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Stephen Malkmus' Beck-produced Mirror Traffic possesses a relaxed, spontaneous feel befitting the Pavement frontman's earlier days. | Stephen Malkmus' Beck-produced Mirror Traffic possesses a relaxed, spontaneous feel befitting the Pavement frontman's earlier days. | Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Mirror Traffic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15736-mirror-traffic/ | Mirror Traffic | As we spend the next nine years critically dissecting and reassessing the 1990s, let's agree to make one historical revision: The lo-fi auteurs of the era-- your Malkmuses, your Pollards, your Elephant Sixers-- were not in fact "slackers," despite the prevailing label/insult of the the day. Truthfully, their lack of studio polish was not a matter of laziness, ironic aesthetic, or poverty, but a coping mechanism for the unstoppable torrent of melodies, words, and ideas exploding from each songwriter's brain. No time for getting that song exactly right-- on to the next one.
That first-draft immediacy can fade with success, creative fatigue, or that demon "maturity." In the case of Malkmus, the transformation took the flavor of just wanting to play his damn guitar-- a mid-life crisis where sports cars were replaced with extended solos, ornate riffs, and long songs that felt even longer. But if the recent rash of alt-rock reunions were meant to cash in on audience nostalgia, perhaps some happy memories ricocheted back onto the bandleaders as they revisited their ragged, spontaneous greatest hits. To put it plainly, Mirror Traffic is not the time travel back to Pavement's peak that is the futile wish of every 30-something indie dork, but it is a rewind to a less perfectionist Malkmus, packed with the most mischief and weirdness he's displayed since his eponymous solo debut. It also has the most songs since Wowee Zowee. Like that declaration of independence from the confines of a successful band, Mirror Traffic possesses a relaxed, spontaneous feel befitting his earlier days in NoCal.
Despite originally wanting to title the album L.A. Guns and putting the hard-rocking "Senator" forward as the first single, Malkmus largely lays off the Guitar Hero: The fretboard theatrics are used more sparingly and deployed to much greater effect on "Forever 28" where a "Mr. Blue Sky" bounce is interrupted by Thin Lizzy runs, or in the thrilling summertime riff of "Stick Figures in Love". Only three songs break the five-minute barrier, and these feel far less claustrophobic than the extended tracks on the last three Jicks records. "Share the Red"'s shambolic waltz, for instance, goes down easier than the 10-minute-long interlocking duets of "Real Emotional Trash".
Songs also move in unexpected directions, like the Go! Team-ish coda of "No One Is (As I Are Be)" or the slingshot tempo changes of "Spazz". Even a brief interstitial like "Jumblegloss"-- with cosmic guitars and unidentifiable auditory objects whirring by-- is a refreshing bit of spontaneity to rinse after the album's most Jicks-like rocker, "Brain Gallop". The less serious vibe better suits Malkmus' still intact sense of humor and menagerie of oddballs (opening here with a nudist in Birkenstocks and ending 15 songs later with a cousin "down with soft rap").
Happily, celebrity producer Beck doesn't employ the heavy hand he showed earlier this year on Thurston Moore's Demolished Thoughts, which re-enacted Sea Change with the Sonic Youth frontman on vocals. Here, Beck's fingerprints are lighter-- he plays enabler to Malkmus' quirks, leaving in mid-vocal laughs, adding subtle lap-steel on "Tigers" and "Long Hard Book", and fuzzing out the punkish "Spazz" and "Tune Grief".
Whether he likes it or not, Malkmus is the indie-rock version of a Dylan or Simon or U2, artists who will forever be blurbed as making "their best album since ____." Competing with his younger self is definitely not a priority for Malkmus, who went through Pavement's reunion tour like he was punching a clock. Any resemblance to earlier days is likely unintentional, but for the aging hipsters of the world, even an accidental flashback is a good contact high. Mirror Traffic tickles that nostalgia without sacrificing maturity, discovering that "playfully relaxed" is a valid third route between "slacker" and "manic." | 2011-08-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / Domino | August 22, 2011 | 7.7 | 99ce9c97-f60f-4f54-818d-46b1cbfc0576 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Irish producer Davy Kehoe’s latest is a strange and exhilarating vision of electronic music, drawing from adrenaline-fuelled krautrock, slathered in harmonica and dub delay. | Irish producer Davy Kehoe’s latest is a strange and exhilarating vision of electronic music, drawing from adrenaline-fuelled krautrock, slathered in harmonica and dub delay. | Davy Kehoe: Short Passing Game | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23066-short-passing-game/ | Short Passing Game | Your first thought, launching into the opening song on Davy Kehoe’s debut mini-album, Short Passing Game, may be that you’re listening to it at 45 instead of 33. It’s ridiculously fast, almost too fast: The drum machine tumbles in a syncopated, breakneck blur, shuddering like a washing machine at the furious peak of its spin cycle. The rhythm approximates krautrock’s motorik pulse but sped up until it throws off sparks. On electric bass, a one-note refrain is thumbed with such relentless determination you can practically see the blood spattered on the pick guard. Do not adjust your turntable; there’s nothing wrong with the playback speed. This is the Irish producer Davy Kehoe’s strange and exhilarating vision of electronic music, poised somewhere between Suicide and Neu!, slathered in harmonica and dub delay, and shuddering like a train about to go off the rails.
Kehoe’s album comes to us via Dublin’s Wah Wah Wino, a fledgling imprint that is only slightly less mysterious than Kehoe himself. Until now, the label has been known mainly for wonky, off-kilter electronic music that’s up to its elbows in haywire buzz and squelch. Its four ambiguously credited records so far have mostly been collaboratively produced by label heads Omid Geadizadeh, Olmo Devin, and Morgan Buckley, with assists from various friends, including Kehoe. Short Passing Game, which features input from Geadizadeh and Buckley along with Seán Mac Erlaine and Cloud Castle Lake’s Brendan Jenkinson, reinforces Wino’s rep as a home for strange sounds that don’t fit anywhere else. But it also introduces a new factor into play, something approaching a kind of virtuosity.
Kehoe’s music stakes a position halfway between studio constructions and live jams. His drum machine serves as the spine throughout, with rhythms that range from lunkheaded to sidewinding to svelte. Around that thrumming pulse, Kehoe and his collaborators weave electric guitar and bass, organ, hi-hat, bodhrán, mbira, harmonica, Korg MS-20 synthesizer, and an antiquated string synthesizer called the Siel Orchestra into a porous mesh of battered tones and slippery textures. Kehoe and his collaborators’ long, corkscrewing grooves have something in common with Cavern of Anti-Matter’s krautrock studies, but there’s an even more unhinged quality at work here, with dubbed-out yelps and wheezy harmonica blasts adding to the manic energy. It’s often hard to say with any certainty what instrument is making which sound: Focus your attention beyond the rhythmic handrail, and you’re immersed in a foggy field of crickets, shouts, creaks, drones, and squiggling sine waves. On “Happy Highway,” junkyard guitar riffs recall Horse Lords’ West African-inspired guitar work, while dissonant sheets of guitar feedback suggest Sonic Youth’s atmospheric influence.
On songs both fast and slow, it’s uniformly hypnotic; unlike a lot of music that thrives upon stoned repetition, however, Kehoe’s doesn’t shy away from emotional expression, particularly once the tempo slows down. In contrast to the exhilarating blues of “Happy Highway” and the white-knuckled freakout of “Short Passing Game,” the 10-minute centerpiece “Storm Desmond” is slow, meditative, and gorgeous. A brooding bass clarinet is run through electronic processing that resembles Jon Hassell’s ambivalent atmospheres; the dub-inflected rhythm steps around the mbira like a cat walking through high grass.
“Going Machine” is similarly enveloping, its organ and bassline warily circling each other while hi-hats flicker like a 16mm film projector. As the groove builds, a voice appears out of nowhere, speaking in riddles: “I think at mouth speed, but have my thoughts cancelled before speech.” A burst of rhythmic laughter, imposing as a Greek chorus, tears across the stereo field. You may wonder, What the hell just happened? Your guess is as good as mine; neither the voice nor the laughter makes a return appearance. It’s a testament to the entrancing power of Kehoe’s music that he can break his own spell without losing his hold on the listener. You’re left waiting for the other shoe to drop—Where’d the voice go? Who’s hiding behind the curtain?—while the drums dance nimbly across offbeats and upbeats, moving like a dream of flying, never so much as touching the ground. | 2017-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wah Wah Wino | April 8, 2017 | 7.7 | 99d4258f-06fb-4d5b-9154-69baa8c9fda0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Irish songwriter’s voice shines like a headlight in fog. Her debut abounds with deceptively serene serenades and surprising lyrical shifts. | The Irish songwriter’s voice shines like a headlight in fog. Her debut abounds with deceptively serene serenades and surprising lyrical shifts. | Aoife Nessa Frances: Land of No Junction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aoife-nessa-frances-land-of-no-junction/ | Land of No Junction | The title of Aoife Nessa Frances’ debut album, Land of No Junction, is the product of a happy accident: While speaking to her guitarist/co-producer Cian Nugent about his childhood travels in Wales, she misheard his reference to a train station named Llandudno Junction. But that fortuitous error says a great deal about the Irish songwriter’s methodology: Land of No Junction abounds with deceptively serene serenades and sleights of hand. Drawing from an eclectic array of record-collector reference points—’60s psych-pop, ’70s art-rock, Tropicália, avant-garde orchestration—the album puts you on familiar footing before gradually changing the scenery, blurring the line between the real and the imagined.
When we first meet Frances, she’s pondering the passage of time through the image of withered flora on “Geranium”—a song that demonstrates how patient, attentive nurturing can spur splendorous growth. What begins as a skeletal drum-machine beat eventually yields a melange of rippling guitar lines, hypnotic organ hums, and backmasked swirls, as if Frances were trying to harvest a Spiritualized song inside a terrarium. It’s the first of many sublime musical mutations, but the uncanny allure of Land of No Junction has as much to do with the surprising ways Frances’ lyrics shift from cryptic musings to clear-eyed critique.
Her voice shines like a headlight in fog, luminous and ambiguous in equal measure—though, like fellow pastoral poet Cate Le Bon, her placid diction belies a more restless spirit. “Geranium” and its follow-up, “Blow Up,” share a similar psych-folk melody, but take it to dramatically different places, both musically and topically. Written a few years before Ireland legalized abortion in 2018, “Blow Up” is less an impassioned defense of a woman’s right to choose than a comment on the more mundane ways patriarchy exerts its control. “I’m about to lose my mind,” Frances sings, before concluding, “Tired of being human/Lesser than man.” Her tone is more resigned than enraged, but the increasingly antsy arrangement—courtesy of a rib-poking bongo beat and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s stabbing strings—reveals the beast stirring within.
Land of No Junction is the sort of record that seems to acquire more confidence and force with each passing track. “Here in the Dark” is a powerful portrait of a relationship at the crossroads, the uncertainty in Frances’ voice manifesting in a seasick, symphonic-rock groove that recalls Air’s Virgin Suicides soundtrack; “Libra” delivers an intimate address amid the strobe-lit delirium of a go-go bar dancefloor circa 1966. But those are mere warm-ups for the emotional bloodletting of “Heartbreak,” which frames real-life drama as ’70s soft-rock fantasia with the same grace and gravitas as Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising. In this light, the elegiac title track isn’t merely the record’s comedown closer, but the nocturnal sanctuary where Frances can retreat when the waking world becomes too much to bear. “Leave me with this dream, and wake me after dark,” she sings, just as Oireachtaigh’s exquisite string arrangement sweeps her to slumberland. It’s a temporary peace, to be sure, but as Frances demonstrates throughout Land of No Junction, the smallest, simplest pleasures can have lasting effects.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Ba Da Bing | February 1, 2020 | 7.7 | 99e19e42-5f47-4cfe-a3be-39eab8ceb858 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his latest album, the prolific Turin producer aims to hybridize dancefloor potency and dreamy ambience. | On his latest album, the prolific Turin producer aims to hybridize dancefloor potency and dreamy ambience. | Andrea: Due in Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrea-due-in-color/ | Due in Color | Munich’s Ilian Tape label is a family affair. Its founders are brothers Dario and Marco Zenker, and dance music runs in their blood: Their aunt, Dorle Zenker, ran the iconic nightclub Ultraschall, ground zero for the city’s techno scene. The label’s tightly knit core roster, in turn, resembles a kind of chosen family; a number of its artists, like Skee Mask and Stenny, have released exclusively on the imprint. Turin’s Andrea also belongs to that list. He came on board in 2012, after meeting the Zenker brothers at a gig in his hometown, and he’s since become one of the label’s most prolific artists, racking up eight EPs and one album that encapsulate the breadth of Ilian Tape’s distinctive, homegrown sound.
Though the label’s origins lie in the minimal and dub techno of the late 2000s, over the past decade it has gradually mapped out a dynamic zone where techno, jungle, drum’n’bass, electro, dubstep, and bass music freely commingle, and even the most heavyweight club tracks are imbued with an aura of elegance; there have even been a handful of purely ambient releases. (Daniel Avery has described the label’s signature as “broken beauty.”) Andrea’s productions have encompassed all those sounds, but his new album, Due in Color, goes further; neither strictly ambient nor conventionally dancefloor focused, it feels like an attempt to hybridize club potency and ethereal atmospheres.
Andrea’s debut LP, 2020’s Ritorno, was steeped in the lush textures of Detroit techno and ambient jungle, and it came bookended with a handful of purely downbeat experiments. Like Ritorno, Due in Color begins with a pair of gauzy mood-setters flush with luminous synth pads and acoustic textures—tapped ride cymbals, tactile snares, possibly the sound of dripping water—run through gargantuan reverb. And I mean gargantuan: like, cathedral-in-a-cave-in-a-canyon huge, the kind of reverb that would turn a nightclub soundsystem into soup. The tracks’ burly dub and drum’n’bass rhythms suggest a muscle memory of dancing, but the proportions are all off. Andrea recorded most of the album while clubs were shuttered in 2020 and 2021, and it feels like he is surveying an imaginary space, separating the idea of clubbing from the actual thing.
The first half of the album pursues that concept across a succession of drum’n’bass-fueled tracks that turn the genre’s hallmarks inside out. Some of Andrea’s EPs are among the label’s most bruising releases, but on “Remote Working” and “Silent Now,” the drums are all but swallowed up beneath waves of layered synths and gelatinous bass. The impression is one of drum’n’bass frozen in amber, every intricately detailed strand of rhythm floating suspended in a honeyed glow. “Lush in End” pushes deeper into the viscous depths, burying jungle rhythms beneath heaps of glowing distortion, like Tim Hecker remixing Shed.
The album’s second half moves into more explicitly ambient and downtempo territory. The swinging “Chessbio” evokes the jazzy feel of Carl Craig’s “Bug in the Bass Bin”; the more muted “Hazymo” breaks out the shuffling breaks of vintage Ninja Tune or Mo Wax. “Dove Mai” is a beautiful fusion of heavyweight bass with vaporous synths, but the twinkling piano and wispy pads of “Am Der,” in contrast, feel slight—too pretty, too sentimental. Occasionally, it feels like Andrea is letting all that voluminous reverb do too much of the work for him, filling in gaps where, perhaps, a more idiosyncratic idea might have been allowed to take shape. But at its best—for instance, with the gorgeous pads and mammoth sub-bass of the closing “Return_Lei”—Due in Color offers a unique proposition: the dreamiest ambient music, given the massive scale and physical presence of an earthshaking club soundsystem. | 2023-03-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | March 23, 2023 | 6.8 | 99e7085a-e89d-4e46-9be6-5df82cf16257 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Life Without Buildings, a mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by one-of-a-kind vocalist Sue Tompkins, only issued one studio album, 2001's long out-of-print Any Other City. This reissue affirms that no one since has sounded quite like them, and to even try would miss the point. | Life Without Buildings, a mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by one-of-a-kind vocalist Sue Tompkins, only issued one studio album, 2001's long out-of-print Any Other City. This reissue affirms that no one since has sounded quite like them, and to even try would miss the point. | Life Without Buildings: Any Other City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19181-life-without-buildings-any-other-city/ | Any Other City | Long live the singers who never intended to be singers; they're the ones that make you feel like there are still new ideas under the sun. Life Without Buildings were a short-lived, mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by a painter/sometimes-spoken-word poet named Sue Tompkins, who ended up in a band almost by accident and sang like a kindergarten playground bully reciting her older sibling's copy of Horses from memory. No one since has sounded quite like Life Without Buildings, and to even try would miss the point. Their music valued invention, risk, wonder, imagination, and—perhaps above all other virtues—fun. And like very few bands, they were smart enough to walk away as soon as the fun stopped. "When the band began of course none of us really thought anyone would be interested, so there wasn't anything at stake," guitarist Robert Johnston recalled about a decade after their amicable break-up. "For Sue, I think it turned from a laugh into being a commitment she'd never signed up for." Lucky for us, though, that laugh was caught and forever immortalized on tape.
Released on Rough Trade's Tugboat imprint in 2001, Any Other City is Life Without Buildings' only proper record. (There's also the very good live album, Live at the Annandale, which was released in 2007, a few years after the band broke up.) It came out to mild hype but has grown to be a cult favorite in the years since, its reputation all the more storied and elusive because the CD went out of print and it has never been available on vinyl in the U.S. until now. That the band has yet to capitalize on the reunion show/deluxe-reissue trend keeps with the lack of careerist tendencies that defined its entire run. There's a story that, in 2001 at what would end up being the Strokes' first-ever headlining show in London, Life Without Buildings got bumped down to a supporting act at the last minute. Even if it's apocryphal, I suspect this tale gets repeated by fans so often because it cements LWB's underdog status—their indifference about jumping through the hoops that would have made them the Next Big Thing and the inability of most people to appreciate them in their time. Reviews of Any Other City were either breathless raves or pans that questioned the sanity of anyone who could listen to it in full. "I remember one [review] that said only mad people could like us," drummer Will Bradley said years later. "I was happy with that. Not long afterwards, we seemed to get a lot of guys coming to our gigs with fresh head wounds, like unstitched lobotomy scars."
The most distinct (or to those who prefer the safety of convention, the "maddest") part of Life Without Buildings' sound is Tompkins' singing, which lands somewhere between scatting, talking, and speaking in tongues. "No details, but I'm gonna persuade you!" she insists with electric charisma in the record's first seconds, and opening-line mission statements do not get much truer than that; all you'll want to do for the next 45 minutes is follow her blindly, even when you don't know where the hell she's headed. To Tompkins, language is bubblegum—something exhilaratingly sugary to chomp, crack, and stretch between her fingers. In that opening song, "P.S. Exclusive", she repeats the phrase "the right stuff" 44 times, but it's too dynamic to ever grow repetitive; it's almost like she's playing a game with herself to see all the different ways she can pronounce it.
Tompkins' lyrics often resemble collages. Familiar words are stammered, stuttered, and chopped up until they sound disorienting and strange—which is a sensibility that carries over to the visual art she's been making since she left the band. (A line from the program of one of her recent gallery shows could easily double as a description of a Life Without Buildings song: "Through her typed and spoken works she represents snatches of material gleaned from the everyday, distorting meaning by metering their arrangement and delivery.") She delights in found phrases, homophones, and the serendipity misunderstanding. In fan favorite "The Leanover", she chants "If I lose ya, if I lose ya, if I lose ya in the street" enough for it to start sounding like "if Illusion Street." Or something else entirely. On the song's entry on SongMeanings.net, there is a long comment written by someone who was once convinced that she was saying "a Fallujan street" and that the song was about the Iraq War. Although this theory has been debunked, I have no doubt that this poetic misunderstanding would delight Sue Tompkins.
For all its art-rock leanings, Any Other City never feels too self-indulgent. A lot of this has to do with the interplay between Tompkins' freewheeling style and the dependable (though wonderfully crooked) backbone provided by Johnston, Bradley, and bassist Chris Evans. Inspired by Pittsburgh math-rock heroes Don Caballero, Life Without Buildings were first an instrumental band before they convinced their art-school friend Tompkins to meld her spoken-word poetry with their antic, skittering sound. (Even the band itself is a kind of collage.) Sometimes the disconnect in their sensibilities is a little too wide (the tonal palette of "Young Offenders", the most overtly Don Caballero-esque, is a bit too dull for Tompkins' bold, primary-color exclamations), but more often it creates a novel and unique energy. One of the band's signature songs is "New Town", in which Johnston's quiet, steadily chugging riff and Bradley's muted beat suddenly explode alongside Tompkins' vocals in the chorus. "Looking in your eyes/ I'm looking in your eyes!" she shouts, as combative as she is jubilant, issuing these words like a challenge for everybody else to look, live, and love a little bit more emphatically.
The reissue mostly leaves the original record to speak for itself. The only extra included here is a 7" containing the more ramshackle original versions of "The Leanover" and "New Town", which are interesting because they let you hear Tompkins working out phrasings and pronunciations she'd sharpen on the record. When Any Other City came out, most people assumed her vocals were heavily improvised, but as the spot-on renditions replicated on Live at the Annandale Hotel proved, they're actually carefully metered and display an extraordinary sense of rhythm. Life Without Buildings were most impressive—and influential—in the way they balanced sheer technical skill with a sense of ecstatic playfulness, which is a sensibility carried on after them by bands like Ponytail, Perfect Pussy, Marnie Stern, Los Campesinos!, and more. Hopefully this reissue will add more names to that list.
It's hard to talk about Tompkins' vocals without using the word "childlike", which is too often an annoying cliché people use to infantilize female vocalists and refrain from taking them seriously. (Many of the 2001 pans of Any Other City are tainted with sexism; in one baffling comparison, an NME reviewer faulted Tompkins for not sounding like Whitney Houston.) Here, though, it's apt. This record is all about the wild wisdom of youth; here are four musicians who have managed to recreate that sense of wonder and invention and play that most people (and, let’s face it, bands) lose when they get older. “Look around!” Tompkins insists. “Just information in the leaves, in the leaves, in the leaves!” The phrasing is a little awkward, like an expression stammered out before you knew the proper rules of grammar, or a big word uttered before you knew how to pronounce it right. But who cares. If the sound doesn’t exist, she seems to be saying, invent it. Which is exactly what Life Without Buildings did. | 2014-04-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade / What's Your Rupture? | April 18, 2014 | 8.7 | 99ecf4b4-b5ac-48d6-a240-eec90641dd3b | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The prolific band returns with a brief and seething left-turn: a furious homage to the scummiest, crustiest hardcore of the early ’80s. | The prolific band returns with a brief and seething left-turn: a furious homage to the scummiest, crustiest hardcore of the early ’80s. | Osees: A Foul Form | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/osees-a-foul-form/ | A Foul Form | Osees are a hardcore band now, but if history is any indication, they probably won’t be for very long. Every album from John Dwyer’s astonishingly prolific project—formerly known as OCS, Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, and on and on—has played like a pull of a slot machine, a randomized jumble of garage, psych-pop, and krautrock, cut with varying degrees of experimentation. But the project’s 26th album, A Foul Form, is a departure even for a group that feeds on departures, a furious homage to the scummiest, crustiest hardcore of the early 1980s. It’s the first Osees record in a while that even this band’s feverishly devoted fan base probably couldn’t see coming.
Recorded in Dwyer’s basement on what must have been the shittiest equipment he could muster, A Foul Form is only 22 minutes, one of which is a closing cover of “Sacrifice” by British anarcho-punk pioneers Rudimentary Peni. The mix is bare yet inventively sadistic. With their cassette-tape fidelity, these tracks are nearly all rumble, but that low end is thorned with a protective layer of shrill feedback and harsh static pops that stab at anyone who succumbs to the temptation to turn up the volume. It’s as if the intrinsic causticness of hardcore wasn’t enough. They had to booby trap it.
A Foul Form is an angry record, though like the classic hardcore it emulates, it can be difficult to pinpoint where the genuine fury ends and the self-aware histrionics begin. For much of the album, Dwyer seethes about greed and society’s callous disregard for human life. On “Perm Act,” he blasts violent cops “eating in their car while you’re gasping in the dirt.” On “Frock Block,” he targets the church-sanctioned bigotry of pearl-clutching priests: “Being yourself is simply not a crime/You won’t burn in hell for all time.”
It’s all fittingly scathing, but there’s whimsy under the surface, especially in Dwyer’s berserk vocal performances. His taunting, sneering voice cycles through loose impressions of iconic punk singers—Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, Ian MacKaye, Johnny Rotten—without ever assuming a final form. It’s like he’s method acting every punk band he grew up listening to all at once. Sometimes he adopts a British accent just to drop it after a few words.
Some levity, too, surfaces from the inevitable tension between the band’s attempts at pure genre exercise and their quirkier tendencies poking at the margins of these recordings. Scribby riffs and skronky keyboards prod at “Fucking Kill Me” and “Too Late For Suicide,” as if trying to break through the simple song structures and draw out the longer, weirder dirges in the five-piece lineup’s DNA. But the vigilant nature of A Foul Form never quite allows them to get there. Even if Osees are just moonlighting, they’ve committed completely to the act. | 2022-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | August 13, 2022 | 7 | 99ef9698-0a30-4433-b704-b51a516fc4dd | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
These Japanese avant-rockers have a decade-long history but no releases until now available outside of their home country; this collection of two EPs includes tracks like "Sonic Youth" and "This Heat", named for bands they admire. | These Japanese avant-rockers have a decade-long history but no releases until now available outside of their home country; this collection of two EPs includes tracks like "Sonic Youth" and "This Heat", named for bands they admire. | Nisennenmondai: Neji/Tori | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12400-nejitori/ | Neji/Tori | Nisennenmondai are a band of small attactive Japanese women who play pummeling, dense instrumentals. Their name translates to "Y2K bug" or "year 2000 problem," and they've been around for 10 years, making albums, zines, live CD-Rs and handmade clothes. Still, they haven't released an album stateside. Neji/Tori, two of their earlier EPs bundled together, at least postpones that release gap in their discography. But their biggest problem is that on record you can't get the contrast between their physical size and the size of their music. It's that contrast that struck visiting U.S. musicians like Prefuse 73, who called them both "tiny" and "diminuative" in a Dazed & Confused interview. "The drummer was as big as my hand," he said, before waxing romantic on their technical prowess. That contrast between size and sound is probably startling, but size doesn't matter much overseas. They may be dainty when compared to their U.S. counterparts, but their proper context is within Japan's lush experimental scene, from Koenjihyakkei to Boredoms and Merzbow, where women can be responsible for the harshest sounds.
The two EPs here were released in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Tori's titles are in Japanese, but Neji's songs are named for their influences. "Sonic Youth" is aptly named, as bassist Yuri Zaikawa slows her nimble runs to approximate Kim Gordon's sturdy, deliberate plucks. But many other tracks show clear influences even if they're not named for them. "Kyaaaaaaa" partially turns into a rumbling surf tune, and "Ikkkyokume" snakes into a chase song for a 1960s spy flick. "2534" could have been called "Lightning Bolt", as their influence is clearest here (the band is also one of Nisennenmondai's stateside supporters). At just over one minute, it's their shortest song, but the best cuts here are the longer tracks, where the repetitiveness pushes forward and retreats over each iteration.
Nisennenmondai's eagerness to depart from tonality and form is inherited as much from the free jazz tradition as from these named influences. Zaikawa and drummer Sayaka Himeno set up pins for guitarist Masako Takada to strike down via her looser, messier playing. Her approach doesn't contribute much to the overall "small women with big chops" image of the band-- she's not as muscular, her parts not as technically impressive-- but her guitar morphs while the others stay the same. No matter what sits on top, an undulating groove hides beneath noise, thanks to the Zaikawa and Himeno's precise rhythm. They'd be fun to watch, not for their size, but for how quickly and often Himeno's hi-hat must turn to shards. It almost seems a shame to put much distortion and noise over them, but their cleanest, most repetitive tracks, like "Kyuukohan", clearly fall behind the ones that combust. Nisennenmondai are pummeling, but not because they use repetition as a way of imprinting songs to your memory. They're bigger than that. | 2008-11-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Smalltown Supersound | November 13, 2008 | 6.6 | 99fa12d2-b3de-4e0f-9cb7-c35e519916db | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
The Brooklyn-based MC comes into his own on his third album. It's hard to separate the stark tone of Ka's voice and narrative from the equally stark mood music he embeds it in. As a rapper/producer, he has that finely-tuned awareness of how a track works from every angle. | The Brooklyn-based MC comes into his own on his third album. It's hard to separate the stark tone of Ka's voice and narrative from the equally stark mood music he embeds it in. As a rapper/producer, he has that finely-tuned awareness of how a track works from every angle. | Ka: The Night's Gambit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18341-ka-the-nights-gambit/ | The Night's Gambit | Ka's voice isn't overexcited. It's not larger-than-life, not a caricature, not a distillation of TV rap fantasies. His voice doesn't swell with braggadocio or bristle with rage. It's cool, but not cool in the way some people flaunt themselves and their own unflappable attitude, or callously disregard the lives of people they look down on. It's the cool of someone who, by necessity, has figured out how to detach himself from the emotional stress that would otherwise knock most people in the dirt. What's the point of embellishing something you already know is intense in itself?
The initial appeal of The Night's Gambit and Ka in particular is lyrics, and it'd be easy enough to just lay out a string of them to prove it. The Brooklyn rapper's thoughts scan well on paper, then unspool in a delivery that lets the internal rhyme structure provide the emotional emphasis. “You Know It's About” offers a scene of a street business days gone by with shifts of tense that make old memories fresh, emphasizing the cycle he can't believe he's not still stuck in: “With a toast to rap that roasts your fabric/ The friends, if conflict ever ends we're post-traumatic.” After that opener, the album is a litany of scenarios that play up guilt, betrayal, anxiety, resilience, and everything else that reduces interpersonal workings into a high-stakes chess match. Not for nothing that the three biggest thematic presences in intros and outros are games of strategy, martial arts philosophy, and the church-- tactical, adaptive maneuvering cut through with deep moral weight.
Maybe that seems a bit Recommended If You Like GZA. But while the Wu MC has the bearings of someone doing scientific analysis, Ka's vibe is more like that of a true-crime reporter, trying to find a balance between laying out all the facts and trying not to let that excess of knowledge take a toll on his soul. Reformation narrative “Our Father” packs in enough observations, introspective and looking outwards, to drive this home clearly. But it also puts its point across by situating the rehabilitated perspective in the first verse and the vivid criminal revenge he's trying to atone for in the second. A mid-album stretch of cuts gets even more Scorsese with it, pervaded with criminal guilt on “Barring the Likeness”, restless brass ring-grabbing on “Nothing Is”, and calculating, whistling-through-a-graveyard iciness on Roc Marciano team-up “Soap Box”. And when he really does get double-meaning conceptual a'la “Labels” on “Off the Record”, it's a brilliant recursive trick: the rap he classics he references aren't evoked as mere namedropping, but reflections of how many different artists found indelible, unique ways to tell similar stories.
It's hard to separate the stark tone of Ka's voice and narrative from the equally stark mood music he embeds it in. As a rapper/producer, he has that finely-tuned awareness of how a track works from every angle. Some moments of upfront beauty shine through, as the soul-blues guitar licks and electric piano on “Jungle” cut through like a cold wind, and the aching, wordless hum that intermittently pierces the organ drone of “Knighthood” turns a meditative dirge into a hairs-on-end spiritual. But, like his voice, a lot of his production's pull lies in how its sparseness deeply sinks in just through exposure. The interpolation of that riff of doom from Black Sabbath's “Black Sabbath” on “You Know It's About” is a telling point of reference. Like the source material, he draws a lot of strength from the same insistent tritone, but turns its immediate menace into lurking dread by pushing it into the background and melting it down into bass frequencies.
Last year's Grief Pedigree showed a DIY auteur with one of the more unique and underreported stories in hip-hop. Despite the exposure that comes with his professional working partnership with Roc Marciano and a base in the ironclad diehard world of 1990s-steeped NYC hardcore hip-hop, the stakes of his come-up seem more personal than anything. His outlook on that recent groundswell of support has the levelheaded perspective of someone hitting his stride in his forties: “Of course this isn't over night sensation music...it's the music of the sensations you get over the course of the night”, he quipped on Twitter. And his work's total lack of compromise has the drive of someone who only got stronger when he stopped trying to do things on some other label's terms. If The Night's Gambit has that same imprint, the same ruminative, clinical yet human scale as its predecessor did, it also seems to have the renewed idea that this voice has something that really needs to be heard. Listen, then listen closer. | 2013-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Iron Works | July 31, 2013 | 8 | 99fad7ac-614b-4152-8df1-dcb8ce54b345 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Long-fermenting LP from Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno features guests Mike Patton, Melissa Auf Der Mar, Zach Hill (Hella), Mary Timony (Helium), and Rob Crow (Pinback). | Long-fermenting LP from Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno features guests Mike Patton, Melissa Auf Der Mar, Zach Hill (Hella), Mary Timony (Helium), and Rob Crow (Pinback). | Team Sleep: Team Sleep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8293-team-sleep/ | Team Sleep | Team Sleep features Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno and his longtime friend, guitarist Tom Wilkinson. Along with DJ Crook, the product brings the moodiness of Deftones' later work (their song "Teenager" has been a widely-used but apt comparison point) with little of its hardness, and builds it all from drum loops.
However, that was back in 2001, until someone leaked the album to the Internet, causing the band to quickly shelve it. Since then, the songs have changed considerably and the stable of guest musicians has grown to include Mike Patton, Melissa Auf Der Mar, Zach Hill (Hella), Mary Timony (Helium), and Rob Crow (of Pinback, Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, and probably three other projects started during the nap I took before finishing this review. The man loves to work).
First song "Ataraxia" builds from electronic drums and growling bass, with some bright guitar picking and a bit of piano, before hitting the wall-of-guitar melodrama that Deftones have used in songs like "Be Quiet and Drive" or "Minerva". "Your Skull Is Red" features pulverizing drumming from Zach Hill, but i'ts indiscriminate guitar sludge with a lot of atmosphere but no hook. That and "Live From the Stage" are no more than jam sessions, and the finely-tuned gloss of tracks like "Ataraxia" shows those songs up. Even "Blvd. Knights", with its ill-fit tempo-changing climax and verse parts audible under the heavy guitars in the chorus, point towards hasty execution.
"Ever (Foreign Flag)", however, steps further into ambience while keeping the melodrama and electronic beats. It builds upon the gentler influences beneath Deftones' material (early Cure and Depeche Mode, who they've both covered) but it's far enough removed from Deftones to really justify this project. "Ever Since WWI" is another success, a slow strum that's cathartic without ever dialing up the distortion, likely because of Zach Hill's peerless bass drum action.
Calling Rob Crow a "guest" is misleading; he takes lead vocal duties for four songs, and most of those sound markedly like Pinback. He croons over "Princeton Review", a gentle guitar strum with a skittering loop that shifts tone with an ominous percussive breakdown. Mary Timony is featured on the dour "Tomb of Liegia", an atonal dirge that's the low point of the record.
Unfortunately, while none of the guests are phoning it in (the visible ones, anyway), they never learn much from each other. Even though he's sharing time with Moreno on "Our Ride to the Rectory", Crow's parts could just as easily be cut'n'pasted from one of his own songs. "Elizabeth" is similarly stuck in Pinback mode, though it's spiced up by an unbelievably brief moment of blistering electronic drums. I never thought I'd be calling Team Sleep "conservative," but holding back the harsher elements in this track to seven whole seconds almost proves my point: The artists here could have taken more chances, because this album hints at a fascinating and rewarding listen.
I say "hints" because those moments are few on a record that just drifts by the listener's ears. It's short on hooks, but it isn't necessarily aimless just restrained. It's no surprise that one of the bands' songs was used on the Matrix Revolution; these songs are appropriate soundtracks to hyper-real, stylized encounters. Even the lyrics to the beat-driven misstep "King Diamond" view a male/female encounter in video game terms, with it's "start...restart" shouting and subtle variations. It's the kind of music for which Windows Media Player visualizations were made. If this had been released in 2001, it could have followed the market of electronic-dabbling modern rock compiled on the original Matrix soundtrack, and ran towards success. Today, it's background noise, make-out music for teenagers with lip piercings and caked eyeliner. I respect their effort to blend genre, and while Team Sleep is executed with taste, it's without the risks that should accompany any project calling itself "experimental." | 2005-06-09T02:00:56.000-04:00 | 2005-06-09T02:00:56.000-04:00 | Metal | Maverick | June 9, 2005 | 6.1 | 99fea050-004f-4ecd-84b7-fd11d7e55a26 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
Unbreakable is Janet Jackson's first album since Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and the dissolution of her relationship with Jermaine Dupri. It's a synthesis of ideas she's collected and tested throughout her career. These are giddy, grateful grown-woman songs; like Janet, they are timeless. | Unbreakable is Janet Jackson's first album since Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and the dissolution of her relationship with Jermaine Dupri. It's a synthesis of ideas she's collected and tested throughout her career. These are giddy, grateful grown-woman songs; like Janet, they are timeless. | Janet Jackson: Unbreakable | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21060-unbreakable/ | Unbreakable | Montreal producer Kaytranada put out a remix of Janet Jackson's 1993 single "If" in the fall of 2012, but the edit, which reimagines the misty original as bubbling, whimsical house, became a party staple. The remix was unique, not just because it lingered on DJ playlists far longer than most major-label hits, but because it created an entry point to then-rising nu-house operatives like Soulection and HW&W via a cross-generational touchpoint like no other: Janet. That gauzy vocal loop, floating in on an elastic bassline, nudged along by dense handclaps and pin-sharp hi-hats, deaded the lumbering, surly dominance of brostep in one fell swoop. What Kaytranada did with the remix is what Janet’s long accomplished over her musical career: she won hearts and bridged imaginations on the dance floor. It’s playful and funky and sensual; it sounds like something Janet would make for herself. And even though it’s been out in the world for three years, the tour DJ on Jackson’s current tour runs it pre-show.
Probably the only downside to Janet’s 11th album *Unbreakable—*aside from it running about three tracks too long—is that it doesn’t contain that kind of axis-shifting single. Missy Elliott gives it a try, two-stepping in with a squirmy synthesizer for "BURNITUP!" and the lazy bass and airy vocals of "Dammn Baby" sounds like Tinashe-meets-Teena Marie. "The Great Forever" and "Night" are formally ambitious pop songs, but don’t deliver as much personality as 2004’s underrated Damita Jo. Instead, Unbreakable is a synthesis of ideas Jackson’s collected and tested throughout her career. "2 B Loved", with its cavalcade of hoots and hollers, is probably the album’s most "now"-sounding song.
"No Sleeep," the dusky R&B single, is quintessential Jam & Lewis-abetted Janet. A sweet melody and ribald Isley Brothers sample builds a sultry Quiet Storm groove. Even the silly J. Cole feature can't prevent it from being one of the best songs of the year, a conscious curving of the melismatic summertime bombast of chart-toppers like the Weeknd, Jidenna, OMI, and Bieber. It came out in June, in time for warm summer nights, but fits in better with the enveloping dark of fall. Like Janet, it's timeless.
The story here is love and catharsis. It's her first album since Michael Jackson's death in 2009, and the dissolution of her relationship with Jermaine Dupri. The warm, acoustic guitar sway of the title track sets the tone: these are giddy, grateful grown-woman songs. Janet's settled into a new relationship and, if songs like "After You Fall" and "Broken Hearts Heal", are any indication, ruminating with love on her brother's life and death. On the former she dips into her lower register whilst singing over a somber piano line; on the latter, an uptempo pop song filled with sunny harmonies, she tilts her voice skyward, singing a song of praise about childhood memories and afterlives with an Arabic 'inshallah' on the hook. Jackson, now married to a Qatari businessman, remains private about her personal life but has reportedly converted to Islam. And that one word coming from a pop icon does more for a post-9/11 world than Unbreakable's social-message songs like "Black Eagle", and especially "Shoulda Known Better", a start-stop fist-pumper about reading beyond the headlines that's two choruses and a verse too long.
This ability to synthesize what music needs instead of catering to its whims is what has made Janet Jackson an enduring pop star. Unlike Madonna, whose presence and work open up much-needed conversations about sexuality, commodity, and the gendered age biases of pop music, Jackson, 49, exposes these conventions as construct. Unbreakable might be her most demure album in years, but that doesn't mean it's not sexy. Its strength comes from savvy instead of gimmickry, returning to the producers and formula Jackson built her career on (jubilant dance-pop, bedroom R&B, that angelic giggle). Because Unbreakable is about putting faith in one's career and fans, it plays like the natural next phase in Jackson's discography, which individually might be markers of their time but are ultimately ageless. | 2015-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | BMG / Rhythm Nation | October 6, 2015 | 8 | 9a01b029-c621-4536-a955-c348b0c9bd95 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Cale's 1982 solo album Music for a New Society is reissued and bundled with a vastly different new version of the record, allowing him to wring new meaning from old songs. | Cale's 1982 solo album Music for a New Society is reissued and bundled with a vastly different new version of the record, allowing him to wring new meaning from old songs. | John Cale: M:FANS / Music for a New Society | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21619-mfans-music-for-a-new-society/ | M:FANS / Music for a New Society | About halfway through John Cale, a 1998 BBC documentary about the Welsh experimental rock authority, the focus shifts to the beauty of its subject’s home. "There are certain patterns of behavior you pick up when you’re young that never leave you, moments of tranquility that you get when you’re young that are always the most valuable," drawls Cale in voiceover, a soft and pliable topnote to the tender folk song underneath. The camera swoons over leaves rustling under a waterfall, cattle trotting benignly through verdant fields. "That sense of nostalgia is always with you, because it’s a way of inuring you against the passage of time." The film then smash-cuts to a white cow wedged into a slaughterhouse warren, eyes pleading as it’s shot in the skull, its throat is slit, and torrents of dark blood stream forth. It’s a transition of cruel and abrupt apathy, a needlessly gruesome pivot—Cale isn’t even present—and one that director James Marsh must have believed embodies Cale’s volatility throughout his long career.
Cale has long carved mercurial paths—first in the Velvet Underground, where his eerie bass, piano, and viola parts pushed the band toward the eccentric end of the art-rock spectrum, then as a producer, when he captured the raw spirits of the Stooges and Patti Smith on both artists’ classic debut albums. The 73-year-old’s 15 solo albums touch on protopunk and classical and are niche to the point that some have been out of print for years; one of those works, 1982’s Music for a New Society, has been singled out as a pernicious lost masterpiece, the spare and depressive about-face to his agitpop screed of the previous year, Honi Soit.
When Music was finally reissued this year, it came bundled Jekyll-Hyde style with M:FANS, a new reworking of the album. The latter isn’t as hagiographic as the acronym suggests—Nick Zinner isn’t here shaking a tambourine or anything—but is rather Cale’s attempt to revisit bleak characters through a lens of rage instead of sorrow, as well as process the death of his occasional nemesis Lou Reed. Hearing both versions of the album together, especially by hopscotching to compare tracks directly, is a harrowing yet rewarding spree, not least because Cale’s originals often sound more modern than the new versions.
On Music for a New Society, sparse keyboard lines languish in chilly air, arid spaces imbued with acute confidence. Cale unfurls somber, detached appraisals of miserable lost souls, including mothers on murder sprees ("Taking Your Life in Your Hands") and loners exhaling their death rattles ("Sanctus (Sanities)"), atop deconstructed bleats of churchy organs and dissonant strings. There are wisps of tight pop melodies perched atop a confluence of oddities—"Thoughtless Kind," a spooky dirge, pairs a thickly processed a capella refrain ("The best of times/ With the thoughtless kind") with rough cackling and an agitating percussion line reminiscent of a ticking clock. "Close Watch," its title cribbed from Cale’s septuagenarian spirit animal Johnny Cash, anatomizes loneliness via plodding piano and decomposing bagpipe bursts. Aside from the lone straightforward rocker, "Changes Made," on which Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult plays guitar, the semi-improvised record feels meticulously plotted and borderline intrusive—the most revealing scrawls yet from the solitary confinement of Cale’s fulminating mind.
M:FANS is less reclusive, just by virtue of its premise—Cale is collaborating with himself, the ultimate glum foil—but also because it fills every swatch of white space with his later-career electro-industrial leanings. That needling chronograph tick on "Thoughtless Kind" is now gregarious, beefy with fizzing synths and hyper-processed coos. Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors joins him to sing staccato microtones on "Close Watch," a brusque and R&B-leaning reimagining virtually unrecognizable from its weepy source material. "Sanctus (Sanities)" also proves malleable, Cale intoning a requiem of personal and general-interest doom ("It was a marriage made… in the grave!" is not the least histrionic line) over a driving mechanical stomp Nine Inch Nails would’ve relished. It’s a lot of futurism sourced from the '90s, which highlights Cale’s prescience in the first go-‘round.
Cale is clearly still curious as an artist; in recent years, he’s collaborated with Danger Mouse and represented the motherland at the Venice Biennale. Hell, he practically flirted with Bond villainy two years ago, when he commanded a horde of wasp drones onstage in London. Still, there’s a greater vigor, and a real lack of vanity, to releasing a notorious lost album and upending it in the same breath. That these projects work in tandem, three decades removed, gives nostalgia a good name. | 2016-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 25, 2016 | 8.5 | 9a04010c-4c77-4dff-b5c7-c16ce33ab3cd | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
The Russian electronic experimentalist creates a world without borders, singing in four languages across ambient soundscapes that evoke imaginary lands. | The Russian electronic experimentalist creates a world without borders, singing in four languages across ambient soundscapes that evoke imaginary lands. | Katya Yonder: Multiply Intentions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katya-yonder-multiply-intentions/ | Multiply Intentions | Katya Prokina thrives in liminal spaces, making music that sits between continents and states of consciousness. A decade ago, as a member of a dream-pop band called Tip Top Tellix, the Russian producer, vocalist, and classically trained violinist tried to “embody the phenomena of listening to music while falling asleep,” with pleasant-enough results. Going solo as Katya Yonder, she succeeded more fully across three eerie ambient cassettes for the St. Petersburg label Floe, culminating with 2017’s Winter Skins, a patient, drifting album that evokes a snowy mountainside glimpsed from the brink of oblivion. Yonder’s fourth album, Multiply Intentions, is her boldest effort at boundary-blurring yet.
Born out of a 2018 mix for well-traveled Berlin label Métron, Multiply Intentions explores Yonder’s perspective as a native of Yekaterinburg, a former Soviet industrial hub located on the border between Europe and Asia. Spacey electronics coexist with the earthy hum of Azerbaijani folk instruments, and the lyrics traverse from Yonder’s primary Russian to Japanese, English, and French. That intercontinental concept underpins an album that’s just as absorbing for how it flits across other thresholds: between pop and experimentation, authenticity and fantasy. With spectral vocals, watery chimes, pulsing bass, and hardly any drums, Multiply Intentions captures what it might feel like to listen to music while falling asleep on the Trans-Siberian Railway, or whatever path might best lead to someplace you’ve only imagined.
Although Multiply Intentions is the first Yonder album with prominent vocals, it’s more atmospheric than conventionally song-based, and not only due to the comprehension barrier for anyone who isn’t quadrilingual. Her opening words, a Russian-language declaration that she’s plunging headlong into something like an abyss, are barely audible amid Uncut Gems-like synth burbles and woodwind flutters. When Yonder’s high lilt first comes to the fore, murmuring about having “to stop for a while” over the LaserDisc science-special shimmer of “Solution,” her words are still slightly out of reach, an effect like a British folk ballad plopped down in 1980s hyperreality. “Another Time,” the most propulsive of these 14 tracks, hits harder in context than it otherwise might, because its aching synth-pop is tucked amid all this heady reflection.
Multiply Intentions invites you to keep puzzling over it after listening, especially its songs that sit at especially sharp divides. “Наверняка” (“For Sure”) is coolly intoned in throaty Russian, but its hypnotic organ squiggles wouldn’t be out of place in the belly dance music of Egyptian legend Hany Mehanna. Its serenely ringing arpeggios, meanwhile, keep sending me to French duo Air’s Japan-seeking “Alone in Kyoto”—originally from the soundtrack to 2003’s Lost in Translation, aptly enough. The next track, “Invented Journey,” a centerpiece of Yonder’s 2018 mix, is the first track here with lyrics in Japanese, which Yonder studied in school. Though her engagement with the language is evident, she has never actually been to Japan. The ghostly echoes and bird-chirp sound effects of “Invented Journey” are transportive, but to someplace misty and not quite there, like trying to remember a Kate Bush song your subconscious made up overnight.
Kate NV, Yonder’s fellow Russian electronic artist, is an easy comparison, but also a fitting one. With Multiply Intentions, Yonder too has made an otherworldly album that defies all borders. On the finale, “Interlude,” another lushly arrayed standout from the 2018 mix, she delivers a French translation of a German poem by a Romanian-born writer: a dreamy postcard from an undefined utopia. Long after Multiply Intentions ends, the possibility of such a place stays with you.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Métron | August 19, 2020 | 7.6 | 9a11b2c8-1572-45a8-8f48-6505b105bf63 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The latest album from the Drums—now just frontman Jonny Pierce—is his most honest and most unvarnished. | The latest album from the Drums—now just frontman Jonny Pierce—is his most honest and most unvarnished. | The Drums: Brutalism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-drums-brutalism/ | Brutalism | To hear frontman Jonny Pierce tell it, his fifth album as the Drums, Brutalism, is his most honest effort yet. Something is indeed new and different on Brutalism, but it isn’t Pierce’s obsessive self-examination, nor the A-B-A-B-schemed verses, nor even the fact that it’s the first Drums album to use a live drummer, as its beats remain as simple as always and the difference is barely detectable. What’s different here is that Pierce’s best trick—bailing the Drums out of all the above criticisms with undeniable hooks—is practically absent. Pierce has described Brutalism as a brave, necessary shedding of a false persona he felt forced to maintain ever since the Drums suddenly exploded into one of America’s most-hyped bands. Many others will just hear a lowering of the bar for what qualifies as a finished song.
Brutalism marks the second Drums album with Pierce as the sole member. Looking back on the intensity of their first couple years as young Brooklyn upstarts—from a ridiculous and irrefutably infectious debut single, to becoming one of the most Shazam’d artists of that year, to the subsequent and mysteriously contentious departure of their lead guitarist—it’s a small miracle that we have a Drums album to talk about at all in 2019, and maybe to no one more than Pierce: “I like the idea of putting out a few strong albums then going away forever,” he said in 2011. But Brutalism is a Drums album by technicality, as Pierce is now settled into a familiar path for 21st-century indie-pop bands, one taken somewhat recently by The Shins’ James Mercer, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Alec Ounsworth, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman: trudging forth with sole custody of a defunct band’s name. Everyone in this club has since produced mixed results, and Brutalism doesn’t inspire much confidence that the good will outweigh the unnecessary in this phase of the Drums.
Pierce is clearly over what the Drums were before, but the task of replacing that identity with something interesting seems to be eluding him. Those thudding faux-bass lines at least gave their early albums a unique fingerprint, for instance; now they are gone, replaced by a much cleaner-sounding low end that almost feels sterile in comparison. “626 Bedford Avenue” is speckled with unnecessary electronic frills. So is “Kiss It Away”, with the addition of a cranked-up BPM, which at least makes its frustratingly flimsy chorus go by faster. Either Pierce forgot that there was ever more to his best songs like “Days” or “Best Friend” than a couple synth voices and an easy rhyme, or he’s hoping his listeners won’t know the difference. The latter possibility is cynical; both are bad news for Drums fans.
And then there’s the subject matter. The lyrics are brutally raw, not just in the emotional sense, but in the uncooked sense: seemingly laid to paper or Notes app once and instantly greenlit. Over the sound of a real voicemail, Pierce tells us on opener “Pretty Cloud” he’s badly missing someone, and the diary-entry level of detail that ensues throughout ensures that we don’t forget it. At his best, he can still be effective while being extremely personal. Album closer “Blip of Joy” is both: lyrically hyper-detailed about the hesitations involved with moving on to someone new, and also as exhilarating as a deep breath of fresh air in its upward-surging melody. In other words, it’s strong and considered enough to mean big things to more people than just Pierce. Even the best Drums albums surround a few highlights with filler, though, and Brutalism falls even harder into this pattern. It’s entirely possible that Pierce chose to use this formal LP as his scratch paper for working through frustration, and that Brutalism is simply the type of album made for its own creator above all. | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | April 12, 2019 | 5.9 | 9a1900a4-7d0f-4834-ba1b-9402be423942 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Killer Mike and El-P’s collaborative free-for-all puts the spotlight on artists from the Latin American diaspora. It’s an exciting lineup, but a little too inconsistent to work as an album. | Killer Mike and El-P’s collaborative free-for-all puts the spotlight on artists from the Latin American diaspora. It’s an exciting lineup, but a little too inconsistent to work as an album. | Run the Jewels: RTJ Cu4tro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/run-the-jewels-rtj-cu4tro/ | RTJ Cu4tro | Run the Jewels is one of the most feel-good stories in hip-hop: the musical equivalent of a buddy comedy starring two aging Gen X rappers who join forces and breathe new life into their art and careers. Michael Render (Killer Mike) and Jaime Meline’s (El-P) four studio albums—each minted instant classics—are the product of a unique, alchemical bond, even as they sought to emulate a long line of rap groups who came before them.
But a remix record is about looking outward, expanding the pool of collaborators, and inviting artists with different POVs to reimagine their work. RTJ Cu4tro trains that focus squarely on Latin America, drawing artists from across the diaspora. The musicians featured here live on the cutting edge while flirting with the mainstream—with one notable exception, the Oscar-winning Broadway megastar Lin-Manuel Miranda. While RTJ Cu4tro isn’t the group’s first remix record, it’s the first that doesn’t feel like a joke. At the center of the project is Brooklyn’s Nick Hook, a frequent Run the Jewels collaborator who helped curate and co-executive produce the album with El-P. The record leans hard on Hook’s collaborative relationships and is as much a result of his taste as the group’s.
RTJ Cu4tro highlights some of the more exciting Latinx artists working in the margins, but it doesn’t really work as a coherent album. With wildly different sounds, the sequence doesn’t have the same flow as the original project; it’s as if one attempted to reassemble a puzzle in the same way, even after all the pieces changed shape. Since the only connective tissue outside of the original material is the amorphous “Latin” category—a commerce-driven catch-all that places often disparate genres under the same umbrella—that inconsistency is somewhat inevitable. It’s the rare Run the Jewels project in which the sum of its parts exceeds the whole.
RTJ Cu4tro may be a collaborative free-for-all, but it still yields some memorable moments. The best ones feel the most transformative, when the connection to the originals is just barely recognizable: Bomba Estéreo’s airy electronic palette pulls “never look back” out of the gutter and into the ether, while cumbia punks Son Rompe Pera continue their relentless campaign to make the marimba sound hard AF on “El Suelo Debajo.” Perhaps the most surprising is Nick Hook and Danny Brasco’s reinvention of “Goonies vs. E.T.,” which pulls a saxophone out of the previously crunchy and chaotic mix, pairing it with a moody new piano melody and a scene-stealing performance from Sarah La Morena.
