mother of Pearl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-sean-mccann-mother-of-pearl/ | Mother of Pearl | Sarah Davachi and Sean McCann’s personal and artistic lives are intimately intertwined. Working out of their shared home in Los Angeles, both artists carve out marbled slabs of sound art, each taking their own unique approach to neo-classical music. McCann has styled himself as a sort of DIY Gavin Bryars, overseeing his label Recital Program and assembling ornate passages of home-recorded chamber music to create a new kind of basement-show Baroque. Davachi takes after deep-listening gurus like Pauline Oliveros and Randal McLellan, hanging her songs on endless strings of soft organ and Mellotron chords that wrap the listener in a velvety analog glow. On Mother of Pearl, their first record together as a couple, Davachi and McCann explore the spaces shared between their respective styles of music, yielding a warm, ethereal vision of musique concréte stripped down to the very bone.
An animating principle of both Davachi and McCann’s music has been a devotion to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, whose philosophy might be best summed up by founder George Maciunas: “Coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music.” In this fashion, Mother of Pearl uncovers epiphanies in the duo’s kitchen sink as Davachi and McCann combine farmhouse field recordings, tape distortion, plinking keys, and silence itself to create an autumnal bath of golden tones. The music on Mother of Pearl is just barely there, yet its spectral ebb and flow conjures blurry images of dim, candle-lit rooms, or suns setting on ancient buildings that haven’t felt footsteps for centuries. As slight as the album may seem, Mother of Pearl’s greatest rewards come from listening closely, where all of Davachi and McCann’s textures can reveal their delicate wrinkles.
Throughout Mother of Pearl, McCann and Davachi find a gentle middle ground between the dizzying surrealism of the former’s work and the subtly hypnotic drift of the latter’s. “LA in the Rain” spends eight minutes hovering over a veil of creaking violas and twinkling piano, dancing like dust particles settling in the sunlight. Davachi and McCann constantly keep their sounds at the edge of tangibility, reveling in the tension of their elegant in-betweenness. The most sublime track is the album’s centerpiece, “Lamplighter,” where the two musicians plunge into a ghostly reverie of rumbling bass, softly ringing bells, and cycling waves of tape hiss. On the surface, it seems to convey an all-encompassing emptiness, yet there are details—like the strangely soothing tapping timbre that appears around six minutes in, or the cows that begin to moo toward the end of the track—that turn the whole piece into a balancing act between darkness and light, a richly layered world heard from the deepest possible depths.
There are limits to how microscopic Davachi and McCann can make their music while still achieving something profound; on “Band of Gold,” two guitars spiral aimlessly without ever quite achieving the textural complexity of the rest of the album. But for much of Mother of Pearl, Davachi and McCann continually create musicality from the barest of fabrics, spinning them out into loose tapestries. It’s the kind of music that seems to disappear when you first put it on, but will slowly transform your entire environment. Like reading old love letters from couples long ago, it seems to speak a private language all its own.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Recital Program | December 29, 2021 | 7.4 | 9526b1ce-685a-42fe-9e2a-ff5eab7d1eec | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The improvising guitarist’s first album for Drag City is restless and unsettling. Building on his idea of improvisation as a non-hierarchical value system, it is also a kind of protest record. | The improvising guitarist’s first album for Drag City is restless and unsettling. Building on his idea of improvisation as a non-hierarchical value system, it is also a kind of protest record. | Tashi Dorji: Stateless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tashi-dorji-stateless/ | Stateless | Beyond the principle of “first thought, best thought” comes no thought at all. This is the source of improvising guitarist Tashi Dorji’s playing: the realm of pure instinct, a zone of unpremeditated action in which the fingers outpace the brain. “I generally have a theme or form or simple idea and I work from there,” he told The Wire. But that foundation, he said, “changes the moment I start playing.” When Dorji picks up a guitar, it can sometimes feel like everything and nothing is happening at once: A player in the questing, occasionally contrarian mold of guitarists like Derek Bailey and Bill Orcutt, the Bhutanese musician is capable of spiky intensity and lyrical finesse, and the two moods frequently slip back and forth without warning. Any given note might be a trapdoor to the inverse of what has immediately preceded it. Melodies flash out and disintegrate in the space of a few plucks; patterns repeat until they don’t, and everything in the rearview turns to rubble. Dorji’s pursuit of the melodic line resembles a maze-like garden of forking paths, each choice oscillating between possibility and negation. “Improvisation as a practice is always shifting, becoming and disappearing,” he recently wrote. Stateless, his first album for Drag City—his highest-profile release in an 11-year discography that numbers dozens of albums, tapes, collaborations, live recordings, and digital releases—is a fractal firehose of these transformative moments, in which nascence turns to oblivion and vice versa, over and over again.
Dorji is a committed disciple of spontaneity. He estimates that he recorded the 54-minute-long Stateless in about an hour and a half, and the only reason it took him that long is that he likes to alter his guitar’s tuning in between takes—a process that is itself as unplanned as his compositions. Born into a musical family—his mother is a flutist, her father was an influential lute player, and his cousin is a famous folk singer—Dorji grew up in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where he taught himself to play guitar, soaking up classic rock and heavy metal via shortwave radio and bootleg tapes from India. When he moved to Asheville, North Carolina, for college, he discovered hardcore punk and free improvisation. “Listening to [Derek] Bailey literally changed everything,” he has said. It’s tempting to seek traces of all those experiences in his playing, and it’s true that ghosts of recognizable sounds sometimes flare up—a scrap of flamenco-like strumming, a neatly woven web of American primitive, the arid melancholy of Saharan desert blues or Kenyan “dry” guitar—like a scanning radio dial briefly alighting on a long-forgotten tune. But most often, it seems, what you are hearing is the sound of his mind trying to forget what it knows.
Recorded on steel-stringed acoustic guitar, Stateless might not be Dorji’s most dissonant album—that would probably be a 2013 self-titled cassette played on a prepared instrument modified with bits of metal, chopsticks, and Scotch tape, yielding a flinty, buzzing tone—but it’s close. The mood is a long way from 2015’s reverent Appa or 2016’s meditative VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 13: Dorji attacks his strings as though searching for something he dropped in the dirt, by turns agitated and focused. From the very first two notes, the record bristles with tritones—that sharp, stabbing pair of notes that Renaissance scholars once dubbed “the devil’s interval” for its supposedly demonic properties. Stateless isn’t evil, exactly, but it’s unsettling in its restlessness. Where there is repetition, there is seldom consonance; where there is consonance, there is seldom repetition. Dorji worries away at jarring tone clusters as though trying to work out the kinks in a knotted cord; he treats dulcet passages almost apologetically, as though the pretty bits were indulgences to be left in the dust as fast as possible.
Dorji professes not to be a technically adept player, a patently ridiculous claim. He has speed, muscle, and grace, as well as the all-important sense of when not to play. Trying to chart the course of these pieces can be like chasing butterflies; recapping them is as futile as recounting the twists and turns of a dream. But moments stand out. “The Swelling Fruit About to Shatter the Husk of the Old World” is a gentle, plainspoken highlight of major sevenths and Fahey-esque fingerpicking, clanging accidentals sticking out like burrs in spun silk, and there’s a similarly gorgeous passage of classical guitar in “Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall,” where stately bass melody moves against a shimmering mist of blurred notes.
Early on, “End of State (Pt. 1)” erupts into sour-tuned “La Cucaracha” riffs, evoking car horns in gridlock before turning contemplative halfway through. Dorji typically retunes his guitar in between the various movements of his multi-part pieces, and “End of State (Pt. 2)” coaxes unusual frequencies from its altered tuning, while the opening of “End of State (Pt. 3)” glows and skips like a scratched Sonic Youth record. The final two and a half minutes of “Now (Pt. 1)” he spends hammering at a single open fifth, stretching the edges of the notes with every downstroke; the effect resembles doom metal, though there’s also a hint of Tibetan monks’ throat singing in its ragged overtones.
Dorji chose the album’s title, he told Aquarium Drunkard, while thinking about social structures that lie beyond the boundaries of the traditional nation-state. “I’m looking at it more from an anarchist’s perspective,” he said. This notion of statelessness—what he calls “a fluid, horizontal idea”—is a vision of freedom, one akin to his idea of improvisation as a non-hierarchical value system, an unfettered way of being in the world. Among the album’s inspirations, Dorji cites the anarchist text As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation, the anti-imperialist 1966 documentary The Battle of Algiers, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic work of postcolonialist theory, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of the spring and summer, the title “Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall” appears remarkably prescient; even without lyrics, it is clear that Stateless is a kind of protest record.
I keep thinking about all those tritones, the rickety pillars propping up the album’s canopy. Subtle as fire alarms, tritones have the effect that they do because they strike a tension that refuses to resolve. They are neither major, minor, nor a perfect fifth. Tritones disconcert because they signal rootlessness, restlessness, instability; they represent a state of affairs that cannot hold. Dorji recorded Stateless before the various upheavals of 2020, but the album anticipates the year’s mood: restive, anxious, sometimes antagonistic, and above all, searching. Beneath its rockslides of wrong notes lies the conviction that a different kind of order is possible. Dorji’s other albums may be more soothing or more conventionally beautiful, but none feel better suited to the exigencies of the present moment than this one.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | September 30, 2020 | 8 | 95270301-cb55-4078-b5fa-892310ab97f4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Thirteen years after Trish Keenan’s death, a collection of her demos, home recordings, and voice notes offers an intimate and at times heartbreaking look at her otherworldly genius. | Thirteen years after Trish Keenan’s death, a collection of her demos, home recordings, and voice notes offers an intimate and at times heartbreaking look at her otherworldly genius. | Broadcast: Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006 - 2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/broadcast-spell-blanket-collected-demos-2006-2009/ | Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006 - 2009 | In 1975, a time-traveling being from a distant but familiar realm left an indelible imprint on Trish Keenan’s mind. The titular character from Sky, one of a crop of bizarre British sci-fi shows supposedly made for children in the ’60s and ’70s, speaks with a cold, eerie affect, his voice warped slightly by tight echo. When exercising his telepathic powers, Sky stares down the barrel of the camera, his eyes and splayed palm imbued with a crude chroma-key glow. James Cargill, who formed Broadcast with Keenan in 1995, spoke of Sky’s deep influence on the band during a 2009 interview with XLR8R. He cited the show’s cocoon of white noise and paranoid, spectral atmosphere as key building blocks to Broadcast’s brand of retro-futurist psychedelia. In promotional photos, Keenan often emulated Sky, bathed in oversaturated colors and stretching her hand toward the viewer. She always seemed extemporal, as though her icy contralto and surrealist lyrics were beamed in from some far corner of time and space. When Keenan died of pneumonia in 2011, it was tragic not only for the sudden loss of a brilliant, exploratory musician, but because a portal to some other dimension had been permanently closed.
On what would’ve been Keenan’s 43rd birthday, a mere eight months after her death, Cargill posted “The Song Before the Song Comes Out” to his SoundCloud page. The 40-second recording features an out-of-breath Keenan singing a quick tune, seemingly struck by inspiration in the middle of a walk. In the background, beneath a soft static buzz, you can hear her footsteps keeping time. The melody unspools gracefully, as if it’s a lullaby she’s known her whole life, the occasional fudged note a product of overthinking the intrinsic. Despite its brevity, the demo recording captures what made Broadcast so special: the hypnagogic interplay of childlike melodies and the noise surrounding them.
In November of 2011, Cargill told The Guardian that he was constructing a new Broadcast record from Keenan’s massive trove of home recordings. It would be a monument to her preternatural talent, a fitting cap to the too-short Broadcast arc. That album never came, but for several years, Cargill kept a tradition of sharing one or two of Keenan’s demos on her birthday. It was a gift to perpetually heartbroken fans who trawled Soulseek and YouTube for any unheard scraps of the band’s particular magic. Over time, the links died and Cargill’s blog posts slowed to a trickle, but devoted heads doubled as archivists, preserving the songs on YouTube and Reddit. In 2022, Warp continued the fan service and deepened the band’s legacy by releasing Maida Vale Sessions, a selection of the band’s BBC studio recordings, along with reissues of two previously tour-only LPs, Mictotronics and Mother Is the Milky Way. Now, with Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009, we finally get to hear what an album of new Broadcast material could have sounded like. It compiles 36 demos (including “The Song Before the Song Comes Out,” “Petal Alphabet,” and “Tunnel View,” all of which Cargill previously posted) into a warm and sprawling 65-minute tribute to Trish Keenan, providing an intimate look into her otherworldly genius.
Spell Blanket is an expansive sonic feast, swiftly—but intentionally—oscillating from minute-long loop fragments and textural studies to more fleshed-out, properly arranged songs. There’s a noticeable flow in energy, which gives the collection more of a proper album feel than a mixtape or thrown-together compilation. “My Marble Eye,” a 32-second clip of pirouetting organ, leads directly into “Roses Red,” an unsettling three-minute pop song where guitar figures tumble around modal vocal melodies, a bed of feedback writhing like angry snakes in the background. The acid-dipped folk of “Fatherly Veil,” which features some of Keenan’s most ambitious and layered vocal work, sits between the quick tape-delay workout of “Tell Table” and the hard-panned drum-machine study of “Dream Power.” Quick cuts aren’t foreign territory for Broadcast; Spell Blanket’s collagist technique mirrors the scrapbook approach the band explored in its later releases. The stylistic swings can sometimes be jarring, but they ultimately illustrate the breadth of Keenan’s musical curiosity.
At times, the naked vulnerability of these scratch recordings makes Spell Blanket a heart-wrenching listen. It’s overwhelming to hear such a torrent of Keenan’s music 15 years after what would be her final works. The chorus of “I Want to Be Fine” is gorgeous, a crushing shout of Sisyphean yearning catapulting over spare plucked guitar. She delivers the devastatingly simple line, “I want to be fine,” with her trademark stoicism, like a single tear rolling down a plastic mask. It’s hard to hear the occult sermon chant of “My Body” without feeling chills, as if we’ve walked into Keenan’s former bedroom with ghost-hunting equipment and received a clear transmission from beyond. Once the thrill of new Broadcast material subsides, the nagging recognition that we’ll never hear fleshed-out versions of these songs or know what she could’ve made next settles like a thick, immovable fog.
Despite being a collection of demos, Spell Blanket feels like an appropriate conclusion to Broadcast’s discography—the final album they never got the chance to make. Among other things, it reveals that the group was a folk band at heart. The songs’ largely acoustic makeup takes away none of their power; it’s conceivable that they might even have embraced a more pastoral sound, had they continued. The band never stayed still, which Cargill lovingly confirmed in that Guardian interview: “We would've changed again. That was what I liked about doing [Broadcast]. We never got repetitive.” The bootlegged audio of their final shows in Australia hinted that the band was on the cusp of something new, as Trish’s looped vocals and Cargill’s cosmic synths felt distinct from anything they’d done previously; perhaps they were newly cognizant of the unconscious role shows like Sky and Children of the Stones played in their craft.
As it is now, the Broadcast story is one of steady reduction, a band that pursued a specific idea and peeled away unnecessary layers in its service. Their records went from full-bodied, swinging ’60s psych to brittle, dying-battery synth pop, from a quintet to a duo to one person’s four-track tapes and MiniDiscs. The most prominent instrument on Spell Blanket is Trish Keenan’s beautiful voice, the steady center of Broadcast’s music, the key to its mystical appeal. We are lucky to have shared time and space with Trish; the door to her universe might now be closed, but Spell Blanket gives us one last generous peephole glimpse into its immense, singular beauty. | 2024-05-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 8, 2024 | 8.5 | 9533641f-9380-47c8-8b1c-2f49418501ea | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The cheesy new age sounds on this obscure album from 1988, discovered by a YouTube algorithm and recently reissued, have become a touchstone for producers because of their intense irony and nostalgia. | The cheesy new age sounds on this obscure album from 1988, discovered by a YouTube algorithm and recently reissued, have become a touchstone for producers because of their intense irony and nostalgia. | Software: Digital-Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23086-digital-dance/ | Digital-Dance | There’s a form of listening and musical discovery that’s familiar to anyone who uses YouTube on a regular basis. Find a song you like, press play, free your hands from the wheel, and let the website’s algorithm lead you from video to video. It’s how George Clanton, and many others like him, discovered Software, a little known German electronic duo from the late 1980s. Clanton, the co-founder of the label 100% Electronica, came upon Software’s song “Island Sunrise” during a YouTube listening session a few years back, and was gobsmacked.
“Island Sunrise” is the overwhelmingly relaxing centerpiece song of Software’s 1988 album Digital-Dance. It starts with the sounds of waves gently breaking along a shoreline, and then seconds later it opens up, and bubbles of synthesizer chords and saccharine MIDI strings color the track in warm pastels. It’s a sensorial feast, but it’s also overly serious to the point of being a little goofy. It is, without a doubt, a song that evokes all the beautiful and tired images we have of the beach, all with sounds that seem stock and generic. It’s easy to hear why Clanton was so taken with it—“Island Sunrise” is immediately strange and old fashioned, a dusty time capsule from a bygone era.
