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This avant-garde trio use piano, samples, and carefully skewered tapes to conjure an evocative sense of place. They drift to exquisite effect. | This avant-garde trio use piano, samples, and carefully skewered tapes to conjure an evocative sense of place. They drift to exquisite effect. | Sontag Shogun: Patterns for Resonant Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sontag-shogun-patterns-for-resonant-space/ | Patterns for Resonant Space | Sontag Shogun songs are like environments to float through, lost in hushed wonder. An insectile fragility informs the music that this Brooklyn-based trio has released since its 2011 debut. Ian Temple’s curious, painterly piano—think Erik Satie or George Gershwin—grounds the aesthetic, while Jeremy Young and Jesse Perlstein tremor the balance with filmic samples and carefully skewered tapes. By 2012’s Absent Warrior, Abandoned Battlefield and 2014’s Tale, they’d stirred a variety of voices into the mix to haunting effect, and they had become adept at conjuring an evocative sense of place—a factory floor, a choir rehearsal, a public square—and triggering hazy nostalgia. Experiencing “Paper Canes” or the cosmic-mosaic “Hungarian Wheat” can feel like being the subject of an expressive August Macke watercolor before the brush’s work is even done.
Gentler than its predecessors, Patterns for Resonant Space threatens to crumble at a touch. Melting easily into one another, these 10 mostly brief songs spotlight field-recorded crackle and reversed piano tracks. The band often seems to be caught in the act of simultaneously disassembling and reassembling its own dreamed-in compositions. To tag along is to drift, to engage Sontag Shogun’s acts of reinvention. Piano remains their constant. The brisk, nagging ivories on “no.10 (£20,000)” competes, gamely, with disorienting whirrs, storm gusts, and random radio bursts. Gurgling drains and a cut-up announcer’s voice—“they’ve got different speeds,” it observes—lunge at the hopeful, resolute motifs that guide “no.17 (Chopsticks, Motor, Lecture).” Leading with unsettling sounds that land somewhere between hot oil and a bristling rattlesnake, “no.19 (Patient Elegy for Bernr’d Hoffmann)” stumbles into staggered chords as stratospherically exquisite as the wordless vocal harmonies that follow.
Patterns turns abstract at moments, showcasing a more ambitious Sontag Shogun—as on “no.4 (Sonar),” with its reverb-drenched drones and ink-blot organs. “no.16 (Windmill)” suggests a calliope organ being tuned in the path of a steam locomotive. The organic/artificial frisson at play on “no.2 (Music Box)”—a searching, tentative piano versus the sprained whinges of a manipulated music box—places it among the most surprising and satisfying entries in the band’s oeuvre.
Yet the album’s masterstroke is its longest and most conventional offering. The meditative “no.8 (Leaves like Photographs)” blends patient piano plinks and delicate trills with backwards versions of the same, until melodies and countermelodies blur, shimmering almost psychedelically. Before the song spindles out in a warped, choral wheeze, a woman’s voice emerges from the din. “Leaves are photographs, they’re light-sensitive materials; as they change color, the results are the same,” she explains. “It’s a reaction that happens with the silver nitrate, that’s why it changes color—you can think of green as being the white paper, when it’s exposed to light.” This is Patterns for Resonant Space in a nutshell—a slippery record that’s never the same twice, always evolving to reveal something new. | 2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Youngbloods | July 29, 2017 | 7.3 | 97ca9bf0-af42-46b6-830a-49504d9c93f1 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
The Brazilian-born, Amsterdam-based producer’s new mixtape presents shapeshifting, pop-minded club tracks that showcase her dense production and versatile singing. | The Brazilian-born, Amsterdam-based producer’s new mixtape presents shapeshifting, pop-minded club tracks that showcase her dense production and versatile singing. | Lyzza: Mosquito | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lyzza-mosquito/ | Mosquito | Born in Brazil and based in the Netherlands, Lyzza got her start as a teenager, playing around with production software and uploading songs to SoundCloud while DJing ballroom sets around Amsterdam. She introduced her style of metallic electronic pop on an enigmatic trio of EPs that progressively brought her voice to the fore. Lyzza’s blasé flow and kinetic production style—jumping between rapid BPMs with a deep bass undertow pulling beneath—are confident and enticing, capable of stirring up delirium on the dancefloor before retreating into a more pensive comedown. On her new mixtape Mosquito, Lyzza presents a series of shapeshifting, pop-minded club tracks that constitute her most cohesive project yet. It includes some of her most approachable songs, yet they retain all the thrills of her dense production, here used in service of headstrong lyrics colored by a tumultuous love life.
The music on Mosquito often sounds on the brink of collapse. Lyzza’s avant-pop impulses cut a sharp figure, with winding intros that build toward accelerating tempos, crunching synths, and lyrics that dart between English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The smoldering highlight “Cheat Code” quakes with resounding handclaps, giving shuffling footing to Lyzza’s coolly delivered vocals about the mental anguish of wanting to end a relationship: “No quiero un amor que no tiene cualidad,” she sings emphatically, driving home a growing sense of self-worth. On the reggaeton-tinged “Deserve It,” she recruits Spanish rapper La Zowi, who provides a flexing, rapid-fire verse over Lyzza’s mutating synth line and sticky-sweet beat. Along with the in-your-face “Blush Me Out!” and loping “Ressaca,” they’re among Lyzza’s best tracks, with a forward sense of pounding rhythm and dynamic, shit-talking personality.
Though Mosquito ably conveys the artist’s compelling persona, some songs on the mixtape tread water. “Mind 2 Lips” charges forward with a thudding drum pattern and zipping synths that never reach any real climax, content to simmer in the background instead. “Eraser” loops and chops up stabs of electric guitar into a foregrounded melody, a wrinkle that becomes more grating the longer the song goes on. Lyzza is proficient at creating a hook that sticks with you—the hypnotic, Rihanna-esque chorus of “Blush Me Out!” is indelible—but her competing, distorted production tricks threaten to submerge the mixtape’s better ideas.
Still, Lyzza’s flexible, airy vocals keep things on track as Mosquito threads together her growing sense of authority. She slips between a feathery coo and martial shouts on the choppy, 8-bit-streaked “For When I Fall Again,” which imparts a biting assertion of agency. Later, on the highlight “Heathens Call,” she and Canadian-Zambian firebrand rapper Backxwash dial into a particularly vivid, boastful sweet spot. “Cut through, cutthroat/Can’t tell no more,” Lyzza attests in singsong over head-knocking percussion and echoing synths, ensuring every ounce of tenacity shows. | 2022-09-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Big Dada | September 19, 2022 | 6.8 | 97cb242c-3c82-4412-8814-b7230eb21725 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
There isn't much logic behind Quasi, the Portland-based band that Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have occasionally returned to over the past 20 years. Mole City, a wayward, asymmetrical double album, finds their sound more turbulent than ever. | There isn't much logic behind Quasi, the Portland-based band that Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have occasionally returned to over the past 20 years. Mole City, a wayward, asymmetrical double album, finds their sound more turbulent than ever. | Quasi: Mole City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18573-quasi-mole-city/ | Mole City | There isn't much logic behind Quasi, the Portland-based band that Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have occasionally returned to over the past 20 years. For instance: They produced a video for the song "See You on Mars" to herald the release of this record, a clip which consists of a blizzard of vintage clips all stuck together with scant regard for coherence. Coomes and Weiss don't deal in reason, at least not in this guise. Weiss' work with Sleater-Kinney, Wild Flag, and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, plus their joint tenure as back-up band to Elliott Smith, provided a fairly comprehensible path to follow. Quasi are more turbulent in spirit, especially here on Mole City, a wayward, asymmetrical double album that sees them returning to the two-piece format after a period with Jicks bassist Joanna Bolme.
Something that remains from prior Quasi records is Coomes and Weiss' love of producing short, sweet pop songs smeared in lashings of distortion. Coomes sounds like he was born with a fuzz pedal permanently attached to his foot, ready to whitewash the world with it. That mode of operation is the core Quasi sound, the safe haven they build for themselves around all the idiosyncratic turns they take elsewhere. Coomes' familiar organ sound is often to the fore, sometimes leading him into barroom and honky-tonk directions. But they can just as easily dip into droney synth work ("Chrome Duck", "Loopy"), twee 90s indie on Weiss' vocal turn ("R.I.P."), or, on one of the most affecting songs here, skirt around the kind of twilight blues found on Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos ("Chumps of Chance").
Quasi reek of the 70s, primarily through a love of power pop, Big Star, Todd Rundgren, and occasional moments of rock pomposity. The baroque beginnings of "Headshrinker" devolve into a burst of soloing of which Queen's Brian May would be proud. There's never an overall sense of direction, or a feel Coomes and Weiss are looking to stretch across this record as its primary arc. Instead, Mole City resembles a jumble of all the thoughts and inclinations they've had since their last album, 2010's American Gong. It's a mess, but Quasi find virtue in clutter, turning it into their primary motive for existence as a band. Still, it's hard to digest over the course of 24 tracks, including a limp "Tomorrow Never Knows" pastiche ("Gnot"), a moment where Coomes seems to be channeling his inner Wayne Coyne ("Geraldine"), and even a half-hearted found-sound collage on the title track.
The best song here is buried toward the end, at a point where the less patient listener may have given up altogether. "An Ice Cube in the Sun" radiates warmth and anger, with Coomes addressing "the misfits of the world," Weiss pounding away at her kit, and a point where the whole song arches into a delirious stretch of low-key pop. It's followed by a one-minute ramble into country titled "One & Done"—easily one of the most throwaway moments here—which serves to highlight just how frustrating Quasi can be at times. But it's hard to fault them when that's the whole point, when making music becomes akin to opening up a drawer full of old clothes and trying them on just because you can. The fact that there's a track here titled "Clap Trap" is both indicative of their humor and uncomfortably close to being a useful descriptor for their work. | 2013-10-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-10-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Kill Rock Stars | October 4, 2013 | 6 | 97d5f982-0525-4ccd-9d12-075926c1fa29 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
With songs that travel great distances between the poles of ambient and noise music, Claude Speeed’s latest is a mercurial set, capturing with great skill a kind of restless, sourceless anxiety. | With songs that travel great distances between the poles of ambient and noise music, Claude Speeed’s latest is a mercurial set, capturing with great skill a kind of restless, sourceless anxiety. | Claude Speeed: Infinity Ultra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claude-speeed-infinity-ultra/ | Infinity Ultra | When the Scottish electronic musician Claude Speeed remixed Kuedo’s “Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space” in 2012, he wisely didn’t attempt to one-up the track’s maximalist energy. Instead, he went the opposite route, smearing Kuedo’s hyperactive arpeggios and tumbling hi-hats into something smooth and strangely featureless, like a shadow. But any suggestion that he was playing it safe disappeared once he showed his trump card in the final few minutes: a cascading drum solo whose wild fills, when combined with muted synth buzz, suggested John Bonham sitting in with Oneohtrix Point Never. It was the perfect foil for Kuedo’s streamlined pulses: an epic showdown between human and machine.
That 2012 remix brought Claude Speeed to Planet Mu’s attention; now, on his first full album for the label (after a five-track EP in 2015), the same contrasts still guide his work. Toggling between ambient and noise, the album covers a lot of ground. “BCCCC” opens the record with fluttering arpeggios and a regal synthesizer melody channeling Boards of Canada and Hudson Mohawke—a flashback, perhaps, to his time on the LuckyMe label. But then “Serra” whips to the opposite end of the spectrum with a freeform sprawl of coruscating feedback that plays out like a gentler, more dulcet version of Merzbow’s Rainbow Electronics.
The rest of the album follows a twisting series of switchbacks between those two poles. After a series of high-pitched glitches, “Windows 95” morphs into what can only be described as a weaponized start-up chime. “Ambien Rave” sounds pretty much exactly like the title promises: beatless trance, cushioned in reverb, and floating six feet off the ground; he returns to the idea on “Fifth Fortress,” whose springy melody carries welcome echoes of the Knife’s Silent Shout. Even his simplest ideas are often pulled in multiple directions at once: beneath the sketch-like “XY Autostream” and “VZJD,” both lyrical ambient etudes, an undercurrent of distortion threatens to drag them into far more sinister territory. At the other end of the spectrum, “Alternative Histories,” featuring Kuedo, splits the difference between doom metal’s rumbling ambience and the spectral spray of Ligeti or Xenakis, and “Super 800 NYC,” crackling like a burning amplifier, might as well be a full-scale tribute to Sunn O))).
Sometimes, Speeed’s wandering interests have the effect of throwing the listener off balance. “Entering the Zone,” for instance, puts his yen for rock drumming into the service of a John Carpenter-like prog jam—a jarring contrast with the album’s more streamlined surfaces. That clash raises an interesting point: Unlike a lot of ambient-leaning electronic music, this doesn’t necessarily work as background listening: Its moods are too mercurial, its changes too nuanced. You need to be paying attention to really appreciate the subtle mutations in his sound, yet there’s also something about his queasy tones and grizzled frequencies that keep the listener at arm’s length, emotionally speaking. It’s a record that dares you not to get too close.
But maybe that’s all part of Speeed’s plan. In the press release, he talks about his interest in creating “an abstract space to process the oppression, confusion, and insanity of the contemporary age.” That’s a tall order, but his unsettling instrumental sketches do a good job of capturing a kind of restless, sourceless anxiety. And with the album’s final four tracks, a warm sun rises over his virtual world, and some of the more alienating trappings fall away. The slow, resonant “Center Tech” sounds like some strange musical interface linking digitized tympani with ocean waves; the lyrical “Spirits” and “Contact” show off his synthesizers in all their quicksilver glory. And on the closing “DreamDream,” a voice singing, “Dream,” is looped over his most ebullient melody, evocative, in its own way, of the Field and M83. It’s not at all where you might have expected the record to end up, but it makes for an awfully satisfying finale. Just as he did on his Kuedo remix, he’s kept his best card up his sleeve all along. | 2017-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 18, 2017 | 7.4 | 97d8e650-604d-42af-93aa-10450a714a38 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Oak Park rapper’s new album is one of his meanest and funniest, cementing him as a fresh voice in California rap. | The Oak Park rapper’s new album is one of his meanest and funniest, cementing him as a fresh voice in California rap. | ShooterGang Kony: Red Paint Reverend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shootergang-kony-red-paint-reverend/ | Red Paint Reverend | To hear ShooterGang Kony tell it, he never thought about rapping until he was sitting in a jail cell. The 21-year-old native of Sacramento’s Oak Park was first sentenced to probation at 13 and began bouncing in and out of lockup a couple years later; his music, buoyant but threatening, sometimes recalls these jail cells as portals to hell, on other songs as minor inconveniences. On Red Paint Reverend, his excellent new album, Kony is meaner and funnier than ever, but also delves deeper into the psychic pain of those incarcerations, rapping evocatively about the way he would dial number after number on the jail phones that led him to his friends’ voicemails, as he imagined the fun they were having without him. That he does this without surrendering any of the freewheeling chaos of his early work makes Reverend a marked leap forward for one of California’s most exciting young rap artists.
The cliché goes that by the turn of the century, major-label rap albums were built by rubric: four songs for “the streets,” three for “the club,” two for “the girls,” and so on. Still today, many artist backload their albums with their more somber, most overtly personal songs, as a way to give the records a veneer of seriousness and a sense of emotional heft. Kony has always been a little more slippery in this regard. His album from last summer, Second Hand Smoke, opens with a strange two-step: first a minor-key elegy called “Off the Dribble,” which is followed by “Charlie,” a song that’s bright and breezy but still—to be absolutely clear—about weapons. The forward motion on Kony’s albums comes from variations in tone and execution rather than in subject matter. This means that the sober songs are injected with unsettling humor and the bouncy ones are girded by murder.
Kony doesn’t foreground the technical aspects of rapping, but he’s more than capable: see the way he finds the beat’s pocket on the intro as the drums fall in around the 80-second mark, then compare that to songs like “Veteran’s Day,” where he gestures toward the jagged flows that his contemporaries nearer the Bay and down in Los Angeles have been using, the ones that always teeter on the back edge of the measure, threatening to fall off.
While he never gets quite as unmoored from the beat as AzChike or the guys in SOB x RBE, Kony’s slightly muted version of the style puts his work in conversation with other California rappers––and in turn highlights the comparatively classicist streak to his writing. The most affecting song on Reverend is “A Sinner’s Story,” where he recalls those jail phones and talks about the rapid psychological shift that happens between pulling your first trigger and examining your first exit wound. It is also a shock to hear someone whose writing is so often qualified with winks and asides rap as naked a four-bar passage as:
Ever had your close friend put your name in the case?
Wanna kill him, but you can’t, ‘cause you loved him under the hate.
Ever had your close friend coil into a snake?
He was shedding in my house, it was right in front of my face.
Between “A Sinner’s Story” and “Dearly Departed,” a duet with Oak Park elder statesman Mozzy, Reverend showcases Kony’s ability to write straightforwardly about the grim realities of life in Sacramento. But as mentioned, he’s just as likely to cover the same subject matter with a smile on his face. At various points on the album Kony cracks jokes about industry people telling him to change his stage name (“But I still sleep with the thing”) and about someone who could end up snitching (“Cops had him singing and pointing like it’s the ‘70s”). And then there’s the delayed cause-and-effect of him rapping, on one song, “I prefer the Glock over the chopper, I like to know who I be shooting” and then, on the next track, “I hit his homie on a fluke––he was actually kind of cool,” shrugging off the latter murder like a cackling Oak Park Chekhov. By the time Reverend settles into its slick closer, “Street Talk,” Kony is cemented as a fresh voice for California: of his generation but informed by his elders, untangling the tragedies of his life when he isn’t too busy having fun. | 2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released / Empire | February 28, 2020 | 7.7 | 97dc917f-4fe7-49e4-afe0-8ec5e854676d | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Almost three years since his last solo project, the 26-year-old rapper continues to reimagine and reinterpret his influences, which is part of what makes his new music feel so alive. | Almost three years since his last solo project, the 26-year-old rapper continues to reimagine and reinterpret his influences, which is part of what makes his new music feel so alive. | Chief Keef: 4Nem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chief-keef-4nem/ | 4Nem | For a while, Chief Keef has been the antithesis of the modern rap superstar who coasts on musical trends and collaborations. Finally Rich, released almost a decade ago, was a decent enough swing at the prototypical major label debut. But since then, the Chicagoan’s mixtapes have materialized so specifically out of his own interests that they seem to ignore just about everything happening in rap. If album drop dates weren’t visible on streaming services, it would be nearly impossible to tell if a Keef tape was from 2013, 2017, or 2021. His apparent rejection of the game left a certain corner of fans disappointed that he wasn’t the hitmaker they imagined he could be and left others thrilled that he chose to instead churn out weird, often erratic trips into his psyche.
I tend to side with the latter, which isn’t to say the music is always good. But when it clicks, you get a tape as singular and creative as Almighty So, GloToven, or his latest project 4NEM. If you were to tell me that Keef spent the past year recording this album unplugged with access to nothing but a USB of Gucci Mane and Three 6 Mafia mixtapes and Lex Luger and Zaytoven instrumentals, I would believe you. I suppose that’s nothing new—since Keef was a teenager, he’s been infatuated with ATL trap and Memphis street rap. But the way he continues to reimagine and reinterpret those influences is part of what makes 4NEM feel so alive.
Similar to Keef’s most noteworthy albums, 4NEM is driven by the beat selection. “Bitch Where,” produced by Akachi and Sonickaboom, might be the coolest. For the first minute, Keef’s triumphant raps (“Made it out the Chi’/If I didn’t, wouldn’t see today”) are backdropped by a drumless instrumental and horns that blare louder than a fire alarm. Once you’ve given up the hope of percussion, the drums suddenly begin to thud and the moment is euphoric. “Tuxedo” is similarly led by horns that bring back memories of the Flockaveli era, but this time the hi-hats rattle throughout and clash with Keef as he shifts between chants and growls.
Production may be the catalyst of 4NEM, but his commitment on the rapping end separates it from more minor tapes in his catalog. “See Through” is a trip. Over intermittent drums and bells that ring like a gong being hit with a mallet, Keef puts his vocals through filters that sound like he’s rapping behind a hollow wall and packs the verse with twisted jokes that are unclear if they’re intended to be jokes or not: “You don’t smoke or drink, boy, your fuckin’ pee see-through/My piss need goggles and telescopes to see through.” Both verses on “Picking Big Sean Up” are on the shortlist of the tape’s best, but the second sticks out as he jumps from chilling one-line reflections to freestyled gibberish delivered with croaky vocals, as if he hadn’t taken a sip of water in days.
For all his artistic ingenuity, Keef uncharacteristically puts the bottom line over the art for a moment. (It’s hard to ignore that the album is packaged with an NFT of the artwork, a deflating trend he’s embraced.) But even 4NEM’s throwaway tracks have high points: the interpolation of Three 6 Mafia’s “Slob on My Knob” on “Like It’s Yo Job” is played out but worth it for the chaotic ad libs, and the “Ice Cream Man” beat is flat yet saved by weirdly robotic AutoTune croons. That’s the level Keef is at here, though 4NEM shouldn’t be considered a renaissance or a return to his glory days. Every now and then, he digs further into his brain and tweaks his sound while still pulling from the same foundation, and born is a gem like 4NEM.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Glo Gang / RBC | January 6, 2022 | 8 | 97ddbd8e-2d27-4219-b62f-382630671930 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Backed by veteran jazz musicians and newer players, the Trinidad-born, London-based poet summons spirits of the Caribbean diaspora to ask what it might take to build a better world. | Backed by veteran jazz musicians and newer players, the Trinidad-born, London-based poet summons spirits of the Caribbean diaspora to ask what it might take to build a better world. | Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anthony-joseph-the-rich-are-only-defeated-when-running-for-their-lives/ | The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives | Anthony Joseph can halt your breath with intonation alone. The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives is a work of historical interrogation that is as searing as it is sentimental, in which Joseph details his own struggles along with the tribulations of poets who came before him. These remembrances are the forceful evidence in his call for change, and they are also the material he is made of. It’s a wildly tricky proposition, but throughout the album Joseph attempts to summon spirits of the diaspora to make his case for a novel way of remaking society, if not creating a new society altogether. This might seem like a mighty, almost impossible task; regardless, this is one of the most cohesive, forward-looking jazz albums in recent memory. Backed up by old hands and newer players, Joseph recites poetry with verve, pushing himself and the band to relay both crushing oppression and real hope for change.
Nowhere is this clearer than on the second track, “Calling England Home.” Over a sinuous groove, Joseph recounts different stories of immigrants who arrived in England at different times. Each person, he says, had a difficult relationship with the idea that England was their home. The haunting instrumentation reflects this ambivalence: Unison horns begin to drift apart once Joseph begins to speak, while the rhythm section maintains forward momentum, merging stories that are unified in their sense of isolation. Joseph manipulates his voice as he tells his tales, proffering quiet statements of fact (“Black and been here since 1949”), muttered musings (“I’ve lived here longer than home”), and shouted questions (“How long do you have to live in a place/Before you can call it ‘home’?”). As a means of representing the violence of the diaspora, the physicality of their approach is revelatory.
Just as crucial is Joseph’s reverence for those who have contended with these ideas before. Take the opener “Kamau,” which is dedicated to the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, who died last year. Joseph begins with a simple ode to the powers of that “sonic sage,” praising the “trumpet in his throat.” He launches into a whirl of associative poetry, asking the poet to play every musical style of the Carribean diaspora and detailing his own devotion to another Black Carribean author during a time of duress. The music shifts under him as he performs these acrobatics, and what starts as a bandstand melody then becomes a dirge, only to finally explode into peals of improvised noise. Joseph and the band have such a tight relationship that even the way they lose control is highly calibrated: The original melody never stops (though improvisation occurs around it) and his voice always guides the sound forward. After a year of hearing protest music that has proposed liberation, it’s refreshing to hear a song that actually sounds like freedom.
This freedom emanates from Joseph’s clear yet subtle lyricism and the band’s dynamic virtuosity. Both elements are present on “Swing Praxis,” a call to evaluate the tactics of liberation struggles past and also to examine our methods of working for change in the present. Saxophonists Jason Yarde, Colin Webster, and Shabaka Hutchings play in unison and are backed up by bassist Andrew John, guitarist Thibaut Remy, and drummer Rod Youngs. Youngs provides the backbeat here (and throughout the album), and Remy adds color at opportune moments. When Joseph engages in a thoughtful critique of our current predicament (“Either we vote or protest or tremble or march or fight/But either way it will soon be hard to be ‘cool’ and black at the same time”), his cadence is almost Heron-esque. That poet’s influence can also be felt on the Rhodes-featuring “The Gift,” which brings to mind the collaborations between Heron and Brian Jackson in the late 1970s. In fact, Youngs, the drummer who gives this song its structure, collaborated with Heron in the 1990s, and his versatility provides Joseph with a solid foundation as he gets personal. Right as Joseph recounts the sound of dirt hitting his father’s casket, Youngs bangs down on his set, providing a marching percussion for the funeral. As Joseph talks about what his father has left behind, and what his community gave to them both, he leaves it up to you to decide what the titular gift actually is. Is it the inherited jewel bag he must split with his brother, the prayers of his community, or the mere ability to keep existing? With these questions surrounding you, the horn section plays and the piano slowly plinks away as the song comes to a definite end.
Joseph makes protest music that is heavily rooted in what has come before. The texture he achieves and the insights he finds are hard won; he’s not tossing out what feels good as much as underlining what matters. “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives” is a line taken from the Trinadian theorist C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, a book that analyzed the Haitian Revolution. It’s the type of statement that one can read either as a provocation or a prompt to envision a future that is very different from the one we inhabit. The music Joseph makes seems to waver between these two possibilities. Joseph wants change now, and because of that he’s deeply invested in looking at the ambiguities that we carry with us. It’s through his recognition of those ambiguities that he can declaim so forcefully against a country that refuses to accept those who have supplied it with wealth and labor, while praising poets that have made their adopted countries’ language sing. His declarations aren’t supposed to be persuasive; his gravitas comes from his contemplation. With the backing of an energetic set of players, he testifies with a stony resolve. It must be witnessed to be believed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Heavenly Sweetness | June 10, 2021 | 8 | 97e2161d-967c-426d-9b30-05b62a092ddc | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
The London singer’s sophomore album is a bracing, darkly funny blend of folk and Britpop. Her tactile lyrics keep the songs melodically strong and full of surprises. | The London singer’s sophomore album is a bracing, darkly funny blend of folk and Britpop. Her tactile lyrics keep the songs melodically strong and full of surprises. | Marika Hackman: I’m Not Your Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23158-im-not-your-man/ | I’m Not Your Man | Over the past 14 months, three very different LGBTQ acts have each released a brilliantly subversive song titled “Boyfriend.” Last April, Tegan and Sara made a synth-pop plea for a straight girl to stop playing around and commit. In September, Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace raged at a flaky partner who treated her like “some dumb fucking boyfriend.” Then in February came Marika Hackman’s contribution, a sly Britpop power-play about stealing a man’s girlfriend from under his nose because the poor dolt believes “a woman really needs a man to make her scream.” It’s one of the year’s sharpest singles: a funny, sexy rebuke to ignorant blokes, and an excellently produced throwback. Its boldness erases any lingering sense of Hackman as some fey folkie, a fairly unjust reputation that stuck to the 25-year-old Londoner’s debut, 2015’s unsettling We Slept at Last.
London four-piece the Big Moon back Hackman on her follow-up I’m Not Your Man, and producer Charlie Andrew has balanced the sound of five women playing in a room with details that enhance the record’s sense of menace. Whether boisterous or seething, the guitar tones owe a debt to ’80s U2 and grunge, but the scale is more claustrophobic than stadium. Quiet feedback-hums will suddenly squawk and lurch like a constricting noose, and the group regularly breaks into marauding vocal chants that are impeccably arranged but full of feral energy. Without any explicit tricks, “Round We Go,” a song about “rolling ’round my skull like a flesh-colored marble,” seems to close in on itself, suffocating slowly. There are a few overdone bits—the orchestral outro of “Blahblahblah” is a bit on the nose, and the cavernous “So Long” is more obvious than the rest of the record—but otherwise it’s melodically strong and full of surprises, which is more than you can say for most young British indie-rock albums of the last few years.
Most of those records lack killer hooks; Hackman has many. There’s “Boyfriend,” where she roars, “It’s fine ‘cause I am just a girl/It doesn’t count,” simultaneously mocking the guy and airing her frustrations with perceptions of lesbian relationships as somehow “lesser.” “Time’s Been Reckless” feels like one of Blur’s early singles then breaks into a raucous chorus that pits the Big Moon’s chants against Hackman’s emotional frostiness. It’s similar in theme to “My Lover Cindy,” where idle twang undercuts Hackman’s image of a mutually beneficial hook-up and her tendency to ghost lovers. The music dips out for the chorus, leaving her voice center stage: “‘Cause I’m a greedy pig/I’m gonna get my fill/I’m gonna keep my eyes on the prize and I’ll suck you dry, I will,” she sings, sounding innocent and depraved, pirouetting on each word while licking her lips.
Against more trad backing, Hackman can sound like any English rose, as on the rolling, slightly Medieval “Apple Tree.” But in darker surroundings, she sings at a dispassionate remove that gives her excellent, carnal lyrics an extra kick. She paints the emptiness of a past relationship and the fullness of her current one with sensuality and mordant humor. The breakup in “Cigarette” becomes even more brutal thanks to Hackman’s economical writing, quickly distilling a fight in a car park after a dismal night out. “When did it get so forced? Drunk by the second course,” she rues over fluttery fingerpicking. “I tried to hold my tongue/But you, you yanked it from my grip/Bathed it in petroleum/Lit a cigarette and gave it a kiss.” “I’d Rather Be With Them” could come from the end of the same night, drunk and aching. “I’m so fucking heartless/I can’t even cry,” Hackman sings, sounding full of self-loathing.
There’s one love song here, “Violet,” a luxurious, sinister come-on akin to the space westerns of Torres’ Sprinter. “I’d like to roll around your tongue/Caught like a bicycle spoke,” Hackman sings. “You eat, I’ll grow and grow/Swelling up until you choke.” She savors each word, her seductive delivery driving home the violence. Hackman’s tactile lyricism reinforces a portrait of a numb woman desperate for sensation by any means possible. It’s not hedonistic thrill-seeking, but rings true in a world where numbness can be a survival technique—and pleasure and sensation are equally at a premium. As a writer, Hackman may owe a bit to PJ Harvey, but I’m Not Your Man is the proper arrival of a bold young British force. | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | June 2, 2017 | 7.5 | 97f25e17-4ce9-40d2-9110-9b1c8e5f07a3 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
After fumbling slightly on their last record, the doom apostles recover their grave, soaring majesty on an album that find a new way forward by refining their past. | After fumbling slightly on their last record, the doom apostles recover their grave, soaring majesty on an album that find a new way forward by refining their past. | Pallbearer: Forgotten Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pallbearer-forgotten-days/ | Forgotten Days | Doom metal creeps. Half a century since Black Sabbath released Paranoid, arguably the form’s ark of the covenant, most doom bands still sound somewhat like the original, each with assorted refinements. Yes, doom has occasionally splintered into smaller and slower sects, like the lugubrious “funeral doom” and glacial “drone metal.” But consider the progress of hip-hop in roughly the same time frame: While hip-hop has created its own global ecosystem, teeming forever with wild new mutations, doom is a solitary old oak, steadily growing at its own oblivious clip.
A decade ago, Pallbearer emerged from Arkansas as promising apostles of doom and purveyors of this stubborn beauty. On their first two LPs, especially 2014’s magisterial Foundations of Burden, they paired the kind of compulsory hooks that made Sabbath stars with the seeming belief that every song could be a 10-minute hypnotic wash. Pallbearer synthesized doom’s best elements into a refulgent melancholy, sparkling as it sulked. They wobbled, though, on Heartless, their 2017 parting shot for longtime label Profound Lore. As though trying to prove how much they’d grown during their tenure there, Pallbearer did too much too fast, flitting from would-be hits that missed to panoramic psych-rock that bored.
But on their international debut for Nuclear Blast, a fabled clearinghouse for some of the world’s most popular metal bands, Pallbearer—smarter, sharper, and ostensibly sadder now—again plod doom’s time-worn grooves. Their fourth album, Forgotten Days, is both a return to mighty form and a new way forward for a band perpetually poised at the edge of wider success.
Forgotten Days hinges on “Silver Wings,” the 12-minute saga at its center. A quintessential throwback, it is an encapsulation of most everything Pallbearer have done well, like the tangled solos that animate the middle or the crawling tempos that thrill as they build. During the song’s back half, Pallbearer harmonize over kaleidoscopic synthesizers, perfectly fusing their love of Pink Floyd with the intricate singalongs of AOR. “Silver Wings” ponders human frailty and impermanence—or how time grinds “even the greatest of triumphs/To nothing,” as they sing in unison during the last verse—by creating a formidable monument to that very notion.
More important than this epic, though, are its bookends. Aside from a twinkling curio on Foundations of Burden, “Stasis” and “The Quicksand of Existence” are the two shortest songs in Pallbearer’s catalogue, clocking in at four minutes each. It’s as if producer Randall Dunn challenged them to squeeze their grandeur onto a seven-inch single. The brevity works. Pallbearer fit a magnetic riff, a compelling hook, and at least one curious instrumental section into each song. Nothing is missing; instead, you gain a sense of how catchy and immediate Pallbearer have always hoped to be, beneath the monolithic solos and militant repetition. How would an entire Pallbearer album so pithy work?
The rest of Forgotten Days actually trends that way. Pallbearer never allow indulgence to stand in the way of a song’s urgency here, digging into these grooves without getting stuck there. The title track moves like a mudslide, viscous at the core but relentless as it plows downhill. Brett Campbell’s refrain about the instability of self-doubt—“Is this insanity? Will they come to take me?”—clings to the riff as though it were the only solid ground in sight. The irrepressible “Vengeance & Ruination” is a reminder that the Allman Brothers’ Georgia and Eyehategod’s New Orleans are only a day’s drive from Pallbearer’s home of Little Rock. Finale “Caledonia,” a farewell to youth’s innocence, is a languorous beauty, with keyboards seeping from the cracks between the pensive guitars. When Pallbearer lift into the chorus, you picture them grinning despite the song’s emotional weight, marveling at how good it can feel to share these blues.
Campbell and Joseph Rowland wrote Forgotten Days about family loss. Rowland is finally reckoning with the death of his mother nearly a decade ago, just before Pallbearer became a breakthrough band, and the self-medication that followed. Campbell has recently watched his grandmother succumb to the cruelty of Alzheimer’s. These eight songs grapple candidly with these woes, but, like the music itself, the words don’t wallow. Instead, Pallbearer use these tragedies to revel in being alive, or to answer the “gnawing doubts that I ever learned to live.” That is a longtime hallmark of the best doom, too, from Sabbath through Candlemass and now to Pallbearer—staring directly into the dark and squinting to find the light. Forgotten Days convinces you to do the same.
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. | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | October 30, 2020 | 8 | 97f98efd-39bd-4fa7-916c-d44c87e8479c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Years of online myth-making have culminated with Lil B’s masterpiece Black Ken, 27 tracks of deep funk and hyphy that finally defines the mercurial Based God. | Years of online myth-making have culminated with Lil B’s masterpiece Black Ken, 27 tracks of deep funk and hyphy that finally defines the mercurial Based God. | Lil B: Black Ken | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-b-black-ken/ | Black Ken | Seven years ago, Lil B announced a mixtape called Black Ken, just a blip amid the 13 other projects he released that year. Since then, it’s been hard to judge the size of the gap between the Berkeley rapper’s pious legion of disciples and those who would dismiss his based freestyles as the death of rap. But time has clearly validated his path, arcane as it may have once appeared; and while the average 2017 rap fan might be more familiar with the Based God’s Curse than Evil Red Flame deep cuts, Lil B’s impact on the way rap sounds and how it’s distributed is beyond doubt. In the past few years, that influence has been celebrated by his peers, unprompted, from Kendrick to Metro Boomin to Danny Brown. Even a cursory scan of underground (and occasionally mainstream) rap movements of the 2010s reveals traces of B’s DNA at every turn: Odd Future, Raider Klan, Yung Lean, Makonnen, and perhaps most visibly, this year’s bumper crop of SoundCloud rap stars, from South Florida’s glitchy underbelly to GothBoiClique’s face-tat emo. Put simply: Based God was right.
None of this, however, brings the world closer to articulating what exactly sets Lil B’s body of work apart, even from those in his creative debt. His free-verse mindspray has nudged rappers away from more structured lyricism, and his tear-soaked Imogen Heap-core beats have spawned micro-genres of their own, but a purely stylistic reading of Lil B feels insufficient. His benevolent cult-leader persona—a Zenned-out internet addict in tiny pants with a direct line to the wise and mysterious Based God—has certainly laid the groundwork for a generation of social media myth-builders. But an oversimplified focus on B as “historical online figure,” emphasizing his impact in terms of sheer virality, paints him foremost as a digital marketing mastermind—accurate, maybe, but a bit outside the point. How could the guy who wrote the social media era’s “What’s Going On” be understood as a living meme?
Since the Myspace days, which he spent uploading countless based freestyles to his 100-plus pages, some have argued for Lil B as a rapper whose appeal lies in his subversion of rap conventions: his unedited stream of consciousness, his wide-eyed mysticism, his insistence on his visual similarity to J.K. Rowling, his occasional doubt as to whether he’s even a rapper at all. Black Ken—released nearly two years after his last project—offers a striking argument to the contrary. Lil B is great, Black Ken affirms, not because he disrupts hip-hop but because he embodies it so completely—an endlessly curious student of rap, enamored of the form enough to spend a decade thoroughly deconstructing it, asking what it all means, then putting it back together again. And more than any other release in his immense catalog, Black Ken draws direct and persuasive lines between his own music and that of his Bay Area forebearers—from ’80s pimp wisdom all the way to hyphy—presenting B as a rapper born and raised not on the internet, but in Berkeley, California.
I’ve started to think of Black Ken as a metaphysical He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper situation. Over its 27 tracks, Lil B raps over entirely self-produced beats with occasional narration from the omniscient DJ BasedGod. And its first eight tracks represent his most purposeful block of music since his 2009 opus 6 Kiss—raw, squelching loops of murderous funk and 808s that land like uppercuts, stuff that sounds like you could’ve bought it on cassette out of a trunk in ’88. The first we hear of B’s voice on “Still Run It”—measured, resolute, completely unlike his liquid freestyles—he is channeling a Tupac flow, a reminder of the icon’s claim to Oakland as the city that put him on game in his Digital Underground days. “Hip-hop is back!” B crows, and if you didn’t believe him the first time, three tracks later is “Hip Hop,” unquestionably the dopest song this side of the Reagan (or Dregan) administration with a “Hip! Hop! Hip! Hop!” chorus. “Remember I was younger, I always loved music/So now it’s an honor to write and produce it,” he raps; it all could’ve easily read as kitsch if the beat didn’t knock so hard, or if he didn’t so plainly believe it.
Black Ken channels the sound of Lil B’s hometown in the years just before his birth—an era in which Bay Area rap stood uncompromisingly apart from the industry out of both necessity and pride. The result is an outsider artist’s take on old Too $hort or Kool Rock Jay tapes: plain-spoken neighborhood tours that impart real-life lessons in self-reliance over booming, brittle 808s and P-Funk tracks stripped for parts. “Bad MF,” on which B tells a snitch to kick rocks (“Catch the bus, motherfucker!”), has the kind of roughneck piano beat that evokes a virtuoso who plays only with his elbows, with funk licks that make me want to stomp down an alley kicking over trash cans. And when on “Free Life” he wonders how to exist happily in an exhausting world, his reminder that “the best things in life are free” is not a cliché, but a distillation of based philosophy in the style of Too $hort’s “It’s Your Life,” a 1990 lesson in imposing the positive. The album’s mid-way hyphy section is a less successful revival, but it’s worth it for B snarling, “Gentrify me? I beg your pardon!” in his best Keak Da Sneak voice on “Getting Hot.”
Such is the duality of Lil B: One minute he’s a Zen monk, floating high above the trappings of society, and the next he’s a red-eyed, surrealist gangster, one funny look away from tearing the club up. And there are occasionally confounding, mostly delightful sonic outliers throughout Black Ken’s back half: “Ride (Hold Up),” like a Clara Rockmore theremin performance interrupted by sepia-toned zaps of Detroit techno, feels at once bound inextricably to history and hovering extra-terrestrially above it. On “Turn Up (Till You Can’t)”, B applies his T-t-t-totally dude “California Boy” sing-song to Gothenburg-style Balearic pop, and “Zam Bose (In San Jose)” resists explanation entirely. But what ties Black Ken together, and what makes it not just a palatable but completely thrilling listen, like stumbling unwittingly into the best block party ever, is Lil B’s production throughout—a wild but controlled stylistic breakthrough.
Late last year, Lil B made some headlines when he announced on Twitter that Black Ken would be dedicated to a seemingly bizarre selection of honorees—from Jadakiss and the Lox, to Charles Hamilton and Iggy Azalea, to the state of Rhode Island. In retrospect, though, the most knowing shout-out dedicated the tape “to everyone who makes music.” Typed out, it’s perhaps a simple sentiment. But it also gets to the heart of Black Ken, and to the core of what continues to set the most influential rapper of the past decade completely apart from his peers. More than anything, Black Ken feels like a testament, seven years in the making, to music as a lifelong process of discovery—an affirmation of art-making as not a means to an end, but a reason for being. In that sense, the best thing about Black Ken is that it is not an endpoint in itself, but a mile-marker along Lil B’s journey; it just so happens, after a decade as rap’s most devoted scholar, to also be a masterpiece. | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | Basedworld | August 24, 2017 | 8.5 | 97fca068-7b58-4a5e-9752-d4b013b0a03a | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The pairing of the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser and former Vampire Weekend producer/instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij turns out to be an inspired one. | The pairing of the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser and former Vampire Weekend producer/instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij turns out to be an inspired one. | Hamilton Leithauser / Rostam: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22313-i-had-a-dream-that-you-were-mine/ | I Had a Dream That You Were Mine | “I retired from my fight,” Hamilton Leithauser crooned with a smirk on his first great solo tune. “I Retired”’s very existence confirms that the singer didn’t actually give up, but Leithauser’s point about getting older and figuring out how to keep creating felt like a painfully self-aware revelation upon arrival, six months after his longtime band the Walkmen announced an indefinite hiatus. “All the fire in your heart won’t help/All the smoke up in your head,” he continued, figuring that “as long as [he] can keep the train rolling, then all [his] friends will always know they’ll never be alone.” Consider it a self-fulfilling prophecy tucked inside a nugget of irony: A song called “I Retired” directly spawned Leithauser’s next musical direction.
“I Retired” was one of two songs from Leithauser’s 2014 solo debut, Black Hours, that he worked on with Rostam Batmanglij. Leithauser and the former Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist/producer apparently bonded over shooby doo wops, their deadpan version of which sounds like the Flamingos came down with a case of urban malaise. That vocal technique is all over “I Retired” and again on I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, emblematic of what makes Leithauser and Batmanglij’s first collaborative full-length the rare release that looks backwards without falling victim to retro pastiche.
With Batmanglij’s piano and Leithauser’s voice as their guiding forces, the duo answer a question that has eluded many a musician before: How do you incorporate the music of the past without losing yourself in what’s already been done? Even those beloved harmonies represent just one tool in a deep kit, right alongside Spanish guitar, Disney strings, bawdy horns, tender banjo, airy vocal loops, and cinematic reverb. Together, Leithauser and Batmanglij work their way through nearly seven decades of musical history—from doo-wop and country-rock to Leonard Cohen-style torch songs and the George Martin-indebted baroque-pop Rostam often used to make VW twinkle—but they also don’t forget who they are in the process: one of ’00s indie rock’s most charismatic singers, alongside one of its most creative songwriter-producers.
If there was any lingering doubt that Rostam was Vampire Weekend’s special sauce (before his departure earlier this year), look to I Had a Dream That You Were Mine. The convincing ease with which the duo weaves disparate musical styles together seems distinctly Rostam—the work of someone who made Afropop, calypso, ’80s synth-pop, samples from M.I.A. to Toots and the Maytals, and a half-dozen other global styles fit together within music that often was held up as the indie rock zeitgeist. Here on “You Ain’t That Young Kid,” a spirited Dylan-on-piano-and-harmonica act turns towards pleading slide guitar, then an echo chamber of angel voices, then a slow dance of ’60s organ and steel drum, then a tidy harpsichord minuet—then, impossibly, all at once. The five-minute standout ends as a gilded acoustic singalong, the overwhelming sentimentality of which is amplified by an Instagram-filter of a synth line growing underneath. Rostam’s production is highly visual, and listening to this record, you get a sense of all the colors he must see when he’s behind the boards.
But RostHam is an equal partnership, and Leithauser reminds you why you were drawn to the Walkmen in the first place. He gives what has to be his strongest and most wide-ranging collection of vocal performances on record to date, spanning from talk-crooning to punkish howling to folk-balladeering to heavenly harmonizing to raspily brooding about as he first perfected on “The Rat.”
Black Hours’ primary flaw was that it alternated sharply between Leithauser going Bublé in his own way and simply channeling his old band. I Had a Dream That You Were Mine manages to incorporate these two modes in the larger context of its 20th-century-pop scrapbook—on songs about longing and looking back, no less. And it’s the songs where Leithauser loses himself in what was and what could be that his voice sounds best. On “Rough Going (I Won’t Let Up),” atop a creaking piano line and a spiraling sax solo, Leithauser screams like a man possessed that he won’t let up, but he holds it together, and the song never lets its barroom singalong quality devolve into total shambles.
This is a slightly more mature Leithauser, but that life experience can also be a curse. Over the course of the album, the streets of downtown New York become littered with memories, and even the good ones hurt a little because they’re faded now. The album is drenched in this wistful feeling, the crowning achievement of which is “When the Truth Is…” There are many moving parts that go into making this song work, from the echoing swirl of percussion and piano to the snippet of film dialogue at the end, but they’re rendered so perfectly, all you hear by the end is straight swoon. The main thing Rostam and Hamilton get right about doo-wop is that it often makes romantic yearning shimmer like a slow-moving disco ball.
Towards the beginning of the album—on “Sick as a Dog,” the song that sounds the most modern (and a little like Spoon)—Leithauser harmonizes with himself, “I use the same voice I always had.” Indeed, it’s not that Leithauser has dramatically changed since his days in the Walkmen; rather, pairing with Rostam has brought out the best in him. It’s rare for collaborative albums between known entities to feel like equal reflections of both parties, but RostHam find a middle-ground in mutual longing for the past. It’s the kind of album Leithauser can be proud of—you know, once he’s old enough to actually retire. | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Glassnote | September 23, 2016 | 8.3 | 97fd6422-976b-4bf5-ae4b-6a2378e64957 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
On his first album in four years, the Swedish house producer strips away the hiss to zero in on floor-filling club tracks and big, universal emotions. | On his first album in four years, the Swedish house producer strips away the hiss to zero in on floor-filling club tracks and big, universal emotions. | DJ Seinfeld: Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-seinfeld-mirrors/ | Mirrors | “She loves me” are the first words heard on Mirrors, DJ Seinfeld’s first album in four years. It’s a simple yet personal statement, in keeping with the Swedish producer’s love of vocal samples that cut to the quick. But it’s also a little jarring to hear something that sweet on one of his records. Armand Jakobsson launched the project as a means of processing a breakup; his early singles and debut album were murky, melancholic house, filled with euphoria but also imbued with an inescapable sense of longing and sadness. That sample is a hint that something important has changed.
Gone are the clunky snare beats and muffled hi-hats that were everywhere on his debut, along with the saturated tape effect that coated everything else. Instead, thick and at times almost groovy basslines are everywhere, and soaring Day-Glo synths have taken center stage. Jakobsson has always had a strained relationship to the “lo-fi” tag that attached itself to his productions early on, and here he seems to revel in making music that feels nothing like his old stuff. “Walking With Your Smile” has a garage shuffle that suggests a sunnier Burial, until a gloriously cheesy processed piano reminds you who is actually making this. Closer “Song for the Lonely” feels like Jakobsson trying to prove he can make a proper club banger, with its relentless energy, constantly shape-shifting melody, and pounding kick drum. Everywhere on Mirrors the production has become crisp, smooth, and polished until it shines. Only “These Things Will Come to Be” feels like something out of the old playbook. The song’s syncopated chords build for two minutes, then fade out behind a wistful voicemail from a woman longing for days gone by. But even this moment takes an unexpected turn: The message ends on a note of acceptance and hope, and the music builds back up to transmit a sense of catharsis.
Jakobsson has always been adamant that, despite the goofy name, DJ Seinfeld was never meant as a joke or a one-trick pony. Indeed, he has hinted at a shift in his music for a while, namely on the four EPs he released on his own Young Ethics label over the past two years: All have stretched and pulled his sound, testing out variations of everything from Italo-house to large-scale trance. Making good on the sense of bliss that he has been striving to capture in his music for years, Mirrors is a culmination of these experiments—a way for DJ Seinfeld to show exactly how far he has come.
Die-hard fans might be disappointed that Jakobsson appears to have shed nearly all of the outward trappings that made his music so distinctive in the first place, trading the intimacy and mystery of his early work for something more refined and crowd-pleasing. With Mirrors, Jakobsson is making his ambition clear: He’s trying to go as big as Jamie xx did on In Colour. It’s easy to imagine many of these songs soundtracking humongous outdoor festivals, perfectly synchronized with the setting sun. Yet even in his earliest days, what made Seinfeld’s music special were the melodies hidden below the surface. Mirrors brings them into the light, in all their glory. What Jakobsson has always tried to accomplish with DJ Seinfeld was to try to tap into some grand universal emotion, a sense of want inside us all. This time, he finds it in joy instead of grief.
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. | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | September 7, 2021 | 7.1 | 980aa0b2-f923-4049-9aa9-418f8d721ab3 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | |
Spirit of the Beehive members Zack Schwartz and Corey Wichlin shift styles on a collection of warped, dissonant pop with hairpin turns and an underlying unease. | Spirit of the Beehive members Zack Schwartz and Corey Wichlin shift styles on a collection of warped, dissonant pop with hairpin turns and an underlying unease. | draag me: Lord of the Shithouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/draag-me-lord-of-the-shithouse/ | Lord of the Shithouse | At first blush, it’s hard to make sense of exactly what’s happening in Draag Me’s lord of the shithouse. The tracks here are dense, dissonant DAW symphonies, full of sharp textures and brightly colored elements that burst apart like a crystal shattering on a concrete floor. Compositions settle into a groove only to suddenly about-face, as if trying to stave off an existential crisis through constant movement. It’s music for the endless TikTok scroll, the hollow feeling that remains after long hours of consuming heaping helpings of infinite nothing.
Draag Me started as the solo project of Zack Schwartz, one of the driving forces behind Philadelphia psych band Spirit of the Beehive. His first record under the Draag Me moniker, i am gambling with my life, was a collection of warm, hazy electro-pop with an undercurrent of anxiety. With idle time during the pandemic, Schwartz started emailing scraps of songs to his Beehive bandmate Corey Wichlin, including some taken from Beehive’s ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH sessions. The two passed files back and forth, arranging and mangling them until full compositions emerged, ones more metallic and jittery than their predecessors.
On the album, the duo’s warp-speed compositional style is thoroughly captivating. They’re clearly proficient in various strains of electronic music: “death cult” moves nimbly from Detroit techno to Chicago footwork, throwing in dashes of hair metal guitar and vaporwave bass. The glitching disco of “like a nuisance” morphs into a booming rap song, with Chicago emcee CRASHprez rhyming over a beat that sounds like it’s being stripped for parts. These whiplash stylistic changes can feel distressing. There’s a cloud of malaise that hovers over the record, no matter how much the music zigs and zags beneath it.
Schwartz tends to bury his vocals under layers of processing, but when his lyrics do peek out of the cacophony, they emphasize the general sense of unease. “When you came around, you fucked up my whole life,” he coos against the tender witch house of “faces of vultures.” Amidst the decaying synth stabs and pounding drums of “wax figures in the rain,” he whisper-raps “Just put me in a casket, nothing comes after.” If gambling was a manifestation of anxiety, lord of the shithouse is a record about the destructiveness of depression.
The ever-shifting movements of “throwing rocks” spotlight the album’s key strengths. The track begins with chugging noise pop that disappears within 30 seconds, shifting into an early-aughts R&B jam and then shadowy dubstep that evokes early Burial; it gets increasingly scrambled as quavering organs and clicking percussion enter the mix. It’s a sensory whirlwind that leaves you processing at the end; though you’ve taken all it in, you’re still unsettled. | 2023-08-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Doom Trip | August 17, 2023 | 7.2 | 980b9a88-80fe-47da-aee4-37023271b8e6 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The expanded 20th anniversary edition of the Breeders' breakthrough affirms its status as an alt-rock classic. The set includes a 1994 live show and a disc of rarities and demos that put the finished product in context. Meanwhile, the EPs from the period show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well. | The expanded 20th anniversary edition of the Breeders' breakthrough affirms its status as an alt-rock classic. The set includes a 1994 live show and a disc of rarities and demos that put the finished product in context. Meanwhile, the EPs from the period show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well. | The Breeders: LSXX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17942-the-breeders-lsxx/ | LSXX | Before they could legally drink, the Deal twins, armed with one guitar and two mics, were fixtures in the scuzziest bars of Dayton, Ohio, where legend has it their salty-sweet harmonies could make even the motorcycle dudes cry. The year was 1978, maybe 79. Like the bikers, Kim and Kelley listened to Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers; when Kelley was 16 she watched The Song Remains the Same on acid and the souvenir she kept from her trip was this dead-serious conviction that she wanted to be Jimmy Page. Other people's songs were too hard to figure out, so they made up their own. Nobody else would play with them (Kim: "This is Dayton, Ohio. You know the NGA kids: No Girls Allowed. Motherfuckers."), so they played with themselves. The angel-voiced twins kept booking scuzzy bar gigs and kept writing songs with no greater ambition than staving off boredom. "There was no scene," Kelley recalled years later, "You made up your own fun."
Kim considered herself a guitarist first and foremost. She'd been playing since she was 11, but shortly after she moved to Boston in her mid-20s, she tried out for a band called Pixies whose two current members suggested she learn bass. All the better that she'd never played one before; the Boston Phoenix classified ad she'd answered had said, "Please, no chops." They asked Kelley to be the drummer but she didn't feel like leaving Dayton, so she said no. For the next seven years, Kim sang backup and played bass in the Pixies, but mostly she was cool for a living. The kind of cool that people mythologize in songs years later. The kind of cool that dominoes immeasurably: in the same way that we'll never know exactly how many babies are on this earth because of Sade, we will never know how many girls picked up bass guitars and started bands because of Kim Deal's grinning, invitingly normal, yes-even-you-can-do-this-too charm. It was the kind of cool that irrevocably scrambles people's ideas of what cool actually is. "Kim would come straight from work, so she had skirt-suits and office pumps on a lot," recalled Tanya Donelly, then of Throwing Muses, who accompanied Pixies on their first European tour. "So many people in [the Boston scene were] trying to look cool, and meanwhile the coolest person there is dressed like a secretary. I have to say, in a day it changed my perception of what was cool."