Others are reshaped by new vocal performances, rather than drastic production changes. Mexican rapper Pawmps heats up Gangsta Boo’s ice-cold hook on “Caminando en la Nieve” with a nimble-tongued Spanish translation, and Lido Pimienta manages the seemingly impossible, matching Mavis Staples’ intensity from “Pulling the Pin” with her singular, cacophonous wail on “Tirando el Detonador.” And while Mexican Institute of Sound’s version of “Ooh La La” sounds somewhat sleepy compared to the original, Guanajuato MC Santa Fe Klan’s rolled Rs and aggressive vocal timbre compliment Mike and Jaime’s well enough to wonder what it might have sounded like on the original.
Meline and Hook deserve props for seeking out collaborators from across the diaspora (Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico); even better is the fact that there are Black and brown artists included here, especially in an industry that tends to center white Latinx performers. In that sense, RTJ Cu4tro feels less like co-opting a culture and more like a genuine interest in Latinx artists—a tacit acknowledgement that these perspectives have been missing from what has so far been an intimate collaborative project. | 2022-11-16T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-16T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Jewel Runners / BMG | November 16, 2022 | 7.2 | 9a1b4cfc-366d-45d5-8a3c-bea9a9c32e1f | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The English band’s first album in over 20 years lacks the fuel and fire to elevate it from a good Britpop record into a great Boo Radleys record. | The English band’s first album in over 20 years lacks the fuel and fire to elevate it from a good Britpop record into a great Boo Radleys record. | The Boo Radleys: Keep On With Falling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-boo-radleys-keep-on-with-falling/ | Keep On With Falling | The evolution of the Boo Radleys roughly follows the timeline of British guitar pop in the 1990s. Ichabod and I, the 1990 debut album by the Merseyside quartet, led by guitarist Martin Carr and vocalist Simon “Sice” Rowbottom, was of a piece with the overdriven, hyperspace sound of groups like Teenage Fanclub and Swervedriver. By the time the Boos announced their split following the release of 1998’s Kingsize, they had adopted cleaner, more direct melodies closer in spirit to contemporaries Blur and the Verve. The fulcrum point for this progression was 1993’s Giant Steps, a masterwork that perfectly married the band’s psychedelic introspection and eardrum assaulting volume: an album equally crucial to the canons of Britpop and shoegaze.
No matter how poppy and accessible their music was—the punchy, horn-driven 1995 single “Wake Up Boo!” landed at #9 in the UK—the Boos kept throwing volatile elements into the mix via lacerating guitar work or production techniques that borrowed from dub reggae and electronic dance music. Those radical components are nowhere to be found on Keep On With Falling, the group’s first new album in 24 years. Tellingly, it’s also their first release without Carr, their principal songwriter and chief architect who was responsible for much of the Boos’ unconventional sonics.
Carr’s absence is an important detail in this new chapter of the band’s history, and the result was glaringly obvious when the first singles from Keep On With Falling dropped last year. Both songs—“A Full Syringe and Memories of You” and “I’ve Had Enough I’m Out”—are well-constructed and catchy, led by Sice’s still-robust vocals and dashed with chirping synths and a touch of strings. But, as with much of the album, those tunes are never more than pleasantly vanilla: lovely to listen to but in need of some extra fuel and fire to help turn it from a good Britpop record into a great Boo Radleys record.
“A Full Syringe and Memories of You” is the best example of the album’s valiant but often underwhelming efforts. The song seems to have been built from the title out, with fairly standard turns of phrase about moving beyond a poisonous relationship. “I can do this/I’m no fool/This ends here,” Sice sings. The music keeps mostly to a warm midtempo sway, and its glammed up bridge is nasty but muted. It’s the kind of song that, in previous years, would have boiled and spattered, but here it merely simmers.
Surrounding this song is plenty of friction-free, nostalgia-inducing material. The lovelorn tunes “Tonight” and “Call Your Name” float by without incident, while the multi-tracked harmonies of “Keep On With Falling” and reggae interludes on “I Say a Lot of Things” hearken back to fan-favorites like “Wake Up Boo!” and Giant Steps’ “Lazarus.” In the album’s strongest moments, the Boos regain that lush middle ground where shoegaze and Britpop commingle, as on the glittery “All Along'' and the heaving “I Can’t Be What You Want Me to Be.”
The current Boos lineup deserves credit for daring to move forward under their old moniker, knowing full well that anything they made would be held up to the high standards of their previous Carr-led efforts. But if Keep On With Falling reveals anything, it’s that the band’s success in the ’90s was due to the musical chemistry of the core quartet. Sice, Brown, and drummer Rob Cieka were flexible and fluid musicians, capable of following Carr down whatever twisting pathway he was carving out of the pop landscape. Remove any component from that formula and it wouldn’t be the same. The proof of that is right here in this well-intentioned but watered down comeback. | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Boostr | March 14, 2022 | 6.2 | 9a1e4a6b-df63-4cda-a9de-5e45c2f52703 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
With a low-stakes live album, the English art-rock band showcases the playfulness that runs through even their most elaborate work. | With a low-stakes live album, the English art-rock band showcases the playfulness that runs through even their most elaborate work. | Black Midi: Live Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-midi-live-fire/ | Live Fire | black midi don’t jam as much as they used to. The London art-rock band assembled its 2019 debut in part by editing extended improvisations, but with 2021’s Cavalcade, they began composing from the top down, and their music has only grown more precisely arranged since then. This year’s Hellfire features the longest tracklist and shortest runtime of their catalog so far, its skronky maelstroms and baroque characters whipped up and dispelled in brisk strokes. Live Fire, recorded at NOS Primavera Sound festival in Portugal, cements that album’s orchestrated mayhem as the band’s new foundation, but is looser and more playful than its studio companion, foregrounding the inherent goofiness of their madcap style.
Backed by keyboardist Seth “Shank” Evans, a session musician from Cavalcade and Hellfire who has become a fixture of black midi’s gigs, the band spends the 11-song set condensing and rewiring their music. They don’t call attention to their alterations, but the songs constantly fray and braid back together in exciting ways. “Sugar/Tzu,” Hellfire’s metal operetta about a murder during a heavyweight boxing match, rattles like a speedbag as Shank and drummer Morgan Simpson ratchet up the tempo, its calmer sections snapping into focus when the relentless pace breaks. For the live version of “John L,” the bristling prog opener of Cavalcade, they play so fast that the sounds seem to tumble forward even during the silences between riffs.
Guitarist Geordie Greep’s archfiend voice, a truly distinct timbre that can evoke a goblin newscaster or an auctioneer on Adderall, often seemed detached from its wild milieus of noise and texture on Hellfire. That sense of distance between his narration and the rest of the music could sometimes make the songs feel like sneering celebrations of a burning world rather than explorations of it. Live, he eases up on the bit. His singing throughout Live Fire is warm and gallant, inflected with giddy lilts and maudlin croons that place him within the hyperactive music rather than above it.
Bassist and fellow vocalist Cameron Picton, typically the straight man to Greep’s ringmaster, also changes tack. He adopts a curdled growl on “Eat Men Eat,” making the song’s manic ship captain character sound even more unhinged. On “Speedway,” which Shank’s filigreed melodies turn into a bubbly jazz fusion number, Picton deviates from the lyrics to sing about slicing his finger while cutting manchego cheese. These tweaks are impish and silly, but also affecting. The characters feel become warm-blooded people rather than the writerly muses they can seem to be on the studio albums.
“Lumps,” the set’s sole’s new song, marks a subtle but significant departure. After Greep scolds the band to “slow down,” they settle into a breezy groove that swings more than it shocks. Any one of the elements here—like Simpson’s dynamite drum fills, or Shank’s elegant vamping— might have sent a previous black midi composition spiraling in some unforeseen new direction, but this time they stay the course. For once, they seem bored of being restless. | 2022-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | December 23, 2022 | 7.4 | 9a227934-eb01-4e6c-93a0-c882eeac0f66 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune tells the story of surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and his ill-fated 1974 adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel Dune set to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dalí. Jodorowsky's plan and process frame the documentary's soundtrack, composed by Kurt Stenzel with analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time. | Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune tells the story of surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and his ill-fated 1974 adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel Dune set to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dalí. Jodorowsky's plan and process frame the documentary's soundtrack, composed by Kurt Stenzel with analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time. | Kurt Stenzel: Jodorowsky’s Dune OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21241-jodorowskys-dune-ost/ | Jodorowsky’s Dune OST | In 1974, surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to direct his adaptation of Frank Herbert's monumental sci-fi novel Dune. The film was set to star David Carradine, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, and Amanda Lear. Meanwhile, after the producers considered none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pink Floyd was slated to compose along with contributions from the French prog-rock outfit Magma. Jodorowsky was given a lavish budget but the film didn't make it past its intensive pre-production stage.
As Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune illustrates, Jodorowsky and his production team put a great deal of effort into storyboarding and design, with an eye for detail that would've made Stanley Kubrick blush. As it turns out, the great irony of Jodorowsky's career is that he made his most widely-felt impact with a film he never even began shooting. To this day, his work on Dune continues to reflect in popular cinema and culture. In a sense, his version of Dune died giving birth to the genre-defining films that emerged in its wake. Alien, for example, was written by Dan O'Bannon and of course bore the unmistakable design aesthetic of Swiss painter H.R. Giger—both of whom had been brought in for Jodorowsky's production. This backstory, of course, frames Kurt Stenzel's score to Pavich's documentary and vice-versa.
So many things could have gone wrong here had Stenzel attempted to encompass the pretense and grandeur of the subject at hand. "We need to try," he writes in the liner notes—the implication being that we as the audience should put forth our best effort both to imagine the film Jodorowsky envisioned and to honor the scale of what he was aiming to accomplish. But Stenzel's score—which consists mainly of a bunch of analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time (with no additional digital sequencing)—actually requires little effort from listeners.
Given the psychedelic quality of Jodorowsky's most well-known films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it's no surprise that in the documentary the maverick Chilean director talks about wanting to mimic the effects of LSD with Dune. But his goals didn't stop there. Jodorowsky breathlessly describes how his film was to serve as a "prophet"—not as a prophecy, but as a living, breathing entity with a consciousness of its own. "For me," he declares on camera, "Dune will be the coming of a God. An artistic and cinematographic God."
To Stenzel's credit, although he does fall prey to a bit of reverence—most notably in passages that feature audio samples of Jodorowsky waxing poetic on what moviemaking means to him—the music doesn't strive to be anywhere near as lofty as that. Stenzel is wise to go for a more discreet, at times even whimsical, tone that supports the documentary's easygoing, storytelling structure. It's too bad that Stenzel, when he does opt to use Jodorowsky monologues, doesn't get more creative with them by chopping them up or subjecting them to effects, but the samples occur rarely and end up being incidental to the score's overall flavor anyway.
Charmingly, the liner notes include a list of all the synth gear Stenzel used, just in case you're interested in geeking-out. But that would be missing the point. Stenzel's score doesn't stand out so much for the tools he used to create it as much as for the choices he made while using those tools. Pavich instructed Stenzel to go for a "Tangerine Dream-type feel," and as such the predictable path would have been to mimic the wheezing, primitive synthesizer sounds that define sci-fi cinema of the '60s and '70s—sounds that now feel quaint at best and moldy at worst. Had Stenzel emulated the audacious bleeting style of, say, early Moog pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, Emerson Lake & Palmer, or any number of artists from the period, he would have artificially encased this music in a temporal ambience it doesn't actually require in order to engage your attention. Ultimately, not unlike the French electronic duo Air, Stenzel has too much creative inspiration to settle for being a stylist, and though he openly references the past, he lands with both feet firmly anchored in the present.
Pavich's documentary more or less consists of a string of interviews undercut with shots of old photos and storyboard drawings. Clearly then, Stenzel's job was to keep the music moving along to match whatever pace Pavich set as appropriate for the audience's patience threshold. Stenzel shifts quickly but gracefully from one motif to the next, weaving sounds in and out like a choreographer who prefers to stay offstage while guiding each "dancer"—each new instrument, melody, textural element, or structural change—into the fray on cue. By turns dramatic, spaced-out, otherworldly, entrancing, stately, ominous, hopeful, playful, and chatty, most of the tracks on Jodorowsky's Dune run about a minute long and manage to cover more than one mood before they run that course. Taken as a whole, they stream by yet never feel rushed, and Stenzel establishes his dual knack for patience and economy very early on.
In what is perhaps this album's defining moment, a high-pitched synth line wails and echoes in a vast empty space. Stenzel gives it a character and shape not unlike those celestial bodies that appear to us via deep-space photography as giant, colorful plumes. The lone synth line segues into a live drumset, the first appearance of organic instruments and room ambience on the whole album. The drums don't last long, and soon they too meld into vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding chants before the voices grow more distressed. Then, a snarling, heavily filtered electric guitar riff that recalls Tool's "Forty-Six & 2" makes its entrance before flaring out as quickly as it came. One might expect these elements to step on each other's toes. But, as with just about every other sound that leads up to this passage, Stenzel creates a sensation of smooth sailing, even as he radically alters the scenery every few minutes. On Jodorowsky’s Dune, Stenzel takes you across topographic oceans that never rock the boat. | 2015-11-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Light in the Attic | November 18, 2015 | 8 | 9a2f0254-b170-4baa-bb9e-5d35b8924049 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On his Nonesuch debut, the innovative saxophonist reinvents jazz standards with a psychedelic hip-hop touch. | On his Nonesuch debut, the innovative saxophonist reinvents jazz standards with a psychedelic hip-hop touch. | Sam Gendel: Satin Doll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-satin-doll/ | Satin Doll | Songbook standards can offer a blank canvas. Even straightforward renditions can reveal artists in a new light, like when Willie Nelson tackled the Great American Songbook on his immaculate Stardust at the height of outlaw country, or when John Coltrane countered claims of being “anti-jazz” with his luminous Ballads. They can serve as a bold statement, as when Oneohtrix Point Never deconstructed the Harry Warren/Al Dubin ballad “I Only Have Eyes for You.” After a few years bubbling under with work for Vampire Weekend, Ry Cooder, Lonnie Holley, and Atticus Ross, Los Angeles-based jazz saxophonist Sam Gendel takes the latter tack with his Nonesuch debut, Satin Doll.
Recorded live over the course of three days with bassist Gabe Noel and electronic percussionist Philippe Melanson, Satin Doll pays tribute to everything from Duke Ellington to Hoagy Carmichael, with Gendel dismantling each standard and reassembling it. You’ve never heard so many glitches, hiccups, and pregnant pauses in “Afro Blue” before; Gendel's trio stretches the frame as far as it can go while keeping the tune recognizable. The result feels as weirdly expansive as Coltrane’s famous nine-minute exploration of the Mongo Santamaría original, even as it wraps up in just over three.
Rather than extrapolate on the original melodies, Gendel’s group instead reveal alien qualities inside them. Gendel’s closest predecessors might be Jon Hassell and Ben Neill, but he also nods to the slurred aesthetic of West Coast and Southern rap. You only need to hear two notes—burred and squished though they may be—to perk up with recognition at “Freddie Freeloader,” which Gendel couches in the pneumatic wheeze of G-funk. His tactile playing reveals all manner of new textures within the title track: candy-paint gloss, soap bubbles, Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs. But beneath all that shine, his horn captures the swoon of the original.
It doesn’t always work. Their sputtering take on Charles Mingus’ Lester Young homage “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is intriguing, but the synthesized vocals—delivering the lyrics that Joni Mitchell penned years later—feel like an A.I.’s attempt to “swing.” A better Young homage comes one song later with “Stardust;” Gendel’s buttery vibrato burrows beneath the track’s otherwise-impenetrable sheen, evoking the late tenor saxophonist’s essence.
Gendel and group coyly slot original tunes like "Glide Mode" and "Saxofone Funeral" into the mix. They melt the familiar timbres of horn, bass, and drums into blobs and add samples, making explicit their love for Madlib and chopped ‘n’ screwed music. That playful approach makes their rendition of “Cold Duck Time” feel even drunker than Eddie Harris’ woozy original (a tribute to the titular treacly fortified wine). Gendel and group pile on with UFO whooshes and garbled vocal samples. The trio lets loose, Noel’s bass propelling them into deeper, weirder space. Throughout, Satin Doll warps these standards delectably, leaving you pleasantly dizzy.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | null | March 17, 2020 | 7.8 | 9a317445-1693-4e75-af45-ed5a15a25e65 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The rapper’s hard-knocking horrorcore is classic Memphis trunk music, and only other artists from the 901 are invited along for the ride. | The rapper’s hard-knocking horrorcore is classic Memphis trunk music, and only other artists from the 901 are invited along for the ride. | Duke Deuce: MEMPHIS MASSACRE III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duke-deuce-memphis-massacre-iii/ | Memphis Massacre III | Ever since his 2019 breakout “Crunk Ain’t Dead,” Memphis rapper Duke Deuce has been leading seminars in Southern rap history, laying claim to the mystic styles developed in his city and bringing its history into the present. He’s not resentful that so many people have dipped into his hometown’s creative well, but he wants credit where it’s due: “Shout out to Migos for bringing it back, but the triplet flow comes from Memphis,” as he puts it bluntly on the opening track of his new tape, MEMPHIS MASSACRE III, a return to the mixtape series that started his career.
There’s a constant raucous momentum to Duke’s albums, but with every project, he unveils a new variation of his core persona. On this summer’s CRUNKSTAR, he embraced his inner scene kid, mixing guitar-laden ballads with the stiff, martial beat that’s become his signature. MEMPHIS MASSACRE III, released for Halloween, returns more explicitly to the sound of the city that made Duke: the hard-knocking horrorcore is classic Memphis trunk music, and only other artists from the 901 are invited along for the ride. Duke casts himself as a gleefully anarchic troublemaker nicknamed “Deucifer,” who’s as concerned with tearing up the club as tearing down the system.
Duke loops his hooks like a chant, recalling the rhythmic minimalism of Three 6 Mafia’s early underground tapes, which turned the human voice into its own drum pattern. Though he often looks to Memphis tradition, Duke has a keen talent for lyrical worldbuilding, inducting the listener into a kind of secret society with its own passwords and handshakes. “Anna” isn’t a name, but the word “animosity” sawed in half—“Who got anna? Who got animosity?”—distilling his haters’ bitterness into two syllables. Duke’s become known for his gangsta-walking dances as much as his rapping, and he spits like he moves, combining boisterous enthusiasm with deceptive dexterity. His voice contorts with ease, snarling on the cutthroat “Black Ops” and meditatively crooning on closing track “Nobody Needs Nobody.”
Several years into his career, Duke has assembled a tight-knit stable of producers, including Hitkidd and Ayoza, as well as his father Duke Nitty—keeping it in the family and in Memphis. The musical palette of MEMPHIS MASSACRE III is straight out of a horror movie, all creepy keyboards and funeral dirge organs, and Duke’s sharp ear for sequencing means it flows as naturally as a film score. A decaying tape loop provides the foundation for “Mr Memphis Massacre,” which is practically a seance to summon the spirit of Lord Infamous, as Duke uses the imagery of witchcraft and demonic possession to describe the paranoia and the naysayers who plague his life. But Memphis rap is more than just nightmares, and tracks like “Buck the System” and “What’s My Name” channel the city’s smooth-pimping style. For all the buckness, Duke’s choices are often baroque and ornate, like when he enlists Opera Memphis to provide choral accompaniment on “Deucifer.”
Horrorcore godfather DJ Paul lends his menacing touch to “What You Rep,” but even at this relatively early stage of his career, Duke is already opening up the platform he’s built to emerging Memphis rappers like ATM RichBaby and Paper Route Empire’s Big Moochie Grape. Women rappers like Gangsta Boo and La Chat are a vital part of the city’s musical legacy, and Duke nods to their influence by inviting up-and-coming female talent to steal the show. “Gwak Gwak” is a raunchy duet with fellow Quality Control signee Gloss Up, but it’s Glockianna who comes in hottest, chewing up and spitting out her verses on “Riverside” and “Respect” with the hunger of a newcomer and the confidence of a veteran.
The influence of Three 6 Mafia-style horrorcore haunts contemporary artists from 21 Savage to $uicideboy$, but Memphis rap itself has largely pivoted away from the demonic since the 1990s. Drawing on the city’s underground laboratory of twisting flows and unexpected styles, MEMPHIS MASSACRE III returns the spooky crown to Duke’s hometown. While his music might recall the ghosts of Memphis past, Duke himself never appears stuck in time or overcome by nostalgia. With one ear turned to tradition and another to the future, he’s become a new standard bearer. | 2022-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown / Made Men Movement | November 8, 2022 | 7.7 | 9a339b74-8525-4a4b-ac10-21c7b724cf3f | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The New York singer’s casually elegant EP is remarkably accomplished. Even at just four songs, Amber Mark sounds like a veteran of pop songcraft and performance. | The New York singer’s casually elegant EP is remarkably accomplished. Even at just four songs, Amber Mark sounds like a veteran of pop songcraft and performance. | Amber Mark: Conexão EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amber-mark-conexao-ep/ | Conexão EP | Before settling in New York as a teenager, Amber Mark lived around the world, bouncing between Miami, Berlin, and India; she’s someone for whom the exotic and exceptional have become commonplace. It’s a life of envy, and not just because you imagine her beholding foreign skylines and dipping her toes in the ocean. Immersing herself in other cultures and enduring the drudgery of intercontinental travel helped her grow up a little faster than the average early twenty-something. Her grounded, global perspective makes her sound settled, even as she flits in the space between genres, and it’s the foundation of the casual elegance that defines Conexão, her magnetic new EP.
Mark’s 2017 debut 3:33 AM traced her grieving process after her mother’s death, with each track reflecting a different emotional dimension. Conexão doesn’t bear the same thematic weight—it’s all about garden-variety “love drama,” in Mark’s words—but it’s reinforced by its own narrative arc. The title track captures the instant when sparks start to fly, transcending time and space; it sounds like two strangers meeting each other’s gaze across a dimly lit hotel bar. She explores a relationship that’s started losing its heat across “Love Me Right” and a poignant cover of Sade’s “Love Is Stronger Than Pride.” By the time she reaches “All the Work,” she’s gently but firmly rejecting an ex who’s crawled back after seeing her thrive.
Following a relationship from bloom to bust isn’t a novel concept, but it’s enlivened by Mark’s emotional nuance and attention to detail. “Love Me Right” isn’t an ultimatum or an explosive list of demands: It’s a pained request, a last-ditch effort from someone who sees the good in her relationship but just isn’t satisfied. She reaches a breaking point when her partner’s inattentiveness leads to self-doubt: “Or is it just me? Am I not what you want?/’Cause if that’s the case, baby, why lead me on?” Her vocals are agile but conversational, as if she’s posing rhetorical questions to a close friend over a weekday lunch. When she navigates an electric key change a few minutes later, it feels like the all-too-familiar moment when a heated discussion morphs into a full-blown romantic crisis.
Her musical choices are just as subtle. Conexão is the Portuguese word for “connection,” and Mark spends much of the EP playing with the rhythms and instrumentation of bossa nova. She makes her intentions clear by undergirding the title track with a classic, sensual beat, but Conexão doesn’t dip into gimmickry. The sounds of bossa nova are building blocks in her hands, tools that can ever-so-slightly modify R&B, pop, and dance music. When “All the Work” transforms into sleek pop-house upon reaching its chorus, it does so from an unexpected position; adding skittering layers of rhythm gives “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” roots Sade’s version lacked.
These little touches may not seem important in isolation, but a resonant turn of phrase here and a measured vocal take there add up to something like trust: You listen to an artist and feel like you’re in capable hands. Mark’s career is just beginning, but Conexão rings with the grace and looseness you’d expect from a veteran’s genre exercise. She’s always been ahead of the curve, why stop now? | 2018-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PMR / Virgin EMI | May 9, 2018 | 8 | 9a35e296-66e2-4f4a-a406-e942a8b9a826 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
New York-based, Florida-born producer/singer Roberto Carlos Lange's latest album as Helado Negro is his boldest and most intricate work to date, grappling with memory and its uncanny tendency to wear away despite our best intentions to preserve it. | New York-based, Florida-born producer/singer Roberto Carlos Lange's latest album as Helado Negro is his boldest and most intricate work to date, grappling with memory and its uncanny tendency to wear away despite our best intentions to preserve it. | Helado Negro: Double Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19703-helado-negro-double-youth/ | Double Youth | Two young boys stare out from the cover of Double Youth, and only one of them is Roberto Carlos Lange. The New York-based, Florida-born producer/singer who goes by Helado Negro doesn't remember who the other one is. Face-painted and serious, they both seem to be taking a moment out of one of those perfect childhood days to oblige a parent's request for a keepsake. The cover of Lange's fourth LP is a photo of a photograph that he found unexpectedly in his parent's house; its tears, curls, and age spots are captured in full as part of the composition. Fittingly, Double Youth, the boldest and most intricate Helado Negro work to date, grapples with memory and its uncanny tendency to wear away despite our best intentions to preserve it.
Double Youth follows a trio of ambient, mood-based EPs, shifting emphasis to structure, motion, and beats. It's the first time that Lange's lyrics, which as always shift effortlessly between English and Spanish, aren't the most concrete feature in his music. Synth figures grind together like clockwork on "It's Our Game", which owes some of its playfulness to Jimmy Tamborello's work with the Postal Service and as Dntel. The bass line that tumbles through the song acts more as a counterpoint to Lange's phrasing than a part of the rhythm section, although the line between the beats and everything outside the beats here is a porous one. The 8/8 time signature becomes something for Lange to challenge, not submit to.
Later, "Myself On 2 U" entertains a Boards of Canada-esque flutter while gulps of analog synths and backing soprano map out the chords. The menacing "Triangulate" rides a bristling industrial bass whose ascending phrases seem to leer at Lange's layered chants. "We'll take our time/ And we'll crawl to you," he sings, as if extracting threats from the dissolving context of a dream. Throughout Double Youth, Lange's words follow dream logic rather than concrete narrative. He uses language not as a key to the album's core but as another texturizing element, rolling out commands that sound more natural in Spanish than they ever could in English: "llamame" ("call me"), "dejame" ("let me go"). On "Queriendo", he pronounces the Spanish equivalent to the album's title, "doble juventud", a phrase whose syllabic density gives it an inherent rhythm of its own.
The album's gentle hallucination crystallizes on lead single "I Krill You", a slowly unfolding suite with a patient melody at odds with its rapid techno pulse. Lange builds the song only to break away at its midpoint to a synthetic choral moment, leaping lucidly from the club to the cathedral. "It's a dream, a dream, a dream about you again," he repeats, calling to an unseen other with the sort of longing that usually only survives inside Arthur Russell albums. Spritzes of synth brass stand in for slashes of cello; the beats pile, but never overwhelm.
Double Youth plays as an exercise in reconciling forgotten artifacts with present memories, as anyone who's had the chance to rifle through their former possessions and discover evidence of a totally alien former self knows the uncanny feeling that's articulated so effectively on Helado Negro's latest. The album's title refers most transparently to the twin figures on its cover: two boys being young side by side. But it can also describe the shadows we leave for ourselves, the youth we remember crashing into the husks of youth we discover. Helado Negro animates that conflict, finding not resolution, but harmony in the gaps between selves. | 2014-09-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | September 3, 2014 | 7.5 | 9a3841dc-1615-40ff-baeb-2d36a4ee4fcb | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The Mexican techno producer Rebolledo specializes in work that feels hollowed out and slightly creepy, with a sly streak of absurdist humor. | The Mexican techno producer Rebolledo specializes in work that feels hollowed out and slightly creepy, with a sly streak of absurdist humor. | Rebolledo: Mondo Alterado | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21786-mondo-alterado/ | Mondo Alterado | The Mexican techno producer Mauricio Rebolledo has compared his own aesthetic to a drive through a long tunnel. You can hear that in his music: the whine of the engine and the wheels against the road; isolated notes bobbing in empty space like taillights streaking through the darkness; the steady pulse reminiscent of the rhythm of fluorescent lights passing overhead, all lines converging dimly on a distant vanishing point.
There were glimmers of it on his debut album, 2011's Super Vato, which spun bare-bones synth and drum tracks into rowdy, psychedelic club cuts that conveyed the manic rush of hallucinating at the wheel. But it really came together on his 2014 mix CD Momento Drive, particularly on a remarkably strange song he created for the mix, “Windsurf, Sunburn & Dollar,” in which he hollered the titular phrase in a throaty caveman howl—something more like “Windsor, sumble 'n' doar!”—over a beat that sounded like an electric guitar going up in flames, strings popping their coils as the whammy bar turned molten.
The same aesthetic defines Mondo Alterado, a new album of original material that has more in common with that mix CD than it does with his debut album. A DJ who is partial to psychedelic sets of mind-numbing duration—he and Superpitcher played a 25-hour back-to-back set (as Pachanga Boys) in Mexico City a few years ago—Rebolledo has said that he only began producing in order to create the kind of material he was seeking for his sets but couldn't find elsewhere. In that sense, Mondo Alterado is a testament to the clarity of his vision. It unrolls like an impeccably thought-through DJ set, right down to the way tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, with held notes or drumbeats acting as the glue that holds the pieces together.
Rebolledo's music has always been sparse, but on Mondo Alterado, it's more hypnotically hollowed-out than ever. “Spacer Rainbow Woman” is typical of his approach, as two spindly guitar notes and a gently swaying drumbeat are strung like a rope bridge across the void. A wordless sigh offers a suggestion of melody, and in the song's long plateau—you can't really speak of “peaks” in Rebolledo's work—a rubbery bass arpeggio creates rhythmic and harmonic tension. “Discótico Sinético” and “Discótico Estático” are similar: one-finger synth melodies, distant whoops and howls, lunkheaded rhythms heavy on cowbell and tom. “A Numb Gas to the Future” is even more minimal—a coldwave sketch and seven-minute palate-cleanser, connecting two of the album's highlights, “Fears Come True” and “Pow Pow.” (The latter is especially great, coming closest to the unhinged ecstasy of “Windsurf, Sunburn & Dollar.”)
Nothing happens in a hurry here, and Rebolledo himself pokes fun at his music's humid languor in the title of the album's opening track, “Here Comes the Warrior (Super Short Album Version).” Its swirl of droning synths, tribal drums, and ululations goes on for nearly a quarter of an hour, and begs the question: What on earth must the long version be like? Which brings us to one of Mondo Alterado's best qualities: its absurdist sense of humor. In “Life Is Strange, Life Is Hard, Life Is Great,” Rebolledo fills in the music's emptiness with a rambling monologue full of platitudes and positive affirmations, sounding like a self-help speaker that the denizens of Black Rock City have mistaken for an actual shaman as he builds to a tongue-in-cheek climax: “Never lose the faith, 'cause life is really great/Dance again/Dance again.”
Despite the lyrics' campy qualities, there's something off about them, something almost sinister, and that disturbing undercurrent carries into “Fears Come Through,” a dead-eyed protestation of unrequited love delivered over canned tambourines and Novocaine-drip synths. With a chorus that goes, “I don't want to be afraid to say I love you,” it's the creepiest anthem you're likely to hear on a dance floor all year.
Throughout this long, sidewinding album, you may find yourself asking, Is this guy for real?—and that's precisely what makes Rebolledo's whole shtick so compelling. The music is enervating and exhilarating in equal measure, and it sounds unlike almost anything else in techno right now, save for similarly left-field primitivists like Barnt. Mondo Alterado isn't for everyone. But for those who like their techno with a healthy dose of deadpan, Rebolledo's unique strain of gonzo trance is all the fuel they need for a long trip to the far side of nowhere. | 2016-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hippie Dance | May 30, 2016 | 7.4 | 9a3bbd19-0a4b-442b-96e8-d6617c3927d4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Bubblegum surf-pop meets Midwestern earnestness on the Kansas City quintet’s sweet, funny, but sometimes inscrutable sophomore album. | Bubblegum surf-pop meets Midwestern earnestness on the Kansas City quintet’s sweet, funny, but sometimes inscrutable sophomore album. | Shy Boys: Bell House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shy-boys-bell-house/ | Bell House | In the four years since they released their self-titled debut, Shy Boys have undergone a metamorphosis. Known for glossy harmonies subdued by lo-fi production, the Kansas City, Missouri quintet showcases bubblegum surf pop on its sophomore album, Bell House. Sleeker production allows Shy Boys to showcase their sunny falsettos, while creating a peculiar time warp: Their new music feels refreshing and nostalgic at once.
The project of brothers Kyle and Collin Rausch, along with their friends Konnor Ervin, Kyle Little, and Ross Brown, Bell House is named after the street they all shared for nearly five years and charged with familial love. The snap-happy “Champion” feels like the theme song for an ’80s sitcom where bickering friends and family learn wholesome values through gentle life lessons. Dedicated to the Rausches’ mother, it reminisces over back-to-school photos and marvels at her ability to make them feel like superstars. The song is emblematic of the sincere Midwestern sweetness that pervades Shy Boys’ work.
No matter where they direct their attention, Shy Boys come across as both introspective and benevolent. Their epic lead single “Take the Doggie” swaps blissful guitar for rock angst in the vein of Thin Lizzy, as they contemplate rescuing a neighbor’s abused, malnourished dog. True to their moniker, there are moments when Shy Boys reveal, and even celebrate, their fragility. “Tragic Loss” captures the anxiety of nightmares, and the uncontrollable nature of the subconscious. The chorus is suffused with panic: “Think of what a tragic loss would have done to me.” But for all its unease, the song’s melodramatic tone feels playful and self-aware. Such glimpses of humor are crucial for a band whose earnestness can sometimes feel like a bit much.
The same levity gives opener “Miracle Gro” its charm. The band members’ voices entwine like vines stretching sunward in a cappella harmonies whose Beach Boys-style airiness evokes innocence and simplicity—but the song’s title refers to the super-powered fertilizer one might use to grow a crop of overly potent bud. Handclaps keep the cheerful beat as the groups sings about a seven-foot-tall “dirty secret buddin’ off the street.”
Bell House is an endearing album, but too many gooey guitar licks and saccharine lyrics can start to give you a toothache. Although it ostensibly recounts drummer/bassist Ervin’s encounter with a thief, “Evil Sin” feels more like a scolding parable than a reflection on being the victim of a crime. “But it’s still an evil sin/If you want to be my friend/Don’t ever lie again,” Collin Rausch sings. The baroque-pop melody is pleasant enough. Perhaps there’s a hint of Shy Boys’ subtle humor at work here, too; like kindly teachers, they’re not mad at the robber, just disappointed. Ultimately, though, the pedantic lyrics and honeyed delivery still recall the preschool stylings of Barney or Disney.
Anchored in the Rausch brothers’ “blood harmony,” as Kevin Morby describes their vocals in their liner notes, Shy Boys’ gentle vocals can be disarming. But they can also sound sappy and artificial, as they do on “No Fun” and the odd R&B ballad “Disconnect.” On Bell House, it’s sometimes hard to tell when the band is being too precious and when it’s consciously using self-deprecating humor to subvert that self-seriousness. For all their charms, the album’s confusing tone suggests that Shy Boys haven’t quite figured out how to communicate with listeners who don’t know them as well as they know each other. | 2018-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 14, 2018 | 6.8 | 9a3c2645-746b-444e-bb2b-d1a3ff4013e5 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power's latest occupies a liminal space made up of droning guitars, metallic piano reverberations, and lyrics that trace some barely escaped threat. | Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power's latest occupies a liminal space made up of droning guitars, metallic piano reverberations, and lyrics that trace some barely escaped threat. | Brigid Mae Power: Brigid Mae Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21971-brigid-mae-power/ | Brigid Mae Power | Danger lingers around the edges of the latest album by Ireland's Brigid Mae Power. She made her past records in empty car parks and churches—the kinds of places where you’re always looking over your shoulder. Her self-titled Tompkins Square debut was recorded in Portland with Peter Broderick, and occupies a liminal space made up of droning guitars, metallic piano reverberations, and lyrics that trace some barely escaped threat. “There were some people around us at the time who weren’t for us/Though they claimed to be,” she sings to her infant son on “Lookin At You in a Photo.” The liturgical haze and her slow, methodical singing give the impression of a woman and single mother learning to trust herself and others again, tentatively adapting to a life where she no longer has to look back every dozen steps.
Like This Mortal Coil, Marissa Nadler, and White Chalk-era PJ Harvey, Power is adept at grounding what could otherwise be quite gossamer music. Sometimes she uses pace and volume, as on opener “It’s Clearing Now,” which spends almost eight minutes creeping in like a storm over the horizon, until it becomes overwhelming and transcendent. “Oh, many, many times to force happiness, I have tried/But I had to be patient in waiting for its movement,” she sings meditatively, while her loosely strummed guitar beckons a whirl of strings. She shades her songs with soured highs and unsettling depths, like the low bass note on “Is It My Low or Yours” and the blast of static that cuts through “Watching the Horses.”
Power is an equally nuanced vocalist. Her voice is agile and exhilarating, conveying all her nervous optimism and frank exhaustion, whether singing monastic drones (“Let Me Hold You Through This”), forlorn ballads (“Is It My Low or Yours”), or Carpenters-indebted melodies. She never comes close to elucidating what it is she escaped, but the aftermath leaves little doubt as to how serious it was. She reveals her coping mechanisms on “I Left Myself for a While,” but rediscovers everything she had locked deep in some internal safe on “Watching the Horses.” Backed by dreamy, subtly cinematic strings, she sings, “I thought I had completely forgotten/But it was in body's memory/I release it now/I am free.”
Despite its clear seriousness, Brigid Mae Power runs on that sense of newfound freedom. Power and Broderick find glimmers of light even in the darkest moments, and she learns to trust the kind of love that enables independence, after some period of coercion. “I feel your intent/I'm not sure of the meaning of it yet,” she sings on final song “How You Feel,” which starts with the sound of her laughter, and unspools in sweet freak-folk sepia that evokes great lost songwriters like Connie Converse. “But nothing, nothing feels bad/And I feel safer than I ever have before.” | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Tompkins Square | June 22, 2016 | 7.5 | 9a43d1cc-8e51-4f4c-82f8-e34f9b22c22f | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
John Cobbett is one of modern metal’s premier guitarists. In Hammers of Misfortune, he reinvigorates ’70s progressive rock and the hard rock of Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Uli Jon Roth-era Scorpions. | John Cobbett is one of modern metal’s premier guitarists. In Hammers of Misfortune, he reinvigorates ’70s progressive rock and the hard rock of Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Uli Jon Roth-era Scorpions. | Hammers of Misfortune: Dead Revolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22129-dead-revolution/ | Dead Revolution | John Cobbett is one of modern metal’s premier guitarists, channeling an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre into virtuosic playing that bubbles with an energy folks from all levels of metal fandom can gravitate to. While he’s remained a cult figure, his work in VHÖL has given larger audiences a taste of his gifts for fusing contemporary and classic sounds. VHÖL almost overshadows Cobbett’s long-running main project, Hammers of Misfortune: In Hammers, he reinvigorates ’70s progressive rock and the hard rock of Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Uli Jon Roth-era Scorpions. Dead Revolution, Hammers’ sixth full-length, retains much of the dynamic lineup from 17**th Street and contains some of their most inspired material yet, but it’s also gloomier than much of their work.
It doesn’t begin that way, however. Cobbett and Leila Abdul-Rauf, another Bay Area veteran who’s also in perverse death metallers Vastum, kick off the album with “The Velvet Inquisition,” which begins on a familiar and addictive gallop before Joe Hutton’s vocals come in to dominate. Somehow, he makes triumph sound like despair, a feeling matched by the striding music: Melodically, it’s on point, but there is a pained smile behind the shredding, a sense of reckoning with an encroaching doomsday so ominous it might already be here.
If you’re going to call upon the spirit of Ritchie Blackmore-era Deep Purple, you’re going to have to bring in some organs. Sigrid Sheie, who also plays bass, keyboard, and piano (or rather, “Paino”) in VHÖL, is their John Lord here, but her work goes beyond retro texture. As in Purple, her organ playing acts as a complementary, and sometimes alternate, drive to the guitars, giving off a pollution that clouds Revolution in unease. She gives the Maidenesque “Flying Alone” a turbo boost, with an added dose of weltering confusion, as Cobbett and Abdul-Rauf descend into a tailspin of dueling solos towards the end. On the title track, her work adds to much urgency to the clanking of Will Carroll’s cowbell that it shrugs aside any schlock you might attach to it. One of the album’s most beautiful moments is when “The Precipice (Waiting for the Fall),” breaks into just Sheie’s organ and Hutton’s soaring voice, adding another twist to the duality that characterizes the record.
Hammers feel the sting of the Bay Area’s lightspeed gentrification like almost all of the regions’ artists, something they agonized over on “The Day the City Died” from 17**th Street. Revolution addresses this again by ending with a cover of “Days of ’49,” Joaquin Miller’s Gold Rush poem that was eventually covered by Bob Dylan on Self Portrait. It’s a personal take on the aftermath of a large influx of hucksters chasing fleeting economic gains—sound familiar? Hutton carries the song, combining power metal heft with Phil Lynott’s heart. He captures the longing of more optimistic times, while entirely aware of the damage its brought. Sheie brings her disorienting shimmer, as well as some piano, and Carroll’s thunder is the weight that lets Hutton thrive.
There’s an ongoing metal revival in the States, borne of an appreciation of the pre-thrash era, and perhaps a desire to hear some damn melodies, which rock radio nor the extreme underground will provide in abundance. Bands like Manilla Road and Cirith Ungol, who never got their due back in the day, are gaining a second life, and newer bands like Eternal Champion, High Spirits, Sumerlands, and Magic Circle prove traditionalism still can yield great results. Cobbett would like you to know with Revolution that not only was he ahead of the game, but that it can extend beyond hero worship. | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Metal Blade | July 27, 2016 | 7.8 | 9a45116c-8bd7-46c3-adff-986ac761aa1a | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
A new joint release from the Seoul artists feels like a true collaboration, fusing their distinct styles with shoegaze production and alt-rock guitars. | A new joint release from the Seoul artists feels like a true collaboration, fusing their distinct styles with shoegaze production and alt-rock guitars. | 파란노을 (Parannoul) / Asian Glow: Paraglow EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asian-glow-parannoul-paraglow-ep/ | Paraglow EP | At the beginning of 2021, Parannoul was just an anonymous bedroom artist on Bandcamp. By the end of the year, they somehow became more difficult to define. While To See the Next Part of the Dream became one of the year’s true word-of-mouth successes, Parannoul rejected most requests for press. The few Q&As they accepted were published on message boards and personal blogs, occasionally providing tiny, confounding glimpses into their process: Turns out those lusciously textured guitars that critics swooned over weren’t actually guitars at all, but MIDI presets. But for the most part, what we knew about Parannoul was what came from the music of To See the Next Part of the Dream, a person racked with crippling insecurities and a profound fear of exposure. The only thing worse than the outside world reinforcing their low self-opinion would be having their praise retracted in an inevitable wave of backlash. So if we’re to take them at their word, the mere existence of Paraglow, a collaborative EP with fellow Seoul artist Asian Glow, is about the riskiest move they could make—one that requires relinquishing control of both their art and their narrative.
But Asian Glow—who also works in a melange of noise, bedsit indie, shoegaze, and dream-pop—is a great match for Parranoul. The two already shared a split with Brazilian screamo act sonhos tomam conta on Downfall of the Neon Youth, a work that quickly became a defining document of emo’s fifth wave. And Asian Glow just set a precedent for their Parranoul collaboration in March with Weatherglow, a joint work with another reclusive and cultishly beloved Bandcamp sensation. Left to their own devices, Parannoul usually tends towards mesmeric repetition and scorched-sugar melody, whereas Asian Glow puts a higher premium on abrasion and “ideas” than straightforward song structure. Paraglow is a 30-minute EP that tries to fuse these two modes together.
Uploaded without fanfare to a new joint Bandcamp page by someone who didn’t write a bio for the album because they “wen [sic] to king gizzard last night with the boys,” Paraglow is presented as a true collaboration—even if the shoegaze production and alt-rock guitars suggest a hypothetical “darker, more difficult follow-up” to To See the Next Part of the Dream rather than Asian Glow’s “most accessible work yet.” Parannoul revealed that their first bolt of artistic inspiration came after hearing a middle school teacher use a Doves song in an otherwise boring class presentation. Opener “Hand” shows how, say, “The Man Who Told Everything” inspired such an overwhelming feeling of awe and possibility while rendering the lyrics secondary. In short, cue the strings. As much as the strings on “Hand” provide textural and melodic counterpoint, they exist to supercharge the drama, rendering Parannoul’s typically despondent lyrics (“Whose contact information is in my heart/Whose gravestone is in my heart? “The devil whispers you are nothing”) as symphonic. To be clear, “Hand” does not sound like either of these two ponied up for a real string section, but as with their past work, the uncanny valley of high-quality, synthetic instrumentation is part of the charm.
While “Hand” is a glimpse of big-budget Parannoul, the remainder of Paraglow makes the give-and-take between its two creators more apparent. “The Light Side of the Eyes” begins as robotic cocktail jazz and does not stay that way for very long, punching in drum’n’bass breaks and non-quantized math-rock before Parannoul digs up their gnarliest screamo roots. “Swamp” subsequently toggles between twinkling piano-pop and blown-out sludge. No one has ever combined these genres within the span of four or so minutes before—no one’s really ever even tried. And even if the mix isn’t entirely coherent, it’s always compelling, lending an unstable, unpredictable edge to artists who prefer working within closed circuits.
But this is all prelude to “Wheel.” There’s martial snare rolls, saxophones, strings, an ambient coda, and none of them provide a way out from Parannoul’s intractable gloom. A rough Google translation of the lyrics describes them as “a soulless echo,” and “a shadow waiting for you to exit the long tunnel.” No matter how despairing Parannoul and Asian Glow are in their respective work, there’s an underlying sweetness to it all; both evoke the escapist idealism of early 2000s electronic shoegaze, where sheepish auteurs like Caribou, Ulrich Schnauss, and M83 found utopia in the infinite possibilities of digital home recording. To See the Next Part of the Dream and Cull Ficle both proved that Parannoul and Asian Glow could build skyward monumentals on a depressed foundation. The duo instead spend Paraglow seeing how far they can dig toward the center of the earth. | 2022-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Poclanos | October 26, 2022 | 7.4 | 9a48d1bf-4ee4-40ca-98e5-2fd1b6adf13f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The first country record I ever bought was Merle Haggard's 16 Biggest Hits. Splattered into a harrowing dustbowl of ... | The first country record I ever bought was Merle Haggard's 16 Biggest Hits. Splattered into a harrowing dustbowl of ... | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Greatest Palace Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/702-greatest-palace-music/ | Greatest Palace Music | The first country record I ever bought was Merle Haggard's 16 Biggest Hits. Splattered into a harrowing dustbowl of depravity, deprivation, and deliverance, I quickly found myself placing it on that hallowed shelf of "My Ten Favorite Records." The following year, I played it for some country aficionados who proudly informed me that these were miserably smooth 1994 re-recordings of Haggard's work in the 60s. I sought out a different collection, realized my error, agreed that 16 Biggest Hits was indeed not far from a travesty, and learned that, though my country naiveté, I had deceived myself. I bring this up for a few reasons:
Because hopefully those who fell into Will Oldham's recordings solely through his indie rock connections may enjoy this album for its (seemingly) novel production; and perhaps, through it, find their way to someone like Chet Atkins, Faron Young, or Kris Kristofferson.
Despite Drag City's lofty press releases or Rolling Stone's perplexed reviews, everyone from Son House to Black Flag has covered themselves under the guise of fresh stylizations and trappings. It was not a crazy idea then, and it is not a crazy idea now. Just a bad one.
I wanted to bring some personal nostalgia into this review in order to quell my present discomfort with Greatest Palace Music.
Greatest Palace Music is the long-awaited album of sauntering, weightlifting, sugar-coated covers of Will Oldham's work as Palace. The tracklist was selected via fan poll. The cover is a bizarre, expressionist jumble of lakes and lacerated rainbows. The players include such legendary Nashville muscle as Hargus "Pig" Robbins and Eddie Bayers. Its renditions are often syrupy, bombastic, truckin'-through-McDonalds, barrel-hoppin' blitzes, delivered in a voice that creaks and secretes sincerity. And it does this even as it seems to revel in mocking, I-can't-believe-you-morons-are-actually-listening-to-this production that mechanically smoothes out any soulful, or even human, perturbations with the slightest chance of sneaking through the sheen.
I fancy myself of average intellect and, frankly, the album is entirely bewildering. It's perhaps the most entertaining and thought-provoking album released so far this year. And one of the worst. Thankfully, its allure is easily experienced without ever having to actually listen to it. It's as much of a concept album and process work as any German micro-improv-musique-concrete release in print these days, and it should simply be framed and given a state-sponsored museum tour. The enjoyment it doles out is entirely extramusical, deriving from its packaging, its contributors, Nashville history, Oldham's interviews pertaining to it, its place in his discography, and his intent, whatever that may have been. Greatest Palace Music is almost uniformly tedious, uneventful, dispassionate, and overambitious when it comes to multi-tracking, and underambitious when it comes to arrangements and instrumentation.
Except that, at the same time, it never feels anything but essential. Its paradox of earnestness and pranking is relentless, jarring, and (unintentionally?) amusing. And though none of us are in a position to guess Oldham's intent, one hypothesis might be that the album was intended to befuddle, muddle, and generally piss off listeners' expectations; and, therefore, if you indeed detest it (as you probably should), you're actually one of its biggest advocates. Maleficent and resentful hatred should greet this album, and if it does, well, we've got something of a classic on our hands.
Unfortunately, through some trick of fate, this mischievous and contradictory art took the form of music (at least superficially), and I am a music critic.
The standard procedure now would be to contrast these new versions with the original Palace hits, which might be impossible. Murmurs around my Internet database suggest that "now we can finally find out if Oldham's songwriting skills stand up without the stark atmospherics." Well, based on Greatest Palace Music, they absolutely collapse. "New Partner", probably the greatest moment on Viva Last Blues, and one of the best recordings of Oldham's career, is sieved through jingoistic guitar that veers to the brink of schmaltz and back again. Elated vocals bounce down a wedding-march keyboard. The background vocals are resigned and remote. And when Oldham sings, "You're always on my mind," his voice is so unconvincingly impermeable and tuneless that it lacks any of its previous resonance. Oldham's delivery doesn't imply his usual trepidation and reluctance before death or love, but rather echoes the way people sound when they're waiting in line.
Albums like Days in the Wake or I See a Darkness were propelled by hobbling, fitful marches, and smothered by brazen minor chord blasts. And there are moments on Greatest Palace Music ("You Will Miss Me When I Burn", "The Brute Choir") of stark emotion; gaps and holes occasionally filled with light; a fragmented voice grafted onto the back of Oldham's haggard head; where even the slide solo is condensed and whimpering. But, for the most part, the shambling, stately pallbearer pace is replaced with a bouncing, undeviating, and totally inappropriate luster.
"Gulf Shores" climbs toward a swarm of overlapping voices in perfect harmony, robotically in sync. On "Pushkin", Oldham preaches The Word with a shell-shocked, Appalachian puberty that caricatures itself, and holds its springing slow-jazz drabness in contempt. It's not just polished; it's fabricated, deceitful, condescending, belittling. It's a trick upon the audience and the band itself.
Why would anyone inflict these cruel shenanigans upon an unsuspecting audience? How could it possibly affect or motivate its listeners? By making this album, it feels as if Oldham is scorning me, a longtime fan, personally. It's ceaselessly mediocre, and it actually physically hurts me to know that Oldham has backpedaled, knowingly and irrationally, against his own genius. Yet, it's precisely in the listener's painful struggle-- the reaction to the artist's self-annihilation, devastating arrogance, and backstabbing repugnance-- that this record finds its wisdom and radiance. | 2004-03-23T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2004-03-23T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | March 23, 2004 | 5 | 9a4a7ae9-82a6-492b-82dc-2494c8eb5603 | Alex Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-lindhart/ | null |
This Portland songwriter’s second album is full of femme fatales and other clichés dredged from a half-century of classic rock. | This Portland songwriter’s second album is full of femme fatales and other clichés dredged from a half-century of classic rock. | Kyle Craft: Full Circle Nightmare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kyle-craft-full-circle-nightmare/ | Full Circle Nightmare | Kyle Craft, it would seem, is someone to whom lyrics matter a great deal. “I hate the idea of conforming to shitty lyricism that happens nowadays,” the 29-year-old, Portland-based songwriter said in a recent interview. “It’s not everyone, but there is definitely a lower bar for what is considered good lyricism now.” Citing Bob Dylan as an influence, he also noted that his second studio LP, Full Circle Nightmare, is “a little less scatterbrained” than his 2016 debut, Dolls of Highland. “I think there’s a focal point to the lyricism,” he said, and about that, he’s right. Full Circle Nightmare fixates more or less entirely on one topic: women and their ability to ruin a man through their powers of seduction.
Femme fatales stalk every nook and cranny of this album, which takes the honky-tonk, classic rock sound of Craft’s previous LP and, with the help of the Decemberists’ Chris Funk on production, pushes it to a gleaming, saturated extreme. Pianos, drums and guitars all come crashing into the album like outlaws thrown through plate glass windows in an Old West town. At the center of the mayhem is Craft’s bugle-like voice, steering confidently around tricky melodic turns and full-lunged choruses. If he stuck to the shadows at points during Dolls of Highland, letting the listener catch their breath between bursts of fanfare, he clings to the spotlight here. Even the songs that start quietly, like the tortured love ballad “Bridge City Rose,” inevitably erupt into full-blown climaxes with confetti falling from the rafters.
Fair enough: If you’re going to cosplay the Rolling Stones as 19th-century saloon flies, you might as well commit to the bit. But where the Stones dragged humor and pathos into even their most inane ditties, Craft seems to stall out at reciting various colorful metaphors. The album’s opening track, “Fever Dream Girl,” plugs far-flung analogies into the same sentence construction over and over again. “Was she the train wreck?/Was she your last drag?/Was she the little piece of mind you thought you once had?” he asks in the song’s opening stanza. “Was she the cure-all/Or just the disease?/Was she the ransack gutter kid denim jeans?” Craft goes on, naming different opposing possibilities for what this woman may or may not be. Even if he hadn’t cribbed a binary from a 2002 Coldplay hit, the repetition would be exhausting. When the next song begins with an almost identical construction (“She was a ricochet/Headin’ back at me/She was the full circle nightmare/Weaved into the thick of my dreams”), it’s enough to make you check the tracklist to see if you’re hearing a coda to that last song or if he’s really firing the whole thing up a second time.
“Shes” and “to be” verbs swarm Full Circle Nightmare, which every so often sees Craft finding solace in the company of women, but more frequently shows him sneering at them. On “Belmont (One Trick Pony),” he breaks out a solid Jack White impression to make fun of a woman for living in the suburbs while he frolics in the city. On “Heartbreak Junky,” he seethes at a woman who had the audacity to fall in love with someone other than him. On “Fake Magic Angel,” he rips into a woman for wearing certain clothes and reading, I don’t know, Cosmo? “You flaunt yourself in that same dress/And talk how your magazines taught you,” he sings by way of an insult to her authenticity. To his credit, the same song boasts a self-own for the ages: “You suck life out of what’s around you/But you won’t be sucking nothing out of me.”