Software was composed of the artist Michael Weisser and the musician Peter Mergener. From 1985-1998, the duo produced over thirty releases for Klaus Schulze (of Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream) and Michael Haentjes’ experimental label Innovative Communication, each displaying a consistent aesthetic vision. Their albums bore this specific kind of psychedelic digital art—part collage, part M.S. Paint tomfoolery—that in years since, has become the palette for niche electronic music. Their sound, which changes slightly to fit the world they want to create in their music, is synth-driven new age that also pulled from the campy tropes of late-’80s pop. Apparently, Weisser and Mergener’s musical identity was inspired by a science fiction novel the former wrote where in the future “music [was] created by computer-based laser stimulation of protozoans.” As Weisser has said, each of the albums they created was an attempt at creating “new sound-galaxies,” and to him, what they did wasn’t actually music, but something more aspirational, like fine art.
The music found on Digital-Dance is in line with Weisser and Mergener’s artistic goals, incredibly opulent—almost hifalutin. Made up of seven tracks (plus two bonus songs) that stretch out across an hour, Digital-Dance contains songs that sound like the ill-begotten lovechild of Barry Manilow’s tropical easy listening and John Carpenter’s sci-fi synths. Opening track “Oceans Breath” is supposed to set the scene for the album—seagulls croaking overhead, breeze in the background. Then plinks of vibraphone and windchime come in right before a blaring saxophone solidifies the tone. Like cotton candy, the sensation is sweet but instantly fleeting.
Saxophones are a constant on Digital-Dance, but they hew closer to Kenny G. than Sonny Rollins. Elsewhere, on songs like “Waving Voices” or “Magnificent Shore,” hair metal guitar solos and overblown percussion recall all the pumped-up drama of a Phil Collins track. Even the album’s best song, “Island Sunrise,” can, after several listens, feel like soundtrack music for a beachside action movie watched out of boredom on a pirated feed of Cinemax.
Yet the album seems purposefully contrived and generic: In order to create the world of the “beach,” Weisser and Mergener had to pull from the crudest and most direct musical metaphors for that environment. It’s why this is an album laden with laid-back synths, stock sound effects, and all manner of cheesy instrumentals. As music made specifically for conjuring up a mood—it’s extremely effective. Digital-Dance has become a touchstone for micro-genres like vaporwave (a scene of which George Clanton is part of), and part of that comes from how these songs feel both intensely ironic and nostalgic under a new light.
Why Digital-Dance became the magnum opus of their discography is, of course, pure coincidence. In fact, Digital-Dance’s latter-day prominence is less a story about how timeless Weisser and Mergener’s music is (it isn’t), but how YouTube has helped saved them from the dustbin of history. The video Clanton found was uploaded just a little earlier by the musician Ryan M Todd, who in turn discovered Software’s “Island Sunrise” on a mixtape he received from Dâm-Funk called Chart Toppers. Todd uploaded the video because of the scarcity of Software’s music at the time, and Dâm-Funk, keen to this scarcity before Todd, found *Digital-Dance *during a vinyl shopping spree in Berlin with his Stones Throw labelmates in 2008.
Through both serendipity and YouTube’s algorithm, Clanton and others found Software, as a result of Todd and Dâm-Funk’s interaction. Even if Software’s music found itself on YouTube through some luck, they’ve become famous because of how attenuated their songs are to a sense of escapism. Like the much maligned new age records of the ’70s, which are now in vogue again, the “tropical” ambient of Software can feel new just by virtue of how old it sounds. They weren’t original or innovative (Harumi Hosono and Midori Takada made “beach” records of their own years earlier), but the songs make you want to make you kick your feet up, and imagine yourself a world away. | 2017-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 100% Electronica | April 27, 2017 | 6.5 | 953ae010-0e4b-4834-a878-6000ba2d9081 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On their fourth album together, Xiu Xiu and Larsen create a sense of cinematic whimsy anchored around a mythological creature who helps with household chores. | On their fourth album together, Xiu Xiu and Larsen create a sense of cinematic whimsy anchored around a mythological creature who helps with household chores. | XXL: Puff O’Gigio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xxl-puff-ogigio/ | Puff O’Gigio | Xiu Xiu and Larsen, or XXL, lace their bruising collaborative music with a prankster’s humor. For two decades, Xiu Xiu founder Jamie Stewart has added a sly silliness to his noise-pop Petri dishes of human brutality, once rhyming “vigorous” with “pig-orous.” The scuzzed-up post-rock of Italian four-piece Larsen, meanwhile, skews outré. They once recorded a whole album with Swans’ Michael Gira while shrouded by a dark screen, while 2016’s breathtaking Of Grog Vim used instrumentals to frame the narrative of the supposed visionary for which it was named.
XXL’s largely instrumental fourth album, Puff O’Gigio, is a clash of experimental tics and post-punk throb, pulling the outlandish tendencies of both bands into vivid widescreen frames. In the past, XXL’s three albums split the difference between Larsen’s hypnagogic soundscapes and Xiu Xiu’s overblown melodies, with bright hooks that could sometimes pass for Stewart’s own darkened pop. Recorded in one week during December 2016 in Turin, Puff O’Gigio gathers these impulses with a more even-handed approach. Now 13 years since their debut together, Ciautistico!, XXL has reached a new crest of collaborative motion.
Puff O’Gigio thrives on a cinematic sense of whimsy, telegraphed by the album’s titular figure—“a mythological, genetically modified character” that they say is a chimera of the Italian translation of Smurf and Ed Sullivan’s mouse marionette, Topo Gigio. XXL suggest these 11 tracks inhabit “the same colorful, intersectional world as the character,” but that underplays this album’s boundless sense of scale; Puff O’Gigio is only the steward at the threshold of some bright, bleeding fantastical realm.
At moments, this album teems with sun-guzzling optimism. The exploratory “Welcome to My Planet,” for instance, opens with a haunting high pitch before a flurry of bleeps announces a hypnotic guitar pattern, a ruckus of chatter, and a nonsense melody from Larsen’s Paolo Dellapiana. Conjuring Thom Yorke’s deepest trances, the effect is oddly serene. “Ghost Maid” delivers punch-the-air joy, with kaleidoscopic synths shooting through a vortex of bass. Larsen’s Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo offers a spoken-word ode to a benevolent ghost who helps with household chores—presumably, Puff O’Gigio itself. His words pierce the veil with emotion: “There is no way to embrace you/There is no way to feel you when you land on my fingertip.” This love song to an imagined creature hits you unexpectedly, evoking a deep yearning for human connection.
With its looming soundscapes and twitch-inducing rattles, Puff O’Gigio sometimes feels like an uneasy phantasmagoria or the exploration of some alien landscape where unseen nasties lurk in the dark. “Polar Bear Boogie Part 01” plays up the eeriness with droning electric guitars that recall Six Organs of Admittance, while the seesaw of carnivalesque synths and low-end rumble during “Queen of Koalas” envelops you like quicksand. Most sinister of all is the minimalist shadowplay of “To Carol Rama,” a Stewart-led horror that recalls Shirley Jackson’s nightmare-inducing tale, “The Lottery.” “Why curse Satan as the cause of all of your troubles?” Stewart whispers grimly through vocals layered with wraith-like hiss.
As it plays off a sense of wonder and a creeping notion of menace, Puff O’Gigio feels like it’s always shifting beneath you, a sense captured by an album cover that could be a satellite view of some unknown geographical formation or a distorted image of an earlobe. It’s an apt fit for a record where frequencies oscillate with a sense of embryonic discovery; by embracing the fantastical, XXL find a new frequency of their own. | 2018-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bad Paintings | December 13, 2018 | 7.5 | 953dffdf-19c1-4609-80e6-775b2e9c267c | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
To tour Son Lux’s previous full-length, Lanterns, Ryan Lott put together a three-piece band that included guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The avant-pop trio parlayed their onstage chemistry into Bones, which also features vocal contributions from Moses Sumney, and others. But becoming a real-deal group hasn’t radically changed the project. | To tour Son Lux’s previous full-length, Lanterns, Ryan Lott put together a three-piece band that included guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The avant-pop trio parlayed their onstage chemistry into Bones, which also features vocal contributions from Moses Sumney, and others. But becoming a real-deal group hasn’t radically changed the project. | Son Lux: Bones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20687-bones/ | Bones | It’s almost misleading to say that Bones is the first full-band Son Lux album. Ryan Lott—the film- and dance-score composer, former ad-music man, and mastermind of Son Lux since the 2008 release of At War with Walls & Mazes—has never been one to go it alone. He’s a constant collaborator, whether it be with Lorde, Boots, Shara Worden of My Brighest Diamond, or teaming up with Sufjan Stevens and rapper Serengeti for Sisyphus. To tour the material from Son Lux’s previous full-length, Lanterns, Lott put together a three-piece band that included guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang, and the trio parlayed their onstage chemistry into recording sessions for Bones.
Becoming a real-deal band hasn’t radically changed Son Lux. Lott’s vocals are still unmistakeable in their brittle breathiness, and the songs still come across like the multi-layered electronic manifestations of a classically trained pianist who studied composition in college but can’t suppress his inner beatmaker. But the collaboration with Bhatia and Chang—not to mention vocal contributions from Moses Sumney, DM Stith, Hanna Benn, Holychild’s Liz Nistico, Daughter’s Elena Tonra and others—perceptibly aerates the Son Lux sound. Lott has a tendency to pile his influences in a way that can sometimes feel suffocating, like confetti crammed into a party popper, and on Bones, his bandmates pulled the string while also adding their own crinkled strips of color to the explosion. It’s not unlike the way Dirty Projectors are unmistakably Dave Longstreth’s project, but his talented bandmates are crucial to presenting his vision.
It tends to be the words that trip up Lott. He rarely writes traditionally structured songs, and he tends to go the mantra route with the words, to varying degrees of success. On Bones, though, the questions he poses have never been more pertinent. “Are we now what we’ll be? Are we fixed or free?” he asks on “Flight.” Bones is obsessed with exploring whether we can change our station and how or when to sound the alarm. There’s an undercurrent of class warfare and oppression, but Bones is not a protest album. These aren’t Occupy anthems or the soundtrack to protests in Ferguson or Charleston. Lott isn’t railing against a specific tragedy. It’s more general, and it can apply to your issue of choice. Lott merely realizes that it’s time to start railing.
Bones soundtracks those moments or days or months or years when it feels like something isn’t right, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep it all at arm’s length. Even for someone whom Lott calls “the most fortunate one,” it’s hard to stare at injustice, abuse, oppression, or just plain-old apathy and not be stirred to action—or, rather, stirred to thinking about action. Because that’s the emotion this album captures—that moment in between ignorance and action, when you know you should do something, and you just might.
“Am I the only one? Where are the others?” Lott sings, then concludes “I am the others.” It feels like things are about to get real. “We have the lungs and we have the air to shout,” he says, “...but we don’t.” It’s a downer, and it gets worse on “White Lies”, which starts soft and pretty despite ominous lyrics (“They take hold of our young/ They cut out our tongue”), then turns into a dark, industrial rave for the last minute. Given Lott’s film-scoring background, it’s easy to imagine the song’s coda soundtracking a scene set in a stroboscopic club from some tyrannical, dystopian future. And yet Son Lux hasn’t given up. “Your Day Will Come” lyrically reprises the opening track: “Close your eyes/ Swallow the sun/ You have only just begun.” Darkness may cover the outside world, but inside, hope is brewing.
Son Lux’s avant-pop has always leaned more heavily on avant than pop, and Bones is probably too skittery for a breakout commercial hit (though “Change is Everything” could be a dark horse). Given the album’s staccato beats, bronchitis vocals, strings that may not be strings, flutes that probably aren’t flutes, unexpected blasts of horn-like sounds that couldn’t possibly be horns, it’s not an album you can sing along to from front to back, and given the subject matter, it probably shouldn’t be. Sometimes knowing that you’re about to sing is enough. | 2015-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Glassnote | June 23, 2015 | 7.2 | 953fbc68-fb58-4875-8f6f-cfba9769ec9f | Joel Oliphint | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joel-oliphint/ | null |
The legendary jazz pianist’s 1968 concert at Palo Alto High School, recorded by a janitor and shelved for decades, captures some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of his quartet’s core repertoire. | The legendary jazz pianist’s 1968 concert at Palo Alto High School, recorded by a janitor and shelved for decades, captures some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of his quartet’s core repertoire. | Thelonious Monk: Palo Alto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thelonious-monk-palo-alto/ | Palo Alto | Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, people hadn’t just gotten around to his oblong, minimalist take on jazz—they’d left it behind. After decades of toiling in New York’s clubs to little outside recognition, Monk had briefly tasted superstardom, culminating in a 1964 Time magazine cover. Less than half a decade later, he’d slipped to No. 6 on DownBeat’s International Critics Poll ranking jazz’s best pianists, and writers routinely dismissed his playing as stale and uninspired. Still, he was Thelonious Sphere Monk: If he was no longer weird, and no longer a superstar, he was still a legend. A legend who couldn’t afford to miss a $500 payday at a high school.
The live album Palo Alto is a grainy snapshot of Monk and his classic quartet taking a break from their two-week stand at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop to cut loose and get paid. But just as Monk’s music was characterized by the power of its empty spaces—he’s the person who said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s those you leave out,” a chestnut as well-worn as any of his songs—Palo Alto’s thrills are made poignant by what was happening in his life unbeknownst to the audience, and what was happening in their life unbeknownst to Monk. This is exuberant, abundant music, made by and performed for people whose lives often felt anything but.
Monk was in debt to the IRS. His wife, Nellie, took ill, then Monk did, too. A seizure in May of 1968 put him in a coma that caused him to miss several recording dates; his label, Columbia, charged him for the studio time. He needed every dollar he could earn, and Columbia’s lack of faith in his artistic vision wasn’t helping. At the time of the Palo Alto concert, his most recent album was Underground, which the label had tried to sell to the hippie crowd with a cover photo that portrayed Monk as a French liberation fighter hiding out in a Paris attic, where he could bang away at his keyboard and kick some Nazi ass in private. This did not work.
While they were admittedly disinterested in the electric soundscapes labelmate Miles Davis would begin exploring by year’s end, Monk’s quartet showed up to Paly ready to boogie. They run roughshod through “Well, You Needn’t,” a Monk composition from 1944 that was by then a standard of his sets. Though it was typically a vehicle for some of his most wobbly improvisations, here it’s played with the heavy hip-shaking shuffle of an early R&B song. The quartet takes it at a dead sprint, lapping the version they’d laid down a few years earlier on Misterioso. Monk pushes saxophonist Charlie Rouse throughout the latter’s solo, jabbing with two-note chords like he’s testing for Rouse’s most vulnerable spots; the tenor responds with a rippling line that he staples to the piano’s bumpy contours. When it’s time for Monk to take the spotlight, he dissolves the song’s theme and goes to work moving around its component parts, his fluid runs set against a supremely funky bassline from Larry Gales, who later upstages his boss with a bowed-bass solo that sketches circles around the hard core of Monk’s playing. By the time they pounce on “Blue Monk,” they’re practically splitting the difference between Fats Waller and Fats Domino. Not hip references for 1968, sure, but the thumping power of these songs suggests that the quartet was fully capable of matching the pulse and drive of the era’s heaviest groups without sacrificing the musical complexity around which Monk built his songs.
Even the quieter numbers demonstrate the physicality of Monk’s playing as much as its intricacy. The recording captures the persistent squeak of his chair as he navigates a subtly cubist rendition of the standard “Don’t Blame Me.” One of the school’s janitors recorded the concert, asking only that he be allowed to tune Monk’s piano in exchange, and his rudimentary recording captures incredible details: Gales cheerfully singing along to his own solo in “Well, You Needn’t,” Monk’s foot tapping out the beat in “Don’t Blame Me.” The tape gathered dust in the 50-plus years it spent in the private collection of Danny Scher, the Paly student who booked the concert despite being all of 16 years old, and the fidelity is understandably low.
Crucially, the tape captures the response of a rapt crowd. Scher had promoted the concert heavily in East Palo Alto, a largely Black community located just across the Bayshore Freeway from tony Palo Alto. An unincorporated area with no means for self-governance, East Palo Alto was gutted when nearly half of its small businesses were razed to make way for the freeway in 1955, while land grabs by neighboring Menlo Park and Palo Alto itself robbed it of crucial property taxes. Still, the citizens of East Palo Alto resolutely pursued Black empowerment. The town played host to a national Black Power conference featuring Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver in September of 1968, and ads for Monk’s show at Paly hung near posters promoting an initiative to rename the town Nairobi (the vote would be held mere days after the concert, failing by a two-to-one margin). East Palo Altans were understandably suspicious when a white teenager came around promising an appearance by a titan of bebop. Many didn’t buy their tickets until they saw Monk and the band roll into the school’s parking lot in Scher’s brother’s car.
