alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Radiohead's first three albums are given expanded 2xCD reissues. | Radiohead's first three albums are given expanded 2xCD reissues. | Radiohead: Pablo Honey: Collector's Edition / The Bends: Collector's Edition / OK Computer: Collector's Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12938-pablo-honey-collectors-edition-the-bends-collectors-edition-ok-computer-collectors-edition/ | Pablo Honey: Collector's Edition / The Bends: Collector's Edition / OK Computer: Collector's Edition | When Capitol released a few different shortcuts through Radiohead's career late last year, we were indifferent to its cause, citing a lack of need and poor selection. Most fervent Radiohead fans would have wasted their money buying these packages, and most people interested in the band would be best served by their actual albums. Well, Capitol has now begun to roll out those parent albums-- starting with the group's three 1990s releases (Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer)-- again, without the band's participation. This time, however, the label is doing it right, dressing the releases up with the right accoutrements: B-sides from the era (and since the era overlapped with two-part CD singles, there are plenty), radio sessions, and music videos.
For an epochal, era-defining band, Radiohead had an unusual beginning, looking like they'd wind up one-hit wonders, chancers callously attaching themselves to a sound and moment yet with few ideas of their own. That first hit, "Creep", with its loud/soft dynamic and self-loathing lyric, fit snugly into the post-Nirvana alt-rock landscape-- no surprise: Radiohead copped as much from 80s indie rock as their Pac NW brethren did. Yet instead of being hamstrung by platinum success, Radiohead abandoned careerist moves for artistic ambitions, moving quickly to incorporate the record-collector's music of post-rock and Mo Wax, the post-dance, spiritually nurturing end of UK rock, and the pre-millennial tension of IDM and trip-hop.
By the end of the 90s, Radiohead hadn't supplanted U2, R.E.M., Oasis, and Metallica as the world's biggest rock band. But it was largely agreed upon that they were the world's best-- and with hindsight, arguably, along with the White Stripes, the last indie-friendly group to conquer the world and punch in the same weight class as early 90s alt-rock giants like Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Green Day, or Red Hot Chili Peppers. That they used this critical and commercial currency to such dazzling effect on Kid A and Amnesiac is still one of the highlights of this decade; that the press, especially in the UK, chose the more familiar and necrophiliac "new rock revolution" over the relatively pioneering Radiohead is one of the decade's lows.
UK rock, for all its heady artistry and visionaries throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, had been slumming it a bit when Radiohead first emerged. Size and grandeur, which would become the goals for too many UK guitar bands by the end of the Britpop era, were largely missing from that country's indie scene when Radiohead started recording in 1992. Sure, the Stone Roses had trumpeted their own greatness a few years earlier, but most of the era's indie music was introspective, bands content to gaze at their shoes rather than aim for the back of the venue.
Radiohead's early, full-bodied music was, in most circles then, dismissed as empty Americanisms-- and not without reason. The expansive Pablo Honey set-- the 12-song album accompanied by 22 extras-- mostly highlights a group in hock to U.S. indie heroes Pixes and Dinosaur Jr. (with the occasional R.E.M. homage tossed in-- see: "Lurgee"). The loose "Anyone Can Play Guitar" and delicate "Thinking About You" thankfully break up the 120-minute mood, but most of the rest of the album is squarely in the post-grunge wheelhouse. That's not always a bad thing: "Stop Whispering", opener "You", and a re-recorded version of early single "Prove Yourself" hold up well-- and "Creep" has oddly gotten better with age. Elsewhere, the dreadful "Pop Is Dead", and songs like "How Do You?", "I Can't", "Ripcord", and "Vegetable" are run of the mill at best.
If Pablo Honey didn't betray hints of the band Radiohead would become, neither did its B-sides. Unlike contemporaries such as Blur, who used their non-album material to explore new ideas or moods, Radiohead's Pablo Honey-era work is primarily lesser versions of the album. The extra material kicks off with their debut release, the Drill EP, which features three rudimentary versions of LP tracks, plus "Stupid Car", the first of Thom Yorke's odd automobile-themed fixations (still to come: "Killer Cars", "Airbag", the "Karma Police" video...) From there, it's a mishmash of alternate takes and also-rans (highlight: the U.S. single version of "Stop Whispering"), with only the shoegazey "Coke Babies" and an acoustic version of early political commentary "Banana Co." (released in much better form on The Bends package) worth exploring more than a few times.
I distinctly remember then the first time someone suggested The Bends was a great record. Not being one of the million-plus Pablo Honey owners at the time, I was content to hear "Creep" on the radio over and over and expected I'd soon spend about as much about time with Radiohead's catalog as one would with, say, Hum or Ned's Atomic Dustbin or School of Fish. The My Iron Lung EP had beaten The Bends to U.S. record shelves by a few months, and the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single was out a few weeks prior as well, but few noticed. Anyone who had explored those two earlier singles, however, would have been excited for the LP.
A reaction to the success of "Creep", "My Iron Lung" found Radiohead still exploring the loud/soft dynamic, but guitarist Jonny Greenwood was also locating his own identity and Yorke, inspired by Jeff Buckley, was using a wider vocal range, including some falsetto. Balancing a slightly artier sense of musical self-destruction with a sinewy guitar line, on "Lung" Radiohead found new ways to pick apart and re-construct the typical alt-rock template. Elsewhere on the EP, the five B-sides demonstrated a band whose collective heads seemed to crack open and spill out new ideas, moving the group away from the dour dead-end of grunge signifiers: With more loose-limbed and nimble guitar work ("The Trickster"), hints of art-rock ("Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong"), the valuing of texture over riffs ("Permanent Daygliht"), offers of emotional nourishment ("Lozenge of Love" and "You Never Wash Up After Yourself") and tension and apprehension about workaday life ("Lewis [Mistreated]"), and themes of misanthropy (um, most of the five songs), these tracks pointed the way toward what was to come.
The band's next release, the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single, announced that they'd arrived. "Planet Telex", an early exploration with loops and studio enhancements for the group, is their first song that could have fit on any of their albums, regardless of how experimental they grew; "High and Dry", meanwhile, is the blueprint for the big-hearted balladry that spawned the careers of imitators Travis, Starsailor, Elbow, and Coldplay (who, let's face it, wound up perfecting this sort of huggable, swelling arena rock).
The Bends was essentially split between these poles: warmth and tension; riffs and texture; rock and post-rock. The tricks employed by "Planet Telex" were rarely bested on it-- only arguably by "Just"-- while the "High & Dry" version of the band was topped at every turn here, especially on "Street Spirit (Fade Out") and "Fake Plastic Trees". Even B-sides such "Bishop's Robes" and "Talk Show Host" come close to matching "High".
To many fans, this more approachable and loveable version of the band is its peak. I can't agree, but the record is still a marvel. It feels, with hindsight, like a welcome retreat from the incessant back-patting and 60s worship of prime-period Britpop and a blueprint for the more feminine, emotionally engaging music that would emerge in the UK a few years later-- led by OK Computer. Alongside late 1996 or 1997 releases by Verve, Spiritualized, Belle and Sebastian, Cornershop, Mogwai, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Mansun, and even Britpop stars Blur, Radiohead's OK Computer led the push back against knuckle-dragging Oasis clones who segregated their Boomer rock leanings from the fertile explorations of dance, classic indie, hip-hop, and art-school sensibilities going on throughout the rest of the UK. But once again, the press chose what they knew over the new, and despite the plaudits for 2000's Kid A, by the time of 2001's Amnesiac, people wanted another The Bends.
OK Computer was the balance everyone agreed upon though-- real songs and tunes, but ones that didn't shrink from the increasingly unlimited possibilities of modern music-making. In that sense, Radiohead were not only record-collectors but futurists, approaching the 21st century from the perspective of their day rather than from the generation prior, as Stereolab, Broadcast, Tortoise, and others were doing (to wonderful effect, granted). Discounting the breather "Fitter Happier", only "Electrioneering" seems like a misstep on the album today, with the white-knuckle "Climbing Up the Walls" and pre-album teaser "Lucky" now standing firmly alongside more entrenched highlights "Paranoid Android", "No Surprises", "Karma Police", and "Let Down".
The record's B-sides are no less rewarding, especially "Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)" and "Melatonin", which would have fit fine on LP itself. "Palo Alto" proves they could do light and tongue-in-cheek, while "Meeting in the Aisle" makes you wonder why they don't record more instrumentals. The group's eventual fascination with, for a successful 90s guitar band, relatively foreign sounds like IDM and 20th century classical music found root around this time and it's on these extras where they first explored these notions.
Maybe you don't need to buy these again, maybe you own the material already. If you do, sure-- pass. If you have the LPs but stopped there, both The Bends and OK Computer are worth getting in these versions. If you're curious or a completist, Pablo Honey is out there, too. That the band had nothing to do with these is beside the point: This is the final word on these records, if for no other reason that the Beatles' September 9 remaster campaign is, arguably, the end of the CD era. That all of those discs are coming out at the same time, rather than being slowly and ceremoniously rolled out as they were 20-odd years ago, is a tacit acknowledgment by the music industry that they best sell non-vinyl physical products now, immediately, before the prospect of doing so is gone. With that in mind, I find it wise that many bands are wisely re-organizing their pasts, or having it done for them by their label. So long as it's done like this, I'm happy to re-purchase the stuff. | 2009-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 16, 2009 | 5.4 | 07694b60-2a7e-44c5-a1b7-ae1727d10106 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin) and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. Their debut evokes the primitive, visceral early electronic music of Cluster, Harmonia, and Neu!, a time before available software and computers when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable. | Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin) and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. Their debut evokes the primitive, visceral early electronic music of Cluster, Harmonia, and Neu!, a time before available software and computers when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable. | Karamika: Karamika | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21211-karamika/ | Karamika | In the mid-'70s, Brian Eno was so taken with the strange sounds emanating from Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius's studio in the rural village of Forst—both the duo music they made as Cluster as well as their trio with Michael Rother as Harmonia—that he traveled from England to Germany to record with them. The results of that meeting only came to light in the past few years (it's fully documented on the forthcoming Harmonia box set) but the meeting sprang to my mind while listening to Karamika.
Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin), and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. At times, their work together evokes the chilly sounds of early-'80s minimal wave and some of John Carpenter's analog synth soundtracks. But the snaking, immersive 12 tracks that comprise their debut often brings to mind the primitive, visceral early electronic music that Cluster themselves made back when they were still known as the woolly, circuit-bending band Kluster.
Karamika's music is reactive in that sense, pulling away from the use of readily available software and computers to revisit an era when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable. "Ton 01" begins with a slowly undulating sine wave and throb, and when the metronomic drumming enters it brings to mind Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter's first forays as Kraftwerk. As the track moves along, a noisy guitar appears, reminiscent of the one that worms through Neu!'s "Hallogallo", showing where early electronics grappled with rock instrumentation, each pushing the other into strange new realms.
There's nothing especially novel about emulating the likes of Cluster, Kraftwerk, or Neu! in 2015 (nor would it have been back in 2005), but it's hard to get the parameters right. The exploratory spirit remains intact, but Karamika's resultant tracks feel more focused and they are judicious in adding new layers and noises to the initial framework so that it doesn't all collapse under the weight. More often than not, the deeper you travel into the pieces, the more mesmerizing they become.
A sense of claustrophobia and dread lurks beneath the surface throughout. As "Ton 04" moves through its nine minutes, the throbs gather in density until they feel like a migraine. The cavernous clattering on "Ton 07" begins as an early experimental piece might. Disembodied voices appear on the album highlight "Ton 9", and at the peak of tension a child's laugh comes in, which has a horror-film effect, prickling the skin rather than breaking the tension. In that way, Karamika's homage to their German forefathers forgoes the utopian spirit of some of those albums. Instead, Thompson and Pohl hint at the isolating, disconnected present. | 2015-10-22T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-10-22T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | ESP Institute | October 22, 2015 | 7.3 | 076c78d3-36a0-47b8-91e3-e44f34a637ef | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Reissued for its 50th anniversary, Satanic Majesties remains a singular entry in the Stones’ catalog. It is the strange result of a bizarre set of personal, professional, and cultural circumstances. | Reissued for its 50th anniversary, Satanic Majesties remains a singular entry in the Stones’ catalog. It is the strange result of a bizarre set of personal, professional, and cultural circumstances. | The Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-rolling-stones-their-satanic-majesties-request/ | Their Satanic Majesties Request | Did the Rolling Stones intend Their Satanic Majesties Request to be a spoof of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or was it a sincere attempt to siphon some of the magic of the Beatles’ masterpiece? This question has hung over Satanic Majesties ever since its release in late 1967, perhaps due to the persistence of the perception that the two groups are locked in a deathless rivalry, or maybe just because their album artwork is so similar—not entirely surprising, considering how both ornate cover images are based on photographs snapped by Michael Cooper. Certainly, the arrival of a 50th Anniversary super deluxe reissue of Their Satanic Majesties Request just a few months after the lavish 50th Anniversary super deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper’s invites such comparisons and, once again, the Stones wind up with the raw end of the deal.
The Beatles plumped up Pepper with session tapes, alternate mixes, and other ephemera that not only made diehard fans salivate, but provided fresh insights to an album whose story seemingly had been exhausted. In contrast, ABKCO slaps CDs and LPs of the stereo and mono mixes into a slim LP-sized fold-out box but never bothering with anything laying in the vaults, even though annotator Rob Bowman mentions two separate unreleased versions of “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” in his liner notes. Such offerings may seem skimpy but blame ABKCO, not the Stones, who have no say in how their ’60s material is disseminated and reissued.
Cast aside any comparisons to the Beatles, though, and consider Their Satanic Majesties Request on its own terms. Sure, Keith Richards claims in his 2010 memoir Life that “none of us wanted to make [Satanic Majesties], but it was time for another Stones album, and Sgt. Pepper’s was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on,” but that’s part of a rich tradition of the Rolling Stones dismissing their second album of 1967 that stretches all the way back to 1968, when Mick Jagger said it took them a year to finish the album because they were so “strung out.” While it is true that 1967 ranks among the worst years in Rolling Stones history—it opened with Jagger and Richards getting busted for dope, Brian Jones faced similar charges not much later, and interpersonal tensions were heightened by Keith swiping Anita Pallenberg away from Jones—the Satanic Majesties sessions didn’t last an abnormally long time. A few tracks were cut in February but they began in earnest in the late summer, after all the court cases were settled...a situation that presumably kept the Stones busy enough to not pay too much attention to the June release of Sgt. Pepper’s.
Amid the personal turmoil of 1967, the Rolling Stones also faced a fracture in their inner circles, as Richards and especially Jagger became disenchanted by their manager and producer Andrew “Loog” Oldham. Immediate Records, the label Oldham launched in 1965, gained momentum thanks to the success of the Small Faces, but a bigger distraction for Loog was his increasing fondness for various intoxicants. Hunkering down in the studio in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, the Stones were riding on the same vibes that flowed from coast to coast in 1967, but they—or at least Jagger—were also determined to sever ties with Oldham. Jagger later claimed the Stones went wild on Satanic Majesties “to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.” But, as always, there may have been a mercenary mission driving Mick’s emotions. According to Fred Goodman’s biography Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll, “Oldham, who was contractually obligated to pay all recording costs, suspected the band members were out to bankrupt him and force his resignation. “Suddenly they weren’t arriving in the studio with songs. There’s actually nothing to do. Three weeks this is going on—and three weeks in the sixties was a very long time. I was bored and had no idea what I was doing there.’” According to Klein, the man who muscled aside Oldham in the management of the Stones, the faltering sessions was indeed intentional: “’What bothered Jagger was that Oldham was making five times as much as him.”
All of this means that Their Satanic Majesties Request is the product of a bizarre set of personal, professional, and cultural circumstances, each pushing the Stones to make a record that’s its own strange, wonderful entity, one that is an anomaly within the Stones’ catalog but not one without precedent. Certainly, its immediate predecessor Between the Buttons—in both its U.S. and UK incarnations—has elements that resurface on Satanic Majesties, especially an insouciant rhythm and calculated indifference, the first flowerings of the signature Jagger trend of floating just above whatever cultural trend he co-opts. The Stones don’t seem quite as assured here as they did on Between the Buttons or Beggars Banquet, the 1968 sequel that cemented the band’s reputation as heirs to an American tradition that never was theirs by birthright. Satanic Majesties, on the other hand, burrows into British music from music hall (witness the pure camp of the closer “On With the Show” or the stately “She’s a Rainbow,” purple in its prose and procession) to pastoral folk (the hesitant hum of “Gomper”).
What’s fascinating about Their Satanic Majesties Request is how it belongs to neither the precious school of English psychedelia or its rootsy American counterpart. Nobody on the American west coast really rocked hard in 1967—down in L.A., Love puffed themselves up with orchestras, up in San Francisco they were loathe to shake their folk roots—and the British psych acts of ’67 relied on trippy textures, eschewing any suggestion of swing. Keith Richards may later have claimed he couldn’t play his “old shit” on these sessions—and that was just four years later, in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1971—but Their Satanic Majesties has a pulse that no other psychedelic album does. Blame it on Charlie Watts if you want, but every song on Majesties has some air in its rhythm, which means it grooves when other psych records rely on texture.
Unlike whatever private press psych set you may unearth, this is a band that actually mastered their instruments, so the music is kinetic even when it’s aimless. The group enjoys pushing the boundaries of what they can achieve in the studio and what they can do as a unit, so they indulge in making sounds without the constructs of a song. Since the Stones usually adhere to a rigid structure, hearing them play without a net is thrilling, especially because they purposefully wandered without direction, then cut up a collage of the best elements some time later. This doesn’t mean Satanic Majesties is without songs—”She’s a Rainbow,” “2000 Man,” “Citadel,” “2000 Light Years From Home” are as clearly defined as any of their ’60s singles—but the endless, gormless “Sing This All Together (See What Happens)” and “Gomper” are supporting evidence for Oldham’s thesis that the band was attempting to run out the clock on his dime. They’re also strange and wonderful, pointing toward where the Stones would land, particularly “Sing This All Together (See What Happens),” which descends into a dry run for Keith’s five-string riffing. It’s a hint of a future to come that finds counterparts in the open string drones of “2000 Man” and the piercing echoes of “Citadel,” which contain bracing modern elements that overwhelm the period accoutrements of the production.
Nevertheless, the charm of *Their Satanic Majesties Request * is that it is an artifact of its time, especially in how it’s emblematic of the excesses of its era but sounds like nothing else of its year, either. Perhaps psychedelia wasn’t a natural fit for the earthbound Stones, but the dissonance between their gritty rhythms and ornate, precocious arrangements is enthralling, not in the least because there’s no other record—by the Stones or anybody else—that sounds quite like this. And that means, with all its bad ideas, absurdity and wonder, Their Satanic Majesties Request may capture the ideals of the psychedelic 1967 better than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as it holds dear to the idea that there’s an entire world existing within your head. | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ABKCO | September 23, 2017 | 7.8 | 0771bfec-c0bf-41be-b943-f051fe284130 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Jozef Van Wissem, the self-professed "lute player with a punk rock attitude," offers a collaborative LP with the film director (and guitarist) Jim Jarmusch. | Jozef Van Wissem, the self-professed "lute player with a punk rock attitude," offers a collaborative LP with the film director (and guitarist) Jim Jarmusch. | Jim Jarmusch: Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16306-concerning-the-entrance-into-eternity/ | Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity | Jozef Van Wissem's self-proclaimed "liberation of the lute" has always been a process of inversion. In fact, the songs on his very first release, 2000's Retrograde Renaissance Lute (A Classical Deconstruction), are literally inverted. He took traditional lute tablatures and rewrote them upside-down, then cut up and rearranged the results to form new compositions. Since then, Van Wissem has continued to invert his baroque instrument in order to be, as he told us earlier this month, "a lute player with a punk rock attitude." He's written musical palindromes (melodies which sound the same played forwards or backwards), delved into experimental techniques like field recordings and improvisation, and collaborated with modern-styled string players such as James Blackshaw and Tetuzi Akiyama.
Those players dip into classical styles themselves too, but the musical mindset of Van Wissem's latest collaborator, Jim Jarmusch, was formed in the punk-drenched milieu of late-1970's New York. There the now-famous indie film director played keyboards and sang with the no-wave band the Del Byzanteens and shot no-wave films starring musicians like John Lurie and Richard Edson. Which makes the pair's debut album the first full release Van Wissem has made with an actual punk rocker. (Jarmusch added guitar to one track on Van Wissem's 2011 solo album, The Joy That Never Ends).
Such a meeting of divergent backgrounds could result in a kind of tonal car crash, but Jarmusch easily and compellingly weaves his playing into Van Wissem's era-bridging craft. At times their sounds connect like rhyming lines of poetry; in other places, like opener "Apokatastasis (Restoration)", Jarmusch's long tones form the echo of Van Wissem's patient, precise notes. In a few instances, such as when Jarmusch plays acoustic guitar, it can even be tough to tell these twin souls apart.
That complementary vibe is due in large part to Van Wissem's simple, sparse melodies, which leave lots of room for Jarmusch to enter and move around in. Concerning the Entrance has its moments of contrast and tension, too. On "The Sun of the Natural World Is Pure Fire", the way Jarmusch grinds out caustic noise behind Van Wissem's exploratory plucks produces a mesmerizing dissonance. Later, on closer "He Is Hanging By His Shiny Arms, His Heart an Open Wound With Love", he interrupts Van Wissem's solo playing by reciting St. John of the Cross' poetry with a cool, detached tone, sounding oddly like Thurston Moore at 16 rpm.
Still, the best moments come when Van Wissem and Jarmusch share a single musical mind. The most blending comes during the album's middle track, "Continuation of the Last Judgement". As Van Wissem devoutly spins out a lute loop, Jarmusch adds small accents, then slides into electric guitar waves that slyly bend around Van Wissem's cycles. Here, the duo's capacity to find interlocking patterns feels infinite, making "Continuation" the best possible title. You can imagine these comrades spinning their wordless yarns long after the album ends. | 2012-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Important | February 22, 2012 | 7.3 | 0775be6e-314a-4bf2-b362-44f3950816aa | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
America first caught a whiff of what Richard James had to offer in early 1993,\n\ when Warp released the ... | America first caught a whiff of what Richard James had to offer in early 1993,\n\ when Warp released the ... | Polygon Window: Surfing on Sine Waves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6393-surfing-on-sine-waves/ | Surfing on Sine Waves | America first caught a whiff of what Richard James had to offer in early 1993, when Warp released the Surfing on Sine Waves album under his Polygon Window alias. Though a few imports had already made a ripple stateside, Surfing on Sine Waves, distributed by TVT, marked the first time a James record could be found at domestic prices. The album was originally one in a line of Warp's "Artificial Intelligence" releases, a series that later birthed the much-maligned genre designation "Intelligent Dance Music." As part of the label's recent retooling of its catalog for a larger U.S. audience, Surfing on Sine Waves has now been remastered and re-released in the States with the addition of two unreleased tracks from the period.
In the wake of 2001's Drukqs, an album most Aphex Twin enthusiasts consider among the man's worst (I'm still waiting for a used copy to show up), it's fun to get reacquainted with the old material, if only to get an idea of what made James such an electronic music icon. Surfing on Sine Waves is rarely rated with the Selected Ambient Works albums or the early singles collected on Classics, but it's still a key record from the era that put James on the map and began the myth-making that would mushroom to Howard Hughes proportions around the time of the "Windowlicker" single.
Listening to Surfing on Sine Waves in the context of electronic music circa 2002, I get an idea what it must have been like to listen to Buddy Holly in 1970. Naturally, there are both positive and negative aspects to re-experiencing artifacts from an earlier time. While this album is a crude template for what post-rave electronic music would eventually become, there is a charm in its technological naïveté, and the record's devotion to puritan virtues like chords and tunes is appealing in a post-Autechre world packed with overachieving signal processors. Catchy, melodic and memorable tracks are what made the Aphex Twin so wonderful at his best; Surfing on Sine Waves has a handful of these, albeit in rough, embryonic form.
There are basically three kinds of tracks on this record: the hard dancefloor bang, the edgy mid-tempo bounce, and the melodic ambient drift. Bangers like "Quoth" and "Quixote" are the weakest of the lot to my ears, and they wind up being where the lack of technology is felt most. Though they surely sounded revolutionary on the '93 dance floor, the thin beats have since lost authority and lack the drum programming audacity that James would develop as the 90s wore on. Check "Isopropophlex" and "AFX2" from the Analog Bubblebath EP and "AFX114" from Caustic Window Compilation for far more commanding examples of this sound.
The propulsive mid-tempo numbers are what sound most interesting to me now. The sour acid squelch of the Roland TB-303 is the lead instrument on both "Ut1-Dot" and the untitled seventh track, with the latter inflating the signature sound to almost comic proportions. Working against the harsh machinations of the 303 are soft layers of keyboards and tinny but gently insistent beats. Sometimes these three components seem to be navigating entirely different but complimentary paths, giving the music an endless, drifting quality. Turns toward the kind of melody that made James famous include the jittery, piano-driven "If It Really Is Me," which sounds like Kraftwerk covering the theme from "The Young and the Restless" (that's "Nadia's Theme" for those of you without access to Mary J. Blige liner notes).
The two unreleased tracks are solid and fit nicely with the original record. "Portreath Harbour" is electro with a Middle Eastern tinge, as robotic handclaps compete for space with a melody right out of Lawrence of Arabia. "Redruth School" is filled with repeating patterns of percussion, with a faux-xylophone sequence providing counterpoint to the mournful synths. Wisely, Warp decided to keep the quiet and lovely "Quino - Phec" as the album closer on this version of Surfing on Sine Waves, as it ranks with the best of Aphex's ambient work in conjuring alien atmosphere. Though not quite an essential James release, Surfing on Sine Waves remains an excellent album from a fascinating and important period in electronic music. | 2002-03-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-03-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 18, 2002 | 8.1 | 0775e966-868a-4b49-acb2-5a02670c4e9b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Widowspeak's captivating singer Molly Hammilton conjures Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval but the key to this crestfallen Brooklyn trio is the guitar work. The skill with which Widowspeak assimilates its influences into alluring song structures is what prevents this from being an exercise in tributary. | Widowspeak's captivating singer Molly Hammilton conjures Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval but the key to this crestfallen Brooklyn trio is the guitar work. The skill with which Widowspeak assimilates its influences into alluring song structures is what prevents this from being an exercise in tributary. | Widowspeak: Widowspeak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15735-widowspeak/ | Widowspeak | It usually takes years of practice and several albums for bands to reach the crestfallen state Brooklyn trio Widowspeak showcase on their debut. Here, the music's poignant rush came quickly: We're told their debut single "Harsh Realm" was recorded after the band played a total of six shows. The fatalistic croon of singer/songwriter Molly Hamilton has already garnered plenty of Hope Sandoval comparisons. It would be remiss not to mention those here, as Hamilton's phrasing is often nearly identical to her most obvious influence, but there's enough variation in mood and texture to give this project a weight and balance all of its own.
Much of the credit is due to the versatile guitar lines traded between Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas. At times there's a hollowed-out starkness and foreboding to the playing reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western soundtracks ("Puritan"); at others there's a meshing of hippy idealism and influences extracted from bad-vibes garage rock not dissimilar to Love at their peak (see the pleasingly atonal guitar solo that ripples through "Nightcrawlers"). The latter even bears a moody 1950s tenor that sounds like Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches with the filth cleaned out of his fingernails. Anyone looking to wallow in 1990s nostalgia will find much to gorge on, too-- touchstones from that decade come thick and fast. For instance, when Hamilton's not channeling Sandoval, and when the band crawls out of the doldrums into more upbeat territory ("Gun Shy", "Half Awake"), she often resembles Madder Rose singer Mary Lorson.
The skill with which Widowspeak assimilates those parts into alluring song structures is what prevents this from being an exercise in tributary. There's an ache to "Harsh Realm" that's all their own, the central vocal line ("I always think about you") bearing a downplayed creepiness that suggests Hamilton knows a thing or two about the ill effects of obsessive love. The one-two punch of "Gun Shy" and "Hard Times" are where the band hits its peak, the former combining their natural wistfulness with bouts of polished-up Link Wray guitar twang that wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to Tom DiCillo's Johnny Suede. On "Hard Times" they bend everything around a featherlight pop framework that provides a perfectly melancholy backbone to Hamilton's naturally listless demeanor: It has the right amount of sun and shade much of Widowspeak possesses, the lightness of touch in the arrangement preventing the songwriting from toppling over into unpalatable sorrow.
Sometimes they don't get that balance right-- on "Fir Coat" it sounds like the song is racing away from Hamilton, and the closing "Ghost Boy" is built around the kind of Moe Tucker-inspired drumming that feels tired in the wake of legions of Brooklyn bands mining the sound over the past few years. But this is clearly the work of a group still finding its way, hammering out the kinks in public view. There's a potential here that could lead to something with a great deal more gravity. It's to Widowspeak's credit that they do make this first taste a brief peak behind the curtain: Five of the 10 songs don't go over the three-minute mark, and the entire runtime's barely half an hour. The economical use of space makes Widowspeak feel like a chance meeting with a pining stranger, one who spills their guts then vanishes from sight just as they're beginning to make an impression. | 2011-08-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-08-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | August 24, 2011 | 7.5 | 07767c28-dd02-4209-aa65-71281f88cc32 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The Ohio rapper’s new EP makes a compelling case for his brand of self-aware cynicism. | The Ohio rapper’s new EP makes a compelling case for his brand of self-aware cynicism. | Kipp Stone: Faygo Baby EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kipp-stone-faygo-baby-ep/ | Faygo Baby EP | There’s a canon of American novels that are either going out of style or already have: books by Roth, Ford, and Exley about underachieving men watching shadows creep across the living room. These characters like to consider themselves misanthropes, but they’re actually a pretty good time. Wielding disdain like a weapon, they voice the sort of harsh truths that go unsaid in healthy friendships and workplaces, their sensitivity rendering them at once vulnerable and dangerous. They drink, they argue, and they don’t abide bullshit because they don’t have the incentive.
Strip away the ambient misogyny and mediocre-white-guy entitlement, and you’d be left with a narrator like Kipp Stone. A quixotic, long-winded malcontent in the tradition of Devin, Masta Ace, and Chris Orrick, the Ohio rapper favors dour, voice-driven plotlessness, shaking his head to see whatever falls out. “Staying optimistic is exhausting,” he sighs in the opening bar of “Manic,” the first track from his new EP Faygo Baby. Like his fictional counterparts, Stone is a self-aware raconteur, but being in on the joke is a hollow victory. “The feeling of not feeling good enough was slowly killing me/And my dislike for envy turned me ’to my biggest enemy,” he rhymes on “Bravado,” which details insecurity rooted in his appearance and childhood.
Stone’s last outing, 2020’s HOMME, was a rewarding if occasionally labored listen, featuring such cheerful refrains as “People Be Trash,” “Jobs Be Trash,” and “World Be Trash.” While he continues to probe the disappointments of early adulthood on Faygo Baby, the warm arrangements make it a surprisingly amiable affair. With its languid tempo, wah-wah guitar, and digitized percussion, “Thoughts to Expand On” evokes Mike Dean and N.O. Joe’s layered production from Rap-A-Lot Records’ golden age. A blunted, off-kilter ambiance almost masks the intricacy of Stone’s compositions, yet his devotion to craft is evident at virtually every turn: subtle beat switches, nested choruses, double-tracked harmonies, and double-entendre punchlines.
Three of Faygo Baby’s seven tracks are self-produced, but it’s primarily a vocal showcase, Stone volleying between chatty monologues and an array of sing-song deliveries. When the subject matter turns grim, these theatrics maintain a lively, unpredictable atmosphere. On “Get Myself Together,” Stone races through knotty rhyme patterns for four or eight bars at a time, casting them aside in favor of increasingly complex schemes; when he finally pauses for the hook, it’s like a well-deserved water break. “Stay Down” is the project’s technical coup de grace, pivoting between breakneck raps and soulful crooning with each beat drop. The format would resemble a talent show medley in less tactful hands, but Stone’s easy transitions evince Z-Ro and Trae’s bluesman instincts.
For all the time Stone spends in his head, Faygo Baby makes a compelling case for his brand of cynicism: he’s able to poke fun at himself, and sometimes the world really is trash. What’s enticing about the record—particularly coming from a 30-year-old artist with a few albums under his belt—is that his years of rap-as-therapy finally seem to have placed him on the verge of a personal breakthrough. A mid-track ad-lib on “Manic” could double as a mission statement: “Be content, think abundantly, you can never be lonely/Never be hungry, be worthless, or not deserving of some kind of peace/I’m protecting mine by any means.” At its best, Faygo Baby plays like more of a motivational guide than a moody diary, with a narrator eager to make peace with his shortcomings. The loudest critics are usually the ones who care the most.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Closed Sessions | May 14, 2021 | 7.1 | 0779921e-ceb6-4968-8d97-fdfa093f313c | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Devised by Optimo’s JD Twitch and NTS Radio’s Fergus Clark, this new compilation surveys the previously untenable “Fourth World” sound, from post-punk goofs to classical composers. | Devised by Optimo’s JD Twitch and NTS Radio’s Fergus Clark, this new compilation surveys the previously untenable “Fourth World” sound, from post-punk goofs to classical composers. | Various Artists: Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23141-miracle-steps-music-from-the-fourth-world-1983-2017/ | Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017) | In 1980, Brian Eno and trumpeter/downtown composer Jon Hassell released a collaborative album bearing the slightly cumbersome title of Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics. It bore a trace of Eno’s ambient music explorations from the past few years, but it most closely echoed the work of Hassell. A collaborator with minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley, Hassell also loved the needling timbre of Electric Miles Davis and ran his own horn through a harmonizer to delectably destabilizing effect. His music hovered just outside classification: ambient yes, but those thundering Burundi drums weren’t quite relaxing. There were glints of jazz and minimalism, but Indian classical and electronic washes also wormed through. It suggested ethnographs from an imaginary terrain, exotica from another green world, hence the term “fourth world” to try and put a border around it all.
Eno’s subsequent work has all but eclipsed Hassell, but in the past few years, Hassell’s influence on generations of producers has come to the surface. It’s a sound that arises amid the glistening ambience of Visible Cloaks, the contorted computer tones of Oneohtrix Point Never, and the techno productions of Call Super. Further underground you can hear it in the music that Andrew Pekler, Don’t DJ, and the Wah Wah Wino camp puts out. Well-regarded reissue imprints like Rvng Intl., Emotional Rescue, and Music From Memory seek out hybrids from that bygone era that also wed sleek western electronics with weirder folk forms. And now comes Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017), a thoughtful overview compiled by Optimo’s JD Twitch in conjunction with fellow Glaswegian and NTS Radio contributor Fergus Clark. Miracle Steps offers up a 14-track exploration of a previously untenable sound, spanning from post-punk goofs to library music loners, bedroom producers to classical composers wholly unaware that blending African instrumentation with western composition had a name.
The set opens with a radiant contribution from Mexico’s Jorge Reyes. Known primarily for abetting new age composer Steve Roach and ethno-chillout act Deep Forest, Reyes’ own ritualistic percussion charges the ether here. “Plight,” a mid-’90s piece, features a wordless chant, rainstick rattles that suggest the Amazon and a drum patter that mimics Indian tabla. It alludes to many sources that it soon sounds like it could only originate from no terrestrial plot. Newcomers like X.Y.R. and Iona Fortune seamlessly slot in alongside early ’80s industrial-ambient collective O Yuki Conjugate, who make a slow loop of flute hover over the track like a dark cloud, foreboding but never filling the sky.
The middle section of the comp offers up the most curious amalgam of sources. It features a Muzak-like take on Hassell’s sound thanks to the processed reeds bobbing around marimba lines. David Cunningham’s name might be familiar for the bristly and frisky punk deconstructions of “Summertime Blues” and “Money” that he rendered as the Flying Lizards. But “Blue River” showcases a more contemplative side of his from the early ’90s, with swells of pedal steel, electric keyboard, and metallophone. Soon each element becomes as slippery as river rocks, everything flowing together like a Javanese gamelan.
On his website, composer Larry Chernicoff boasts that the music he makes is “all organic”; his track “Woodstock, New York” provides the liveliest moment of the comp. It features dueling West African bow harps, soon joined by handclaps and a free jazz flare-up of trumpet and saxophone. It brings to mind Cameroonian renaissance man Francis Bebey and free jazz wanderer Don Cherry, but the propulsive piece stakes out its own space.
For music where the rhythms are primarily a texture—toggling between raindrops and a distant drum circle—Clark and Twitch are deft at making the set flow. The comp floats past like a train journey across numerous landscapes. At its end, it quietly builds to a mellow peak. The woefully named group Afro-Disiak has a kalimba slowly meld with a ghost choir and a growl, reaching a crescendo while still at a crawl. Zoviet-France side project Rapoon uses tabla and a wailing sound that might be voice or strings, subtly shifting between the two for 10 minutes of sustained trance.
Whether recent or from 35 years past, the spirit and sensibilities of Jon Hassell reside in the core of almost every track here. The man himself appears on the title track (taken from his 1986 Power Spot album). Against a waterfall pummel of drums, his trumpet electronically morphs from horse whinny to midnight train whistle. But as I attempt to add a more visual regional descriptor (are these sounds from a sand dune in the Sahara? From a desolate American landscape? Atop the Great Wall?), it all beads away like spilled mercury. While “fourth world” remains a slippery genre tag to affix, Miracle Steps’ curatorial and cartographical attempts to map out such a sound remains notable. | 2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Optimo Music | April 15, 2017 | 8.3 | 077cf4b4-8bd8-4e40-80a2-5de4ae4664a9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Their first LP since the 1997 departure of Bill Berry that sounds unmistakably like themselves, this is also R.E.M.'s best record in that time. | Their first LP since the 1997 departure of Bill Berry that sounds unmistakably like themselves, this is also R.E.M.'s best record in that time. | R.E.M.: Collapse Into Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15184-collapse-into-now/ | Collapse Into Now | Though they've been playing stadiums for decades, R.E.M. have never really traded in stadium-sized rock. From the release of the "Radio Free Europe" single in 1981 through 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the band's most anthemic songs were always tempered by space, restraint, and nuance; even 1994's so-called "big dumb rock album" Monster was an exercise in skeletal glam and sly, swaggering pastiche. When drummer Bill Berry departed the band in 1997, he took with him the one facet of R.E.M.'s sound that no other band has really sought to emulate: a nervous, lockstep grid that lacked the momentum to power a grandiose rock band, but gave Berry's bandmates ample room to weave together the distinctive tones and melodies that have always been the heart of R.E.M.
Since Berry's departure, R.E.M. has struggled to retain both the consistency and the daringness of their first 10 records. After releasing the plodding Around the Sun, the band attempted a "return to rock" with 2008's Accelerate, barreling through a forceful but generic set and grasping at a raw, aggressive sound that was never really R.E.M.'s to begin with. So, it comes as something of a relief that Collapse Into Now sounds unmistakably like an R.E.M. album. At its best, the album evokes R.E.M.'s best work while capitalizing on the energy conjured during Accelerate. At its worst, it sounds like a career-spanning collection of B-sides.
The most immediately striking moments on Collapse Into Now are those that sound like explicit retreads of previous R.E.M. songs. The minor key acoustic guitar and slapback delay-treated opening "hey" of "Uberlin" is a jarring callback to Automatic for the People opener "Drive", distracting from one of Collapse Into Now's best choruses. "Oh My Heart" has all the trappings of one of R.E.M.'s haunting mid-period acoustic ballads, but repeats itself into drudgery. Album closer "Blue", with its abstract sing-spoken lyrics and Patti Smith-sung backing vocals, plays out like an awkward and lifeless re-imagining of New Adventures in Hi-Fi single "E-Bow the Letter", throwing into stark relief just how unlikely and remarkable some of the band's earlier successes were.
Collapse Into Now also hosts some unlikely successes of its own; in spite of its discouraging title, "Mine Smell Like Honey" overcomes a water-treading verse and ascends to a truly a majestic classic R.E.M. chorus, complete with soaring Mike Mills backing vocals and jangling Peter Buck guitars. "Walk It Back" alone is worth the price of admission here, a gorgeous and enveloping song that takes a step back from the album's dense arrangements and gives Michael Stipe's vocals room to resonate. It's wise, mature and relaxed in a way that's subtly different from anything R.E.M. have done before, and it is quite possibly the best song that the band has recorded in nearly 15 years.
Bits and pieces from every great R.E.M. record are present on Collapse Into Now, but the ease with which the band once combined these elements is now tenuous and hard-fought. Some of Buck and Mills's best melodic ideas simply get drowned out or rushed through, and Stipe often trips over the idiosyncratic vocal phrasings he once commanded so well. A deadpanned "20th Century collapse into now" towards the album's end echoes the line "20th Century, go to sleep" from "Electrolite", the last song on the last truly great R.E.M. album. Fifteen years ago, however, Stipe followed that line with a self-effacing "... really deep." This generous and deeply human complexity was often R.E.M.'s saving grace, even as they pursued counterintuitive and seemingly pretentious directions. This album is host to more such complexity than anything since 1998's Up-- but Collapse Into Now still sounds like the work of a band caught between old habits and new adventures. | 2011-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | March 9, 2011 | 6.8 | 077e79e5-fbe1-4251-b89e-210f853527e8 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
The two rappers show great chemistry on their collaborative mixtape, even if Future sounds like he’s dragging slightly. | The two rappers show great chemistry on their collaborative mixtape, even if Future sounds like he’s dragging slightly. | Future / Lil Uzi Vert: Pluto x Baby Pluto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-lil-uzi-vert-pluto-x-baby-pluto/ | Pluto x Baby Pluto | Future and Lil Uzi Vert might as well be on two different planets right now. Uzi’s still hot off Eternal Atake, one of the year’s best rap albums, and its star-studded B-side, LUV vs. The World 2. On the other hand, Future’s most recent release was High Off Life, a record in which he sounded nearly asleep, as if operating on autopilot. One of the only highlights from High Off Life was the bubbly, Uzi-featuring “All Bad,” a strange yet welcome breath of fresh air that felt like an Eternal Atake cast-off. A collab album from Uzi and the man who inspired his Baby Pluto persona felt inevitable after they appeared on each other’s albums, but the disappointing two-pack of “Patek” and “Over Your Head” from this summer left much to be desired. However, Pluto x Baby Pluto is more than a slight improvement from their earlier missteps—it’s like watching two friends trade lives for a day.
They warmly embrace each other’s production choices on here. Future sounds just as comfortable over the cartoony, electronic Working on Dying production as he does on DJ Esco’s racing melodies. The cheery horns and rattling drums of “Bankroll” sound like they were ripped straight from a Stunt Taylor mixtape. The chaotic tracklist puts producers like WOD’s Brandon Finessin and NeilaWorld’s Lukrative, who first rose to prominence on SoundCloud, on the same album as Atlanta veterans like Zaytoven.
What Uzi brings to Pluto x Baby Pluto is a revitalizing energy that makes Future wake up for the first time since The WIZRD. On “Marni on Me,” they trade bars over ominous whistles, trying to one-up the other with uncounterable flexes. “I push a button my car need no keys,” Uzi says with a carefree shrug. “I push a button, the car drive by itself,” Future immediately fires back. As the album goes on, their designer lifestyle gets even more animated and expensive. They talk about owing money to Elliot Eliantte and buying out stores in Paris as if these were regular occurrences. But even with all this super-charged energy, it’s hard to ignore the moments where Future lags behind, like his unimaginative hook from “Sleeping on the Floor.”
If a project from Future and Lil Uzi didn’t spend some time trying to get their exes to fall back in love with them, it wouldn’t be a project from them at all. On “I Don’t Wanna Break Up,” it’s bizarre hearing someone as self-serious as Future right after Uzi goes full pop-punk on the chorus. “Tryna make better decisions, tryna be more consistent, yeah,” Future dreamily sings. “I’m going through hell just to get to you again.”
Despite their newfound chemistry on Pluto x Baby Pluto, Future and Uzi’s best rapping comes when they’re left alone to get lost in their own thoughts on their solo songs. Future raps vividly about betrayal over the prickled keys and piercing strings of “Rockstar Chainz.” Uzi sounds like he’s rapping every bar as soon as he thinks of it on “Lullaby,” not giving himself a chance to forget a clever thought. “I try my best just to hug her with my fingers crossed, cause I know deep down inside, I am really doing wrong,” Uzi painfully exhales.
Throughout Pluto x Baby Pluto, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Future is playing catch-up with Uzi. It wouldn’t be the first time Uzi’s out-rapped an Atlanta legend on a collab tape. Regardless, it’s exciting seeing how they’ve learned to play off of each other’s energy. It’d be easy for Uzi to coast and phone in verses after the year he’s had so far, but he’s shown no signs of slowing down.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Epic | November 17, 2020 | 6.8 | 077fdc49-7281-4e78-b8c9-682aca81f6a3 | Brandon Callender | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-callender/ | |
The godfathers of no wave use bits of punk, post-punk, and disco, connecting them all through attitude. In their first two albums, you can even hear the roots of new wave, industrial, and techno. | The godfathers of no wave use bits of punk, post-punk, and disco, connecting them all through attitude. In their first two albums, you can even hear the roots of new wave, industrial, and techno. | Suicide: Suicide / Alan Vega Martin Rev | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22039-suicide-alan-vega-martin-rev/ | Suicide / Alan Vega Martin Rev | Amid the ongoing musical revolution of 1970s New York, Suicide were the ultimate “you had to be there” band. Live, the duo’s music was a cacophonous wall of pulsing noise that could feel physically intimidating. As Martin Rev spewed distorted melodies and hammering beats from a keyboard/drum-machine hybrid he called “The Instrument,” Alan Vega rapped, gasped, and howled like Elvis reborn as a hit man. Vega even ventured into the crowd, crashing through tables to threaten inattentive onlookers. Suicide’s rep was built on the unique danger of this stage act, seemingly impossible to reproduce on something as two-dimensional as a slab of vinyl.
It was possible. But you couldn't have predicted their method. Suicide’s first two studio albums, Suicide(1977) and Alan Vega Martin Rev (1980), don’t try to capture the sonic chaos of their concerts. As Thurston Moore puts it in his notes to Superior Viaduct’s reissue of the former, “the record sounded contained, not blasting and melting your skin off, but it was still amazing because the songs were amazing.” In other words, even when turned down, Suicide’s music shakes with tension. Maybe it doesn’t shove you or knock over your beer, but the animalistic repetition and sinister attitude is still brashly in your face.
In fact, as the primal throbs of these albums infect your nervous system, their minimalism seems less a compromise to studio constraints than a feat of strength. Suicide’s attempt to bottle their energy without sacrificing potency is a daring gambit, but it pays off—so much so that the duo’s most stripped-down track, “Frankie Teardrop” (from Suicide), is its most devastating. Over Rev’s unwavering, tell-tale-heart beat, Vega exhales the tale of a murderer venturing into hell. His harrowing screams at the end are certainly not minimal, but it’s all the chilling restraint that precedes them that makes “Frankie Teardrop” ripple your skin.
That restraint lets Suicide inject danger into some surprisingly sweet, even cheesy melodies. On Suicide, the noir-movie vibes of engine-revving tunes “Ghost Rider” (named after Vega’s favorite comic book) and “Rocket U.S.A.” feel scary. But they’re no more menacing than swaying ballads “Cheree” and “Girl,” which sound like ’50s love songs darkened by disturbing undercurrents. Though Vega was trained as an artist and Rev studied piano with jazz greats, the two initially bonded over childhood love of doo-wop. That influence bubbles inside Rev’s three-chord riffs and Vega’s chanted rock-myth narratives.
Traces of classic pop become more prominent on Alan Vega Martin Rev, due in part to the involvement of the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who was already a devoted Suicide fan before producing the album. The duo makes their intentions clear in the title of the first song, “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne”: this is a shinier, more glamorous version of Suicide. Just listen to “Sweetheart,” whose lilting tropical-lounge swing is so glittery it makes “Cheree” sound like industrial noise.
But Alan Vega Martin Rev still boasts tons of gut-level grit, and the way the duo apply that to catchier tunes is fascinating. On heavier tracks “Fast Money Music” and “Harlem,” Rev’s knack for rhythmic loops that build without changing is stunning, as is Vega’s ability to shift cadences through those cycles. But even more thrilling are openly melodic pieces “Shadazz” and “Be Bop Kid.” The latter in particular sounds like doo-wop boiled down to its ideal, much the way the Ramones divined diamonds from the coal of classic rock.
There’s also something thrilling about how Suicide found their own space between scenes and styles. They overlapped with punk, post-punk, and disco, and are often cited as the godfathers of no wave. Yet no other band in any of those genres sounded like them. Their connection to their peers was about attitude, which often seems to be the only thing their songs are made of. You can hear roots of new wave, industrial, and techno in Rev’s keyboard lines, even embryonic hip-hop in Vega’s rhythmic delivery. But if these albums initially sound familiar, give them time. Eventually, what sound like simple loops become fishhooks that puncture your skin, leaving marks as indelible as this band’s singular five-decade career. | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | June 27, 2016 | 9.1 | 07826c41-e340-4112-9123-499eadac0c89 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Five months after her stunning debut album, the Brooklyn composer offers up a modest yet revealing set of sketch-like guitar pieces, drawing unexpected connections between Pat Metheny and Midwestern emo. | Five months after her stunning debut album, the Brooklyn composer offers up a modest yet revealing set of sketch-like guitar pieces, drawing unexpected connections between Pat Metheny and Midwestern emo. | Rachika Nayar: fragments | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rachika-nayar-fragments/ | fragments | It’s not immediately obvious from much of Our Hands Against the Dusk, Rachika Nayar’s stunning first album, that the electric guitar is the Brooklyn-based composer’s primary instrument. Nayar uses her own melodic lines as source material for electronic manipulation, twisting and stretching them until they ripple and shimmer like reflections on unquiet water. The mirage dissipates only rarely, as in the final section of “The Trembling of Glass.” The uncanny swirls of the piece’s first half recede, and we’re left with a lonesome arpeggiated figure, one of few easily recognizable guitar sounds on the album. Nayar gradually adds more layers but soon halts on a choked staccato note that suggests the abrupt end of an impromptu solitary jam session, one last stab at the strings before putting the instrument away. Within the context of Our Hands Against the Dusk, whose production and arrangement remain poised and deliberate even as the music traverses huge emotional peaks, the unplanned air of this moment offers a look behind the curtain: a brief reminder that, no matter how vast and strange the landscape becomes, it usually starts with Nayar alone at the guitar.
The compact fragments arrives five months after Our Hands Against the Dusk, and it functions as a sort of companion piece. It extends that earlier look at the inner workings of Nayar’s music, revealing the sorts of raw recordings that often serve as starting points for her larger compositions, according to promotional materials. The EP’s 11 tracks range in length from 54 seconds to two and a half minutes, and they generally contain several guitar parts weaved in an intricate latticework, looping with occasional electronic accompaniment. They are often lovely, and almost always end before you’d like. The magic of Our Hands Against the Dusk lies not only in its crystalline textures but also in the way Nayar develops them across the sophisticated compositional arc of a given piece. Each track on fragments is akin to a single stop on one of those journeys. Nayar presents an idea, lets it run for a while, then pulls the plug and moves on to the next one. Listening feels a bit like perusing the auxiliary materials of a museum exhibition, looking at early charcoal drafts on paper while spectacular canvases hang behind you.