As the Pixies' cult fanbase grew throughout late 80s and early 90s, Kim's artistic contributions diminished with each record. Depending on who you ask, she was either almost kicked out of or almost quit the famously tumultuous band a few different times before Frank Black sent out indie rock's most notorious fax in the summer of 1992, letting everyone know that the Pixies were through. In the liner notes to the 20th anniversary reissue of Last Splash, the phenomenal second album from her other band the Breeders, Kim sums up the Pixies' explosive seven-year run in a single, tellingly faceless sentence: "[W]e started by driving ourselves in a van with no record contract, went on to appear on front covers of the English music press (while still largely unknown in the States) and ended when the lead singer quit the band to pursue a solo career."
The Breeders began in earnest when Pixies and Throwing Muses came off that first European tour, at some point during which Kim and Donelly decided they wanted to make a record together. They recruited a British bassist they'd met on the road, Josephine Wiggs, and their Boston friend Carrie Bradley would play violin. In 1990, they released the great, eerily primal Pod, which Kurt Cobain loved, cited as an inspiration on Nirvana, and later dubbed, "an epic that will never let you forget your ex-girlfriend." After that, Donelly left to form Belly, Dayton's Jim Macpherson became their permanent drummer, and the Breeders found themselves in search of a new guitarist so they could go back into the studio with the bouncy, grungy demos they'd been writing in 1992. Kim knew somebody back in Dayton. Could she play well? Well, the thing was that she couldn't play at all. But she figured she could teach her pretty quickly, because she was her twin.
That's some of the psychic energy fueling one of alternative rock's most unlikely platinum records and most enduring masterpieces, the Breeders' Last Splash: an indie-famous frontwoman who'd spent the last couple of years feeling increasingly fed up and creatively muzzled at her high-profile day job; an untrained lead guitarist joyriding up and down the fretboard and riding high on the freedom of please, no chops; and maybe above all else a decade-delayed bar band family reunion. It's no wonder that 20 years later, Last Splash still sounds as sloppy and beguiling and warm as the day it was pressed. Although the songs were meticulously crafted and revised, and although the post-Nevermind boom had made the audience for a record this singularly weird suddenly visible, in the end the Breeders sound like a couple of kids from Dayton (and one like-minded Brit) making up their own fun.
Last Splash is a noise-pop record in the fullest sense of both of those words: It is a symphony of feedback but the melodies holding it all together are sweet enough to rot your teeth. From the squalling, rhythmic dissonance of "Roi" to the melodic Lynchian lullaby "Mad Lucas", the record is full of warm, damaged beauty. Fresh off a tour with Nirvana, the Breeders drove to San Francisco in a blizzard to record Last Splash with veteran producer Mark Freegard in the winter of 1993, and the reissue’s liner notes describe the process as a series of sonic experiments. What's that corrosive whir that opens "S.O.S."? It's Kelley's sewing machine fed directly through a Marshall amp, because why not. The distorted vocal on "Cannonball" happened because Kim (who shares a producer’s credit with Freegard) wondered what it'd sound like to sing through a harmonica mic and when they play the song live, they still get that particular tone of the iconic opening vocal ("Ahhhhhoooo-oooh/Ahhhhhoooo-oooh") not through some custom pedal, but by putting a styrofoam cup over the mic. At times they resorted to measures even more DIY than that. The best take of Bradley's warbling strings on "Mad Lucas" was the one where, by her account, "Kim and Kelley grabbed me on each side and shook me and quaked me while I played."
All of which might make Last Splash sound like a haphazard and amateurish affair, but the collection of demos and the 1992 live show included in the extensive LSXX reissue tell a more complex story. Unlike their Dayton buddies Guided by Voices (the Breeders' own cover of "Shocker in Gloomtown" made the reissue, along with the rest of 1994’s excellent Head to Toe EP), the Breeders crafted, road tested, and revised their tunes. Check, for one example, the completely reworked demo of "No Aloha" against the one that made the album. As all the extras on the reissue attest, the genius of the Breeders lies in the balance between being tirelessly tinkering perfectionists who still understand how to embrace creative serendipity. So Last Splash is a tight record that's also alive with happy accidents. Perhaps the most famous example: the bassline's hesitant entrance on "Cannonball"-- and we're talking about one of the most iconic basslines of the 90s-- was actually the product of a fortunate mistake. In a rehearsal, Wiggs played the last note of the riff flat (twice in a row) but everybody thought it sounded cool, so it became a part of the song.
Wiggs and Macpherson are the unsung heroes of Last Splash; a driving-but-just-loose-enough rhythm section, they gave the sprawl a backbone. But the Deals are the record’s charismatic center. It’s hard to imagine a frontwoman more perfect for a record so fixated on the tension between distressed textures and gleefully hooky melody. From her mirror-fogging enunciation of “No bye/No/A-lo-ha” to the way she delivers the title syllable of “Hag” like a cutting sidelong glance, each note comes out of her mouth affixed with a halo of cartoon dirt, like the one that hovers over Pigpen. Expressive yet enigmatic enough to cover a whole range of emotions, Kim’s voice embodies that dirty-prettiness that makes Last Splash’s appeal so complex and hard to pin down. In a 1995 issue of Spin, Charles Aaron called Last Splash "the rare album that had all the I-need-you and you-gross-me-out emotions seamlessly bound together." It can be mean one second ("You’re a nuisance, and I don't like dirt") and then deliver something as vulnerable and classically tender as "Do You Love Me Now?" the next. That it doesn’t always want to admit that it’s a romantic record only makes it more of a romantic record. The point is that it's sweet and gross and guarded and needy and cutting and gleeful because love can be all of those things too.
The reissue is available either as a three-CD package or a vivid, electric-brite vinyl box set, though either prompts a fair question: “Why should I spring for a special edition of an album I can probably still find in the dollar bin?” For any Breeders fan, though, the extras make a convincing case. The live album (recorded in Stockholm in 1994) and disc of rarities and demos put the finished product in context, while the array of EPs show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well. They’re all worth a listen, though the wooly pop of Safari (Donnelly’s last recording with the band) and the later, comparatively aggro Head to Toe (featuring the great, Wiggs-penned title track-- a fan favorite) are the best of the bunch. The less essential Divine Hammer EP is notable for featuring “Do You Love Me Now Jr”-- a fittingly titled duet that features J Mascis, who recalls his amusingly ill-fated attempt to produce some Breeders tracks in the liner notes. “I was not the best producer. I only wanted to work until 7 p.m. Kim got up about 3 p.m., so that didn’t leave much time before I would bail.” And as the duet proves, their voices are about as compatible as their working hours.
Still, it was Mascis who once succinctly summed up the irony of Deal’s two great bands: “The Breeders seemed bigger than the Pixies, and now the Pixies are way bigger than the Breeders.” In both instances, it was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. With Last Splash, the Breeders were poised to ride the cresting alt-rock wave that the Pixies had inspired but just missed out on, and when the Pixies reunited in 2004, the mounting nostalgia for late 80s/early 90s indie rock made it the perfect time for a long-delayed victory lap. But now it’s the Breeders’ turn to bask in a little bit of that nostalgic glory. LSXX is proof of an enduring benefit of sounding like nobody else: 20 years later, these songs still sound fresh. The undeniable “Cannonball” may have made Last Splash an unlikely mainstream hit, but as Kim reminds us in the liner notes, “This is an indie record. Put out by 4AD.” She says “indie” proudly-- like it means something personal. And Last Splash proves it still can. As big as it made the Breeders, it has a scrappy intimacy that captures what those early, unrecorded, make-your-own-fun Deal sister bar gigs must have sounded like. A million alt rock fans and all the bikers in Dayton, Ohio can't be wrong. | 2013-05-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 15, 2013 | 9 | 981329aa-84ad-4e47-a596-eac82af63e2d | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The Texas experimentalists set aside their drone and ASMR proclivities in favor of Auto-Tuned riffs on hyperpop, indulging in plenty of deadpan jokes and self-deprecating swagger along the way. | The Texas experimentalists set aside their drone and ASMR proclivities in favor of Auto-Tuned riffs on hyperpop, indulging in plenty of deadpan jokes and self-deprecating swagger along the way. | claire rousay / more eaze: never stop texting me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-more-eaze-never-stop-texting-me/ | Never Stop Texting Me | Over the past few years, the San Antonio-based composer and sound collagist claire rousay has ascended through avant-garde music circles with a wide-ranging spectrum of work. There are somewhat trite text-to-speech ruminations on big concepts, fit to be enjoyed with microscopic hors d’oeuvres at gallery spaces. There are pleasant ambient albums filled with tactile clatter and long, silvery tones. rousay has also put out a number of collaborations with her best friend and fellow Texas experimentalist mari maurice (more eaze) that rove into more whimsical pop territory, incorporating arcade bleeps, slimy burbles, and fragile emo wailing. Together, they let loose; the pair have titled projects after Jimmy Eat World lyrics and songs after a TikTok series in which absolutely plastered young women do dumb shit like tumble off of mechanical bulls.
For their latest project, Never Stop Texting Me, rousay and maurice take a good-humored stab at hyperpop. Though they are primarily known as “drone superstars,” in the words of one critic, their change in palette isn’t ultimately that jarring; they have played with Auto-Tune before, like on their 2020 emo-pop album </3. While the new record primarily pulls from 2000s pop-punk, emo rap, and chiptune, it doesn’t completely discard the field recordings and atmospherics the two have been known for. There are warm, enveloping washes of synths on “arm” and the crinkle of what sound like wrappers on “camille.”
Opener “same” begins with trickling water and rumbling static, like what you’d hear if you were at a spa, until the transcendental headspace fades away. Then a frail, robotic warble: “Do you think of me every time we’re apart? Do you feel my name inside your heart?” the voice asks, and the digital plinks in the background recreate the trepidation of chatting with your crush on AIM. As is typical with hyperpop releases, it’s sometimes hard to discern what rousay and maurice are singing on Never Stop Texting Me because of the vocal treatment—rousay typically bleats like a Minion, and maurice adopts a feathery falsetto—but the songs tend to reflect frustrated attempts at connection. “iphone2” stages a funny and sweet dialogue between two people who live in separate castes of phone ownership. “Can’t even pay for my one phone,” one says, dreaming of the day that they make the big bucks. The other expresses insecurity about their shiny new device, because “you’re still rocking the iPhone 2/And all I want is to get close to you.”
One of the most amusing songs on the album is “art,” which is like a Lonely Island parody for ambient hotshots, full of self-deprecating swagger. “We’re on that Kali Malone shit,” rousay and maurice sing in unison, citing a beloved but relatively niche organist as a way of expressing triumph at their creative process. Heightening the levity is the track’s overly sentimental production, which is built on fingerpicked guitar and whistling flutes. Being a smaller artist is pretty unglamorous, but rousay and maurice flaunt their lifestyle like they’re Megan Thee Stallion big: “Cashing out PayPal because we just got paid/Ordering UberEats with cash from Bandcamp Day.”
In profile last year, rousay playfully self-identified as a “millennial sun, zoomer rising,” and Never Stop Texting Me does feel designed more for the former demographic than the latter—or at least for hyperpop newcomers, and not those already entrenched in its communities. (One bridge between generations is Bloodz Boi, a Drain Gang-loving, Rate Your Music-posting rapper from Beijing who broods about feeling isolated on “missed.”) The album’s production is stiff and blocky, due in large part to the militant percussion, and while the music’s rough-hewn quality is part of its appeal, the songs can lack a sense of audaciousness and velocity. Still, as a lighthearted entry within rousay and maurice’s ever-expanding discography, Never Stop Texting Me has an indisputable charm. And even if you aren’t quite convinced, there will be plenty more music to come. | 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Orange Milk | February 11, 2022 | 6.7 | 98247589-9dce-4c7c-b2fb-e274cc59bf7f | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
1999 is the greatest album ever made about partying as a way of staring down oblivion. At the height of the Cold War, suddenly the world felt a little warmer. | 1999 is the greatest album ever made about partying as a way of staring down oblivion. At the height of the Cold War, suddenly the world felt a little warmer. | Prince: 1999 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21842-1999/ | 1999 | For all the hot-pink light bathing 30-years-on memories of the '80s, that decade was full of dread—bad guys lurked around corners, and the threat of nuclear war hovered over the world’s geopolitik. 1999, Prince’s fifth album, opens with reassurance: “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt U,” a mushily robotic voice announces. “I only want U to have some fun.” The song that follows is the record’s title track, and with its lyrical laser focus on the world possibly ending, if not imminently then eventually, it fulfills that promise. Prince realizes the power of saying “Fuck it, let’s party” in the face of near-assured annihilation, a gesture that foments an effervescent, uncontrollable glee. (Which, here, is depicted by mashed-on keyboards and a joyously wailed policy of ejecting anyone who might be in a less-than-celebratory mood.)
But we all die eventually, right? That’s the attitude that runs through much of 1999, which powers itself with machines like the Oberheim OB-SX and the Linn LM–1 while taking a slightly more sober view of the pleasures that dominated so much of Prince’s earlier work. Dangers—the bomb, “brand new laws,” sneering critics—get their airing, and time might be running out (Party over, oops!). Best, then, to get in all the good stuff while one still can, whether those feelings come from extended make-out sessions in the back of a slick car (the simmering “Little Red Corvette,” which emerges from a plume of smoke to become one of Prince’s most potent fusions of funk’s swing and rock’s swagger), late-night secrets about love and lust told among icy synthscapes (the stretched-out seduction “Automatic”), or Prince’s Holy Quadrality of Dance, Music, Sex, and Romance (the jittery “D.M.S.R.”).
1999 is a sprawling double album (“D.M.S.R.” was cut from initial CD pressings to make it fit on a single disc) on which Prince indulged his curiosity in new technology, but what’s remarkable about it is how tightly-wound it feels, even on the more far-flung jams. “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” is claustrophobic and tense, Prince’s pleas to a lover who’s left him behind made even more frantic by the cacophony of digital sounds ricocheting around the mix. (It’s the song that probably brings Prince’s admitted influence of Blade Runner to mind the most.) “Lady Cab Driver” unfolds like a movie playing on fast-forward in Prince’s dirty mind, with a request for a “ride” turning into a bit of slap-and-tickle play before fading back to reality—as evidenced by scritching guitars and the reprise of the song’s feather-light hook.
Then there’s “Delirious,” one of Prince’s most unbridled offerings, its wheezing keyboards sounding like a mind left alone to whirl, propelled by a dizzyingly upbeat drum track and Prince’s half-sneeze vocals. The one-two punch of that track and the Erotic City staycation “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” is enough to drive even the most buttoned-up listener to their own personal brink—one that arrives even before Prince murmurs, “I’m not sayin’ this just 2 be nasty/I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth/Can U relate?” Well. When U put it like that…
It’s not all fun and sex games, of course; even though “1999” makes the idea of impending apocalypse alluring, the planet still goes kablooey when all is said and done. The piano ballad “Free” presents Prince in tender mode, smearing the personal and political together as he sings “Be glad that u r free/Free 2 change your mind.” The music grows increasingly stirring, with militaristic drums and fiercely slapped bass fighting for supremacy as Prince sings of creeping clamp-downs. And “All the Critics Love U in New York” takes the self-regard exhibited by the city and its more pretentious inhabitants and mashes it into a ball. But those forays into the wider world only give the more pleasure-minded tracks on 1999 more urgency and lightness.
Prince played with different toys on 1999—new synths, new sexual frontiers, new paranoias. He bent them to his will, though, and this 11-song opus was the result. Balancing synth-funk explorations that would reverberate through radio playlists’ ensuing years, taut pop construction, genre-bending, and the proto-nuclear fallout of lust, 1999 still sounds like a landmark release in 2016; Prince’s singular vision and willingness to indulge his curiosities just enough created an apocalypse-anticipating album that, perhaps paradoxically, was built to last for decades and even centuries to come. | 2016-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. | April 30, 2016 | 10 | 982616ff-b838-4419-9b7d-541f04606938 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | null |
Chicago’s least-relaxed band doubles their personnel and scales up their sound for a set of unnerving new wave. | Chicago’s least-relaxed band doubles their personnel and scales up their sound for a set of unnerving new wave. | The Hecks: My Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-hecks-my-star/ | My Star | Since they began in 2012, the Hecks have sounded like Chicago’s least-relaxed band. They approach melody not as a sequence of notes, but jabs. On their 2016 self-titled debut, recorded when the band was still a duo of singer-guitarist Andy Mosiman and drummer Zack Hebert, Mosiman sounded like he was strenuously aiming his guitar, playing either unnervingly on-beat or nowhere near it. His jagged interplay with Hebert recalled the late Women guitarist Chris Reimer, or Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis bashing holes through the solid walls of Lee Harris’s drumming. Mosiman committed to maintaining this angularity in ways beyond his guitar playing, too, whether by singing in a grating monotone or by holding a stoic stage face only slightly less intense than that of the sudden-realization meme guy.
Since then, the Hecks added their producer, Dave Vettraino, as a third official member on guitar, followed by a full-time synth player in Jeff Graupner, thereby doubling their personnel. They sound like a completely different band on their sophomore album, My Star, for two main reasons. The first and most obvious is that the grainy recording quality of their debut is out the window; everything on My Star has been recast in sparkling high-definition. The album’s low end is satisfyingly full. Second, and more surprisingly, not a single sound on My Star is out of place; there no “off” notes, no stray threads. Postures are straight, clothes are ironed, and nobody stumbles.
As a result, the bizarro world of the Hecks is an entirely different place to spend time; it sounds like it belongs somewhere around the Carter presidency and the start of the jogging craze. “Zipper” sounds like they stayed up for three straight days watching Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” music video, then only remembered how to play one repeating measure. “Heat Wave” reimagines the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” as a blank motorik pulse playing in an empty airplane hangar.
Mosiman uses his voice primarily for instrumental effect on My Star, more so than on the debut. His lyrics are usually obscured by the band, except for when serving as boilerplate to complete a hook: “It’s tearing me apart” on “Heat Wave,” or “I only wanted to be with you” on the otherwise-fantastic Prince nod “So 4 Real.” The automated quality can be a little suffocating: At one point, he chants the alphabet to the beat, and at another, he counts up to and backwards from eight the same way. Live, the band dances together with stiff, synchronized choreography. That means these songs wind up making a little more sense onstage than they do on record. Nonetheless, there is something poignant in their mathematical rigor; they may treat songs like spreadsheets, but they fill the cells with neon.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | October 14, 2019 | 7.2 | 982f8146-f899-4801-a6e9-3089d67e2f42 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
On their second album, the Brooklyn quartet sinks deeper into their dread-filled chill-out sound, but they become sharper and more focused in the process. | On their second album, the Brooklyn quartet sinks deeper into their dread-filled chill-out sound, but they become sharper and more focused in the process. | Crumb: Ice Melt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crumb-ice-melt/ | Ice Melt | On their 2019 debut, Jinx, Crumb slowly lowered dazed psych-rock into a loungey abyss, evoking the feeling of one long summer day spent entirely inside the endless buzz of an anxious mind. It was unnerving and terrific. Before forming at college in Boston, the Brooklyn-based quartet honed their chops in low-profile jazz, soul, and rock groups. After a couple EPs, they flourished in the softly lit chasm of their debut—now Ice Melt captures a band breaking free of the trance for a little more clarity.
Even at its most blasé, Crumb’s music can sometimes feel, well, dreadful. “Trophy” calls to mind sudden vertigo that won’t shift. “Ice Melt” captures the singular unease of coming up in a bad frame of mind. Crumb have distanced themselves from being a band that makes music that simply wafts in and out of the room on a lazy afternoon (“I wouldn't want to chill to our music,” singer-guitarist Lila Ramani told Pitchfork in 2019). Highlights here like “Up and Down,” a helter-skelter of slinking arpeggios with hat-tips to the golden era of trip-hop, support the position. Beyond a general air of cosmic longing, aided by violinist Maeve Feinberg on songs including “Gone,” Crumb zone in on the low-key doom they have always dabbled in.
With Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado co-producing, Ice Melt pushes the band forward with more lucidity and more manipulated space. While the thrashing, high-gain climax of “Tunnel” sounds like a band briefly weary of nuance, the empty drift between “Seeds” and “L.A.” feels like forever. Speaking to Rolling Stone, bassist Jesse Brotter revealed one of the more curious advances: “We’d take a microphone, put a condom on it, put that in a bucket filled with water, and then play a sound source at the water, so you would get a slight underwater effect that you could merge it with the original sound source.” The punch-drunk panning of Bri Aronow’s synth work on “Gone” and “Up & Down” sounds like an obvious success story here. Paired with Ramani’s phaser-doused shapes, they sit like swells of seafoam in the mix.
As the band’s main songwriter, Ramani has always threaded Crumb’s songs with oblique impressions akin to an interior monologue when people-watching. On Ice Melt, whether loosely riffing on belonging (“Retreat!”) or characterizing strawberry seeds as shoes on her feet (“BNR”), she continues to grasp the power of ambiguity, while offering a reminder that simply being a human in the world can feel just as unknowable. Occasionally, though, outliers such as “Gone” buck the trend: “Ma rolls in the waves/She wants someone to save her/Says she used to be a beauty/Then they took her soul/So far away from here.” She cryptically referred to her family on Jinx highlight “Faces” (“All of my heroes are people I know”), but by directly evoking her artist mother, Ramani pushes biographical detail through a haze of sleepy non-sequiturs.
According to Brotter, the hallucinatory scenes that made up Jinx stemmed from a collective exploration of “loss and fate and some other myth around the band.” Even at its most hope-sapped, Ice Melt sounds like four old college friends brightening the corners of their twilit sound. By refining their reality, and allowing themselves to be a little more seen, they feel more reachable than ever.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crumb | May 14, 2021 | 7.5 | 983b23fe-d142-4ed5-8879-852c6f47b9e3 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
The second album from the Michigan rock trio is alternately brutal and transcendent, like heavy machinery coming up against the stubbornness of nature. | The second album from the Michigan rock trio is alternately brutal and transcendent, like heavy machinery coming up against the stubbornness of nature. | Greet Death: New Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greet-death-new-hell/ | New Hell | Dixieland was only a somewhat misleading title for Greet Death’s 2017 debut—the Flint, Michigan trio wasn’t pulling a Kid Rock, but paying tribute to a hometown flea market while they gleefully rummaged through used Midwestern relics. They incorporated the Smashing Pumpkins, Mark Kozelek, and Jason Molina at their most uncomfortably numb, broad-shouldered heavy acts like Cloakroom and Pelican, and even pulled some old Bob Seger records off the shelf. Even when songs were built on lyrics like, “Waking up dead on sheets of white,” or, “I’m going down,” Dixieland was oddly uplifting, three guys finding their purpose by reclaiming some of the bleakest music of their lifetimes. The reference points haven’t changed on their second LP, but Greet Death sound like they’ve actually lived them this time around, enough to justify making an album called New Hell on a label called Deathwish.
More than a realization of Dixieland’s promise, New Hell can be seen as the culmination of a decade where a wave of like-minded bands were lumped into shoegaze despite seemingly inverting its entire aesthetic of cocooned bliss. Instead of soft-focus vocals wrapped in sheets of trebly, white noise, acts like Greet Death bludgeoned with bottom-heavy production and guitars that sound forged from molten steel, only sharing shoegaze’s aim for sensory domination. Pedalboard gawkers might show up to a Greet Death gig a half-hour earlier to get a look at their distortion rig, but New Hell isn’t dirty or grimy itself, more comparable to heavy machinery coming up against the stubbornness of nature. The instrumentation of “Circles of Hell” variously resembles a bulldozer stalling against a massive pile of rubble or a power drill hitting impenetrable bedrock. The earth is a cold dead place on the frostbitten dirge “Entertainment,” as Sam Boyhtari’s guitar thuds like a shovel against solid dirt. The hyperbolically spiteful “Do You Feel Nothing” is the end result of all this digging, New Hell’s one moment of release that comes off like an extended, three-minute mudslide in the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” video.
But the success of New Hell is mostly attributable to Greet Death’s newfound ability to synthesize Boyhtari and Logan Gaval’s distinct head voices—Boyhtari sings directly through his nasal passage, while Gaval moans in a DayQuil haze. On Dixieland, they did the logical thing and separated the two almost completely. Here, both make the most of their unique tones to represent the opposing forces of abject depression: Gaval is the voice of dejection, the one best suited for lyrics like, “I would kill myself completely out of spite,” or, “I sit around and I wait to get high,” as what comes across in his lethargic, drawn-out sighs is the inability to immediately access those maladaptive forms of relief and the impotent longing to speed up the process.
Meanwhile, Boyhtari is the sound of rejection, why the caged rat sings. Unlike Gaval, he relishes the idea of wasting all of his days as revenge against everyone who cares about him: “I hate my friends ’cause they don’t hate themselves,” he snarls on “Do You Feel Nothing?” justifying getting fucked up because he’s young, it still works, and it’s pretty much all he’s got going right now.
Impressive and imposing as Greet Death are in teardown mode, all the above serves as the foundation for “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and the closing title track—towering, nine-minute monuments to self-pity. Both are structured similarly and depending on your mood, they’re either offering ascendance one layer of fuzz at a time or boring deeper into the earth’s core. Either way, it’s an escape from the limbo that’s so painfully and accurately captured throughout New Hell. Having someone to help out is the one thing that keeps you rolling that boulder up that hill despite every temptation to just let it roll over you.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Deathwish | November 16, 2019 | 7.9 | 9840fb12-052a-41aa-a69a-ea2f31779100 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
This 5xLP set documents LCD Soundsystem's final show. It's a largely unedited document of everything this band had to offer: the laughs, the tears, the disco, the rock, the cowbell, the deep cuts—a set for completists, by completists. | This 5xLP set documents LCD Soundsystem's final show. It's a largely unedited document of everything this band had to offer: the laughs, the tears, the disco, the rock, the cowbell, the deep cuts—a set for completists, by completists. | LCD Soundsystem: The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19183-lcd-soundsystem-the-long-goodbye-lcd-soundsystem-live-at-madison-square-garden/ | The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden | On a spitting grey evening last week, I went to Rough Trade's new record store in Williamsburg to see what's being called an "interactive gallery exhibition" in honor of LCD Soundsystem. It showcased a small shrine to the band—replete with candles, flowers, and an empty bottle of Jameson—alongside some framed photos, a flat screen TV playing the 2012 documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits on mute, and a glitchy projection of random home-movie style footage of the group. There were also five portable Numark turntables set up, each spinning one of the discs from the box-set chronicle of their 2011 finale, The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden. The whole white-walled room felt like a well-intentioned relic—a cheap museum piece that barely hinted at the too-recent memories it was designed to revive. The same could be said of the entire Rough Trade store, which has all of the hallmarks of Tower Records of yore—plenty of space, high retail prices, huge promo posters—but now with an added level of desperate nostalgia. The visit left me a bit dulled—experiencing the halfhearted fossilization of your youth will do that. But something less soul-shattering stuck with me, too.
Stamped onto the wall above the LCD shrine were little hand-written love notes to the band by fans who had previously stopped by the space. Some were weird ("James, I once rubbed your back at a ramen restaurant, it was so creepy and so awesome"), some gushed ("James Murphy is my David Bowie"), and some were all too real ("Thanks for making me realize that it was OK that I hadn't achieved my goals by the age of 25"). More than anything else in the room, those scrawled bits of Sharpie resonated, and they reminded me of the crowd noise that hums underneath much of The Long Goodbye's 187 minutes. That last LCD show was as much of a party as a concert, an extended celebration of goodwill, good taste, and the fact that something so relentlessly sharp and gracious could reach such a rarified place within the culture. It was also really long. Which made sense. LCD Soundsystem were not a greatest hits band. They were band for completists, by completists. This is one reason why The Long Goodbye is such an apt punctuation. It is a largely unedited document of everything this band had to offer: the laughs, the tears, the disco, the rock, the cowbell, the deep cuts. And if you were to listen to this five-disc set front-to-back on a turntable, you'd need to flip or change the record a total of nine times—a very serious commitment in today's stream of endless one-click playlists.
Speaking of vinyl, it is no coincidence that this item is originally seeing life as one of those Record Store Day specials. Along with its superfan collectibility, the box's presentation is spare, monochrome, and elegant, and Murphy tweaked the audio with needles and grooves in mind. "We're totally not making a CD of this or anything, because it's not 1997," he quips on a tiny square download card. And while The Long Goodbye will get a digital release next month, he stresses that "it's really mixed for vinyl." Having heard both the WAV files and LPs, I can report that the overall experience is indeed different. While the computer version retains more clarity, the sound on the records gives into the live-wire atmosphere of the actual show—the low tones in particular are noticeably fatter, gloriously smudging into everything else. Along with Pat Mahoney's tireless drumming, Tyler Pope's bass provides a rubbery rhythmic backbone from which the rest of the band is allowed to explode. Murphy was smart to highlight this controlled chaos in this mix, because it offers a distinct, refreshing contrast to LCD's studio records, which are often marked by deadpan dryness along with a watchmaker's attention to detail. Live, though, Murphy and his crew are more excitable and woolier—it's where the frontman can get out of his own self-conscious mind for few hours and get lost in the beats and emotions around him. This feeling is contagious.
And it's found all across The Long Goodbye. Song of the Century contender "All My Friends" benefits from edging perilously close to breaking apart at the seams, its smile-to-cry ratio more perfect than ever; "Time to Get Away" speeds up and morphs from something slinky into a monolith of funk; "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" turns into a giddy rush of imagined robots and punk rock synths; Murphy ditches his early stuffed-nose Mark E. Smith affectations as "Movement" reminds you that LCD Soundsystem are a better straight-up punk band than almost any other straight-up punk band; 45:33's "You Can't Hide (Shame on You)", with singer/comedian Reggie Watts on pitch-perfect guest vocals, lives out its disco-ball dreams with a newfound vividness. Watts' brief spotlight reminded me of his production work on the funk-soul theme song for Louie C.K.'s "Louie", a TV show that could easily be subtitled "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down". C.K. and Murphy are both in their mid-40s, both late bloomers, both hyper real and surreal at once, and in many ways "Louie" has taken on the affably-fucked-white-guy baton Murphy left behind more than any band. And just as "Louie" can hit deep emotional chords within an unlikely milieu of strange sex, stranger doctor's visits, and fart jokes, LCD did the same with dance music, trying to make the beats pump harder because they're always one step closer to the big goodbye. This set highlights that fleeting fleshiness—the paradox of creating something timeless while thousands of people run out of time together.
That headlong rush makes The Long Goodbye more than a cash grab, more than a chintzy white room in a big, overpriced record store with two customers in it. The music is undeniably alive, even though—or perhaps because—the band that made it is all over. Of course, Murphy has always left the door open for an LCD reunion, and the possibility will forever be on the table because the band left at the height of their powers (and because basically every other band has already gotten back together). Talking to Rolling Stone about reunion offers last year, the frontman said, "They get shot down before it ever gets to me." At a time when the nostalgia circuit is on a even-more-depressing downswing, that answer feels right. Even though his recent output—including a stunning David Bowie remix, an elite coffee blend, and a 50,000-watt custom sound system—hasn't tried to match the impact of LCD in any sense, it's managed to stay true to the LCD ethos by remaining singular and impassioned; while you or I may not get the same high from sipping a perfect cup of coffee as we do from listening to "All My Friends" for the thousandth time, it's where James Murphy is at now. And if the band ever steps onstage together again, it'll have to be for a damn good reason. Until then, though, we can still come home to this. | 2014-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Parlophone / Warner Bros. | April 21, 2014 | 8.1 | 9846d0a9-38f8-4a85-ab77-a14ebe0a20b1 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Recorded in 2001, this previously unreleased LP from Young and his most recognizable accompanists is a surprisingly slick, fans-only affair. | Recorded in 2001, this previously unreleased LP from Young and his most recognizable accompanists is a surprisingly slick, fans-only affair. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Toast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-crazy-horse-toast/ | Toast | Among Neil Young’s one-off genre-experiment albums, 2002’s Are You Passionate? enjoys neither the adoring cult of his foray into synth-pop sci-fi nor the infamy of the rockabilly revival act that got him sued for not sounding enough like himself. Perhaps that’s because Are You Passionate?’s animating conceit—a tracklist heavy on slow-burning ballads that nod in the direction of 1960s R&B, backed by the veteran soul men of Booker T. and the M.G.’s—seems like the sort of thing any number of Young’s boomer contemporaries might have attempted a few decades into their respective careers. It isn’t as outwardly experimental as the others, but it has its charms. One of Young’s many personae is the songwriter who can churn out a beautiful melody without much apparent effort, and the classic-soul trappings of Are You Passionate? seemed to bring that side out of him, with several unusually sumptuous tunes to distinguish it from his other efforts of the same era.
Not a bad record, but hardly anyone’s favorite Neil Young album, either. Which makes Toast, a previously unreleased seven-song collection recorded in 2001, over half of which eventually made its way to Are You Passionate? in marginally revised form, a decidedly fans-only affair. The hook: Before bringing the M.G.’s into the studio, Young recorded these songs with Crazy Horse, the band of brilliant rock primitivists who have backed him on many of his best-loved albums over the years. You might think, given that premise, that Toast would replace the in-the-pocket smokiness of Are You Passionate? highlights like “Quit” and “Mr. Disappointment” (retitled “How Ya Doin’” here) with Crazy Horse’s familiar unrefined squall. Instead, the alternate versions demonstrate that Young had the understated R&B of Are You Passionate? in mind before he ever hired the M.G.s to play it, and that Crazy Horse was better than anyone could have reasonably expected at delivering the sorts of grooves he was after.
The Crazy Horse rendition of “Quit” that opens Toast, for instance, is hardly distinguishable from the one the M.G.s laid down the following year, other than by its slightly darker recording fidelity. That isn’t exactly a mark against it. It’s a good song, with a lilting melody and a tear-jerking premise: Young spends the verses trying in vain to convince a partner not to leave, despite the pain he’s caused her, before a chorus that consists only of her stone-faced response: “Don’t say you love me.” The band is more than capable of conjuring the right atmosphere, which is something like a corner bar after the revelers have filed out and only the regulars remain. The rhythm section is appropriately laid-back; even the call-and-response backing vocal arrangement, the final version’s most overt homage to Stax-era soul, is already in place. As on Are You Passionate?, Young's scorched guitar tone and pleasantly meandering leads provide a welcome contrast, elevating “Quit” beyond pastiche and toward something more idiosyncratic.
“Goin’ Home” and “How Ya Doin’” are similarly of a piece with their final forms. The former, the only track on the original album to feature Crazy Horse instead of the M.G.s, sounds, predictably, like the same band playing the same song. The latter becomes slightly less interesting in its Toast incarnation, replacing the Tom Waits-like gravelly low register Young tried out on the Are You Passionate? version with his usual clear-throated tenor. It’s impressive that Crazy Horse were able to pull off the style of Are You Passionate? so well, but their adeptness raises an issue. Some roughness around the edges might have made these previously released tracks a little more distinctive; their surprising slickness means there’s little compelling reason to put them on over the better-known versions.
Three songs from the Toast sessions didn’t make the cut for Are You Passionate?, and they appear as studio versions for the first time here. “Standing in the Light” sounds like cheap beer and fast cars, with a dumb-fun fuzztone riff and not much going on songwriting-wise beyond that. “Timberline” is in a similar hard-rocking lane, but with more interesting lyrics, sung from the perspective of a logger who loses his job, and consequently, his faith in God. “Gateway of Love” is the best of the unreleased tracks, a 10-minute guitar workout that differentiates itself from the many similar odysseys in the Horse catalog with a Latin-feeling polyrhythm instead of their standard four-four stomp. It’s easy to understand why Young felt these songs didn’t fit in with the lovelorn mood of Are You Passionate?, but they’re all worth hearing at least once.
The most compelling reason to give Toast a spin is “Boom Boom Boom,” its 13-minute closer. Structurally, it isn’t much different from “She’s a Healer,” the nine-minute version on Are You Passionate?, which is among the jazziest tunes in Young’s canon, cycling between a menacing one-chord vamp and a more harmonically elaborate instrumental refrain, with plenty of group improvisation throughout. But its arrangement on Toast is richer and stranger, piling on layers of seasick piano and trumpet. And in contrast to the rest of the Are You Passionate? tracks on Toast, Crazy Horse’s playing is noticeably rawer and more exploratory than the M.G.s’ later take, always on the verge of falling apart, without the glue of Booker T’s organ holding everything in place. The precarity of the performance is suited to Young’s songwriting, which addresses his attachment to a woman who may or may not be ready to dump him. “There ain’t no way I’m gonna let the good times go,” he sings repeatedly, a line that might strike an inattentive listener to Are You Passionate? as a straightforward call for celebration. On Toast, there’s no mistaking it for anything other than the desperate plea it is. | 2022-07-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | July 7, 2022 | 6.3 | 985a4dfc-9640-4fe8-ad93-43f1b1a1eb02 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
7 Days of Funk is Snoop Dogg recording in laid back mode as “Snoopzilla” and Dâm-Funk revamping the classic synthesizer melodies, electronic basslines, and digital drums that coursed through funk both before and after they attached the “g-” to it. It was home-recorded and assembled quickly, and the easygoing nature shines through. | 7 Days of Funk is Snoop Dogg recording in laid back mode as “Snoopzilla” and Dâm-Funk revamping the classic synthesizer melodies, electronic basslines, and digital drums that coursed through funk both before and after they attached the “g-” to it. It was home-recorded and assembled quickly, and the easygoing nature shines through. | 7 Days of Funk: 7 Days of Funk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18801-7-days-of-funk-7-days-of-funk/ | 7 Days of Funk | “This isn't a comedic tribute to talkboxes and widebrims; there's no Snoop Dogg descending a foggy staircase through a faded VHS haze here.” That's how the last paragraph of my review of Dâm-Funk's Toeachizown kicked off, and in hindsight it's sort of a strange thing to say in the album's favor. “Sensual Seduction” (or “Sexual Eruption”, depending on your comfort level) was a funny throwback showcase on video, but it also clicked big-time as an actual funk song; get past the then-unusual novelty of Snoop as crooner and it's the kind of tribute to 1981 that doesn't sound like an extended eyeroll at the era's expense. Would Snoop warbling those same kind of come-ons over some of Dâm's vamp-heavy slow-roller instrumentals really sound that ridiculous?
7 Days of Funk makes it immediately clear that it doesn't. Far from ridiculous, it's actually the most natural thing in the world, work from two musicians who grew up on the same sounds and were born less than a year apart. Snoop, recording as “Snoopzilla” as a conscious homage to the influence of Bootsy Collins, is in top laidback mode here, the self-assured smoothness that made him a star gliding along whether he's (serviceably) singing or (engagingly) rapping. Dâm-Funk's thing is revamping and renewing the classic synthesizer melodies, electronic basslines, and digital drums that coursed through funk both before and after they attached the “g-” to it, a triple-layered take on 80s electro-boogie, 90s West Coast hip-hop, and contemporary nu-funk that helps the music work on all these different levels. And with both artists' stated mission to do this project as a fuck-the-radio labor of love—home-recorded and assembled quickly, with a rush owing more to easy inspiration than stressful deadlines—the easygoing nature shines, even through the cuts that wax ambivalent about love or challenge rivals to step up.
The leadoff cut “Hit Da Pavement” pulls off this vibe from the word go, the titular refrain initially reading like a duck-down threat on paper but evoking that other meaning of hitting the pavement; Snoop's “you don't work, you don't eat” language acting as the prime motivator. He pulls off romantic appeals without sounding syrupy (“I'll Be There 4U”) and breakup ruminations without sounding antagonistic (“Faden Away”)—the kind of unflappable ease that still sounds satisfied with his vet-status years instead of bored by them. He's not Nate Dogg or anything, but his workmanlike singing voice is smooth enough to mesh with the piled-high space-flight chords Dâm-Funk uses to buoy it. It's late-night party music that sounds equally calibrated for winding down or getting worked up, and Dâm's typical propensity to let rhythms and riffs soak for a bit before taking off into solo turf keeps it moving.
It's a strong mode to be in, but 7 Days of Funk doesn't change or challenge things—it's a brief LP, even accounting for bonus tracks, and with everybody firmly in a comfortable lane there's not much surprise. There's Steve Arrington again, following up Higher with an engagingly quirky spotlight turn on “1Question?” that makes Snoop sound like a guest on his own track. Toeachizown highlight “I Gots 2 Be Done Wit' U” repurposed and given a new squiggly outro solo for “Do My Thang”. And the smooth-rolling vibe is so seamless and immersive that even the slightest deviation from it sounds jarring—Kurupt's verse on “Ride” is perfunctory though not terrible, and yet over that backdrop he sounds so far out of the pocket you'd need a chain wallet to bring him back. This isn't the out-of-nowhere clash of strange bedfellows that some people might imagine from a “Snoop on Stones Throw?!” expectation—in fact, it feels practically inevitable. Without the element of surprise or clashing styles forced to compromise, though, all you've got is a solid record that does exactly what you'd hope it does, nothing you think it shouldn't, and not quite enough to make you feel like they've explored every idea they could. | 2013-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Stones Throw | December 9, 2013 | 7 | 985a5084-2059-4356-a4ae-37406b815a8a | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
In his most directly political album yet, the Tuareg guitarist lets his solos become the sound of his fury when his Tamasheq lyrics aren’t enough. | In his most directly political album yet, the Tuareg guitarist lets his solos become the sound of his fury when his Tamasheq lyrics aren’t enough. | Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mdou-moctar-funeral-for-justice/ | Funeral for Justice | Uranium extraction is backbreaking work. Workers spend hours in the mines operating heavy machinery while risking exposure to radioactive chemicals. In Niger, uranium comprises almost its entire export product, but its government sees virtually none of the profit. Instead, France, its former colonial occupier, still controls most of the country’s supply, using the minerals to power a third of its domestic electricity while almost 90 percent of Nigerien citizens are left without access to power. And though France finally relinquished all military bases in Niger following a 2023 military coup, many of its mines remain active to this day, leaking radon into the water supply of surrounding towns.
On his new album Funeral for Justice, Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar addresses these abuses directly. “Why does your ear only heed France and America?/Occupiers are carving up your lands/Gallantly marching all over your resources,” he sings in his native Tamasheq on its title track. You might not pick up on all of the finer details from listening to the first song from Moctar’s monumental new album, but it’s hard to miss the sound of righteous fury in its opening guitar chords, which ricochet like the first shots in battle. When speaking to The New York Times, Moctar said he wanted to make his guitar sound like a person crying for help, or the piercing cry of an ambulance’s siren. In his most directly political album yet, Moctar lets his solos become the sound of his fury when his Tamasheq lyrics aren’t enough.
“I make music to make people smile,” Moctar recently told Crack Magazine, and so far, that music has garnered him plenty of success among Western audiences. Just a few weeks ago, Moctar and his exceptional live band—Souleymane Ibrahim on percussion, Ahmoudou Madassane on rhythm guitar, and Mikey Coltun on bass—took the stage at Coachella to bring their exhilarating live show to their biggest crowd yet. At that performance, Moctar himself couldn’t help but grin as he stepped away from the mic and began one of his now legendary solos, his fingers nimbly dancing across both the body and fretboard of his lefty guitar, stacking melodies atop each other until they seemed to take on a life of their own.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the lyrics scan as an immediate plea to the American audiences: “My people are crying while you laugh/All you do is watch.” And perhaps just to get his point across more fiercely, Mdou Moctar does not shy away from power chords or distortion, instead leaning into the anger and power of the D.C. punk scene that birthed bassist and producer Coltun on “Funeral for Justice.” “Sousoume Tamacheq” is a synthesis of these ideas, meshing a breakneck rhythm section with the sounds of traditional Tuareg instruments like the three-string fretless tehardent or the gourd-shaped calabash. The result is an exuberant and enraged call for Tamasheq unity that sounds just as urgent as it reads on the page.
Funeral for Justice is the result of extended improvised sessions with the full Mdou Moctar band, condensed and edited by Coltun for maximum impact. The band often develops its music live, and there’s an artifact of that process here: “Imouhar,” the spellbinding, slow-building ode to Tamasheq cultural pride, grew from an instrumental riff on 2022’s Niger EP Vol. 1. Layered over nothing but a simple drum machine, that guitar rhythm was promising yet ultimately limited—without a full band, the 13-minute song seemed stuck in an endless groove. But the album version, with a full band and Moctar’s voice, transforms the song into a swaggering blues rock stunner. For the first minute of the song, it sounds as if everyone is performing behind a screen, before a surging guitar solo crashes like a tidal wave, flooding every possible inch of listenable air with Moctar’s towering fretwork, each transition more nimble than the last.
For Moctar, music is inextricably linked with political expression: the assouf or “desert blues” Tuareg musical lineage from which Moctar partially derives his style has always been a way of engendering unity and documenting sociopolitical upheaval. Moctar’s sentiments were clear on his 2021 album Afrique Victime: “Africa is a victim of so many crimes/If we stay silent it will be the end of us.” But the urgency of his message could be overlooked if all the listener chooses to hear is an uptempo guitar groove. On Funeral for Justice, it’s impossible to miss—from the blood dripping off of the crows on its album cover to the screeching guitars that open its first song, it’s the proud sound of rebellion, transposed from Tamasheq into a language that refuses to be misinterpreted. | 2024-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 10, 2024 | 8.4 | 985bcc35-c8e8-4985-a0dd-f19e5df8d0c3 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The veteran avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill collaborates with pianist Jason Moran on his latest. The project offers plenty of room for twisty, adventurous solos, while also feeling like a tight 47 minutes. | The veteran avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill collaborates with pianist Jason Moran on his latest. The project offers plenty of room for twisty, adventurous solos, while also feeling like a tight 47 minutes. | Henry Threadgill / Ensemble Double-Up: Old Locks and Irregular Verbs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21674-old-locks-and-irregular-verbs/ | Old Locks and Irregular Verbs | When it comes to stressing jazz’s long-term relationship with popular song, the pianist Jason Moran is a seasoned campaigner. For Blue Note, Moran has covered Afrika Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock"—and also updated vintage Fats Waller songs, bringing a modern-day R&B sensibility to early-jazz dance hits. At other junctures, Moran has shown an affection for more experimental forms, by working with loft-jazz titan Sam Rivers or else investigating operatic song.
Plenty of elite musicians can genre-hop like this. Fewer can bring academic-sounding concepts and groove together into an individual language that cheats neither tradition. So it makes sense that veteran saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill is one of Moran’s heroes—and that Moran would one day wind up in one of this giant’s bands. Since the 1970s, Threadgill has honed an urgent and bluesy sound (usually on alto saxophone), while also leading ensembles that feature unusual combinations of instruments (like tuba and cello).
"My head nods to Threadgill just as deep as it does J Dilla," Moran has said. And it’s true that Threadgill expects his bandmates to keep track of a beat, even when his compositions tilt away from traditional harmony—as has been the case over the past decade. On his new record, Threadgill steps back from playing entirely, in order to conduct an opus that springs from his bumptious and melodically pungent late style. Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is an extended work that Threadgill composed as a tribute to the late avant-jazz pioneer Butch Morris (who developed a method for leading group improvisations that is known as "conduction"). Like the best Morris performances, Old Locks offers plenty of room for twisty, adventurous solos, while also feeling like a tight 47 minutes.
Threadgill’s lineup includes Moran as well as the Cuban progressive jazz talent David Virelles (on separate pianos), the two-alto attack of saxophonists Curtis MacDonald and Roman Filiu, driving percussion courtesy of Craig Weinrib—and a pair of veterans from the band Zooid, Threadgill’s other active performing vehicle. Given their deep experience with the composer’s recent work, Jose Davila’s tuba and Christopher Hoffman’s cello provide some of the album’s most rewarding soloing. (On CD and in download versions, the recording is indexed into four "parts," but it’s meant to be absorbed as a whole.)
"Part 1" starts off with delicate piano interplay, courtesy of Moran and Virelles. An early, descending run of chords establishes an air of a lament before collapsing into a stark tone-cluster, signaling that this tribute to the departed will not be a meek or morose affair. The end of the brief "Part 2" sees Weinrib moving between spacier playing and blasts of fractured funk. Hoffman has a sublime cello feature at the start of "Part 3"—full of quick exclamations and longer, graceful lines. "Part 4" kicks off with the pianists, once again. This time, however, they’re collaborating on a lushly harmonized, hymn-like theme. Even the improvised runs of dissonance have an ecstatic feel by this point, and when the full ensemble joins in, Threadgill’s memorial to Morris’ life and art feels emotionally complete.
The set marches on from grief over a lost comrade, and in doing so eventually creates a fervent celebration of the lived experience. Jazz’s roots are in New Orleans, and so the music has always had access to post-funeral stomp. But as with his manner of approaching any other genre tradition, Threadgill works new changes on the expected patterns. He’s a fan of vintage tools, but an experimentalist when it comes to grammar. Despite the fact it doesn’t contain a single note of his own searing saxophone playing, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs remains pure Threadgill—and a highlight in career stocked with more than a few classics. | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pi Recordings | April 6, 2016 | 8 | 985bee43-3845-40d1-9afa-3347127afef2 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Yaeji’s debut channels a lifetime’s worth of anger into an airy blend of synth-pop, jazz, techno, and ambient. It’s a generous, understated exploration of rage as a source of creative renewal. | Yaeji’s debut channels a lifetime’s worth of anger into an airy blend of synth-pop, jazz, techno, and ambient. It’s a generous, understated exploration of rage as a source of creative renewal. | Yaeji: With a Hammer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaeji-with-a-hammer/ | With a Hammer | The great women artists of modern history knew that the most intense, powerful kind of rage may wield a hammer, but the hammer is the means and not the end. Tracey Emin’s bed lies unmade, soiled and strewn with detritus. Betye Saar’s glass Aunt Jemima bottle is recast as a Molotov cocktail, a Black Power fist gripping the wick. Yoko Ono offered audiences scissors to snip her clothes, an invitation to violate, and perhaps consider, a woman. Each piece is a symbol: the physical manifestation of the fury within, confrontation as a conduit for something greater, something that affects a shift.
On With a Hammer, Yaeji offers it all up: the person, her rage, and the symbol. The Korean American New Yorker fabricated two aluminum sledgehammers that she keeps nearby at home and in the studio, blunt instruments as signifiers: power, protection, comfort. She wields one on the cover of With a Hammer, thrown casually over her shoulders—the way construction dudes do in the male imagination—and glances sideways, either daring the viewer to step to her or inviting us to join in.
Yaeji has said that With a Hammer, her full-length debut, was created in a maelstrom: suppressed childhood memories, rolling waves of alienation, anger at increased violence against Asian Americans, revelations during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, that euphoric pique when you finally realize you’re really not as small as the world would have you believe. In an accompanying 111-page booklet of her artwork, outfit photos, and song sketches, she includes an epic comic about a wizard dog that helps her unleash her anger—it emerges through her mouth in hammer form, of course—and the concept is both sweet and unexpectedly moving. In her own fury she locates creativity and beauty, experimentation and scrutiny, acerbity and warmth. In destruction, hammers create anew, and Yaeji seeks her own kind of rebirth, venturing musically beyond the club and finding deliverance in the sound of her voice.
Here, the infectious house music on which she built her career makes way for the space between the notes, and her melodic acumen is clear and often gripping. Commingling synth-pop (“Done (Let’s Get It),” “Away x5”) with classical and jazz (“I’ll Remember for Me, I’ll Remember for You”) and exploring the outskirts of techno and ambient, Yaeji’s self-actualization comes as she tries to disentangle the inner workings of a big, freaky universe. On album opener “Submerge FM,” a bilingual contemplation of space and time, she interrogates conventional concepts of past and present and how their authority affects our collective sense of community: “I can see myself in you and yourself in me, and we’re all a part of one,” she harmonizes in a nigh-transcendent state, flute trills crafting curlicues around her promise.
Yaeji assembled a collective of friends to play and sing on With a Hammer: Collaborations like the sumptuous “Happy,” with Baltimore musician Nourished by Time, and contemplative “Ready or Not,” with NYC producer K Wata, embody the philosophy that in community, satisfying new artistic avenues open up. “Michin,” with fellow producer Enayet, roils with sub-bass as Yaeji readies herself to smash the negative self-talk, and maybe some state property along the way. “How you like it now?” she asks in an alto snarl, the rhetoric of a street confrontation. It’s the part when tension approaches triumph, when the audience begins to cheer. As she works through her bruises, she seems to reach the conclusion that fearlessness and hope are the only response to social and internal plagues. Strengthened with resolve, Yaeji even offers her services: On “1 Thing to Smash,” with the producer Loraine James, she sings in Korean that she’ll smash up “what’s distressing you” over a soothing bouquet of ambient flute and synth.
With a Hammer captures Yaeji's emotional transformation, a painful but necessary part of getting older. In the newfound freedom to break stuff, she chronicles her growth as a musician and, perhaps, as an Asian American woman artist disposing of presumptions and circumstances beyond her control. “Passed Me By,” a stunning highlight built on cinematic synth chords and an analog drum kit, is an offering to her former self, a fusion of child Yaeji with the grown, protective adult. “Anything that touches me will evaporate,” she sings airily, as if in prayer, “And fly higher and higher.” Half of rage is confronting the sorrow that births it and watching it metamorphize. Witnessing the chrysalis is With a Hammer’s most generous gift. | 2023-04-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | April 10, 2023 | 8.5 | 985e1f5d-8416-4d07-b91a-cd2de8e759b8 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
UK grime fixture Mr Mitch’s latest LP explores a pared-back sound. It feels polished and tactile, with themes of loyalty, accountability, and fatherhood. | UK grime fixture Mr Mitch’s latest LP explores a pared-back sound. It feels polished and tactile, with themes of loyalty, accountability, and fatherhood. | Mr. Mitch: Devout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23165-mr-mitch-devout/ | Devout | For a brief period in September of 2013, the UK grime scene went to war. This time, though, the battleground was Soundcloud, and the soldiers were the genre’s producers, who turned out a fearsome barrage of beats—christened “war dubs”—aimed at their peers and rivals. In the spirit of Jamaican soundclash culture, there was the sense that this battle was as much about the flexing of technical ability as any real enmity. One producer rose above the fray: Mr. Mitch, real name Miles Mitchell, who dropped a selection of soft, sample-driven tracks he called “Peace Edits,” and in doing so, all but left with the spoils.
Time has proven this to be not so much a conceptual feint as an expression of Mitchell’s character. There is no front to the music he makes, no rough edges. Instead, Devout—like its predecessor, 2014’s Parallel Memories—explores a pared-back, gossamer sound, with emotions to the fore. Mitchell is no outsider: he runs his own label, Gobstopper Records, and is one of four producers behind London clubnight Boxed, a home for inventive, off-the-wall productions that has been credited as an engine behind grime’s revival. But he is also a father of two from suburban South London and his own artist albums reflect this reality, exploring the sanctuary of home life and matters of the heart.