Monk was a supporter of the civil rights movement, and his biographer Robin D.G. Kelley suspects that he may have worried that simply playing benefits for CORE and SNCC wasn’t doing enough for the cause. In 1963, he told a French reporter that, while he viewed himself primarily as an American, that didn’t “prevent me from being aware of all the progress that still needs to be made,” adding, “I know my music can help bring people together, and that’s what is important.”
That afternoon in Palo Alto, Monk did precisely that. As Kelley writes in his definitive biography, “[Black] and white kids from both Palo Altos” showed up at the gig, and they made their voices heard. They cheer as the band winds its way into the ending of “Blue Monk” and the quartet launches into a set-closing “Epistrophy.”
“We used to talk about how the birds can do these extraordinary maneuvers where they’ll all change the formation, something that even airline pilots couldn’t do,” French horn player David Amram once recalled of his time with Monk, and in the final moments of the song, the band takes to the sky, weaving around one another in double-time staccato bursts, Ben Riley’s cymbals glowing like a California sunset. This is not the graceful latticework and tempo-shifting they displayed at the Jazz Workshop; it’s a strafing. When Monk finally sets the song down, the crowd whistles its delight. It seems unlikely that Monk and his quartet would have known about what was happening in East Palo Alto, but they’ve clearly been buoyed by the crowd’s youthful energy, and they deliver some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of their core repertoire in response.
The notion that a great concert can end racism—or affect any kind of meaningful social change—is a convenient myth. Monk’s concert at Palo Alto High School didn’t change the fortune of East Palo Alto any more definitively than the $500 changed Monk’s own financial situation. But by offering a temporary escape from their respective grinds, it gave the artist and his audience a chance to catch their breath, shake themselves free, and revel in the sound of one of jazz’s greatest-ever combos simply enjoying themselves. As the applause rains down following “I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” Monk speaks for the first time all afternoon. “We got to hurry back to get to work,” he says. “You dig?” For him, it’s an explanation; for the crowd, it’s an exhortation.
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. | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | October 1, 2020 | 9.1 | 954b1a4a-7200-4e88-9eac-e3e99578db44 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The Canadian electronic musician’s globe-trotting work mingles the familiar and the strange, mixing colorful influences from around the world and somehow landing close to trip-hop. | The Canadian electronic musician’s globe-trotting work mingles the familiar and the strange, mixing colorful influences from around the world and somehow landing close to trip-hop. | RAMZi: Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ramzi-multiquest-niveau-1-camoufle/ | Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé | Unsettling and alluring in equal measure, RAMZi’s Phobiza series was a kind of imaginary travelogue, its title an apparent portmanteau of “phobia” and “Ibiza.” Across the course of three releases, the Canadian electronic musician mapped out an archipelago of fantasy islands and forgotten languages—a mingling of the tawdry and the exotic where bird calls, chintzy synths, and garbled voices tangled like overgrown vines. The sleeves, emblazoned with bizarre flora and fauna, were styled to resemble artifacts of 20th century ethnomusicology, and the music offered a correspondingly global web of references: oddly tuned flutes, indistinct radio chatter, and the splintered rhythms of dembow, kwaito, and footwork. If you’ve ever lain awake in a strange country, jetlagged and listening through thin walls to the sounds of a nearby market square, then you already know the sensation.
RAMZi, aka Phoebé Guillemot, is working with similar materials on Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé, but the new material sounds like she’s turned a corner. Guillemot has always been considerably more invested in rhythm and groove than peers like Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Visible Cloaks, who have taken a shared interest in globe-trotting to more atmospheric ends, and Multiquest Niveau 1 is her most rhythm-centric release. Where previous records seemed to be on the verge of dissolving into the muggy night air, the new album puts its drums front and center, leaning into muscular syncopations, slow-motion breakbeats, and, on more than one occasion, deep house.
“Muskin” opens the album as though pushing through a beaded curtain into a dimly lit watering hole; saxophone riffs curl like smoke against a meditative backdrop of bells and Rhodes keys. But at barely a minute and a half long, it’s also something of a fake-out, and with the following track, “Kombat,” RAMZi plunges into the kind of propulsive cut that constitutes the bulk of the album: a bass-heavy dub groove covered in acidic synths, vaguely non-Western scales, and the occasional outburst of police sirens.
The song strikes Guillemot’s customary balance between familiarity and strangeness, and the rest of the album follows suit. On the surface, the deep-house drums and buoyant synth pads of tracks like “Balmi” and “La nuit l'été 1996” sound conventional, with echoes of Mr. Fingers. But her habit of collaging mismatched chords and samples creates weird, murky pockets of dissonance, and even the most straightforward tracks are suffused in chipmunk chirps and molasses-thick baritone vocals, pitched on each end well beyond the limits of intelligibility.
But the most unexpected influence is a far more pedestrian one: trip-hop. The album is shot through with distant echoes of acts like Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation, and other period purveyors of satiny aspirationalism and frequent-flyer beats, from the sitar and vibraphones of “Rubicon” to laid-back cadences that are just a stone’s throw from a Café del Mar compilation. Trip-hop, synonymous with early-’90s electronic music, is a funny case: It’s never really had a proper reappraisal. From personal conversations I’ve had over the past five years, I know that there’s no shortage of left-field electronic musicians interested in dusting off classic trip-hop and trying to make something new with it—something that resonates with the uncanny feel that distinguished, say, Portishead’s Dummy upon its arrival, more than a quarter century ago. Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé might be the album that finally recognizes the latent experimental potential in that most misunderstood of genres—and makes the easy-listening doldrums of “chill” safe once again for aberrant behavior.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | FATi | January 10, 2020 | 7.4 | 95510252-5768-4b94-9a43-ac66e75342e9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The L.A. singer and rapper offers a fun-forward deluxe mixtape that exudes color and energy, pinballing between personas and styles. | The L.A. singer and rapper offers a fun-forward deluxe mixtape that exudes color and energy, pinballing between personas and styles. | Kari Faux: Lowkey Superstar Deluxe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kari-faux-lowkey-superstar-deluxe/ | Lowkey Superstar Deluxe | Kari Faux’s music prizes self-possession. The time-wasters (“No Small Talk”), scrubs (“Lie 2 My Face),” and social media hucksters (“On the Internet”) who haunt her songs aren’t just pests—they’re rudderless and confused, unsure of who they are and what they want. Kari can’t relate. Her mixtape Lowkey Superstar gushes with easy confidence, her rapping and singing playful and nonchalant. The deluxe edition brings some guests into her self-assured world.
The original mixtape was born from a trip to London, where Kari bonded with producer Danio through a shared commitment to improvisation and a mutual love of DOOM. Kari has described those sessions as a restorative time that helped her move past the confessional and probing mode of 2019’s Cry 4 Help EP. “This new music is really fun and I’m a fun person,” she said in an interview. “I’m not a sad girl.” In three weeks, they recorded and finished an album and laid the groundwork for what became Lowkey Superstar.
Produced in full by Danio, the fun-forward mixtape exudes color and energy, pinballing between personas and styles. On “StickUP!” Kari chases unpaid invoices with exaggerated bloodthirst. “Stickup, bitch!” she ad-libs, sounding more excited to intimidate her debtors than collect the loot. She raps in a menacing whisper on “While God Was Sleeping,” riding the guitar loop with a metered double-time flow straight from Memphis, a connection underscored by the song’s horrorcore tale of “sex magic.”
Kari sounds everything but strained, her writing and performances lively yet effortless. In 38 seconds, “Skit” swings from resignation (“Uphill battle against patriarchy with a plastic knife/That’ll probably be the synopsis of my fucking life”) to pointed insults and delirious sex jokes. And it’s just the prelude to “McGrady,” which channels Tracy McGrady’s slick handles as well as the swaggering rap of Houston, where he spent six NBA seasons. Her nonplussed delivery carries the track, inspired by Kari’s escape from a love triangle. “I had to shake a nigga like McGrady with the Rockets,” she sings breezily, like she’s just completed the world’s most mundane chore. The self-deprecation in the tape’s title is winking; she’s emboldened by her dim spotlight.
The deluxe’s guests, remixes, and additional songs nearly double the short tape’s length, but it feels fuller rather than padded, more unruly, and entropic. After a spirited Smino verse, “Mo ‘Liquor” shifts into a Miami bass breakdown that turns the song into a void of low end, snare, and chants. It feels like a Freaknik block party has blipped through a wormhole. “Too Much, Too Fast” also features a spry transition, morphing into a slick electro-funk groove toward the end. “Slow down, bitch!” Kari shouts, following that instruction by bursting into indulgent crooning.
Kari’s singing can be a liability. Her sung verses on “Actors, Rappers & Wrestlers” and “Rapunzel” lack the charge and grace of her rapping. She’s far more skilled at using melodies to vary her flows than to belt outright or sustain a note. Her best songs leverage the litheness of her voice, using its soft timbre to wind into punchlines or flutter into nervous streams of thought. That use of melody as a vehicle for style as well as expression is an asset in an era where rappers often sing just to emote and singers often rap just to flex. Luckily, Lowkey Superstar centers her animated rapping, celebrating, in its low-key way, the quiet freedom of anonymity.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Don Giovanni | September 28, 2021 | 7.5 | 95531724-4a4c-4fcd-89c1-7d47a0ec8246 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The renowned composer-- no stranger to topical music, from the early "Come Out", which explored violence and race, to works since on cloning and the atomic bomb-- here creates a piece inspired by the life and interests of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was brutally murdered by terrorists in 2002. | The renowned composer-- no stranger to topical music, from the early "Come Out", which explored violence and race, to works since on cloning and the atomic bomb-- here creates a piece inspired by the life and interests of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was brutally murdered by terrorists in 2002. | Steve Reich: Daniel Variations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12053-daniel-variations/ | Daniel Variations | Daniel Pearl, the South Asia Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and subsequently beheaded in January 2002 by a group of Pakistani terrorists later linked to the September 11 attacks. That's the headline, but Pearl, like anyone, was more than a few facts printed on some newsreel: Born in New Jersey and raised in California, Pearl was the son of a UCLA professor, Judea, and a mother of Iraqi Jewish descent, Ruth. He was a passionate musician and listener, playing jazz and bluegrass fiddle, buying records by Miles Davis and Antonín Dvořák, and quoting at least one song title by bebop violinist Stuff Smith in casual conversation. In 1994, he wrote a story about a Stradivarius violin, the "Duke of Alcantara", that someone purportedly found at a freeway on-ramp in Los Angeles.
Steve Reich, considered to be one of the four major minimalists in American music, is best known for his 20th-century classical innovations with phases, processes, counterpoints, and pulses. That's the synopsis, but Reich, like most any musician worth your time, means more than four techniques spread over four decades. Born in New York, Reich is the son of a Jewish father, Leonard, and a mother, June, who sang in and wrote lyrics for Broadway musicals. After his album Music for 18 Musicians became a relative commercial success, he met his wife, video artist Beryl Korot, with whom he visited Israel. They later explored shared Jewish and Muslim ancestries in a work called The Cave, and much of Reich's work has mined similar personal interests. The politics of the day have never been far behind, either. One of Reich's most famous pieces, "Come Out", sampled the voice of a boy who had to squeeze the blood from the blue bruises on his black skin so cops would believe he'd been beaten during 1964 Harlem riots. Reich's compositions have since explored cloning and the atomic bomb.
Reich and Pearl's parallel paths meet in Daniel Variations: Conceived after a conversation between Pearl's father and Reich and commissioned in part by the Daniel Pearl Foundation, "which is dedicated to cross-cultural understanding and music," Daniel Variations is the latest in a long line of Reich pieces to combine massed voices and meticulous instrumentation. Sections one and three use lines from a conversation between Nebuchadnezzar the Great-- a Babylonian ruler who, according to Jewish and Christian texts, destroyed Jerusalem-- and Daniel, who became his adviser. "I saw a dream. Images upon my bed and visions in my head frightened me," Nebuchadnezzar told Daniel. Those sentences are repeated three times in Reich's recasting, and their orderly presentation by the 12-voice Los Angeles Master Chorale splits and stacks the syllables like the square stones of menacing palatial walls. Four minor chords-- pounded in pulses by pianos but stretched into tense suspensions by a string quartet-- offer the sense that the horizon beyond those walls will fold in, the staggered rhythms indicative of a steady tumble of troubles.
Quotes from Pearl serve as Reich's fodder for the piece's triumphant even sections, two and four: Reich employees the same instruments, but he lets the violin lead many of the turns as a tribute to Pearl's own enthusiasms. This time, four major chords bounce off of one another, countering the darkness of their counterparts, even as the chorale sings one of the final sentences Pearl spoke before being beheaded on video: "My name is Daniel Pearl." In the final and longest of the sections, the chorale presents a variation on a Stuff Smith song title, "I Hope Gabriel Likes My Music". When questioned about his belief in the afterlife, Pearl once replied with that title. "I sure hope Daniel likes my music, when the day is done," the text reads here, Pearl's words augmented by Reich. The music's bounce is at first relentless, the pianos flashing quickly as the strings flit in romantic figures overhead. Gradually, it all slows, letting the liminal message-- a musician quotes a journalist, who once quoted another musician-- settle like a luminous cloud: When you're gone, will the universe approve of your contribution?
That said, the most intriguing component of Daniel Variations is its reminder that what's often made Reich so daring is the humanist blood pumping into his scientifically executed forms. Daniel Variations doesn't eclipse Reich's past vocal works, and its message isn't one of courage, as some have suggested, as much as it is one of solidarity. Light versus dark, you know? It's smartly built and perfectly played, just like the record's second half, the instrumental dance "Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings". Rhythmically and melodically, it's classic, resplendent Reich, but he's made these sounds with more vigor. Both pieces, then, are interesting without being essential, constituting the sort of record that-- thanks to the context of Pearl and Reich-- will be remembered but never mistaken as a masterwork from the composer The New Yorker once called "the most original musical thinker of our time." | 2008-08-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | August 6, 2008 | 6.2 | 95542091-2624-46b5-845c-d24ba19ed133 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
A pioneer of what he once termed “weightless” bass music moves toward the outer fringes of club aesthetics on an album imbued with the apocalyptic overtones of sci-fi and speculative fiction. | A pioneer of what he once termed “weightless” bass music moves toward the outer fringes of club aesthetics on an album imbued with the apocalyptic overtones of sci-fi and speculative fiction. | Logos: Imperial Flood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logos-imperial-flood/ | Imperial Flood | It stretches the imagination to conceive of an album like Logos’ Imperial Flood as something borne out of dance music. Cold Mission, the London producer’s well-loved 2013 debut, hewed a little closer to those origins, luxuriating in the shattered glass and deep bass of its grime and dubstep influences. In subsequent collaborations with Mumdance, with whom Logos, aka James Parker, runs the label Different Circles, this approach was bestowed the term “weightless”: a sublimation of dance-music signifiers into something greater than the sum of its parts—that is, something that fights past a tendency to think about this music primarily in terms of genre pastiche.
Imperial Flood has been in the works since 2015, and it is the sort of cavernous and elegant record that one imagines could only be the product of quiet deliberation. In a sense it feels weightless, streamlined to the point of near-austerity; it reaches for something elemental to the strains of dance music that Simon Reynolds has dubbed the hardcore continuum and lets that unfold without troubling itself with dancing bodies or the excess fuzz of nostalgia. In another sense it’s heavy to the point of exhaustion, its nine tracks cohering into a thundering drama that concerns place and landscape and the faltering tropes—namely, sci-fi and speculative fiction—we deploy to explain to ourselves where we are at this odd moment on Earth.
The shudder is Imperial Flood’s dominant trope; its opening track, “Arrival (T2 Mix),” stitches together cinematic stretches of ambience with condensed flickers of anxious energy, one thing recoiling while something else unfurls. “Marsh Lantern” is marked by the same flickering quality, but melody recedes behind distant, otherworldly rumblings (something that could almost be human conversation, fed through a metallic filter) cut through with shards of silence. The quiet is what gives this album its intensity, its heaviness. The static-laced passages that lead throughout “Flash Forward (Ambi Mix)” and “Lighthouse Dub” become more electric, and subsequently more threatening, in the absence of sounds that could crowd and ground them. Even the lone full-fledged dance track, “Zoned In,” a collaboration with Mumdance, is a bare-bones acid-ish workout whose hyperactive euphorics are nonetheless concentrated, serious.