Nayar cites Midwest emo as an influence, which in the past was most audible in her work as an undercurrent of sensibility rather than an explicit reference point, an unabashed directness of feeling—and an instinct for chord changes that raise a lump in your throat—that persisted even through the music’s most abstract passages. On fragments, the connection is much closer to the surface. Nayar also mentions the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich, as interpreted by virtuoso jazz fusion guitarist Pat Metheny, as a source of inspiration, and fragments sometimes resembles a literal collision of these influences. The jangly guitar interplay of tracks like “allegheny” and “softness” is plainly reminiscent of the canonical Midwest emo sound, but the way Nayar uses these riffs as vessels for trancelike repetition is pure Reich. (As for Metheny, a Missourian with a nerdy streak whose early albums are filled with twinkling clean-toned paeans to the beauty and desolation of his native landscape—well, maybe the distance between him and American Football isn’t as big as you’d think.)
The EP’s most affecting moments come when Nayar begins filling in the outlines of her sketches with motifs like the heroic synth bassline that arrives halfway through “memory as miniatures,” the harmonized ascending figures of “august 31st,” the circuitous melody winding among the loops of “parking lots”—tracks that begin to feel like compositions unto themselves, not outposts along the way to some weightier end. But it would be a mistake to demand more of fragments, a release that makes no bones about its own ephemerality, from its title to its low-key cassette release to its 15-minute runtime. Our Hands Against the Dusk announced Nayar as a formidable talent among guitarists and electronic musicians. While fragments doesn’t aspire to the same heights, it does provide several compelling new angles from which to view her more substantial work.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | August 12, 2021 | 6.9 | 0783e62d-22cc-4e2a-b3d7-c7ab614863c8 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
null | *How did we get here?*
Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways-- we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our | Arcade Fire: Funeral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/452-funeral/ | Funeral | How did we get here?
Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways-- we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance. We forget that "emo" was once derived from emotion, and that in our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing.
We are not the first, or the last, to be confronted with this dilemma. David Byrne famously asked a variation on the question that opens this review, and in doing so suggested a type of universal disaffection synonymous with drowning. And so The Arcade Fire asks the question again, but with a crucial distinction: The pain of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the enigmatic husband-and-wife songwriting force behind the band, is not merely metaphorical, nor is it defeatist. They tread water in Byrne's ambivalence because they have known real, blinding pain, and they have overcome it in a way that is both tangible and accessible. Their search for salvation in the midst of real chaos is ours; their eventual catharsis is part of our continual enlightenment.
The years leading up to the recording of Funeral were marked with death. Chassagne's grandmother passed away in June of 2003, Butler's grandfather in March of 2004, and bandmate Richard Parry's aunt the following month. These songs demonstrate a collective subliminal recognition of the powerful but oddly distanced pain that follows the death of an aging loved one. Funeral evokes sickness and death, but also understanding and renewal; childlike mystification, but also the impending coldness of maturity. The recurring motif of a non-specific "neighborhood" suggests the supportive bonds of family and community, but most of its lyrical imagery is overpoweringly desolate.
"Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" is a sumptuously theatrical opener-- the gentle hum of an organ, undulating strings, and repetition of a simple piano figure suggest the discreet unveiling of an epic. Butler, in a bold voice that wavers with the force of raw, unspoken emotion, introduces his neighborhood. The scene is tragic: As a young man's parents weep in the next room, he secretly escapes to meet his girlfriend in the town square, where they naively plan an "adult" future that, in the haze of adolescence, is barely comprehensible to them. Their only respite from their shared uncertainty and remoteness exists in the memories of friends and parents.
The following songs draw upon the tone and sentiment of "Tunnels" as an abstract mission statement. The conventionally rock-oriented "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" is a second-hand account of one individual's struggle to overcome an introverted sense of suicidal desperation. The lyrics superficially suggest a theme of middle-class alienation, but avoid literal allusion to a suburban wasteland-- one defining characteristic of the album, in fact, is the all-encompassing scope of its conceptual neighborhoods. The urban clatter of Butler's adopted hometown of Montreal can be felt in the foreboding streetlights and shadows of "Une Annee Sans Lumiere", while Chassagne's evocative illustration of her homeland (on "Haiti", the country her parents fled in the 1960s) is both distantly exotic and starkly violent, perfectly evoking a nation in turmoil.
"Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" is a shimmering, audacious anthem that combines a driving pop beat, ominous guitar assault, and sprightly glockenspiel decoration into a passionate, fist-pumping album manifesto. The fluidity of the song's construction is mesmerizing, and the cohesion of Butler's poignant assertion of exasperation ("I went out into the night/ I went out to pick a fight with anyone") and his emotional call to arms ("The power's out in the heart of man/ Take it from your heart/ Put it in your hand"), distinguishes the song as the album's towering centerpiece.
Even in its darkest moments, Funeral exudes an empowering positivity. Slow-burning ballad "Crown of Love" is an expression of lovesick guilt that perpetually crescendos until the track unexpectedly explodes into a dance section, still soaked in the melodrama of weeping strings; the song's psychological despair gives way to a purely physical catharsis. The anthemic momentum of "Rebellion (Lies)" counterbalances Butler's plaintive appeal for survival at death's door, and there is liberation in his admittance of life's inevitable transience. "In the Backseat" explores a common phenomenon-- a love of backseat window-gazing, inextricably linked to an intense fear of driving-- that ultimately suggests a conclusive optimism through ongoing self-examination. "I've been learning to drive my whole life," Chassagne sings, as the album's acoustic majesty finally recedes and relinquishes.
So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it's so easy to embrace this album's operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire's vision. It's taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase "emotional" to its true origin. Dissecting how we got here now seems unimportant. It's simply comforting to know that we finally have arrived. | 2004-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 12, 2004 | 9.7 | 07848e17-5b0a-4212-9725-47864dc5e22b | David Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-moore/ | null |
Loosely related to Broken Social Scene, this Montreal band traffics in the same brand of anthemic, proficient indie rock. Arcade Fire's Jeremy Gara guests. | Loosely related to Broken Social Scene, this Montreal band traffics in the same brand of anthemic, proficient indie rock. Arcade Fire's Jeremy Gara guests. | Land of Talk: Cloak and Cipher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14555-cloak-and-cipher/ | Cloak and Cipher | After spending an entire North American tour supporting Broken Social Scene after the release of debut Some Are Lakes, you'd think that Land of Talk would be be eager to dial back the Canadian Indie Power Pop Bombast a little. Indeed, after the group translated some of the raw energy of its breakout EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss into the more graceful, delicately arranged pieces found on Lakes, it seemed as if Land of Talk were destined to slip into the recesses of comfortable, regal indie rock. But with their follow-up Cloak and Cipher-- a fevered, grandiose record that's both denser and more technically proficient than its predecessor-- the Montreal trio take every opportunity to make their former tourmates proud with this batch of swoon-worthy, anthemic songs.
If there's one thing the band does right on Cloak and Cipher, it's nail these big, star-bursted choruses. Powell, who acts as both the voice and chief songwriter of Land of Talk, has clearly allowed some of her time working with BSS to rub off on the material found here. While it might be a little dangerous to nick ideas from your new employer, the songs on Cloak and Cipher that sound the most like BSS tunes are the best ones here. Riff-slathered single "Swift Coin" sounds a lot like "7/4 (Shoreline)", while standout "Quarry Hymns" marries some familiar balladry with salted air and sunset-warmed guitars lifted from some late-70s FM station. It's a high-water mark, and one that best captures the band's intent to never allow the emotive moments to get the best of the blustery ones, and vice versa.
Throughout, Powell remains a transfixing voice, and Land of Talk gives her the space she needs to try a variety of approaches. On an otherwise sad but endearing sounding little ballad, "Color Me Badd" (yep, like the "I Wanna Sex You Up" guys) finds Powell's softly spun vocal boiling-over with a controlled kind of lovesick frustration that locates a complex hurt. But most of the time, she doesn't need to rely on anything as dramatic, channelling a humbler, late-era Stevie Nicks on "Playita" or doing a less-precious Feist on "Hamburg, Noon".
Cloak and Cipher wisely enlists and array of heavy-hitters, with guests from Arcade Fire and Stars pitching in where needed. While these helping hands provide added oomph, their reputations for drawn-out tracks and LPs has also seemingly rubbed off on Land of Talk. Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely. | 2010-08-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-08-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | August 20, 2010 | 6.9 | 0784a1f9-42a9-4520-9243-b925663d4ff2 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The 20th anniversary reissue of Nirvana’s third LP includes a remastered version of the original mix, B-sides, outtakes, and a slew of embryonic demos, along with a new mix overseen by Steve Albini. Taken together, the set’s vitality puts lie to the notion that In Utero was the soundtrack to a suicide, commercial or otherwise. | The 20th anniversary reissue of Nirvana’s third LP includes a remastered version of the original mix, B-sides, outtakes, and a slew of embryonic demos, along with a new mix overseen by Steve Albini. Taken together, the set’s vitality puts lie to the notion that In Utero was the soundtrack to a suicide, commercial or otherwise. | Nirvana: In Utero (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18517-nirvana-in-utero-20th-anniversary-edition/ | In Utero (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) | For the past two decades, we’ve essentially been living with two versions of In Utero. The first was officially released September 21, 1993, though its legend was established several months prior. As the intensely anticipated follow-up to the most transformative rock album of the 1990s, Nirvana’s third record was pre-destined to become a battlefield in the heightening clash between indie and corporate culture, as mediated by a band that was philosophically faithful to the former but contractually beholden to the latter.
While Kurt Cobain famously used the liner notes for 1992 rarities compilation Incesticide to call out the jocks, racists, and homophobes in Nirvana’s ever-expanding audience, In Utero promised a more aggressively hands-on process of weeding out the mooks, a concerted effort to realign Nirvana with the artists they actually listened to and away from those they were credited with spawning. And where the album’s title would reflect Cobain’s lyrical yearning for a back-to-the-womb retreat from celebrity scrutiny, it also proved emblematic of the record's messy birth: A by-all-reports harmonious two-week quickie session with recording engineer Steve Albini in a rural Minnesota studio would lead to months of acrimonious exchanges in the press among the band, DGC, and Albini over the purportedly unlistenable nature of the results, requests for cleaner mixes, and cruddy cassette copies leaked to radio that falsely reinforced the label’s misgivings. (The second-guessing circumstances were not that dissimilar to those of the preceding Nevermind—wherein Butch Vig’s original recordings were eventually handed over to Andy Wallace for a platinum-plated finish—only this time, the outcome had the potential to affect Geffen’s share price.)
Upon release, In Utero may have debuted at number one, but initially it was something of a pyrrhic victory: Rather than lead a wave of Jesus Lizard–inspired noise bands to the top of the Billboard charts, In Utero would send millions of Nirvana’s more casual crossover fans scurrying into the warm embrace of Pearl Jam’s record-setting October ’93 release, Vs., an album that, from a music-biz perspective, was the true blockbuster sequel to Nevermind. In that sense, this first version of In Utero resonates as much today as a symbolic gesture as a collection of 12 unrelentingly visceral rock songs, a how-to manual for any artist at the top of their game—from Kid A–era Radiohead to Kanye West circa Yeezus—that would rather use their elevated position to provoke their audience than pander to it.
The second version of In Utero came to be on April 8, 1994, from which point the album would be forever known as the rough draft for rock’n’roll’s most famous suicide note. In the wake of Cobain’s shotgunned sign-off, it became nigh impossible to hear In Utero in any other context. The infamous album-opening lyric that once dripped with sarcasm—“Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old”—now sounded coldly nihilistic. Where the seismic stomper “Scentless Apprentice” invoked Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume as metaphor for Cobain’s festering disgust with the music press and industry, the song’s grueling shriek of “get awwwwwaaaayyyy” suddenly seemed to be directed at humanity itself. The “Leonard Cohen after-world” fantasy of “Pennyroyal Tea” turned into wish fulfillment; “All Apologies” ceased to be an innocently plaintive pop song and was instead permanently etched into its writer's epitaph.
But with this two-disc 20th-anniversary reissue, we now have a third version of In Utero, and I’m not just referring to the newly remixed iteration of the album. Taken as a whole, the package—which also includes a remastered version of the original mix, B-sides, outtakes, a slew of embryonic demos, and a cheeky but affecting liner-note essay by comedian/tourmate Bobcat Goldthwait—puts lie to the notion that In Utero is the soundtrack to a suicide, commercial or otherwise. In charting the songs’ evolution from rough instrumentals to the militaristic blasts of fury heard on the album proper, and through the outré experiments scrapped along the way, we hear a band that was on the cusp of an intriguing new phase.
In a surprisingly conciliatory Musique Plus interview conducted just prior to the album’s release, Cobain stated that In Utero would mark the end of Nirvana as grunge torchbearers and, throughout the record, the band screech and howl like they're skinning themselves alive to expedite their reinvention. But not a lyric goes by on the album where Cobain doesn’t sound conflicted between what he wants to do and what he feels he has to do. The scowling verses of “Serve the Servants” are countered by the chorus’ soothing incantation of the song’s title, as if Cobain had to anesthetize himself in order to answer his audience’s populist demands. You didn’t need to hear the feedback assault of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” to sense the irony reeking from its title, while the sludgy savagery of “Milk It” deploys Cobain’s fascinations with bodily fluids and birthing to depict a soul being run through the music-industry wringer. Though Cobain claimed in the aforementioned interview that the deliberately bald language of “Rape Me” was his response to misinterpretations of Nirvana’s more ambiguous portraits of sexual/power dynamics (“Polly,” “About a Girl”), the fact that it cops the riff to his most famous song unsubtly directs the titular demand to his hit-seeking minders; when he answers his request by repeating “I’m not the only one,” he seems to be placating himself with the knowledge that he’s not the first punk-rocker caught in a boardroom power play. (And, in light of Cobain’s mounting disdain for the media, I can’t be the only person who’s always heard that line in “All Apologies” as “choking on the ashes of her NME.”)
But this set supports the theory that Cobain didn’t necessarily fear or hate success; his real struggle was achieving it on his own terms. If he really wanted to clear the room, he could’ve made In Utero a lot weirder than it actually turned out to be: Among the outtakes here is “Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flowing Through the Strip” (which previously surfaced stateside on the barrel-scraping 2004 box set With the Lights Out), an exceedingly odd, stream-of-consciousness ramble that sees Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl adopting the art-damaged inscrutability of then-underground darlings Pavement. Also included are Albini’s supposedly contentious original mixes for In Utero’s two singles, “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies”, which the band eventually handed over to R.E.M. associate Scott Litt to create the spit-shined radio-friendly versions that wound up on the final record. Furthermore, Litt’s crisper alternate take of “Penny Royal Tea” (which scrubs off a layer of its Sebadohian scuzz) is featured here as a reinforcement of Nirvana’s acquiescent impulses—it first appeared on a special edition of In Utero created specifically for Wal-Mart that swapped out the title of “Rape Me” for the more big-box-shopper-friendly “Waif Me.” (That the differences between the Albini and Litt’s mixes are slight speaks to the sort of nitpicking the band were being subjected from without and within.) And in hearing the unvarnished demos of “Scentless Apprentice” and “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” you get a clearer sense of just how much refinement and fierce discipline they were subjected to before being presented to the public. (In particular, the versions featured in the band’s MTV Live and Loud concert from December 1993—included in a deluxe four-disc version of this set—perfectly encapsulate the In Utero ideal of arena-rock at its most anarchic.)
There’s also evidence here to suggest that, in spite of In Utero’s caustic reputation, Nirvana were also keen to explore more sophisticated songcraft. “Sappy” was presumably kept off the In Utero tracklist (and punted over to the No Alternative charity compilation) due to its strong resemblance to Nevermind corkers like “Drain You,” but it still stands as one of Cobain’s purest, most effortless power-pop gestures, while the hushed B-side ballad “Marigold” serves as a test flight for Grohl’s Foo Fighters. Most surprising of all is an early demo of “All Apologies” with an acoustic, countrified shimmer that could practically pass for a CCR golden oldie, transmuting the song’s overarching sense of resignation into bright-eyed, fresh-start optimism. Though Nirvana obviously had second thoughts about assuming such a radically chipper guise, that sort of willingness to mess with their essence would carry over to the band’s subsequent touring formation, on which ex-Germs guitarist Pat Smear was added to fill out the sound and the sight of guest cellists was not uncommon.
This exploratory ethos also informs In Utero’s new 2013 mix, overseen by Albini with input from Novoselic, Grohl, and Smear. Strangely enough, the revamp was inspired by another rock icon who died at 27: Novoselic recently revealed the idea came to him after hearing a gussied-up Doors compilation that emphasized certain, previously unnoticed sonic details. Albini, however, has offered a more pragmatic rationale: In Utero’s quick gestation period meant some mixing decisions were made off-the-cuff, resulting in various instrumental parts, alternate guitar solos, and harmony lines being left out. As he told podcaster Vish Khanna, his intention was not to replace the 1993 mix, but to simply take a snapshot of the same songs “from a different angle.” The new version is in fact more textured and nuanced, but not at the expense of the album's bone-dry, brutalizing crunch. Most of its touch-ups are tastefully unobtrusive and illuminating, like the unearthed cello lines creeping behind the chorus of “Serve the Servants” that bring a greater sense of melancholy to the fore, or the screeching strings and slowly decaying fadeout of “All Apologies” that lend a more palpable degree of finality to the proceedings. But there are times where the listening experience is reduced to a parlor game of spotting what’s been added and what’s been omitted: On the upside, “Scentless Apprentice” now sounds like it’s being screamed into a toilet, pushing the song to exciting new levels of gnarliness, but excising the cello parts that are so integral to “Dumb” is, well, kinda dumb.
Fittingly, for an album that starkly contrasts Nirvana’s melodic and maniacal extremes, In Utero (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) highlights another inherent contradiction: much like the Beatles’ Let It Be, what was originally intended to be a raw, back-to-basics reaction to past excesses has, ironically, been subjected to so much over-thinking and console-board tinkering (this latest mix constituting its Let It Be… Naked moment of revisionism). But all these mutations reflect the restless, irrepressible nature of these songs, which—whether in the form of crude demos or modern-day remasters—still sting and ooze like a flesh wound that refuses to heal. And yet In Utero is the sort of painful shock that, paradoxically, reinstills the empowering sensation of feeling alive. Cobain may have been bored, but he checked out before he grew old; when listening to his final collection of songs, you forget, for a little while, the possibility of either. | 2013-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | September 24, 2013 | 10 | 0786a349-0209-4f22-bae3-5f9ee4371e61 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Toronto singer and rapper’s second album seeks immortality, but it's just a record full of crude imitations of every remotely bankable contemporary R&B or rap song. | The Toronto singer and rapper’s second album seeks immortality, but it's just a record full of crude imitations of every remotely bankable contemporary R&B or rap song. | Tory Lanez: Memories Don’t Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tory-lanez-memories-dont-die/ | Memories Don’t Die | Memories Don’t Die is Tory Lanez’s attempt to leave an indelible mark, to foster a legacy that will outlive him. “People die every day but the memories don’t,” he intones gravely on the intro. “This my motherfuckin’ album.” It’s too bad, then, that Lanez’s quest for immortality hinges entirely on a record full of crude imitations of every remotely bankable contemporary R&B or rap song. He scans production and songwriting templates through his photocopier and then presents them as originals, all the while taunting those who have criticized him for doing just that. Lanez is obsessed with showing up anyone who doubts him, but if Memories is supposed to offer evidence proving them wrong, it is a miserable failure.
Much was made of his “beef” with Drake, which was rather unceremoniously quashed last May, and, like his more famous rival, Lanez goes out of his way to work all the drama into his narrative on “Hate to Say”: “If … me and Drake mendin’ bridges it’d probably equal to winnin’.” What he doesn’t realize is that he will always be measured by the shadow of the man he impersonates most. The timing of his debut album, 2016’s I Told You, was favorable for the upstart, as it was released shortly after VIEWS, when Drake’s defenses seemed most vulnerable. But this settles it: The chasm between the two has never been wider.
There are still plenty of Drake flows and melodies and impressions on Memories Don’t Die, but a lot of the problems are entirely Lanez’s own. The album is still way too long (18 tracks, an hour and 10 minutes) and his singing can be lifeless and devoid of personality, soaking up the flavor of the month like tofu. His creative impulse is to smash two perfectly fine songs into one annoyingly jumbled one, like on the eight-minute “Happiness x Tell Me.” “Tell me how you feel about a nigga, knowing everything is real about me,” he says flatly on the song. But he doesn’t really want to know. That would require him to do some actual soul-searching.
Until now, Lanez was a functional rapper, fine for an R&B sadboy. He used his bars like a party trick, pulling them out sparingly to show casual onlookers he was a bit more interesting. But he’s leaning more heavily on his raps now, to his detriment. Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless. Behold: “My dick giant like Fifo, if you need know/Money singin’ in a C-Note like Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do.” Earlier he rips off this brutal trio of facepalm-worthy stinkers: “I’m cruisin’ through New York in a 911/Used to fuck Julie ’round 9:11/Fly nigga in the buildin’ like 9/11.”
The songs that do work are largely indebted to their guest stars or influences. “48 Floors” is smooth and understated thanks to a shimmering coda from the Oakland singer Mansa. The Fabolous-led “Connection” is the album’s most satisfying listen, a mélange of hollow sounds and wispy melodies; Lanez doesn’t have a verse. The weird and sudden vocal turns on “4 Me,” Lanez’s most daring effort to date, are slippery and elastic; his aerodynamic performance is reminiscent of recent exhibitions from Swae Lee and Young Thug. With every release, it becomes clearer that the singer-rapper’s only true skill is interpretation.
Then there’s “Pieces,” Lanez’s big turn toward evocative drama. The song samples Sting’s “Shape of My Heart”—previously used prominently on Nas’ “The Message”—and tells a convoluted tale of a rape victim who kills the uncle that molested her. The song has a “twist” ending, and Lanez has compared it to Immortal Technique’s cult classic “Dance With the Devil.” But that song had power and purpose, and it wasn’t tragedy for tragedy’s sake. Plus, Lanez’s writing doesn’t have the nuance required to unpack such a complicated situation, and many of the plot points are entirely self-serving. Tory Lanez wants badly to be felt, to be remembered by history. But Memories Don’t Die reflects an inability to achieve anything beyond being featured on RapCaviar. | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Mad Love / Interscope | March 7, 2018 | 5.5 | 0786c6f4-0b71-4695-a69e-329f484c613f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The debut album from Atlanta-via-Tupelo brother act Rae Sremmurd floats with a singular and sinister energy. Featuring guests like Big Sean, Young Thug, and Nicki Minaj and exceptional production from Mike WiLL, Sonny Digital, and others, SremmLife never sags, packing hooks into every pocket and half-beat. | The debut album from Atlanta-via-Tupelo brother act Rae Sremmurd floats with a singular and sinister energy. Featuring guests like Big Sean, Young Thug, and Nicki Minaj and exceptional production from Mike WiLL, Sonny Digital, and others, SremmLife never sags, packing hooks into every pocket and half-beat. | Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20113-sremmlife/ | SremmLife | Last year, buoyed by effervescent hits like the anti-stunt anthem "No Flex Zone" and the jarring synth pound "No Type"—a song revered by composers and bloggers alike—Rae Sremmurd became a household name despite the fact that people have had a hard time figuring out how to say "Rae Sremmurd". SremmLife, their debut LP, floats with a singular energy, a culmination of the group’s 2014 coming-of-age.
While trying to build an album of stuff that’s approximately as good as "No Flex Zone" or "No Type" is a tall task, SremmLife hurdles the hype machine with infectious rap music. It never sags, packing hooks into every pocket and half-beat. Swae Lee giddily slides over syllables ("trill-ass ind-div-vid-du-al" on "No Flex Zone") while Slim Jimmy’s gruffer delivery sets up an interesting vocal dynamic where sometimes it’s difficult to discern who’s rapping, but at other times it’s clear as day. A six-second snippet of each song would be enough for its own free-standing Vine, but often the full product—energetic pounds like "Up Like Trump" and "YNO"—earns its longer form.
Though a few songs stretch out an interesting idea too far—for instance, the post-Nae-Nae scrum "My X"—SremmLife is a showcase of an electric new talent paired with all the trappings of a bigtime major label debut. Guests like Big Sean, Young Thug, and Nicki Minaj (who sings the earworm hook on strip-club anthem "Throw Sum Mo") meet the energy of the Brown brothers, who are paired with exceptional production from Mike WiLL, Sonny Digital, and others. The music here is at once huge but also inward looking—burly soundscapes like "No Type" and the closer "Safe Sex Pay Checks" create an atmosphere that suggest something shadowy lurking outside the frame. Given that SremmLife is a flagship of Mike WiLL’s new Ear Drummer imprint, it may not be surprising that SremmLife is a logical companion to his other recent pop-minded success—Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz, the album equivalent of being caught up in the thrill of an epic party but knowing that it’ll soon come crashing down. It’s life-affirming music in ways that make you feel both better and worse.
SremmLife fulfills the promise of "No Flex Zone" and "No Type", though a prominent piece of the record hints at something more. "This Could Be Us", SremmLife’s fifth song, stands apart from the whole. A lovely track about a failed relationship, the brothers Brown—Jimmy rapping, Swae singing—deliver a promise that’s easy to project a successful career upon. Above all else Rae Sremmurd pull you in with their synergy and symmetry: SremmLife is a less of an album and more of a way of life. | 2015-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope / Ear Drummer | January 16, 2015 | 7.8 | 0789f8a0-94d2-4e11-aa12-0789c16294dd | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
The first three albums by the Norwegian black metal band Ulver presaged the disintegration of heavy music's stylistic boundaries, laying the groundwork for everyone from Windhand to Deafheaven. | The first three albums by the Norwegian black metal band Ulver presaged the disintegration of heavy music's stylistic boundaries, laying the groundwork for everyone from Windhand to Deafheaven. | Ulver: Bergtatt/Kveldssanger/Nattens Madrigal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21762-bergtattkveldssangernattens-madrigal/ | Bergtatt/Kveldssanger/Nattens Madrigal | The Norwegians use the word "trolsk" to describe the dark magic that sets in when you're wandering in the forest after sundown and find yourself seized by a desire to surrender to the id, slinking off like a wolf into the forest. In the early '90s, this untranslatable fury fueled the country's burgeoning black metal scene: a radical, violent offshoot of the misanthropic havoc wreaked abroad by Bathory and Venom. Trolsk imbued Per Yngve Ohlin, Euronymous and Varg Vikernes with the fierce energy they needed to achieve worldwide acclaim—and notoriety—with their respective bands, Mayhem and Burzum. In time, the same forces would lead to their downfall—and inspire musicians and fans to stab men and set churches ablaze.
In Oslo 1993, away from the spotlight, 17-year-old Kristoffer Rygg (known to most by his nickname, Garm) quietly formed Ulver with his friends: Sigmund Andreas "Grellmund" Løkken (who died the same year), Robin Malmberg, Hävard Jørgensen, Carl-Michael Eide, and Ali Reza. A lifelong disciple of black metal, Garm was as enamored with the necrocosms as anyone else, with some exceptions: while his peers were indulging LaVeyan power-trips, the teenager espoused rebellious romanticism, recasting black metal as a dissonant, gloomy cousin of Norwegian folk music, rather than a form love-letter to Baphomet. They crystallized this vision on their first three albums, which are also their loudest:'*95'*s Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr I 5 Capitier, '96's Kveldssanger, and '97's Nattens Madrigal-Aatte Hymne Til Ulven I Manden. A trifold rebuttal to black metal formalism, the records presaged the disintegration of heavy music's stylistic boundaries, laying the groundwork for everyone from Windhand and Horseback to Drudkh and Deafheaven.
Ulver's debut album Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr I 5 Capitier (typically shortened to Bargtatt) derives both its title and inspiration from a Norwegian folk tale centered around the aforementioned trolsk. Lost in the wilderness and enticed by the mythical creatures lurking in the twilight, the album's female protagonist clambers into the mountains, never to return. Accordingly, Bergtatt's five chapters see Ulver dragging Norwegian folk into the black-metal void. The nearly seven-minute “Capitel II: Soelen gaaer bag Aase need” opens with a graceful flute solo that flits about, only to get snapped up by the blast-beats after the first minute. Garm’s phantom croon drifts in to fill the vacant space, guiding the melody through the web of misery. Just when it seems like a truce has been reached and all's at ease, the frontman flips back to black-metal mode, unleashing more punishing death growls. Ulver are a crafty bunch, but they’re not afraid to flex their muscles once in a while.
Bergtatt's massive arrangements are majestic on their own, but the album's esteemed reputation is owed to stylistic diversity, rather than pure aggression. Ulver were among the first to integrate folk into the genre's thorny framework, illuminating the pitch-black racket with haunting, clean melodies and acoustic arpeggios. The razed thicket gave outside listeners an access point into a sound that had catered to diehards, breaking open black metal's hostile niche. Simultaneously, the stylistic juggling paved the way for future crossovers by proving that metal bands could expand their stylistic palette without compromising on their abrasive integrity.
A little over a year after Bergtatt made Ulver heroes in their scene, the band torched their laurels on the follow-up Kveldssanger ("Twilight Songs.") The 14-track album does away with the debut's black metal trappings entirely. In other words, it's an entire album of "Capitel IV"s. Garm's icy tenor has been largely replaced by somber, choral vocals, frequently presented a cappella as if they're sourced from some sacrilegious church service. Unless you're a sucker for medieval chants or Norwegian folkways, you'd be wise to skip over tracks like "Ord," "A Capella (Sielens Sang)," and "Kledt I Nattens Farger" and stick to the instrumental requiems, which reprise Ulver's mournful, multi-faceted approach to melody. Flutes feature prominently on the hypnotic "Naturmystikk," twirling atop the spindly chords like landing snowflakes; they deepen this wintry mood on "Hiertets Vee," situating the woodwinds within a howling blizzard. Devoid of the guitars' molten heft and the drums' thunderous pulse, Kveldssanger can't capture the heft of the previous album; It's an enjoyable folk record, but ultimately underwhelming.
The band completed their Trilogie in 1997 with Nattens Madrigal-Aate Hymne Tip Ulven I Manden ("Madrigal of the Night – Eight Hymns to the Wolf in Man.") The eight-part record reprises the same hyper-focused approach as its predecessor, but its palette's the polar opposite: a riotous return to black metal, stripped clean of all traces of Ulver's folk favoritism. Once again, the group found their muse in the trolsk: more specifically, its animal emissary, the wolf. "It [the wolf] indisputably holds a strong position as the Devil's herald in Norwegian myths and conceptions," the band revealed in an interview with Slayer. "[Nattens Madrigal] glorifies this fiery crossroads and describes both the pain and pleasure by giving in to and recognizing the beast within."
True to their muse, Ulver frame Nattens Madrigal as a show of musical lycanthropy: not just with regards to its animalistic themes and fanged arrangements, but also its ramshackled, lo-fi production. Fans have come up with some crazy origin stories to explain the record's divergence the from the first two albums' sterling presentation. According to one popular (and sadly, debunked) legend, Ulver recorded the epic in a Norwegian forest on an 8-track recorder after blowing their entire recording budget on drugs, cars and Armani suits. In actuality, the cramped sonics have nothing to due with logistics; rather, the album's compressed presentation is an extension of its return to nature, far from the comforts of a cushy studio.
Inhospitable as their presentation may be, Nattens Madrigal's eight hymns unfold with the same grace as the first two records, provided that you're willing to dig through the din to uncover that wild beauty. Within the monstrous core of "Hymne V," for example, Jørgensen and Pedersen's guitars weave together subtle harmonies that lend the song's mammoth arrangement some much-needed breathing room. "Hymne I" and "Hymne VII" are unexpectedly nuanced as well. Even as Garm growls his throat to shreds, barreling down his devolutionary path in time with the blast beats, his bandmates resist the temptation to transgress. Instead, the guitarists' pointed, victorious solos muzzle the feral roar, ensuring that the tug-of-war between man and beast never gets too one-sided.
Ulver left the woods for good following Nattens Madrigal, but their fascination with the arcane has yet to fade in the 19 years since the Trilogie. From industrial reinterpretations of William Blake to sludgy takes on Greek mythology, they've peered into the darkness through every imaginable prism. Listening to January's sophisticated kraut-rock offensive ATGCLVLSSCAP, it's hard to believe that these three albums came from the same band. Certainly Ulver will go down in history for crafting two of black metal's greatest achievements—but it's that unparalleled polymorphism that marvels so many years later. | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Metal | null | April 25, 2016 | 8.7 | 07915a65-3049-46ef-83db-33e95c7b581a | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Henry Steinway’s second full-length largely abandons the cool-kid stylistic tics of his debut for something bigger, brighter, and wholly anonymous. | Henry Steinway’s second full-length largely abandons the cool-kid stylistic tics of his debut for something bigger, brighter, and wholly anonymous. | RL Grime: Nova | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rl-grime-nova/ | Nova | Even considering the trend-hopping world of dance music, Henry Steinway’s career so far has been hard to parse. The 27-year-old producer cut his teeth earlier in the decade with big-room bangers under the Clockwork alias before switching to his current RL Grime moniker; after shaking off his bass-face past with the High Beams EP for Fools Gold in 2013, he released his debut LP Void under the umbrella of California’s woozy, slightly off-kilter WeDidIt collective. Spanning jungle-inspired breakbeats and brittle, cavernous techno, the album contained few true revelations when it came to the type of sounds Steinway was exploring—but there was a level of competence on display that suggested, with a little ingenuity and maturation of style, he could bring a darker and more complex sound to the festival-tent audience he’s since courted.
If Steinway still possesses promise as a producer, it seems we’re going to wait a little longer to see him deliver on it: his second full-length, Nova, largely abandons the cool-kid stylistic tics of Void for something bigger, brighter, and wholly anonymous. It’s loaded with guests, from the increasingly ubiquitous Ty Dolla Sign and Miguel to Chief Keef and songwriter-of-the-moment Julia Michaels; the music backing said guests is appropriately glossy and bombastic, possessing all the subtlety of a thousand confetti cannons. If Void was reaching for stylistic smarts, Nova sets its sights for the highest rafters in the biggest arenas possible. It’s big music, with gaping synth storms and mountain-flattening beats sprawled across its 15 tracks.
The sonic makeup of Nova is split between nasty bass workouts and straightforward pop, but Steinway seems incapable of distinguishing himself as a producer in either mode. The skyscraping throb of “Light Me Up” could’ve come from any EDM mega-producer over the last decade, and it technically did; the song was repurposed from an unused demo from Diplo and Skrillex’s Jack Ü project passed along to Steinway for a spit-shined finish. Play the bleeping, bruising electro of “Pressure” for any Electric Daisy enthusiast Folgers Challenge-style, and they’re likely to mistake it for, say, the searing tang of Alexander Ridha’s Boys Noize project—who, coincidentally, assisted with some analog-synth sounds for the track.
Collaboration is nothing new in dance culture, and even when taking into account the shadowy-but-common practice of ghostwriting in the genre’s upper echelons, it’s far from a scandalized convention—but these by-committee moments on Nova only further the theory that Steinway’s still in search of his sound. He tries his hand at the booming, mainstream-made 2-step sound Skrillex’s recently dabbled in on “Shoulda,” and crashes through the industrial grind of “Era” with a hair-whipping drop that feels as migraine-inducing as it does dated; “UCLA” transitions from a palm-muted guitar bridge to a stomping chorus with a charisma-free anti-hook from rapper 24hrs. As the credits roll on the celestial, M83-aping theatrics of closing track “Atoms,” you might find yourself catching your breath after trying to chase down whatever overarching mood Nova is trying to cast.
Perhaps it makes sense, then, that Nova’s brightest moment is also its most straightforward: the anthemic “I Wanna Know,” assisted by a potent vocal turn from Daya. You might recognize her from the Chainsmokers’ perfectly fine “Don’t Let Me Down,” and, for better and worse, “I Wanna Know” sounds like it could’ve easily come from the pop pariahs’ songbook, with jackpot synths yo-yoing on the chorus and effervescent drums splashing against its backdrop. Like so much satisfying, EDM-influenced pop music from the last several years, it sounds tailor-made for hearing in an open field, swaying to it in a sea of bodies before turning to your friend and asking, “Who made that song?” They probably won’t know, and until Steinway finds his sound and sticks to it, that question will likely remain unanswered. | 2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wedidit | August 2, 2018 | 4.1 | 07946538-7f68-4473-a944-18f13b785d51 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Cursive frontman Tim Kasher's third album with The Good Life ditches the Cure-informed bent of their past two LPs for its own vision. | Cursive frontman Tim Kasher's third album with The Good Life ditches the Cure-informed bent of their past two LPs for its own vision. | The Good Life: Album of the Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3646-album-of-the-year/ | Album of the Year | "I was reading Fante at the time/ I had Bukowski on the mind." In the midst of the opener on The Good Life's latest album, the cheekily titled Album of the Year, lead singer Tim Kasher is name-dropping his taste for curb-front cult faves. Now, I hate to be a quibbler, but perhaps Bukowski's more applicable to the emotional thrashing in Kasher's other group, Cursive. The more appropriate literary one-off for this record might be Nelson Algren, whose resurgent castaways could settle quite comfortably into the spoon-fed healing and isopropyl fumes of Kasher's newest songs.
Whereas Cursive has made a career of pleading for catharsis through bruised, over-the-top emoting, The Good Life has always detailed Kasher's lonely nights; he formed the group for the material that would have sounded too sleepy alongside most of Cursive's ranting and raving. Adopting soft, shadowed hues and more rounded arrangements for his confessional tales, Kasher's The Good Life project has made steady progress from its Cure-esque first two albums to more crisp, autumnal sounds.
Album of the Year's premise is somewhat ungainly: to document the passage of a year in 12 songs, one for each month. But, to appreciate its stark, lovelorn poetics, you need know none of this. The songs are instantly welcoming, flickering with enough hope and tenacity to outlast Kasher's heartbreak. It's not enough to revel in your own melancholy without understanding what's being gained through its endurance. Augmented by Mike Mogis' best production of the year (and manning the boards for a label like Saddle Creek, it's been a busy one), each song seems to hover in fathomless space, but interacts with an effortless synthesis that belies such separation.
"Night and Day" is a trapeze-wired waltz that shuffles along on a broken accordion and Mogis' starlit Wurlitzer. In three dizzy minutes, it makes you uncomfortably familiar with the forlorn vagrants that populate Kasher's world. "You're No Fool" adds to this circus-tent feel by combining a lonely saxophone line with a bar-soaked piano, painting a dark tale of exes incapable of losing former lovers. The strong, almost insolent saxophone returns you to Kasher's ability to wallow in sorrow without sinking under its weight, the redemption of the past through its seemingly insufferable passage. Here, Kasher again reminds one of his kinship with Algren, as the track would have fit perfectly alongside Elmer Bernstein's jazz score for the film adaptation of The Man with the Golden Arm.
On "Inmates"-- the one track where Kasher allows someone else to voice his heartache-- Jiha Lee steps in without missing a beat to add a seductive, mesmerizing shyness. Atop a soft acoustic guitar, distant bongos and tingling electronics, both Lee's voice and the epic track build before Kasher turns the song into a duet and electric guitars grind out the transcendent ease. By the time "Inmates" ends with Lee's pronouncement that "she can"t be your prisoner," the song seems to have packed an entire relationship's worth of tempo shifts and transgressions into its 9-plus minutes without ever sounding bloated.
The complaints with the album are worn-in with old caveats, namely the "emo" tag. Those unfamiliar with Kasher's songwriting could mouth that forbidden word after the album's initial sad-eyed glance. One might hear the hysterical strains of Ben Gibbard or Chris Carraba in Kasher's reckless emoting. But remain calm and it will pass: The vibrant productions and transient lyricism will pull you through that knee-jerk response. Kasher has turned his pissings and moanings into grand, translucent tales that typically avoid the isolation of self-indulgence (occasional slip-ups like the sugary bleating of the title track to this year's Lovers Need Lawyers EP only prove how adeptly most of the album is handled). He might tell you otherwise, but like Isaac Brock, he knows that it's tough to live like Bukowski. Instead of seeking spirituality in pocket-change or San Franciscan street-grime, he's after the sudden comprehension gained from nights spent alone and stories that translate the open pitfalls of the heart. | 2004-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | September 2, 2004 | 8 | 0795aa8b-a74b-40fd-9351-63691ede5b2e | Derek Miller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/derek-miller/ | null |
Heralded by Miles Davis, sampled by both Nas and Gang Starr, the great pianist’s 1970 album is alive with a buoyancy and jubilance that went overlooked in its day. | Heralded by Miles Davis, sampled by both Nas and Gang Starr, the great pianist’s 1970 album is alive with a buoyancy and jubilance that went overlooked in its day. | Ahmad Jamal: The Awakening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23042-the-awakening/ | The Awakening | Miles Davis was a great admirer and defender of the pianist Ahmad Jamal, who in the 1950s was not taken seriously by some jazz critics. But the sublime ear of Miles instead recognized a light, exquisite touch, one of varied complexity despite Jamal’s commercial success.
“I loved his lyricism on piano, the way he played, and the spacing he used in the ensemble voicings of his groups,” Miles wrote in 1989. “ I have always thought Ahmad Jamal was a great piano player who never got the recognition he deserved.”
That recognition would eventually come, and Jamal’s stature has only grown over the decades. The Awakening, recently reissued on vinyl by Be With Records, is a fine example of Jamal’s stately—and understated—elegance punctuated with doodles of whimsy. The album, recorded in early February 1970, is made up of two Jamal originals, a standard, and pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Oliver Nelson, and Herbie Hancock, a pianist of similar disposition who Miles famously hired in his “Second Great Quintet.”
In Michael Jarrett’s new book, Pressed For All Time, Ed Michel, who produced the original album for Impulse!, remembers that “Jamal absolutely knew what he wanted to record….We were recording during Ramadan. He was fasting during the day, until sunset. The only real condition was, he said, ‘At six fifteen, we’ve got to take a break. You’ve got to tell us precisely. We’re all hungry.’”
The “we” Jamal is likely referring to is his working trio at the time, the drummer Frank Gant and bassist Jamil Nasser, who sounds especially inspired on this outing. Hip-hop was still years away, but by the 1980s, MCs would begin sampling Jamal extensively—The Awakening in particular. The compelling Jamal-penned title track, for instance, turned up in Gang Starr’s 1989 “DJ Premier In Deep Concentration” and in Shadez Of Brooklyn’s “Change.” The following track, “I Love Music” (written by Hale Smith and Emil Boyd), is almost a total solo performance for Jamal. It ended up on a classic recording of a different kind, nearly a quarter-century later, Illmatic, where Nas, intimately connected with the jazz idiom, and producer Pete Rock used Jamal’s lush interpretation on “The World Is Yours.” When the esteemed jazz critic Leonard Feather—of whom Miles also approved—wrote in The Awakening’s original liner notes that “Ahmad Jamal is one of the most pianistic of pianists,” it’s especially resonant here.
Taking on pieces like Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance” and Nelson’s “Stolen Moments,” as memorable a composition as anything from the 1960s, is trickier considering the drama that the horns—and what horns!—provided in the originals: George Coleman on the former; Nelson on the latter, with Eric Dolphy on flute; and Freddie Hubbard on both. Jamal’s versions are truncated and stripped down—his “Dolphin Dance” is quickened, too—but they still manage to stir. “You’re My Everything,” the only standard on the set, popularized by Billy Eckstine, Nat Cole, and Sarah Vaughan, is almost unrecognizable in Jamal’s hands, but has, like much on this album, a wonderful playfulness, especially at either end of the keyboard, with deep, perfectly-placed thumps with his left hand answered by fanciful phrases in the highest register.
Feather’s last line in the notes, written forty-seven years ago, still may say it best: “…for youngsters and newcomers, let this album serve as a delightful if belated awakening.” | 2017-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Be With | April 3, 2017 | 8 | 07976ed4-f3c0-4b7f-9f82-0eb3e6beecae | Michael J. Agovino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-j. agovino/ | null |
The 16-year-old Harlem drill rapper attained viral fame after the tragic killing of little brother Notti Osama. His debut mixtape is an excruciating contrast of teen celebrity and raw grief. | The 16-year-old Harlem drill rapper attained viral fame after the tragic killing of little brother Notti Osama. His debut mixtape is an excruciating contrast of teen celebrity and raw grief. | DD Osama: Here 2 Stay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dd-osama-here-2-stay/ | Here 2 Stay | Last summer, before DD Osama was being played out of every pre-teen’s Bluetooth speaker in the five boroughs, he was a relatively small-time drill rapper from the Sugar Hill area of Harlem. Along with his friend Sugarhill Ddot and little brother Notti Osama, they were a trio of baby-faced 14 and 15 year olds with a couple of no-holds-barred diss tracks to their names. Then tragedy struck. In early July 2022, 14-year-old Notti Osama was stabbed to death in the 137th Street-City College subway station. The incident rippled through New York’s drill scene, bringing a ton of attention to the trio and its music. Seemingly overnight they were sensations. Voyeuristic beef pages and online platforms, including but not limited to No Jumper, ran wild. Drake hit them up to model his newest clothing line. Labels swooped in with heavy briefcases in hand.
In the meantime, Notti’s death was callously turned into a punchline, most infamously by the attention-hungry viral hit “Notti Bop,” a song and dance mocking the way he died. Dark turns are inevitable in a subgenre that’s become the go-to outlet for the youngest residents of the most depleted and underserved corners of New York, but this was a new low. Now 16, DD Osama is the current most popular New York drill rapper not named Ice Spice. He commands a different type of fandom than previous title holders like Pop Smoke and Sheff G; those artists were older by a few years, which is a lot at that age. DD is beloved by kids who are still years away from getting into R-rated movies. Recently I spent a day at a middle school in Harlem and just about the only artist they wanted to talk about was DD Osama. At his live shows, young girls scream like he’s on the cover of Tiger Beat and adult chaperones mill around in the background. The dissonance couldn’t be louder on DD’s eerie new mixtape Here 2 Stay, a debut that’s trying to be drill’s version of My World 2.0 and process grief at the same time.
Understandably, DD is not entirely sure how to handle all of this. Songs that are supposed to be loved-up teenage pop-rap actually sound melancholy and fatalistic, even when they’re trying not to. On “Who I Am,” he flatly sing-raps about a girl that he’s fallen for. The song clearly wants to have the slick tone of “Yo (Excuse Me Miss)” but is unintentionally more like “Heart on Ice” as he lilts, “Been through a lot and I ain’t tryna’ lose you/Lost my brother this shit feels unusual.” Likewise “Be Alright” is a romance where everything is going pretty much fine in the lyrics yet the miserable-sounding ATL Jacob beat and DD’s quiet, cracking voice makes the depression feel inextricable.
Truthfully he doesn’t seem ready to be putting music out there. But the numbers are climbing fast, shows are selling out, and TikToks are being made, so the hype must be capitalized on. You won’t find many songs on Here 2 Stay that are inspired or at least therapeutic; DD’s candor comes out of obligation. He tries to make it work by adopting Lil Durk’s method of fluctuating between typical drill trash talk and traumatic personal reflections. But that style took Durk years to refine, and DD is being thrown into the fire. On “Leave Me,” when he lifelessly sings, “I just want my little brother, I don’t want fame no more,” it’s raw to the point of being unlistenable. His relative inexperience is clear on “Letter 2 Notti,” where his fast-rapping gets awkwardly jumbled as he tries to articulate a tribute to his brother without really having the words. I like it when he gets to have a little bit of fun: The club-drill record “Money Calls,” with Philly’s 2Rare, is a momentary break from having to confront fresh wounds. But that doesn’t last long.
Where else but rap are artists tasked with powering through life-altering events instantly? It’s cruel, isn’t it? The fear of transient fame is hung over their heads by bigwigs anxious to generate enough revenue before the next hot drill rapper comes along. As the money floods in, genuine stars who started attracting too much heat are getting hit with indictments and an opportunist like Lil Mabu is poking fun at the desperation and exploitation while raking in the views from his Upper East Side mansion. Is everyone thriving but the artists themselves? DD Osama’s rise isn’t a success story, it’s a dehumanizing one. At this point, that’s the usual in New York drill. | 2023-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | May 25, 2023 | 5.7 | 0797e14f-17e5-4525-8829-246ee0b250df | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Aaron Funk's latest album was created and performed live on a modular synth with no overdubbing and editing; it's one of the more beautiful records from the project in recent memory. | Aaron Funk's latest album was created and performed live on a modular synth with no overdubbing and editing; it's one of the more beautiful records from the project in recent memory. | Venetian Snares: Traditional Synthesizer Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21571-traditional-synthesizer-music/ | Traditional Synthesizer Music | The idea that Venetian Snares might release anything you could describe as "traditional" boggles the mind a bit, but like much in the Snares catalogue, the title of his new record gleams like a trap for the unwary. Since he introduced himself in the early '00s with a brace of rapid-fire records on Planet Mu, Aaron Funk has carved a singular path. He once claimed to have recorded his early works while coming down from crack cocaine; he has sampled Bartók, Billie Holiday, and Elgar (all on his outstanding 2005 LP Rossz Csillag Alatt Született), and once made an entire record about his cats titled, in a rare straightforward gesture, Songs About My Cats. Visually, Funk in no way fits the mold of your everyday IDM egghead. A man mountain with lank hair and unkempt beard, he more resembles a burly woodcutter, or a mad monk: the Winnipeg Rasputin.
Still, in this case there is no suggestion we should take Venetian Snares at anything other than his word. Traditional Synthesizer Music, explains Funk, was created and performed live on a modular synth "with no overdubbing and no editing." If the result still sounds like a logical continuation of his previous work, that's probably because this sort of hardware has long been a part of his playbook. Certainly, this isn't the record where Snares starts making dreamy hippy kosmische. The abrupt opener "Dreamt Person v3" takes us into broadly familiar Snares territory: an unceasing torrent of squiggly, scattershot breaks pinging across the frame, pursued by slow, gloaming synths that float about like jellyfish.
Funk's music often sounds so meticulous and precise that it can be surprising to learn it has improvisational or random elements. But like, say, Autechre—well-known for their algorithmic tinkering—or another modular synth enthusiast, Aphex Twin, Funk embraces chaos as a compositional method. A complex process of patch-building has introduced a random factor into these structures, allowing for surprises or "unforeseen progressions." The titles—things like "Goose and Gary v2" and "Anxattack Boss Level 19 v3"—indicate that these tracks are not fixed in stone but malleable, each track charting one particular path through a chain of possibilities.
Incidentally, this is one of the more beautiful Snares records in recent memory, relaxing some of the more tiring qualities of his music—the unrelenting abrasiveness, the taste for a certain gynecological grotesquery—in favor of moments of relatively straight prettiness. He will never qualify as "easy" listening, of course: "Slightly Bent Fork Tong v2" laces its globular synth-funk with warped chimes and ringing bell tones, while electronics groan and harrumph deep in the bowels of an inscrutable jitter titled "She Married a Chess Computer in the End." But even while it's being difficult, Traditional Synthesizer Music feels relatively palatable by Snares standards. The album's analog genesis lends it a cushioned wooziness, making the manic energy more palatable in the long haul.