Occasionally, women appear on Full Circle Nightmare as characters, not merely temptresses to be derided for daring to be attractive. The comparatively gentle “Slick & Delta Queen” has Craft shacking up with an on-again, off-again girlfriend who’s as sick of it all as he is, though he still spends most of the song mourning her absence when she leaves him for someone else. The fur-clad seductress on “The Rager” seems to be nursing some heartbreak of her own, even if Craft does end up labeling her a “walking apocalypse.” On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy. | 2018-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 5, 2018 | 4.1 | 9a530c66-3a5a-4f68-8058-aed1f5bd2cef | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
As the frontman for Iceage, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt has carried the Danish punks across three good-to-great albums. With this side project Marching Church, Rønnenfelt enlists members of Lower, Puce Mary, and others for an improvisational avant-garde LP that stretches the boundaries of the soul recordings that inspired it. | As the frontman for Iceage, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt has carried the Danish punks across three good-to-great albums. With this side project Marching Church, Rønnenfelt enlists members of Lower, Puce Mary, and others for an improvisational avant-garde LP that stretches the boundaries of the soul recordings that inspired it. | Marching Church: This World Is Not Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20436-this-world-is-not-enough/ | This World Is Not Enough | Describing the motivation for his project Marching Church, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt wrote, "I had a picture in my head of me in a comfortable chair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne. ‘What would this picture sound like?’ was the question." Judging from that image, you wouldn't be faulted for assuming the band's debut, This World Is Not Enough, may end up being the unintentional comedy album of the year, but looking at Rønnenfelt’s track record, it's worth indulging him for a quick minute.
As the frontman for Iceage, he’s carried the Danish punk firebrands across three good-to-great albums, from the wild-eyed pummel of New Brigade through last year’s curveball Plowing Into the Field of Love, which offered country-informed punk rave-ups as well as desperately drunken ballads, all with uncommonly successful results. Now with Marching Church, which has been around in some capacity since 2010, Rønnenfelt seems to be doubling down on Field of Love’s risk-taking, enlisting members of Lower, Puce Mary, and others for an improvisational avant-garde LP that stretches the boundaries of the soul recordings (James Brown, Sam Cooke) that inspired it.
How you approach This World Is Not Enough, and how patient a listener you consider yourself to be, will factor heavily in your enjoyment of it. "Well I’m still being convinced that I contain some kind of godlike charm," Rønnenfelt croaks over the rapture-heralding drums and slashing guitars of opener "Living In Doubt", and it's often hard to disagree with him. As on Field of Love, he cuts a striking figure, a confident but conflicted young man who rambles like a junior year philosophy major in the throes of a fever dream. And while his rakish sexuality and winking sense of humor are on display once again, this time he seems to have crawled a little too far into his own head.
He holds off for approximately two songs—including the great, sax-laden "King of Song", which kind of sounds like "Sympathy for the Devil" as performed by people who’ve never actually heard "Sympathy for the Devil"—before going off-the-rails. So, just as quickly as things seem to be shaping up for This World Is Not Enough, "Hungry for Love"—a seven minute panic attack of clattering cymbals, strained strings, and Rønnenfelt's trademark mad spouting—rears its head. It’s fascinating but also purposefully repellent, a moment when the idea of self-indulgence threatens to mutate into a wildly pretentious guilty pleasure. From here on, the record follows "Hungry for Love"’s lead, and it never quite finds its way back.
And yet, This World Is Not Enough displays little moments of greatness amid the chaos and confusion. You’ll have to wade through almost five soupy minutes of rusty bells, anguished moaning, and hovering guitars on "Your Father’s Eyes" before being rewarded with a soulful, horn-assisted death waltz, though it’s a nice reward anyway. But, all said, there’s just too much wide open space to fill here, and especially on the album’s draggy back half, it’s fairly clear that Rønnenfelt and company have absolutely no idea what to fill it with, but decide to try anyways.
This usually means more shapeless, frequently unpleasantly calamitous dicking around from the players, and more moaning from Rønnenfelt. (It can also mean a painfully dull cover of the eternal "The Dark End of the Street".) And while he is often quite good at conjuring up vividly disquieting imagery, it’s rarely enough to keep your attention. But somehow, This World Is Not Enough is too cluelessly conceived and sloppily executed to get very mad about it. What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here. | 2015-04-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-04-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | April 6, 2015 | 5.6 | 9a57cb08-245b-4e0e-aba2-999972526f07 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
L.A.-based auteur Michael Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too. | L.A.-based auteur Michael Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too. | Drugdealer: Raw Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drugdealer-raw-honey/ | Raw Honey | In rock music, history isn't always written by the victors. Legacies are constantly reassessed; much modern criticism serves to elevate the underdogs of yesterday into the icons of now. By contrast, scan Billboard charts from the ’60s and ’70s and you’ll find countless chart-toppers who swiftly slid into obscurity, remembered only by the most dedicated golden-oldies station programmers and seasoned dollar-bin flippers. And yet these forgotten favorites can be more vividly evocative of a specific time and place than any so-called classics of a given era—and on his second album as Drugdealer, L.A.-based auteur Michael Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too.
Since Collins rebranded himself Drugdealer for 2016’s The End of Comedy (following loopy lo-fi solo adventures as Run-DMT and Salvia Plath), the project has existed somewhere between proper band and Brill Building song factory, with Collins recruiting guest vocalists to animate his tunes. Raw Honey assumes the same form and methodology as its predecessor, right down to the baroque instrumental (“You’ve Got to Be Kidding”) that introduces the record like a movie’s opening theme. (In true period detail, it goes on long enough to accommodate an entire credit roll.) But while Raw Honey’s cover art visually references the 1968 self-titled debut from avant-psych pioneers the United States of America, musically, it leans ever further to the right of the dial, venturing beyond The End of Comedy’s John-Lennon-via-John-Barry pop classicism to wade into the mellow-golden waters of post-hippie singer-songwriters and proto-yacht-rock.
On Drugdealer’s debut, Collins sang, “Were you saying something, or was it just ‘la la la la la’?”—which was pretty funny, given that it came right after the Ariel Pink-sung “la la la”s of “Easy to Forget.” But that joking line betrayed the serious anxiety of influence that can afflict artists enamored with recreating the sounds of the past. Collins’ songwriting is timeless in the truest sense of the term—he’s fond of upbeat songs about feeling down, and for the most part, avoids any temporal, geographic, or pop-cultural references that might tie a song to any particular date. Instead, he asserts himself most soundly through savvy casting. Fitting for an album that begins with the sound of someone starting their car, the rotating vocalists give Raw Honey the feel of a radio station keeping you company on a lonely drive.
As Collins admitted in a 2016 interview, he abandoned his previous solo set-up in favor of Drugdealer’s collaborative approach because his compositional aspirations had “outgrown my musical chops.” Likewise, his outsourcing of vocal duties presumably allows the songs to hit emotional grace notes his own modest voice can’t quite convey. A return appearance from Natalie Mering (a.k.a. Weyes Blood) on the sweet, slow-burning “Honey” deepens the sense of mystery in lines like, “you’ve got some things you can’t erase, and honey, I’ve got mine.” The cosmic country-rock of “Wild Motion,” meanwhile, gives Brooklyn cowboy Dougie Poole a vast desert landscape to fill with sad-eyed Elvis croon. But Collins’ peculiar personality is still audible in the voice of others: with the breezy “Lonely” (featuring a playfully forlorn lead from fellow ’70s-pop revivalist Harley Hill-Richmond of Harley and the Hummingbirds), he shows that, while anyone can rip off the Beatles, it takes an especially mad genius to produce a song in 2019 that’s a dead ringer for a Ringo Starr solo single.
Collins’ own voice is still tinged by a ’60s-psych aftertaste, which, when paired with the whimsical harmonies of bandmate Sasha Winn, recedes a little too easily into the retro milieu—the bright brass arrangement of “Lost in My Dream” makes a far stronger impression than the tune it’s meant to support. Fortunately, Collins leaves that affectation behind for Raw Honey’s sterling centerpiece, “Fools,” a cool, sax-smoothed cruiser that would’ve fit snugly between soft-rock relics like Ace’s “How Long” and Player’s “Baby Come Back” on the airwaves back in ’77. But while he embraces the previous generation’s coke-cutting soundtrack, Collins warns against the temptations of living in the past. “It’s not the same song you remember,” he sings. “You can try but it’s just plain wrong.” He might not be exactly following his own advice, but when the results are this charming, it's hard to hold it against him. | 2019-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer | April 22, 2019 | 7.4 | 9a5a17ab-da80-4fcb-a735-6f0644d1de14 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Will Oldham’s double-album tribute to Merle Haggard is an intimate and considered collection that pays homage to a legend while showcasing the steady growth of Oldham’s voice and career. | Will Oldham’s double-album tribute to Merle Haggard is an intimate and considered collection that pays homage to a legend while showcasing the steady growth of Oldham’s voice and career. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Best Troubador | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23120-best-troubador/ | Best Troubador | Though his deep catalogue is as strange and bottomless as the American songbook that inspired him, Will Oldham has been more reflective in recent years. Following the release of 2011’s austere Wolfroy Goes to Town, he’s assumed the most old-school responsibilities of folk musicians: collaborating with friends, reimagining old songs, and quietly releasing new music. Best Troubador, his new 2xLP tribute to Merle Haggard, is not his first covers album. In 2013, he paid homage to the Everly Brothers with Dawn McCarthy on What the Brothers Sang, and just last year, he covered the Mekons with Angel Olsen on Fantastic Voyage. Of the three artists, Haggard seems like the best fit for present day Bonnie “Prince” Billy: a singular force who found a way to age gracefully by following his own path—refusing to be pinned down even as he slows down.
Best Troubador, despite taking source material from one of country music’s boldest voices, does not end Oldham’s quiet streak. It’s a somber, contemplative record, less indicative of the bars and honky tonks associated with Haggard than the wine-stained carpets and dimly lit living rooms of Wolfroy. And while Haggard’s diverse body of work is filled with fight songs and jukebox singalongs, Oldham’s 17-song selection is tight-knit and intimate. The set opens with “The Fugitive,” previously a freewheeling acoustic number that played like a blueprint for the following year’s “Branded Man.” It’s one of the only compositions here that Oldham embellishes upon, introducing the record with snappy momentum. The instrumentation on the album—adorned with saxophones and flutes, pedal steel and fiddles—helps highlight the particular way Oldham’s voice has evolved. His pipes have grown deeper and reedier, but somehow—in an almost actorly way—he sounds youthful. During a loose, lo-fi rendition of “If I Could Only Fly” at the end of the record, you can hear the tender cracks in his voice that defined his early Palace Brothers records.
While the tracklist was thoughtfully considered—centered on Haggard’s themes of self-identification and contentment—the pacing sometimes drags a bit with a bevy of mid-tempo cuts. Oldham’s attempts to switch things up pay off well. Mary Feiock’s guest vocal on “Nobody’s Darling” is a highlight; her crystal clear falsetto reflects a tenderness that Haggard’s stoicism often belied. Oldham also succeeds by adjusting Haggard’s songs slightly, embedding them with the cryptic humor that dots his own catalogue. While retaining a nearly identical arrangement to the original, he twists Haggard’s late career anthem “I Am What I Am” with just his vocal performance, adding a slight stutter to subvert one of its more trad-country sentiments (“I believe Jesus is god/And the pig is just ham”). In “What I Hate (Excerpt),” Oldham refines Haggard’s laundry list of modern grievances to a single line about chemtrails—a surreal anachronism on an album that’s unabashedly old-fashioned.
The tribute album is a long-standing tradition of country music, one that was employed by Merle Haggard for his own heroes like Bob Wills and Elvis Presley. With Best Troubador, Oldham reflects the format’s most expressive tendencies—to filter an artist’s work through the lens of your fandom. Through these songs, Oldham’s appreciation for Haggard seems to stem less from his innovation within the genre than for his patient evolution and longevity. The sentiment is reflected by the song choice, which highlights obscure late-career numbers like the gorgeous “That’s the Way Love Goes” over more celebrated material like “Mama Tried” (relegated to a non-album single, with vocal duties handed off to a band member). And while all of Oldham’s work can be pilfered for meaning, Best Troubador is all the better for its simplicity: “The goal with this record is to highlight a life spent obsessed with songs and with singing them,” Oldham has said. It’s an obsession that’s defined both artists’ careers, and a sentiment reflected throughout these warm, lived-in performances. | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | May 9, 2017 | 7.4 | 9a5c0217-e2b1-4894-9ea6-c24597f582fe | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
While it carries the same flaws as his previous work, the latest album from the Baton Rouge rapper provides a clear portrait of a tragic figure who often blurs the lines between fact and fiction. | While it carries the same flaws as his previous work, the latest album from the Baton Rouge rapper provides a clear portrait of a tragic figure who often blurs the lines between fact and fiction. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Sincerely, Kentrell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-sincerely-kentrell/ | Sincerely, Kentrell | The inspirational Netflix documentary about YoungBoy Never Broke Again would probably go something like this: He was a teenager constantly getting screwed by the legal system and therefore made an outcast by the music industry, yet in spite of that he became one of the biggest rappers in the world; while that tale might be somewhat true, its simplicity smooths out all the rough edges. The bleak reality is that his popularity didn’t arise simply because the music is good, which it often is, but it was also fueled by fan obsession with authenticity and realism.
Earlier this March, the FBI swooped in on the 21-year-old Baton Rouge rap star and indicted him on weapons and drug charges. It may sound like nothing new, but it was, especially since his attorneys alleged this was a targeted message sent by the FBI, which doesn’t sound out of character for the infamous hip-hop cops. His first album in nearly a year, Sincerely, Kentrell, comes while he’s still in jail, arriving with minimal promotion (there were even rumors that YouTube, the platform where his music took off, refused to support his album). This all only intensifies a well crafted, but ethically questionable branding embraced by his team and Atlantic Records: He is a rebel who is scratching and clawing to have his voice heard while the powers that be try to silence him.
It’s hard to consider Kentrell without this baggage. He has blurred the lines between his rap persona and lived reality, which makes it an uncomfortable, but sometimes remarkable listen. He coldly raps about jail and violence as if it’s fate. On “Forgiato,” he aggressively says, “Since a kid, in and out the chains, swear they don’t know my pain/I don’t know who tryin’ to get me at work one night, I ain’t sleep with my shank.” Meanwhile, he’s constantly attempting to push those dark thoughts to the side, usually distracting himself with unhealthy relationships and drug abuse: “You don’t like all these different drugs I’m on,” he coos on “All I Need” to a girlfriend who is fed up with his unpredictable behavior. “But I won’t leave them alone if you leave me alone.” It’s desperate, manipulative, and chilling.
In a way though, Kentrell isn’t that much different from any other YoungBoy project. There’s a blueprint to this and he sticks with it, which also means that it carries the same flaws as his previous work. Once again, the occasionally forgettable production contains too many ’90s R&B ballad pianos and cheap acoustic guitars. It’s not as if these types of beats can’t be done well, but the ones he picks sound like familiar versions of instrumentals done better by other producers. Take “Life Support,” it’s essentially a Zaytoven beat but without any of the improvisation or personality that makes a mixtape like Beast Mode so distinct. The twinkling “Rich Shit” sounds like a Wheezy-type beat in the worst way, and “Level I Want to Reach”’s piano riff is so basic that it’s frustrating. Even if the beats on YoungBoy mixtapes are mostly an afterthought, is it really too much to wish for more inspired choices like “White Teeth,” which has a bounce to the drums that resembles early Mannie Fresh?
As a writer, he has a bad habit of telling us how to feel instead of making us feel it. His emotions come across more genuine through strains in his melody or sudden flurries of howling than when he just says the words “pain” or “hurt.” This occurs when he stops sweetly singing halfway through “My Killa” for a sudden hot-tempered flare up, or in the way he belts, “I’m not on no drugs right now, it’s the truth,” like he’s crying out for help on “Nevada.” These moments elevate his songwriting as well as distinguish him from the wave of Southern rappers sing-rapping about their pain, trauma, and struggle.
Nitpicking about spots where the production or songwriting could be punched up feels trivial when mulling over music this raw and intimate. He’s baring his soul again and again, and here I am, saying that the pianos should be more interesting. (They should be!) This conflict is what has made the popularity of YoungBoy’s music feel so confusing to those who don’t pay him much attention. Though the album’s quality may vary from song to song, it all adds up to a startling glimpse of a larger-than-life figure whose tragic shadow extends over everything he touches.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | September 29, 2021 | 7.1 | 9a5c81fc-2f6a-4cc3-843e-a890b38777b9 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
California producer Jansport J makes instrumental hip-hop that summons J Dilla’s Donuts without falling in its shadow. p h a r a o h is his eighth and best album. | California producer Jansport J makes instrumental hip-hop that summons J Dilla’s Donuts without falling in its shadow. p h a r a o h is his eighth and best album. | Jansport J: p h a r a o h | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22780-p-h-a-r-o-a-h/ | p h a r a o h | “I think a lot of us heard Donuts and made it our Bible.”
Talking about his excellent new album p h a r a o h in an interview with Bandcamp, the California producer Jansport J (aka Justin Williams) was blunt about the beat tape’s most obvious influence. Since Dilla’s Donuts came out, a little more than a decade ago, it has stood as both monolith and lodestar at the base camp of the beat scene. Few producers have been able to escape its shadow or avoid the microsample-strewn path it lays out. P h a r a o h does not seek to try.
But by ridding himself of the anxiety of influence, J has made the best of his eight records to date, and one of the more compelling offerings to emerge from the beat scene in recent years. He’s absorbed and built on the lessons to be found on *Donuts *and in the work of instrumental hip-hop’s other leading lights. P h a r a o h was originally conceived in the midst of a New York snowstorm, and the record jumps off with eight tracks worth of diamantine blizzard beats, many of them punctuated by or predicated on the human voice. Chants, shouts, whoops and screeches fill the record to great effect creating an atmosphere of engaged protest. J explained in the same interview that the track “RIP Harambe” speaks to more to than just an assassinated zoo animal; its sharply edited music is immediately followed by a 911 dispatcher, issuing yet another report of a suspicious male. That ominous audio attends the beginning of a track called “12,” a title barely more subtle than the one N.W.A. kicked off some shit with almost thirty years ago. P h a r a o h is remarkably effective as an explicit political document; no lyrics necessary.
Williams opens up and shows his range in the records latter two thirds, starting around the tributes to classic New York rap on “45 Joint” and “Set it Off.” Though Williams may mean it to signal otherwise—he’s remarked several times that this is his New York record—this section begins something of a national tour. While Williams continues to honor Gotham (check out the MC Lyte sampling on “BKNY”), he stretches beyond the city, from O.D.B.’s shouts to Miami on “The Dirt II” all the way to California on “Live From the Forum ’86” and “Crenshaw” near the album’s back half. In allowing his beats to criss-cross the country, choosing a diverse array of samples even as he cleaves to a classicist style, he retraces the original migration of hip-hop throughout the country.
Donuts was characterized by the Detroit producer’s rare mastery of sampling, both as technical skill and artistic expression, speaking his deathbed fears and desires through prerecorded voices. J shows a similar facility here, but this is not some covers record. On songs like “Crush” and “Crenshaw,” he takes a page out of the pop-loving programming of his contemporary Knxledge, essentially cross-wiring Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” and Luther Vandross’ “Better Love.” Williams also has a knack for isolating intriguing spoken samples: one of the best tracks here is “IwasFeelinShortee,” which hands the mic over to Mos Def’s lovelorn monologue from “Ms. Fat Booty.” And he favors a diversity of approaches, as happy using a hyper-recognizable Bob James drum sample as he is veering toward the obscure.
A record like P h a r a o h makes a compelling case for Jansport J to be considered for a short list of names associated with transcendent instrumental hip-hop, a pantheon that, along with Dilla, would include Madlib, Knxledge and Oddisee, as well as pioneers like DJ Shadow and Blockhead. Though Donuts and Madlib’s Beat Konducta series continue to loom over the scene, making it difficult to expand the genre, these artists like have continued to add depth and breadth within the boundaries already set out. P h a r a o h hits upon a particularly deep wellspring, exploring it with curiosity and a coherent point of view that characterizes the instrumental hip hop’s best work. Though it barely features Williams’s own vocals, it speaks in a passionate, warm, consistently recognizable voice. | 2017-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Blackwhitegoldville | January 28, 2017 | 7.6 | 9a7f8376-b667-4145-a6ed-64f5f952ed32 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Produced by Dirty Projectors leader Dave Longstreth, the virtuosic Saharan guitarist Bombino’s latest album features a sublime iteration of desert blues that’s both authentic and ambitious. | Produced by Dirty Projectors leader Dave Longstreth, the virtuosic Saharan guitarist Bombino’s latest album features a sublime iteration of desert blues that’s both authentic and ambitious. | Bombino: Azel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21693-azel/ | Azel | While interviewing Dirty Projectors for a profile in 2009—on the cusp of the release of Bitte Orca and their Malian guitar-meets-Mariah hit “Stillness Is the Move”—band leader Dave Longstreth enthused over a Saharan guitarist on the Sublime Frequencies label who went by the name Bombino. In the last six years, the Tuareg artist has continued to make inroads in the West, touring and recording Stateside, and his 2013 album Nomad found him in the studio with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. And now, Longstreth’s early admiration has come full circle, as he was tapped to record Bombino’s latest, Azel, in upstate New York. The resulting record presents the guitarist in a lucid, unadorned light.
There’s no need to add too much to Bombino’s desert blues—his unassuming and astonishing playing speaks volumes on its own. Seeing him live, his left hand is deceptively fast, flicking off the strings and lighting upon extra notes that other players can’t quite hit. Much like fellow Tichumaren players Tinariwen, Bombino’s acumen blends techniques derived from ngoni (a traditional lute), the imzad (a one-stringed bow instrument), and the amplified guitar of Hendrix and Santana.
Azel isn’t so different from his unofficial first album for Sublime Frequencies, 2009’s Guitars From Agadez Vol. 2, which was recorded in his home country of Niger and intimate enough to capture the sounds of camels on one side and ragged stomping on the other. His gentleness comes through on “Igmayagh Dum (My Lover),” built from handclaps, thumped guitar body, and a nimble melody, with Bombino’s lines of love—sung in Tamasheq—delivered in a gentle purr. Meanwhile, his electric guitar prickles and the drums careen on “Timidiwa (Friendship).” There is one new wrinkle, though: a kind of fusion with reggae. That might sound corny on paper, but Bombino and his group keep it all low-key, and the sounds soon assimilate. Album centerpiece “Iyat Ninhay / Jaguar (A Great Desert I Saw)” is driven by a lilting bassline that leads into an incandescent solo from Bombino as trilling zaghrouta voices punctuate the ecstasy of the moment.
But for all the guitar pyrotechnics, Western production, and reggae infusions, Azel never sounds like anything other than a sublime iteration of desert blues. Bombino has not pivoted towards Western music, as he still sings about the issues of his homeland in his native tongue. Hushed closer “Naqqim Dagh Timshar (We Are Left in This Abandoned Place)” tells of the plight of his people with a lines that translate to: “We sit in an abandoned place/ Everyone has left us/ The world has evolved/ And we’ve been abandoned.” Even with Bombino increasingly gaining exposure in America, lyrics like those remind us that his music continually speaks for those that would otherwise be unheard back home. | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Partisan | April 11, 2016 | 7.8 | 9a818517-309d-48bb-b9c3-ed8138993bd5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The British-Chinese musician trades the club tropes of previous albums for unadorned guitars and surreal soundscaping. It’s some of his most emotionally nuanced work yet. | The British-Chinese musician trades the club tropes of previous albums for unadorned guitars and surreal soundscaping. It’s some of his most emotionally nuanced work yet. | Organ Tapes: 唱着那无人问津的歌谣 / Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/organ-tapes-chang-zhe-na-wu-ren-wen-jin-de-ge-yao/ | 唱着那无人问津的歌谣 / Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao | Tim Zha makes music that feels like having a psalm read to you through the iridescent glow of your laptop screen. “Music is pretty inseparably tied to spirituality for me,” the British-Chinese producer told AQNB in 2017. Discussing the influence of his Christian upbringing, he described his music as being “concerned with understanding the experience of subjectivity, the experience of being bodied, which to me is always dominated and defined by the condition of being ‘fallen’ in a biblical sense.” Zha’s music as Organ Tapes always seems to be reaching for some form of redemption—a whispered prayer to be born anew, assembled from the scattered debris of another night at the club.
This idea of rebirth has been a constant in Zha’s music, with Organ Tapes’ sound continually mutating and evolving into new shapes over the years. On releases like Words Fall to Ground and Into One Name, Zha concocted a lo-fi hybrid of Afrobeat and deconstructed club so delicate it felt like it could shatter in your hands. On 2019’s slowcore-driven Hunger in Me Living, Zha incorporated more straightforward guitar and drum patterns while keeping his unique taste for sweetly synthetic flute and harp sounds. Uniting it all has been Zha’s transformation of club-filling pop tropes into the foundation for his intimate bedroom ruminations (as well as his densely Auto-Tuned voice, which mysteriously winds its way through his songs like a wounded serpent searching for sanctuary).
His new release for DJ Python’s Worldwide Unlimited label, Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao (whose title roughly translates to “Sing the Song That No One Cares About”), represents yet another stylistic shift. Adopting a primarily acoustic approach, Zha becomes a kind of ghostly nomad, often abandoning drums entirely in favor of unadorned guitars and surreal soundscaping, ending up somewhere between Elliott Smith and Ecco2k. In some ways, the album mirrors the emo sensibilities that have overtaken the online musical landscape in the last few years. But where other young laptop artists like quinn or blackwinterwells might orient their songs around cathartic, earsplitting drops, Zha prefers to drift in a spectral quiet, emphasizing the tenderness of his fingerpicking and his uncannily disorienting samples. In its hushed sense of grace, Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao represents some of Organ Tapes’ most emotionally nuanced work yet—a blurry, half-remembered vision from one of the unsung prodigies of the modern electronic underground.
As with all Organ Tapes releases, Zha’s vocals on Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao are obfuscated by an almost impenetrable digital haze, each word phasing in and out like a thought on the very edge of becoming. His lyrics are often indecipherable, but occasionally you can make out brief silhouettes of meaning in the fog. On “Submission”—a brightly strummed acoustic chant that feels like it came from the same shimmering world as yeule’s “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty”—Zha softly declares,“I was young, and I said I would change as I lived and I listened,” seemingly reflecting on his own growth. Only later does he modify the line into a repentant confession: “I was young, and I said I would change, and I did, and I didn’t.” Elsewhere, Zha lets his samples speak for him; “Eventually He Will Come Into My Life” pulls a quote from the 2014 film Rich Hill, a documentary chronicling rural Missouri teens trying to find hope in the face of abject poverty. “I praise God and I worship him, and I pray to him every night,” a boy’s voice quivers against a glimmering, cybernetic drone. “Nothing’s came, but that ain’t gonna stop me.” Zha casts this moment as a solemn epigraph for the entire record—a portrait of private, mundane faith, pleading for some intangible salvation.
Lyrical moments like these may act as dowsing rods for Zha’s thematic intentions, but one of his greatest strengths is how much he’s able to convey through sound and inflection alone. On “Never Had,” Zha builds a withered R&B lament around a distant guitar sample cloaked in crinkling distortion, cutting the instruments in and out as he layers his sighing falsetto harmonies one on top of the other. “Heaven Can Wait” is even more stunning: After a beautifully sparse opening verse consisting entirely of Zha’s fragile voice and guitar, an otherworldly sound collage washes over the song, suggesting an iPhone recording of a street performer spliced with the tactile rubbing of fabric, with idle chatter from passerby swirling all around. In Zha’s hands, this moment comes off like a triumphant solo, its melody distilled into a pure texture, as cold and artificial as it is warmly human.
Even on his strangest stylistic detours, Zha manages to infuse these melancholy songs with an aching longing for something greater. Whether it’s in the chintzy karaoke horns that adorn “Acid & Wine” like provincial fanfare or the Dirty Beaches-esqe rockabilly strut he adopts on “Earned,” Zha turns these small absurdities into new refractions of his weary worldview, where anything can be the basis for a wistful lullaby. It’s as if his songs are pleading to mend the fractures and dissonance happening within them, each one a diffuse portrait of contemporary music at its most mournful. As with all of Organ Tapes’ work, that might seem out of reach if it weren’t so openly and deeply felt. | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Worldwide Unlimited | April 28, 2022 | 7.7 | 9a87720b-0fa2-4294-8e7a-0c6533bed51b | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
On the sequel to his breakout 2014 mixtape, the Washington, D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy is simply a joy to listen to, one of the most distinctive and technically adventurous rappers working today. | On the sequel to his breakout 2014 mixtape, the Washington, D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy is simply a joy to listen to, one of the most distinctive and technically adventurous rappers working today. | Shy Glizzy: Young Jefe 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22160-young-jefe-2/ | Young Jefe 2 | The first thing Shy Glizzy says on Young Jefe 2, the sequel to his breakout 2014 mixtape, is “Rest in peace that nigga Soulja Slim, man...free C-Murder.” A little more than 20 minutes into the new tape, C-Murder himself checks in by phone from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the country’s most notorious maximum-security prisons. (The one-time No Limit star—and brother to Silkk the Shocker and Master P—is serving a life sentence stemming from a 2009 murder conviction, but is appealing on the basis of juror misconduct.) In the phone message, called “OG Call (Skit),” C-Murder details the fake people he’s met on the inside, then turns his attention outward: “This world is full of chaos right now, bro.”
So on the next song, the sprawling “Rounds,” “Club pay me ten thou just to come stand on the couch” sounds particularly defiant. In fact, that’s the throughline of *Young Jefe 2—*material concerns as symbols for something bigger. In the first eight bars of opener “Let It Rain,” Glizzy’s mom swaps her Corolla for a Range Rover; later he sneers, “I seen a couple niggas in my same kicks/Tell them lame niggas, we ain’t got the same limp.”
Both times, Glizzy’s vocals are injected with such dread, such conviction, that they throw you into his psyche, where you stay for the rest of the tape’s brisk running time, save for that call from Angola. The Washington, D.C. native is simply a joy to listen to, one of the most distinctive and technically adventurous rappers working today. On the Zaytoven-produced “Bankroll,” the musical structure of each bar (half-sung, the intensity peaking at the end) serves as a writing constraint that brings out his sharpest work.
Speaking of “Bankroll,” the song nearly shares a name with the “Bank Rolls” remix that was a star-making turn for Tate Kobang. Hailing from just up the corridor in Baltimore, Kobang is also signed to the same label as Glizzy, the Lyor Cohen-headed 300 Entertainment. Each artist finds himself at a sort of commercial crossroads: uniquely of and for his region, but on the precipice of crossing over nationally. In Glizzy’s case, it can seem like he’s been stuck there for some time. While *Young Jefe 2 *is engrossing and, in some ways, a remarkable testament to his talent, there’s no breakout single, no “Awwsome” or “Funeral.” Either of the back-to-back “New Crack” and “Ride 4 U” could make it into radio rotation, but each is a slow burn and unlikely to expand the base.
So where does Shy Glizzy go from here? He’s already folded elements from other cities into his sound, usually to impressive effect: His ad-libs owe plenty to Atlanta, as does his affinity for rolling hi-hats. “Funeral” has cast him as joyous and lovable; the album cuts round out a more menacing persona. And while he’s a tremendous technician, he keeps gesturing at a fascinating internal life that hasn't been mined to full effect yet.
Barring a world-beating single from left field—like “Trap Queen,” which turned Fetty Wap into a goldmine for 300—the answer might be to double down on his hometown. The national discussion about D.C. rap has always been frustratingly reductive, treating the District’s love for go-go and other genres like a barrier (as if juke and footwork hampered young rappers in Chicago). But with Wale mostly relegated to lounge music and with Fat Trel having receded to the background, Glizzy might become the commercial counterpoint to Oddisee’s reliable underground stature. If the urgency from “Waiting on my Time,” one of *Jefe’*s most affecting cuts, is to be believed, he’ll make sure that moment comes before too long. | 2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | July 26, 2016 | 7.1 | 9a8b9a5b-e336-4823-9ca0-c518f2126f38 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
TK | TK | Lost Girls: Selvutsletter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lost-girls-selvutsletter/ | Lost Girls: Selvutsletter | Lost Girls’ second album Selvutsletter opens with Jenny Hval waiting for a rental car at an airport. Planes take off and land. A bell chimes in the distance, like the ringing of a railroad crossing. Amid this buzz of transportation, Hval is sitting still, thinking. Waiting is something she’s “very good at.” A bloom of synths summons both the calm, antiseptic environment of an airport and the feeling of being trapped. Every now and then Hval lets loose an astonishing high note, flaying her voice bare with vocal fry, as if rebelling against the bloodlessness of her surroundings. But the car never comes. She vaguely resolves to cure her fear of flying, but the song ends with the singer in the same place she began, bemused by the “choreography of living.”
The pleasures of the Norwegian duo’s style are all there on “Timed Intervals,” not least the thrill of hearing Hval disappear into her own mind, coming up with connections that make surreal sense (she compares the planes ascending and descending to a “creature inhaling and exhaling”). But while the 10-minute-plus epics that until now have been a hallmark of the Lost Girls project moved linearly, the songs on Selvutsletter feel circular. The nearly 14-minute “Drive,” from Lost Girls’ debut EP Feeling, also involved a rental car, but that car was actually moving down the highway, mirroring the singer’s journey into her own head. Here, one of Hval’s most memorable lyrics from “Drive” comes to mind: “I rage without moving.”
On Selvutsletter, Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden limit themselves to pop-song lengths, with only two tracks exceeding five minutes. The expansive vistas of earlier songs like “Drive” and the title track of 2021’s Menneskekollektivet have shrunk slightly, but within these relatively brief runtimes there’s a wealth of creativity. “Sea White” and “World on Fire” indulge in vast washes of cathedral organs, the latter toggling playfully between drawbars to end on an effect almost like a skipping CD. “Re-entering the City” opens caverns of space between skeletal drums and eventually dissolves into a wash of ambient sound. Lost Girls love scratchy drum machines, scratchier guitars, and huge billowing house chords that seep into songs like ominous industrial fumes.
With less time per song for guided tours of her mind, Hval instead focuses on remembering or imagining how something felt a long, long time ago. She skips around in time, speaking directly to the listener, letting them know it’s 1996 or 1998—the years when Hval got her start as a performer singing with the goth-metal band Shellyz Raven. “With the Other Hand” takes us into the kind of dimly lit dive bar where Hval undoubtedly played dozens of shows early in her career, while “June 1996” plunges headlong into the era, adroitly replicating the kind of sincere and faintly grungy pop song a lot of people were making at that time. On “Re-entering the City,” she goes further back, visiting a park and “smelling” years of history. “People demonstrated here in the ’50s,” she whispers, like the kid from The Sixth Sense.
Hval consistently sings throughout Selvutsletter, only intermittently veering into the spoken word that’s long been a hallmark of her work. Sometimes, her English words slip into Norwegian, or even into glossolalia. As with previous Lost Girls releases, Hval has made the deliberate decision not to include a lyric sheet. It might have been superfluous with Feeling or Menneskekollektivet, on which Hval enunciated her lyrics with the precision of a nature-documentary narrator. But on Selvutsletter the words are often challenging to make out. What, exactly, is in ruins? Did she say “gardening dog?”
This blurriness makes it difficult to follow the narrative threads from the beginning of one song to the end, but certain lyrics stick out as sharply as a hypnotist’s suggestion. “You step out of the car,” Hval says at the beginning of first single “With the Other Hand,” leading us across the street, into a bar, and up onto the stage, where she is already performing. To anyone who’s spent enough time in small venues, a rush of tactile associations floods in: the tenebrous light, the stench of beer and cigarettes, the boisterous chatter drowning out the music on the jukebox.
It seems significant that “Timed Intervals” ends with Hval waiting for a car and “With the Other Hand,” the very next song, begins with a command to step out of one. Hval has long since graduated from playing in bars like the one she describes. Are we stepping out of the car and into the past, perhaps the mythical late ’90s to which Hval returns again and again? Lost Girls is named for a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in which three great heroines of fantasy literature—Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Alice of Wonderland—meet as adults and share their most disturbing and erotic memories. On Selvutsletter, Hval slips into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, and all we can do is follow her down. | 2023-10-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Smalltown Supersound | October 23, 2023 | 7.8 | 9a8c3eee-7f30-48ed-8505-4aa44621e359 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The rapper’s latest is a cosmic synthesis of EDM, emo rap, and cutesy pop refrains that echoes the rave fantasies of Drain Gang. | The rapper’s latest is a cosmic synthesis of EDM, emo rap, and cutesy pop refrains that echoes the rave fantasies of Drain Gang. | Lil Tracy: Saturn Child | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-tracy-saturn-child/ | Saturn Child | Over the years, Jazz Butler has reset his career numerous times: In 2016, when he changed his professional moniker from Yung Bruh to Lil Tracy, but also more existentially following the tragic loss of his right-hand collaborator Lil Peep in 2017. At times, he’s drifted toward a more mainstream rap career—2020’s Designer Talk 2 featured the likes of Pi’erre Bourne, Chief Keef, and the late Lil Keed, and 2018’s country-tinged “Like a Farmer” had viral novelty potential a few months before “Old Town Road” eclipsed it entirely. But whenever the road seems clear and charted, Lil Tracy seems to swerve unexpectedly left. 2019’s Anarchy was on-the-nose pop-punk pastiche that could have been ghost-produced by Travis Barker; Designer Talk 2 demonstrated how well Tracy’s sensitive falsetto can blend with a more straightforward trap sound. His new album Saturn Child is comparatively much harder to classify, and more singular—a cosmic synthesis of EDM, emo rap, and cutesy pop refrains that’s maybe the closest an American rapper has come to replicating the rave fantasies and euphoria of Drain Gang.
Regardless of his sonic evolutions, Tracy’s soul is still the same: an aching romantic with a perpetually broken heart and a penchant for toxic love affairs. He’s largely been defined by his relationships with other people; it’s almost impossible to find a review or profile that doesn’t mention his close artistic kinship with Lil Peep, or his notable parents, Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets and Cheryl Gamble of SWV. Because Tracy is so often viewed through his external relationships, the fact that Saturn Child has no features demonstrates an artist asserting his voice on its own terms. Tracy’s early delivery was often abrasive and buried in Auto-Tune but he’s become a more confident vocalist, with a sing-song flow that feels effortless, even soothing. At times his voice tilts toward the cartoonish, but his delivery is grounded by the catchiness of his choruses—he invokes the nasal whine of Blink-182, the sultry falsetto of The Weeknd, and the cartoonishness of iLoveMakonnen. Though not quite on the full-blown Jaden Smith indigo child tip, Tracy weaves a loose aesthetic of astrological and intergalactic imagery into his tales of material gain and emotional loss: “I feel like Saturn/I got rings,” he raps on “Touche.”
Recurring members of the Gothboiclique universe like Smokeasac, Bighead, and BetterOffDead all turn in production work, but Tracy also recruits a number of younger and lesser-known beatmakers, particularly for drill-flavored tracks like “Location” and “Roadrage”—evidence of an artist with his ear to the underground. On Saturn Child, Tracy’s alt-influenced sound is reconfigured and retrofitted, creating a sound that’s on a more astronomical wavelength. Tracks like “It Is What It Is” have the heavily synthesized, sci-fi flavor of Pi’erre Bourne and Working on Dying. On “Heavenly,” Tracy abandons the direct rock signifiers but keeps the pop-punk flow, going in over a wonky dubstep beat. “Roadrage” updates the Gothboiclique sound, marrying an emo-tinged guitar line to a bassy Brooklyn drill beat. “Knight in Shining Armor” and “Heavenly” each briefly break into a heavy kicking beat that splits the difference between synth-pop and hardstyle rave.
Within a single song, Lil Tracy changes his skin and shifts into unpredictable shapes. On “Knight in Shining Armor” as Tracy croons about broken hearts and fake friends, the beat mutates beyond his control. An opening crest of synths gives way to dubstep bass, which is soon overtaken by a stomping rave four-on-the-floor, but all the while, Tracy’s angelic delivery remains a guiding star. It’s impossible to call Saturn Child Lil Tracy’s final form, given his many reinventions, but it’s a variant that sounds more comfortable and confident than ever before. | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Toreshi | June 22, 2022 | 7.5 | 9a8dc498-4265-447a-aba3-37a4adc599d9 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The renaissance of Richard D. James continues with his latest EP, a knotty, meticulous, and joyous collection that ranks among his best late-career albums. | The renaissance of Richard D. James continues with his latest EP, a knotty, meticulous, and joyous collection that ranks among his best late-career albums. | Aphex Twin: Collapse EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aphex-twin-collapse-ep/ | Collapse EP | Just four years into Aphex Twin’s post-comeback career, Richard D. James is making some of the best music of his life. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole or provocation. He’s got a formidable track record, after all: Between 1991 and 2001, he turned electronic music on its ear more than once, giving the world a number of classics in the process. But since 2014’s Syro, James’ music has been marked by the kind of freedom you don’t often get from an artist who’s been making records for 27 years.
Every album he’s put out since he returned from a 13-year hiatus as Aphex Twin has sounded unmistakably like his own inimitable self while at the same time breaking new ground. The wide-ranging Syro, his reintroduction to the world, was a kind of stylistic clearing-house—that much was apparent from the wide-ranging BPMs he listed in brackets in the track titles. The tropes were familiar but the sounds, flickering like holograms, were a touch more vivid than before. With Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP, he ditched the synths and let a robot combo loose on acoustic drums and prepared piano; what could have been abstruse instead radiated a quiet magnetism. Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) rescued some rave bangers from the archive, while the Cheetah EP, in 2016, was a lark, basically: seven low-key doses of low-slung funk banged out on an obscure, infamously difficult-to-program synth from the 1990s. Nerd manna, sure, but also irresistibly groovy and surprisingly unencumbered—just straight-up fun, really.
With the Collapse EP, he doubles down on those pleasure principles, even as he returns to some of the knottiest programming he’s tackled since the mid-’90s and songs like “Flim.” All five tracks are descendants of the manic style once called “drill ‘n’ bass”: The drums skip and stutter, bouncing like ball bearings in an earthquake. It’s a safe bet that no two bars are alike, though it would take a forensic analyst to map the minuscule variations of his splintered rimshots and blood-spatter drum drip. His rhythms have never been more dynamic: He’s taken the slow-fast lurch of classic drum ‘n’ bass and fractured it into ever tinier shards, with kicks and snares setting off percussive chain reactions and elastic triplet patterns being pulled taut into zippers of pure buzz.
As usual, he applies wistful synth melodies to smooth over those jagged edges. The melodies are, by and large, the least surprising things here, though they are also among the most satisfying. Until the drums kick in, “pthex” starts out sounding like an outtake from Selected Ambient Works Volume II, its elongated steel-pan synths suggesting intonation systems not quite of this earth, while detuned harp plucks add extra kinks to his funhouse-mirror surfaces. In “MT1 t29r2” and “T69 collapse,” the tuning feels even screwier, casting an eerie glow over the rhythmic wreckage.
What feels new to this release is way the music moves on a wider scale. James’ arrangements thrash spasmodically like beasts unwilling to succumb to the tranquilizer dart. There’s a real sense of violence underpinning these tracks: “T69 collapse” breaks down, halfway through, into a heaving mess of drum fills and haywire-robot pummeling—wild, senseless aggression, bewildering in its kinetic energy. “abundance10edit[2R8’s, FZ20m & a 909]” is less brutalizing but it still lurches like a machine run amok. You’d think that would be a bad thing, but no—those white-knuckled moments are an essential part of the record’s fucked-up beauty, just like all those queasy, quicksilver tones. It’s not quite wrong but definitely not right, either. The thrill lies in James’ ability to juggle precision and chaos—it’s part laser-guidance system, part demolition derby—and somehow come out of it relatively unscathed.
That said, “1st 44,” by far the best thing here, is also the simplest. It’s a straight-up drum track, practically a DJ tool stripped back to jackhammering sequences of claps and snares and some of the biggest, boomiest bass drums ever heard on an Aphex Twin record. It’s a virtuosic display of programming and sound design alike, the kind of tune that could plaster a shit-eating grin on any raver’s face—outdoor, basement, or armchair. Then, for good measure, he goes and slaps the time-stretched bark of a reggae deejay over the top of it, as though it already weren’t hype enough. There have been times in James’ career when his knowing smirk threatened to eclipse the music. But here he’s obviously having a genuine blast, and his joy is infectious. | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | September 17, 2018 | 8.1 | 9a8e7fe5-930a-48da-8c7c-5c3d5563167e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Thanks to Martin Shkreli, Wu-Tang is worth millions again. But is their new album even worth your time? | Thanks to Martin Shkreli, Wu-Tang is worth millions again. But is their new album even worth your time? | Wu-Tang Clan: The Saga Continues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wu-tang-the-saga-continues/ | The Saga Continues | The uproar surrounding pharma bro Martin Shkreli’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, a Wu-Tang Clan album pressed in an edition of one in 2014 and stored in a safe at a Moroccan hotel, was illuminating. Barely a year after A Better Tomorrow, the Clan’s first wide release album in seven years, went largely ignored, Shkreli bought the only pressing of Shaolin for $2 million at auction. As the latter was certified the most valuable album in existence, the former struggled to sell 50,000 copies. While listeners complained about not being able to hear the mythic Wu-Tang Clan album Shkreli dangled over their heads like a carrot for years, they largely rejected the Wu-Tang album that was already easily accessible, which was telling: With Wu-Tang Clan, now, it’s more about the idea, the legacy than the actual music.
Wu-Tang Clan lore has long been so significant that a prospective juror in Shkreli’s fraud case admitted they couldn’t be objective because of it—sure, Shkreli’s bad business denied access to medicine to many but he’d also tarnished the sacred Wu emblem with his petty posturing. “It’s my attitude toward his entire demeanor, what he has done to people,” a transcript of the jury selection process revealed. “And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.” They’ve become a symbol, a “Chappelle’s Show” skit. Recently, Bloomberg reported that Shkreli himself may even have been seduced by the Wu-Tang Clan mythos; the very rare Wu-Tang artifact he thought he paid millions for could just be an unauthorized side project later repackaged and marketed as a crafted and prized collectible (Shkreli admitted in the album’s eBay listing that he never really listened to it), which led to an argument about what the working definition of a “Wu-Tang Clan album” even is. The status of that exclusive, and the crew’s new release, The Saga Continues, begs the question: What even makes a Wu-Tang album these days?
Before even releasing The Saga Continues, the project’s architects made clear that it isn’t a canonical Wu-Tang Clan album; RZA has pegged the offering as a curated collection of treasures from the Wu collective, and the project is billed to “Wu-Tang” and not “Wu-Tang Clan,” which is apparently an important distinction. So what is The Saga Continues? It can firstly be classified as a compilation, and secondly as a showcase for longtime Wu-Tang producer Mathematics. RZA executive produced the project, but Mathematics “crafted” it. (At the end of “Lesson Learn’d,” Redman, who is not a member of the Clan but gets more airtime than six living members, intimates as much, introducing Math as the show’s star.) The project has all the moving parts of a Wu-Tang album, but the gaps in posse cuts are filled by affiliates like Killah Priest and Streetlife. On average there’s one official Clan member per song, almost as if sharing space is a chore. Where Wu-Tang Clan once felt like a cohesive unit made up of diverse voices and personas, the group now seems like a dysfunctional family begrudgingly reconvening for reunions.
No matter how this is billed—group or collective, album or anthology—the project is a self-fulfilling prophesy: The Saga Continues feels like an unnecessary continuation of a Wu-Tang adventure growing more and more tedious, only persisting out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to the brand. They’re still trading on the name, yet they don’t even want to commit to making music en masse. The Wu-Tang group efforts are largely unimaginative affairs now. They’re mostly rapping in circles. They ignore the conditions that forged some recent solo work worth visiting. There’s none of the panel-by-panel storytelling of Ghostface’s Twelve Reasons to Die series, or the dramatic flair of the last few Raekwon albums. Ghostface is the least illustrative he’s been in some time. And Raekwon sounds flat-out disengaged. The project is packed with extremely dated references, and outdated rhetoric. On “Why Why Why,” RZA chastises strippers dancing for rich showmen like Floyd Mayweather, Jr. (“And she wonders why, why, why she can’t keep her husband?”) but doesn’t condemn or even mention the boxer’s history of domestic violence. In a guest spot, the late Sean Price proudly pronounces “I don’t weirdo with queer clothes.” Later on the same song, RZA raps, “Bobby Dig convert Lady Gaga/Back to heterosexual,” which aside from being problematic, misunderstands both Gaga and how sexuality works. Everything about this feels dusty, suspect, and archaic.
Anyone who comes in expecting a throwback is rewarded with a workable period piece: This is a spin-off in every sense. The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways. Songs are sketches using old Clan templates. There are skits. Mathematics knows the Wu-Tang blueprint well and is more than capable of executing; he supplies their staples: sample-heavy soul, knocking drums, and the usual snippets from martial arts cinema. But nothing notable or consequential happens inside. And worse still: nothing unpredictable happens. Why listen to a bargain bin Wu joint when 36 Chambers is readily available? Outside of servicing the most diehard Wu-Tang fans, this album has little to no utility.
As pointless as the project is, The Saga Continues isn’t a complete drag. Method Man and Redman, longtime partners in crime, come away as the standouts. They’re consistent, delivering the best verses on “People Say” and reuniting as a tag-team for the loud-mouthed “Hood Go Bang!” But early on, Redman all but provides the compilation’s thesis: “At my age it’s all about bread/Tryna be nice at 40, you can have it all shawty/I’m tryna make history, and history say: ‘Fuck rap,’ I divorced her, the bitch bore me.” More than anything, The Saga Continues seems like a lazy way to cash in on Wu-Tang cachet. This wouldn’t be the first time. | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One | October 21, 2017 | 4.5 | 9a8eed0c-94d1-4009-94cf-36f06bf5126d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Much as he did on last year’s remix of Spoon’s Lucifer on the Sofa, the storied dub producer uncovers a universe of detail lurking in the folds of the duo’s 2022 album Reset. | Much as he did on last year’s remix of Spoon’s Lucifer on the Sofa, the storied dub producer uncovers a universe of detail lurking in the folds of the duo’s 2022 album Reset. | Panda Bear / Sonic Boom / Adrian Sherwood: Reset in Dub | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/panda-bear-sonic-boom-adrian-sherwood-reset-in-dub/ | Reset in Dub | From the first crash and gurgle of Reset in Dub, it’s clear that Adrian Sherwood’s extensive reworking of Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s 2022 album offers a new perspective on the original—a reset of Reset, if you will. The Eddie Cochran guitar riff deployed on the album version of “Gettin’ to the Point” is gone, the verses have transformed into horn lines, and the chorus echoes over sirens, flutes, a thick wall of bass and drum, and classic dub effects.
A sunny, trippy, Beach Boys-esque throwback and pastiche, Reset used bits and pieces of late-’50s and early-’60s pop to pay tribute to what had come before. In its unyielding optimism, the record demonstrated a fervent belief in the power of the hook. Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s creative trip to the past dug up bygone melodies and motifs, a modus operandi shared with the Jamaican studio method of musical excavation pioneered in the late ’60s by legends like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. That makes dub a fitting choice to further unlock the secrets of Reset, which had already spun off an instrumental version and a smattering of remixes.
Sherwood has a long history as one of dub’s most prolific crossover figures; in addition to many Jamaican reggae musicians, the British artist has produced or remixed Depeche Mode, the Fall, Mark Stewart, Nine Inch Nails, and scores more. In ranging so widely, he frequently departs from dub’s emphasis on manipulating the existing elements of a given song: When Sherwood revisited Spoon’s 2022 album Lucifer on the Sofa to create Lucifer on the Moon, his intricate reworks were billed as “reconstructions.” Here, he breaks open Reset’s songs and packs in as much extra sound as possible. On this record, more is more: more bass, more percussion, more melody, more everything.
On Reset in Dub, Sherwood continues to move past dub’s conventional methods of manipulation, opting for a whole new studio treatment. As he did with Spoon, he has added plenty: extra strings and piano, additional drums and percussion, and horns arranged by Little Axe, a former member of Sugarhill Records’ house band who played on Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” and “White Lines,” among others, before eventually joining Sherwood’s On-U sound crew. He also enlisted former Sugarhill Gang and Living Colour bassist Doug Wimbish, whose weighty low end anchors the flyaway vocal harmonies on “Go On Dub,” while on “Everyday Dub,” he breaks out of dub’s confines with a slinky disco-funk bassline. The brass and winds propel the melodies forward, countering the drag of the dub delay and providing an extra measure of dynamism.
Leaning into the vintage samples and rocksteady influence that informed the original Reset, Sherwood digs into each track to find pre-existing potential. The reverberant vocals and diffuse percussion of “Whirlpool” were already swirling toward dub, but Sherwood amps up the echo, emphasizing the pulse with Wimbish’s bass while Ivan “Celloman” Hussey adds extra depth and richness. The cello’s vibrant tone appears most effectively on “Living in the After Dub” and “Everything’s Been Leading to This Dub,” and each time it is as surprising as it is satisfying. “In My Body Dub” is perhaps the simplest treatment of the set. Whereas the original pushed the vocals to the fore, here Panda Bear’s voice floats gently over saxophone, chimes, and delicate piano stabs. The song seems to have expanded its dimensions, sprawling like a galaxy.
Reset was supersaturated with color to begin with, but Sherwood has succeeded in finding still more shades within its nooks and crannies while simultaneously drawing fresh textures from its folds. The effect is to highlight a wide range of emotion lying beneath the duo’s candied hooks. If Reset channeled the uplift inherent in teeny-bopper tunes from half a century ago, Sherwood’s dub pulls the ethereal happiness warmly down to earth. | 2023-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | August 19, 2023 | 7.6 | 9a8fe8cd-3e98-4e59-8749-6716fe51b881 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | |
With his vulnerable, keening voice as the primary emotional vessel, the New York-based songwriter reckons with his break from evangelical Christianity. | With his vulnerable, keening voice as the primary emotional vessel, the New York-based songwriter reckons with his break from evangelical Christianity. | Ben Seretan: Youth Pastoral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-seretan-youth-pastoral/ | Youth Pastoral | Breakup albums leave their creator in the awkward, ironic position of putting the source of their pain on a pedestal. The greater the heartbreak, the greater the catharsis, and all of it—the self-examination, the inventory of shortcomings, the mourning, the acceptance, the hope—is contingent on understanding why someone willingly invested so much in a relationship in the first place. There’s a fairly traditional story of codependence couched within Youth Pastoral, but it’s secondary to Ben Seretan’s larger reckoning of his break from evangelical Christianity, a lifestyle that guides every moment of a person’s life and leaves a gaping void when it’s gone. More than a simple breakup album, Youth Pastoral fits into a small ex-religious subgenre typified by the Heathen podcast, Jamie Lee Finch’s book You Are Your Own, and David Bazan’s Strange Negotiations documentary. You can’t just go on Tinder and find a rebound spirituality.