You don’t need narrative to get close to these tracks, but structurally, they unfold in a way that suggests half-sketches of stories, could-be characters crawling somewhere in the shadows. Parker has given a handful of literary references that informed the making of the album, including J.G. Ballard and the American eco-sci-fi novelist Jeff Vandermeer. In Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, the boundaries of the “thing” that threatens humanity shift in ways that evade human knowledge and perception. Nature acts differently, but it’s still nature, sort of; horror arrives ambivalent. Some of the scarier moments on Imperial Flood are those that seem to mimic the sounds of our world: birds cawing on “Omega Point,” a vaguely insect-like chatter on “Weather System Over Plaistow.” Abstract synthetic pathos, like that of “Stentorian,” a cathartic stunner near the album’s close, arrives as a relief.
It would be fair to say that Logos is picking up a torch of some kind from Burial; Parker’s music is soaked through with feeling in a way that is linked to an acute sense of place. The shift we hear is one from melancholy realism—bleary sketches of an urban predawn—into a world where it’s hard to see or hear where we’re located without drawing on sci-fi tropes of some kind. Anxiety about the imminent dark future seems to have made it even more difficult to represent the present as “real”; meanwhile, it’s curious that these big contemporary narratives have become fixed to certain strains of future-leaning dance music. It might be a condition of UK dance music in the wake of the late critic Mark Fisher’s era-defining writings, which encouraged listeners to make deeper meanings from rave culture and its offshoots. Or maybe it’s that these rave-derived sounds—even if they’ve been condensed, reworked, and obfuscated—still hold traces of the bodies they were originally engineered to make move, so when Parker gives us these carefully rendered places, we can feel them intensely, with fear but at least not alone. | 2019-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Different Circles | April 16, 2019 | 7.7 | 9555bea0-bc46-494b-a417-fe6c9af78338 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
After years of mixtapes, erstwhile Odd Future rapper and MellowHype MC releases his debut album. He sounds completely unmoored, stuck somewhere between punchline rapper, storyteller, and moralist. | After years of mixtapes, erstwhile Odd Future rapper and MellowHype MC releases his debut album. He sounds completely unmoored, stuck somewhere between punchline rapper, storyteller, and moralist. | Hodgy: Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22678-fireplace-thenottheotherside/ | Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide | Technically, Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide is the debut solo album from Hodgy (née Beats). The Odd Future co-founder has been in the public eye, however, for over half a decade. He’s released six solo mixtapes and EPs, five projects with MellowHype, MellowHigh, and been prominently featured on all three OF group efforts—not to mention the “Sandwitches” verse that landed him on national TV. Still, there’s typically a reason why a rapper calls something an album after years of mixtapes. Even if the distinction is increasingly meaningless, as Drake and Chance the Rapper have both scored Grammy nominations off of releases they insist are “mixtapes,” the implication remains that the “album” is a statement piece. In addition, going solo allows an artist to explore sounds and themes that may not fit into a group’s more established aesthetic—even if Hodgy was the lone MC in MellowHype. In both regards, Hodgy offers nothing new on Fireplace, and brings into question what he offers as an artist with MellowHype dormant and the more powerful collective dissolved.
Right off the bat, Hodgy struggles to distance himself from Odd Future. After a brief intro, the first rapper to deliver on the record is Salomon Faye. It’s a move that will instantly ring a bell for OF loyalists—the widest audience for a 2016 Hodgy release—as it’s the same one Earl Sweatshirt pulled on his own debut, Doris, when the shy and sly Sweatshirt let non-rapper SK La’ Flare open his comeback record in one last effort to delay his triumphant return from Samoa. Regardless of intent, Hodgy’s decision to wait his turn on “Kundalini” is a misfire, as he and Faye share tone, pace, and message, making them virtually indistinguishable. There is no contrast or aha moment, just confusion as to why Hodgy would not want to set the tone for his first real album.
Non-distinction plagues much of Fireplace. With MellowHype, Hodgy leaned on Left Brain to create the mood. With Left ensuring a consistent vibe, Hodgy was free to express himself with more creative lyrics that rarely explored much, but had great energy. Fireplace lacks any semblance of cohesion in production, which leads to a survey of generic rap beats that ranges from a Clams Casino copycat cut like “Resurrection” to the chopped-up soul of the Knxwledge-produced “Dreaminofthinkin,” which does not fit Hodgy. There is nothing to ground Hodgy on the record, and very few of the instrumentals catch the ear, despite collaborations with big names, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra, BADBADNOTGOOD, Knx, and 88-Keys.
Without interesting beats, or at least ones that fit a defined aesthetic, all that’s left is Hodgy’s lyrical ability. To start his career, Hodgy’s greatest asset was that he was not Tyler, the Creator. He could have fun while his comrades screamed vilely, but no longer are they rambunctious teens, and lines like “I’m just like Mike, Mike-WiLL, Miley Cyrus,” and “I’m observing like I’m the fly on the wall, nigga, Pink Floyd” are just bad. The latter is on a track with Busta Rhymes, who upstages Hodgy even while on cruise control, just by varying his flow and delivery.
Throughout Fireplace, Hodgy is stuck somewhere among being a punchline rapper, a storyteller, and a moralist. On “They Want,” he raps about institutional racism, and on the closing “DYSLM,” he fights to win back the mother of his son. Otherwise, he does not maintain a consistent message throughout a track, nor does he connect ideas throughout the album. On “Glory,” for example, he declares, “The brightest light my future,” but by “The Now,” he intones, “Don’t be waiting around, go get it time is now.” There are no developments between the two moments that indicate a change in perspective: They remain empty cliches.
The only discernible advancement on Fireplace is Hodgy’s continued growth as a singer. It’s a skill he began to flex in earnest on his 2016 mixtapes They Watchin Lofi Series 1 and Dukkha, and it’s quickly become his most pleasant trait. Unfortunately, although no fault of his own, he sounds exactly like Frank Ocean circa *Nostalgia, Ultra., *and the Odd Future connection certainly doesn’t help in distancing the two. Hodgy’s singing allows him to handle hook duties on his own, but it also amplifies how bad some of the rapping is (“I’ve learned that ball is life, and I’m the goalie” on “Laguna”), knowing he could do so much more with less just by using his own abilities.
Fireplace is not even Hodgy’s first release on a major label. MellowHype’s Numbers, MellowHigh, and The OF Tape Vol. 2 all came out on Odd Future’s Sony imprint; even BlackenedWhite got a reissue via Fat Possum. After six attempts and years after the collective’s cultural peak, it’s not clear what made Fireplace the project worth declaring Hodgy’s official debut. The record lacks consistent themes and any set of beliefs beyond scattered attempts at positivity. Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity. Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide does not give depth to Hodgy, does not answer why he’s any different now that he’s Beats-less, does not prove that he’s capable of carrying a project on his own. It’s disappointing, considering the potential he showed as a fiery young rapper, but that feeling is perhaps the same reason why Fireplace even exists. Hodgy is a rapper you once knew, and he’s still here for better, but mostly, for worse. | 2016-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Columbia | December 19, 2016 | 5 | 955b695e-55d6-4b4b-b801-de8719b3c473 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
New Zealand psych pop virtuoso Connan Mockasin's latest, Caramel, creates a stainless world that is both unsettling and fitting. Each new instrument seems to come out thick and globby, gradually dribbling out with an adult contemporary sheen. | New Zealand psych pop virtuoso Connan Mockasin's latest, Caramel, creates a stainless world that is both unsettling and fitting. Each new instrument seems to come out thick and globby, gradually dribbling out with an adult contemporary sheen. | Connan Mockasin: Caramel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18748-connan-mockasin-caramel/ | Caramel | "I liked the idea of making a record called Caramel," Connan Mockasin told NME. "Then I made the whole record around what I thought a record called Caramel would sound like." It might not be an especially deep concept, but take a listen: His Caramel sound quickly introduces itself. The album's title track begins with a deep voice, which is pitched down and smoothed out for a flirtatious monologue in the vein of Barry White. "Oh, and what is this?" Then, there's a coy giggle before Mockasin delivers a gentle, melodic howl ("ah-oooooo") over a soulful, beatific, far-away synth. "Welcome, this is Caramel album," the voice says. In a stereotypical universe, this is the moment where you're prompted to pick up the album's sleeve. Welcome. Take a moment to study Connan's platinum hair, pencil-thin mustache, and averted gaze. There he is, dressed all in white, swaddled in pillowy fabric. His stainless world is both unsettling and fitting; everything on "Caramel" shines. Each new instrument seems to come out thick and globby, gradually dribbling out with an adult contemporary sheen.
The 30-year-old New Zealand psych pop virtuoso recorded his sophomore album in a Tokyo hotel, and this time around, he's feeling sultry. He closes out the bridge of "I'm the Man, That Will Find You" by cooing a mostly unadorned falsetto. After one careening moment of calm, he moans and launches into the belted chorus with its slinky R&B groove. It's the perfect sort of pause to force anticipation in a love song—a calm before a storm, a gaze before a conversation. Throughout Caramel, he's ready to employ sonic examples of human emotion (like sobbing and moaning), and he doesn't make those details subtle. As he proved on Forever Dolphin Love, he's not afraid to go theatrical. Like a cartoon madman, he delivered a warbling, wide-eyed plea on that record: "Please turn me into the snat". The title track of that album featured over 10 minutes of cluttered, kinetic, continuously shifting music. Connan's clearly got it in him to create a sizable, at times unsteady odyssey.
Caramel is an album that demands patience. With a concept in mind, Mockasin seemed to be taking his time, playing the long game, establishing a gradually mutating mood. His broad view seems especially evident with his five-song "It's Your Body" suite—16 minutes with one abstract narrative wherein Connan forces the listener to slow down for a few lengthy slow jams. It takes over two full minutes of soporific minimalism to break into the primary melody of "It's Your Body 1". Then, things come to a standstill with the respectively loud and quiet (and equally stagnant) instrumentals on "3" and "4", which feel similar to the dragging mid-section of "Why Are You Crying". Thankfully, there are moments where Connan springboards into some well-executed, catchy grooves, like on "Do I Make You Feel Shy" and "I'm the Man, That Will Find You".
At the end of the "It's Your Body" suite, the melody resolves into that familiar beatific synth line from the title track. There's a petite voice repeating the words "thank you Connan Mockasin". The subsequent reply is loud, bursting out in that same voice from the title track: "Ahhhh. You're very welcome." The echo from that last word is intentionally overemphasized, ending with two very blunt repetitions: "COME. [beat] COME." Then, album closer "I Wanna Roll With You" kicks in with some cartoonishly sexual moans. It's tempting in that moment to nudge Connan toward the novelty bin, but he never quite makes it there. Instead, he occupies a similar space as Ariel Pink—a guy with offbeat sonic inclinations, a loudly absurd sense of humor, and a knack for writing ultra-weird soul songs. From the hair to the warped yacht rock soundscapes, comparisons to Ariel seem inevitable. Both men are weirdos and self-recorded savants whose careers will likely continue to take them to far-out, primary colored spaces.
When the moans clear away on "Roll With You", Connan delivers some quiet, mournful vocals (followed by, yes, a spoken word monologue where he says, innocently, "Please, roll with me"). The word "caramel" is most readily embodied by this music's sensual, flirtatious leanings. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems to just mean "slow", i.e. the pace of swimming through caramel. | 2013-11-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer / Because Music | November 11, 2013 | 6.7 | 95624c0e-02f6-46b9-ad6c-5afa31de8ae7 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
James Blake's follow-up to his breakthrough self-titled album incorporates more gospel and R&B elements and a wider variety of textures. He successfully splits the difference between the sultry bedroom vibes of R&B’s resurgent Quiet Storm moment and the more mundane life of a British “bedroom” artist. | James Blake's follow-up to his breakthrough self-titled album incorporates more gospel and R&B elements and a wider variety of textures. He successfully splits the difference between the sultry bedroom vibes of R&B’s resurgent Quiet Storm moment and the more mundane life of a British “bedroom” artist. | James Blake: Overgrown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17842-james-blake-overgrown/ | Overgrown | In a well-publicized late 2011 interview, James Blake drew his line in the sand on the Great Dubstep Debates. The boy who fell for the emotional resonance of bone-disintegrating sub-bass only after years of playing piano privately came out against the American version of guys like Skrillex (whom he couldn’t even be bothered naming). Such performers, Blake contended, appealed strictly to a “testosterone-driven, frat-boy market” that couldn’t be more different from the Feist-and-Joni covers and Bon Iver duets pouring out of the Londoner who’d just turned 23. Blake argued that his music was not only more egalitarian-- appealing to women and men equally-- but was also a purer representation of dubstep as an idea. It was a misrepresentation of American dubstep’s audiences and a presumptuous statement about What Women Want, sure, but at the same time, it was hard to fault Blake for forcefully trying to stake his claim to a patch of land within a genre broad enough to incorporate a rave resurgence and a brooding folkie.
Blake’s real argument for the continued relevance of his dewy, electronic gospel-folk comes via his second LP, Overgrown. At a few points on the record, he seems to be demonstrating to the wub fetishists that he’s also capable of sonic mayhem. Whether they’re meant as representations of conflicted emotions or simply designed to get crowds moving, the codas to “Digital Lion” and “Voyeur” are as bass-first and funky as anything Blake’s done to date. The last minute of “Lion”, which credits Brian Eno as collaborator, prominently showcases Blake’s gospel fixation, his wordless vocals present to acknowledge the powerful groove. For its part, “Voyeur” is possibly his most techno-sounding track to date, though you wouldn’t know it from the opening. Blake begins in jazzy repose, dwelling on a short phrase (“and her mind was on me”) over a light piano loop and minimal bass thump. The introduction of a treated cowbell and a 4/4 thump gradually morphs the song into something resembling a club track, similar to Four Tet’s slow-building 2010 banger “Love Cry” or 2011’s simmering, sample-based “Pyramid.”
Overgrown is a showier album than Blake’s eponymous 2011 debut, incorporating more gospel and R&B elements and a wider variety of textures. In a way, it feels like Blake’s meeting himself midway between his LP and EP personas. The string of EPs he released before putting his blurred face and name on the cover of an LP cast Blake as the latest UK producer prodigy, capable of modern classical pieces and tracks built around Aaliyah and Kelis samples. On his first LP, however, Blake opted for the singer-songwriter move, making heart music instead of head music, alienating certain purists while gaining new fans who have zero interest in his work on the Hemlock label.
On Blake’s own admittedly modest terms, Overgrown is marked by extremes. The album starts in the mode of the 2011 LP on which he rued childhood relationships and pondered his dreams. On the title track, he mewls “I don’t want to be a star/ But a stone on the shore,” confessing he prefers to blend into his surroundings rather than draw attention to himself. For a guy who puts a crisp, pensive photo of himself on his album cover, it’s a questionable stance, and his delivery is self-serious enough to nearly tip over into self-parody. It pales in comparison to James Blake opener “Unluck”, though it’s saved from schmaltz through Blake’s skill at investing even the cheesiest sentiments with a palpable anxiety.
There’s showy, and then there’s “Take a Fall for Me”, a collaboration with RZA, who Blake gives free rein to smear awkward romantic imagery all over his track. It’s easy to understand why the pair would collaborate: their production styles aren’t dissimilar, both showing a fondness for gloomy, bass-heavy soundscapes rooted in R&B. Why RZA was asked to rap, however, is hard to understand. If you want to hear the phrase “tight as the grip of a squid” on a James Blake album, or an American’s stereotype of a proper British meal (fish & chips, Guinness), you’re in luck. For the rest of us, “Fall” is Blake’s first out-and-out failure, the sort of song that should have been relegated at the very least to bonus track status, and probably should have been kept private altogether.
Overgrown is not as wall-to-wall great as his debut, but fans of the first LP will still find much to admire. The most promising development is his indulged fondness for various permutations of R&B and gospel styles, best evidenced on the album’s great first single “Retrograde.” Self-described as a song about falling in love, it balances the solemn soul of Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands” with periodic bursts of passion, via Blake shouting “suddenly, I’m hit!” Throughout the album, he successfully splits the difference between the sultry bedroom vibes of R&B’s resurgent Quiet Storm moment and the more mundane life of a British “bedroom” artist fond of keeping to himself. “To the Last”, in particular, tiptoes around a Sade-style smooth-soul composition, aided by the synthesized sounds of waves crashing ashore.