Last year, Funk tweeted that he was in "very serious financial trouble," directing his followers toward his Bandcamp (they followed his cue, filling the Bandcamp chart with Venetian Snares albums, and shortly afterwards Funk repaid their loyalty with a pay-what-you-want album titled Thank You for Your Consideration). Looking at the gigantic rig he's assembled on the video to "Magnificent Stumble v2," you can sort of see where all those IDM dollars might have gone. But where some musicians get lost inside the labyrinth of modular synth building, Snares seems adept in harnessing these elemental energies and bending them to his will. Traditional Synthesizer Music feels not so much traditional as a refresh: a suite of music that is crafted and ferociously complex, but at its root a pure and primal thing, high on its own chaos. | 2016-02-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu / Timesig | February 22, 2016 | 7.4 | 079872cf-b6b4-474b-b5bf-f884ef77a17c | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The Puerto Rican hitmaker attempts to replicate the magic of his celestial 2022 album in this summery spinoff but winds up lost in space. | The Puerto Rican hitmaker attempts to replicate the magic of his celestial 2022 album in this summery spinoff but winds up lost in space. | Rauw Alejandro: PLAYA SATURNO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rauw-alejandro-playa-saturno/ | PLAYA SATURNO | With Saturn transiting the water sign of Pisces for the next few years, it’s fitting that Rauw Alejandro’s 2022 album SATURNO found its way to the beach. The blue-haired bad boy from the Puerto Rican city of Carolina, who has a penchant for panty-dropping falsettos and ’90s-style flows, built his name making clubby reggaeton just different enough to be interesting. The music is about ass-shaking, yes, but it’s always accompanied by compelling details: a leftfield synth loop, an electric guitar riff worthy of a rock en español track, a Baby Rasta and Gringo interpolation that shows Alejandro’s ear is finely tuned to the old school.
SATURNO was a playful maelstrom of these influences, a concept album that positioned the Puerto Rican star, who donned a chic cyberpunk aesthetic for the release, as an experimental and meticulous presence. He set the bar as an unconventional mainstream reggaetonero, both in his own work and in collaborations (take Tainy’s recent producer project DATA, where Alejandro goes back and forth effortlessly with Skrillex and Four Tet). His crooning tenor is one of the prettier voices among the Olympus of pop reggaeton titans, and his moves are unmatched; just ask the Jabbawockeez, the iconic masked hip-hop crew who spent the last few months breakdancing alongside Alejandro on tour. On PLAYA SATURNO, envisioned as a “spinoff” of its celestially minded predecessor, Alejandro attempts to stretch the stardust to the tune of 14 new songs. Unfortunately dampened by filler tracks, the album winds up lost in space.
For starters, many of the collaborations struggle to live up to their promise. Alejandro’s reliably excellent vocal performances, full of careening vocoder belting and enviably erotic delivery, are still not enough to bring everything together. On lead single “Si te pegas,” Spanish pop icon Miguel Bosé makes a treasured appearance after eight years of vocal difficulties. But rather than a legendary comeback, Bosé’s feature feels tacked-on; his famously velveteen voice shines briefly before he drowns in an ocean of tepid keys and snare rolls. Guanajuato’s golden boy Junior H makes an appearance on “Picardía,” but doesn’t indulge in the relaxed drawl that makes corrido tumbado so powerful. Instead of a potentially exciting cross-genre moment, the rising Mexican star is squashed into a copy-paste feature that could have been spit by anyone.
This is not to say there aren’t showstoppers. The Ivy Queen feature “Celebrando,” a deliciously disjointed electro-perreo that spotlights her distinctive snarl and interpolates the iconic harpsichord of her signature song “Quiero bailar,” feels like an intentional co-sign of El Zorro by La Caballota. Jowell & Randy’s appearance on the appropriately named “Ponte nasty,” a horny anthem with a dembow beat straight out of a sweaty marquesina, adds a touch of grime to one of the hardest tracks at this cosmic beach bash. “I want to fuck her/She wants to fuck me,” Alejandro breathily rasps in English, tapping into the cheeky confidence that makes him so irresistible.
Alejandro’s Bizarrap session, released last month, closes the album on a high note. After a slog of generic beats built for the background music of the afters, long after anyone has stopped listening, it feels unearned. Not even Kenobi Sensei’s ever-shiny production, which has bolstered Alejandro from the start, can make PLAYA SATURNO stand on its own; nor can experiments like the downtempo reggae track “No me sorprende.” Without a framework that allows the real gems to shine, PLAYA SATURNO is just another party album, a chart-chasing reggaeton offering that could move bodies on the dancefloor, but won’t move the needle. It feels imprecise to think of this album as a true sequel to SATURNO, even though it was crafted as a continuation. If the initial record harnessed the energy of the planet, this collection more closely resembles Saturn’s rings: a shiny decoration of ice and dust held in place by the gravity of a more substantial body. | 2023-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Duars Entertainment / Sony Music Latin | July 15, 2023 | 6.5 | 07992e94-fbeb-48f2-86de-28d5694e7154 | E.R. Pulgar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/e.r.-pulgar/ | |
On his most personal project to date, the Buffalo rapper laces intimate narratives with battle-ready barbs over an ornate collage of haunting boom-bap. | On his most personal project to date, the Buffalo rapper laces intimate narratives with battle-ready barbs over an ornate collage of haunting boom-bap. | Conway the Machine: God Don’t Make Mistakes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conway-the-machine-god-dont-make-mistakes/ | God Don’t Make Mistakes | When Conway the Machine opens a verse with his signature “look,” the Buffalo rapper known for his tough talk and impactful rhymes already has your attention. Blessed by his gruff, grim-reaper resonance, each line makes your fingers moonwalk across the progress bar to take in his lucid, precise imagery. But even after several collaborative releases and solo projects, we still don’t know his full story. Thankfully, the Buffalo rapper’s long-awaited Shady Records debut, God Don’t Make Mistakes, gives us an inner-glimpse at his inspiring come-up, plagued with twists and pitfalls.
This introspective mood is complemented by aggressive bars, a balance that makes this his most impressive project to date. Conway’s hard-hitting delivery is a throwback to the era of “106 & Park”’s Freestyle Fridays, when contestants would dazzle the audience for consecutive weeks, score big-budget record deals, then vanish into obscurity. “Piano Love,” with its wintry Alchemist beat, boasts breathtaking couplets: “We don’t play fair, drive-bys right in front of the daycare/We spray hairpin triggers, that FN on the waist here.” It would be satisfying to simply hear him spit hard-body lines like these (as he does on his mixtapes and countless freestyle videos), yet Conway goes even deeper here, providing an intimate look at his personal struggles.
These tales are backed up by a collage of boom-bap that is as haunting as it is ornate. Most of the beats on God Don’t Make Mistakes are provided by Daringer and Beat Butcha, with solid contributions from Bink!, J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, and, of course, Alchemist. The broken piano of “Drumwork” sounds like it was played by some hardcore composer who sat down to tinker on it after it got hurled from a fire escape; Conway raps like he’s the one who did the hurling. His nimble bars give you goosebumps, and his heartfelt reflections make you feel like a fellow traveller on his journey.
There have been flashes of Conway’s meditative side on previous projects. “Front Lines,” from 2020’s From a King to a GOD, gave a personal account of how the corrupt system that forced him into dope-dealing is predicated on the murder of unarmed Blacks by the police. But God Don’t Make Mistakes marks the first time the forty-year-old rapper has been candid about how he dealt with the trauma resulting from his close call with death. He lays it all on the line on “Guilty,” speaking at length about being shot in 2012 (“No feeling in my legs, I took a bullet in the head, nigga”). You can hear a vulnerability in Conway’s voice when he describes how Bell’s Palsy crippled the right side of his face–his delivery is concrete, evoking a pain he lives with to this day.
In the autobiographical “Stressed,” Conway delves into the nature of addiction and abuse, digging through a lifetime of trauma hoping to find “a lesson in it all.” Conway can craft a gripping autobiographical account as deftly as he can a battle-ready barb; his depth brings to mind similarly skilled veterans like Beanie Sigel, who makes an appearance on opener “Lock Load,” a booth-annihilating screed. Yet Conway holds his own with the Philly vet, spitting, “I get to trippin’, get the blick and this AR in my hands/Every bullet in the cartridges land/The stick look like a guitar in my hands, drummin’ like I’m part of a band.” Lines like these are why Conway is known as an adroit lyricist, and what makes this album so compelling is that it allows us to have a look at the man behind the virtuosic wordplay. He won’t let anything stop him from what he does best. | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Shady | February 25, 2022 | 7.5 | 079debce-b8bd-4fc5-94a4-e82931188211 | Will Dukes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-dukes/ | |
The debut Hyperdub LP from the duo once known as Hype Williams feels like a trip through the fragments of their collective psyches. | The debut Hyperdub LP from the duo once known as Hype Williams feels like a trip through the fragments of their collective psyches. | Dean Blunt / Inga Copeland: Black Is Beautiful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16566-black-is-beautiful/ | Black Is Beautiful | Pitchfork's Paul Thompson began his review of Hype Williams' 2011 album One Nation by struggling to discover exactly who was behind the music. Were they called Inga Copeland and Roy Blunt? Or perhaps Karen Glass and Roy Nnawuchi? For their debut full-length on Hyperdub, the duo present themselves as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland. Just don't bank on those being their real names, or any kind of indication of a settled moniker for future releases. Notions of a fluctuating self are a crucial part of the world in which Blunt/Copeland choose to operate, although Black Is Beautiful throws up greater thematic ties than their previous work, with the pair gently reeling in its tendency to shape shift its sound into oblivion. There's still a crude, sun-warped skew to their vision. But releasing this album as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland makes it feel like a layer of mystery has been removed, and that's mirrored in the subtle erosion of their musical identity crisis.
Despite the lurch toward refinement, there are still acres of ambiguity to get lost in here. Blunt/Copeland don't even pose questions without answers. It's more like getting asked a question that trails off halfway through the conversation, never to return to its original intent. The lack of traditional track titles, aside from the opening "(Venice Dreamway)", positions this as a singular work that doesn't lend itself well to being broken down into its various parts. Outside of that opening cut, which begins by slowing down the coughing intro of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" to an asthmatic wheeze, each track is numbered from 2-15. It's often reminiscent of the dream-pop stencils A.R. Kane sketched out in the late 1980s, especially when they let dub templates delicately seesaw between the dreamy and the discordant. Black Is Beautiful shares the same kind of chimerical idealization of pop as A.R. Kane’s 69, where everything is set up to shoot into the heavens.
Only three tracks of the 15 make it over the three-minute mark, causing the record to feel like a wander through the fragments of Blunt and Copeland's collective psyches. At times it can be frustrating-- their reimagining of Donnie & Joe Emerson's "Baby" is such a gracefully poised sci-fi torch song that it would surely benefit from being stretched out over a greater expanse of time. "11" sparks a similar feeling. Elsewhere, they have a keen sense of how to turn lo-fi tools to their advantage, with the in-the-red vocal cooing on "5" matched by the same kind of boxed-in musical ambition Ariel Pink displayed on Worn Copy. There's a playfulness at work here too, with atom-sized chunks of sound deployed in the shorter tracks, shards of dialogue from sources unknown left to loop into infinity, and plenty of heavily treated audio ephemera cut and pasted into the mix.
But there's a natural path forged between all the shifts, a sense that the abstraction feeds off the structure and vice versa. As such, Black Is Beautiful nears something that could readily be branded as Blunt and Copeland's aesthetic, which is likely to cause them as much consternation as it might pleasure. The key difference is the transformation from throwing a spanner in the works out of a gleeful kind of perversion to that spanner being an integral part of the overall picture. It's there when "9" is cut dead in its tracks to bring in a sample of a newsreader, only to quickly resume where it left off. And it's there in the outstanding centerpiece "10", which causes Copeland's vocal to disappear in the rearview mirror, getting obliterated entirely when the track is stonewalled by spacious stabs of noise. Occasionally the world needs to be blocked out to make sense of it. Black Is Beautiful undergoes that blocking-out process and finds no kind of sense anywhere, instead focusing on the gloriously messy sift through the clutter we go through just to approach a tiny semblance of meaning. | 2012-05-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-05-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Hyperdub | May 1, 2012 | 7.4 | 079eb282-1d2e-4a7c-8a21-2bb39135bf52 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | 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 a teenage fever dream, the mainstream pop-punk debut of Avril Lavigne. | 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 a teenage fever dream, the mainstream pop-punk debut of Avril Lavigne. | Avril Lavigne: Let Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avril-lavigne-let-go/ | Let Go | Avril Lavigne’s origin story would be the perfect American fairytale if it wasn’t so undeniably Canadian. She grew up in Napanee, Ontario, a small town best known for its proximity to the country’s largest highway and its selection of fine truck stops. She sang Pentecostal hymns in her family’s church and performed in local productions of Godspell and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. It was little more than an average, provincial life.
When the nearest big-city country station held a singing contest, a 14-year-old Lavigne sent in a tape for a chance to sing with none other than Shania Twain, the Canadian country-pop superstar. Lavigne didn’t just acquit herself: She won the damn thing, which meant driving two-plus hours to the nation’s capital and belting Twain’s brassy 1993 hit “What Made You Say That” in front of a packed Ottawa hockey arena. At the time, Lavigne told Twain she wanted to be “a famous singer.”
Lavigne had no idea how quickly her dream would come true: Within a few years, she’d be sneering on the cover of Rolling Stone in a black tank top and a curt plaid skirt, winkingly labeled “the Britney slayer.” The onetime country-pop princess who performed hits by Faith Hill and Sarah McLachlan at an early record label audition had become a gleeful anarchist, a pop-punk supernova who skated through videos for hits like “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi,” causing chaos in ratty T-shirts and neckties. She wasn’t disingenuous or calculating; she was a teenager, one whose formative experiences and changes in taste were taking place while she navigated the expectations that come with a major-label record deal. The reaction between Lavigne’s volatile energy and the music industry’s commercial imperative produced her 2002 debut Let Go, a rebuttal of Spears-Aguilerian pop—overtly sexual, vaguely urban, hyper-processed—churned out by the exact same kind of hit factory. It boasts a handful of genre-changing smashes and mood swings that’d put a high school sophomore to shame.
While Lavigne’s ascent from local radio contests to the top of the charts seems rapid in retrospect, her career took shape in fits and starts. Nine months after she appeared on stage with Twain, Cliff Fabri—the manager who shepherded her through the earliest phase of her career—watched her sing country karaoke in a Kingston, Ontario Chapters, the Canadian equivalent of being discovered in a college town’s Barnes & Noble. “I was thinking of her as another Sheryl Crow. They both had the same small-town roots,” Fabri told The New York Times in 2002. “Then I was thinking Fiona Apple, because of her independence. She definitely had attitude. So my line was Sheryl Crow meets Fiona Apple.”
By the summer of 2000, Lavigne was a known commodity within the small Canadian music industry, with executives driving up to Napanee to hear her sing in her parents’ basement. Lavigne spent that summer and fall heading back and forth between Napanee and Manhattan working on a development deal, and she was bold enough to ask her high school principal for course credit given the time she was spending in the studio. Within a few months, she’d accrued enough buzz to score an audition for L.A. Reid, then the president of Arista. A few hours after singing for Reid, Lavigne and her team were scooped up by a limo and whisked to the top of the World Trade Center to celebrate her lucrative, major-label record deal.
While Arista was prepared to invest significant time and money in Lavigne—Fabri told the Toronto Star she’d signed a two-album deal for over $1 million—she was struggling to find an appropriate sound. Inspiration didn’t strike until Lavigne traveled to Los Angeles in May 2001, where she worked with journeyman songwriter Clif Magness. The first song they wrote together was “Unwanted,” an angsty, crunchy statement of purpose that suggested Lavigne was more interested in meathead riffage than contemporary Nashville sparkle. (They also came up with roaring album opener “Losing Grip,” which beat Evanescence to the nu-metal-pop punch by a solid year.) Lavigne had finally settled on an aesthetic that satisfied her evolving taste, but her label was aghast that their new signee—still barely old enough to drive—was veering into heavy alt-rock. “Arista was drop-dead shit afraid that I would come out with a whole album that sounded like ‘Unwanted’ and ‘Losing Grip,’” Lavigne told Rolling Stone in March 2003. “I swear they wanted to drop me.”
When they sent her back into the studio, they paired her with Lauren Christy, Graham Edwards, and Scott Spock, a production team that worked together under the extremely aughts name the Matrix. “We’d been listening to the kind of stuff she had been doing—it had a Faith Hill kind of vibe,” said Christy in a 2006 interview. “As soon as she walked in the door we knew this was just wrong. This kid had melted toothbrushes up her arm, her hair was in braids and she wore black skater boots. She didn’t seem like the Faith Hill type.” They played Lavigne a song written in the style of her earlier demos, and she hated it. When they heard “Unwanted,” they scrapped their work and went back to the drawing board. Lavigne and the Matrix came together the very next day and wrote “Complicated,” the song that made her a teen icon.
The exact division of labor behind “Complicated” remains a point of contention. When Lavigne spoke to Rolling Stone in 2003, she insisted that she was the primary author; the Matrix argued that her contributions were far less substantial. “Avril would come in and sing a few melodies, change a word here or there,” Christy told Rolling Stone. “She came up with a couple of things in ‘Complicated,’ like, instead of ‘Take off your stupid clothes,’ she wanted it to say ‘preppy clothes.’” When asked to comment, L.A. Reid opted for poptimism through an executive’s lens. “If I’m looking for a single for an artist, I don’t care who writes it,” Reid told Rolling Stone.
No matter where the song falls on the authenticity spectrum, “Complicated” is the teenage state of mind: a hissing, bubbling cauldron of anger, confusion, naïveté, lust, paranoia, and desperation. It’s a moment in time where you’re childlike enough to beg for a simple explanation for everything and just mature enough to know there’s no such thing. (Maybe you’d neg a friend by saying, “Chill out, what you yelling for?” and then scream at the top of your lungs a few seconds later.) It’s a phase where you can barely understand your own behavior, let alone anyone else’s, and the quality that set Lavigne apart from peers like Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton—singer-songwriters mining the same musical and emotional terrain—was her ability to imbue her music with the thrill and terror of real teenhood.
The song echoes throughout the rest of Let Go: Lavigne’s need for clarity and authenticity, her struggle to find solid ground, her general distaste for the bourgeois tyranny of polo shirts. It also sounds incredible, in part because the Matrix understood that Lavigne could sing with enough defiance to camouflage their clear, starry-eyed pop melodies. After opening with some lazy record-scratching and the brightest, bluest chords this side of “Free Fallin’,” “Complicated” locks into a military structure: twinkling keyboards, tight drum loops, a teasing vocal hook that can still send a karaoke bar into a frenzy. Everyone involved knew it was a hit right away, and when Reid heard it he sent Lavigne back to the Matrix to bang out a dozen songs just like it.
Lavigne felt conflicted about her work with the Matrix—they ended up contributing five songs to Let Go, the same number as Magness—and was practically disowning it while Let Go was still flying off of store shelves. “I don’t feel like ‘Complicated’ represents me and my ability to write,” she confessed to Rolling Stone. “But without ‘Complicated,’ I bet you anything I wouldn’t have even sold a million records. The songs I did with the Matrix, yeah, they were good for my first record, but I don’t want to be that pop anymore.” She’d finally figured out what kind of music she wanted to make, only to be told it wasn’t meeting expectations. Being painted as another teen pop star fresh off the assembly line just added insult to injury.
Her sense of grievance aside, the songs Lavigne made with the Matrix are Let Go’s indisputable highlights, striking a perfect balance of scrappy attitude and radio-ready polish. Second single “Sk8er Boi” is Lavigne at her most pugnacious, snarling the chorus in tight harmony with herself over power chords that sound like they’ve been popped in the microwave until sizzling. It’s also the album’s most developed example of storytelling, though that isn’t saying much: A high school beauty queen can’t appreciate her local diamond in the rough, and she’s left to watch him rock out on MTV with a triumphant Lavigne by his side while she nurses her baby in suburban hell. It sounds like Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” as if written by a normal teenager instead of a precocious musical cyborg.
She took her first stab at a power ballad on “I’m With You,” a desperate, string-backed plea for companionship that sounds like a late-’90s Aerosmith B-side. And Let Go’s hidden gem is “Anything but Ordinary,” a coming-of-age anthem with a melody like pure spring water. (It’s also the one song on the album that tests your suspension of disbelief with its lyrics—listen and hear Lavigne describe the world as “A beautiful accident/Turbulent, succulent/Opulent, permanent” in the bridge.) L.A. Reid would’ve made it the album’s title track if Lavigne hadn’t intervened. She’d already been forced to subjugate her instincts. Couldn’t she just name the album?
Let Go’s phenomenal success—it’s been certified platinum seven times over in the U.S. alone—may not have single-handedly slayed Britney Spears, but it helped make room for songs reliant on alternative palettes. As the teen-pop stars of the late ’90s leaned into hip-hop, R&B, and electronic influences, Lavigne and her contemporaries filled the resulting vacuum with pop melodies and punk attitude. The Matrix quickly landed on a formula—clean, spiky riffs, punchy live drums, sparkling background atmospherics—that yielded minor hits for then-Disney icon Hilary Duff and indie legend Liz Phair, both making bids for mainstream success. It wasn’t long before up-and-coming stars like Duff, Ashlee Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan adapted the same formula. Lavigne spawned enough imitators for The Globe and Mail to put together “Pieces of Avril,” a 2004 trend piece cataloguing the would-be sk8er girls—Fefe Dobson! Katy Rose! Skye Sweetnam!—emerging in her wake. This wasn’t a phenomenon limited to female artists, either: Pop-punk boy bands like Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, and Yellowcard landed on the charts with slightly chunkier riffs and whiny, exasperated vocals.
Her influence continued to trickle down through the Disney talent pipeline—Hannah Montana wouldn’t exist without “Sk8er Boi” as a template—and even Taylor Swift, who ended up becoming the country-pop ingenue Arista thought they’d found with Lavigne. Lavigne herself earned a co-writing credit on “Breakaway,” the title track on Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 album of the same name. Of course, Breakaway is best remembered for “Since U Been Gone,” the song that launched Clarkson’s career, revitalized Max Martin’s, and quickly entered the contemporary pop canon. And while Martin and Dr. Luke have credited the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” for inspiration, it’s hard to imagine “Since U Been Gone” becoming a massive hit without Lavigne clearing the path.
Let Go is still rippling through the musical pond today: When asked about Lavigne for a Billboard cover story earlier this year, next-generation indie heavyweights like Soccer Mommy, Alex Lahey, and Snail Mail—who said “I just wanted to be her so badly”—credited her as a role model, a teenage girl whose stardom was built on videos spent trashing the mall and songs about guys who break your heart by smoking too much weed. And yet, since her debut, Lavigne has never struck gold in the same way, veering back and forth between surly post-grunge (2004’s sophomore effort Under My Skin) and songs like “Girlfriend,” a bratty 2007 collaboration with Dr. Luke that hit No. 1 but felt like a concession. Listening to later singles like “Here’s to Never Growing Up” and “17” feels like chewing pieces of dime-store bubblegum when you’re old enough to make your own appointments at the dentist.
Lavigne has spent the last few years fighting back from Lyme disease and navigating the end of her marriage to Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger, and her impending pivot into Christian music—judging by recent single “Head Above Water,” her first in half a decade—is a full-circle return to her religious, small-town roots. Let Go is the foundation of her surprisingly considerable legacy. Her feelings about it might be, well, complicated: She’d grown up enough by its release to know it wasn’t the album she wanted to make, and she never quite escaped its shadow. But you can imagine her listening to Let Go like she’s flipping through a yearbook or watching some long-forgotten DVD from a high-school talent show. It feels like a true dispatch from the frontlines of a teenager’s brain: unsure of itself, inelegant and occasionally inane, crackling with nervous energy. | 2018-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arista | December 16, 2018 | 6.6 | 07a1d864-2331-4a6d-b40d-a2b18eda29bb | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
The Austin quintet’s debut fuses grimy post-punk, agit-jazz, and warped disco into a unique, oblique, and cheeky sound of their own. | The Austin quintet’s debut fuses grimy post-punk, agit-jazz, and warped disco into a unique, oblique, and cheeky sound of their own. | Font: Strange Burden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/font-strange-burden/ | Strange Burden | Thom Waddill, frontman of Austin rock quintet Font, summons his lyrics in semi-conscious fits of instinct. Dream recall and automatic writing; scrawled poems and nonsensical muttering. Waddill seems to live among towers of haphazardly stacked pages—Cormac McCarthy essays and dog-eared Dostoevskys—clipping from them like a scissor-happy kid. The angular, polyrhythmic outbursts from his bandmates are just as reflexive, often built from the drums up during improvisatory practice sessions. On their debut album, Strange Burden, Font fuse grimy post-punk guitar, combustive percussion, and blazing synth riffs, committing roughly three years of evolving live sets to tape. They lose nothing in the process. Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.
Font is populated by multi-taskers; most members dart between strings, synthesizer, or a sampling pad at any given moment. During gigs, bassist Roman Parnell and guitarist Anthony Laurence swap machinery with Waddill at the front of the stage, while Font’s two drummers, Jack Owens and Logan Wagner, dish out dueling rhythms in the back. Wagner stands while performing, and of course, also plays a sampler. This kind of dexterity only aids Font’s teeming arrangements, which dissect and reanimate a pile of hyphenated genres. But trying to identify Font’s music is a slippery business; post-punk, art-rock, dance-punk, noise-pop…they are all accurate but insufficient descriptors.
Font have been pretty up front about their influences: Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, and Radiohead have all been name-checked. But they are also channeling the warped disco of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, James Chance’s agit-jazz, and prog fuckery à la Squid and Black Midi. Font’s earliest singles are stirring and pushy. “Sentence I” is a twisted punk sermon spurred by Parnell’s elastic bass licks and Wagner’s thwacked cowbell. On “It,” Waddill contorts his voice between breathy yelps and ragged shouts, as Laurence’s guitar screeches like a circular saw gnawing through steel. The song is an early instance of Waddill’s absurdist humor:
It comes through the body
It opens the door
It crawls up my leg while my mom’s at the store
It insults my dad
It calls out for God
It suns on the deck with abandon
This faceless “It” is at first menacing, suggesting some kind of hostile, inhuman species. But the sudden swerve into a grocery store, and then a porch chair where “It” tans “with abandon,” feel like cockeyed portraits of the mundane. Most of Font’s songs modulate tension in this way, and Waddill is keen to conjure hyper-specific, mismatched visuals—as if he’s playing a solo round of Exquisite Corpse.
Waddill is fascinated with surreal and precise imagery, but many of his lyrics celebrate the pure musicality of words. On “The Golden Calf,” which lurches from downtempo ’90s alt to throbbing industrial, he sings of “breastlike curtains sagging burdens earthbound,” “fingering velour handbags,” and “asbestos in the narthex.” He has an innate grasp of poetic language. Slant rhymes and clashing consonants seem to spill out of him without sounding overworked. He manipulates his voice with similar ease—it can sound as taut and clean as platinum thread, or frayed like the edges of a wind-battered flier.
Clocking in under 30 minutes, Strange Burden is perfectly paced and sequenced, maintaining its charge as Font adjust their intensity. Amid the jittery beats and processed grit is “Looking At Engines,” a sneaky power ballad that could be sold to the 1975. Just picture the irreverent Matty Healy belting the song’s funniest line: “Your father eating peach pits like they were smaller peaches/He’s never seen the snow and I don’t think he knows what teal is.” It’s another taste of Waddill’s potent brevity. We have a small amount of strange information, but can easily inspect the character’s pores and fingernails.
But the crown jewel of Strange Burden is lead single “Hey Kekulé,” with its pulsing disco keys and crossfire percussion. Waddill penned the lyrics after reading Cormac McCarthy’s essay on the German chemist August Kekulé, who discovered the ring-shaped molecular structure of the chemical benzene when he dreamt of a snake eating its own tail. McCarthy’s piece examines the subconscious and its pesky habit of communicating in cryptic symbols. But Font flourish in this murky realm, and they are thrilled to receive all of the odd creatures that crawl out of it. | 2024-07-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Acrophase | July 31, 2024 | 7.8 | 07a38a2d-ef03-4a41-b9b9-747f5842d704 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Super Furry Animals frontman has always been political, but he’s never sounded as spiteful as he does on this satirical portrait of the United States in 2018. | The Super Furry Animals frontman has always been political, but he’s never sounded as spiteful as he does on this satirical portrait of the United States in 2018. | Gruff Rhys: Babelsberg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gruff-rhys-babelsberg/ | Babelsberg | “God! Show me magic!” Gruff Rhys screamed on the first song of the first Super Furry Animals album, and 22 years later he’s still waiting patiently. Even as his band of psych-rock shapeshifters waded through all manner of global epidemics—pollution, war, technology overload, evangelicalism, and, um, vampire bats—he never lost his grace, sense of humor, or faith in the underdog. While the Furries have been on pause for much of the current decade, Rhys has continued juggling absurdity and profundity, albeit with a more delicate touch, as a solo artist. But the ceaseless stream of bad political news that flooded the past couple of years tested even this eternal optimist’s mettle. And when he wasn’t contemplating the doomsday clock, he had to keep an eye on the actual one: He recorded his new album, Babelsberg, in a Bristol studio that was set to be demolished for condo redevelopment.
On his previous solo effort, 2014’s American Interior, Rhys embarked on a musical road trip across the Midwest, retracing the footsteps of an 18th-century ancestor who ventured stateside in search of a mythic Welsh-speaking indigenous tribe. Babelsberg is another journey through the American landscape, but it forsakes speculative history to survey the nation’s current condition. Lyrically speaking, the album features some of the most sobering, spiteful songwriting of Rhys’ career, with little of his trademark whimsy to cut through the black-sky mood. If its omnipresent, string-swaddled arrangements (courtesy of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales) initially feel like a soothing antidote to the bleak subject matter, they also serve an equally provocative purpose.
After all, the plush, countrypolitan sound they create is evocative of the bygone America to which so many MAGA-hat ideologues desperately want to revert. With Babelsberg, Rhys effectively delivers that crowd a flaming pile of dog shit encased in a rhinestone-studded jewelry box. The messenger arrives in the form of “Frontier Man,” the kind of smooth, harmony-rich cowpoke serenade you could imagine raising the curtains at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968. But when Rhys croons, “On the frontier of delusion/I’m your foremost frontier man,” he invokes the all-American outlaw archetype less as a model of valor and independence than as an example of pigheaded persistence in the face of contrary evidence.
Just as “Frontier Man” savors the friction between its medium and its message, much of Babelsberg lays on the symphonic opulence to conjure the shaky-handed unease of our times: After barreling out of the gates with a frantic gallop, “Oh Dear!” free-falls into the orchestra pit as Rhys shouts out the ominous title like a drowning victim begging for a life preserver. “Architecture of Amnesia,” meanwhile, uses its chamber-prog grandeur as a cudgel, with Rhys mounting a war march against “bigots” who hide behind the “blue birds” of social media to spew their hate. But even the album’s prettiest, most serene moments simmer with external tensions. “Drones in the City” is a gorgeous ambient ballad that has Rhys ruminating on the ambiguous meaning of “drones” and how their connotations—annoying remote-controlled gizmo vs. stealth killing machine—differ depending on where you are in the world. But in its final minute, the song’s burbling bassline accelerates as though it’s about to flatline, briefly transforming the album’s most splendorous song into its most anxious.
For all its lavish instrumentation and weighty subtext, however, Babelsberg never overwhelms Rhys’ preternatural gift for writing swoon-worthy melodies. “Limited Edition Heart” and “Negative Vibes” are among the finest, most impassioned songs he’s ever crafted—defiant soft-rock salvos that position a warm embrace as armor against the world crumbling around us. And if we are truly doomed, Rhys offers the grim reassurance that we’re too narcissistic to notice. Atop the chipper, ivory-tickling saunter of “Selfies in the Sunset,” Rhys and guest vocalist Lily Cole sardonically serenade each other about posing for a few last snaps in front of a “blazing red” mushroom-cloud backdrop, milking the apocalypse for Instagram likes. In the unsettled universe of Babelsberg, this is the way the world ends—not with a bang but a self-satisfied finger tap. | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | June 23, 2018 | 7.8 | 07a4b976-6d6d-466f-97b4-f70b53c46700 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
More Blueprint 2 than Blueprint, Jay-Z's latest is actually closer to Kingdom Come than either of those others. Unfortunately. | More Blueprint 2 than Blueprint, Jay-Z's latest is actually closer to Kingdom Come than either of those others. Unfortunately. | Jay-Z: The Blueprint 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13445-the-blueprint-3/ | The Blueprint 3 | Who's been responsible for The Blueprint 3's biggest PR boost thus far: Kanye West or Rihanna? Timbaland or Drake? Um, LeBron James? According to our RSS, the answer would appear to be Ed Droste. Now, a few years ago, a YouTube of Jay-Z swaying lazily to "Ready, Able" might've been a "gotcha" moment worthy of the Summer Jam Screen, but in 2009, the buzz it's generated is either a huge breakthrough for the hip-hop/indie conversation or a sign that seeing Jigga in the same room as Grizzly Bear is more exciting than hearing him on the same song as any of the all-stars that populate The Blueprint 3: After all, The Blueprint 3 is so certainly Jay-Z's weakest solo album, you'll be tempted to wonder if Kingdom Come was somehow underrated.
While "30 Something" and "Beach Chair" might stand as some of the most smug hip-hop ever committed to tape, they at least came from a real place, which illustrated the "curse" Jay so often speaks of: Nearly all of his LP's are concept albums about the state of his career, but in the 21st century, he's needed some sort of external boost to make it work, whether it's announcing his dominance of New York, his retirement, or the ability to play fast and loose with Frank Lucas' biography. Maybe it's just the timing, but like any recent MTV VMA's, Blueprint 3 generates its event-ness from a stubborn belief in its own ability to be an event. As such, most of it finds Jay-Z dealing in contradictory impulses-- to remind listeners of his unparalleled success in the rap game, but just as often, imploring everyone to stop thinking about his unparalleled success and get on some ill-defined "next shit."
Honest question-- did Kanye West pull an inside job on Big Brother here? I mean, he gets all the good lines on "Run This Town" and getting Jay to follow his punchdrunk, slouchy flow on "Hate" has to be the result of some bar bet. But it isn't a matter of Kanye fronting him bad beats as much as a state of mind, the sort of maniacal need for approval that often humanizes Kanye but just makes Jay-Z sound insecure and whiny (see: most of The Blueprint 2). "Niggas want my old shit/ Buy my old album," he sneers in "On to the Next One" over a hyperactive Swizz Beatz track that indicates Jay's not the only one trying to sum up his entire career within the span of four minutes. But "Thank You", "Reminder", and "So Ambitious" all go to great lengths to reiterate accomplishments that we've heard dozens of time, but without naming names, they ultimately feel toothless considering his detractors in 2009's rap game are almost incapable of being taken seriously.
But even as Jay attempts to flow futuristic on self-explanatory tracks like "Off That", "Already Home", and "A Star Is Born", he never allows any sort of torch-passing moments-- without the credits, you'd almost completely forget actual Future of Rap guys like J. Cole, Kid Cudi, and Drake even made it to the studio. The last of which is numbingly non-committal salutation to the past 10 years of hip-hop royalty with all the insight of an Encarta entry-- yeah, Eminem was a white guy and he still got respect. Those were the times, right?
We can wrangle with the moral implications of Jay-Z making a track like "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" when the very next song on Blueprint 3 has Rihanna (to say nothing of whoever's on the hook for "Reminder"), but the singles actually gain a sort of halo effect for their familiarity, or at least giving Jay some sort of topical construct. Elsewhere, there's just such a weird vibe-- Jay-Z still sounds like himself, but for someone whose lyrics become the lingua franca of the hip-hop community for months after any of his releases, he goes vast stretches of time without saying anything remotely memorable. He's in Kingdom Come autopilot here, "get me out of these 16 bars" clock-punching intermittently spiked with chuckle-worthy rich rapper rhetoric ("nowadays I eat quail/ I'll probably never see jail"), pulled-from-People namedrops ("no I'm not a Jonas," plus a Bernie Madoff reference that we won't get into), and a "downward dog" coke rap that even Clipse might think twice about.
Even stranger is how it invokes the title of the original Blueprint (not to mention an aborted attempt to opportunistically recall its release date), but bears no sonic resemblance to it at all. Timbaland clearly wasn't bringing his A-game here ("Reminder" and the dumbfounding "Venus vs. Mars" are phoned-in from his uninspired mid-decade valley), but the other big names, even Kanye, follow suit with the most middling futurism 2004 had to offer, or the kind of Vegas schmaltz that make all those Sinatra at the opera lines uncomfortably trenchant-- the piledriver hooks of "Run This Town" and "Empire State of Mind" are content to annoy their way to ubiquity, but the cheesed-out synths of "So Ambitious" clearly demonstrates the difference between "ft. Pharrell" and "produced by the Neptunes."
I guess we should've brought up "Young Forever" earlier, and the answer to your question is "Alphaville, not Rod Stewart," and done completely straight-faced by Mr. Hudson. So menopausal and trite that it makes "Beach Chair" sound like "Streets Is Watching", Jay-Z rounds out Blueprint 3 with a gaggle of self-help bromides-- "just a picture perfect day that lasts a whole lifetime/ And it never ends because all we have to do is hit rewind." It's only passable as next-level reverse psychology, inspiring a demand of another Jay-Z album in spite of how godawful Blueprint 3 is, just as long as "Young Forever" isn't the last song we hear from him.
But in the end, Jay-Z's probably right about his claim this year that hip-hop could learn a thing or two from indie rock, even if he's purposefully vague about what that actually means. Should rappers start booking studio time with, like, Nico Muhly? Well, there's always Late Registration. Talk a good game about making "experimental albums," like Jay's doing already? 808s & Heartbreak. Is Jay-Z really the kind of guy who should be telling rappers to think differently about building a fanbase when his only mixtape was created to sell a shoe? Because from its roster of producers and guest spots to its elaborate marketing, Blueprint 3 is the kind of stuck-on-stupid, event-driven money pit that proves while Jay-Z's at a point where he's got no one to answer to but himself, he's still capable of an entire hour of failing to take his own advice. | 2009-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Roc Nation | September 14, 2009 | 4.5 | 07a65373-f2a9-4489-a8ff-877784eb5df9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Detroit rapper Denmark Vessey lives in the haze. His Sun Go Nova is freewheeling and exciting, the kind of hip-hop that breathes. | Detroit rapper Denmark Vessey lives in the haze. His Sun Go Nova is freewheeling and exciting, the kind of hip-hop that breathes. | Denmark Vessey: Sun Go Nova | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/denmark-vessey-sun-go-nova/ | Sun Go Nova | It’s hard to reconcile our dependence on the sun with the fact that it will one day kill us. That day is not likely to be tomorrow, or the next day, or even a billion years from now. But even from a safe distance, knowing the sun, the fulcrum of life as we know it, will end life, is quite the headtrip. On Sun Go Nova, Detroit rapper Denmark Vessey is unfazed. Breezy, calm, and nonlinear, the brief collection skitters between the cosmic, the mundane, and the absurd with levity.
Recorded during the same sessions as last year’s Buy Muy Drugs, Vessey’s manic collaboration with Chicago producer Azarias, Sun Go Nova is just as scatterbrained and wide-swinging. On “Zzzzz” Vessey uses his “counterfeit money phone” to make prank calls, threatens politicians that misuse tax money, and confronts a lover for sending too many texts. On “SunGoNova” he thanks JAY-Z for explaining the risks of selling drugs and discloses his lady’s preferred pasta dish (pad thai). Buy Muy Drugs wove such oddball minutia into a prickly, acerbic satire; Sun Go Nova relishes their lack of connection.
Vessey’s always been at ease rattling off non-sequiturs, and on Sun Go Nova his rapping itself is free-wheeling. His verse on “SunGoNova” zigs from baby babble, to double-time raps, to sing-song chants. His opening verse on “Zzzzz” is interrupted by a fuzzy ad-lib that morphs into a hazy, shouted refrain. There’s a sense of freedom in all this spasming. In the past, Vessey’s anxiety raps filled his music with unresolvable tension. Even when joking or outright trolling, he could come across as grave. Here he achieves catharsis, his freeform flows easing him into bliss. “The sun went nova when we was sleep,” he deadpans on “Sellout.” He sounds relieved.
Part of this relief is cooked into the record. The project is divided into two volumes. The first volume, produced by Earl Sweatshirt and Knxwledge, is a swamp of diced soul loops, dulled drums, and foggy chords. The arrangements are dense and feverish. Sounds are packed tight, melted down, and soaked in filters. Instead of rapping inside the crags and pockets of this teeming morass, Vessey orbits around it, using its warmth to forge his own rhythms, like a planet fostering life from a star’s light. Midway through the record, Vessey floats off entirely. The second volume is a rap-less, self-produced beat tape. Relative to Earl and Knxwledge, Vessey’s compositions are airy and porous; the drums strike cleanly, the samples breathe. His beats can jitter just as much as his raps, but the effect is similarly cathartic. “Halal Avocado Toast” shifts from a breezy tropical swing to a snappy bounce without fuss. “Quiet Storm Jam” casually hops from bass-heavy thump to a caramelized sample of Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter.” No beat goes unheard.
The persistent aloofness of Sun Go Nova sometimes blurs into triviality. Even if it’s considered a looser, sunnier counterpoint to the acidic dread of Buy Muy Drugs, the lack of narrative and structure give the songs an unfinished feel. There’s no indication that his streams of conscious couldn’t have been whittled into coherence or that his beats couldn’t have been scaled up into something more robust. Freedom isn’t aimlessness. Still, there’s something relatable about Vessey’s restless self-indulgence. Why not live a little? The sun is going to kill us, after all. | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | April 24, 2018 | 6.4 | 07ab4cbd-0931-4c92-8f8d-dd7788bdb6db | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Now a legitimate star, Wiz Khalifa offers a free mixtape named for his high school that attempts to reclaim what he sees as his. | Now a legitimate star, Wiz Khalifa offers a free mixtape named for his high school that attempts to reclaim what he sees as his. | Wiz Khalifa: Taylor Allderdice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16434-taylor-allderdice/ | Taylor Allderdice | Before releasing this mixtape, Wiz Khalifa sent something of an apology letter to his fans. "When I made Kush and Orange Juice, I listened to it and knew I had created a genre that would change music," he wrote. "The mistake I made on Rolling Papers was thinking it was time to move on from that genre and not knowing that it had impacted people so much…creatively [it] wasn't my best work."
The gist was that Khalifa had gone too far into pop-rap with his major label debut and sacrificed the kicked-back stoner vibe that first got him wide attention. Concurrent with this were other artists-- from psychedelic producers like Spaceghostpurpp to au courant rap crews like A$AP and Main Attraktionz, basically the whole "cloud rap" or "trillwave" movement, whatever you want to call it-- who had since ran with a similar style. Taylor Allderdice, named for Khalifa's high school, is the rapper attempting to reclaim what he sees as his.
There are a few logical flaws in this argument. For one, while Kush and Orange Juice did crystallize the Taylor Gang aesthetic and help trailblaze the mixtape-to-commercial-success model for others, Khalifa was hardly the first guy to leisurely rap about weed. The list of cannabis-obsessed MCs is long and you don't have to look far to find a Wiz precursor. (See: Devin the Dude.) Also, Rolling Papers was actually pretty good. Yes, the record did nosedive into B.o.B.-esque cheese in the second half, but the front end contained some of Wiz's strongest material-- "The Race", "Hopes and Dreams", "On My Level".
To some degree, it's disappointing to see Khalifa shrugging off the strides he made on Rolling Papers and choosing regression over creative advancement. Taylor Allderdice is basically Kush and Orange Juice 2. The flip side is that there's still gas left in this tank, in part because the guy still loves weed and is still good at rapping about it. Marijuana is his muse, his raison d’être. Like Curren$y, Khalifa rarely leaves his comfort zone, but can create variety within self-imposed limits. Over humid tracks by various producers (in-house Taylor Gang beatmaker Sledgren oversees, the aforementioned Spaceghostpurrp contributes a beat), he weaves raspy bars and singsong choruses into pleasant, low-stakes party jams.
Obviously life has changed a lot for Khalifa in the two years since Kush and Orange Juice was released. He's a legitimate star now with a tabloid-fodder fiancee in Amber Rose and presumably lots more money. Weirdly there's not much acknowledgment of these seemingly big transitions. Every now and again, he lets go of a ruminative line ("Still rollin' weed on my XXL, only difference is that's me on the cover" or "Room full of expensive bags, still all the shit on the floor/ But that's just how you live when your wife's a model"), but mostly he seems determined to prove he's the Same Old Dude. If the album has a thesis statement, it's this couplet from "Never Been": "In my jacuzzi, roll another doobie/ See what's newest on Netflix, order another movie."
Where he does get personal is during a recorded interview with MTV News correspondent Rob Markman that's broken up and threaded throughout the album. It's annoying for several reasons. Almost every song ends with a clip of the two guys talking, thus breaking up any groove you may establish. Two, Khalifa actually burps at least twice during these segments. (I realize this mixtape comes at no cost to the listener, but this is pushing it even for free shit.) Third and most important, it seems remarkably lazy for an artist to rely on a conversation with a random guy to express the themes, ideas, and frustrations he wants to get across. That's what the songs are supposed to be for.
It feels like this is the central problem with Khalifa right now. He seems either unwilling or incapable to share the personal details, the other aspects of his persona that would give him extra dimension as a rapper. It's not a dealbreaker on this particular tape because a) it doesn’t carry the weight of a major release and b) these songs for the most part sound good, but it should be cause for concern for his fans going forward. Songs about pot are fine, they have their place, but he's reached the level of popularity that it's reasonable to expect something more. | 2012-03-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-03-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 29, 2012 | 6.3 | 07abb6e7-8743-41d9-9187-9a8dee12f49b | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The Connecticut DIY duo struggles to shed their influences on this newly remastered and reissued record, yet they still manage to bring a unique virtuosity and vitality to downcast guitar pop. | The Connecticut DIY duo struggles to shed their influences on this newly remastered and reissued record, yet they still manage to bring a unique virtuosity and vitality to downcast guitar pop. | waveform*: Last Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/waveform-last-room/ | Last Room | Coming up in the Connecticut DIY scene, Jarett Denner and Dan Poppa lacked community. They made friends online or with out-of-town bands passing through on tour, their local scene too stagnant to support their ambitions. The pair began performing as waveform* while still in high school, writing and recording hushed acoustic sketches from their bedrooms. Their early work reeked of their idols, namely Alex G, who they both clearly admire; it’s impossible to ignore the uncanny similarities between waveform*’s 2018 album library with Alex G’s Trick and DSU—the pitch-shifted vocals, the sparse guitar strums, the vague one-word song titles. Denner and Poppa expanded their range on 2019’s Shooting Star, elevating their withdrawn minimalism into melodic guitar pop that evoked acts like Hovvdy and Sparklehorse. On their newly remastered and reissued album Last Room, waveform* further explore the boundaries of indie rock without ever quite settling into a cogent identity of their own.
Last Room’s strongest moments are spackled with soothing guitar and sullen melodies, a sense of longing and despair simmering below the surface. “Miner’s Lullaby” repeats a haunting line—“you’re trying to fall inside”—over an American Football-esque riff and a slowly disintegrating drum loop. On “Favorite Song,” Denner’s flat, wistful voice slinks across slide guitar and grand piano, crooning lyrics so specific and pitch-perfect they feel plucked straight from his subconscious: “I want to hear you complain about things/I want to hear you play video games.” waveform*’s music aches with immediacy and desire, their best songs locating the gray area between wanting to get out of bed and wanting to press your face into a pillow.
The duo’s songwriting doesn’t always possess an appropriate heft, though. Teen romance, bad fathers, unrequited love—these topics can certainly be rendered with profundity, but without the proper details they can read like one-dimensional diary entries. Take horrorcore ballad “Book of Curse,” for example, in which Poppa mutters, “I might love her/She made me sad/Yeah, she hurt me.” It’s a song like no other in their catalog—eerie and unsettling, a blend of Nick Cave and Lil Peep. But the song never fully clicks into focus; the experimentation feels like experimentation, the emotions immaterial.
Throughout the album, waveform* are determined to escape their heads but unable to do so. Even on the record’s more upbeat songs, like “Blue Disaster,” the duo sinks into solipsism: “I'm a winner when I'm all alone/I've gone years never finding home.” There’s little reprieve from this solitude, no dramatic arc to alleviate the suffering. The album’s lone moment of catharsis arrives on “Hello Goodbye,” a song Denner says is about “struggling with sexuality.” With a twang remnant of Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Denner gives a remarkable vocal performance, his stirring falsetto offering a sense of release. He’s still in his head, but he’s intent on moving outward and telling someone else how he feels, no matter how painful the excavation may be.
In an interview from last year, waveform* were asked what place or feeling they thought their music embodied. “I guess to me it couldn't really be pinpointed to anything specific,” Poppa said. “Hopefully being in the forest temple from Ocarina of Time or something,” added Denner. It’s telling that, even to them, their sound is rudderless, breezy enough to belong anywhere or niche enough to play in a Nintendo 64 game. While Last Room succeeds in bringing virtuosity and vitality to a certain strain of downcast rock, its lack of direction prevents waveform* from homing in on a sound truly unburdened by their predecessors.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | February 1, 2022 | 6.5 | 07b2d8f0-a25d-425e-98bf-dc7f8cbcd08e | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Former Tussle member Alexis Georgopoulos reinvents himself as the architect of an early 1970s throwback to a time when electronics seemed warm, friendly, natural, perhaps inevitable, and above all optimistic. | Former Tussle member Alexis Georgopoulos reinvents himself as the architect of an early 1970s throwback to a time when electronics seemed warm, friendly, natural, perhaps inevitable, and above all optimistic. | Arp: In Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11353-in-light/ | In Light | Alexis Georgopoulos, the sole member of Arp, used to be in the instrumental funk outfit Tussle. His former band, who are still going strong, made their name channeling the lean, driving sound of early 1980s New York outfits like Liquid Liquid and ESG; Arp, though a very different animal, is just as heavily indebted to the music of a specific time and place. The most obvious inspiration for this project is West Germany in the first half of the 70s, when the artistically inclined kids born around the time of WWII began to hit their stride creatively. Think early Kraftwerk on Phillips, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream; though each has a hugely varied body of work, all were electronic music pioneers with their eyes and ears trained on the future.
To Georgopoulos' credit, In Light doesn't come across as a retro exercise so much as an attempt to capture a certain spirit. Titles allude to his forbearers (hard to see a track called "St. Tropez" without thinking of Pink Floyd's 1971 LP Meddle, "Premonition of the Sculptor Steiner" references a Werner Herzog film and, by extension, an accompanying Popol Vuh score) and vintage synths abound, but the overall mood doesn't feel overly tethered to the era. What Georgopoulos capturers most of the age is an approach to sound that made electronics seem warm, friendly, natural, perhaps inevitable, and above all optimistic.
The post-moonshot days of the early 70s-- like the 50s and the 90s-- were a time when it seemed as though technology might save us yet. In Light reflects a grounded, idealistic mindset; the music is not especially psychedelic, and clarity is prized over drugginess. The percolating "Potentialities" is the spaciest track, its fat, sequenced bass made for either stargazing or a show at the planetarium, but it still has an innocent cast. Even further in this direction is the clean, bright pulse of "St. Tropez", which brings to mind Raymond Scott trying to engineer the ultimate aural environment in which to raise babies. Only the 15-minute drone piece "Odyssey (For Bas Jan Ader)", its midrange-heavy synths burred with distortion, flirts with an unsettling atmosphere, but even here it's more a sense of anticipation than dread. All tracks are simple, effective, and easy to grasp, letting a few elements and subtle changes do loads of work.