A traditional, solo-credited singer-songwriter album wasn’t necessarily a given for Seretan. After years of personal upheaval following the release of 2016’s Bowl of Plums, Seretan bounced back with My Life’s Work, a 24-hour, 48-track collection of vividly titled ambient pieces (“Stoned and Slackjawed Under the Ferris Wheel,” “I Want to Taste the Pondwater on You”). His writing on Youth Pastoral doesn’t mimic the breathless essays that accompanied My Life’s Work, which captured a man trying to make up for an entire circumspect youth in a couple of years. But he does capture the spirit of self-rediscovery: “Filled to the brim with something fine, one spark and I’ll explode,” he coos in the first line.
Throughout Youth Pastoral, Seretan recognizes the conflation of profane and sacred desires that turned lovers into gods and vice versa. His confessions (“I remade myself to your taste,” “I’m your good boy, am I your good boy?”) are intentionally open-ended, speaking in overtly religious terms of surrender and supplication. No longer willing to make a single entity his higher power, Seretan finds salvation in community and earthly, platonic friendship. His vulnerable, keening voice is the primary emotional vessel on Youth Pastoral, but not its only one: Devra Freelander, a multimedia artist who was tragically killed before the album’s release, provides harmony vocals throughout.
The core of the new album is similar to that of Bowl of Plums or Seretan’s self-titled debut: full of variously wooly and weary songs with freak-folk melodies vining over gnarled, knuckled guitar, as if Devendra Banhart and Mark Kozelek had become drinking buddies for a spell in 2003. Abetted by more than a dozen contributors adding heraldic horns, trilling flutes, and theater-troupe harmonies, Youth Pastoral hews towards the potluck folk of the mid-’00s, dabbling in stoned soft-rock, Laurel Canyon revivalism, and an avowed psychic connection to Phantom Planet.
Seretan doesn’t set out to completely negate his evangelical upbringing; in Youth Pastoral’s most captivating moments, he seems to honor it. In the album’s pivotal scene, he’s baptized in the Pacific Ocean as a teen, and much of the record sounds as if it’s been exfoliated by a sea salt bath. The insistent ticking of cymbals on “1 Of” and “Holding Up the Sun” evoke a state of weightlessness, as if anticipating the same release from inhibitions typically associated with religious transformation. “Everything’s gonna be alright/You shine a little light for me… Shine a light!” Seretan screams towards the end of “Holding Up the Sun,” and whether the mimicry of a praise chorus is meant as homage or sarcasm, it doesn’t really matter. Seretan once found purpose in fundamentalism. Now he’s found freedom in the realization that heaven is what you make it. | 2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Whatever’s Clever | March 12, 2020 | 7.5 | 9a900031-6285-4e39-adc9-0c5da47c22ea | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On this guest-crowded remix album, the duo continues its wild, swerving path through memes, genres, and decades, making some of its originals sound like demos in the process. | On this guest-crowded remix album, the duo continues its wild, swerving path through memes, genres, and decades, making some of its originals sound like demos in the process. | 100 gecs: 1000 gecs & The Tree of Clues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/100-gecs-1000-gecs-and-the-tree-of-clues/ | 1000 gecs & The Tree of Clues | The American woodcock—colloquially referred to as a “timberdoodle” or “hokumpoke” in some areas—is a chubby, exhibitionist shorebird with stout legs and a long beak. When it scouts for worms, it rocks its body and stomps its feet in a funky little dance-walk; ditto when wooing potential mates. In April, Laura Les and Dylan Brady of the avant-garde pop duo 100 gecs posted a TikTok of three woodcocks—one adult, two babies—doing this strut, soundtracked to an array of beeps, honks, xylophone hits, and squeaks. (They made the audio.) Depending on your imagination, the final product looks like a bird family humping invisible Bop Its or competing in an intense round of Dance Dance Revolution. All of it is quintessentially gecs—the “beep boop” cacophony; the playful iteration on a meme; the subtle sweetness. Most of all: It’s weird. It’s fun. Don’t think too hard about it.
According to one oft-told account, the name “100 gecs” originates from an accident in which an online lizard retailer shipped Les too many live geckos, leaving her with 100 instead of one; in the vast constellation of memes, “100 gecs” feels like an intellectual predecessor to “30-50 feral hogs.” On their 2019 studio debut, 1000 gecs, the duo’s arch, impish humor popped up in aggro copypasta-style taunts (“Hey, you little piss baby/You think you’re so fucking cool?”) and tragicomic tales of betting on a “stupid horse.” They specialize in hyperactive collisions of “uncool” genres: ska, dubstep, and ’00s metalcore, not to mention the sort of witless EDM that convinced you “I’m a vegetarian and I ain’t fucking scared of him” was the sickest diss ever. Writers often compare listening to their music to the whiplash of thumbing through digital feeds, but 100 gecs resist the cultivated eccentricity common on Twitter or TikTok, eliciting instead the spontaneous freedom of riffing in a group chat. Listening to 100 gecs is like watching your buds test out tricks at the skatepark: it’s less about precision and polish than the act of being together and having a good time.
For their remix album, 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues, Les and Brady have assembled a rowdy crew of friends, including expected PC Music affiliates like Charli XCX and A.G. Cook and new faces like Fall Out Boy, Rico Nasty, and alt-rap group Injury Reserve. 100 gecs’ music already sounds reconfigured; a remix album just pushes their techniques of extraction, warping, and recombining further, lending Tree of Clues the novelty and depth of an original. While the original “xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx” already interpolates Soulja Boy’s long-distance classic “Kiss Me Thru the Phone”—released a year after the invention of the first iPhone—the Eurodance-inspired remix digs deeper into the exultant rush of the late ’00s. Estonian rapper Tommy Cash hams it up with a Soviet Pitbull impression: “Mr. Worldwide … International killa!” Meanwhile, Hannah Diamond and Dylan Brady pine over untouchable lovers. Its chorus of entering and disappearing voices evokes DJ Earworm’s 2009 “United States of Pop” mashup; both reassemble the shiny debris of the ’00s into new shapes, eulogizing bygone optimism. “Let’s go all the way,” Brady trills, the same giddy, romantic dare from Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” a decade ago.
The guests skillfully mold the originals into creations of their own, while still preserving some of the songs’ initial ideas. Dylan Brady was already channeling Fall Out Boy on the original “hand crushed by a mallet,” so hearing Patrick Stump bellow on the remix alongside Craig Owens of post-hardcore band Chiodos and Canadian singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger makes the original feel like a demo. Noise-pop duo Black Dresses’ thrashing interpretation of “745 sticky” magnifies the chaos and hedonism documented on the track. Unfortunately, Injury Reserve’s attempt with the same song is less successful. Their version of “745 sticky” is buried under extraneous car honks and clown squeaks, but the growling, voracious “GODDAMN” in the second chorus almost rescues it. Peculiarities like these keep things lively. “Please hold while I connect you to a rock hard wet gec,” Dylan Brady purrs in a sweaty phone sex monologue on the Dorian Electra-assisted “gec 2 Ü.” GFOTY and Count Baldour’s “stupid horse” remix kicks off with an actual whinney.
Perhaps the biggest transformation occurs on “gecgecggec.” The original is a whimsical assembly of crime-scene music, game-show-style sound effects, and more, with incessant “gec gec gec gec”-s that sound croaked by brainless seagulls. The remix is a gummy pop-rap song. Those “gec” sounds are looped into a beat over which Lil West raps about bitches, racks, and convertibles. “If she wanna fuck, she call me,” he brags, adopting a DaBaby flow. But this cold, cocky front slowly crumbles, as Atlanta rapper-singer Tony Velour ends his melodic verse on the concession, “You got my strongest love.” By the time Laura Les appears, the mood is of complete and utter vulnerability: “Baby, I’m not stronger than you,” she wails. Online, skeptics wonder if fans only like 100 gecs as a meme; and yet, their sincerity hides in plain sight. The sad “gec 2 Ü” becomes sadder when Danny L Harle emulates Owl City’s burbling, saccharine production. Its wide-eyed innocence only underscores the tragedy of the premise: two people failing to meet each other’s needs, thunderous bass pounding like chunks of hail to emphasize the force of their agony.
In a recent interview, Les confronted a sore spot in the coverage of 100 gecs. “We’re having fun,” she clarified, “we’re not fucking being ironic.” The duo began seriously working together after being invited to perform at Minecraft festivals, where artists attempt things “too stupid or too funny” for Spotify release, like cramming 30-40 songs into a 20-minute set. 100 gecs’ music feels tailor-made for a world like Minecraft, full of childlike pixelated figures wandering free in a vast, lonely landscape. On “came to my show,” one of two original songs on the album, a high-pitched voice whimpers, “I can’t believe you came to my show/It hurts when you don’t.” It’s a pure, wrenching distillation of the simple desire for someone to be there for you. While swerving through memes, genre pile-ups, and decades, 100 gecs crash into one idea over and over: There are always missed connections.
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(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Big Beat / Atlantic | July 14, 2020 | 7.9 | 9a9097f0-b4c9-45d2-be37-544f05fd6bbb | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
In his latest reinvention, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman hires Rick Rubin to deliver a prestige comeback album in the producer’s usual stripped-down and soul-baring mode—but Corgan is no Johnny Cash. | In his latest reinvention, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman hires Rick Rubin to deliver a prestige comeback album in the producer’s usual stripped-down and soul-baring mode—but Corgan is no Johnny Cash. | William Patrick Corgan: Ogilala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-patrick-corgan-ogilala/ | Ogilala | Billy Corgan has good reason to doubt his impulses. “I’ve been wrong about every record I’ve made since Mellon Collie,” the famously ornery musician recently told Spin, and while he qualified that statement with his usual defensiveness, the assertion holds. From his instant punchline of a supergroup, Zwan, to his listless synth-pop album TheFutureEmbrace and, most unforgivably, Zeitgeist, the shrill, quasi-metal Smashing Pumpkins reunion record that chased fans away from the perfectly decent ones that followed, Corgan has either misread the public or misplayed his hand at every turn.
Some artists delight in sabotaging their careers. Although Corgan has at times tried to pass himself off as one of them, he’s not. He’s one of the most transparently approval-craving artists of his era, and lately he hasn’t found much of it. So for his latest solo album, he’s done what so many artists before him have done after admitting they’re in a slump: turn to Rick Rubin, who gives him the same stripped-down makeover the producer has made his signature since pioneering this model of prestige comeback album with Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. Ogilala, Corgan’s first album as William Patrick Corgan—a billing meant to signal candor and reinvention—is so no-frills, so predictably Rick Rubin, that it’s easy to overlook what a radical concession it must have been for one of alt-rock’s most notorious control freaks to outsource its vision to somebody else.
It’s a credit to Corgan’s light touch and his unforced melodic instincts that the album works as well as it does, given how fundamentally ill-conceived it is. Rubin’s back-to-basics approach functions by grounding artists who have somehow strayed from their essence, doing away with any superfluous trappings to remind the world of their indelible talent. That focus can be a revelation for an iconic presence like Cash or Neil Diamond, but Corgan’s presence has never been his draw. Smashing Pumpkins’ hook was the spectacle—the guitars, the fury, the sensory wonder—not the adenoidal outcast at the center of it all. Records like Mellon Collie showed that if you bake a sour apple with enough sugar, cinnamon, and butter, you can create something truly succulent. Rubin, bizarrely, seems to believe fans only want the apple, not the crumble.
And so Ogilala holes up listeners for 40 drumless minutes in close proximity to a voice that even diehards can only tolerate so much of. “Take me as I am,” Corgan sings over strummed guitars and faint washes of synths on “The Spaniards,” one of the record’s many confessional songs that doesn’t actually confess anything. His lyrics are rarely flattered by the scrutiny Rubin’s bare-bones presentation invites. A pun like “Cain isn’t able to build a superstar,” from the album’s opening Bowie tribute, “Zowie,” might have slid mercifully under the radar surrounded by the kerosene-lit Stratocasters of yore. Here it just makes you wonder how many groaners lay hidden on his old records.
The album really should be more interesting than this, because Billy Corgan, for better or worse, is more interesting than this. He’s probably the only person on earth who has owned both a professional wrestling league and a tea shop. And, just days after releasing Ogilala, he casually dropped this nugget on Howard Stern’s show: He swears he witnessed a shapeshifter in his store. “It’s up there with one of the most intense things I’ve ever been through,” he said. Why isn’t that on the album? Some of Corgan’s conspiracy theories, as voiced on “Infowars,” are appalling, but if ever there were a healthy outlet for that kind of runaway imagination, it’s music. Ogilala begs for a little of that weirdness.
Instead Corgan settles for an album that’s tastefully cordial but about as suspenseful as a round of bumper bowling. There are a few moments when everything clicks, when the passive pleasantness gives way to active pleasure, most of them involving a smartly deployed string quartet. Two string tracks at the album’s halfway point, “The Long Goodbye” and “Half-Life of an Autodidact,” hint at the quixotic, Automatic for the People-shaded mood piece Ogilala could have been. Of course, unlike Ogilala, Automatic for the People was an actual gamble. R.E.M. had to piece together that vision themselves; there was no precedent for a Southern alternative band recruiting Led Zeppelin’s bassist to score a symphonic grunge opus. There’s nothing but precedent, though, for a musician of a certain age tossing the keys to Rick Rubin and hoping for the best. | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG / Martha’s Music | October 26, 2017 | 5.7 | 9a9f2811-cddc-435f-a66f-245f77a020d2 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The final two Led Zeppelin LPs, Presence and In Through The Out Door, have been reissued, along with 1982's posthumous odds-and-ends comp Coda. While easily their weakest albums, they are redeemed by the fact that they are also easily their strangest. | The final two Led Zeppelin LPs, Presence and In Through The Out Door, have been reissued, along with 1982's posthumous odds-and-ends comp Coda. While easily their weakest albums, they are redeemed by the fact that they are also easily their strangest. | Led Zeppelin: Presence / In Through the Out Door / Coda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20668-presence-in-through-the-out-door-coda/ | Presence / In Through the Out Door / Coda | In the first six years of Led Zeppelin's existence, they released seven albums' worth of music, and nearly all of it was brilliant. During that time, everything seemed to go their way: they had a bottomless well of songs built on the blues, early rock, British and American folk, psychedelia, and R&B; they had the greatest riff machine the world had ever known in Jimmy Page, and they had hard rock's quintessential drummer in John Bonham. But given their penchant for excess and the hyper-intense life they lived as the world's biggest rock band in the '70s, there was no way it could last. They were getting older and growing tired; they did too many drugs; they were too isolated. In the five-and-a-half years between the February 1975 release of Physical Graffiti and the death of drummer John Bonham that ended the band in September 1980, they released just two albums—Presence in March '76 and In Through the Out Door in August '79. The two LPs, newly reissued (along with 1982's posthumous odds-and-ends comp Coda) to round out what will almost certainly be the last large-scale catalog effort in the lifetime of the band members, were easily their weakest. But both are redeemed by the fact that they are also easily their two strangest.
Presence and In Through the Out Door are opposites. The former was very much driven by Jimmy Page, who wanted badly to keep the band busy during a time of retrenchment following the serious car accident that injured Robert Plant in August 1975. The recording is ultra dry and the simple guitar/amp interface is front-and-center; just one song features an acoustic instrument, and the album has barely any keyboards. Page's strong hand led to an album that puts the focus on the playing and makes the fewest concessions to pop music. It has also developed a cult following in a way that no other single Zeppelin album has. ("Presence is just perfection," Jim O'Rourke told Time Out Tokyo, and given his preference for clean and crisp engineering and arrangements, his admiration makes perfect sense.) It's the Zeppelin album that was least embraced by the radio, with its lengthy songs and general aversion to hooks. But the hard and brittle sound of Presence (at points, it sounds like a Shellac album) has much to admire, not least because you can hear the contributions of each band member so clearly. There are moments of space and silence and very little standing in between the instrument and the listener.
Throughout the album, bassist John Paul Jones and John Bonham are so perfectly in tune they seem like a single organism. Listen to how Jones' bass syncs with Bonham's kick drum on the tumbling stop/start masterpiece "Nobody's Fault But Mine", which certainly ranks with either's greatest moments, or the loping "Hots on for Nowhere", where the pauses serve as a third rhythm instrument. Page keeps his parts unusually lean, emphasizing percussive force over atmosphere. Distortion is used sparingly, as is reverb; though the songs contain many layers of guitars, the focus is on overlapping lines and counterpoint, even at the expense of riffs.
One thing Presence most certainly is not is Plant's album; he sang these songs from a wheelchair, still recovering from a car wreck, and his voice sounds pinched and thin on the group's least inspired tunes. Indeed, the overall lack of melody on Presence shows you just how underrated Zeppelin were in that department (as does the previously unreleased bonus track "10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod (Pod)", a blandly pretty piano-led instrumental with a chiming acoustic guitar that's the closest Zep ever got to yacht rock). It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special; none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record.
It's hard to believe that In Through the Out Door was the work of the same band. By this point, Page, deep in the throes of heroin addiction, had mostly checked out, and Bonham's chronic alcoholism was reaching a terrifying end stage. Robert Plant's five-year-old son died unexpectedly in 1977 and his grief almost caused his exit from the band. Out of this turmoil came Zeppelin's most singular record, if far from their best.
With Page out of commission, Plant teamed with Jones, always the group's steadying force, and they wrote colorful songs that heavily featured synthesizers. Most of the '60s and '70s veterans who made a synth-heavy album in the '80s were responding to broader trends in pop, but In Through the Out Door doesn't sound like a reaction to anything, least of all new wave. The general mood is dark and inward; Plant's words are often hard to make out, and when you do catch lyrics they are especially cryptic. But there's something restless and experimental about it too, a feeling of open-ended structures being explored.
Out Door is defined by its production sheen; even the most famous guitar part on the album, Page's beautifully broken solo on "In the Evening", sounds like it's been run through a dozen pedals and filters. The dirge "I'm Gonna Crawl" is utterly shapeless, not a ballad so much as a drawn-out moan; "South Bound Suarez" comes at country-tonk from bizarre angles. Where Zep once had direct homages to the music of their youth, now they were creating weirdly synthetic mutant versions of them. Sometimes, as with the Sun-era Elvis trifle, "Hot Dog", they didn't quite work, but the Latin-inspired "Fool in the Rain" is a unique creation that still sounds fresh. The piano is used as a looping rhythmic instrument in the Cuban tradition—there aren't chord changes, exactly—and the feel of the whole is circular and strange. John Bonham, whose nervous system was ravaged by a daily vodka intake that would stop most people's hearts, somehow managed one last burst of genius and created his most memorable and lasting drum line (hear it in isolation and marvel at just how deeply in the pocket he could still play, the utter mastery of his feel). "Carouselambra", a bizarre proggy rave-up that stretches for more than 10 minutes, is impossible to compare to another song.
Coda, collecting outtakes (of which Led Zeppelin did not have many), followed in 1982. The big story on this reissue is the release of tracks recorded by Page and Plant in what in the early '70s was still called Bombay. The tabla and strings certainly bring to mind the flavor of some of their experiments in global music around the time, but truthfully there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the "Bombay Orchestra" tracks. Beyond the new curiosities, Coda's offerings range from one of the band's best single songs ("Hey Hey, What Can I Do"), which was originally relegated to a B-side, to a fantastic III outtake ("Poor Tom"), to a couple of essential live cuts, to a skippable drum solo ("Bonzo's Montreaux") and an exhausted rocker that truly feels like the end ("Darlene"). "Ozone Baby", recorded during the In Through the Out Door sessions, would have easily been that record's catchiest and most accessible song. Coda is a great listen with a skip button close at hand.
Revisiting their final records, it's clear that Zeppelin didn't exactly go out on a high note. But they didn't exactly fade away, either. True to their model, they did something no other rock band of their stature has before: They took a couple of wrong turns and changed into something else rapidly before vanishing. These sets will always leave a peculiar taste in the mouth of Zeppelin fans, but they affirm they were the rock band of the '70s, the decade when rock music ruled the world. Even in their exit, they carried themselves with a majesty and strangeness that simply couldn't be replicated. | 2015-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 28, 2015 | 7.6 | 9aaad605-4289-4396-8880-8836e134a788 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
A modern-jazz touchstone that opened the door to the sleek introspection and sophisticated aplomb of 1950s cool jazz gets an exquisite and essential vinyl reissue. | A modern-jazz touchstone that opened the door to the sleek introspection and sophisticated aplomb of 1950s cool jazz gets an exquisite and essential vinyl reissue. | Miles Davis: The Complete Birth of the Cool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miles-davis-the-complete-birth-of-the-cool/ | The Complete Birth of the Cool | “And right now, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you something new in modern music,” announces Symphony Sid Torin from the stage of the Royal Roost, a chicken shack turned bebop haunt on Broadway, near Times Square. “We bring you: Impressions in Modern Music, with the great Miles Davis and his wonderful new organization.”
This introduction opens Side 3 of The Complete Birth of the Cool, a deluxe vinyl reissue of a modern-jazz touchstone that opened the door to sleek introspection and sophisticated aplomb and, fairly or not, was credited with the boom in 1950s cool jazz.
Davis was only 22 at the time of the Royal Roost gig. Best known as the trumpeter who’d bravely succeeded Dizzy Gillespie in the Charlie Parker Quintet, he had been workshopping a less mercurial, more chamberlike strain of bop in collaboration with the brilliant arranger Gil Evans. Their experiments in form and mood, fleshed out in Evans’ New York basement apartment on 55th Street, expanded on ideas that had gestated in the Claude Thornhill Orchestra before the war. Thornhill’s signature was a delicate blend of timbres, with soft projection and virtually no vibrato—a far cry from the regimental blare of a garden-variety big band. Evans, who arranged for the orchestra, famously described its effect: “The sound hung like a cloud.”
The unorthodox nonet that Davis brought to the Royal Roost in 1948—featuring bebop confreres like Max Roach (drums) and John Lewis (piano) as well as forward-thinking Thornhill alums like Lee Konitz (alto saxophone) and Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone)—did in fact represent “something new in modern music.” But as Symphony Sid’s next utterance implies, the ensemble wasn’t yet known by a catchy album title. Studio sessions for The Birth of the Cool were still months away, initiated by a Capitol Records producer, Pete Rugolo, who was persuaded by the gig. Those sessions would yield a series of 78-rpm sides in ’49 and ’50. The iconic moniker wouldn’t be attached to the project until a compilation album in 1957, touted on the LP jacket as “the classic recordings” that “launched a jazz era.”
Which is to say that The Complete Birth of the Cool is a repackaging of a repackaging, informed at every stage by a canny awareness of its own cachet. Seventy years since the studio recording of The Birth of the Cool, we’re equipped to understand that phrase as a signifier of aura and intention in Davis’ multifarious career. A documentary film by that name premiered at Sundance this year. It’s also the title of a new children’s book. To state the obvious, that earlier tag, Impressions in Modern Music, has a lot less mystique; The Birth of the Cool, timed to coincide with the rise of hi-fi systems and the word “cool” as a lifestyle, had a title intrinsic to its success.
The music itself is rightly considered a landmark and in this new edition, mastered from the analog session reels for the first time since ’57, its exquisite intricacies assume an almost tactile form. I’ve been listening closely to The Birth of the Cool for about as long as I’ve been listening to jazz. Hearing the new reissue on my turntable was a revelation: not so much a matter of “warmth,” as vinyl proponents often put it, but rather a function of spatial clarity.
The slithery inner voicings of Evans’ orchestration—on both a lissome swinger like “Boplicity” and the intriguing highlight “Moon Dreams”—sound present and alive in a way they hadn’t before. Some sly, murmuring touches from the tuba and French horn are clearer in the mix, without diverting from the coherence of the whole. The other arrangements, mainly by Lewis and Mulligan, shine nearly as bright; there’s a unifying style that makes each piece seem like a room in a house, with Davis’ trumpet serving as a guide. (For a present-day listener, the only truly jarring moment may be “Darn That Dream,” a vocal feature for Kenny Hagood that evokes the bandstand customs of the big-band era.)
Due to the limitations of the source material, there isn’t nearly as much improvement in the quality of the Royal Roost recordings, made on Sept. 4 and 18, 1948. (They first appeared in sanctioned form on a 1998 2-CD reissue, also titled The Complete Birth of the Cool.) So the primary selling point here is the superior sound of the studio material. The new set also features exemplary liner notes by Ashley Kahn, who connects all of the dots while preserving a big-picture narrative arc. Among the sources that Kahn quotes is the authoritative jazz critic Gary Giddins, who once wrote that The Birth of the Cool nonet went “straight from cult to classic,” at least among jazz cognoscenti. “Its musicians redesigned jazz in the ’50s,” Giddins goes on, “calming bop’s fevers, soothing its brow, bringing wreaths to its entombment.”
Davis always expressed ambivalence on the subject of West Coast “cool jazz,” which made stars out of Mulligan, trumpeter Chet Baker and others. There was a racial dynamic at play in the popularity of the style, and Davis wasn’t one to let such matters slide. “Birth of the Cool came from black musical roots,” he asserts, maybe a touch defensively, in Miles: The Autobiography, first published in 1989. “It came from Duke Ellington. We were trying to sound like Claude Thornhill, but he had gotten his shit from Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.” At the same time, it’s worth noting how harmoniously the nonet functioned as an integrated unit. Davis heard complaints from black musicians about that, as he recalls in his book: “I just told them that if a guy could play as well as Lee Konitz I would hire him every time, and I wouldn't give a damn if he was green with red breath.” (Listen to Konitz’s harmonically daring and hummingbird-quick alto saxophone solo on “Israel,” a John Carisi tune, and the remark will make perfect sense.)
In his notes, Kahn also consults with arranger Ryan Truesdell, a leading authority on Evans, who elucidates the quantum leap of a track like “Boplicity,” in which “all the inner parts have strong melodies, much in the way you would write for strings, which brings out the strength, warmth, and color of the piece.” The Birth of the Cool not only opened the next lyrical phase in bebop’s evolution; it also foretold the expansive Davis-and-Evans collaboration realized on albums like Porgy and Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)—feats of synthesis between jazz and symphonic music, often hailed as emblematic triumphs for the classical-jazz hybrid known as Third Stream. Davis himself regarded them as high-water marks in his recorded career.
And yet it would be an error to categorize The Birth of the Cool as a document of transition. The “birth” in the title may have been a marketing flourish, but this music did signal a new set of possibilities for modern jazz, while establishing Davis as a savvy bandleader and a leading trumpeter. The unhurried calm in his phrasing as he improvises on “Move,” the brisk opener, could be seen as a statement of intent. Even in the most boppish of circumstances, with Max Roach swinging fast behind him, Miles is going to set his own terms: unharried, unhurried, and yes, fundamentally cool. Whatever this album prefigured in his career, and in the modern-jazz discourse, it should take a backseat to an experience of the music. As this new reissue only helps clarify, The Birth of the Cool stands very much on its own—not as a counterargument or a checkpoint, but a singular achievement unto itself. | 2019-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note / UMe | June 19, 2019 | 10 | 9aad7a83-4276-47c3-9b58-0a6c1742fca0 | Nate Chinen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-chinen/ | |
Filled as always with ridiculously catchy garage-pop hooks, Wavves’ sixth album is caught between exploring something new and rehashing something old. | Filled as always with ridiculously catchy garage-pop hooks, Wavves’ sixth album is caught between exploring something new and rehashing something old. | Wavves: You’re Welcome | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23261-youre-welcome/ | You’re Welcome | Nathan Williams began making music in his early twenties. It was deft and reckless, all noise-pop, no seriousness. Wavves was an outlet for the San Diego guitarist to get melodies out of his head and let California punks let loose in the crowd. Several garage-pop veterans have figured out how to uphold youthfulness when leaving their 20s: hone your style into one that can’t be mimicked. On You’re Welcome, Williams is unwilling to part with his hooks or sharpen them, letting Wavves neither coin its sound nor push it forward. A title like You’re Welcome makes it clear Wavves believe that’s good enough to warrant fanfare. So the record sits there, limp, like a rain-soaked, half-torn blunt: satisfactory when there are no other options in sight, but an item of questionable pride to the one who unveils it.
As expected, Wavves sound best when revisiting their early tricks. “Hollowed Out” and “No Shade” follow their format to a T: descending backing vocals, drums like a metronome, and a chorus that doubles the volume of the verses bookending it. “Exercise” recaptures the spirit of King of the Beach where Williams goes from self-portrayed laggard to energy-strung hitmaker. These may be a missed opportunity to grow from rote learning, but Williams has never failed in writing catchy hooks. It just doesn’t justify settling for menial pop-punk everywhere else.
Had Wavves leaned into glossy production head-first, You’re Welcome could be a fulfilling listen, an LP of welcome change. These songs have the structure of tangled Sour Belts, full of brash noise and sugary choruses that the band half-heartedly cleans with studio tricks. Voice filters feel carefully contained. Guitar scratches sound safe. Even the spastic synth outro in “Dreams of Grandeur” presents itself in a tidy bow. Production that starts strong softens the punches it tries to land. By no means is it offensively bad—Wavves momentarily solve the problem with “No Shade,” a bite-sized number that polishes off fuzz pedals with flashy appeal—but it tends to undermine the energy of their past.
You’re Welcome fails to pick a side because Williams didn’t see the point, likely part of why he ditched Warner Bros. They traded racing summertime songs for cheapened guitar melodies, like the stringy plastic of “Daisy” and “You’re Welcome,” and snotty jokes like “Come to the Valley” playing for two minutes too long or “I Love You” existing at all. Darting through a tracklist works when capturing material that explodes at its core, something garage-pop tends to do naturally. Sauntering through a tracklist works when the material is lyric-heavy. You’re Welcome feels stale, dried of both new inspiration or improvisational allure. It’s why “Million Enemies” sounds like a cover of “My Sharona” on Oxycontin instead of an intentionally obnoxious hit. Williams wants attention and big responses, but the energy that granted him both early on is starting to slow. Now, he has become an artist who overlooks the very revisions that could have sanded down You’re Welcome’s faults.
Bands of a certain track record reap the comfortability of tenure, but their longevity is only impressive if they do something with their time. Effortless garage pop is what made Wavves a king of the beach years ago, and since then, they’ve moved in and out of lo-fi bedroom records to a roided-out major label sound to something that’s locked into a mode like early Devo left out in the sun for too long. But once a band gets older, failing to partner that initial indolence with innovation turns effortless songwriting into bitter apathy. It becomes a frontman front-flipping off a balcony onto fans half his age who just wanted music to skate to. | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ghost Ramp | May 24, 2017 | 6 | 9ab2b6cb-b6bf-4bb0-9683-053e5c734d85 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1993 debut from the Irish pop-rock band, a showcase for Dolores O’Riordan’s disarming songwriting and immaculate voice. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1993 debut from the Irish pop-rock band, a showcase for Dolores O’Riordan’s disarming songwriting and immaculate voice. | The Cranberries: Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cranberries-everybody-else-is-doing-it-so-why-cant-we/ | Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? | One Sunday afternoon in 1990, Dolores O’Riordan lugged her keyboard across Limerick, Ireland, for an audition. The 18-year-old only knew a few details about the rock band she would potentially be joining: They only wanted to play original songs and they were punnily named the Cranberry Saw Us (say it out loud).
For their part, the Cranberry Saw Us had not formed much of an identity beyond these details. The trio—drummer Fergal Lawler, guitarist Noel Hogan, and his bassist brother Mike—had grown up together in Limerick. As teens, they shared a love of breakdancing—Ireland had a robust breakdancing scene—and a fondness for the Smiths. The three had formed the Cranberry Saw Us about a year earlier but since their fourth member and frontman had departed, the band had been adrift. They had been searching for a female lead singer for months, but now that a slight, mousey candidate actually stood in front of them, they didn’t know what to make of her. However, when O’Riordan began to sing—her audition consisted of a few original tunes and a rendition of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Troy”—there was no question that they had found their new vocalist.
O’Riordan grew up about 10 miles outside Limerick in the rural townland of Ballybricken. The youngest of seven children, and one of two girls, O’Riordan learned early on that her voice would set herself apart: She was the precocious student that was asked to sing in Gaelic in front of the class, the tiny niece uncles brought around local pubs to entertain sloshed patrons. On her first day of secondary school, O’Riordan declared that she was going to be a rockstar before launching into a Patsy Cline song. She would go on to sing with a school choir that would frequently sweep the boards at Slogadh, an Irish youth arts festival. A devout Catholic, O’Riordan would later credit the church where she played the organ as the place that helped her envision music as a potential career. In 1992, she contextualized her band’s success as a kind of religious karma: “I could be just superstitious, but I think what’s happening now is a kind of a reward.”
After the audition, as O’Riordan headed out the door, the band handed her a tape with a loose sketch of a song—maybe she could think of some lyrics? The track consisted of four simple chords but, as O’Riordan remarked a few years later, “I took them home and I just wrote about me.” One week later she returned with a song that would change the foursome’s lives. Inspired by O’Riordan’s first kiss and the swift sting of rejection, “Linger” condenses every stage of heartache into four-and-a-half minutes of pop perfection with a few humble tools: an acoustic guitar riff, O’Riordan’s wistful humming, Lawler’s rolling drumbeat, and swooning orchestrals that aim for visions of grandeur far beyond the cheap synthesizer that produced them. The problem, as O’Riordan tells it, is that she gave her heart to someone, they stomped on it, and now she’s left holding the pieces. “But I’m in so deep/You know I’m such a fool for you/You got me wrapped around your finger,” she sings, her Irish brogue warming the edges of every syllable. All she wants is a little compassion moving forward: “Do you have to let it linger?”
As if galvanized by their new member, the band quickly began writing and performing with a newfound intensity. As O’Riordan later recounted, she initially assumed that people would find the cards-on-the-table emotion of songs like “Linger” too “girlie girlie.” “The music was so emotional I found that I could only write about personal things….I was sure that it would be considered soppy teenage crap, especially in Limerick, because most bands are really young (men), and their lyrics are humorous or mad. They don’t go pouring their hearts out,” she said. But the appreciation of O’Riordan’s vulnerability proved a point: everybody’s got a heart that breaks.
Once relegated to brief mentions in the local newspaper, by the summer of 1991, the band—now blessedly called the Cranberries—were British indie media darlings, especially after they signed a reported six-figure deal with Island. The press was especially charmed with O’Riordan, who was initially as unguarded in interviews as she was in song. Despite her shy nature and tendency to sometimes perform with her back to the audience, O’Riordan became the band’s mouthpiece, offering soundbites about her unfamiliarity with basic music equipment and passionate endorsement of the Catholic church.
That fall, Melody Maker visited the O’Riordan home in the Ballybricken and spotlighted the family’s soon-to-be-slaughtered Christmas turkeys, a kitschy Jesus clock, and supposed “gallons and gallons of Lourdes holy water.” “The Cranberries in general, and Dolores in particular, bring new meaning to words like innocence and naivete,” an Irish magazine quipped. (“Just because every second word isn’t ‘fuck’ and every song isn’t about sexual intercourse, people think it’s innocent,” O’Riordan retorted in 1992.) O’Riordan’s songwriting was vulnerable and her origins were certainly humble. But more often than not, these details played into sexist attitudes that align emotional awareness with fragility rather than a certain strength.
In March of 1993, after extensive soul-searching and some behind-the-scenes managerial drama, the Cranberries released their debut, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? If the band’s initial ascent to fame had exploited O’Riordan’s sensitivity as an oddity, Everybody Else bears no evidence that her heart was hardened as a result. “Linger” reappears and ascends to “Be My Baby”-levels of yearning thanks to the grandiose handiwork of producer Stephen Street, who had worked with the band’s beloved Smiths on albums like Meat Is Murder and The Queen Is Dead. “Dreams,” which articulates how falling in love is thrilling and terrifying all at once, achieves similar heights. From the first words out of O’Riordan’s mouth—“Oh my life/Is changing every day/In every possible way”—“Dreams” embraces the uncertain adventure ahead. With every new line, the band seems to breathe in fresh new air, constantly revitalizing themselves in real-time; at one point, O’Riordan lets out a defiant yodel, a vocal tradition that she was taught by her father.
Everybody Else is an album about relationships and the ways that a pair of people can love and hurt each other with equal intensity. Unfortunately, O’Riordan is consistently the one whose heart is getting broken. (“I was always one for the tears,” she once said.) Across 12 songs, the wind that once swept O’Riordan up into a gust of romantic euphoria has disappeared, leaving her desperate to understand where she—or her lover—faltered and everything fell apart. “Sunday” examines the dissolution from both sides, beginning with the other person’s unhurried romantic indecision, which is conveyed atop a gentle string arrangement. As if to express how destabilizing this waffling makes her feel, when it’s O’Riordan’s turn to vocalize her own perspective, the song shifts into a tighter, more upbeat melody. “You’re spinning me around/My feet are off the ground/I don’t know where I stand/Do you have to hold my hand?,” she tells her aloof lover. “You mystify me.”
While only “Dreams,” “Linger,” and “Sunday” channel swirling bliss, every song on Everybody Else blazes a path towards catharsis. Sometimes the exact conflict O’Riordan is trying to process can be difficult to pinpoint—“Still can’t recognize the way I feel,” she sings at one point—but this is an album that sinks into the idea that simply feeling can be enough. When O’Riordan is conflicted about a breakup, as on opener “I Still Do,” the band kicks up a grungy squall around her. Meanwhile, the seething betrayal of “How” boils over into a flood of rage, urged on by a blistering guitar riff, which Noel Hogan delivers as if he were trying to outrun the fire set by O’Riordan’s anguish. The Cranberries sound ridiculously tight as a unit, but their most expressive asset is always O’Riordan’s voice. In the band’s early days, she was often compared to Sinéad O’Connor; a feeble observation rooted in the fact that they were both Irish. But on the Cranberries’ heavier songs, O’Riordan moved into a class of her own: Every syllable becomes a tussle in miniature, either ripped from her mouth in protest, spat out in disgust, or bursting forth in delicious victory. On “Not Sorry,” you can hear her lips curl around each word: “Cause you lied, lied/And I cried/Yes, I cried, yes I cry, I cry, I try again,” she bellows, channeling the Gregorian chants that captivated her as a child.
As a songwriter, O’Riordan paid little attention to poetics and instead focused on firm, recurring questions: How do I feel now, what do I do next, can I learn anything from this? It is selfish songwriting that ends up being remarkably generous: O’Riordan’s recognition of her own emotional depths is affirming. Every matter of the heart is treated like a butterfly pinned under glass, a quietly complex entity deserving of appreciation for simply managing to once exist in this cruel world.
Everybody Else was far from an immediate hit in Europe. Across the Atlantic, however, “Linger” wormed its way up the college radio charts and soon its Godard-inspired video was receiving heavy rotation on MTV; its ethereal take on angst was a welcome divergence from grunge’s takeover. Spurred by the Cranberries’ American success and the re-release of “Dreams” and “Linger” as singles, by 1994, the album would hit No. 1 on the charts in the UK. Soon enough, O’Riordan couldn’t shop for underwear without being mobbed. Not since U2 a decade prior had an Irish band inspired such pandemonium. The band quickly capitalized on their popularity with a second album, 1994’s No Need to Argue, which featured the gigantic hit, “Zombie,” a protest anthem defined by O’Riordan’s commanding vocal performance.
Predictably, since they are the album’s poppiest moments, “Linger” and “Dreams” were the tracks on Everybody Else that would leave the largest impact through their ubiquity in film and television. Within a year of Everybody Else’s release, “Dreams” had become Angela Chase’s anthem on My So-Called Life; “Linger” later soundtracked a romantic flashback in the 2006 Adam Sandler comedy Click; a Cantonese cover of “Dreams” by Faye Wong appeared in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express and became a still-beloved song in Asia.
One recent afternoon, desperate for some levity, I turned to Derry Girls, a silly sitcom about teens coming of age in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, right around the time that the Cranberries were ascending. At the end of the first season, “Dreams” plays over a powerful scene that contrasts the young friend group dancing while their parents watch a report of an explosion on television. The moment had a two-fold poignancy as a depiction of youthful innocence but also as a serendipitous tribute to O’Riordan, who died as a result of an accidental drowning the same month that the show premiered. “Dreams” burst through the screen and pierced through my veil of depression. Soon enough, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? was playing on repeat; O’Riordan’s commitment to being fully present in her emotional reality was like an intravenous drip of clarity, helping me understand that the only real way through pain is to face it head-on. The Cranberries held out a hand that gave me—and countless others—the strength to feel. | 2021-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | August 29, 2021 | 8.5 | 9ab2f11e-91b7-4ccd-be10-198407f73afc | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Shania Twain’s fifth studio album and first in 15 years feels courageous. Her songs are modern and pleasant but the specter of her life’s temporary collapse hangs over its best tracks. | Shania Twain’s fifth studio album and first in 15 years feels courageous. Her songs are modern and pleasant but the specter of her life’s temporary collapse hangs over its best tracks. | Shania Twain: Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shania-twain-now/ | Now | Shania Twain’s return to public life and performance is the foundation of one of this decade’s most remarkable comeback stories. If it seems ludicrous that an artist with three diamond-certified albums could possibly need a “comeback,” much less a remarkable one, it’s worth taking a minute to review the one-two punch that threw Twain’s life into quiet disarray. Her vocal cords were ravaged by dysphonia, a physical disorder induced by Lyme disease and exacerbated by stress that left her unsure if she’d ever be able to sing again. And while she lost her voice, she also lost her partner: her marriage to super-producer Mutt Lange fell apart in 2008 after Twain learned about his affair with her best friend.
It’s not like Twain had anything left to prove: her album sales are unimpeachable, and her influence has grown to encompass almost every musician with a passing interest in pop—Taylor Swift to Sheer Mag. (Listen to Haim’s “You Never Knew” and try to imagine it existing without “Love Gets Me Every Time.”) The skepticism she weathered from country traditionalists made it easier for contemporary boundary-pushers like Sam Hunt and Maren Morris to blaze their own trails. She would’ve earned plaudits just for settling into a comfortable Las Vegas residency and the occasional charming cameo on “American Idol” or “Broad City”. It’s in this light that Now, her fifth studio album and first in 15 years, feels courageous: a woman who’s enjoyed several careers’ worth of success and pain is searching for a place in a musical landscape that’s unrecognizable compared to her salad days. It’s the kind of leap you don’t take unless you have something you really need to say.
Now is a pure expression of Twain’s intent: she wrote and produced every song on the album, curated its additional four producers, and laid down strict guidelines regarding their involvement and the album’s sound. “I told anyone getting involved musically to forget about my other records,” she told Rolling Stone in February. “I didn’t want it to be related to Mutt’s productions at all. I wanted a more organic approach.” To appreciate the creative risk this decision represents, you have to understand the nature of Twain and Lange’s partnership. Their collaboration on mega-smashes like The Woman in Me and Come on Over reflected their romantic connection: they had a deep respect for each other and a sincere belief in the work they were doing, even if no one else did.
”Mutt was incredible with the feel and groove of a song,” Twain wrote in her intense 2011 memoir From This Moment On, “and my challenge was to write lyrics and melody to his phrasing.” This division of labor made Twain one of the best-selling artists in musical history, so it’s hard to argue with the results. She and Lange would alternate scraps of lyric and ideas on a single notepad, their two minds coming together as one. “As much as I loved Mutt as my husband, it’s possible I admired him even more for the unique way his musical mind worked,” wrote Twain. “It was as though the only person who really had the whole thing in his head all at one time was Mutt.”
Left to her own devices, Twain’s album touches on her past glories without leaning too heavily on them. Its eclecticism is an extension of her work with Lange on 2002’s Up!—an album famously released in “country,” “pop,” and “world” mixes to capture the greatest possible international market share—but there’s nothing about Now that feels cynical or even boardroom-tested, even with songs that sound like clear descendants of the Chainsmokers (the aching “Poor Me”) and OMI’s summer 2015 hit “Cheerleader” (”Let’s Kiss and Make Up”). Instead, it sounds like the work of an artist who’s written and spoken frankly about country as a means to an end rather than an abiding passion. Twain is still putting together load-bearing vocal arrangements: hooks like the ones at the heart of “Swingin’ With My Eyes Closed” or the Motown-lite romp “You Can’t Buy Love” throw off as much light as anything on Come on Over— but she isn’t going out of her way to cover up the combined effects of illness and age on her voice. The top of her range has been sanded down, and the residual grit is pebbled through a voice that was once uniformly crisp and clean.
And while Now still rings with Twain’s irrepressible optimism, its most impactful songs explore what happens when that unstoppable force meets heart-shattering, life-changing betrayal. Twain is adamant that Now isn’t a “divorce album.” Her marriage to Lange ended nearly a decade ago, and she’s long since moved on and found happiness with her ex-best friend’s own jilted lover. This isn’t her version of Lemonade. She’s never been able to summon that kind of righteous fury.
Yet the specter of her life’s temporary collapse hangs over the album like a shadow. She sounds a world away from the sassy, effervescent icon of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” on songs like “I’m Alright” and “Where Do You Think You’re Going,” piercing and desperate even as they end on hopeful notes. (Her writing is particularly bleak on the former: “I tried to scream/But silence haunted/Me in my sleep/Oh, and probably always will.”) Even at her bubbliest, darkness is always just outside the rear-view mirror. “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” is a plea for communication masquerading as lightweight tropical house: “Let’s be honest, let’s be open/We’re not broken, not yet.” And on lead single “Life’s About to Get Good,” jaunty strumming belies extreme vulnerability: “I trusted you so much, you’re all that mattered/You no longer loved me and I sang like a sad bird/I couldn’t move on and I think you were flattered.” Twain never quite reaches jubilance. She has to settle for relief.
Now can’t help but suffer by comparison to Twain’s absolute zenith, both in terms of musical potency and commercial performance. These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop; her label is already brushing off her recent singles’ poor showing at radio and on the charts. (”[Radio is] the magnifier,” said UMG Nashville president Cindy Mabe to The New York Times, “but frankly, does she need it? No. She’s a global icon.”) There’s an air of inevitability to Twain’s upcoming world tour: she’ll play the hits to legions of adoring fans, and they’ll hit the concession stands as soon as they hear an unfamiliar note.
This album deserves more, if only because it successfully conveys Twain’s one immutable strength: her personality. Her space in our collective cultural memory has as much to do with her character—her pluck, her unpretentious elegance, her genial nature—as her melodies or stomping arrangements. Even after tens of millions of albums sold and a decade-plus out of the spotlight, she still feels a little like your daffy aunt: ready for a campfire singalong, quick with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, and overeager with an exclamation mark. Time can’t take that away; trauma can’t take it away, either. | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mercury Nashville | September 30, 2017 | 6.6 | 9ab52c2d-1f4c-4fe1-8090-3f848dbc6321 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Chaz Bear delivers a smartly crafted, comfortably mid-fi album of grooves and melancholy—it’s one of his best albums in years. | Chaz Bear delivers a smartly crafted, comfortably mid-fi album of grooves and melancholy—it’s one of his best albums in years. | Toro y Moi: Outer Peace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/toro-y-moi-outer-peace/ | Outer Peace | With Toro y Moi’s last album, 2017’s pleasant but often forgettable Boo Boo, it seemed possible that Chaz Bear was running out of new ways to make his habitually laid-back music register a pulse. He’d already spun his sound in seemingly every possible permutation, from lo-fi sampledelia to instrumental disco to guitar-crunched indie rock and back again. On Boo Boo, with tempos sagging like a wet paper bag, his production chops too often outstripped his songwriting abilities—a weakness that had dogged Bear (fka Chaz Bundick) since his debut.
But on Outer Peace, Bear sounds revitalized: Buoyed by a refined take on the kinds of dance music he has occasionally toyed with as Les Sins, his woozily recumbent sounds snap to attention. It’s the most smartly crafted Toro y Moi album since 2011’s Underneath the Pine, bringing Bear’s stylistic savvy and studio finesse to some of the stickiest songs in his catalog. Lean, packing 10 tracks in just over half an hour, his sixth album is frontloaded with breezy, house-inspired grooves, shot through with bassline after truly excellent bassline, and fleshed out with a handful of surprisingly affecting sad-trap tearjerkers. The production is comfortably mid-fi—neither expensively hi-def nor self-consciously distorted or tape-warped—yet it sounds remarkable on headphones or good speakers, the rare example of indie dance whose sound design could go toe to toe against most “proper” dance music. It will make any car ride approximately 300% more enjoyable.
In a typical slacker move, Bear wears the low stakes—a mid-career album from an artist closely identified with a cultural moment rapidly receding in the rear-view—on his sleeve. On the giddy single “Freelance,” he turns a filtered vocal line into a garish cavalcade of gagging noises, like a French house tune sung by Bill the Cat. On “Laws of the Universe,” he sings about Prometheus and Bob, claymation characters on the late-1990s Nickelodeon series “KaBlam!”; he mutters that James Murphy is spinning at his house, playing “all rare shit from Flying Dutchman”— a wry and meta-meta double LCD Soundsystem reference. (“I met him at Coachella,” he deadpans. That’s not the only indie inside joke here: On “Monte Carlo,” he rhymes “PDX to OAK” with “Isaac Brock I float away.”)
But such gags are more tongue-in-cheek window dressing for the album’s spry synth lines, 1990s-inspired chord stabs, and sparkling little details—like a few lines of Ugly Casanova’s “Hotcha Girls” interpolated into “Freelance,” just because. “Laws of the Universe” harbors the funkiest guitar lick this side of George Benson; on “Monte Carlo,” the silky way he sings the phrase “1997 Monte Carlo” is so satisfying—run through Auto-Tune and delivered in the staccato cadence of contemporary rap—you could happily loop it for an hour and drift away, Chuck Person style.
Given the gloomy national mood (and the fact that Spotifycore has made a mockery of all things hazily supine), it’s easy to be skeptical of the entire premise of artfully laid-back music nowadays. But if Outer Peace had a subtitle, it would probably be Inner Turmoil. A deep, abiding melancholy runs beneath the record’s house-party vibe. Bear’s cool sigh frequently sounds like the aural approximation of bedhead, his vowels tousled, his consonants shying away from the light. Whether multi-tracked in close harmony or applied like superfine sandpaper, his voice has never been lovelier than it is here, and it trails a pensive shadow as he sings about boredom, anxiety, and ambivalence, and wonders (on two separate occasions!) if he’s getting old.
“I want a brand-new house/Something I cannot buy/Something I can’t afford,” goes the refrain of “New House,” one of the album’s sneaky highlights; it’s the recession-pop anthem we’ve been waiting for since the financial collapse of 2008. But perhaps it’s fitting that it falls to Bear to deliver it: Chillwave’s adolescent regression was always a response to the recession, even if it wasn’t recognized as such; chillwave embodied the “dream of the ’90s” insofar as the 1990s was a decade in which young people’s opportunities withered and died on the vine. A decade down the line, the unemployment rate has fallen below 4 percent but young people’s fundamental prospects haven’t gotten much better. “Uber messed up everything,” Bear grumbles on “Monte Carlo.” In the gig economy, it’s no wonder that the chorus to a song called “Freelance” would mimic someone gagging. Toro y Moi’s brilliance is to make the mere act of survival sound like so much fun. | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Carpark | January 23, 2019 | 7.4 | 9ab72927-be4f-4275-9ac2-344ae49b3b2b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On a wildly ambitious 80-minute opus, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s shapeshifting metal band reaches its most radiant incarnation yet. | On a wildly ambitious 80-minute opus, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s shapeshifting metal band reaches its most radiant incarnation yet. | Liturgy: 93696 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liturgy-93696/ | 93696 | For over a decade, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix has cloaked her shapeshifting metal band Liturgy in a dense matrix of symbology. Diving into her Substack and YouTube channel, where she connects dots between Marxist thought, the Upanishads, Thomas Aquinas, and Aleister Crowley, can be as enlightening as it is mystifying. For all of Hunt-Hendrix’s theorizing, though, the music has always been thrillingly physical. It’s one thing to read about her concept of the “burst beat” and how her rapid-fire rhythms are intended to induce a state of awakening and transformation. It’s another thing to simply feel it.
Devotees willing to trawl through Hunt-Hendrix’s countless diagrammatic wireframes may notice a recurring theme, perhaps best encapsulated by the title of one of her videos: “What Will Heaven Be Like? (Part 1).” Hunt-Hendrix’s music reaches toward utopian catharsis, reshaping the craven and nihilistic timbres of black metal into blissful, glowing pillars of sound. In her manifestos, she’s described a desire to create music that pushes listeners toward self-discovery and actualization, a goal that’s taken on more personal weight after she came out as trans in 2020. “Gender dysphoria is a huge part of what made me make this music,” she told the Needle Drop. 93696, whose title is intended to mean “heaven” according to Hunt-Hendrix’s interpretation of Thelemic numerology, plays as its name suggests: This is Liturgy in their purest form, tapping all of their strengths to reach their most radiant incarnation yet.
Across 80 minutes, 93696 incorporates elements from throughout Liturgy’s evolution. The mathy riffs of 2011’s Aesthetica, the glitch-hop of 2015’s The Ark Work, and the baroque orchestration of 2019’s H.A.Q.Q. and 2020’s Origin of the Alimonies are all accounted for (even riffs and motifs from previous songs reappear here in new shapes). 93696 may not present anything Liturgy haven’t done before, but it connects their many zigzagging roads into a rich cartography. Take “Djennaration,” whose vicious symphonic assault smashes through the gates in the album’s opening minutes. As its melody unfurls, drummer Leo Didkovsky batters his snare within an inch of its life. When Hunt-Hendrix’s shriek finally emerges, surrounded by chirping flutes, she sounds as if she were trying to tear a hole through the sky. After three continuously crescendoing minutes, a hip-hop bridge suddenly drops in, its rumbling bass and coarse handclaps finding a more natural interplay than her previous dalliances into the genre.
There’s a tenderness coursing through 93696, even when the band pushes its sound to extremes. As “Haelegen II” swells from its gloomy piano intro to a sludgy, tremolo stomp, the track comes off like Hunt-Hendrix’s version of a power ballad, with Didkovsky’s rapid blastbeats intensifying its melancholic sway. On the soaring 15-minute title track, the band’s thundering riffs and head-spinning polyrhythms come laden in glockenspiels and shimmering strings, lending their violent thrashing an elegiac, mournful resolve. In between the multi-suite epics, Liturgy include an array of brief interludes that restore an eerie calm. Following the short-circuiting final attack of “Caela,” the choral voices of “Angel of Sovereignty” undulate with a yearning, baptismal tranquility. The brittle ocarinas of “Red Crown II” tremble softly, as if illuminated by the glow of a post-apocalyptic campfire.