Parallel Memories was pretty but almost too minimal, sometimes feeling short of a layer or two. It would be deceptive to claim Devout is heavier, but it is compositionally tighter, and roughly half the tracks feature vocals from Mitchell and a small coterie of guests. There are still qualities that harken back to grime: the 16 bar structures, the wriggling, liquid melodies. But where grime generally works from an abrasive, lo-fi palette, Devout feels polished and tactile, reminiscent of Fatima Al Qadiri’s forays in sino-grime, or the ’80s synth ambient of Ryuichi Sakamoto.
ASMR enthusiasts will find a lot to love in the pizzicato violin and breathy synth washes of “Lost Touch”—or “Black Tide,” with its analog camera sounds and melodies that squeak like a squeegee on a windowpane. The album’s vocal turns, meanwhile, veer soulful, grappling with love and relationships from a mature perspective. On “Fate,” Denai Moore whips up a quiet storm as she puts an end to a floundering love affair. “VPN” captures the pain of separation, with fellow South Londoner Palmistry’s airy cod-patois afloat over blown-glass melodies and a gentle kick.
Parenthood is a vexed topic in popular music; the rap album blighted by the saccharine track about Dad life is a cliché for a reason. Devout tackles this conundrum head on. The sole MC moment on the album comes courtesy of P Money, who raps about fatherhood on “Priority.” His delivery balances #blessed vibes with a glimpse of struggle and challenge, and Mitchell is canny enough to pair it with a beat laced with just a shred of anxiety—you can feel the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. More sentimental are the moments when Mitchell himself takes the mic, his voice tinted with Autotune. On “Intro,” he croons accompanied by samples of his sons at play, while “Oscar” is a song directed towards his newborn, set to childlike xylophone chimes. They come over as more imperfect than the rest of Devout, but their homemade intimacy feels like an end in itself.
Describing the concept of the album, Mitchell has spoken of challenging negative representations of black fatherhood: “We all know the stereotype of the black dad with multiple children from multiple partners who is absent from the child’s life, we see it consistently in popular culture,” he says in promotional materials. “I want to champion the alternative, which to me is just normal.” Loyalty and accountability are topics that seldom make it into popular music, but Devout finds bliss in its sense of balance. From its gentle textures come a calm centeredness, from its soft words a sense of strength. | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | April 20, 2017 | 7.2 | 986573c1-c4a7-4d94-ab6b-4750c606700a | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The Edmonton MC has served as the official poet laureate of his hometown, so it's surprising the strength of his third album doesn't lie in his writing or his rapping. | The Edmonton MC has served as the official poet laureate of his hometown, so it's surprising the strength of his third album doesn't lie in his writing or his rapping. | Cadence Weapon: Hope in Dirt City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16694-hope-in-dirt-city/ | Hope in Dirt City | The rapper Cadence Weapon, onetime Pitchfork contributor Rollie Pemberton, was the official poet laureate of his hometown of Edmonton, so it's a surprise that the strength of his third album, Hope in Dirt City, doesn't lie in his writing or his rapping. It's an album from an artist who has improved the overall direction of his music, but who still has room to grow as an MC. Hope in Dirt City is not a great album-- and there are more than a few moments that make me wince-- but as much I want to dismiss it, I'm left with the sense that Pemberton is working toward something, and that he's fearless enough to one day achieve it. The album itself is no endgame, but transitions have gone far worse.
For Hope in Dirt City, Pemberton has thankfully ditched the flimsy, starter-kit electro of 2008's Afterparty Babies. Instead we get warm, live instrumentation and tasteful, fruitful dips into 2-tone ("Small Deaths"), the synths of deep-house ("There We Go"), the pink-hued funk of Vice City ("Hope in Dirt City"), and a palate-cleansing Madvillainy homage ("Cheval"). The beats here are often jazzy, and even when that jazziness turns into outright skronk on a song like "Jukebox", the production rewards immersion. Despite the slight genre experiments, there's a looseness to the playing that holds everything together.
As impressive and encouraging as the production is, Pemberton's rapping isn't up to snuff. He's still overly dry and often noticeably amateurish, and he sometimes pushes himself to do things he can't. On opener "Get on Down", for instance, he kicks off the chorus by awkwardly spelling out his name and then continues to trip all over himself during the second verse as he tries to speed up his flow. Other times, like on "There We Go" or "Hope in Dirt City", he'll fall into a flow that's much closer to talking than rapping. There are also a few choruses that show off how unpolished he can be as a writer, be it when he devolves into screaming ("Jukebox") or when he introduces a melody that clashes with the rest of the song (the title track, "No More Names [Aditi]"). Likewise, his writing doesn't offer much to grab onto: The album focuses mostly on boys chasing girls, but his critical eye fails to do much to illuminate either his life or the listener's.
Pemberton is a rap outsider, and one of the positive things to take away from Hope in Dirt City is that this may have given him the license and the freedom to let the listener watch him figure himself out. Not all of his targets are hit, but there are moments here where you can squint and see something that could be built upon. The notable example is the single "Conditioning", which in its second half features the best honest-to-goodness singing on the album. Pemberton's vocals are impassioned, but he also perfectly harnesses the range of his voice, lilting at the end of a few lines into a falsetto while growling as he delivers others. He hits that same sweet spot in the album's final minute as well, allowing the record to at least close with its best foot forward. Rapping becomes singing becomes screaming with a fluid sonic identity to match, and though there are some misses, the process itself provides its own fleeting charms. | 2012-06-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-06-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Upper Class | June 7, 2012 | 6 | 9868573f-2aa9-477a-b4f2-205d91cfa05d | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Megafaun member offers his solo debut, a collection of instrumental folk compositions mostly for acoustic guitar, banjo, and harmonica. | Megafaun member offers his solo debut, a collection of instrumental folk compositions mostly for acoustic guitar, banjo, and harmonica. | Phil Cook & His Feat: Hungry Mother Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15442-hungry-mother-blues/ | Hungry Mother Blues | Megafaun stand out from a crowded field of Americana-inspired indie rock bands because of their investment in musical heritage, from old-time string bands and traditional folk ballads to jazz to 20th century classical. Last September in Durham, the historically rich North Carolina city the band calls home, they collaborated with former bandmate Justin Vernon, Brooklyn singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten, and Virginia jazz combo Fight the Big Bull on an expansive reinterpretation of one of American folk's sacred documents, Sounds of the South, the anthology recorded by Alan Lomax circa 1960. It's no stretch to imagine that Megafaun multitasker Phil Cook's immersion in this venerable material shaped the deep-rooted simplicity of his solo debut.
During the Sounds of the South premiere, I was especially enamored of Cook's sensitivity as an instrumentalist. On the piano, he had a gracefully leaping sense of melody, and on the banjo, he played clusters of sweet harmonics in places where a less humble musician might have soloed hard. This tasteful and generous temper suffuses Hungry Mother Blues, a collection of instrumental folk compositions mostly for acoustic guitar, banjo, and growling resonator; perhaps a dash of harmonica for color. Cook's Feat are actually just his feet, lightly whomping on a homemade stompbox. He's alone and yet not, conversing with a pantheon of American innovators who favor expressivity over flash: people such as slide guitarist Ry Cooder, the fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey, and the shapeshifting Bill Frisell.
The album opens with the welcoming breeze of "Frazee, Minnesota", whose lead melody strongly resembles the vocal part of Arthur Russell's "Maybe She". While almost certainly coincidental, it gives you an idea of how melodically lucid Cook's writing is. The fluent "Juniper" is just as eminently hummable, to an almost crazy degree for instrumental music. These are simple, bucolic themes, brought to life with a deft assortment of bends, slides, and evolving transpositions. Offsetting the earworms are groove-and-atmosphere focused tracks such as the gently galloping, clawhammer banjo tune "Waiting 'Round the Oven Buns" and the Cooder-esque "Ballad of a Hungry Mother". Overall, it's a great chance to hear the subtle and relaxed touch Cook brings to Megafaun unadorned, save for the barest four-on-the-floor beats here and there.
Still, let's be clear: This is not a Megafaun record. There are no freak-outs or electronic interventions or field recordings. It's eight casual-feeling songs in just under 20 minutes, though it's quite diverse within those narrow confines, flowing easily from the moony blues of "Sparrowander" to the cockier swagger of "The Last Steam Engine Train". Hungry Mother Blues shows us some of the basic underpinnings beneath Megafaun's gritty inventions, reminding us that if you want to make something really new, it helps to be deeply coversant with the old. | 2011-05-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-05-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Trekky Records | May 31, 2011 | 7.5 | 9868b188-5f18-4461-bdb4-4a843e99052f | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
22Gz attempts to chase a hit on a melodic but stale mixtape that struggles to keep up with the drill scene the Brooklyn rapper helped originate. | 22Gz attempts to chase a hit on a melodic but stale mixtape that struggles to keep up with the drill scene the Brooklyn rapper helped originate. | 22Gz: Growth & Development | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22gz-growth-and-development/ | Growth & Development | Brooklyn’s drill rap scene began as a ripoff of Chicago’s movement, the sign of a borough that had lost its way. In late 2016, Flatbush’s 22Gz released “Suburban,” a song that sounds like it was made in Chicago’s summer of 2012—the flow is jacked from a teenage G Herbo and the beat might as well be ripped from DJ L’s hard drive. But despite its lack of originality, “Suburban” opened up the possibilities of what drill could become in New York. 22Gz injects the single with the cockiness and swagger that has forever pulsed through the veins of Brooklyn’s premier rappers. Within the next few months, as drill rap became inescapable in the city, 22Gz went to jail.
In the spring of 2017, during a trip to Miami, 22Gz and his friends were involved in an argument over a parking spot. The disagreement resulted in the death of two people and 22Gz was arrested and charged with murder. After spending nearly half the year in jail, the case against him never came together, and he was released at the end of 2017. When 22Gz returned to Brooklyn’s drill scene, behind the force of fellow Flatbush rapper Sheff G, drill had progressed. Even as his visibility was raised through signing to Kodak Black’s Sniper Gang imprint, 22Gz’s style lagged behind. His 2019 mixtape, The Blixky Tapet, sounds like it’s from another era.
On “Suburban Pt. 2,” the first single from 22Gz’s new mixtape Growth & Development, he makes up some lost ground. It follows the path set by the late Pop Smoke, who separated Brooklyn’s drill from the dead-eyed aggression more common in Chicago; instead, he talked cold-hearted shit while hitting a goofy dance, and without losing an ounce of his intimidation—a balancing act that’s essential in Brooklyn’s latest wave of drill rap. Like, yes, the centerpiece of 22Gz’s “Suburban Pt. 2” is a brutal threat (“Bust your piñata, open your māthā, shoot up the party”), but it’s still catchy and silly enough to have inspired infinite TikTok dance videos.
But it becomes clear that the purpose of Growth & Development isn’t to be a good mixtape—it’s just 12 shots at finding a single to follow-up “Suburban Pt. 2.” He comes close with the effortless “No Questions,” like someone put a mic in his face and told him to cut a wrestling promo: “Don’t test us, have my yungin’ take his necklace/Got a temper, make a movie like Netflix.” Though 22Gz no longer has a definitive style of his own, often the songs on the project are dated.
There are tracks on the project that sound like they could have landed on an early 2010s Troy Ave mixtape, specifically “ATB,” a reminder of a Brooklyn rap era that made an entire generation turn to Chicago drill in the first place. 22Gz’s attempt at a melody is forced, and “Twirl Girl” is the type of unbearable “modern” rap song you would hear on Empire. He takes another step backward with “The Oath” and “Careers,” both of which have none of Brooklyn’s signature flash and production reminiscent of the cheap Chicago imitations the scene was known for in its earliest days. It’s almost as if 22Gz is out of touch with his own borough, like he has never taken the time to scroll through the Raps & Hustles YouTube page—the unofficial home of Brooklyn drill. The irony is that it’s clear he’s struggling to keep pace with the rapid evolution of a Brooklyn drill scene built on the foundation he laid. | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Sniper Gang | April 15, 2020 | 5.8 | 986e0ce1-7fa6-4bf8-9439-ac0201020127 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A new EP of soft, slowcore music from Maya Bon and Ryan Albert arrives like a postscript, elaborating on past themes of grief and accountability with a darker scrawl. | A new EP of soft, slowcore music from Maya Bon and Ryan Albert arrives like a postscript, elaborating on past themes of grief and accountability with a darker scrawl. | Babehoven: Sunk EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babehoven-sunk/ | Sunk | California expat Maya Bon and collaborator Ryan Albert of Babehoven put on Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and sprawled out on the floor of their apartment in the mountains of Vermont. After the dreamy maximalism of last year’s EP Nastavi, Calliope—a catalog of requiems equal parts clever and anguished—they hoped to embellish their new project with Smith’s deckle-edged sound. Armed with little more than a MIDI keyboard, together they trouble Bon’s old conclusions, questioning whether loss or forgiveness are ever really final.
Sunk, their first release with Double Double Whammy, is a summer hailstorm of contradictions. It arrives like a postscript, elaborating on past themes of grief and accountability with a darker scrawl. Brooding slowcore percussion texturizes Bon’s creaky riffs and sometimes-haunting-sometimes-angelic vocals—“I don’t know how to love anymore,” Bon whispers. While the band upholds their indie charm, Bon shows off the range of her voice—borrowing from both shoegaze and country antecedents—tracing a lineage from Grouper’s Liz Harris back to Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. She distinguishes herself by resisting tidy melodic turns and pop hooks, offering instead a sonic kaleidoscope made even more beautiful by its complexity.
The poet Adrienne Rich famously claimed to use formalism like asbestos gloves—it allowed her to handle material she couldn’t pick up barehanded. For Bon, this is humor. Heartbreak, an absent father, the death of her pets, and now climate anxiety, land mismanagement, misogyny: she plumbs the existential depths with a comedic spade. On the lethargic lead single, “Fugazi,” she laments that a guy thought he’d been the one to introduce her to the D.C. punk band. Of course, Maya Bon knows Fugazi. Like Ian MacKaye, she plays her wit the way she plays her hurt: with a straight face. Her voice leaden with fatigue, she continues, “It doesn’t make sense why it hurt me.” But the irony only punctuates the pain; it makes perfect sense, and her guitar is showing you why.
In Bon’s world, vulnerability thrums against intellect, the quotidian against the grandiose. On the stirring, folk-operatic seven-minute closing track, “Twenty Dried Chilies,” she describes watching TV on the couch in the same few breaths as a staggering declaration about the cruelty of aging and the fragility of human connection. “I regret sending you that email where I said I wanted to kill you,” she sings, her tone theatrical against a scrim of harp-like strings and keys, like an epic poet enchanting a story with the lyre. Like much of her writing, the line succeeds because it is as much a joke as it is not a joke. Her syllables flutter and tumble over rows of hypnotic fingerpicking, in stark contrast to the stand-out “Creature” which precedes it, whose power resides in its spareness and in whose open strumming and nihilism, Elliott Smith’s influence is clear.
At Brooklyn’s Union Pool in early February, Bon and Albert concluded their set with a kiss onstage. Despite her fears and forfeitures, something like hope emerges between the songs’ softer moments and their buoyant orchestral swells. She does know how to love, we just have to listen for the wink. | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | March 9, 2022 | 7.3 | 9870cef1-1253-45f2-a1a0-5c4f11d50fe4 | Holden Seidlitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/holden-seidlitz/ | |
The tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix, an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system. | The tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix, an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system. | Freddie Gibbs / Curren$y / The Alchemist: Fetti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freddie-gibbs-currendollary-the-alchemist-fetti/ | Fetti | Like a collaborative project conceived on a hip-hop blog’s message board in 2012, Fetti is an underground rap fan’s dream come true. At just nine tracks—some as brief as a minute and 40 seconds—the tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix of what Curren$y, Freddie Gibbs, and producer Alchemist do best. It is also an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system.
Each member of this triumvirate has brushed up against mainstream success and fame before: Curren$y was a charter member of Lil Wayne’s Young Money and his early collaborations with Wiz Khalifa helped propel that Pittsburgh rapper to his breakthrough moment; Freddie Gibbs was once under Young Jeezy’s CTE auspices before their public falling out; and Alchemist has produced hits and album cuts for platinum acts ranging from Mobb Deep to Kendrick Lamar—in addition to being Eminem’s occasional tour DJ. All three have been adjacent to the limelight but never directly in it—but not for lack of talent or exposure. Where they differ from their more visible peers is their choice to sidestep conventional stardom and the inevitable artistic compromise that comes with it. Rather than chasing hits and clout, Gibbs, Curren$y, and ALC have been growing cult followings who revel in the micro-worlds they create.
Gibbs remains the consummate gangsta rapper. He’s one of the sub-genre’s last versatile lyricists whose street savvy and wit are complemented by a gift for flows and ferocious delivery. On “Willie Lloyd,” named for the deceased Vice Lords leader, Gibbs lets loose with a staccato flow: “In my dreams I see Faces of Death/I might pray for you hoes/Get your rosary across your chest/Your soprano can’t fade me like Thanos/I just shipped a whole damn piano up out the West.” Where Gibbs is concerned with stealing the scene, Curren$y is more into setting it, making his verses rich with detail. He uses his words to inspire visions of Jet Life opulence filled with classic cars, beautiful women, and exotic weed strains. On “Tapatio,” a smooth-talking Spitta drives with a female companion who’s so overtaken by the weed and the Anita Baker on the car stereo that her mascara starts running. As always, Curren$y’s music soundtracks a stoner-slash-hypebeast lifestyle with a sound that every kid who has taken a bong rip or lined up to buy a pair of sneakers can relate to and aspire to.
The Alchemist is the centerpiece of the whole affair, the unseen ringleader whose presence is felt without him having to speak a word. He employs a production style that’s all about mood; using ’70s soul records to create the soundscape at the nexus of Blaxploitation soundtracks and eerie, ’80s-style synths. “Saturday Night Special” transports the listener to a dark parking lot and the passenger seat of smoke-filled ’85 Monte Carlo as Gibbs and Spitta talk shit and plot. Gibbs recalls the elements that make up his persona: “I’m controversial with these verbs like Christopher Wallace with words, Felix Mitchell with birds, Malcolm X with the perm.” It’s one of a hundred little moments on Fetti that offer a proof: In the splintered rap world the internet created, every artist worth their salt can carve out a niche and prosper. Curren$y, Gibbs, and Alchemist wouldn’t have it any other way and like Gibbs says here: “Once I made a M, I ain’t give a fuck if I popped or not.” | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | ESGN / Jet Life / ALC / Empire | November 14, 2018 | 8 | 98718af9-e1ea-410e-94d7-f38129b795b2 | Timmhotep Aku | https://pitchfork.com/staff/timmhotep-aku/ | |
West Coast rap nostalgist G Perico has spent 2017 on a forward-looking tear. His third full-length release of the year contains his immediate charm. | West Coast rap nostalgist G Perico has spent 2017 on a forward-looking tear. His third full-length release of the year contains his immediate charm. | G Perico: 2 Tha Left | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/g-perico-2-tha-left/ | 2 Tha Left | G Perico might initially sound like a straight-ahead West Coast nostalgist. But if he’s craning his neck to look back, he does not stumble over himself in the process. There’s no way around the DJ Quik, Too $hort, and Eazy-E comparisons: Perico lilts his nasally voice with the same crassly blustering swagger, atop similarly synthed G-funk. Still, there’s nothing imitative in his music, and the 29-year old Perico doesn’t fetishize the past, even when stomping around South Central in a still-wet Jheri curl. He’s spent 2017 on a forward-looking tear, releasing a fiercely concentrated solo debut this spring, and sharing space with a pair of fellow up-and-coming California rappers on a collaborative mixtape called G-Worthy this fall. 2 Tha Left, then, is G Perico’s third full-length release of the year, and it feels like a bit of a heat-check.
2 Tha Left is similarly spare as Perico’s last solo outing, though it is bookended by matching intro and outro tracks—which add time and sound a little out of place. This solo album also, for better or worse, folds in a busier cast of featured rappers. TeeCee4800 and A.D. nail their appearances on “What Up Cuz,” building it into a sinister turf taunt. Meanwhile, Curren$y sounds lazily at home on the steal-your-girl “Send Her Home,” clocking in the same verse he’s been rapping for years alongside Perico’s bouncy shit-talk. There isn’t a moment where Perico is upstaged, and his immediate charm is in the stylish near yelp of his rapping voice, the way he struts over a beat. He seems to always be at the top of his register, but he tucks a deceptive range of perky melody into each verse and hook.
All of this plays out over a sleek G-funk backdrop, with plenty of playful nuance in the production. Sleigh bells briefly shake in time with the bass on “Mind Yours,” and some pizzicato tucked deep in the mix on “Affiliated” lends the stomping anthem a delicate menace. Still, it’s the synths that build the world. Most of them are up-front and warm but they take various shapes: pierced whistling, chunky bass tones, shimmering atmosphere.
Perico raps with a casual, plain-spoken lyricism. He never explains or obscures a detail in his storytelling, a writing philosophy he captures in the album’s bark of an opening bar: “Don’t ask me how I do it, watch how I move.” 2 Tha Left catches him perpetually stuck in the middle, almost compromising his come-up. On “Everybody,” a solo track with a jubilant hook that sounds like it was written by or for Kamaiyah, he makes the simple prospect of hope sound wistful with a bare, pattering quip: “Look at me tryna get rich with everybody I know/But I probably can’t trust nobody I know.”
That same paranoia washes over “One Two,” when Perico snaps: “Yeah I love you my nigga, but I don’t know if I can trust you my nigga.” With a droning hook and menacing economy to his detached narrative, Perico turns a song about a police raid and its aftereffects into something grimly mundane. On “Affiliated,” a stomping G-funk anthem with a bassline that sounds like it was pounded out on a janky living room piano, Perico injects the same depressingly shrugging perspective, finding a silver lining in his 10-toes-down ethics: “The G homie just took a dub/I know what you’re thinkin’ ‘Yeah that sounds super long’/But he comin’ home.”
Music is a second act for Perico, who once just dabbled but is now doubling down on his reinvigorated rap career. He went to jail for the second time in 2012 on a gun charge, releasing an album on the day of his surrender. Ever since, he’s been pitching himself as a convincingly timeless and hyperlocal hero, burrowing deeper and deeper into the groove of a second chance. | 2017-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | So Way Out | December 13, 2017 | 7.7 | 987ea421-b741-4cb6-9968-9c9a6d31a1cc | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The Virginia crooner reintroduces himself with a set of sumptuous, retro R&B that’s a soothing, dapper fit for his impressive vocal range. | The Virginia crooner reintroduces himself with a set of sumptuous, retro R&B that’s a soothing, dapper fit for his impressive vocal range. | Shelley FKA DRAM: Shelley FKA DRAM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shelley-fka-dram-shelley-fka-dram/ | Shelley FKA DRAM | In 2016, Shelley FKA DRAM captured his essence up to that point on the joyful cover of his debut album, Big Baby D.R.A.M.: a tightly framed shot of the “Cha Cha” rapper cheek to cheek with his Goldendoodle, beaming with a signature toothy smile. Like his inescapable hooks and elastic approach to R&B and hip-hop, the image was contagious with genuine and overwhelming goodwill. But behind the scenes, the Hampton, Virginia artist sank into a battle with addiction, leading to a life-altering stint in rehab last year and a larger reassessment of his artistry. “[“Cha Cha” and “Broccoli”]... they brought me immense success and many, many spoils,” he admitted. “But also, I feel as though the core of what I do was being totally overlooked.”
On his self-titled second album, Shelley seeks to rectify that problem by reintroducing himself under his birth name with a set of sumptuous, retro R&B from a newly peaceful state of mind. Shelley FKA DRAM swaps in his trademark dizzying hooks for the smooth neo-soul and funk he found a groove with on previous highlights like “Sweet Va Breeze” and “Caretaker.” It’s a soothing, dapper fit for his impressive vocal range as Shelley ponders variations of romance through a pensive lens.
The record focuses primarily on the phases of love that make him feel more balanced and secure, but where other men in pop and R&B are prone to cheesy wife-guy platitudes, Shelley is refreshingly old-school about it. He promises a California King size bed and silk sheets to a lover on “The Lay Down,” delivered in his resonant baritone and filled out with lush electric guitar. On “Married Woman,” he warbles melodramatically about an extramarital affair in the horny spirit of “Me and Mrs. Jones,” maintaining traces of the comical energy that lit up his biggest songs. The album’s laid-back sexiness easily suffuses whatever room you play it in, even if Shelley wants to rib you a little as he sets the mood: “Let’s stop trying to pull the wool over each other's eyes/Besides, we only get like this when we horny.”
Featherlight songs like “Beautiful” and “Exposure” drift into a lovesick headspace to explore the first moments of a new connection. “Let me touch your soul just like I touch your skin,” he urges on the latter over heart-filling vocal runs, keys, and a tugging bassline. Later, Shelley teams up with Erykah Badu again for “’93 Acura Vigor,” introduced with a long, spoken intro on the power of collaboration. It’s one of several interstitials meant to guide the listener through his thought process. But here, over a lethargic club beat and sample, the two make eyes at each other in a coy back-and-forth that loses the sly, memorable alchemy of “WiFi.”
Shelley’s mellifluous voice keeps the tone light throughout, even as his lyrics prove more introspective than his previous album. “All Pride Aside” recruits Summer Walker for a rework on the “addicted to love” trope that feels more personal in Shelley’s hands: “Since we not stoppin’ ourselves/I’ll keep lettin’ you if you keep lettin’ me,” he pleads against a wall of stacked background vocals, making the unhealthy codependency clear. “Cooking With Grease” pulls off a similar trick in the opposite direction, with a pared-back, downcast beat to serve his vulnerable side: “I feel used and abused, so I started doing it, too/But I never did it to you,” he croons wearily, at his most unsure of the relationship and working through it with swooning breath control.
As earnest as the album can get, Shelley’s lyrics sometimes tread into mushy territory (“Beautiful as stars lit up by the moon,” while it sounds angelic over gentle piano, is also nonsensical). The relaxed production tends to blend songs, too, which isn’t altogether unintentional; Shelley has said he wants the album to be so easygoing you can throw it on while cleaning the house. But he holds on to a roguish element of surprise: On a cover of Daft Punk’s 2001 heartbreaker “Something About Us,” he makes a natural compromise between his former bubbly exuberance and newfound sincerity. Shelley’s restrained vocals embody the song’s loungey mood, only climbing up to a dreamy falsetto for the bridge. He then mimics the song’s dancing synth line in a high-pitched, meowing ad-lib, a joyously improvisatory moment that captures his present identity: doing whatever he wants and at ease with his new self.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Empire / Atlantic | May 5, 2021 | 7.5 | 9882890e-77c5-48c6-b7e4-9dc94a845da7 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
With her solo debut, AlunaGeorge’s Aluna Francis explores dance music in many forms—pop-house, dancehall, funk, Caribbean and African dance—as a personal refuge and an industry corrective. | With her solo debut, AlunaGeorge’s Aluna Francis explores dance music in many forms—pop-house, dancehall, funk, Caribbean and African dance—as a personal refuge and an industry corrective. | Aluna: Renaissance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aluna-renaissance/ | Renaissance | AlunaGeorge, the British duo of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid, never quite got massive, but they did get everywhere. British audiences may know the group best from “White Noise”—Disclosure’s biggest UK hit. Others might remember the glitchy Timbaland homages on 2013’s Body Music, an early revival of now-ubiquitous Y2K pop. If all this genre-shifting made AlunaGeorge a little amorphous as a group, it did mean they got plenty of work. “You could give us one week and we’d do 10 songs,” Francis told Vulture. “Any genre—we’ll just knock them out.”
Between the knockouts, though, brewed increasing frustration with the dance music industry, coming to a head with a bracing manifesto on Francis’s Instagram. Sometimes there’s blatant exploitation; last year, Francis accused a producer outside the group of sexual assault. But it’s often subtler. Dance producers, disproportionately men, often become mega-paid stars, while dance singer-songwriters, disproportionately women, get second billing—or none, made into modern-day Martha Washes. Wash, of course, is Black, and that dynamic also persists: The most successful dance stars tend to be white, with Black artists showing up in interpolations, uncredited samples, pastiches, or plagiarism, but less often in person or pay. Francis knows it well; though many AlunaGeorge features were basically solo Aluna features, and though Reid was often offstage at AlunaGeorge sets, for years she hesitated to go officially solo. “I knew that, as a Black woman alone, I was going to get chewed up,” she said.
On Renaissance, Francis aims to disprove that. The album showcases her curatorial skills—honed from years of DJ sets, streaming playlists, and recently virtual shows as Aluna’s Room—and her range. Maybe as a challenge, Renaissance neither starts nor ends with dance music. The opener, “I’ve Been Starting to Love All the Things I Hate,” is less a product of the club queue than the away message; slow jam “Whistle” unspools a drowsy vocal and sumptuous synth-violin solo. In between is proper dance in many forms: pop-house, dancehall, funk, Caribbean and African dance, and only occasionally R&B, in TLC homage “Sneak.” She’s an excellent curator of features, too: On Mr. Vegas-interpolating “Get Paid,” Aluna cedes the floor to rapper Princess Nokia and Jamaican songwriter Jada Kingdom in assured form, and “The Recipe” pairs Aluna’s ability to channel earnestness with a small fluting note with Kaytranada’s ability to wring wistfulness out of a small chord change.
Francis describes Aluna’s Room as “an introvert’s palace of escape,” and likewise, Renaissance was written for the inner headspace as much as the dancefloor—convenient in a year where those are empty. “Don’t Hit My Line” hammers exes back into the woodwork to a four-to-the-floor beat, but complicates itself: percussion interludes and Francis’s staccato vocal turn the beat polyrhythmic, and the melody leans hard into “I think of you,” like a “New Rules” by someone not totally ready to let go of the old. And lead single “Body Pump,” written with Josh Lloyd-Watson of Jungle, is built like a house-diva showcase, from the torchy first verse to the drop to the triumphant close. But there’s a scrappiness to it, in the froth of handclaps on the bridge—a studio accident, left in—and the way Aluna pushes her voice into the red, frayed and vulnerable. It’s decidedly human, just the thing to play in a “palace of escape”—or at least in one of its many vibrant rooms.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mad Decent | September 9, 2020 | 7 | 988d9222-eea5-4600-b863-913f7df116b4 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
With help from the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and erstwhile pop star Michelle Branch, the DIY icon finds new ways to tease out light and dark, allure and anxiety with his key-ignoring baritone. | With help from the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and erstwhile pop star Michelle Branch, the DIY icon finds new ways to tease out light and dark, allure and anxiety with his key-ignoring baritone. | Calvin Johnson: A Wonderful Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/calvin-johnson-a-wonderful-beast/ | A Wonderful Beast | Calvin Johnson’s key-ignoring baritone subverts any song it graces—countering rhythms, shifting tones, darkening even the sunniest moods. That voice is a big part of what made Beat Happening’s work deeper than standard DIY twee, and it’s since stirred all his other projects, from the the indie rock of Halo Benders to the dance pop of Selecter Dub Narcotic. Like the contrapuntal emissions of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, Public Image Limited’s John Lydon, and Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, Johnson’s singing constantly disrupts the music around him.
On A Wonderful Beast, Johnson’s third solo album but first in 13 years, these disruptions begin immediately during opener “Kiss Me Sweetly.” Johnson’s gravity-laden singing battles the soaring highs of turn-of-the-millenium pop star Michelle Branch, dragging them to earth for a sinister love song where the demand for a kiss sounds a little like a threat. Likewise, Johnson’s dense moans chill the bright tones supplied by the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, the record’s producer and a one-man backing band of guitar, drums, bass, and keyboards.
It might seem odd that Johnson would pair with Carney and Branch, two figures far outside his normal scene, but he’s always been an open and avid collaborator, working with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Here, the partnership creates a dynamic of friction—upbeat sounds distorted by tremorous vocals—that defines A Wonderful Beast, giving it a tonal depth that rewards repeat listens.
The contrast also adds intriguing ambiguity to even the simplest songs. If delivered earnestly, “Like You Do” could be a pure ballad supported by staccato guitar and swelling keyboards. But Johnson’s wry sing-speak straddles sincerity and sarcasm, sometimes mocking the idea of romantic relationships altogether. The catchy “Wherefore Art Thou” reworks Romeo and Juliet into a snarling cartoon, while good-cop Branch and bad-cop Johnson pit emotional empathy against skepticism during “Another Teardrop Falls.” The oddly political “Bubbles, Clouds and Rainbows” is the album’s most cryptic moment. During dreamy verses and a chorus of “alt, right, click, delete,” Johnson imagines achieving nirvana by eradicating hateful fringes. But the song is so sunny, it’s possible to hear him making the opposite case, too. When he sings ”welcome to our bubble,” it’s as if he were sarcastically admonishing the perils of the opposition’s echo chamber.
Those nuances may make A Wonderful Beast seem tedious or heavy-going, but it’s actually quite entertaining. The tunes Johnson wrote with Carney teem with hooks, and Carney’s production has the spirit of a poppy garage session. Some songs are even best enjoyed at the surface, as with “Are We Ready,” which begins with Johnson crooning “What does it mean to shing-a-ling?” He extols the utopian magic of simple pleasures on “When the Weekend Comes Around.” “All the problems solve themselves/When the weekend comes around,” he sings over a pulsing New Order-esque bassline. “When the weekend comes around/Is when the records spin around.”
Sunny sentiments mixed with darker hues was a hallmark of one of Beat Happening’s best albums, Black Candy, a title that applies to Johnson’s approach to music in general. A Wonderful Beast is too overtly engaging for a pitch-black album cover, instead using a colorful portrait of Johnson by Mecca Normal’s Jean Smith to capture the singer’s peculiar allure. A Wonderful Beast shows again how Johnson’s voice adds layers of meaning to his music—and how he’s kept that skill fresh by finding new ways to deploy it, and new people to help. | 2018-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | K | October 19, 2018 | 7.8 | 9899c628-6d08-482f-a8f1-1c1ce94fcf0a | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The Detroit rapper Dej Loaf came to national attention with "Try Me", an icy song dedicated to keeping one's personal circle small. Her new EP jumps smoothly between rapping and singing, and is just as confident and contained. She is aloof, but she never shuts herself off so much to miss when real attraction might be coming her way. | The Detroit rapper Dej Loaf came to national attention with "Try Me", an icy song dedicated to keeping one's personal circle small. Her new EP jumps smoothly between rapping and singing, and is just as confident and contained. She is aloof, but she never shuts herself off so much to miss when real attraction might be coming her way. | Dej Loaf: AndSeeThatsTheThing EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20896-andseethatsthething-ep/ | #AndSeeThatsTheThing EP | Last year, the Detroit rapper Dej Loaf came to national attention with “Try Me”, an icy song dedicated to keeping one's personal circle small. The sentiment isn't too dissimilar from plenty of “us against the world” street rap songs, but Dej’s sweet hook and relatively unknown status gave the song an extra push. She arrived aloof, an emotion that gains currency as social networks proliferate and push themselves into every corner of our lives. People can buy followers, beef between superstars can start over tweets, and it is harder and harder to opt out of any of it. Dej’s latest EP may indulge in this world—see the hashtag inclusion in the EP's title #AndSeeThatsTheThing—but her default remains disinterest.
On the EP’s opening track “Desire,” Dej says “I’d rather feel on myself than let you feel on my ass,” and the rest of the EP is just as self-contained and confident. The Big Sean-assisted “Back Up,” one of the most upbeat tracks in Dej’s catalog, focuses on keeping the distance with someone after just one night together. Big Sean, someone with a very public and on the record relationship history, struggles to keep up with Dej’s cold-hearted dismissals (“If I fuck and make you come, you gotta promise not to stress me,” she insists). But she never shuts herself off so much to miss when real attraction might be coming her way. “Butterflies” refers to the little creatures that flutter in nervous stomachs, and it captures the cheeks-blushing sweetness that is the other side of Dej. On “Hey There,” Dej partners with Future—more recently a heel on Dirty Sprite 2—who rediscovers his softer side that won over fans a few years ago with “Turn on the Lights”.
Dej Loaf’s confidence extends to her production. She knows the particular sound that works for her mix of rap and R&B. The EP’s production stays laidback, so Dej can smoothly jump between singing and rapping without leaning too heavily towards one style. “Back Up” is the exception, a crisp straight-ahead rap song that forgoes genre blurring. Though Dej’s talent is walking both sides of that divide, she’s a strong enough singer and rapper that it’s great hearing her not stuck on instrumentals that straddle the genre fence.
The performative nature of muting people from one’s life isn't seeking true isolation, but being selective about who is allowed into one’s world. Whether it is a passerby on the street, dudes creeping into DMs, or the comment section of Instagram, there are always so many voices shouting. The response of Dej’s music to pull inward feels appropriate, to only open up when most tender. #AndSeeThatsTheThing might sound so sad today, but Dej appears comfortably dour. | 2015-08-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | August 11, 2015 | 7.4 | 989ad1e7-7ca7-404f-b92d-7d84eae7e730 | David Turner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-turner/ | null |
For the last two years, Greg Fox has worked with a dozen projects, but his name has been chased by one thorny apposition: (ex-Liturgy). With two new releases, Guardian Alien’s near-brilliant second LP and a collaboration with jazz pioneer Milford Graves, he may have finally drummed himself past parenthetical suffixation. | For the last two years, Greg Fox has worked with a dozen projects, but his name has been chased by one thorny apposition: (ex-Liturgy). With two new releases, Guardian Alien’s near-brilliant second LP and a collaboration with jazz pioneer Milford Graves, he may have finally drummed himself past parenthetical suffixation. | Guardian Alien / Greg Fox: Spiritual Emergency / Mitral Transmission | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18871-guardian-alien-greg-fox-spiritual-emergency-mitral-transmission/ | Spiritual Emergency / Mitral Transmission | At last, Greg Fox might’ve drummed himself past parenthetical suffixation. For the last two years, the wildly prolific Fox has worked with a dozen projects, from his own electronic rampages as GDFX to the spirited explorations of the improvisation-and-academia sublimation squad Zs. There’ve been stints with the drum militia Man Forever and the arid punk band Cy Dune, treks with garage weirdos PC Worship and sets with stylistic jester C. Spencer Yeh. But through most all of this, Fox’s name has been chased by one thorny apposition: (ex-Liturgy). For all the talk of treatises and transcendentalism, Fox was Liturgy’s locomotive, powering their metal with his relentless and intricate drumming. Fox hasn’t been in the band since October 2011, but the association is just now, at last, beginning to peel from his side.
In large part, Fox’s name has begun to hold sway without that former association because he’s just so goddamn busy—the aforementioned are only a sample of his manifold projects since leaving Liturgy. More important than accretion, though, has been the excellence of his Guardian Alien, the wild-eyed, open-ended troupe that emerged just before Fox split with Liturgy. Guardian Alien couples Alexandra Drewchin’s spasmodic vocals and electronics and Turner Williams’ electrified Indian zither, the shahai baaja, with a daunting power trio—Fox on drums, surrounded by bassist Eli Winograd, and former Liturgy guitarist Bernard Gann. Their debut LP, the one track See the World Given to a One Love Entity, recalled Fox’s recent past only through the force of the rhythms—primal, knotty cataracts spilling over refracted dub and jazz, noise and abstraction. It was a primer for Guardian Alien’s broad musical reach, suggesting a group whose interests were as wide as the psychedelic sky above. It was, in earnest, the start of Fox’s post-Liturgy liberation, a process that reaches its next phase with a pair of new LPs—Guardian Alien’s near-brilliant second LP, Spiritual Emergency, and Mitral Transmission, a wonderful and ponderous collaboration between Fox and jazz pioneer Milford Graves.
Spiritual Emergency follows the noble freak/free music tradition of pitting one or several sides of short takes against one sidelong epic. The album’s first half links four divergent improvisations, while Guardian Alien commits the flip to an extended, excited span that starts near silence and ends in paroxysmal explosion. The structural decision places Guardian Alien in an idiomatic continuum that includes John Coltrane, Patty Watters, Frank Zappa, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Amon Düül II. It also spotlights the band’s admirable willingness to tinker with most anything: That first side includes a duet for chopped-and-stacked samples and percussion that might recall the Books and an electric guitar drone that stretches and then drifts into the distance, like Bardo Pond on a lunch break. “Mirror” is a drum-and-noise tirade that mirrors Lightning Bolt, while opener “Tranquilizer” bounds between rhythms and samples, effects and instruments like a warm-up jam from the salad days of Gang Gang Dance or Black Dice. That tizzy of activity and references, mind you, happens in an erratic 20 minutes—not enough time for any of the ideas to congeal into something greater or for the pieces to feel like more than loose leaves from the Guardian Alien’s collective notebook. Momentarily intriguing but never quite transfixing, they are exercises in exercising.
Their slightness comes in bas-relief to the audacious title track, the new pinnacle of Guardian Alien’s limited output. “Spiritual Emergency” begins with a reading by Stanislav Grof from Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes A Crisis, a book that argues for working through freak-outs of faith rather than treating them like mental illness. Guardian Alien takes the idea as precept here, rising and falling in and out of momentum and confusion. They struggle to keep the rhythm and find the groove, to build from basic ideas into something grand. Drewchin’s voice drifts like a ghoulish invocation. Gann winds through the hyperactivity with a sterling desert-blues riffs, daring the quintet to follow him into the distance. They do for a bit, idling into a land of jam-band torpor just ahead of the 16-minute mark. But it’s a feint: All at once, the band bursts forward, drums and voices and guitars surging into the ecstasy of volume. It’s a new peak for Guardian Alien, a breakthrough that shows their ability to be mutually focused and wild, composed and chaotic. It’s exhilarating, liberating stuff, a deserving entry in the sidelong canon it follows.
As with “Spiritual Emergency”, Mitral Transmission succeeds because of its singular direction and focus. For years, Milford Graves—the border-defiant drummer, medicine man, scientist, and theoretician who played on many ESP Disk albums that shape Guardian Alien’s larger aesthetic—has recorded and analyzed the heart beats of musicians in his Queens basement laboratory. “His heart research can help anyone,” wrote New York’s Mark Jacobson in 2001, “but mostly he works on musicians, ‘so they hear how they sound naturally, let them compare that with what they’re playing.’” Graves invited Fox into his lair for one of these sessions, connecting him to sensors and software that allowed Fox to listen to the beat and pitch of his own body. He used that data as the basis for Mitral Transmission’s four compositions, wondrous instrumentals that fascinate with or without their biosynthetic context.
These tracks float occasionally toward the negative connotations of “new age music,” with long stretches of steel drum radiance, plucked harp patterns, softly pattered rhythms, and nebulous tones that suggest a breeze across a meadow. But the music’s too busy and prickly for somnolence. Just when the motion starts to settle, Fox adds a brief shock of noise or a new trace of rhythm to upset the system ever so slightly. “Heartbeat cycles with asymmetrical time values are more healthy,” Graves once told Wavelength Magazine. “This asymmetry is called the chaotic heartbeat.” Fox’s interlocking meters and melodies shape a pinwheel sort of gamelan, spinning forever into new moments of wonder. Less esoteric than its origins suggest, the music lands somewhere between an acoustic recasting of Four Tet’s coruscant electronica and Matmos’ alien-but-accessible trip.
Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future. | 2014-02-06T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2014-02-06T01:00:05.000-05:00 | null | null | February 6, 2014 | 6.2 | 989c09f8-724c-4c0d-b21a-ecfc754588b9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
This heavy and rewarding set of dark, beat-driven ambience gathers three EPs released in 2010 and adds a healthy amount of bonus material. | This heavy and rewarding set of dark, beat-driven ambience gathers three EPs released in 2010 and adds a healthy amount of bonus material. | Demdike Stare: Tryptych | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15012-tryptych/ | Tryptych | Demdike Stare is a collaboration between a techno DJ/producer and a dedicated crate-digger for Finders Keepers, one of those boutiquey Euro labels that issues albums of Czech cult-horror soundtracks and Persian funk under gonzo banners like "20 vintage slices of Cymraeg Soft Psych and Welsh Kosmic Pop." The particular digger in question, Sean Canty, was once referred to by Fact magazine as one of Manchester's "best-known record collectors," which is illustrative of the company we're in: People who not only rate records, but rate their collectors. Canty's partner, Miles Whittaker, has been been an associate of Manchester's Modern Love records for nearly 10 years, primarily sticking around the kind of eerie, minimal techno that production groups like Basic Channel developed in the 1990s. Basically, Canty and Whittaker are lifers in communities where darkness and obscurity are tools, not handicaps.
Demdike Stare is primarily a sample-based project, and "dark" is its organizing principle. Their logo is a skull, rose, and triangle; the cover of one of their EPs is a visual riff on a Ouija board; and they're named after a 17th-century witch-- a quasi-gothic, English variation on the sci-fi and horror imagery that has saturated the American underground over the past couple of years. The tracks on Tryptych are droning and nightmarish: lots of close murmuring and distant wind, lots of groaning earth and quietly whining steam-powered machines, glassy techno keyboards and the buried wailing of undefined tribes. But like some drone (and most minimal techno) there's usually a build or a climax, and one of the most consistently satisfy [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ing things about listening to Tryptych is that it takes music you might expect to be purely ambient and shapes it into something with a hump somewhere in the middle-- something with a narrative to it.
Canty and Whittaker also manage to give their atmospheres rhythmic inertia and shape their beats in ways that make them sound like they're emerging from the track's atmosphere. I'm guessing this comes from Whittaker's time in the world of minimal techno, where the sound of static can pass for a backing track when edited and looped just right. Tryptych's collapsing of background and foreground is a holistic approach that makes their unexpected connections-- between the black ambience of Nurse With Wound, Middle Eastern chant, and minimal techno-- sound seamless and logical*.* The result is a style part-techno, part-drone, part-noise, sometimes European-sounding, sometimes ambiguously "ethnic," part-heavenly, part-hellish-- a kind of map to a musical otherworld.
Demdike Stare's influences are well integrated and their commitment to them feels enduring, and after the deluge of half-kitschy, self-parodying indie-goth bands last year (GL▲SS †33†H was when I got off the bus), the commitment is refreshing. Tryptich is sample-based but doesn't just suss out some particular cultural moment and heap static on top of it, it reaches for a moment-- a confluence of sounds-- that never actually happened. In a blog post on what he called "the new doom," Pitchfork contributor Philip Sherburne wrote that "Demdike Stare are even more deserving of the 'witch house' tag [than Salem], given that they're named for an actual witch and have a deeper connection to actual house music." True, but I have no temptation to belittle Demdike Stare with the term*.*
Tryptych collects the three EPs they released in 2010 and adds 40 minutes of bonus material to them, which ostensibly leaves you with an album that's about two and a half hours long. Two and a half hours is a long time. I'd be lying if I said I had the patience to give it my full attention from start to finish, but the caveat is that I think it's best enjoyed either in small listens or in a kind of absent-minded immersion. It's the kind of thing you can keep turned on but tuned-out-- for bad dreams, adventures into chemical hinterlands, night drives, and so on.
Canty and Whittaker are impressively capable in that respect: they know exactly what will and won't belong in their creepy little mood-worlds, and as a result, Tryptych rarely calls attention to itself. I tried playing it while I slept a few times, and woke up in the middle of the night with a real oh god, what's going on and how can I make it stop feeling, which in this context is an absolute plus. I in fact recommend that you listen to Tryptych at night-- thematically, it's where the album lives and where it thrives. | 2011-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | February 2, 2011 | 8.3 | 98a57bb4-d22d-4737-b859-6f8535469a0a | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Foxygen began as two L.A. high school kids obsessed with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and like their heroes they excel at mixing and matching 1960s and 70s rock touchstones into an appealing and highly referential collage. | Foxygen began as two L.A. high school kids obsessed with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and like their heroes they excel at mixing and matching 1960s and 70s rock touchstones into an appealing and highly referential collage. | Foxygen: Take The Kids Off Broadway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16869-take-the-kids-off-broadway/ | Take The Kids Off Broadway | In the old century, the classic-rock canon appealed to a certain kind of music nerd obsessed with order and clarity. In the canon, there was no room for gray areas. The Beatles, Dylan, and the Clash were important because they'd always been important. It was practically a science, with laws that were established on the basis of ancient albums that were similarly well-ordered, with their linear tracklists and agreed-upon contexts. You could argue that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band wasn't actually that great, but this would instantly put you in the flat-earth lunatic fringe. Certain albums were just factually great, which meant your experience with them, even as a newcomer, tended to be fairly rigid and pre-ordained.
The internet, as it tends to do, pretty much put an end to this old way of looking at things. The ability to access any song from any era, instantly, and place it alongside other songs from other eras-- therefore rendering the "official" rock narrative irrelevant-- did a big gravity check on the canon, sending its fussy compendium of carefully curated history spilling in all sorts of erratic directions. Take the Kids Off Broadway, the new EP by recent Jagjaguwar signees Foxygen, is latest product of this DIY context for rock history, and the spillage is as disorienting as ever.
Broadway is fun and boisterous and consciously difficult to discern, like the sugary fuzz stuck between oldies stations. Band members Jonathan Rado and Sam France have been honing this sound for seven years, starting off as L.A. high school kids obsessed with the Brian Jonestown Massacre. (They're also big admirers of singer-songwriter-producer Richard Swift, who gets a shout-out in Broadway's closer, "Middle School Dance".) The guys in Foxygen made 10 records together before unofficially splitting off to attend college, but they remained on the same musical page as they entered their 20s. Finally, they returned to the Foxygen fold to make a series of independently released EPs, including Broadway, which originally came out last year.
France and Rado beg, borrow, and steal from 20th-century legends in uniquely 21st-century ways, deconstructing their favorite Stones, Bowie, and Lou Reed records and brazenly re-assembling those elements into free-wheeling songs that melt old sounds into weird, wild shapes. Why reference Their Satanic Majesties Request when you can touch on every 1960s Stones album, plus every other classic record you've just downloaded, in the space of a single song? On Broadway, Foxygen's music sounds like a stack of eight-tracks that's been left out in the sun too long.
While Broadway touches on territory similar to that previously mined by Ariel Pink and MGMT, Foxygen approach psych-pop revivalism with the cram-it-all enthusiasm of teenagers discovering rock-music staples for the first time. Coupled with a muscular virtuosity that belies Foxygen's bedroom pop roots, Broadway transforms familiar ingredients into unpredictable, even unwieldy music. Sometimes France and Rado lift melodies wholesale, like the interpolation of "Ruby Tuesday" into "Abandon My Toys", or the snippet of Los Bravos' 60s pop chestnut "Black Is Black" into the title track. Other times they make up their own timeless melodies in order to twist and subvert them, like on "Make It Known", the closest thing to a straightforward song on Broadway, which starts off as a lounge-singer synth-rock ballad that's buffeted by a free-form horn section and English music hall-style theatricality. The 10-minute "Teenage Alien Blues" is the purest distillation of the Foxygen aesthetic, marrying the drone-y dread of the Doors with the lysergic freakouts of the Flaming Lips before heading recklessly though detours into psychedelic Motown soul and *Bitches Brew-*inspired voodoo spaciness.
Foxygen haven't so much produced memorable songs as much as cool, disembodied sonic layers that might one day coalesce into memorable songs in your head if you listen to it enough. Whether this approach is more refined on the upcoming full-length due early next year remains to be seen. But Broadway suggests that Foxygen have found a patch of untamed wilderness in the midst of otherwise well-trod territory. Offering neither clarity nor order, but very much the opposite, Foxygen see exciting possibilities in these disjointed times. | 2012-07-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-07-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | July 23, 2012 | 7.9 | 98a80da9-f980-420e-b284-9cb3f3e4489a | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The Canadian art-pop artist's debut album is as much a product of his time in Montreal and Toronto's DIY scenes as it is influenced by their predecessors in Brooklyn and Baltimore. But Lesser Evil is primarily rooted in Airick Woodhead's dystopian imagination. | The Canadian art-pop artist's debut album is as much a product of his time in Montreal and Toronto's DIY scenes as it is influenced by their predecessors in Brooklyn and Baltimore. But Lesser Evil is primarily rooted in Airick Woodhead's dystopian imagination. | Doldrums: Lesser Evil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17646-doldrums-lesser-evil/ | Lesser Evil | Moving to Montreal from Toronto a few years ago drew Doldrums (aka Airick Woodhead) into one of the most exciting art pop scenes of the past few years, home to Grimes, tourmates Purity Ring, D'Eon, and others. His debut album Lesser Evil is in large part the product of those cities' DIY/noise scenes, where Woodhead came up throwing warehouse parties. His addictive single "Egypt", however, nods toward earlier such scenes in Brooklyn (Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance) and Baltimore (Dan Deacon): It's cacophonous and polyrhythmic, continuously falling apart and putting itself back together. Just when it appears ready to implode from hyperactivity, the song erupts into an unearthly refrain, no doubt designed to link a mass of partiers into a temporary, euphoric community.
Yet the name "Egypt" signals that Evil is primarily rooted in Woodhead's active imagination. The Doldrums project started as pure science fiction, with Woodhead picturing drugged patients in an experimental clinic who started sharing "dream maps," which lead to "this extremely fucked up, dystopic place in which everyone's wildest, darkest fantasies are being realized." We're introduced to this scenario on "Anomaly", as he asks: "Are you living out your fantasy/ Or caught in someone else’s dreams?" The track's gothic atmospheres and pulsating electronic rhythms link it to Crystal Castles, another Toronto duo similarly prone to creating soundworlds with no fixed address. "Holographic Sandcastles" takes this approach to its endpoint: Woodhead finds himself face-to-face with a fellow traveler "10 miles underground, an ocean over our heads now" amidst an echo-laden soundscape.
Evil is equally borne of Woodhead's skill at channeling the infinite possibilities of digital production and the countless distractions of online life. That "fucked up, dystopic" site of wild, dark fantasies? Some of us call it "the internet." The most talked-about pre-release story surrounding Evil has been that Woodhead compiled it on a laptop borrowed from his pal Claire Boucher, then featured that laptop's busted monitor on the album cover. It's the perfect metaphor for Woodhead's brand of jittery maximalism; it's easy to imagine him climbing inside, pushing it to its absolute limit, then posing next to the rubble when he was done. Out of this scorched earth M.O. arises Evil's most massive song, "She Is the Wave". It's less than three minutes long, but every second is packed airtight with laser stabs, spiraling synth squeals, and dark sub-bass. (And yes, there is an internal organ-rearranging "drop" a few seconds in.) Bass is one of the album's most recommendable sonic traits: for all of Woodhead's tweaked-out, non-linear layering, he pays a lot of attention to low end.