Most subtle of all is "The Rising Sun", which is perhaps the best example of Georgopoulos hearing the music of the past in a fresh way. Sometimes overlooked in discussion of the kosmisch pioneers is that they unwittingly invented new age. These acts weren't above teasing out a pure mood piece, something placid and meditative that was unashamedly in tune with Aquarian-age spirituality. "The Rising Sun", built with resonant piano clusters that seem to tumble down waterfall-style and a soothing whistle-like tone that brings to mind Florian Schneider's flute, strikes me as sort of brave in its delicacy. It flirts with a sphere of music many consider verboten and then, eventually, Georgopoulos brings through a bassy drone to shake up the calm and give the track some bite. The track's free use of acoustic instruments and familiar textures shows a pragmatic side also in evidence back in the day. Georgopoulos has a very specific vibe in mind for Arp, and he uses whatever works; though a small, simple record on the one hand, In Light, on its own terms, is a big success. | 2008-04-09T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2008-04-09T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | April 9, 2008 | 7.6 | 07b531e7-f334-4999-80ee-15a6f22a87ce | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Following a debut steeped in generational aimlessness, the Brooklyn band’s second album thrives on a combination of rock extroversion and frontman John Ross’ hard-won and tenuous new optimism. | Following a debut steeped in generational aimlessness, the Brooklyn band’s second album thrives on a combination of rock extroversion and frontman John Ross’ hard-won and tenuous new optimism. | Wild Pink: Yolk in the Fur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-pink-yolk-in-the-fur/ | Yolk in the Fur | By the end of 2017, Wild Pink’s self-titled debut was being celebrated as one of the year’s overlooked gems. This designation would’ve had the ring of faint praise if the band’s music hadn’t sounded like it was made to be stumbled upon. John Ross sang fully formed, footnoted sentences at a conversational volume. The hooks never gave you a hard sell—they were just phrases that rattled around on repeat, lodging themselves in your short-term memory. Wild Pink could kick up enough distortion to get loud, occasionally even bordering on rude, but Ross’ pose remained the same, staring off into the distance amid the ambient clatter of New York City. Listening to him sing felt like eavesdropping on someone muttering something to himself that he should’ve said an hour ago.
It’s an approach that puts a lot of faith in the listener, and the album yielded a substantial return on whatever that audience invested. But Wild Pink ultimately came across like a conversation Ross preferred to keep to himself. Yolk in the Fur can’t wait to share it.
Lead single “Lake Erie” is at once the most polished and pyrotechnic Wild Pink song to date—and it’s where Ross sounds most beholden to his professed influences. As he tells it, those heroes are Tom Petty and Jackson Browne, but in 2018, indie-rock fans are sure to think of the War on Drugs first. This connection is the first real narrative hook that's emerged for a band that's been tough to classify; in the past, Wild Pink were most often compared to pre-“O.C.” Death Cab, which is to say that they don’t exactly share the punk aesthetics of their more celebrated Tiny Engines labelmates like the Hotelier. And while they live in Brooklyn, they’re not really of it; they didn’t come up in any particular local scene.
For better or worse, the band’s crowd-pleasing new combination of brassy acoustics, bleary pedal steel, and rigid beats on “Lake Erie” means that the heartland synth rock tag has already stuck, even if it barely applies to the rest of Yolk. Aside from the slow-motion windmill strums of the title track, few elements of the release scan as “classic rock.” Instead, Ross’ nimble acoustic fingerpicking evokes John Fahey, and his searching solos harken back to the indie anti-guitar heroism that typified Wild Pink’s earlier work. The biggest riff on the album comes from a vintage synth on “There Is a Ledger” that strobes and squawks like a toy UFO.
Wild Pink also avoid the grand gestures that make the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile, and Amen Dunes among the few guitar-centered acts that have won over the Vibe Generation. Damon McMahon and Adam Granduciel can transmute “regular dude” into a kind of aura, a brand that calls back to performers like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp—rock stars who seemed down-to-earth compared with Bret Michaels and David Lee Roth, with voices as gritty as distressed denim and dried cornhusks to distract from the wealthy lives they led. Ross, on the other hand, never sounds like anything but an actual regular dude, strolling through the suburbs, running into acquaintances, and tapping mundane thoughts into his cell phone as he walks.
That stream of consciousness doesn’t include as many wisecracks on Yolk as it did on Wild Pink. But nods to mobster bars, “boomers with hepatitis,” Kim Carnes, and “Edelweiss”provide hyper-specific grounding for vague, hopeful mantras: “Love is better than anything else”; “You have a heart like a star.” The band’s debut was written when Ross was, as he put it, “super pessimistic for a lot of good reasons.” By the time it was released, in February 2017, Wild Pink spoke to the previous year’s sense of generational aimlessness rather than the culturally inflamed present. But on Yolk’s florid Cocteau Twins homage “Jewels Drossed in the Runoff,” Ross sings, “There’s nothing worse than pretending that you don’t actually care”—and the album takes that advice to heart, connecting Wild Pink’s “active rock” extroversion with their frontman’s hard-won and tenuous new optimism.
On opening track “Burger Hill,” Ross draws out the last word of the lyric “I woke up too fast from a dream” long enough to capture the liminal, confused state the song’s harp-like guitar figures suggest, of feeling a connection with the smoke and the breeze and everything else that will soon fade out of existence. Mark Kozelek fans who wish he’d start writing songs again must be dreaming of something like this, a track whose starlit slowcore is a balm for the hopelessly melancholy, an idyllic “prenatal slow globe” and a “world untouched and set free/The way it was meant to be.”
This is a much different world from the one Ross sees on “Lake Erie,” in which he watches a cleanup crew erase a roadside disaster. It isn’t a grand, metaphorical gambit like Springsteen’s “Wreck on the Highway,” where life hangs in the balance. An IRL crisis soon gives way to a URL one (“Meanwhile people on Tumblr unpack their neuroses/And all you ever wanted was the one you love the most not to suddenly leave”), and the song reveals its true intent: It’s not a rebranding of Wild Pink, but a rejoinder to the apocalyptic discourse that drives our everyday existence—we all know how this is going to end, so why not find freedom in the uncertainty? Ross sings “I hope we find peace” eight times at the end of “There Is a Ledger,” before a line that will reappear on “All Some Frenchman’s Joke” to become Yolk in the Fur’s final lyric: “I don’t know what happens next.” Repeated this way, the expression of uncertainty becomes a mantra of acceptance that spans the length of the album. | 2018-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | July 20, 2018 | 8.1 | 07c0b608-b6f1-480f-9699-47528a0f60f4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The cryptic YouTuber’s new album is the first to fully embrace the upsetting qualities of her video works, folding elements of nu-metal and grindcore into her seasick melange. | The cryptic YouTuber’s new album is the first to fully embrace the upsetting qualities of her video works, folding elements of nu-metal and grindcore into her seasick melange. | Poppy: I Disagree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/poppy-i-disagree/ | I Disagree | Since the very beginning, there has been a darkness buried in Poppy’s heart. It’s there in the earliest videos uploaded to her mysterious YouTube channel back in 2014, in which the character—portrayed by an actress and musician named Moriah Pereira—performed simple tasks against a white background, occasionally delivering surrealist monologues. Her very first video featured her eating cotton candy in a way that might feel familiar to fans of ASMR videos: Her lips smack, her throat rumbles, she makes satisfied “ahhs,” but something’s off about the whole thing. Audio and image are out of sync; nothing sounds quite like you expect it to.
It was an unsettling beginning, and in the ensuing years, she’s only plunged further into uncomfortable territory. One of her early popular videos, for example, features her staring into the camera as she teaches the viewer how to load a handgun. In another, she makes explicit reference to one of 4chan’s most notoriously noxious message boards. Unlike a lot of people who have set about parodying the strangeness of influencer culture, she and her collaborators—chief among them the director and producer Titanic Sinclair—have seemed uniquely attuned to the surreal perversity that lurks in the shadowy underbelly of YouTube culture. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that some of the platform’s more unsavory figures have been outspoken fans of hers. She’s fluent in the lingua franca of the internet’s darkest parts.
The music attributed to Poppy over the years hasn’t always mirrored this side of her work. Her first album was a collection of wheezy ambient compositions self-consciously designed to “help facilitate a full night of sleep” and made, she says, with guidance from doctors who study sleep at Washington University. She’s made several albums’ worth of sugary bangers for Diplo’s Mad Decent label and a sci-fi synth soundtrack to a graphic novel. But her new album I Disagree is her first to fully follow through on the upsetting qualities of her video works, adding the grim aesthetics and curdled riffing of nu-metal, grindcore, and industrial noise to the seasick melange of her music.
The record’s opening track, “Concrete,” is typical of her approach here. After an air-raid siren, she whispers about wanting to be buried alive, covered in concrete and turned “into a street,” before launching into a series of proggy vignettes. There’s a section that sounds like the Body’s sludgy electro-metal, a paisley pop chorus that’d be at home on a Kinks record, and a series of gurgly riffs that’d rank among Slipknot’s grossest, all before culminating in what sounds like an arena crowd chanting her name, followed by a coda that sparkles like “Blank Space.” Like, say, 100 gecs or the recent Grimes singles, part of the joy in I Disagree comes in how overwhelming it is. No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise.
Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic. “Bloodmoney” castigates hypocrites and evil men who hide behind the banner of religion. “Don’t Go Outside” evokes the imagery of biblical plagues, with frogs falling from the sky. The title track explicitly welcomes the end of the world, assuring, “We’ll be safe and sound when it all burns down.” None of the situations she explores are especially specific, but it’s striking—as the world burns and nuclear war once more feels like a distinct possibility—to hear a reminder that chaos can be cleansing, that calamity is the first step to starting all over again and building something new. | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Sumerian | January 15, 2020 | 6.5 | 07c2fa54-8704-4028-b8be-66a0670b10f1 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On their latest collaboration with director Alex Garland, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury craft an unsettling vocal-driven score to match the creepy idyll of Men. | On their latest collaboration with director Alex Garland, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury craft an unsettling vocal-driven score to match the creepy idyll of Men. | Ben Salisbury / Geoff Barrow: Men (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-salisbury-geoff-barrow-men-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Men (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury have proven themselves to be masterful architects of slickly intricate cinematic scores. Their abilities emerge from their complementary talents: Barrow is famous for his distinctively sullen and sultry percussion-laden sounds (most notably with Portishead), while Salisbury is an Emmy-nominated television and film composer, deftly attuned to the structural cues necessary for any score’s skeleton. Their first formal collaboration on DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega City One was audacious, glistening with Vangelis-influenced analog synths and roaring with the heightened dimensions of the Judge Dredd comics from which it was adapted. Their work on this score introduced the duo to Alex Garland, who wrote and produced 2012’s Dredd, and would enlist Barrow and Salisbury to score his directorial debut, Ex Machina.
Their collaboration has continued through 2018’s Annihilation, the 2020 television series Devs, and now, Garland’s latest movie, Men. Unlike the complex sci-fi worlds of Ex Machina or Annihilation, the world of Men is plainly ordinary. It’s set in the English countryside, where Harper (Jessie Buckley) retreats after her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) falls from their home to his death. Was it an accident or suicide? Harper does not know. Nonetheless, she finds herself weighed by the shackles of guilt. After strange men—all of whom appear to resemble her odd landlord Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear)—begin to stalk her, the idyll quickly unravels.
With this score, Barrow and Salisbury’s intention is to dramatize the familiar, such that even ordinariness—the comfort of the home, a sympathetic glance from a stranger, or the sway of leaves—becomes disquieting. To do so, Barrow and Salisbury focus on the voice. It is one thing to speak, and another to be heard, and whenever Harper tries to express her discomfort within her new setting, she’s quickly brushed aside. Likewise, Barrow and Salisbury’s score heavily involves manipulated vocals that climb to seemingly dolorous stretches of pain throughout. They rise to screechy, hysterical heights, and fall to lamenting, unsettling lows. These vocals are desolate, as if trying to push against the condemnation of incredulity. They, like Harper, scream—but who listens?
Harper confides to a priest that she feels “haunted” by the ghost of her husband. “Haunted” also describes this score, which forms around the negative space of silence. Like Men—sparsely populated, save for Harper and these few creepy men—Barrow and Salisbury’s score strays away from formal complexity. Vocals and instrumentation begin isolated, then layer—but before anything becomes too intricate, the score sputters back into the vacuum of silence, beginning anew. Even the most anguished howls fade just as they had begun: like wisps. “Runaway / Crash” begins with a four-note riff which then combines with a simple synth melody, ascending rapidly in intensity, before a sudden stop.
The second—and shortest—track, “A Country Walk,” provides a gasp of optimism, opening with bright pipe organ chords. The organ is a nod to the church, and to the dimension of pain Harper feels: so deep, so implacable, that it feels divinely wrought. “A Country Walk” captures Harper at the beginning of Men, witnessing the lushness of the countryside, and hopeful that she might escape James’ lingering memory. But as the increasingly damned bellows on Barrow and Salisbury’s score express, escaping one’s past isn’t so easy.
Earlier on in the movie, Harper stands before a tunnel and sings a note. The tunnel somehow echoes her voice back perfectly. While they use Harper’s literal echo in the film in “Runaway / Crash,” Barrow and Salisbury also use the echo as a generative structure. Anxiety in this score is etched, like many frantic echoes, in short riffs and repetitiousness. On tracks like “Tunnel Escape” and “Fuck This,” these echo-like structures distort into into what sounds like the adrenaline-soaked throb of a heart trapped in a nightmare.
For Harper, that nightmare is voicelessness. She spends the film screaming: in church, underneath water, watching James plummet to his death outside her window. Even so, we don’t hear her screams—in the film, they’re usually muted. But Barrow and Salisbury’s score screams for her. Tucked into the final seconds of “Birth,” the final track, are plaintive two-note echoes that descend, as if resigning to their fate of damnation. Even if we hear Harper, it’s too late. | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | June 3, 2022 | 7.2 | 07c5fc57-5fe0-4df5-82e3-7994f056fab6 | Annie Geng | https://pitchfork.com/staff/annie-geng/ | |
On the second half of their paired EPs, the Toronto collective settles into comfortable territory that soon proves stale. | On the second half of their paired EPs, the Toronto collective settles into comfortable territory that soon proves stale. | Broken Social Scene: Let’s Try the After Vol. 2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/broken-social-scene-lets-try-the-after-vol-2-ep/ | Let’s Try the After Vol. 2 EP | Twenty years after their conception, Toronto’s Broken Social Scene remind us that they’re not going anywhere. After the seven-year silence that resulted in 2017’s Hug of Thunder, the two-part Let’s Try the After comes as a sign of continuity. The project’s first half, released this February, was understood as a refreshing amuse-bouche, but Vol. 2 is more clumsily served. At their best, Broken Social Scene create intimate moments of restlessness, gradually building urgent percussion and layered vocals without sacrificing their versatility and love of detail. Here, the band’s signatures—propellant drums and fierce, lime-lit guitar solos—soon prove stale. Though it settles into comfortable territory, Vol. 2 ultimately feels purposeless and undercooked.
BSS co-founder Kevin Drew has explained that Let’s Try the After is about persevering to overcome life’s obstacles: “Sickness, suicide, uprise, love, death, betrayal, hurt, joy, sex, communication, battles and divisions… Let's just get to their after and start building again.” On Vol. 1, the vibrant instrumental “Remember Me Young” and the melancholic “1972” beautifully captured the thesis. But aside from their titles, there isn’t much cohesion between the two halves of Let’s Try the After. The only musical connection lies in their psych-rock instrumental openers. Vol. 1’s “The Sweet Sea” was sedate, while Vol. 2’s “Memory Lover” is energetic and propulsive; where the former made for an exciting prologue, the latter feels more like an interlude.
There are moments where their beloved innovation breaks through. Zigzagging synth lines and two separate guitar solos bring an easygoing revelry to “Can’t Find My Heart.” “Let’s Try the After” radiates ominous background noise: a low and blurry piano, hissing whispers, vibrant arcade game sounds, and a mournful horn crying in the distance. Splintering horns and clamorous drum hits bring closing track “Wrong Line” closest to the band’s past post-rock exuberance, yet in failing to confidently resolve the strangeness of Let’s Try the After, it makes for an unsatisfactory ending. “We got caught in the wrong line,” Drew sings, fading out into a void.
Across Vol. 2, BSS seem cognizant they’re lacking something—maybe a heart, a companion, or self-knowledge. “Big Couches” begins even-tempered, building to a hovering suspense peppered with jubilant horns, but there’s no burst of resolution. “Where did you go?/I can’t recognize this supposed to be,” Drew sings. His voice is awkwardly masked in Auto-Tune, furthering the sense of unrecognizability. Let’s Try the After may be inspired by forward movement, but it feels directionless, preoccupied by searching without clarifying what was lost. “Tomorrow’s kind of a bitch/The kind of bitch you can believe,” a jaded Drew exclaims on the title track, a depressing (and infuriatingly sexist) finishing sentiment for a song ostensibly about entering uncharted territory.
There is a hunger apparent on Let’s Try the After Vol. 2. Whether in the roaring guitar solos or transcendent piano riffs, Broken Social Scene seem keen to fulfill the promise of a second half. But these songs are rarely strong enough to stand on their own. Though their familiar sound is warm and at times welcoming, it pales in comparison to the developed instrumental ferocity of the band’s past catalog. There’s no enthralling combustion to rival “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)” or “7/4 (Shoreline),” no warm percussive bath like that of “Love and Mathematics.” Here, Broken Social Scene seem to have forgotten their gift for making the listener feel as if in the room, standing at a comfortable distance, in favor of awkward small talk with a stranger. | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | April 18, 2019 | 6.5 | 07d018bf-1542-4cff-9230-88d2d0cb3ed3 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Far from a public idol-killing, or zany sideshow, Barter 6 is composed, patient, even subtle—an album neither fans nor detractors saw coming. It argues that Young Thug's greatest asset all along was his uncanny and singular way of piecing a song together. | Far from a public idol-killing, or zany sideshow, Barter 6 is composed, patient, even subtle—an album neither fans nor detractors saw coming. It argues that Young Thug's greatest asset all along was his uncanny and singular way of piecing a song together. | Young Thug: Barter 6 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20529-barter-6/ | Barter 6 | Young Thug is not into literalism. He thrives in gray areas, animated by the electricity generated by the tension of his own contradictions, and he never, ever offers a straightforward explanation. Look how he handled the most surreal rap beef of 2015 in a recent Instagram message to Lil Wayne. "This is my idol. I won’t ever in my life swap words with him," Thug pledged—days away from releasing his imminent debut album, Carter 6, a title hijacked from Wayne, whose own Carter V languished in Cash Money purgatory. But then, in closing: "Ha haaa," punctuated with a trollish tongue wag. Like most everything Thugger has done in the last year and a half, it made people confused: What kind of god-level shade was this? Is he taking any of this remotely seriously? And what in fuck’s sake is his endgame with this album, the name of which changed days before its release to Barter 6 after Wayne threatened to sue? Barter 6 was already the year’s most controversial rap album—or "retail mixtape," as if the distinction really matters—before it even dropped.
But Barter 6 has almost nothing to do with Lil Wayne, save its provocative title (which I’m saying is more Treachery of Images than aimless troll, anyway) and a handful of scattered lyrical shots. Idol or not, Thug hasn’t directly emulated Wayne since his debut tape, 2011’s I Came From Nothing. But he’s always seemed to delight in playful misdirection, quietly reveling in the chaos provoked by his mere existence, from the vaguely gender-bending fashions to the pet names for his friends. Thug seems to recognize the power of his own mystique, headline-grabbing yet somehow unknowable: "Every time I dress myself, I go muhfucking viral," he crows, bemused, on "Halftime". And on Barter 6, Thug yet again dodges any easy narrative. Far from a public idol-killing, or zany sideshow, it’s composed, patient, even subtle—an album neither fans nor detractors saw coming.
Over the course of his three-part I Came From Nothing tape series, Thug’s now-singular voice took shape. The projects often felt like extended stylistic experiments, ranging wildly in quality—but when inspiration struck, it sounded like nothing else coming out of his Atlanta hometown, from guileless outsider-pop ballads to completely unclassifiable vocal performance clinics. By 2013’s 1017 Thug, Thug’s "weirdness" had become an easy hook, a rapper who sang and hollered odes to lean and compared his jewelry to Pokémon. Early 2014 singles "Stoner" and "Danny Glover" plopped Thug on the threshold of the mainstream, and Rich Gang, the Birdman-conceived duo of Thug and kindred spirit Rich Homie Quan, spawned the radiant single "Lifestyle".
There is no "Lifestyle" on Barter 6, nor is it particularly "weird." Opening track "Constantly Hating" unfurls gently, its impressionistic Wheezy beat leaving space between bass tremors for Thug to explore. There are hardly any big-name collaborators here: "Can’t Tell", with its T.I. and Boosie appearances, is the least integral track, despite its star power. It reflects none of the clamor of Thugger’s dramatic 2015. Instead, Barter 6 argues that his greatest asset all along was not his wackiness, his "outsider" status, or his surprising inner hitmaker—it’s not even his voice, or at least, not entirely. It’s Thug’s uncanny and singular way of piecing a song together, a skill he has doubled down on with this release: a way with vocal technique, melody, and detail-oriented composition that makes the bizarre seem approachable and the familiar feel new.
He plies those compositional talents here to the cohesive rap album, a format Thug had shown very little prior indication he was interested in at all. He treats the smallest compositional details with the care and craftsmanship of a chorus—everything here is a hook, from the ad-libs (a term that feels insufficient—Thug’s "ad-libs" are fully integrated into the song’s structure, to the point where we should probably just call them backing vocals) to the individual bars to the empty spaces. Barter 6 is not a world-conquering album; instead, it digs tunnels.
More than anything, Barter 6 feels like a 50-minute performance of what rap, as a form, can do: rap that need not transcend itself, towards High Art on one hand or commercial art on the other, in order to succeed in 2015. Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened. Take "Halftime", the most thrilling technical display here, on which Thug seamlessly snaps into a dozen different flows: casually extending the second syllable of "re-cy-cles" so that it threatens to throw the song off track entirely, pausing a beat, unleashing a quick guffaw, snapping back on beat. It's an almost-reckless balance-beam routine. He pauses only for an ingenious vocoder breakdown that melts his cries of "Havin’ the time of my muhfuckin’ liiiiiife" into semiotic ooze, suddenly giving the blood-red backdrop of the cover art an almost Lynchian cast, like the velveteen Black Lodge interior.
Every element exists for a reason, fitting like puzzle pieces into place over multiple listens: even the guest spots from presumable weed carriers like Duke (formerly MPA) and Yak Gotti put in work. Haunting, virtuosic final act "Just Might Be" gives Thug’s moments of silence the primacy of a hook: "That’s called breathing, that’s how you let that bitch breathe," he sighs after a verse of rapid-fire double-time, leading into a cathartic exhale that spans a full eight bars. This is the anti-"Let the Beat Build", on an album that’s the anti-Carter III.
And as for Thug’s widely-touted unintelligibility, Barter 6 argues that all we need to do is listen a bit more carefully: what may not be legible at first glance reveals itself patiently over time. In this sense, you are doing it wrong by asking Young Thug his thoughts on Ferguson point-blank, as one reporter did last fall. Thug bristled then, responding with what looked like apathy. But there is no ambiguity on "OD" when he cries, "RIP Mike Brown, fuck the cops" (nor was there, for that matter, on his gut-wrenching 2013 Trayvon Martin tribute). He will speak when he’s ready, and on his own terms: abstracted, maybe, but ultimately loud and clear. | 2015-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / 300 Entertainment | April 24, 2015 | 8.4 | 07d0f080-a772-4689-b042-901d328aeddf | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Innocent Country is more reflective than Quelle Chris' previous work. He's trying to make sense of his inner thoughts, no matter how random or conflicted they may be. | Innocent Country is more reflective than Quelle Chris' previous work. He's trying to make sense of his inner thoughts, no matter how random or conflicted they may be. | Quelle Chris: Innocent Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20795-innocent-country/ | Innocent Country | Detroit rapper Quelle Chris has developed a distinct persona over the last several years: He's the funny dude with whom you can laugh about smoking weed and sexual cardio. He's always clever, and his nasal pitch goes well with the hazy funk beats he creates. Yet his new album, Innocent Country, is ruminative in a way we've never heard before. Quelle's 2013 full-length, the breakout Ghost at the Finish Line, found the MC/producer assessing the indie grind; Innocent Country is the inner dialogue of a man trying to understand his logic, no matter how random it is.
Yet Quelle doesn't fully articulate his views here; instead he just muddles through them. In a good way, Innocent Country resembles early Slum Village: The music has a cassette-worthy hiss that solidifies the album's nostalgia, and Quelle—whose Bandcamp is full of low-key gems—doesn't speak directly to his listeners. He flubs lines and trails off in other places. It's shoegazing in a pure form; he's just talking it out, hoping you catch a line or two.
That's most prevalent on "Well Running Deep". It feels like Quelle is rapping alone to a mirror, reciting the words from his rhyme book and locking them into memory. "I barely eat, and barely sleep," he raps, "'cause when I sleep, I'm just reacquainted with mistakes and paths that are way gone." Beneath the humor are the regrets he first examined on "Loop Dreams", a Ghost standout produced by Chris Keys, who handles all the beats on Country. The sound is loosely built around dusty drum breaks, and sonically, Keys seems influenced by early '90s West Coast rap—Cypress Hill or the Alkaholiks.
The soundtrack moves between wistful and nonsensical moments, which leads to a strong alliance with Quelle who, across several projects, uses conversational flows of disconnected thoughts. He strings those meditations into effective one-liners that somehow stick, even if they don't make sense. Quelle's impact isn't so much in what he says, but how he says it—with a blunted, nonchalant tone that draws comparisons to Redman. There's no shortage of randomness on Country: "Murphy's Law", featuring Crown Nation collaborator Denmark Vessey, is carried by a lo-fi Dilla-inspired beat (think Slum Village's "Fantastic") where the two riff on whatever comes to mind: houses getting robbed, pork belly, stock trading, and hedge funds. The next song, "Drugfest TooThousandToo", is a show-of-hands survey for your favorite narcotics ("Y'all fuckin' with them shrooms?!... How 'bout the meth").
Druggy satire is Quelle's thing, but Innocent Country is equally refreshing when the rapper reflects. On "I Asked God", Quelle revisits some old demons while the music conveys sullen remoteness. Yesterday, he says, "everything was where it belonged, but something went wrong." Quelle wakes up, dusts himself off, and tries to move forward. Yet, for reasons he can't fathom, he simply cannot. "Maybe it's the drink, maybe need to put down the bottle, or maybe I'm drunk/ Maybe it's the weed, maybe stop hittin' them high notes, or maybe I'm skunked right now." On Innocent Country, Quelle asks these kinds of questions without getting clear answers. Certain revelations take time to appear. | 2015-07-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | July 14, 2015 | 6.9 | 07d17778-5b38-4395-ba1b-1458ecc21d45 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
On his solo debut, the BADBADNOTGOOD member applies jazz instrumentation and technique to compositions that approach psychedelic rock and dream pop. | On his solo debut, the BADBADNOTGOOD member applies jazz instrumentation and technique to compositions that approach psychedelic rock and dream pop. | Leland Whitty: Anyhow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leland-whitty-anyhow/ | Anyhow | Anyhow, the solo debut from BADBADNOTGOOD multi-instrumentalist Leland Whitty, is like sleight of hand or a trick of the light. It’s a record that appears simultaneously small and ambitious, jazz and yet not. One one hand it’s a brief side project, featuring members of a shapeshifting jazz group known for these types of experiments; on the other, it builds on their previous releases without sounding like anything else in their catalog. You might compare it to Snoopy’s dog house or Doctor Who’s TARDIS, both famously bigger on the inside than out, full of psychedelic twists and turns as discombobulating as the Doctor’s time-traveling machine.
After working on several film scores (including the 2019 thriller Disappearance at Clifton Hill), Whitty wanted to make a record with a narrative focus. Anyhow emerged from voice notes and short loops that Leland, brother Lowell Whitty, and a trio of BADBADNOTGOOD bandmates past (Matthew Tavares) and present (Alexander Sowinski and Chester Hansen) built into full-formed songs. Leland plays the majority of instruments on the album, including guitar, flute, Wurlitzer, clarinet, violin, viola, saxophone, and synth. He also worked in a directorial role, guiding the collaborators to shift the songs’ rhythm and energy.
At times you can hear the little acorns of this album’s mighty oaks. “Svalbard” is built around a miniature flute loop that flutters in and out of focus like a bird on a misty morning. Anyhow isn’t particularly long (only 30 minutes) or laden with attention-grabbing features; its collaborators are subservient to the musical whole. But in its depth, tone, and quality it feels subtly epic, like a short film whose details linger in the imagination.
“Silver Rain” packs more imagination and melody into three cosmic, slightly discordant minutes than many albums manage in 40, its intimate, spooky detail reminiscent of Broadcast’s miniature epics or Caribou’s excursions into dream pop on Andorra. The song is a mosaic of soprano sax and flute, which wobble and break as if viewed under water against the brightened sunshine of an acoustic guitar. Serpentine chord changes, Hansen’s inquisitive bass, and a sprightly drum track from Sowinski reveal more depth on every listen. “Silver Rain” is so condensed it could easily triple its run time without overstaying its welcome, but there is something audacious about the way the song makes its point and gets out, with almost nothing in the way of repetition.
“Glass Moon” is similarly agile, refusing to sit still as it races through a mesmerizing series of chord changes, building brushed drums, upright bass, strings and saxophone to a surprisingly furious climax. “Awake” makes space for lustrous string arrangements; daubs of soprano, alto, and tenor saxophones; and a kaleidoscopic Rhodes piano solo, which Tavares delivers with economical dexterity. The title track illustrates the record’s chimerical feel: Lowell Whitty’s drums are so brilliantly loose it feels as if the whole album might drift away on a wave of beatific strings.
Like BADBADNOTGOOD, whose cross-disciplinary approach has produced collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Obongjayar, Whitty takes a wide-angle view of genre on Anyhow. His choice of instruments like brushed drums, saxophone, and upright bass evoke jazz, as do the songs’ expansive solos. But there is little swing to the album’s rhythms; the hazy, meditative musical layers Whitty constructs feel closer to psychedelic rock—an influence BADBADNOTGOOD have drawn upon in a more grandiose way, notably on 2021’s “Signal from the Noise”—or dream pop, which they haven’t. Anyhow stands out among the band’s array of releases and production work: Rarely have BADBADNOTGOOD sounded this tender, this quietly mystical.
From the self-deprecating shrug of a title to its brief run time, the aesthetic details of Anyhow suggest a musical trifle. But the reality is a work of profound detail, fascinating musical textures, melodic twists, and stylistic ambiguity that is more diamond dust than pocket lint. | 2023-01-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Innovative Leisure | January 6, 2023 | 7.5 | 07d5d348-996f-446b-9615-bde6302d1ab0 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Four years after an unexpected comeback LP, the Los Angeles country-punk veterans return with their final album. They sound vigorous and assured, finding fresh inspiration in familiar sounds. | Four years after an unexpected comeback LP, the Los Angeles country-punk veterans return with their final album. They sound vigorous and assured, finding fresh inspiration in familiar sounds. | X: Smoke & Fiction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/x-smoke-and-fiction/ | Smoke & Fiction | Billed as the band’s final album, Smoke & Fiction is a fulfilling closing chapter for X, the pioneering band whose breakneck rhythms and turbo-charged rockabilly riffs came blazing out of Los Angeles’s nascent punk scene in the late 1970s. Forty-four years after their debut, 1980’s Los Angeles, the group sounds vigorous and assured, finding fresh inspiration in familiar sounds, emotions, and ideas.
Chaos was central to X’s appeal in the early days. The intertwined lead vocals of John Doe and Exene Cerevenka suggested that the one-time couple were embroiled in an ongoing argument; guitarist Billy Zoom added to the frenzy, though he never forgot the swing of early rock’n’roll, even when chasing after the velocity of the Ramones. Inherently empathetic to the needs of his singers, drummer D.J. Bonebrake provided a steady anchor—though he, too, could occasionally get caught up in the band’s feverish excitement.
The band thrived on tension, channeling interpersonal drama and clashes with the culture at large into a potent songbook that sustained them decades after they stopped writing new material. In 2020, following a succession of lineup changes, hiatuses, and reunions, the group unexpectedly returned with the sharp, lively ALPHABETLAND, its first album of new material from the original quartet in 35 years.
The focus and urgency of Smoke & Fiction makes ALPHABETLAND look like a dry run. Part of that stems from the palpable sense that the band can feel the clock ticking away. Frustrated that they were unable to tour ALPHABETLAND, which landed in the early days of the pandemic, and keenly aware of their advancing ages—Cervenka and Bonebrake are pushing 70, while Doe and Zoom are over that line—X chose to re-run the play one more time. Teaming again with producer Rob Schnapf, who also helmed ALPHABETLAND, X knocked out Smoke & Fiction in a few days this past January—a working band working in the method that suits them. (To underscore the impending sense of finality, they’ve dubbed their new tour the End Is Near.)
Clocking in at 28 minutes, roughly the same length as Los Angeles, Smoke & Fiction sounds as if X is drawing inspiration from its long history, purposefully recalling the kinetic rock’n’roll of the band’s early records for Slash. As Doe explained to the Los Angeles Times, “It’s not in our nature to reinvent things. We have a clear idea of who we are.” As robust as they sound, Doe’s and Cervenka’s voices show signs of wear, while the rhythms feel heavier than in the past, even when the tempos quicken. These elements lend natural grain to the music, adding depth to the tales of aging that riddle Smoke & Fiction.
Doe and Cervenka are fascinated by the passage of time, accepting the present while being cognizant that the old days don’t seem as far away as they actually are. Those yesterdays are explicitly celebrated in “Big Black X,” a joyous recollection of the band leaving decaying Hollywood for a life on the road, a journey that takes them from “A big black X on a white marquee” to “A tiny little x on a white marquee.” There’s the desire to “get in trouble again,” as the pair sings on “Sweet Til the Bitter End,” with the realization that they’re in the process of—as they put it in another song—“Winding Up the Time.” But the prospect of the end doesn’t haunt the band. Rather, they seize the chance to create a righteous noise one last time, still getting a kick from turning country two-step into punk, or adding dusty, cinematic accents to hard-bitten urban tales like "The Way It Is.”
Listening to Smoke & Fiction in the same sitting as Los Angeles or Wild Gift, the lasting impression isn’t how they’ve changed over the years, but how much of their original spark they’ve sustained. No longer frenetic or hungry, X have nevertheless maintained their intrinsic interpersonal chemistry, drawing strength from the way their voices collide with a relentless backbeat and three simple chords. It’s a simple yet powerful pleasure that gives Smoke & Fiction its kick, along with a surprisingly emotional resonance. | 2024-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | August 8, 2024 | 7.7 | 07dfe49c-0f66-4a92-9fef-5f5d34dd902b | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Four Organs and Phase Patterns come from a time when minimalist composer Steve Reich was in an obsessively scientific mode. They establish a new language, while arguing for their very right to exist. | Four Organs and Phase Patterns come from a time when minimalist composer Steve Reich was in an obsessively scientific mode. They establish a new language, while arguing for their very right to exist. | Steve Reich: Four Organs / Phase Patterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21584-four-organs-phase-patterns/ | Four Organs / Phase Patterns | Unlike some other famous works by the minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, Four Organs is not the least bit soothing. It doesn’t murmur or churn; it squawks, sort of, digging into your nerves like a hangnail: “Stop, stop, I confess,” someone reportedly wailed at the work’s premiere. A concertgoer rapped her shoe on the stage at the same performance, like Khrushchev at the 1960 United Nations General Assembly. Reich described the scene years later with evident pleasure as a “riot.”
As a result, it acquired a reputation in Steve Reich’s canon. It is unloved, the black-sheep son that will never reap the adulation of Music for 18 Musicians or Different Trains. But the thing is, Reich designed it for discomfort. The whole piece consists of four Farfisa organs, hardly peaceful instruments, leaning on one long dominant eleventh chord. This chord, the dominant eleventh, is a “home” chord with bits and notes of other places lingering in it. It is inherently uneasy, rooted to the spot with one eye over its shoulder. Even if you’ve never looked at a page of written music in your life, you can just feel the tendons pulling in its harmonic makeup. Listening to this piece in headphones, with multiple Farfisas pulling at this one chord like dogs fighting over a sock, I sometimes had to remind myself to unclench my jaw.
This record, reissued by the San Francisco-based label Superior Viaduct, was originally released in 1970 by Shandar, a small French label that made an outsized impact on American musical modernism: in its decade-long existence, the imprint managed to release works by Albert Ayler, La Monte Young, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and many others. Like any good champions of the musical avant-garde, they were eventually punished by fate: in 1979, a flood destroyed most of their original vinyl stock, effectively ending the enterprise.
But for a while, places like Shandar were safe harbor for then-misfits like Reich. The two pieces here, Four Organs and Phase Patterns, come from an era of Reich’s work when he was still in an obsessively scientific mode, boring down on a single capital-I Idea to extract from it whatever secrets might be unlocked from it. The idea here was his first big one, and the one that he remains most associated with: If you took two tones, set them apart from each other, and then moved them in and out of frequency incrementally, you could push open a gate of perception. The idea began with tape loops, but Reich soon moved it into live instrumentation, and then pushed its way into larger forces, where that original idea could be heard more as a whisper more than a shriek. Here, it is the work of four monomaniacally focused musicians: The Farfisas are played by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, joined by Arthur “Art” Bixler Murphy and Steve Chambers, while Jon Gibson supplies the steady maraca shakes.
These early works have a fierceness, a pointed urgency to them, the way that early works in new styles tend to: They are not only establishing a new language but also arguing for their very right to exist in the same breath. “Phase Patterns,” the second composition on this recording, has a similar feel: To layman ears, it might sound like the beginning of a long Ray Manzarek organ solo that caught a snag in a tree branch mid-ascent. It also might sound, to digital-age music fans, like an intentionally corrupted recording, something that had been spliced on a laptop. But that’s where the dizzy energy of these recordings come from: Behind these odd, irregular shapes are four musicians counting measures and beats as if their lives depended on it.
All of this makes the piece sound like torture, which of course it is not — it is a sensory challenge, the same way a deep massage can be. When the masseuse leans their elbow into the soft tissue under your shoulder blade, you groan but you don’t yelp; you trust that when they are done you will feel the benefits of the discomfort. So it is with your ears and mind and Four Organs. It is good to have your patience stretched, your senses tugged. Minimalism was often thought of as smooth churn, something to help regulate your breathing and help you zone out. But that’s only one function it serves; it can also tunnel deep into areas of your nervous system that other music doesn’t even think to aim for. | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Superior Viaduct | May 25, 2016 | 7.6 | 07e01d6b-2da3-462e-9bc7-38ab146c0f1f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On his third solo album in as many years, the wise and stoic singer-writer extolls the virtues of the sacred and the mundane. | On his third solo album in as many years, the wise and stoic singer-writer extolls the virtues of the sacred and the mundane. | Bill Callahan: YTI⅃AƎЯ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-callahan-ytilaer/ | YTI⅃AƎЯ | Over his last few albums, Bill Callahan has been pondering his role in the universe. Lover, father, son; marriage advocate, neighbor, cosmic tour guide. With each one he has edged closer towards some kind of essential purpose, embracing his sense of responsibility to his fellow man with a tentative joy, and radiating a euphoric humility about the idea that maybe there’s something even bigger out there. YTI⅃AƎЯ—rendered backwards like that—is Callahan’s third solo album in as many years (fourth if you count the impish covers album Blind Date Party with Bonnie “Prince” Billy), and you could interpret the 56-year-old songwriter’s newfound prolificacy as a desire to catalog every petal of his late blooming. As his family expands (he is now a father of two) and his marriage deepens, his roots grow longer and every second more precious. “I wrote this song in five and forever,” he sings on the uncommonly jaunty “Natural Information,” about boogying his infant daughter down the street, holding the moment and the lifetime that brought him here like some goofy sandal-wearing god spinning an orb in each hand.
Callahan specifically approached YTI⅃AƎЯ with the intention of rousing his listeners from our pandemic slumber and reacquainting us with life’s fundamentals: community, patience, deep feeling. It can be annoying, hearing someone extol the virtues of simplicity when times are anything but simple for most people, but Callahan—who we knew for decades as a dyspeptic, or someone doing a good impression of one—retains his irresistible convert’s zeal, one he wields to share the potency of fleeting beauty: Going “look, here” and letting us feel its weight. He watches his children hold hands on the dreamy “First Bird”—a rare moment of groundedness for his daughter, “because everybody wants to carry her around”; he lays on a rock and basks in the music of the spheres on “Planets,” which leaves him feeling as sparkling “as sudsy chrome/Renewed, ya know?/For a second season.” As with those images of buffed fenders and relieved castmates, he collapses the sacred and the mundane into his own particular kind of transcendence, one strengthened by an awareness of mortality: The gurney carrying his dying mother “screamed all down the hall/Just like a seagull screaming down the hall” on “Lily.” The shaggy, lightly noodling “Last One at the Party,” which might be about the late David Berman, makes the gnomic, yet somehow lovely promise: “If you were a house fire/I’d run back in for the cat.”
More than ever, the music reaches for transcendence too. These are Callahan’s most digressive and intuitive songs, and his finest work as a bandleader: guitarist Matt Kinsey, drummer Jim White, pianist Sarah Ann Phillips, and bassist Emmett Kelly at its core. The soothing “Planets” softly takes flight, reaching to echo that celestial resonance in softly shuddering electric guitar and a haze of cymbals; the conflict of dream-state and time’s lengthening shadow on “First Bird” prompt tender fanfares but then tense thickets of clarinet and guitar that wobble Callahan’s observations. Even the quietest songs teem with detail, which makes them feel alive. “I feel something coming on/A disease or a song,” he sings on “Everyway,” one of YTI⅃AƎЯ’s most grounded numbers and one of its most hyper-alert: a steady acoustic tumble that flickers with electric frequencies and barely perceptible cricket chirrups of guitar.
It yearns for the essential, even before Callahan explicitly articulates that aim. “And the wooden nickel we took/In the divorce of rider and course/Was by the book,” he sings later on that song, getting at one of YTI⅃AƎЯ’s main themes: the alienation of man from nature, and how they might be reunited. Callahan’s proposition is more metaphysical than straightforward prelapsarianism—think How to Do Nothing with a laid-back groove. In “Partition,” Callahan denounces “big pigs in a pile of shit and bones” who think they can buy enlightenment, and over the course of its driving, vigorous incantation, he urges us to: “Microdose!/Change your clothes!/Do what you’ve got to do …. To see the picture.” He practically vibrates as he does so, leaving you invigorated to wage your own quest for the sublime, whatever it may be. Though he doesn’t always land the pitch: “Natural Information” is a fun theme song for the virtues of the innate, but it’s so chipper—almost unsettlingly so, for anyone steeped in the Smog years—that it nearly lands in the territory of “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.”
Callahan tempers his roving third eye with a less sparing lens on figures who are closed off to that sort of possibility, perceiving it as near enough the root of all evil. “Naked Souls” offers a comic sketch of basement-dwellers and keyboard warriors repelled by humanity—wearing their “shades that say ‘F-U’”—but then drives them out in a stormy climax of raging horns and communal singing, a bulwark against isolationism. The cool “Drainface” flashes with anger, seething against the patriarchal forces that appointed the kind of god that avenged cuckolding Adam by making “birth painful”; “Bowevil,” Callahan’s take on a traditional about warding off a harvest-chomping pest, scans as a rebuke of racists and xenophobes, though its wry, rumbling burr is too reminiscent of Apocalypse’s more stirringly ambiguous “America!,” or Gold Record’s entertainingly horrified “Protest Song,” to add much more than a dash of comedy.
YTI⅃AƎЯ reaches Callahan’s aims to reawaken something primal in his listener at its most diffuse—when it’s less a broadcast and more of a wavelength. The lazily lovely “Coyotes” is a domestic scene and a whole allegory. Callahan surveys his family on the porch while roaming dogs linger in the periphery—a little threat licking the edges of his perfect scene. In his sleeping hound, he sees the softening of the wild. In his family, he recognizes the pack mentality shared between man and beast. The only reading that wins out is Callahan’s deep, palpable contentment at the lot of it: “Yes I am your loverman,” he insists happily, again and again. That line aside, the sentiments on YTI⅃AƎЯ are less direct and specific than Callahan’s most openhearted love songs, such as Dream River’s “Small Plane,” which some listeners may lament the lack of; the melodies, too, are less emotionally leading and immediately satisfying. You get the impression those songs aren’t in his wheelhouse anymore; that instead, Callahan’s purpose, in this vivid season of his career, is to divine more nuanced shades of happiness, try to act as a conduit to that kind of connection, and leave a gap for us to fill in. It suits him. | 2022-10-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 17, 2022 | 7.8 | 07e04d89-93a0-4cc7-a0c3-21b6562ea5f0 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Skiffle Players is a ragtag outfit featuring Cass McCombs alongside members of Circles Around the Sun and the faded alt-country group Beachwood Sparks. Their enjoyably low-stakes debut LP captures the liberal, halfway-stoned spirit that’s demanded of musicians past thirty living in California. | The Skiffle Players is a ragtag outfit featuring Cass McCombs alongside members of Circles Around the Sun and the faded alt-country group Beachwood Sparks. Their enjoyably low-stakes debut LP captures the liberal, halfway-stoned spirit that’s demanded of musicians past thirty living in California. | The Skiffle Players: Skifflin' | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21543-skifflin/ | Skifflin' | In September 2013, at the excellently named Mollusk Big Sur Jamboree, folk songwriter Cass McCombs played a one-off show with a ragtag outfit assembled from jam-rockers Circles Around the Sun and faded alt-country group Beachwood Sparks. Dubbed the McCombs Skiffle Players, the band playfully alloyed backwoods folk, lap-steel-infused country, and elaborate West Coast jams. The songs sprawled, the band clicked, and more shows followed, at some length. A 12-track set bootlegged last year clocked in at 100 minutes, and their debut LP, though half as long, captures the liberal, halfway-stoned spirit that’s demanded of musicians past thirty living in California.
Skifflin', an enjoyably low-stakes release, feels less like McCombs’ next frontier in tackling the Great American Folk Album than a leisurely sojourn. (Given the group's colorful press statement–"Peace to the spirits of the musicians who came before us and taught us the secret esoteric ways of skiffle!"–you sense an easy pace suits the rest of the band just fine.) McCombs has never been a predictable songwriter, but Skifflin’ frees him to explore pockets of early American innovation beyond the scope of his pared-back solo work. There’s a shamanistic dirge ("Skiffle Paperclip When Science Evolves"), a quirky jam interrupted by studio in-jokes ("Skiffle Strut"), two faithful trad-folk covers ("Omie Wise" and "Coo Coo Bird"), and a wild freight-train skiffle called "Railroadin' Some," narrated by an unhinged conductor who hollers myriad place names yet can't seem to settle on a destination.
Perhaps thanks to his peripatetic disposition, McCombs has a knack for silently invoking a character’s withheld details; he can be laconic, teasing, and morbid, sometimes simultaneously. Dreamy ballad "Always," the first immediately McCombsian song here, complicates honey-sweet lyrics with an undertone of ambiguous resignation. "All the way to your room/ Rising like a lost balloon ... All the way until the end/ You are my lover and my friend," he murmurs, before closing on a couplet that inexplicably haunts: "No one could ever say/ We didn’t take it all the way." "When the Title Was Wrote" is a perkier take on the McCombs staple, but it’s just as crafty. "Buddha is crucified/ Another misquote," he sings, a loaded riddle that is conspicuous on a record concerned with the interpretation and ownership of American tradition.
McCombs describes songwriting as a process of "uncovering" ancient song forms: Folk melodies and themes, he says, are couched in our cultural fabric, waiting to be found. You see something of that worldview in the detached way he observes his characters, as if wary of imposing his truth on theirs—a wilful outsider, even in worlds of his own creation. It makes sense, then, that on Skifflin’’s pair of folk standards—"Coo Coo Bird" (aka "The Cuckoo") and the murder ballad "Omie Wise"—he is in his element, inhabiting stories that have gone full circle, unearthed long ago from the cultural imagination and since returned to the realm of mythology. Skifflin’ is full of seemingly aimless excursions, but McCombs, far from needing direction, is just finding something larger than himself to get lost in. | 2016-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Spiritual Pajamas | February 15, 2016 | 6.8 | 07e54d9d-b7ee-424b-a3d0-46549f923623 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
After an 11-year hiatus, the first album from Jack White’s other other band floats in weightless, haughty bliss through a perpetual 2008. | After an 11-year hiatus, the first album from Jack White’s other other band floats in weightless, haughty bliss through a perpetual 2008. | The Raconteurs: Help Us Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-raconteurs-help-us-stranger/ | Help Us Stranger | The gloss of celebrity served the Raconteurs well in the late aughts—“the White Stripes are dying, long live Jack White’s new radio-rock band!” But 11 years after the band’s last album, the novelty has faded and the Michiganers—Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler alongside White himself—have found themselves floating in a weightless, haughty bliss, through a perpetual 2008. Help Us Stranger must now contend with the strength of a new indie rock field, and the mere fact of White’s affiliation is not nearly as compelling as it once was.
The Raconteurs make the strongest case for themselves through competent, workmanlike song construction. They’ve built a rock record that is sequenced perfectly; sturdy, but never staid. Raucous numbers like “Sunday Driver” recall the band’s biggest hit, 2006’s “Steady, As She Goes,” and they’re nestled alongside softer, more contemplative pieces, like the lovely, acoustic “Only Child.” The players swing skillfully from loud to quiet to loud, never neglecting either side of the scale. There are few surprises on Help Us Stranger, but that tends to be the case when you’re in the hands of capable adults.
Some light improvisation in the recording booth lends spontaneity without veering into the self-indulgence that so plagued White’s latest solo album, 2018’s Boarding House Reach. Off-the-cuff flourishes abound. Nigh-title track “Help Me Stranger” opens with a brief, bluesy rendition in miniature by the band’s bassist, Jack Lawrence, equalized to sound like Jimmie Rodgers on an old 78. “Now That You’re Gone,” too, is a welcome change: In its verses, the narrator lashes out, petty and vindictive, at a former lover—“Where you gonna go? Not that I care!”—only to slip in the chorus and lay bare his own lonely stupor: “What will I do now that you’re gone?” Without sacrificing sonic or thematic coherence, the Raconteurs vary their approach enough that each individual track sparkles.
But even the album’s brightest moments are colored by a kind of dull, grey disdain. Attempts to conjure bluesy commiseration and evoke alienation are uniformly bloodless. “Don’t Bother Me” is a poor choice for a rock refrain; the song’s rage is so impotent it may as well have been titled “Get Off My Lawn.” Other songs are undercut by static simplicity: “Some days, I just feel like crying/Some days, I don’t feel like trying.” Clunky as these lyrics are on the page, they’re diminished even further by the sheer lack of conviction in White and Benson’s vocal delivery. Their tone throughout is one of boredom, even irritation—with themselves, with anyone who might be listening, with the mundanities of making music.
The songs of Help Us Stranger often succeed only because they succeeded before, decades ago, as better songs. Tapping your foot to the giddy “Live A Lie” is fun until you recognize, in a too-familiar riff, a limp effort to conjure the anarchic, animal spirit of “Fell in Love With a Girl.” The piano lines and orotund group harmonies of “Shine the Light on Me” land like painted-by-numbers Sgt. Pepper’s, less tribute than hacky pageantry. The Raconteurs have never been coy about pastiche, but on this record, their motivation for mining the past feels firmly rooted in fear of the unfamiliar. White’s rapping on Boarding House Reach offered, at least, the perverse thrill of real transgression. Here, he never takes any risk so great that failure presents a real possibility. The band’s few efforts to innovate on their own catalogue are peccadilloes in the grand scheme: a new amp here, a new pedal setting there. The result is an air of timidity that dampens the pleasures this album does offer.