Liturgy have always brought a proggy, sprawling ambition to their music, but rarely have all the pieces locked into place so elegantly. 93696 can be pulverizing, but it’s also gentle, and amid the brutality lie some of Hunt-Hendrix’s prettiest and most ornate songs yet. As time has gone on, Hunt-Hendrix has discussed her interest in undoing conceptions of metal as a masculinist enterprise: “We’re ripe for a feminization of metal,” she explained in a 2020 video, going on to suggest that this may be a vital path forward for the genre. Listening to her band in full command of its sound, weaving between passages of chaotic release and delicate beauty, it sounds as if Liturgy have finally found some kind of promised land. | 2023-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | March 27, 2023 | 8 | 9ab913fe-d5af-4b77-b5f2-0e8e12af239b | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Powered by brittle electronic drums and buzzing synths, the Congolese musician’s debut album is simultaneously bleak and exhilarating. | Powered by brittle electronic drums and buzzing synths, the Congolese musician’s debut album is simultaneously bleak and exhilarating. | Rey Sapienz / The Congo Techno Ensemble: Na Zala Zala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rey-sapienz-the-congo-techno-ensemble-na-zala-zala/ | Na Zala Zala | Two dates figure crucially in Bahati Sapiens Moïse Dhekana’s artistic career. In 2002, in his hometown of Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo—a city of 900,000, located near Lake Albert—he formed his first band. Rapping over Congolese soukous, he earned his nickname, Rey Sapienz, el Rey Mago—the wise king. He was 12 years old. Ten years later, he traveled to Kampala, Uganda, to collaborate with artists in the city’s burgeoning electronic scene. But when civil war broke out in the DRC, just the latest conflagration in a long-running conflict that between 1996 and 2013 killed an estimated 3.5 million to 5.4 million people, Sapienz chose to remain in Kampala. He already had years of experience leading songwriting workshops in Bunia’s youth centers; in Kampala, he taught himself music production and co-founded Hakuna Kulala, the club-centric sub-label of Nyege Nyege Tapes, a hub for experimental electronic music from across East Africa.
On Sapienz’ Hakuna Kulala EP, released in 2018, he took a more laid-back approach than his labelmate Slikback, who had inaugurated the imprint. Where Slikback’s Lasakaneku EP flirted with a jarring synthesis of trap and grime, Sapienz’ debut EP floated atop gracefully syncopated drums and buoyant soukous guitar riffs. Na Zala Zala, his debut album, is at the opposite extreme from that comparatively blissful EP, following the path of 2019’s dark, eerie Mushoro. It is a heavy, turbulent affair marked by brittle electronic drums, buzzing synths, and an overwhelming chorus of voices that whisper, mutter, growl, bark, and scream, sometimes all at once. (The album is credited to Rey Sapienz and the Congo Techno Ensemble, which also includes rapper Fresh Douggis along with percussionist and singer Papalas Palata, but they sound less like a trio than a small army.) Even for listeners who can’t understand the Lingala and Swahili lyrics, the multitudinous din can be harrowing.
The abrasiveness is apparent from the very first song, “Dancehall Pigme,” in which a broken electro groove throws off sparks in the form of dissonant synth stabs. (Somewhat confusingly, the song is unrelated to another with the same title from his 2019 EP.) The vocals are split between gruff rapping and a sour wail run through a gravelly harmonizer. There’s no melody to speak of, just a succession of tones that rise and fall queasily like a heaving prow in high swells with no land in sight. “Esala Rien” blends its multi-tracked shouts and murmurs into a frightening chorus in which the only consensus is nihilism itself: “It does not matter,” runs the repeated refrain. The drums are sharp as road spikes; the wilting synth riff sounds like disappointment incarnate.
In the context of such merciless beats, the lyrics can scan as bleak, at least in translation. “I’m sick I want to heal,” runs a repeated line in “Posa Na Bika,” against mournful background harmonies; “I have become stupid/I have become useless.” In “Dancehall Pigme,” Sapienz laments having been abandoned by his biological family and asks, “What do I do to get what I deserve?” It’s not all so grim; in “96,” Sapienz, Douggis, and Papalas trade playful verses about the return of clubbing after COVID. You might not hear a sense of hope in the song’s machine-gun percussion and samples of explosions and breaking glass, but it’s impossible to miss the exhilaration in Sapienz’ jagged syncopations. (And is that an intentional reference to Kid Cudi’s “Day N Nite” in the song’s blippy synth melody?)
“Santonge,” a highlight of the album, shows how far Sapienz has come from the sunny sound of his debut. There’s not much more to the beat than dull kick drums and the sound of knives being sharpened; in the place of synthesizer, reverb rushes like a howling wind. As Sapienz chants hoarsely, the background vocalists Lemeulleur and Sekelembele howl and shriek. Pitched halfway between dancehall and black metal, it’s a blood-curdling affair that sounds less like dance music than an exorcism. Like the best heavy music, it’s as thrilling as it is terrifying.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Nyege Nyege Tapes | July 20, 2021 | 7 | 9abcefe1-b792-47e5-a49f-6e9461a087c8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Following on their 2010 debut, Ghost Blonde, the Montreal noise-pop band returns with a five-song EP that finds them changing up their style from one track to the next. | Following on their 2010 debut, Ghost Blonde, the Montreal noise-pop band returns with a five-song EP that finds them changing up their style from one track to the next. | No Joy: Negaverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16792-negaverse/ | Negaverse | No Joy quietly slipped their 2010 debut, Ghost Blonde, into the marketplace in late November of that year-- i.e., a commercial dead zone for releases that aren't celebrity Christmas records or quickie cash-in greatest-hits compilations. But, in retrospect, the timing was brilliant. Though unknown outside of Montreal, the fledgiing band had already made an enthusiastic fan out of indie rock's most voracious Tweeter, Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, whose band was just then starting to pop up on year-end best-of lists for their own 2010 debut. By January 2011, Best Coast had parlayed their critical buzz into theatre-headliner status, accruing enough clout to bring their Montreal mates on tour as their hand-picked opener, and introducing them to large Stateside audiences mere weeks after their album's release.
The instant mutual-admiration society made total sense: in their infancy, both Best Coast and No Joy exhibited a fondness for swooning melodies, and an equal affinity for obliterating them in a hurriance of fuzz and reverb. But since their 2011 tour, the bands have followed markedly divergent paths: while Best Coast followed Crazy for You by hiring Jon Brion to turn them into the world's youngest dad-rock band, No Joy have answered their own debut's promise by receding even deeper into the murk. If Ghost Blonde owed a considerable debt to the pedal-stomping squall of late-80s My Bloody Valentine, Negaverse sees them adopting MBV's release strategies as well, in the form of a five-song EP that feels less like a random collection of leftovers than a stand-alone mini-album of complementary tracks.
Negaverse marks an evolution from Ghost Blonde, though not in ways you'd necessarily expect. In concert, that album's hazy-headed distort-pop was given a muscular makeover worthy of SST-era Dinosaur Jr. Negaverse, however, deemphasizes the band's live presence by highlighting both the intimacy and intricacy of their songcraft; this is a record that feels demo-quality crude yet sonically dense and deliberate at the same time.
Opener "Junior" provides a logical leap-off from Ghost Blonde, its airy melody and wordless harmonies hitched to a double-time drum stomp that, thanks to the unyielding corrosiveness of Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd's guitars, still feels like it's moving in slow motion. But even when working within Negaverse's downsized dimensions, No Joy seem eager to reveal that there's more to their music than a simple noise/pop dichotomy: "Shame Cave" is another trash-can-thwacking Mary Chained rave-up, but one where the drums drop out in its final minute, transforming the song's reverberating guitar line and backing harmonies into a slow-dissolving swirl; "Smiley Face" takes a good half of its 3:35 runtime pulling back the slingshot before unleashing a space-bound robo-cow-punk rampage. And if Negaverse's proudly washed-out sound still provides little clue as to what White-Gluz is going on about, the enchantingly whispered "Yang Sanpanku" still manages to sculpt a dramatic arc out of what at first seems like a monolithic, buzz-killing drone; it's a song that sounds anthemic even if it lacks the basic lyrical intelligibility required of a proper anthem. Packing five songs into 15 minutes, Negaverse goes by in a blur-- but what impresses most is its sense of patience. | 2012-06-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | June 14, 2012 | 6.9 | 9abd07b7-315d-4138-89d8-4662bd7c1cef | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Solange Knowles-curated compilation Saint Heron feels like the Flex Your Head or No New York of ambitious minimalist R&B. Although most of the songs here from the likes of Kingdom, Kelela, Sampha, and Knowles herself, have been previously released, she’s assembled them into a coherent piece that becomes something of an aesthetic manifesto. | The Solange Knowles-curated compilation Saint Heron feels like the Flex Your Head or No New York of ambitious minimalist R&B. Although most of the songs here from the likes of Kingdom, Kelela, Sampha, and Knowles herself, have been previously released, she’s assembled them into a coherent piece that becomes something of an aesthetic manifesto. | Various Artists: Saint Heron | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18778-saint-heron/ | Saint Heron | The Weeknd's House of Balloons is one of the more influential records of this decade, but thanks to Solange Knowles, “alt-R&B” would have happened without it. The sonic aesthetic she’s pieced together—a crackling experimental streak with potent pop hooks—is deeply pleasurable, and though she hasn't recorded anything as monumental as House of Balloons, people have increasingly taken notice. It's unknown whether or not Solange was attempting to claim the credit she’s owed while curating her Saint Heron compilation, but listening to it, it certainly has that result. Although most of its songs are previously released, she’s assembled them into a coherent piece that transcends the usual odds-and-sods nature of the compilation format. It's an aesthetic manifesto of a specific corner of a rapidly expanding scene—the Flex Your Head or No New York of ambitious, minimalist R&B that possesses considerable mainstream ambition and appeal.
Those loose parameters contain a broad range of sounds and styles. B.C. Kingdom’s album-opening “Lockup” and Kingdom’s “Bank Head” (featuring vocals by Kelela, whose “Go All Night” also appears) both give off a stiffly robotic funkiness—the latter through a juddering bass synth, and the former via the tasteful application of Robocop noises. Sampha’s “Beneath the Tree” is a jazzy piano ballad set to drum programming that combines elements of two-step, footwork, and Burial-style found-sound beats. Jade de la Fleur’s “Jaded” has the brutally stripped-down arrangement and smoky paranoia of a top-tier Tricky song. Spanish producer Pional's remix of South African artist Petit Noir's “Noirse" clears away the comp’s nocturnal moodiness with bright, syncopated staccato melodies passed down from township music.
Despite their different approaches, the tracks all share a few basic commonalities: deep bass unimpeded by fussy arrangements, stoner-friendly electronic textures, and a willingness to borrow from pretty much any musical style that can project stylishly understated sexiness, whether it’s post-dubstep or 4AD-style atmospheric goth. Above all, these songs are also song-focused—the artists assembled here may all have deep experimental streaks, but they never ignore pop’s pleasure principle, and there are hooks all over the place on this near-flawlessly sequenced compilation.
Solange wrote and co-produced her own wryly titled contribution, “Cash In”, and the track's one of the most aesthetically conservative songs on the compilation, featuring a straightforward beat, a relatively lush arrangement, and the kind of gracefully building, inspirational melody that slow-jam R&B hits are made from. It's the one song on Saint Heron that I could see getting radio rotation, a swaggering, graceful power move. It may have taken her a while to get to the point where she can pull such a gesture off, but in this insurgent territory, Solange reigns supreme. | 2013-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Saint | November 18, 2013 | 8.1 | 9abe9316-d4c8-49ee-af2f-9ab472ea5b47 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Raphael Saadiq’s 2002 debut, a meticulously crafted record that bridged generations of soul and R&B. | 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 Raphael Saadiq’s 2002 debut, a meticulously crafted record that bridged generations of soul and R&B. | Raphael Saadiq: Instant Vintage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raphael-saadiq-instant-vintage/ | Instant Vintage | When it came time to promote Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm, William “Kedar” Massenburg started looking for the right name to describe the sound. It needed to be short, snazzy, something to capture how artists like Badu and D’Angelo—both of whom Massenburg was managing—incorporated modern hip-hop and electronic styles into their music. He landed on “neo-soul,” and it stuck.
Neo-soul caught on quickly in no small part because it was a marketing term. The name was useful shorthand for fans and critics, but many of the artists who fell under the neo-soul umbrella didn’t appreciate it. “There’s nothing ‘neo’ about it. It’s just soul,” Raphael Saadiq said of the label during an interview about his 2002 solo debut Instant Vintage. A son of soul who, by this time, had produced and played sessions for both D’Angelo and Badu, Saadiq saw the label as limiting, an unnecessary divide between the innovation of the present and the foundation of the past: “Otis Redding would turn over in his grave right now if he heard someone say ‘neo-soul.’” Saadiq floated his own term: gospeldelic. “Gospel is for the truth in the sound and the words,” he continued. “-Delic represents the funky part and the room to experiment.”
Gospeldelic never caught on in the same way (or at all), but Saadiq committed to it anyway. Sampled voices saying the phrase are scratched into Instant Vintage’s triumphant opening track “Doing What I Can,” all shuffling bass riffs, swirling strings, and crisp drum programming. And he stands by it on the second half of the album’s closing track “Skyy, Can You Feel Me,” saying “it came from God” over a bed of wah-wah pedal and warbling synths. Functionally, gospeldelic pulls from the same tradition as neo-soul—they’re both preoccupied with the intersection of soul, hip-hop, rock, funk, blues, and electronic music. But where some artists in the neo-soul movement strove to blur the lines between old and new, Saadiq honored the old school. Instant Vintage wasn’t a vehicle for spirituality or a way to reap the benefits of a newly popular subgenre. He saw it as his duty to not just revolutionize what audiences considered to be soul music, but to breathe new life into tradition, to carry on a legacy.
Saadiq’s vision had its share of arrogance, backed up by a career that had already spanned two decades. Born Charles Ray Wiggins in 1966, he was the only one of 14 siblings to be born in Oakland, California. Music came early: He first took interest at age 6, teaching himself to play guitar, drums, and—his favorite—bass. By middle school, he was singing in gospel groups and spending summers at the Young Musicians Program at Berklee, where he was already approaching the level of a professional session musician. Days before his 18th birthday, he stumbled into the opportunity of a lifetime. He was at a studio in Oakland when he got a call that drummer Sheila E. was seeking touring musicians to join the Revolution on Prince’s upcoming Parade tour. Auditions were the next day. Other hopefuls showed up in flamboyant Prince gear but Wiggins, dressed down in jeans and a baseball cap, made quick work of his audition. When Sheila’s people asked for his name, he responded with the first one that came to mind: Raphael.
“Next thing I was in Tokyo, in a stadium, singing ‘Erotic City,’” he told The Guardian in 2009. “We were in huge venues with the biggest sound systems in the world; all these roadies throwin’ me basses, and a bunch of models hangin’ round Prince to party. For almost two years. That was my university.” But Wiggins did more than just party. Prince invited him to play bass for him at a handful of after parties on tour, which did wonders for his confidence. Two years after that first audition, he returned to Oakland and formed his own band with brother D’wayne and cousin Timothy Christian Riley, which they called Tony! Toni! Toné! (Each member remembers the name’s origins slightly differently, but all agree it started as an inside joke about a person who thinks they’re too cool for this planet.) Wiggins provided lead vocals and played bass; he wouldn’t begin producing until their second album, 1990’s The Revival. It was around this time that he officially took on the last name Saadiq, which is Arabic for “man of his word.”
The newly crowned Raphael Saadiq laid a strong foundation with his family, cultivating their modern blend of R&B and soul and earning a double platinum album, 1993’s Sons of Soul, for their troubles. But after 11 years of giving the world the Oakland stroke, Tony! Toni! Toné! parted ways in 1997 amid allegations that D’wayne, the eldest member, had mismanaged the group’s funds. (“Things just weren’t operating right,” Saadiq told NME in 2019. “We were young, we all really didn’t understand everything and [D’wayne] was sort of the leader of the group. We all had the same bank account at one time.”)
Saadiq didn’t rest long. In 1995, with the Tony! Toni! Toné! credits under his belt, he had begun to branch out as a producer. A beat with a simmering bassline he’d shopped around for six years caught the attention of D’Angelo; the two of them turned it into “Lady,” the third single from Brown Sugar. This was followed by “Ask of You,” a solo single recorded for the soundtrack of the John Singleton movie Higher Learning, which debuted at #19 on the Billboard Hot 100. There was also his induction as an honorary member of the Ummah—a collective of musicians including Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest and Detroit producer J Dilla—a connection that led him to help craft Tribe’s final two classic studio albums, Beats, Rhymes & Life and The Love Movement. After his time with the Ummah, Saadiq joined forces with Muhammad and former En Vogue member Dawn Robinson—who Saadiq had been friends with since they were 16—in the short-lived supergroup Lucy Pearl, who dropped a single self-titled album in 2000. But the partnership ended on bad terms through a combination of professional jealousy on Saadiq’s part and his reneging on plans to financially support Robinson, who’d turned down a major record deal in order to make Lucy Pearl, which resulted in Robinson losing her house.
By this time, Saadiq had burned a few bridges, but he felt he was on top of the world. What can you tell an artist who had just come off of two successful groups and produced gargantuan hits for everyone from D’Angelo—they’d scored another with 2000’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”—and the Isley Brothers to TLC? But while Saadiq had accomplished a lot, he was better known as a producer and a group member than as an individual artist or a marketable solo act. Instant Vintage was the first time he took center stage, a performer, hypeman, and backing band rolled into one.
And contrary to his tutelage under a notorious perfectionist like Prince, the atmosphere Saadiq facilitated was fast and loose. That isn’t to say Instant Vintage sounds lackadaisical. By now, Saadiq’s mastery over the bass was profound: He could make a song jump, melt, or simmer with a handful of notes. Basslines on “Body Parts” and “Be Here” practically coax you between the satin sheets, while the one running through “Uptown” drips like spilled soda snaking down a hot sidewalk. The finished album has a sleek, professional quality, but throughout the recording process, Saadiq’s presence ensured the laid-back vibe of a jam session. Several guest features from artists like TLC’s T-Boz (“Different Times”) and Angie Stone and Calvin Richardson (“Excuse Me”) came from spurr of the moment recording sessions for other songs.
This spontaneity added variety to the album’s comfortingly sunny disposition. “You’re the One That I Like” and “Tick Tock” are more traditional bass-driven songs that feel like modern interpretations of Prince’s funk era. “Body Parts” and “Faithful,” two of the most spirited cuts, match the zany grooves of Fresh-era Sly & the Family Stone with orchestral embellishments: Digitized drum thumps mesh with cowbell and electric guitar streaks mingle with violins. “Be Here,” another D’Angelo collab, takes the aesthetic to cinematic heights, Saadiq’s bass notes dancing around an orchestra’s worth of strings and a steady flow of beatbox gasps. It writhes like the soundtrack to what romantic dramedy screenwriters call the “All Is Lost moment,” voicing the pain that comes with not being able to lay up with—or make breakfast for—the person you love.
Ironically, Instant Vintage comes into its own when it dips into the genre fusions of neo-soul, especially when production duo Jake & the Phatman bring hip-hop elements into the fold. The fellow Bay Area natives first connected with Saadiq while producing tracks for Lucy Pearl and became his go-to producers for years. Saadiq was already a rap fan: The Tonys made a song with DJ Quik, and Instant Vintage features interludes produced by friend Hi-Tek, as well as drum programming on “Faithful” by California DJ and producer Battlecat. But Jake & the Phatman brought their own full-bodied sheen to 10 of the album’s 18 tracks. Horns and strings on “Doing What I Can” were recorded to vinyl and then physically scratched back onto the records for added effect. The beating heart of “Still Ray” is an interpolation of Scott Storch’s iconic piano melody from Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.,” which blooms around programmed kickdrums and an inexplicable tuba solo. Even on tracks that draw from more traditional soul sounds, like late highlight “Blind Man,” the snap and thump of the low end is all rap. The melodies and chord progressions on Instant Vintage would sound as comfortable in 1973 as 2003 or 2023, but they’re also begging to be chopped and looped into the shape of 16 bars.
Lyrically, Instant Vintage is decidedly less complicated than its musical arrangements might suggest. Time-tested romantic notions, like the pining of “Be Here,” “Still Ray,” and “Make My Day,” and the shoulder-to-cry-on thoughtfulness of “Tick Tock” had been Saadiq’s bread and butter since the days of the Tonys. A line like “Let me show you what you’re missing every day” sounds generic on paper, but there’s a boyish charm to his smooth, almost golden voice that helps it land like a first kiss. On the 15-minute closer “Skyy, Can You Feel Me,” Saadiq gives his most involved and passionate performance. He has said he wrote the song on the night Aaliyah died in a plane crash (“I was just feeling kinda angel-y about her,” he later told Billboard), and every high note or low rumble falls like a tear on the mic.
When it was released on June 11, 2002, Instant Vintage was inevitably lumped in with the then-peaking sounds of neo-soul. But it was both too reverent and too amorphous to find solid footing there. For all of the album’s genre fusions, there are songs that feel like boxes on a checklist: the Sly song, the Stevie song, the Smokey song. Nothing sounds ingenuine, but Saadiq occasionally leans a little too hard on emulation, and the album is at pains to show its work in a way that, say, Badu’s Mama’s Gun and D’Angelo’s Voodoo aren’t. Instant Vintage is timeless when it wants to be, but also desperate to be of a time, flexing for the traditionalists, making sure you recognize the significance of every moving part. This made it catnip for loyalists who’d followed Saadiq since his Tony! Toni! Toné! days, and even earned some award nods: He scored a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album and two more for “Be Here” (Best R&B Song and Best Urban/Alternative Performance). But commercially, Instant Vintage was no Voodoo—the album debuted at No. 25 on the Billboard 200 and stalled at 168,000 copies sold, numbers that inspired MCA/Universal to end Saadiq’s contract.
Regardless, he emerged from Instant Vintage with his head high, gushing to the press about the influence of Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder and how, after years of collaboration and compromise, he’d made something that felt completely, unapologetically his. The prominence of neo-soul has faded and “gospeldelic” never really got off the ground, but Saadiq’s particular hybrid strain created a ripple effect that remains easy to detect. The second act of California band the Internet’s career, from their 2015 breakthrough Ego Death through the members’ respective solo projects and their 2018 reunion Hive Mind, shares a spiritual kinship. Multihyphenate crooners like Leon Bridges, Anderson .Paak, Bruno Mars, and Steve Lacy all borrow from Saadiq’s blueprint, a vision of music’s future grounded in the warmest and funkiest sounds of its past.
After being dropped from Universal, Saadiq started his own label, called Pookie, and used his next albums, 2004’s Ray Ray and 2008’s The Way I See It (released with Sony), to dig further into the musical histories of Blaxploitation funk and doo-wop. He’s released solo albums, scored television and movies, and produced for Beyoncé, Solange, and Brent Faiayz. Perhaps it all could have happened without Instant Vintage—he was already a respected producer—but Saadiq needed to be sure that his vision would survive outside the security of a group. For all its virtuosity, Vintage is home to some of his catchiest earworms and warmest basslines—an imperfect but inspired reminder of the value of grooving to your own beat. | 2023-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Universal | April 9, 2023 | 8 | 9ac02605-37e1-4cc6-866d-fbd58e4b0450 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Dedicated to an incarcerated man who spent years fighting wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada, Crampton’s latest album confronts the systems of oppression hidden in plain sight. | Dedicated to an incarcerated man who spent years fighting wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada, Crampton’s latest album confronts the systems of oppression hidden in plain sight. | Elysia Crampton: ORCORARA 2010 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elysia-crampton-orcorara-2010/ | ORCORARA 2010 | For thousands of years, the Sierra Nevada mountains regularly pulsed with wildfires. Lit by indigenous tribes like the Yurok and the Karuk, these controlled burns kept local ecosystems thriving, clearing weeds and detritus that, if left to accumulate, could fuel devastating infernos. When the state of California instituted fire control measures in the early 20th century, that kindling began to build up. Dried out by global warming, the state’s forests have succumbed to hellish blazes in the past few years, many of which have been fought by prison laborers making less than minimum wage alongside trained firefighters. It’s a phenomenon that nearly condenses the myriad horrors of the contemporary United States into a single scene: a forest on fire, thrown out of rhythm by centuries of colonialism, hosed down by people caught in the gears of the prison industrial complex.
Elysia Crampton, the American Indian producer whose experimental electronic music ranks among the most singular and idiosyncratic of the past decade, dedicates her latest full-length release to Paul Sousa, a man “who while incarcerated, worked years as an inmate firefighter across the Sierra Nevada of California.” This image hangs over ORCORARA 2010, which was originally released as the soundtrack to an installation Crampton debuted at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018. It was first meant to be heard in a dark room throbbing with diffuse light, an environment where sound overwhelms the senses and the mind can fall into a trance state. As an album, ORCORARA 2010 calls back to that method of listening. Its slow, sparse gestures reward patient attention with delicate, enveloping beauty.
On Crampton’s tight, condensed self-titled album from 2018, voices flitted in and out like stray transmissions from distant broadcast towers. Here, the voice emerges as a central instrument by way of a handful of guests. Jeremy Rojas layers a spoken-word performance atop several piano-driven tracks that set the record’s oblique narratives in motion, while the New York-based singers Embaci and Shannon Funchess appear at two of the album’s high points. Embaci’s classically trained voice darts between tangled acoustic guitars, droning synthesizers, and owl calls on “Grove,” a song whose placidity belies a gut-deep restlessness. Twin guitar lines strobe in and out of sync, and her voice lifts away from the confusion, gliding and searching. Later, Light Asylum’s Funchess, whose unmistakable voice graced the Knife’s 2013 album Shaking the Habitual, makes an earthshaking appearance on “Crucifixion,” a slowly building piece that increasingly sounds like it’s on the verge of toppling. There’s no steady beat to ground her stirring vibrato, just a thicket of quavering instruments, digital and physical, that pulse until a frenetic piano and drum breakdown ushers her out.
The album’s spoken-word segments return continually to the concept of twilight, a charged and liminal state where daylight ebbs away and the clean lines between seen objects tend to blur. “I confused you with the twilight/Confusing myself with you,” says guest vocalist Fanny Pankara Chuquimia on the tranquil meditation “Crest.” In this dusk, boundaries between people—between the self and the other, the “I” and the “you”—soften. Thoughts and desires become harder to constrain inside a single body. Feeling bleeds from skin to skin, and the individual dissolves into the environment.
Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power: There are a great many systems of harm that survive on habit. Enough people have accepted that it is normal to lock others away in cages and send them out to fight fires when the fires get out of hand. Enough people agree upon the many acts of violence sustaining this and other countries that the atrocity is naturalized, a distant but constant pillar of a certain way of life. These systems are bigger than any one person and yet sustain themselves on individuals networked in covert agreement, people who act as porous cells for mass behavior. What would it take to agree on something else—something less painful, where fewer of us die? In its hypnotic and generative confusion, ORCORARA 2010 bores open a portal to a life hiding just beyond this one. | 2020-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | May 14, 2020 | 7.7 | 9ac202c2-0096-4765-bfb0-86d4474a1f4d | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The follow up to 2016's revelatory Islah offers another showcase for the Baton Rouge rapper's fully formed and gloriously weird personality. | The follow up to 2016's revelatory Islah offers another showcase for the Baton Rouge rapper's fully formed and gloriously weird personality. | Kevin Gates: I’M HIM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-gates-im-him/ | I’M HIM | Somewhere along the way, Kevin Gates got buff. It wasn't a magical Gucci Mane transformation, but the once dad-bodded Louisiana rapper is now fit enough to be the subject of a Men’s Health video, where he outlined an exhaustive regime that includes rigorous dieting and 2 a.m. weight training. That same dedication he brings to working out—or to practicing oral sex on mangos, as he revealed when that Men’s Health segment inevitably took one of those weird, sexual turns that Gates always seems to invite—permeates just about everything he does, including his music.
I'm Him is Gates’ official follow-up to his revelatory 2016 album Islah, although that ignores all the very good EPs and mixtapes he released in the interim. Parsing the distinction between albums and mixtapes is usually a fool’s errand, especially for an artist like Gates who mostly works without guest features, name producers, and other big-budget trappings. But I’m Him differentiates itself from his non-album releases in one key way: The hooks are magnificent, his most boisterous and fine-tuned since Islah.
Lots of rappers sing, of course, but few seem to enjoy it as much as Gates. Even the most naturally tuneful SoundCloud rappers from the last few years sing as if out of solemn obligation. Gates bellows with a zeal rarely heard since Fetty Wap’s 2015 singles run; even when he's singing about pain and regret, he offers the go-for-broke gusto most of us save for a hot shower. “By My Lonely” runs a scant two minutes, but its hook is so monumental the track hits like an epic.
Gates has carried a full-length project by himself before, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable hearing him do it again. Seventeen songs with no guest features should be a recipe for exhaustion, yet there's hardly a trace of fat on I’m Him, and most tracks clock in at about the length of a Ramones song. “Push It” belongs in a Rocky montage, while “What I Like” pits Gates’ voice against a blown-out bass rumble. There are fewer sex songs on the album than usual, too, which is nice. Wonderful as it may be, Gates' voice is not the aphrodisiac he thinks it is.
He includes two bravely sentimental standouts. “Betta For You” is an apology to the daughter he vows to do right by (“Your mother had you waterbirth and I skipped out, I was scared/I was afraid to be a failure, prayed my faith would prevail,”) while on “Fly Again’ he offers a grandiose love letter to his wife. “We the reciprocal of one another, come from the same star/We got the same moles under our nose and we got the same scars,” he raps, his voice dripping with sincerity.
If I’m Him feels just a hair less essential than some of Gates’ previous releases, it’s because there isn’t all that much new to see. Gates folds a bit of DaBaby’s irritable yammer into his flow on “Facts” and on “Pretend” he flirts with a dancehall patois, both of which he more or less pulls off. But innovation has never been integral to a Kevin Gates project. The draw remains, as always, hearing one of rap’s most well-rounded personalities be his unabashed self, whether that means being a hardhead, a hornball, an unguarded romantic, or all of the above. | 2019-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bread Winners’ Association | October 2, 2019 | 7.4 | 9ac3e053-6e58-420c-ba02-d01e3775a0d4 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Gucci Mane, once one of the most prolific and popular Southern rappers, has done an LP with Kreayshawn sidekick V-Nasty. Even more surprising? BAYTL is a competent, sometimes fun, low-stakes rap album. | Gucci Mane, once one of the most prolific and popular Southern rappers, has done an LP with Kreayshawn sidekick V-Nasty. Even more surprising? BAYTL is a competent, sometimes fun, low-stakes rap album. | Gucci Mane / V-Nasty: BAYTL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16133-baytl/ | BAYTL | It's hard to determine what the biggest surprise is regarding BAYTL: that it wasn't a joke, or that it isn't a joke. As far as the former goes: Yes, this thing exists. Gucci Mane, once one of the most prolific and popular rappers in the South, has done a full album with V-Nasty, the Kreayshawn sidekick who's famous only for being a white person that has vigorously defended her usage of, and her further right to use, the n-word. As for the latter, BAYTL is a surprisingly competent and sometimes fun low-stakes rap album, far from the disaster it could've been.
Though there are many ways in which the album might have gone off the rails, it's fairly easy to pinpoint why it often succeeds. One major reason is that Gucci and V-Nasty smartly decided to let underground big shot Zaytoven-- long one of Gucci's favorite and most fruitful collaborators-- handle the lion's share of the production. His beats are workshops in space and melody, stretching keyboard notes (that mimic organs) like they're taffy until the rappers have a melodic, yet unobtrusive, canvas to paint on. In Gucci's heyday the two were a constant source of gold, with Zay's production pairing harmoniously with Gucci's playful, inventive flows. On BAYTL, Zay is probably asked to carry too much of the load, and his effectiveness becomes dulled over the course of the album. But allowing him to produce nearly the entire record brings professionalism, cohesion, and coherence to a project that threatened to have none of the above.
V-Nasty, for her part, also acquits herself better than you would think. Her voice is atonal in a way that's more off-putting than interesting, and her flow can get clumsy and cluttered at times, but she's more or less up to the task of writing half of a decent album, which is more than you could say for some rappers famous for being actual rappers. She gets by well enough on swagger and brashness, and without the baggage her contributions would scan as acceptingly perfunctory. It would be hard to argue that the world needs V-Nasty's rapping-- and it doesn't, obviously-- but she'll get clowned for being a try-hard white girl when in reality there were at least four worse rappers in XXL's "2011 Freshman Class."
In a cruel and sad twist of irony, easily the best verse on the album belongs to Slim Dunkin, who shines on "Push Ups". Dunkin was murdered in Atlanta last month as he prepared for the filming of the video for that song. If there's anything truly exciting to be pulled from BAYTL, it's Slim's marked improvement as a writer, something that makes his premature death even sadder.
As for Gucci himself, he sounds sober and engaged, which is a step up from where he was for most of last year. He's on autopilot here, but he works so well with Zaytoven that the only drawback is that it allows you to dream of how good a full collaborative album between the two would've been three years ago. Gucci's major issue now-- even more than his lost affinity for cinematic imagery-- is that humor and creativity have been all but sapped from his writing, leaving us an MC whose aggressive braggadocio comes off as unnecessarily defensive. When, late on the album, Gucci raps, "I'm not romantic, but I cook my dope candlelit," it's as stunning as if you ran into a good friend you thought you'd never see again. But, just as quickly, that Gucci disappears.
BAYTL is a record that, contrary to the hopes of some and the fears of others, isn't a huge failure or massive embarrassment. The talent of all involved-- fading in some, and bubbling in others-- ends up taking control of the sideshow. But with that said, the album, more than anything, is a bizarre and unique artifact of rap music in 2011. It's a record that marks the time when the "Gucci Gucci" rapper's homegirl became notorious enough to do an album with Gucci Mane, and when Gucci Mane had fallen far enough to decide to go along with it. | 2012-01-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-01-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | January 5, 2012 | 4.9 | 9ac4fc95-826b-4066-a633-47cf6bf74ec9 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Some may know the Chicago pastor only as the source of Kanye’s “Father Stretch My Hands.” Documenting his ’70s fusions of gospel, funk, and soul, Numero Group’s box set captures the full sweep of his legacy. | Some may know the Chicago pastor only as the source of Kanye’s “Father Stretch My Hands.” Documenting his ’70s fusions of gospel, funk, and soul, Numero Group’s box set captures the full sweep of his legacy. | Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir: I Shall Wear a Crown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pastor-t-l-barrett-and-the-youth-for-c-i-shall-wear-a-crown/ | I Shall Wear a Crown | It’s a child’s question: Where does God live? In Heaven or outer space, perhaps, or maybe a house of worship right here on Earth. Asking “where” unspools the “how” and the “if,” and things only get more complicated from there.
For T.L. Barrett and his followers, God lived at 5512 S. Indiana Avenue in Chicago, the address where the 23-year-old pastor stepped into the pulpit of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in 1967. Barrett’s own adolescent struggles had called him back to the South Side neighborhood he’d known as a boy; his mission manifested itself in the Youth for Christ Choir. Barrett’s fusion of gospel music with more contemporary idioms attracted a passionate following in his home city, even drawing the likes of Maurice White and Donny Hathaway to its pews. The charismatic minister expanded his local outreach as it grew in popularity, later leading his own Life Center Church of God in Christ.
Barrett’s optimistic approach to his ministry shines across I Shall Wear a Crown, a new 5xLP Numero Group box set. In more recent years, Barrett has attracted attention from a wider national audience via Kanye West, who sampled his “Father I Stretch My Hands” on The Life of Pablo. Before he used Barrett’s devotions to frame bars about a ruined t-shirt, West had wondered aloud how he could find a way to talk to God again. Barrett’s work suggests the best place to start is in song.
Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir released Like a Ship… (Without a Sail), their first record together, in 1971. Light in the Attic reissued it in 2010; it remains a singular jewel. The distinction of youth over children’s choir is important: The singers were a bunch of 12-to-19-year-olds, which is to say, young people staring over the precipice, wondering where their lives were going to go. Their collective voices capture tender vulnerability and earnest hope, seeking relief and protection at the edge of uncertainty. The record’s stunning highlights—“Nobody Knows,” “It’s Me O Lord,” “Like a Ship”—are wide-open reaches for deliverance, offered in sweeping, passionate harmonic layers. Individual agonies dissolve in the magnificent din of the singers’ adulation. It’s painful, frightening, and lonely to feel cast out on the open ocean, but even as troubles endure, they never have to be borne alone.
The other four parts of I Shall Wear a Crown are stuffed with gems, and their details illuminate what make Like a Ship such a sparkling prize. Though death is necessarily a central theme of gospel music, Barrett’s selections search for love, redemption, hope, and clarity. They celebrate the abundant opportunities to be joyful on Earth before the hour comes to shuffle off the mortal coil, a massive nondenominational benefit of Barrett’s youth advocacy.
“Do Not Pass Me By,” the lead cut to Like a Ship’s follow-up, is a rollicking demand for recognition; “After the Rain” and “So Many Years” are vibrant and especially uplifting standouts from Do Not Pass Me By Vol. 1. Barrett doses counterculture with piety on “Turn on With Jesus,” an after-school special in song form that escalates into near-psychedelic shrieks at its end. The astonishing brassy peals of “I Shall Wear a Crown” establish the track as a rightfully representative title for the set, swaggering toward a roaring conclusion that hits like a platinum freight train.
Barrett’s arrangements fold the profound influence of Black American gospel music back on itself; they pull the spiritual playing field closer to ear level by reinforcing his ecclesiastic ends with popular sounds indebted to the genre. Western popular music would be nothing without Black gospel: Sister Rosetta Tharpe electrified rock’n’roll to life in her own two hands. Church choirs were the crucible for Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, and scores more. Barrett’s references are occasionally direct: The electric piano on Do Not Pass Me By Vol. II came straight from Wonder’s Talking Book, and “Pray, Pray, Pray” invokes Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.”
Digging into funkier grooves, Do Not Pass Me By Vol. II and I Found the Answer further toy with spiritual/secular boundaries. “I Want to Be in Love with You” begins like a potential Chess Records hit before Barrett pivots the narrator’s point of view. The results of Barrett’s reorganizations are sometimes surprising, as when the centuries-old Lord’s Prayer becomes a soul-funk jam where “Thy kingdom come/Thy will be done” is a hook slicker than sacramental chrism. Likewise, “My Country Tis of Thee” takes on the heavy poignancy of young people trying to believe in a better future for a country that has abused and exploited them for generations.
Barrett’s approach emphasizes the underlying two-way bond of sounds and the spirit: Music can be a vehicle for praise and celebration, but also an everyday place to commune with God. Even better, these fulfilling returns need no specific religious affiliation: The name to the feeling of surrendering oneself to a song doesn’t have to fall on a God-or-nothing binary, as anyone who’s lost themselves that way can testify. So if heavenly spoils reveal themselves in an organist’s exultant vamps, or in the euphoric shouts of a choir, where else might they be? I Shall Wear a Crown makes it easy to conclude that the difference between the ecstasy of feeling moved by a greater something in a church pew, on a dance floor, or in a concert hall is, functionally, nothing.
Elsewhere, Barrett’s gestures at pop music are looser, but no less distinct. The “I don’t know”s of “What Would You Give” recall the same in “Something,” but they find hope in their unknowing instead of chasing George Harrison’s anguish. Likewise, the choir nods to Donny Hathaway in “I Am So Glad,” drifting over a seasonal refrain that echoes the singer’s sublime take on “You’ve Got a Friend.” The lingering message—Your pal Jesus loves you—fits nicely with the notion at the heart of Carole King’s original, which is that deep and loving friendship can be a form of grace extended without divine intervention. (That moody WASP messiah James Taylor inspired both “Something” and “You’ve Got a Friend” is surely some other cosmic joke.)
Barrett continued to develop his ministry after moving on from record-making in the late 1970s, eventually building a facility known as the Prayer Palace. Despite his decades-long career at the pulpit, Barrett’s sermons get surprisingly slim representation on I Shall Wear a Crown. “Dry Bones in the Valley” revels in the transcendent live environment of Barrett and his congregation in action, while “How Would You Like to Have a Nice Hawaiian Punch” offers a glimpse at Barrett’s passionate commitment to engaging his flock with political participation.
In 1988, one of Barrett’s projects was accused of being an alleged pyramid scheme. The set’s liner notes address the scandal head-on, maintaining Barrett’s denials of bad-faith dealings. Barrett fulfilled the terms of his redress, which included paying back more than $1.3 million over the next decade. He continued his other church operations, and seems to be in good enough standing that NPR recently hosted him for their mild-mannered Tiny Desk series. Restitution is not the same as forgiveness, which can only be extended by those harmed; the truth of the matter, like questions of fallibility and the Holy Trinity, may ultimately find its answer only in searching the grayer chambers of the heart.
It’s hard to come away from I Shall Wear a Crown and not reconsider what it is to be moved by a piece of music. Returning to the query of holy residencies: there’s something rare and golden that lives in sounds that move the soul, in private and secret moments of joy, in other fleeting connections that feel like part of some bigger unnamed web. In his final book, A Man Without a Country, avowed humanist Kurt Vonnegut proposed an epitaph: “The only proof he needed of the existence of God was music.” Thank god, whatever it is, for that.
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. | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Numero Group | September 27, 2021 | 8.4 | 9accdad1-3ebf-4162-bd71-69e33bbc7f9c | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
After years of making somber, traditionalist folk on dueling acoustic guitars, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan expand their palette on the duo’s most engaging and diverse record to date. | After years of making somber, traditionalist folk on dueling acoustic guitars, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan expand their palette on the duo’s most engaging and diverse record to date. | The Milk Carton Kids: All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-milk-carton-kids-all-the-things-that-i-did-and-all-the-things-that-i-didnt-do/ | All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do | The traditionalist folk duo the Milk Carton Kids put Stravinsky’s adage that limitations set art free to the test. For years, they adhered to the strict parameters they established on their 2011 debut, Prologue: two acoustic guitars, their harmonizing voices, and nothing else. Even after the band began sharing bills with bubblegum folk groups like Mumford & Sons, their music remained thorny and somber. Onstage, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan perform their generally downtempo compositions with similar solemnity; dressed in funereal suits, half-facing each other, they make even their sunnier songs feel a bit gothic.
But All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn't Do finally signals a change: Pattengale and Ryan have loosened their restrictions, inviting a cast of session pros that includes Wilco’s Pat Sansone to add splashes of piano, strings, and thumping drums to their songs. The additions are often subtle—conceptually, they have more in common with Beach House’s quiet amalgamation of synth tones than with Bob Dylan going electric—but they have an outsized impact on the group’s dynamics. These songs continue the world-weary narratives of earlier tracks like “Michigan” and “Years Gone By,” albeit with heightened urgency: Pattengale overcame a cancer diagnosis and the dissolution of a long-term relationship before recording got underway. Paradoxically, though, the album crackles with newfound levity and muscle.
All the Things is the Milk Carton Kids’ most engaging and sonically diverse record to date. Unfortunately, most of that variety is front-loaded into the album’s first half. Opening track “Just Look at Us Now,” a rueful reflection on idealism that could easily have gotten lost on an earlier release, is powered by undercurrents of cello and lap steel that amplify its bittersweet memories. “Nothing Is Real” offers stale commentary on the dehumanizing effects of technology but is redeemed by an airy staccato piano and cheery percussion that compensate for its shallow sentiment. But, past the halfway point, the album’s lead single, “One More for the Road,” proves its least thrilling and most heavy-handed moment. No amount of self-deprecating commentary can change the fact that the 10-minute track is a lukewarm attempt at an opus. Bookended by an elegiac verse, the meat of the song is an almost proggy guitar interlude that never reaches a satisfying peak.
That may be because the duo’s skillful guitar interplay, which often sounds like an Appalachian take on the National’s syncopated riffs, has become so predictable. Some of the album’s most exciting songs scale back the guitars, making room for intricate vocal melodies. Pattengale and Ryan sing “You Break My Heart,” a woozy waltz in the vein of the Ink Spots, with such a playful sweetness that it can be easy to miss its mournful message. “Younger Years” successfully combines Townes Van Zandt’s cowboy grit with a burbling Simon & Garfunkel harmony. All the Things may only mark the first step in the Milk Carton Kids’ transformation—but, in eliminating so many of the constraints they once placed on their music, they have already crafted the richest, most accessible songs of their career. | 2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | July 2, 2018 | 6.8 | 9ace9ab5-eb2e-4960-9d4f-38c4cec2e310 | Max Savage Levenson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-savage levenson/ | |
The second album from the Chicago MC is lighter and more fun than his debut, focusing on his incredibly versatile voice within a warm palette of sludgy R&B and neo-funk. | The second album from the Chicago MC is lighter and more fun than his debut, focusing on his incredibly versatile voice within a warm palette of sludgy R&B and neo-funk. | Smino: NOIR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smino-noir/ | NOIR | Listening to Smino’s second album NOIR led me to an essay James Baldwin wrote for The New York Times called, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” Baldwin makes his point simply in the title but continues in the first paragraph: “Language...is meant to define the other—and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.” That came to mind when I read something Smino tweeted a few weeks ago, “dnt correct my grammar hoe I spelt it dat way kuz das high say it,” which also feels a bit like an echo of a Dunbar poem. Either way, Smino is working within tradition by bending his words to his will and through his Blackness.
NOIR is above all an album about language: Smino throws a million different voices into the mix, sometimes all at once. His default singing voice—which he uses to rap as well—is weightless and honeyed to the point that it’s hard to tell if he’s in a falsetto. He shrieks, whispers, squeaks, mumbles, and sometimes stops just a few notes from outright yodeling. He doubles his vocals and self-harmonizes everywhere, and sometimes he breaks a song down into a doo-wop vamp that could easily double as an audition for Boyz II Men—if D’Angelo was singing lead. On “MERLOT” Smino and one other singer conjure up a knotty harmony like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
All of those vocal tricks help Smino shape words to make them rhyme unexpectedly or to unlock new spaces inside them by folding them up into his breath. “I'm flee like 10 puppies/These Japanese/I don't drink champagne/But fuck it, clack the drinks.” You could sing that sentence to yourself a million times and never arrive at the way Smino raps it. Listen to Smino rap it once and you’ll never revert back from the upswing at the end of “10 puppies” so that it somehow rhymes with “Japanese” or the way he makes a four-syllable utterance of “champagne” feel like a graceful pirouette.
Smino never explains or calls attention to them but these moments are everywhere on NOIR sometimes to the point of bogging things down with cleverness. On the same song he makes “real freaky” sound like “Rafiki” to force a Lion King reference and accomplish nothing else. On another he rhymes “Shibuya” with “she boo, yeah” and “see-through dress.” The production is so warm and soft and despite all the maneuvers, Smino is so understated that it sometimes sounds like he’s whisper singing brags under a velvet blanket.
For the most part, NOIR is a raunchy bedroom party album where Smino would rather put a wet towel under the hotel bathroom door than be stuck in the club. He’s also downright hilarious and endlessly sassy. On “HOOPTI” he calls back to his single “Netflix & Dusse” and raps his idea of a perfect night: “Chicken strips and scary movies—romance.” At one point, on the throbbing R&B track “Z4L,” Smino snowballs into an all-out Bugs Bunny impression and ends up saying, “Check my color palette/White just like a bunny wabbit,” without breaking the mood, but also without making a point. He does this often: a funny voice that’s just a funny voice, a line that’s just clever and nothing else. Still, the revelation of his verses usually only clicks in on the third or fourth listen and can still feel like a discovery.
He’s has spent the last couple years helping build the artist collective Zero Fatigue, which also includes the singer Ravyn Lenae and the producer Monte Booker, who has helped Smino arrive at a warm palette of sludgy R&B and neo-funk here. Thanks to Booker in particular, many of the songs on NOIR are freckled with weird and fidgeting sounds. None is more forward about it than “KLINK,” which crumples a spooky clavichord or a harpsichord riff into a dramatic banger. Smino also produced “KRUSHED ICE” himself, giving it an enormous and unfurnished room of a beat meant for whispering weird flexes—it sounds like a Valee song even before he shows up. Almost everywhere else, Smino gives a precise delivery, but here he’s made up the room for Valee and burrowed into his flow.
NOIR is much less serious and autobiographical than Smino’s debut. Still, there are moments when he turns morose, clenches his fist, and sings explicitly about his Blackness. On “Spinz,” a sludge of trad-jazz inflected trap R&B, Smino chants: “It was gruesome/What we grew from/But we grew some in the end/Ain’t enough to be where you from/Had to be mixed with some Indian.” On “SUMMER SALT” he kicks off a playful gymnastic floor routine of a flow with: “What do they care? I need enough for my kids’ kids’ kids” before making a “Mortal Kombat” “finish him” sex joke (his girl’s a Scorpio). It might say less about himself up front, but NOIR feels like the real Smino. | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Zero Fatigue | November 12, 2018 | 7.6 | 9aceb6ea-7a8a-42ec-a3c7-a45e2647b83d | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The Swedish artist better known as Yung Lean makes an unexpected pivot on his long-running side project, swapping out sad rap and vaporwave to embrace his inner crooner. | The Swedish artist better known as Yung Lean makes an unexpected pivot on his long-running side project, swapping out sad rap and vaporwave to embrace his inner crooner. | jonatan leandoer96: Sugar World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonatan-leandoer127-sugar-world/ | Sugar World | In the past decade, Yung Lean has traveled well beyond the novelty-rap origins of “Ginseng Strip 2002,” moving from trance to 2-step to art pop. But he’s never really been able to escape the fact that he was first known to the world as a white 15-year-old making joke raps. The jonatan leandoer96 side project and its predecessor Jonatan Leandoer127 have, over the years, offered a respite from the baggage that comes with the name Yung Lean—not just his fans’ expectations for a certain type of rap music, but also the air of appropriation that colored the project’s origins. If Yung Lean had introduced himself to the world first as jonatan leandoer96, he might have been regarded more like the Swedish King Krule than the stepchild of Lil B. The double-edged irony of viral success is that without the meme appeal that initially built his audience, he wouldn’t have a built-in following for his subsequent wanderings, and would likely still be toiling in obscurity.
Though he used to keep his two projects siloed, Yung Lean and jonatan leandoer96 have increasingly converged as the respective experimentation of one inevitably feeds into the other; the haunted piano ballads and post-punk riffs of Yung Lean’s 2022 album Stardust fit snugly within the leandoer96 palette. While the first leandoer96 releases possessed the diaristic aimlessness of a sketchbook, his new record Sugar World is tightly produced and precisely programmed, marking both a confident step forward and a somewhat unexpected pivot for the artist, regardless of moniker. Here, Lean sounds less interested in hypnagogic pop than classic Britpop.
Lean benefits from the grounding presence of Danish multimedia artist Frederik Valentin, with whom he seems to have found an unexpected kinship. As one-fourth of the thumb-nosing butt-rock group Hard Rock Power Spray, Valentin experienced early success with his edgelord antics, opening tours for Green Day and Bloodhound Gang, joining the Warped Tour, and even releasing a concert-movie-cum-porno called Rock N Fuck. But time has a way of wearing down even the artists most invested in shock value, and Valentin seems to have matured into a respectable avant-garde polymath. Big riffs and dick jokes gave way to loops and reverb, adult film soundtracks swapped for Chris Marker live scores. However unexpected it might seem, the slightly elder Valentin offers a role model for Lean, as the rapper continues his own transition from adolescent transgressive to dignified auteur.
Though the leandoer96 project has grown in scope and confidence with each release, it has remained firmly in the bedroom until now; Sugar World drapes Lean in velvet and syrup, with a lush sound befitting the cornball crooner he plays on the album’s cover. The production is more melodic and uptempo than the sparse compositions and ambient soundscapes of Valentin’s recent years, but he’s nevertheless softened since his punk days, arriving at a singular combination of glam rock and indie twee. Lean has always had strong taste in collaborators, and like Gud and Sherman of the Sad Boys collective, Valentin fills out Lean’s aesthetic universe with textured shading, infusing Sugar World with the kind of whimsy Jon Brion brought to Late Registration.
The dissonant shapelessness and heavy reverb of 2016’s Psychopath Ballads mimicked Hippos in Tanks labelmates like Dean Blunt and James Ferraro, but Sugar World is more like the second coming of Jens Lekman. Polished arrangements replace the slapdash Garageband drafts that populated previous leandoer96 releases, and tracks unfold like miniature suites. At once hard rocking and sweetly melodramatic, Valentin’s treatment positions Lean as a Bowie or Bolan-esque figure, a chameleonic icon shifting into his blue-eyed soul period. “Nightmare Amusement Park” effortlessly glides from guitar-heavy power pop into a glistening symphony as Lean’s own voice oozes in and out of Auto-Tune. On “Open (Copenhagen Freestyle),” Lean is in pure piano-ballad mode, before a talkbox-like guitar joins in to duet.
There are still traces of a lo-fi sensibility—Valentin generally favors a simple drum machine over full percussion—but the freeform warblings of the leandoer96 project have been molded into a new shape. The jangly keys and sweeping strings of “Rivers of Another Town” channel Camera Obscura, and the clean lead guitar of “If I’m Born I Have to Live” has an echo of Phoenix. At other moments, Valentin and Lean flirt with a classic FM radio sound. The opening bars of “Nightmare Amusement Park” riff on Kiss’ “Strutter,” while the guitar solo on the title track blazes into “All the Young Dudes” territory.
Just as he once played the rapper, Lean has searched for new characters to embody, and here he summons his inner wedding singer. Abandoning his monotone rap flow, Lean stretches into the upper reaches of his register, the cracks and chokes of his unvarnished voice offering an evocative counterpoint to the blushing twinkle of Valentin’s production. On “Swedish Elvis Storm,” he reaches an angelic falsetto, swaying like a doo-wop crooner standing on a corner. Some of his lyrics still mimic rap bars—“When I was a young one/Got my head sprung”—but Lean’s writing conforms to pop structure more than ever, distilling it to a refined simplicity. There’s still an occasional clumsiness to the phrasing and delivery, but he’s learned to exploit that as a vehicle for an almost adorable earnestness, serenading the unseen lovers in his phone. Lean’s accented voice achieves a distinct emotional affect, where stumbling and half-uttered words stand in for a broken heart.
What skeptics misunderstand about Yung Lean is that his appeal was never solely about irony: It was about a kind of dissonance between the profanity and imperfection of Lean’s lyrics and the dreamy, frequently gorgeous production that served as a backdrop. Lean was always drawn in by the sublime, but he offset it with the juvenile deflection of a kid uncomfortable with sincere emotion. Over the last decade of his career, he’s struggled not only to be taken seriously by others, but to take himself seriously as a voice capable of making beautiful noise. With Sugar World, he finally lets all the sweetness and gentle feeling built up inside come tumbling out, stripped of any macho defense mechanisms. While it’s the kind of stylistic switch that might at first seem like another gimmick, Lean lets his heart bleed freely like never before. | 2023-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Year0001 | February 15, 2023 | 7.6 | 9ad24a78-d62f-4ca3-9310-b34b7a7a4e51 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Executive produced by Thom Yorke, Chris Clark’s latest album is warm and gratifying, offering the veteran electronic musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate production. | Executive produced by Thom Yorke, Chris Clark’s latest album is warm and gratifying, offering the veteran electronic musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate production. | Clark: Sus Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clark-sus-dog/ | Sus Dog | Like the shifting atmosphere of a distant planet, Chris Clark’s music is subject to violent extremes. With little warning, a reassuring beat might furiously morph into an instrumental storm, breaking just as suddenly into a diamond rain of twinkling synths. The British musician’s delight in wrong-footing expectations has been one of the few constants in a career that has swerved wildly—from tricky IDM to off-kilter hip-hop beats, and from blistering techno to hushed minimalism. At his propulsive best, Clark dazzles with both the density and dynamism of his music. But in contrast to the explosive changes that have taken place from record to record, Clark’s work has also undergone another, more subtle evolution. In recent years, as he has amassed a growing body of soundtracks for film and TV, he has developed an ear for emptiness, one that has both heightened the drama of his music and accentuated its suggestion of three-dimensional space.