Among the sensory overload, there's a strong sense of naïve romanticism unique to a kid in his early 20s. Much will likely be made of Woodhead's androgynous vocal style, but primarily, it just sounds young, the kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm perfect for a guy who named his musical project after a fantasy world. These songs sound complex, but lyrically they're mostly about simple things that we fixate on when we're young: love, identity, escape. On the title track, the album's highlight, Woodhead grabs a fellow traveler and splits from a world of his own creation-- because it's boring, like the Doldrums in in The Phantom Tollbooth that gave his project its name. They don't know what they want to do, or where they want to go, they just want to get there quickly. As the squealing synth melody driving the song turns into a howl during its last third, Woodhead starts chanting a refrain that kids have relied upon for centuries, and which is axiomatic for Evil as a whole: "If I don't see it, it's not there." | 2013-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arbutus | February 27, 2013 | 8 | 98ac0864-7e5a-411d-99b5-9b1f040c2651 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Byran Müller’s latest LP plays like a guided tour of his catalog. It’s some of his warmest and most inviting music to date. | Byran Müller’s latest LP plays like a guided tour of his catalog. It’s some of his warmest and most inviting music to date. | Skee Mask: Resort | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-resort/ | Resort | Before he was Skee Mask, Bryan Müller was SCNTST. Monday, the Munich producer’s debut EP, is straightforward and delirious, full of tightly wound grooves and head-spinning change-ups; it rockets between electro, ghettotech, juke, and techno, each track containing as many ideas as it does drum patterns. With that EP, Müller was looking less toward science than alchemy—an approach that proved indicative. As Skee Mask, Müller has spent the past decade combining dance-music histories in all sorts of beguiling ways: dubbed-out hardgroove techno, fleet-footed drum ’n’ bass and bone-chilling ambience, psychedelic and minimalistic IDM. Resort, the electronic producer’s latest LP, may be his most potent distillation yet. Here, he makes his club-ready approach to historiography clear, crumpling up timelines and sketching out a universe.
While particular details change from record to record, Müller’s tunes often harbor a similar feeling: It is heart-on-sleeve and tough at once, every drum landing with an icy precision and each keyboard stretching towards the skies. Even as he pans from one genre to another, that emotive approach serves as his bedrock. His music sits at the intersections of breakbeats, ambient music, and techno; over the years, he’s become so adept behind the boards that any seams are more or less invisible. His catalog is equally suited for basement raves, 4 a.m. highways, and sun-drenched afternoons—pitch the bass accordingly and you’re good to go. Resort takes full advantage of this range, playing like a guided tour of Müller’s catalog, each kick drum landing with the quiet intimacy of a familiar heartbeat.
Part of the thrill of Resort is in watching Müller stretch out a bit, exploring new territories by revisiting old traditions. In doing so, he offers up some of his warmest and most inviting music to date, giving his always-precise drum programming a sepia-tinged hue. In its best moments, the LP sounds beamed in from a slightly different universe, one in which Warp and Rephlex never left the mid-’90s and every sample arrived blanketed in a thin layer of dust. “BB Care,” thanks to its ramshackle drums, dreamy synth pads, and barely there vocal samples, feels like a forgotten bonus track from Music Has the Right to Children. “Hölzl Was a Dancer,” a house-music stomper with shuffle-and-skip drums and an acrobatic bassline, might have lit up dancefloors in 1992. The hazy synth workout “Hedwig Transformation Group” recalls GAS at his most blissed-out, while “Waldmeister” displays Müller’s ambient-techno chops, with sun-dappled synthesizers gleaming amid groaning bass.
For all its retro-leaning references, Resort is hardly shackled to the past. It is a series of clever and subtle reimaginings, fusing new-school and genre-agnostic approaches to electronic music with vintage textures. (A few track titles—“Nostaglitch,” “Reminiscrmx”—cheekily underline this idea.) Squint and you’ll notice shards of juke and footwork underneath the lullaby-soft synthesizers of “Daytime Gamer,” and “Element,” which sits somewhere between acid, breaks, and ambient music, sounds like something that might play as sun fills the Nowadays dancefloor. Skee Mask has never been an aesthetic purist, exactly—that first SCNTST EP twisted DJ Assault’s speaker-busting “Ass N Titties” into a psychedelic sort-of-techno brain-bender—but he clearly understands the power of tweaking familiar idioms. Resort, with its blissed-out breakbeats, lucid-dream techno, and gauzy downtempo, is both a quiet flex and an ode to umpteen dance-music histories. | 2024-06-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | June 21, 2024 | 7.7 | 98ad349d-3c70-4971-b077-a1e6b12c4730 | Michael McKinney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-mckinney/ | |
Balancing vaporwave’s glossy kitsch with throat-shredding metal vocals and labyrinthine sound collage, Angel Marcloid’s music is a perfect fusion of pop and pure abstraction. | Balancing vaporwave’s glossy kitsch with throat-shredding metal vocals and labyrinthine sound collage, Angel Marcloid’s music is a perfect fusion of pop and pure abstraction. | Fire-Toolz: Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fire-toolz-field-whispers-into-the-crystal-palace/ | Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) | Angel Marcloid is no stranger to chaos: Her labels Swamp Circle and Rainbow Bridge brim with glitchy noise and scrambled vaporwave. But the music the Chicago multi-instrumentalist makes as Fire-Toolz has always been too meticulous to simply coast on entertaining randomness. Slapping MIDI basslines, screamed metal vocals, video-game synths, riffing guitars, and proggy drum fills might all collide in any given song, but Marcloid’s instrumentally and mathematically virtuosic constructions never feel simply thrown together. The highwire balancing act of all these wildly moving parts has always been Fire-Toolz’s calling card, and on the brilliant new Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) it reaches a whole new level of thrilling intensity.
Marcloid’s compositional approach has often felt clearer when she narrows her stylistic parameters slightly. Projects like the sample-based Mindspring Memories or the jazz-fusion Nonlocal Forecast, beautifully captured on Bubble Universe! for Hausu Mountain earlier this year, show how well Marcloid can hone in on a specific musical idea and reveal an entire world. On the other hand, Fire-Toolz has always been an opportunity for Marcloid to spin every plate in her cupboard at once. Until now, the alias has felt especially influenced by metal, due to the perfectly honed black-metal hiss she unleashes over many tracks. Here she drastically reins those vocals in, but by pulling back on the most striking element of Fire-Toolz, she lifts everything else in her arsenal. It makes Field Whispers feel like an evolution of the project as a whole.
Field Whispers opens with what might be the best vocal song Marcloid has ever written. Despite its long, unwieldy name, “mailto:[email protected]?subject=Mind-BodyParallels” distills Fire-Toolz’s sonic obsessions into a strange approximation of pop music. Its web of bouncing drum-machine beats and bright keyboard melodies sparkles alongside throat-shredding screams. Even through this web of smooth guitar lines and funky synths, Marcloid’s bile-dripping roar locks right in without ever sounding out of place, charting a path from easy listening Muzak to a cathartic finale that surges as fiercely as Agalloch. “Mailto:” is followed by its opposite, the sprawling seven-minute sound collage “Clear Light,” but each of that track’s carefully sculpted left turns, from harsh noise to ambient to surging synths and a twisting guitar solo, shows that Marcloid’s experimental flourishes are as carefully considered and exciting as her pop songs. It sounds like Oneohtrix Point Never’s last three albums played simultaneously. Prior to the album’s release, the two songs were combined into a single nine-minute single, which seems unwieldy until you realize it makes complete sense. Nothing has captured this nearly indescribable project better than jumping on these two sonic roller-coasters back to back.
Those songs recalibrate Fire-Toolz’s framework, creating a playing field where Field Whispers’ leaps into pop and dives into abstraction are equally rewarding. The hallucinatory sound design of “The Warm-Body (A Blessing & Removal)” unpredictably shifts into a tender melodic coda; “Hologram of a Composite” feels like a momentary return to Nonlocal Forecast’s proggy, euphoric Bubble Universe!; and “✓ BEiNG” begins with birdsong and forest ambience before igniting with stadium-sized drums, a soaring guitar solo, and another surprising swoop of the ground-razing vocals that opened “mailto.” It’s a welcome return to Marcloid’s voice, which gets a third and final showcase on the ecstatic closer, “Smiling at Sunbears Grooming in Sunbeams” (along with Marcloid’s late cat, Breakfast, to whom the album is dedicated). It all makes Field Whispers Marcloid’s strongest statement under any moniker, a reaffirmation of her work as a wild playground where anything can happen—and usually does. | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Orange Milk | August 30, 2019 | 8 | 98b0a6b4-c9db-4864-b8fd-91b035d85dc3 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The second album from the rapidly ascendent synth-pop star Garrett Borns offers more of the same: great ideas constrained in songs that rarely allow them to come to fruition. | The second album from the rapidly ascendent synth-pop star Garrett Borns offers more of the same: great ideas constrained in songs that rarely allow them to come to fruition. | BØRNS: Blue Madonna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/borns-blue-madonna/ | Blue Madonna | If you’ve encountered any commercials in the past couple years, you’ve likely heard “Electric Love,” off of Garrett Borns’ synthy 2015 album Dopamine. Even if you haven’t, you could probably guess it came from an ad for something or other. Such is the nature of the beast: acts that combine synth-pop and rock and a not-overly-generous spritz of funk, straining to be liked by as many people as possible, commissioned and talked about in terms of utility: “could slot in a playlist or festival lineup alongside MGMT and Currents-era Tame Impala.”
Blue Madonna, BØRNS’ follow-up to Dopamine, differs from its predecessor mostly by having a less atrocious cover. Where Dopamine boasted big-name producers like Jeff Bhasker and Emile Haynie, Blue Madonna only brings back one, Tommy English (Ladyhawke, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness). But the expensive sheen with which he coats most of the tracks here makes these songs more or less indistinguishable. Mirroring the turn toward gloom in pop on and just outside the charts, Borns said earlier this year the album came out of a “melancholy feeling of departure,” but while there certainly are breakup songs, they’re nothing that’d harsh a festival crowd too much. And like all of Borns’ work, Blue Madonna’s main value over replacement synth-pop is his falsetto, capable of reaching a glam-rock frenzy but constrained in songs that never quite allow him to go there.
Another difference: a guest artist, Lana Del Rey, with whom Borns shares a couple ideas about aesthetics and the moody side of L.A. Unfortunately, while Lana’s been surprisingly lively on other guest spots, Borns got her at her most soporific, and the two are rather bloodless for a track called “God Save Our Young Blood.” At almost four minutes, it’s no longer than anything else on the album, but it feels endless. Similarly languid is “Second Night of Summer,” basically a classed-up Maroon 5 song. They even crash and skid at the exact same part of the chorus: Levine with “motherfucker,” Borns with a “throwing me that shade like I’m not cool enough.” (Mourn, once again, the loss of Shade Court.)
Better are the likes of the synth buzz of “Faded Heart,” however canned, or the rock riffs of “We Don’t Care,” though they’ve gone through so much processing they’re practically taxidermied, or the surprisingly decent groove of “Iceberg,” although once it gets going it abruptly stops. And for a genre that’s by definition safe, Blue Madonna does have one pleasant surprise: “Supernatural” features a theremin interlude by self-taught virtuoso Armen Ra. “I feel like he crash-landed into the album from his star,” Borns said earlier this month. “I had to summon him from the cosmos.” He’s not wrong; the bridge is sumptuous, given all the room it needs, and made of totally different stuff than the rest of the album. It’s a glimpse, however fleeting, of the album that might result if BØRNS spent as much time teasing out the weirdness in his ideas as smoothing out the wrinkles in his luxe suit. | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | January 22, 2018 | 5.7 | 98b30ce9-536d-44b4-b45f-0852faf47f64 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
In drifting arrangements for saxophone, keyboards, and contemplative vocals, the trio invents a singular style of shipwrecked yacht rock that’s well suited to the strange pace of 2020. | In drifting arrangements for saxophone, keyboards, and contemplative vocals, the trio invents a singular style of shipwrecked yacht rock that’s well suited to the strange pace of 2020. | Shabason, Krgovich & Harris: Philadelphia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabason-krgovich-and-harris-philadelphia/ | Shabason, Krgovich & Harris: Philadelphia | Joseph Shabason, Nicholas Krgovich, and Chris Harris’ Philadelphia owes less to the American metropolis than to a song about it. To complement the ethereal soft rock they recorded together over three days in Toronto last fall, the Canadian trio opted to cover Neil Young’s 1993 hymn “Philadelphia,” which originally appeared on the soundtrack for Jonathan Demme’s namesake AIDS-themed drama, but was largely overshadowed by Bruce Springsteen’s Grammy-winning “Streets of Philadelphia” single from the same film. The song is a classic Neil alone-at-the-microphone tearjerker, a private prayer for the City of Brotherly Love to live up to its nickname during a moment of weakness and loneliness. That plea for community struck a deep chord with the trio, who decided to make their “Philadelphia” cover the title track on a record rooted in familial bonhomie and mutual support.
In one sense, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris’ Philadelphia is a faded snapshot of a pre-COVID world. But if the project’s origin story seems blissfully removed from the world of political tumult, pandemic anxiety, and endless doomscrolling that we inhabit today, the record is also uncannily timely; you’d be hard-pressed to find an album that more vividly conjures the equally disorienting and liberating effects of putting your life on pause. This is the sound of your brain on lockdown: You’re languishing in your apartment for days on end and losing all sense of time and place, yet you’re noticing wondrous new details in things you’ve stared at a million times before, and finding pride and purpose in the most menial of daily routines.
Shabason is no stranger to exploring these sorts of Zen states. As a guest saxophonist for Destroyer and the War on Drugs (and prolific composer in his own right), he has helped steer indie rock into smoother waters over the past decade, blurring the lines between adult-contemporary pop and avant-garde experimentation. On Philadelphia, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris arrive at their own singular style of shipwrecked yacht-rock, retaining all the shimmering surfaces but trading any wave-crashing forward motion for free floatation. They let these songs drift wherever they need to go, as the glassy synth tones, wandering piano lines, and fluttering flutes accumulate around the melodies like so much water-logged debris. Like their compatriot Sandro Perri, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris understand the fine art of unhurried busyness, maintaining a calm sense of stasis even as their surroundings change considerably.
While Philadelphia is of a piece with Shabason’s past work, it’s somewhat uncharted territory for Vancouver singer/songwriter Krgovich, who over the past two decades has cultivated a reputation as a wry romantic in the Stephin Merritt/Jens Lekman mold. (Harris—who plays guitar, synth, and percussion here—has occasionally served as his sideman over the years, dating back to Krgovich’s late-2000s outfit, No Kids.) Philadelphia provides an especially stark point of contrast to Krgovich’s most recent solo release, “Ouch”, which chronicled a real-life breakup in discomfiting detail. But on Philadelphia, he relishes the opportunity to free himself from traditional verse/chorus/verse songwriting; he also redirects the gaze away from his personal life to the world around him, delivering his lyrics with all the patient poeticism of Bill Callahan returning from a yoga retreat.
Over the wind-chime synths of “Osouji,” Krgovich gradually unfurls a song that’s both as mundane and profound as the annual Japanese house-cleaning ritual for which it’s named: “Moving furniture, wiping baseboards, the radio on,” he details; “I’m seeing things that have been here/And considering them.” From there, he talks us through the rest of his day, right up to his pre-bedtime rituals, until he actually drifts off before completing the song’s final verse (“Falling asleep at night, falling ahhhhh…”). It’s a reminder that even the most uneventful days are a gift. But if “Osouji” is a day-in-the-life chronicle, then the epic “I Don’t See the Moon” is pure dreamtime wonderment, harnessing the glacial pace, open space, and jazzy informality of late-period Talk Talk into an eight-minute swoon.
Philadelphia abounds with these moments of intense contemplation and quiet rapture, and their celestial, sax-sweetened version of Neil’s namesake track fits snugly into its meditative milieu. But the album finds its clearest philosophical articulation in “Friday Afternoon,” an ambient serenade that’s part ’80s lite-FM ballad, part pedal-steeled Lynchian torch song. Stuck in a traffic jam caused by “a dusty mini-van with the hood flipped up,” Krgovich redirects his attention from this “frazzled moment” to gaze at the “pretty sunset” before introducing the song’s oft-repeated motivational mantra: “Wrap your loving arms around it!” As relaxed as it sounds, Philadelphia is also a useful tool for confronting the drama of modern life. Embracing the world with loving arms might also mean grappling with its chaos, but it’s all a means of better appreciating everything that’s still beautiful about it. | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Idée Fixe | November 11, 2020 | 7.6 | 98badb91-927e-45e5-af3f-47d00574d59d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The latest in a line of fine Swedish pop exports, Lykke Li's debut album-- which, although it seems like it's been around forever, is only just now out in the UK with a U.S. release to finally come this summer-- was produced and co-written by Björn Yttling of Peter Björn and John. | The latest in a line of fine Swedish pop exports, Lykke Li's debut album-- which, although it seems like it's been around forever, is only just now out in the UK with a U.S. release to finally come this summer-- was produced and co-written by Björn Yttling of Peter Björn and John. | Lykke Li: Youth Novels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11414-youth-novels/ | Youth Novels | Sweden has found a niche for itself as the backroom of modern pop. Its production teams provide the engineers for global Top 40 sounds; in men like Jens Lekman and Johan Agebjörn it produces theorists of pop classicism; and its own top-sellers, like Robyn and now Lykke Li, are welcomed into collections which otherwise carefully sidestep the commercial. So it's not wholly surprising that Youth Novels, Li's first full-length album, has the air of the workshop about it. The careful, spartan production-- by Bjorn Yttling of Peter Björn and John-- asks listeners to do more work than most pop records allow for. At its frequent best, the record manages to sketch out widescreen hit songs with a remarkable economy of means. At its more occasional worst, the tracks feel frustratingly underthought.
The foundation for the successful songs tends to be voice and bass: the bass thick with reverb, the voice cute and close-up. Around this Yttrling-- who co-writes all the tracks-- places other instruments: splashes of piano or woodblock, petite guitar phrases, keyboard buzzes. The trick-- and they pull it off over and over again-- is to bring all the elements together on the chorus for a big hooky payoff. Of course for this to work they need strong choruses-- "I'm Good, I'm Gone", "Let It Fall", "Hanging High", and others provide them. Standout "Dance Dance Dance" has one of the stickiest refrains on the album, and one of the most audacious instrumental builds-- close-mic'ed bass, tippy-tappy percussion, and then suddenly a cheeky sax nudging its way into the track and scrapping puppyishly around its edges. If you don't smile at that, Lykke Li is probably not for you.
With so many surprises in the arrangements, you might overlook what a strength Li herself is, how well she unifies Youth Novels' scattershot imagination. It's easy to dismiss her style as overly cutesy-- the babytalk chorus on first single "Little Bit", for instance-- and her fragility can seem annoyingly affected. But don't be fooled-- she's in total command of the songs, and her breathy fuzziness fits the wireframe aesthetic better than a fuller voice would. There are also hints that Li would be as happy with a richer sound-- on the beautiful "My" she's rolled and washed by cymbal, string, and echo and lets them envelop her without erasing her.
Not all experiments work though, and when realizing ideas is less important than having them you're entering a slightly dangerous area. Li gives you fair warning that she'll do what she wants-- opener "Melodies and Desires" is ornamentally lovely but you won't linger long on its spoken-word philosophies. Even so, when her judgement fails to match her talent it can be painful going. Electro trudge "Complaint Department" in particular is dreary and grating enough to risk throwing your faith in the whole project off-beam: It doesn't help that Li can't remotely bring the venom the song needs. Thankfully she follows it with "Breaking It Up", one of her most vigorous and likeable tracks, whose blend of multi-tracked squawks and wandering synthesisers make for one of the album's most joyful moments.
Chart music today is often so gloriously maximal that reproducing any of its thrills on limited means can seem an impossible task. By paying attention to detail, Yttling and Li's prove that doesn't have to be the case. But even more impressive is the way their intimate, playful miniatures capture the daring and novelty of modern pop, as well as its hooks. | 2008-06-03T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-03T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LL | June 3, 2008 | 7.8 | 98c51f1b-0860-43da-81a5-681eb0eb4f9d | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
Exploring the tensions of a long-term relationship, the pop artist’s second album is the work of a keen-eared musician coming into their own as a producer and stylist. | Exploring the tensions of a long-term relationship, the pop artist’s second album is the work of a keen-eared musician coming into their own as a producer and stylist. | King Princess: Hold On Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-princess-hold-on-baby/ | Hold On Baby | Cheap Queen, the debut album by King Princess, played like one of those summer nights that stretches on forever. Across a series of louche, Mellotron-heavy ballads, the New York songwriter and producer born Mikaela Straus sang about shooting the shit with friends and exchanging furtive glances with girls across crowded parties, each scene rendered with the insouciant, reflexive cool of an Eve Babitz story. It was a debut whose supreme confidence belied the fact that Straus first became famous after their Patricia Highsmith-referencing debut single “1950” went viral in early 2018. Where so many musicians react to virality with hesitance—quickly shifting gears or denouncing their early work—Straus delivered on her early promise with the grace and mien of a star.
Like Cheap Queen, Straus’ second record Hold On Baby is urbane and self-possessed, the work of a keen-eared musician coming into their own as a producer and stylist. She sounds even more like herself: More flexible as a vocalist, more cutting as a lyricist, more confident in her own power to bridge gaps between disparate styles. If Cheap Queen’s palette was ambiguously vintage—all old-school soul flourishes, redone as to slot in easily somewhere between Troye Sivan and Lorde—Hold On Baby firmly positions Straus as someone who came of age in the 2010s, when indie rock was hitting its mainstream peak.
Working alongside a murderers’ row of mainstream-indie heavy hitters including Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Ethan Gruska, Shawn Everett, and Mark Ronson, Straus pulls influences liberally but never thoughtlessly: A Strokes-y guitar line lopes through “Cursed,” while “Crowbar” nods to Sufjan Stevens’ fluttering piano ballads; the piano at the beginning of “Dotted Lines” recalls Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid’s work on Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, and “Sex Shop” feels of a piece with the alienated sexuality of St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy. These references never feel winky or obvious, in large part because Straus’ own sense of mood—their fondness for warm tones and spacious atmospherics that can turn cold and claustrophobic in a second—always takes precedence. She presides over the affair with a cool hand and a keen awareness of when to pull back—the restrained elegance of someone who’s spent most of their life hanging around studios.
Hold On Baby is a more solemn record than its predecessor. The energizing frisson that Straus found on Cheap Queen has been supplanted by anxiety and despondence. Hold On Baby isn’t a breakup album; instead Straus finds inspiration in the tensions that arise in a long-term relationship. On “Hold On Baby Interlude,” they describe themselves as “a chipped tooth with the nerve exposed,” and that queasy tension pervades the album. The plush, weightless love song “Winter Is Hopeful” curdles its sweet nothings (“I’m always thinking, thinking, thinking of you”) with ribbons of acid: “But you never believe it.” Straus practically whispers the lyrics; it feels like she’s practicing lines from across the room rather than actually addressing the object of her desire. “Change the Locks,” one of a handful of songs produced with Aaron Dessner, explodes from pleading minimalism into booming, gritted-teeth arena rock, even though one of its primary tensions is impossibly small: “Losing your mind over something I wore/Just ’cause it’s yours.”
Despite its subject matter, Hold On Baby is far from dour. It’s rich with little details that make the whole thing feel alive, like the goofy, overdriven synth that opens “Too Bad” or the crunchy, stomping drums, played by the late Taylor Hawkins, that power “Let Us Die.” The unfussy orchestration of “Winter Is Hopeful” feels like a verdant update of Cheap Queen’s humid atmosphere; it floats in and out of focus like the scent of jasmine on a spring breeze. Everything on Hold On Baby feels so easy that its missteps are particularly overbearing: “Little Bother,” a collaboration with New Jersey musician Fousheé, feels too similar to all the other emo revival songs that have shown up on pop albums over the past couple of years. It’s one of the few times when Straus’ personality gets lost in the vibe.
Between records, Straus has become a more interesting vocalist. No longer singing with the soulful but slightly anonymous affectation of Cheap Queen, they refit their vocals to suit the needs of each song, jumping into a nasally drawl to convey the sneering nihilism of “Too Bad” and adding a strained, breathy tension to “Change the Locks” and “Dotted Lines.” And her lyrics still possess a dark, needling humor, whether running through a deadpan lockdown routine (“I watch TV, fuck my girl, check my phone, babe/PS5, change my shirt and drink alone, babe”) or telling an ex, “You look the same/Did you stop smoking weed?/Or trying to please your dad?” As with Cheap Queen, Hold On Baby doesn’t achieve any great innovations, but thanks to their stylistic and structural instincts, and their innate star power, Straus still manages to thrill. | 2022-08-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Zelig / Columbia | August 2, 2022 | 7.7 | 98c8a2e7-6304-4238-a52e-ecf0c5bce275 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
On his odd and ambitious new album, singer-songwriter Will Toledo dons a gas mask, adds electronic textures, and tries to separate himself from the indie fame of Car Seat Headrest. | On his odd and ambitious new album, singer-songwriter Will Toledo dons a gas mask, adds electronic textures, and tries to separate himself from the indie fame of Car Seat Headrest. | Car Seat Headrest: Making a Door Less Open | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/car-seat-headrest-making-a-door-less-open/ | Making a Door Less Open | Feeling like shit is the emotional baseline in Car Seat Headrest songs. Sex, drugs, or, if we’re taking Making a Door Less Open at its word, indie rock’n’roll fame only make it worse. Car Seat Headrest mastermind Will Toledo self-recorded and self-released nearly a dozen albums in the six years leading up to 2016’s feverishly lauded Teens of Denial, a commercial breakthrough that could easily be framed as an argument for the relevancy of an entire subculture. Released on Matador, feverishly debated and annotated on Reddit and Genius, a fount for major and minor Twitter controversies, Teens of Denial was a triumph for the past three decades of indie rock: a unification of ’90s aesthetics, ’00s blog-rock ascendancy, and 21st-century consumption.
It has taken Toledo four years to release another collection of new material. And with it, he’s introduced Trait, his gas-mask-wearing alter ego that writes and sings exactly like Will Toledo. Though it’s ostensibly a gimmick or a distraction, Toledo has explained Trait as a means of clarifying his intentions by allowing everyone, himself included, to take the focus off Will Toledo for once. Or, put more plainly, it’s a way to make a Car Seat Headrest album without being “Car Seat Headrest.”
This requires revisiting a time when “Car Seat Headrest” wasn’t loaded with meaning, heavy with all of the inane interviews, critical misinterpretation, endless tours, lawsuits, and deadlines earned by the success of Teens of Denial. At 43 minutes, Making a Door Less Open is one of the shortest Car Seat Headrest albums in the catalog and the first to be explicitly modeled after that year’s quartet of introductory, numbered compilations that preceded any flicker of buzz: a collection of singles with no overarching concept, no real allegiance to the “album” as a finalized document. Vinyl owners will hear “Hymn” as an interminable three-minute drone, while the CD and digital format feature its breakbeat-riddled remix. “Deadlines” has “Acoustic,” “Hostile” and “Thoughtful” retoolings, while “Martin” variously appears as the fourth, sixth, and seventh track. Making a Door Less Open already exists in three different formats, with more fan-made “Best Of”s inevitably to come.
But all versions start with the essential “Weightlifters,” which functions the same way “Fill in the Blank” did on Teens of Denial, acknowledging the heightened stakes and validating the expectations of a “new, improved Car Seat Headrest.” Toledo kicked off Teens of Denial with an exuberant defense of depression that positioned him as an heir to Matador’s prolific slacker icons Stephen Malkmus and Robert Pollard, while here, “Weightlifters” reflects Car Seat Headrest’s status as the only Bandcamp-to-bandshell success story that warranted a live album. There have been many Car Seat Headrest songs structured like “Weightlifters”—where the beat builds for two minutes or so while Toledo breathlessly untangles a web of thoughts until its pithy core is revealed (“I should start lifting weights/Cause I believe that thoughts can change my body”). But Car Seat Headrest has never operated with the level of showmanship displayed here. The whirring synths and electronics sound more like walk-on music for the mighty septet that held its own at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl.
It’s the best-case scenario for the newly bionic Car Seat Headrest, one that Toledo designed to compete with the pop and hip-hop acts that have banished rock bands like his from the zeitgeist. If anything, Making a Door Less Open benefits from the inherent repetition of electronic music. Rather than the circuitous, tangential songwriting Toledo once stretched out to five minutes or more, songs like “Can’t Cool Me Down” and “There Must Be More Than Blood” just circle back to their hooks and hang on for dear life. It’s an apt structure for songs inspired by exhaustion, as Toledo’s most memorable images find him half-asleep on a red-eye and taking the stage through fever sweats and lemon throat lozenges.
Yet, it’s not the “electronic influence” on Making a Door Less Open that belongs in scare quotes, but that of Toledo’s electronic “side project” called 1 Trait Danger, where Toledo and drummer Andy Katz imagined a band’s entire fictional career arc within two albums. Anyone who’s swapped guitars for synths likely understands the thrill of reinhabiting a beginner’s mindset, where pressing a button on the arpeggiator feels as significant as learning the chords to a Green Day song as a teenager. From that angle, maybe there’s a contact high to be gained from the overeager panning effects, samples, and redlining drums that clutter “Life Worth Missing” and “Famous” and leave them sounding like incoherent remixes of themselves.
That same sense of gleeful adventure goes missing when Making a Door Less Open hews closest to autobiography. When Toledo describes Hollywood as “a place where people go to make their fantasies come to life, and they end up exploiting other people and doing terrible things to maintain their fantasy,” does he even expect people to repeat his words like he’s making a novel point? “Hollywood” is essentially Toledo’s version of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” somehow both the laziest and most ruthlessly calculated thing he’s done. Its concept is catchy and banal enough (“Hollywood makes me wanna puke!”) to realistically get co-opted by the very people in its crosshairs. The most generous possible reading of “Hollywood” is as a lyrical Eephus pitch, something that destabilizes through counterintuitive simplicity. Perhaps it’s not a mockup of Hollywood’s facade, but the cliché of people feeling like they have something new to say about it.
This take becomes impossible to sustain with “Deadlines,” where Toledo’s stylistic tics— in-game metacommentary, nagging harmonies—start to feel like Car Seat Headrest cannibalizing itself. But if a song about the drudgery of songwriting is itself a slog, does that mean “Deadlines” achieves its goal? Or does it suggest that not even Toledo can use writer’s block as a prompt at this point? The latter seems more realistic in light of Making a Door Less Open’s more overtly inessential tracks. In the past, “Hymn” and threadbare interlude “What’s With You Lately” could’ve been written off as the churn of Toledo’s bustling DIY cottage industry. But when they make up 20 percent of the tracklist of his only collection of new material in four years, they become a working definition of filler.
They’re not spectacular failures either, but Making a Door Less Open would inevitably benefit from a willingness to risk spectacular failure—this isn’t the hard left-turn “Can’t Cool Me Down” hinted at. Though I’ve seen plausible comparisons to Julian Casablancas chasing off the squares with the Voidz, the album never alienates and antagonizes to the same extent—its mild disappointments and half-realized experiments lack the contrarian conviction that mints future cult classics.
For that, I direct you to 1 Trait World Tour, a concept album about 1 Trait Danger accepting the “Softmore Slump” after a critically acclaimed debut and taking good-natured shots at Car Seat Headrest's actual neighbors on festival side stage lineups: Beach House, the xx, laptop EDM producers, Mac DeMarco. As far as Matador artists moonlighting with hip-hop, it somehow drew less attention than Interpol singer Paul Banks’ experimental rap album, Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. Katz worried that 1 Trait Danger would jeopardize Car Seat Headrest’s reputation, but they followed their muse anyway. The side-project only essential for being so profoundly inessential, yet more than Making a Door Less Open, it feels like a project in which Toledo followed his own artistic credo: commit yourself completely.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 1, 2020 | 6.6 | 98ce91a2-f79f-4fc5-96d4-2c101037fa5f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On his second LP as a duo with DJ Premier, Royce 5’9” fights mightily to offer more than corny punchlines and pointless bars. | On his second LP as a duo with DJ Premier, Royce 5’9” fights mightily to offer more than corny punchlines and pointless bars. | PRhyme: PRhyme 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prhyme-prhyme-2/ | PRhyme 2 | Last May, a simmering generational conflict between Lil Yachty and Joe Budden came to a head on Complex’s Everyday Struggle. Budden’s dual claims to fame are the 2003 hit “Pump It Up” and his status as the most Old Man Yells At Cloud person in hip-hop. So he was playing to type when, within minutes of the show’s opening, he began berating Yachty for everything from the younger rapper’s album art to his claim that he was happy 24/7. The beating heart of the confrontation comes 11 minutes in, when Budden demands that Yachty rank his contemporaries, and Yachty refuses to because “that’s kind of weird.”
Royce 5’9”, Budden’s sometime bandmate in the rap group Slaughterhouse, says that the encounter gave him nightmares. On PRhyme 2, the second album he’s made with DJ Premier under their (poorly chosen) joint name, he raps that Yachty, 19 at the time of the interview, is about the same age as his son. He recalls the rapper Canibus reacting poorly to Eminem’s rise, points out that time goes in circles, and concludes his verse by saying that he’s not here for villainizing the youth. In case anyone missed the point, the song is called “Everyday Struggle.”
If only the rest of PRhyme 2 were so generous. The contrast between Budden and Yachty provides a helpful way of understanding Royce’s struggles throughout the record: Sometimes, the veteran Detroit rapper transcends his natural Buddenism, avoiding corny punchlines, esoteric lyrical easter eggs, and bars that lead him nowhere. At other times, he doesn’t.
In this LP’s best moments, like the opener “Black History,” Premo laces him with a rich tapestry through which Royce weaves compelling narrative threads. His long experience in the industry allows for an incredible depth of texture, replete with echoes of JAY-Z, Snoop, Tribe, and Camp Lo. “Loved Ones” is a fantastic duet between Royce and the North Carolina rapper Rapsody, in the tradition of Biggie and Lil’ Kim on “Another” or Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek on “Coming of Age.”
But much of the time, Royce spins his wheels, hurls retrograde insults at foes, or performs lyrical tricks for a small audience. His already not-great verse on “Era” is interrupted by a semi-functional triple pun that involves XXXTentacion. It’s the second triple pun in two songs and, throughout the record, Royce comes across as the kind of rapper who thinks that this alone should earn him five mics from The Source. This is a 40-year-old who’s shameless enough to drop the line “I am the absolute shit/I actually speak latrine” (on the otherwise good “Sunflower Seeds”), which belongs in a category that Lil Wayne exhausted a decade ago.
Guests like Dave East and Roc Marciano mostly avoid these challenges by opting for straightforward revivalism, a significantly safer mode. They fare moderately well. 2 Chainz, though, has a standout verse on the late-album cut “Flirt,” in which he expertly combines the new and the old, with his trademark jokes and a vintage Eminem flow. (“Flirt,” by the way, is preceded by the funniest skit I’ve heard in years.)
If Royce often has to fight his instincts, DJ Premier should have trusted his more. Both of PRhyme’s records have operated under an unusual constraint, with Premier using another producer’s beats as source material for his own. On their 2014 album, it was Adrian Younge; this time, it’s the underrated Philadelphia producer Antman Wonder, who, like Younge, mostly eschews samples in favor of original compositions. Premier mines some gems from Wonder’s cache, including the beats for on “Respect My Gun,” “Sunflower Seeds,” “My Calling,” “Made Man,” and “Do Ya Thing.” Elsewhere he makes strange decisions, like the little squeaks that ruin “Era,” or the occasional doubling of the beat that drags down “Everyday Struggle”. And someone needs to be held responsible for the Flock of Seagulls interpolation on “Streets at Night,” which isn’t even an original way to tweak that song. (The Slim Thug version wasn’t good either.)
One of the most fundamental challenges facing elder statesmen like DJ Premier and Royce is how to balance their values with those of the younger fans they hope to win. Royce sometimes seems as though he’s aware of that tension. On “Streets at Night,” after he says that he comes from “where you don’t disrespect none of your successors,” there’s an interesting line. “‘Who the best?’ is a horrible, rhetorical, sick question,” he raps, perhaps suggesting that the practice of pitting artists against each other in an arbitrary hierarchy is better left in the ’90s. Or, alternately, maybe he’s just saying that he is so clearly the best that it’s not even a question worth asking. (Which, lol.) Either way, he makes it clear where his loyalties ultimately lie on “Black History,” where he can’t help telling us about his own ranking of the best rappers alive. His list? Kendrick Lamar, Pusha T, Eminem, himself, and the other three guys in Slaughterhouse—including, of course, Joe Budden. | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | PRhyme | March 22, 2018 | 6.1 | 98d2f953-7d14-45ae-b865-abad629d45b4 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
With stripped-back instrumentation and poignant emotion, the English singer’s latest release is a stopgap EP that punches above its weight. | With stripped-back instrumentation and poignant emotion, the English singer’s latest release is a stopgap EP that punches above its weight. | Jorja Smith : Be Right Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jorja-smith-be-right-back/ | Be Right Back | On her 2018 debut Lost & Found, Jorja Smith presented a coming-of-age album on her own self-assured terms. Vivid lyrics and a flexible vocal range revealed the then-20 year old as a preternatural talent whose sleek songs speak to both small-scale romantic dramas and broad social and political ills; that year, she landed a coveted Mercury Prize nomination. Since then, the English R&B singer has kept a relatively low profile, providing the occasional guest feature while plugging away at a follow-up. Now Smith returns with the low-lit Be Right Back, a stopgap EP between albums with eight tracks from the cutting room floor. With its stripped-back instrumentation and forthcoming lyrics, Be Right Back proves that even Smith’s rejects are worthy of attention.
As an artist, Smith is adamant about working in her own style and at her own pace: “I don’t feel like I need to be doing this or that,” she told Pitchfork in 2017. “Ever.” Be Right Back maintains the ethos, contrasting the glossy, hip-hop-inflected production of her peers with a focus on mellower, guitar- and piano-driven instrumentation. “Addicted” is a particularly heart-rending missive from a fractured relationship, sung over rolling percussion and a faint, reverb-washed guitar. “The hardest thing/You are not addicted to me,” she confesses, stretching out the word “addicted” in a wounded search for reciprocity. Over rhythmic bass and guitar by co-producer Jeff Gitelman on “Burn,” Smith adopts a gently rolling delivery that feels on the verge of tears: “You burn like you never burn out/Try so hard you can still fall down/You keep it all in but you don’t let it out.” It’s one of her most confessional moments to date, a delicate yet plainspoken depiction of trying to keep it together while falling apart.
The mood shifts slightly on the propulsive, reggae-tinged “Bussdown,” but Smith sustains her languid style. She recruits the cool-headed South London rapper Shaybo to describe a self-made woman who can’t find happiness, even when surrounded by the spoils of success. The song eventually pivots to a sharper first-person point of view: “They call me Miss Naive, I’m still naive/I put trust in all the ones that got me,” Smith reels off in a curling flow, an admission of both vulnerability and strength that she then wrinkles with a sneer: “They never really had me.”
Be Right Back’s most appealing quality remains Smith’s voice, which stretches at will as she taps into various emotional states. She sings with insistence against echoing shouts on the moody “Digging” and flies up to a heady falsetto on “Weekend,” where her background vocals dovetail in operatic melodies. Be Right Back can at times feel like a minor expansion on Lost & Found’s melancholy moments, but Smith’s emotional acuity and resolute confidence prove that she’s still just getting started.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Famm | May 19, 2021 | 7.2 | 98d7bb26-c47f-4d4b-82b0-09d2dfe5b865 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On her second album, a country singer-songwriter accustomed to crafting songs for artists like Miranda Lambert and Lee Ann Womack finds her own voice. | On her second album, a country singer-songwriter accustomed to crafting songs for artists like Miranda Lambert and Lee Ann Womack finds her own voice. | Natalie Hemby: Pins and Needles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/natalie-hemby-pins-and-needles/ | Pins and Needles | Over years spent crafting material for others, songwriter Natalie Hemby has come to specialize in creating songs around thoughtful characters. Country music, happily, thrives on narrative. On Pins and Needles, the artist who earned a publishing contract barely out of her teens tackles her own tunes, songs that she might have written for clients/friends like Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town. Her second solo album benefits from her zen approach to singing: She won’t go beyond what her men and women feel. In a genre with a penchant for melodrama, Hemby has a novelist’s range and a short story writer’s concentration.
An imagist adept at supplying singers like Lee Ann Womack with vivid ideas (“The Bees” could be in a Songwriting for Dummies manual), Hemby has earned those royalties in the last decade. A rousing, blowzy number for Kelly Clarkson in “Don’t Rush”; songs about simple stuff like “Pink Sunglasses” and “Smoking Jacket,” among others, for Lambert; and delicate bubble-disco bops like “Velvet Elvis” and “Butterflies” for Kacey Musgraves—whether she’s writing alone or with a team, her material functions as scripts bereft of camera directions, as if aware the star will change things around. Hemby’s 2017 debut, Puxico, was the equivalent of an indie film whose makers had previously hobnobbed with George Clooney: tentative, conscious (if not self-conscious) of its smaller scale. Two years later, a project with Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlisle, and Maren Morris called the Highwomen allowed Hemby to blend with three exemplary vocalists and songwriters in an album-length demonstration of democracy at its most blithe.
Pins and Needles, assembled over several years with help from buddies including Lambert, Morris, and Brothers Osborne, captures a moment when an artist, calling in her chits, audibly blooms with the assurance of having found a voice after years of experimenting with others’. People making do without making a fuss is her subject; her women are wary, not weary. Occasionally Pins and Needles softens when the allure of her conceits is just about the only thing she’s got—for example, comparing a relationship’s chill to “Radio Silence,” or letting the dull syncopations, whistled hook, and redundant vocal filters on “Banshee” shrivel the track into something decidedly un-banshee-esque. Call it the complacency of metaphor. Hemby is best riding mid-tempo grooves like “New Madrid,” whose acoustic guitars chug at the pace of her recollections, and “Pinwheel,” a song heavily indebted to Sheryl Crow jams like “A Change Will Do You Good.” (In fact, Crow co-writer Jeff Trott had a hand in both.)
Hemby, married to producer Mike Wrucke, projects the self-confidence of an artist who understands how collaboration with equals rebounds to the credit of the top-billed person. She helped make Miranda Lambert into the last decade’s most dependable country act; Lambert and other pals are returning the favor. “I don’t wanna be a hero/Just wanna be a face in the crowd,” she announces in the first track, as if we needed reminding. Thanks to her understatement at the mic, the women in her songs feel too deeply to show those feelings. Reminiscing about days when she and a lover left clothes on the waterbank while she “breathed in” his kiss in “Lake Air,” Hemby gives each word its weight, as if the memory were a flower pressed between the pages of a favorite book. The bounty of Pins and Needles suggests she’s got plenty more tales to tell.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fantasy | October 19, 2021 | 7.4 | 98d9f642-9d33-4162-91f1-fe918ad838c8 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Two of Puerto Rico’s most promising independent rappers join forces for a summer-ready album, threading samba and ballroom into the worlds of R&B and reggaeton. | Two of Puerto Rico’s most promising independent rappers join forces for a summer-ready album, threading samba and ballroom into the worlds of R&B and reggaeton. | Duo Deleite / Gyanma / Enyel C: Duo Deleite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duo-deleite-duo-deleite/ | Duo Deleite | The collaborative album has a storied place in hip-hop. It’s a celebration of two artists’ creative synergies, typically honed in prior team-ups that became hits and/or fan favorites. But sometimes, it can be an opportunity for each rapper to test their mettle. The examples are plentiful: Jay-Z and Kanye came together as The Throne for their now classic LP, Method Man and Redman entertained audiences for nearly a decade, and the legends of Black Star and Madvillain will outlast us all.
But in the world of Spanish-language hip-hop and reggaeton, it’s harder to recall projects with the same kind of consistency. Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam released knockouts in the early aughts as Los Cangris, and Arcángel and De La Ghetto still insist they were never an official duo, in spite of all the singles they’ve released together. Fast-forward to the present: The burgeoning alt-urbano scene in Puerto Rico has transformed into a hotbed for experimentation. Two of its most promising acts, Gyanma and Enyel C, have appeared on the same bills in recent years. In early 2020, they dropped “Oro Centro,” which has become a show-stopping live staple. Later that year, they jumped in the booth again for “Joe Exotic.” So they decided to take the next logical step: releasing a joint album under the moniker Duo Deleite (aka Delightful Duo, or Duo That Delights).
The self-titled album collects many of the styles that have made alt-urbano so rich over the last few years (and a creative hub where labels discover new talent). As solo acts, Gyanma and Enyel occupy different lanes: Gyanma’s sound is the lovechild of trap, R&B, and the roguish energy of reggaeton, while Enyel C began his career as a lo-fi hip-hop savant who eventually came into his own as a lyricist and producer on his debut EP Angelito. Those abundant influences make Duo Deleite an album whose biggest strength is its variety; it forgoes some of the more predictable pop templates that currently dominate the urbano mainstream.
Take “Café,” a song that resembles an urbano version of the “jet set” song made popular by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Tony Bennett (a “Corcovado” for the streets, if you will). Produced by New York’s Balbi, the song wafts through the air like the aroma of its namesake, quietly lighting up the synapses as Gyanma and Enyel rap over a smooth, samba-fusion beat. It’s far removed from the boisterous trap they’re known for, but even in tranquility, the duo is capable of innovation.
Even when they venture into familiar thematic territory or dabble with a more standard pop sound, the duo avoids monotony. “Millonari” and lead single “MTV” kick the album into a higher gear, as they let loose and lean more aggressively into catchier trap hooks and bars. Both tracks touch upon the well-trodden topic of daydreaming about wild success, but they don’t feel redundant when the production and lyrics are so snappy.
Around 2020, urbano producers began to experiment more frequently with house and electronic music. Some artists, like Rauw Alejandro and Randy (of Jowell & Randy) successfully pulled it off, but others became victims of their hubris, thoughtlessly overlaying one rhythm over the other and calling it a day. Gyanma and Enyel are both producers themselves (the former is a Berklee alumnus), so the care they take around crafting and selecting beats is palpable, especially on tracks like “De Vogue.” Here, they traverse ballroom’s steady synth stabs, modulating their cadences and darting between tempos to match the lightning pace. With the added spice of a cheeky YHLQMDLG interpolation, the track proves that when it comes to making the music authentic, Duo Deleite have done their due diligence.
The last two songs on the eight-track album contribute to that mission of authenticity: “To’ Los Gantel” and “Número Uno” invoke two pillars of the Puerto Rican urbano sound—malianteo (read: gangsta rap) and perreo. Both are filtered through Duo Deleite’s vision, yearning for light-heartedness without diluting the song’s effectiveness. “To’ Los Gantel” carries Enyel C’s best verse and a ragga-inspired coda, while Gyanma excels on “Número Uno,” flaunting his talent for threading romantic overtures with flirty innuendo, as he did on his previous EPs Rompecorazones and Lado A/Lado B.
Duo Deleite showcases the pair’s symbiotic relationship and the versatility with which they can tackle new genres. The interest in older sounds is foreshadowed even in the cover art, as Enyel dons a colorful New Jack Swing-type jacket and black beret, and Gyanma appears in ’90s street hoops drip. But don’t get it twisted: The twosome is still very much of this moment, not just in the tangible enthusiasm they imbue in the production, but in their lyrics as well. On “Café,” Enyel raps, “Damn, mi loquite, conmigo tú coronaste,” utilizing the gender-neutral “e” suffix (a practice that has caught on among younger Latines to make their Spanish more inclusive).
Duo Deleite is a lean array of easygoing anthems—one that feels like a soundtrack for road trips, beach days, and vacilón. The duo has said that “good vibes and having a good time” is the thesis of the album, and while they’ve certainly achieved that, it more closely resembles a goodie bag rather than a cohesive, well-rounded collection. If and when they decide to reteam, here’s hoping for a more linear sonic throughline. Still, the LP illustrates the indie scene's capacious, experimental vision of urbano, which is forcing the mainstream to take notes. The young guns got next, and they have the talent and drive to back it up. | 2023-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ALAS | April 6, 2023 | 7 | 98db1ecc-2742-4e55-9c32-6a521af754cc | Juan J. Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/juan-j. arroyo / | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the biggest albums of all time: its origins, its impact, and why it remains a permanent fixture in the rock canon. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the biggest albums of all time: its origins, its impact, and why it remains a permanent fixture in the rock canon. | Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/ | The Dark Side of the Moon | When Pink Floyd first premiered what would become the most successful rock album of all time, it was quite literally too big for the system to handle. A half-hour into the band’s concert in Brighton on January 20, 1972—the live debut of what was then called “Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics”—the band started to play “Money,” which required synchronizing their performance to a pre-recorded sound collage of jingling coins and ka-ching-ing cash registers. But coupled with the band’s power-sucking sound system and lighting rig, the show slowly ground to a halt. After a brief break, bassist Roger Waters came to the mic to explain: “Due to severe mechanical and electronic horror, we can’t do any more of that bit, so we’ll do something else.” Less than a month later, the band had to abandon a performance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall when the same thing happened.
Over the prior half-decade, Pink Floyd had established themselves as, if not the best psychedelic rock band, then certainly the most technologically extravagant. From late 1966 through the fabled Summer of Love, they were the house band at the UFO, the Swinging London rock club/art space/drug den, which gave them free rein to blend their droning jams with trippy visuals, sound effects, fog machines, and extreme volume. That August, Waters told Melody Maker that he wanted Pink Floyd to travel from city to city with a circus-style big top. “We’ll have a huge screen 120 feet wide and 40 feet high inside and project films and slides.”
His prediction never came to be, but for an invite-only gig at Queen Elizabeth Hall in May 1967, the band installed a joystick dubbed “The Azimuth Co-ordinator” on top of Richard Wright’s keyboard to send the band’s potent, droning sound and sci-fi effects careening around the first-of-its-kind quadraphonic playback system in the venue. For the back cover photo of the 1969 double album Ummagumma, drummer Nick Mason arranged the band’s road gear to resemble an aircraft carrier, a concise reversal of one philosopher’s claim that rock music is not much more than “a misuse of military equipment.” Waters told Melody Maker that Pink Floyd’s gear fixation was a matter of going where no band had gone. “We’re trying to solve problems that haven’t existed before.”
So, too, was NASA, whose decade-long effort to put men on the moon was coming to fruition at the same time. It was a perfect match: Around 10 p.m., Pink Floyd appeared on the BBC’s marathon telecast of the Apollo 11 landing and jammed on a song they called “Moonhead.” Along with the requisite panels of astronomers and physicists, the quartet was joined by space-themed poetry readings from Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, and recordings of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra”—prominently featured in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi opus 2001: A Space Odyssey—and the new single “Space Oddity,” released to capitalize on moon mania by ambitious 22-year-old folkie David Bowie.
Though Bowie was just beginning to explore the cosmos, Pink Floyd had been traveling the spaceways since their inception: The first track on their debut album was “Astronomy Dominé,” a slab of B-movie sci-fi cheese masterminded by the band’s co-founder, songwriter, and frontman Syd Barrett, which, along with “Interstellar Overdrive,” landed them the “space rock” sobriquet from critics. Though no band likes to be classified so generically, they grew to embrace the idea. Eighteen years later, the band’s official tour t-shirt read “Pink Floyd: Still First in Space.”
Barrett watched the moon landing at his Wetherby Mansion flat in London with a group of friends and hangers-on. By 1969, Barrett had disappeared into a haze of quaaludes and LSD that eroded his already-fragile mental health. There was a depressing irony in the fact that Barrett had churned out the whimsical art-pop character studies “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” that got the group signed by EMI, then immediately soured on the non-stop promotional requirements that came along with hit singles. When Barrett showed up to live gigs in 1967, he was more of a distraction than a contributor. Forced to lip-sync on TV, he barely moved.
The band hired Barrett’s childhood mate David Gilmour as a live replacement, and one day they simply headed to a gig without picking up their singer. While Barrett was a master of making quotidian things charmingly weird, Roger Waters—who’d become Pink Floyd’s leader by dint of his forceful personality and big ideas—was honest about his careerist impulses and grand aims. “That was always my big fight,” Waters later said, “to try and drag it kicking and screaming back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd was into, to my concerns, which were much more political and philosophical.” It would take a half-decade after splitting with Barrett for Waters to reroute his obsession with outer space into a grand treatise on—as he’d later call it—inner space.
In the five years between Barrett’s departure and the 1973 release of The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd wandered the hinterlands as European psychedelia fractured into the high-minded progressive rock of the Moody Blues, the Nice, Procol Harum, Yes, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull; the jazz-fusion experiments of John McLaughlin and Soft Machine; the rock-operatic pretensions of the Who and Genesis; fellow space-rock travelers Hawkwind; and the synth-obsessed German bohemians Kraftwerk, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, and Popol Vuh. Without their putative leader and most charismatic member, Pink Floyd recorded a string of low-budget film soundtracks, released the classically gassy concept albums Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, helped Barrett record his 1970 solo debut Madcap Laughs, and toured the world. They earned enough money from their elaborate live shows—which journalists were beginning to describe in terms of tonnage—to make up for their paltry album sales.
With 1971’s Meddle, the band finally settled into a studio groove. The best of the new songs was the side-long “Echoes,” over 20 minutes of airtight studio jamming, a bit of jazz and folk, a single, repeating piano note fed through a Leslie speaker, and Waters’ newfound lyrical focus on the riddles of social alienation. Gilmour and Wright’s serenely harmonized voices intone Waters’ lyrics: “Strangers passing in the street/By chance, two separate glances meet/And I am you and what I see is me.” This recognition of a stranger’s shared humanity and pessimistic view that empathy is an impossible thing to communicate was rooted in Waters’ regret at being increasingly unable to reach his friend Syd. But as “Echoes” demonstrated, that fear could be blown out to galactic proportions.
There’s a good chance that Waters was among the billion or so humans who first saw the far side of the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, when Apollo 8 beamed the first detailed images of the mysterious lunar surface to televisions around the world. As astronomers have stressed for decades, “far side” is the accurate scientific term, but the spooky indeterminacy of “dark side” allows everyone else to tap into the same stoned undergraduate awe of learning that “lunatic” is derived from the 13th-century notion that some forms of mental illness were caused by adverse reactions to the moon’s phases. For Waters, the dark side of the moon was an inaccessible psychic space to which Barrett had retreated, perhaps forever, ingesting immeasurable amounts of psychedelics to cope with the unbearable stresses that accompany life on Earth, let alone one lived in the luminous glare of the public eye.
On the penultimate Dark Side track “Brain Damage,” he leads the band on a quest to find their wayward friend. There are elements of old Floyd on the verses: Gilmour alternates between major and minor chords, Waters sings of creeping madness like a seance leader while a man’s deep voice emits a maniacal haunted-house laugh. But on the choruses, the band soars skyward into a gospel-rock echo of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Let It Be,” with Waters making an even grander attempt toward cosmic connection: “And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes/I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
Pink Floyd’s expansion of the interpersonal to the intergalactic materialized at a moment when the record industry was more than ready to accommodate it. Waters’ ambition toward art-rock as gestalt—records, packaging, films, and concerts combined into an overwhelming whole—accelerated the rapid growth of the rock-industrial complex of the 1970s. In 1972, Pink Floyd introduced Dark Side’s songs in 3,000-capacity theaters. By 1975, they and their arena-rock contemporaries were playing 60,000-seat stadiums. Like the post-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and many of their prog peers, Pink Floyd viewed the album as the paragon of rock meaning, and Dark Side is the culmination of rock’s transformation into sacred druggie ritual and the elaborately packaged rock album’s transmutation into a rockist totem, a bearer of secrets, something to be decoded. With the help of their Cambridge friends Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of design firm Hipgnosis, the Dark Side album’s prism-on-black design ushered in a new era for rock iconography, as stark and suggestive as 2001’s obelisk.