Blake’s deconstructive take on R&B is similar in spirit to that of How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell. In a recent interview with Pitchfork TV, Krell explained his writing process as one of locating bodily sensations that haven’t yet shaped themselves into recognizable emotions. Suddenly you’re hit, in other words, but you don’t yet know if that feeling is joy, anxiety, frustration, or terror-- you’re only aware that something’s there, and you try to freeze it, to examine it more closely, instead of simply slotting it in a category and moving on. This is exactly what Blake does so well (and, for what it’s worth, RZA doesn’t): locating these sensations, and conversing about them. On “I Am Sold”, he even manages to explain the process, by mulling a single phrase over and over, tweaking it, and approaching it from different directions: “speculate what we feel.” Instead of worrying about where he fits in a broader musical landscape, or whether he’s a “star” or not,” this is Blake’s comfort zone. Whether he’s making bass-heavy bangers, quiet meditations, or increasingly of late, something in-between, Blake is a modern master of emotional speculation. | 2013-04-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | April 9, 2013 | 8 | 95657184-ec4d-4235-866d-dba11ceca5c0 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Written during a period of grief, Jhené Aiko’s 22-track LP turns her methods of survival—enlightenment, drugs, music itself—into an epic concept album. Some of Aiko’s most honest writing occurs here. | Written during a period of grief, Jhené Aiko’s 22-track LP turns her methods of survival—enlightenment, drugs, music itself—into an epic concept album. Some of Aiko’s most honest writing occurs here. | Jhené Aiko: Trip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jhene-aiko-trip/ | Trip | Grief is unlike any other life experience. It is the process of feeling the spectrum of human emotion all at once: unbearable sorrow combined with profound joy to have known this person, immense love coupled with blinding anger that they’re gone. The weight of grief threatened to buckle Jhené Aiko after she lost her brother Miyagi in 2012, but she turned to music for respite. She turned to spiritual enlightenment, and she turned to drugs. Trip is the culmination of it all, hazily floating over a hefty 22 tracks.
As a concept album, Trip aims to translate the hallucinogenic highs of weed, LSD, and shrooms into sound. Befitting its length, these are highs that last for hours on end. The airiness of Aiko’s voice blends well into the spare, psychedelia-inspired productions courtesy of Dot Da Genius, Fisticuffs, and Amaire Johnson among others. Where her peers often drift towards dense electronica or hip-hop to inform their sounds and give them commercial appeal, Aiko keeps this music light and ambient, a space where she’s at her best. It’s all part of a larger multimedia project comprising an emotional short film, the album, and a forthcoming book of poetry. Aiko has completely opened herself up for this work, bravely mourning in public and exposing all the ways she tried and failed to do so in private. With that, Trip exists for its own sake and on its own terms; it’s a respectable undertaking, even if 90 minutes seems daunting. Trip is more committed to its narrative of self-discovery than churning out a hit, but there are a few potentials.
While the skating rink groove of “OLLA (Only Lovers Left Alive)” is the album’s most ostensibly pop-facing moment, the Swae Lee-assisted “Sativa” is the immediate standout. Lyrically, it’s a sexy party hookup anthem (“Why you make it so complicated?/Off the drink, we concentratin’/I know you won’t leave me hangin’,” goes the hook), but it ends up feeling like that moment when you’re too faded to actually complete the mission. It is bittersweet euphoria. These two tracks are some of the more dynamic within an album that can feel a bit one-note at times. It generally does well as chilled-out background music, but it’s also worthwhile as a focused listen, as some of Aiko’s most honest writing shows up here.
On “Jukai,” Aiko grapples with the concept of suicide, inspired by Japan’s Aokigahara forest. With “Nobody” and “Overstimulated,” she battles her demons of addiction. “Pop one, pop two, pop three, four pills/These things tell me how I should feel,” she sings on “Nobody,” convinced she can (or has to) handle her problems alone. “Overstimulated” captures the dizzying effects of stimulants like cocaine and Adderall, but there’s a seductive element in her lyrics that makes the high sound as fleeting as a noncommittal lover. Ultimately, all of this is built around the grief. Aiko’s constant search “for a brother’s love in every single man” ties into her hope that if she can just “get high enough,” she can reach him.
Towards the back end, the gloom begins to subside. Optimism sets in as the clarity from the trip materializes. “Sing to Me,” featuring Aiko’s daughter Namiko Love, is one of the album’s shining moments. The adoration the two share for each other is palpable as they sing back and forth—“mommy sing to me” and “Nami sing to me ”—over piano chords that, coincidentally, bring to mind Big Sean’s “Memories.” It’s sentimental and effective; there’s nothing like the love of a child to clarify blurry visions of the future. “Frequency” is a hopeful prayer for liberation: “Free my city, freed my seed/Bless my situation, give me freedom/Bless the generation, give them mercy.” And on the rose-colored “Ascension,” Brandy’s feathery voice is a perfect complement to Aiko's. The production seems to twinkle as Aiko, “on her way to heaven,” finally makes her peace.
Trip works because it isn't just about self-medicating or journeying through a grief-ridden mind. Rather, it’s about all the places we go to escape from reality and ourselves. It's about the way vices can be found in everything from isolation to sex to outright gambling with life as we search for freedom. Aiko finds salvation in her own transparency and in the people, still alive, who give her a reason to carry on. It all comes back to sustaining the highest high that is love. Love and our insistence on it is the reason for every trip: the backdrop to all experiences, the strongest drug of all. | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | October 5, 2017 | 6.7 | 956797b5-f4dd-4d6d-a671-e40f7933fba9 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Marissa Nadler's second full-length by way of her own Box of Cedar imprint is her most narcotic album to date. | Marissa Nadler's second full-length by way of her own Box of Cedar imprint is her most narcotic album to date. | Marissa Nadler: The Sister | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16662-the-sister/ | The Sister | To press play on any of Marissa Nadler's six albums is to enter a peaceful but painful dream. Since 2004, whether over the barebones creak of the early The Saga of Mayflower May or the synthetically textured Little Hells, Nadler's records of wispy melancholy have opened outwardly like arms, inviting the listener to stay for a permanent spell. Invariably hypnotic, Nadler's music has often felt like its own self-sustaining atmosphere-- ready and able to be inhabited, suited for the repeat button, surreal in its dream-like propensity to remove the listener from the rest of the world.
The Sister is Nadler's second full-length by way of her own Box of Cedar imprint in as many years, and she's possibly never made a record that so completely meets those sequestered conditions. These eight songs feel like a turn-on, drop-out experience, an engrossing reverie of complicated characters, their twisted feelings and Nadler's muted reverence for them. That's not necessarily the best look for Nadler, who, in spite of her albums' all-encompassing essence, has managed to squeeze at least one indelible standout into every record; Songs III, for instance, had "Bird on Your Grave", while last year's self-titled disc sported "The Sun Always Reminds Me of You" and "Wedding", all songs that stood apart from their settings while ably functioning within them. But these 33 minutes hang together to a fault, with songs trussed by a singular stylistic and sonic palette until the album as a whole actually starts to seem stiff. As always with Nadler, The Sister is still an absorbing listen, even if it is a bit conservative.
With the exception of the resilient, piano-anchored "Love Again, There Is a Fire", Nadler leads each song on The Sister with her acoustic guitar. For opener "The Wrecking Ball Company", the playing is simple and direct, with a short phrase thumbed through the steady drums and webbed vocals; during "Apostle", she refashions the celestial heights of James Blackshaw's 12-string compositions with modesty. Nadler's grown substantially as a guitarist, meaning that her notes are crisper and her lines more mesmeric. But she operates exclusively in those alternate modes-- that is, elegant or elementary-- across all of The Sister, meaning that the excellent supporting cast she's gathered here falls behind her direction rather than helping to drive it. Carter Tanton's intriguing electric textures on closer "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine" feel more like an accessory than a building block; ditto the spectral harmonies and the faint serial keyboards tacked onto the end of "Christine". Like the songs they support, there's nothing wrong with any of these moments. They just blur into one another, sublimating into a whole that's occasionally void of definition.
At various points throughout Nadler's career, there's been compulsory evidence to consider her something of a "breakout" artist. At the height of the freak-folk moment, she fell just short of the "alabaster queen" status that she later pledged; in the following years, she signed to Kemado Records, a label whose beard-and-beer-can metal and sleaze-ball rock roster didn't buoy Nadler toward many ideal audiences; when she subsequently lent her spook to an album by black-metal mystery Xasthur, she again missed her chance to connect wholesale with an expanding crowd. Last year, it felt as if she was giving herself a new start by crowd-funding her first self-titled release on her own label; that record, in retrospect, seems impregnably confident and adventurous, where several perfect bits of country loneliness came countered by a half-dozen variably gothic trances. The Sister is Nadler's most narcotic album to date, and she also continues to sharpen her skills as a writer, beguiling with alliteration and distant images that should cause listeners to daydream with wonder. But The Sister ultimately comes across as, at best, a retread done well and, at worst, a retreat into previously approved territory by an artist who has noticeably improved as a tactician.
In this way, The Sister recalls clear Nadler forebear Buffy Sainte-Marie, another songwriter who, at her best, built albums that felt apart from the rest of the world, even as they wove together the very familiar and the very abstract. (Like Nadler, she also had a way with Leonard Cohen songs.) Sainte-Marie surrounded occasional great albums with stacks of entirely good, functional music, never able to progress definitively despite obvious improvements on multiple fronts. Still, there's no shame in a string of albums that are at least "entirely good," a streak that Nadler has yet to break-- even if The Sister feels like the first minor album of her career. | 2012-05-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Box of Cedar | May 31, 2012 | 7 | 95756670-8df5-4df3-977f-5912abd7f5ed | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Like bassist and vocalist Eamon Sandwith’s already iconic bowl-cut/mullet combo, Get Fucked is militaristic severity up front, party in the back. | Like bassist and vocalist Eamon Sandwith’s already iconic bowl-cut/mullet combo, Get Fucked is militaristic severity up front, party in the back. | The Chats: Get Fucked | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-chats-get-fucked/ | Get Fucked | The history of punk rock is rife with underground aggressors who enjoy a surprise brush with mainstream notoriety thanks to an atypically sunny song that teeters precariously close to novelty-tune status. So the crossover success of the Chats is all the more remarkable given that it came through their surliest song. With the 2017 single “Smoko,” the Australian trio not only scored an anti-social anthem that’s since been covered by the likes of YUNGBLUD and Wet Leg, they also transformed regional vernacular—in this case, Aussie slang for “smoke break”—into an international catchphrase. Vividly channeling the boiled-blood irritation of a service-industry worker who’d sooner gut you than waste a precious second of their five-minute puff session making idle conversation, “Smoko” nonetheless possessed the sort of Seinfeldian relatability that landed the then-teenaged band on morning shows and the 6 o’clock news back home. But since then, the Chats have hardly gone out of their way to make themselves more respectable for the masses. The best songs on their 2020 debut High Risk Behaviour concerned venereal disease, getting caught wanking on webcam, and gorging yourself on rump steak. Now their second album comes bearing a title that’s practically begging to get them disinvited from the late-night talk show circuit.
Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together. But it’d be wrong to say Get Fucked simply serves up sloppy seconds from their proverbial pub feed. This is a portrait of a changed band: Once the pride of the small Sunshine Coast surfing town of Coolum Beach, the Chats are now based 90 minutes south in the big city of Brisbane, a relocation that pays immediate dividends in the form of “I’ve Been Drunk in Every Pub in Brisbane,” which is kind of what Wire’s Pink Flag would sound like if all the lyrics were Yelp reviews. But the album is also their first without founding guitarist Josh “Pricey” Price, who played the grubby goofball foil to perpetually pent-up bassist and vocalist Eamon Sandwith. With Sandwith’s snarl now the uncontested focal point, the Chats sound both more agitated and absurd than ever. Like Sandwith’s already iconic bowl-cut/mullet combo, Get Fucked is militaristic severity up front, party in the back.
Even as the Chats skate on the edge where street punk blurs into hardcore, they still retain the shout-it-loud bonhomie of classic ’70s rock. This is a band that’s always put Cosmic Psychos and Kiss on the same piss-stained pedestal, a veritable Oi-C/DC that’s in awe of rock’n’roll’s high-voltage power and pint-sloshing communalism yet fully aware of its inherently ridiculous macho posturing. And so the opening “6L GTR” is a muscle-car manifesto for 90-pound weaklings who know nothing about automobiles, a buzzsaw-riffed ode to a hot-rod model that doesn’t actually exist; in live versions of the song, Sandwith has taken to slipping in the car-seat seduction monologue from Van Halen’s “Panama,” a move that underscores the fact Sandwith will never be a ladies’ man on par with David Lee Roth in his ’80s golden-god prime while acknowledging the Chats’ spiritual debt to hard rock’s original pranksters.
But as much as the Chats seem like the kind of band that would happily bait a stadium full of Guns N’ Roses fans (an opportunity they’ll get to indulge this fall), they take equal glee in subverting the stern-faced pose of punk. Their songs are so preoccupied with life’s everyday annoyances—from public-transit ticket inspectors (“Ticket Inspector”) to panic attacks (“Panic Attack”) to getting paid late (“Paid Late”)—and so proudly unpoetic that their frustration and aggression can’t help but come out sounding joyful and celebratory. The addition of rockabilly-schooled guitarist Josh Hardy—of fellow Sunshine Coast garage combo the Unknowns—also allows a little more sunshine into the Chats’ self-described “shed rock,” whether he’s answering the blitzkrieged charge of “Struck by Lightning” with “doo-woo-doo-wop” hooks, rerouting the chugging surfer-dude beatdown “Emperor of the Beach” into a bluesy swing, or contributing the congenial, 1963-bound closer “Getting Better,” which stakes out the middle ground between the toga party and the circle pit.
And yet, as with “Smoko,” Get Fucked’s value goes beyond comically deranged depictions of mundane scenarios. Despite specializing in the kind of songs that’ll send non-Aussies scurrying to decipher the significance of Boggo, Beefy’s, and “hoonin’ down the Bruce,” the Chats are ultimately tapping into universal anxieties. “Smoko” isn’t merely about some asshole sitting on a milk crate and puffing away; it’s about an economy where workers are run so ragged that they can’t even enjoy their brief moments of respite. On Get Fucked, the Chats present a sequel of sorts in “The Price of Smokes,” a song that’s reportedly been on the backburner for a few years, but whose release is perfectly timed for this moment of inflationary angst. Cruising on a steady, post-punky bass groove, with Hardy’s leads stretched into a psychedelic smear, Sandwith repeats the line, “The price of smokes is going up again/I could already barely afford my rent”—and he sounds seriously torn by the choice between cigarettes and shelter. At nearly four minutes, it’s practically a prog song by this band’s standards, a gradually intensifying surge in lieu of their usual instant stage-dive strikes. But it’s a reflection of both the Chats’ evolution and that of the world at large—the ticking time bomb soundtrack to an increasingly unfair society where you’re now in danger of being priced out of a smoko. | 2022-08-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bargain Bin | August 18, 2022 | 7.7 | 9576e024-4593-401a-8f14-3dab3802c8ff | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Two decades into their career, Spoon return with loud, low-down, melodious rock record almost without sacrificing any of their savory nuance and inscrutability. | Two decades into their career, Spoon return with loud, low-down, melodious rock record almost without sacrificing any of their savory nuance and inscrutability. | Spoon: Lucifer on the Sofa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spoon-lucifer-on-the-sofa/ | Lucifer on the Sofa | Wind Britt Daniel any tighter and he still won’t burst. For 20 years, Spoon have recorded wary, taut, almost-rock songs whose minimalist trappings contain maximalist urges. Paranoia is Daniel’s muse, a paranoia unmoored from referents—recognizable ones at any rate. “Everything Hits at Once,” “Don’t Make Me a Target”—it always feels like somebody’s watching Britt. Their tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, sets aside the electronic gewgaws of Hot Thoughts and They Want My Soul for Spoon’s loudest record yet. These songs, at last, rock in every sense of the word; they even refer at times to recognizably heterosexual scenarios to which Daniel has alluded on songs like “The Mystery Zone.” And the Austin quintet pulls it off without Daniel sacrificing any of their savory inscrutability. A lover? Sure. A target? Not so fast.
Proving their fealty to the usual career arcs, Spoon followed the Experimental Album with the Back to Basics Album, assembled over two years and aggravated by COVID worries (as if Daniel needed something else to chew his fingernails about). Mark Rankin, who has produced Queens of the Stone Age and Adele, joins Dave Fridmann and Justin Raisen in thickening the mix. You can hear the money on “The Hardest Cut” and the Smog cover “Held,” where the instruments tear a hole in the sky. The new bassist Ben Trokan locks in with longtime drummer Jim Eno, perfecting the welcome looseness with which the band experimented on Hot Thoughts.
If music were clothes, Spoon’s would be a fitted shirt; they named a 2001 song after one. Their preppy sternness and the intermittent submission to supervised anarchy—so much depends on the erotic allure of Daniel’s six-string squalls, manipulated with the ease of a casanova who has calculated the impact of a messy kiss. His chalky bray, an amalgam of Texas country dudes and English pubsters like Nick Lowe, is a match. Assisted by recruit Gerardo Larios and multi-instrumentalist Alex Fischel, the loudest songs reek of sex. On “Satellite” Daniel becomes a lonely planet boy in orbit around a beloved, wagging his finger: “I know where you draw the line/I know what you draw it for.” The title track centerpiece, an aural sequel to They Want My Soul’s “Inside Out,” observes a flâneur cruising up Lavaca in skinny-ass jeans hearing Dale Watson tunes in his head. Like Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s “Street Life,” he hears poetry in white noise. Sampled sax bleats echo the traffic; Fischel’s electric piano lines reflect the blue mood.