The architecture of Clark’s production has never sounded airier or more fluid than it does on his latest record, Sus Dog, where he foregrounds one instrument he has largely left in the margins: his voice. Executive produced by Thom Yorke, Sus Dog is warm and immediately gratifying, offering the musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate and sometimes breakneck production.
Historically, Clark’s experiments with voice have yielded mixed results. By turns angelic and menacing, the vocal accents on 2017’s Death Peak are crucial to that record’s apocalyptic appeal, while the garbled, ultra-processed growls and chanted raps on 2009’s Totems Flare have aged poorly. Here, rather than slapping his voice on top of the mix, Clark has learned to accommodate it. Working with a more limited palette of alternately boxy and lightspeed synths interwoven with acoustic instruments, Sus Dog is an ornate but fleet-footed synth-pop album brimming with some of the loveliest music he’s ever made. Clark glides over his beats, using his high, plaintive voice to nudge a song into gear before soaring on its pent-up momentum. “Clutch Pearlers” levitates over a bed of delicate music-box plucks, while on “Town Crank” he surfs a blaring synth pulse reminiscent of Suicide at their most antagonistic, his voice rising above the chaos as the track veers into the red.
With the exception of Arca’s mentorship with Björk, no electronic producer has had a more reliable singing coach than Clark under the tutelage of Thom Yorke. At first you might think that Yorke himself is tearing into “Town Crank,” but the similarity between the two men is limited to their beatific falsettos. Clark’s voice, while handsome, lacks the lower range and piercing, corroded edge that Yorke brings to Radiohead’s most emotive tracks, a quality that he more than makes up for with the sheer violence of his production. Apart from the bridge of “Bully,” where he sighs an ultra-Yorkean line—“Drift off in traffic/Colonized by your phone”—in a particularly Yorkean way, he largely forgoes replicating any of his mentor’s vocal tics, even when they harmonize together on “Medicine.”
The power of Clark’s singing derives from the shapes that his voice makes out of air as much as the content of the songwriting itself. He opens “Alyosha” with a tinny a cappella refrain, repeating “I want to believe” in a hurt tone before his voice cleaves into separate spheres that pit mature practicality against raw adolescent distrust. “Forest” is almost entirely instrumental until a bright, multi-tracked chorus to rival Fleet Foxes rises brilliantly out of the mist. In one of the record’s most striking moments, at the title track’s emotional nadir, he leaps an octave from a mournful croon into an aching note of despair as a detuned synth bleeds over the song’s swelling acoustics like a bruise.
Because Clark’s production is so finely detailed, one risk in making the leap to conventional songwriting is that his words might appear crude in comparison. But his approach as a lyricist remains resolutely off-kilter, pitched between vague but highly evocative ribbons of text and a clear-eyed sensitivity that approaches the unknowability of human behavior from odd angles. “Alyosha,” a song whose title might be a reference to the virtuous but passive protagonist from The Brothers Karamazov, is full of unanswerable, emotionally naked pleas for understanding that are met in turn by one of the producer’s most scorching and merciless techno refrains. On “Dismissive,” he achieves a Zen-like clarity, recognizing cruelty for the shortcoming that it is before transforming derision into drive. “And they can be as cynical and dismissive as they like” he croons, “In fact please carry on/It’s all fuel to the fire.”
For years, Clark’s best work has toggled between beauty and brutality, blistering noise and otherworldly calm. Sus Dog is also situated between those two poles, but in leveraging his voice like this, Clark has discovered not only a new way to guide listeners through his maze-like production, but also of expressing the strain of navigating such wild terrain. On the closing “Ladder” he sings wearily over mournful piano about “living on a ladder stuck between two floors,” which itself could be a bleakly beautiful metaphor for the zigzagging course of his own music. On Sus Dog, Clark harnesses his career’s wild atmospheric extremes; it’s as though for the first time, he truly felt the weather in his bones. | 2023-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Throttle | May 31, 2023 | 7.7 | 9ad53b2b-77f5-44fd-ac25-e74266dbf4c2 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
The classics kid in me craves noble grandeur-- craft-happy shit with more than meets the rods and cones, less is ... | The classics kid in me craves noble grandeur-- craft-happy shit with more than meets the rods and cones, less is ... | Isolée: We Are Monster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4164-we-are-monster/ | We Are Monster | The classics kid in me craves noble grandeur-- craft-happy shit with more than meets the rods and cones, less is always more (except with clothes), suggestive-seductive vs. the once-off gunfuck. Full-on body music's great, sure, but so is porno, and with that shit I'd much rather wax new flesh than drag my stylus off the same old 10-second loop. Same time, Intelligent Body Music's as much a nightmare as Intelligent Anal, both a prefab excuse for pleasure-lack. So we're stuck in this immediacy=better rut, when really the best stuff cross-genre-- cross-platform, cross-media-- has instant funk, but with enough tricks for prolonged appeal.
Liking We Are Monster is easy. Isolée aren't bangers but they groove hard enough; melodies are pretty but most times we have to look for them (no lead vox or riff jihad per se). Tracks aren't afraid to be songs ("Face B"), and songs aren't afraid to be tracks ("Jelly Baby / Fish"). Everything's pleasant in other words, non-threatening like the cutesy-est Morr Music lullaby, but physical enough that you could get away with some great normal-person dancing. There are guitar sounds on a few tracks too, if that's important ("Today" sounds like "Do You Realize?"), and traceable horizontal A-->B trajectory in songs with actual movements and quantifiable progress. No need for all the "it's about size! it's about expansion!" apologies people make for their favorite loops.
As for loving this record-- letting it problematize itself with spins and learning to let it offend-- well, We Are Monster has the depth if you have the time. Yep, here's a fun record that's a work-for-it, in-the-details record, too. Behind the choked-vocals groove of, say, "Enrico" are countless micro-surprises (check how the kicks break down differently each turnaround, or how the downbeat finally drops deceptively mid-bar instead of on the loop's head), structured flips with chess-like anticipation (the guitar-like scratches function percussively at first, their color stuck in overtones until the song needs them in full), and avalanching momentum not from Isolée stuffing ideas half-baked, but from letting the seeds of lines grow, branch out, and tangle. Not sure we can talk of "Golden Age IDM" or even "Golden Age Techno" yet, but something like the Copeland-does-Glam gem "Schrapnell" seems so effortless, breathes so carefree, years from now crits might accuse it of sounding timeless-- maybe even of being so.
The rest of the tracks have their own self-revealing logic, obeying the beat but never in dependency to it. Honestly, you could drop the drum sounds off "Madchen mit Hase" and the song would still kill a floor, the rhythms of its composite parts boasting good spine, serving the melody before decorating the dancefloor. No gesture's incidental; the simplest blip plays for both a greater purpose and its own passing punchline. Even the second-trackiest number, "Do Re Mi", fronts a perplexing guitar jingle so it can alley-oop with drones of the same progression and a goofy italo-disco melody of 180-degree mood change, then the polar-opposite timbre. These songs are well-poised and well-developed and terrifyingly autonomous-- so much so I'm afraid they're no longer Isolée's anymore. On that note: Yeah, while I wish We Are Monster was an Album w/Overarching Concerns and Worldview, not just a Bunch Of Sweet Similar-Sounding Stand-Alone Tracks, I'm also convinced that in fact, a worldview is there, and probably an exciting one at that. I just haven't cracked one yet-- or just won't be able to. | 2005-06-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-06-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Playhouse | June 14, 2005 | 8.4 | 9ae12601-8d96-432e-9c19-a4796aa5584f | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Originally released in 1997, the Britpop band’s second album feels like a crash course in the history of UK rock, zipping through glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. | Originally released in 1997, the Britpop band’s second album feels like a crash course in the history of UK rock, zipping through glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. | Supergrass: In It for the Money (Remastered Expanded Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/supergrass-in-it-for-the-money-remastered-expanded-edition/ | In It for the Money (Remastered Expanded Edition) | Indulgence can be its own reward. Take In It for the Money, the wild, careening sophomore set from Supergrass. Flush with success and fresh out of adolescence, the Britpop trio embraced all the new adventures heading their way, a journey that steadily pulled them away from the frenzied pleasures of their 1995 debut I Should Coco. Where their peers sang of common people and wonderwalls, Supergrass concerned themselves with teenage thrills: buzzing on speed, getting busted by cops, telling dirty jokes, and hanging out with friends. At the center of the album was the smash hit “Alright,” an incandescent pop song about being young, dumb, and free. Other bands might have chased the charts by attempting to re-create the spirit of “Alright.” Supergrass instead chose to see how fast and far they could run.
In It for the Money isn’t so much a departure from I Should Coco as a progression. Often, it feels as if Supergrass are attempting to offer a crash course in the history of British rock, cramming in elements borrowed from the swinging 1960s and 1970s classic rock, then filtering these well-known sounds through the irreverence of punk. They still sound vigorous—witness the rampaging single “Richard III”—but they lack the exuberance that fueled their first album. The shift was necessary for their long-term survival. “Alright” threatened to pigeonhole Supergrass as loveable teenage imps, a role they played to the hilt in the song’s supremely silly video. (They played their part so well that Steven Spielberg believed Supergrass would be ideal candidates for a gen-X spin on the Monkees.)
Supergrass turned down Spielberg, choosing instead to do the things normal rock’n’roll bands do: play an enormous amount of shows before hunkering down in the studio to make another record. It helped that Supergrass had arrived just as the Britpop wave crested, its rising tide not only lifting the shaggy group into the Top Ten but putting them squarely within a happening scene. They shared space on charts and festival bills with the amiably straightforward likes of Cast, Sleeper, the Bluetones, and Ash, yet they were qualitatively different, possessing punk-pop smarts to rival Elastica, a brawnier musicality than Oasis, and a self-evident sense of humor.
All of this comes to a head on In It for the Money, an album where the riffs and jokes are wrapped in woolly psychedelia, blaring horns, and splashes of sweet melancholy. Where I Should Coco blew by at a breakneck pace, In It for the Money unfolds with a deliberate sense of drama, slowly coming into focus with the menacing swirl of the title track and proceeding to ebb and flow across its 12 songs. The record feels so unified that it’s remarkable to realize they entered the studio in 1996 with only two completed songs in tow, forcing them to write the bulk of the album during the recording sessions. Along for the ride was Rob Coombes, a keyboardist who was the brother of Supergrass frontman Gaz. He’d been on the band’s periphery for a while, hammering out the piano to “Alright” and playing woozy organ on “Going Out,” the stopgap 1996 single Supergrass released between their first and second albums, but he’s an integral part of In It for the Money, earning writing credits on all 12 songs and adding distinctive color throughout. (Rob Coombes would officially become a member of Supergrass in 2002.)
Listen closely—or spend some time with the clutch of monitor mixes and rough versions that fill the second disc of the new 3xCD deluxe reissue of the 1997 album—and it’s apparent that Supergrass did indeed write In It for the Money in the studio. Many of the songs are rooted in vamps that blossom into full songs: The slinky funk that propels the verses of “Cheapskate,” the circular stomp on “G-Song,” the lazy, shambling gait of “Hollow Little Reign” all bear telltale signs of compositions that began as group jams. None of these songs sound tossed off, though, littered as they are with overdubs, backwards guitars, and sound effects. Supergrass couldn’t resist any bit of studio trickery when they were making In It for the Money, yet they retained their sense of concise craft. The record feels vibrant, not overstuffed.
The triple-disc reissue of In It for the Money can dampen some of the album’s energy. Some fine B-sides, such as the tuneful neo-music-hall ramble “Melanie Davis,” are buried among the alternate mixes and working versions on the second disc, a collection of ephemera that plays better as individual tracks than as an album. The disc of live recordings is another story. Anchored by a full show from January 1998, a concert given nearly a year after the release of In It for the Money, the live disc shows Supergrass at full roar, turning these studio creations into breakneck rockers.
The title of In It for the Money is a nod toward Frank Zappa’s anti-hippie classic We’re Only In It for the Money. Supergrass may not sound anything like the Mothers of Invention, but their choice reflects the extent to which they were steeped in rock history. Supergrass never attempted to be innovators. They were magpies who busied themselves with figuring out how to assemble pieces of glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. They would continue to hone their craft, making sleeker albums than In It for the Money, yet the group’s enthusiasm and imagination are at a peak here. They sound delighted to discover their full potential, and that giddiness remains infectious decades later.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Echo | August 28, 2021 | 8.3 | 9ae2a0fc-15c9-4947-90d2-a7bc9a8caa27 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On their fourth LP, the Olympia band sounds as ever like they just wandered off the set of a country Western being shot inside a shipping container. But this modest-feeling band explores vast emotions, and Dream All Over has the blue-sky sensibility of a soul-searching road trip. | On their fourth LP, the Olympia band sounds as ever like they just wandered off the set of a country Western being shot inside a shipping container. But this modest-feeling band explores vast emotions, and Dream All Over has the blue-sky sensibility of a soul-searching road trip. | Gun Outfit: Dream All Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20980-dream-all-over/ | Dream All Over | What Gun Outfit do sounds secret and borderline ineffable. Like many bands to come out of Olympia since the '80s, they understand their place in rock history: their four LPs bear the mark of musicologists who know their "Bad Moon Rising" from their Bad Moon Rising, their "Kool Thing" from their "2 Kool 2 B 4-Gotten", their "Some Velvet Morning" from their Some Velvet Sidewalk. Levitating hooks and an emotional heaviness co-exist in their impressionistic songs, like the light-and-dark glow of a perpetual magic hour. As a singer, Carrie Keith (who also plays guitar) has absorbed as much from Lucinda Williams' pained rasp as from Kim Gordon's spacious monotone. And it's telling that her notably crazy-legged fellow guitarist Dylan Sharp once played in a corrosive hardcore band called Spiritual Warriors, an allusion to the surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. The connection underscores the subtle late-capitalist critique in his plainspoken lyrics, a soft-pedalled but deeply felt ideological edge. Gun Outfit are a seemingly modest band who sound alternately chained or freed by their devotion to thinking big-picture, by their gentle insistence on life-or-death stakes.
As ever, they sound like they just wandered off the set of a country Western being shot inside a shipping container, but Dream All Over is Gun Outfit's most consistent record by some margin. With its echoing grooves, drifting landscapes, and new textures—bits of bluegrass banjo, homemade electric sitars—Dream All Over has the blue-sky sensibility of a soul-searching road trip. There's gorgeous outlaw poetry on Keith's imagistic "Legends of My Own", a tale of a woman reborn alone in a foreign land. "When I put my blanket down/ I'm going to dream all over," Keith sings; it's an inspired metaphor for the act of becoming, and the cool composure with which she draws out the line "I wear a mask but not to hide" is its own kind of empowerment.
That abstract feminism also comes through on the LP's bare, sun-staring centerpiece "Angelino". Keith's symbols of "a kingdom in ruins" and "all of the cowgirls on the losing end" are more graceful ways of saying "fuck the patriarchy," but if you listen close to them they bite. Dream All Over's incantatory folk-rock cushions pleas for the systematically oppressed, meditations on apathy, poverty, greed, slavery, death. In the survivalist's love song "In Orbit", Sharp sings "You and I/ Are not the only satellites/ Circling an uninhabitable void/ For our whole lives." At least they are together.
Gun Outfit's music has gotten slower with each release, an inversion of (or response to) how human life has evolved since their band formed nine years ago. They reject the pace of our times, where everything happens so much. When they do evoke the modern world—like the 3D-printed gun that appears in the lyrics to closer "Only Ever Over"—there is an ominous, no-future edge to it. They seem to acknowledge the planet is doomed, while drawing a strange relief from facing facts. "Oh world, what lesson do you teach?" Sharp sings on the poignant ripper "Worldly Way". "Console yourself with sadness/ Befriend your misery." It made me think of an essay by the poet Melissa Broder, in which she explores the idea that depression is the over-evolution of the mind.
Perhaps this is why Gun Outfit—a band that will validate your pain as much as it will comfort you—still has such a fervent cult following underground. Punks love Gun Outfit because punks are inherently a little shattered. It's easy to carry a heavy heart when you live in a state of constant confrontation, when "anxiety's your default," as Sharp tosses off on the relatively upbeat "Gotta Wanna". Gun Outfit understands what it is to feel unsettled, to need some calming. On "Only Ever Over", after making the grand, dour, and quietly hilarious assertion that rock'n'roll and literature are dead, Sharp sings: "Cup a little coal/ Try to make it glow/ We're going to have a fire before we go."
In a recent interview, Sharp gave one of the best definitions of punk that you're likely to hear this year—that it's broadly "about being humble and resisting the illusion that everything's fine." In this framework, Gun Outfit fit as logically alongside folk tradition as Sonic Youth, to whom they have often been compared. The latter connection seemed truer of 2010's clattering, astounding Possession Sound, which should have made Gun Outfit as popular as contemporaries like Kurt Vile or Angel Olsen. The comparison now feels more spiritual, insomuch as Gun Outfit can offer a countercultural compass of restless subterranean artists, filmmakers, bands, labels, philosophies. Dream All Over recalls the most crucial lesson of all underground rock music: become your own sound, and create a universe for it to exist in. | 2015-10-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Paradise of Bachelors | October 20, 2015 | 8.1 | 9aec2fb4-dff4-4daf-aef8-0d5c16921e01 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Dropping the crust punk of their earlier offerings, the San Francisco band is committed to old-school death metal on its brutal, surprisingly catchy latest LP. | Dropping the crust punk of their earlier offerings, the San Francisco band is committed to old-school death metal on its brutal, surprisingly catchy latest LP. | Acephalix: Deathless Master | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16551-deathless-master/ | Deathless Master | San Francisco's Acephalix began as a hybrid of crust punk and death metal. Given that a couple of their earliest releases came out on Prank, it's natural a little punk would shine through the murk. Through a pair of tapes released in 2010 and 2011, and packaged together as Interminable Night, the death-metal influence became more prevalent. D-beats were still a component of the band's machinery, but the riffing began to resemble Grave and other stalwarts of 1990s Swedish death metal. On Deathless Master, the crust presence has all but departed, and Acephalix are now committed to death metal. In metal, consistency is more desirable than diversity-- bands are at their most potent when they record albums where the sound is uniform and where the atmosphere is established. There's always the occasional Naked City, but Acephalix know they are not Naked City. They know that finding your strength and focusing on that will reap artistic dividends, which is exactly what Deathless does.
Spiritually, the quartet-- which shares three members with the newer group Vastum-- takes cues from the most ancient death metal band of them all, Master. When Paul Speckmann created Master in 1983, there was no "death metal." He took the thrash and heavy metal he loved, amplified the harsh aspects, and birthed the new genre. Acephalix display a similar appreciation for simplicity on Deathless-- they don't seek to fancify death metal, but to penetrate the soil deeper. Riffs are still of the Swedish persuasion, but Acephalix also work in grooves that they can call their own. Guitarist Kyle House has a knack for catchiness in a genre that seldom rewards such a trait; this is especially seen in "On Wings...", where he maintains a bounce even when the chord patterns and tempos shift. "The Hunger" serves the same function as the long closing title track from Interminable, but improves upon that template. House's introductory lead is off-kilter and angular; from there the band continues to vamp and pummel until the track fades out.
Acephalix's most noticeable transformation is with vocalist Daniel Butler. In the group's earlier days, he had a snarl that was kept high enough to fit the then-crusty sound. Out of all the members, he's embraced the shift in direction the most, delivering a guttural yell seemingly submerged in tar. His vocals add the ambiance a death-metal album needs-- that the band is overtaking you, that you are a slave to the inevitable. You have to wonder if he's had it in him this whole time, and he was just waiting for the right music to really let hell break out. Lesser bands will list their vocalist under "Vokills" in their liner notes as a contrived measure of brutality; Butler will simply use his gut to strangle you.
What's also interesting about Deathless is that, while it's an entirely different organism from the rest of the band's works, like them, it was recorded at San Francisco's Lennon Studios with Vöetsek's Jef Leppard. He's in tune with the band's changes, and dials in appropriately thick tones. It's nice to see that a band can organically develop its sound while still maintaining a home-grown sensibility. Should the relationship continue, how else will Acephalix mutate in the future? Sometimes, even the music most focused on darkness can inspire a burst of optimism. | 2012-05-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-05-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | May 10, 2012 | 7.5 | 9af6622c-ec56-4021-9d0c-691f5dd42906 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
This odds-and-ends compilation features tracks originally released between 2010 and 2016, and presents a more vulnerable version of the pop colossus we know now. | This odds-and-ends compilation features tracks originally released between 2010 and 2016, and presents a more vulnerable version of the pop colossus we know now. | Drake: Care Package | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-care-package/ | Care Package | During his creative peak, from 2011’s Take Care through 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, Drake processed his memory through his music. He plumbed the depths of his skyrocketing stardom, processing it all with a weary stream-of-consciousness. It was almost as if he was rapping names, places, and scenes as a way to remember them. (Never forget Courtney, from Hooters, on Peachtree.) Some songs included snippets of voicemails from irritated girlfriends. Others felt like rhyming notes to self, including one where he spent four minutes apologizing to his mother.
Drake will be 33 in October, and he’s no longer that person. His music has become more of a narrative running alongside his celebrity than the main product. Yes, he still breaks records, but his albums and songs now seem to be in service of the bigger, more lucrative business of being Drake.
But when his breakthrough mixtape So Far Gone turned 10 earlier this year, Drake decided it might be time to relive some formative memories. Or at least, to remember—and reap streaming royalties from—them. His OVO imprint celebrated the occasion with a physical release and digital release, and So Far Gone made its debut on the Billboard albums chart, hitting No. 5. In that same spirit comes Care Package, an odds-and-ends set that collects tracks that were originally released between 2010 and 2016. It’s an accessible time capsule, a concise document of his growth as a musician and a primary source for his OVO imprint’s signature sound, which has since anchored multiple careers. For Drake, who has had a relatively quiet year musically, now’s as good a time as ever to reflect on where he’s been.
While many of the songs on Care Package had logistics-related reasons for never seeing wider release—for instance, “Dreams Money Can Buy,” “Girls Love Beyoncé,” and “Draft Day” all contain expensive samples—they were all easy to find online, and quickly emerged as fan favorites. (Drake, a seasoned product pitchman at this point, described the release as “Some of our most important moments together available in one place.”) Many of these songs find Drake dredging up his rawest emotions while utilizing R&B textures and moods, speaking to a broad audience while still maintaining a singular perspective. There are tracks here that winningly delve into vulnerability, defeat, fear of failure—subjects his music rarely addresses anymore. Several songs once served as warm-ups for eventual full-lengths, musical mile-markers from a guy overflowing with great ideas. Drake could hardly miss during this period, a fact that Care Package definitively underscores.
“Paris Morton Music,” the oldest song on the collection, is a throwback to the time immediately before the entire radio started to sound like Drake featuring Drake, with a blurry-streetlight score that would become a rap radio formula for the first half of the decade. It’s a huge sound, by design—in producer Noah “40” Shebib’s production, Drake could easily find pockets to rap, pockets to sing, or both.
Throughout the compilation, from the after-the-afterparty trap of “Days in the East” to the versatile performance and soft-bellied synth twinkle of “The Motion” to the music-blog-friendly “Dreams Money Can Buy,” Drake is also presented not only as a versatile pop vocalist who could impress himself on almost any trending sound, but also as someone who could add a new dimension to that sound. His appeal as a pop musician was growing, and songs like “Club Paradise,” released a few months before Take Care, previewed Drake’s forthcoming leap; candid and funny, the song served as self-indulgent, status-update music way before “mood” was a hashtag.
Certainly, there’s a few corny or dated moments—listening through Care Package, you’ll hear hashtag rap (“I got that Courtney Love for you/Crazy shit”), epically cloying vocal runs, and overly cutesy wordplay like, “Brunch with Qatar royals all my cups is oil.” However, the best songs here stand up with Drake’s best music. Take “Trust Issues,” perhaps the most meta moment on an extremely meta release, a song where Drake echoes his own hook from the DJ Khaled hit “I’m on One,” casting a shadow on all of its implied excess. Or 2013’s “Girls Love Beyoncé,” featuring a “Say My Name” sample that Drake and 40 reorient as a lonely plea for connection. “You know how this shit goes,” Drake sings, over soft drum claps and sampled vocal snippets. “This isn’t like four years ago.” The version of Drake that Drake is referencing on that song is the Drake of 2009, a guy with humbler ambitions. A guy that was gone, but not totally forgotten.
The Drake of 2019 has moved into the future—he now owns an eSports team. He is likely no longer driving his girlfriend through the snow so she can make the bar exam. He’s far more protected, far wealthier, far more inaccessible. As opportunistic as the release of Care Package is, the reminder of Drake’s work at the margins during his most prolific creative period is a timely one. The compilation layers history upon history, creating a dense nostalgia. We may no longer have the Drake from five or 10 years ago, but we’ll always have the memories. | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Republic | August 6, 2019 | 8.1 | 9af7274c-ad10-47e0-aee9-d445250cfa82 | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | |
Recorded live at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival, this brief but incendiary set includes a famous rendition of “Mississippi Goddam” tucked inside a handful of potent standards. | Recorded live at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival, this brief but incendiary set includes a famous rendition of “Mississippi Goddam” tucked inside a handful of potent standards. | Nina Simone: You’ve Got to Learn (Live) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nina-simone-youve-got-to-learn-live/ | You’ve Got to Learn (Live) | Nina Simone’s legendary 1966 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival has been talked about in small circles with awe for half a century. This is due in part to two things: Her set was so captivating that the audience wouldn’t let the next act on the stage; they hooted and cajoled the festival’s emcee until he finally announced she’d be back for an encore. It was also for the revamped version of her passionate “Mississippi Goddam.” For completists, fans, and anyone who even vaguely loves Simone’s music, the Newport “Mississippi Goddam” has been like a vapor in the wind: often discussed, rarely heard.
You’ve Got to Learn is the first-ever release of this specific Newport set, in honor of what would have been Simone’s 90th birthday. Of course, there’s no shortage of recordings of Simone playing live. From her first time at Newport in 1960 all the way to her sets at the London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s in the ’80s, the stage is where her endless artistry shone brightest, and where her often unpredictable stage demeanor deepened our understanding of a brilliant and troubled artist. But this set captures a moment at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, after the marches in Selma and Jackson where Simone performed, but before many of her friends like Langston Hughes or Martin Luther King Jr. had died. On You’ve Got to Learn, Simone renders familiar songs in unique arrangements, and its political urgency translates through a particular serenity in her performance, like she was both eye and the hurricane.
As the set begins to rapt applause, Simone goes back to the roots of blues, grounding each track in the foundation from whence they came. The wrenching title song—recorded with strings and soothing background vocals for 1965’s I Got a Spell On You—is presented here in its true form, a powerfully sad and gritty blueprint for suppressing the pain of a broken heart until it scars over. On “I Loves You Porgy,” the George Gershwin tune that made her a star, she sounds stranded in the muck of human emotions. In an interlude introducing the commanding “Blues For Mama,” she sets the scene in her honeyed, regal speaking voice: “There is an old porch, and there’s an old man, and there’s a beat-up guitar and a broken bottle. There are flies all around, there is molasses all around, and he is composing his tune on a hot afternoon.” In that political moment, if inadvertently, she traces the long road from the origins of the blues to the fight for liberation, but also brings it home: “It will appeal to a certain type of woman who’s had this kind of experience.” Simone, too—the pain is just at the surface, but she’ll let it all out on the piano.
You’ve Got to Learn is worth it for the new “Mississippi Goddam” alone. Simone had written the song in response to the racist violence plaguing the South in the summer of 1963—the assassination of attorney and Civil Rights icon Medgar Evers in his Jackson, Mississippi, driveway, by a Ku Klux Klan member; and the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, where four KKK members in Birmingham, Alabama, planted a dynamite bomb that murdered four young Black girls. The ensuing furor over a Black woman singing a curse word in a song demanding equality in the era of Jim Crow resulted in radio stations breaking the vinyl singles in half and sending them back to the record label. But their anger couldn’t come close to Simone’s own, which channeled that of a nation. “We all wanted to say it,” observed the legendary activist and comedian Dick Gregory, in the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? “She said it.”
The most popular rendition of “Mississippi Goddam,” recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1964, is a knowing bait and switch: her anger towards the murderous cruelty visited upon Black Americans is, at first, expressed mainly in words. She sings, conversationally and almost cheerily, over her bright chords and lets the tension build as the song spreads out, and then the cloudy key shift of the bridge: subjugation, despair, urgency, and finally, existential revolt. It hasn’t lost an iota of its power, but it says a lot about both the era and her Carnegie audience what makes the audience gasp in shock is Simone saying the word “goddam” aloud.
Two years after the Carnegie Hall performance, in Newport, Rhode Island, “Mississippi Goddam” was a rallying cry, and Simone decided to sideline the rousing showtune rhythm, instead swinging deep into a blues riff. In this accounting of the chaos, she swaps out Tennessee for California in the lyrics to reflect the Watts Rebellion of ’65, “sending the listener on a wave across the growing expanse of national violence,” as the professor and author Shana L. Redmond puts it in the liner notes. Simone’s delivery is especially conversational here, her voice curling at the edge of each phrase with a scratchy, exasperated depth. But even at her most powerful, she never quite betrays the measured nature of her rage, an enigmatic quality that permeated her music as well as her life. Her brilliance stemmed from both studiousness and tumult, her technical virtuosity an outlet for the personal pain she endured, whether at the violent hands of her first husband and manager, or through the struggles of her long-undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
Across seven songs and 33 minutes, it’s hard to feel like we’ve discovered a new fold, wrinkle, or tear in Nina Simone’s richly cataloged life and music. But even in its brevity, You’ve Got to Learn is a hearty document of how music can motivate a political moment and how the most crucial of these songs reverberate throughout history, particularly as history coils in on itself, repeating the same cruel pattern. Simone’s music and voice still have the ability to deliver us toward righteousness. | 2023-07-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Verve | July 26, 2023 | 7.5 | 9b05ad4e-7b7e-47d6-8d18-e4195b669dbf | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
Developed in collaboration with the Alias dance company, Fernando Corona’s newest solo album is a swirling miasma of ominous drone and murky rhythm that hums like an electrical substation. | Developed in collaboration with the Alias dance company, Fernando Corona’s newest solo album is a swirling miasma of ominous drone and murky rhythm that hums like an electrical substation. | Murcof: The Alias Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/murcof-the-alias-sessions/ | The Alias Sessions | In his work as Murcof, Fernando Corona has long shown a talent for drawing beauty out of bleakness. On his earliest albums, 2002’s Martes and 2005’s Remembranza, the Tijuana native fused the timbres of contemporary classical with the tonal and rhythmic elements of ambient, minimal techno, and microsound. Over the years, Corona diversified without abandoning his essential palette, balancing fulsome dub techno with spectral drones and glitch miniatures with lyrical etudes, in conversation simultaneously with Scriabin and Oval, Autechre and Ligeti. The Alias Sessions is Murcof’s first proper solo album, not counting the soundtracks Lost in Time and La Sangre Iluminada, since 2008’s The Versailles Sessions. Where that record explored the sensuous textures of chamber instruments like viola da gamba and harpsichord, The Alias Sessions represents a new stylistic step, distilling synthesized drones, acoustic timbres, and the occasional drumbeat into a molten, swirling mass, ominous yet engrossing.
Corona, who lives in Girona, Spain, has spent the past dozen or so years working with artists from across disciplines, exploring jazz fusion with French trumpeter Erik Truffaz and contemporary minimalism with French classical pianist Vanessa Wagner. The Alias Sessions derives from a pair of collaborations with the Brazilian-Swiss choreographer Guilherme Botelho and his company Alias. It’s striking to imagine this as music for dance, if only because overt rhythm plays such a minor role. Actual beats are few and far between: A brief flare of agonizingly slow death-march drums on “Unboxing Utopia” recalls Andy Stott’s scorched-earth techno; the percolating modular pings of “Underwater Lament” bring to mind the fizzing pulses of golden-era Pan Sonic. Mostly, his tones—out-of-tune strings and piano, charcoal-hued reverb, the threatening hum of aging electrical substations—just hover, like some foul mist. The net effect is a blend of mystery and outright malice; had Hildur Guðnadóttir not gotten the commission, Corona’s music would have made a fine soundtrack to HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries.
But this is, without a doubt, music of movement. For all its omnipresent darkness, nothing is ever static or even stable. Gray clouds are forever swelling and fading; weary whale-song moans rise and fall in pitch; microtonal clusters tremble with dissonance. The piano figure heard early in Contre-Mondes, the suite that takes up disc 1, flickers unsteadily, seeming to dissolve into midair. The disc 2 suite Normal opens with a tentative melody—violin, or perhaps Theremin—that is equally ethereal. It feels as transient as the memory of a color glimpsed just once, long ago. One of The Alias Sessions’ most fascinating motifs—the first identifiable sound heard on the album, and one that recurs throughout the first suite—is a low rumble, like a dog’s growl, slowed into a series of evilly oscillating waves. It is a kind of ghost rhythm, a seething undercurrent to the album’s carefully sculpted shapes; it feels as though Corona slid one of his drones beneath a microscope and discovered something terrible lurking inside the waveform.
Video extracts of Alias’ dance performances offer a fascinating glimpse of Corona’s music in situ. In Contre-Mondes, naked bodies writhe in slow, arcing movements, half covered in shadow; zoomed-in sequences draw parallels between the dancers’ rippling flesh and Corona’s undulating frequencies. Normal appears more dreamlike: The dancers, dressed in street clothes, fall to the ground as though fainting, then rise again, over and over, in waves. Live, Botelho’s choreography must have added a welcome dimension to Corona’s slow-moving behemoths, but the music is plenty dynamic on its own, particularly the doomy maelstrom of Contre-Mondes; the held tones and arpeggios of Normal are slightly more conventional, their abiding melancholy more familiar and thus less startling.
Most important, though, is a good pair of speakers or headphones, ideally turned up loud; there’s a wealth of detail here that laptop speakers simply can’t capture. And to really appreciate the worlds that Corona has created, they should be absorbed in full. These aren’t songs meant to be cherry-picked for playlists. Each of the two suites, both more than 40 minutes long, is a single piece of music, gradually and gracefully playing out its dramatic arc. The Alias Sessions may appear forbidding, but give it the requisite time (and volume) and Corona’s work rewards handsomely. Like the best horror films, it raises a spectacle of unease from which it’s impossible to look away.
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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. | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | The Leaf | May 20, 2021 | 7.4 | 9b0b7436-0182-4c45-93d6-99f7a621e579 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The debut album from the uncompromising rapper was released one week before his untimely death. It delivers a concentrated dose of his tense, menacing take on drill. | The debut album from the uncompromising rapper was released one week before his untimely death. It delivers a concentrated dose of his tense, menacing take on drill. | King Von: Welcome to O’Block | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-von-welcome-to-oblock/ | Welcome to O’Block | Dayvon Bennett, known throughout Chicago as rapper King Von, was shot dead outside the Monaco Hookah Lounge, Atlanta in the early hours of November 6 when, according to police, an argument between two groups of men “escalated to gunfire.” He was 26 years old. Von—one of two men killed in the incident—leaves behind two children and a catalog of music that’s stark and uncompromising in its depiction of street violence. Yet at the time of his death, Von appeared motivated to escape the trappings of a troubled past. “I like the people more in Chicago, but it’s just smarter to live at where I am now,” he told Passion of the Weiss earlier this year.
Atlanta might have been his adopted home, but Von was Chicago all the way to his bones. The title of Welcome to O’Block—released exactly a week before Von’s death—references the tough 6400 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Dubbed O Block after murder victim Odee Perry, it includes the Parkway Gardens apartments, where Michelle Obama grew up, where Chief Keef used to hang out. Von’s music is heavily indebted to drill pioneers, and bears many of gangster rap’s timeless fundamentals. His verses are unapologetic about the violence that rippled through a life marked with stints in prison, delivered with an unpolished flow distinguished by its sense of tension.
Welcome to O’Block has been pitched as Von’s debut album after a series of mixtapes and his “origin story.” The tragedy that has followed its release means the project shoulders more of his legacy than Von could ever have intended. Thankfully, it delivers a concentrated dose of the rapper’s burgeoning style. Von was not Killer Mike, broadly covering America’s social ills, but when he raps about committing burglaries at 13 years old (“I Am What I Am”) and asserts he has “bodies from way back” (“All These N****s”), it comes with not just a captivating belligerency but sobering honesty. The opening lyrics to opening track “Armed & Dangerous” immediately give the album a sense of edginess: “Police steady watching me/Everyday they clockin’ me.” Von’s voice is the sound of tense muscles impossible to unwind.
Welcome to O’Block is a more nuanced set than Von’s last tape Levon James, which traded almost totally in hardened gangsterisms. On “Can’t Relate,” Von makes it clear his life can only be viewed through glass, insisting we can never appreciate the gravity of being on the run from authorities or sitting in jail away from your children. The album’s best section is its final three tracks, a painful hint at what Von’s future as a recording artist might have held. “Ride” sees him give thanks for a partner who stuck by his side during a trial. Punctuated by an AutoTune-doused hook, “How It Go” offers a vivid telling of his legal troubles, while closer “Wayne’s Story” depicts a 14-year-old trapped in a cycle of violence.
Primarily produced by ChopsquadDJ, the beats are uniform in their presentation: eerie piano keys, humming basslines, skittish drums, a palpable sense of menace. There are occasional divergences from the formula—“I Am What I Am” places Von in the Brooklyn drill scene alongside rising regional artist Fivio Foreign—but by prioritizing heavy atmosphere, the music scores Von’s words with the appropriate sense of gravity.
There are moments when an artist notable for his raw style shows a lack of polish. “Mad at You” shows Von somewhat churlishly decrying a woman who left him, with Dreezy playing the role of his ex. The generic “Back Again” features a strangely lackluster appearance from Von’s mentor and label head Lil Durk. Much better is “All These N****s,” a short, energetic shot of drill that showcases the pair’s musical chemistry. (Both Von and Durk’s recent work has been in the backdrop of charges faced in connection with a February 2019 shooting outside of Atlanta restaurant the Varsity. The case is still open.)
Becoming laser-focused on flaws perhaps unfairly sidesteps the importance of Welcome to O’Block in the broader Chicago rap narrative. Recontextualised in terrible sadness, it serves as the most complete document of Von’s artistry, tinged with the sting that he was still getting better. King Von wrote about a world that was bleak. His passing just makes it all the more so.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Only the Family / EMPIRE | November 20, 2020 | 6.8 | 9b1496f2-d4c3-424c-ad54-c5152969e67e | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On the former emo standby’s first album in five years, Chris Conley documents the history of the band, missing the reason they mattered as he recalls his chart-topping glory days. | On the former emo standby’s first album in five years, Chris Conley documents the history of the band, missing the reason they mattered as he recalls his chart-topping glory days. | Saves the Day: 9 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saves-the-day-9/ | 9 | Saves the Day have long operated with an inflated sense of self. “This song will become the anthem of your underground,” Chris Conley sang on 2001’s Stay What You Are. At the time, he may not have been far off. It’s hard to imagine mid-2000s alternative had the band’s lyrical forthrightness not inspired a wave of suburban adolescents to buy studded belts, pick up guitars, and whine about their relationships. Post-hardcore outfits like Midtown were the very offspring of the New Jersey scene Saves the Day helped foster, while Fall Out Boy, the genre’s savviest shapeshifters, first connected through a shared love of Saves the Day’s 1999 benchmark, Through Being Cool.
But after more lineup changes than years in existence and consistent record-label hopscotch, Saves the Day can barely be considered the same group that once clogged Case Logic binders; instead, during the past decade, Conley used the name for ill-fated concept albums and public mental breakdowns. With 9, the band’s first record in five years, Conley hopes to create a lyrical scrapbook of sorts from an earlier era of the band: “This album is the story of Saves the Day and my own personal journey through life,” Conley announced, “which all unfolded as my relationship with music progressed.” It is a document meant to capture the moment he ruled, if not the world, at least “the scene.”
While bands like Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate pioneered the emotive lyricism that would inspire the much-maligned subgenre’s name, Saves the Day brought emo and its cultural associations to the mass audiences of MTV with blunt, lovelorn lyrics, ripped from the pages of a teenage diary. Their forebears often hid their emotions behind weepy metaphors about wilting flowers, but Saves the Day plainly didn’t care about being cool: “I wish I had friends like that,” Conley shouted on their first record. “They’d always be there for me/I wouldn’t look bad/Yeah, they wouldn’t talk behind my back.” Like a good episode of “Degrassi”, Saves the Day spoke directly to the insecurities any awkward kid might face in high school.
On 9, Conley applies a similarly honest approach to a different subject matter. Conley’s no longer being picked last in gym class; he’s rocking out on a Les Paul, signing to large labels, and singing about it all. “Oh yeah, we’re writing a record,” he begins on opener “Saves the Day.” On his later records, Conley was derided for more moody, complex arrangements. Not here: These songs are choppy, fast, and elemental, with his saccharine voice somehow pitched higher than on those songs he recorded two decades ago. Save for the blown-out breakdown in the 21-minute saga “29,” the guitar riffs are clean and catchy. Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.
Nostalgia can be potent and poignant, of course, but Conley fumbles it by assuming the audience is still just as enamored with his band as he is. “You’re gonna love it/You’ll know it forward and backward,” he continues. “We’ll get it stuck in your head every day.” Perhaps with 20 years remove, the band’s success is all that Conley remembers about albums that codified the growing pains of early adulthood for so many. Absent of emotional context, it feels delusional and desperate: “Let’s sing along another 20 years,” Conley begs, conjuring up the cursed image of a wrinkled, 50-year-old Saves the Day performing “At Your Funeral” at some kind of twelfth-wave emo revival cruise full of retirees.
For the rest of the album, he tries, with the same play-by-play specificity, to paint a picture of Saves the Day’s early accolades and kinetic energy. But like the wildest moments of teenage debauchery, the stories are cooler when retold without the bad parts. On “Suzuki” and “Side by Side,” Conley recounts the making of Can’t Slow Down, calling out the record by name. It comes off as a half-brag—“Come over Friday/And bring your Les Paul”—and half-desperate ploy for eternal youth—“We’re faded on a Thursday before midnight in a basement in New Brunswick.”
Then there are Conley’s days “on the road,” his self-mythology made self-important through song titles like “Kerouac and Cassidy.” His memories of international tours and playing Conan come off like a jock recalling athletic feats while drinking bottled domestics at a high school reunion: simplistic and overeager, leaving the listener incredulous that they ever happened. And for a band whose lyrics have inspired body ink, lazy rhymes like “Rendez-vous sidestage/Parlez-vous Anglais?” just seem sad.
Conley has said 9 is a love letter to Saves the Day’s fans. He enthusiastically thanks his listeners multiple times here, as on the fast and loud ode to longevity, “Suzuki.” But in a bigger sense, Conley has completely misrepresented their fandom. Saves the Day lifers, the ones who come to their reunion shows and still speak of Conley’s lyrical feats, found the band because they spoke to their lived experience as misfits and losers. But it’s impossible to relate to the world Conley has built for himself on 9, with heartbreaks at the top of the Eiffel Tower and tours through Berlin in a Mercedes-Benz. And when Conley bursts into ecstatic rhapsodies about the beauty of the world during 9, it feels dismissive and out of touch with the moment, like a therapist gaslighting patients. Saves the Day was once the biggest band in the scene—if only Conley could remember why. | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Equal Vision | November 1, 2018 | 3.5 | 9b1886d7-36b9-43e0-860e-cf66060914c7 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The minimalist composer's latest album features a piece that takes inspiration from Radiohead songs, along with a recording of Reich's 1987 classic Electric Counterpoint, performed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. | The minimalist composer's latest album features a piece that takes inspiration from Radiohead songs, along with a recording of Reich's 1987 classic Electric Counterpoint, performed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. | Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19818-steve-reich-radio-rewrite/ | Radio Rewrite | When Steve Reich heard Jonny Greenwood perform his 1987 classic Electric Counterpoint at a Polish festival, he was swamped. By his own admission, he was floundering beneath a massive, unmanageable multiple-orchestra commission for the London Sinfonietta, and watching Greenwood's bracing, devoted rendition, originally written for Pat Metheny, he felt something settle in with a "click." It occurred to him that, despite friends' repeated urgings, he had yet to "check out" Radiohead, so he finally did. Radio Rewrite, a five-movement piece built on themes from Radiohead songs, was the result.
The songs he focused his piece around were "Everything in Its Right Place", from Kid A, and In Rainbows' "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". In an interview last year, he called the opening series of chords on "Everything in Its Right Place" "one of the classics in Western music," elaborating: "'Everything' is a very rich song. It's very simple and very complex at the same time. What does it mean? Maybe it's about a relationship, maybe I should ask Thom Yorke."
The piece itself doesn't quote Radiohead's songs, exactly, as cock a quizzical eyebrow towards them. You can hear the jagged heave of "Jigsaw"'s rising action in the first movement, and the tabula rasa drone of "Everything" in the second, but by the third movement, the lines of transmission grow spotty, by design: "The piece is a mixture of moments where you will hear Radiohead, but most moments where you won't," Reich remarked in an interview with his publisher Boosey & Hawkes. The harmonic language starts to complicate itself, stirring up clouds and creating something that feels more like a series of dreams the songs themselves are having than a straightforward tribute.
When Reich's music quietly departs from its source material, the piece achieves lift off, as the form fades and the piece settles into a seething, anxious rhythm of its own. The piece follows the by-now familiar Reich structure—pairs of movements, titled "Fast " and "Slow", alternating between thrumming low-level unease and calm—and the familiarity has a bittersweet tinge to it. When the piece directly references Radiohead, the piece feels troublingly like a printout, with new material going in one end and the churning minimalist music emerging reliably on the other. His final two movements, with their scrambled rhythmic pulses and sumptuous string writing, help mitigate this feeling.
Jonny Greenwood's recording of Electric Counterpoint, meanwhile, feels genuinely different. His version, which he's honed live over years and is included on Radio Rewrite, has a nagging, insistent edge, with more space in between the guitars than in the famous Pat Metheny version, as if the tracks are echoing from opposite corners of a massive, empty room. Greenwood's phrasing is choppier; you can hear almost every pick strike, making it sometimes feel like you need to swat away a locust cloud. In Greenwood's hands, Electric Counterpoint suddenly becomes body music.
Greenwood's taken the unusual step of pre-recording 1o of the 11 guitar tracks that comprise the piece. His guitar tone is unmistakable, especially on the second movement, which directly channels "Let Down". Oddly, it feels more like more of a meeting of the minds between Reich and Radiohead than Radio Rewrite itself. There is another piece on the album, a reworking of Reich's Piano Counterpoint, played here by Vicky Chow, who surfs atop the pre-recorded tracks with fierce aplomb. Watch her do it in real-time here, with a half-smile on her face, to get a sense of her calm ease and total control, and then listen to this recording; you can almost hear the same half-smile. It's ironic, and maybe fitting, that the younger musicians on this album find more easeful communion with the hardy, contrarian spirit of Reich's works than Reich does. | 2014-10-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-10-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | October 2, 2014 | 7.3 | 9b22fa01-868a-488f-a129-bdd7f7cfb618 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Visitor deepens Matias Aguayo's dependence on his voice as he steers away from merely assisting dance tracks to carrying song structures. In the past, his goofy, spontaneous-seeming persona has carried his music with ease, but here, he sounds like he's struggling at times. | The Visitor deepens Matias Aguayo's dependence on his voice as he steers away from merely assisting dance tracks to carrying song structures. In the past, his goofy, spontaneous-seeming persona has carried his music with ease, but here, he sounds like he's struggling at times. | Matias Aguayo: The Visitor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18221-matias-aguayo-the-visitor/ | The Visitor | Matias Aguayo has always been a goof, the type of jump-on-the-table artist who's having way more fun than you. He depends on this persona for his scatterbrained takes on house and electro; it takes more than a little charm and panache to get someone up on that table with you. So it's problematic that it feels like Aguayo's laboring for long stretches of his third album, The Visitor. Aguayo has, in the past, mixed in noisier, less friendly tracks, but on The Visitor these tracks are more prominent, busier, and messier.
The Visitor deepens Aguayo's dependence on his voice as he steers away from merely assisting dance tracks to carrying song structures. For an inveterate weirdo, Aguayo has been involved in a surprising number of smashes: the catchy-despite-itself "Rollerskate", his vocal turn on Battles' "Ice Cream", his DJ Koze-remixed "Minimal" and its spiritual companion, "Walter Neff". On his best tracks, the rhythms act as a centrifugal force, an axis around which his voice and melodic detritus can spin. Too many songs on The Visitor fail to establish this center, and the result is an album of oddball psychedelia with its wacky creator foregrounded.
Unfortunately, we've reached the point of diminishing returns on Aguayo's imagination, as The Visitor veers from style to style recklessly; The Visitor was recorded with a host of South American artists, many of them residents of the Cómeme label. "Dear Inspector", for example, is a long, gently tumbling pop song that sounds like someone in the Elephant Six collective bought an MPC sampler. After dragging "Dear Inspector" out for nearly eight minutes, Aguayo abruptly switches modes on "By the Graveyard", a reverb-heavy storm that sounds like Can's more aggressive moments, a style he revisits on the album's clanging, industrial closer, "A Certain Spirit". These tracks have plenty of rhythm, but Aguayo can't seem to find it. He shrouds himself in effects and shouts the songs' titles, retaining none of his casual tunefulness.
Aguayo has trouble balancing his whimsical impulses with his aggressive ones throughout The Visitor, like he can't decide if he wants to flirt or brood. The chant-heavy "Llegó El Don" is domineering, its thwacking rhythms pointed right at the listener. "Levantate Diegors" busies itself with noise, unleashing dozens of small rhythmic flourishes around its bossy, bass-y vocals. It's not just that these tracks are less fun, it's that they're not compellingly deviant either. The big, evil synth line that anchors the creeping "Las Cruces" feels like a better mix of Aguayo's new style and troublemaking instincts.
Aguayo is better, too, when his tracks are less cluttered. He captures a little of his old magic on "Una Fiesta Diferente", a vocal-heavy stew where he and some background singers spin an easy tune out of bilingual lyrics. "El Sucu Tucu" is frantic but focused, with Aguayo's staccato vocals matching the song's eager snares. "Rrrrr" opens the album with a stupid, inviting bassline, and the chorus's purring, rolling "r"'s are vintage Aguayo. Aguayo's music is brave and increasingly complex, but it's worth wondering how well these impulses are serving his tracks. There's potential in The Visitor's mix of electro, new wave, and pop, but it's obscuring or distorting Aguayo's personality, which is the engine that has driven his songs for so long. | 2013-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cómeme | June 27, 2013 | 5.9 | 9b2303b6-546c-4b67-acdb-b98f00e38096 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The major-label debut from the Maryland rapper clearly wants to appeal to the thinkers. But even at its most lucid, this loosely conceptual album falls well short of lofty ambitions. | The major-label debut from the Maryland rapper clearly wants to appeal to the thinkers. But even at its most lucid, this loosely conceptual album falls well short of lofty ambitions. | IDK: Is He Real? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/idk-is-he-real/ | Is He Real? | Maryland rapper IDK wants to be rap’s next great aesthetician. His major-label debut, Is He Real?, is a concept album of sorts, in the way all of his projects are; there is a theme and a structure but it isn’t actually beholden to them. The “He” in the title is God, the framework around which the album is built. It opens with a kid denying God’s existence, and an uneven discourse unfolds from there, with rap theology serving as plot points along the album’s arc: a DMX prayer, a conversation about divinity with Tyler, the Creator, a hood psalm from GLC, and IDK playing Devil’s advocate.
In the end, these outlooks crescendo into the PG County rapper arguing that humans don’t have the capacity to dispute His being; the end result of his probe is basically the shrugging emoticon. His unspooling scriptural thread is easy enough to follow. It’s what happens in between that makes the album perplexing. It doesn’t always track, and its pursuit of grandiosity feels largely fruitless. Even at its most lucid, it falls well short of lofty ambitions.
IDK, whose name stands for Ignorantly Delivering Knowledge, considers himself a polymath and educator. (He helped people get their GEDs in prison.) He clearly wants his songs to appeal to the rap thinkers, for listeners to have to peel back the layers of meaning and have epiphanies. He has labeled his music “suburban trap” or trap with substance, trying to collapse a nonexistent lowbrow-highbrow trap binary, as if Jeezy’s The Recession never happened. His songs aren’t deep enough to warrant or hold up under dissection and they aren’t ignorant enough to scan as brainless amusement. A student of Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, he aspires to hifalutin aesthetics and big ideas. This album is a self-professed effort to lay a foundation for future classics. “This will be the Section.80 mixtape before my good kid, m.A.A.d city,” he vowed in The Fader. But Is He Real? isn’t the raw display of talent Section.80 was, and it is far less inspired—musically and conceptually. There is a whiff of self-importance that IDK struggles to live up to. He is an intriguing, occasionally even stimulating rapper who has yet to really bring any of his (sometimes bland, sometimes bold) visions to life.
In this instance, IDK never really gets to the point. What is to be gained by posing this question here and now? What is to be gained by failing to answer it? The aesthetic argument claims that art itself is proof of God’s existence, but this album never scratches the surface of something that meta, much less a conclusive purpose. Given the heavy Kendrick influence, IDK almost forces a comparison he can’t possibly do justice to. It’s hard not to wonder how much more depth the Compton rapper could’ve brought to this idea.
IDK can be a clever writer, but he doesn’t have nearly the skill or the range to prevent a subject this huge from crushing him beneath its weight. Neither preacher nor parishioner nor nonbeliever, he has a hard time saying anything definitively and with emphasis. Within a clusterfuck of thoughts, he strains to connect songs like “Alone” and “Digital” into his larger spiritual saga. The songs are designed to transition seamlessly from one to the next but the shifts are inconsistent; sometimes hollow, sometimes overwrought, sometimes challenging.
His singing, however, is pleasantly surprising. He ably flips the dancehall classic “Murder She Wrote” (on “December,” with a more than game Burna Boy) and Amerie’s “Why Don’t We Fall in Love” (on “I Do Me … You Do You”), interpolating the latter and using the former as a backbone for an afro-fusionist jam. He also doles out his unexpectedly malleable voice to expound upon on the album’s lesser ideas: the collective consciousnesses’ diminishing attention span (“No Cable”), money as the root of all evil (“24”), and golddiggers as embodiments of sinfulness (“Lilly”). In one instance, he’s jaded and mournful; the other, he’s flamboyantly flexible; the third, he’s impish. He cites Frank Ocean as an influence, and his croons are a nice chaser for his rap bravado.