The Dark Side of the Moon is by just about any measure rock’s most overdetermined album: It can be hard to talk about the music itself, and not the stats and legends accreting around the eighth-highest-selling album of all time. The music’s sense of scale and gravity communicates importance, but 741 consecutive weeks on the album chart is something else entirely. Dark Side’s unhurried tempos and swells of emotion are grandly cinematic, and the band maintained mystery by avoiding the press, but that’s true for lots of bands that don’t generate widespread conspiracy theories about secretly composing their music to sync up with The Wizard of Oz. In truth, Dark Side’s music didn’t sound much like Pink Floyd’s previous work, and went places that firmly separated the band from its peers. Few 1973 bands were blending rock with jazz, sound montages, electronic sequencers, and interviews with average people about their deepest fears and secrets. Overwhelming earnestness and statement-making are tough for a band to pull off at the same time, and attempts at making profound alienation sound beautiful that aren’t Dark Side or OK Computer inevitably fail.
Though Waters himself has described Dark Side’s theme as a simple battle between darkness and light with outer space as a backdrop, he’s actually underselling the album’s elegant doomerism—apropos of, well, everything that was happening at the time. Some light bleeds through, but not much. From the moment your lungs draw air your innocence is lost, and your life is spent fighting against the forces of time, money, religion, death, and politics, culminating in a sizable psychic (“Brain Damage”) and existential (“Eclipse”) collapse. If the real subject of English psychedelia, as the Beatles’ chronicler Ian Macdonald has it, is neither drugs nor love, but the lost innocence of childhood, then The Dark Side of the Moon could reasonably be called the end of the 1960s countercultural dream. The vivid spectrum of refracted light surrounded by depthless pitch black. The sun is eclipsed by the moon.
Dark Side was the No. 1 album in the U.S. for a week in April 1973, pushed to the top by incessant FM radio airplay of the single “Money.” Preceded by the same coin-and-cash register montage that melted down their 1972 Brighton concert, Waters’ spongy introductory bassline marks a tonal shift in the album’s mood and flow. Even with the necessity of a side-flip between tracks, the decision to follow the orgasmic death-wail of “The Great Gig in the Sky” with the crass sounds of commerce counts as the album’s lone wanly humorous moment. In interviews, Gilmour has implied that he took Waters’ demo as an opportunity to make a kind of prog-rock “Green Onions,” but the closest comparison to a blues in 7/4 with a sarcastic lyric about grotesque greed, complete with a fiery sax solo and a three-part guitar solo, was Steely Dan’s July 1973 single “Show Biz Kids” (the following year, the O’Jays would issue the definitive take, with the definitive bassline, on the topic).
Though Pink Floyd had to be talked into even releasing “Money” as a single, the programmers in the Album-Oriented Rock radio format wouldn’t have minded either way. The most successful new format of the decade, AOR was a corporatized, data-driven update of the late-’60 “free-form” model of radio programming. Free-form merged the anti-establishment tenor of the era with the FM band’s sonic superiority over AM (the home of transistor radio-friendly Top 40) to merge political progressivism and progressive rock, eschewing standardized playlists and constant advertisements in favor of the Ummagumma version of “A Saucerful of Secrets” and plugs for local head shops and third-party candidates. But in the same capitalist metamorphosis that turned field festivals into arena shows, AOR engulfed free-form, replacing the DJ’s ear with demographic research and point-of-sale polling. Rock album sales exploded: Apart from Dark Side’s week at No. 1, 39 weeks of 1973’s Billboard 200 album chart were topped by AOR-programmed acts: the Moody Blues, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Wings, George Harrison, Chicago, Jethro Tull, the Allman Brothers Band, the Rolling Stones, and Elton John.
That list underscores two effects of the AOR revolution: the final cleavage of (white) “rock” from (Black) rock’n’roll, R&B, funk, and soul; and AOR’s blatant preference for music made by men. One of Dark Side’s greatest tricks is making sure that suburban stoners could find their way into songs like “Money” or “Us and Them” through their countercultural aura, while Wright’s modal jazz tints, Gilmour’s tone, and Parsons’ lush quadraphonic engineering could just as easily rope in the “high-fidelity first-class traveling set” of pseudo-cosmopolitan Playboy readers (who voted it fourth in their 1973 Jazz and Pop poll in the “small combo” category, behind Chicago IV, Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire, and Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play).
During production, Waters advocated for a drier sound, and more intense psychological exploration inspired by Plastic Ono Band, an idea that was thankfully nixed in favor of what Gilmour called a “big and swampy and wet” mix. “Breathe,” “On the Run,” and “Time” are the exemplars of this approach, forming the sonic and theoretical core of the album’s Side A. “Breathe” dramatically blooms into existence out of the album’s opening sound collage with Gilmour’s placid Fender 1000 twin neck pedal steel at the fore. Though the steel guitar was a mainstay in Jerry Garcia’s country-rock arsenal at the time, Gilmour’s open-G tuning hewed closer to the languid tones of the Hawai’ian islands where it was born. Combined with the vibrato effect of the Uni-Vibe pedal on his Stratocaster, the track is both impossibly tranquil and gently unnerving. The recommendation to simply “breathe” can be said to someone giving birth, meditating, or having a panic attack or bad trip, and Waters moves the story quickly through the beginnings of life through an existence marked by tireless labor, then a premature death.
When Pink Floyd entered the studio in May 1972, they’d road-tested their new material for a year; the songs were all fairly far along, leaving ample time for production and experimentation. On Meddle and the Obscured by Clouds soundtrack they recorded in France a few months prior, they’d deployed one of Wright’s new gizmos: a synthesizer and primitive sequencer made by the English company EMS Synthi-A that he had bought from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They were all the rage in 1973—John Paul Jones fed his piano through one to create the eerie mood of Led Zeppelin’s dirge “No Quarter” and Brian Eno used one on the Roxy Music song where Brian Ferry sings about having sex with a robot. For Waters, however, the Synthi’s eight-note sequencer generated an inhuman, hyper-modern sound-swirl that, when mixed with the recorded sounds of airport terminal announcements, mimicked the intense travel panic that he was increasingly experiencing as a touring musician. Life as he saw it was not a matter of wrangling modern technology toward a sunny future, like Kraftwerk a year later, but a numbing cycle of alienated labor and idle, wasted moments.
Introduced with its own two-minute overture that moves from Parsons’ clock-sounds montage and Nick Mason’s roto-tom solo, “Time” is Dark Side’s grooviest and simplest song, with Gilmour’s taut riffs backing Waters’ best set of lyrics—a far more serious take on the sardonic Kinks-glam of Obscured’s “Free Four.” About as close to a Marxian statement on industrial capitalism as one could hear on FM radio, “Time” combines with “Breathe” to evoke Marx’s well-traveled claim that capital’s institution of tight factory clock regulations caused a psychic rupture in the human understanding of time, and a took a physical toll on our bodies. When you are young and time is long, your days are occupied “killing” time, but as you age, you increasingly focus on “saving” and “spending” it—until, all of a sudden, it runs out. “Time” gives way to a brief “Breathe” reprise introducing the opioid effects of softly spoken magic spells.
Titled “Religion” in its demo form, “The Great Gig in the Sky” initially took shape as a cyclical Wright-led instrumental with Gilmour accompanying on pedal steel, but the band made the last-minute decision to add a female vocal to the track. They called in Parsons’ acquaintance Clare Torry, a local session singer who came into the studio cold, and was prompted by Gilmour and Wright to, she recalls, improvise over the track while imagining a “birth and death concept.” She nailed the album’s ecstatic emotional peak in a few takes. In the context of Dark Side, “The Great Gig” feels like a transitional point—in musical flow and skyward narrative ascent—but AOR programmers extracted and rotated it regardless. In the right sequence—say, near Merry Clayton’s powerhouse choruses on “Gimmie Shelter” or Jim Gordon and Duane Allman’s elegiac piano-and-slide coda to “Layla”—it slotted in perfectly.
So did “Us and Them,” the album’s best song, which gently moves through Wright’s modal chord changes and highlights the album’s soulful backup quartet (which included Doris Troy, who’d co-written her own hit a decade earlier, and had provided vocal punch for the rollicking coda of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”). The seductive music is a feint, of course, softening the blow of an evocative and elemental Waters sentiment about the cruel abstractions of war. Waters’ father was a schoolteacher and member of the Communist Party who, after initially refusing to join the Army in lieu of volunteering closer to home, decided to join the 8th Battalion Royal Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. He died on the beaches of Anzio when Waters was five months old. Thirty years later, “Great Gig” and “Us and Them” cycled through the FM airwaves, providing a doleful backdrop for the senseless, state-sponsored murders slowly concluding in the dense jungles of Vietnam.
The Dark Side of the Moon remains Pink Floyd’s greatest musical achievement, and despite the band releasing four more albums before dissolving a bit more than a decade later, sent an early signal of its demise. Waters was growing ever more certain of his singular genius and forcing his will, while Gilmour and Wright resented his lack of musical chops and production choices in the studio. When the band split after 1983’s The Final Cut, Waters and Gilmour released solo albums within a month of each other, and toured separately while performing the same Dark Side songs. Waters’ new band (including Squeeze’s Paul Carrack on vocals) was still capable of booking arenas, but Gilmour, Wright, and Mason, as Pink Floyd, staged the highest grossing tour of the 1980s. Leave it to Pink Floyd to generate quantum versions of its original self.
In a 1987 Rolling Stone feature pegged to the release of the first post-Waters Floyd LP Momentary Lapse of Reason, David Fricke interviewed the ex-bandmates separately, surfacing just how much Gilmour resented Waters’ megalomania, which had driven Wright out of the band during the tense 1979 Wall sessions, and paraphrasing Waters’ characterization of the remaining Floyd members as “lazy, greedy bastards hacking out a record and sleepwalking through a tour to build up a multimillion-dollar retirement nest egg,” using, in Waters’ words, “the goodwill and the name Pink Floyd.”
By the time of Pink Floyd 3.0’s 1994 Division Bell world tour, the band was a cultural institution and had long been recognized as a formative cog in the same globalized, financialized record and touring industry that they used their music to decry. In Europe the tour was sponsored by Volkswagen, which released a “Pink Floyd Edition” Golf in commemoration. Such a tacky corporate tie-in may have caused a younger Waters to retch, but Gilmour—who’d recorded much of his post-Waters music on his posh houseboat—defended his affluence matter-of-factly in a 1995 interview: “When you compare [my wealth] to what chairmen of big companies earn, I think that I am more entitled to my millions than they are. After all, I have made the world happier than Unilever.”
The second set of each Division Bell date featured Dark Side played in full, and the tour was the largest-grossing in history before the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge trek eclipsed it the same year. When it came to Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome in June 1994, a high school senior named Charlie Savage drove down from Fort Wayne with some friends to see one of his favorite bands for the first time. A few months later as a college freshman, Savage availed himself of his university’s internet connection to explore Usenet—a messageboard predecessor to the World Wide Web that contained information and discussion about thousands of topics—and quickly dove into alt.music.pink-floyd. There, he learned about a DIY multimedia ritual that Floyd fans had concocted, likely by stoned accident: synchronizing the CD version of Dark Side (which didn’t have to be flipped over) with the VHS version of The Wizard of Oz. At numerous moments, the music seemed to perfectly soundtrack the film’s action, inspiring speculation about whether the band had secretly intended it that way. The next summer, Savage wrote a piece about the phenomenon for his hometown Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette during an internship (Pink Floyd didn’t return several faxed requests for comment), and once he reposted it online, it went mid-’90s viral. By 2000, TCM paired with Capitol Records to program it.
While there’s no truth to the rumor, the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” myth does provide bold evidence for two dimensions of Pink Floyd and Dark Side. First, its omnipresence. Despite being one of the 20th century’s most recognizable works of popular culture, Dark Side has never ranked highly on any of Rolling Stone’s canon-creating album lists: It came in at No. 35 on their 1987 20th-anniversary Top 100, dropped to No. 40 on the 2003 Top 500 and slid to No. 55 on the 2020 edition. But it kept selling and selling and selling, only dropping off the bottom of the Billboard 200 in 1988—fittingly, the year after its home format, the vinyl LP, was outsold by its successor, the compact disc. The solemn, rockist vinyl rituals that Pink Floyd helped initiate with Dark Side were reimagined for the era of CDs, VCRs, and urban legends spreading online. It says something that Savage has won a Pulitzer Prize for his political reporting but still receives more questions about his college Floyd piece.
The second thing that “Dark Side of the Rainbow” highlights is that Pink Floyd is perhaps the classic rock band for whom the descriptor “cinematic” not only rises above cliché, but feels absolutely necessary. Their career started, after all, playing at the London Free School and UFO Club with synchronized imagery that engulfed them. Though they declined Stanley Kubrick’s request to use “Atom Heart Mother” in A Clockwork Orange, the methodical pace, overwhelming seriousness, precision-tooled production, and obsession with man/machine dynamics of Dark Side and its follow-up Wish You Were Here are deeply Kubrickian. “Breathe” was originally written as part of the soundtrack to the 1970 Vanessa Redgrave-narrated documentary The Body, and Michelangelo Antonioni rejected Wright’s “Us and Them” instrumental for a riot scene in Zabriskie Point. In 1973, an Australian filmmaker commissioned “Echoes” for a legendary surfing film, and for part of their 1974 tour, Pink Floyd commissioned several animations and short films to project on giant screens behind the stage. Though it’s true that any music played under any motion picture will inevitably synchronize somehow (“Echoes” over the end of 2001 works decently), it also makes perfect sense that this particular conspiracy attached itself chiefly to Pink Floyd.
The full Pink Floyd reunited for the London portion of Live 8, Bob Geldof’s 2005 sequel to Live Aid. Taking the stage between sets by the Who and Paul McCartney was a fitting end to a live career that began in Swinging London with must-see psychedelic multimedia spectaculars that both McCartney and Townshend popped in on. Waters and Gilmour were diplomatic and agreeable on stage—though Gilmour later said it felt like “sleeping with your ex-wife”—and they ran through “Breathe,” “Money,” and “Wish You Were Here,” Waters’ tribute to his long-lost friend Syd Barrett, whom Waters acknowledged from stage. Barrett died at his parents’ home a year later.
Like its predecessor, Live 8 was based on the notion that rock stars could save the world by staging a large enough spectacle. In 1985, at MTV’s early peak, that idea wasn’t yet as quaint as it would seem in 2005, long after rock stars had ceded the cutting edge of cultural and political conversation to subsequent generations and new technological infrastructure. In 2020, Gilmour and Mason reformed Pink Floyd for a one-off charity single, “Hey Hey Rise Up,” to support Ukraine’s battle against a Russian invasion, but it came and went without much fanfare. Waters, on the other hand, enters political debates with a vengeance, and with the kind of “freethinking” contradictions that suggest deep YouTube rabbit holes. In Waters’ mind, support for Palestinian independence and disdain for Donald Trump share space with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, his desire to perform in SS-style uniforms in Germany, and his both-sides view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Where he once barked at his ex-bandmate in the pages of Rolling Stone, Gilmour and his wife, writer Polly Samson, lit Waters up on Twitter.
Over the past few years, Merck Mercuriadis, the avaricious industry veteran, has spent billions buying up the publishing rights to dozens of Pink Floyd’s classic rock contemporaries and others, naming his firm Hipgnosis in tribute to the Dark Side designers. Waters himself has decided to expand the Dark Side franchise, re-recording its songs in new arrangements, ostensibly pegged to the album’s 50th anniversary, but also, one suspects, so that he can reap the profits from what one might call “Money (Roger’s Version).” And though the music and fanbases are different, trace backward in time from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s blockbuster 2023 stadium tours and you’ll find Dark Side-era Floyd hiring the Bond films’ effects coordinator and filling multiple semi-trailers with their amps and lighting rigs. Pink Floyd’s era of the rock star guru gave way to multiple waves of larger-than-life icons decades ago, but any performer-mogul bent on building impossibly huge and expensive musical experiences to call the faithful to their knees is, to some degree, working from The Dark Side of the Moon’s original text. | 2023-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 6, 2023 | 9.3 | 98db3900-39ec-45a9-a7e8-df1be21bce34 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
The Zambian Canadian rapper and producer’s third album is heavy and suffocating, cranking up the murk and intensity to reveal the relief within unbridled anger. | The Zambian Canadian rapper and producer’s third album is heavy and suffocating, cranking up the murk and intensity to reveal the relief within unbridled anger. | Backxwash: I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/backxwash-i-lie-here-buried-with-my-rings-and-my-dresses/ | I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES | Backxwash’s previous album, the Polaris-winning God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It, ends with a benediction. Over a serene loop of breezy guitar and tender hums that wouldn’t be out of place on a MIKE record, the rapper and producer samples a recording of the pastor T.D. Jakes, as if inviting the people who have forsaken her to forgive themselves. Backxwash tends to tuck such moments of warmth and reprieve into the margins of her raucous, blistering music, but “Redemption” is forthright, an olive branch extended to an undeserving world. On her third album, she’s uninterested in reconciliation. I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES embraces wrath, cranking up the murk and intensity of Backxwash’s snarling nu-metal to reveal the relief within unbridled anger.
God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It raised Backxwash’s profile, but because the album was laced with uncleared samples, she was forced to withdraw it from streaming services. That setback seems to have pushed her toward a less rap-first approach to songwriting. Instead of riding the drums and bass, here she adopts a slower, breathier delivery that thunders over the percussion. She trades drum loops and recognizable samples in favor of layered production with tighter pockets and denser mixes. These shifts produce heavier, more suffocating music, a backdrop that fits her tales of manic benders and grim ideation.
The record oscillates between Backxwash resisting the relentless current of her thoughts and surrendering herself to it. “Wail of the Banshee,” a frank litany of self-harm, is the latter. “Look in the mirror, it’s telling me I should kill something,” she raps over a thick wall of drone and screams. “Terror Packets” is equally despondent as Backxwash and guest Censored Dialogue relay personal brushes with transphobia, many involving relatives or romantic partners. “I am just dick to these hoes,” Backxwash growls, the double entendre pointed. The song ends with a clip of Angela Davis detailing how constant surveillance foments explosive rage.
Backxwash’s rage takes an array of shapes: Sometimes it’s destructive, as on “Burn to Ashes,” where guilt trips flare into fantasies of self-immolation. On the self-produced “In Thy Holy Name,” anger is jet fuel. Placed after a sample of a homophobic pastor, Backxwash’s final verse grows denser and craggier, then spills into a cathartic gurgle of noise and distortion. It feels like she’s run out of words. On “666 in Luxaxa,” the instrumental channels her fury. Rapping over a sample of a ululating Zulu chant, Backxwash, who grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, gives a quick lesson in colonization, allowing the loop to act as a marker of what empire erased. It’s also a subtle monument to Black resilience: When Backxwash’s bleak verse ends, the loop endures.
I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES has an introspective bent that distinguishes it from more cathartic pairings of rap and industrial music. While rappers as varied as Rico Nasty, Playboi Carti, Kanye West, and El-P have sought harsher sounds to unspool themselves and tap into spontaneity, Backxwash’s embrace of chaos and rage is meditative. Many of these songs attempt to both articulate anger and harness it in the name of self-acceptance—as well as more elusive feelings, like transcendence and euphoria. Backxwash’s sneering use of religious imagery demonstrates her deep skepticism of this impulse, but it’s a fixture of her music, buoying her when she careens toward rock bottom and propelling her when peace is just within her grasp.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ugly Hag | July 9, 2021 | 7.6 | 98df3837-e4a8-40d5-b1b9-61b0d07e082e | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Liverpool band’s debut looks at rock music and quotidian life through their own bizarre, distorted pop lens. | The Liverpool band’s debut looks at rock music and quotidian life through their own bizarre, distorted pop lens. | Courting: Guitar Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/courting-guitar-music/ | Guitar Music | If you were caught up in the acid-trip instrumentation of Courting’s cheekily titled debut album, Guitar Music, unmindful of Sean Murphy-O’Neill’s charged lyrics, it would seem that he and his bandmates were running around London, partying, falling in love, having the time of their lives. But even their funniest songs have a dark underbelly, and on closer listen, Guitar Music is occupied with far thornier subjects: the BDSM power structure of paypigs, bodily autonomy as it relates to beauty standards and adulthood, and the way changing cityscapes can create tour routes for poverty porn.
Guitar Music was originally made as a “rock” album before producer James Dring helped rip it to shreds and put it back together. Album opener “Cosplay/Twin Cities” is the sound of a band who is annoyed at publications who label them a guitar band. It’s Courting’s abrasive and deceptive prelude: A lush melody and romantic strings are consumed by an earth-shattering bass, sinister glitches, and censor beeps. The SOPHIE-inspired track immediately reveals that Courting aren’t afraid to pull the rug out beneath the listener. The cumulative effect makes these songs feel like tatters of unearthed time capsules that got mixed up in the same burial ground.
Since their 2019 debut single “Not Yr Man,” a satirical screed about masculinity norms, Courting have evolved beyond tight-fisted romps in the style of Parquet Courts or IDLES. There’s still plenty of pop culture shoutouts and nods to modern mundanity delivered in a deadpan voice, but at their best they feel less like provocations and more like world-building details—observations of a messy world contextualized with messy anxieties about growing up. “Famous” references luxury trends associated with self-care and upward mobility: “All of my friends are getting work done,” Murphy-O’Neill notes. “Fillers, facials, personal trainers/Calvin Klein collaborators/The American dream.” After imagining a now-scattered group of friends flying home to hang out and watch sports like the good ole days, Murphy-O'Neill cries, “Why’s everybody getting older?” Serrated guitars, short-circuiting background vocals, and Murphy-O’Neill’s searing tone create a sense of distrust and disgust while working through tumultuous changes.
The album’s longest song is a strange, alarming ode to falling in love with a robot influencer, inspired by content creator enigma Lil Miquela and Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. “Uncanny Valley Forever” begins as the album’s quietest track, with an eerie sweetness reminiscent of a Smashing Pumpkins ballad. Garbled high-pitched speech staggers into softly plucked electric guitar, then Murphy-O’Neill begins to sing gently about the future’s infinite possibilities. He sounds like he’s in love, but something isn’t adding up: “Every day she makes me laugh and I make her dinner/Although she can’t eat.” Soon, reality sets in and the division between humanity and technology appears like an exposed wire; it becomes unclear who’s the robot in this relationship as the song simpers from a guitar jam into a nearly indecipherable fried vocal outro. From head-scratching to head-banging, Courting transform observations from our bizarre reality into vivid storytelling and ambitious song structure, all in an effort to push pop further into the future. | 2022-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Play It Again Sam | October 27, 2022 | 7.3 | 98e28b4b-ec5a-4aff-9d41-fe9ff4755cfa | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On the third album of an astronomically-inspired trilogy, the German producer suspends lonely, isolated instruments within a sweeping cosmos. It sounds appropriately epic and a little vacant. | On the third album of an astronomically-inspired trilogy, the German producer suspends lonely, isolated instruments within a sweeping cosmos. It sounds appropriately epic and a little vacant. | Markus Guentner: Extropy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/markus-guentner-extropy/ | Extropy | The bell sound on “Concept of Credence,” from Markus Guentner’s new album Extropy, is just the bees’ knees. It comes out of nowhere, through a crack in the dense clouds of choir-synth-string-harmonics that form the bulk of the record, and it’s so evocative as to induce a little bit of whiplash. Such a terrifically ancient sound makes for a great contrast with Guentner’s hyper-treated textures; it’s just about the last thing anyone would expect to hear on a record like this. The bell itself is such a loaded sound—so deeply intertwined with religion, ritual, death, and inevitability—that it’s easy to start thinking in outlandish, cosmic terms: Could this be the bell that tolls for all of us, floating somewhere in the seas of time?
Extropy leans hard into interstellar new-age aesthetics and sci-fi splendor. The portentous horn on “Everywhere” immediately conjures associations with Also sprach Zarathustra, the theme used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to announce humanity’s transcendence and in innumerable parodies to mock sci-fi self-seriousness. The rest of the seven-track album sounds like the searching, minor-key themes from countless science documentaries and space operas, amplified and blown up until it resembles the vastness of space itself. Within these ebbing, flowing sheets of sound, Guentner suspends lonely little instruments—a sonorous cello on “Here,” a sparkling vibraphone-synth on “Nowhere”—to approximate the luminous little objects that twinkle from the murk of the cosmos.
Guentner is probably best known for his association with Wolfgang Voigt’s Kompakt label. He appeared on the first eight Pop Ambient compilations, and his 2001 debut In Moll is a highlight of the label’s early catalog despite being clearly indebted to Voigt’s almighty GAS project. But Guentner’s textures have always been a little colder and more metallic than Voigt’s vivid swaths of sylvan psychedelia, and the compositions on Extropy have a steely edge that keeps them from feeling too weightless or incorporeal. They move like tied-down balloons, yearning to drift away but still tied to the constraints of gravity. There’s a heaviness to this music, which may have something to do with Rafael Anton Irisarri’s mastering. The Black Knoll Studio boss favors a gauzy yet bottom-heavy sound in both his own music and his engineering jobs for artists like Warmth and Loscil. It’s easy to see why he’d be drawn to a project like this.
Extropy does a great job of sounding epic and huge, but “epic and huge” isn’t quite enough to sustain the project over its seven-track, hour-long runtime. This music is too forceful to be soothing, too gentle to be buffeting, and without any contrasting techno-oriented material, as on In Moll or 2005’s 1981, the great, gauzy textures seem to swirl around vacantly, with nothing to stir them up. Guentner claims this music was inspired by the “pseudoscientific prediction that human intelligence and technology will enable life to expand in an orderly way throughout the entire universe.” But Extropy never really expands; it just pulses and contracts like an astral object viewed through the cold remove of a telescope.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | A Strangely Isolated Place | November 1, 2021 | 6.4 | 98f0bdd1-c617-4acf-9e39-addea87dd279 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The Spanish group’s second album displays the superior songcraft of the band, as vocalists Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials wade through love’s messy feelings with confidence and exuberance. | The Spanish group’s second album displays the superior songcraft of the band, as vocalists Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials wade through love’s messy feelings with confidence and exuberance. | Hinds: I Don’t Run | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hinds-i-dont-run/ | I Don’t Run | Hinds specialize in songs about love—which are not the same as love songs. Their jaunty tunes don’t so much offer declarations of devotion as catalog all the conflicted emotions, second-guessing, and compromises that lead up to them. In a Hinds song, love isn’t the product of the universe bringing two soulmates together, love is the result of uncomfortable conversations and ultimatums issued after one too many casual hook-ups. But on I Don’t Run, the Madrid quartet wade through these messy feelings with confidence and exuberance to spare, taking us on a pleasure cruise through choppy waters.
If Hinds’ 2016 debut, Leave Me Alone, presented more discrete genre exercises, I Don’t Run melts down its ’60s girl-group, ’90s twee, and post-DeMarco indie-pop influences down into a lustrous swirl befitting its superior songcraft. But like its predecessor, I Don’t Run’s charm offensive is powered by the interplay between singer-guitarists Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials, who share songwriting duties with Ade Martin on bass and Amber Grimbergen on drums. Their sugar-and-spice dynamic presents a study in sharp contrasts: the former favors a calm tone that belies her cutting sentiments; the latter voraciously devours her lyrics and lets the words melt in her mouth like pieces of sponge toffee. But unlike most foils, these two are always working together, whether they’re eagerly finishing each other’s sentences, providing emotional support, or just amplifying the sense of hysteria through harmonies that push the mix into the red.
Their audible sense of camaraderie functions as a form of group therapy. Atop the deceptively laid-back groove of “Soberland,” the two lay into a potential partner who’s getting older but still wants to be the life of the party and enjoy all the non-committal sex it promises. They sing as a united front, delivering an ecstatic chorus that doubles as a tough-love intervention. “Tester” is even more testy, with the duo voicing the frustrations of a woman who realizes she’s a second-class citizen in her boyfriend’s little black book: “Why did you have to kiss me after sex/Should I’ve known before you were also banging her,” they seethe, before the song’s spirited jangle-punk stomp clears a beeline from the bed to the door.
The critiques are self-inflicted, too: The giddy “New for You” couches Perrote and Cosials’ pledge to change their duplicitous ways and be better partners—yet when they admit, “I don’t want to disappoint you with my new persona,” they tap into the latent fear that even positive changes can have destabilizing effects on relationships. And with the roughed-up ’50s pop of “Rookie,” they suggest the key to happiness is overlooking your mate’s imperfections: “Don’t know who messed your bed,” Parotte sings, “but my socks are staying there.”
On an album overflowing with cheeky ruminations on modern romance and pleas for commitment, the lo-fi acoustic closer “Ma Nuit” offers a stark portrait of Hinds’ day-to-day reality as touring musicians, and its inherent logistical incompatibility with domestic bliss. As Cosials’ Spanish-sung lyrics chronicle the difficulties of long-distance love, Perrote offers this glimmer of hope: “Every night when I’m on stage,” she sings, “I picture you in my favorite lines.” It’s a vulnerable moment, but for Hinds, this is what a proper love song should sound like. | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | April 6, 2018 | 7.4 | 98f162fe-11e0-4e78-a2d5-02546c643b7a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre's latest album features guest spots from The Pet Shop Boys, Primal Scream, Cyndi Lauper, and...Edward Snowden. | Electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre's latest album features guest spots from The Pet Shop Boys, Primal Scream, Cyndi Lauper, and...Edward Snowden. | Jean-Michel Jarre: Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21876-electronica-2-the-heart-of-noise/ | Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise | Emerging in the mid-'70's, Jean-Michel Jarre was part of wave of musicians that were incorporating synthesizers, tape loops and state-of-the-art effects systems into pop-leaning forms. Unlike his mentor Pierre Schaeffer and his peers in the avant-garde and academic communities, Jarre married sweet, hummable melodies and traditional European harmonies to star-gazing soundscapes, making electronics seem safe and inviting to the masses. To some, this was tantamount to treason; one of electronic music's first manifestos, written by Luigi Russolo in 1913, demanded composers “break at all costs from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.” For those not interested in modernist treatises and radical new forms, however, Jarre was the sound of the future.
Without doubt, Jarre was on the right side of history. In addition to album sales well into the millions, in 1979 he broke the world's record for concert attendance, bringing 1,000,000 people to Paris' Place de la Concorde (he went on to break that record three more times). Yet in many ways his influence pales in comparison to his sales; his sheen is futuristic but his music looks fondly to the past. Though titled Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, Jarre's latest album is anything but an exploration of the genre's roots in the radical manipulations of raw sound and analogue circuitry. Rather, it's an overstuffed, overlong string of collaborations that smothers Jarre's nimble melodicism under heaving EDM production and spooks his guests into cliches of themselves, or worse.
And what a series of guests. The Pet Shop Boys, Yello, and Gary Numan are all here, as well as Cyndi Lauper, ambient pioneers the Orb and pop shapeshifters Primal Scream. In their heyday, each of these artists had an unmistakable sound signature (except perhaps Primal Scream, who made a career out of reinvention), yet on Electronica 2 they are bulldozed by Jarre's production. There are flashes of recognition, such as the gospel choir on Primal Scream collab “As One,” an obvious nod to “Come Together.” More often though, Jarre appears resolutely in the driver's seat. For the previous installation*, Electronica 1:The Time Machine*, he said he tailored each song as a demo with the specific collaborator in mind, to be fleshed out or rewritten together in the studio later. If that's true here, it's hard to tell.
Jarre's decades on stadium stages may have something to do with the broader-than-broad strokes employed throughout the album. His preference is for slow, bombastic tempos and questing, classically-leaning chord progressions, and he runs this formula into the ground. The arrangements, heavily layered and sound-designed, telegraph an up-to-the-minute sheen yet lack a timeless quality. Sadly the effect carries over to the singers' performances; Lauper attempts an Ellie Goulding impression on “Swipe to the Right.” Numan, once both campy and sleek, is a bogged-down wannabe pop messiah on “Here for You.” The Pet Shop Boys fare a little better on “Brick England”—they simply sound like a boring version of themselves. Yello are meanwhile unrecognizable on the aptly titled existential dirge “Why This, Why That and Why.”
Other collaborations promise to push Jarre a bit out of his comfort zone, yet you feel him fussing. The presence of Jeff Mills suggests that Jarre might be game for a descent into a techno wormhole. Though “The Architect” eventually speeds up to a danceable clip and features traces of the claustrophobic minimalism that Mills perfected in his younger years, it also foregrounds string flourishes worthy of a James Bond opening sequence. The structure, too, is a mess, scrolling through breakdowns, sequences and buildups that have little relation to each other.
Intriguingly, the brief presence of NSA whistleblower and non-musician Edward Snowden on “Exit” yields the liveliest results. Jarre described the track as “trying to illustrate the idea of this crazy quest for big data on one side and the manhunt for this one young guy by the CIA, NSA and FBI on the other,” and “Exit” could certainly soundtrack a frenetic chase scene. Mid-song, the music slows to a halt and Snowden gets on the mic: “Technology can actually increase privacy... Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say... And if you don't stand up for it, then who will?” Jarre grabs that last phrase and loops it as he builds to a rushing climax. It's grandiose, cheesy and sounds like any generic rave scene in a movie, but coming halfway through Electronica 2's slog, it's a high point.
Closing with a pair of solo expeditions, one strangely credited “with JMJ himself,” the lasting impression isn't of a journey to the heart of noise, but rather of a blustery loneliness. Jarre recorded his breakthrough 1976 album Oxygene in his kitchen on a rudimentary setup; now he's has assembled a collection of his "heroes" and been given access to the finest studios in the world and yet repeatedly fails to engage the imagination. One senses a massively missed opportunity, a chance for exploration blown by Jarre's insatiable need to make everything bigger, more impressive. Perhaps Yello caught a glimpse of this while working on their lyrics: “trying to dig out the man that I could be, and I was shouting loud to find there's little me. ” | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | May 12, 2016 | 4.9 | 98f2f79c-61ad-43b4-a5ad-4a5acd59bde7 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Made months before he cut his masterpiece and almost exactly a year before he died, these newly excavated recordings show the exploratory vigor and versatility of the jazz revolutionary. | Made months before he cut his masterpiece and almost exactly a year before he died, these newly excavated recordings show the exploratory vigor and versatility of the jazz revolutionary. | Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eric-dolphy-musical-prophet-the-expanded-1963-new-york-studio-sessions/ | Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions | Eric Dolphy heard things differently—his ears seemed attuned to the notes between notes. And so, his own sound was unlike anything anyone had heard. He brought a brittle, scabrous tone to the alto saxophone and bass clarinet, using extended techniques like multiphonics, which allowed him to produce more than one note at the same time. His solos performed wide interval leaps, and he twisted into braying, off-kilter runs, often veering outside a piece’s basic chord structure. Dolphy drew inspiration from the rhythmically loose, microtonal quality of bird song, which he liked to transcribe; his flute playing fluttered, like a whistle.
This singular sound earned famous enemies. Miles Davis called him a “sad motherfucker,” and in an infamous DownBeat pan from 1961, the critic John Tynan labeled the music Dolphy was playing in John Coltrane’s group “anti-jazz.” Dolphy, though, appeared on some of the most vital jazz albums of the early 1960s—Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure. But his abrasive style could sound out of place in more traditional settings, so he struggled to get work. In 1964, he moved to Europe, hoping to find a more hospitable audience. He died the same year in Berlin, succumbing to undiagnosed diabetes at the age of 36.
A number of posthumous archival excavations have cemented his spirit as a bandleader and composer, including Out to Lunch!, recorded four months before his death and regarded as an avant-garde masterpiece. But for the past three decades, very few unheard studio recordings have emerged. Now, a new triple-album combines two previously released records and 85 minutes of unheard recordings, almost all taken from the same two-day session in the summer of 1963. Carefully curated, Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions illustrates the breadth of Dolphy’s artistry and gives an intimate look at his process during the last full year of his life.
According to the collection’s producer, Zev Feldman, there were nearly eight hours of tape to comb through in order to find the essential cuts. Several of these recordings are alternate takes from two albums Dolphy made at that moment—Conversations and Iron Man, smartly included here for context. The new tracks are startlingly good, with Dolphy reveling amid fresh ideas in a variety of unique settings.
There are, for instance, two new solo alto saxophone recordings of “Love Me,” the longing romantic ballad most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra. They complement the original take from Conversations, the last album Dolphy released before he died. Dolphy rarely repeats himself, deploying well-timed pauses to let the echo of his surprisingly sultry tone ring into the room. An alternate take on Conversations’ “Alone Together” finds Dolphy paired with the great bassist Richard Davis. On the album, Dolphy, with his bass clarinet, is a spasmodic force against Davis’ rhythmically amorphous accompaniment. But here, Davis mostly walks the bass with rich, round notes, giving Dolphy a firmer foundation to hew closer to the uplifting melody.
Dolphy and Davis had one of the more meaningful connections in jazz; they communicated almost telepathically, as if completing each other’s thoughts. Their takes on “Muses for Richard Davis,” eerie and ruminative, are among the best work here. Rendering an unsettling drone, Davis’ bowed bass operates much the way a tanpura would in Indian music, which Dolphy admired. It occasionally aligns with the gritty tone of Dolphy’s clarinet, creating a satisfyingly disorienting frequency.
By the time of these recordings, Dolphy had been tinkering with unconventional instrumentation for several years; on 1960’s Out There, he moved bassist Ron Carter to cello. He doubled down on that mandate for these sessions, presaging the introspective chamber-jazz of Out to Lunch!, which he recorded seven months later. The vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson—a crucial presence on that album, contributing spare tone clusters and odd single-note embellishments—makes his first appearance alongside Dolphy in these sessions. His shifting chords, loose and echoing, imbue the music with a strange, nebulous feeling, like a theremin whose pitch keeps modulating.
Dolphy also recruited an unorthodox assemblage of horn and wind players, including two saxophonists, a flutist, a bassoonist, and trumpeter Woody Shaw, a late innovator on the instrument who makes his recording debut here. Together, their voicings are dense and unfamiliar, as on the alternate take of “Burning Spear,” originally from Iron Man. Ominous harmony and a jagged arrangement evoke a Stravinsky orchestration.
Dolphy is at his most ferocious with a full band. Though the Fats Waller composition “Jitterbug Waltz” is a relatively amiable tune, Dolphy warbles through his flute like a delirious songbird. During an alternate take for “Music Matador,” an upbeat, Spanish-tinged composition, he gobbles like a wild turkey on his clarinet, creating tension by working against the playful rhythm.
There is one song here that is not from those July 1963 sessions—“A Personal Statement,” a haunting meditation on race by the pianist Bob James (yes, the smooth jazz pioneer). Dolphy recorded it in March 1964, four months before his death. He plays all three of his instruments at different times, but his own eccentricity is overshadowed by the abnormally high countertenor of the little-known vocalist David Schwartz. This is an apt reflection of Dolphy’s willingness to put himself in unusual situations. Although he felt alienated by the domestic music scene, he managed to perform in a staggeringly wide range of settings—alongside drummer Chico Hamilton, with Charles Mingus, on a jazz-meets-classical album conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a big band backing Sammy Davis Jr.
Had he not died in the middle of his 30s, during his most creatively fertile period, Dolphy could have gone in several directions. Listening to these tracks now, it’s admittedly dispiriting to realize what he might have accomplished had he lived even a little longer. Still, Musical Prophet is a worthwhile compromise, a valuable reminder of his capabilities and vision. And it is gratifying, more than 50 years after his premature death, that he still has new things to tell us in a way no one else could. | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Resonance | January 24, 2019 | 8.3 | 98fbdc39-ca0b-4030-80cf-6018926ec717 | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
Camila Cabello’s third album embarks on an exploration of her musical heritage while holding onto familiar themes of love and anxiety. She swings big and often hits. | Camila Cabello’s third album embarks on an exploration of her musical heritage while holding onto familiar themes of love and anxiety. She swings big and often hits. | Camila Cabello: Familia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camila-cabello-familia/ | Familia | With “Havana,” Camila Cabello barrelled past the quasi-anonymity of her girl group days to announce who she was and where she was from. The realignment felt complete by the time she sang the hit, a crackling ode to her birthplace, at the 2019 Grammys, making stops to shimmy opposite Ricky Martin and trill along to J Balvin’s “Mi Gente.” Fifth Harmony, the Simon Cowell-engineered quintet with which she’d performed girlbossy pop anthems, was in her past. Now, if not exactly carrying Martin’s torch, she was warmed by the flame he had ignited on the same stage, two decades prior, with a famous performance that heralded the so-called “Latin explosion” in the United States.
Latin pop was an energizing, though not dominant, force across Cabello’s first two solo albums. “She Loves Control,” from her 2018 debut, deploys a reggaeton beat to underscore a statement of self-determination; trumpets and flamenco handclaps adorn the taunting “Liar,” from 2019’s Romance. On her third album, Familia, Cabello—who is half Cuban, half Mexican, and lived in both countries before immigrating to the U.S. at age seven—embarks on a more immersive exploration of her musical heritage. Abandoning the revolving-door approach of previous albums, whose credits read like a directory of pop producers, Cabello locked in with a smaller group of collaborators including Latin pop veterans Cheche Alara (Thalia, Natalia Lafourcade) and Edgar Barrera (Maluma, Natti Natasha). She ushers in the sonic revamp with the tale of a lover—a proxy for her audience, perhaps—who’s transfixed by her culture and compelled to take up salsa dancing. That song, “Celia,” is the first release of her own to be sung entirely in Spanish.
We’ve known this was coming since at least last summer, when Cabello went full Gloria Estefan on Familia’s first single. A neon-streaked entreaty to a partner threatening to bail on a night out, “Don’t Go Yet” is like an overstuffed house party: The guitarist arrives first, then the percussionists, then the brass band, and when there shouldn’t be any room to spare, the choir. The song offers a fitting introduction to an album that swings big and often hits. “La Buena Vida” is similarly maximalist, with an urgent tempo and mariachi theatrics to dramatize the hurt of being stood up: “Why am I home alone with your glass of wine?” Cabello gripes, trumpets blaring in the background.
Even when she’s mad, Camila sounds like she’s having fun. In both Spanish and English, she’s an exuberant and expressive transmitter of language, smashing up words in her mouth and bending phrases around her tongue. Hear how she treats the titular lyric of “Don’t Go Yet” like a rubber band, alternately stretching it out and snapping it back. A capable vocalist with a lightly nasal tone and a dramatic streak, Cabello rarely misses an opportunity to riff or sail into her wispy head voice. But her spoken delivery can be just as captivating: “Baby don’t go yet/’Cause I wore this dress for a little drama,” she says, slipping in a seductive rasp and showcasing her skill as a percussionist as well as a melodist. The line is tossed off like a teasing glance over the shoulder.
Cabello’s actual familia does appear on the album that’s named for them: her young cousin, Caro, on the cover and on “Celia”; her father in the backing vocals on “La Buena Vida.” But on the whole, the record is more taken with romantic than familial love. As the first full-length release by either party following Cabello’s high-profile breakup with Shawn Mendes, Familia can’t avoid tabloid scrutiny, but handles its presumed subject lightly. A few lines reference identifiable details of their relationship, like the Hollywood Hills home Cabello sold shortly after the split; for much of the album, though, the love interest’s main function is to hold up a mirror. Peering into it, Cabello grapples with anxiety and loneliness that surface in her partner’s absence, the paranoia that runs rampant in her brain. On “Hasta Los Dientes,” the album’s second all-Spanish song, Argentine singer Maria Becerra joins to trade lines about fixating on a paramour’s romantic history. Cabello does her best reggaetonera on “No Doubt,” stuttering and heavy breathing while confessing to “seeing red flags that don’t even exist.”
The topic of spiraling is most conspicuously but least effectively handled on “psychofreak,” which guest stars Willow Smith, lending her emo bona fides and a vocal riff that sounds like “Tom’s Diner” got a poltergeist. Forgoing the live instruments that color much of the album, Cabello repeats a single descending melodic line ad nauseum atop moody, blown-out synth. Between its streamlining of musical ideas, vocal cues taken from alt-rappers like Doja Cat and Ashnikko, and trendily self-lacerating subject matter, the song scans as TikTok bait. Much more affecting is “Boys Don’t Cry,” an R&B number where Cabello plays the consoler rather than the inconsolable, swatting away toxic masculinity in the process. She veers ever closer to rapping, landing unexpected rhymes and playing with cadence while pleading for vulnerability in the verse; when the beat falls out in the bridge, it feels like a gust of cool air. The sentiment is sweet, and the writing here is leaps ahead of “In the Dark,” a song from her first album with a similar conceit.
Cabello is a credited writer on all her post-5H songs, and her Instagram essays offer further evidence of her active pen. In a recent one, she mused on the state of perpetual otherness she experiences as an immigrant, mentioning frustration with the limitations of her Spanish and feeling like an outsider in Latinx spaces. “I want so badly to sit at a table I don’t belong to as much as everybody else,” she confessed.
Familia’s penultimate track, “Lola,” works to prove that her Latin immersion is sincere. It centers on a girl growing up poor, her dreams stunted by geography. A lyric referencing “90 miles to the shore”—the distance between Cuba and Key West—sheds light on the story’s setting, as does a guest verse by the rapper Yotuel, whose song “Patria y vida” (“homeland and life”) provided a rallying cry for anti-government demonstrations in Cuba last year. On “Lola,” Yotuel reprises that song’s keystone lyric, which flips the old revolutionary slogan “patria o muerte” (“homeland or death”). Something of a thematic outlier on Familia, “Lola” coheres because it remains grounded in the personal: Cabello’s imagining of her own life, had her family not left Cuba. It shows that she is paying attention not only to her homeland’s cultural exports, but to the plight of its people. Her heart really is in Havana. | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | April 13, 2022 | 7.3 | 990310ce-b4bb-419e-b71e-5b9efbc30d69 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Philly septet continues its winning streak on this sprawling and ambitious affair, masterfully puzzled together from a wide range of parts. | Philly septet continues its winning streak on this sprawling and ambitious affair, masterfully puzzled together from a wide range of parts. | A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Ashes Grammar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13440-ashes-grammar/ | Ashes Grammar | The predominance of digital-editing software and increased use of sampling have made piecing together an album a much easier task than it once was. Ashes Grammar, the sophomore album from Philadelphia septet A Sunny Day in Glasgow, doesn't sound composed with modern tools-- overdubs ad infinitum-- but like pop music masterfully puzzled together. Featuring bushels of tracks that blur the line between interlude and song, many listeners will associate the two-dozen-strong tracklist with either unfinished business or lazy editing, but Ashes Grammar is a surprisingly disciplined affair. Watch the band tunnel a small groove during "Evil, With Evil, Against Evil", drop it, and pick it back up again before moving quickly on. They mine the ringing, orbital electronics of "Canalfish" for 90 gorgeous seconds before letting it slip into "Loudly"'s more concrete whoosh. "Passionate Introverts", however, needs its four-plus minutes of glowing pulse to deliver its serpentine melodies and abstracted nostalgia ("Do you believe in dinosaurs at all?", asks the chorus), and SDIG provide it the necessary breathing room. Summed, the shifting tracks pull Ashes Grammar through its hour-long runtime smoothly and patiently.
Ashes Grammar is more propulsive than SDIG's debut, Scribble Mural Comic Journal, whose effects-heavy compositions sometimes felt leaden or overconsidered. "Blood White" and "Loudly" thrum along with Krautrock-y beats. Those rhythms, when mixed with SDIG's lite-psych jams, recall Caribou's The Milk of Human Kindness or Múm's whipped electro-folk. The band plays with contrast, often layering their catchiest and most concrete vocals ("Passionate Introverts [Dinosaurs]", "Failure") over their least tidy, far-flung compositions, while their most traditionally orchestrated moments ("The White Witch", "Close Chorus") receive affected cooing and wordless harmonizing.
If there's a real complaint to be lobbed at Ashes Grammar it's that the vocals are too often buried, and their mushmouth-y Liz Fraser-timbres too willingly blended into the pooled sonics. If SDIG didn't imbue so much of Ashes Grammar with a terse rhythmic presence, many of these songs would easily be swept into the ether.
Ashes Grammar is not for those who need their pop music spit-shined and robust. Instead, SDIG form their hooks stealthily, letting acoustic guitars and a steady patter rise from the ambient beginnings of "Starting at a Disadvantage" or repeating phrases amidst the disparate stretches of "Nitetime Rainbows". "Close Chorus" offers big, breaking hooks only after four minutes of morning chatter.
Ashes Grammar draws you in by offering outstanding moments in strange contexts; you'll re-listen to hear specific pieces even though you're unable to remember exactly when and how they occur. Ashes Grammar often feels like the result of a band who took Martha Reeves & the Vandellas' "Come and Get These Memories" in the most abstract, art-damaged way possible: nostalgic, jigsaw pop music from a group of writers strong enough to keep you humming and courageous enough to make you guess. | 2009-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mis Ojos Discos | September 15, 2009 | 8.3 | 9908f503-d833-4c04-8330-96c7417c32c2 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The eclectic, party-starting Southern California band make their most accessible record, with big hooks matching definitive statements. | The eclectic, party-starting Southern California band make their most accessible record, with big hooks matching definitive statements. | Chicano Batman: Invisible People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chicano-batman-invisible-people/ | Invisible People | As much as any American band, Chicano Batman represents the diversity of the American experience, the idea that no one thing exclusively belongs to any one group of people. A group of Latinos from Southern California with Central, North, and South American heritage, they grew up listening to as much Ruben Blades and Rigo Tovar as Dr. Dre and Warren G. For the past decade, they’ve honed a distinctly American take on Tropicália’s sun-drenched psychedelic grooves, evolving from the meandering jams of their eponymous debut to tightly crafted psych-funk jams with a political bent.
It’s this perspective that shapes their fourth LP, Invisible People. The album’s thesis—“…a statement of hope, a proclamation that we are all invisible people, and that despite race, class, or gender we can overcome our differences and stand together”—is admittedly a bit hokey, but the songs themselves speak with considerably more nuance and wit, decrying “prophets for profit” and reminding us that race is a construct. The record’s optimism is rooted in love, the subject of most of its songs, and in its rhythm section, which makes even the most macabre tracks danceable. Because while the band has long responded to the contemporary political climate—2017’s Freedom Is Free is a direct response to the idea that it isn’t—they come from a place of perseverance, a dogged resistance to succumbing to the forces of evil.
To that end, Chicano Batman songs typically start with a vibe, the pursuit of a specific feeling. Album opener “Color my Life” grew from a desire to make a song like Queen’s “Cool Cat” that boogied like Parliament. The demo for “Pink Elephant,” a song ostensibly about a predatory woman, was originally named “$40 Car Wash,” for the swagger that bassist Eduardo Arenas felt after getting an expensive car wash on his birthday. The result is a mish-mash of the ’90s hip-hop and R&B of their youth; think Ginuwine singing a D’Angelo song from a lowrider in a Warren G music video. With Chicanos. It’s a lot of fun.
But Invisible People is at its strongest when it gets confrontational. On the title track, Bardo Martinez’s croon bleeds all over the hook, and the verses plainly state axioms that only sound radical to those privileged by the status quo: “Invisible people, the truth is we’re all the same/The concept of race was implanted inside your brain….Invisible people, the truth is we take the blame/Fuck the system, it created so much pain.” It’s followed by “Manuel’s Story,” a frantic jaunt of a song driven by a spacey synth melody that belies its bleak narrative, which tells of an uncle who fled cartel violence to live in the U.S. It’s a vignette that distills the collateral damage of America’s drug war and Mexican immigration, a reminder of the people rendered invisible by capitalist political forces. Or maybe it’s just a tall tale your drunk tío likes to tell at the cookout. Whether it actually happened is mostly irrelevant.
The 2020 version of Chicano Batman has evolved from its original incarnation. The influences that shaped them are still present, but their perspective has shifted; this is the first Chicano Batman LP without a word of Spanish. They’ve ditched their most distinctive visual elements, like the wedding-band-chic of their matching ruffled suits—an homage to Latin ballad groups of the ’60s and ’70s—as well as Bardo’s shoulder-length mane. But while they may have shed some of the quirks that made them unique, Invisible People is far and away Chicano Batman’s most accessible record, with big, clean hooks to match definitive statements. A decade into writing songs together, they sound stronger than ever.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | May 7, 2020 | 7.4 | 9914e36e-0cec-4255-a95f-46890b9872d0 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Toronto-based singer stretches big-tent pop music in her own image on a messy but tuneful mixtape. | The Toronto-based singer stretches big-tent pop music in her own image on a messy but tuneful mixtape. | Elio: Elio’s Inferno | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elio-elios-inferno/ | Elio’s Inferno | Elio introduced herself in 2020 with a dreamy, surprisingly depressing bedroom pop song. “I just want my friends online to be around me when I die,” the 23-year-old artist sang in an airy upper register on “My Friends Online,” about hanging out in public while anxiety-ridden over virtual relationships. The song quickly tapped into generational internet ennui while simultaneously revealing the singer’s pop star ambitions. Elio’s studied songwriting and self-production come from an adolescence playing in a shoegaze band and listening to artists ranging from Ariana Grande to Mazzy Star, leading to a genre fusion that lends her sugary songs some alt-rock nerve. “My Friends Online” eventually earned her cosigns from phenoms like Troye Sivan and Charli XCX, the latter of whom joined her team as a creative consultant to provide the Toronto-based singer with a sounding board for new music. The management choice paid off: Elio’s stickiest songs, like last year’s irrepressible “Charger,” now amplify her relatable themes with Charli-lite hooks. But it’s Elio’s cool delivery, swerving from a conversational lilt to a bratty shout, that makes her music appealing in its own right.
On new mixtape Elio’s Inferno, she steps toward elastic, party-starting pop with a bolder sense of humor. Shaking off some of the more downtempo, Clairo-like balladry of last year’s Can You Hear Me Now? EP, Elio instead focuses on how far she can stretch big-tent pop music in her own image. Elio co-wrote and co-produced all of the songs here, a few of which zero in specifically on her experiences in the industry. The swaggering “Typecast” adopts a lurching beat and menacing vocal delivery to bluntly chew out critics who pigeonhole her. “No, I don’t wanna write like that/I checked the vibe and you didn’t pass,” she sings matter-of-factly. She ratchets up the bravado on the strident “Godly Behavior,” whose production sounds lifted from Britney’s Darkchild era. Elio shoots off boasts about her self-worth that double down on her newfound clout: “Want a feature on the next release/Wanna party with me at Charli’s,” she taunts, offering a winking self-awareness that freely indulges in the image people may hold of her.