These admissions of ardor are forthright—Daniel is the least accidental of songwriters—but you can be forthright and vague too. Whether, ick, remarking on “God walking in the room softly” on “Astral Jacket,” or, ugh, toying with conventionality on “My Babe,” he’s like a candidate for public office taking a position; he’s passionate about coming across as passionate. He has welcome relapses, though. Those guitars crackle on “Feels Alright,” a declaration of aloneness with more conviction than the valentines; he gets how our culture regards couplehood as an emblem of maturity. “On the Radio” even summons the paranoia of yore for an account of Daniel’s device keeping tabs on him, which, in 2022, well, why not.
Determined to give fans a jolly time after a five-year absence, Lucifer on the Sofa doesn’t let up and won’t change minds. Range, like relationships, means shit with enthusiasm this committed and with consistency this compelling. Yet I miss the darker moods evoked on Hot Thoughts’ “WhisperI’llistentohearit,” on which Daniel, over an electronic pulse, issues threats with the zest of a professional cad. Lucifer’s pleasures assert the pure good of form—for example, the oblique Stones quote in Fischel’s piano part for the Jack Antonoff co-write (!) “Wild.” A rangy sensualist for whom playing the reprobate gives him an excuse to play with cool pedals and stuff, Daniel lets his guitars flesh out his suggestive, gnomic verse, and he moves me in mysterious ways (I should know). The hint of menace—the way the vague warnings come disguised as songs—keeps him alert during this permanent standoff with an unnamed enemy.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 12, 2022 | 7.4 | 957c0d52-2cc7-4128-af20-a7858293a4a7 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Erin Birgy’s fifth album feels like the heartfelt expression of a uniquely weird viewpoint. It flits from groovy jazz to psych-pop to sylvan folk with freaky glee. | Erin Birgy’s fifth album feels like the heartfelt expression of a uniquely weird viewpoint. It flits from groovy jazz to psych-pop to sylvan folk with freaky glee. | Mega Bog: Dolphine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mega-bog-dolphine/ | Dolphine | “Never smother the mystical song that rests deep inside you,” Erin Birgy murmurs midway through Dolphine, her fifth record as Mega Bog. Since adopting the moniker 10 years ago, the Los Angeles-based musician has lived out this sagely maxim. Her music overflows with images of hidden scorpions, blue salamanders, writhing snakes, and a flesh-eating troll. Despite its inscrutability, Dolphine feels genuine—the heartfelt expression of a uniquely weird viewpoint.
The album is partially inspired by the otherworldly writings of the late Ursula K. Le Guin, who once said of the label “science fiction”: “My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.” Dolphine similarly flits from groovy jazz to psych-pop to sylvan folk with freaky glee. Birgy’s idiosyncrasies bear resemblance to the off-kilter lyricism of Cate Le Bon or Aldous Harding, the elastic voice of Jessica Pratt, or the cosmic guitar reverence of Big Thief, whose drummer James Krivchenia, a frequent Mega Bog collaborator, engineered the album. But Dolphine pushes further into uncharted realms, where any rules about conventional melodies and lyrical coherence deteriorate.
Opener “For the Old World” wobbles on a slack tightrope, always threatening to tumble into chaos. The song springs between twinkling percussion, smooth jazz, and prickly tension; a woodwind zigzags erratically in the background like a shrill songbird. Melodic shapes undulate to a hidden logic on “Fwee Again,” an instrumental odyssey that references a made-up word for joyful epiphanies from 2017’s Happy Together. Birgy is once again backed on these adventures by a crew of collaborators—among them Krivchenia (percussion, effects), Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy (guitar), and iji’s Zach Burba (synth, bass)—whose performances enrich her remarkably peculiar stories.
Yet Birgy is not a storyteller in the traditional, linear sense. Rather, she strings crisp and enigmatic fragments into enchanting collages. “Crazy Kermin in the hall/Shadow plant leaf bleats/Piano stumbling/I forgot all your songs,” goes “I Hear You Listening (To the Bug on My Wall).” “As foxes bloat up Eastern expressway shoulders/Aloe breaks an arm,” she burbles on “Untitled (With ‘C’).” Much like a Le Guin novel, these sentences throw you into fully formed worlds without a map. But immersion encourages acclimation. Birgy explains the process plainly on “Shadows Break”: “The language erodes and unearths me more.”
Exploring this new world reveals abstract expressions of pain and loss, both specific and existential. “And now I’m crying like a spider in the sun/It’s not fear, or sadness, or even aches/It’s just living/Long, long, long,” she aches on the curliquing “Left Door.” “Untitled (With ‘C’)” was written for Philando Castile, the Minnesota man killed by a cop during a traffic stop. “Another murder should still disturb you/Delivered like clubhouse music to a white supremacy/Loneliness like this one cannot last,” Birgy sings over mournful bass in a rare unambiguous moment. Midway through the record is “Spit in the Eye of the Fire King,” a duet written by and performed with Ash Rickli, a Georgia musician who later passed away suddenly. Though the song’s cheery folksiness is an outlier, its presence underlines Birgy’s appreciation of the mystical implications of life beyond death.
The personal significance of these losses can sometimes be so heavily cloaked as to feel impenetrable. Yet there’s something refreshing about Birgy’s unapologetic commitment to her inner code. This is her reality, and sometimes it can be stranger—and certainly more poetic—than fiction. “Diary of a Rose” plays with a double meaning of the word “rose,” referencing both the shrub and the name of Birgy’s childhood horse to tie together images of flower-induced mania and the animal lounging in grass. The gentle “Truth in the Wild” may or may not be a love song, but it concludes with a clear and profound declaration of desire: “I want to be with the one I love/I want to play with the one I love.”
It’s tempting to use the word “surreal” to describe the visionary world Birgy conjures. Her songs teem with colorful metaphors, recurring characters, and dreamlike arrangements, like a Leonora Carrington painting set to music. But often “surreal” is confused with fantasy or hallucination, illogical outpourings of the subconscious thrown together for eccentric value. Even at its most inexplicable, there’s not a moment on Dolphine that feels careless. As her imagination roams, Birgy understands that sometimes irrationality is necessary to make sense of reality.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Paradise of Bachelors | July 3, 2019 | 7.9 | 9581507c-9e05-40a2-8393-738e680aca6b | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
This 4xCD set offers a look at mid-20th century Detroit blues, anchored by a generous selection of rarities by John Lee Hooker. Despite its subtitle, Garden City Blues doesn’t really chronicle a scene so much as it documents a transitional period in blues history. | This 4xCD set offers a look at mid-20th century Detroit blues, anchored by a generous selection of rarities by John Lee Hooker. Despite its subtitle, Garden City Blues doesn’t really chronicle a scene so much as it documents a transitional period in blues history. | Various Artists: Garden City Blues: Detroit’s Jumping Scene 1948-1960 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20938-garden-city-blues-detroits-jumping-scene-1948-1960/ | Garden City Blues: Detroit’s Jumping Scene 1948-1960 | John Lee Hooker’s chugging guitar emerges from a swamp of static. An unidentified pianist interjects simple flourishes barely audible above the din of scratches and scrapes on the acetate. But then Hooker’s voice enters, emphatic and sturdy, weary yet randy as he begs a woman to relieve his sorrows. Her name is illegible (Essie Mae? Ethel May?), but the desire borders on desperation: "I want you to drive my blues away." "Rocks" is not one of Hooker’s best tunes, but it does project a certain charisma that would later come into greater focus. It’s notable for being one of the first recordings Hooker made after leaving Memphis and arriving in Detroit in the late 1940s, a tenure that would produce some of his most famous hits—including 1948's massive "Boogie Chillen". As such, "Rocks" is the anchor of a new 4xCD set from the UK label JSP Records, a fanfare that set Detroit blues rolling and tumbling for more than a decade.
Hooker was the focal point for the scene, and he gets more than a full disc of tracks—35 in all, a number that reflects both his early arrival in Detroit and his heavy studio schedule. Neil Slaven, the producer and historian who penned the liners for Garden City Blues, sounds almost apologetic about some of his cuts: "There’s none of the personality in his guitar playing that we came to expect. He’s not helped by a pedestrian pianist even more limited than he was at the time." Especially compared to Hooker’s most popular hits (many of which were recorded in Detroit yet have been omitted from this compilation), these tracks may sound rudimentary, but together they add up to more than just a prologue to his career. Each one indulges some new whim or tries out some new trick: "Boogie Woogie" moves with such an exaggerated strut that even the poor quality of the recording can’t diminish its cocky exuberance, and "Christmas Time Blues" slows a jingle-bell melody down to a crawl before disrupting the lament with loud, percussive strums.
Hooker comes across as a musician of formidable ability and charisma, so it’s little wonder that he played with most of the other artists on Garden City Blues. Eddie Kirkland was his touring partner, Eddie Burns backed him on harmonica. Obviously they all borrowed from him, just as he no doubt learned a few things from them, but they developed their own styles. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this box set is its range: Detroit obviously encouraged a great deal of variation and innovation, such that the rhythms, the structures, and even the lineups vary from one track to the next and certainly from one artist to the next. Some of these artists provide their own accompaniment, picking on a guitar while stomping on the floor, while others bring in one or two other players. Big Jack Reynolds brings in a full band for his sole track, "Going Down Slow", recorded sometime in the early 1960s, and his unidentified drummer takes off in the first measure and turns the song into a pounding proto-garage rocker.
That loose parameters of the Detroit scene also permits some entertaining oddities, especially the Richard Brothers’ "Stolen Property". Recorded in 1959, it starts as a fairly run-of-the-mill blues number, with the siblings lamenting an unfaithful woman and laying down a jumpy blues riff. Soon, however, they veer into a bit of comic playacting, with one brother playing a pistol-wielding husband and the other a movie-house usher trying to minimize the violence. "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, there’s a man in the inside of the theater with another man’s wife, and HE’S OUTSIDE WITH A .45!" The whole place empties out in just a few seconds, leaving the brothers to deliver the inevitable punchline. It’s an odd bit of humor—part radio play, part vaudeville routine—but nearly 60 years after its creation, it works as a winking parody of the violence so often described in blues lyrics.
Despite its subtitle, Garden City Blues doesn’t really chronicle a scene so much as it documents a transitional period in blues history. The early and mid-20th century saw millions of African-Americans leaving mostly agrarian jobs in the South for the promise of work at factories in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and other areas thriving in the new industrial era. The Great Migration coincided with great leaps in recording technology, and blues musicians began to gravitate toward electric guitars. This was industrial music before it became a rock subgenre—before rock itself was even a genre—and the new sounds allowed players to do things in urban venues that had been unimaginable in the farmland juke joints many of them had left behind.
The shift from acoustic to electric wasn’t instantaneous, but gradual. It took years for ideas to develop and conventions to gel, and the music collected on Garden City Blues documents that period of transition, when old styles and methods mingled with new. As such, the set may not be the best point of entry for anyone unfamiliar with what led to this music and what followed it. (For primers, either of Smithsonian Folkways’ Classic Blues comps is recommended, as is the 1992 box set Chess Blues.) But there is still a great deal to discover and appreciate here: spirited performances depicting a lively city that prized jumpy grooves, idiosyncratic swagger, and dogged innovation above all else. | 2015-09-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | JSP | September 1, 2015 | 7.6 | 9582ed24-6c85-430d-9616-7da6dc578932 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
When they recorded 2015’s late-career highlight The Waterfall, MMJ wrote enough material for two albums. If the original was about conflict, the new volume concerns the healing that comes after. | When they recorded 2015’s late-career highlight The Waterfall, MMJ wrote enough material for two albums. If the original was about conflict, the new volume concerns the healing that comes after. | My Morning Jacket: The Waterfall II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-morning-jacket-the-waterfall-ii/ | The Waterfall II | Before My Morning Jacket released The Waterfall back in 2015, Jim James was already teasing a follow-up. He mentioned that the band’s sessions in Stinson Beach, California, just north of San Francisco, were so productive that they left with at least two full-lengths’ worth of material. They considered releasing a double album and quickly abandoned that idea, instead splitting the songs into two distinct records, the second of which was originally slated for 2016. On the heels of that release, however, the band got caught up touring and James got busy writing a bunch of material, and that follow-up became known as their “lost” album. “It still exists,” James assured Rolling Stone in 2017.
And now it finally exists for the rest of us. The surprise release of The Waterfall II ends the longest drought of new music in their 20-year career, but this isn’t really a lost album like Neil Young’s Homegrown. It doesn’t tell us anything about My Morning Jacket that we didn’t already know, and it doesn’t pose any what-ifs or prompt speculation about alternative timelines. Instead, it’s just more My Morning Jacket music: solid but seldom revelatory, new yet familiar. “Spinning My Wheels” opens with a dark cloud of buzzing static, which is quickly dispelled by a woozy keyboard theme—a simple, quiet demonstration of music’s power to provide clarity and direction. “I’ve been wrong for so long,” James sings, “risking my life for the sake of the song.”
This might be a reference to his manic schedule during the early ’00s, when My Morning Jacket were touring constantly and James’ health suffered, leading to an incident during the Waterfall sessions when he herniated a disc in his back and was bedridden for two months. Is that busy schedule worth it, he seems to be asking himself, especially when you’re just doing it so you can do it again and again? Typically an album ends with such an epiphany, but The Waterfall II opens with that declaration and carries it through nine more songs. If its predecessor was about conflict and healing—it’s My Morning Jacket’s thorniest album, emotionally speaking—then this follow-up is more about what comes after that healing.
It makes for a busier-sounding album. My Morning Jacket have always savored the collision of disparate styles and sounds (remember that cover of Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls”?), but lately that’s become a more prominent tactic for them. The band constructed several songs on The Waterfall by digitally piecing together bits of different recordings, and the resulting arrangements moved in weird, unexpected ways that could be thrilling in their unpredictability. Those moments sound a little more scripted here. “Still Thinkin’” morphs from a chorus that recalls Herman’s Hermits into a crushed-velvet coda that’s closer to King Crimson, and while anything that places those two acts in the same sentence can’t be all bad, the pivot sounds disjointed and disorienting. “Climbing the Ladder” better integrates its varied sounds, marrying a two-tone rhythm section to some hyperactive honky-tonk guitars, like the Specials winning over a crowd in Bakersfield, but the equation still sounds a bit too clever.
The best moments here are the most direct, the least demonstrative. We’ve heard My Morning Jacket in slow-jam mode many times before, but “Feel You” sounds weightless, its guitar arpeggios like fingers down a lover’s spine. It’s less about sex than the seduction beforehand and the languid moments afterwards, and My Morning Jacket don’t add anything extraneous to break that spell. On “Magic Bullet” they establish a lurching, squelchy beat and let it run its course; it never resolves, never uncoils, even as they layer more guitars and more saxophone on top of it. The song doesn’t veer from that straight line, and that restraint is what makes it sound so tense and frenetic.
“I wonder where the time went,” James sings delicately on the closer “The First Time,” which sounds like one of many acknowledgements of the many years in between The Waterfall and The Waterfall II. Right now 2015 feels like a completely different geologic time period, so these songs can’t help but convey a sense of poignancy in their reminiscences. In that regard its surprise release is well timed; this satellite album, forever orbiting another, better record, may never escape its gravity, but it does ultimately carve out its own character and declare its own commentary. “Can tomorrow feel like it did back in the past?” James asks, once again soaring up into his famous falsetto. He makes it sound like this was his plan all along—to delay the release of these songs until that interim actually meant something and made them sound even better.
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. | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | July 13, 2020 | 7.2 | 95858edb-3c01-4261-8197-bbb8fb778635 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Japanese multi-instrumentalist enlists Jim O’Rourke for an unusual fusion of jazz improv, musique concrète, and plaintive pop that pays tribute to Law & Order’s Jack McCoy. | The Japanese multi-instrumentalist enlists Jim O’Rourke for an unusual fusion of jazz improv, musique concrète, and plaintive pop that pays tribute to Law & Order’s Jack McCoy. | Eiko Ishibashi: For McCoy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eiko-ishibashi-for-mccoy/ | For McCoy | Eiko Ishibashi’s career is punctuated with stark contrasts. In only the last few years, the Japanese multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter has dabbled in free-form electronics, lush chamber piano, and saccharine pop tunes for the score of a potentially Oscar-nominated film, continuing a process of self-reinvention that has been a through line of her solo career since the start. It’s not uncommon for an ambitious artist to work across a range of genres, but what stands out about Ishibashi is how deep she can go in any direction; her experimental work lies far out in left field, yet her pop songs can be exceptionally precious. Her myriad styles often run along parallel tracks, rarely intermingling. “It’s like all these things that were coexisting in myself weren’t coexisting in one piece of music,” Ishibashi told Tone Glow in 2020. In 2018, The Dream My Bones Dream tore down the walls that had kept Ishibashi’s talents partitioned, synthesizing disparate influences into a personal work that uses its dramatic fluctuations to build an audible narrative. Ishibashi would return to developing her interests separately for a while, but they were destined for another collision course once she had another story to tell. For McCoy represents another marker of progress for the ever-changing musician.