The album’s best song has nothing to do with its almighty dialogue: “Porno,” a libidinous collaboration with Pusha-T and J.I.D., feels like an extension of Pusha’s “Sociopath.” At its core, it’s a song about a sexualized society that, among other things, finds space to mimic the intro of “Wannabe” by Spice Girls. (IDK’s attempt to weave this into the wider narrative is to simply rap, “Bad hoes is the devil, like 666” and “The bible say beatin’ my dick and killin’ is equal/But that don’t add up.”) Unlike so much of what happens on this album, “Porno” is fun-loving and low-stakes. He isn’t overthinking it. Along with outliers like “No Cable,” it is the nexus of an interesting thought experiment: If IDK wasn’t so married to tawdry themes, his music would be much better. His songs wouldn’t be undermined by his desire to be recognized as a philosopher and auteur.
For all the album’s shortcomings, Is He Real? has many really exciting compositional flourishes. A team effort helmed primarily by IDK with beatmakers Eden Eliah Nagar and Rascal, the production is rich and diverse, often familiar but never derivative: the Pi’erre Bourne-ish funhouse thrills of “Digital,” the ugly, “HUMBLE.”-esque piano mash of “24,” and the meditative sampling of “No Cable” and “Julia …,” are all satisfying in their own ways. “Julia …,” for its part, also happens to be a gut-wrenching remembrance of his mother, who died of AIDS in 2016. The album could’ve used more of those personal revelations and less biblical revelations. | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Clue / Warner | September 11, 2019 | 6.3 | 9b27022f-821d-4c28-baa4-374092138fa2 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
It isn’t really in Keef’s nature to be sentimental, but even Zaytoven has a way of getting to the hardest rappers. | It isn’t really in Keef’s nature to be sentimental, but even Zaytoven has a way of getting to the hardest rappers. | Chief Keef / Zaytoven: GloToven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chief-keef-zaytoven-glotoven/ | GloToven | Chief Keef, if you didn’t know, put out five tapes in 2017, nine projects in 2018, all capped this January by the seventh installment of his The Leek series. Sometimes, despite all that activity, and roughly one in every three of those projects doing something weird or interesting, it feels like very few people are actually paying attention. One way to draw such attention is to do an entire tape with Zaytoven, the virtuosic trap pianist who has brought soul and verve to many a great rapper’s catalogs. GloToven, a 12-track collaborative effort, finds Chief Keef once again tinkering with what his songs can be.
A few weeks ago, Zaytoven played his own Tiny Desk Concert when Future no-showed a planned set featuring a couple of their most breathtaking songs. With no rapper in front of him and a band behind him, Zay was sensational. He was no stranger to the format, having accompanied Gucci Mane there during his comeback tour in 2016, but being the focus seemed to empower him. Without verses, in a smaller space, the songs were even more intimate; they breathed, each chord lingering. One confounded YouTube commenter wrote of the Zay-led set, “It’s crazy just hearing this trap music turn into contemporary jazz with a change of performance style.” The transformative, adaptiveness of Zaytoven’s playing has become a hallmark of his: He’s turned Future into a blues singer and Usher into a man half his age.
Keef interprets Zay’s production differently than any of the maestro’s previous partners (with the exception of “Fast,” which is of a kind with Beast Mode’s “Real Sisters”). He doesn’t emote into the warm beds of the producer’s masterly keystrokes. He can’t lurch through Zay’s busiest king-making processions the way Gucci does, so he has started to taper his barked melodies so they settle just above the shimmers of a superb set of Zay beats, allowing the production to speak nearly as much as he does.
GloToven finds Keef in an entirely different mode than last October’s Back From the Dead 3, which, in keeping with that series, was rap as noise music, his largely amelodic bars erupting through booming productions, his verses sitting way up in the mix and nearly cacophonous. With Zaytoven establishing the terms, he is far more simpatico; perfectly measured and never suppressing the sounds cushioning him. Be it the crystalline gleam of “Spy Kid” or the bounce of “Sneeze,” Keef’s intoned flows are perfectly in phase.
As the godfather of “mumble,” Keef continues to push toward new sounds, expanding the scope of his music at every opportunity. (“All the young niggas grew up, wanna be me/You can act like it, bitch, I know you see me,” he raps knowingly and defiantly on “Spy Kid.”) On GloToven, he is constantly changing the shape of his voice and fiddling with its composition. Keef is far from the post-form ad-libbing of his acolytes like Playboi Carti; these songs have very clear ideas laid out and are performed deliberately. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the songcraft beyond what Keef feels, but he has great instincts. “3rd Person” is a single rambled verse, in which his flows float through a wind tunnel of sounds from across the Zaytoven starter kit. Half of “F What the Opp Said” is just wordless Auto-Tuned warbling buoyed between Zaytoven’s oscillating keys. Ever the maverick, Keef turns a tender arrangement fit for The-Dream, on “Petty,” into an anti-ballad about how a paramour is nagging him too much about the cheating he’s definitely doing.
It isn’t really in Keef’s nature to be sentimental, but Zaytoven has a way of getting to the hardest rappers. The presence of fallen love ones looms in the periphery as the tape goes on. “I ain’t got no choice but do this shit for my dead partners,” he raps early on. “I wanna bring my brother back but I know it ain’t gon’ happen,” he accepts on “Ain’t Gonna Happen,” calling Fredo Santana out by name. The anthropomorphic gold star on the cover, with its double cup and the cross between its eyes, is likely an homage to the late Fredo, who appears in promo footage for GloToven in which Keef bangs out a tune on a baby grand and is dubbed “the new Beethoven.” As the piano chords swell across GloToven, Chief Keef continues to expand his legacy, for both his sake and the sake of those he’s lost. | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RBC | March 20, 2019 | 7.5 | 9b285ba7-2496-4d96-b34a-a2e2cde38f27 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Ennio Morricone's score for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight marks the 87-year-old legend's first work on a Western-themed film in over 30 years. His melodies are still simple, relying on a few notes to form a backbone from which he never strays far. Morricone still trusts that a few strong musical ideas can supply lots of atmosphere and emotion throughout an epic-length film. | Ennio Morricone's score for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight marks the 87-year-old legend's first work on a Western-themed film in over 30 years. His melodies are still simple, relying on a few notes to form a backbone from which he never strays far. Morricone still trusts that a few strong musical ideas can supply lots of atmosphere and emotion throughout an epic-length film. | Ennio Morricone: The Hateful Eight OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21369-the-hateful-eight-ost/ | *The Hateful Eight* OST | Eighty-seven-year old legend Ennio Morricone occupies a unique position among film composers. He's known outside of his industry, a rarity for any score-writer not named John Williams. And he's one of the few film composers whose work has had a significant impact on rock music (perhaps only John Carpenter can claim more). In fact, the work that first brought him fame—his iconic soundtracks for Sergio Leone's mid-1960s Spaghetti Westerns—might have had more influence on rock musicians than film composers. Whenever I hear dramatic rock using echoey twang and dusty atmospheres—examples include Labradford, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 (who covered Morricone's music for Leone), and Earth—I immediately think of scenes from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
All of which makes Morricone's decision to score Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight immediately interesting, since it's the first Western-themed film he has worked on in over 30 years. Doubling the intrigue is the fact that some of the music is a cross-pollination of Morricone and Carpenter's visions. Due to time constraints, Morricone re-used pieces he wrote for the latter's 1982 thriller The Thing which Carpenter ultimately didn't include. Then there are the facts that Tarantino has never made a fully-scored film before—he's only used previously-recorded music—and that Morricone once said he "wouldn't like to work with [Tarantino] again, on anything" (a statement he later partially rescinded.)
So there's a lot of promise in The Hateful Eight soundtrack, and the final result delivers—though not necessarily due to the factors above. Morricone's return to the Western genre ends up somewhat coincidental; this music is more in line with his later, traditionally-filmic orchestral work, and there's nary a guitar twang to be heard. The score's relation to Carpenter (whose own music has undergone a recent underground revival) is more evident. Morricone's themes have the kind of primal tension that Carpenter used so well in his other movies, but in this case transposed from synth to orchestra.
Ultimately, Morricone's music for The Hateful Eight is rich and evocative regardless of the circumstances of its creation. You might guess that after this long, he'd have to make increasingly complex pieces to find new things to say. Yet the opposite is true: his melodies are still simple, relying on a few notes to form a backbone from which he never strays far. His arrangements and flourishes build momentum, but the core is always powerfully uncluttered. Morricone trusts that a few strong musical ideas can supply lots of atmosphere and emotion throughout an epic-length film.
The Hateful Eight isn't all Morricone, though. Tarantino can't resist DJ-ing a little bit, sprinkling in a short gem from the second White Stripes album, an excellent mid-'60s Roy Orbison single, a David Hess track from the 1972 Wes Craven movie The Last House on the Left, and a fascinatingly-unpolished version of the Australian folk song "Jim Jones at Botany Bay" as sung by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the film itself. There are also snippets of movie dialogue interspersed throughout, which are entertaining but too short to be very meaningful (they also include what has to be the most uses of the n-word on any Morricone album).
All those Tarantino additions add texture to The Hateful Eight soundtrack, but Morricone's music by itself is more than enough. There's a wealth of both visceral adventure and reflective emotion in hs pieces. At best, these songs are thrill rides, mood swingers, and thought provokers, all at once. That makes them a perfect fit for a Tarantino movie—but then, as he's proven for over half a century, Morricone is the right choice for any filmmaker. | 2016-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Third Man / Decca | January 5, 2016 | 8 | 9b28d8fd-4724-4e79-88fa-9d596ee5be7d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Clash’s famously complicated fifth album that contains some of their biggest songs as well as their moodiest and most impenetrable material. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Clash’s famously complicated fifth album that contains some of their biggest songs as well as their moodiest and most impenetrable material. | The Clash: Combat Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-clash-combat-rock/ | Combat Rock | Joe Strummer claimed he’d run the Paris Marathon in three hours and 20 minutes. Officially, he didn’t race at all—just showed up that morning in May 1982 and dodged whoever was taking names. Hardly anybody knew he was in France. Strummer was dodging them all: Clash manager Bernard Rhodes, who’d dared him to go AWOL as a publicity stunt and then had to hire a private detective when Strummer actually disappeared; songwriting partner Mick Jones, who’d been hurt when the group rejected his vision for their new album and become increasingly difficult to get ahold of; brilliant drummer Topper Headon, who was losing his friends’ trust as his drug use escalated precipitously. Only the Clash’s unflappable bassist, Paul Simonon, seemed to be doing alright.
Combat Rock, the band’s fifth album, came out that same marathon weekend. The Clash were supposed to be touring the UK, but when Strummer didn’t return, the dates had to be postponed. Maybe the Parisian vanishing act was calculated, a way to show his bandmates they couldn’t very well carry on without him. Maybe, as Strummer would tell NME’s Charles Shaar Murray days later, he’d just gone “a bit barmy.” Wouldn’t you have to be, to gatecrash a marathon after a night out drinking and then get drunk again afterward? But compared to the Clash, Paris probably felt like a dream. Not long after the race, Clash PR rep and fixer Kosmo Vinyl tracked Strummer down at a café and hauled him back to London.
It makes a certain grim logical sense that an album heavily inspired by the aftermath of the Vietnam War and more directly by Apocalypse Now would get in deep and then start to lose the plot. The second-to-last Clash album is better than it has any right to be, considering the tension amid the people who recorded it, and the debt it owes producer Glyn Johns, who tightened an unwieldy, 16- or 17-track album into a 12-song bruiser after the band deemed Jones’ mix unsatisfactory. It wasn’t as zippy or as effortlessly brilliant as London Calling—few albums are. But it’s a good record: bracing, challenging, authentically conflicted by its own enthusiasm for military aesthetics. When Margaret Thatcher made a bid to save her re-election prospects by launching an imperialist war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands weeks ahead of its release date, Combat Rock became spiritually aligned with the anti-war cause, hit No. 2 in the UK, and made the Clash stars in America.
The Clash were an extraordinarily intertextual and self-conscious, and in that sense postmodern, punk band. You know this instinctively when Strummer says something like, “phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust,” and if listening to London Calling is like reading a book with a lot of footnotes (BBC World Service, Spanish Civil War, original “Brand New Cadillac”), Combat Rock is an oblique political tract that lifts off into a hallucinatory vision of a society plagued and entertained by violence. It’s all less legible than it first looks, particularly pre-internet. (“If you don’t know what’s goin’ on,” urges Strummer on the recording of that October’s concert at New York Shea Stadium, “just ask the person standing next to you.”) Combat Rock is as wrapped up with world events of the day as it is spectacularly still relevant; it holds a couple of the band’s most overexposed songs and some of their moodiest and most impenetrable material.
The history of the Clash reads like a comic strip—maybe a soap opera—where nearly all the main characters are young Englishmen, the kind of rough-and-tumble social environment where if you miss the setup, you’re about to be the punchline. The antagonist is usually Rhodes, the manager; he preferred Bernard, so naturally, the Clash always called him Bernie. Rhodes, along with guitarist and singer Mick Jones, had assembled the band in 1976, recruiting Paul Simonon, a passionate reggae fan who couldn’t yet play the bass, and Joe Strummer, the magnetic frontman of local London pub rock band the 101ers.
Rhodes, a volatile, fast-talking operator who moonlighted as a car mechanic, was undeniably a formative influence. Early on, the Clash rehearsed at his studio seven days a week. Rhodes insisted the group write songs not about their own small lives or feelings, but about real-world issues: conflict, power, protest. “Bernie was very against it being a social scene,” original drummer Terry Chimes says in Pat Gilbert’s Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash. “He’d say, ‘Are you here for a goal or are you here just eating a cucumber sandwich?’ He had a way of wording things to make you feel stupid, and get you to do things his way.”
Trouble was, Rhodes answered to no one, certainly not the band he worked for. “If the Clash was the Communist Party, Bernie was our Stalin,” quips Simonon in Mark Andersen’s We Are the Clash. In 1978 the band fired him, allegedly for scheming to replace Mick Jones with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, the latest bungled maneuver in Rhodes’ long-term frenemy drama with Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. But the band didn’t cut him off for long.
In 1981, frustrated by public response to the sprawling triple-LP Sandinista! (with production supervised by Mick) and anxious to recapture the dynamism of London Calling, Strummer insisted the Clash take Bernie back. Mick understandably objected, but Strummer supposedly threatened to walk, and Simonon backed Strummer, so here they all were again, making Combat Rock and gradually accumulating emotional scar tissue.
Work commenced in London until Mick Jones purportedly said he’d only show up in New York City, where his girlfriend lived, so they moved to the Electric Lady recording studio. Later, he’d claim he’d been joking, but the mood was heavy: Jones appointed himself producer while Strummer holed up in a fort made of flight cases (the “spliff bunker”) and by the end, they worked separate shifts and were barely speaking. Reaching a compromise on the final mixes and track sequence proved impossible. The album wasn’t done when the Clash departed for a tour of Asia and Australia in early 1982, so they flew out the unfinished tapes and the standoff continued. As photographer Pennie Smith, who joined the band in Thailand to shoot the Combat Rock cover, puts it in Passion Is a Fashion: “If you’re with people for long periods of time you can sense they’re fed up without anyone having to say anything.” Finally, Rhodes suggested they call in Glyn Johns, a career rock engineer who’d helped salvage the Who’s Who’s Next, and Johns, Strummer, and a very reluctant Mick Jones sat down and reworked every song in three days.
Some popular bands get along well, and some make enough money to fake it, but the Clash circa Combat Rock couldn’t manage either. They weren’t yet cashing in on their records, because they’d sold London Calling and Sandinista! for bargain prices in Britain. They weren’t making it up on tour, because they wanted rock-star live production and refused to pass on the cost to the audience. After Sandinista!, the band owed their label, CBS, something like half a million pounds. The upside was that, by now, the Clash could play almost anything: slinky socialist disco (“The Magnificent Seven”), white reggae-rock (“Bankrobber”), swanky barroom blues (“Jimmy Jazz”), even a fluke American pop hit (“Train in Vain”). It’s this flexibility and fluency that carries Combat Rock’s walloping opener “Know Your Rights” into the carbonated R&B-punk of “Car Jamming” and on to the spacious, echoey dub of “Sean Flynn.”
The album’s themes—antimilitarism, the damage inflicted by American imperialism—weren’t new material. “I don’t wanna go fighting in the tropical heat,” the band had railed on “Career Opportunities,” from 1977’s The Clash. London Calling’s anti-fascist rocker “Clampdown” took up the specter of Brownshirts; Sandinista! protested the draft and U.S. interventions in Latin America. Combat Rock is constantly of two minds, fascinated by the grit and vibrance of early ’80s New York and aghast at the bigger system of which it was part.
The ambivalent nature of many later Clash songs reflected the criticism the band faced in the UK rock press (too focused on America, betraying punk values) and doubles as a way to sidestep the fact that art doesn’t equal political action. Often, Combat Rock seems to speak in the voice of another, absorbing establishment doublespeak on “Know Your Rights,” the omniscient narration of Allen Ginsberg on “Ghetto Defendant,” and the POV of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle on “Red Angel Dragnet” (voiced by Kosmo Vinyl). Sometimes the provenance is less clear: “Car Jamming” is like a folk song stitched together from fragments of broadcast news and “Atom Tan” presents the grotesque spectacle of “the first all-live heart attack.” Casualties of war on “Inoculated City” occur not in battle but “at the top of the hour” for an indifferent public. The mediated distance, the intimation of surveillance, feeds into the album’s sense of wariness and paranoia. Yet the Clash also speak with clarity: “Murder is a crime!/Unless it was done/By a policeman or an aristocrat.”
If you think of the two sides of Combat Rock as a narrative arc of tension building to fury and the slow, destabilizing comedown of catastrophe, you’ll notice the comedown lasts far longer than the fury. But for a thrilling few moments it sounds like “Rock the Casbah,” an instrumental Headon recorded practically by himself on a day when no one else showed up to the studio. Strummer’s lyrics, about a repressive sheik’s failure to stamp out rock’n’roll, were partly a parable inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and partly a shot at Rhodes, who’d quickly grown impatient with the Clash’s taste for improvisation and complained that all their new songs were too long.
Taking a page from Apocalypse Now, “Rock the Casbah” mythologizes the Clash’s professional frustrations and maps them onto the cinematic land of the sheikh, who drills oil and drives an American car. In retrospect, it’s a terrible miscalculation: “Rock the Casbah” is famous now in part because it was a hit in the U.S., and thereafter used as an ad hoc soundtrack to the American bombing of the Middle East. The orientalist imagery enables this sort of reading even as the narrative writes against it, a criticism that doesn’t apply to, like, fuck-up former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani using “Rudie Can’t Fail” as walk-on music. Like the band’s polarizing debut single, “White Riot,” “Rock the Casbah” is almost too powerful; the Clash mean to suggest music as the catalyst for revolution, but their hedonistic glee summons the kind of energy that’s hard to control.
All of Combat Rock is preoccupied with cycles of violence and the structures that support them, especially “Straight to Hell,” where the music echos hollowly under an enormous arc of oppression that spans deindustrialized English steel towns, the children of American servicemen in Vietnam, and the plight of immigrants throughout history. When the Clash ask who has the right to kill, the answer is: no one. “Who got shot tonight?” they cry above the ominous reggae thump of Simonon’s “Red Angel Dragnet,” another perilous Clash political mirror that holds up New York City vigilante organization the Guardian Angels alongside Kosmo’s deranged Travis Bickle: self-congratulatory reactionaries celebrated for their impatience to clear the streets.
Nothing on the second half brings quite the same energy—in Strummer’s words, “Fifty percent of Combat Rock was great rock, but the other fifty was what Phil Spector would call ‘wiggy.’” Side two kicks off with the lively but lyrically weak “Overpowered by Funk,” perhaps the nadir of the Clash’s interest in early hip-hop and improvised rap (“Breakfast, serials?/You know you can’t escape”); the guest verse by graffiti artist Futura, whom the Clash had hired to live-paint their stage backdrops, is more interesting as a glimpse into the golden age of New York street art culture than as a technical accomplishment. From there, it moves slowly from the cockeyed apocalyptic humor of “Atom Tan” into the cold fog of ambient dub collage “Sean Flynn,” named for the photojournalist and son of Hollywood actor Errol Flynn who had disappeared in Cambodia more than 10 years earlier. The closing “Death Is a Star” tinkles like the accompaniment to film credits, mournful and a little confused, reflecting on the cinema-going experience with the faintly dissociated feeling of one who’s just walked out of the theater.
But if Combat Rock eventually spirals off into psychedelic battlefield phantasmagoria, Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg is the director’s cut, Apocalypse Now Redux. Half an hour longer and significantly woozier than the album proper, Rat Patrol—a working title borrowed from the vintage television series about a quartet of Allied servicemen—is often described as Mick Jones’ final version of Combat Rock, shelved sometime in 1981. In truth, the bootleg sounds a little rough and hissy around the edges, like a transmission to a cheap radio, but to this day, plenty of Clash fans will tell you it’s required listening. The influence of Jones’ sequence on the final tracklist is clear, bunching together his timeless “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” with “Rock the Casbah” and “Know Your Rights” before spiraling out with a lengthy instrumental jazz interlude and versions of “Ghetto Defendant” and “Sean Flynn” that stretch to six and seven minutes.
Extended runtimes came naturally to the Clash as dub reggae fans and prodigious stoners, though you don’t have to be a major record label to see why they’d be a hard sell. Much as they might’ve downplayed it for the benefit of the British press, the Clash aspired to reach U.S. audiences, and a third super-long LP would’ve risked already tenuous label relationships. But it can be tempting to overwrite the 46-minute Combat Rock with Rat Patrol, the looser, wilder album, arguably the more ambitious attempt to fuse the Clash’s diverse musical interests and take in the whole sweep of American moral decay in one staggering, 77-minute slow pan.
Then there’s the notion that the clarified and abridged version of anything must be inauthentic and thus fundamentally un-punk. Imagine if the Clash had released another dense double LP and “Rock the Casbah” would’ve never taken such a gruesome turn, because the whole album would’ve been weird and unmarketable. Offer any counterfactual you like: If Combat Rock weren’t so successful, maybe the band wouldn’t have felt so conflicted about it, and there’d have been more Clash albums after (there is one, the unfortunate 1985 Bernard production Cut the Crap). When fans debate Rat Patrol vs. Combat Rock, it’s like watching an endless re-enactment of the competing tastes and opinions that fueled and then splintered the band.
It is traditional to locate the Clash’s failure in their fundamental contradiction, a collective psychic conflict between ambition and principle—what Strummer, speaking in 1984, called “an experiment of a kind, that’s never succeeded, mind you, in making rebel music for a mass audience.” Of course, contradiction is their source of success, the reason why Rat Patrol is interesting but Combat Rock hits. Jones’ mix brought the sinister atmosphere and heroic stamina, but popular art requires strategy. “Every night we play I wonder who our audience is,” Strummer told Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore during the Clash’s 1982 U.S. tour. “But you have to figure you’re reaching some of them. Maybe we’re only entertaining most of them, but that’s not really so bad when you think about it—look what it is that we entertain them with. I reckon each show we reach some new ones, really reach them. It’s like fighting a big war with few victories, but each of those victories is better than none.” The other word that comes up a lot with the Clash is “romantic,” because the romantic is always holding out hope.
So chalk up a few victories to Combat Rock. It sounds like a band drifting toward the edge, yet it remains astonishingly, unsettlingly topical. Among the lessons the Clash learned from reggae: Protest music doesn’t have to be loud and fast (punk) or slow and serious (folk); it can be midtempo and jammy, spare and surreal. Its power lies in the ability to unite an audience in the sense of being outsiders—to draw in other people who like to think they’re pretty clever and tell them something worth knowing. Forty years later, the opening trifecta on “Know Your Rights” will grab you by the throat: the impunity of wealth and power, the indignity of means-tested welfare, the suppression of dissent. At the end of the song, when Strummer breathes the word “Run!” and Jones’ lead guitar takes off in flight, the rhythm section pursues in a jackbooted stomp. I don’t suggest that you learn politics from the Clash, necessarily; you listen to the Clash and understand what politics means, which is life and death.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | October 24, 2021 | 8.4 | 9b38b1b7-d764-46ad-9ecd-9118a63a07ec | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
In conjunction with a hardcover collection of his lyrics, the singer-songwriter reimagines his classics and obscurities as intimate, acoustic tales. | In conjunction with a hardcover collection of his lyrics, the singer-songwriter reimagines his classics and obscurities as intimate, acoustic tales. | Will Oldham: Songs of Love and Horror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/will-oldham-songs-of-love-and-horror/ | Songs of Love and Horror | Near the end of a recent show in Brooklyn, Will Oldham brought the room to silence. He stepped to the foot of the stage to sing “Careless Love,” a nearly a cappella track from 2001’s Ease Down the Road. Now played with a seven-piece band but sung without a microphone, what was once a hushed prayer became powerful enough to fill the theater. The moment captured what, nearly three decades into his career, might have become Oldham’s defining quality: He can really sing. It’s as clear onstage as it is in his recent work, as he’s become perhaps the genre’s most hotly requested guest vocalist, making him an heir apparent to Emmylou Harris or Drag City’s own bearded, mystic Ty Dolla $ign. Oldham hasn’t released a complete set of new solo songs since 2013, but that voice keeps finding new territory for reinventing itself.
Just as it once would have been difficult to imagine Oldham—the guy from Louisville with the creaky whisper, the inscrutable lyrics, and the half-dozen pseudonyms—belting from the footlights, he also never seemed like the type of artist to solidify his songbook into one of those fancy hardcover books. But the 304-page Songs of Love and Horror spans his vast discography and includes a few tunes that even Palace lifers will have to Google; a gorgeous book, it is also uncommonly thoughtful and funny. (“So strong a love gurgling in the stomach that even the regurge is something beautiful,” reads the annotation to “Raining in Darling.”) To coincide with the book, Oldham has issued a new album of the same name, featuring solo acoustic renditions of 10 songs from his catalog, plus a cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Strange Affair” and an appended archival recording that suggests just how much he has grown into his voice.
Unlike similar releases in his catalog—say, the country facelift of 2004’s Greatest Palace Music—none of these new takes on old songs are reinventions. If anything, the songs sound less melodic and more conversational here. Stripped of Dawn McCarthy’s gorgeous backing vocals, “Wai” wobbles slightly, like Oldham’s just re-remembering the melody as he sings it. Elsewhere, the verses in “New Partner,” one of his first great songs, emerge as one escalating plea, swiftly sung in an almost distracted cadence. Compared to Mark Kozelek’s stripped cover of the same number, Oldham’s version here seems almost tossed-off. As with this set’s reliably beautiful redo of “I See a Darkness,” it won’t replace the original, but it highlights the endless malleability of Oldham’s work, ripe for discovering and reinterpreting.
Offering more than mere updates of classics, Songs of Love and Horror also showcases the depth of Oldham’s catalog through obscure tracks like the slow, haunted “Most People” and the previously unreleased “Party With Marty (Abstract Blues).” The latter track was recorded in 1997 (and not re-recorded here), but its breezy storytelling fits into the set with such ease that, were it not for the fidelity difference, you might not notice the two-decade leap. It’s a magic trick Oldham plays, finding wisdom in his earliest compositions and reworking recent songs so they sound more like those old records. Lovable and intimate, it’s the type of album that could have been conceived in the 40 minutes it took him to play it. On any given day, it might have been a completely different set of tracks, radiating with a completely different mood. “Every song is built with the idea that it will be repeated,” he writes in the book. “Again and again and again.” This record acts as another quiet testament to that mission. | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 24, 2018 | 7.1 | 9b459154-7a3e-4cdd-9b21-d52cba6e5c8f | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Following last year’s mesmerizing Stadium, this three-track EP is as spacious and richly textured as experimental percussion gets. | Following last year’s mesmerizing Stadium, this three-track EP is as spacious and richly textured as experimental percussion gets. | Eli Keszler: Empire EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eli-keszler-empire-ep/ | Empire EP | The work of percussionist and composer Eli Keszler often feels like a tug of war between movement and stasis. On 2011’s Cold Pin, tiny, rapid-fire details massed into vast sheets of solid sound, like minuscule shells compressed to form enormous limestone cliffs. On 2016’s Last Signs of Speed, Keszler’s intricate runs and fills scuttled with the energy of a foraging squirrel, though drones tamped down the music’s volatile edges. Last year’s Stadium was his most groove-oriented release to date, its rippling cadences often reminiscent of drum ’n’ bass or hip-hop but smoothed by muted techno-jazz keys. Even when snare rolls rained down like soft avalanches, there was a sense of things coming to rest.
On Empire, a three-track follow-up to Stadium, Keszler moves even more toward what might be described as proper songs. As on Stadium, the theme running through this short, cohesive EP, Keszler says, is “the illusion of order during declines.” That may account for the songs’ relatively restrained kinetic energy: A familiar feeling of exhaustion oozes from the music’s pores. “Enter the Bristle Strum” is built atop a brooding, half-speed drumbeat—almost a shadow of one, really, just a lurching series of kicks and low toms fleshed out with faint detail. For once, all the focus is what’s happening tonally, as quiet, searching chord progressions blossom into Rhodes licks. It might be as close as Keszler has ever come to a ballad.
“Corrosion Kingdom” is even more lyrical. The drums here are all but an afterthought, with brushed snares hissing like a quick inhalation. The tonal field is awash in vibraphones and other glassy sounds; as an elegiac piano melody rises from the mist, echoes of Tortoise at their most diffuse appear. Turn it up enough, and it becomes apparent that there’s a gray layer of static draped over everything, like a crystal chandelier swaddled in a moving blanket. It’s an unknown shape lurking in the mix, as intentional as his pin-pricked cymbal taps. This is as spacious and richly textured as experimental percussion records get.
Part of this sense of space derives from Keszler’s unusual toolkit. Along with the vibraphone and the similar Vibracelesta, he has worked with several sample-based instruments of his own creation, the Violoskapa and the Amarelion. These, he explains, allow him to take environmental recordings from urban locations and compress them into “split second strikes… a way of collapsing long distances and large spaces into actions on an instrument, weaving these sounds and spaces around each other.” What exactly that means in practice may be hard to visualize, but it helps explain the music’s unusually charged atmosphere, as though it harbors unknown dimensions within its folds.
Only with the closing “The Tenth Part of a Featured World” do the flickering sticks of Keszler’s previous work come to the fore. The same slow mallets once again set the pace and pensive mood. There’s a hint of new age here—wind chimes, flutes, and voice-like synthesizer pads. Where new age leans into calming consonance, though, Keszler’s tones bristle with dissonance. That harmonic complexity serves as the springboard for his drumming: small, explosive fills that sound like knitting needles against a flat metal surface. It’s a remarkable array of textures and conflicting impulses, and as the piece builds—chords swelling, layers accreting, drum patterns tangling into tighter and tighter knots—it takes on an unusually expressive character for music so abstracted.
Keszler describes both Stadium and Empire as attempts to capture his impressions of modern American cities, especially the glassy sheen of their metallic surfaces, and tie that back to a sense of political and cultural malaise. What comes across in the music isn’t so much the illusion of order as the personal search, through sound, for a meaningful path forward. | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Shelter Press | February 12, 2019 | 7.6 | 9b4c9db4-4330-44a1-982b-451c2f10c2e6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Over the span of their first five albums, the Roadside Graves were quintessential, New Jersey roots-rock storytellers, with songs full of empathetic third-person narratives. On their fifth album, and first for the esteemed Don Giovanni label, they are ready to tell their own. At its best, Acne/Ears unassumingly places itself within reach of New Jersey's A-list of confessional indie rockers. | Over the span of their first five albums, the Roadside Graves were quintessential, New Jersey roots-rock storytellers, with songs full of empathetic third-person narratives. On their fifth album, and first for the esteemed Don Giovanni label, they are ready to tell their own. At its best, Acne/Ears unassumingly places itself within reach of New Jersey's A-list of confessional indie rockers. | The Roadside Graves: Acne/Ears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21046-acneears/ | Acne/Ears | Over the span of their first five albums, the Roadside Graves were quintessential, New Jersey roots-rock storytellers, with songs full of empathetic third-person narratives. On the title track of Acne/Ears, they're ready to tell their own. It's as unflattering as you'd expect from a song called "Acne/Ears", two facial features that seem to exist for the sole purpose of causing adolescent embarrassment. "Some boys are filled with piss and vinegar/ Some boys are filled with just pus and blood," John Gleason sings, recalling the days when his breakouts were so profuse, he didn't even bother going to school. It's similar to Strand of Oaks' breakthrough single "Goshen '97", in which a sullen teen finds relief by singing terribly in the mirror even when he could hardly bear to look at himself.
As Gleason inventories his musical, physical, and spiritual failings throughout Acne/Ears, he becomes an avatar for an easily identifiable nowhere man—the guy who trudges through high school without much distinction or even the dignity afforded by being a true weirdo, starts a band, gets a job, and never gets quite far enough away from his origins to forget his past life as a pockmarked loner. On the album centerpiece "Donna (Reno)", Gleason thinks back on every book he's read and forgot, every show he was too drunk to remember, and shrinks from the laughter of construction workers and a middle finger from a bus full of schoolchildren. His only wish is to be cremated and baked into the highway, "so you can say I helped build something." But otherwise, Gleason tries to turn his liabilities into assets on Acne/Ears—misery as an opportunity for character building, introspection as a bullshit detector.
At its best, Acne/Ears unassumingly places itself within reach of New Jersey's A-list of confessional indie rockers. But it lacks a true sense of stakes—Gleason's take on romance occasionally bears the startling bite of the Wrens on The Meadowlands, but otherwise his insights pass after a brief sting, like those kids on the school bus. Nor do Roadside Graves have the youthful brass or ambition to impose its will on naysayers like Titus Andronicus or Cymbals Eat Guitars. The lack of urgency can sometimes show just in the inescapable fact that this took four years to make. There are questionable binaries in "Surfin'" that feel at least that many years behind the cultural conversation, and the rousing coda of "Acne/Ears" is sunk by archaic gendering of what true rock'n'roll means—"Somebody please wake up those girls in the back on their phones/ Ears are meant to be destroyed by boys in basements making noise."
Though they're now signed to the esteemed Don Giovanni label, Gleason works as a second-grade teacher and the rest of the band is spread out across the country; "no big tours planned now but hopefully one day!" reads a post on their Facebook page. Gleason spends a stray thought in "Donna (Reno)" dreaming of getting married, moving in with his cousins back in Jersey, and quitting Roadside Graves. It's unclear whether he sees any of that as progress or resignation, but for the time being, he finds a way to live in the moment by expressing disarming sincerity on the title track—"I'm just happy you're listening." | 2015-09-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Don Giovanni | September 18, 2015 | 6.9 | 9b50015c-26b5-4dd6-8bbd-b6df1c0057d6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Atlanta star’s third solo album balances a new level of celebrity and the icy realism that’s long been his signature. | The Atlanta star’s third solo album balances a new level of celebrity and the icy realism that’s long been his signature. | 21 Savage: American Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21-savage-american-dream/ | American Dream | One of 21 Savage’s earliest forays into letter-writing came on the penultimate track of 2018’s i am > i was, where he penned an apologetic and appreciative tribute to his mother, Heather Carmillia Joseph, for dealing with his teenage mischief. It wasn’t the first time that he’d revealed such an interior window—all over the album he posited himself as a tormented agent of the macabre, unable to shake the traumatic memories while also enjoying the spoils of his riches—but it signified a unique willingness to go long on personal soliloquy. On his latest release, american dream, his mom returns the favor, opening the album with a spoken-word dedication that alludes to the countless sacrifices she undertook to help him achieve his wildest dreams. Instead of nestling the emotional weight away in the corner, 21 uses it as a battering ram, bursting through the door to begin to try to paint the full picture of who he has become.
And it’s a tall task. 21’s profile has grown in recent years, with a collaborative album and tour with Drake, humanitarian initiatives that made him a community leader in Atlanta—hell, even the teaser “trailer” credits for american dream read like an Emmy after-party invite list. His third solo album attempts to balance reveling in his newfound elevated celebrity and retaining the tortured persona that relishes in recounting the gruesome details of his journey. This produces some missteps, but the 31 year old cuts through the glossy excess with clarity and lyrical self-assuredness, producing enough sterling moments to show that he’s still a star worthy of fanfare.
The line between inventive use of samples and cynical nostalgia-bait is thin; maybe 21 learned from the disastrous hijacking of Daft Punk on Her Loss’ “Circo Loco.” The crack team of producers on american dream—including Metro Boomin, Cardo, Coupe, London on da Track, and OG Parker—attempt to string together more moments of harmony between 21’s reserved register and the production landscape, rather than taking big swings at grandiosity. Rose Royce lead singer Gwen Dickey’s lilting voice echoes in the background of “all of me,” creating a morose arena in which 21 dwells upon the violence and backstabbing he survived to reach this stage of his life. The album’s crate-digging finds (like Brazilian singer Elza Laranjeira’s angelic crooning from “Serenata do Adeus” on “redrum”) mesh better than the easily recognizable tributes (Faith Evans and K-Ci loops on “prove it” and “should’ve wore a bonnet”), but the overall cohesion of the production is a welcome sign.
Understatement has suited 21 for years. His effectiveness stems from minute tweaks, mutating his low register and delivery to imbue emotion and variance into his stone-faced raps. The drawn-out distribution of his murderous wordplay on “redrum” makes it feel as though he’s almost veering off the tracks. A heightened version of his whisper flow arises on the hook of “sneaky,” before returning to truncated one-liners about Flipmode squad and sneaky links that hit like prizefighter jabs. “Head so good, she could eat ice cream with a straw/I’m too fertile to be goin’ in you raw,” he raps, over a Coupe-produced trap beat that leaves you bouncing your shoulders without even noticing.
It’s not high-profile moves that make 21 great. As much as he’s trying to capture the essence of those R&B classics he cherishes on Instagram, the Summer Walker-assisted “prove it” falls short of the intrinsic charisma produced by the likes of a Busta Rhymes and Mariah Carey collaboration: 21’s materialistically vapid bars are washed away by Walker’s runs, which feel as though they belong to one of her emotionally charged ballads. Celebrity guests Burna Boy and Travis Scott register as vestigial appendages—a sharp contrast with the gratifyingly grimy murkiness of Young Thug’s brief cameo and the aloof whispers emanating from Doja Cat. The attempt at a cinematic pop-rap track with Tommy Stewart and Mikky Ekko on “red sky” lands like a forgettable deep cut from the Furious 7 soundtrack.
As 21’s status has shifted, he puts the realistic contradictions of his existence on display with a steely neutrality. He can oscillate between acknowledging the devil on his shoulder, memorializing his fallen loved ones, and executing an enemy in his own backyard in consecutive breaths. He can lament the fatal ramifications of “standing on business” while slandering those who turn witness for their own self-protection. On the closing “dark days,” he reflects on the merits of his self-improvement, doling out wisdom like “stay in school” and “put the guns down” to teenagers who run the streets. It’s a sensitive affirmation that unravels the violent persona he’s created, an honest assessment fueled by confidence in who he’s become and what he wants to do. It is the crux of the freedom that his mother strived for from the beginning. | 2024-01-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Slaughter Gang / Epic | January 17, 2024 | 6.8 | 9b5568b9-9499-4f7e-98fb-595a4c563ce6 | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
On their first album in 7 years, the blackgaze innovators lighten up their sound with bountiful hooks and life-drunk enthusiasm. | On their first album in 7 years, the blackgaze innovators lighten up their sound with bountiful hooks and life-drunk enthusiasm. | Lantlôs: Wildhund | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lantlos-wildhund/ | Wildhund | Lantlôs, a project led by German multi-instrumentalist Markus Siegenhort, were adventurous from the jump, combining icy black metal with post-rock and jazz in the late 2000s. While their sound has softened since then, their creativity has not. It’s been a full seven years since they did away almost entirely with screams and blastbeats on the epic suite Melting Sun. Its long-awaited follow-up, Wildhund, nixes longform compositions for a punchier sound. And while plenty of metal bands have gone shoegaze over the past decade, this music smashes those familiar tropes into a million kaleidoscopic pieces.
Wildhund’s aesthetic is as distinctive as it is lurid: Its swirl of thick riffs is held aloft by zero-gravity drumming, and its melodies are buoyant enough to support a tricky array of grooves. Shoegaze, in part, stuck as a genre tag because of the slouched posture needed to monitor a multitude of effects pedals onstage. Lantlôs deliver those same heavily treated wallops of guitar with a hooky earnestness that’s directly at odds with that brooding stereotype. Wildhund’s closest forebears are probably Hum and Deftones, bands whose hi-fi takes on shoegaze led the genre far from its origins. But even those bands’ most ebullient moments—say, the former’s “Stars” and the latter’s “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”—seem dour in the face of Wildhund’s life-drunk enthusiasm.
As much as Lantlôs diverge from shoegaze norms—as on the giddy, souped-up “Magnolia”—they stray even further from black metal. Siegenhort, alongside his former bandmate and Alcest frontman Neige, is considered one of the forefathers of the blackgaze subgenre, having helped to establish the sound in its pre-Sunbather wilderness period. In particular, the band’s 2010 album, .neon, which features Neige on vocals, stands as an early touchstone, its infusion of jazzy chords and loose drumming exploring a direction that few contemporaries have been able to replicate. While Melting Sky pushed the band toward post-rock grandeur, Wildhund is even more divorced from that era’s abrasiveness.
Across the album, the band only sparingly incorporates screaming and double bass drum beatdowns. On songs like “Home,” “The Bubble,” and “Amber,” these touchstones of extreme music are used as punctuation marks rather than cathartic climaxes. Drummer Felix Wylezik and Siegenhort, who handles the remainder of the instrumentation, keep the energy cranked with little time for build-ups or crescendos. They hit the ground running and rarely let up, save for a breathy, ambient interlude (“Cloud Inhaler”), and they keep things catchy but structurally engaging with earwormy mini-breakdowns. These flourishes, such as the crushing two-beat motif in opener “Lake Fantasy,” the jerky breakdown that opens and recurs throughout “Home,” and the abrupt switches in and out of triplets on “The Bubble,” freshen up songs that, if delivered in more straightforward fashion, would already be outstanding alt-rock cuts. Augmented by Lantlôs’ rhythmic dexterity and prismatic guitar tones, the sparkling Wildhund offers thrills beyond immediate catchiness while also raising a question why everything so musically impressive can’t be this catchy.
A potent mix of black metal’s bombast and shoegaze’s smeared beauty, Melting Sun was a daring album, but years down the road, Wildhund takes its experimentation even farther. It’s not just Lantlôs’ continued pursuit of genre-mashing—Siegenhort’s vocal approach is so wide-eyed that it almost moves the album out of the blackgaze conversation entirely. The genre is no stranger to colorful artwork (see r/blackgaze’s header collage of album artwork) but with lyrics about “pastel coated bubble blower[s],” “supersonic swirl[s] of azure nectar,” and in a particularly Owl City moment, “100 million butterflies,” Siegenhort brings that palette to life. Were he shrieking so raggedly that his words’ true nature was revealed only in lyric booklets—the ultimate act of black metal introversion—the album might sound more bracing, and therefore more challenging. But at this stage in Siegenhort’s career, delivering his words in such a clear voice with his chest puffed out feels like the more radical act.
If the melodies weren’t so catchy, the song structures so dizzying, and the production so gleaming, Wildhund might crumble under the weight of its own outsized ambition. But amid a sea of metal artists breaking free from stifling genre confines only to land on a self-propelled treadmill of equally tired and gloomy signifiers, Lantlôs’ embrace of hooks and lysergic imagery is refreshing. At a climactic moment on “The Bubble,” Siegenhort sings, “Elevate me, make me feel again.” Within the trajectory of his music—and blackgaze as a whole—that is exactly what Wildhund seeks to do.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Prophecy | August 2, 2021 | 7.5 | 9b591481-29df-4fd3-9aed-9b9a7032c73d | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The tempestuous debut by producer and vocalist Felicia Chen is an emotionally tense album that whips between violent outcries and quiet pockets of respite | The tempestuous debut by producer and vocalist Felicia Chen is an emotionally tense album that whips between violent outcries and quiet pockets of respite | Dis Fig: PURGE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dis-fig-purge/ | PURGE | Felicia Chen is usually associated with spinning intense electronic DJ sets under the guise of Dis Fig. At one point during the recording of her debut album PURGE, Chen conveyed to her label boss, Geng, who runs the New York City-based PTP, that the vibe of the music was like anguished Portishead meeting the bass swamped tendencies of the Bug.
Contextualizing music in a referential way like this happens a lot when you listen to PTP releases: The label was originally named Purple Tape Pedigree in honor of purple-colored cassette copies of Raekwon's 1995 hip-hop standard-bearer Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., but you won't find much in the way of ’90s-influenced raps allied to dusty soul samples in the vault. Instead, PTP's mission seems to be to annihilate genre boundaries and revel in the brilliant debris—like releasing a musing on the REM sleep cycle that flashes between moments of serene sci-fi ambience and pummeling video game techno (Nima Aghiani's REMS), presenting a noise-rock workout to invoke trance-like feelings of healing (Among The Rocks And Roots' Raga), or running tapestries of percussion and field recordings from Tehran through an echo-chamber as commentary on chemical attacks in Iraq (Saint Abdullah’s Stars Have Eyes).
Dis Fig's PURGE fits snugly into the PTP credo: The record wavers between Chen’s scorched vocals battling to be heard over brutal, electronic production and luminous, minimalist moments where her words resonate as tender pleas. Along the way, the album nods to trip-hop, techno, noise, punk and soul influences. But despite its progressive production, its emotional heart challenges the listener to empathize why Chen whips between violent outbursts and quiet pockets of respite.
The album opens with "Drum Fife Bugle,” where glitchy electronic jabs are paired with what sounds like a fanfare of panpipes, before being joined by sampled panting and buzzsaw motor-blades. The track has a frantic quality, conjuring images of Chen escaping through wild overgrowth, phosphorescent alien lands, or an emotional battlefield. It’s followed by "Alive," where Chen sounds caged: Her distressed vocals—“I came to see if you're alive”—are suppressed by waves of murmuring bass and digital volcanic ash sputtering around. After the intensity of “Alive” comes the revitalizing “Watering,” a ghostly quiet storm of a song consisting of lapping waves of digital noise. This vertiginous setup continues, with the maelstrom of vocals and electronic production typifying songs like “U Said U Were” and “Unleash” soothed by the hymnal solitude of “The Hermit” and the confessional digi-soul of “WHY.”
The ebb and flow between drama and reflection define PURGE’s topography. Her words are often repressed by the production, but she isn’t crying out in vain—she’s feeling for tears in a fabric of her own creation. This comes to a head between “Purge” and “WHY” via a 30-second interlude where she’s heard listening to a tinny Cantopop song while puttering around her home. There’s something shocking in the domesticity of it all and it unlocks PURGE. As PURGE ends with the relative instrumental calm of “I Am the Tree,” you realize all of Chen’s self-induced emotional pain and unstinting soul-searching has been a mechanism to just, simply, feel secure. | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PTP | March 14, 2019 | 7.7 | 9b5c24e3-4c1d-4294-bc93-5facdc96d23f | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre. | The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre. | Alvvays: Blue Rev | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alvvays-blue-rev/ | Blue Rev | Why has no one thought to better organize the institution of power pop? Ever since Big Star chimed in with their #1 Record, bands of all stripes—the pop group with a shreddy guitarist, the pivoting mid-career punks, the shoegaze band going sober—have gathered loosely under this jubilant banner to pay tribute to broken hearts through hooks and harmonies. At some point, an intrepid fan could have borrowed from the various committees that oversee ska and emo and split power pop into waves, or at the very least adopted a post- or a nü- prefix along the way to divide a genre that’s collected bands since the Nixon era, from the Raspberries to the Go-Gos to Superchunk to the New Pornographers.
So let’s hang a sign over Alvvays and their astonishingly great album Blue Rev as the sound of the genre today. Call it dream-power pop, power pop-gaze, nü-power pop, it doesn’t matter—it’s just one Toronto band absorbing its spirit, mastering its construction, and making it all their own. While singer-songwriter Molly Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley had started writing Blue Rev back in 2017, a series of unfortunate events—floods, thefts, visa issues, a global pandemic—delayed the recording of the album until last year, when the band finally entered the studio with veteran producer Shawn Everett. Armed with a new rhythm section and the one producer you hire when you want to “level up” in the indie world, Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan. It is a deep dive through the history of pop and rock, down into the abyss of what its future might look like.
Alvvays knew the mechanics of a song inside and out on their second album, Antisocialites, but now they are masters of their craft. Blue Rev is absolutely lousy with bridges and middle-8s that give even the album cuts a sense of stakes and momentum. They’ll do the Pixies’ quiet-loud-quiet thing, then a big gaudy key change straight out of a country tune, then bring in some of Kevin Shields’ famous “glide guitar” technique, then Rankin will belt out a note like it’s Adele karaoke night, then the band will bring it down to do a synth-led psychedelic song about a reply-guy in your mentions. This wide-ranging, recombinant style is less about genre-hopping and more about the construction of the songs themselves—there’s so much care over when the chorus needs to go up the octave, when the guitar solo needs to come screaming in, when the key needs to modulate, when the rhythm section needs to drop out. Any band can borrow a style, but when Alvvays builds these songs from the treasured blueprints of bands like Lush and the Lilys, they feel monumental from the very first listen.
What separates Blue Rev from all the teenage-kicks albums before it is Rankin’s subconscious, hyperreal songwriting, which runs counter to the current mode of stark diaristic pop songwriting where singers follow an emotion or idea without detour. Rankin, on the other hand, is all detours and off-ramps, asides and parentheses, bushwhacking through the undignified mess of life. She only gestures at a feeling, allowing the band and her blockbuster vocal lines to take the listener the rest of the way. In her world, the worst thing is not running into your ex, but running into your ex’s sister at a pharmacy who will casually offer that he has that “new love glow” about him. Murder, She Wrote and a Belinda Carlisle song make memorable cameos. Proust had his little cookies; Rankin has Blue Rev, a nuclear-blue malt beverage that is swilled behind a skating rink on “Belinda Says” like one last dizzying teenage reverie before early-onset adulthood.
From the band’s first single, the HOF indie rock jam “Archie, Marry Me” to now, Rankin’s literary flair has never been pretentious, only wise. When she’s helpless, she’s “an assistant to the way life’s shaking out”; if she wants to leave, she will “egress”; she’s not single, she’s “riding the pine.” Near the end of the album, on “Lottery Noises,” Rankin sings one of the most crushing lines about a breakup, foregrounding good fortune in the face of total destruction: “I’ll always be looking for ways to remember the sound of the lottery noises that I can’t believe rang for me.” Like the sound of Blue Rev, the sentiment is so layered and dreamy the real pain underneath is basically invisible.
One more great Rankin line, that opens the triumphant “Easy on Your Own?”: “I dropped out/College education’s a dull knife/If you don’t believe in the lettered life/Then maybe this is our only try.” It gets at the diffuse themes of Blue Rev: escaping and returning, stasis and change, how difficult it is to tell the difference between the two. It’s not the gnarly stuff of high-school hallways, but the soft fear of matriculation. Maybe this liminal, shoegazian state resonates with you, or maybe it’s O’Hanley’s guitar solo at the end of the big rave-up “Pomeranian Spinster.” Blue Rev careens between the sublime and the extremely sick, soothing one moment and whipping you back against your seat the next. It is cool and righteous, it makes you feel cool and righteous, you hope that when other people hear it they feel cool and righteous. This is the old currency of pop music, and Blue Rev makes it feel new again. | 2022-10-07T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-07T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl / Transgressive | October 7, 2022 | 8.8 | 9b6549c2-2821-4d37-8a49-b656405e5fe8 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
Four years after her genre-blending debut, Santigold offers a polished assortment of global pop tunes produced by the likes of Q-Tip, TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Boys Noize, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner. | Four years after her genre-blending debut, Santigold offers a polished assortment of global pop tunes produced by the likes of Q-Tip, TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Boys Noize, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner. | Santigold: Master of My Make-Believe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16570-master-of-my-make-believe/ | Master of My Make-Believe | Four years ago, when lines between the struggling fringe artists and moneyed pop favorites were drawn more cleanly, Santi White-- then known as Santogold-- played an important role representing the underdogs and the outcasts. "Brooklyn, we go hard/ We on the look for the advantage, we work hard," she sang on "Shove It", the outer-borough banger that Jay-Z eventually rapped over. Part A&R rep (she'd worked at Epic Records and once wrote material for singers like Lily Allen and Ashlee Simpson) and part punk (she fronted a new-wave grunge act from Philly called Stiffed), she wanted the corporate pop machine she mingled with to know she was batting for the creative underclass. Her debut was chock full of declarations of authenticity like, "That shit must hurt real bad/ Fakin' what you wish you had." But what happens when your creative underclass hops in bed with the corporate pop machine on its own accord?
This is the dilemma White faces four years removed from her genre-blending debut. Four years that have blurred indie/corpo, authentic/fake, pop/rock dichotomies to the point of irrelevance. White's long-time producer Switch, for example, started out shaping the sound of the global underground as one half of Major Lazer and wound up repurposing it for none other than Beyoncé. "I remember when Switch went to work on Beyoncé's record," White said in a recent interview. "I had actually... played Beyoncé Major Lazer's 'Pon de Floor' and she was like, 'That's amazing.'" It was only a matter of time before that beat found itself on 4's lead single "Run the World (Girls)" and the accompanying music video racked up 133 million YouTube views. "I was working with Switch at the time and I was like, 'OK, Switch, we're working tomorrow?'" White explained. "And he was like, 'Actually, I'm working with Beyoncé.'"
Perhaps realizing words like, "Taint my mind but not my soul/ Tell you I got fire/ I won't sell it for no payroll" would ring hollow, White has switched the overarching message to something a bit more personal this time around: Don't put me in a box, I'm in control, and I can be as many different things at the same time as I want to be. On the Kehinde Wiley-designed cover she appears as three different characters-- a valiant Napoleonic type next to a horse in a painting, a man perched arrogantly in a chair in a suit, and a sex kitten/warrior woman figure in a lamé one-piece. Unfortunately, the record doesn't deliver on the bold promise to explore a fantastical assortment of characters. Instead it offers a polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.
A telling moment arrives on "Freak Like Me", a thorny, gyrating standout that jolts you from the record's lull. After a few listens you realize why: The track repurposes the tune of "Rich Girl", the adaptation of a Fiddler on the Roof song popularized by Louchie Lou & Michie One in the 1990s and then by Gwen Stefani and Eve in 2004 (come to think of it, Santigold's ear for the crossover potential of ska, dub, and punk-pop shares more with Stefani than it does with M.I.A., someone to whom she's constantly compared). It doesn't spell good things for the rest of the album that one of its boldest-sounding songs grabs at familiar low-hanging fruit.
Despite the star-studded grab-bag of a production roster that includes Q-Tip, TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, Boys Noize, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, the record flattens into a glossy collection of effortless dub-tronica that's oddly lacking in texture. The closest White plays to actual make-believe is on "Look at These Hoes", a diss track with a lurking throttle of a beat over which Santi appropriates a snide rap persona, spitting "Look at me/ Then look at these hoes/ These bitches ain't fuckin' with me." The tension between earnestly pissed and mockingly caustic makes for the record's most engaging track. The remainder is primed for play in, say, the dressing rooms at a hip clothing chain or downtown hotel bar-- a fate that almost seems tragic given White's allegiance to opposing ideologies and aesthetic decisions.