The bright spots on Elio’s Inferno are occasionally overshadowed by its more overwieldy lyrics. The Harry Styles name drop on “Inferno” immediately dates it, while the laidback, guitar-laced “New and Improved” aims for self-improvement after a breakup through a misguided hodgepodge of schmaltzy metaphors. Elio attempts to walk a fine lyrical line; even “Vitamins,” with its charming, winding melodies, falls victim to a distractingly overwrought chorus: “I want you the way I take my vitamins,” she coos alarmingly, “Every day or I die a little.”
Elio succeeds when she dials toward a brighter, more featherlight style of pop, like the fizzy club kiss-off “9 Lives” or the delectable love song “Superimpose.” Both tap into the sped-up rush of emotion she’s trying to well up in listeners while offering tuneful dance-pop in the process. Elio’s Inferno isn’t breaking much new ground, but it’s a pleasurable confection from an upstart eager to make her claim, however messy that process might be. | 2022-08-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | August 5, 2022 | 6.7 | 9915fe37-2ce6-4963-9a32-aff0d313ba25 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The debut of guitarist Rachel Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rogers is unconventionally well-formed. Their tightly-wound art punk unspools their anxiety and turns it into something worth celebrating. | The debut of guitarist Rachel Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rogers is unconventionally well-formed. Their tightly-wound art punk unspools their anxiety and turns it into something worth celebrating. | Sacred Paws: Strike a Match | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23043-strike-a-match/ | Strike a Match | Not even a minute into Strike a Match—debut LP from London-to-Glasgow duo Sacred Paws—and Rachel Aggs is already bouncing back from some minor slip-up. “It’s okay, it won’t matter in a month, in a year,” she reminds herself. A few songs later, she's on the bus, just a few stops from home, cursing herself for skipping breakfast. Hunger turns to worry; worry consumes all. That’s anxiety for you: intrusive, all-consuming, and ultimately sort of mundane. If Aggs can’t shake her woes, she’s gonna do the next best thing and bring ’em to the party.
And Strike a Match, frayed nerves and all, is one hell of a shindig. At nearly every turn, the rainclouds in Aggs’ head are temporarily lifted by shots of radiance. Over blacktop-scorching, genre-darting grooves, Aggs and singer/drummer Eilidh Rogers—fellow alum of Glasgow janglers Golden Grrrls—chronicle every skinned knee and dropped ice cream cone.
A half-day’s ride on the Megabus separates Londoner Aggs and Glaswegian Eilidh Rogers. In interviews, Rogers always seems to be trying to get Aggs to move up to Scotland so they can pal around more. They are friends first, bandmates second, and that off-record tightness lights up Strike a Match—they sing with the informality of flatmates doing dishes with the radio on, crooning not really with but towards each other. Rarely do they seem to be reading off the same lyric sheet, and when they do, they favor these woozy, out-of-whack harmonies that sit rather peculiarly against the album’s dialed-in grooves.
A dozen listens in, and I’m poring over Strike a Match, attempting to work out the couple dozen lines in which Aggs and Rogers’ intersecting vocals have blotted each other out. But these loosely tethered vocals function as a kind of mental cross-check. Aggs plays the pragmatist just trying to keep her head down and make her transfer; Rogers is the intruder, that uninvited nogoodnik who pops up to remind you of everything else you're doing wrong. These exchanges really get at what living with anxiety is like: You’re just bopping along, minding your business, when all of a sudden, some past failing or future worry starts crowding out the present. Though this could easily turn to solipsism or self-pity, Aggs and Rogers mostly just try to keep things moving. The anxiety’s present and accounted for, but if they can help it, they aren’t about to let it get in the way of their good time.
Compared with Aggs’ other projects—the austerity-minded Shopping, the thrill jockeys of Trash Kit—Strike a Match is brighter, punchier, its charms a little closer to the surface. Whereas past Aggs projects felt like they’d been recorded in a rock tumbler, Strike a Match bounds out of the speakers. Producer Tony Doogan’s done wonders in burnishing Aggs’ oft-spendthrift sound without dulling its off-the-cuff impact.
Behind the kit, the looser-limbed Rogers is every bit Aggs’ equal. They urge each other on without crowding each other out, leaving each other plenty of room to finish each other’s sentences. Influences run an impressive gamut—the post-punk/new wave convergence, smartly self-lacerating twee, yelpy mid-’00s indie, Papa Wemba, you name it—but the closest analog is probably the last couple Talking Heads albums, when they’d so thoroughly absorbed all their worldly forerunners that they mostly wound up sounding just like themselves. Sacred Paws have arrived, on the back of a troubled groove: a little preoccupied, maybe, but ready to dance. | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rock Action | March 30, 2017 | 7.7 | 99164328-7bf0-400b-8de1-d9d02b396dc8 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Philadelphia-based experimental pop musician nails a sunny, carefree vibe somewhere between creepy and sweet. | The Philadelphia-based experimental pop musician nails a sunny, carefree vibe somewhere between creepy and sweet. | ARTHUR: Hair of the Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arthur-hair-of-the-dog/ | Hair of the Dog | The experimental Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter ARTHUR once explained that while he often sets out to write songs that sound like the Beach Boys or Gram Parsons, “they end up sounding like Daniel Johnston if he was a cyborg.” His music delights in pulling the rug out from underneath you, so that cheery, bittersweet tunes like “Simple Song” turn on jarring lyrics like “All I know, and all that’s clear to me/Is that everything ends, and everyone leaves.” Time and again, his sunny pop melodies prove to be a Trojan Horse for his brain-warping sonic experiments and existential angst.
Hair of the Dog arrives roughly 18 months after ARTHUR’s debut, Woof Woof, and as the title would suggest, the new record very much picks up where the last left off: it has the same mixture of whimsical, jangling guitars, eerie lyrics, and stomach-drop production maneuvers. But Shea has become more ambitious. The expansive, chaotic “Feel Good” recalls the stretched-elastic percussion of SOPHIE, and the cascading, cavernous beats of “Something Sweet” suit Bronx rapper Caleb Giles’ understated verse. The scrappy psychedelic funk of “Epic” and “I Don’t Want To Talk To You” recall Steve Lacy’s melancholic lo-fi songwriting.
Sometimes, these ideas end too abruptly—as with the too-brief, shimmering “Fatalist”—or are expressed too bluntly. The heavy-handed lyrics of “Biz,” which take aim at the superficiality of the music industry (“Your manager says that you look great/With dollar signs written on your face”), feel at odds with the gentle surrealism of something like “No Tengo,” Shea’s best song to date, which does much more work with oddly touching, evocative images like “I can't help but feel small when she kisses my head.”
Shea’s music seems to exist in multiple genres and time periods at once, and his lyrics frequently evoke a kind of purgatory. Despite his sing-song, carefree style, the protagonist of Shea’s songs seems to be perpetually trapped, whether that’s “inside a jar of Formaldehyde” (“Something Sweet”), or waiting for someone to come home and save him from loneliness (“William Penn”). The latter song is buoyant even as it takes on a creepy dimension, threatening: “You can’t get away from me!” When ARTHUR nails these uneasy moments, the effect is like looking in a funhouse mirror: what you see is recognizable, yet somehow terrifying, and you can’t avert your eyes. | 2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honeymoon | May 20, 2020 | 7.4 | 9916f64c-aa5e-4598-88ce-386fc4e3af01 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
On his latest, EDM titan deadmau5 continues to hint that he might have a better, richer album in him. Once more, he has not made it. | On his latest, EDM titan deadmau5 continues to hint that he might have a better, richer album in him. Once more, he has not made it. | deadmau5: W:/2016ALBUM/ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22681-w2016album/ | W:/2016ALBUM/ | There aren’t many electronic dance musicians more cantankerous than deadmau5. His beefs are legion, his tweetstorms legendary. And the scrawny, tattooed Torontonian’s self-loathing is nearly as famous as his short fuse. Sometimes, the self-deprecating potshots—making fun of his own costume, admitting that most EDM performances are pure pantomime—scan as refreshingly down-to-earth takes on an industry full of metastasized egos and virtually no self-awareness. But sometimes, his snark takes a darker tone. Just a year ago, he threatened that he was thinking about “killing off” the deadmau5 “bullshit” and starting over. “fuck it. why not,” he tweeted, sounding not unlike a man standing on the railing of a bridge.
But where many neurotic artists’ work actively benefits from their neuroses, the same can’t necessarily be said of deadmau5, aka Joel Zimmerman. His music isn’t without its strengths: It can be catchy and immersive, and it’s remarkably well-engineered, packed with satisfying oomph and spine-tingling timbres. And for all the shit that deadmau5 has gotten for being, well, deadmau5, his music has often been markedly less corny than 99% of mainstream EDM. The best deadmau5 tracks burrow into the kind of long, dark groove that has characterized four-to-the-floor dance music since the very beginning; for listeners, they’re more about losing yourself in the beat than gawking at the bozo onstage. (That’s ironic, given his mouse-head gimmick.) Nevertheless, his music tends to be relatively uncomplicated, conflict- and friction-free—in short, far more polite that you’d expect from a guy who smokes like a chimney, swears like a sailor, and, you know, wears a gigantic, light-up cartoon mouse head on stage.
Perhaps it’s this disconnect between his music and his persona that led deadmau5 to trash his latest album upon its release. “i don’t even like it,” he tweeted. “it was like... so fucking rushed / slapped together.” Later, despite “orders from above” not to bad-mouth his own work, he explained to Rolling Stone that it wasn’t written “from start to finish; it’s over a year’s worth of work that doesn’t correlate. It's not *The *fucking Wall!” (Remarkably, this isn’t the first time he’s criticized one of his own records in almost identical language. Of 2012’s >album title goes here<, he lamented the fact that his “tour-heavy year” had stood in the way of him sitting down and making something “from start to finish like The Wall.”)
Still, the album isn’t without its pleasures. The opening “4ware” is wistful and driving, with a pinging lead reminiscent of Eric Prydz or Gui Boratto’s progressive trance. The nu-disco number “Cat Thruster” manages the perfect balance of slouching cool and giddy kitsch, playing legato synth riffs and ersatz electric bass off harp flourishes and clever chord changes; if someone told you it was a new Todd Terje tune, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. And the grinding “Deus Ex Machina” sounds a lot like the kind of gravelly, psychedelic techno that Robag Wruhme and the Wighnomy Brothers used to be known for.
Some songs are more lackluster. Both “2448” and “No Problem” tear pages from the Daft Punk playbook, but the former wastes a perfectly good synth riff on a formulaic big-room stomp whose slow rise in pitch mimics a trick he already tried on 2010’s “Bad Selection,” while the heavy-handed touch of the latter tune makes Justice’s most lunkheaded jams look like surgical implements. And the unrequited-love song “Let Go” aims for bittersweet release, but it gets hung up on the earnest-yet-anodyne vocals of the young singer and producer Grabbitz.
Even on some of the stronger tracks, Zimmerman seems to be going through the motions. His synthesizers have never sounded richer, but once introduced, his sounds don’t morph and his themes don’t evolve; loops simply loop, unvarying and uninflected, and once a track gets through its obligatory mid-way breakdown, there's really no point in sticking around for three or four minutes of reprise. His drums, meanwhile, favor cleanliness over character; the disco-leaning “Cat Thruster” has more to do with abstract ideas of disco than the music’s actual essence.
What’s most frustrating is that Zimmerman clearly has it in him to make a better, more exciting record. “Glish,” a three-way merger between IDM, digi-dub, and skweee, could pass for Aphex Twin, and “Snowcone” is a perfectly serviceable Boards of Canada tribute—not a goal in and of itself, necessarily, but at least a stepping stone toward greener pastures. Best of all is “Whelk Then,” which mixes thundering breakbeats and glistening synths until they swirl like the interior of a snowglobe. Finally, here on the album’s penultimate cut—it would have made for a killer close if they hadn't tacked on an unnecessary, 12-minute edit of “Let Go”—we’re given a sense of what one suspects Zimmerman really wants to do. So why isn’t he doing it? What's strange about W:/2016ALBUM/ is that it’s Zimmerman's first album since buying himself out of his contract with EMI; in theory, that means he should finally be beholden to no one but himself. Yet he still sounds like he’s hemmed in by others’ expectations of what deadmau5 is supposed to deliver, and who deadmau5 is supposed to be. Maybe it really is time for him to build a better mousetrap once and for all, and see what happens next. | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | mau5trap | December 16, 2016 | 5.9 | 991dc246-ac6a-4eb4-9a3b-eee639c3fa19 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Selena Gomez’s third album is a smooth and confident pop record that delves deep—but not that deep—into heartbreak, resilience, and self-love. | Selena Gomez’s third album is a smooth and confident pop record that delves deep—but not that deep—into heartbreak, resilience, and self-love. | Selena Gomez: Rare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/selena-gomez-rare/ | Rare | Selena Gomez was reborn from a hermetically-sealed fantasyland back into reality when, in 2015, she released her second solo record, Revival. It was the pop star’s beginning of a transition away from Disney incorruptibility towards songwriting that better represented the crossroads at which she found herself. Unlike the overproduced electropop of her 2013 debut, Stars Dance, Revival reflected her expanding sexuality, power, and interest in telling her own stories; Gomez actualized these objectives by posing nearly nude on the album cover, serving among its executive producers, and working with specific songwriters to help translate her experiences. As she proclaimed on the title track, it was her “time to butterfly.”
Over the next five years, Gomez’s journey towards emancipation would be challenged by serious struggles with anxiety, depression, and chronic illness that sidelined her music career and threatened her life. But in 2017, the same year she underwent a risky kidney transplant due to complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, Gomez shared a series of genre-curious singles including the Talking Heads-sampling “Bad Liar.” After checking the cultural pulse, the then most-followed woman on Instagram logged off, removing herself from the public eye once more. Besides popping up for the occasional movie role or fashion collaboration, Gomez focused on herself. “I just needed to let my old self go,” Gomez told Zane Lowe this month.
When Gomez shared the ballad “Lose You to Love Me” last fall, it seemed like the work she put into her physical and emotional wellness had clicked. The song looks at the ways she lost herself in a relationship and solemnly promises to never make that mistake again. While dropping hints at which supposedly “Sorry” singer had been dragging her down, Gomez reclaimed her own narrative. Her anguished soul-searching struck a nerve: “Lose You to Love Me” became Gomez’s first Billboard No. 1. Though the song’s drama is an exception, its moral of losing love and gaining self is the guiding ethos of her third record, Rare. While none of these 13 songs attempt the subtle weirdness of “Bad Liar” and the emotional thesis—self-love!—can be a bit one-note, Rare is the 27-year-old’s most cohesive record to date. It feels spiritually in tune with the woman who once cheerfully told Vogue that people would be surprised to learn how much she loves “depressing things.”
But Rare’s celebration of autonomy, resilience, and growth is overwhelmingly upbeat. After waving goodbye to a lover who does not respect her worth on the blissed-out self-titled opener, Gomez cleanses her heart with an electro-pop party on “Dance Again.” Dancing through pain is by now a tried-and-true motif in pop music, but the sentiment holds extra weight for Gomez, who undoubtedly knows from her lupus how it feels to be powerless over your body. But Rare doesn’t dwell on heavy realities like chronic illness or the ice-cold grip of depression or, really, any sadness lingering after heartache. When Gomez looks back on toxic relationships wracked with mistrust or self-sabotaging anxiety spirals, her perspective is more grateful than regretful, as if to say that everything in life is a valuable lesson.
Gomez’s biggest hurdle as a musician has long been her voice. Low and breathy, her understated vocals are better suited for intimate contemplation than big, belted catharsis. For the first time, Gomez seems to have a grasp on her range and mainly sticks to a husky, bedroom-eyes murmur instead of attempting bravado. Her best performance arrives on the muted, throbbing “Vulnerable.” Though the wordplay can be a bit heavy-handed—“If I let you cross my finish line, then would you wanna make it?”—Gomez sounds firm and assured even when she dips into a whisper. Guided by a vast team of songwriters and producers including Swedish duo Mattman & Robin, Simon Says, and Finneas (of the Eilish brood), Gomez dips her toes into some du jour sounds: “Ring” does a diet-“Havana” with a “Smooth” riff thrown in for good measure; “Fun” aims for a “Bad Liar” redux with a snappy bassline, handclaps, and bubbly frivolity; “Cut You Off” plays with downtempo funk and a familiar yoo-oo-oo chorus. Notably, the songwriting duo of Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, whose melodic playfulness was all over Revival, only appear together on “Lose You” and its clubby companion single “Look At Her Now.”
But Gomez’s malleability can also be her downfall. Though she has a writing credit on every song, a majority of the tracks on Rare’s second half feel impersonal and underwhelming. These songs feel like they could be sung by anyone, and you can’t help but wonder what Gomez saw in them. On “People You Know,” she avoids confronting any real feelings of regret by wallowing beneath a frigid, tiptoeing beat and stale chorus. The trumpet-tinged kiss-off “Kinda Crazy” feels totally inconsequential. Any reference to the relationship-in-question’s halcyon days is so submerged in tired figures of speech about fire and water that their actual separation feels anticlimactic. What is meant to be a seductive liaison on “Crowded Room”—which features a middling appearance from rapper 6LACK and borrows a feeling from Cassie circa 2006—comes off as lethargic and forced.
Rare’s insipid gear shift culminates with its closer, “A Sweeter Place.” Despite his brief contribution, the song feels dominated by the melodramatic-stoner aura of its guest, Kid Cudi, all Auto-Tune and heavy synths. If only the song focused on unpacking one of Rare’s most compelling—albeit cheesy—lines: “Holding hands with the darkness and knowing my heart is allowed.” Sadly, this intriguing notion of finding dignity in depression is erased by a painfully vapid chorus: “Is there a place where I can hide away/Red lips, French kiss my worries all away/There must be a sweeter place/We can sugarcoat the taste.”
“Vulnerable ain’t easy, believe me, but I go there,” Gomez proclaims near the beginning of Rare. Maybe so. But it’s difficult to come away from Rare with any real perspective on who Gomez is other than that she doesn’t want to be the person she was, whoever that similarly mysterious shadow was. Unfortunately for pop stars everywhere, exposing your soul does not equal examining it. Gomez tries, but never quite succeeds at doing either here. Her introspection can only go so deep when it’s paired with sleek, easy songwriting that lets her slip by, just another specter.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | January 14, 2020 | 6.8 | 991f21ad-d09e-4a4f-90d6-e599fccc85b5 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
An in-demand beatmaker who has worked with Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and more, the producer finally releases his solo debut—a dynamic record bursting with soul samples and complicated emotions. | An in-demand beatmaker who has worked with Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and more, the producer finally releases his solo debut—a dynamic record bursting with soul samples and complicated emotions. | Kenny Beats: Louie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kenny-beats-louie/ | Louie | Kenny Beats has his eye on eternity. Over the last five years, the 31-year-old producer has emerged as one of hip-hop’s most in-demand beatmakers, an ideal collaborator for artists looking to meld genres and eschew chart trends. He’s released one-off singles with Dominic Fike, JPEGMAFIA, and slowthai, made collaborative projects with Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and Rico Nasty, and created a content empire that’s lofted him into rarified air: He’s Gen Z’s Rick Rubin, a Twitch streamer’s Madlib. On his YouTube series “The Cave,” he makes beats in real time for artists like Mac DeMarco and Doja Cat; on his Twitch channel, he hosts beat battles, gifts high-level recording equipment to aspiring musicians, and offers practical advice and motivating pep talks. “These communities are things I never dreamed about when my biggest dream was [to] have a platinum plaque, make a million dollars,” Kenny said in a recent interview. “My dream now is: Holy shit, I can have this be self-sufficient way after I’m dead.”
Kenny had yet to drop a solo project until now. The classic producer compilation tape didn’t appeal to him; why gather a bunch of verses from famous rappers when he’d already been doing this for years, across a variety of platforms? “I always said that I wouldn’t do a solo album because I didn’t have anything to say,” he wrote in advance of Louie, his full-length debut. “Finally, I did.” After his father was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, he found the inspiration he’d been looking for. Louie pays homage to Kenny’s father—a former broadcaster—through radio-DJ-style transitions and old recordings of his voice, but the album’s no requiem; it’s a joyous, funky, and texturally dynamic record bursting with soul samples, warm studio instrumentation, and a range of complicated emotions. Although plenty of features are sprinkled throughout, each guest works in service of Kenny’s larger mission: to create a universe both solemn and celebratory, comprising abstract rhythms and melodic detours, unexpected transitions and cohesive eclecticism. With each listen, the universe expands, unveiling new details and surprises lodged within his sample-based beats.
Early on, Louie soaks in the sun, assembling songs from pitched vocals, mangled guitars, warm Rhodes, and live horns. “Hold My Head” blends an exuberant singing sample with high-octane drums and a string of inscrutable bars from Pink Siifu. Two other early highlights, “So They Say” and “Hooper,” mesh giddy percussive grooves with retro soul harmonies. These songs don’t climax as much as they constantly bend into new, playful variations: a waft of wistful keys, a jolt of digitized effects, a barely audible vocal chant that propels the beat toward conclusion. Even when Kenny does his best J Dilla and Madlib impressions—like on the Shades of Blue-indebted “Moire” or the Donuts-inspired “Drop 10”—his creations are idiosyncratic. A quirky, bouncy bassline, a crisp doubled snare, a custom-made saw synth; Louie’s stuffed with little treasures like this, subtle choices that feel like diamonds when you unearth them.
Though the album is mostly instrumental, Kenny incorporates his guests in unique and deceptive ways. On the mid-album standout “Still,” JPEGMAFIA shouts energetic catchphrases over a simple drum line and tender backing vocals from Omar Apollo. Just as JPEG launches into a verse, though, the beat cuts out and stalls into a grainy sample. “Get Around” features Dijon, whose layered cries undergird twangy guitars and musky breaks, his voice a mere stitch within the song’s intricate tapestry. It’s rare for producers to deploy vocal talent in such an oblique manner, but Kenny weds his crate-digging affinities with his collaborative impulses, adding the artists’ most compelling strengths to his overflowing cauldron of sounds and samples.
The sequencing on Louie leaves something to be desired. The first 10 songs feel like their own contained album, wrapping up with the elegiac “Eternal,” which flips a Shira Small deep cut into a gorgeous ode to the afterlife. The record’s B-side more actively weaves in recordings of Kenny’s father, adopting an FM-radio framework and musings on childhood and the past that are rarely seen in the preceding songs. It’s a forgivable incongruity, though, because the beats in the back half are consistently excellent and build upon the record’s foundation. “Really Really” is another flawless emulation of Dilla, while “Rotten” mimics a Voodoo-era D’Angelo number. There’s not a skip in sight; each song collages into the next, changing in pace and tone while cycling through obscure samples and inventive backbeats.
Louie closes on “Hot Hand,” a percussive, chant-laden song that synthesizes the emotions burbling below the album’s surface. It’s designed to make you clap, stomp, dance—anything that lets you lose yourself inside the elasticity of the rhythm. What’s more healing, more affirming, than this sort of communion? Kenny thought he needed to have something to say before putting out a record; turns out the message was always there, just waiting to be channeled into a series of ecstatic grooves. | 2022-09-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | XL | September 7, 2022 | 7.6 | 99359989-4546-42aa-bceb-1a541ae5d3f0 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Yo La Tengo’s second EP in recent months finds them resuming their covers jukebox niche, weaving together selections as unlikely as a 1940s blues oddity and as recognizable as a Bob Dylan classic. | Yo La Tengo’s second EP in recent months finds them resuming their covers jukebox niche, weaving together selections as unlikely as a 1940s blues oddity and as recognizable as a Bob Dylan classic. | Yo La Tengo: Sleepless Night EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-la-tengo-sleepless-night-ep/ | Sleepless Night EP | How many Yo La Tengo deep cuts did you enjoy for years before realizing they were covers? If you’ve been a fan for long enough, chances are it’s a few. The trio’s ability to morph into a kind of living covers jukebox is nearly as legendary as their propensity for making non-Jews care about Hanukkah, and if you always thought “You Can Have It All” was an original, you’re not the only one—it’s a testament to the band’s knack for taking any unsung gem and rearranging it until it’s unmistakably a Yo La Tengo song.
Sleepless Night, the band’s second standalone EP of 2020, finds them resuming this curatorial role, weaving together covers as unlikely as a 1940s blues oddity and as recognizable as a Bob Dylan classic alongside one stray original. Unlike the recent ambient workout We Have Amnesia Sometimes, which felt like a time capsule from quarantine, this one is more of an odds-and-sods collection, with recordings stretching back 10 or even 20 years. (The tracks were originally chosen in collaboration with Japanese visual artist Yoshitomo Nara, and previously appeared as part of a limited-edition catalog for his Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit.) Yet it never feels patchwork: The tone is reliably lovely and hushed, reflective of Yo La Tengo’s recent instinct for responding to outer turmoil with a heightened commitment to dreamy tranquility.
A little nostalgia, too, is warranted during such destabilizing times; much of Sleepless Night’s tracklist reflects Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley’s 1960s–’70s youth, well before the indie-rock explosion. Guest guitarist (and YLT alum) Dave Schramm nails the jingle-jangle Rickenbacker sound on a surprisingly faithful cover of the Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” a song Kaplan first encountered when his mom took him to see Easy Rider in 1969, while Hubley takes the lead on a sighing, leisurely cover of Ronnie Lane’s 1974 gem "Roll on Babe,” first written by forgotten folk legend Derroll Adams. Meanwhile, the trio’s three-part harmony is the star on “Blues Stay Away,” an excavation of a 1949 Delmore Brothers standard made electric by NRBQ in 1972. Yo La Tengo’s take, recorded in 2011, is more aligned with the song’s downbeat blues origin.
The main attraction, though, is a blissful dream-pop recalibration of Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Recorded for a John Peel radio show, this version is a newly unearthed recording from the And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out era and it shares that album’s gorgeous nocturnal ambience. Hubley replaces Dylan’s straining wheeze with an understated murmur, and her bandmates swap out the “thin, wild mercury sound” of mid-’60s Dylan for a warm, droney hum. It’s a worthy addition to the band’s recurring Dylan obsession, which dates back to 1989’s President Yo La Tengo.
For the most part, though, Sleepless Night feels like an extension of a different record: namely, the band’s 2015 covers-etc. album Stuff Like That There, which itself was a loose sequel to 1990’s similarly spirited Fakebook. As on those releases, the selections are eclectic, the tone is subdued, and there’s not a squalling whammy bar in sight. Only the obligatory new original—a fuzzy and indistinct mood piece called “Bleeding”—feels a bit slight. As for the rest of this 19-minute release, there’s nothing here that particularly surprises or reveals a new side of Yo La Tengo, but there’s nothing that could conceivably disappoint a fan of the group’s jukebox side, either. For most of us, it’s probably the closest we’ll get to a Hanukkah show this year.
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. | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 13, 2020 | 7.2 | 9938171e-efb1-4723-bac8-8cc06ffeab82 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The jangly San Franciscan band the Mantles have never seemed that interested in consistent release schedules, touring, or otherwise playing the indie career game. On their third release in six years, the group's breezy, rickety pop has the poignant feel of a retreat from reality. | The jangly San Franciscan band the Mantles have never seemed that interested in consistent release schedules, touring, or otherwise playing the indie career game. On their third release in six years, the group's breezy, rickety pop has the poignant feel of a retreat from reality. | The Mantles: All Odds End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21032-all-odds-end/ | All Odds End | All Odds End, the Mantles' third proper full-length in six years, is full of scenes of stasis: Vocalist Michael Olivares sings of baths and bedridden Sunday mornings, delivers a paean to standing—"all day"—in a doorframe, and somewhat sarcastically laments missing his ride down south to Los Angeles. It ends with "Stay". The thematic focus on idleness befits the Mantles' breezy but rickety pop, and though the lyrics rarely despair, All Odds End is nevertheless saturated with a quiet, interior melancholy.
The Mantles, who formed in the mid-'00s, first garnered notice with their eponymous 2009 debut. The record mediated indie-pop, pastoral '60s psych, and the various locales known for jangling in the 1980s, all liberally swathed in tape machine gauze. Along with the Siltbreeze connection, the production pegged the Mantles as "lo-fi," a reductive category that was particularly ill-fitting in their case. After a downtick in output following the turn of the decade, 2013's Long Enough to Leave reaffirmed what the Mantles always sounded like: a band besotted with too many disciples of the Velvet Underground to list but defined by its immutable eccentricities.
That's even more so the case with All Odds End, where Olivares' ragged vocal melodies stumble between notes, emphasizing flair and character over the conventions of pitch. If on earlier material Olivares risked overstraining his delivery, here he's more settled, inclined to deadpan instead of whimper a snappy phrase for effect. Meanwhile, the expanded lineup augments his voice with greater presence and texture. It's still scrappy—with cymbals that fall like trashcan lids and an overall reverence for basic root notes—but while the Mantles continue to prize sparseness and restraint, All Odds End sounds especially confident in that decision. Many indie pop songs endear with their sense of delicate, precarious construction, but here the individually shambolic parts coalesce into a substantial whole. All Odds End suggests an ensemble of players who don't need to hold back; they choose to, together.
Olivares' metaphors for resisting change and liminal places usually have a lackadaisical tone, but the lyrical focus connects to how the band has drifted toward anachronism. Many of the Mantles' early regional peers have dissolved or resettled in L.A.—which "Best Sides" deals with in veiled terms—and the group never demonstrated much interest in consistent release schedules, touring, or otherwise playing the indie career game. Indeed, as Oakland and San Francisco undergo rapid and reckless redevelopment, it's easy to hear All Odds End as a defensive retreat inward, an attempt to suspend time. As a futile endeavor in reality, it's sad. As a listening experience, it's effective. | 2015-10-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | October 13, 2015 | 7.5 | 9939126c-485b-4f17-90dd-77d1dacec060 | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | null |
The best parts of techno group DUST's Agony Planet recreate those transcendent moments where the DJ finds the sweet spot as close to the edge of blowing out the P.A. as they can get, when all the individual spirals of drug-altered moods on the floor line up and the whole dingy space seems to lift off from Earth. | The best parts of techno group DUST's Agony Planet recreate those transcendent moments where the DJ finds the sweet spot as close to the edge of blowing out the P.A. as they can get, when all the individual spirals of drug-altered moods on the floor line up and the whole dingy space seems to lift off from Earth. | DUST: Agony Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21431-agony-planet/ | Agony Planet | The throwback house and techno that forms the foundation of DUST's Agony Planet has long been overrun with producers aiming for the crispest, clearest, most audiophile-quality sounds the human mind can conceive of, but the Brooklyn trio goes in the opposite direction. They have coated their debut album in a fine layer of hiss and sonic grime, and if you’ve been around dance music for long, the murkiness might remind you of a time before the post-scarcity age of streaming music, when rave devotees would trade cassette dubs of rare 12''s.
Or it might remind you of an overdriven P.A., pushed far past its capabilities to power some kind of under-the-radar, probably illegal rave. Coming out of the Brooklyn DIY electronic music scene, that’s something DUST's members–John Barclay, Mike Sherburn, and Greem Jellyfish–know all about. Barclay in particular is a tireless advocate for pre-EDM, pre-superclub rave ethics, which he wove deeply into the events he threw at already-legendary spaces like 285 Kent (which he helped open, and where DUST was among the last acts to play before it was shuttered) and Trip House, a run-down Bushwick mansion that he turned into a 20-room party palace. More recently he’s gone legit with the Bossa Nova Civic Club, whose shadowy back room has become a mecca for hardcore house and techno freaks.
Barclay’s ventures as a promoter suggest not just nostalgia for a time when dance music was still dangerous, but a fairly successful attempt to yank that kind of seductively undomesticated energy out of the good old days and into the here and now. Agony Planet fits into that scheme nicely. The music has a raw edge that comes part from the redlined production and part from the relentless body-jacking four-on-the-floor beats and stroboscopic synth arpeggios, as well as tempos that feel pitched up a few percentages by the type of DJ who likes to test their audience’s physical endurance.
Singer Greem Jellyfish, a multimedia artist who designs her own surreal stage costumes, helps push the album’s manic energy over into madness. Inverting the concept of a disco diva, she yelps, shrieks, and moans her vocal parts, drawing out the dark, slightly sadistic quality woven into the beats, and really all good techno in general. Her frequently wordless vocalizing suggests someone who’s lost her mind so thoroughly to the music that she’s gone post-verbal.
When Agony Planet really comes together—and it doesn't, always, but it's a hard spot to locate— on tracks like "Alien Prey" and "Tell Me," the effect is downright magical. It can transport you to an unrehabbed industrial loft or maybe even the abandoned loading dock where I went to one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life, and recreates those transcendent moments where the DJ finds the sweet spot as close to the edge of blowing out the P.A. as they can get and all the individual spirals of drug-altered moods on the floor line up and the whole dingy space seems to lift off from Earth. And then it’ll make you want to go out this weekend and find that same sensation all over again. | 2016-01-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | 2MR | January 18, 2016 | 6.8 | 993a9488-62b0-4e19-b302-57858d22a3de | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Teen R&B oddball Corbin Smidzik (fka Spooky Black) has refocused his energy. Working with Weeknd collaborator Doc McKinney, he hones his vocal talent, even going for some black metal-inspired screams. | Teen R&B oddball Corbin Smidzik (fka Spooky Black) has refocused his energy. Working with Weeknd collaborator Doc McKinney, he hones his vocal talent, even going for some black metal-inspired screams. | Corbin: Mourn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/corbin-mourn/ | Mourn | Corbin Smidzik has been off the grid. Transforming from a turtlenecked, viral R&B oddball into a reclusive crooner—one well equipped for apocalyptic times—isn’t something he could pull off while maintaining a Twitter presence or popping up at festivals. So into the woods he went, a young man wrestling with an unwieldy public persona. In 2013, when he was 15-years-old, Corbin first appeared online with Forest, an amateurish rap project released under his since-abandoned Spooky Black pseudonym that showcased his ear for ghoulish effects. It scanned as an Americanized take on Yung Lean’s #sadboy opus Unknown Death 2002: decent production bogged down by crude and violent lyrics that flyover state teens were high on after the Odd Future boom. He followed that several months later with Black Silk and abandoned the rap angle entirely, instead bringing to light his incredibly powerful voice, one that stirred up a cult following in short order. Combining the young Minnesotan’s organic vocal talent with delightfully low-budget music video treatments, songs like “Without U” and “DJ Khaled Is My Father” earned Corbin fans in the inner-circles of Drake and the Weeknd.
Now working with Toronto-by-way-of-Minneapolis producer Doc McKinney, who teamed with the Weeknd during the House of Balloons era, Corbin has honed his sound and refocused his energy. Gone are the days where a mention of the Spooky Black moniker merited a chuckle and an inquiry into just how serious we should take this teen with a bizarre aesthetic. Under his government name, Corbin is nearly an entirely different entity. He is driven by paranoia and isolation to some Vantablack levels of doom and gloom.
Corbin’s new album Mourn follows a loose narrative wherein our protagonist builds a bunker for himself and his lover to wait out the apocalypse. The protagonist passes away in a plane crash before things go belly up, and his lover dies alone. If you’re looking for a silver lining in the plot, you won’t find one, but the record does have some positive attributes elsewhere. Most notably, Corbin continues to carve out his signature sound vocally, cornering the market on world-weary vocal strain as an R&B approach.
Mourn is a difficult album to pin down, a piece of music that is both stylistically transcendent and lyrically half-baked. Some songs find Corbin pushing his vocal chords to their limits with guttural screams so packed with emotion you can feel the veins popping out of his neck as he digs through his soul with a rusty pickaxe. Corbin has toyed with this vocal style before, like on the Leaving EP track “Echoes in My Mind,” but he’s never exerted himself this far, to such a viscerally painful threshold. On other songs, like “Giving Up,” he cuts through with a throbbing baritone that shakes the spine. Opener “ICE BOY” is a standout, starting synthy and syncopated with Corbin’s hybrid growl-moan that crescendos into a mushroom cloud of emotion when he wails through the second chorus. “Oh I’m on ice/Can’t you tell?” he howls, with an arctic vocal sneer he credits to listening to black metal during the recording process.
“Find your bite tonight,” Corbin rasps on “Revenge Song,” a track about exacting grim vengeance on a rapist. The subject matter is bleak—a trip into the fractured mindset of a man beset by anger and grief over his true love’s story of being assaulted. The song ends with the couple visiting a house at the bottom of a hill in the dark of night to end the life of the man who abused her. The grim tale is matched by the operatic treatment it receives from Smidzik, who sings like he’s worn his voice down to the last, crying about the wrongs done to his lover, himself, and the world at large. On “Giving Up,” he drops in to say, “Had enough of this world, now I’m giving up,” emerging from the song’s nearly 40-second intro like a specter from the back of a cave. Throughout Mourn, this lyric feels most like Corbin’s mission statement. Take a look around, he implores the listener, because clearly things aren’t going the way they should be.
Tonally, this material feels like a manifesto of sorts. But there’s still room for Corbin to grow. With pulsating, gothic production throughout from Shlohmo and D33J, Mourn is an end-times tale told with a youthful energy that contrasts its finality with freshness. It’s an industrial R&B soundtrack that would not sound out of place in Lars von Trier’s ode to impending doom, Melancholia, but coded through the hectored mind-frame of a young person growing up in the brutal reality we currently occupy. These are teenaged ruminations on the futility of a life without love, a showing of so many feelings fully felt but only half-formed. | 2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wedidit / Kobalt | September 19, 2017 | 6.8 | 993b5331-150f-490a-8e2a-42b2a72d9741 | Pat Levy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-levy/ | |
Animal Collective have followed each of their last three albums with a short companion EP closely related to its predecessor. Right on schedule, here's Water Curses, containing three tracks from the Strawberry Jam sessions and another recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room studio. | Animal Collective have followed each of their last three albums with a short companion EP closely related to its predecessor. Right on schedule, here's Water Curses, containing three tracks from the Strawberry Jam sessions and another recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room studio. | Animal Collective: Water Curses EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11479-water-curses-ep/ | Water Curses EP | Animal Collective have followed each of their last three albums with a short companion EP closely related to its predecessor. 2005's Prospect Hummer echoed the bent acoustic folk-pop they'd explored on Campfire Songs and Sung Tongs; it also featured British folk legend Vashti Bunyan on vocals, who was then just returning to public consciousness. While Prospect sounded terrific from the start, 2006's People, which followed Feels, felt more like what it was-- a chance to release a few not-quite-as-good songs out that didn't make the cut. Now comes the Water Curses EP, which contains three tracks from the Strawberry Jam sessions and another recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room studio.
The opening title track ranks among the best songs the band has written in purely pop terms, alongside "Who Could Win a Rabbit", "Grass", and "Fireworks". The production is busy with snippets of what could be a gurgling bong, creaking floorboards, and laser-like effects, but it's mixed beautifully and remains light on the ears despite its density. With its de-emphasis on identifiable instrumentation (guitars are there, but they're way down in the mix), "Water Curses" seems unbound by genre or era, and serves as a nice reminder of how many risks Animal Collective is taking sonically these days. It's mostly electronic and it's pop, but it doesn't have anything to do with the 1980s, which in itself makes it unusual; it sounds like something no other band working right now could have made.
Among the other three tracks, nothing else is nearly so direct melodically. "Street Flash", which has been a staple of live sets for a while now, begins slow with dubbed-out scraping noises and distant samples of loud vocalizations. The opening section is pure mood, as Avey Tare sings in his lower register to assorted sounds placed against a wide backdrop of silence, but then his voice is subjected to an underwater effect, some gentle piano enters, and things grow progressively thicker. The baby-like screams that he alternates with sweet crooning aren't going to win the band any new fans (they feel somewhat out of place in this more subtle track), but it's still an effective slice of ambience.
"Cobwebs" is like a mid-tempo and more song-like variation on some of "Street Flash"'s ideas; where the latter gets by on impressionistic drift, "Cobwebs" is like a slow march through a bucolic landscape, the clackity and deliberate percussion occasionally giving into a surging chorus. There's again plenty of intriguing sonic detail, and the track sounds especially good on headphones; with its bright, tactile production, the whole record is very visual, sometimes feeling like a series of weird scenes glimpsed through the glass of an aquarium. The aquatic motif returns on record closer "Seal Eyeing", which is anchored by a few notes of melancholy piano, and nicely wraps up some of the production ideas as they fold in the sound of the traditional instrument on a pretty, evocative ballad while maintaining an air of strangeness.
Though ostensibly a collection of outtakes, Water Curses feels like its own thing, with a consistent mood and an identifiable palette. The record also finds the band becoming increasingly comfortable with integrating unusual sounds and textures into their music. Where they once used synths, delay pedals, and crude electronic percussion in an abstract, noise-oriented ways, they're now discovering how to make odd sounds work with proper songs. You can hear them becoming more experimental and more accessible simultaneously. While Water Curses is plenty enjoyable on its own, it also sets you dreaming about where Animal Collective will go next. | 2008-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | May 6, 2008 | 7.3 | 993f4b68-f817-45c8-8f79-c07261622af6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Over a fleeting 10 minutes, the Swedish artist swings between confidence and insecurity and explores an exciting new direction. | Over a fleeting 10 minutes, the Swedish artist swings between confidence and insecurity and explores an exciting new direction. | Ecco2k: PXE EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ecco2k-pxe-ep/ | PXE EP | Years before they formed the Drain Gang collective, Ecco2k and Bladee were in a hardcore band called Krossad (“crushed” in Swedish) as schoolmates. This fun fact has become part of the Stockholm group’s narrative: their noisy 2007 demo CD has been ripped and uploaded online, and fan pages regularly post pictures of the two artists as kids, wearing patched and studded leather jackets, the sides of their heads closely shaved.
The spirit of that early experimentation—as well as the abrasiveness of his 2015 instrumental EP, Crush Resist—lives on in PXE (read: pixie), Zak Arogundade’s latest project as Ecco2k. He produced every sound on the five-song EP, and many of its individual elements are easy to pinpoint from his past: his distorted guitar on “Jalouse” is reminiscent of Krossad’s rudimentary instrumentation, the same haunting synths that ran through Crush Resist appear on “Big Air.” And the sweet falsetto that’s made him stand out, both next to collaborators and on his own, balances out this project’s more metallic textures. Woven together, with glitchy stops and starts that attract and repel, PXE sounds like an exciting and exploratory new direction, over the course of a fleeting 10 minutes.
Much of Ecco2k’s recent music explores the tension and beauty of living in his own skin. On E, his long-awaited 2019 debut album, he sang about learning to embrace his Blackness in an overwhelmingly white country: “Why are you scared of me when I’m not so hard?/No peroxide, I stay dark.” This self-discovery mirrored a broader shift, as he stepped out from his role as a mysterious behind-the-scenes creative force and became an artist in his own right. It’s fitting then that the first intelligible lyrics on PXE are, “Come out of your shell/Come into the light.”
The EP picks up on this theme of self-discovery but less topically and more viscerally. It presents a few moments of shimmering melody surrounded by distortion, ambient bleeps, and crushing bass, sometimes all in the same song. “In the Flesh,” the closest PXE comes to traditional pop, is a deceptively upbeat song about existential longing where Ecco2k wonders on the refrain, “Someone said, ‘You’ve got to get help’/And I kept asking myself, ‘Is that all there is to it?’” After acoustic guitar-picking builds into messy feedback, the final seconds of “Jalouse”' provides one of the most striking parts of the project; he sings in an aching whisper, “More than I care to admit, I love you, I love you, love you, I love you.” These spurts of vulnerability are quickly pierced by the sharp barbs in the EP’s production, sometimes obscuring his mesmerizing vocal performances. But this contrast, and the give-and-take between confidence and insecurity that it reveals, is a big part of what makes PXE compelling.
At points, Ecco2k seems to consciously pull the listener out of the project—the ambient cassette-tape sound effect on “Jalouse” brings with it an awareness of both the song’s recording and its transmission. On streaming platforms, the EP is presented as five individual songs, but it’s best experienced as one long track, the way it appears on Drain Gang’s YouTube channel. It’s easy to imagine the project falling into the algorithm of full-album rips on that platform, which tends to privilege a specific canon of cult favorites from online forums (some fans have already compared PXE to Sweet Trip’s velocity : design : comfort, Rate Your Music’s top album of 2003). Unlike those works, PXE ends before all of its ideas can be fully fleshed out. It’s a testament to Ecco2k’s evolution as an all-around artist that it feels like there could be even more to say.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Year0001 | April 8, 2021 | 7 | 99423d4f-0594-41e3-bdb5-0043146ab0e2 | Ben Dandridge-Lemco | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-dandridge-lemco/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we return to the 1999 album from the singer and bassist, a spare and mercurial exploration of a breakup that has become her masterpiece. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we return to the 1999 album from the singer and bassist, a spare and mercurial exploration of a breakup that has become her masterpiece. | Meshell Ndegeocello: Bitter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meshell-ndegeocello-bitter/ | Bitter | “Why is the measure of love loss?” Jeanette Winterson asks in her 1992 novel Written on the Body, where a genderless narrator mourns their previous relationship so deeply they write long, vivid paragraphs cataloging the departed lover’s body parts, her legs, torso, mouth, hair, trying to reconstitute the whole through the memory of fine details. Take stock of what the world looks like after a relationship ends; it’s an emptier one, as if an apocalyptic event removed half of everything from existence. Furniture is gone. Certain perfumes and cooking smells no longer hang in the air. Friends who were their friends are no longer your friends. It can feel disorienting to move through this new world where someone who was always there is now missing, like tiptoeing the edge of a crater.
Plenty of breakup albums past and present attempt to depict this feeling, whether from a place of hurt or acceptance or stranded at an uncertain point between. But Meshell Ndegeocello’s masterpiece, 1999’s Bitter, lives inside of it. The doomed timeline that your life diverted into when you broke up with the person you loved the most. The silence that took over every room of the apartment, the darkness that filled in that silence at night. Bitter’s songs develop in this dark space like spider webs in corners. Piano chords and acoustic guitars tremble at the threshold of being heard, while Ndegeocello’s voice cradles a sentiment so extraordinarily vulnerable that it couldn’t be delivered in any register louder than the softest breath, lest it fall apart entirely: “You made a fool of me/Tell me why.”
Ndegeocello made Bitter from a place of abandonment, though it was more creative than romantic: When 1996’s Peace Beyond Passion was misunderstood by her record label, radio, and music television, she threatened that it would be “the last Meshell Ndegeocello album,” that she would retreat into making instrumental music instead. One of the singles from Peace, “Leviticus: Faggot,” about a gay teenager who is beaten to death after getting kicked out of his home by his parents, had its video banned from BET, and Peace itself, an album that swings through various forms of queerness and spirituality in an attempt to find an evasive truth, was worlds more complex than Ndegeocello’s debut single and only solo mainstream hit to date, “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” (Note that from her very first single she was interested in people slipping in and out of categories like liquid.) “I’ve already said as much as I can say in my songs at this point,” she said at the end of Peace’s promotional cycle. “I need a break… I hurt.”
Bitter blossomed gradually out of this hurt. If she was going to make a new album, she needed a new approach. She wrote a few songs with David Gamson, former member of Scritti Politti and producer of Ndegeocello’s first two records. While those albums were smooth soul-funk records chopped up by drum machines, the material Ndegeocello was writing merited a recording process that was more subtle, more live. The songs seemed to fall in line with other singer-songwriters of color that had traveled across the racial boundaries of genre before her, into a kind of celestial folk music: Joan Armatrading, Richie Havens. (Blackness isn’t genre, Ndegeocello is more or less always saying with her work—a person’s race doesn’t necessarily predict the sounds they’re surrounded with or eventually make.) She hired producer Craig Street, who had just recorded a standards album with k.d. lang, to foster this sense of naturalism, to make songs that were less composed and more played, a room of musicians responding to each other’s faintest gestures.
How better to craft a work of art about loss than with an act of subtraction? Peace Beyond Passion’s songs constantly move, developing new branches of melody as they go. Bitter, by contrast, would almost seem static if you didn’t also register its constant quiverings. They are spectral songs in terms of genre, spartan as folk, dynamic as jazz, on edge with feeling as the most incandescent soul record. Sometimes the music stirs lightly, as if it’s been awake in bed for hours, depressed, only moving when necessary. Sometimes it follows a memory back to when the relationship was strong, then casts its focus to when it was only a few strands away from fraying; this is the feeling the title track spins through, just Ndegeocello’s voice and an acoustic guitar wringing the final poisoned kisses out of a courtship that’s run its course. The whole album is like this, an account of a relationship that is constantly adding footnotes to itself: This is where I was almost unfaithful to you, yet here as well is where I felt hopelessly devoted to you. Monogamy is untenable and eventually unbearable—as Ndegeocello sings, “No one is faithful/I am weak, I’ll go astray”—but someone can still be the only person who satisfies you, their love your lone “saving grace.”
It’s at the center of these tensions where Ndegeocello can most effectively play the masculine and feminine against each other, inhaling as one, exhaling as the other, wearing each persona like a mask. A man loves his girlfriend with “sweetness and sincerity,” while she only offers him the pretense of love, a deliberate reversal of how heterosexual relationships are usually depicted. Later, in “Loyalty,” Ndegeocello creates and fully inhabits a man and a woman who, despite the broken homes they emerge from, are trying to find something permanent in each other, even though something yawns beyond them, a future they can’t quite see clearly, where everything they know may end in hurt—as the girl’s mother (another perspective Ndegeocello manages to sneak into) tells her, “Trust only in change, ’cause hearts change/But betrayal always feels the same.”
Like her hero Prince, Ndegeocello’s work is constantly flowing between different embodiments of gender; if she seems relaxed wherever she temporarily touches down on the gradient it’s because she could be one or the other or really anything at all at any given time. “[Prince] fights his femininity and he fights his masculinity,” Prince’s guitarist Wendy Melvoin, who plays on both Peace Beyond Passion and Bitter, said. “Meshell doesn’t pay too much attention to being male or female. She’s not self-conscious about it, and that’s in her music. Sometimes she’s a boy, and sometimes she’s a girl.” Inasmuch as her albums invoke the concept of gender, it doesn’t remotely feel like a binary, like a switch being flipped. Ndegeocello is masculine here, feminine there, without ever losing her coherence as a person. And Bitter is full of different types of voices and relationships as she is—masculine, feminine, lesbian, straight, all like different imprints in the sand made by the same wave.
As on most of her records, Ndegeocello incorporates a cover in the Bitter tracklist, like a conversation with the past to determine where her own music is. Here she covers Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love.” Her version of the song—which in its original form is a dreamy electric crackling, a love song hummed by power lines—is so smooth it’s like a pebble taken from the bottom of the ocean; where Hendrix’s recording gave off sparks, Nedegeocello’s goes liquid in your grasp, a feeling that nothing could contain. She replaces the bridge with an ambient whirlpool, and you hear Ndegeocello’s voice, surrounded by washes of sound, reciting Hendrix’s words instead of singing them, as strings curl outward from the slipstream of keys. It’s masculinity submerged, crystallized, held in the feminine, a perfect prismatic expression of Ndegeocello’s own sexuality through the vessel of someone else’s song; it’s also the centerpiece of Bitter, an album about being held, or at least about wishing you could still be held, by someone who complements you, who is you and isn’t you at the same time.
Critically, Bitter was beloved—Newsweek declared it album of the year for 1999—but it received little promotional muscle from Ndegeocello’s record company, Maverick (she had once again turned in an album that sounded little like “If That’s Your Boyfriend”), and was released to sales as motionlessly quiet as some of its songs. She heard the undertones looming beneath what her record company and the sales were saying: She’d seemingly abandoned the Black music that had gotten her on the radio. But the music on Bitter isn’t any less of a fusion than the records Ndegeocello put out before and after it. It may be her simplest, starkest record, feeling years older than it is, like wood floors creaking underfoot; but that doesn’t keep it from being a soul record, just a soul retreated inward, a door closed behind it—instead of witnessing its full force, you glimpse the evocative shadows of its movements.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2023-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Maverick | June 18, 2023 | 9.2 | 99474984-1185-4e5b-94a7-5a0ececddec4 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
On its third album, the Chicago band continues to refine its strain of post-punk revivalism, trotting out familiar tropes while subtly pushing at the boundaries of its sound. | On its third album, the Chicago band continues to refine its strain of post-punk revivalism, trotting out familiar tropes while subtly pushing at the boundaries of its sound. | Deeper: Careful! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deeper-careful/ | Careful! | In the constellation of “don’t call it post-punk” post-punk bands that have emerged in recent years, Chicago’s Deeper stand out as proud traditionalists. Many of the young groups lumped together under the genre push against its (already broad) confines, or reject the tag altogether. But Deeper are masterful craftsmen happily existing in a clear lineage. On Careful!, their third album and debut for Sub Pop, they’ve returned with their sharpest collection of songs yet, hitting all the familiar post-punk pleasure centers while subtly expanding their own boundaries.
Deeper’s sophomore album, 2020’s Auto-Pain, documented a difficult period of transition for the band. They had begun writing and recording the record when guitarist Mike Clawson left the group on acrimonious terms. The split, they have said, inspired that album’s pervasive darkness. Then, not long after they had finished in the studio, Clawson died by suicide. With clubs shuttered by the pandemic, and still processing the loss of their friend, the band—vocalist and guitarist Nic Gohl, guitarist Drew McBride, drummer Shiraz Bhatti, and new bassist Kevin Fairbairn—began considering what else Deeper could be.
With Careful!, they venture an answer. Nearly every song sounds like a long-lost gem from post-punk’s 1980s heyday, with subtle updates from four subsequent decades of indie music. While Auto-Pain had plenty of hooks—often delivered by Gohl in vocal cadences that echoed Robert Smith’s yelpier side—it also skewed toward colder, more mechanical sounds. For Careful!, Gohl has cited “Bowie’s most coked-out productions” as an inspiration, and you can hear the melted plastic and corroded electronics of Bowie’s Berlin era—still conjuring post-industrial wastelands, but shot through with colors both vivid and lurid. Yet 1980’s Scary Monsters might be the closest antecedent: Careful! can be queasy and zonked, but Deeper wrangle even their ugliest sounds into their poppiest songs yet.
Earworms like “Glare” and “Sub” are driven by the requisite elements: insistent bass pulses, crisp drums, tangled-wire guitars. While those tracks are easy to love, many of the album’s standouts are those where Deeper tweak that formula. “Tele” swaddles its off-kilter chug in icy synths, while “Fame” grows hypnotically out of skeletal rhythms and ghostly strands of guitar and saxophone. “Everynight” has an infectious, sunglasses-at-night new-wave strut, while “Airplane Air” is both as claustrophobic and ethereal as its title suggests. Heavy on jagged, clanging guitars and muscular electric bass, the band’s aesthetic may not convert skeptics of the post-punk revival, nor will it shock those fluent in the music’s various iterations. But Deeper nevertheless make their historical reference points sound great right now, if not exactly groundbreaking.