Ishibashi wrote For McCoy—self-released in 2021, now reissued by Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle with a new mix courtesy of Ishibashi’s frequent collaborator and fellow jack-of-all-trades Jim O’Rourke—as a tribute to Law & Order’s iconic Jack McCoy, Ishibashi’s favorite character from her favorite TV drama. The long-running criminal procedural is a constant in Ishibashi’s daily life, serving as background noise when O’Rourke and Ishibashi cook and eat dinner together. “Almost every day when I was making For McCoy, [Jack McCoy’s] voice was always echoing through the house,” Ishibashi said in an interview with Tone Madison. The composer frequently uses field recordings in her music as a means of paying homage to the everyday sounds that inspire her, so it made sense to treat Jack McCoy with a similar reverence. “Because McCoy’s personal life is rarely discussed in the drama, I wanted to scoop it up with my music,” she said.
With an ensemble of her closest collaborators in tow—including O’Rourke, percussionist Joe Talia, and saxophonist Daisuke Fujiwara—Ishibashi takes a tour through the musical styles that have captured her fascination in the years since The Dream My Bones Dream. For McCoy rests somewhere in that nexus of improvisational jazz, musique concrète, and plaintive pop music.
The lion’s share of the LP is taken up by the 35-minute “I can feel guilty about anything,” which plays out like a wordless drama. The track opens with a porous layering of descending flute melodies—reminiscent of the ascending flute in Law & Order’s main theme—before melting away against a warm swell of synthesizer and voice. Talia dances in with a darting cymbal fill before locking into a steady rhythm, while Fujiwara weighs in with small bites of saxophone. Each moment is given a distinct but fleeting shape before giving way to the next, like a series of scenes that set the stage for McCoy to move through.
The piece begins to loom larger as it transitions to the second side of the LP, with violin slowly surging from a low to high register against a backdrop of unintelligible speech. It’s evocative of a point of conflict, perhaps a presentation of oral arguments in the courtroom. As the music oscillates between modes, coalescing into something resembling song and dispersing back into formlessness, it invites the listener to imagine where McCoy might be and what he might be feeling. Ishibashi introduces a sweet vocal melody near the end of the piece, stretching it out to a suspenseful infinity—is this the end of McCoy’s story, or an indication that there’s more to come? Ishibashi’s personal stake in the narrative is palpable, and it’s hard not to feel invested yourself.
Ishibashi teases bits of sonorous melody throughout the half-hour cinematic suite, finally crystallizing them into a sparkling jewel on the album’s short coda, “Ask me how I sleep at night.” Joining Ishibashi’s soaring flute is a rhythm section of Tatsuhisa Yamamoto on drums and O’Rourke on double bass, with tinges of wistful saxophone and guitar. The groove is striking in its contrast to the amorphous organism preceding it, but doesn’t feel jarring. Ishibashi has built up to this conclusion skillfully, foreshadowing hints with the flourish of a seasoned storyteller. It’s a cut to the credits, putting a cap on the bittersweet tale of a hardened district attorney. For McCoy plays to Eiko Ishibashi’s most potent strength, utilizing the pull of polar extremes to simulate the ups and downs of a gripping drama.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Black Truffle | February 3, 2022 | 7.8 | 9589a49e-92c9-4d08-869c-21fe6ca19732 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Martha’s sophomore LP offers fodder for critical thought that can be digested while pogoing. | Martha’s sophomore LP offers fodder for critical thought that can be digested while pogoing. | Martha: Blisters in the Pit of My Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22095-blisters-in-the-pit-of-my-heart/ | Blisters in the Pit of My Heart | Since their inception in 2012, Durham, England punk poppers Martha have existed as a collective effort between Nathan Stephens-Griffin (drums), Naomi Griffin (bass), JC Cairns (guitar) and Daniel Ellis (guitar). The four share vocal and writing credits in a fashion that reflects their collective DIY, anarchist, vegan politics. Martha’s 2014 debut LP Courting Strong received positive praise for its autobiographical accounts of underdog outsiders told through extremely catchy hooks, anthemic outpourings, and plainspoken honesty. Perhaps most critical to Martha’s success on Courting Strong, and now on their sophomore effort Blisters in the Pit of My Heart, is their effortless fusion of pop and politics. It’s a relief to hear a record that acknowledges our disappearing freedoms and is still fun. Rather than leaving listeners exhausted with ideas, Blisters offers fodder for critical thought that can be digested while pogoing. As Stephens-Griffin explained in an interview, “We do politics, but we play pop.”
A fine example of this is “Goldman’s Detective Agency,” which goofily reimagines early 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman as a private investigator. Its initial goofiness (gumshoe is too underused as a synonym for detective) is suddenly crushed by a quiet blow delivered over twinkly guitars: There is no one I can trust/And the cops are so corrupt/All protected by the politicians/In these wicked cults.” “St Paul’s (Westerberg Comprehensive)” is a story about queer students at catholic school. The Paul in question, however, is the of the holy Replacements sect and the fear described is much more intimate than the misuse of government. Inspired by Let it Be song “Androgynous,” “St. Paul’s” highlights individuals who defy the norms placed on them by society. Again and again, Martha remind us that love unjustly deemed dangerous by institutions like the church is ultimately a powerful tool of hope.
A political edge continues to line Blister’s more overtly romantic songs. In the careening “Christine,” memories of a “passion forged under a four pound box of wine” are poignant enough to last through an imminent nuclear war. For Martha, happily-ever-after looks like something out of “Love and Rockets” (“It’s the story of/A lonely kid who fell in love/When you spray painted ‘ACAB’ on the wall/Of the local village hall,” they sing on “Curly and Raquel.”) Blister’s most stirring moment arrives on “Ice Cream and Sunscreen,” which is at various moments across its brief two minutes, desolate, self-critical, and dangerously swept away and distracted by unrequited love. After an initial intro told over quiet guitars, passion suddenly explodes like fireworks and the narrator loses all anxiety in a fit of power chords. Martha are negotiating the intersections of reality and emotionality, and sometimes their idealism swells and spills over the brim. At times it may feel cheesy, or like “naive romantic shite” as they say at one point, but in the end, it’s honestly comforting. | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirtnap / Fortuna Pop! | July 13, 2016 | 7.3 | 958dfe08-e9be-419b-88e2-ea135d39a46a | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Great, cohesive albums often have messages or statements embedded in\r\n\ the lyrics and musical attitude. As a highly ... | Great, cohesive albums often have messages or statements embedded in\r\n\ the lyrics and musical attitude. As a highly ... | Luna: Romantica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4914-romantica/ | Romantica | Great, cohesive albums often have messages or statements embedded ir the lyrics and musical attitude. As a highly respected and highly paid music critic, it's my job to sniff out these themes and present them to you, the reader. After spending some quality time listening to Luna's sixth album, taking extensive notes, and applying the most complex theories of musicology, I think I have unlocked Romantica's secret: Dean Wareham be getting laid!
Of course, I have absolutely no concrete facts to back this up-- it's a conclusion based on equal parts hunch and dirty mind. Nevertheless, I haven't heard a collection of songs this infused with post-coital glow since Björk's heavy-breathing exercise Vespertine. But while Ms. Gudmundsdottir's love songs are set in the wintery climate of her home country, Wareham pens tunes appropriate to the album's springtime shimmer, images of lovestruck springs and summer picnics in the park.
I mean, come on, the album's called Romantica, the cover art is a Caribbean souvenir cigarette lighter, and the leadoff track's name is "Lovedust," for crying out loud. While a song called "Lovedust" that talks about seeing "a million, billion, trillior stars" could just as easily be about the demon cocaine, the Jimmy Buffett-style guitar effects and the "air is creamy/ You look so dreamy" lyrics suggest otherwise. Throw in the sultry backing vocals of super-hott new bass player Britta Phillips, and you've got the indie rock world's answer to that steamy Robbie Williams/Nicole Kidman duet.
Not that the majority of Romantica is much of a sonic departure from Luna's back catalog, a series of albums that don't feature much in the way of experimentation. Wareham's songwriting formula has varied little since his hyper-influential days in Galaxie 500: hazy minor chord vamps behind his thinly wistful singing voice. Since the peak of this approach on the band's classic Penthouse, Luna have made a number of small attempts to stretch out their sound, but Wareham's easily recognizable voice kept the songs from deviating too much from the mean.
The same appraisal goes for Romantica, despite the presence of esteemed producer Dave Fridmann; nobody's going to be fooled into thinking this isn't a Luna album. Fridmann's influence is remarkably subtle, wisely keeping his characteristic thick drum sound to a minimum to preserve the band's slight aesthetic. Only the grandiose "Black Champagne," with it's orchestra-in-a-can strings swelling Soft Bulletin-style around Wareham's plea to "train the disco lights on me" overtly reveals his presence behind the boards.
What separates the album from previous Luna product is not so much instrumental alterations as the newly unabashed sentimentality of Wareham's lyrics. The twelve songs find Wareham largely rhapsodizing about food, love, or both, with stanzas like "Salt and pepper squid/ And Singapore noodles/ I could look at your face/ For oodles and oodles," from "Renee Is Crying." Okay, yeah, wher written out, lines like that probably have you puking on your computer monitor. But if anything can pull it off without triggering the gag reflex, it's Wareham's doe-eyed voice, which practically has cartoon hearts bouncing around it.
The band, meanwhile, further brightens the mood with "ba ba ba" backing vocals and arrangements more peppy and muscular than or previous efforts. Phillips' vocals contribute the most obvious new elements, tradingoff singing with Wareham on "Mermaid Eyes," the band's sexiest song since Penthouse's cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie and Clyde" with Laetitia Sadier. Instrumentally, the quartet have never sounded so confidently loose, with nearly every song spiraling off into guitar soloing sessions that would perk up the ears of jamband followers, were they not faded out after a minute or two.
Unfortunately, the album takes a dive after the first seven tracks into less memorable territory, without a big ending like "Bonnie and Clyde" or The Days of Our Nights' clever "Sweet Child O' Mine" cover. Chances are you'll hardly notice, however, as by this time the album has lured you into its fuzzy trap. With Romantica, Luna shows that they know their sound and their place: nothing too fancy, just solid, cheerful music for barbecue romance and driving with the windows down. | 2002-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jetset | April 22, 2002 | 7.8 | 958f6fa9-f22c-449c-b8d4-416dc145d5cb | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
English Oceans is the first album since Drive-By Truckers' 2001 breakthrough Southern Rock Opera where the songwriting duties are split solely between Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. In several aspects, it's a return to form. | English Oceans is the first album since Drive-By Truckers' 2001 breakthrough Southern Rock Opera where the songwriting duties are split solely between Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. In several aspects, it's a return to form. | Drive-By Truckers: English Oceans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18972-drive-by-truckers-english-oceans/ | English Oceans | Drive-By Truckers don’t owe us shit. They’ve never made a bad or even a mediocre album in their two decades, even though they’ve given themselves many opportunities to do so. And considering their occasionally acrimonious lineup changes and bold conceptual gambits, they’d have many valid excuses if that fate were to come to pass. But depending on your affinity for 2008’s generous-to-a-fault Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, it’s either been six years or 10 since their last truly great album. English Oceans isn’t great, but it’s not mediocre and certainly not bad—but its reception most likely will be predicated on whether or not you think Drive-By Truckers owe you anything more than a “Drive-By Truckers album.”
They seemed due for a shake up, particularly after the hiatus occurring following 2011’s Go-Go Boots. Bassist Shonna Tucker (who started contributing songs and vocals on Brighter) and pedal-steel specialist John Neff left the band, while founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley both made solo records. And in several aspects, this is a return to form; English Oceans is much more of a “rock” record than the Muscle Shoals-influenced Go-Go Boots, though DBT have retained enough groove to the point where there’s just as much Stones in their sound as there is Skynyrd, probably more so. And that’s a good thing, as they had the tendency to be a lumbering musical entity even during their peak days.
It’s also the first time since their 2001 breakthrough Southern Rock Opera where the songwriting duties are split solely between Cooley and Hood. More pointedly, it’s the first time the songwriting duties have been split equally. And that allows you to hear Drive-By Truckers in a completely different way, because not only does Cooley reestablish himself after being relegated to a bit player on Go-Go Boots and The Big To-Do, he actually puts this album on his back.
In the past, he hasn’t been underrated so much as overshadowed. Hood’s been often seen as DBT’s head and heart, whereas Cooley operates more from the gut and groin, the sidekick, the comic relief. Cooley still comes up with some instantly quotable, real-talk snark about the sad sex lives of white-collar supervisors (“Trophy tail wives taking boner pill rides for the price of a Happy Meal”) and a henpecked friend (“Said she only hollered when she'd stood as much as she could stand/ Jimmy's ego can take it ‘baby go on and fake it loud as you can’"). But he’s also developed a kind of redneck, cosmic profundity to rival that of early Isaac Brock. While still spoken in plain language, Cooley gets at the kind of accidental enlightenment available to intelligent, if undereducated men given repetitive tasks and a lot of time to mull over things. The construction worker on the shit-hot “Shit Shots Count” notes “Meat’s just meat and it's all born dying.../ Somebody's gotta mop up the A-1 somebody's gotta mop up the blood,” while a tumultuous relationship on “Natural Light” is “As cold as a loveless embrace/ Or hot like a low seething rage.”
Cooley’s superlative performance on English Oceans would be more worthy of celebration if it wasn’t negated by Hood’s most non-committal songwriting to date. “When He’s Gone”, “Til He’s Dead or Rises”, and “Pauline Hawkins” are all variations on the same inert gender dynamics, pro forma Dixie rock with gawky choruses that I suppose one could applaud for being lyrically succinct: “She can't stand to have him around/ But she always misses him when he's gone,” “love is like cancer/ And I am immune,” “She’ll ride him until he’s dead/ Or rises to the occasion.” But Hood never uses these sturdy, nondescript phrases to bear any additional detail or personality, and that’s problematic for a songwriter of his nature: there’s never been a strong melody or a killer riff that’s saved a lyrically weak DBT song.
The gap is even more clear when the duo delve into politics. Cooley’s “Made Up English Oceans” alternates the surreal and hyper-real in a manner similar to PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, invoking right-wing zealots and god-fearing religious factions while leaving worlds open to the interpretation. Conversely, Hood’s “The Part of Him” recalls the strawmanning that marred The Dirty South, leaning hard on stilted rhymes (“His integrity was phoning in/ Totally Nixonian”) and shrugged jokes about wingnuts and teabags. As with “Pauline Hawkins” and “When He’s Gone”, there’s no sense of place or humanity; it’s something Hood could’ve cooked up after a jag of "House of Cards", to say nothing of the likely inspiration for “When Walter Went Crazy”.
Which is to say that the truly great Drive-By Truckers albums may have been unified by a concept, but the great songs they’ve made throughout their career are inspired by real people, whether it’s “The Living Bubba”, George Wallace, the only people in America imprisoned for consensual incest, Buford Pusser, or Craig Lieske. If you don’t know the last name, he served as DBT’s merch guy, was a fixture in Athens’ music scene, and was remembered fondly by his community upon his death in January 2013. He’s the inspiration for English Oceans’ showstopping closer “Grand Canyon”, and it’s DBT’s most musically rich and expansive song to date, seven-minutes of acoustic guitars and vocals that positively gleam in waltz time. Hood’s lyrics are equally up to the task, a meditation on their last great memories with Lieske, the therapeutic value of the road and the supernatural. It’ll probably be their closer for the next decade, and if Drive-By Truckers are still touring in 10 years, that’s a good thing. For now, English Oceans ensures they’ll back on the road, where they’re still one of the best things going and Drive-By Truckers probably don’t owe us much more than that. | 2014-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | March 5, 2014 | 6.7 | 9596bbe5-e572-46ef-b7b5-e352bfed55c3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Allan Kingdom’s affecting bridge on Kanye West's “All Day” helped transform the song from a sleek ode to out-of-season shopping to a carefully pointed political screed. On Kingdom’s new mixtape, Northern Lights, the obvious connections between Kanye and the younger MC are stylistic. | Allan Kingdom’s affecting bridge on Kanye West's “All Day” helped transform the song from a sleek ode to out-of-season shopping to a carefully pointed political screed. On Kingdom’s new mixtape, Northern Lights, the obvious connections between Kanye and the younger MC are stylistic. | Allan Kingdom: Northern Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21490-northern-lights/ | Northern Lights | Last February, Kanye West brought 40 hoodied-and-masked-up men (and at least a couple of flamethrowers) to the front of the O2 Arena in London. They were assembled to perform “All Day,” which was then slated as a single from his still-unreleased seventh album. The song had been teased, in various unfinished states, for more than a year, but Allan Kingdom, the key player in the song’s final cut, made the trip abroad with less than two days notice, and hadn’t even unpacked when he hopped onstage. Kingdom’s affecting bridge on “All Day” helped turn the song from a sleek ode to out-of-season shopping to a carefully pointed political screed, one where all the parole hearings and Farrakhan meetings are grounded in something immediate and human.