Other indie rock groups—supergroups, like boygenius even—are presently making music that is orders of magnitude greater than this record, often with vastly less experience, vastly fewer resources, and vastly higher barriers to entry. Recall the indelible moment in “Me & My Dog,” where Phoebe Bridgers’ voice becomes a scooped-out husk of itself, and she murmurs, ashamed, “I cried at your show with the teenagers.” Even in her own song, she is at somebody else’s show, her story dissolving into a crowd of other stories. The Raconteurs, by contrast, would never lower themselves to the level of their audience. They understand their presence on the stage as a given, not something to be earned anew. They have always stood in the spotlight. They assume that they always will.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | June 26, 2019 | 6.4 | 07ec5d7d-0219-4325-ae00-3394a321d8e7 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
null | Last week I was buying some detergent at a local laundromat in rural Nebraska. This is what was occupying my mind: "See, I don't give a fuck, that's the problem/ I see a motherfuckin' cop, I don't dodge him." Now, based on my limited experience with law enforcement, I've found most cops to be cordial, beneficent protectors of the law. Yet, at that moment, I didn't just want to fuck tha police, both physically and figuratively; I wanted them lynched, drenched in gasoline, and burnt alive. It's one thing to get a catchy couplet stuck in teenagers' heads; it's another | N.W.A.: Straight Outta Compton / Efil4zaggin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11791-straight-outta-compton-efil4zaggin/ | Straight Outta Compton / Efil4zaggin | Last week I was buying some detergent at a local laundromat in rural Nebraska. This is what was occupying my mind: "See, I don't give a fuck, that's the problem/ I see a motherfuckin' cop, I don't dodge him." Now, based on my limited experience with law enforcement, I've found most cops to be cordial, beneficent protectors of the law. Yet, at that moment, I didn't just want to fuck tha police, both physically and figuratively; I wanted them lynched, drenched in gasoline, and burnt alive. It's one thing to get a catchy couplet stuck in teenagers' heads; it's another to convert half the nation into murderous psychopaths hell-bent on riot and rape. N.W.A. accomplished the latter.
Straight Outta Compton was not the first gangsta-rap album, nor was it the first album to use such disconcerting and scabrous blasts of sound, but the music was revolutionary for two reasons. First, Dre and Yella took the vitriolic, cacophonous rampage of Public Enemy and discarded all the motivation and history behind the anger; second, they sampled laid-back jazz, psychoastral-lovetron p-funk, sweetly romantic soul, naïve doo-wop, Martha Reeves, Charles Wright and Marvin Gaye, and proceeded to lay it under the most gruesome narratives imaginable, dead ho's and cop killers. This is tantamount to using a "Happy B-Day, Grandma" Hallmark card to inform a family you just slaughtered their grandmother. It's cruel, duplicitous, perverse, horrifying, hilarious.
In some ways, Straight Outta Compton is the archetypal rap album, the one you would send into space if you wanted to ignite a stellar holocaust. It unites the paranoia of It Takes a Nation of Millions with the chill of The Chronic, while still retaining an old-school, Run-DMC-style playfulness. The opening squall of "Straight Outta Compton", "Fuck tha Police", and "Gangsta Gangsta" is still as confrontational and decimating as it was at the dawn of the 1990s. The bass throttles, the funk combusts, and the sirens deafen as Eazy-E dispenses with tired romantic clichés: "So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her!/ You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain't no sucker!" And this is the least misogynistic of N.W.A.'s albums.
In the remaining ten tracks, the group depicts a paranoid, conspiratorial wasteland where cops "think every nigga is sellin' narcotics," where they often are selling narcotics to buy gats to kill cops, where bitches have two functions in life-- to suck dick and get shot when they stop-- and where there are two only professions: bein' a punk and shootin' punks. The mind itself is a ghetto, and the ghetto is universal. A lot of people, for whatever reason, take offense to such ideas. William S. Burroughs writes the same thing and gets hailed as the greatest writer of the twentieth century. There is no hope, no messages, no politics, rarely an explicit suggestion of irony. The only respite is "Express Yourself", the sweetest anti-drug song to ever take place in a correctional facility. Musically, the rhythm pummels and the scratches are strong but sparse; lyrically, Dre says it best: "It gets funky when you got a subject and a predicate." For all the genius, there are some tracks that simply can't compare to the classics. "If It Ain't Ruff", "8 Ball", and "Dopeman" are triumphant rap songs, but they consist of minimalist beats and the silly battle raps that N.W.A. helped eliminate.
Efil4Zaggin, meanwhile, is about as close as you can come to a death metal/hip-hop hybrid. People will get hurt here. The group, sans-Cube, is simply trying to further their status as icons of shock-rap. Unlike someone like Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson, though, N.W.A. sound like they've actually gone insane: The song titles alone ("To Kill a Hooker", "One Less Bitch", "Find 'Em, Fuck 'Em and Flee") are enough to send some people into seizures. I have no idea what Eazy-E was doing between albums, but it clearly involved a lot of sadomasochism and PCP-- his lyrics are revoltingly unlistenable: "Yo, I tied her to the bed/ I had to let my niggaz fuck her first/ Loaded up the 44, yo/ Then I straight smoked the ho/ 'Cause I'm a real nigga." The main musical motif is the Psycho theme.
The songs here sound like the Bomb Squad in the graveyard Superfly got buried in. "Approach to Danger" is essentially rapping over a Halloween FX record. It's complexly debauched, fantastically jagged terror-hop that at its best challenges anything on Fear of a Black Planet and at its worst challenges anything off Dre's 2001. It's also much funnier than Straight Outta Compton. Eazy-E's Ten Commandments on "Appetite for Destruction" set the bar so high on his first command that he can barely think of enough vices to finish it. In the skit "Protest", an N.W.A. concert turns into a scene from Platoon. Eazy also sings on two tracks, one of which ("Automobile") may as well be titled "With a Little Help from Your Pussy". Ten seconds can barely pass before someone is murdered or raped. It's the sound of an expletive anger at its breaking point.
The reissues sound pretty tight, but high-quality audio was never really the point. The supplementary tracks are a more interesting point of discussion. Straight Outta Compton adds extended mixes of "Express Yourself" and "Straight Outta Compton". The former may be a better song, but only because it uses more of the Wright sample, whereas the latter regrettably decides to disturb the propulsion of the original by inserting spoken dialogue. The B-side, "A Bitch Iz a Bitch", however, is one of Cube's finest moments, beginning as a specification of what he means when he curses, and ending with a tirade against a "contact-wearin' bitch." Efil4Zaggin just adds the 100 Miles and Runnin' EP, which is fairly superfluous. The title track, though, is easily one of the best rap songs of all time-- N.W.A. if commissioned to write a James Bond theme.
Listening to these discs again just remind me how ludicrous the whole Eminem controversy was. More than a decade ago, N.W.A. was instructing suburbia to smash bitches' brains in with a cock in one hand and a glock in the other. In comparison, Eminem's harshest lyric ends up sounding like, "I may slightly disagree with certain tenets of popular ideologies." When Eminem rapes and kills his mom, it's because of a long-standing psychological disorder that relies on a complicated relationship with his family. When Eazy-E does it, it's because nothing good was on TV that night. These are the most nihilistic, apolitical recordings since the Nixon tapes. | 2003-10-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-10-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | null | October 2, 2003 | 9.7 | 07f0ff2a-6fe6-4cff-a0c2-b8e78c172e0e | Ray Suzuki | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ray-suzuki/ | null |
The lines between post-hardcore, indie rock, and emo blurred on the two mid-’90s full-lengths from the Van Pelt, which are newly reissued. | The lines between post-hardcore, indie rock, and emo blurred on the two mid-’90s full-lengths from the Van Pelt, which are newly reissued. | The Van Pelt: Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves / Sultans of Sentiment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23230-stealing-from-our-favorite-thieves-sultans-of-sentiment/ | Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves / Sultans of Sentiment | Dig deep enough through the archeological record of the 1990s underground and the lines between post-hardcore, indie rock, and emo begin to blur. Looking back on the work left behind by the Van Pelt, it’s as if those styles were less offshoots branching out in different directions than tributaries flowing into a larger pool. Originally active for just four years, the Van Pelt released two full-lengths before breaking up in 1997. Both releases heavily reflect their time and place. Some elements sound dated, even clichéd, to our modern ears after decades of overuse: the undistorted guitars, the somber tone and cerebral lyrics, the trebly production that progresses to Albini-like room ambience from one album to the next.
If you’re allergic to these sounds, the Van Pelt aren’t the best vehicle for overcoming your prejudices. Dozens upon dozens of bands have yielded songs like the vaguely punkish, uptempo pogo-jangle of “You Are the Glue,” for example, off the band’s 1996 debut Stealing from Our Favorite Thieves. In several respects, the Van Pelt were stereotypical of their era, but if you look past the cosmetic features, Thieves and its ’97 follow-up Sultans of Sentiment provide a zoomed-in perspective on a group of overlapping movements coming to a head more or less at once.
Period aficionados will rejoice over the historical value here: out-of-print titles by an obscure band with members who would go on to better-known acts like Blonde Redhead (bassist Toko Yasuda) and Jets to Brazil (guitarist Brian Maryansky). But nothing on either album positions the Van Pelt as a “missing link” within a greater narrative arc. Instead, what comes across in hindsight is just how much rock’s fringe had encroached on the mainstream and vice-versa. In an ironic twist, the Van Pelt were offered deals by several major labels but only one indie, Gern Blandsten. Averse to being groomed into “the next Nirvana,” the band remained independent.
It’s hard to say whether the Van Pelt would have broken had they chosen the opposite path, but it’s easy to picture the production on Thieves beefed-up and window-dressed. Easily the more derivative of the Van Pelt’s two albums, Thieves nevertheless crackles with personality and energy, not to mention hooks. In a parallel reality, at least tens of thousands of people are looking back on their teenage years getting misty-eyed at the way “It’s a Suffering” soundtracked their summers. The song’s chorus is so big and full of a sense of promise that it rivals anything Foo Fighters ever struck gold with.
On the other hand, frontman/guitarist Chris Leo keeps one foot defiantly planted in art rock and post-punk, too. Leo—brother of Ted Leo, who supplies backing vocals and percussion—spikes much of Thieves with somewhat non-melodic verses that border on the spoken-word style of the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie and the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow. Much of the lyric sheet reads as prose. This is unsurprising given that Leo would go on to publish novels, starting with 2004’s White Pigeons. But he had already reeled-in his wordplay in favor of economy and space by Sultans of Sentiment.
Sultans doesn’t quite flow with the same continuity as its predecessor, but it’s a major step forward in terms of production and vision. In some respects, the album sounds as anchored to its time period as Thieves does—Leo and Maryansky weave-together arpeggios and chords as so many of their contemporaries did—but the improved fidelity exposes the unique fingerprints in Leo’s songwriting. Sultans was written and recorded during a personal low point for him, and whatever plagued him at the time remains buried under heaps of metaphor. Still, the album is completely devoid of the youthful bluster from just a year earlier. Somber and reserved, Sultans is, in a manner of speaking, heavier.
When the Van Pelt wander off the beaten path, such as on the folky violin-laced “Don’t Make Me Walk My Own Log,” they sound like a band on the hunt for their own voice. You can debate whether they ever found it, but the Van Pelt might have been more ahead of the curve than anyone could have rightfully guessed in 1997. Watching live clips of Sultans-era material from a brief 2014 reunion, Leo and company recreate the vibe of the original recordings with an accuracy that few bands ever nail after that much time has passed. The songs sound even heavier with age, and surprisingly in-tune with current sounds. Perhaps they contained an adult wisdom that the Van Pelt were unable to convey back then. Whatever the case, they were onto something. | 2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 15, 2017 | 7.4 | 07f4aba1-eefc-4dcf-810a-2f99245f1e88 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The young, Manchester-based Portuguese producer offers a radical take on batida that draws on the scrappy aggression of UK bass and experimental electro-R&B. | The young, Manchester-based Portuguese producer offers a radical take on batida that draws on the scrappy aggression of UK bass and experimental electro-R&B. | P. Adrix: Álbum Desconhecido | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/p-adrix-album-desconhecido/ | Álbum Desconhecido | For tight-knit crews like Príncipe Discos, proximity is everything. Rooted on the outskirts of Lisbon, the niche label of DJs and producers has invigorated the city’s underground dance-music scene by drawing international attention to batida, the percussive, polyrhythmic sound popularized by immigrants from war-torn Angola and other former Portuguese colonies. Príncipe has expanded cautiously, in an effort to protect the community sound from exploitation and appropriation. So what happens when an artist relocates and the collective is forced to relax its grip? In the case of P. Adrix, a young producer who moved from Lisbon to Manchester, England, in 2015, the answer is Álbum Desconhecido, a riveting debut with a dual-citizen sensibility. Selectively fusing his native batida with elements of jungle, grime, and drum ‘n’ bass, he deftly links two hotbeds of electronic music and creates something entirely new.
Conceived in Lisbon’s vast slums and suburbs, batida is a hybrid of traditional African rhythms—Angolan kuduro, kizomba, and zouk, among others—and contemporary electronic dance music. It gained traction in 2012 as Príncipe waded into block parties boasting minimal equipment and big beats. The sound is marked by frantic synths and fierce, choppy drum patterns, its turbulence and dizzying repetition reflecting Lisbon’s tumultuous political climate. As Príncipe co-founder Pedro Gomes told Pitchfork in 2014, “We were looking for contemporary manifestations and evolutions of Angolan and Verdean music that reacted to being from there and now living here.”
But just as emigration from Luanda to Lisbon turned kuduro into batida, so the sound has continued to evolve as it has been carried out of Portugal and into new countries. Nowhere is this happening as radically or artfully as on Desconhecido, which rounds up all of the original ingredients and bakes them in enthralling new forms. It’s reassuring to see Príncipe broadening its horizons; the label has recently supported more experimental projects, like DJ Nigga Fox’s longform acid 12-inch and the unexpected melodies DJ Lycox unveiled in a mix for the Astral Plane. The traditional rhythms underpinning batida still inform these releases, but they no longer exclusively define them. The same can be said for Desconhecido. Moving at a breakneck pace, Adrix takes listeners on a rollercoaster of twitchy techno, whinnying flutes, furious breakbeats, and sensual soul.
It’s astonishing how many energies and emotions he crams into 22 minutes: angst, paranoia, thrill, fury, depression, panic, euphoria. Although it’s not unusual for batida producers to work in shorter cuts, Adrix’s feel especially tightly edited. While most of DJ Marfox’s tracks hover around four minutes long, here only “Viva La Raça” eclipses the three-minute mark. More often than not, he gets the timing just right: He cuts the howling “Bola de Cristal” before it loses any intensity and packs “Ovni” with bursts of chaotic flutes that fizzle on top of each other like a fireworks finale. Slowed-down mind-benders like “Sonhos” and “Estação de Queluz” take you by surprise, filling the room with the raw sensuality of minimalist electro-R&B. But the shining moment is “Zelda Shyt,” which opens under a black cloud of snaking, sinister synths and only gets darker from there, ascending into a vortex of chants, syncopated drums, and cymbals poured over an oscillating howl. When the storm clears and lifts into a quiet click-click-click, it’s always too soon. | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | March 7, 2018 | 7.4 | 07fa9ef0-c1e5-4f84-a149-4959ccb59815 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
A mysterious project from an unknown source sends listeners on an exhilarating goose chase through ambient techno and ethereal jungle. | A mysterious project from an unknown source sends listeners on an exhilarating goose chase through ambient techno and ethereal jungle. | тпсб: Sekundenschlaf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tpsb-sekundenschlaf/ | Sekundenschlaf | It was a good shtick while it lasted. The music, it was claimed, had been discovered on a refurbished hard drive purchased off Russian eBay—hence titles like Hard Drive Tracks 1, and hence, presumably, the fuzzy, lo-fi sheen and garbled timekeeping, qualities suggestive of corrupted data. What was this stuff? Were these vintage rave bangers crafted by some bedroom producer back during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reign? Were they newly created, retro-leaning tracks using orphaned audio files? Or was the whole thing a hoax, the Russian text merely a red herring?
With тпсб’s latest release, on the London-based imprint Blackest Ever Black, the story has shifted. Now the music is said merely to be of “unclear authorship,” originating “somewhere west of Lake Lagoda, near the Russia-Finland border.” The artist, or artists, must have realized that the original tale sounded, frankly, too good to be true, because when I emailed them to find out more, they readily copped to the subterfuge: The tracks weren’t really recovered from a secondhand hard drive at all. But a pair of emails, one from an intermediary named Gregor and another from one Fedor Servolenko, who claims to be the artist behind the music, left me no less confused. Their accounts suggested stories nested within other stories, unreliable narrators ceding the stage to other, even sketchier narrators, like the introduction to a novel by Melville or Conrad. The alias тпсб is apparently an abbreviation for “темное прошлое светлое будущее,” or “Dark Past Bright Future”—a name that Servolenko, via Gregor, says he likes for its ambiguity. That’s appropriate: Having tracked down an old interview with Servolenko, I’m still not convinced that he’s not an invented character.
Fortunately, wherever it’s from, this stuff needs no elaborate backstory. Its pleasures are readily apparent in every dubbed-out synth chord and chopped-up breakbeat. Just seven tracks and 32 minutes long, Sekundenschlaf is a full-body immersion in ambient techno and ethereal jungle that is by turns meditative, ominous, and exhilarating. Murky drones float like oil slicks atop layer upon layer of sampled and programmed drums; new-age keys veil indistinct scraps of dialogue. It’s easy to see how the artist came up with the found-sound conceit, because nothing here feels like it has been meticulously arranged. Layered phrases fall where they may, and short loops repeat with the nagging insistence of a stuck MPC pad. Just as Burial is said to compose his music using a rudimentary audio-editing program, these drifting scraps of synths, drums, and field recordings don’t sound like they required much CPU power to put together. An aleatory spirit governs the music. The various parts suggest less the precisely gridded lines of Ableton or Logic than they do scraps of analog tape that have been hung from a clothesline in the breeze.
As a fuzzy snapshot of vintage rave made all the more thrilling for the gaps in its memory, Sekundenschlaf shares a lineage with Burial’s Untrue and Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.” The title is taken from a German word for “nodding off” that’s frequently used to describe falling asleep at the wheel, and the music conveys that sense of hurtling through the darkness at terrific speed. But unlike many stabs at rave revivalism, the mini-album doesn’t restrict itself to a small set of hoary tropes, and it benefits from the wider perspective. The opening track, “Catching Rare Birds,” begins with looped congas, choral pads, and tentative electric bass tones before an imposing acid squelch seizes control; it has as much in common with 4AD as it does 4 Hero. The similarly hybrid “Walking Distances” is a kind of gothic dancehall, and even the B side’s more uniformly white-knuckled tracks sound like approximations of jungle by someone who had read extensively about the genre without ever having heard a lick of the real thing.
In the closing “Are You Still Hurt,” the record’s heart-in-mouth climax, tight loops of wordless vocals and short bursts of breath weave a wheezy web above craggy breaks and savage drum programming. The whole thing is suspended between furious energy and weightless rumination. Just like the moments of dangerous fatigue referenced in the title, the music acts out a kind of surrender, where you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where you’re going. It’s a portrait of motion, plain and simple, of free falling through empty space, and no mystery—and, conversely, no ultimate reveal, should it come to that—can rob this music of its immediacy. | 2018-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Blackest Ever Black | January 17, 2018 | 7.8 | 080069dc-c5fb-4d0c-983c-de840087e7f9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
A template for both emo and modern rock, Sunny Day's original lineup has its two records reissued, with bonus cuts, and they deserve reassessment. | A template for both emo and modern rock, Sunny Day's original lineup has its two records reissued, with bonus cuts, and they deserve reassessment. | Sunny Day Real Estate: Diary / LP2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13411-diary-lp2/ | Diary / LP2 | Whether it's lifelong softies like Jimmy Eat World, strident scream machines such as Thursday, or over-their-heads windbags in the vein of Angels & Airwaves, critspeak about bands with roots in emo usually dictates the following career path: Hang with Fat Mike all you want, call us when you're ready to sound like U2. It's an easy narrative to set up, maybe because it requires fewer keystrokes than the more correct comparison: Sunny Day Real Estate.
It's got nothing to do with churches of reverb or Christianity, though those would come later for SDRE. Taking the longview, SDRE seem even less of their time than they were in the mid-90s, positioned between the more stone-faced acolytes of Fugazi and the branches of Jade Tree that went mathletic or simply stuffed as many proper nouns as possible into radio-intended pop-punk (see: songs called "Anne Arbour"). SDRE saw beyond the constraints of "scene" and envisioned a point where the meek would inherit the arena--- independently minded, sensitive boys doling out anthems of introspection to thousands of fist-raising, navel-gaving kids. With a hotly anticipated fall tour coming, Sub Pop has reissued the original lineup's only two records, which reaffirm what those swiftly sold-out shows already made pretty clear: a lot of people love these guys, and rightfully so.
What immediately strikes you about Diary is it doesn't sound intended to be a gamechanger-- even if it's no surprise that one of emo's most enduring documents is called Diary of all things. But even if it doesn't break new ground musically, it signaled a new way to talk about the passion. The quicksilver time-changes and jangly-but-not-collegiate guitar chords show nods to Dischord, but it's the terse yet tender delivery of the lyrics from Jeremy Enigk that ultimately drew people in. "The waiting could crush my heart/ The tide breaks a wave of fear," okay, fine-- this kind of stuff inspired a whole lot of heartfelt word salad from far less talented sadsacks, but "Seven" still is one of those great album-starters, written like they had to win you over in five minutes or it would be their last song.
Immediately after, the insistently ringing two-note riff that opens "In Circles" portents something every bit as excitable, but to this day, I still find myself genuinely surprised as it folds into a half-time dirge. It's quite possibly the definitive SDRE song, since it's here where you hear their signature trick: Enigk is often content to softly nudge verse melodies, but the choruses are something else entirely. If the harmonies were prettier, it could be straight-up pop; if they were yelled, it might be punk. Here, it simply hits a sweet spot for people who were into shows for the community, but also to meet potential dates. The rangy, disarmingly ramshackle "Song About an Angel" nearly equals it during its six-minute run.
If Diary has a reputation of being front-loaded, it can't be in the pejorative sense: bands can and have spent entire careers ripping those three songs off over and over again. For a while, I thought Diary happened to be an album whose importance exceeded its quality-- thanks to some unfortunately (or unavoidably) dated production, if nothing else. That's been remedied to good extent on this remaster-- "The Blankets Were the Stairs" no longer sounds as grounded by its granular grunge tones, and the drums sound less bogged in Green River sludge. Elsewhere, classic rock guitar heroics are more prevalent than Pac NW grunge: certainly in the memorable riffs from "47" and "Round", and "Shadows" played the shadow-and-light game better than any of their peers who were just dying to be compared to Led Zeppelin.
Despite Diary's success, SDRE had a pretty uncomfortably defined relationship with their audience as well as themselves, so the follow-up proved to be a knottier affair, and not just because it's widely known as either Sunny Day Real Estate, LP2, or The Pink Album. The songs themselves didn't get any shorter or less intense, but they feel significantly less edified. When the charmingly animated video for "Seven" ran on "120 Minutes", it never felt too out of place regardless of whether it led into Jawbox or Pearl Jam, but LP2 tended to veer more towards the obscure. It certainly didn't help that the packaging itself contained no artwork other than its entirely pink cover or lyric sheet. And compared to Diary's untouchable opening triad, that of LP2 was bound to pale, and you feel like SDRE is playing it overly self-aware-- "Friday", "Theo B", and "Red Elephant" each would've been the shortest track on Diary, save for its near-interlude "Phuerton Skeurto". "Friday" starts LP2 with the kind of risky, slippery melody that all but screams "difficult follow-up." The high-wired guitars of "8" introduce damn near atonality, the kind of chords an amateur bangs out on a piano, but soon they become the backbone of the record's most muscular number.
It's easy to project the idea that this was a band dissolving personally and musically from the inside-out if you know the history, but the music itself is every bit as ghostly on its own-- even beyond the threadbare arrangements, Enigk has said that many lyrics were left unfinished or sung as gibberish. LP2 certainly has more than its share of moments, but in the context of SDRE's artistic arc, a time when they wanted to be Shudder To Think instead of arena-fillers can feel like a bridge to nowhere.
And that was pretty much it for the classic lineup of SDRE-- the rhythm section would play on Foo Fighters' The Colour and the Shape, a record whose brickwalled dynamics and gleaming-edge guitar arguably did just as much to determine the actual sound of modern radio rock as Sunny Day or even producer Gil Norton's work with the Pixies. Meanwhile, Enigk would put more emphasis on mysticism than mystery for 1998's amber, glowing How It Feels to Be Something On and 2000's divisive swan song (to this point) The Rising Tide. Some saw Tide as a natural culmination of Enigk's sonic ambitions and lyrical specificity, while others took Return of the Frog Queen and "Rain Song" in tandem and wondered when the fuck this guy turned into Rick Wakeman. Either way, it certainly deserved better than to be tethered to Time Bomb Records, which would shortly cease to exist after the release of The Rising Tide.
Sure, the B-sides will generate some interest amongst die-hards, but as is the case with the recent Radiohead reissues, the sort of fans that would buy a Sunny Day Real Estate album twice probably are more than familiar with, say, "The Crow". But really, it might just be in the vein of so many rereleases that are meant as a reminder or a call for rediscovery-- in some circles, SDRE is Pavement, or MBV or any of the other 1990s legends you might care to mention, but a huge difference of perception is that most of their acolytes, despite making great records, are just too damn earnest to be fashionable. Or maybe it's just that Sunny Day Real Estate's influence is more conceptual than musical, and if that's the case, it's been so fully adapted into modern rock (emo or not) that it's not so much innovative as it is timeless. | 2009-09-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 3, 2009 | 8.7 | 08025616-5586-479e-bb6f-f6cb17519fd8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On Real Estate's rich, sad third album, Atlas, the once-ideal pool party band has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone's gone, the sky's threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we've all gotta work tomorrow. The result is at once their most forlorn record and their most beautiful. | On Real Estate's rich, sad third album, Atlas, the once-ideal pool party band has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone's gone, the sky's threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we've all gotta work tomorrow. The result is at once their most forlorn record and their most beautiful. | Real Estate: Atlas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19060-real-estate-atlas/ | Atlas | Before their rich, sad new album Atlas, it would have been difficult to imagine the Real Estate song you'd turn to in a time of crisis. “Suburban Beverage”? “Let’s Rock the Beach?” The New Jersey band's first two albums were simply not places to which you brought problems—they were escapist havens, Tiki-torch grottos leading you away from your worries and gently towards the pool raft. The lyrics, meanwhile, were mantras best understood with a beer koozie gripped in one hand: What you want is just beyond your reach; keep on trying. Whoah, it's real. Budweiser, Sprite.
On Atlas, their basic sound hasn't changed—frontman Martin Courtney's clean-strummed open chords, Matt Mondanile's bright leads, and a light-stepping rhythm section all squish together comfortably like college housemates sprawled on a sectional sofa—but the mood has. "I'm just trying to make some sense of this before I lose another year," shrugs Courtney on "The Bend”. On "Crime", he sings "Toss and turn all night, don't know how to make this right/ Crippling anxiety." The once-ideal pool party band, in other words, has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone's gone, the sky's threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we've all gotta work tomorrow.
The result is at once their most forlorn album and their most beautiful. Producer and mixer Tom Schick dissolves the noncommittal haze of reverb that made it sound like you were hearing Days through a fisheye lens, and the crispness that emerges on Atlas is gorgeous. Courtney’s tenor is soft and even, and the room tone is bruised-ripe like an October sunset. In this soft light, the band sounds like the platonic ideal of themselves, and it’s difficult not to wish all their albums had been recorded this way.
The clarity of Atlas underlines what an uncommonly graceful unit they are. Real Estate essentially has two lead vocalists—Courtney’s tenor on the one hand, and Mondanile’s pearly guitar melodies on the other. The two voices enjoy a near-telepathic relationship, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Courtney’s singing without Mondanile’s guitar twirling around it, and vice versa. As the tabbed tutorial they posted for “Crime” underlines, nothing anyone is playing would tax a first-year guitar student. But their two voices, working modestly and in perfect sync, key into a mysterious and powerful emotional calculus. When the bell-clear leads rise out of on "The Bend" and"Navigator", they feel like spontaneously welling tears.
This simplicity and eloquence is the key to Atlas’ surprisingly profound ache. Courtney’s words tend to mention the same things over and over—the sky, the horizon, the sidewalk, the houses on his block—but he’s not repeating himself. He’s shaping the contours of a world, one that's built on a sense of cosmic gratitude matched by an equal and opposite sense of cosmic loss. “I don’t need the horizon/ To tell me where the sky ends/ And it’s a subtle landscape/ Where I come from,” he sings on “Had to Hear”. “Just over the horizon/ That’s where I always think you’ll be/ It’s always so surprising/ To find you right there next to me,” he sings tenderly on “Horizon”. The bittersweet disorientation of these two competing thoughts—I’ve lost more than I’ll ever know, I have more than I ever imagined—mark out a very particular phase of life, and it’s one Courtney is currently in the throes of: He’s about to have his first child.
This is a life moment when you engage in a little less dreamy reverie about who you might be, and begin assessing, with some alarm, who you have already become. If you’re lucky, like Courtney, you are roughly pleased with what you find, even as you squint bewildered into the recent past to mark the notch where the transition happened. “I remember when/ This all felt like pretend/ And I still can’t believe,” he marvels on “Crime”. “I’m staring at the hands on the clock/ I’m still waiting for them to stop” he sings on “Navigator”, the album’s final song and one of many bemused meditations on the passing of time. Real Estate have weathered some jam-band comparisons, and Alex Bleeker is an avowed fan of the Grateful Dead, so it feels like a permissible stretch to note that the shadow of a very particular Dead song—the wry, valedictory “Touch of Grey”—seems to hover over Atlas. Like that song, Atlas assesses the current moment, and everything leading up to it, with a puzzled head scratch and shit-eating grin.
Real Estate are a deeply suburban band, and the shade of long tree-lined streets, the lonely symmetry of the houses, rise up continually out of their music. If it has been too easy to underestimate Real Estate in the past, it might be in part because of this: Suburbs are not often stages, in the popular imagination, for great existential drama. They are places of reverie, of absence, into which the drama of the real-world intrudes. But Atlas gazes calmly and wisely into the face of some troubling questions: Mortality, the passing of time, the problem of loneliness. With it, Real Estate have made more than just their third excellent record in a row, more than just their best-ever record. They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves. | 2014-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | March 3, 2014 | 8.8 | 08026e49-881e-45ea-ae5e-4abd241212b3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Twelve years since D'Angelo released his dirt-encrusted soul opus in the first month of the new millennium, we have yet to see a follow-up. Heard now on this 2xLP reissue, Voodoo still stands as a paranoid, mysterious, and challenging statement that somehow managed to scale the industry. | Twelve years since D'Angelo released his dirt-encrusted soul opus in the first month of the new millennium, we have yet to see a follow-up. Heard now on this 2xLP reissue, Voodoo still stands as a paranoid, mysterious, and challenging statement that somehow managed to scale the industry. | D’Angelo: Voodoo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17407-voodoo/ | Voodoo | It's impossible to talk about Voodoo without talking about what's happened since Voodoo. Or, more accurately, what hasn't happened since Voodoo. It's been 12 years since D'Angelo released his dirt-encrusted soul opus in the first month of the new millennium, and we have yet to see a follow-up. During those dozen calendar runs, the Virginia-bred singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer has learned to play guitar and spent countless hours in various studios, trying to find his way to the next sound. This time last year, unofficial D'Angelo status updater and kindred spirit/collaborator ?uestlove told me the new album is "pretty much 97% done." And this year, D played a number of live shows, his first in a decade. That's the upside.
He's also been arrested-- for disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, carrying a concealed weapon, and driving under the influence in 2005, and then for offering an undercover NYPD officer $40 for a blowjob in 2010. There were several attempts at rehab. And he's almost died at least once, when he drunkenly crashed through a fence and flipped his Hummer alongside Virginia's Route 711 seven years ago. In 2010, when I asked ?uestlove how his friend stacks up against the other luminaries he's worked with-- people like Jay-Z and Al Green-- he summed up the D'Angelo dilemma well: "I consider him a genius beyond words. At the same time, I say to myself, 'How can I scream someone's genius if they hardly have any work to show for it?' Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it's lasted 10 years."
At this point, it's easy to forget that Voodoo itself was, for quite awhile, one of those forever-delayed studio myths, too. "I've been gone so long, just wanna sing my song," D'Angelo sings on "The Line", a self-directed pep talk and explanation of his slug-like pace, "I know you been hearing a lot of things about me." Voodoo arrived five years behind D's home-recorded bap&B debut, Brown Sugar, and blew through its fair share of release dates before touching down on January 25, 2000. Its arrival came during the twilight of the mega-CD era-- six months after Napster's birth, two years before the iPod-- but its four-year gestation occurred during the halcyon 90s, a time when artists were afforded the chance to tinker for years on end while blazing through bottomless studio budgets. The record topped the Billboard albums chart during its first two weeks out, and looking at 2000's other #1s-- including N'Sync's record-breaking No Strings Attached, Eminem's angsty Marshall Mathers LP, and, uh, Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water-- Voodoo stands tall with October's Kid A as a paranoid, mysterious, and challenging artistic statement that somehow managed to scale the industry.
Riding high off of 1998's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Maxwell's first two LPs, and Erykah Badu's 1997 album Baduizm, the so-called neo-soul movement, which favored earthy 70s production rather than 90s slickness, was reaching an apex in 2000. And Voodoo was positioned as a more down-to-earth alternative to the infinite excess of late-90s hip-hop and R&B. "[Contemporary R&B]'s a joke," scoffed D'Angelo at the time. "It's sad-- the people making this shit have turned black music into a club thing." (For his sake, here's hoping D hasn't flipped on the radio in the last five years.)
While this viewpoint may seem somewhat myopic in our poptimist era, to understand D'Angelo is to understand who he looked to for musical and spiritual guidance: Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Otis Redding, Prince-- supremely gifted artists known for expertly plying their craft. His devotion isn't merely cosmetic or fashionable, though-- by all accounts he's a hardcore music nerd who "knows every Prince concert's playlist," according to recent GQ profiler Amy Wallace. His love of musical lore is partly why he chose to make Voodoo in Electric Lady Studios, the downtown Manhattan recording space Hendrix built in 1969. Listening to the album, his influences are apparent, but also ingrained in a way that's equal parts reverent and uncanny. Rather than just listening to old Funkadelic or Stevie albums for inspiration, Voodoo was literally born from them; a typical night at Electric Lady would have D, ?uestlove, bassist Pino Palladino, and maybe one or two of their prodigious buddies playing an entire classic soul album through, and then seeing where those jams led them. This went on for years. The result is ineffably natural, the type of live-in-studio sound that requires copious god-given talent-- D'Angelo started playing piano at age 4-- and constant woodshedding to really pull off. There are no shortcuts.
D'Angelo's old-school obsessions extended even further than songwriting inspiration. Voodoo was recorded on 2" tape-- 120 reels of the stuff were used in total according to engineer Russell Elevado-- and many of the songs' instrumental takes were recorded live without overdubs. Vintage gear was employed. The analog fetishism is ironic considering how, at the time of its release, vinyl had yet to make a resurgence; indeed, this 2xLP reissue is a godsend in that respect, especially for anyone who's considered dropping $100 on eBay for one of the few LPs originally made in 2000. I've been listening to this album since it came out-- my original 74-minute CD-R, burned from a friend, left out the 79-minute album's last song-- and it never gets old, or grating, or tired. While this is obviously largely due to the quality of the songs, it's hard not to think that the warm glow given off by the equipment and recording techniques used to create it factors in as well. Not all music needs to be built to last, but Voodoo was designed and willed and technically optimized to be a testament for the ages; it captures empty space and heartbreak as well as it does rim shots and joy. The grooves deepen. When the news of a bare-bones, no-bonus-tracks vinyl reissue causes palpable excitement 12 years later, it's a rare accomplishment.
But Voodoo is more than a fetish object for analog geeks and old-soul collectors. It's peppered with hip-hop inflections largely informed by the singular work of J Dilla, the record's biggest modern influence. D'Angelo probably had Dilla's beats in mind when he wanted ?uestlove to dirty his impeccable timing to drum like he had just "drank some moonshine behind a chuckwagon," as ?uest once put it. In GQ, D cited the Detroit producer's 2006 death as the moment he decided to wake up from his booze-and-cocaine fueled lost years. "I felt like I was going to be next," he said. And when he played this year's Made in America festival in Philadelphia, he stepped out to the strains of obscure Canadian band Motherlode's "When I Die", which Dilla flipped on the finale of his last true album, Donuts. The song's hook: "When I die, I hope to be a better man than you thought I'd be." Voodoo's element of sampling is crucial and varied as well, whether through flawless interpolations (as on "Send It On", which borrows its horn-laden lilt from Kool and the Gang's "Sea of Tranquility"), or sly cut-ups (like when DJ Premier drops in a line of Fat Joe's materialistic "Success" into the anti-materialism screed "Devil's Pie"), or well-chosen covers (the slowed-down brilliance of "Feel Like Makin' Love", a #1 for Roberta Flack in 1974).
Given his extensive repertoire of male R&B legends, the fact that D chose Voodoo's only cover to be a song made famous by a woman also seems key. Because another aspect of the album's overall concept involves an embrace of femininity. "The Aquarian Age is a matriarchal age, and if we are to exist as men in this new world many of us must learn to embrace and nurture that which is feminine with all of our hearts," wrote singer/poet Saul Williams in the record's liner notes. "But is there any room for artistry in hip hop's decadent man-sion?" The album's most uncharacteristic moment involves this schism between hip-hop and misogyny and feminism, when guest stars Method Man and Redman drop tone-deaf dick-fluffing broadsides on "Left and Right". (Intriguingly, Q-Tip recorded a more thematically appropriate verse for the track, though that version has yet to surface.) But everywhere else, Voodoo exhibits a mature attitude toward women and relationships-- one that doesn't pander, but empathizes, and shows that the then-26-year-old father of two was becoming acquainted with all sides of love.
Voodoo's second half, from "One Mo' Gin" through "Africa", goes from the depths of despondency, to regret, to carnal ecstasy, to something more spiritual and everlasting. These songs get to the bottom of nothing less than the core of human interaction; what happens when people collide and come together and break apart. And it's all done with the omnipotent knowing of a saint. Nothing is overstated. "The Root" is the record's most downtrodden track lyrically, where D'Angelo confesses, "I feel my soul is empty, my blood is cold and I can't feel my legs/ I need someone to hold me, bring me back to life before I'm dead." But instead of dour instrumentation, the song's accompanying rhythm is comforting, warm. The whole song leads to a kind of exorcism-- in its final minutes, the singer masterfully layers his own voice on top of itself, vocal lines coming in at every imaginable direction, offering a peek inside his brain. Then it all smooths out, finding comfort in infinity: "From the Alpha of creation, to the end of all time." D'Angelo knows these stakes are high but, as he concludes on "The Line", "If I can hold on, I'm sure everything will be alright." Voodoo is the sound of him holding on; its ensuing silence marks his lost grip.
Details also give Voodoo its timelessness. The album's gentle avoidance of common song structures adds spontaneity; even after hundreds of listens, it's still possible to be surprised. The barely-heard words spoken in intros and outros give things continuity and a voyeuristic quality, like you're hearing it all through a city wall; listen again for the the sweetly awkward conversation with an ex that starts "One Mo' Gin" or the way "Greatdayndamornin'" is introduced with D'Angelo praising ?uestlove to journalist dream hampton: "I was like, 'You gonna be my drummer one of these days,'" gushes D.
The concept of voodoo itself-- as portrayed via the record's voodoo-ceremony photos-- is multi-layered. While probably using voodoo's exaggerated and misrepresented image within modern popular culture to add some mystique and danger, D'Angelo's also likely referencing the religion's African origins, and how it was coveted by uprooted slaves, feared by slave owners, and ignited the Haitian Revolution of 1791. D'Angelo was born the son of a Pentecostal minister, and he was exposed to that religion's closely intertwining relationship between the spiritual and earthly realms: speaking in tongues, divine healing. And music. "I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher," he told GQ. "The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful." Coming out of D's mouth, this is more than hokum-- he believes it and he makes you believe it. There are many ghosts hidden within this record. They're still being drawn out.
Still, many simply know Voodoo for a certain naked music video. The clip for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the reason why the album went platinum, and it plays a large part in D's ensuing disappearance. It instantly transformed the singer from a very talented artist to a pin-up. The song was the last track recorded for Voodoo, and it's the most direct thing here, a churning Prince-inspired ballad that bests nearly every actual ballad Prince ever recorded. It's about lust, sure, but it's a two-way street. The way he sings it, "how does it feel?" isn't necessarily rhetorical, no matter how much it should be considering the power of the music. And if you look closely, the video isn't just a handsome and muscular guy flexing his pecs. There's a vulnerability in D'Angelo's eyes, an awkwardness that's both endearing and slightly uncomfortable.
"You've got to realize, he'd never looked like that before in his life," D's trainer Mark Jenkins told Spin in 2008. "To be somebody who was so introverted, and then, in a matter of three or four months, to be so ripped-- everything was happening so quickly." The video became a phenomenon and, soon enough, women were standing at the lip of D'Angelo's stage, telling him to take off his clothes. The attention was infuriating to him, and it sent the singer to a dark place-- all that work, all that time blown away by a few sweaty shots of his abdomen. Then again, while he was hesitant, he still shot the video. The unfortunate ordeal causes writer Jason King to conclude, in this reissue's new liner notes: "For all of Voodoo's claims to realness and authenticity, D'Angelo's imaging, while rooted in promise, had been in some ways a charade, an unsustainable performance of black masculinity gone awry."
"I got something I'm seeing; I got a vision," D'Angelo told Time upon Voodoo's release. "This album is the second step to that vision." It seems safe to say the prophecy he was speaking about did not entail more than a decade of nothingness, or drug addiction, or shame. Now, it's difficult to say where this vision is leading. Playing an upbeat new funk track called "Sugar Daddy" at this year's BET Awards, he looked solid, and his voice sounded fantastic, but it was almost as interesting to watch the cutaway shots-- to see Nicki Minaj staring on, seemingly confused, or Kanye talking to someone during the performance, or Beyonce standing up, loving every second. (BET headlined the clip: "D'Angelo's Sexiest Performance Ever!")
There's a big difference between a prodigious, smooth-skinned 26-year-old playing retro-styled music and a 38-year-old doing the same thing. The backwards-looking pose can calcify; by the time Prince was 38, he was well into his symbol phase. That said, D'Angelo is the quintessential old soul. And there's hope in the comebacks of fellow 90s refugees Maxwell and Badu, who both released some of their best work after long layoffs over the last few years. But D'Angelo's inactivity has only helped to inflate Voodoo's myth, though it doesn't need much help. It's frustrating to think about how someone so enamored with the past, who knew his heroes' failures so well, could be doomed to repeat them. It's almost as if he studied them too much, and the same spiritual power that fueled his greatest moment couldn't help but bring him down. Like that's how he thought it was supposed to go. In an interview between ?uestlove and D around the release of Voodoo, the drummer confronted the singer about his idols: "They all have one thing in common, they were all vanguards, but 98% of them crashed and burned." To which D'Angelo responded: "I think about that all the time." | 2012-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Light in the Attic | December 12, 2012 | 10 | 08041a48-74e4-463b-8a0c-1c846f6fb332 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Toronto-based musician explores his Nicaraguan roots on an album of drifting, ambient-adjacent songs incorporating instruments like the quena and llamador. | The Toronto-based musician explores his Nicaraguan roots on an album of drifting, ambient-adjacent songs incorporating instruments like the quena and llamador. | Mas Aya: Máscaras | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mas-aya-mascaras/ | Máscaras | Take it as an auspicious omen when you have to google the instruments used on a recording. Many listeners may find that the case with Máscaras, the fourth album by Canadian-Nicaraguan musician Brandon Valdivia, aka Toronto-based Mas Aya. A deft multi-instrumentalist who’s worked with Laraaji, Tanya Tagaq, U.S. Girls, and John Oswald, among others, Valdivia uses the bansuri (a side-blown bamboo flute originating in India), quena (a seven-hole flute from the Andes), and llamador (a Colombian hand-percussion instrument) in addition to tin whistle, thumb piano, and drums. Over the years, he has optimized this unusual tonal palette, filtering traditional sounds through modern technology. On Máscaras, what could have been a glib amalgam of ancient and futuristic tropes in less skilled hands becomes a compelling admixture of unlikely elements, the rare quasi-ambient work to which you can nod your head in tricky time signatures.
The album’s title means “masks” in Spanish, and Valdivia uses it to signify their use in both indigenous rituals and Nicaraguan resistance movements. Opening cut “Momento Presente” fades in with a festive flute aria and then deep, mesmerizing llamador hits; soon the avian-like woodwinds layer and overlap chaotically, creating ghostly shimmers and overtones. When hard claps enter the mix, a wonderful sense of temporal disorientation ensues. On “Key,” a gorgeous drone built around a peaceful four-note progression shows that Valdivia’s time spent with Laraaji did not go to waste. Eventually, drums and oddly tuned percussion—seemingly made out of logs and Tupperware—come in, and we’re transported to a new-age house-music club on a Caribbean beach.
Valdivia is fond of beginning his pieces with intriguing atmospheric drift, as he does in “Villanueva,” and then dropping in beats after a few minutes of oneiric mood-setting, as if to shift your reverie into revelation. When sluggish kicks enter around the halfway point, they launch “Villaneuva” into the ominous trip-hop zones of Scorn’s Gyral. The blissful wind instruments rubbing up against the rugged low end generate an odd friction.
If Máscaras has a single, it’s “Tiempo Ahora,” on which Canadian-Colombian diva Lido Pimienta sings a beautiful ballad over methodical trap beats and dewy synth wisps. But the album’s true peak comes on “18 de Abril,” a Latin American take on Jon Hassell’s sonic dislocations, with hints of Jorge Reyes’ mystical ambient forays and Master Musicians of Joujouka’s 4 a.m. trance formations. The bulbous beats aren’t exactly danceable, but they’re impossible not to twitch to; marvel at some of the fattest snare hits you’ll likely hear this year. Valdivia ingeniously gets his woodwinds to swirl into hypnotic ribbons that resemble the rhaita, a North African double-reed instrument. He also drops in agitated voices amid frantic percussion runs, suggesting intense socio-political unrest. The whole song is druggier than a William Burroughs/Brion Gysin/Brian Jones summit meeting in Morocco. On the closing “Quiescence,” rapid, weirdly tuned percussion bubbles and crackles beneath feathery flute. There’s a wondrous chillout opus struggling to be heard above the rhythmic bustle, and it’s this tension that exemplifies Máscaras’ piquant musical spells.
Valdivia’s alias is a double pun referring both to his grandmother’s Nicaraguan hometown, Masaya, and the Spanish-language phrase “el más allá,” or “the beyond.” On Máscaras, with a masterly blend of earthly and unearthly sounds, he draws a link between his roots and otherworldly points unknown.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Telephone Explosion | September 24, 2021 | 7.8 | 080529c1-554a-4041-8249-ddd1f9ebcbbd | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
Produced by PC Music and affiliates, this collection from Charli XCX is presented as a “project” rather than an album or mixtape. It’s largely stolen by its guests, like Uffie and CupcakKe. | Produced by PC Music and affiliates, this collection from Charli XCX is presented as a “project” rather than an album or mixtape. It’s largely stolen by its guests, like Uffie and CupcakKe. | Charli XCX: Number 1 Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23059-number-1-angel/ | Number 1 Angel | At some point, the music world decided that Charli XCX doesn’t suit or want her new direction: that 2013’s True Romance was the true Charli, that 2014’s was Sucker an acceptable lark, that her PC Music collaborations were acts of desecration. Charli would disagree, probably while partying. In the past year, she has defended SOPHIE and co. in almost every interview—and while half of True Romance comprised immaculately tasteful dramatics, the other half was Charli karaoke-ing over Gold Panda tracks and collaborating with Brooke Candy. Before that, she was a MySpace kid drunk on Ed Banger Records. Charlotte Aitchison makes her own decisions, and if those decisions involve dystopian car sleaze, so be it.
A proper follow-up to Sucker has yet to materialize. So to apparent label consternation, Charli released Number 1 Angel as a nebulous—but increasingly common in pop—“project.” It’s not a proper mixtape (it isn’t free) nor an album (the stakes are lower, or that’s the hope), as the ever-prolific Aitchison rummages through the vaults to fill out a stopgap. Like Vroom Vroom, Number 1 Angel is produced by PC Music and affiliates, but this isn’t entirely their show.
The main difference between the True Romance era and 2017 is that Aitchison doesn’t write alone but with her peers, like MNDR (Feed Me Diamonds) and Sweden’s Noonie Bao (“Run Away With Me,” “I Could Be the One”). With Aitchison, they tone down PC Music’s worst habits—Tinkertoy takes on Eurotrance, two-dimensionalizing of women into storyboard dolls—and bridge their work with pop radio. The dovetailing is uncanny. While Aitchison’s said she doesn’t write about real-life heartbreak—making her the Diane Warren of teenage angst—the current of masochism that runs through her work runs exactly parallel to the anthemically undone women of EDM-pop today.
Number 1 Angel is best at its most vulnerable. On “Emotional,” Charli guiltily relishes an affair, plunging into a cavernous Patrik Berger track whose doomed joy would fit perfectly on True Romance. “3AM (Pull Up)” contains an entire emotional arc: a heroically lust-lorn “holding on” hook, an ill-advised booty call answered to perky trop-house, then the same perk used to shoo him away, however long that lasts. A.G. Cook can’t resist turning the last third of “Blame It On You” into a jock jam, but the rest nails the late-night desolation of letting oneself be played.
Sometimes the desolation is a bit much. “White Roses,” despite being a cool True Romance callback, is a dubious, desiccated, and over-obvious take on “The Rose.” When Charli sang about ecstasy on True Romance’s “Take My Hand,” it sounded like she was actually on ecstasy; here, “Drugs” says the word but sheds the high. It’s PC Music, so there’s a chance her dead-eyed “baby, you the love of my life/Selling all the drugs that I like” is just cynical, but it might as well be a D.A.R.E. commission to make drugs sound terrible.
The other novelty of Number 1 Angel and Charli’s past work is that it showcases, and is largely stolen by, a lot of guests. Starrah (“Needed Me”) and Raye (“All Cried Out”) carry themselves confidently on “Dreamer,” but a bit too confidently and interchangeably; the track comes off like three successive cuts of a Charli XCX demo that may not go to any of them. The otherwise delightful “Babygirl” exhumes trash-rapper Uffie from Charli XCX’s teenage dreams, and—maybe just from absence—she of all people steals the track away.
Sometimes the producers are at fault. The problem with emulating the likes of Britney’s Blackout is that fetishizing the vocalist as cipher comes with the territory. “Roll With Me,” produced by Robyn collaborator Klas Åhlund, perfectly channels the Swede in her cutesy-maniacal fembot phase—but like his song for Britney, “Piece of Me,” you sort of only can hear Robyn. On “Lipgloss,” Charli gets her QT on, vanishing into PC Music’s Alice-Deejay-at-Claire’s-but-sexy aesthetic. It features the rapper CupcakKe, who has too much personality and gleeful filth to be disappeared like she is. Her verse, zipping from iCarly shoutouts to the X-rated uses of pineapple, is a revelation. You could see all this as camaraderie: Charli, having sorta made it, helping others catch up. But the cost is hearing one of pop’s most vibrant young personalities consistently, disappointingly upstaged. | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Asylum | March 27, 2017 | 6.3 | 0805ed5d-6e6b-4dc4-b8df-98dac7e9cd9b | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The Horrors tone down the experiments of Primary Colours for a record with obvious stylistic debts and impeccable taste. | The Horrors tone down the experiments of Primary Colours for a record with obvious stylistic debts and impeccable taste. | The Horrors: Skying | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15645-skying/ | Skying | It must be hard for a young British band growing up as NME darlings, but the Horrors seem to have handled it all rather well. They made the cover of the magazine in 2006 before having even released an EP, presumably on the strength of their black cotton-candy haircuts and their media connections. And they debuted first single "Sheena Is a Parasite" with an equally uncommon assist from director Chris Cunningham, who had previously done his unsettling, special effects heavy work for more musical outliers such as Aphex Twin and Autechre.