At this point it's difficult to discern whether Master of My Make-Believe is disappointingly inert because it's actually unadventurous or because the rest of the world has simply caught up with White. Would the fusion of twinkling electronic dub with shreddier undertones on the anthemic "Disparate Youth" be more interesting if we didn't have bands like Sleigh Bells melting bubblegum sensibilities into punishing guitar shriek? Or if each week didn't bring a ceaseless wave of remixes pairing artists who never would have appeared in the same mp3 tag three years ago? They're questions White herself is yearning to answer, and struggling. She acknowledges it on the appropriately titled ballad "The Riot's Gone", singing: "I've been searching for an angle/ For a cause I can't defend." She'll admit she knows better than anyone that fight music is hard to make when you can't figure out what you're fighting against. | 2012-05-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Downtown | May 2, 2012 | 6.3 | 9b6bde89-9284-4fad-a9dd-e9d5cfa5ef43 | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Drakeo’s second project of all-new material since being released from prison is more relaxed and less bitter than his first. There’s a subtext to every flex; he’s been through the wringer, and this is his time to celebrate. | Drakeo’s second project of all-new material since being released from prison is more relaxed and less bitter than his first. There’s a subtext to every flex; he’s been through the wringer, and this is his time to celebrate. | Drakeo the Ruler: The Truth Hurts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drakeo-the-ruler-the-truth-hurts/ | The Truth Hurts | In the early 2010s, Los Angeles rap was in a transitional period, moving from the underground haven of Blu & Exile to the album-length narratives of YG and Kendrick Lamar. Drakeo the Ruler sailed in and upended all of that. He came to prominence on his 2015 mixtape I Am Mr. Mosley, which created waves for its unique slang like “Silly billy really want to try me for my pieces/bullets bodying for pints, yeah bitch it’s that easy.’’ Drakeo didn’t make albums with Spike Lee or John Singleton-like narratives in them; he reached his peak with minimalist drums, a Ghostface-like capacity to develop new slang at a single moment (Who ever heard of “flu flamming’’ before Drakeo said it?), and a 2Pac-like ability to combine different moods and feelings in one verse.
Hearing him rap is like eavesdropping on an illicit conversation between street heads, full of mumbled phrases and lingo for fear of anyone decoding what they're talking about: “Do I got to get tactical?/Start grabbing dracos off mattresses,” he mutters on “Intro,” the standout first statement on his new album, The Truth Hurts. This is his second project of all-new material since the deal that he struck on November 4th granted his freedom. The first, We Know the Truth, celebrated his freedom with a tinge of bitterness: “Twelve jurors, not guilty, nigga beat it,” he spat on “20 Pieces.” The Truth Hurts is more relaxed. Sure, everyone knows the subtext to when he laughs at his enemies, but there are no specific details about his case or his time spent locked up. He’s mostly flexing here, which is more in line with his work previous to the LASD’s scheme. At the same time, he is triumphant. There’s a subtext to everything: On “Exclusive,’’ he spits “The police asked me what's my name?/I told ‘em So Icy, I had to blind ‘em, they almost found the pole by me.” He’s been through the wringer; this is his time to celebrate.
His delivery might be in the descending tree of Bay Area legend E-40, but Drakeo only sounds like Drakeo. Where E-40 sounds like a drunk uncle, Drakeo is your playful and intense cousin. He has five different ways to describe a gun; it’s “heavy metal’’ on “Too Icey,” and a ”meat cleaver’’ on “10.’’ He’s also becoming a great songwriter. “It’s Sum Shit On Me’’ recreates the smoothness of Fabolous’ “Make Me Better,’’ but with the trademark ironclad monotone that has made Drakeo the best rapper of his region for the past three years. Drake is on the last song, “Talk to Me,” and they make a good duo. Drakeo gives Drake the ability to talk about sliding down on enemies in the club. Drake gives Drakeo the ability to spit game. There’s never a feature (except perhaps the Don Toliver one), that sounds like it is out of place in Drakeo’s world. “Pow Right in the Kisser,” which sounds like a Timbaland beat that drank lean, features fellow Stinc Team member Ketchy the Great in rare form. Drakeo lurks in the background adding “pow right in the kisser” after every Ketchy bar. The song is audaciously weird, and only gets more so as it goes on, like it’s daring you to complain about it.
Ketchy is on four songs on this album. On February 15th, Drakeo confirmed that Ketchy had sadly passed away the day in a car accident. Unfortunately, this loss is still something that Drakeo knows all too well being a Black man from South Central. Even when Drakeo achieves greatness, there’s going to be something trying to bring him down. With The Truth Hurts, this is now his fourth project that counts as the best rap music coming out of the West Coast. It keeps in line with the pared-down street production that JoogSZN and Ron-Ron have created, which is running the West Coast right now, while expanding on the songwriting and lyrical skills that made Drakeo a household name. If that wasn’t enough, his songs have now become the soundtrack to a movement. The LASD detectives are upset. They used song lyrics, rap beef, and his trademark slang to try to paint Drakeo and The Stinc Team as criminals. Now those same lyrics are making him a rap superstar.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Stinc Team | March 4, 2021 | 7.7 | 9b6d2f48-d851-48e2-b525-4d53fa5d3e67 | Jayson Buford | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-buford/ | |
High Life, the second collaboration between Brian Eno and Karl Hyde of Underworld in the last four months, is a genuine surprise. Filled with energy, rich harmonies, and sideways references to various strands of global music, it's Eno's best vocal-centric album in years. | High Life, the second collaboration between Brian Eno and Karl Hyde of Underworld in the last four months, is a genuine surprise. Filled with energy, rich harmonies, and sideways references to various strands of global music, it's Eno's best vocal-centric album in years. | Brian Eno / Karl Hyde: High Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19539-brian-eno-karl-hyde-high-life/ | High Life | In 2010, the announcement that Brian Eno had signed to Warp Records was an event. His decades-long history of groundbreaking electronic music had a lot to do with Warp even existing at all, so the fact he was going to be working with the imprint known for taking the torch in the 1990s and 2000s brought dreams of great things. Lost in the excitement was the memory that Eno had for a number of years been making low-key records that made little impact outside of his cult. Another Day on Earth from 2005, his first song-based solo album in many years, had some memorable songs, and his 2008 pairing with David Byrne, Everything Happens Today, found an audience. But ’90s and ’00s instrumental releases like Drawn From Life, The Drop, Neroli, and The Shutov Assembly didn’t come close to entering his canon. The Warp signing obscured the fact that Eno always had more than his share of uneven records, in part because he’s never been the sort of artist interested in perfection. So the fact that four of the records and collaborations released on Warp have ranged from a lovely retread of familiar ground (2012’s Lux) to eminently forgettable collaborations (the two records with poet Rick Holland, and the first with Underworld’s Karl Hyde) should surprise nobody.
High Life, though, is a genuine surprise. As the second meeting between Eno and Hyde in the last four months, it would have been reasonable to expect outtakes, another set of OK half-songs to accompany the ones released earlier this year. But High Life—recorded in just five days, with much of it played and processed live—is something else altogether. This is Eno’s best vocal album in 25 years, since his 1990 collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. It’s interesting to go back that far because High Life has a few things in common with that record, most prominently the elements inspired by pop music from the African continent. Yes, this is a recurring obsession of Eno’s, dating back at least to his first co-billed collaboration with David Byrne, 1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But on High Life it’s again made explicit, from the title (Highlife is a broad genre of jazz-inflected West African pop music that emerged late in the last century) on down.
That said, many of the references are less musical and more textural, and guitars are the first thing you notice. The opening “Return” is nine minutes of drone-guitar bliss, as Karl Hyde strums two chords furiously with the sort of pinched, trebly, delay-heavy tone that evokes both West African styles and the Edge circa The Unforgettable Fire. The tension of pivoting between those two chords without resolution is softened by Eno’s voice, which he layers into sturdy central melody softened by billowing harmonies. It’s the kind of blindingly simple thing that nobody does better than Eno, and it points to why this record towers over much of his recent output—it sounds analog, like people in a room playing who could make mistakes. Despite his technological pedigree, Eno has always been most inspired by the place where abstract mathematics meet the messiness of nature. His earlier collaborative efforts on Warp, as well as Small Craft on a Milk Sea, felt like records where meaning was carved from endless possibility; High Life shows how much more he can wring out of just a handful of ideas.
If I’m leaning heavily toward Eno’s contributions here, it’s because so many of his songwriting and production signatures are in the foreground. Hyde is the guitarist throughout the record, but Eno’s fingerprints are all over his approach. “DBF” is a relatively upbeat track with a chicken scratch-funk feel that makes me think of Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches”, while the slow and dreamy line in “Time to Waste It” brings to mind an ’80s interpretation of King Sunny Ade. But we’re talking about something more than just a collection of global music signifiers here—influences are stripped down, transformed, and often turned into something disorienting and strange through Eno’s processing. “Time to Waste It” has pinched, warped, and ultimately very weird vocals of uncertain origin which seem to be singing lead from different songs with each new line. “Lilac”’s overlapping guitar lines have the frenetic pulse of classical minimalism, with odd bleeps and squawks mixing in with the chords, and they’re contrasted with the richly harmonized vocals, which remind us how in tune he is with the pure joy of singing.
That big-hearted spirit is embedded into the record as a whole. I count one dud among the six tracks, the just-OK “Moulded Life”, which has some nice sounds but feels a bit like processing-for-processing’s-sake. But that is more than redeemed by the elegiac closer “Cells & Bells”, where grinding Fennesz-like electronics are set against a mass of voices singing a dark but faintly hopeful prayer. It’s a moving end to a startling and inspiring record. Eno’s been involved with quite a few of those in the past, but it’s especially nice to experience a new one that reaches us in the present moment. | 2014-07-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | July 2, 2014 | 8.5 | 9b6e3708-baf4-4eb5-8497-7254a39cd721 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
With a newfound emphasis on dynamics and space, the Brooklyn group evolves from its gritty post-punk origins into a proudly outrageous jam band. | With a newfound emphasis on dynamics and space, the Brooklyn group evolves from its gritty post-punk origins into a proudly outrageous jam band. | Geese: 3D Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/geese-3d-country/ | 3D Country | Geese learned their lesson: New York City is so whatever. While their much-hyped 2021 debut, Projector, struggled to stand out among every other Brooklyn band doing Talking Heads and Television, 3D Country is a pivot out of CBGB and into indie rock’s Day of the Dead era. Traces of jittery post-punk are still present, but this time, the band lightens things up with sunnier and proggier hues. It turns out Geese are more inspiring as a glamping jam band than a slick post-punk outfit: They sound bright, colorful, and at ease, with their goofiness now on full display.
From the opening “2122,” vocalist Cameron Winter immediately sounds liberated—and ridiculous. Like a horny shaman yelling at the Grand Canyon, he summons an ecstatic bellow to call upon idols from Ancient Egypt (Osiris, lord of death and rebirth), a questionable blend of Hinduism and Slavic folklore (“Voodoo Balarama Baba Yaga”), and Norse mythology (Jörmungandr, the World Serpent). Instead of boxing in their more expressive singer, the rest of the band rises to his level. Guitarists Gus Green and Foster Hudson throw dueling “War Pigs” riffs and a banjo into the mix. Bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin provide the needed consistency and structure. Rather than projecting a united front, Geese are now a band of distinct voices racing against each other, resulting in an album full of gleeful chaos.
Geese still make intricate rock music, but there’s a newfound emphasis on dynamics, space, and, most crucially, melody. The first half of the record is especially strong. “3D Country” slows the tempo and allows listeners to catch their breath, and the addition of background vocals and piano adds some much-welcome depth. “Cowboy Nudes” is effortlessly carried by melodies that anyone could sing along to. Later, “Tomorrow’s Crusades” incorporates wedding-ceremony strings and Winter’s falsetto—“Where would I ever be without you?” he sings in a rare moment of straightforwardness—to earn the distinction of being the first Geese song that can be called pretty.
Things fizzle out around the middle. By the time we get to “Undoer” and “Crusades,” two slow burns that forget to burn into anything, Geese revert to noodling. Their comfort zone speaks to the jam-friendly pivot: the built-in understanding that most of these songs will probably sound better live than in the studio. “Maybe the last record was our teenage angst and 3D Country is our newfound twenty-something arrogance,” Winter suggests in the press material, where he also claims that 3D Country is about modern doom, climate change, and perseverance through ambient dread—themes that will only be apparent from a close and generous read through the lyrics. While their influences are all over the map, it’s encouraging to hear Geese getting more comfortable sounding like themselves. | 2023-06-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan / Play It Again Sam | June 23, 2023 | 6.8 | 9b756978-edb9-4976-859c-d90d7bb6d3e8 | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
The new album from producers Sam Shackleton and Vengeance Tenfold foregoes traditional structures for byzantine, suite-like movements full of headtrip spoken word and drifting pads. | The new album from producers Sam Shackleton and Vengeance Tenfold foregoes traditional structures for byzantine, suite-like movements full of headtrip spoken word and drifting pads. | Shackleton / Vengeance Tenfold: Sferic Ghost Transmits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22749-sferic-ghost-transmits/ | Sferic Ghost Transmits | Among club artists as well as experimental composers, Sam Shackleton has few peers. Since his Skull Disco label closed shop in 2008, he has continually broken down and reformed his template of North African percussion, paranoid atmospheres, and crushing sub bass, drifting beyond the outer-reaches of the dubstep galaxy that tangentially gave him his start. The sound that has emerged, especially on his more recent Woe to the Septic Heart! label, places him in a legacy of UK artists adept at pulling from jarringly disparate corners of music to create an evocative, dour, strangely mystical body of work that transcends the sum of its parts.
The specters of two such groups—Coil and This Heat—loom large on Sferic Ghost Transmits, the outstanding new album from Shackleton and on-again-off-again collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. Coil’s sense of tense foreboding, cultish incantations, and slithering sensuality are mirrored in the album’s headtrip spoken word and Shackleton’s drifting pads. Meanwhile, Vengeance’s occasionally glum vocal melodies, and the grim sense of survival amid a collapsing neoliberal hellscape, could be cribbed directly from This Heat’s playbook. What these groups have in common is a fluid sense of experimentation that channels technical virtuosity into raw, punk gestures, startling textures, and hypnotic grooves rather than flash.
Still, the music on Sferic Ghost Transmits firmly establishes its own space. The album opens with twisting gamelan percussion and builds layers of oozing drones, choral pads, and lithe percussion figures into a sprawling voyage. Shackleton’s compositions of late have foregone traditional structures, swerving instead through byzantine, suite-like movements. Except for the closer “The Prophet Sequence,” these tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, can go as long as 16, and are built with the intricacy of a puzzle box.
The cover art Shackleton has favored since the beginning telegraphs something critical, too: this is stoner music of the highest order. The intonations on “Seven Virgins” could pass for a lost archival recording of a sea shanty jammed through a flanger. Vengeance sounds quietly epic while Shackleton lays back, focusing mostly on setting thick, opium den moods for over seven minutes. Then a burned synth rips a gnarly solo, occasioning perhaps the first air guitar moment in his extensive discography.
Equally druggy is the way the tracks bleed together. In using a largely consistent sonic palette from song to song, Shackleton has written an album that can wash over you if you’re not listening closely. The tracks demand your attention, but they also reward it. Check for the fidgety organ motif buried in the back of “Sferic Ghost Transmits/Fear the Crown,” tucked beneath Vengeance’s throat singing, or the opening gong of “Five Demiurgic Options”; each moment of this album drips with mood. This is the kind of record that can appeal widely, and may actually find more detractors among its intended audience of electronic music heads precisely because of its lack of traditional club touchstones. Speaking with Resident Advisor in 2010, Shackleton expressed a certain exasperation. “I just make [music] until it sounds right and that’s as simple as it is,” he said. “I know some people say, ‘You can’t fucking dance to that shit.’ When I’m making something, I’m imagining myself dancing to it and I get off on that.” | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | January 21, 2017 | 8 | 9b790efd-008b-48e8-95ae-62b1178208ed | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
On her second album, the Gambian-Swedish musician sings movingly about grief and otherness, but her rich voice too often gets lost in busy, formulaic pop production. | On her second album, the Gambian-Swedish musician sings movingly about grief and otherness, but her rich voice too often gets lost in busy, formulaic pop production. | Seinabo Sey: I’m a Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seinabo-sey-im-a-dream/ | I’m a Dream | Released in 2014, Seinabo Sey’s “Younger” was one of those hits that bubble up every week or so from the cauldron of PR and algorithms, but it was one of the good ones. The gimmick that got it streaming was clear—the singsong pitch-warping on Sey’s repeated “younger”s—but what made it work as a song were the Gambian-Swedish musician’s robust voice and probing lyrics, plus a euphoric string breakdown that whirls its way through the last third. Streamed over 150 million times on Spotify, “Younger” sounds every bit as career-making as it was. The singer’s 2015 debut, Pretend, reached No. 4 on the Swedish charts.
Her second album, I’m a Dream, offers much of the same. Sey’s voice is rich, adept with fluting falsetto and a rich lower register that recalls the underrated Heather Headley. Sometimes, both of Sey’s signatures appear in the same song: “I Owe You Nothing” is a brash, fuck-off statement of independence delivered with a roar, bolstered by gospel choirs, and closed with a near-operatic cod. But beneath the brashness lies an assertion of interiority. Her voice is forceful, upfront, and—unlike the voices of her streaming-bolstered peers—mostly unhindered by features. The only guest vocalist on the album is British soul singer Jacob Banks, whose weary rasp is substantially more robust than most and well-matched to Sey’s. Their duet, “Remember,” feels mature and lived-in.
But euphoric this album is not, for plenty of reasons. Sey, the daughter of Gambian musician Maudo Sey, lost her father in 2013. She dedicated a 2015 EP to him, and I’m a Dream includes “Never Get Used To,” a song about how grief hollows out everything around the mourner, from inside out. “I sing because you told me to, and then I stop because it sounds just like you,” she sings, and you really do hear their shared cadences.
Her pain isn’t just personal but societal; she’s talked about how, as a biracial woman, growing up in Sweden stifled her. In her defiant 2016 Swedish Grammis performance, she stared down the crowd amid a phalanx of women of color. The number was compared to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show, but to Sey it was as bittersweet as it was triumphant. “[The performance] kind of cemented that feeling that I think about a lot but don’t often talk about: I’m very different than Sweden, than Swedish music,” she told The New York Times. “Breathe,” written on a sabbatical in Senegal, expresses that same thought: “I love it here, ‘cause I don't have to explain to them why I’m beautiful,” she sings. “Back home they’re so scared of me, that I became scared of me.” There’s grit to her voice and heft to the string arrangement. What could have been a rote inspirational track feels hard-earned.
Living in Sweden has worked against her professional ambitions, too: The industry can seem to eat people and breathe hits. “[In] the Swedish music industry, [we’re] looking for a formula to do things, because that’s the way that Denniz PoP and Max Martin did things,” Sey told Billboard. To GQ, she explained that, “Having a hit song is not working for me in my brain.… I want to study with people that I admire and get out of my Sweden bubble.”
But the bubble encircled her anyway. “Younger” got big partly due to a Kygo remix. Another Sey single, “Hard Time,” was snapped up for a Galantis track. And whether it’s due to producer Magnus Lidehäll—who is Sey’s longtime collaborator but whose credits also include Katy Perry’s Prism and David Guetta’s “Bang My Head”—or just a concession to the all-important algorithm, formula finds its way into I’m a Dream. “I Love You” and “Never Get Used To” are full of squiggly, snippetized vocals sliced off the Kygo/Calvin/Guetta EDM amoeba. The latter, in particular, is a heartbreaking song about grief, but it’s set to a stiff, static track that sounds like it’s two instrumental parts away from becoming a Maroon 5 demo. Every time Sey conveys genuine pathos—through her words, through an unmoored piano line, or through vocal murmur—it's clobbered by lite-disco.
Far more cohesive are the piano balladry of “Truth” and the gospel uplift of “Breathe” and “Hold Me As I Land,” which don't innovate much but don't need to. And far more interesting are the pensive, understated “My Eye,” with its sinuous, Sade-like vocal runs and bass burbles, as well as “Good in You,” a whirl of twinkly keys, DJ Mustard “hey”s, and palpable Janet influence that combines come-on and uplift into a burst of joy. “I be myself and I ain’t fronting,” Sey sings on “I Owe You Nothing.” Her music works best when it allows her to do that. | 2018-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Saraba AB | September 15, 2018 | 6 | 9b84b3e7-0b56-4662-a2d2-630e3dfdeb06 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
On their most compelling album in more than a decade, the discursive metal trio folds their broad musical interests into a relentless series of hardcore oddities. | On their most compelling album in more than a decade, the discursive metal trio folds their broad musical interests into a relentless series of hardcore oddities. | Boris: NO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boris-no/ | NO | The first quarter-century of recordings by the Japanese trio Boris plays like a guide to heavy music’s assorted possibilities. Since the mid-’90s, they have pivoted from curdled psych-rock to blown-out doom, from snarling thrash to blissful shoegaze, from chaotic improv to manicured pop, scurrying like a cornered animal looking for a spring from a waiting stylistic trap. Can you imagine any other band recording with Merzbow and the Cult’s Ian Astbury? That remarkable versatility has made Boris a lodestar for collapsing subgenre walls, within metal and beyond—if Boris were having so much fun digging through and temporarily donning metal’s various garbs, especially on stage, shouldn’t you?
But Boris’ albums have often suffered from that discursive zeal, as the band methodically moved among their obsessions in a way that could feel academic or clinical. They’d build momentum just to squander it, put you in trance just to interrupt it. All that whiplash could get tiring—on last year’s tedious LφVE & EVφL, their studio debut for Third Man, even Boris sounded over it. Not now, however: The remarkable NO—self-recorded during quarantine starting in late March and self-released in a digital rush—is a gloriously claustrophobic crucible full of all the sounds Boris make best, heated by indignation with our time of closed borders and extreme international turmoil.
Boris squeeze almost everything they’ve ever done and loved into these breathless 40 minutes—hardcore tirades and harsh-noise onslaughts, doom-metal riffs and droning tones, rock’n’roll hooks and reverb-shrouded murmurs. NO may be the most compelling and singular album they’ve made since their stateside 2005 breakthrough, Pink. But it’s a complete inversion of those thrashing party jams and hazy anthems—this is Boris, mad as fuck, screaming at the world about the feeling. It is fun and, as they correctly note in an accompanying essay, “extreme healing music.”
NO is rooted in the explosive power of punk-metal crossover. Put it on in the background as you go about your day, and you’ll mostly notice the wonderful belligerence of these short, riotous tunes. “Anti-Gone” feels like Motörhead imploring the crowd to cut loose. “Kikinoue” manages to lumber like doom and lunge like hardcore, like the best of Cloud Rat or even Integrity. They barrel through a relentless, noise-spiked cover of “Fundamental Error,” by cantankerous Japanese hardcore band Gudon. Katsumi Sugahara, who’s played in several such groups since the mid-’80s, adds splenetic guitar to this euphoric tantrum, a testament to the domestic inspiration.
The most remarkable thing about NO, though, is what’s often hidden in its recesses, whether buried beneath the songs’ pummeling beats and hoarse screams or wedged between the tracks like musical bookends. “Non Blood Lore” might scan like a simple D-beat sortie, but it sports a hook ready for classic-rock radio. “HxCxHxC -Parforation Line-” lets hardcore and shoegaze dissolve into one another until they form a chimera. It’s one of Boris’ most ingenious moves ever, a perfect fusion of their preferred extremes.
These songs often fade out of or into some seemingly unrelated motif, like the Sabbath-sized chords that end “Loveless” or the writhing circuitry that starts “Lust.” The album mirrors that structure, too. Boris begin with the instrumental doom march “Genesis,” the riff circling the rhythm like aircraft surveying a target, and end with “Interlude,” a ghostly ballad so vaporous it conjures cirrus clouds. They’re all reminders of how much experience Boris funnel into NO, how many ideas are at play within songs that may seem simple.
White-hot rage and long-simmering frustration bind all these sounds together. You don’t need a translated lyrics sheet to sense that—the music is visceral, the feelings palpable. The words, howled and grunted, consider the loss of love as an extinction event and position music as an outlet for anxiety. Punk is a historically reliable outlet for such invective, of course, a cross-cultural language of discontent whose urgency can’t be mistaken. But in returning to that atavistic expression for NO, Boris didn’t cordon off these songs from the rest of their musical lives. The resulting sense of chaos redoubles Boris’ wrath and gives it a welcome depth, the sense that it’s here to stay because it’s been here all along.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | self-released | July 7, 2020 | 7.7 | 9b8cfb85-5e04-4e42-94ef-b9b0ea64131c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Toronto country artist releases his sophomore album, featuring guest work from Leslie Feist and the Band's Garth Hudson. | Toronto country artist releases his sophomore album, featuring guest work from Leslie Feist and the Band's Garth Hudson. | Doug Paisley: Constant Companion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15006-constant-companion/ | Constant Companion | For years Doug Paisley gigged around Toronto covering classic country songs in a series of curiously named acts such as Live Country Music and the Stanley Brothers: A Loving Tribute. After spending some time as one half of Russian Literature, he opened for Bonnie "Prince" Billy as Dark Hand and Lamplight, which involved playing acoustic songs while an artist displayed paintings behind him. Already he's had a storied career, so it's odd to think of his 2008 self-titled album as his debut and even harder to think of Constant Companion as only his second release. Both sound effortless and insightful, full of songs that draw you in with their peaceful, easy surface and then dump a big load of hurt on you.
Country remains Paisley's foundation, providing both a subject (relationships in various states of disrepair) and a musical approach that favors straightforward arrangements and spare instrumentation. But the twang in his voice has softened into a gentle burr that recalls the 1970s heyday of outdoorsy singer-songwriters, without putting too fine a point on the nostalgia. He's neither quite country nor folk anymore, but something in between, something that tends to get dismissed as sonic wallpaper by those who aren't willing to dig beyond the surface of the music. In that regard, Constant Companion exceeds Doug Paisley in terms of both the serenity of the surface and the hard truths lurking just beneath, drawing out more hummable melodies as well as more stinging observations. The pedal steel that helped define his debut's sense of isolation is gone, replaced this time by Garth Hudson on keys. The former Band member's counterintuitive piano and organ riffs enliven "No One But You" and "End of the Day", alternately taunting and consoling as he acts as a foil for Paisley-- a gremlin in the works. Subtle harmonies by Leslie Feist, Jennifer Castle, and Julie Faught of the Pining alleviate the loneliness only minimally.
Death and departure loom over Constant Companion, infusing even the smallest moments with a sense of loss and dread. "At the end of the long, long day/ Come go with me in the blue and the gray," he sings on "End of the Day". It sounds like a warm invitation until his real meaning sinks in: "There's no up there's no down/ And there's no way around." Those metaphysics-minded lines don't amount to a suicide pact necessarily, but they do comprise a chilling acknowledgement that every relationship inevitably ends, whether in tears or in death. All you have is yourself, that quietly disturbing album cover attests (seriously, take another look at it). And yet, Paisley's mood isn't woe-is-me dejection, but rather a stoic resignation to the fact that you're ultimately your own constant companion, for better or for worse. | 2011-01-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-01-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | January 21, 2011 | 7.5 | 9ba36451-45aa-4ab2-8312-9275b921d966 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Bored by the status quo and excited by everything he hasn’t tried yet, the Queens rapper is unafraid to take risks and get weird on his latest EP. | Bored by the status quo and excited by everything he hasn’t tried yet, the Queens rapper is unafraid to take risks and get weird on his latest EP. | Homeboy Sandman: Anjelitu EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/homeboy-sandman-anjelitu-ep/ | Anjelitu EP | When it comes to rapping, Homeboy Sandman shares much in common with Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do, a martial arts philosophy that sees no way as a way and having no limitations as a limitation. While Sand is a prolific, technically gifted MC, it’s difficult to draw a throughline between his dozens of releases; and after 10 years in the rap game, it’s apparent that it’s a feature, not a bug. Like Lee, his form is no form. Infinitely adaptable and stylistically unpredictable, he’s hard to pin down as an artist but also sometimes tough to follow. Perhaps this is why commercial success—even at a modest, independent level comparable to his contemporary and frequent collaborator Aesop Rock—continues to evade him.
Sandman seems quite aware of this, and on his latest EP, Anjelitu, he places himself at a crossroads. In a statement shared with the project, he said he wrote half of its songs “when my energy was either headed in the wrong direction or already there.” The EP’s title is a portmanteau of his childhood nickname Angelito (he was born Angel Del Villar II) and the taijitu, the famous Chinese symbol for yin and yang. The adversarial relationship between the songs on the record—and broadly, his discography—helps illuminate this inward-gazing perspective. Bored by the status quo and excited by everything he hasn’t tried yet, Sand is unafraid to take risks and get weird, with understandably mixed results.
At his best, Sandman revels in forcing listeners to confront uncomfortable truths. “No Beef,” a veganism screed that presents a compelling argument against eating red meat, exemplifies this. The wordplay is more direct than clever, but Sand wields a remarkable internal metronome, jumping in and out of the pocket for effect without ever losing the beat. He’s armed with a different flow on almost every track. “Go Hard” sports a nimble start-stop stutter that would twist the tongues of lesser rappers, and Sand’s rapid-fire delivery on “West Coast” presses each new bar up against the last, barely coming up for air yet always in control. He’s still capable of dropping absurd one-liners (“Raving and ranting, I’m like Fred Hampton/Chewing on rattlesnake plantain,” he raps on “Go Hard”) and of effortlessly switching rhyme schemes, but it’s the delivery here that’s most impressive.
Aesop Rock, Sand’s collaborator and producer of all of Anjelitu’s six tracks—together known as Lice—brings consistency and levity to the admittedly dualistic project. The first five tracks are crafted using a similar palette, built around bare drums, guitars, and bass, peppered with analog electronics and keys. And while the sparse compositions offer a solid base for Sand to experiment stylistically, when juxtaposed with the lush production of the EP’s final track, “Lice Team, Baby,” they’re somewhat lacking. The song features a verse from Aes and would sound more at home on any of the Lice EPs than here. But it’s also evidence of how his collaborations with Aes bring out the best in Sand. Some of the strongest verses in his catalog come with Aes on the track; homed in on their target, they’re focused but unafraid to be silly, with wit as sharp as their skill.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | August 17, 2021 | 6.6 | 9bb3f339-86f7-4600-9d9f-61d714cdc630 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Deantoni Parks has collaborated with John Cale, Sade, the Mars Volta, and Flying Lotus. His latest solo album is above all else a showcase for what he can do with a drum kit, a sampler, and a limited number of hands. | Deantoni Parks has collaborated with John Cale, Sade, the Mars Volta, and Flying Lotus. His latest solo album is above all else a showcase for what he can do with a drum kit, a sampler, and a limited number of hands. | Deantoni Parks: Technoself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21327-technoself/ | Technoself | In the mid-'00s, a combination of Dilla’s Donuts, easy-to-use digital production technology like Fruity Loops, and websites like SoundCloud gave aspiring producers of instrumental rap a muse, a method, and a destination. The beat music ecosystem exploded; Donuts was a record that launched 10,000 loopers, a globalized corps of dedicated amateurs, some of whom—Shungu, Teebs, Lee, Knxwledge—have been able to break out ahead of the pack.
But the SoundCloud universe isn’t necessarily kind to aspiring producers with no formal sense of what they’re doing behind the boards. Some of the stronger beat albums of the past decade have come from knowledgeable studio musicians, people like Karriem Riggins, who cut his teeth playing behind some of the biggest names in the world (Paul McCartney, Diana Krall). Deantoni Parks has a comparably decorated background: He’s collaborated with canonical progressive acts of several different decades (John Cale, Sade, the Mars Volta, Flying Lotus) and is an astounding technical musician, as evidenced by his tenure teaching at the Berklee College of Music, or, if you prefer, this Nike ad.
Parks’ latest solo, Technoself, is above all else a showcase for what the Georgia native can do with a drum kit, a sampler, and a limited number of hands. (He only has two.) Every track here is a live recording, an astounding feat given the percussive complexity present on something like "Graphite", which with its surround-sound distortion and riffage feels as if it were carefully engineered over the course of a month of lab work. Frequently, the aggression of the drumming itself is a thrill. "Automatic" is a fantastic pump-up track, with the same wall-to-wall excitement as Eminem’s "Til I Collapse" (and none of the yelling.)
The ambition on Technoself is staggering, particularly given the technical limits that Parks has imposed on himself. Album opener "Black Axioms" uses alternating samples and BPMs to deliver a crash course on modern African-American music, hinting at different eras and genres (blues, house, hip-hop, footwork) by use of speed and musical association. Another track, "Fosse in the Grass", manages to deal cleverly (and wordlessly!) with the issue of appropriation, as it references the choreographer Bob Fosse, and Michael Jackson’s famous borrowing of his moves for "Billie Jean". (Beyoncé was also accused of stealing from Fosse for the "Single Ladies" dance, worth noting given Parks’ connection to the queen through his work with producer Boots.)
And yet, when building upon those two sturdy legs of musicianship and conceptual heft, Parks is sometimes guilty of leaving the third leg of the tripod unstable. Several of the tracks here are not all that much fun to listen to, and it can seem as if Parks values astounding his audience over engaging them. Try watching the video for the track "Bombay" and then simply listening to the instrumental. When you can see what Parks is doing with his set-up, you can’t help but to be impressed. But the track alone isn't even half as compelling. As an exercise in musicianship and high-level conceptual art, Technoself is masterful. But over the course of an entire album, it becomes overwhelming and just a little bit masturbatory. | 2015-12-09T01:00:06.000-05:00 | 2015-12-09T01:00:06.000-05:00 | Electronic | Leaving | December 9, 2015 | 7.2 | 9bbd1d7f-de3d-4a40-8e37-f8729da6ae33 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Staten Island artist’s debut full-length collects dreamy R&B and punchy pop rap, chronicling stories of heartbreak and hookups with a cool, crowd-pleasing ease. | The Staten Island artist’s debut full-length collects dreamy R&B and punchy pop rap, chronicling stories of heartbreak and hookups with a cool, crowd-pleasing ease. | Wolfacejoeyy: Valentino | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolfacejoeyy-valentino/ | Valentino | The emergence of New York City’s sexy drill movement couldn’t have come at a better time for Staten Island native wolfacejoeyy. Though he’d already begun to hash out the particulars of his sound by the time Cash Cobain and Chow Lee dropped their pioneering 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy mixtape in 2022, joeyy was undergoing artistic growing pains. For the past few years, he’d been chopping it up in group chats with the underground’s then-buzziest upstarts, like SoFaygo, Slump6s, and Yung Fazo, exploring the moment’s pastel-streaked, melodic trap sound. Though he had a knack for writing the sticky, falsetto-laden choruses favored by his peers, joeyy’s more ambitious output indicated a desire to break from SoundCloud rap’s superficial and often overstimulating conventions.
The best of his early cuts were refreshingly organic, backed by baroque string arrangements and mixed with comparatively subtle vocal processing chains. Those effects allowed joeyy to flex his impressive singing chops, while accenting the youthful idiosyncrasies in his voice. After notching a minor TikTok hit with the Jersey club-inspired “buku,” he joined Cash and Chow in the studio to record “weekend,” a gritty R&B track that foreshadowed the rawer sound of his more recent body of work. Trading prurient bars over disintegrated sub-bass and keyboard arpeggios straight out of a platformer video game’s aquatic level, joeyy was finally in his element: His starry-eyed idealism was the perfect foil for his collaborators’ endearing sleaze.
“Weekend” appeared on last summer’s 22Joeyy EP, but seems to have catalyzed the aesthetic of Valentino, his first full-length album. Its beats center on quasi-acoustic timbres that suggest a “live” feel, instead of the synth-driven wizardry that has defined the recent wave of DIY pop rap. Jazzy piano chords creak and echo. Backing vocalists weave rich harmonies on “don’t be dishonest.” Fingerpicked guitars underscore interludes. This pursuit of intimacy also extends to joeyy’s pen. Wistfully recalling hookups in triplet flows and licentious detail, he tends to offer songcraft that is more story-driven and cohesive than the horny punchlines that have defined the subgenre thus far.
Opener “stop trippin bout girls u don’t know” follows the trajectory of a short-lived situationship—from initial flirtation to the inevitable fallout that occurs when joeyy can’t commit. The track leaves out kicks and 808 pulses almost entirely, paring the production down to chirping hats, droning bass, and elegant synth brass layers. The roominess allows joeyy to experiment more easily: He makes short leaps into higher octaves and imbues the exchange between him and his love interest with voice-cracking intensity. The music may be dreamy ear candy, but the depth and structure of joeyy’s craft puts him a rung above his peers.
On “solar,” he takes Valentino’s strangest beat—springy, bitcrushed bass drums and wacky samples that conjure images of a footrace between Looney Tunes characters—and flips the screwball vibe on its head, inviting listeners to follow him as he tries to numb fresh heartbreak in the middle of a rowdy function. As he’s contemplating the strangely dissociative effects of his weed, joeyy disappears from the track entirely, letting the instrumental ride out for a full minute. It’s an unconventional decision, but it works well within Valentino’s loose narrative, which transitions from an initial stretch of gloomy songs to its ecstatic middle portion. A lesser artist dipping out on the track like this might read as a case of poor editing, but joeyy is charismatic and detail-oriented enough to land the stunt.
Halfway through Valentino, joeyy plays to his greatest strengths, ping-ponging between blown-out Jersey club stomps and impressionist keys. On “cake,” he’s head over heels as he volleys pickup lines with his crush—so in the zone, he’s practically panting between bars like a tennis pro. Lines like, “I told her she sexy, she said ‘period purr,’” and “My pockets blue like Sonic and her pussy pink like Amy” might seem like a tough sell, but they’re delivered with such sincerity that you’ll want them custom-printed on candy hearts. “don’t be dishonest” features gorgeous multi-part backing harmonies performed by London R&B songwriter Moses Ideka, lending joeyy’s delivery a religious fervor as he offers healing to a potential partner. Only “double tap,” a quirky club tune that resembles the synth-funk inspired bounce of Ice Spice’s “Think U the Shit (Fart)” or Lunchbox’s New Jazz mixtape slows the momentum, its busy topline forcing joeyy to rein in his melodic impulses.
Now that he’s finally old enough to frequent the clubs he makes music for, wolfacejoeyy has migrated from the realm of bedroom producers and Discord servers into the real world. He’s benefiting from more developed song structures and writing his most mature, evocative songs yet. His hooks are still unshakeable, but the tiny details and ingenious melodic flourishes that surround them make each listen feel like a small adventure. Valentino hits like downing a flat white when you really should be sleeping: It’s a jolt of restless euphoria that’ll have you ready to leave the house at all costs, wandering in search of anyone’s company—or anything to do. | 2024-05-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | May 21, 2024 | 7.4 | 9bbe7a84-bfbb-42e6-883d-481f2f382743 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The Chennai quartet are indie-rock revival survivors making an overdue play for international recognition. Their latest EP is packed with sunlit synths, neon grooves, and upbeat pop melodies. | The Chennai quartet are indie-rock revival survivors making an overdue play for international recognition. Their latest EP is packed with sunlit synths, neon grooves, and upbeat pop melodies. | The F16s: Is It Time to Eat the Rich Yet? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-f16s-is-it-time-to-eat-the-rich-yet/ | Is It Time to Eat the Rich Yet? | The indie-rock revival of the early 2000s took a few years to hit Indian shores, where bands had spent much of the decade still flogging the corpses of grunge and ’90s alternative. It wasn’t until 2011 or so when a new crop of acts—inspired by the post-punk retromania of the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, as well as the new ubiquity of YouTube and high-speed broadband—found new reservoirs of hitherto-untapped inspiration. This “new wave”—including bands like high-octane garage rockers the Lightyears Explode, cabaret-jazz punks Peter Cat Recording Co., and post-punk revivalists the F16s—arrived at a rare moment of optimism in the Indian rock underground. Rock bands were headlining some of the country’s biggest festivals, making their presence felt on Bollywood film soundtracks, and even catching the eye of international rock publications. (Both Rolling Stone and NME launched Indian editions around this time.)
The optimism was short-lived. Having opened the door for independent music to enter the national mainstream, rock was pushed aside by EDM and hip-hop, eventually finding itself back on the fringes of the industry. The little space left for guitar music was quickly occupied by bland and inoffensive singer-songwriters hoping for a lucrative sync deal. But while many of their contemporaries disbanded or reinvented themselves as bedroom producers, the F16s persevered. Across two EPs, one full-length (2016’s Triggerpunkte), and a series of singles, the band honed their sound—a nostalgic melange of the last four decades of indie rock—into dense, danceable alt-pop. In the process, they hit all the heights available to a rock band in India which, by their own admission, aren’t many. With their new EP, Is It Time To Eat the Rich Yet?, the F16s make their long-delayed play for international recognition.
Taking a step back from the Tame Impala fanboyism of 2019’s WKND FRNDS—a collection of woozy, synth-driven heartache ballads—Is It Time To Eat the Rich Yet? returns to the F16s’ post-punk roots, now complemented by a healthy dose of G-funk synths and neo-soul melodies. Frontman Joshua Fernandez remains obsessed with the impermanence of contemporary romance and his own imperfections (both consistent themes), but there’s a darker political edge to his lyrics as he confronts India’s growing authoritarianism and cultural revanchism. The F16s’ rock’n’roll intransigence has always been at odds with the conservative mainstream: When Fernandez smashed a guitar onstage at a music festival in 2016, he was met with howls of outrage. But the events of the last few years—communal riots, arbitrary arrests of dissenting voices, online mobs of right-wing trolls—have driven home the existential nature of India’s ongoing socio-political crisis. Ironic detachment is no longer an option.
But despite what the title suggests, this is not a record of political polemic. In fact, the music is decidedly celebratory, packed with sunlit synths, neon grooves, and upbeat pop melodies. It’s only when you pay closer attention to the lyrics—which Fernandez delivers in cheeky pitch-shifted falsetto and expansive chamber-pop baritone—that you realize you’re, as one band member put it, “dancing to (y)our doom.” Opener “I’m on Holiday” blends classic doo-wop, psych rock, new wave, and Afro-pop into a summery tropical cocktail, imagining lockdown-induced separation from loved ones as a jangly vacation ditty. Never have the words “I’m on holiday, forever” sounded as sinister. Driven by Abhinav Krishnaswamy’s guitar and a brass section, “Trouble in Paradise” breathes new life into the alt-rock trope of the self-identified misanthrope. “Easy Bake Easy Wake” opens with a submerged synth line that, in its mixture of AM gold and psychedelia, is basically a ready-made Avalanches sample. It also features the terrific line “She fucks me like the government”—delivered with a straight face.
“Sucks to Be Human” is all maximalist synth and disco rhythm, a halogen-lit retro-futuristic tour of alienation, planetary destruction, and billionaire space-escape fantasies. It’s the first of two tracks on the record that look beyond Fernandez’s emotional universe to the world around him. The other is closer “The Apocalypse,” an ode for nihilistic eco-millenarianism: “SOS! Don’t panic,” goes the falsetto chorus, “Bless our death, we’ve doomed our planet.” There is something audacious about this ecstatic invocation of self-annihilation. Perhaps that’s why they end the track with a slight reprieve: “We’re all gonna be fine,” Fernandez sings. Will we? The F16s aren’t the first band to hide ominous messaging under outwardly joyous melodies, and sometimes they wear their influences on their sleeve too openly. But the instant familiarity is balanced by their technical and songwriting chops. Just grab a drink and dance your way to extinction.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | House Arrest | October 26, 2021 | 7.2 | 9bc31a86-7528-4515-94b1-af44928ef1f7 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Polly Jean Harvey has never made the same album twice, and neither has she ever made an album as bleak as White Chalk, which finds her trading guitar for piano and haunting her own house. | Polly Jean Harvey has never made the same album twice, and neither has she ever made an album as bleak as White Chalk, which finds her trading guitar for piano and haunting her own house. | PJ Harvey: White Chalk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10697-white-chalk/ | White Chalk | If there's been a constant in Polly Jean Harvey's 15-year career it's that she seems uncomfortable in her own skin-- which may explain why she sheds it so often. Harvey has a penchant for self-correction, to an almost compulsive degree: After To Bring You My Love made her a marquee act, Harvey released the dark, more atmospheric Is This Desire? When her 2000 album Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea accidentally captured the tenor of the times (its songs had an eerily prescient relationship to post-9/11 paranoia), Harvey responded with the stripped-down and studiously raw Uh Huh Her. In recent years, reports even swirled that Harvey was considering retiring, and in at least one regard she temporarily has: White Chalk-- Harvey's most radical self-correction to date-- finds her setting aside the guitar and the blues touches that marked past releases in favor of chamber-gloom, a ghostly piano her tool of choice.
In Uh Huh Her's liner notes, there's a scribbled note from Harvey which reads, "TOO NORMAL? TOO P J H?" On White Chalk, there might be more Polly Jean Harvey than we've ever heard before-- if not quite enough of what traditionally falls under the "PJ Harvey" moniker. One problem is that Harvey isn't nearly as creative a pianist as she is a guitarist. However, the instrument switch has forced her to alter the way she composes as well as the way she sings. From opener "The Devil" on down, she's singing almost exclusively near the top of her range, using the piano as much as for percussion as melody. There are very few distracting trills on "Dear Darkness" or "Grow Grow Grow", where every note rings with loneliness, and the simple repetitive pattern that gently drives "When Under Ether" drips with menace.
The rest of the album's instrumentation is equally spare and strictly old-fashioned, with such mood-setters as broken harp fleshing out (ahem) "Broken Harp"; when some (fake) brass enters the song, it's somber and subdued. Even the scant use of drums is largely intended to accent the songs. While there's probably more room than usual for Jim White, only "The Piano" finds him playing with any force.
Lyrically, White Chalk is oppressively bleak. Harvey's songs never seem as if they come easily; they instead sound like the product of much effort, rigor, and even some pain. Her music is so raw it's a far cry from fun, even when she's trying to be funny; when she commanded Robert De Niro to "sit on my face" in 1993's "Reeling", she made it sound part dare, part threat. But there are no chuckles to be had on White Chalk, which is dark and austere, the songs striking an uneasy balance between indulgence and confrontation.
Despite the presence of regular collaborators John Parish, Captain Beefheart alum Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood, White Chalk sounds as lonely and isolated as any album Harvey has made. There is a rich history of depressing British folk that Harvey taps into here, but without a hint of catharsis, much of White Chalk's miserablism just hangs in the air like a noose. On the right day, at the right time, the album's powerfully claustrophobic intimacy is more palatable; on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind, White Chalk may be the longest half-hour in the world. | 2007-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | September 24, 2007 | 6.8 | 9bd0e6e4-225e-4990-9e12-2370984ebf28 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The reggaeton of the Colombian pop star meets the reggae of Jamaica on a short and sleek album that, as far as cross-cultural projects go, just barely skims the surface. | The reggaeton of the Colombian pop star meets the reggae of Jamaica on a short and sleek album that, as far as cross-cultural projects go, just barely skims the surface. | Maluma: #7DJ (7 Días En Jamaica) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maluma-7dj-7-dias-en-jamaica/ | #7DJ (7 Días En Jamaica) | Though reggaeton’s popularity has offered some artists a dependable ride to global stardom, the genre’s non-stop commercial expansion has meant that even its top ambassadors have had to find ways to avoid monotony. For Maluma, this has been tricky. Innovation isn’t quite his thing; the Colombian singer has been more interested in nailing formulas that produce massively successful hits—and he’s good at it. He’s tweaked the ratios over time, dialing up his lecherous side in early songs like “Cuatro Babys”' and switching on the gooey sensitivity for 11:111’s syrupy ballads. His penchant for sliding in and out of characters has resulted in a few unexpected fusions, including collaborations with Brazilian artists Anitta and Nego de Bordel and traces of salsa on last summer’s Papi Juancho. But his surprise visual EP #7DJ is one of his most pronounced creative attempts and direct experiments with cross-cultural sounds yet.
In January 2020, before the pandemic began, Maluma took a week-long vacation to Jamaica and returned home inspired by reggae and dancehall traditions. The focus on Jamaica carries a specific weight: Workers from the island—who migrated to Panama alongside thousands of Caribbean laborers to build the Panama Canal among other infrastructure projects—shaped reggae en español, which is the backbone of reggaeton. Songs such as Farruko and Bad Bunny’s “La Cartera” and J Balvin’s “Ambiente” have hinted at these diasporic connections, and Maluma is aware of at least some of the music’s history. “We wouldn't have Urban Latino music without Africa and the contributions of the Black community in Latin American and here in the U.S.,” he said recently. “This album is a small way to show my love for Jamaica and for Black culture.” Such a statement is a rare and overdue acknowledgment of the Black and Caribbean erasure that occurs in the Spanish-speaking music industry.
Still, this is reggae made in the image of Maluma, which is to say it’s sleek and commercially minded. Flashes of authenticity appear in certain details, such as the Jamaican musicians and live instruments blended into the production, and the seven videos that premiered alongside the album celebrate locals and quotidian life on the island. However, these visuals also operate like a Maluma vacation lookbook, particularly in scenes where he chases after his co-star, former Miss Jamaica Davina Bennett. The music is benign and unobtrusive as the two splash on crystal beaches and grind on dancefloors in a never-ending spiral of prettiness. Even tracks that boast the co-signs of reggae legends—the brassy “Tonika” features Ziggy Marley and Charly Black lends vocals to the laidback melodies of “Love”—are lacquered in a high-sheen gloss designed for feel-good radio play. Though Maluma seems to appreciate Jamaican sounds, the album isn’t a deep interrogation or absorption of the styles he’s using. There’s a clear strategy involved in the decision to keep things light: It’s what works best for the singer’s brand and for his spumy delivery. “Agua de Jamaica” and “Desayun Arte,” in fact, are some of the record’s best vocal performances precisely because of their breeziness.
Maluma doesn’t dive too far into Jamaican culture. Instead, he floats on the surface of the music and focuses on churning out a tidy, marketable compendium that, despite its limits, manages to broaden his range. And while he passes on the chance to do anything radical or cutting-edge, there is one flicker of inventiveness on “La Burbuja,” a slinky sliver of dancehall that trades the project’s mellow vibes for smoky clubbiness. The moment doesn’t last long though, and #7DJ ends without becoming more than a quick, seven-day dip into the island.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Sony Music Latin | February 11, 2021 | 6.7 | 9bdb67d3-65b9-4433-a74f-a813cedc0084 | Julyssa Lopez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julyssa-lopez/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/6022f93f4aeb935f9d4fe1a4/1:1/w_1500,h_1500,c_limit/Maluma%20-%20#7DJ%20(7%20Di%CC%81as%20En%20Jamaica).jpg |
The Los Angeles techno producer’s second album is sharp and focused. Maymind does a lot with very little to make gratifying soundscapes that are easy to sink into. | The Los Angeles techno producer’s second album is sharp and focused. Maymind does a lot with very little to make gratifying soundscapes that are easy to sink into. | Maymind: Cheap Storage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maymind-cheap-storage/ | Cheap Storage | The first solo material Leo Maymind released, in 2016, was torn between two competing impulses. On the one hand were rich layers of synths, sampled voices, and delay, all stretched and twisted like blown glass; on the other, muscular drum programming informed by techno and bass music. The record, a three-track EP for Adam Marshall’s New Kanada label, showcased a bold, burly sound, and one starkly at odds with what followed it: On last year’s Illumina, Maymind’s debut album, the Los Angeles producer opted to strip back, deliberately restricting himself to a modest tabletop setup of synths, drum machines, and effects, all run into a handheld recorder. It turns out that by imposing limitations, he opened up new avenues. The spacious Illumina patiently mapped ambient and broken techno landscapes in ways that weren’t always easy to follow, but all the more intriguing for it: indistinct outlines, foggy terrain, disappearing ink. Now, on the follow-up, he continues that line of investigation across eight tracks of an even more exploratory bent.
Where Illumina sometimes felt tentative and amorphous, Cheap Storage is sharper and more focused. The drums often took a backseat on last year’s album, but they’re more prominent here. That doesn’t mean straight techno—well, save for the opening “K Density,” in which thudding kick drums and a single, syncopated synth tone summon echo-soaked memories of warehouse raves. Maymind’s drums tend to be distant and echoing: “Loneliness and a Kick Drum” is held together with a steady clanking reminiscent of old radiators; “No Headlights, One Glove” rolls a single weathered snare sound out into the velvety dark. Its downbeat, wrapping slowed-down breakbeats in echoing synths, recalls Urban Tribe’s The Collapse of Modern Culture, an expressive beat-music touchstone from 1998; the tinny, loping “Loneliness and a Kick Drum” takes after the minimalist synth bleats that Antipop Consortium brought to underground hip-hop in the early 2000s. Those aren’t the only faintly throwback sounds here: The whirring, chirping noise at the center of “Cheap Storage” is a dead ringer for Garbage-era Autechre.
Like Illumina, Cheap Storage was made with limited materials, taking shape in improvised takes on MPC, synths, and an inexpensive vocal mic. Those conditions are often apparent in the music. Maymind’s jams don’t always do much—there’s not a lot of compositional complexity here; “Continuous Spectrum” merely paints woozy synth pads over slinky electro drums for nearly seven minutes—but they’re gratifying soundscapes to sink into, particularly when he layers overlapping rhythmic patterns in such a way that the downbeat disappears in a shifting, wrongfooted groove.
“From the Rooftop We Could See the Skyline,” a swirling, 150-BPM dub-techno cut, shows how small variations can go a long way. Synth parts subtly fade in and out; a few minutes in, the hi-hats rise in volume, doubled by delay, and what at first seems placid turns more strained as a distant, high-pitched voice pulls the track’s edges taut, the energy rising and falling in slow waves. In terms of intensity, the head-nodding “No Headlights, One Glove” falls at the opposite end of the spectrum, but its graceful, real-time arc is similar. Its unchanging boom-bap rolls on like a nighttime drive through empty streets, and, two-thirds of the way through, when a fistful of organ chords flares up, it makes for a moment of subtle but unmistakable drama, like brake lights splashed suddenly across a rain-slicked windshield.
Though Maymind never spells it out, I suspect there’s a creative philosophy tucked into the album’s title. Hard drives these days are voluminous and inexpensive; unlike the era of tape, there’s virtually no cost involved in capturing a musical idea, so might as well just keep the recorder running. Writers have a saying: “Write drunk, edit sober.” Even teetotalers can find a kernel of truth here: First, strip away all inhibitions, then go back with a critical eye and refine. Balancing freeform spontaneity with spotlit detail, Cheap Storage shows the merits of such an approach. | 2018-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Atlantic Rhythms | August 25, 2018 | 7.2 | 9bdfe173-e7ec-49ac-9ceb-bbeb4cd3bf69 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ |
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