On Kingdom’s new mixtape, Northern Lights, the obvious connections between West and the Winnipeg-born, St. Paul-bred Kingdom are stylistic. The younger MC favors a musical atmosphere that marries the brooding, synth-backed minor keys of 808s & Heartbreak to the more spare and visceral sounds Kanye has explored with Yeezus and “All Day.” Kingdom also enjoys some of Kanye’s everyman appeal circa The College Dropout and Late Registration, though he mines this territory less than the elder rapper. Here, weighty existential worries and simple practical hangups are allowed to simply exist next to one another; most of West’s music has dealt with, in some form, the tension between Benzes and backpacks. Allan Kingdom acknowledges both, but moves quickly onto other concerns.
When he does deal in moral panic, Kingdom is at his slickest. On “Hypocrite,” he laments, “You got fatter thighs than the one that I lied to”; on the title track, he says he’s “Trying to stack some fucking funds, fuck a lot, and have some fun,” and encourages his guest, “Leave your questions at the door, and your dress, like, half-undone.” A few songs later, on the Auto-Tune-drenched “I Feel Ya,” sex is far less trivial. The coda that includes “Tell me when to stop/ Tell me when to stop/ Feeling for you” and a warbled “I can make you feel better” is his strongest vocal performance on the tape—confused, guilty, defiant, naked.
Northern Lights clocks in just under 45 minutes, but plays even faster. “Believe” benefits from a pulsing house beat, and the production as a whole is more concerned with forward motion than with virtuosity. Kingdom’s time with the Stand4rd—the four-piece St. Paul collective that also includes the producer Psymun, the rapper, singer, and producer Bobby Raps, and Corbin, who was originally known as Spooky Black—has clearly served him well. His 2014 mixtape, Future Memoirs, was mostly excellent, but it was on the Stand4rd’s self-titled debut that he codified his raps into something that bent and cascaded into sharp, half-crooned records. While he surrenders hook duties a few times here (most notably to D.R.A.M., who sings about changing his cell number on “Renovate”), he’s more than capable of starting and finishing a dynamic song without ever leaving the booth.
Still, the strongest song on Northern Lights is the most autobiographical. “Interruption,” which is produced in part by the Minneapolis mainstay Ryan Olson, looks back at when Kingdom was darting from Hennepin Avenue through the city’s freeway system, lying that he’d lost his wallet to avoid paying for meals, and meeting Plain Pat, the manager that would eventually link him with West. Allan calls himself “the son of some immigrants, ‘bout to son ‘em like Africa.” And when he puts his life into plain language, it starts to come into light—the tension between the backpacks and Benzes is what set him in motion in the first place. What matters is where he goes next. | 2016-01-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 19, 2016 | 7.5 | 9598c3e1-ad6f-4513-a109-09f3fe17cb59 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
On its second album, the Australian group strips its melancholy electronic pop down to a whisper, nodding simultaneously to 1980s ennui and 2020s anxiety. | On its second album, the Australian group strips its melancholy electronic pop down to a whisper, nodding simultaneously to 1980s ennui and 2020s anxiety. | Acopia: Acopia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/acopia-acopia/ | Acopia | Acopia’s melancholy electronic pop is homespun, but it sounds luxurious. Melbourne musicians Kate Durman, Morgan Wright, and Lachlan McGeehan are all pedigreed electronic producers in their own right; their work in this band is minimalist but purposeful, prizing drive and atmosphere even when the music is at its sparsest. A solitary horn pierces the electronic gloom on “We Evolve,” the opener of their self-titled second album, and it evokes the image of vocalist Durman as the dame in a film noir, looking out onto a rainy street for some shred of hope amid the gloom.
Acopia specialize in songs about loneliness and isolation. Throughout, Durman sings as if she were a ghost wandering among the living, her quiet, breathy voice often lying like a layer of mist between ominous post-punk guitars and icy programmed drums. “Acopia” is a medical term describing an inability to cope with daily life, and the lyrics here live up to that moniker. On “Be Enough,” Durman drifts through a party scene, her lyrics an endless stream of unanswered questions and pregnant pauses; on “Eyes Shut,” dissociation “feels like a drug” amid emotional strife. This is pop music for absentee friends and serial ghosters, where the lines, “I take you for granted/It’s just what I do, ooh” ring out like a singalong chorus.
Although that may sound ponderous on paper, Acopia is charged with tension. The band builds on its 2022 debut, Chances, a record of catchy, fragile songs set to altogether bolder and more forceful production, by making everything a little more muted. Acopia are one of a handful of groups in Melbourne that clearly worships at the altar of HTRK, a band that looms large in Australia’s experimental scene; on this record, Acopia smartly follow their lead in stripping their sound down to a whisper. This subtler palette yields a record that’s more dynamic than Chances. “Eyes Shut,” the album’s centerpiece, breaks through the fugue state like a battering ram. Powered by unrelenting sub-bass and McGeehan’s thundering drumming, it feels like the onset of the anxiety attack that’s been slowly building over the course of the record, a slow suffocation.
Acopia are hardly alone in specializing in feel-bad electronic pop, but they do feel especially 2020s in their outlook. Durman seemingly has every possible ultra-therapized line in her arsenal—“I need to zoom out,” “Maybe we could take it at my own pace,” “What is your intention?”—and still seems to feel totally horrible. Although songs like “Holding On” and “Intentions,” which recall classic 4AD bands, nod to romantic melodrama, their lyrical concerns are wan and banal: missed connections, miscommunications, listless interactions. Set against the band’s rich, nervy environments, this glazed-over, alienated tone makes for a record that’s both intimate and intense, dazed and direct—hardly a cure for modernity, but something that makes it easier to cope all the same. | 2024-01-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | self-released | January 4, 2024 | 7.4 | 959dc27e-b549-413d-8d1d-ea8d42bed70b | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The Oregon doom metal trio's newest, an expansive album that never takes the space it's been given for granted, is a reminder that, in this crowded field, there are simply those who do it better. | The Oregon doom metal trio's newest, an expansive album that never takes the space it's been given for granted, is a reminder that, in this crowded field, there are simply those who do it better. | YOB: Atma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15724-atma/ | Atma | If you spend some time digging through interviews and profiles of YOB, you'll find the consensus on the long-running heavy-as-full-stacks army of Oregon's Mike Scheidt is that his band fits partially into nearly half a dozen interconnected subgenres: psychedelic rock, stoner rock, stoner metal, blues metal, and, most consistently, doom metal. From associated instruments to target demographics, several factors unite those niches, not least of which is the propensity to indulge a sound, solo, or song for minutes on end. As it is with High on Fire, so it is with Hawkwind, and as it is with Earth, so it is with Eyehategod: When a band latches onto something it loves, be prepared to go the distance.
YOB, it seems, is no different: "The Great Cessation", the title track of the trio's previous album, was a colossal 21-minute closer that took its time snaking through several obsessions, from the twinkling introduction and a throbbing mid-tempo midsection to a monolithic coda that felt like a great, malevolent sigh. Similarly, "Adrift in the Ocean" ends the band's latest LP Atma with a magnificent 16-minute rise: Middle Eastern-influenced guitars tessellate over teased cymbals until the full trio of Scheidt, drummer Travis Foster, and bassist Aaron Reiseberg lurches forward, rising and collapsing in thick, deliberate bursts for about eight minutes. Like its predecessor, Atma closes in a glorious burnout, Scheidt's post-rock-sized guitar solo ultimately smearing into a drone over a mangled drum limp.
One of YOB's chief accomplishments here and throughout much of its discography has been its sterling ability to maintain a sense of momentum, whether the track ends after five minutes or pushes into the teens. The shortest of Atma's five tunes, "Upon the Sight of the Other Shore", nears the eight-minute mark thanks to several Geezer Butler-gone-Godflesh verses and a handful of guitar solos. Its sense of constant movement, though, isn't unlike that of the preceding "Before We Dreamed of Two", the album's 16-minute, three-part marathon: In spite of languid riffs and an occasional absence of drums, "Dreamed" never sits anywhere for too long and, more important, never bores.
In several Eastern religions, atma means a more complete aware version of the self. Scheidt uses that word during the refrain (or mantra, maybe?) of "Dreamed", singing "Self reaching outward/ Toward within" at the apogee of the riff’s power. The bulk of Atma seems to be about some human realization that's more meaningful than the mundane, where change and finality and death and loss actually work toward something important. "Burning within from what must be/ The desire of the one to be witnessed," he howls as if caught in mid-strangulation at the end of the title track, a menacing swirl of drums and distortion at his back. You can hear those ideas throughout Atma, a record that never takes the space it's been given for granted. Each passing second feels like a chance for a new thought, a happy diversion. That's not what you expect from the stasis and slow shifts of doom metal or anything with which YOB is generally associated. It's exactly what makes every bit of Atma so very powerful.
If you were a novice forming a metal band in 2011, YOB's psychedelic heaviness might not be a bad place to start. It can, after all, be played at length with a basic riff, a drummer with some stamina and heavy hands, and a bassist that can find the roots of chords. It doesn’t require the speed of black metal, the equipment of drone, or the skill of death and technical metal. You don't even need an especially great singer: Scheidt is more communicative and versatile than dominating. What's more, it's a sound that's proven ripe for crossover into both indie rock and mainstream rock circles during the last decade. So why not? Indeed, there's a glut of bands currently mining post-Sabbath, after-Sleep stoner metal, playing lean, distorted riffs over clattering china. In that crowded lot, YOB should serve as a reminder that, even in more common forms, there are simply those who do it better-- through more experience, better conceits or, as is the case with Atma, a compelling mix of both. Scheidt's guitar tone is unimpeachable here, and he uses it as an unwavering guide for the trio: His riffs control the pushes and the pulls, the rises and the falls, the stops and the starts. And with YOB, a doom-stoner-sludge-psych band with too much thrust to fit into any of those holes for very long, that's the deciding, divining factor. | 2011-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | September 8, 2011 | 8.3 | 95a3fc31-97cc-48be-92c5-685b93b20af0 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Texas songwriter examines empathy in a series of probing and gemlike miniatures. | The Texas songwriter examines empathy in a series of probing and gemlike miniatures. | Lomelda: M for Empathy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lomelda-m-for-empathy/ | M for Empathy | For the past few years, Hannah Read has been in constant motion. Long drives were a part of her routine when living in small-town Silsbee, TX., and the isolating mobility of her extensive touring as Lomelda led to the inspiration for her 2017 album Thx. But the road is more than just a means to her physical destination—it cultivated a fixation with communication and understanding, which were hefty themes on Thx and have continued to provide fodder for new songs. Now, after transplanting herself to Los Angeles, Read takes a more contemplative turn, embracing brevity and modest production on her newest album M for Empathy.
Within her album’s very short sixteen minutes, Read reminds us of the intricacies and nuances of empathy. The task of understanding others is arduous: Read’s empathy is not a political magic bullet, but a personal exploration. On the opener “Talk,” she mentions her move to the Golden State as if she’s moving a few buildings down. “I need to be over there, four states a step a way,” she sings carefully. Her voice will make the 1,700-mile trek, communicating with those she’s moving closer to and those she’s traveling farther from.
Read cultivates a cozy pocket of sound for her choice topic’s delicate nature. Piano keys cascade during “Bust” and then glint on “M for Mush”; acoustic guitar strums are round and woody on “Tell” and then are bright and steady on “So Bad 2, Care.” With the help of her brother Tommy, Read stretches the calming tones and comforting sentimentality of these two instruments. As a lyricist, Read uses small, poignant sentence fragments, repetition, and wordplay with incredible precision, capturing intimate snapshots within tiny frameworks. Despite the songs’ short lifespan—a minute and half on average—they feel expansive, shapeshifting like shadow puppets on a wall. “I thought of so many things to say to you/But what were they,” Read wonders aloud on “Bust.” She repeats the latter fragment three times before tagging on “to you,” a subtle semantic layer that underscores the two-way mirror effect of trying to understand someone else’s perspective.
She takes some wild lyrical risks on the stunning “M for Mush”: “Must make myself a mold to hold my mushin magic mercy mind,” she sings. Here, empathy is as pliable as playing with Play-Doh. But, M for Empathy’s most potent moments are when Read travels vast space, whether through an instrumental transition or an existential concern. Misunderstanding is not the only obstacle to empathy—death also has a troublesome way of intervening.“What If I die before I get to know ya more?” she asks on “M for Me,” her voice fragile.
Read understands that in many ways empathy is not completely possible. It’s not as simple as saying “I understand,” but reaching out to others and possibly saving someone’s life—on “Slide,” Read sings about depression and a friend’s phone call that saved her. She doesn’t perform empathy here; she investigates it. By erasing the extraneous detail from her lyrics, she leaves space for our imagination and even some room for us to insert ourselves. | 2019-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | March 7, 2019 | 7.6 | 95a6e45a-ba96-4118-b389-e3ee2c3ea4ce | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The second album from the synth-pop group finds them getting anxious about their own ambition, a feeling that doesn't always gracefully adapt to the dance floor. | The second album from the synth-pop group finds them getting anxious about their own ambition, a feeling that doesn't always gracefully adapt to the dance floor. | Joywave: Content | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joywave-content/ | Content | The second full-length from Joywave practically bursts at the seams with discomfort, a sharp contrast from the synth-pop band’s hallmark dance grooves. On 2015’s How Do You Feel Now?, Joywave’s proper debut after two mixtapes and two EPs—grooves came quantized, shiny, and pre-inflated for getting arenas full of people bouncing in place. This time, as much as the new material contains darker pockets, it’s still a world away from the sweaty intimacy of clubs, where spontaneity and human contact rule the day.
This is an important distinction to make because frontman/bandleader Daniel Armbruster pretty much spends the entire new album lamenting his lack of connection to his surroundings. Right off the bat, over a spare synth figure and a soft thump that suggests the sound of a beating heart, Armbruster sings, “I’m searching for the difference between/What CON-tent and con-TENT can bring [...]/Maybe I’m just an algorithm with a given name but/I’m trying to find the difference.”
It’s an odd and gangly sentiment to hear from someone at the helm of a band that, musically speaking at least, is hell-bent on seizing mass-appeal by the horns. And as the mechanical beats gurgle and thump, advertising their commercial viability in letters large enough to be visible from space, Armbruster isn’t so much a ghost in the machine as a helpless presence unable to stand up to his own music.
“I’ve filled myself with doubt/I feel like I sold out” he sings over a rolling cadence on the aptly titled “Doubt.” The song encapsulates the album’s driving conflict perfectly: with more dynamics and room to breathe, “Doubt” could have matched the cresting and falling of the “panic playing out in black and white” that Armbruster tries to convey. Instead, the music proceeds with a cold precision that hits all the right spots but feels ruthless, especially in light of the distress signal the person inside the music appears to be sending.
According to these songs, success is a compulsory pursuit that just sweeps you away in its tide. “You deserve the finer things, you’re supposed to be famous,” Armbruster sings on “Little Lies You’re Told.” Of course, the push-pull between chase and catch, goal and reward, success and failure makes for extremely fertile ground for art. The problem is that Armbruster expects the audience to go along for the ride with an existential crisis that’s his to solve not ours to carry. The band’s creative backbone along with multi-instrumentalist/producer-programmer Sean Donnelly, Armbruster could’ve chosen differently.
For starters, he and Donnelly could have guided mixing engineer Rich Costey (Haim, Vampire Weekend, Fiona Apple) towards highlighting organic elements that would have served the subject matter. Instead, they shoot straight for the radio-friendly bullseye while Armbruster wrings his hands the whole way. By about the third song or so, the music makes you wonder: If you’re going to take this path, why not be resolute about it? And if you have these reservations, why not take a different path, then? Plus it seems just a little too early in Joywave’s career for Armbruster to sound as jaded as he does on “It’s a Trip!,” where he sings “There’s nothing left to want.”
Armbruster and Donnelly have clearly grown as songwriters, and Content hints at a subtlety that Joywave are capable of using to their advantage. On “Confidence,” essentially a lo-fi piano demo that sticks out defiantly right smack in the middle of the album, you can hear the piano’s sustain pedal release before Armbruster walks away and closes the door behind him. “When my confidence is gone,” he sings, “it helps to sing a little song /I find it helps.” Does it really, though? If Content’s songs are to be taken at face value, it’s hard not to have your doubts. | 2017-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hollywood / Cultco | August 4, 2017 | 5.9 | 95b776ae-2db8-4833-ac65-9f4245f39b90 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
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