But if the Horrors' high profile debut was baffling, their follow-up moves were encouraging. They spoofed themselves with an appearance on an episode of the British comedy "The Mighty Boosh", as a band called the Black Tubes, in an episode revolving around protagonist Vince Noir trying to squeeze into a pair of impossibly skinny jeans so he can join the band. They quickly shed the campy, dark garage shocks of debut Strange House, announced a sophomore album produced by Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Cunningham (the latter resulting in a lot of "cinematic" talk despite his decidedly claustrophobic small-screen style), and started stretching out their sound to accommodate eight-minute krautrock jams. This is perhaps the best you can hope for from your rising rock stars: a willingness to laugh at oneself and a will to evolve.
Skying continues the evolution set in motion 2009's Primary Colours, but with an emphasis on melody and pop form. This time, the band recorded and produced in their own studio, crafting a sound that recalls both the gothic pomp of 80s new wave and the big-screen dreaming of early-90s shoegaze, just as it was beginning to transform into chart-conquering Britpop. That the record can be heard as a catalogue of influences is nothing new for this outfit. They've routinely been tagged as "record collector rock" for their unabashed aping of influences from the Cramps to Can-- and indeed their well-selected covers indicate a group that has spent some time in record shops. Skying isn't likely to change that perception. The insistent chorus and Badwan's breathy delivery on "I Can See Through You" comes off like the Psychedelic Furs run through the effects rack of My Bloody Valentine. "Monica Gems" nods to Suede with its decadent guitar swirl and Badwan's moaning sighs. On "Endless Blue", a horn section pops in for the floating intro as if borrowed from a James Bond theme by way of Blur or "This Is Hardcore" before the song abruptly surges into an impressive rock nosedive. The debts owed here are obvious, but the taste is impeccable, and the application is more often than not convincing.
There are moments when the band stretches out past seven minutes and opts for something more impressionistic, like the hypnotic "Moving Further Away" and the reclining-then-softly-erupting album closer "Oceans Burning", but the Horrors seem otherwise content to craft solid, emotionally inflected rock songs here. Lead single "Still Life" sets the tone in that regard, with an appealing bucolic stupor, rhythm section keeping half time, synths seeping backwards, and frontman Faris Badwan singing in a low, foggy voice that holds its spot high in the mix as easily as it drifts away on the chorus. That it brings to mind Simple Minds and, by extension, teen angst of the John Hughes variety, is by no means a negative.
Both Badwan's voice and the band's production have made some strides here: He sounds surer behind the microphone than ever, and the band's guitars and synths are frequently smoothed of shrieks into one great blur, the black eyeliner watered down and smudged into a gray cloud. So while they may have started out as all glittering surfaces, the Horrors have evolved into a dependable band making wide-reaching rock music. Whether a calculated retreat or just a natural maturation, the Horrors have found a sound more content with background and atmosphere, and it suits them nicely. | 2011-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | July 25, 2011 | 7.5 | 08087f5b-6189-42cb-b4f6-1d34d96fea25 | Eric Grandy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-grandy/ | null |
Nine Inch Nails’ surprise-release new EP Not the Actual Events is slight, but at moments it delivers the kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday. | Nine Inch Nails’ surprise-release new EP Not the Actual Events is slight, but at moments it delivers the kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday. | Nine Inch Nails: Not the Actual Events EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22718-not-the-actual-events-ep/ | Not the Actual Events EP | Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor has spent decades griping about the music business, dating back to his complaints about TVT in 1992 and his resulting “secret recording sessions” of the Broken EP. Now in some ways, he is the music business, a power player whose pioneering moves—surprise releases, extreme secrecy, fanbase cultivation, big budget commercial soundtrack jobs—have become global-pop-star S.O.P. So when he boldly introduces his surprise new EP Not the Actual Events as “an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make” there is some cause for both intrigue and healthy skepticism.
For longtime followers of Reznor, a few scenarios suggest themselves. Maybe he's hoping to stoke enthusiasm for a slight, 21-minute EP that mainly serves as a promotional tool for a trove of concurrent reissues. Maybe he thinks he's done something remarkable, because he still sees himself as an innovator, even though his output since reforming NIN in 2005 has been well-textured but either comfortably formulaic (With Teeth, Hesitation Marks, The Slip's first half) or uncomfortably ambitious (Ghosts I-IV, the second half of The Slip, parts of Year Zero). Optimists and diehards might wish for a third option: Maybe he's legitimately produced powerful and fresh music under the Nine Inch Nails banner. To Reznor’s credit and detriment, he's managed to touch on each scenario.
There are only a handful of examples in Reznor’s post-millennial NIN output where the group have departed from their turbulent, sturm-und-drang industrialism. There’s the piano and Vocoder-driven disco barnburner “All The Love In the World,” opener to the otherwise-toothless With Teeth; the gloomy, overlong and under-baked instrumentals-only closet-cleaner Ghosts I-IV; and on 2013’s Hesitation Marks, the baffling, sunny “Everything,” a rare major-key tune in the band’s catalog. The more interesting of these, “All the Love in the World” and “Everything,” are the opposite of “unfriendly” or “impenetrable”—their disarming warmth is what makes them memorable. Nine Inch Nails have spent nearly thirty years trading on a signature type of abrasive, parents-repelling industrial melancholia—they’ve provided decades’ worth of precedent in this style, and it would be it pretty damned difficult to release anything that could notably set itself apart on these terms. The band’s most “impenetrable” release so far is Ghosts, which demonstrates how that word can frequently mean “boring.”
Despite its rough-edges production, Not the Actual Events is neither unfriendly nor is it inaccessible, especially for fans. It does, however, deliver a kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday. “Burning Bright (Field on Fire)” begins with a detuned, overdrive-saturated guitar riff reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine rather than the crunchy, sharp riffs of standard NIN before erupting into a swarm of shimmering guitars that give the synesthesiastic effect of being inside the field aflame. The song doesn’t necessarily go anywhere, but its crude, unhinged force feels vital.
On “Branches/Bones,” the band stays truer to their post-2005 form. A textbook post-Fragile NIN single, it follows in the efficient and winning form of The Slip’s “1,000,000” and “Discipline” or the Nirvana-meets-NIN 2009 single “Not So Pretty Now,” tracks that show Reznor as a biting pop songwriter rather than a brooding noisemaker. However, his decisions to wedge in a chorus of “It’s like I’ve been here before!” and cut the proceedings off abruptly after less than two minutes feel perverse, suggesting a desire to tease what’s worked in the past but deny the full-on pleasure of nostalgia.
Unfortunately, the album’s other three tracks don’t bring enough new ideas or fun to justify that denial. The burbling synth number “Dear World,” goes nowhere and says little, while cacophonous album centerpiece “She’s Gone Away” is a spiritual sister to “Burning Bright” but plods rather than runs; at six minutes of churning sludge, you wish Reznor would have lopped off two and half and added them to the opener. Penultimate headbanger “The Idea of You” resembles a Broken-era track updated for 1997’s Reznor-produced Lost Highway soundtrack, with ear-shredding trebly guitar riffs reminiscent of (gulp) NIN-lovers Rammstein and the clear, plaintively struck piano notes from Reznor solo cut “Driver Down.”
It’s disappointing that after a four-year wait—let alone the pretension of “[it’s] a record we needed to make”—Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released. But with the subsequent announcement that “two major events” for NIN in 2017 are now also promised, perhaps Reznor himself knows this already, and it will turn out that that this slight record was in fact, not the actual event. | 2016-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | December 28, 2016 | 6.3 | 080b92a5-f420-4d77-abee-4906c460a400 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The 1994 hip-hop landmark is reissued in a box set with vinyl, a gold CD, an ersatz cherry wood case, and a 48-page book. Almost 20 years later, it remains a sterling example of how great rap can be. | The 1994 hip-hop landmark is reissued in a box set with vinyl, a gold CD, an ersatz cherry wood case, and a 48-page book. Almost 20 years later, it remains a sterling example of how great rap can be. | Nas: Illmatic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17497-illmatic/ | Illmatic | You hear the arthritic rumble of the train. The 100-ton iron horse clacking at 55 miles per hour through the tunnel to nowhere. Stainless steel cars bombed with balloon letters in bubble gum paint. The F Line, pre-Giuliani, packed with rats and villains, foreigners and flummoxed out-of-towners, beggars, bandits, and sweating working stiffs. Third rails everywhere. It stops at 21st street. Queensbridge exit.
The doors crumple open and the passengers vanish up half-lit stairwells into the Bridge. There is no Illmatic without the Bridge. Illmatic is the bridge. Queensbridge Houses, the largest projects in America, brick buildings dun as dead leaves, a six-block maze clotted with 7,000-plus trying to survive. The pissy elevators only stop on every other floor. The neighbors are the rotting East River and the "Big Alice" power plant, its smokestacks hacking up black clouds.
The Bridge is where Nas was raised. He explained the mentality to The Source in April 1994, the same month Illmatic was instantly canonized with a perfect 5-Mic score: "When I was a kid I just stayed in the projects… that shit is like a city. Everybody's mentality revolves around the projects. Everybody's gotta eat. It's just the attitude out there, it's just life. You can't be no sucker."
Illmatic starts with that rumbling of the train. A VHS snippet from Wild Style immediately snarls, "Stop fucking around and be a man!" You hear a cassette tape hissing the verse from teenaged Nasty Nas on Main Source's "Live at the BBQ," 1991: "When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus." He anointed himself the "street's disciple." Everyone blessed him as the Golden Child.
The track shifts to "The Subway Theme" from Wild Style, hip-hop's first creation myth, the 1983 film that exposed the routines of the South Bronx to the rest of the world. Nas calls his version "The Genesis", fusing his own story of origin with the culture.
His brother Jungle snaps, "yo, Nas, what the fuck is this bullshit?" Nas tells him to chill. He's carrying on tradition, defined as: "When it's real, you do it even without a recording contract." It's an oath of purity amidst poisons-- something that seems sanctimonious in a post-Puffy world, but it assured the older gods that they would have a stake in the next generation. He was the spawn of the Wild Style, the first great to grow up with Park Jams as his earliest memories.
I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times.
Hip-hop was a teenager when Illmatic dropped*.* Old enough for biblical foundation, but young enough to be embroiled in an early identity crisis. The Columbia press sheet that accompanies it opens: "While it's sad that there's so much frontin' in the rap world today, this should only make us sit up and pay attention when a rapper comes along who's not about milking the latest trend and running off with the loot."
New York street culture was losing its birthright to hip-hop's evolution. Death Row and West Coast gangsta rap dominated the charts and mass media oxygen. Rap-A-Lot was carving up its empire in the South. It was after Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and leather-suited rappers wanted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze money. Big Daddy Kane was firmly in the silken post-Madonna Sex book era. LL Cool J was mugging with a red beret in Toys. Even a young RZA and GZA got bamboozled into goofy New Jack Swing jams by clueless executives. And Nas couldn't get a record deal.
This sounds insane in hindsight. When people start making greatest rapper lists you can't count to five before Nas' name is mentioned. The kid who went to hell for snuffing Jesus has become a sacred cow. Twenty years deep, he's nominated for a Grammy and is in Gap ads with his dad. There was the album with Damian Marley, the feud with Jay-Z, there was Belly. Nas is firmly entrenched in VH1 Special territory. He has crossed over enough without ever making radio hits, save for "Oochie Wally", in which he is out-rapped by his bodyguard-- all for oochie.
But Def Jam's Russell Simmons passed on the demo, famously claiming that Nas sounded too much like Queensbridge machine gun, Kool G Rap. Translation: great but unsalable. He signed Warren G instead, who went triple platinum in the summer and fall of 1994. Illmatic only sold 330,000 copies in its first year. It has no "Regulate" that can inspire drunken Nate Dogg sing-a-longs, but it is widely regarded as the greatest East Coast rap album ever made. Illmatic is the gold standard that boom-bap connoisseurs refer to in the same way that Baby Boomers talk about Highway 61 Revisited. The evidence they point to when they want to say: this is how good it can be.
I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death.
The enduring vision of Nas: a baby-faced Buddha monk in public housing, scribbling lotto dreams and grim reaper nightmares in dollar notebooks, words enjambed in the margins. The only light is the orange glow of a blunt, bodega liquor, and the adolescent rush of first creation. Sometimes his pen taps the paper and his brain blanks. In the next sentence, he remembers dark streets and the noose.
The phrases and images are so deeply rooted in rap consciousness to have become cliché. Over the last 19 years, a million secret handshakes and scratched hooks have been executed to lines from Illmatic: I woke up early on my born day; I sip the Dom P, watching Gandhi 'til I'm charged; you couldn't catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer, that's like Malcolm X catching jungle fever; I'm an addict for sneakers, twenties of Buddha, and bitches with beepers; vocabulary spills, I'm ill; life's a bitch and then you die.
Removed from context, they seem unremarkable. When spit with criminal smoothness over beat breaks, they became iconic. If Rakim was rap's Woody Guthrie, Nas was the Dylan figure expanding the possibilities and complexity of the form, twisting old fables to match contemporary failings, faithful to tradition but unwilling to submit to orthodoxy.
Illmatic was the bridge. Melle Mel and Kurtis Blow, to Run-DMC, to Rakim, the Juice Crew, and Big Daddy Kane. Now Nas. Everyone said he had next since Large Professor brought the chipped tooth kid sporting Gazelles into the studio. His arrival was a communal effort. After MC Serch discovered he was unsigned, he landed him a deal at Columbia Records. When Nas summoned beats, he was laced with jewels from the city's best producers: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, the Large Professor, and Q-Tip.
Regional demand was so high that Serch claimed he discovered a garage with 60,000 bootlegged copies. The brief length (10 tracks, 39:51) was due to this rush to get to market. It also left less room for error. There are many albums with higher highs than Illmatic, but none with fewer flaws. The sequencing is perfect down to "Halftime" ending as the cassette tape clicked. It's as dense and claustrophobic as Queensbridge, but blood simple. The verses sprint around blind corners and the hooks are hypnotic chants: New York State of Mind, One Love, It's Half Time, The World is Yours, Coming Out of Queensbridge, Represent.
A classic album is supposed to change or define its time. Illmatic did both. The Notorious B.I.G. borrowed everything from art ideas to album structure. It was so blatant that Ghostface and Raekwon dedicated an entire skit to mocking it. Jay-Z took a hot Nas line and made a hot song on Reasonable Doubt. If you listen to Sean Carter before Illmatic, the rat-a-tat is straight from Big Daddy Kane. After Nas dropped, Jay-Z suddenly got smooth. Those are just the two most famous appropriations.
No album better reflected the sound and style of New York, 94. The alembic of soul jazz samples, SP-1200s, broken nose breaks, and raw rap distilled the Henny, no chaser ideal of boom-bap. The loops rummage through their parent's collection: Donald Byrd, Joe Chambers, Ahmad Jamal, Parliament, Michael Jackson. Nas invites his rolling stone father, Olu Dara to blow the trumpet coda on "Life's A Bitch". Jazz-rap fusion had been done well prior, but rarely with such subtlety. Nas didn't need to make the connection explicit-- he allowed you to understand what jazz was like the first time your parents and grandparents heard it.
I pour my Heineken brew to my deceased crew on memory lane.
None of this context has to matter. Illmatic is imprisoned within itself. The power is targeted in the narrow scope of its worldview. There are six desperate and savage blocks and there is nowhere else. Nas captures the feeling of being young and trapped. You see his struggle and you see his ghosts.
The more I listen to Illmatic, the more haunted it feels. When you're younger, it clubs you with its hail of words and the skeletal beauty of its beats. But the older I get, the more it strikes me as a teenaged requiem for those still living. "Old Soul" is the sort of stock phrase used by yoga teachers and amateur psychics, but it always fit Nas. He's 20 and prematurely nostalgic, struck by memories of park jams and watching "CHiPS.", when Shante dissed the real Roxanne, and how much he misses Mr. Magic.
There is no narrative about Ill Will, but you hear the name over and over. Will was his best friend and first music partner who lived on the 6th floor with turntables and a mic. He was shot to death in Queensbridge over a drunken argument. You don't hear how Nas and his wounded brother Jungle rushed Will to the hospital, got static from emergency room officials, and watched him die. But the sense of grievous loss shadows almost every bar, especially "Memory Lane" and "One Love".
If you listen to it enough names start to pop out: Fatcat, Alpo, Grand Wizard, Mayo, the foul cop who shot Garcia, Jerome's niece, Little Rob, Herb, Ice, and Bullet. The entirety of "Represent". You start to wonder where they are now, or if they are. The album's lone guest AZ, lays it down flat: he's destined to live the dream for all the peeps who never made it.
But Nas uses Illmatic as more than a vehicle to escape. The styles and stories that formed him fuse into something that withstands outdated slang and popular taste: it is a story of a gifted writer born into squalor, trying to claw his way out of the trap. It's somewhere between The Basketball Diaries and Native Son, but Jim Carroll and Richard Wright couldn't rap like Nas.
That's why 19 years later, Get On Down is re-issuing a box set with a vinyl, gold CD, and an ersatz cherry wood case featuring a 48-page book with The Source article that originally crowned him-- even if Illmatic was the archetypal cassette album (along with the purple tape). It's best heard by ignoring the dogma, culture wars, Nas clones, and would-be saviors that have accreted since April of 1994. Who cares whether it's the greatest rap album of all-time or not? It's an example of how great rap can be, but not necessarily the way it should be.
There was no real follow-up to Illmatic because Nas understood that he'd tapped into a moment that could only come once and in one place. This is what things had been building towards. A little over a decade later, Nas claimed that hip-hop was dead, but this world that was his was already starting to vanish on Illmatic. But you can still summon it from the first rumble of the train. This is what happened when the doors opened. | 2013-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Get on Down | January 23, 2013 | 10 | 080b99a8-7cef-476a-9dfc-de1ad73ee1ca | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
The young Australian DJ/Producer's profile has grown immensely in the past few years. On his new album, he recruits an all-star cast including Beck, Little Dragon, Vince Staples, and more. | The young Australian DJ/Producer's profile has grown immensely in the past few years. On his new album, he recruits an all-star cast including Beck, Little Dragon, Vince Staples, and more. | Flume: Skin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21921-skin/ | Skin | The universe opened quickly for Flume, the 24-year-old Australian DJ/producer born Harley Edward Streten: his debut album topped the ARIA charts, Lorde and Disclosure enlisted him for remixes, and mud-caked crowds have strained to glimpse him at Coachella and Lollapalooza. And with that rise, he’s become something of a dance music Rorschach test: either he’s posited as mainstream electropop’s next great hope, or he deepens the frowns of those fatigued by rave culture ubiquity and personifies all that is frivolous about it. (The Guardian recently brushed him aside with, “Oh, great! Just what the world has been waiting for,” a pessimism that leans toward the Woody Allen school of astronomy.) It’s no wonder, on his second album, Flume says he aimed to write a track that sounds “like the fabric of the universe tearing ”—all that weight was cramping his shoulders.
Skin, the record in question, aims for that level of grandiosity throughout. It’s a stadium-sized upsell of Flume’s prior atmospheric formula—skittish beats that cleave easily to gruff rappers and R&B sopranos alike, rattling future-bass warp, undulating synths—that swells with energy but spills over edges. Here, Flume recruits an array of famous guests (Beck, Little Dragon, Vince Staples, Raekwon, AlunaGeorge), padding their radio-friendly cuts with the persistent crescendos of his self-titled debut, then ballasting them with loose instrumental interludes. The sum suggests that he’s an earnest collaborator, flashier but still casting around for a distinct identity.
Flume has a fondness for female voices singing in their upper register. On his first album, that role was played by Jezzabell Doran on the album’s best cut (“Sleepless”). Here, it’s handled twofold by Aluna Francis of AlunaGeorge (the groggy, glitchy “Innocence”) and also Kučka, a young Aussie singer who distinctly echoes Francis in slinky R&B phrasing and tinny topnotes. The halting, futurist beat of Kučka’s solo track (“Numb & Getting Colder”) nods to Flying Lotus and Four Tet; that core is closely repeated on her second turn, “Smoke & Retribution,” which jolts awake in agile verses by rapper Vince Staples. The lead single, “Never Be Like You,” is already a Disclosure-remixed pop hit (and a winking psychotropic video); it saunters on Flume’s languid trap drops and a plummy R&B hook from the Canadian singer Kai, a former Jack Ü collaborator who trills a mundane mea culpa with a gleam of defiance. (“I’m only human can’t you see/I made, I made a mistake/Please just look me in my face/Tell me everything’s OK”). There’s a mathematical quality to how he deploys singers in these productions, where the heavier his low-end distortion throbs, the more featherweight smoke curls follow.
Snuck in at the close, “Tiny Cities,” featuring Beck, is comparatively minimalist, a welcome smattering of downtempo new wave synths. Here, the production is as nimble as the vocalist; Beck opens in staccato leaps, chipper despite the Sea Change-like refrain of despondency (“it was never perfect, never meant to last”), and Flume loops him in a slow, roiling momentum until the sentiment blooms into a battle-scarred catharsis worthy of a John Hughes soundtrack. There’s one betrayal of Flume’s busy hand in the song, in a dubstep-lite drop halfway, but it’s energizing. The delicate ebb that follows it—complete with falsetto from Beck, naturally—is the most vulnerable moment of the album. Skin’s other cameos don’t approach that humanity: Little Dragon’s “Take a Chance” buckles under an erratic beat that feels determined to remix itself twice over, and Tove Lo’s lilt sounds harried on “Say It,” though her chorus does generously provide your next Tinder icebreaker (“let me fuck you right back”).
Against this, the instrumentals can be hesitant, as if waiting patiently for a vocalist to drop by—“Pika” stretches out a fragment of a SBTRKT-like soul murmur, and “Free” pushes the repetitive yet determined synth runs of a keytar gained sentience. But there is one glimpse of intriguing extroversion in Flume’s standalones: “Wall Fuck,” the musician’s aforementioned attempt to rip the universe a new one, which delivers a hell of a rubbery, electrohouse-inflected bass and snarls a sliver of ghostly female coos into a strange, invigorating banger. It’s short and snappy, gone too fast in an album that could’ve been streamlined to let moments like it shine. But maybe it’s the sound of floodgates opening. | 2016-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Transgressive / Mom+Pop / Future Classic | June 2, 2016 | 6.4 | 080c3975-5d19-4c12-af95-cb9683724403 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Tokyo's Moscow Club came to attention at a time when bands from all over Japan's independent music scene seemed poised to break out internationally. The moment didn't last, and the quartet's second album has the feeling of a tribute for a time that slipped away. It's also a reminder that they stood out because they knew how to write a solid, catchy song. | Tokyo's Moscow Club came to attention at a time when bands from all over Japan's independent music scene seemed poised to break out internationally. The moment didn't last, and the quartet's second album has the feeling of a tribute for a time that slipped away. It's also a reminder that they stood out because they knew how to write a solid, catchy song. | Moscow Club: Outfit Of The Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21048-outfit-of-the-day/ | Outfit Of The Day | There was a moment a few years ago when Japan’s independent music scene seemed poised to break out internationally. Between 2011 and mid-2013, artists from all over the nation were making inroads abroad -- shadowy project Jesse Ruins signed to Captured Tracks, while outfits such as Sapphire Slows and Hotel Mexico were regulars on MP3 blogs such as Gorilla Vs. Bear, with many more rising up beneath them. It was during this period that Tokyo’s Moscow Club started sharing their music online, earning attention for their genre-hopping releases. The quartet also saw the potential in front of Japan’s indie community, prompting them to spearhead a compilation in 2012 highlighting unsigned artists. “It is so exciting that there are still so many undiscovered amazing talents creating their own sound somewhere on this little island,” they wrote at the time.
Moscow Club’s second full-length album, Outfit Of The Day, arrives long after the community they championed left the international spotlight. No moment can last forever, and many of the bands from that fruitful span have broken up, changed drastically or simply stopped doing anything (Moscow Club themselves vanished for two years, returning this summer). Outfit features collaborations with many of the artists from that period, and lends the album a feeling of a tribute for a time that slipped away, but also serves as a reminder of the talent that still exists.
Above all else, Moscow Club -- and the artists in the same orbit -- stood out because they knew how to write a solid, catchy song. Outfit starts with “Band Of Outsiders,” a fleet-footed indie-pop song packing every hooky idea it can into just over two minutes. This is the lane where Moscow Club excels, and Outfit features plenty of guitar-anchored tracks skipping towards sticky choruses. They especially shine when glossing up their jangle with synthesizers. The extra twinkle adds an emotional pining central to numbers such as “Carven” and “Celine” (owing to a band-wide interest in fashion, the album boasts a fashion theme, down to the Instagram-born title). The latter -- written by lead singer Kazuro Matsubara after hearing a Tokyo train station melody and featuring backing vocals from Amanda Åkerman of Swedish group Alpaca Sports -- showcases Moscow Club at their best, capable of a chugging number that progressively ups the drama.
Although hazy, melancholic indie-pop is their strength, part of Moscow Club’s appeal has always been their eagerness to branch out, resulting in glistening dance numbers or straight chillwave. Their ambition remains, as one of Outfit’s finest comes on the slow-burning “Tour De Moskow.” The title gives away one key point of inspiration -- though, if you forget, the breathing samples throughout serve as a reminder - but its shuffled beat also pays homage to Frankie Knuckles’ “The Whistle Song” and nods to electro group Telex. It’s a lot to juggle, but Moscow Club balance it all just right. More of a curveball, though, is “Carven (Orchestral),” a four-minute orchestra version of the more straightforward “Carven.” It’s an interesting interlude, albeit one that could have shaved a minute off.
Outfit, as mentioned, isn’t just a Moscow Club creation, but a collaborative effort featuring names central to the Japanese independent scene. Some of them appear on the songs proper -- Eri Nakajima of Osaka indie-poppers Wallflower sings on “Margaret,” while Ryota Komori plays saxophone on “Saint Laurent,” bringing the chaotic edge of his main band Miila and the Geeks to Moscow Club’s world. Two members of Kyoto’s now-defunct Hotel Mexico pop up too, although only lead singer Ryuyu Ishigami appears on track, as former bassist Kai Ito provided words for two songs. Yet the names behind the scenes are just as important, helping to write the lyrics gracing Moscow Club’s music.
It adds up to a very solid collection, and one bringing to mind a time that feels long gone. Western media tends to cover Japanese acts veering to an extreme side, whether that be harsh Japanoise or, in more recent years, cuter and weirder fare rarely taken seriously as music. The embrace of art confirming existing images of the country -- as strange, as colorful, as different -- is a disservice to bands such as Moscow Club, who sing in English and don’t play up being Japanese for just that reason. Outfit Of The Day is a solid collection of indie-pop with some detours, and a reminder of how good the often overlooked indie community in the country can be. | 2015-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fastcut | October 2, 2015 | 7 | 080c65ee-99aa-4b81-93cc-38e8c24ea961 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
The rising pop star's sophomore album goes for experimental radio hits that are full of anhedonic drama. It's ambitious and nuanced, though calculating in ways that dull its impact. | The rising pop star's sophomore album goes for experimental radio hits that are full of anhedonic drama. It's ambitious and nuanced, though calculating in ways that dull its impact. | Halsey: hopeless fountain kingdom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23301-hopeless-fountain-kingdom/ | hopeless fountain kingdom | Halsey’s sophomore album *hopeless fountain kingdom *comes with a backstory to rival an ARG. There were actual fountains and actual newspapers sent to actual doorsteps, but in 2017 this is the status quo. Tove Lo’s debut as the voice of Max Martin’s Wolf Cousins writing collective was presented as a four-part concept album about emotional turmoil. Beyoncé’s last two albums are bona fide franchises. Artists from The Fame-era Lady Gaga to suddenly-woke Katy Perry conduct album campaigns about how their music truly means something. It’s easy to see why: Streaming is a hopeless penny fountain, radio is a hopeless playlist kingdom, so one scrounges any extramusical interest one can. And most musicians prefer to think they’re making art, not content—especially with an audience that demands increasing creative control from artists and an industry that doesn’t keep up.
This is certainly less outwardly exploitative than the antiquated pop model of finding a teen, then corrupting their fictionalized innocent image for public ogling. Halsey’s bid at true meaning on hopeless fountain kingdom is to simply prove she’s “more than capable of writing radio music,” as she told Rolling Stone. The concept is ambitious, but the product ticks all the boxes: staid piano ballad (“Sorry”), In the Zone* *nostalgia (“Walls Could Talk”), R&B dilettantism (“Don’t Play,” Quavo-assisted “Lie”), recreations of proven hits (“Now or Never”). Of course, ever since she said she was raised on Biggie and Nirvana while getting high on kind and legal bud on *Badland’*s “New Americana,” Halsey has been accused of inauthenticity. Everything from her hairstyle to her racial and sexual identity has been seized upon as clues to debunk the enterprise. *The New York Times *called her “a millennial built in a lab.” Grantland: “Halsey’s life can be reduced to a perfect millennial construct.” Halsey lamented to Billboard the “conspiracy theorists who think [she] was crafted in a boardroom.” However, who but an actual Tumblr teen would imagine herself on a Rider-Waite card or dream up a post-teenage apocalypse where the only scarcity is connection?
“100 Letters” sets the scene: dingy floors, negs, and would-be love notes destroyed in the wash. The production is fittingly dirgelike with new age percussion loops and far away decaying guitar samples, like an Enigma track left overnight in a dive-bar bathroom. “Alone,” plush with brass and cellos, also sounds ‘90s: like a track off Everything But the Girl’s Temperamental if someone were actively having a panic attack over it. The lyrics cut through parties and drinks and hangers-on as Halsey’s vocal climbs the scale, increasingly agitated, up to the last, worst anxiety: “I know you’re dying to meet me, but I can just tell you this/Baby as soon as you meet me, you’ll wish that you never did.” “Eyes Closed” portrays that timeless gambit of getting over someone by getting under someone else, as well as the timely gambit of getting into co-writer The Weeknd’s production drears, withering melodies, and joyless sex. But while the backing vocals sound like Tesfaye, he’d never write something so abandoned as “he’ll never stay—they never do.”
The album’s not entirely anhedonic. The heart-thud pace and breathless quotables in “Heaven in Hiding” suggest genuine lust—that lurid diary entry with 25 blank pages on either side. Nor, despite the sheer quantity of shitty dudes here, is it just men who fail to connect. “Strangers” shimmers and yearns like a recent Tegan and Sara cut, with Heartthrob co-writer Greg Kurstin and with Fifth Harmony’s Lauren Jauregui as duettist. Jauregui, like Halsey, is bisexual, and “Strangers” is Halsey’s stated attempt to get a love song between two women onto pop radio. Not coincidentally, it contains the album’s most nuanced lyrics, the coupling that’s most promising yet most out of reach.
On an album full of radio experiments, some succeed—“100 Letters,” “Walls Could Talk” and “Alone” demonstrate the perennially fertile sound of alt-pop—and some inevitably fail. The two R&B tracks are a swagger void. “Devil in Me” is hopeless fountain kingdom’s requisite Sia track, and like so many others, Halsey makes it sound like anything but. More damningly, style never quite matches substance. That could be the young creative’s “taste gap”; Halsey is just 22. Or it could be the market. Is lead single “Now or Never,” as the story goes, “one part in the center of a long narrative that tells the story of two people in love despite the forces trying to keep them apart”? Or is it just writer Starrah commissioned to make another, poppier “Needed Me”—less prickly, less urban, less precise with the vocals? To some, it might not matter. Others might await a kingdom built on more than just airplay. | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Astralwerks | June 7, 2017 | 6.5 | 080cf737-cce3-4d51-a81f-69cafd6ebcfe | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
DonMonique is a young Brooklyn rapper who feels old-school without being too precious about it. She recalls the huffy, hedonistic bravura of Lil Kim and zooms in on the lean, mean rapping that made Brooklyn hot. Danny Brown guests on a track. | DonMonique is a young Brooklyn rapper who feels old-school without being too precious about it. She recalls the huffy, hedonistic bravura of Lil Kim and zooms in on the lean, mean rapping that made Brooklyn hot. Danny Brown guests on a track. | DonMonique: Thirst Trap EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20954-thirst-trap-ep/ | Thirst Trap EP | On her very first EP, Thirst Trap, DonMonique, an unconventional young rapper from Brooklyn, slinks out the gate with two conventional rap album tropes: the voicemail, and the skit. "You's a fake and your man's a clown," she raps on the intro, leveling barbs at an invisible adversary. She recalls the huffy, hedonistic bravura of Lil' Kim—right down to calling your man a bird. "If he with me then you know I make him eat it proper, cuff my hands and show me if you're down to be the poppa, poppa." Wielding Biggie's nickname like punctuation, it's inarguable that she's paying homage to one of her borough's finest.
"Phone Call" resumes the schtick, this time over a beat. It's "Phone Tap" minus the mise en scène: an old school, pre-social media kind of goading. The message is that DonMonique, without being too Joey Bada$$ precious about it, feels like an old school rapper. Stelios Phili, DonMonique's producer, helps further the allusion. Of the seven beats that follow the intro, no less than three invoke the crisp, airy, neck-cracking loops of the late '90s. "UNTLD", in particular, channels Blunted on Reality-era Fugees. Brrrraps waft about the track while guest rappers Remy Banks and Wara duck and weave, playing the Pras and 'Clef to DonMonique's sneering Lauryn. "Jada", the EP's closer, fades out with a clip featuring Jada Pinkett in the classic all-women heist flick, Set It Off. And on "Fifty Kay", over Stelios' brisk drums, guest rapper Noah Caine makes all these '90s fantasies explicit: "Me and Don the new Biggie and Kim."
Danny Brown, who worked through his own formative influences before breaking out to become one of rap's premiere weirdos, cuts enthusiastically in like a Kramer entrance on "Tha Low", which features a honky-tonk piano loop over smoke-thick bass and boom bap drums. His presence energizes what is otherwise a classic street-to-stage come-up story (DonMonique's said that it's inspired by Wu-Tang's "C.R.E.A.M.") "I don't serve no more, bookin' shows off the flows," raps DonMonique. On the next verse Brown mirrors the sentiment by looking back: "Remember when I was thirsty, couldn't even afford the orange juice."
What makes Thirst Trap more than just a series of recycled flows are songs like "ION". It's the most pop-sounding track on the EP, with slithering hi-hats and an Auto-Tuned hook that bears traces of the now. I's good, but not the album's best song. With Thirst Trap, DonMonique makes a case for a certain kind of nostalgia: one that's not about lifting classic cadences and rhyme schemes, or cloyingly idealizing the more noble values of a bygone era. This is not a treatise on real hip-hop. Instead, DonMonique zooms in on the lean, mean rapping that made Brooklyn hot. | 2015-09-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 21, 2015 | 6.8 | 08122525-2a37-481a-9099-7fe78d2af10d | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Toronto indie-pop quintet Alvvays’ Chad VanGaalen–produced debut is the sound of pristine pop music blasted through cheap, blown-out headphones. Every time it seems like a song is about to decay before your ears, you sense both the sadness and the liberation of knowing that nothing lasts forever. | Toronto indie-pop quintet Alvvays’ Chad VanGaalen–produced debut is the sound of pristine pop music blasted through cheap, blown-out headphones. Every time it seems like a song is about to decay before your ears, you sense both the sadness and the liberation of knowing that nothing lasts forever. | Alvvays: Alvvays | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19508-alvvays-alvvays/ | Alvvays | Yes, it’s “Alvvays” as in “always,” not “All-vays”—but that typographic quirk is more than just an opportunistic ploy for this Toronto quintet to enhance its search engine optimization. (If anything, Alvvays’ dual affinities for post-C86 girl-group revisionism and dusty-grooved distortion strongly suggest they’re yearning for a time when seeking out bands involved trans-Atlantic fanzine correspondence and mail-order forms.) Apparently, the curious spelling was implemented to avoid confusion with the bygone, like-minded British indie-pop outfit with the same name. However, Alvvays actually proves to be a perfect visual manifestation of this band’s thematic framework: with nearly every crestfallen song on their debut pitched at the crossroads of commitment and abandonment, nostalgia and uncertainty, the band’s name effectively becomes the textual representation of the broken promises catalogued within.
Such quarterlife-crisis concerns—the bane a generation that, as one song puts it, feels like it’s “too late to go out, too young to stay in”—are natural preoccupations for a band of twentysomethings that is the very product of upheaval and a clean-slate reset. As recently as two years ago, Nova Scotia native Molly Rankin was still trying to establish her identity as a solo artist on the maritime club circuit—a task made all the more formidable by the fact she’s a descendent of Canadian roots-music dynasty the Rankin Family. An EP released under her own name in 2010 suggested she was destined to travel down a similarly bucolic path, casting her cheekily self-deprecating lyrics and siren of a voice in familiarly folksy surroundings. However, her partnership with that record’s guitarist Alec O’Hanley (formerly of Prince Edward Island power-popsters Two Hours Traffic) would eventually turn more ambitious. With Rankin enlisting childhood friend Kerri MacLellan on keyboards and O’Hanley recruiting PEI pals Brian Murphy and Phil MacIssac on bass and drums, the quintet relocated to Toronto last year with their new name, new aesthetic, and, in former brunette Rankin’s case, new hair.
But it’s not just the singer’s striking, peroxide-blonde locks that make Alvvays stick out from the infinite number of contemporary indie acts forging a similar union between early-’60s AM-radio pop and late-’80s freak-scene discord. On the band’s winsome Chad VanGaalen–produced debut, it’s the disarmingly frank, aching lyricism that ultimately raises them above the cardiganed fray, capturing both the humor and heartache of seeking intimacy in the big city. Amid the buoyant surf-tingled jangle of the opening “Adult Diversion,” Rankin isn’t just discreetly ogling a fellow commuter from afar; she’s already plotting out their future domestic bliss, asking her oblivious object of desire, “How do I grow old with you even if you don’t notice as I pass by you on the subway?” The rousing, pints-aloft follow-up, “Archie, Marry Me,” serves as a sequel of sorts where Rankin has got the guy, but not the ring—and yet she already sounds less like she’s fighting for the love of her life than checking items off a list (“Honey, take me by the hand, and we can sign some papers/Forget the invitations, floral arrangements, and breadmakers”), thereby proving that the only thing more tragic than a break-up song is one about a person desperate to break in.
Rankin possesses the sort of radiant but deceptively deadpan voice that lets her to infuse these lovelorn laments with sly, sometimes sinister wit: When she sings, “I left my love in the river” on the drowned-boyfriend requiem “Next of Kin,” there’s the simmering implication that she could’ve done a little more to save him. (The chorus to the dreamy slow-motorik ballad “Ones Who Love You,” meanwhile, is home to the most beautifully nonchalant F-bomb.) This sense of irreverence bleeds into the album’s production, whose scabrous guitar lines, synth-blurred vistas, and drum-machine experiments reveal the band are hardly the purists their pedigree might indicate. Presenting a brighter contrast to the claustrophobic insularity heard on VanGaalen’s own recordings and in his work with the much-missed Women, Alvvays eagerly scuffs up the band’s gold sounds with dissonant edges—not to deliberately obscure the gleaming melodies or make the band seem tougher than they are, but to enhance the very feeling of raw-nerved unrest seeping through Rankin’s lyric sheet. This is the sound of pristine pop music blasted through cheap, blown-out headphones—and every time it seems like a song is about to decay before your ears, you sense both the sadness and liberation of knowing that nothing lasts forever. | 2014-07-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-07-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | July 21, 2014 | 7.6 | 0812853d-718a-4147-a8f9-c3263eb283c8 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Los Angeles quartet reinvents its sound on its sixth album, building on the cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s live Spiders in the Rain. | The Los Angeles quartet reinvents its sound on its sixth album, building on the cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s live Spiders in the Rain. | Wand: Vertigo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wand-vertigo/ | Vertigo | The West, to quote the Lizard King, is the best. In the years since Jim Morrison committed that bit of boosterism to wax, the synecdoche between a few hundred miles of California coast and our whole hegemonic civilization has only become more darkly involved. Thankfully, this same ballyhooed complex of energy, spectacle, and violence offers a handy template for processing ongoing developments on its political, aesthetic, and psychic frontiers: aptly, the Western.
Vertigo, Wand’s sixth studio album, is undoubtedly a Western—albeit in the contemporary style. Like the cinematic interpretations by Monte Hellman and Jim Jarmusch, it’s a meditation on inner frontiers, where borders constrict, identities shift, and maps go blank. Once upon a time, the Los Angeles quartet excelled at music fit for touring Mulholland Drive on research chemicals. Vertigo, by contrast, beats its vagabond retreat to the desert—to a Llano del Rio or Spahn Ranch of the mind. Its pleasures, consequently, are furtive and indirect, scattering like reptiles from an overturned stone.
At the heart of Vertigo is not a narrative so much as fugitive guideposts through life’s fractured final cycle. From out of a haze of electric guitar texture, opener “Hangman” shuffles the mandala mid-tempo that will sustain much of the album. Frontman Cory Hanson’s voice is somber, shell-shocked; the tale a sketch without fixed subject or object. “Somebody’s trying to disappear/I guess I will find out/I’m gonna see you here tomorrow/I’m gonna be left out…” A dream before dying or the memory of a blackboard guessing game? The hangman carries out his sentence, but he also eases us on our way. In this sludgy fever’s subsidence, extended coda “Curtain Call” suggests a soul’s ascent, its destination still uncertain.
Vertigo, too, emerges from a moment of uncertainty for the band. A four-year recording hiatus saw the departures of keyboardist Sofia Arreguin and founding bassist Lee Landey. Hanson, in the meantime, notched two formidable solo albums (recorded with help from Wand guitarist Robbie Cody and new bassist Evan Backer) whose energetic blend of folk, power pop, and progressive rock threatened intermittently to eclipse the main event. Ever resilient, Wand have conscientiously retooled their sound, crafting songs that seem excavated instead from the kind of cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s live album Spiders in the Rain. The result is a second debut of sorts, an act of self-definition in negative, at once a settling in and a shearing away.
Gone is their past material’s giddy, lysergic bounce; instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continual foundation where melodies rise through repetition, and rich details (with string and wind arrangements courtesy of Backer) slither and swim. The members of Wand would probably be first to acknowledge that this is ambitious stuff—something akin to the tabula rasa of Pygmalion or Spirit of Eden, a whole of metamorphic parts—and thus not without pitfalls. The glistening, incantatory back half of “JJ” must still overcome a somewhat muddled takeoff. Elsewhere, atmospheres can linger indistinctly; at length, you come to miss Hanson’s mischievous persona and the old band’s monster-movie licks.
Vertigo is not all evasion, however. Clouds part around lead single “Smile,” which revels in the band’s easy-riding FM radio influences, scanning for a frequency of longing to cut through our sketch-like desperado’s fatigue. And “High Time,” built from a percussive feedback pulse, seemingly from the top floor down, cascades into a deliriously layered sturm und drang, receding again in a vapor trail of strings and static, headed for the sunset.
But the essence of Vertigo remains defiantly (even frustratingly) in the eerie, interlinked soundworld designed around its peaks. Closer “Seaweed Head” stamps a mystic image on a twilit anti-climax, its flickerings the closest approximation of vertigo itself—the false perception of movement in stillness. “Find it really hard to see the ray/Got you green upside down in the month of May/Someone’s gonna tell you there’s nothing left to hide/Someone’s gonna bring you back through the other side…” Of course, the pervasiveness of motion is a scientific truth, and a spiritual one as well. Whether what awaits our hanged man is revelation, or some return to the primordial source, no one is saying. Vertigo is a welcome return for one of our most fascinating bands, in L.A. or anywhere else. That they’ve arrived with seemingly nothing to lose only heightens anticipation for what’s still to come. | 2024-07-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 30, 2024 | 7.3 | 08136bf8-9f9e-4549-b7fa-694c018dfa24 | Ryan Meehan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-meehan/ | |
The third album from the New Zealand quartet blends openhearted lyrics about post-breakup regret with a sugar-rush immediacy and a craftsman-like attention to detail. | The third album from the New Zealand quartet blends openhearted lyrics about post-breakup regret with a sugar-rush immediacy and a craftsman-like attention to detail. | The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beths-expert-in-a-dying-field/ | Expert in a Dying Field | Only beautiful dreamers prize the amicable breakup. With fuck-yous in short supply, severance goes from a clean break to a wrench complicated by second-guessing and enduring fondness—not to mention the painful awareness that fondness either wasn’t enough, or wasn’t given freely enough when it mattered. The Beths’ third album swims in this swirl of hope and anguish—an emotional postmortem that can be hard enough for the regretful to interest their weary friends in, let alone power the kind of snappy songwriting this band made its name on. But the New Zealanders are in their element at turning these murky ruminations into sterling indie rock, its catchiness inextricable from songwriter Elizabeth Stokes’ almost painfully bright and openhearted lyricism.
On Expert in a Dying Field, the Auckland four-piece are back to full power after 2020’s understated Jump Rope Gazers, though they’ve recalibrated, too. Their 2018 debut Future Me Hates Me was giddy and bristling, of a piece with punk-spirited peers such as Hop Along; Expert is richer and less hurried, brimming with smart power-pop that brings to mind the casual virtuosity of ’90s Aimee Mann and the bonhomie and euphoria of Superchunk and Fountains of Wayne. Like the very best of their kind, Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck make music that has a sugar-rush immediacy and a craftsman-like attention to detail that invites close listening.
In “Best Left,” Stokes regrets picking at her wounds “well past productivity,” and her bandmates’ pristine harmonies buoy her reminder, yelled at the heavens, that “some things are best left to rot”; the furrowed soloing, meanwhile, makes an intrepid lunge for the freedom of leaving it all behind. Their choruses have an anthemic ease: “Don’t cry/I’m on the next flight,” Stokes imagines her ex saying on “Your Side,” elongating the rhymes to bask in the fantasy, and you’re there dreaming right along with her. But at the same time, their arrangements are visceral and complex, as if they had scored the surges of an adrenaline rush. Stokes often forgoes straightforward melodic toplines to scale and dance around the impetuous playing, moving almost as deftly as Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins amid the chaotic noise of “Silence Is Golden.” Although a couple of songs get samey, Expert is relentlessly invigorating and grounded by the clarity of Stokes’ writing.
On the title track, Stokes wrestles with what to do with the once-shared intimacy of a defunct relationship, her now-obscure specialist subject. What to do with the memory of your former partner’s footsteps on the stairs, your nonsensical shared language, your loving months or years-long research project into how to make them laugh so hard they gag? Stokes’s delivery goes from fluttery to frustrated as she realizes she can’t do anything but live with it. “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?” she asks bittersweetly one final time as the song thrashes to a close, as if she’s handing out trophies for her graduating class of pyrrhic winners.
Expert finds its stakes in Stokes’ careful considerations of whether the relationship might yet be salvageable, delivered in a direct address to whoever it is she most wants to hear it. She examines her own fearfulness and and anxieties, admitting to her shame on “Knees Deep” that she only wades up to her ankles in life, and her envy and admiration of someone who slices “like a knife through the surface”—although the full-bodied elation of her performance suggests a different kind of introvert’s boldness. And her attempts at persuasion are even more crushing for their pop perfection. “When You Know You Know” has the loose edge of Sheryl Crow paired with the sort of heart-in-throat bridge writing Taylor Swift does so well. As Stokes sings in a nervous, anticipatory run-on:
Never seen a heart in a worse condition
Pinning all my hopes to the wrong pin cushion
But if you wanna try we could leave it all tonight
We could be aglow in the streetlight
Next the tension breaks to embody her hopes, and they’re “running down the road to jog the memory/Like tit for tat, that is you for me”—just one example of Stokes’ consistently charming and original way with an aphorism. It’s a memory she returns to on closer “2am,” the album’s lone slow song, a lull of rolling guitar and vocal harmonies that steadily build to an iridescent crescendo. “Do you feel it?” Stokes asks. “Feel it like you did back then?/2am/We were pounding the pavement/And I wonder/Could we be that way again?” She sings with an incantatory rhythm, as if teasing their union into existence, and a slight sense of hesitation, all the while painfully aware of the weight of the question. That’s the thing Stokes knows about being an expert in a dying field: It’s the hope that kills you. | 2022-09-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | September 16, 2022 | 8 | 08139233-5772-410a-9ffa-16be70e28e92 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The onetime 30 Rock writer and Community star Donald Glover’s newest Childish Gambino album is a multi-platform project that includes guest spots from Chance the Rapper, Azealia Banks, Problem, Mystikal, Miguel, and Jhené Aiko, among others. | The onetime 30 Rock writer and Community star Donald Glover’s newest Childish Gambino album is a multi-platform project that includes guest spots from Chance the Rapper, Azealia Banks, Problem, Mystikal, Miguel, and Jhené Aiko, among others. | Childish Gambino: Because the Internet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18817-childish-gambino-because-the-internet/ | Because the Internet | Donald Glover is a restless polyglot, and you can watch him tire of a medium just as he appears to get good at it. He caught the small screen bug after a stint as a writer for 30 Rock and skated off to join the ensemble cast of NBC’s Community in 2009. With Community approaching what might be its twilight, Glover jumped ship this year to become the star and showrunner of his own loosely autobiographical FX sitcom Atlanta. He hasn’t had much time for stand-up since 2011’s hour-long special Weirdo. In a sense, his rap career, hatched in 2008 after plugging his name into an online Wu-Tang rap name generator and receiving “Childish Gambino” as a result, has been his most enduring project. It has also been his most troubled.
Early Childish Gambino releases like 2008’s Sick Boi carried the playful “Just fucking around, sorry!” vibe of a rap career started on a lark but buckled under too much squeaky voiced Lil Wayne worship. Gambino later linked up with Community composer Ludwig Göransson for Culdesac and EP, proudly twee-as-fuck offerings that pondered Glover’s outsider upbringing over increasingly plush instrumental settings. But as the beloved Community awarded Glover’s musical exploits a higher profile, the pridefully uncool sloganeering of songs like Culdesac’s “Different” crystallized into spite. Gambino seemed to draft Camp, his nerd rage nadir of a debut studio album, as a piss and vinegar shower for his doubters. It spent more time thumbing its nose at the backpackers, racists, and dismissive women that gouged out the massive chip on Glover’s shoulder than it did, you know, trying to be a good rap album. The 2012 follow-up mixtape Royalty tried to recover by calling in buddies from Black Hippy, Wu-Tang Clan, and more to boost Gambino’s hip-hop cred, but he ended up getting creamed every step of the way by his more talented friends.
This year Donald Glover got weird. He announced a new album, the clunkily titled Because the Internet, and launched into a promotional campaign that included a confessional series of Instagram posts about depression and fear, frank talk about mortality in interviews, an introductory prelude-cum-making-of-featurette titled Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, an installation at the new Rough Trade NYC store, and, finally, a 76-page, four-act screenplay that shares a title with the album. The star of Because the Internet is “the Boy,” the future estranged son of Rick Ross who gets his kicks trolling celebrities online and hosting mansion parties that only serve to amplify a nagging loneliness. The story tracks the Boy’s helpless, irrational descent to his own undoing. Viewed through the lens of the album and screenplay, Gambino’s pre-release antics may have even been part of a long con to tease the themes of the project out into the real world.