While Deeper were always more earnest than sneering—the term “auto-pain,” referenced again here in “Glare,” denoted an imagined antithesis to the numbing drug soma, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—they have noticeably brightened the mood on Careful!. “Now build a bridge!” goes the rallying cry of the opening song, and the search for connection underlines much of what follows. The album concludes with “Pressure,” an unabashed love song written in tribute to Gohl’s wife. “Get you someone who kills/All the pressures of my life,” he practically coos. The sense of anxiety that has often plagued Deeper is still present, yet the band sounds more peaceful and content than we’ve ever heard them. That turns out to be Deeper’s real innovation on Careful!: Abandoning the genre’s stereotypical gloom, they’ve opened themselves up to something that looks almost like joy. | 2023-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 7, 2023 | 7.1 | 994bceda-feb3-422d-b729-19caac8f05bb | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
Beneath the metallic sheen of goth rock, the cult band’s third album addresses the disquieting anxieties of adulthood with vengeful indignation. | Beneath the metallic sheen of goth rock, the cult band’s third album addresses the disquieting anxieties of adulthood with vengeful indignation. | Have a Nice Life: Sea of Worry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/have-a-nice-life-sea-of-worry/ | Sea of Worry | Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga live double lives. To a rabid subset of the notorious 4chan forum /mu/, they are the mysterious co-founders of Have a Nice Life, whose debut record, 2008’s foreboding, gauzy Deathconsciousness, is regarded as beyond reproach; its accompanying 70-page manifesto has since begot reams of stoned hermeneutics. But man cannot survive on 4chan fame alone; Barrett and Macuga have day jobs, and day lives, with families and children who might be less enamored by the creation myths of Christian cults. Their follow up, 2014’s The Unnatural World, raised uneasy questions about settling into the tedium of adulthood. Five years later, Sea of Worry presents disquieting answers.
Have a Nice Life’s early work had a tendency to shape-shift, presenting as garage rock on one track only to unravel into ambient noise on the next. On Sea of Worry, these shifts are more abrupt; the pace of the record suffers as a result. The momentum of the triumphant, shout-along choruses on “Sea of Worry” is flatlined by “Dracula Bells,” a track rendered exhaustingly slow by awkward rhythmic shifts, multiple melodic tangents, and a painful dash of free jazz.
It’s nearly grating enough to make a new listener pull the plug altogether, which would be a shame—Sea of Worry finds the band honing in on the metallic sheen of goth rock, a subgenre consistently in the mix on previous records but never given its due. With a propulsive bassline that gives way to shimmering guitars, “Science Beat” sounds like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as helmed by Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, Barrett’s atonal sing-speaking cutting through the blinding brightness. “Lords of Tresserhorn” plays with the same elements—twinkling synths, thrumming bass, clipped vocals—but simmers them slowly, not so much building to a chorus as painting layers of scenery.
But these ambitious experiments are paired with concessions to an active fanbase that is terrified of change. Two of the album’s seven tracks are re-recordings of demos already familiar to diehards, padding a relatively short record with old material. “Trespassers W,” originally a brooding post-punk love song with muffled vocals and a bassline ripped from “Transmission,” justifies its inclusion with a full-band remake. The new version represents what online fans feared for the band, with crunchy, overdriven guitar and full-throated yelps that are more indebted to Superchunk than Bauhaus. But the song benefits from the crisper recording, which highlights impressive chord changes and structural twists that were previously buried. “Destinos,” with a lengthy sample of a sermon about the evils of Satan and Hell, is more similar to its original version; as a closer, it makes a disappointingly safe choice for a dramatic exit.
As Have a Nice Life learn to embrace professional studio recordings and bigger audiences, perhaps the band’s most defining quality will prove to be its lyrics, a potent expression of what one might call dad rage. Sea of Worry addresses the anxieties of adulthood with vengeful indignation. “I opted out by never really opting in,” they sing on the title track, finding simultaneous freedom and sadness in the idea. But the sharpest commentary on the nihilism of total independence comes from “Lords of Tresserhorn”: “I can stay up late whenever I want,” Barrett sings, “but other than that, it’s nothing like I thought. I guess I thought I’d know what I’m doing by now, but I know nothing.” Where Matt Berninger might be ruefully fondling his argyle sweaters, Have a Nice Life eyes revolution: “I am mortgaged to an irrational thought: that we are always on top, and nothing will ever go wrong.” After two records about death, Macuga and Barrett have landed on something truly terrifying: finding oneself, inexplicably, still alive.
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 | The Flenser | November 12, 2019 | 7.4 | 994c9aa6-f7ca-4dc7-9f69-b06de20d4168 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Newly reissued on vinyl, this late-career gem from the beloved songwriter highlights the hope, humor, and underdog rage that animate his best work. | Newly reissued on vinyl, this late-career gem from the beloved songwriter highlights the hope, humor, and underdog rage that animate his best work. | John Prine: Fair & Square | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-prine-fair-and-square/ | Fair & Square | By 2005, John Prine had lived many lives. In his formative years, he had been a Vietnam-era draftee, a mailman, and a contender in the very-bizarre-in-retrospect New Dylan sweepstakes of the early 1970s. Singing in the folk clubs of Chicago, he was discovered by Kris Kristofferson and widely admired by everyone around him, including Dylan himself. But he remained a cult act, a “songwriter's songwriter,” which is just another way of saying not that many people listened. Prine’s audience considered him to be a genius, but his genius was for modesty and humor, and modesty and humor don’t always scale. No writer during the 20th century wrote more beautifully about the overlooked, the under-acknowledged, or the never-thought-about-at-all.
When Fair & Square was released in 2005, Prine was 58, and it had been five years since the world had heard from him, following a diagnosis with neck cancer in 1998. On this late-career gem, newly reissued on vinyl, he sounds weakened, which is different from saying he sounds weak. His voice had dropped an octave from radiation treatment and having given up a 30-year pack-a-day cigarette habit. There is sometimes a slurred hesitancy to his delivery, which contributes to the poignance of shaggy dog stories like “Taking a Walk,” a lovely, loping song which imbues the simple act of strolling around with metaphysical portent.
Given his health crises, you might expect Prine’s spirits to be low on Fair & Square—but it isn’t so. The wry and ebullient opener “Glory of True Love” reflects with awe on spiritual and romantic deliverance: “You can climb the highest mountain/Touch the moon and stars above/But Old Faithful’s just a fountain/Compared to the glory of true love.” Following the tumult of two broken marriages, Prine had wed Fiona Whelan, with whom he would raise a family and remain for the rest of his life. Very much in love and too close to death for comfort, Fair & Square splits the difference between Dylan’s winsome domestic bliss classic, 1970’s New Morning, and his trembling-at-mortality classic, 1997’s Time Out of Mind.
Like the novels of Charles Portis, Prine’s records are loaded with characters you might encounter on a wayward road trip. “Crazy as a Loon,” a co-write with the multi-instrumentalist Pat McLaughlin, is among Prine’s finest, a hilariously forensic biography of a three-time loser who roams the country searching for contentment but can’t escape his own thoughts. A heartbreaking cover of Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” recounts the gnomic utterances of a down-and-out Greyhound-rider hoping to “get back in the game,” whatever that means. And then there is the tale of “Safety Joe,” a man who “wore a seatbelt around his heart” and never took a risk.
There was no safety belt around Prine’s heart—no risk he wouldn’t take and seemingly no limit to his compassion. Uninterested in cultivating the mystery that shrouded many of his folk peers, Prine’s purview was what the writer Jim Gavin once referred to as “people who don’t know how to climb the pyramid of American success.” For all of Fair & Square’s loveliness—the album was co-produced with Gary Paczosa and resembles Nick Drake’s transporting work with producer Joe Boyd—the subtext of underdog rage remains. “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” which takes aim at the George W. Bush administration, may be the angriest song Prine ever wrote:
They screw you when your sleeping
They try to screw you blind
Some humains ain’t human
Some humans ain’t kind
Fair & Square won that year's Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and it began a renaissance of interest in his previous work. He continued making music up to his death in 2020, and he enjoyed a long and well-deserved eminence as an inspiration for younger generations of artists, ranging from Kacey Musgraves to the Drive-By Truckers to the Mekons. In 2013, Prine appeared on an episode of The Colbert Report With Stephen Colbert, a huge fan who confronted the artist with a knowing question: “Were you a mailman’s mailman?” Prine, not missing a beat, responded, “I was the kind of mailman that dogs couldn’t wait to see coming down the street.” An enduring beacon of hope, Fair & Square cemented his stature as an elder statesman of the folk tradition.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Oh Boy | October 2, 2021 | 8.1 | 994d0fe6-63a6-464a-94c3-749ea610cecc | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
null | With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might "mean," Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure. *Merriweather Post Pavilion*, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who's been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point-- all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog-- is refined and amplified here.
Since their inception, | Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12518-merriweather-post-pavilion/ | Merriweather Post Pavilion | With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might "mean," Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure. Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who's been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point-- all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog-- is refined and amplified here.
Since their inception, Animal Collective have wandered the territorial edges of music, scoping out where boundaries had been erected and looking beyond them. They've punctuated perfectly likeable indie rock songs with bleating vocalizations. They've seeded pretty instrumentals with irritating noise. They've juxtaposed West African rhythms and melodies cribbed from British folk. They've stayed on a single chord for 10 minutes. But Merriweather feels like a joyous meeting in a well-earned, middle place-- the result of all their explorations pieced together to create something accessible and complete.
Although it will be tagged as Animal Collective's "pop" album, Merriweather Post Pavilion remains drenched in their idiosyncratic sound, a record that no one else could have made. The album is named for a Maryland venue that last year played host to Santana, Sheryl Crow, and John Mayer, but its songs won't be heard on the radio, and besides, Animal Collective's M.O. requires them to exist outside of rigid formats. Nonetheless, they've found a natural way to integrate the sing-along melodies, sticky hooks, and driving percussion that have long been hallmarks of celebratory popular music.
Animal Collective's two vocalists, Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) and Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear), have never sounded better together, and the way their styles complement each other is the story of the album. On the one hand you have Panda's straightforward melodies, his fuzzy, head-in-the-clouds dreaminess, and his instinctual trawl through pop music history. The tracks that favor his songwriting typically have an underlying sense of drone, with everything moving forward along a line in relation to some subliminal center: They begin, then build, expand, and contract. Tare, meanwhile, tends to work within a more classic pop structure, with clear bridges and snappy choruses, greater harmonic development, and a sharper lyrical focus. Here, he reins in the blurting vocalizations that he's so often used as punctuation (the hardcore faithful might miss this unhinged emoting just a little). Both songwriters are on exactly the same page and, working with sonic spelunker Brian "Geologist" Weitz and producer Ben Allen (no Josh "Deakin" Dibb this time), they've found a sumptuous musical background for their most accomplished songs.
Merriweather is the kind of album on which any song could be someone's favorite, but two will likely reign as the choice picks: "My Girls" and "Brother Sport", both of which leaked prior to the record's release, contain the album's most effervescent moments, drawing from the communal energy of the group's astonishing live show. "My Girls" grows from a synth-speckled, half-speed intro into a booming electro-pop burner with handclaps and deep bass-- a towering edifice of sound trailed by long wisps of West coast harmonies. The Afro-Brazilian-flavored "Brother Sport" moves from one chanted melodic nugget to the next before building to a huge swirl of psychedelic sound that encompasses rave sirens and immersive tribal drums.
But these obvious peaks would have less resonance if not for the more subtle moments. The oblong architecture of "Daily Routine" hearkens back to the band's less stable earlier days, as it moves appealingly from an awkward organ-based mid-tempo number to a long, droney coda that has the ego-pulverizing bliss of shoegaze. The surging thrust of distortion and drumkick that propels "Summertime Clothes" starts with an almost militaristic pomp, but the song soon reaches a place of pure sweetness with a simple chorus hook ("I want to walk around with you") that could have come from any point in the last 100 years. Similarly out-of-time sentiments mark "Bluish"-- lines like "I'm getting lost in your curls," or, "Some kind of magic in the way you're lying there"-- and the music has the airy ease of 1970s soft-rock that weirdly winds up a little disconcerting. And then "Also Frightened" has the dislocated swoon of first-wave psychedelia, a "See Emily Play"-style mediation on the small insanity of childhood softened with billowing layers of voices.
The lyrics focus on the body, basic human connection, the need to take care of oneself, the puzzle of existence. Where the churning electronic sound, with its fizzes and echoes and underwater cast, brings to mind altered states and the confusing gap between the familiar and the strange, the words seem like a running commentary on the essential mystery of being alive. Animal Collective don't tell stories, and their music rarely has characters; there's little clever wordplay and fewer money lines you'll repeat later on. Rather, the words reinforce the sense of vulnerability that cuts through the music, and wind up being an essential component on an album that oozes confidence from every pore.
Music obsessives talk a lot about originality-- whether it's important, or why having a new sound should or shouldn't matter. In recent years, some fantastic albums have turned a number of people off for being retreads, which has sparked some interesting discussions. This album, which finds Animal Collective completely owning their unique sound, feels like the crucial next step in that conversation. What they've constructed here is a new kind of electronic pop-- one which is machine-generated and revels in technology but is also deeply human, never drawing too much attention to its digital nature. It's of the moment and feels new, but it's also striking in its immediacy and comes across as friendly and welcoming. Animal Collective have spent the decade following their own path, figuring out what their music is capable of while also working to bring more listeners into their world. On Merriweather Post Pavilion, their commitment has paid off tremendously. | 2009-01-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-01-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino | January 5, 2009 | 9.6 | 995679fe-9697-4f96-8d54-e51e0ae60bd9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The ostensible sequel to How Fly offers a few fleeting glimpses of the easygoing, unruffled, and effortlessly cool rap produced by the duo 10 years ago. | The ostensible sequel to How Fly offers a few fleeting glimpses of the easygoing, unruffled, and effortlessly cool rap produced by the duo 10 years ago. | Wiz Khalifa / Curren$y: 2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiz-khalifa-currendollary-2009/ | 2009 | Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y’s 2009 mixtape How Fly—blog era rap’s own Watch the Throne—was a transitional and somewhat ephemeral moment. NahRight posts were the coin of the realm and going double-platinum on the mixtape database DatPiff was a valuable metric. It’s a tape almost displaced from its time—buried by commercially successful artistic failures from legacy rappers (JAY-Z, Eminem, 50 Cent) and pivotal moments of ascension for their successors (Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Kanye West)—yet also almost entirely of it. There’s a bar on How Fly about playing Nintendo Wii while using the now-defunct iChat. These days, the rap duo swaps in Nintendo Switches and Instagram, but in the decade since teaming up, almost nothing has changed about them.
That’s kind of the point of 2009, a mixtape that has been at least four years in the making: Despite a seismic shift in the world and music industry, they’re still the same guys, only richer, making the same songs. After an unofficial reunion in 2013 on the stopgap EP Live in Concert and years of teasing How Fly 2, the duo has finally released a proper sequel to their high-times epic. And they want their credit: “One of the originals who showed you fools how to turn the internet rhymes into residuals,” Curren$y raps on a song called, well, “Stoned Gentleman.” They are very clearly trying to replicate something here, working with producers from their shared pasts (Cardo, Sledgren, MonstaBeatz) in search of the fleeting high that is nostalgia. There are glimpses of the easygoing, unruffled, and effortlessly cool rap produced in the apartment on the tape’s cover, but it’s diminishing returns.
Listening to How Fly and Live in Concert now, it’s easy to see why it worked before. They were lovable stoners. They interpolated OutKast, presenting themselves as the zonked-out second coming of the two dope boyz. They sampled Ron Burgundy flute solos. One was a major-label prospect who’d escaped an unflattering situation to become a prolific artist; the other was a major-label hopeful earnestly producing DIY mixtapes and maximizing a fledgling online economy. They’d taken opposing trajectories to wind up in the same place—the origin story of most great buddy cop movies—and as a tag-team, they felt refreshingly outside of the grinding gears of mainstream machinery. Even when Wiz signed his Atlantic deal, this partnership still seemed to ground him.
But Wiz and Curren$y are an odd couple. They have little in common beyond a love of weed and women, lounging around and cruising in foreign whips. They are very different rappers, too. Curren$y is a marble-mouthed spitter who bends flows so dramatically they can seem out of time. Wiz enunciates each syllable distinctly and sticks rigidly to cadences. Curren$y slithers through verses, perpetually spontaneous. Wiz’s easy-bake flows couldn’t be more formulaic.
At this point, it feels like every line out of Wiz’s mouth is something he’s rapped before. He presents all of his ideas in the most primitive ways. Curren$y, on the other hand, is still capable of rapping something so simple it’ll make you wonder how no one has rapped it already. “The vision for us was quite clear/When the smoke clears decades later we’ll still be here,” he spits, summing up the Jet Life mythos. They have similar laid back ideologies but there’s a noticeable disparity in the presentation. Curren$y summarizes his particular methodology best, on “Forever Ball”: “Musical scholar, pennin’ his own products, straight narcotics/Watch me turn this beat into a foreign with a spoiler on it.” The keyword is watch; the difference is in the showing.
When Wiz raps about expensive supercars they are itemized in his brain: “And my cars is decent, some of ’em older, some recent/Leaving my keys in, this one for today/You gon’ see a new one this weekend.” Meanwhile, Curren$y identifies what he’s driving like each model has a distinctive birthmark—the Cabriolet, the Italian design, the white-wine interior. “Came through in the space coupe, everything new/Umbrellas in the door, galaxy in the roof,” he raps on “Getting Loose.” “Be cool, muhfucker, ain’t nobody asked you.” Many of the Curren$y verses on 2009 make the poorly aging Wiz verses look shapeless. The difference in style and detail can be like going from seeing in three dimensions to two.
Even though his role is diminished, there is still a place for Wiz in this stoner paradise. His delivery can be stiff—stilted, even—but he can also be charming. When he gets a flow off, as on the vintage “Plot Twist,” he seems almost infectiously nonchalant. He sometimes shows off his mastery of the patronizing put-down, self-aware and awkward about it: “My closest filled with all types of shit/It’s bad you’d probably work your whole life for this and I’ll get it in one night,” he raps, almost embarrassed for you. When both he and Curren$y are in their bags, locked in on the shamelessly nostalgic 2009, it can feel like a How Fly retrospective, allowing the listener to channel that experience. But when the glow wears off, you’re left with half-baked impressions of a bygone era. | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Jet Life | February 13, 2019 | 6.3 | 995f2c49-0fa9-42e3-94a0-82e51521bbf6 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The English electronic musician's newest is in many ways a return to his earliest material. If people have forgotten the whimsical-yet-punishing pleasures of Squarepusher's breakbeat chaos, might it be a good a place to get onboard? | The English electronic musician's newest is in many ways a return to his earliest material. If people have forgotten the whimsical-yet-punishing pleasures of Squarepusher's breakbeat chaos, might it be a good a place to get onboard? | Squarepusher: Ufabulum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16608-ufabulum/ | Ufabulum | During the first half of his career as IDM troublemaker, Tom Jenkinson became one of the most divisive figures in electronic music, plundering electric jazz and rave music for his own extremist ends, idolized and reviled in seemingly equal amounts. For folks who didn't fall into either camp, who were just looking for futuristic shocks or crazy rhythms, he was one of many artists around the turn of the millennium who seemed to treat dance music like a science-fiction movie, removing all the pesky plot and character development, until just the wild special effects highlights remained.
Ufabulum comes many years and many albums after Squarepusher briefly enjoyed this kind of marginal pop culture recognition. His detractors have since found new things to hate, and his acolytes have weathered the various less-than-effective shifts in direction that come with following any long-running artist prone to frustrating whims. Ufabulum is in many ways a return to the angry-jazz-droids-run-amok vibe of his earliest stuff, and if people have forgotten (or never known) the whimsical-yet-punishing pleasures of Squarepusher's breakbeat chaos, might it be a good a place to get on board?
Yes and no, because it's also exhausting stuff, at least in large doses. This has always been a problem with Squarepusher's music, and Ufabulum is no different. Individual tracks can still induce a "whoa!" response from unsuspecting listeners. But at their best and their worst, Squarepusher's albums remind me of what video game fans call "bullet hell" games, shooters with an impossible density of enemies swarming at you at all times. Bullet hell games have an intensity that makes them initially mind-boggling (how can I process all this?) and quickly frustrating (why am I bothering to try and process all this?). Ditto Squarepusher's long-ish-players like Hard Normal Daddy and Big Loada.
That's why artists like Squarepusher, despite the refusal of rock-star posturing, were so perfect for that late 90s moment when MTV briefly discovered electronic music, and why their albums remained mostly for the serious fans. It's bracing stuff in three or four minute doses, immediately standing out amidst songs running at pop's usual pace, especially when paired with equally oddball and arresting barrages of imagery. Just like a casual player might play one or two levels of some fiendishly hard game, laughing with delight before hanging up the controller, singles are all most people need when it comes to dense swarms of breaks and zaps. As with those devoted arcade button-mashers, you're meant to delight in the complexity. If you don't, maybe it's not for you after all.
The endless explosions of Squarepusher tracks are similarly startling, at first, especially if you don't usually spend time with music this convoluted and hectic. He wastes no time on Ufabulum, immediately plunging the listener into antic, overlapping streams of chopped jazz snares and bass blurts. When opening track "4001" really kicks into gear, with an enveloping cascade of synth played against an almost head-banging drum and bass groove, it takes you back to the thrill and jolt of Jenkinson's earliest productions, where the already unreal speed of jungle was taken to truly inhuman velocities. The nagging worry is still there, though: How much of this am I going to be able to endure before I just get bored?
Part of the problem is tempo. Moments of Ufabulum, particularly the middle stretch, are all but impossible for me to remember after a dozen plays. Maybe there are brilliant ideas in the maelstrom, but I was left too numbed to pick them out. That's why it was great to hear Jenkinson try something new in the first third of Ufabulum, like pacing and funk and giving his ideas space to breathe. He immediately slows things down after "4001" with "Unreal Square", a typically perverse but still groove-friendly take on the half-time funk of dubstep. He can't resist spray-gunning that groove with caustic breaks at the very end, but at least the barrage feels more like an honest-to-god release of tension for a change.
"Stadium Ice" is even better, prog-tronica every bit as overstuffed as anything on Rustie's Glass Swords, but with plenty of Jenkinson's own virtuoso jazz-fusioneer stamp. That's a sound he more or less bequeathed to IDM, of course, helping to make an aesthetic like Rustie's possible. "Stadium Ice" is as transportive a bit of audio world-building as Jenkinson's ever made, a track full of grand peaks that actually work because they follow relative lulls, sounding like all the best bits of old-school RPG soundtracks shoehorned into one track.
So it's frustrating that Jenkinson ditched this measured grandeur just as quickly. "Stadium Ice" hardly lacks that aforementioned "whoa!" factor. It's just infinitely friendlier and more replayable than the hyper-speed and assaultive stuff. It's hard to imagine an entire album in this vein wouldn't have been as whoa-worthy as Glass Swords itself, not only a brilliant reinvention but maybe Jenkinson's first must-listen since 1998. Once Ufabulum launches into overdrive again, it's not long before it becomes another for-fans-only deal.
Worse for those fans, Jenkinson actively seems to be pastiching himself in a few places. "Drax 2" and "303 Scopem Hard" are dead-ringers for the industrial-strength distortion and breakbeats-as-psych-warfare he was plumbing on 1997's virulent Vic Acid EP. But somehow they're duller, too, as if Jenkinson knew he was recycling once-vital stuff and couldn't be bothered to work up the appropriate intensity. Even if you're not immediately bummed out by artists replaying former glories, the least they can do is come hard with it, right? | 2012-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 18, 2012 | 6.3 | 9963cd04-cfcb-45e4-9be2-0b5d44998803 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The latest signee to the $uicideboy$ label is an Atlanta skater-turned-rapper with a voice that’s as aggressive as it is gleeful. His new tape isn’t that serious, but his rapping is. | The latest signee to the $uicideboy$ label is an Atlanta skater-turned-rapper with a voice that’s as aggressive as it is gleeful. His new tape isn’t that serious, but his rapping is. | Germ: The Hijinx Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/germ-the-hijinx-tape/ | The Hijinx Tape | The rap label G*59 is the brainchild of $uicideboy$, the New Orleans rap group consisting of cousins Ruby da Cherry and $crim. The underground duo have flipped a tried-and-true formula into international touring dates and millions of Spotify streams, combining Raider Klan’s love of Southern rap samples with the self-destructive lyrical tendencies of emo rap. But G*59 is more than a flagship group, as the label attests with the latest release from Atlanta rapper Germ, The Hijinx Tape. Germ is a punk-rap court jester and skater-turned-rapper with a voice that’s as aggressive as it is gleeful.
Though his highest-profile project thus far is the collaborative DIRTIERNASTIER$UICIDE EP—a release that showcases the “suicide pimpin’” house sound, as Juicy J’s adlib describes it—Germ stems from a different stylistic lineage than his peers. He’s capable of the tongue-twisting, Lord Infamous type flow that is the bread and butter of $uicideboy$, but it’s not his preferred mode of delivery. There’s a power to Germ’s rapping, but unlike G*59’s crown jewels, Germ is pure Atlanta, owing as much to YSL and 1017 as he does to underground internet rap. He’s collaborated on two mixtapes—the Big Bad Gnar Shit series—with fellow Atlanta rapper and skater GNAR, both of them members of the city’s younger generation that owes a massive debt to the mixtape runs of Gucci Mane, Future, and Young Thug.
There’s little of the metal influence or alt-rock affect of $uicideboy$ either, but Germ still plays with a variety of styles. His voice is, at once, gritty and high-pitched, as confident with tight, biting couplets as he is with smooth vocal runs. In the space of a few bars, Germ will entirely pivot his delivery, like on “AR Pistols,” when he briefly breaks into song amid a precise, exacting verse. Sometimes you can just tell when a rapper is feeling themselves, and Germ always sounds like he’s having a good time—his tape is thoroughly hotboxed, a brash and energetic tribute to the joys of gelato and Girl Scout Cookies. Several of these tracks beg to be the soundtrack to TikTok dances, like the gleefully fat beat of lead single “7 Hunna Horses” or the sharp piano line of “Walked Outside.”
Germ’s Atlanta heritage shines through in his occasional soulfulness. On “Plead the 5th,” the rapper says he feels like Usher as he shares his confessions—the beat sounds like a Drake slow jam from the If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late era, with a fluttering trap beat, pulsing bass, and a gentle chorus in the back of the mix. Germ leans into an almost mournful sound on “Runnin Thru Plastic,” as paranoid synth loops soundtrack an outpouring of feeling; his voice cracks like he’s on the verge of tears, but his response to the anguish of emotion is to just roll another blunt. Germ gets introspective over a distorted guitar line on “We Outside,” but it’s much closer to Polo G than the emo rap you might expect from G*59.
Germ’s debut solo project, last year’s GERM HAS A DEATH WISH, was heavier on the features—The Hijinx Tape only includes one, from San Fernando rapper Shakewell on “Hellcat,” who balances Germ’s high-pitched shenanigans with his more biting, lower register flow. But Germ’s tracks are short, menacing taunts and sucker-punches more than extended bouts. His personality is so commanding and his songs so to the point that there’s no real need for guest appearances. Germ isn’t just goofing off, his skill is serious business.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G*59 | August 10, 2020 | 7.1 | 9969edd3-8c67-46d2-8bf3-d3d99199ba16 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Radiating Light is the second compilation from Orchid Tapes, a sequel to 2014's *Boring Ecstasy. *Like the first, it gives you hope that people still make magic in their apartments behind closed doors. | Radiating Light is the second compilation from Orchid Tapes, a sequel to 2014's *Boring Ecstasy. *Like the first, it gives you hope that people still make magic in their apartments behind closed doors. | Various Artists: Radiating Light: Orchid Tapes & Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22227-radiating-light-orchid-tapes-friends/ | Radiating Light: Orchid Tapes & Friends | Warren Hildebrand (who makes music as Foxes in Fiction) started Orchid Tapes six years ago in an apartment in Toronto. He was still in college, and the label was essentially an ad-hoc distribution method for his 2010 debut Swung from the Branches**. The label took its name from a 2007 Deerhunter song “Tape Hiss Orchid” (from Cryptograms)*, *and fittingly the song and perhaps much of Bradford Cox’s noisy somnambulism is hardwired into the label’s DNA. Eventually he connected with artists over Myspace, and the label started to serve as a platform for cassette releases of self-described “bedroom pop.” R.L. Kelly, Elvis Depressedly, Ricky Eat Acid, Alex G, and many more found homes at Orchid Tapes, and over the course of its existence it’s become one of the most successful cassette labels. It’s succeeded because of careful curation on the part of Hildebrand and the label’s co-manager Brian Vu, who Warren met when he moved to New York a few years ago.
The artists that work with Warren and Brian are quick to define the vibe of Orchid Tapes as familial and personal: Alex G even described the label as “a support group.” Two years ago, the label released its first retrospective compilation, *Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes**, *which perfectly summed up the melancholic and handmade love that pulsated through the music that Orchid Tapes was sharing. The songs found within were rough, immediate, and refreshing as the cool side of a pillow. In *Radiating Light: Orchid Tapes & Friends, *the loose sequel to *Bedroom Pop, *the tricks start to run thin, and the inventive eccentricities once present have started to feel as safe as a day spent perusing Etsy.
This isn’t evident at first. The opener features a newer artist on the roster, Soccer Mommy, and her contribution, “Memories,” begins with an 8-bit jingle, making the very first second’s of the compilation feel like you’re entering an arcade game. It’s tactile and attention-grabbing, and what follows is about three minutes of bedroom pop, cleverly written, confessional, sincere, but allusive. The following song, Katie Dey’s (another newer artist) “Few Hours Later,” is diverse, messy, and dense with gnarled-but-inviting sounds. These two songs alone are tantalizing, and some of the best new work that Orchid Tapes has curated.
Veteran label members add equally vivid and interesting contributions to the mix. R.L. Kelly’s “Mad” is a nicely unadorned and relatable meditation on frustration and mental health. Ricky Eat Acid and Blithe Field's “It's Love” is a bittersweet and dreamy piece of electronic music. The off-kilter garage rock of Infinity Crush’s “Mirror” adds an element of bracing power to the album, and it's redolent of Mitski's recent work. Alex G’s “July 27, 2015,” a ramshackle twee-house song, is the one moment of true risk and failed experimentation: Its lilting drum machine pitter-patter could easily fit somewhere in the world of internet house labels like 1080p.
Elsewhere *Radiating Light is muddled by a sense of dullness and repetition. There aren’t many risks, *and unlike it’s predecessor, it doesn’t tell a story or give a solid collective artistic statement. Benoît Pioulard’s “Layette [slow version]” is a pedestrian retread of a song he already released earlier this year. A cover of Elvis Depressedly’s “Weird Honey” done by Owen Pallett and Foxes in Fiction is overwrought, busy, and saccharine. These aren't adjectives that normally orbit the kind of music these guys make.
Overall, there are chunks of the compilation that feel anonymous or shapeless, yet it’s hard to hate this release: If you get one of the vinyl bundles, it comes complete with some guava candy, an Orchid Tapes tea bag, Polaroid photos, and a handwritten thank-you note. This kind of love and care that’s hard to beat. Perhaps after six years of innovating, Orchid Tapes is settling for what works. It might not make for an interesting collection of music, but there is something about *Radiating Light *that gives you hope: People still make magic in their apartments behind closed doors. | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Orchid Tapes | August 19, 2016 | 6.7 | 996c4db5-29f9-4da4-a43e-24ca293ff5ff | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The smoldering collaborative album between the experimental singer-producer and ambient duo casts overwhelming emotions into stark relief. | The smoldering collaborative album between the experimental singer-producer and ambient duo casts overwhelming emotions into stark relief. | Rainy Miller / Space Afrika: A Grisaille Wedding | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rainy-miller-space-afrika-a-grisaille-wedding/ | A Grisaille Wedding | Grisaille, which translates from French as “greyness,” emerged centuries ago as artists grew frustrated by the lack of depth in their paintings. Starting with a light base, they would layer shadow and highlights using a monochromatic palette, building dimension so their canvas looked sculptural, as if chiseled from marble slabs. The austere technique serves as a guide to Rainy Miller and Space Afrika’s new collaborative project A Grisaille Wedding, a smoldering, overcast electronic album that casts overwhelming emotions into stark relief.
Miller and Space Afrika shape each composition around a single concept, slowly adding elements to fill the surrounding space. The songs, a blend of gossamer ambient pop and thunderous hip-hop, wrench at themselves, tugging between softer and heavier sounds. The bleary-eyed “00-down / Murmansk 12” employs the bleak winter boom of 2010s Chicago drill to tamp down a reversed melody line; “Maybe It’s Time to Lay Down the Arms” threads candlelit samples through a rickety trip-hop beat that constantly threatens to fall apart. “The Graves of Charleroi” would be a delicate, meandering folk tune if not for its crashing strings and reverberant vocal loops, crushing the air out of the guitars and inducing a sense of claustrophobia.
The vocals work more as texture than narrative advancement, but occasional glimpses suffuse the album with yearning. On “Sweet (I’m Free),” guest RezNiro proclaims that “life is absurd,” peeking out from the maelstrom of overdriven drones and feedback stabs; Iceboy Violet’s distorted, double-time flow is another spinning gear propelling the track to its explosive conclusion. The album holds space for both heaviness and hope: When Miller repeats “They told me” in the middle of “Maybe It’s Time to Lay Down the Arms,” he sounds flat and dissociative, as if parsing a truth that his brain won’t process.
The album’s most poignant song, “Let It Die,” moves from hushed beauty to total obliteration over the course of its six minutes. The sustained keyboards, slightly frayed at the edges, slowly accumulate; it’s hard to catch everything Miller sings, but even through the processing effects’ alien haze, it’s impossible to miss the ratcheting passion in his delivery. The reverb begins to yawn, swallowing everything, and noise serrates all the synths until the track peaks in an enormous, blistering swirl. It’s an IMAX screen of emotion, overwhelming and cathartic. As it winds down, you’re left drained—not hollow or empty, but cleared, ready for what’s next. | 2023-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Fixed Abode | November 21, 2023 | 7.7 | 996eb0e1-8345-4037-a7e9-64a260d9936f | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
On Belle and Sebastian's first album in five years, the band has introduced a new wrinkle, writing a record filled with synthesizers and dance grooves to coax their once notoriously-staid live crowds to cut a rug. | On Belle and Sebastian's first album in five years, the band has introduced a new wrinkle, writing a record filled with synthesizers and dance grooves to coax their once notoriously-staid live crowds to cut a rug. | Belle and Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20135-girls-in-peacetime-want-to-dance/ | Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance | Seven years is how long Belle and Sebastian lead singer Stuart Murdoch was afflicted with chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating illness with no easy cure. You’re tired all the time, but sleep doesn’t help; you can’t hold a job down, since you don’t have the energy to be anywhere. Murdoch developed the disease as a university student, when he was old enough to fully comprehend what he’d be forgoing should his symptoms endure. Family? The hope of fame, or fortune? Forget about it.
If you imagine for a second how Murdoch must’ve despaired, then you’ll understand why he calls "Nobody’s Empire"—the opener on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, in which he sings about the solitude brought on from his sickness—the most personal song he’s ever written. That’s not a small statement, considering Belle and Sebastian’s reputation. Their ethos was crystallized in the title of the first song on their first album—"The State I’m In"—and they’ve spent nearly two decades staking their claim as the most sensitive band in indie rock, patron saints for daydreaming boys and girls. Their early records sounded feather-soft, but over the years, they slowly put on weight and become a real band, translating their bedroom aesthetics for the festival set.
On Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, they’ve added a new wrinkle by writing an album that attempts to be pop qua pop, filled with synthesizers and dance grooves to coax their once notoriously-staid live crowds to cut a rug. Even the artwork is different: This is their first cover that doesn’t use a monochromatic photographic still that directly references the Smiths, their emotional forerunner. The band hired outside producer Ben H. Allen III (Animal Collective, Washed Out) to punch up their sound, and he encouraged them to take more chances. The band is confident enough to step into pro forma P-funk on "The Party Line" and polka singalong on "The Everlasting Muse" without losing their penchant for bookishness: "The Power of Three" name drops Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, while the jaunty "Play for Today" mixes in chants of "author! author!" as Murdoch and Dee Dee Penny of Dum Dum Girls trade harmonies.
"Enter Sylvia Plath" combines both worlds, with a brittle rhythmic backbone giving the band their first song that you might—might—hear in a club. "The Cat With the Cream" and "Ever Had a Little Faith?" are both classic Sebastian, softly spoken songs where Murdoch reminisces for rainy days and childhood wonder. The piano line that kicks in during the latter’s outro is a pleasant little melody that accentuates Murdoch’s ear for nostalgic detail. So does "Nobody’s Empire", which Murdoch wasn’t lying about. It’s a nakedly autobiographical song that’s verbose even by their standards, with Murdoch spitting rapid-fire verses over a sleepy melody before letting loose with what passes for a scream in the Sebastian-verse, which is a place filled with indoor voices.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Murdoch said he would’ve loved to be "a young Carole King," working in the Brill Building where so many of pop’s yesteryear hits were written. "I see no reason why that music can’t be possible again, but I look around and don’t see it," he said. "Sophisticated, nuanced, melodious pop music, that sweeps you away." That Murdoch’s shining ideal of pop harkens back to a half-century ago goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the band’s dandier affectations, as does his casual dismissiveness of today’s comparatively hedonistic Top 40. It's also strange because, to many long time listeners, the band already took their shot at writing a pop album with 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress and 2006's The Life Pursuit, where they churned out romantic hook-loaded singalongs like "I'm a Cuckoo" and "The Blues Are Still Blue", both of which are catchier and more memorable than anything on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance.
Besides, Murdoch is surely trifling if he doesn't think sweeping, sophisticated pop has a place on the charts: Adele and Sam Smith are two singers who've carved their niche by singing right to your parents. A flippant comment to Pitchfork about how listeners would rather lose themselves in Nina Simone than Beyoncé shows not just a flagrant misunderstanding of how people listen to Beyoncé, but to the artists they love. He means well, but it faintly stinks of snobbery that's gotten other indie acts in trouble when they've tried to explain their theory of pop with, well, a lot of theory. Tom Krell of How to Dress Well raised hackles when he told Pitchfork he wanted to be "pop, but not populist." But what's wrong with trying to appeal to as many people as possible?
Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance reminds me of another recent attempt from a high-profile indie band to change directions. Arcade Fire surprised fans with the Caribbean-influenced Reflektor, their attempt at writing a looser, more playful album. They sort of looked like a bunch of dorks, but it didn't matter. Eventually, everyone learns what children and merengue instructors know to be true: Dancing is fun, regardless of how well you move your hips.
Look at the video of the band cutting through "I’m a Cuckoo" from the 2013 Pitchfork Music Festival. Murdoch hams it up, casting flirtatious looks from side-to-side, dropping to his knees like Elvis. At one point, he loses the guitar, because you can’t dance while holding a guitar. He’s having fun. And if fun is what he wants to have after 19 years and nine albums anointing them as kings of coyness and crossed arms—it’s hard to begrudge that.
And, who knows: Maybe this is the album to teach someone about fun. If not, it’s still a perfectly respectable hour of Northern soul-influenced pop, even if it’s difficult not to hear the intention behind every song. (Or to shake the feeling that a band like Cut Copy is much better at this shambling soul revue style of music.) One of Murdoch’s imaginary women instructs him to "be popular, play pop, and you will win my love" on "The Everlasting Muse", which sounds like noble inspiration but ends up falling short. You don’t win anyone by simply playing a pop song, or by deciding to be pop. It takes something else, something that can’t be explained by a mission statement. For a band so well-loved for writing from their heart, it sounds like they got stuck in their head. | 2015-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 21, 2015 | 6.6 | 99783d1c-7399-4fe2-bc33-11f1dd2fbef5 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
Moving from ambient washes of synth and samples to sludgy, pseudo-anthemic passages of throat-straining emotion, this band's debut brings to mind both early post-rock outfits Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno as well as mid-70s krautrock. | Moving from ambient washes of synth and samples to sludgy, pseudo-anthemic passages of throat-straining emotion, this band's debut brings to mind both early post-rock outfits Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno as well as mid-70s krautrock. | Bear in Heaven: Red Bloom of the Boom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10886-red-bloom-of-the-boom/ | Red Bloom of the Boom | Bear In Heaven's debut album doesn't automatically reveal itself to the listener. It's too abstract to get in one sitting, full of through-composed songs and strange ambient pieces. But while it may take several spins to get everything, something about the album's atmosphere grabs you the first time. Maybe it's just that the record's most tangible assets-- the vocal melodies and rhythms-- are being held just out of reach, ready for the taking with a bit of work, or it could simply be the inventive textures they create. Whatever it is, Brooklyn's Bear in Heaven have a way of drawing you into their world and making you feel like you belong in its alien landscapes.
In that regard, it reminds me a bit of the early-1990s UK post-rock outfits Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno. Those bands had influences of course, but, like Bear In Heaven, they put together their sounds in such a way that it was hard to tell exactly what those influences were. This is a band that will go from ambient washes of synth and samples to sludgy, pseudo-anthemic passages of throat-straining emotion to minimalist beat-making to slippery, Eno-inspired indie rock in one song like it's no big deal.
This approach works better on some tracks than others, naturally. Opener "Bag of Bags" has an oddly appropriate title because of the fact that its various passages don't link seamlessly-- it's a piece of music full of smaller pieces of music. But the next song, "Slow Gold", is just the opposite. The fragments it's built from fit together like a jigsaw puzzle as it glides from a mysterious intro through a couple of hushed indie-rock verses to a hellish passage full of loud, repetitive vocal phrases sung/shouted in close harmony.
The most haunting track is also the most abstract, a long, spooky piece called "Fraternal Noon", which recalls Can's "Aumgn" with its patchwork of strange sounds. The wordless vocals sound as though they're trapped inside the synthesizer that provides the main texture, and the heavy echo and processing make the guitar sound like percussion and certain bits of percussion feel like tonal instruments. It's essentially formless, but still somehow memorable, like a nightmare just after it's awakened you with a start.
With seven songs in 43 minutes, Red Bloom of the Boom feels something like a 70s prog-rock or krautrock album-- a true cohesive work in an era when the album-as-art form appears to be slowly dying. It has a dreamlike logic to the way it flows, going from the reverb-heavy "Fraternal Noon" straight into the driest song on the album, "Shining and Free", which stutters along on an unadorned, straightforward drum beat but also includes a few totally unexpected bursts of dub echo and phasing. It ends with a spine-chilling drone that whispers the album to an unresolved close. It's the perfect dénouement for a record that defies easy description and never goes quite where you think it will. | 2007-11-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2007-11-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Hometapes | November 26, 2007 | 7.8 | 999243bd-017a-427d-9785-33e0318a0b4b | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The pop star returns with a grown-man, R&B album about domestic love that has all the glow and eroticism of an airport terminal. | The pop star returns with a grown-man, R&B album about domestic love that has all the glow and eroticism of an airport terminal. | Justin Bieber: Changes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/justin-bieber-changes/ | Changes | At some point in the endless world tour supporting his 2015 album Purpose, Justin Bieber stared into a sea of fans and pleaded with them to quiet down. “When you guys are screaming... it’s hard for me,” he muttered, pacing in front of his own JumboTron double in the opening montage of his new promotional documentary Seasons. In 2017, he canceled the remaining 14 dates of his tour. His team cited “unforeseen circumstances,” and for a while, the Bieber machine fell eerily silent.
Now, as it fires back up again, his management is busily filling in the blanks. In one episode of the docuseries, Bieber discusses the severity of his former drug use; he smoked weed for the first time at age 13, he tells us, and by the time he entered his 20s, he had progressed to pills and lean: “My security... were coming into the room at night to check my pulse,” he admits. He also discusses his struggles with anxiety and his diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. “No one’s ever grown up in the history of humanity like Justin Bieber,” his manager Scooter Braun adds.
At the center of this whirlwind lies Changes, his first album in four years. On it, Bieber returns to us a wiser man—the emphasis, here, strenuously, on “man.” As of 2018, he is happily married to Hailey Bieber, née Baldwin, model and daughter of Stephen. Bieber is newly sober, newly wed. Now is the time for stubbly beards stroked fondly, for wry smiles at the memories of youthful folly, for a sharp decline in public-urination incidents. But above all, now is time for sex. More precisely, for love-making, of the most grown-up and responsible variety—no giggling, constant eye contact. His fifth studio album is pitched as an invitation to bask in Bieber’s newfound domestic bliss, but while his contentment might be heaven for him and his managers, the resulting album has all the glow and eroticism of an airport terminal.
Bieber recorded Changes mostly with his main writing collaborator Poo Bear and Josh Gudwin, his trusted producer and engineer. Without the animating presence of someone like Skrillex (who helmed six songs on 2015’s Purpose), Changes settles into a middle-distance, stream-friendly murmur that is more sleepy than salacious. Its 16 songs (plus a remix) are all cold angles and frictionless surfaces, devoid of intimacy and heat. Married-sex songs can be some of the most provocative: see “Rocket” or “Partition” from Beyoncé’s self-titled album for a few minutes’ evidence. But the language here is off-putting and sanitized, and the music has none of the bright syncopation or rhythmic surprise of the Purpose singles.
Nearly every song on Changes resembles every other in tempo, arrangement, and often in lyrics, which seem to be sourced from the same 10 or 15 pastel candy hearts. Some lines would be fascinating in their distance from human communication (“Let’s get it in expeditiously,” he proposes on “Come Around Me”) if they weren’t so dull (“Shout-out to your mom and dad for makin’ you/Standin’ ovation, they did a great job raisin’ you,” he bleats on “Intentions”).
As that last line hints, there is a creepy patriarchal blankness to the devotion displayed here. In Seasons, Hailey is almost exclusively discussed in terms of what she provides for Justin: “She loves her man.... She’s so caring, so giving, so loyal,” says Braun. “If I could handpick a girl from the stars, it would be Hailey,” his manager Allison Kaye insists. That kind of anti-erotic ownership language permeates Changes and is never quite as pointedly apparent as when Bieber sings “Heart full of equity, you’re an asset” right after an ill-advised reference to “the kitchen” on “Intentions.”
Now, Hailey and Justin have entered into marital communion—and they’d like you to know that they enter into it eagerly, and often. If Bieber whispering “You got that yummy yum” doesn’t make you want to dart away like a cat up a tree, maybe his ecstasy over “the way you motion, motion in my lap” will do it. Changes is a baby-making album if you find Lil Dicky ogling underage girls on Instagram and rapping, “I’ll kiss your breasts all tenderly, what’s up,” stimulating. It is a celebration of marriage if you consider “Do you wanna look at me forever?” an acceptable proposal. On “Habitual,” Bieber sings, “Flowers open when they feel the sunlight,” a sentiment which is really only a few degrees removed from The Handmaid’s Tale’s dystopian catchphrase, “Blessed be the fruit/May the Lord open.”
In fairness, some of this language might result from the whittled-down phrasing, which seeks to emulate current pop/R&B trends. This truncated, staccato delivery generally suits outsized performers, who can fill a vacuum left by song structures with their personality, with their quirks, with their wit. Putting it mildly: personality, quirks, and wit are not Bieber’s strengths. He is a traditional entertainer, a people-pleaser who works best as the wholesome center of a wilder party. “Sorry,” his biggest-ever hit, placed a rowdy dancehall beat behind old-fashioned eight-bar melodies; the top line was as bright as it was sophisticated, and Bieber sounded at home. Lost in the midtempo grayscale of Changes, he suffers from a terminal wholesomeness that loops back around to unsettling.
Scattered bright spots come from guests—on “Forever,” Post Malone injects his destabilizing energy, singing with the urgency of someone in dire need of a bathroom. Kehlani’s appearance on “Get Me” enlivens the muted, Noah “40” Shebib-type beat. Otherwise, the only appealing moments appear in the last third, when Bieber sings over minimal accompaniment. “That’s What Love Is” features nothing but an acoustic guitar, capo’d high and twinkling like a music box. The words redefine “sweet nothings” (“Don’t nobody else deserve my eyes,” he avows) but they dissolve in the sunlight of Bieber’s falsetto. The way he capers between chest and head voice is effortless and dazzling, like watching a figure skater land triple lutzes, one after the other. For exactly two minutes and forty-five seconds, the joy he takes in his talent is palpable.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RBMG / Def Jam | February 18, 2020 | 4.5 | 9992655f-4010-4fdb-9657-b4a9ece46228 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Released by UK bass scion Batu, this survey of cutting-edge club music is less a collection of voices than a shared statement of purpose, full of thrilling rhythms and textures. | Released by UK bass scion Batu, this survey of cutting-edge club music is less a collection of voices than a shared statement of purpose, full of thrilling rhythms and textures. | Various Artists: Patina Echoes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-patina-echoes/ | Patina Echoes | The story of UK dance music is a story of mutation: of soundsystem culture and breakbeat hardcore colliding to create jungle and drum ’n’ bass; of American house that spawned its mutant UK garage; of the darkside 2-step that would morph into dubstep, that (briefly) world-conquering sound that rampaged like a world-conquering robot. But aside from a few exceptions—specialist subgenres like UK funky, drumstep, and bassline house, also sometimes known, fittingly enough, as “niche”—the UK hasn’t generated many new styles in the past decade. That doesn’t mean that the process of evolution has hit a wall; it has just diversified and diffused. Instead of yielding distinct, readily identifiable rhythmic signatures, club music’s innovations have become restless, reinventing themselves at every turn. Seeking new ground across an expanded array of tempos, cutting-edge club music has poured its energy into shape-shifting textures and timbres. It’s a tough time for those of a taxonomical bent, but a golden age for listeners who like to be surprised at every turn.
Smack in the center of this vortex is Bristol’s Batu (Omar McCutcheon) and his Timedance label. Timedance is part of a fresh generation of imprints—like Wisdom Teeth and Whities—that have come along in the wake of Hessle Audio, Livity Sound, Hemlock, and Idle Hands, whose idiosyncratic output helped usher the amorphous style known as “UK bass” to an even more unpredictable place. Timedance has been putting out 12"s since 2015, and Batu has also released on Hessle Audio and Dnuos Ytivil, a sublabel of Livity Sound. But this is the first album-length statement that Batu has released. Even though he doesn’t actually appear on his own compilation, his sensibility guides it. The record’s tracks are all over the place—some are slow, some fast and some entirely beatless—but their flow is more in keeping with the work of a lone artist than a group effort by nearly a dozen different musicians.
McCutcheon has spoken of his debt to UK styles like jungle, dubstep, and grime, and those roots resurface all over Patina Echoes—particularly jungle, whose knotty cadences can be heard echoing through many of these tracks’ snapping syncopations. House music’s influence looms in the background—particularly in the lovely “Soft Opening,” the lush, conga-driven offering from Mexico’s Nico—but almost nothing here gives in to the regularity of a four-to-the-floor pulse. Kick drums stagger, grooves swagger, and accents jerk and thrash. In rRoxymore’s “bRINGTHEbRAVE,” minimal techno’s icy chimes ring atop a shuddering pile-up of sub-bass and white noise. The lone exception is Metrist’s “Auld Flaurist,” which borrows its insouciant bounce from ghetto house and juke. But even here, nothing is played straight: The beat sounds like it’s been sampled from a pocketful of loose change, and in the breakdown, halfway through, a string quartet makes an unexpected appearance, as though a Morton Feldman concert had broken out in the middle of a coin-op laundromat.
Everything here is richly tonal. Not like deep house or dub techno, with their monochromatic chord stabs; instead, tones slip and stretch across the spectrum. The Bristol producer Cleyra’s opening “Naked,” (a debut), takes jazz-inflected chords and smears them, in the manner of Arca’s Mutant; Rae’s “Sleep Rotation” (another debut), bathes a tentative, clicking beat in dissonant shimmer; and Via Maris’ thrilling “Side Effects” balances glassy pinging with chords that twist like the northern lights. If there’s one thing that unites everyone here, it’s a shared interest in contrasting textures and timbres—draping synths like a strip of silk over a spiky beat, or exploding a cluster of fizzy tones like fireworks in the mist.
McCutcheon has said that Patina Echoes, although a compilation, is also intended to function as a coherent long-player. Its ambient bookends help give it shape, while beatless detours like Bruce’s mind-bending “Let’s Make the Most of Our Time Here” offer the chance to duck away from the dancefloor—like microdosing, perhaps, in place of nipping out for a smoke. (Chekov’s clattering “Stasis 113,” meanwhile, is the only real club anthem here, and it’s a corker; combined with his star turn on Lena Willikens’ recent Selectors 005, the Leeds newcomer looks to be a remarkably promising talent.) More than a collection of individual voices, Patina Echoes feels like a statement of shared purpose, and as such, it assumes the mantle of iconic UK label documents like Warp’s Artificial Intelligence, Mo Wax’s Headz, and Night Slugs Allstars Volume 1—all surveys of a landscape in flux, less repositories for an established sound than catalysts for a new upheaval. | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Timedance | June 6, 2018 | 7.8 | 99926b3c-2ff8-4f98-a04f-a59b543bf81c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Los Angeles-based artist’s full-length debut uses Peruvian chicha, Congolese soukous, and Afro-Colombian percussion to explore both personal grief and the abiding melancholy of diaspora. | The Los Angeles-based artist’s full-length debut uses Peruvian chicha, Congolese soukous, and Afro-Colombian percussion to explore both personal grief and the abiding melancholy of diaspora. | Reyna Tropical: Malegría | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/reyna-tropical-malegria/ | Malegría | Grief demands its own impossible language. To confront the death of a loved one (or the lingering melancholy of diasporic displacement), you have to bend the rules. It requires new idioms, new phrases, new forms of expression altogether. To contend with these feelings, the Los Angeles-based musician Fabi Reyna, aka Reyna Tropical, turns to the wisdom of a pithy neologism: malegría.
Borrowed from a 1998 Manu Chao song, the term mimics “bittersweetness” by colliding the Spanish words for “bad” and “happiness.” It’s a concept that captures the radiant emotional spectrum of Reyna’s debut full-length, released two years after the death of her bandmate, Nectali “Sumohair” Díaz, in an e-scooter accident. The record is an imaginative meditation on the possibilities of diasporic genre collage: Reyna, Díaz, and new collaborator Nay Mapalo collect hues of Peruvian chicha, Mexican zapateado, Congolese soukous, and a handful of other styles, glazing them over each other like a highly saturated watercolor painting. With its loose construction, inventive arrangements, and liturgical tranquility, Malegría is an incisive exploration of the porosity of diasporic life.
Reyna is a nimble guitarist, able to glide fluidly between genres and settle in the space in between. “Lo Siento” is built on a bare-bones lyrical refrain about carrying knowledge that is painful, but the looping soukous melody feels soaked in marigold-colored light, as if she’d harnessed apricity itself. “Conexión Ancestral” is a high-gloss stylistic detour with a punchy four-on-the-floor foundation. “Suavecito” is a beaming prayer for serenity, built on dapples of Afro-Colombian percussion and a galloping dembow riddim. The song features London producer Busy Twist and Franklin Tejedor, one-half of Colombian electronic duo Mitú. Tejedor comes from a long line of percussionists in the UNESCO-recognized town of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free Black village of the Americas. He lends his voice and drumming to the track, opening the song with a spoken intro in San Basilio’s creole palenquero language. With its shimmering guitars and clacking folkloric drums, “Suavecito” reflects Reyna’s most exploratory impulses, conjuring an indelible moment of tropical futurist magic.