If you’re fleet enough of a reader, the sequential song prompts in the screenplay reveal the album to be less of a stand-alone release than the full-fledged audio component to a daring multi-platform media project whose audio and literary wings collude to complement and even explain each other. “II. Worldstar” begins as a blippy trap number and takes a hard left on a found-sound fight sequence before landing on a psychedelic chamber jazz coda all because of a club night gone wrong in the play’s first act. Unfortunately, as the play begins to lurch with purpose the album resolves to allow the screenplay to do the heavy lifting. The third and final acts of the album are ill-served by the hairpin shifts in action they’re meant to soundtrack, and in the process, we get a series of jerky, very literal advance-the-plot numbers like “The Party” and “No Exit” followed by over-long, mournful fare like “I. Flight of the Navigator” and “II. Zealots of Stockholm (Free Information)”, songs that are well-timed and appropriate in the context of the multi-platform project but don’t make much sense without the screenplay. It’s all very ambitious, but experiencing Because the Internet as the artist intended requires an hour of fully plugged in attentive reading, embedded Youtube clip viewing, and listening.
On its own, Because the Internet’s album component breaks a number of Childish Gambino’s poor rap habits. Glover’s mic skills have radically improved since the last few outings, and his delivery is quite often formidable. The bouts of Kanye, Drake, and Lil Wayne tribute that assailed earlier efforts are mercifully absent. He seems to have found his own voice. Royalty’s injurious guest overload is scaled back in service to showcasing Gambino’s newfound mic control, so that all of the guests here are assigned hook detail. Chance the Rapper, Azealia Banks, Problem, and Mystikal all creep into the picture alongside Lloyd, Miguel and Jhené Aiko, but barring the Aiko spot on “Pink Toes”, Gambino takes all the verses. It’s a blessing and a curse; Gambino’s gotten rather good at the physical act of rapping, but he can still be a Christmas ham with the wordplay. The album is a minefield of wacka-wacka punchlines, facepalm-inducing hashtag raps and clever-until-you-really-think-about-it puns in spots, hampered periodically by gunk like, “In the garage/I had a menage/I murdered the vag,” “I got no patience, ’cause I’m not a doctor/Girl, why are you lyin’? Girl, why you Mufasa?,” “Yeah, you got some silverware, but really, are you eating, though?” and, my favorite, “Tia and Tamera in my bed, I’m a Smart Guy.” (If you’re Smart Guy Taj Mowry, and Tia and Tamera are in your bed, you’re not getting any action. They’re your sisters.)
With Gambino’s wordplay ping-ponging from caustic wit to message board snark, the enduring strength of the album is its production. Gambino and Göransson handle the bulk of it here alongside usual suspect Stefan Ponce and alley oops from twin act Christian Rich and Flying Lotus associate Thundercat. Because the Internet’s production team not only ensures the sounds are pretty, spacey, and jarring in all the right places, but they also effortlessly nail the album’s Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz synchronicity gambit. “III. Telegraph Ave. (‘Oakland’ by Lloyd)” kicks off with a tinny fragment of a Lloyd song bellowing out of a radio station and opens up into a full blown Gambino R&B showcase. (Glover might be a better singer than a rapper now, as tracks like “Telegraph Ave.” and the curt, exquisite “III. Urn” regularly bear out.) Following in lock step with the screenplay, you learn that it’s a Secret Life of Walter Mitty–style bout of impassioned karaoke to a song that nails the protagonist’s station in life a touch too closely. It’s not only the album’s best song; Gambino’s hook writing nearly bests guys we’d previously thought him to mimic, and he slides masterfully into and out of a cogent sixteen on the back end. It’s also a fulfilling payoff for bothering with the totality of Gambino’s project in the first place, a gobstopping execution of a lofty idea.
When the parts here come together you can catch a glimpse of Glover’s ambitious plan fully realized, but these moments run scarce the further into the project you trudge. This is saying nothing of the risky outlying assumption that everyone interested in the new Childish Gambino album is also interested in (or aware of) the new Childish Gambino screenplay you’re meant read online alongside it. Because the Internet is a nobly expansive attempt at plumbing the catacombs of social media for meaning and exploring the gap between the performative avatars we present as our online selves and the offline realities of our lives, but like the Twitter hounds and comment section warriors it speaks to and about, it could ultimately do well with a little less multitasking. | 2013-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Glassnote | December 12, 2013 | 5.8 | 0813abcb-01c3-415d-9408-e823261fb39a | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | |
After two game-changing LPs and the surprise 2008 success of "Paper Planes", M.I.A. returns with an album heavy on noise and light on memorable songs. | After two game-changing LPs and the surprise 2008 success of "Paper Planes", M.I.A. returns with an album heavy on noise and light on memorable songs. | M.I.A.: / \ / \ / \ Y / \ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14434-y/ | / \ / \ / \ Y / \ | Pop music has a way of forgiving artists on a hot streak. You can say, do, or get accused of horrible things, but most of time, if you're delivering the goods, the public will remain on your side. This is why R. Kelly is like Teflon, and why outrage regarding Michael Jackson's scandals and peculiarities only truly hobbled him when the quality of his music began to slide in the early 1990s. Madonna, too, has proven herself capable of multiple comebacks following creative missteps and P.R. disasters. Right or wrong, the social contract is simple: If you bring the hits, we'll put up with your shit.
With *///\Y/*, M.I.A. has broken that contract. And she could not have chosen a worse time to do it. The album comes not long after a New York Times Magazine cover story that portrayed her as a pretentious, truffle fries-eating phony spouting radical politics at odds with her extremely comfortable lifestyle. The piece was devastating to her credibility, and her childish response-- putting the author's cell number on Twitter-- only made matters worse. It seems likely that *///\Y/* will only accelerate this M.I.A. backlash. The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.
It's hard to tell whether *///\Y/* is half-assed or half-baked. There are certainly a number of good ideas in the mix here, but the execution is lacking. Tracks like "Story to Be Told", "Lovealot", and "Teqkilla" come across like mildly promising demos ready to be edited into sleeker, stronger compositions. Lead single "XXXO" sounds unfinished, as if everyone involved figured they may as well wait around for someone else to make a better remix. Most of the songs are built out of digital clangs and electronic noise, but unlike Kala's "Bird Flu", in which chaotic clatter was the basis for a brilliant track evoking panic and confusion, this cacophony doesn't signify much of anything, aside from perhaps a desire to seem confrontational and daring. There are moments of interesting noise, but in the absence of appealing grooves or memorable hooks, it barely matters.
The production credits on *///\Y/* aren't too different from Kala or Arular. Regular collaborators Switch and Diplo are back, but their contributions are disappointing despite their previous chemistry with M.I.A. "Tell Me Why", one of two songs with Diplo, aims in the general direction of the pop crossover success of "Paper Planes", but the beat is limp, and the song is marred by a poor, heavily Auto-Tuned vocal performance. "Born Free", produced by M.I.A. with Switch, is appealingly aggressive and punky, but the intentionally amateurish sound diminishes rather than accentuates its visceral impact. "Steppin' Up", a Switch collaboration with Rusko, is the album's most successful attempt at grafting her jarring new aesthetic to a traditional M.I.A. rhyme, but it's still a far cry from, say, "Bamboo Banga" or "Pull Up the People". Both producers get lost in this deliberate clutter.
M.I.A.'s new collaborators don't fare any better. Dubstep producer Rusko seems to be the most dialed-in to her current muse, but his tracks are better at evoking vague menace than provoking physical movement. Sleigh Bells' Derek E. Miller, author of some of 2010's most inspired and aggressive bangers, is wasted here. Rather than providing a track as enormous as "Kids" or "Crown on the Ground", his riff from the Sleigh Bells tune "Treats" is mutated into the haphazard "Meds and Feds". That song is not a total disaster, but it's certainly a missed opportunity and a poor application of a strong guitar riff. Sugu's intro track "The Message" is the worst thing on an album of failed experiments-- a bad demo with a simplistic, paranoid rap that's as rhetorically effective as someone in a dorm room ranting about the C.I.A. inventing A.I.D.S. It's not the best idea to kick off your politically charged album with a song that demolishes the possibility of addressing a serious issue about privacy with any degree of depth or nuance.
It's not exactly a surprise that M.I.A. would opt to create such an off-putting and anti-pop album at this point in her career. She may be reaching for an interesting and provocative style, but her motives seem defensive in nature-- reasserting her artsy, agit-prop cred not long after breaking through to the mainstream and becoming engaged to the heir of the Bronfman liquor fortune. On a superficial level, *///\Y/* is a challenge, but it's really more of a retreat. She's shrinking from her chance to engage with a mainstream audience, and refusing to live up to her potential as a pop artist. One hopes that *///\Y/* is just a detour, a misstep, something she had to get out of her system before getting back on track. | 2010-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Interscope / N.E.E.T. | July 12, 2010 | 4.4 | 0813f31e-505a-48e9-9b98-6f5d14d9523c | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The South Sudanese star reflects and celebrates the liminal life of a refugee on his first album recorded in Australia, where he's lived in asylum from his home country's civil war since 2014. | The South Sudanese star reflects and celebrates the liminal life of a refugee on his first album recorded in Australia, where he's lived in asylum from his home country's civil war since 2014. | Gordon Koang: Unity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gordon-koang-unity/ | Unity | The king of South Sudanese music has been living in a suburb of Melbourne since 2014, a refugee of his home country’s civil war. Blind since birth, Gordon Koang was a prolific writer and star in South Sudan, with ten LPs to his name. He was in the middle of an international tour when he decided not to return to home, fearing for his safety as members of his ethnic group, the Nuer tribe, were being killed in pogroms. Koang did not release music for a half-decade in Australia, until connecting with Music in Exile, a nonprofit that links refugee musicians with the country’s network of indie venues and infrastructure.
Unity is his first new album since leaving South Sudan, and his first attempt to articulate what it means to be an artist who exists between states. For Koang, this isn’t just a geographical issue. Across Unity’s eight songs, he calls on his home country’s many ethnic groups to find common ground, celebrates the bond between audience and musician, and longs for an eventual reunion with his wife and children, who he hasn’t seen since arriving in Australia. The combination of Koang’s South Sudanese thom and the group of local indie rockers who make up his band produces an energy to match the music he made back home—a pleasant surprise, even if they sometimes struggle to figure out how to use it. (South Sudanese percussionist Paul Biel, Koang's cousin and fellow refugee, also contributes.)
The thom is a harp-like instrument similar in sound and appearance to the East African krar. Koang plays it as both a rhythmic and melodic instrument, making it sound something like a Delta blues guitar or a detuned kora. His melodies unfurl in long, legible lines that he doubles with his vocals. Though his earlier music was largely backed by drum machines and synthesizers, he knows how to command a live ensemble, egging them along with his instrument and daring them to keep up. His bandmates step cleanly into the tight pockets he creates, and they move along at a parade-march pace.
While Koang is capable of leading the band wherever he wants to go, at times it’s not clear where they’re headed. With the thom setting the pace, the songs skip and skitter with frantic, locomotive energy. When properly harnessed, as in the pulsing “Stand Up (Clap Your Hands),” that energy nearly matches the incredible highs of his concerts. But the longer cuts here don’t progress so much as they dilate, stretching beyond what feels like their natural run times without pursuing any kind of melodic or rhythmic development. “Mal Mi Goa” opens with a synth that shimmers like a gold curtain, but the instrument dutifully settles into a simple rhythm pattern for the rest of the song’s eight minutes. Absent any real soloing or groove-digging, the lack of movement can be stultifying.
But Koang’s charisma is strong enough to pull the listener through when the album starts to stall. Whether he’s singing in English, Arabic, or Nuer, he emotes like someone who’s used to making himself heard over raucous crowds, and he knows precisely where to push into a higher register. On the intricately melodic “Stand Up,” Koang prods his listeners to join him and the band on stage, rounding out the chorus by declaring “we love you, audience.” He reels notes out of his thom, nearly cackling with delight as he sings along. His palpable sense of purpose keeps the mood bright, even when the subject matter turns dark. He counsels his fellow exiles in “Asylum Seeker,” advising patience and good cheer as they wait for new visas. On closer “Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial,” he sings across the ocean, sending comfort to his family as the band splashes blue chords behind him.
Shortly after Koang finished work on the album, the government granted him his permanent protection visa, making it possible for his family to finally join him in Australia. “There’s a lot of change here” Koang told The Guardian of his new country, “[but] now it’s home.” Unity is a reflection of his in-between existence. It’s indelibly shaped by his Australian bandmates, and it’s of a piece with his South Sudanese roots; happiness and grief wind their way through nearly all of these songs side by side. There’s joy in these liminal spaces, Koang makes clear, setting up shop inside and inviting the audience to join him for a dance.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Music in Exile / Light in the Attic | August 14, 2020 | 7.3 | 08188fd3-ed5b-47f6-b178-bb7e355dcff1 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
For the most rewarding installment in RVNG's FRKWYS series, Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras traveled to Jamaica to collaborate with legendary reggae vocal group the Congos on this psychedelic gospel album. | For the most rewarding installment in RVNG's FRKWYS series, Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras traveled to Jamaica to collaborate with legendary reggae vocal group the Congos on this psychedelic gospel album. | The Congos / Sun Araw / M. Geddes Gengras: Icon Give Thank | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16513-icon-give-thank/ | Icon Give Thank | By the mid 1970s, Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark Studios in Jamaica was conjuring unequivocal reggae albums (not to mention singles and special dub plates for soundsystem battles) at a possessed rate. There was the soulful work on Junior Byles' Beat Down Babylon and George Faith's To Be a Lover, Doctor Alimantado's raucous Best Dressed Chicken in Town, the drum-drug of Ras Michael & the Sons of Nagus' Love Thy Neighbour, Junior Murvin's trenchant and keen Police and Thieves, Max Romeo's loverman-cum-revolutionary on Revelation Time and War Ina Babylon. And then there was the epochal Heart of the Congos, the 1977 album cut by the Rastarian duo of the same name.
"Ashanti" Roy Johnson and Cedric Myton formed as a vocal duo, but to their already celestial vocal harmonies (perhaps if Curtis Mayfield and Barry Gibb had intermingled their throats), Scratch added the thunderous baritone of Watty Burnett to the Heart mix, which at times also included the harmonized mewl of a zombie cow. Now is not the place to unpack the majesty that is Heart of the Congos (where a song like "Ark of the Covenant" sounds exactly like that). Suffice to say it placed higher than any other reggae album in Pitchfork's survey of the 1970s, and former editor Scott Plagehoef waxed rhapsodic on those angelic voices that "contemplate spiritual awakening, cultural pride and human weakness (while) Perry practices a sort of addition by subtraction."
Even if he does put incants to Stevie Wonder, Bo Diddley, and Don Cherry on his most dubbed-out albums (see my personal highlight, Heavy Deeds, where the flange droops like Dr. Alimantado's zipper), Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones hews closest to Perry's cosmic swamp noise. Having Stallones-- with fellow West Coast noisenik M. Geddes Gengras-- venture to the wilds of Jamaica to record with the Congos (a four-piece now with the addition of touring member Kenroy Fyffe) makes a strange sort of sense. As long as you don't think too hard about stoned white guys tripping down to a third-world country seeking spiritual communion.
"With the Congos, if we had gone there and tried to be 'Hey, we're coming to you as white musicians from America... and we're going to do it in this way...' [we'd have been] setting up a hierarchy," Stallones told the Wire in a recent cover story. "As if [we're] understanding the situation more clearly than they do. And that's incredibly condescending. And incredibly false." There are moments of each party feeling the other out, resulting in an album that grows more assured only as it goes deeper. And for this collaboration, it sounds like Sun Araw are practicing sonic subtraction rather than addition.
"Happy Song" squiggles around Johnson's unwonted high register, guitars snake like something out of Black Dice's Creature Comforts, all of it underpinned by massive hand-drum bass drops. Between those canyonesque drops and the Nyabinghi drums that open "Invocation", this might spur UK dubstep producers like Shackleton and T++ to book the next flight to Kingston. A paean to "Sunshine" slinks at a crawl, the Congos incanting that it's "time to make a move, time to get you in the groove" while Gengras and Sun Araw instead proceed like a Pocahaunted acid folk processional.
In that same article, Stallones hints that even he was uncertain of how the Congos might react to the alien, non-roots music presented before them. And at the fore of the album, there are instances where the Congos sound hesitant on such terrain. Peak-wise, there are more transcendent vocal harmonies to be heard on Heart's bountiful "Fisherman" than on the entire first side here. But then a shift occurs: "At some point a little bit further into the recording though, [Ashanti Roy] turned to me and said, 'Oh, they're like chants.' And from that point it made so much sense to everyone." So as the album closes on "Invocation" and the ethereal lagoon drift of "Thanks and Praise", the symbiosis between both parties levitates to another plane, beyond dub, dancehall, roots, Ancient Romans, never really sounding like anything of the aforementioned genres. It's not the best reggae album of 2012, nor the best noise album, but it's undoubtedly the best psychedelic gospel album you'll hear all year.
What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series (see here and here) is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album. Nor is it a recording-artists-of-a-bygone-era-aligning-themselves-with-youth project. While Heart of the Congos' most repeated refrain remains "we've got to reach a higher ground," when Icon Give Thank succeeds, it's when the six men instead find common ground. | 2012-04-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Global / Experimental | Rvng Intl. | April 18, 2012 | 8.1 | 0818c5f3-f352-418b-b37a-40424826f3af | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Let me get this off my chest right away: Your Blues, the latest album from Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and New ... | Let me get this off my chest right away: Your Blues, the latest album from Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and New ... | Destroyer: Your Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2293-your-blues/ | Your Blues | Let me get this off my chest right away: Your Blues, the latest album from Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and New Pornographers contributor Daniel Bejar, could be the soundtrack for a Sega Genesis game about kittens studying post-structuralism. It is host to unapologetic MIDI instrumentation, glaringly theatrical vocals, and that ubiquitous but rarely implemented synth preset called "aah voice." Much more so than with any other Destroyer album, the aesthetic of Your Blues can be intensely jarring, and will likely annoy the fuck out of many, many people.
Ultimately, though, it's the most initially vexing aspects of Your Blues that prove the most endearing, memorable, and surprisingly touching. Like Bejar's 2002 release This Night, Your Blues constitutes a fundamental challenge to deeply ingrained conventions of sincerity and emotional honesty. The record's conceptual brilliance lies largely in Bejar's ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements, subtly suggesting that all music, if not all human expression, is in effect some sort of artifice. Bejar's critical engagement with codified aesthetic techniques certainly renders Your Blues a less immediately "accessible" record, and can at first come off as kitschy or detached. But the album's unique and defiant expression makes this the most holistically accomplished album Bejar has released to date.
Though it's a conceptually fascinating record, it would be unfair to write off Your Blues as a "concept album," or to suggest that its atypical aesthetic renders it unlistenable. Without a doubt, it's the songs here, not the conceptual meaning that could be read into them, that constitutes the core of the album's appeal. In fact, Bejar's newfound ability to conjure a plastic orchestra allows many of these songs to achieve a textural and structural richness only hinted at on previous albums. "The Music Lovers", previously released as a Sub Pop Singles Club seven-inch, benefits greatly from this treatment, as rising lines of synthesized strings grant the song a terse harmonic complexity absent from its more previous incarnation. "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" is an exercise in pure melodic elegance, a sing-songy, cleverly composed construction of bright acoustic guitars, multitracked vocals, and warm, evocative synthesizers.
Elsewhere, Bejar's songwriting takes on a more grandiose bent. The album's opening track, "Notorious Lightning", finds Bejar sing-speaking his way through a string of vague-yet-striking images, slowly building to a rousing, anthemic finale. Framed by fake tympani, strings, and snare drums, Bejar sings, "And someone's got to fall before someone goes free," his voice carrying an unrestrained, fist-clenched passion never before present in a Destroyer song. "Notorious Lightning", like many songs on Your Blues, has a markedly theatrical quality to it, its breathy vocal delivery and artificial orchestral arrangements landing somewhere between Stephin Merritt and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Like Merritt, Bejar explores the emotional momentum that these theatrical forms can evoke, reinforcing this connection with a computerized simulacrum of bombastic arrangements.
Lyrically, Bejar is at the top of his game, his words reinforcing his musical play on artifice in lines like, "Warm yourself by the fiery stage/ Fiery 'cause I lit it," and most notably, "Always the play, never the thing." The song "An Actor's Revenge" borrows its title from a Japanese movie, but replaces the film's visceral and dramatic plot with a more general and pointed discussion of impersonation, sincerity, and frivolity. On "What Road", Bejar hijacks a Smiths lyric, whispering, "There is a light and it goes... out," before an ascending swell of synth-strings ushers in a forceful coda, with Bejar hissing, "Your backlash is right where I wanted you," a clever (whether or not intentional) address to his potentially befuddled audience. Oftentimes, Bejar's delivery evokes Thunder Perfect Mind-era Current 93, only more fangy and melodic, and with substantially fewer lyrics about dragons.
Certainly, those hoping for a return to the more straightforward Destroyer of yore will initially be put off by Your Blues. But it's hard to see Bejar's refusal to backtrack as a creative hindrance. A full six albums into his career, Daniel Bejar is making a compelling case for self-doubt as a fine art-- not content to rest on the fractured charm of City of Daughters, the formal, classicist brilliance of Streethawk: A Seduction, or the epic, perverted rock-isms of This Night, Bejar has made his bravest and most iconoclastic album to date. Now, finally, the bandname begins to make sense. | 2004-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 14, 2004 | 8.6 | 081fd3fd-042d-4f5d-8510-0fdb27d15753 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | 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 Pink Floyd’s conflicted and brilliant album from 1971. | 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 Pink Floyd’s conflicted and brilliant album from 1971. | Pink Floyd: Meddle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-floyd-meddle/ | Meddle | It was a single note, flickering out like a beacon to lead a wayward ship through the night. Pink Floyd had no new songs prepared when they started recording in early 1971, but they did have access to the legendary Abbey Road Studios, and free rein from their label to mess around until they found their way. They spent weeks improvising with each member isolated from what the others were playing—a harebrained search for the sort of strange and spontaneous inspiration that their old leader, guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, conjured freely.
They called the results “Nothings 1-24”: Predictably, they were almost entirely unusable—except for this one note: a high B, played on a piano near the top of its range, warped by the undulations of a rotating Leslie speaker. It was piercing, but slightly obscured, as if it had traveled a great distance to reach your awareness. “We could never recreate the feeling of this note in the studio, especially the particular resonance between the piano and the Leslie,” drummer Nick Mason wrote later. So they used the demo tape, and began composing around it. “Echoes” grew from that note into something awesome: a 23-minute psych-prog voyage from tranquility to triumph to desolation and back, with a riff like a lightning bolt striking open sea, and a pillowy lead vocal keeping you cozy and safe below deck. It was the first song Pink Floyd completed for Meddle, their conflicted and brilliant sixth album.
After a period of flailing for direction, “Echoes” offered a path toward the populist art-rock epics that would make Pink Floyd one of the most successful bands in history. But it was also a kind of ending. During the late ’60s, under Barrett’s mad reign, Pink Floyd was turbulent and intuitive, balancing his fairytale songs with the sort of chaotic and noisy improvisations that presumably inspired Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to name her dog after him. As their fame rose and bassist Roger Waters seized ever-tighter creative control across the ‘70s, the music increasingly favored solemnity over whimsy, formalism over exploration. “Echoes”—and Meddle as a whole—sit at the intersection of these two approaches, offering a hazy preview of Pink Floyd’s future as international stars without yet abandoning their past as visionary young ruffians.
From Pink Floyd’s founding in 1965 to Barrett’s ouster in 1968, they were the de facto house band of London’s nascent psychedelic scene. The members, a group of brainy misfits who’d assembled while attending university for art and architecture, mostly kept a professional distance from actual psychedelics—with the exception of Barrett, who indulged heartily. Soon after the release of Pink Floyd’s debut album, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he became withdrawn and erratic: He refused to participate in performances, sat unresponsive as people tried to talk to him, sabotaged a TV appearance by standing still when he was supposed to mime along to a backing track. His bandmates grew frustrated by these impediments to their success. One day in February 1968, they decided they simply wouldn’t pick him up on the way to their show that night. That was the end of his time in Pink Floyd. Barrett recorded two solo albums, then withdrew from public life until his death in 2006. “I’m disappearing, avoiding most things” he told a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1971, the year Pink Floyd released Meddle without him. Two of the last songs he recorded with them were deemed too dark and unsettling for release until several decades later. “I’ve been looking all over the place for a place for me,” he speak-sings in one of them, his voice taking on a theatrical Mad Hatter edge. “But it ain’t anywhere.”
Syd Barrett’s story fits neatly within two late-’60s archetypes: the acid casualty and the doomed rock star. The reality is probably sadder, and more ordinary. With the rock star myth no longer as culturally potent as it once was, and more nuanced contemporary understanding of LSD’s relationship to disorders like schizophrenia—it can precipitate psychotic breaks in people who are already disposed toward them, but it doesn’t cause them by itself—he looks simply like a man with a serious mental illness, no desire for fame, and no one around who understood how to help him.
Nick Mason, in his memoir Inside Out, returns multiple times to the callousness with which he and his bandmates treated their frontman while he was unraveling, presenting their disregard for Barrett as a consequence of their fixation on making it as musicians. Beginning with 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, their post-Barrett superstar years can be seen as a series of attempts to reckon with his absence and their guilt, even as they moved away from his vision of the band: Dark Side, a suite about how the pressures of modern life can drive a person to insanity, exploring mental anguish by the light of a lava lamp; Wish You Were Here, an elegiac and sometimes cynical album presented more or less explicitly as a tribute to Barrett; The Wall, a rock opera about a singer’s increasing alienation from society and his loved ones. These albums’ status as dorm-room classics can make their preoccupation with psychological instability seem like a bit of trippy kitsch, but it seems unlikely their creators see it that way.
There were six years and six albums between The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and The Dark Side of the Moon. During this limbo period, Pink Floyd seemed to be avoiding a confrontation about their identity, who they really were without their leader. 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets mostly follows in the style of Piper; it came as Barrett was on his way out of the band, and is the only Pink Floyd album where he and Gilmour, his friend since secondary school, both appear. After that, there was a film soundtrack, a double LP with a live recording and a series of pieces the members recorded individually, and a ponderous quasi-symphonic work assembled in large part by a guest arranger. “Meddle was the first album we had worked on together as a band in the studio since A Saucerful of Secrets,” Mason writes, positioning Pink Floyd’s sixth album as the true follow-up to their second, and their first proper collaborative statement without any involvement from Barrett.
Making Meddle took the better part of a year, thanks to the band’s touring schedule and their insistence on doing things in “the most complicated way possible,” as Mason puts it. The every-man-for-himself jams that produced the “Echoes” piano sound were only the beginning: There were fruitless attempts at recording vocals backwards, pedals wired up the wrong way, a dog trained to howl along to music brought in as a collaborator. At some point, they convinced EMI, their label, that Abbey Road lacked the technical sophistication for the music they were trying to make, and moved the operation to George Martin’s recently opened AIR Studio, which had the state-of-the-art 16-track tape machines Abbey Road lacked.
Soon, Pink Floyd would marshal the precision of new recording technologies toward albums that were carefully planned from the top down, with every moment derived from an overarching theme and tuned for maximum impact. On Meddle, they’d arrived nearly at the rich and enveloping sonics of Dark Side, but not yet at its elaborate compositional holism. No other Pink Floyd album sits in quite the same sweet spot: huge and ambitious but beholden to no extramusical narrative, pushing at rock’s limits without reaching beyond them for the virtues of cinema and theater. It needs no three-act storyline or operatic themes and reprisals to flatten you to your couch and scorch a hole in your brain; the thunder of the band is enough to do that on its own.
Progressive rock was on the rise in early-’70s UK, and punk wasn’t far behind it. Pink Floyd would eventually come to be associated with the indulgences of the former, but they were always an imperfect fit for prog—they were certainly indulgent, but they simply lacked the instrumental virtuosity of bands like Yes and King Crimson. Early on, they had as much to do with noise rock, though the term was still decades from being invented. Johnny Rotten famously wore an “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt onstage with the Sex Pistols; not long after, his deconstructed jams with Public Image Ltd. weren’t so different from the freakouts of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” or “Interstellar Overdrive.” Meddle has both: the sweep of Floyd’s proggy later days and the scrappiness of their origins.
The mostly instrumental opener “One of These Days” sounds like a Camaro rocketing through the cosmos. It is a visceral thrill that exists only for its own sake, introducing Meddle with a bit of hard rock sci-fi that does nothing to prepare you for the narcotized drift of the rest of the first side. The album’s first lyrics (aside from a brief spoken interjection in “One of These Days”) do a better job of setting the languid prevailing tone: “A cloud of eiderdown draws around me, softening the sound/Sleepytime, and I lie with my love by my side, and she’s breathing low,” Gilmour sings to open “A Pillow of Winds.” Whether consciously or not, these lines contain strong echoes of Barrett, who sang of being “Alone in the clouds all blue/Lying on an eiderdown” on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
If the Pink Floyd of Dark Side and onward grappled with Barrett’s legacy in their subject matter while shaking off his direct musical influence, Meddle is indebted to him as a musician without yet directly acknowledging him as a man. Its only inessential song is “Seamus,” featuring the aforementioned canine, whose blend of blues pastiche and playful sound collage is the clearest attempt to replicate the madcap character of Floyd’s earlier era. But where Barrett might have located some essential strangeness at the meeting of slide guitar and singing dog, the rest of Pink Floyd seem to believe the juxtaposition itself is enough. The lyrics—“I was in the kitchen/Seamus, that’s the dog, was outside”—are almost perverse in their refusal to engage with anything substantial.
“Fearless” is another matter. It focuses on the quiet dignity of an “idiot” following his own path up a hill while a crowd jeers from below that he’ll never make the top. As with much of Meddle, the guitar seems to proceed in slow motion, matching his humble climb, a stately ascending riff with ringing open strings that Waters played using an alternate tuning Barrett taught him years earlier. Gilmour takes the lead vocal, and his sleepy delivery—which usually implies a state of stoned beatitude—instead conveys sadness and futility beneath the determination. “Fearless” is among Pink Floyd’s greatest and most moving songs, heartbreaking even as the idiot seems to prevail over the voices that tell him he won’t.
If the band felt the story held any resonance with their own personal trials, they didn’t show it overtly. “Fearless” ends with a recording of a football crowd bellowing out the anthem of Liverpool F.C., framing its tale of perseverance with the simple good feeling of an underdog defeating a rival. Mason could never understand Waters’ insistence on this strange coda, especially given that the bassist was a devoted Arsenal supporter. Maybe his affinity was for the familial sentiment of the song itself, a Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune adopted by Liverpool fans after a local group turned it into a pop hit, rather than its sporting context. “Walk on with hope in your heart,” fans can be heard singing as “Fearless” fades out, “and you’ll never walk alone.”
But Meddle’s real reason for being is “Echoes,” which takes up the entirety of the album’s second side. Ambitious beyond anything Pink Floyd had attempted before, wild beyond anything they’d attempt after, it takes the origin of life itself as its subject, another humble ascent. In lilting harmony, Gilmour and Wright describe a scene deep below the sea: “No one knows the wheres or whys/But something stirs and something tries/And starts to climb towards the light.” As the song’s storm gathers force, its focus shifts to an ambiguous chance encounter between two people, descendents of those stirring amoebae. The drums grow more forceful; the guitars turn from vapor to liquid to solid to flame. In place of a climax, there is disintegration. The rhythm halts, the bottom drops out, and for one last time, Pink Floyd sound more like avant-garde improvisers than stadium rock musicians: groaning, twisting, screeching, expressing the complicated freedom of coming untethered from any plan.
Eventually, the beacon of that high B on the piano returns. The band reassembles and finishes the song. Later, they release one of rock’s greatest albums with Dark Side of the Moon, and solidify their status as icons forever. As if in a dream, Barrett makes a final visit to the studio as they record Wish You Were Here, its followup. He wanders into Abbey Road as an uninvited guest, bald and barely recognizable, seeming confused and disengaged when they play him samples of an album they wrote partly about him. Pink Floyd find their way through the storm of his absence, and eventually steer into another one: ego, money, fame, their corrosive effects on brotherhood. But for now, they are at the center of the turbulence, making noise, lingering in darkness and uncertainty until it’s time to climb out.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Harvest | July 12, 2020 | 9 | 081fd72d-f92d-4884-a961-2609ceaa0480 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On their third album, the Mexican dream-pop duo leans further into their soothing and immersive sound, taking a soft dive into the comfort of solitude. | On their third album, the Mexican dream-pop duo leans further into their soothing and immersive sound, taking a soft dive into the comfort of solitude. | Mint Field: Aprender a Ser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mint-field-aprender-a-ser/ | Aprender a Ser | During the height of the pandemic, Mint Field returned home to Mexico City to record Aprender a Ser in isolation, then spent the last three years refining its sound. The mood is wistful, but never dreary. They sketch out hazy scenes, like clouds settling over a vast landscape without a stormy ending or a slinky noir film. While their previous work relied more on contrasting airy vocals with gritty guitar outbursts, Aprender a Ser leans into sleek trip-hop, with vaporous synths and Sebastian Neyra’s heavy basslines. It’s dream pop without a script.
Mint Field build a collection of shadowy tracks that blend seamlessly into each other. On “El Suspiro Cambia Todo,” radiating synths and licking reverb set a consistent atmospheric tone for the rest of the album. The group excels at fostering a specific airy reverie, and they don’t verge often from this chilled-out stupor. But on standout “Moronas,” a drum machine punches up the pace and locks in a track perfect for a vintage intergalactic video game. Mint Field pull from a popular set of ’90s influences—Portishead, Low, Mazzy Star—but they never feel too referential. The group weaves strands of its inspirations together to create their own avant-pop sound.
Frontwoman Estrella del Sol Sánchez’s hypnotic voice is at the core of the group. There’s a numbness in her drawn-out breaths. She never fully gives into her deepest emotions, so we’re left with our ear against the door, making sense of the muffled voices behind it. She was inspired by the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, whose vocals served more as a layer inside a song’s arrangement. And like Fraser, Sánchez is always on the verge of floating away. On “Sueño Despierto,” Sánchez’s delicate falsetto melds with a swirl of fluttering saxophones, pulling us further into her impending dream state. It’s a harmonious example of how her voice fuses with lush instrumentals–the aural equivalent of watching dollops of paint mix on a canvas.
Sánchez is a spare songwriter, relying more on the timbre of her voice to convey the songs’ emotions than lyrical complexity. Her words often repeat, soft and yearning, evoking natural ephemeral images—the leaves of an orchid wilting or a butterfly’s brief lifespan. For Sánchez, nature is a reminder of her impermanence. There aren’t huge revelations to take away from these tracks. Sánchez only grazes the surface of her inner world without much personal specificity. And the album can dwindle as its weightless charm wears off. But Mint Field are more about conjuring a feeling than spelling out a narrative. Aprender a Ser is a dream world without much explanation, but like the body settling into a chilled pool, the acclimation is worth it. | 2023-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Felte | December 19, 2023 | 7.3 | 0824a65c-db5e-4e99-b2da-30df12d51b21 | Maria Eberhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maria-eberhart/ | |
Love Is Overtaking Me, a compilation of more as-yet-unavailable Arthur Russell material-- most of which was born from a more traditional singer/songwriter structure than the avant-garde cello compositions and kinetic, jazz-influenced disco for which he has also come to be known-- continues the late composer and producer's winning streak. | Love Is Overtaking Me, a compilation of more as-yet-unavailable Arthur Russell material-- most of which was born from a more traditional singer/songwriter structure than the avant-garde cello compositions and kinetic, jazz-influenced disco for which he has also come to be known-- continues the late composer and producer's winning streak. | Arthur Russell: Love Is Overtaking Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12375-love-is-overtaking-me/ | Love Is Overtaking Me | In the four years since Audika began releasing the much-loved but less easy to find music of composer and producer Arthur Russell, his popularity has soared. Particularly striking a chord with a younger generation of musicians, many have enthusiastically championed his progressive and influential sound. In 2007, Jens Lekman arranged the brief but tenderly constructed EP, Four Songs By Arthur Russell, which featured imaginative covers by Joel Gibb, Vera November, and Taken By Trees. Meanwhile, artists including Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear (who digitally restored and edited Love Is Overtaking Me), St. Vincent, and DFA's James Murphy have effused about their admiration for his distinctively free-flowing, compelling arrangements.
As Matt Wolf's perceptive, beautifully shot film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, reveals, Arthur Russell quite literally had hundreds of tape reels documenting the material he recorded, from his first compositions in the early 1970s to the very last made in 1991, a year before he died of AIDS in New York City. Love Is Overtaking Me, a compilation of more as-yet-unavailable material created during those two decades, proves to be a valuable insight into Russell's extensive body of work. Most of the 21 tracks on this album have a more traditional singer/songwriter structure than the avant-garde cello compositions and kinetic, jazz-influenced disco for which he has also come to be known. Tracks such as "Close My Eyes", "Oh Fernanda Why", and the traditional cowboy song "Goodbye Old Paint", are strong examples of his connection to folk music and are largely developed on acoustic guitar. A common thread always runs throughout Russell's work and is well represented here: his moving, gentle voice-- and a knack for storytelling that could rival Bob Dylan. On this album, these lovely lyrical details are especially prevalent on songs like "Habit of You" and "Big Moon", where Russell's sensitivity and sense of humor gracefully anchor the music.
Many other great artists at a similar level of Russell's prolificacy have more than enough skeletons in their musical closet, plenty of which would only appeal to the most die-hard of fans. The tracks currently being dusted off in his archive, however, have so far been dependably strong, despite being mostly unfinished tracks of incredible musical variety. Russell himself was rarely satisfied with his results, preferring to move on to the next song rather than dotting the i's and crossing the t's. His creativity, it seems, was pretty much constant. He would work every day without fail, and the songs on Love Is Overtaking Me are a deftly selected microcosm of this brilliant musical world. The compilation features all elements of Russell's margin blurring, from the warm pop of "Planted a Thought" and the Modern Lovers-influenced delivery of "Time Away" to the stark, cello driven song, "Eli", where the vocals and strings seemed to be in a tonal battle, although this brings an urgency to the lyrics (about a lonesome, mistreated dog) and allows them to resonate in the best possible way.
At the time of his death, Russell's music had reached only a limited audience outside of his devoted, often high profile connections (he collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Allen Ginsberg, among others). Yet his distinctive music has the rare resilience to keep growing, connecting to more and more people because of its extraordinarily contemporary, even timeless, quality. While he was alive, Russell and his relatively small group of listeners were convinced that his music should reach more ears; that it should be able to stretch across the same boundaries that his compositions navigated so elegantly. Now, through the care of Audika and the genuine love of fellow musicians and fans that have recognized his prodigious talent, Russell is finally getting the acknowledgment his honest, powerful, and most remarkable music deserves. | 2008-10-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-10-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Audika | October 29, 2008 | 8.3 | 08252664-ae92-4982-8246-edcab8713fa9 | Pitchfork | null |
|
After a protracted streak of hijacking Top 40 smashes like “U.O.E.N.O.” and “Bugatti”, spitballing weirdness out on mixtapes, and farming his more saccharine ideas out to huge pop stars, Atlanta's Future returns with Honest. | After a protracted streak of hijacking Top 40 smashes like “U.O.E.N.O.” and “Bugatti”, spitballing weirdness out on mixtapes, and farming his more saccharine ideas out to huge pop stars, Atlanta's Future returns with Honest. | Future: Honest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19221-future-honest/ | Honest | Much of the intrigue surrounding Future’s debut album Pluto fixated on the voice: raw and emotive, possessed of both a forlorn R&B Lothario’s despondency and the gruff yawp of a drug-runner celebrating a sold out batch, and shellacked in a thick, forbidding coat of Auto-Tune and reverb. Coupled with a penchant for interstellar iconography, the vocal modification frequently attracted science fiction descriptors, portraits of the artist as a moody machine. But Pluto’s most gripping cuts (“Turn on the Lights”, “You Deserve It”) took flight by scaling back the mods to focus on the unnerving frailty of a singer unafraid to skim around and across the break in his voice. Even in moments where Pluto’s vocals were heavily processed, the most captivating quality was the humanity poking through. So let’s set aside this robot business.
Pluto’s greatest success was opening new avenues in Future’s songwriting. At the time, his calling card was the trap house shouter: 2011–12 mixtape highlights “Tony Montana”, “Magic”, and “Same Damn Time” delivered dopeboy truisms via battering ram. Pluto collected those cuts for good measure, but otherwise it dispensed with the tough guy shit, reintroducing Future as a lovelorn hook man. As with Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak, the transition from rapping to singing was smoothed out by a T-painian dollop of purposefully overdriven pitch correcting tech and confessional emotionalism. The gambit worked, but the album was a touch too reliant on its crutches in retrospect. After a protracted streak of hijacking Top 40 smashes like “U.O.E.N.O.” and “Bugatti”, spitballing weirdness out on mixtapes, and farming his more saccharine ideas out to pure singers from Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus to Rihanna and his fiance Ciara, Future finally returns with his second proper full-length, Honest.
Future’s got a notably greater command of his instrument two years on from Pluto, and to that end, much of the Auto-Tune and reverb that occasionally gave the first album’s vocals the distance of a radio transmission have been scrubbed. The training wheels are off. Fight songs like “My Momma” and “Covered N Money” draw their intensity from the quirky sound of a voice giving out screaming the titular choruses, a trick perfected on the searing pre-album street single “SH!T”. Flubbed notes are left in for character rather than squeegeed out by computers, but there’s less of those than ever because writing for and performing alongside other singers has worked wonders for Future’s range. The rousing upper register chorus for “Blood, Sweat, Tears” and the slick falsetto hook on “Honest” wouldn’t have worked with his voice before. “Never Satisfied” refuses to let Drake do the heavy lifting as Future confidently soars past the Toronto MC’s introspective vocalizing in between choruses. And where guests were once employed to secure a measure of credibility, now they hover in Future’s orbit: Drake gets faded out mid-chorus on the two-minute “Never Satisfied”, and even when Kanye parks the Kardashian roadshow in back of “I Won”, he sticks to the script.
Honest relinquishes Pluto’s romantic tendencies as well, retaining a personal bent without resorting to pining for affection to achieve it. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Future said flatly, “There are no love songs on this album,” although mid-album stunners “I Won” and “I Be U” teem with pride and excitement about meeting the mate he yearned for on “Turn Out the Lights”. Otherwise, Honest prefers to buck expectations by sneering through the slow jams. Deep cut “Special” is all somber strummed guitars and taunts for an ex who couldn’t handle the fame. (“You ain’t even tryin’ to be special.”) The title track uses a sedate piano-filled production from DJ Spinz and Metro Boomin to coolly revel in newfound wealth and status in a wan, sad deadpan. (“I’m a rock star for life, I’m just being honest.”) Honest is consistently moneyed and aspirational in all the places you might’ve previously expected sap.
Future’s eagerness to escape his old tics and methods also means moving away from trap. There’s still room for grisly, gothic stompers from a murderer’s row of 808 architects from Nard & B to Sonny Digital and 808 Mafia, but Honest’s production is expansive. “Look Ahead” outfits a sample of Amadou and Mariam’s Santigold-assisted “Dougou Badia” with kicks, claps, and guitars for a powerhouse opening argument for Future’s growth. Fresh off a year of platinum hits, frequent collaborator Mike WiLL Made It has gotten weird: he approximates Noah “40” Shebib’s pulsating bass and muted drums on “Never Satisfied” and affixes rattling low end to the gritty, almost atonal synths of “Move That Dope” like a Southern rap Trent Reznor. The album closes with “Blood, Sweat, Tears”, a sermon about the fruits of perseverance delivered over martial drums and wrenching strings specifically designed, it would seem, to blow the lid off arenas.
The searching stream of mixtapes and loosies that followed Pluto appeared to many to signify a struggle to maintain footing in an industry notorious for feeding on Atlanta rap sensations and casting them aside once the hits dry up. But Honest surges with the self-assurance of an artist finally coming into his own. The bruisers are icepick sharp, the ballads restlessly toy with convention, and Future’s heightened ease with both makes Pluto look like a transitional album in retrospect, the dress rehearsal for this, the actual takeover. | 2014-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic / A1 / Free Bandz | April 22, 2014 | 8.1 | 0825a05e-790e-4c3f-bc66-c043a112d476 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
null | At a glance, a Phil Elverum/Julie Doiron meet-up seems entirely apt, perhaps even inevitable. The two share collaborators, hail from sleepy corners of their respective countries, and make music a Last.fm or Pandora bot would more than likely peg as "similar." Viewed a certain way, however, the two couldn't be more far afield. Elverum, as a songwriter, has long occupied himself with The Big Questions, his catalog full of probing meditations on birth and death, the elements, and the unknown. Doiron, conversely, has consistently stuck to the simple and domestic, quietly reveling in the tangible and everyday. Songs such as | Mount Eerie / Julie Doiron / Fred Squire: Lost Wisdom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12292-lost-wisdom/ | Lost Wisdom | At a glance, a Phil Elverum/Julie Doiron meet-up seems entirely apt, perhaps even inevitable. The two share collaborators, hail from sleepy corners of their respective countries, and make music a Last.fm or Pandora bot would more than likely peg as "similar." Viewed a certain way, however, the two couldn't be more far afield. Elverum, as a songwriter, has long occupied himself with The Big Questions, his catalog full of probing meditations on birth and death, the elements, and the unknown. Doiron, conversely, has consistently stuck to the simple and domestic, quietly reveling in the tangible and everyday. Songs such as "Snowfalls in November" are patiently observed odes to satisfaction and serenity in the absolute. In short, Doiron is the contented period to Elverum's searching question mark.
The mini-album Lost Wisdom represents an intersection of those two distinct sensibilities and their resulting voices: Elverum, his tone often hesitant and sorrowful; Doiron, her singing reassuringly direct and familiar. For Doiron, this is a chance to wrap her warm, homespun vocals around Elverum's words of uncertainty, bringing earthly color to songs which, under the Mount Eerie banner alone, might emerge cold and gray. From her entrance on opening track "Lost Wisdom", a stately rumination rife with natural imagery which sets the tone for the album, through her solitary vocal on the Songs-era Leonard Cohen-evoking "If We Knew...", and on to the closing duet "Grave Robbers", Doiron is a reassuring presence in song-world often threatening to capitulate to doubt.
Indeed, it's this presence of a second voice that distinguishes Lost Wisdom amid the abundance of post-Microphones Phil Elverum material. To hear Elverum sing of his existential quandaries in isolation is frequently compelling, but with these songs often cast as duets, we're presented with the notion that Phil's struggles are universal. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on "Voice in Headphones", the closest thing to a standout track on Lost Wisdom, with its harmonized refrain-- borrowed from Björk's "Undo"-- of "It's not meant to be a strife/ It's not meant to be a struggle uphill." It's the sort of lyric Elverum would have the whole crowd singing along to at a show, and here-- surrounded as it is by plenty of brooding restraint-- it sounds resoundingly triumphant, a more terrestrial counterpart to the otherworldly song it quotes and a kind of modern day spiritual for those oppressed within.
Elverum, too, benefits from the de facto constraints of this collaboration. The album was recorded during a brief touring respite, forcing him to forgo the intricate (if still lo-fi) ornamentation that typically adorns his output. It is instead, as he told Pitchfork, a "documentary of a session." Even Fred Squire's electric guitar is notably unobtrusive as it complements the two voices and the steady rumble of Phil's acoustic. The result is a collection of songs so taut and concisely resonant as to be psalms. But psalms to be sung, perhaps, in secret: "Grave Robbers", the closing track, ends with someone abruptly shutting off the tape. In a way we're made to feel as though we've been eavesdropping all the while, but even so, seldom has an act of auditory voyeurism been so rewarding. | 2008-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | October 14, 2008 | 8.3 | 0826127a-6e8d-4257-87a8-d0426ec68b76 | Matthew Solarski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-solarski/ | null |
A deluxe, remastered version of the indie rock classic, this original 1988 album was the first full articulation that the underground music of the Reagan era-- hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes-- was converging into a new, exciting Alternative Nation. | A deluxe, remastered version of the indie rock classic, this original 1988 album was the first full articulation that the underground music of the Reagan era-- hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes-- was converging into a new, exciting Alternative Nation. | Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10326-daydream-nation-deluxe-edition/ | Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition | I don’t expect to hear too many complaints about the rating above. Daydream Nation is a great uniter: You’d be hard pressed to find many fans of indie rock who don’t have some love for this record. That’s partly because this record is great, sure—that’s one boring reason—but it’s also because this record is one of a handful that helped shape the notion of what American indie rock can potentially mean. It’s almost a tautology: Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are.
Not that there wasn’t plenty of underground music in the U.S. before this album’s 1988 release—hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes. But the notion that all those Reagan-era discontents might be in the same boat—a new Alternative Nation just beginning to converge—hadn’t yet been fully articulated. Sonic Youth sensed that convergence in the making, and they were pretty sure it had something to do with Dinosaur Jr.: “A new aesthetic of youth culture,” Thurston Moore called it in Matthew Stearns’ 33 1/3 book about the album, “wherein anger and distaste, attributes associated with punk energy, were coolly replaced by head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance.” Right. So the band writes the most glorious, accessible pop song of its career, calling it “J Mascis for President”—i.e., an underground-rock campaign song—and it kicks off this record under the title “Teen Age Riot.” What does that sound like if not the grand calling-together of a nascent underground audience?
Sonic Youth don’t set the song up as a call to arms. Instead, Thurston, singing, is in bed, just like you might be while listening to it—or to Bug, or Surfer Rosa, or Isn’t Anything, all of which came within the same year. Just two motes of potential energy, both waiting for Mascis to “Come running in on platform shoes/With [his] Marshall stack/To at least just give us a clue.” The video for this song contains more images of musicians who aren’t in Sonic Youth than musicians who are: Ian MacKaye, Patti Smith, Mark E. Smith, Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Sun Ra, Daniel Johnston, Neil Young, the Beach Boys—a crash course in what still, almost 20 years later, looks like an indie canon.
Following that, the band spends this double album managing to inhabit just about every major strain of the underground, collecting and referencing each facet of what this “new youth culture” might look like:
avant-garde Downtown NYC new music, complete with odd harmonic collisions and screwdrivers wedged in guitars
hardcore punk sneering and double-time drumbeats
good old off-kilter, accessible collegiate pop music
gorgeous, oceanic “head-in-the-clouds outer limits” guitar stuff, which-- along with the previous year’s releases from My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies—would define indie rock’s guitar vocabulary as much as anything this side of Joy Division/New Order
high-art, film, and literary references, ranging from the album cover (a Gerhard Richter painting) to the lyrics (which borrow from an Andy Warhol film and books by Harry Crews and Denis Johnson—and this is before Denis Johnson published Jesus’ Son)
giant tongue-near-cheek rock gestures, like including a three-part “trilogy” and four Led Zeppelin-style icons representing the band members
slacker poses and goofy skater-kid trash culture
ambitious art-world braininess
this
that
the other
All melted down into one lump: “Seamless” isn’t even the word.