The album is dotted with voice memos of conversations Reyna had with Díaz, doubling as a window into the pair’s creative process while also reflecting back on the album’s broader themes. In the interlude “Mestizaje,” an unnamed narrator speaks about the dangerous colorist racial ideology that has shaped her family and so many other Latin American ones, in which marriages with white partners are encouraged in order to produce “better-looking” children. Malegría succeeds, in part, because Reyna isn’t afraid to confront the ugly parts of Latin American culture, too.
Often, Reyna finds solace by attuning to the natural world. Field recordings of chittering birds or cresting tides offer the album a faunal and aquatic texture; it’s as if Reyna is humming a tune on the beach, or perhaps singing beneath the verdant rainforest canopy. Much of the album was recorded in these environments, a choice that feels like a conscious attempt to reconnect to the knowledge embedded in ancestral lands stolen by colonialism, exile, and displacement. For example, “Huītzilin,” named after the Nahuatl word for “hummingbird,” transforms grungy guitar streaks and scattered chirps into a slow ballad about welcoming life’s eternal transformations. Reyna’s diaristic and pictorial lyrics are often simple or repetitive, which makes them even more impactful, especially when she delivers them in her hushed vocal register. It’s as if you’re listening to a friend share their deepest secrets over an ASMR mic, their lulling tones offering the curative power of self-awareness.
There’s a familiar, if hackneyed, saying among Latin American diaspora kids: “ni de aquí, ni de allá” (literally, “not from here, not from there”). The phrase tries to capture the liminality of diasporic life, but inadvertently, it has glossed over significant differences in citizenship, race, and class, instead suggesting the experience is homogenous. Still, the maxim gestures at a very real sense of isolation, estrangement, and grief that is difficult to shake. It’s a feeling Reyna is acutely aware of, and one she speaks to directly on “Cartagena.” “Y así te sigues moviendo/Con la tristeza en tu cuerpo,” she sings, acknowledging the melancholy that inhabits diasporic bodies, even in moments of joy. In its summery melodies and impressive stylistic experimentation, Malegría asserts that the experience of diaspora can never be fixed to a single definition or affective state. You always exist in multiplicity, carrying the beauty and the sorrow together. | 2024-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | Psychic Hotline | April 11, 2024 | 7.7 | 999362b2-c881-4cfa-aa8a-0dbb482c9562 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
This collaboration between Arca and Shayne Oliver looks back at a scene where queer and trans artists of color birthed avant-garde club sounds that continue to hold sway today. | This collaboration between Arca and Shayne Oliver looks back at a scene where queer and trans artists of color birthed avant-garde club sounds that continue to hold sway today. | Wench: Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wench-greatest-hits-88-16/ | Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 | The duo of Arca and Shayne Oliver, founder of the successful fashion brand Hood By Air and the multidisciplinary creative studio Anonymous Club, WENCH is the musical collaboration of two club kids, who—in their kinetic alignment and disdain for the mainstream—became two of the most influential people in their respective fields during the 2010s. WENCH formed shortly after Arca, aka Alejandra Ghersi, met Oliver during the latter’s days as resident DJ and co-host of the prolific underground party GHE20G0TH1K—a queer punk/rave space founded by Venux X where artists like Total Freedom and Nguzunguzu came up, a space extremely formative to the trans clubscape of today. Their first stint working together produced the Swaggot Trilltape in 2013: a sample-heavy, 33-minute “goosebump pop” mixtape that jumped between hip-hop, industrial, techno, bass, noise, and more; they described it as “the sounds you remember after you exit the club on your way home.”
WENCH eventually produced more projects, including the HBA Galvanize soundtrack and Arca’s cult classic Sheep. They had plans to release a full-length LP, where they promised to capture a “hypercharged” sensuality, but that never came to light. A compendium of unreleased productions, Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 marks the duo’s official debut, finally capturing the erratic energy that beatmaker Arca and vocalist Oliver fomented at the height of their partnership. Like much of Arca’s previous work, Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 rejects normative forms in favor of an amorphous embrace of the abject. In its reproach of the mainstream emerges a celebration of the queer-of-color punk, industrial, and electronic sounds that dominated raves of the 2010s (and continue to do so today). Supported by Arca’s sludge-tinged explosions, Oliver interjects with ballroom-esque one-off phrasings that cement Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 as a document of queer euphoric defiance, sexual emancipation, and sweaty club intoxication.
Sexually charged sound design and subject matter gives Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 its bite. Elements of hardcore techno and digital punk excavate righteously horny revved-up representations of queer sex. “Fister” is a blown-out ambient-industrial track that’s as hard hitting as the act from which it gets its namesake. “Primal Pussy” hypnotizes, pairing Oliver's repetitions with droning alarm-signal synths: “Primal pussy/Got you oh so gushy, it’s so pussy.” On “Snake,” Oliver hisses, “Take my body like a snake, take my sss/Take my bussy, recreate,” against booming bass synths that evoke a humid, heaving dancefloor. The erotic mode they evoke—an act of relinquishing bodily and sexual control in the name of music—was birthed in the spaces that WENCH called home, and it continues today in quintessential trans spaces like Club Carry or For the Gworls.
Heard without context, WENCH might seem like a one-off collaboration. Much of the record sounds like sliced-up mutilations of Arca’s earliest work on Stretch 2 and &&&&&. But Oliver’s playful lyrics add a new dimension that, in retrospect, feeds into Arca’s earliest expressions of trans identity. In a 2016 Dazed interview, Shayne Oliver said that WENCH “started out as a sexually deranged music project that had a lot to do with tension, sexual identity and how to feel like a man having sex with the feelings of a woman and a man.” Through Oliver’s disdainful vocals and celebratory filth, the music teases at the carnal themes that Arca would express more explicitly in Arca and the KiCK series.
Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 offers an essential retrospective look at the way WENCH and their peers birthed a fluid array of hard-hitting electronic music that is distinctly queer and trans in foundation. Yes, some of Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 is messy—the vocal undulations on “Rocker Fish” are unpolished in an unflattering way—but much of that is intentional, because in its off-kilter design, it is distinctly queering sound, celebratory in its rejection of societal norms. Enticing in its popper-whiffing rush, it is punk and goth in blueprint, and an abundance of youthful euphoria (reflective of the time in which it was recorded) adds color to the record’s darkly lit worlds. On “Teen Spirit,” supported by arcade-game synths, WENCH capture the juvenile sound of queers of color coming into their identity with confidence. Album highlight “Sick” is among the album’s most comical songs: With its ballroom-inflected interjections and pitched-up laughter, the video chronicles a Black trans woman and Shayne Oliver kiki-ing around town, an endless vision of leisure and shit-talking.
While Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 plays like a marker of GHE20G0TH1K’s success, it is just as much a sensually crafted love letter between Oliver and Ghersi. Arca has spoken tenderly about calling Oliver “mother,” while Oliver has detailed the two being physically affectionate with one another in private and public spaces. “Take My Hand” is a full-on display of their shared affinity. “Ba ba ba ba black sheep,” Oliver echoes from a distance, calling upon fellow outcasts to take his hand and seek solace within this music. It’s through songs like this that Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 feels so representative of the creative and personal bonds that queer and trans artists of color often express. Behind the record’s gnashing synths and siren-like vocals is a broader, more emotive narrative on the ways that many underground queers survive and make art in the digital age. | 2022-08-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | August 24, 2022 | 7.6 | 999ba4c0-dcd1-4110-8515-f7dce1ad2e7e | Gio Santiago | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/ | |
In his first Fabric mix under his Daphni alias, Caribou’s Dan Snaith zigzags his way through an eclectic set of edits and original productions. | In his first Fabric mix under his Daphni alias, Caribou’s Dan Snaith zigzags his way through an eclectic set of edits and original productions. | Daphni: Fabriclive 93 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daphni-fabriclive-93/ | Fabriclive 93 | Around 2011, Dan Snaith stepped away from his band, Caribou, to focus instead on the tricky mechanics of making dancefloors combust. As Daphni, he began moonlighting as a club DJ and releasing edits and drum-heavy remixes. Since then, Caribou itself have moved toward Daphni’s own gravitational pull: Our Love hewed more closely to leftfield house than to the sounds of his previous work. Meanwhile, Daphni’s beats have gotten tougher, trickier, a tad stranger.
Following Ricardo Villalobos, Omar S, and Shackleton, Snaith’s entry in the Fabric mix series is built exclusively out of his own tracks and edits, although delineating them as original productions versus edits isn’t quite right either. “It’s almost a category mistake,” Snaith recently told NPR. “Yes, it’s a continuously mixed piece of music, but I didn’t put it together by DJing and I didn’t put it together imagining that it would be played in Fabric.” Samples, loops, synth and drum patterns, and more all blur together to create an organic whole whose tracklisting breaks down into 27 smaller tracks. The mix includes a few insanely rare songs (like Pheeroan akLaff’s “3 in 1”) chopped up by Snaith as well as his remixes of contemporaries like Container and Jamire Williams; the rest of the set constitutes a trainspotter’s (and Shazam’s) worst nightmare. His Fabric mix minces disco, post-punk, EBM, R&B, rave, and free jazz, and stirs them together in a way that disregards conventional notions of genre. It doesn’t consistently inspire listeners to move, but it still reaches atypical peaks.
At their most effective, disco edits take the body-moving aspects of older songs and heighten their effect. In some cases, that means slicing away cheesy choruses or honing in on one dope passage and stretching it out to tantric lengths. Daphni’s approach is slightly different, as opener “Face to Face” shows. Rather than focus on the break itself, Snaith zooms in on that slack moment a few seconds before a beat tightens up. Tapped hi-hat, plucked bass, and shuffling snares run throughout “Face to Face,” and out of this minute measure, Snaith adds studio laughter and tambourine, dropping each ingredient in and out at his leisure before finally teasing in a falsetto loop of the title phrase. It’s the equivalent of finding a tasty dish in the offal of a track, rather than the prime meat, and few can pull it off like Snaith.
But Snaith never fully gives himself over to dance music’s pleasures; he’s always pulling back on the reins, fussing with other sounds and moving on to new directions. He takes the spare, drilling snares of Williams’ “Futurism” and adds ghostly voices and warm arpeggios, slowly morphing it into the prickly, dubbed-out drum machines of “Ten Thousand” (itself an edit of Nyrabakiga’s “Cor Corora”), and he lets the African tones of that track splinter into gentle kora figures before the stomping filtered house of “Medellin.”
“Hey Drum” and a looping edit of Luther Davis’ 1979 cut “You Can Be a Star” provide the mix’s first transcendent moment, as the looped refrain swells into a disco mantra. But nothing stays settled for long, and the mix soon shifts through more restlessly varied territory: glints of kora, Bollywood vocals, menacing acid lines, storming drums. It’s an impressive display, but it’s also slippery to dance to. “So It Seems,” with its cooed vocals and minor-key chords, even drops a false ending into the mix, some 23 minutes before the actual finale.
A surge of steel-drum-laced UK garage beats leads into the mix’s propulsive home stretch, though it’s not without its own quick detours. Snaith moves from the orchestral disco stabs of “vs” into the dubby house of “406.42 ppm” and on into the triple-time groove of “Always There” before peaking with the anthemic pianos of “Fly Away.” It’s deftly mixed, but it’s also a lot of ground to cover, and after that breathless sequence, it all lurches to a close with “Life’s What You Make It,” a woozy song whose title name-checks Talk Talk, yet whose chord changes more closely resemble Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” A snatch of laughter bubbles up, a burst of static obscures the music, and the final few seconds warble like a tape getting chewed up—a fitting metaphor for a set that’s all about scrambling listeners’ expectations about club music. The mix won’t convince diehards that Snaith is a dance music demiurge. At crucial moments, it sacrifices momentum for eclecticism. It’s less for club puritans than for adventurous Caribou fans who are willing to follow Snaith no matter which rabbit hole he dives down. | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | July 24, 2017 | 7.6 | 999e17cc-8d8a-437d-b8a9-090525271173 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The debut album from the Canadian-born, St. Paul-based rapper stretches his stylings further than they’ve ever gone before. It’s an innovative study in individuality, as technical as it is passionate. | The debut album from the Canadian-born, St. Paul-based rapper stretches his stylings further than they’ve ever gone before. It’s an innovative study in individuality, as technical as it is passionate. | Allan Kingdom: LINES | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23093-lines/ | LINES | So much of Allan Kingdom’s work is about collapsing borders. He is a sing-songy rap alchemist turning signifiers across genres into something radical. His voice melts into slippery flows that seep into the cracks on any production. He was born in Canada, the son of South African and Tanzanian immigrants, and spent much of his life in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, shaped by a small creative community of “dirty, hippy artists…grinding in the middle of the forest.” His last project, Northern Lights, was a sporadic opus molded by the host of cities in which it was made, including the trip to London for the blacked-out BRIT Awards performance of Kanye West’s “All Day.” These cues give hints about the sprawl of his sounds, which rest at a nexus of the African diaspora and the modern rap internet. His work is fueled by spontaneity—sudden bursts out of pockets and slinky jumps in and out of compacting phrases. His unique milieu is a guide to his chameleonic sonic identity.
“I am from Canada, I am from Africa, I am from so many states,” Kingdom raps early on LINES, a debut studio record that stretches his stylings further than they’ve ever gone before. It is a project that goes a long way toward fleshing out the personality of the man behind these eclectic mixes. While exploring a wide array of compositions from collaborators like Cadenza, Dro, and Jared Evans, he offers appraisals of life after a Kanye co-sign, rap as a tumultuous path to escaping the middle class, and how being a nonconformist can be alienating. It’s a study in individuality, where the subject seeks a connection—or more specifically, to be drawn to something.
Aside from the literal “Feeling Magnetic,” which illustrates his pull and his longing to attract plainly, there’s a more subtle desire to bond throughout LINES. Loneliness, and the push for companionship have been constant themes in Kingdom’s songs, but many moments on this album examine coupling closely. The full-throated, crooned descender “Down for Me” requests undying devotion. On the watercolor-ish “Vibes,” he tries to close the distance with a lover, citing a shared energy. The island-flecked title track shares a similar sentiment. Conversely, the disgust in his voice is palpable when a clinger feeds on proximity to his celebrity on “Astounded.” He longs to be close to someone in a meaningful way, but can’t. The closer, “Loner’s Anthem,” feels like a rebuke of the rest of the album in that way: it turns inward, finding solace in his work.
Allan Kingdom cares deeply about craft; he wouldn’t open his debut with “Perfection,” a song about honing his skills amid slow payoffs if he didn’t. It explains why so much of his music is about originality, avoiding negative energy, and protecting his sound from the posers trying (poorly) to replicate it. But the latest entry into his ever-growing technique-sweating pantheon, “Leaders,” is an interesting twist on the series, conceptually and sonically. The flute-led, scuzzy-riffed jam is an everyman dispatch from an emerging phenom that asks peers and fans alike not to follow his lead, on account of his own personal demons. A great deal of the album plays out in a similar fashion: humanizing an eclectic artist who is often inaccessible. On “Questions,” he mentions an absentee father and lost friends as asides in a life recap, providing clues into a fragile mindset. Each cadence in each stanza is selected to strike just the right tone. With stringy flows and a voice that naturally carries melody, he puts into practice his distinctive mechanics.
Though it doesn’t quite reach the highs of its predecessor, LINES is constantly in motion, full of exhilarating lyrical exercises (“Feeling Magnetic”) and sweeping sound installations (“The Fusion”). Ideas tumble one after another, often overlapping at the joints, as on “Don’t Push Me”: “I’m from the land of the lakes/I knew that she wanted to fuck me and she fell in love when she saw me with Ye/I used to save all my shawtys when I was a shorty, I lost all the capes/Tony the Tiger but covered in apes/Back in the day no one thought I was great.” The cadences and inflections spring outward, widening the scope of his sound. With each passing breath, Allan Kingdom strives to expand his universe, creating safe spaces for outcasts in the process. | 2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / So Cold | April 12, 2017 | 7.4 | 99a04bc3-4a1f-49f1-92b0-c5a30080ea1b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
London-based Midwestener Karen Gwyer recorded her debut album on No Pain is Pop while pregnant with her first child. The result, which recalls Oneohtrix Point Never and Julianna Barwick, is a loosely finished collection that feels like entering a deeply private realm. | London-based Midwestener Karen Gwyer recorded her debut album on No Pain is Pop while pregnant with her first child. The result, which recalls Oneohtrix Point Never and Julianna Barwick, is a loosely finished collection that feels like entering a deeply private realm. | Karen Gwyer: Needs Continuum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17746-karen-gwyer-needs-continuum/ | Needs Continuum | London-based Midwesterner and electronic music artist Karen Gwyer deals in abridged thoughts, often setting ideas in motion with barely any sense of form brought in to shape them. The intrinsic openness of her work differs rather strongly from Gwyer's recording process for the new album, which was undertaken in a great creative outpouring in the months leading up to the birth of her first child. Such rigorous circumstances haven't led to a work of great conceptual heft. Instead, Needs Continuum feels more like a gathering of sketches, a sense of letting loose ends stay loose just to see if the world can make sense of them. Gwyer might not be concerned with other people's opinions; her debut EP, released on Patten's Kaleidoscope label, was a cassette issued in an edition of 13 copies. (Though it's free to download from the label.) The step up to No Pain in Pop for the release of this debut LP draws the world in a little closer, even if it does feel like entering a deeply private realm.
Gwyer sometimes leaves her electronics dry and unprocessed; the percussion in "Some of My Favourite Lotions" even feels like a set of ancient Cubase presets set in motion, as do the handclaps in the opening "Sugar Tots". The rest of her sound palette feels thoroughly labored over, providing a depth that's easy to get lost in once Gwyer hits her stride. On "Sugar Tots" she triggers a soupy signature sound that hacks an appealing path through the track. She's at her best when setting repetitive rhythms in motion and layering ideas on top of them, occasionally approaching similar moods to the placid material Cluster produced circa Zuckerzeit. When she diverts into pop her vision is less assured. "Pikku Kokki" harks back to the orange half-light of Nite Jewel's Good Evening, a place so thoroughly mined for inspiration that returning there now feels redundant.
The bulk of Needs Continuum is shorn of traditional vocals, with hums and sighs occasionally buried in the mix. "Pikku Kokki" includes the album's only recognizable vocal, delivered in a series of whispered lines. Elsewhere, Gwyer uses her voice as an extra layer of instrumentation, simply letting spectral coos drift across tracks such as "Night Nails" and "Plan B". It’s a trick that works reasonably well, but it adds to a sense of hesitance and, at times, a lack of confidence about the project, especially coming off the back of that debut EP released in an edition of 13 copies. It makes Gwyer’s work feel like a secret that she’s reluctant to share, constructed in a place so private that she’s wary of letting anyone in. Perhaps such reticence is understandable considering the circumstances in which the record was made, especially as she has talked of wanting to make something that "measured up to the significance of the start of a new life". Occasionally she does approach such peaks. The coupling of the beautifully vacillating "Waukon" with the sobering "Jajja Uses Ancestral Spirit" is where the album reaches its apex.
This isn't a cohesive work by any means: There's a demo-y feeling to some of the pieces, coupled with a sense that this is an album with a decent amount of inspiration but just lacking in execution. Perhaps that's to be expected-- after all, Gwyer was working under extreme circumstances. It doesn't feel like it would take a great shift to give her work the kind of gravitas that Julianna Barwick's music often possesses, and the two certainly share a fondness for diaphanous vocal pining. There's plenty of potential in the electronics here, too, particularly when they form into the kind of supple globules that Daniel Lopatin constructed under his Oneohtrix Point Never guise around the time of Returnal. Gwyer's not there yet, but Needs Continuum contains some satisfyingly oblique turns. | 2013-03-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-03-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | No Pain in Pop | March 5, 2013 | 6.7 | 99a0fa23-60e9-43e5-8326-beaf7934a9d0 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Although recorded in the shadow of tragedy, the Brazilian singer-songwriter’s first album in six years is characteristically delicate in tone and full of charm. | Although recorded in the shadow of tragedy, the Brazilian singer-songwriter’s first album in six years is characteristically delicate in tone and full of charm. | Bebel Gilberto: Agora | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bebel-gilberto-agora/ | Agora | Bebel Gilberto made Agora over three years of tragedy. In that time the singer lost her best friend, who suffered a fatal heart attack as Gilberto spoke with him over the phone, and her mother, the samba star Miúcha, who died of lung cancer. Then Gilberto’s father, Brazilian music legend João Gilberto, passed away in 2019. All the while she was at work on Agora, an album that raises the question: How might personal turmoil have reshaped an artist whose music has been defined by its tranquility?
Since emerging as a solo artist in the mid 1980s, Gilberto’s music has been calming on the ear yet emotionally resonant. The 54-year-old’s smoky vocals and bossa-nova arrangements are the sound of stirred feelings; she can move the soul with the faintest brushstrokes. (When Nip/Tuck used the ghostly, gorgeous “Lonely” as its pilot episode’s theme song in 2003, it hinted at the wicked underside of beauty that the cosmetic surgery-themed show aspired to probe). Still, unlike Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen, Agora does not pontificate on grief, nor does it trade in voyeuristic detail. Perhaps the most personal track is the moving “O Que Não Foi Dito” (“What Wasn’t Said”), a song Gilberto wrote for her father. Yet the words (sung, like the majority of the album, in Portuguese) are oblique, tender, and not overly explicit, with Bebel singing of the bond father and daughter shared: “I know you trust in me.”
Despite its unhappy origins, Agora mostly shares the polished feel typical of Gilberto’s albums, albeit with a few distinct flourishes from producer Thomas Bartlett, who helps color in the edges with understated electronic touches. The title track’s clattering beat nods to Fiona Apple’s penchant for unusual percussion, with a quirky feel complemented by Gilberto’s spoken-word delivery. On “Essence,” Gilberto’s soft touch is matched with twinking synth pop. Most striking might be “Na Cara,” a duet with fellow veteran Brazilian performer Mart’nália, where the singers playfully bob and swagger over a creeping double bass. As ever, Gilberto’s delicate melodies feel like they might not withstand a strong breeze.
This elegance helps carry the goofy but charming “Yet Another Love Song,” which walks the same path as Wings’ “Silly Love Songs.” Here, Gilberto looks at her beau and immediately feels inspired to write a romance tune—acknowledging, like Paul and Linda McCartney before her, that this is well-trodden ground: “Now the world makes room for yet another love song.” she sings. Gilberto also toys with eternal songwriting truisms on “Cliché,” addressing her listeners directly: “For those who do not know/I’m singing this melody for you.” Unfortunately, her voice takes on an exaggerated wispiness here, bordering on frailty. There are a few other moments throughout the record when Gilberto and Bartlett’s instincts seem off: The lagging beat and wordless refrain of “Raio” feel half-hearted and out of step with the rest of the set.
But for the most part, Gilberto’s voice finds the pocket, and when she’s front and center, the arrangements expertly draped around her, Agora is a rapturous listen. It’s not the star’s finest work—for newcomers, 2000’s Tanto Tempo remains her most engaging set—but in a time of personal distress, Gilberto embraces the familiar comforts of her graceful sound.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PIAS | September 2, 2020 | 6.7 | 99a56be5-a8cb-4882-9ea7-e0123e62f2b3 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
In the hands of the master violist, this famous stretch of Bach’s music become body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle. | In the hands of the master violist, this famous stretch of Bach’s music become body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle. | Kim Kashkashian: J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Viola Solo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kim-kashkashian-js-bach-six-suites-for-viola-solo/ | J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Viola Solo | There are as many ways to play Bach cello suites as there are to draw breath. You can treat these pieces as a map to anywhere you want to go. You can play them inexorably as if you are being mowed down like a holy instrument. You can play them as if you are being haunted by the memory of previous interpretations. You can play them like a series of private philosophical musings. Or, if you are Kim Kashkashian, you can play them on viola.
Kashkashian has been exploring the outer reaches of the viola for years, building up a dense thicket of recordings where she casts the instrument in a series of meaty roles: In Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” her viola was a bony branch scraping a window, a voice calling out nervously into gaping silence. In Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s “Signs, Games, and Messages”, her viola filtered into blackness like vents peeking into a collapsed mine shaft. Her decision to tackle Bach’s cello suites is an ambitious one, but in the context of her career, it is just the latest audacious leap in an unbroken series.
The viola can never have the cello’s resonance, but it has a nearly-human tone that will always make it an excellent character actor—the aural equivalent of a lined, stern-browed face that grabs the camera. Kashkashian’s tone has a mournful, woody tang, dark and foreboding and ink-dipped, that makes it a beguiling Bach interpreter. There are moments in these pieces where the instrument’s peculiarities poke through—the string crossings in the opening of the famous Suite 1 are slightly stiff-legged—but they help give defining markings to pieces that might otherwise wear smooth from familiarity.
The most radical aspect of playing Bach is how exposed it leaves you. There are no obscuring pyrotechnics to dazzle with, nowhere to hide a moment of faltering uncertainty. Unlike a concerto, where a single instrument hurls itself up against the massed forces or the orchestra and beats it back, they offer no hero’s triumph to applaud. Solo Bach is inherently private music, insofar as truly holy experiences tend to be private, and for classical musicians, they are the most hallowed of proving grounds—you don’t turn to them to show the world how you play. You turn to them to show how you exist.
Kashkashian steps into this unforgiving spotlight with grace and poise. There is something very corporeal in her interpretations: In her hands, these works are body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle. This relationship is underlined by the intimacy of the close mic’ing: You often hear her breathing in between phrases, the slight flutter of the string crossings and the dry rasp of the bow. The Courante movement of the G Major bristles with ungainly and infectious energy—the courante is a light-stepping dance, but Kashkashian turns it into an invigorating chorus of heavy-thudding peasant boots.
The mood of her interpretation is searching, earthbound, human—she doesn’t treat solo Bach like divine math out of reach of mortal understanding. Her tone is sumptuous, moaning, throaty, with a catch of ache snagged in the instrument’s midrange. Her phrasing in the Préludes always seems to be worrying away at a nagging question—you can feel urgency in the way she presses up against her own tempo slightly in the Prelude to the D Minor suite. Her Bach is furrowed-brow Bach, crisis-of-faith Bach, toiling Bach. Her instrument has never sounded lovelier or humbler than it does here. | 2018-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | ECM | October 20, 2018 | 7.6 | 99adb0d7-9c93-49c8-ad9e-0e41babdc022 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The influential dance artist unveils his second act-- and first after blog house producers turned overblown feedback and digital grime into exhausting shtick. | The influential dance artist unveils his second act-- and first after blog house producers turned overblown feedback and digital grime into exhausting shtick. | Vitalic: Flashmob | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13704-flashmob/ | Flashmob | Few 21st-century house/techno tracks have proven as oddly influential as Vitalic's 2001 "La Rock" and "Poney Part 1". Released when microhouse's delicate sound-sculpting was being touted as dance music's future, and strangely first claimed by electroclash fans during that trend's brief and ignoble peak, Vitalic offered speaker-frying synth-riffs (or sometimes just synth-squeals) to scare off wannabe aesthetes and IDM refugees, reaffirming the productive struggle in post-acid dance between funk and floor-clearing noise. But as "Poney Part 1" and "La Rock" reared their ugly heads again and again, showing up on one compilation after another during the next three years with little new Vitalic material in sight, fans who valued humor and nuance as much as focused brutality may have wondered if producer Pascal Arbez had exhausted his one distortion-drenched trick.
So it probably helped Vitalic's long-term career prospects that his 2005 debut album, OK Cowboy, included enough oddities (like "Wooo", with John Carpenter subbing for the oompah band at a local polka night) and slow jams (like "The Past", a rare non-unctuous trawl through 1980s synth-pop romanticism) to keep John and Jane Doe from tuning out after the 10th consecutive helping of fuck-you. Which is not to say Monsieur Arbez wussed out in the name of crossing over. The fearsome "Poney"-alikes far outweighed the goofball interludes, and if he'd released his second LP 12 months later, his rep as middlebrow dance music's premier scourge would have been secured. Instead, another three years passed between OKC and Flashmob, a period during which a horde of noisy, uncouth producers (many of them fellow Frenchmen in the Ed Banger orbit) popped up, turning overblown feedback and digital grime into exhausting shtick in record time. With the landscape glutted with punk-dance nobodies, Vitalic's mission-- to create deranged, over-the-top dance music that nonetheless honors disco's body-moving tradition-- became that much harder.
If he succeeds, and Flashmob proves that he does, it's because Vitalic's best productions have a near-psychedelic sweep, a sensuous appreciation for the way he can overlap often grating textures until they become both beguiling and disorienting, while so many of his contemporaries are happy to strangle the details right out of their tracks with volume. Even if he's unerringly loud, his weakness for buzzsaw mid-range obliterating the dub-influenced sense of space you hear in the best minimal and deep house, Vitalic offers sublime, spaced-out moments as crucial punctuation in even his least compromising tracks. Opener "See the Sea (Red)" is undeniably dominated by the fat, fuzzed-out riff that takes the place of a traditional bassline, but Arbez knows said riff will flatten listeners all the harder when it rears back up after a twinkly, almost Kompakt-ian breakdown. Justice, by contrast, would just let the riff build and build until you're begging for relief that never comes. Arbez obviously appreciates this no-mercy approach, but realizes that what's effective on a lone 12" gets wearying when repeated a dozen times in an hour.
This contrast-- between short moments of catch-your-breath beauty and the violence of riffs on the edge of pure noise-- has proven to be Vitalic's greatest weapon. Perhaps that's why Flashmob's slower, more even-keeled tracks feel like filler. Necessary filler, but nonetheless. "Poison Lips" is fine as post-Italo/hi-NRG pastiche goes, but it's too streamlined, too emotionally flat to feel like anything other than an interlude that got out of hand. Ditto "Allan Dellon" and its slow-motion electro-house, where Vitalic proves he can do straight-up, classically synth-driven beauty well enough, while lacking the melodrama of Flashmob's obvious highs.
But you also sense that Arbez knows these tracks are glorified breathers, and has sequenced the album very carefully. For instance, following the relatively low-key and carefully sculpted vocoders of "See the Sea (Blue)" with "Chicken Lady", Flashmob's most unrepentantly thuggish moment-- three minutes of Arbez dragging his knuckles around his studio as his melody-spurning machines groan and growl. Taken individually, neither is a jaw-dropper, but in tandem they mimic the one-two punch of his best work. Little of Flashmob could be described as "tender," or even traditionally catchy, but Arbez has enough of a pop instinct to know that drama results only from careful pacing. He also knows that when you're making big, potentially dumb, and definitely unruly dance music, a sense of humor and a lack of pretension is crucial. It's hard not to laugh when a robot tells you, "This is your disco song, made for you, for those rain days, to chase the shadows away," over a backdrop of mock-menacing see-sawing synth-grind.
That's why the best track here is "Terminateur Benelux"; it squeezes everything Vitalic does well into four minutes, a summary of Flashmob's well-crafted, winking brutalism and my pick for a single-serving download for the curious. It's hilarious and a little terrifying all at once, an unhinged homage to early-90s hardcore rave, with a clattering quasi-breakbeat that sounds like it's agitated itself into a fit, sampled "woo!"s and "ah-ha!"s straight off a 2 Bad Mice single, and the kind of freaky Belgian techno drone-riff that's probably ground zero for Vitalic's sonic signature. Listening, you don't know whether to giggle, run for cover, or start breakdancing. Like those first-wave rave producers, Arbez wants to have it all: to make listeners smile, shake their shit, and still walk away a little shaken by the music's intensity. Flashmob pulls off this near-impossible combo with more skill than even Vitalic's fans may have expected. | 2009-11-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-11-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | PIAS | November 13, 2009 | 7.9 | 99b1b8e1-eec6-495d-8771-9409db3e550a | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The tracks on the Florida rapper’s latest tape overflow with jubilant maximalism and have a proudly Southern bounce. | The tracks on the Florida rapper’s latest tape overflow with jubilant maximalism and have a proudly Southern bounce. | Big Baby Scumbag: Big Baby Earnhardt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-baby-scumbag-big-baby-earnhardt/ | Big Baby Earnhardt | Ask a Southerner whether or not Florida is part of the South and the answer will vary, but the most common response might be that Florida is just Florida. It’s not not the South, but it juts out from the region both geographically and culturally. The Florida hip-hop continuum—from Miami bass to Trick Daddy to Rick Ross to Raider Klan—has never really fit neatly into the Southern rap tradition. Florida is somehow deeper than the Deep South and dirtier than the Dirty South.
As trap has become globally popular, it’s strayed from its regional roots, becoming a kind of common denominator rather than a local style. Tampa Bay rapper Big Baby Scumbag first caught my attention with “Dale Earnhardt,” which reminds you that trap is, above all else, a Southern thing. His music videos drip with regional flavor: sucking the juice out of boiled peanuts, shotgunning Bud Lights, stomping around the mud in a Ghillie suit, and stopping at Waffle House for an All-Star Special. As a born-and-bred Southern boy, I used to think Florida was an island all its own. After listening to Big Baby Scumbag, I’m not so sure anymore.
Big Baby came up in the same scene as rappers like XXXTentacion and Wifisfuneral, and he’s affiliated with Atlanta’s Awful Records, but his aesthetic diverges from both. The predominant sound of his work is throwback trap, 1017-style: organ swells, high-pitched synths, 808 bass designed to blow out car speakers. Big Baby’s profile is still relatively low, but he’s already hopped on instrumentals by heavyweights like Zaytoven and TM88, and last year’s Juvenile Hell mixtape was entirely produced by trap forefather Lex Luger.
Until Juvenile Hell, Big Baby’s discography was just a string of singles coated with pastiche, with cover art inspired by Pen & Pixel and track titles that tend to be proper nouns like Lil B: “Austin Powers,” “Metal Gear Solid,” “Tony Stewart,” “Major Payne.” Celebrity names and pop culture references generally provide a hook or central punchline, but they also give Big Baby a chance to play around with his persona, allowing him to embody different characters on different songs (a shagadelic playboy, a good ol’ country boy, etc). His colorful and cartoonish loosies are supported by a canny sense of marketing: He’s released a Trix-flavored craft beer and a line of condoms (take the “S” out of “Scumbag” and you’ll get the pun) and has even hinted at a Big Baby Earnhardt racing game.
Big Baby Earnhardt anchors the rapper in a central character: the Man in Black, the Intimidator himself, Dale Earnhardt Sr., the most controversial and canonized figure in all of stock car racing. Across the mixtape, Big Baby gives flex rap a new meaning: He’s not just showing off but working out. The album incorporates a wide palette of sounds, each one presented by a different part of Big Baby’s personality. On “Modelo Time (Bebe Grande),” his sensual side is accompanied by flamenco guitar, while he tells the woman of his affections that he prefers to be referred to in Spanish. He’s a lonely cowboy on the range with a country drawl on “Toy Story,” a vocal-fried white girl on “Nicole Ritchie,” an honorary Chopstar on “Til’ My Death.” His voice is malleable; he wears many different trucker hats.
The guests Big Baby recruits offer a similar smorgasbord of styles: SoundCloud legend sickboyrari (FKA Black Kray), emo rapper Lil Aaron, and underground kings like Project Pat and Lil B. Drain Gang and Sadboys-affiliated producer CadyCutThroat shows up for “N**GAS IN SWEDEN,” an instrumental interlude that marries trap and tropical house, and Meltycanon pushes Big Baby into math-rock territory with “Street Lights.” Big Baby’s flow is hard-hitting, with barely any space to breathe between bars, but here he expands his vocal range with vaguely country-western hooks that reveal a sensitive songwriter underneath the racing jacket.
Dale Earnhardt Sr. was an embodiment of the Southeastern U.S. He’s a walking, talking contradiction, a ruthless businessman with his name licensed to anything who still kept it authentically down-home. The legend of #3 endured because Dale Sr. proved the South didn’t have to be just one thing. He was the champion of a sport that most people think is for backwards chumps, but he hated the Confederate flag. He respected his forefathers, but he pissed off a lot of people with his driving. It’s like how Big Baby Scumbag’s music is proudly Southern, but it plays with tradition as much as it pays homage—the engine of a Tesla in the body of a stock car, with the trunk speakers of the most pimped-out, candy-painted Cadillac imaginable. The sound is classic, the structure is retrofitted and refurbished, but the eyes are squarely on the finish line. | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 28, 2020 | 7.1 | 99b9bc06-1a4d-48e9-b393-f2215c23d387 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Recorded in jail over a crackly phone line, Drakeo’s mesmerizing album is a remarkable feat: a stark rebuke of the justice system and an unparalleled achievement for a rapper and his producer. | Recorded in jail over a crackly phone line, Drakeo’s mesmerizing album is a remarkable feat: a stark rebuke of the justice system and an unparalleled achievement for a rapper and his producer. | Drakeo the Ruler / JoogSzn: Thank You for Using GTL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drakeo-the-ruler-thank-you-for-using-gtl/ | Thank You for Using GTL | The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department might see money from Drakeo the Ruler’s latest album before he does. Thank You for Using GTL was recorded over the phone from the county’s Men’s Central Jail using phone service from GTL (formerly Global Tel*Link), a company that controls about half of the market for telecom services in correctional facilities. Their exorbitant rates, which extort families’ access to inmates, have been under fire from politicians and advocacy groups alike, but persist largely because they cut sheriffs in on the scam. The company has guaranteed the L.A. County Sheriff millions of dollars each year in fees, providing plenty of incentive to keep the predatory systems in place.
This context is important because GTL is more than just a symptom of a corrupt capitalist corrections industry; on Thank You for Using GTL, it’s a passive collaborator. Drakeo quite literally could not have made it without them. He’s spent much of the last three years at the MCJ, first on a gun rap, then later on murder, attempted murder, and criminal street gang conspiracy charges. Acquitted of the murder charges, the District Attorney re-filed the conspiracy charges; Drakeo remains in custody without bail as he awaits a new trial. He released Free Drakeo earlier this year, a compilation mostly comprising remixes and previously released material. But with a depleted vault of verses and no access to a studio, any new material would have to be made from the MCJ.
That new material is a stunning depiction of what it means to be a gangsta rapper in 2020: constantly surveilled, presumed guilty until proven innocent, pressure applied from all sides. Producer JoogSzn paints the scene with a moody G-funk drum machine that perfectly matches the crunchy analog texture of Drakeo’s phone vocals, and his subdued mix leaves room for Drakeo’s verses and hooks to remain prominent. There’s a dissonant reversal of the flown-in producer tag; the interruptions of the GTL system’s automated messages (“This call is being recorded”) serve as a jarring reminder of the surveillance state in which his music is made—Big Brother is watching you. When JoogSzn’s actual tag gets dropped in, it feels more like an ad-lib. His touch is light, and the production so well-matched, that without the “Thank you for using GTL” interstitials it would be easy to forget this record was made on a jail phone.
And that fact is no small feat. There are a few ways to release an album while incarcerated: The cleanest requires some foresight, building up a backlog of verses and songs before entering custody that can be released while you’re incarcerated, like 03 Greedo’s recent, furious recording run before serving a 20-year sentence on drug and gun charges. C-Murder recorded his vocals for 2005’s The Truest Shit I Ever Said on a portable recorder during visits from his attorney. But the phoned-in method presents unique challenges. Despite the massive revenues they generate, prison telecom companies like GTL are notorious for providing dismal audio quality on their prison communications. And audio delays make it difficult to rap on beat; Gucci Mane’s producer Drumma Boy admitted that he had to chop up his vocals in order to make them fit the tempo of the beats on the Burrrprint (2) HD.
That Thank You for Using GTL overcomes these obstacles is a remarkable achievement from both rapper and producer. Drakeo’s flow is so laid-back it often sounds horizontal, but his internal metronome allows him to slide in and out of the pocket without ever losing the beat. And the aesthetic is crucial to the story. Drakeo didn’t choose to cut the record while incarcerated, but the jail, and his jailers, had a hand in how it was made, and how it sounds. It’s impossible to ignore, and each listen invites a closer read of its circumstances. (The irony of those circumstances is thick: The FBI investigated gangs within the Sheriff’s department itself, and the former L.A. County Sheriff currently sits in federal prison, found guilty of obstructing a different FBI investigation into abuse and misconduct in the county jails.) Still, Drakeo remains in the MCJ, where he’s lived for much of the past two years without ever being convicted of any crime.
Yet there’s not an ounce of desperation in his voice. A master at flipping classic one-liners into memorable hooks, Drakeo displays an uncanny ability to expertly wield repetition to create rhythm with the vocal track. His style is equal parts Snoop Dogg and Juvenile, smooth yet aggressive, oozing confidence and effortlessly expanding the English language with coded street slang. In one of the album’s few moments of levity, he decodes his shorthand for being unimpressed by large sums of cash (“300,000 in a duffel? Do a backflip or sumn, bitch”). The content mostly remains in line with his past work; rhymes about his namesake assault rifles, checking social media tough-talkers IRL, and his predilection for shopping at Neiman Marcus. If he was worried about rapping gangster shit while on trial for gangster associations, you wouldn’t know it until the album’s final moments.
And yet one of the more disturbing elements of L.A. County’s case against Drakeo is their repeated use of his lyrics as evidence of his criminality. It’s crucial to their case, which argues that the Stinc Team is a criminal organization, and therefore their music is indicative of their criminal intent. It’s one of the few specifics of his case referenced on record. The album’s closing track “Fictional” pokes fun at the DA’s obsession with his lyrics (“This might sound real, but it’s fictional/I love that my imagination gets to you”), pointing out that no other art form gets exploited like this in criminal court (“You’re not gonna hold Denzel Washington accountable for his role in Training Day”).
As cold as Drakeo sounds throughout Thank You for Using GTL, its strongest moment is its most vulnerable. The brooding bass and electronic snare on “Pressure” set an ominous mood, and Drakeo—in a rare move—admits the weight of the force applied against him. “I can’t think about my past, I got Alzheimer’s” he raps, his focus firmly trained forward, acknowledging that “Loyalty always comes with a price, it’s the life/just keep your mouth shut.” He knows the implications of the raw deal he’s been handed. But he refuses to buckle under the pressure.
Drakeo’s charges aren’t the result of his actions. His prosecution hinges solely on his associations—where he’s from, the people he grew up with, and the music that they make together. In a city where underfunded services languish while police budgets expand into the billions, it’s hard to consider the resources consumed by the county to prosecute Drakeo multiple times for the same incident and see it as anything other than a vendetta against a rap crew known to publicly disdain the police. He was forced to create the best album of his career from behind bars and, in a cruel twist, to pay his jailers for the privilege to do so. It’s likely the greatest rap album ever recorded from jail—an honor that will provide little consolation if the county’s vendetta is successful.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stinc Team | June 10, 2020 | 8.5 | 99bdc367-c5c2-4f6f-8b4e-7f8c86b2c36a | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Cincinnati post-punks craft melodic, hard-driving pop in service of eerie, unsolvable riddles. | The Cincinnati post-punks craft melodic, hard-driving pop in service of eerie, unsolvable riddles. | The Drin: *Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-drin-today-my-friend-you-drunk-the-venom/ | Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom | The Drin make obscure, threatening post-punk that invites a kind of mental projection. When the Ohio six-piece light up their ambient gloom with a flash of in-the-red guitar or the thunderclap of a harsh snare, it can be as alarming as the sight of a shadowy figure through the trees. With a steady clip of releases over the past three years, the band has rapidly deepened and darkened its world, growing steadily more confident in its vision of rock as occult shadow play. On 2021’s Engines Sing for the Pale Moon and last year’s Down River in the Distance, where the group operated as a solo project of frontman and multi-instrumentalist Dylan McCartney, the music cast a pall that occasionally risked dampening its forward motion. On Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom, the Drin make small but impactful course corrections, wielding depth and shading as accents to their most effortlessly ominous statement yet.
The pleasures of Today My Friend are both immediate and obscurantist: melodic, hard-driving pop in service of eerie, unsolvable riddles. “Venom,” “Stonewallin’,” and “Walk So Far” are riotously straightforward garage rock in the tradition of Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer, propelled by muscular bass, clattering drums, and jagged guitar riffs. But for all its simple pleasures, the record also features wild chasms of noise. “Five and Dime Conjurers” roars to life off the back of a pummeling bassline and descends into a squall of tape delay and guitar feedback, while the deceptive “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling” foregrounds a relentless drumbeat against a backdrop of sulfurous reverb reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s “Six Six Sixties.”
On previous records, McCartney teased out fascinating musical threads, incorporating murky EBM and sticky, shambling guitar pop. He has a Liars-like approach to production, working from a punk blueprint but seeding his hooks with labored krautrock drumming and dissonant electronic flourishes. The Drin explore genre to especially playful effect on “Eyes Only for Space,” which incorporates the anti-gravity properties of dub to dramatize utter desolation: “The stars above are no match for the distance that I feel/When angels come to take me away and break me on the wheel.”
McCartney doesn’t sing his lyrics so much as intone them, and rarely at the front of the mix. From his vantage in the depths, he delivers cryptic pronouncements in a ragged drawl or croons over the beat with a corroded edge. He is an unreliable but evocative narrator, spelling out surreal, doom-laden imagery with eyes fixed on encroaching evil. His paranoid speak-singing recalls Kim Gordon on Bad Moon Rising (the Mike Ousley painting of a burning effigy that fronts the record even feels like a callback). “All the warning signs are there/Dogs that bare their teeth/Everywhere is seeming off/Sirens by the creek,” McCartney warns on “Five and Dime Conjurers.” Amid the nightmarish churn of “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling,” he sounds like the teen narrator of Harmony Korine’s Gummo when he suddenly announces, “Life is so amazing/Life is so fun.” But rather than dwell on the rubble and brutality of Korine’s Midwestern landscape, Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom is an album of cast shadows and lurking menace. It’s catchy enough to draw you into its dark center and disarming enough to make you question everything you hear. | 2023-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Feel It / Future Shock | February 9, 2023 | 7.4 | 99c098fa-0827-49a9-af52-6b8b63b7fc1c | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
On London producer patten's new EP, his Warp debut, his sound remains much the same—a pulverised form of electronica tempered with a subtle melodic glow. However, these tracks are a touch more incisive than those on his debut GLAQJO XACCSSO. | On London producer patten's new EP, his Warp debut, his sound remains much the same—a pulverised form of electronica tempered with a subtle melodic glow. However, these tracks are a touch more incisive than those on his debut GLAQJO XACCSSO. | patten: EOLIAN INSTATE EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18792-patten-eolian-instate-ep/ | EOLIAN INSTATE EP | With the release of his 2011 debut LP GLAQJO XAACSSO, and the obligatory round of introductory interviews that followed, Londoner patten decided to do things a little differently. A Dummy interview showed him to be unafraid of tackling the big questions—What is music? How can we truly know ourselves?—while he repeatedly turned the tables on the interviewer, probing him for his views on the album, interrogating his language, and praising him when he asked a good question. In a Dazed interview from around the same time, meanwhile, the producer’s responses to the boilerplate questions came in the form of links to a jumble of abstruse Wikipedia pages—on exergy, the Hum, the finer points of 5th century Sanskrit linguistic theory, and so on.
All of this points to a personality type that, if not entirely birthed by the web, certainly seems to be in plentiful supply in the internet age; a personality type that shone through on the album itself, too. Many comparisons were made between GLAQJO XAACSSO and golden era Warp, and though patten’s reference points were mostly contemporary—up-to-date strains of hip-hop, house, and techno—he displayed a similar urge to push the parameters of these styles to the edge of chaos, perpetually striving for greater density, volume, abstraction. (He has also spoken about trying to work “in a subliminal state between waking and sleeping,” echoing Aphex Twin’s notorious sleep deprivation method). The resultant music was fascinating and often highly inventive. But it could sometimes feel like the sheer intensity of it all was concealing a basic paucity of material—that, as with those Wiki links, what we were dealing with was a diverting but rather shallow engagement with the subject matter at hand.
Perhaps it’s just that patten’s music doesn’t benefit from prolonged exposure. Certainly, condensed into 23 minutes on the EOLIAN INSTATE EP, the producer’s signature style is far more palatable. The tracks on this, his debut release for Warp, are a touch more incisive, although in other respects it seems that little has changed for patten in the past two years. The sound remains much the same—a pulverised form of electronica tempered with a subtle melodic glow—and passing comparisons can still be made to Actress’ heat-warped techno, or Flying Lotus at his most fervidly psychedelic.
In places the familiarity is welcome. Opener "Aviary" starts out near-impossibly dense and heads upwards from there, patten piling on ever more layers of gauzy texturing. "Obsidian Alms (mid-saccade)", a bracingly abstract take on warehouse techno, pushes this logic even further. But elsewhere it becomes clear that, in spite of its brevity, this is not an all-killer package. There’s pleasure to be found in the subtleties of "Towards infinite shores", but as a whole the thing feels rather desultory. And "oea/Catalogue"'s steady accrual of material begins to feel workaday after about minute four, in spite of the peppy surface edits.
Fortunately, the loping "Sixth seven" shows that patten has a few new tricks up his sleeve. In this case it’s stripping things back. Given space to breathe, the vivid strangeness of each layer of material, and the way in which they fit together to form a single skewed mechanism, becomes all the clearer. Perhaps patten is learning, finally, that everything-all-the-time isn’t the only way to go*.* | 2013-12-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-12-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | December 5, 2013 | 6.9 | 99c8983a-5ca9-4d44-81e9-d8d701836448 | Angus Finlayson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/angus-finlayson/ | null |
Though heavily inspired by ’90s and ’00s R&B, the Portugal-born, Danish musician grows into a quietly commanding presence of her own on her second album. | Though heavily inspired by ’90s and ’00s R&B, the Portugal-born, Danish musician grows into a quietly commanding presence of her own on her second album. | Erika de Casier: Sensational | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erika-de-casier-sensational/ | Sensational | Erika de Casier found an escape in pop music when she was growing up. Born in Portugal to a Belgian mother and Cape Verdean father, she moved at the age of 10 to the tiny Danish village of Ribe, where she and her brother were some of the only mixed-race kids in school. Music became not just a refuge but a mirror: “MTV was the only place where I saw other Black people,” she would later recall. In high school, de Casier discovered the local library’s music section, checking out CDs by artists like Erykah Badu, N.E.R.D., and Destiny’s Child and playing them obsessively. After graduating, as de Casier taught herself music production in her bedroom, she learned to sing in a whisper, to avoid disturbing her flatmates.
De Casier is not the first singer to tiptoe into her preferred vocal register via the exigencies of cohabitation. But where Romy Madley-Croft’s tone on the xx’s debut album telegraphed a painful shyness, de Casier has put her breathy purr to different ends: seductive, playful, and sneakily powerful. It requires listeners to lean in and pay attention. That’s the effect that de Casier has on Sensational, her second solo album. Nestled within a bed of the featheriest R&B imaginable, she is a quietly commanding presence with a few tricks up her sleeve.
De Casier’s voice rarely rises above a hush on Sensational, and neither does the music. The album isn’t an expressly retro affair, but, like her 2019 debut, Essentials, it’s heavily inspired by ’90s and ’00s R&B. Sade’s Love Deluxe and Lovers Rock are obvious touchstones, along with Brandy’s Never Say Never and Craig David’s Born to Do It. Working with her frequent co-producer Natal Zaks (aka DJ Central, of Aarhus, Denmark’s Regelbau collective), de Casier employs the hallmarks of the era’s production: sparkling acoustic guitar, bone-dry shakers and rimshots, and, beneath it all, voluptuous sub-bass that mimics the wooziness of desire. She revels in the plasticity of synthesized woodwinds and sampled strings, and the high-gloss timbres of Café del Mar-style chillout, sticky as suntan oil. Occasionally, birdsong is faintly audible, giving the album the feel of an R&B holodeck.
There’s something almost vaporwave-like about the music’s hyperrealism, yet the record’s palette is also overwhelmingly tactile, full of sumptuous textures—plucked harp, brushed chimes—that emphasize the friction of contact, in the same way that the closeness of de Casier’s voice suggests the warmth of breath on skin. Lyrically, however, Sensational is rarely an explicit silk-sheets soundtrack. Instead, it’s something more subtle and often more interesting, full of the scenarios that play out in a racing mind late at night. De Casier scolds herself for being unable to rein in her worst impulses, revels in the glow of fresh infatuation, and tells off a lover who’s fool enough to leave her. Often, the men in her songs sound like real jerks. In “Polite,” her date is rude to the waiter; in “All You Talk About,” her clueless beau is obsessed with Versace and Fendi. “When you gonna see I’m bored outta my mind, babe/Put your hands on me,” she pleads. Worst of all might be the know-it-all cad in the languid “Insult Me,” a mournful highlight of the album, who straight up ignores what she has to say. “You insult me man/You insult me man,” she sings, her voice dissolving into a mixture of sorrow and contempt. It’s hard to imagine a chorus more witheringly succinct.
These songs amount to a kind of therapy for de Casier, an opportunity to get the upper hand after the fact. Her easy sense of humor makes these imagined victories feel all the more triumphant. In “Drama,” she balances self-recriminations with double-entendre promises of FaceTime sex; in “Better Than That,” a song about moving on after a betrayal, she shrugs, “I already watched that TED Talk on how to let go.” Even in the absence of explicit punchlines, the grain of her voice and the rhythm of her delivery often have all the nuance of a great comic actor. Underscoring the lightness of her touch, she peppers the lyric sheet with emojis, which lends the act of reading along the voyeuristic thrill of poring through someone else’s chat history.
De Casier often gives the impression that she’s in conversation with the music of her upbringing: The tossed-off line, “You go on and on, and on and on,” makes fleeting reference to the Erykah Badu song; elsewhere, she borrows Snoop Dogg’s slightly nasal, sing-song delivery, breezily tapping g-funk’s laid-back vibe. Occasionally she’ll dip into American vernacular, picking up the accents of those singers and rappers she studied so closely as a teenager. It’s a reminder not just of the worldwide sway that American pop culture holds, but also of the way that Black American popular culture offers a sense of belonging to Black people who feel estranged in other countries, too.
“I think the experience of being isolated and having a lot of time for myself meant that creating became a way of dealing with all these emotions,” de Casier has said. But while Sensational is fiercely interior, it never suffers from the pitfalls of navel-gazing: It’s sexy, self-assured, spirited, fun. All those qualities come to the fore in “Busy,” a punchy, retro UK garage anthem about a woman who’s too driven to find time for a relationship. Invoking the bubbly, bump-and-flex vibes of vintage MJ Cole and Artful Dodger, it could be a 2-step counterpart to Marie Davidson’s “Work It.” Sensational might have benefited from a few more songs in this vein (especially since De Casier shines in clubbier contexts), but that’s a minor quibble. De Casier’s got a soft voice but a big personality, and even at its most muted, Sensational radiates charm.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | May 26, 2021 | 7.7 | 99cd978b-fc15-4b79-a69d-b464679b050c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ |
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