Of course, now that a whole genre's grown out from Daydream Nation’s roots, all its “difficult” sounds, modified guitars, and strange collisions have become de riguer, invisible, and normalized, more clearly revealing the shimmering pop epics that always lay beneath. What’s really shocking is the energy of it. This record’s default setting is the place most rock bands try to work up to around the third chorus—guitar players veering off into neck-strangling improvisations, singers dropping off the melody and into impassioned shouts. These songs start there and just stay. Usually the guitars spend a few bars wandering off and into sideways tangles, choking out their harmonies, and then come back together and spend a few bars pinning down the riff: On “’Cross the Breeze,” that means Kim Gordon keeps returning to the same refrain, each time grunting it more insistently than the last. Sometimes they don’t even stay there: Lee Ranaldo’s “Hey Joni” starts off already on some next level of energy, and then Lee shouts “kick it!” and the band ratchets up to some next next level, and then he coasts up to one exhilarating shouted “HEY!” and the band bursts through a ceiling higher than you could have imagined at the start of the track. It’s the kind of transcendent glory that crosses genres and even arts: that same in-the-zone feeling you get from a be-bop combo in top gear, a rapper at the absolute clear-eyed peak of his game—hell, even an athlete in perfect function.
Lyrically, it’s Thurston who turns in the rock slacker trash: When he’s not just lying in bed, heÆs wandering around downtown Manhattan, getting mugged, blowing up amplifiers, and talking in a stoned skater-kid argot (“you got to fake out the robot!”). Lee, being Lee, exists on some more mystical future/past plane, located in dreams and open fields instead of on the Bowery. Kim’s lyrics are the brutal, terrifying ones, each song outlining a flirtation with some demonic jerk. In “Kissability,” it’s a rotten entertainment mogul, pledging “you could be a star” and probably playing with himself under his desk. In “Eliminator Jr,” it’s Robert Chambers, the teenage rich-kid “Preppy Murderer,” and a horrible little shit even before he raped and strangled Jennifer Levin behind the Met in Central Park. In “’Cross the Breeze,” it may be the devil himself.
This reissue does what reissues have to do these days, raising the volume to compete with all the over-compressed new stuff on your mp3 player. Someone’s clearly taken care with the process, making sure not to spoil the wide dynamics of this music, but this kind of re-master isn’t the best fit for the open-room feel of the original: I’d be lying if I said the crystalline brambles of guitar in these songs didn’t suffer a little from being flattened out like this. (Steve Shelley’s busy, subtle drumming gets a particularly raw deal.) Mild audiophiles—or anyone attached to the feel of the original CD and LP issues-—might want to spring for the vinyl re-release.
On the plus side, this package is well aware that Daydream Nation is for celebrating Daydream Nation, and that there are already record stores where you can spend a year’s salary on Sonic Youth rarities. Never mind the four covers included, or the home demo of “Eric’s Trip” that quietly fades out the album disc: The treat, for this album’s devotees, is a terrific, seamless collection of album-contemporary live performances, touching on every song on the album. (Yes, even “Providence.”) It’s a thrill, and not just for those who've heard this record enough times to need a fresh perspective. Daydream Nation was one great, liberated scribble on the mostly blank slate of what underground rock was starting to become, and through these tracks you get to hear the band take it out on the road and show it to everyone—playing loose, sliding energetically through things they made precise on record. And, 12 tracks in, taking their J Mascis campaign song on a Straight Talk Expressway to Yr Skull. | 2007-06-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Enigma | June 13, 2007 | 10 | 08272eb5-e505-4d5d-bcea-df5e760cc437 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The Los Angeles ambient musician continues to explore the interdependence of plants and humans, but they add new wrinkles to their placid style, shifting from easy listening to dynamic soundscaping. | The Los Angeles ambient musician continues to explore the interdependence of plants and humans, but they add new wrinkles to their placid style, shifting from easy listening to dynamic soundscaping. | Green-House: A Host for All Kinds of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/green-house-a-host-for-all-kinds-of-life/ | A Host for All Kinds of Life | For proof that we all must ultimately coexist on this planet, look no further than coquina. The porous sedimentary stone forms almost entirely out of fragments of shellfish, trilobites, and other invertebrates; over millions of years, snails, urchins, and other creatures make the rock home alongside algae blooms, forming communities inside each rainwater-carved divot. Coquina lends both an opening track title and general ethos to Los Angeles musician Olive Ardizoni’s new album as Green-House, A Host for All Kinds of Life. Within Ardizoni’s ambient collage of field recordings, synth, and piano flourish idiosyncratic melodies crafted with the patient and methodical hand of a gardener.
A Host for All Kinds of Life is the first Green-House album Ardizoni has made with longtime collaborator Michael Flanagan as an official partner, and it represents a maturation of the ideas introduced on Green-House’s 2020 debut, Six Songs for Invisible Gardens. The music, deconstructed new age designed as a communication between plants and those who care for them, has evolved from soundtracking individual organisms to the mutually beneficial ecosystems they create. But Green-House’s work has always been invested in biotic beings big and small, following in the footsteps of artists like Mort Garson and musicians associated with kankyō ongaku, a Japanese style of ambient sometimes translated to “environmental music.”
Like kankyō ongaku, which sprang up in the 1980s in conversation with architecture and contemporary art, Green-House’s own branch of environmental music homes in on what flora and fauna might sound like behind the din of modern metropolis, almost as if a biodome started up a chamber band. Throughout A Host for All Kinds of Life, electronic elements—clean tones from Casio synths or mellotrons that form hypnotic refrains—are woven with field recordings that evoke intimate moments with the natural world, moments Green-House insists are still an intrinsic part of urban living. Even in a concrete jungle, signs of life as minuscule as the chirping of birds lift a veil of false separation between a city and its roots.
Where 2021’s Music for Living Spaces played like incantations for a struggling bird of paradise, A Host for All Kinds of Life takes more interest in pauses and negative space. Moments of stillness in “Lichen Maps” are brought to life by distinctive noises like the rustling of a dried rattlesnake tail, fed through a granulator plug-in, or a deep human breath. Sitar- or theremin-like synths on “Coquina” and “Luna Clipper” ring out tentatively before growing into more complex compositions. Green-House’s measured approach means that even on songs that intertwine three or four melodies, discrete textures from foley recordings or keyboards still ring out in the background like muted bells. The details in cuts like “Coquina” or “Castle Song” build so intuitively that it’s almost as if they’re happening in secret, a thicket blossoming away from prying eyes.
The gentle singing that graced Music for Living Spaces standout “Find Home” is absent from A Host for All Kinds of Life. The timbre is missed, but the choice may be deliberate: The only voice heard on the album arrives at the end of the winkingly titled penultimate track, “Everything Is Okay,” in the form of a voicemail from Ardizoni’s mother following up on a missed connection. “I didn’t want you to think that our conversation you wanted to talk about wasn’t important,” she assures Ardizoni, “because you are the most important.” Coming right after the title track collapses in a frenzy of agitated, pitch-shifted saxophone, “Everything Is Okay” feels like a steadying hand on the shoulder, unexpected but familiar.
Green-House bridges similar dichotomies often and skillfully on A Host for All Kinds of Life, engendering an atmosphere that's comforting but not exactly comfortable. In structuring the album around pregnant pauses and hushed single-instrument lines, Green-House realigns their sound away from easy listening and back toward a vision of active communion in shared space. Like any plant, A Host for All Kinds of Life requires careful attention without demanding it. But spend time with these songs, and small wonders—a chime, a beep, a grainy but unmistakably maternal “you”—continue to surface like new blooms on a lovingly tended vine. | 2023-10-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Leaving | October 23, 2023 | 7.6 | 082a0d43-c73e-4f4c-b047-8f5d09f241bd | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar is after a trance-like state of ecstasy on the new release from his chamber orchestra group Rivers of Sound, which boasts some of contemporary jazz’s most powerful soloists. | Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar is after a trance-like state of ecstasy on the new release from his chamber orchestra group Rivers of Sound, which boasts some of contemporary jazz’s most powerful soloists. | Amir ElSaffar / Rivers of Sound: Not Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amir-elsaffar-rivers-of-sound-not-two/ | Not Two | Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar’s father immigrated to the United States from Iraq. His mother was American. Because of that biography—and because ElSaffar grew up to be an expert in Middle Eastern modes as well as jazz improvisation—he has been the subject of a lot of talk about cross-cultural practices. In the liner notes for his ambitious new double album, he seems over it. Of his new orchestra group, he writes: “Rivers of Sound is not concerned with ‘bridging’ divergent cultures. In each composition, one can hear elements of maqam, polyphony, polyrhythmic structures, melisma, and groove. But these do not exist as separate entities ‘belonging’ to any people or place.”
In other words: sure, there’s a lot of material that goes into music like this. You’re not likely to have heard a jazz keyboardist playing a microtonally-tuned piano while riffing alongside a powerful rhythm section, a cellist, a vibraphonist, and musicians specializing in instruments like the buzuq (a lute-like instrument) or the santur (a hammered dulcimer instrument that ElSaffar sometimes plays). But focusing too much on individual ingredients isn’t the right approach.
ElSaffar is after balance, wholeness, a trance-like state of ecstasy. Throughout Not Two, the careful, even self-effacing manner in which ElSaffar guides his large ensemble manages to underline the benefits of this philosophical approach. The Rivers of Sound orchestra that plays ElSaffar’s compositions boasts some of contemporary jazz’s most prominent and powerful soloists: players like pianist Craig Taborn and guitarist Miles Okazaki. While there are select moments when individuals command center stage, the music never seems overly taken with a hero-soloist format.
Some of the best parts are dialogues, as at the tail end of the 12-minute composition “Ya Ibni, Ya Ibni (My son, my son).” After Taborn has contributed a short solo on an altered piano—required by this particular maqam’s scale—the sound of Jason Adasiewicz’s vibraphone joins the space. The latter’s resonant instrument creates strange but compelling harmonies alongside the microtonally-tuned piano. Next, percussion and guitar join, establishing a final groove. It’s a unique sound, and easy to dream along with.
The album is full of dramatic changes that sneak up in unassuming ways. Opener “Iftitah” begins with string instrument lines that create an ambient spell. The introduction of brass and reed instruments in the third minute could easily break the mood—but the ensemble’s control of dynamic levels makes the progression sound appropriately grand, all without seeming aggressive in nature.
There’s a stirring lute-instrument solo during “Jourjina Over Three,” but the group sounds most energized during a sprinting finish that manages to incorporate some free-improv style playing. The second disc’s opening tune, “Layl (Night),” introduces ElSaffar’s own vocals. The singer’s entrance comes after a long-lined theme that has been slowly, steadily building in intensity. The arrival of the vocal melody is the climax of the same community vibe that the other members of ElSaffar’s orchestra have been working to establish.
The smoothness of all those transitions means that one of the most complex pieces on the album—the 16-minute, suite-like composition “Shards of Memory/B Half Flat Fantasy”—moves through its changes in a comparatively harried manner. Every twist in the music is exciting, and the performances sound great. But it’s possible to imagine ElSaffar stretching the same melodic material out to symphonic length, and getting that much more out of all his ingenious sonic effects. For now, Not Two works as a towering statement of purpose—wise to many traditions, even while it remains accessible to anyone. | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Global | New Amsterdam | June 24, 2017 | 7.9 | 082a9375-1c04-47bc-8d10-d56841b14841 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The long-awaited debut from the Jersey singer is a opulent, raw R&B album that constantly tests the borders of the genre. SZA’s deeply personal lens on modern romance gives these songs endless life. | The long-awaited debut from the Jersey singer is a opulent, raw R&B album that constantly tests the borders of the genre. SZA’s deeply personal lens on modern romance gives these songs endless life. | SZA: CTRL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sza-ctrl/ | CTRL | Originally titled A, the debut album from SZA was meant to conclude a trilogy of self-titled releases following 2013’s S and 2014 ’s Z—her official entré into the music world. The release date was originally projected for summer 2016 and, as she revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the time, it was going to be a frank recounting of her romantic life, warts and all. “I’m talking a lot of grimy shit, but it’s truth,” she said. In the year the album sat in the wings with her label TDE, the fearless style of her grimy shit fermented into a powerful R&B set piece that is unlike any released in recent memory.
Over a lonely electric guitar riff on CTRL’s opening track ”Supermodel,” she sets the tone: “Let me tell you a secret/I been secretly banging your homeboy/Why you in Vegas all up on Valentine's Day?” This sorry setup isn’t fiction, either. In the same EW interview, she said that one of the songs on her album would be about her ex-boyfriend leaving her on Valentine’s Day while she slept with his friend as revenge. “[It] will be the first time he hears about it,” she said.
Boyfriends and more, ahem, casual acquaintances are taken to task across the album, but this isn’t a pity party. CTRL is about sexual freedom while still having your hunger for intimacy be taken seriously. On the woozy “Doves in the Wind,” SZA sings about Forrest Gump—not a figure running through her mind like Frank Ocean—but the kind of guy who sees women as more than just their bodies and who “deserve the whole box of chocolates.” Born Solána Rowe, the Jersey singer seems to take comfort in the freewheelin’ Forrest Gump character Jenny Curran (on Z track “Warm Winds,” SZA quotes young Jenny’s “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away” prayer). But SZA finds solace in the sweetness offered to the adult Jenny by Forrest. That sentiment (without literal Gump references) bleeds through on tracks like the heartbreaking “Normal Girl,” about being unable to find a paramour who wants to take her home to meet his family, not just home to his bedroom. But when she sings, “I really wish I was a normal girl?” it’s a stinging reminder that with so many platforms to meet people, there are just that many more people to be hurt by. What if not finding an emotional connection means there’s something fundamentally wrong with you?
SZA’s scrutiny of modern dating is not always self-effacing. “Love Galore,” featuring an able Travis Scott, is the perfect anthem for the not-looking-for-a-pen-pal set. SZA and Scott coo, “Why you bother me when you know that you don’t want me?” It’s a sentiment that feels especially potent in 2017 when loneliness is so much easier to combat fingers-to-screen instead of face-to-face. Ask a friend and she’ll tell you she quit Tinder because she was tired of having ten text-boyfriends but not one who’s ever asked her out on an actual date. Its foil comes in “The Weekend,” a song about sharing a boyfriend with other women. The hook rings, “My man is my man is your man, heard it’s her man, too,” with a tone of both freedom and a muted sadness over settling. She knows there are concessions one makes to boost their sense of self-worth and little fibs we tell ourselves to turn a bad situation into something we think we want.
It's ironic that the album’s little misfires do not really come from SZA herself. “Doves in the Wind” features a verse from Kendrick Lamar who employs the song’s all about vaginas theme to produce some inscrutable lines like, “Pussy can be so facetious,” and, “How many niggas get mistaken for clitoris in a day?” No matter. SZA shines so bright, her honeyed voice making lines like, “I'm really tryna crack off that headboard/And bust it wide open for the right one” sound sweet instead of like bawdy pillow talk.
The album’s finest moment arrives with “Prom,” a meditation on the existential worry of youthful aging—“Fearin' not growin' up/Keepin' me up at night/Am I doin' enough?/Feel like I'm wastin' time”—that sounds like it was pilfered from The Forbidden Love EP-era. But SZA has never been one to glom onto trends. Other areas on the album have more of an indie influence, as well, like “Supermodel” which blooms from its spartan guitar intro into something more in line with old Jimmy Eat World than the undefinable “alt-R&B” tag. Even when there is trap percussion, like on “Garden (Say it Like Dat),” it’s still clear why SZA cites artists like Jamiroquai and Björk as influences. CTRL’s adds indie rock and neo-soul flourishes on its radio-friendly fare, while its cottony production centers the album and pushes against the borders of R&B. She’s not looking to fill the SoundCloud status quo.
SZA deals outside of the confines of her genres, a distinction that is all but meaningless in the polygluttonous context of 2017. Her forebears are more Keyshia Cole and Mary J. Blige, who have hurt and have been fearless enough to sing about that hurt, from Blige’s heart-crushing second album My Life to Keyshia’s chart-topper “Let It Go,” around and around again. People will go to extremes to absolve themselves of judgment, whether it’s for liking something as benign as “The Bachelor” or by mining the depths of psychology to determine that breaking someone’s heart was somehow just an act of radical self-care. SZA has the grit to say that it doesn’t just feel shitty, it is shitty. She is in touch with love’s fragilities and understands that it is worth protecting, there is just a lot of tireless work to get it. The record is all the more beautiful for it. | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA | June 13, 2017 | 8.4 | 082bd97a-fa20-4144-8216-abbfcf32dabd | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
The music on this compilation documents the bursting scene in Guinea from the late '70s, when state-sponsored record label Editions Syliphone Conakry urged the residents of the newly independent African country to forge the voice of a new Africa through music. The sound that Syliphone promoted was an astonishing, elegant blend, embracing old Guinean folk music as well as newly heard Cuban music and American jazz bands. | The music on this compilation documents the bursting scene in Guinea from the late '70s, when state-sponsored record label Editions Syliphone Conakry urged the residents of the newly independent African country to forge the voice of a new Africa through music. The sound that Syliphone promoted was an astonishing, elegant blend, embracing old Guinean folk music as well as newly heard Cuban music and American jazz bands. | Various Artists: Musique Sans Paroles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21280-musique-sans-paroles/ | Musique Sans Paroles | Guinea’s state-sponsored record label Editions Syliphone Conakry closed permanently in 1984, with the death of President Ahmed Sékou Touré. The economic, cultural, and political situation in the newly independent African country had been sliding downward since the mid-'70s, but at one point the label had been a beacon for the country. Sékou Touré, perceiving that creating a strong national identity for the one-time French colony hinged on developing its culture, established a record label and a national radio station, distributing instruments to citizens and funding bands. The imperative was for the young nation of Guineans to create the voice of a new Africa.
The sound that Syliphone promoted was an astonishing, elegant blend, embracing old Guinean folk music as well as newly heard Cuban music (by way of the Congo) and American jazz bands, all under the banner of "authenticité". In an ideal world, proponents of small government and shuttered arts programs might hear the twinkling, beguiling music rendered by Guinea bands like Bembeya Jazz National, Jardin De Guinée, Balla et Ses Balladins and be charmed into state sponsorship of the arts so as to "Make (insert country) Great Again." By 1976, Guinea was in turmoil, with a failed assassination plot on Sékou Touré, and detention of political dissenters. Some of the strongest music from Syliphone predates this struggle, but that's part of what makes Musique Sans Paroles (translation: Music Without Words), released that same year, such a jewel: Amid increasing unrest, Sans Paroles serves as an oasis.
This compilation documents some of the label’s lesser known acts: Only one of them, alto saxophonist Momo Wandel, has more than one release to his name. Given the turmoil of Guinea, it’s likely that many of these groups never got the chance to record again. Opening band Sombory Jazz most closely resembles the flagship acts of the imprint, the rhythm shuffling between African polyrhythms and Cuban rhumba without quite settling. The horn work evokes comparison to Bembeya Jazz National, the guitar solo imbued with that rippling, eddying guitar tone so prevalent in the era, liquid and psychedelic at once. But from there, Sans Paroles explores little-heard wrinkles. Wandel’s "Tam-Tam Sax" emulates Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango but with squawks that bring to mind spiritual jazz players like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.
Each song shows a stylistic shift. The seldom-recorded Quintette Guinéenne does a rhythm & blues number on "Douga", while "Flute Parlante" is as close as the album gets to words. Highlighting solo flute, it brings to mind the recordings that the old Folkways Records used to document. The highlight is Quintette Guinéenne’s second contribution, "Massane Cissé". A Griot thought to date back to the 12th-13th century, it exemplifies Sékou Touré’s mission to update his country’s traditions in the new century. Between the extended guitar solo and battery of percussion, it brings to mind the exploratory psychedelic rock happening across the Atlantic Ocean. Trio Papa Kouyaté, named and propelled by Miriam Makeeba’s longtime conga player, offers up two nimble acoustic numbers with Kouyaté shadowed by stand-up bass and acoustic guitar. Kouyaté’s conga playing hints at Arsenio Rodriguez’s groups of the 1950s. Close your eyes and the capital of Conakry starts to turn into downtown Havana. Or, in the case of "Massane Cissé", the epicenter of San Francisco a decade prior. | 2015-12-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Editions Syliphone Conakry | December 7, 2015 | 7.7 | 08347c40-0410-4cad-b37b-605728b5a684 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The rapper’s second album of 2022 is a dark memoir about love, memory, and faith. With a meticulous but loose style, it amplifies his capacity for vulnerability. | The rapper’s second album of 2022 is a dark memoir about love, memory, and faith. With a meticulous but loose style, it amplifies his capacity for vulnerability. | billy woods: Church | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billy-woods-church/ | Church | In 1947, the American minister William Marrion Branham claimed he was visited by an angel who bestowed him with the gift of curing the world of sickness and decay. It began Branham’s worldwide post-World War II healing revival, where he became a quintessential cult figure. News reporters and other ministers accused him of being a fraud, he launched and validated the violent ministries of Jim Jones and Paul Schäfer, and he spread a doctrine based on the restoration of archaic Christian values and doomsday predictions. Branham’s voice, ripped from a 1954 sermon in Washington, D.C., acts as a bridge between the second and third songs of billy woods’ newest album Church. It is measured, striking against the fading instrumental. “Let Him be first of all. Then, the hunger, deep. As David said, ‘When the deep calleth to the deep, at the noise of thy waterspouts,’” he barks. The line invokes Psalm 42:7, a lament that witnesses a call out to God, as the psalmist seeks confidence and hope in the face of trials and tribulations. The grainy recording feels as if it was buried deep in woods’ subconscious: Here, the lessons of faith burned into his memory are brought to the forefront, delivered through the voice of a false prophet.
Church arrives just a few months after woods’ stellar solo effort Aethiopes. With Church's short list of collaborators (Fat Ray, AKAI SOLO, Fielded, and Armand Hammer’s Elucid appear over 12 songs), his voice arrives in relative solitude. It grants him the space to unravel a dense memoir, musing about love, memory, and faith. There’s a heaviness that shrouds the album: Producer Messiah Muzik’s mutation of obscure crate gems like Roger Bellon’s 1977 “Blaknite” makes the entire project feel like a fever dream spiraling out of control. But that chaos and murkiness suits woods; with his uncanny ability to fuse raps to fractured beats, Church is a sprawling personal history, one that ensures that his status as a master of his craft remains unchanged.
woods has previously changed his writing perspective at the drop of a hat, treating his lyrics as puzzles that the listener has to piece together. This time, he writes from his own viewpoint, utilizing powerful imagery and nimble similes to narrate his experiences, often focusing on gloomy themes. On “Paraquat,” woods likens his relationship failures and lack of self-worth to James Harden’s stints on two different teams, then lambasts his brother’s spiritual and moral hypocrisy in the following four bars. In the next breath, as the beat switches to a trodding piano and straining saxophone seemingly lifted from a seedy Harlem jazz bar in the ‘50s, woods veers into political commentary: “Whitey hit Hiroshima, then he doubled back/Black rain baptized, black skies/I’m always waiting on the thunderclap,” he raps, chomping at the bit to put warmongers on trial with his words.
woods’ strength is in the details. He is meticulous and encyclopedic, holding his hat on the boast that his words “gon’ be here when all y’all is gone.” It is impossible not to picture his upbringing in Zimbabwe on “Fever Grass;” he paints scenes of an impolite cousin’s house and the religious sanctum his grandfather built in the jungle, where virulent sermons were doled out with reckless abandon. God and religion are intrinsic to his being, and he’s been grappling with the aftereffects ever since. Even as woods strays from material thoughts into existential ones, as on “Artichoke,” he remains poignant—each phrase opens a window into his psyche. “Hope is an assassin, fear fill up the casket,” he says, as an eerie sample wails above, making his words feel like a twisted campfire song.
Producer Messiah Muzik is familiar with woods, thanks to previous collaborations with Armand Hammer; the intimacy makes moments of instrumental cacophony feel more challenging than unpleasant. The crashing, ascending piano chords and saxophone blaring intermittently on “Frankie” intersect with woods’ delivery, and quick punch-ins and fragmented sentences allow him to find the pockets in the trudging beat. But sometimes, the dissonance can become distracting. The curtailed sample loop of “Fuschia & Green” quickly becomes a whirring, repetitive earworm, providing a frantic setting for woods and Elucid to rattle off biblical and Islamic references. There are moments of serenity, too: The peaceful arpeggios and Fielded’s angelic crooning at the end of “Classical Music” arrive like rewards for the listener’s patience and understanding.
Unlike Branham’s sermons, this record doesn’t offer a grand lesson that beats the listener over the head. Church isn’t a collection of parables: It holds the scraps of a diary with its pages stripped bare. Where Aethiopes could be considered a career peak, this album grounds him atop that summit, maintaining a level of quality, vulnerability, and precision that few could dream of recreating. He likens this stage of his career to the theatrical program Shakespeare in the Park on “Pollo Rico,” which is fitting—through masterful manipulations of language, he’s built a monument to his life and career in one fell swoop, meant to withstand the end times. | 2022-10-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | October 18, 2022 | 7.8 | 0834b7fb-57fb-4e05-8e46-2a21177a605d | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
On the least dense and most inquisitive album of his career, the experimental musician creates a fascinating dialogue between his technology and some of the world’s most ancient instruments. | On the least dense and most inquisitive album of his career, the experimental musician creates a fascinating dialogue between his technology and some of the world’s most ancient instruments. | Tim Hecker: Konoyo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-hecker-konoyo/ | Konoyo | For the last decade, Tim Hecker has been on a quest to unite musician and machine, to blur the border between the sources of his sounds and the output he renders. During the two-part “Hatred of Music” suite from 2011’s Ravedeath, 1972, piano sparkled through a wall of noise and ran like water into the synthesizers beneath it. Two years later, Virgins made a pointillist chamber ensemble sound like Steve Reich trapped inside an electric storm. And on the exhilarating Love Streams, Hecker morphed loping woodwind lines and seraphic choirs arranged by Jóhann Jóhannsson into ad hoc beat machines and chord organs. Still, the source material from instrumentalists and singers felt like exactly that—fodder being fed into Hecker’s finished electronic product, data he mined for updated textures. The hierarchy between the composer and his components was clear.
At least until now: On the least dense and most inquisitive album of his career, Konoyo, Hecker puts his synthesizers, sequencers, and software on the same level as his source material, so that the original music he’s manipulating feels every bit as important as the music he is in turn creating. Encouraged by the late Jóhannsson to consider pulling back both volume and layers, Hecker creates a fascinating dialogue between his technology and some of the world’s most ancient instruments. Where one begins and the other ends often remains a mystery, as when a pair of Japanese flutes (the hichiriki and ryūteki) float into harmony with a soft keyboard line or a cello merges with a piercing ray of noise. In the tradition of Harold Budd’s piano-and-electronics daydreams, Christian Fennesz’s electroacoustic invocations, or frequent collaborator Kara-Lis Coverdale’s own choral wonders, Hecker stands at the center of two worlds and puts them in knowing conversation.
Late in 2017, Hecker enlisted Tokyo musician Motonori Miura to assemble a gagaku group whose members would improvise around nontraditional concepts. Gagaku is the imperial court soundtrack of Japan, a mesmerizing mix of curling flute melodies, drums, strings, and the spectacularly droning 17-pipe horn called the shō. They convened for several days in a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, built on the site of an ancient place of worship.
Rather than guide the gagaku ensemble, record their results, and simply return to a traditional studio to sculpt their sounds, Hecker became a de facto bandleader, offering thoughts about a mood and then joining the group as they improvised around the idea. He’d play back his results, and they’d respond in kind, building a sort of call-and-response repartee between their ritualistic instruments and his command center of synthesizers. During “A Sodium Codec Haze,” Hecker’s sequencers sing in harmony with gagaku flutes and percussion, a chorus of wonderment. For “In Death Valley,” those same instruments fall in and out of focus, moving through Hecker’s hum like a digital latticework.
At its best, Hecker’s radiant drone has been a nest of hidden feelings, with moods and emotions meant to be teased out after the music’s initial sense of unapologetic bluster has passed. But Konoyo is immediately vulnerable, its vacillation between the dense and diaphanous framing a sense of deep longing and worry. When these sessions began, Hecker’s equipment didn’t cooperate with the gagaku instruments, as they were designed with different standard pitches in mind (430 Hz, as opposed to 440). You can sense those traces of uncertainty and the quest to overcome that hesitation from start to finish here. In the literal sense, Konoyo sounds experimental, the stuff of trial and error.
“This Life,” for instance, is an endless cycle of baseline anxiety, where washes of worry and hints of relief are interwoven components along the same Mobius strip. Every time a melody starts to twinkle, Hecker undercuts it; just as the piece begins to grow into hellish miasma, Hecker backlights it with keyboards that beckon like shooting stars and safety beacons. It’s a seesaw of emotional unrest, never letting you land on just how you feel. “Keyed Out” is a score of quiet exasperation and creeping desperation, as a droning metallic tone slowly sloughs off its weight. Gagaku percussion clangs and patters in the distance, as if tracing the walls of some dark room in search of the way out. By using fewer strata of sound, Hecker leaves his impulses exposed, the skeleton now as prominent as the nervous system that operates it.
In the past, Hecker has tended to flood any space, to fill even a room’s hidden recesses with the glow of his sound. Harmony in Ultraviolet feels like some imposing orb, its transmission as inescapable as walking into La Monte Young’s magenta-bathed Dream House. Ravedeath, 1972 is a winter wind churning along some exposed ridgeline, whipping and subsiding only to return with increased conviction. But Konoyo is always mindful of the space it occupies. Hecker listens, responds, and keeps listening for the ways others respond to his actions—a cycle of dialogue that is, if not obsequious to the whims of the world, at least observant of his impacts on others.
This self-awareness is timely, of a piece with the social tides that rightfully demand the voices of white men need not be the only or loudest ones in the room. Konoyo’s other musicians are either Japanese gagaku experts or classically trained women with their own compelling experimental visions, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Mariel Roberts. If Konoyo is not a direct reflection of slowly shifting worldviews, it is at least a righteous affirmation of them, a pointed reflection on the value in listening to new perspectives. By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade. | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | September 28, 2018 | 8.5 | 0837032e-e4ff-4740-918b-229d0f00bc37 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The singer-songwriter revisits highlights from her magnetic 2018 LP with the help of guests like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Courtney Barnett, and Julia Holter. | The singer-songwriter revisits highlights from her magnetic 2018 LP with the help of guests like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Courtney Barnett, and Julia Holter. | Anna Calvi: Hunted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-calvi-hunted/ | Hunted | In his paintings Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the British artist David Hockney used the pretext of private pools as scenes for voyeurism. At a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in his native UK, the artist's adopted home of Los Angeles provided a sanctuary where he could express his desires, which were fueled by post-war "beefcake" magazines and Hollywood films.
Anna Calvi has said Hockney's obsession with the pools he first noticed from his airplane window was a direct inspiration for the rippling guitars in “Swimming Pool,” a song from her 2018 record Hunter. On that album, she explored gender and sexuality and dove into her relationship to androgyny. Her swimming pool wasn’t vivid and clear like Hockney’s, but a shadowy and eerie space where desire could be contained.
18 months after its release, Calvi dug out her earliest recordings for Hunter, and saw that, in their rawest state, the tracks were a time capsule, vulnerable dispatches often whispered gingerly over her Telecaster. Resisting the impulse to remix or revisit the tracks herself, she sent four of them to artists she admires—Julia Holter, Courtney Barnett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Joe Talbot—and has released their contributions, along with three tracks in their demo form, as the EP Hunted.
Calvi’s preoccupation with gender roles and fluidity imprints itself on her collaborators here, as Barnett's trademark laconic drawl joins her on “Don't Beat the Girl Out of My Boy.” The addition of Talbot on “Wish” transforms the song from a pulsing encouragement to indulge in fatalist desires into a tense and sorrowful elegy. The IDLES frontman uses his grief and loss to transform the band’s live shows into punk rallies campaigning for joy and hope, but he’s more melancholy here. His and Calvi’s dueling voices evoke a primal need, born from the fear of knowing time is running out.
At no point on the EP is Calvi's role in the proceedings made truly explicit: she is both the hunter and the prey, the quivering and the stalking. On the album cover, she appears drenched in sweat, her every pore and blood vessel visible. Tendrils of her dark hair are matted to her face in the aftermath of the ecstatic pose she assumed on Hunter's artwork. This is what comes after, she suggests: the steam from her exhaling nose distorts the mirror’s reflection of her smudged lipstick and running eyeliner. The makeup is a marker of traditional femininity, but there's something carnal and animalistic to her pose, a rejection of the ladylike and precious.
Across Hunted’s seven tracks, Calvi contorts her dance along the spectrum of gender and sexuality into something more of a march, stomping between tenderness and brutality. On “Eden”, Gainsbourg echoes Calvi’s story of a formative queer romance, while Holter's otherworldly vocals rise up from the depths on “Swimming Pool.” Calvi's intention to share the frame with other artists on Hunted feels like a way to relinquish control while maintaining power, allowing her work to be a mirror more than one person can stand before. But even when she's hidden from view, there's no one else who could possibly be in charge.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | March 16, 2020 | 7.3 | 0838d5c3-48fe-4868-9b3a-98f21805cb45 | Brodie Lancaster | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brodie-lancaster/ | |
These leftovers from the UK band’s 2017 reunion album successfully position them in a contemporary context alongside peers like Tame Impala and Caribou. | These leftovers from the UK band’s 2017 reunion album successfully position them in a contemporary context alongside peers like Tame Impala and Caribou. | Ride: Tomorrow’s Shore EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ride-tomorrows-shore-ep/ | Tomorrow’s Shore EP | In a 1990 interview with the long-defunct UK music program Rapido, a very young Ride can be seen talking about what young indie bands tend to talk about: their favorite groups from their scene. It’s a typical list of anorak icons including My Bloody Valentine, the House of Love, and the Wedding Present. Bassist Steve Queralt, however, is wearing a Madonna t-shirt, which, while not exactly a radical act in a post-Ciccone Youth era, offers an early indication of Ride’s fondness for pop music—a tendency that would only grow more pronounced. Even Ride’s stormiest surges came with blissful harmonies, percolating electronics, and shuffling, almost-danceable grooves that cut through the shoegaze haze. By the 1996 rave-up “Black Nite Crash,” singer/guitarist Andy Bell was displaying a dark-sunglasses swagger on par with the much more famous band he would go on to join after Ride’s dissolution that year.
When Ride reconvened last year for Weather Diaries, their first new album in over two decades, singer/guitarist Mark Gardener affirmed the band’s desire to make “a record that sounded like it was released in 2017, not 1991.” And while seasoned shoegaze architect Alan Moulder returned to mix that LP, lead production duties were handed to DJ/electro-indie polymath Erol Alkan. Aside from a few flagrant modern-pop embellishments, though, Weather Diaries’ currency was more perceptible in its uncharacteristically topical, post-Brexit lyrics than in its languorous, meticulously textured stargazing lullabies. Ironically, this EP of four Weather Diaries castaways proves much more successful in positioning Ride in a contemporary context.
As the band observed during the Weather Diaries promo circuit, Ride’s first two albums (1990’s Nowhere and 1992’s Going Blank Again) boldly asserted an experimental ethos that their subsequent, Britpop-baiting releases (1994’s Carnival of Light and 1996’s Tarantula) more or less extinguished. Back then, you couldn’t really fault the band for shifting gears—shoegaze seemed pretty played out by the mid-’90s, and Oasis looked like they were having way more fun. What was less apparent at the time was that shoegaze’s future lay not in guitar rock, but in electronic exploration. In Ride’s absence, the band’s original mission to fuse splendorous melody and swirling noise was inherited by a number of artists—like Caribou, M83, MGMT, and Kevin Parker—who are very much studio savants first and bandleaders second.
As Tomorrow’s Shore illustrates, these are Ride’s true peers today, much more so than fellow resuscitated ’90s acts like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. In the pulsating pop of “Pulsar,” you’ve got the “Time to Pretend” sequel that MGMT have put off writing for the past 10 years, with Gardener’s dazed vocal melody coasting atop a robust, robotic backbeat. “Keep It Surreal” is a motorik power-pop knockout whose helium-spiked harmonies give way to an artfully sculpted fuzz solo, all while cruising down the Pacific Coast Autobahn like the open-sunroof soundtrack to a Dazed and Confused remake set in the year 2076. Even when Ride dip their toes back into Beatlesque psychedelia on “Cold Water People”—complete with a harpsichord-style synth solo—the result is less Magical Mystery Tour than Lonerism, with the song’s queasy textural backdrop mirroring the stewing existential despair chronicled within. “Tell me again about evolution/I’ll follow you back into the sea again,” Gardener and Bell sing with palpable resignation, as if they were administering last rites to humanity’s failed potential.
The EP’s closing track, “Catch You Dreaming,” ups the doomsday ante, chronicling the final moments of the last two people remaining on an imploding Earth. Despite the grave subtext, it’s actually the most inconsequential track here—while the song’s downtempo tropical-house throb and nakedly yearning vocals cast Ride farther away from their shoegaze roots than ever before, the inert, new-agey atmosphere leaves these distorto-rock titans sounding like a cut-rate Cut Copy. Still, it’s an encouraging sign that Ride aren’t about to rest on their post-reunion laurels. Even in its misguided moments, this leftovers EP offers more than mere vapor trails of what came before. | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita | February 20, 2018 | 7 | 083a24b4-7c6f-4a0a-b9a9-eabd24ed4b14 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
For his second Tri Angle LP, Bristol producer Sebastian Gainsborough's made a noise-specific techno record beholden to his remarkably generative skills with sound manipulation. His reliance on homespun methods of fabricating instruments gives Punish, Honey a distinctively raw and tactile identity. | For his second Tri Angle LP, Bristol producer Sebastian Gainsborough's made a noise-specific techno record beholden to his remarkably generative skills with sound manipulation. His reliance on homespun methods of fabricating instruments gives Punish, Honey a distinctively raw and tactile identity. | Vessel: Punish, Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19710-vessel-punish-honey/ | Punish, Honey | Everyone enjoys their own noise, and we're all curious to hear how, when given the opportunity, our natural ability to create noise might sound as it rings in our ears. Often this innate form of expression can materialize into learning an instrument or honing a vocal skill, but not so for Sebastian Gainsborough. The Bristol native's Vessel project remains fixated on the possibilities of making and arranging his own noise, using the forms of dub and techno like a means to his esoteric ends instead of the impetus itself.
Released in 2012 through the increasingly experimental Tri Angle label, Gainsborough's debut album was conspicuously titled Order of Noise. But referring to him as a "noise artist" or calling his music "noise-techno" wouldn't be entirely accurate, even if he does paint with many of the same grim colors. Order of Noise was more gauzy and mystical as it took on the producer's hometown sounds, as trip-hop, dubstep, and industrial were dissected and used as decorative references in its treacherous, fog-choked landscape. Ultimately, this worked best when Gainsborough was simply showing off his handiwork in well-crafted environments; any notion of moving through the space felt faint and illusory. For his second Tri Angle LP, Gainsborough's made another noise-specific techno record beholden to his remarkably generative skills with sound manipulation. His reliance on homespun methods of fabricating instruments gives Punish, Honey a distinctively raw and tactile identity.
The 2013 EP Misery Is a Communicable Disease provides a better entry point to Punish, Honey than the cabalistic Order of Noise. The first full-blown iteration of stark, mechanically inclined techno that Gainsborough put to his name, the EP's three tracks accosted the listener with an unforgiving clamor, entirely unexpected from the Bristolian at the time. Punish, Honey comes across like that, too, and in much the same way. Gainsborough's source materials sound crude and primitive, like the din of reverb around each knotty crack of percussion is drawn from the cold, dry cave dwelling it was recorded in. He distills those prehistoric qualities into a fuel for the stone-grinding engine inside each incessant bassline and crushing stomp of a kick drum. Occasionally, Gainsborough takes a break from the machinery and tosses a few handfuls of granite dust into the air so we can watch it sparkle. Punish, Honey may not be the most hospitable of environments, but there's always a fascinating display working in its shadows.
The album is best taken as a document of unparalleled noise creation, an inconceivable world made from the everyday objects around us; Gainsborough has outdone himself here in terms of mastering this predominate craft. In this context, however, noise isn't everything, and structural refinement doesn't seem to be a priority for Gainsborough. Most of Punish, Honey pushes a sense of melody that—whether due to the instruments making the sounds, or the outsider mentality of the producer himself—is inherently off. The nauseous moans of "Red Sex" and "Euoi"'s whiny racket become less palatable with each turn on the carousel that makes up Gainsborough's debased techno. This infatuation with musical "wrong"-ness is a defining characteristic across the nine-track LP, so it's unfortunate that necessary counterbalances (compelling arrangement, emotional arc, memorable hooks) aren't consistently utilized.
Perhaps such criticisms are of no concern to Gainsborough, though, because his approach does work staggeringly well when each disheveled factor is in alignment. "Drowned in Water and Light" recalls the full-moon majesty that made Order of Noise so alluring, rendering that haunted splendor aside lumbering rhythms and seismic heaves. The centerpiece of Punish, Honey, "Anima", sets a Suicide-sourced synth pattern against swarms of ghostly detritus, rolling drums, and omnipresent organ chords, a claustrophobic production that works because you feel it shift and expand while it churns. "Kin to Coal" operates on similar gears, but is fashioned in a lean, sinewy way with jackhammers and hacksaws. Unquestionably, Gainsborough's sonic ingenuity continues to be his greatest asset; his growth as an artist hinges on accepting that others can't always enjoy his noise as much as he does. | 2014-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Tri Angle | September 15, 2014 | 7.3 | 083bca62-3ed1-418b-84b3-36459d56dd0c | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
It's easy to scoff at juvenile humor. You hear a single utterance of "fuck" or "pussy," and you turn ... | It's easy to scoff at juvenile humor. You hear a single utterance of "fuck" or "pussy," and you turn ... | Ween: God Ween Satan: The Oneness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8608-god-ween-satan-the-oneness/ | God Ween Satan: The Oneness | It's easy to scoff at juvenile humor. You hear a single utterance of "fuck" or "pussy," and you turn your nose up at the lack of sophistication. No laughter escapes your tightly pursed lips. You fume with rage, images of smug, pathetic 13-year-olds spending daddy's cash on the newest Adam Sandler record cascading through your highly evolved brain.
But those tightly pursed lips are trembling. Somewhere deep inside you, buried beneath back issues of The New Yorker and piles of free jazz CDs, something is happening. Almost like a little 13-year-old boy kicking you in the nuts from the inside and saying, "Dude! Holy shit! That is fucking funny!" Sure, you can deny this reaction. But the fact remains that, when executed properly, juvenile humor can be absolutely hilarious. If the timing's right, the phrasing's right, and the context's right, a well-placed "fuck!" can translate into unquestioned excellence.
Of course, establishing the correct context, timing, and phrasing is not at all easy. And establishing it in such a way that it will entertain upon repeated listening is practically impossible. Ween's debut album, God Ween Satan: The Oneness, is a massive, near-overwhelming bombardment of profanity, hard rock riffing, and goofy genre parody. But no matter how absurd Ween are being, they always manage to accomplish a seemingly contradictory task: sounding exactly like every band operating within the genres they attack while sounding only like themselves.
"You Fucked Up" is a perfect mission statement for Ween-- a sloppy, furious faux-metal number with recklessly shrieked, flat-out hilarious vocals. Granted, there's nothing particularly funny about the lyric, "You fucked up/ You fucking Nazi whore!" But in the context of a psychotic hard rock song, it's difficult to miss the humor. "Tick" couples the overblown rage of "You Fucked Up" with a unique brand of twisted, gleeful pop, while "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" distills this warped glee to its purest, most cloyingly twee essence.
Songs like "Tick" and "You Fucked Up" succeed largely because they tap into that most primal, basic urge to rock out. Sure, there's an undeniable element of parody to these songs. But the parody is backed up by the fact that the songs themselves are actually really, really good.
Fortunately, God Ween Satan isn't all crunchy riffs and barely contained screams. Stylistically, the album is absolutely all over the place. "L.M.L.Y.P.," a longtime fan favorite and live staple, takes on the obscure Prince b-side "Shockadelica," adding a distinctively Ween twist. Cheesy talk box guitars and slapbass provide perfect backing for a hilarious take on Prince's over-the-top sexuality, with Gene Ween's effects-laden vocals intoning in a high-pitched warble, "Let me lick your pussy/ Let me lick your cunt." At over eight minutes, "L.M.L.Y.P." does come awfully close to outstaying its welcome. But let's not forget that "Purple Rain" clocks in at an eternal 8:40.
"Squelch the Weasel" is the closest thing to a folk song to be found on God Ween Satan. Unlike the straight-up lyrical imitation of "Cold Blows the Wind" from The Mollusk, "Squelch the Weasel" is a folk song about... weasels. Lyrical and musical elements from traditional folk music, or at least the commonly held notion of what traditional folk music should sound like, permeate the song, but there's no question that this is pure Ween.
The same can be said for "Up on the Hill," a gospel-styled number about the demon god Boognish that is perhaps the closest thing to a theme song the brothers Ween have recorded. A dramatic, multitracked Gene Weens croons, "When I was younger/ My momma told me/ She said, 'Gener, I wanna smell it'/ And then she smelled it/ And it was smelly/ And I said, 'Lordy lordy lord, I'm coming home." It's gospel, but it's totally fucked. And yet it's pulled off convincingly enough that it can be enjoyed just as much outside of the context of a parody as inside.
Like any 29-song schizophrenic freakout, God Ween Satan is not without its highly questionable moments. "Common Bitch" is a weaker version of "You Fucked Up." "Mushroom Festival in Hell" gets points for sounding exactly like its name, but also loses points for sounding exactly like its name. The aforementioned "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" closes with a frightful swirl of toneless vocals that, though annoying, seems to be in keeping with the pure dementia of this album.
But this, the "25th Anniversary Edition" of God Ween Satan, finally fixes the one biggest problem that confronted the original: undeniably shitty production. The whole album played at what seemed like a good 10 decibels below most other CDs, and the sound quality in general was aggravatingly muddled. Finally, thanks to the magic of technology, God Ween Satan can be heard in all its crisp, pure glory, without the loss of the rough-edged sound that's been a major element of the album.
And it's a good thing, too, as this is one of the most wonderfully twisted albums ever to be released upon the unsuspecting masses. Unafraid to say "fuck" for no apparent reason, unafraid to rock out on cheesy metal riffs, and unafraid to pick to pieces just about every variety of music, Ween managed to capture the essence of their sound on their debut as well, if not better than, on any later album. And as a result, God Ween Satan isn't just good. It's fucking good. | 2001-09-20T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-09-20T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Restless | September 20, 2001 | 9.6 | 083e76af-455f-4d22-8733-ae2bd39c9235 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Naturally, The Best of the Howling Hex isn't a greatest hits collection; as if Neil Hagerty would ever be so straightforward. Instead, it's the Howling Hex's first album in six years to feature drums, which form the backbone for a record that endlessly repeats and refines its fusion of reggae, polka, acid rock, and cowpunk dust-ups. | Naturally, The Best of the Howling Hex isn't a greatest hits collection; as if Neil Hagerty would ever be so straightforward. Instead, it's the Howling Hex's first album in six years to feature drums, which form the backbone for a record that endlessly repeats and refines its fusion of reggae, polka, acid rock, and cowpunk dust-ups. | The Howling Hex: The Best of the Howling Hex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17629-the-howling-hex-the-best-of-the-howling-hex/ | The Best of the Howling Hex | Neil Hagerty has been doing a bang-up job of ensuring Royal Trux remain the one 1990s indie-rock institution that never reforms. He's reportedly turned down multiple reunion tour offers, opted out of participating in Drag City's recent Trux reissue campaign, and declared his utter disinterest in the prospect whenever the question pops up in interviews. His recent choice of homes-- New Mexico and, currently, Colorado-- keep him well insulated from music-industry machinations; Rather than stage, say, a Royal Trux comeback at an ATP festival, Hagerty would sooner play sparsely attended weekly residencies in Denver dives. All the while, he's been pushing his post-Trux outfit the Howling Hex further and further away from his previous band's bell-bottomed boogie, favouring a scrappy, norteño-spiced tack that, since the release of 2007's XI, has done away with drums altogether.
Given his strident don't-look-back ethos, it was something of a shock when, last December, Hagerty announced he would be performing Royal Trux's 1990 mind-fucking masterwork Twin Infinitives in its entirety at a New York City show, albeit with an unknown female vocalist filling the high-heeled cowboy boots of Hagerty's former foil and flame, Jennifer Herrema (currently of Black Bananas). This news was soon followed by the announcement of a new Howling Hex album that, for the first time in six years, would employ the services of a drummer. Taken together, these developments prompted speculative hints that Hagerty was more eager this time out to, if not outright retrace his Trux tracks, at least recapture some of his old band's mystique and muscle.
But listening to The Best of the Howling Hex, you're reminded not so much of Royal Trux's music as their second-most viewed YouTube video. In the infamous bootlegged clip, the band -- fresh off from signing an ill-fated deal with Virgin Records in 1995-- are being subjected to one of the least glamorous aspects of major-label patronage: having to record a soul-destroying succession of station IDs for generically named local music video shows. But a funny thing happens on the way to Alternavision: while Herrema's disdain for the process intensifies with each cigarette puff, Hagerty gets really into it, and becomes increasingly obsessed with getting each take just right, giving his partner instructions with the fussy impatience of a movie director running over-budget. You get the same sense listening to The Best of the Howling Hex: the album is maddeningly repetitive to the point of seeming like some cruel joke, but there's something admirable and charming about Hagerty's determination to make it work.
The most hilarious thing about The Best of the Howling Hex isn't the faux greatest hits title-- the album features all new material, natch-- but the fact that Hagerty recruited a new drummer only to have him play the exact same beats throughout the entire record, as if he were a human Casio preset. The album cover may list eight tracks, but there are really only two songs here: The slow ones play out like some bizarro reggae/polka/acid rock fusion scraped from Ween's old four-track; the fast ones keep double-time pace with cowpunk dust-ups of yore, like the Meat Puppets' "Lost" or the Minutemen's "Corona." Atop both are Hagerty's circular, repetitive melodies and his furious fretwork, which can dazzle in any context. But rather than provide points of distinction, his brain-scrambling, six-string swirls are consistently mixed so low as to be overshadowed by the chintzy, clipped, one-note rhythm guitar accents. "Variations on a theme" is an understatement for what transpires here; choruses mostly follow the same patterns as the verses, time changes are practically non-existent.
But the album's title starts to make a little more sense if you view The Best of the Howling Hex as an ongoing process through which Hagerty is trying to refine and perfect a particular song form. As wearing as it is to hear the same arrangements over and over again, the songs do get better and more engaging as the album chugs along: In this unwavering setting, the subtle, soothing synth line that buttresses the congenial melody of "The General Prologue" hits with all the splendour of a meteor shower, and heralds the album's most ebullient guitar hook; by the time we reach "Green Limousine", the Hex's default oompa-oompa gait has acquired a more frantic energy and, in the process, goads Hagerty into his most urgent and spirited vocal performance. And if the closing "Trashcan Bahamas" starts out like yet another trip to the bionic hee-haw, it suddenly detours into an ascendant, arpeggiated grand finale that sees Hagerty achieve his own version of "Beck's Bolero". But that sense of triumph is as much as ours as it is his-- a parting reward for those of us who manage to stay sane while the songs remain the same. | 2013-02-21T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-02-21T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | February 21, 2013 | 6.1 | 083e77c4-a482-493b-9e8d-c2dec19865ef | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
After two EPs and a big single, this young English electronic producer steps out with his debut full-length on Night Slugs, an album that feels more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks. | After two EPs and a big single, this young English electronic producer steps out with his debut full-length on Night Slugs, an album that feels more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks. | Jam City: Classical Curves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16768-classical-curves/ | Classical Curves | Classical Curves is the first full-length album by Jack Latham, a young English electronic producer who goes by the name Jam City. Some claimed influences for the album are marble, trenchcoats, and "oily black Jeep windows." These are opaque things, hard things, things that reflect and conceal. The music isn't much different. Latham's previous releases for the Night Slugs label-- two EPs and the one-off "Arpjam"-- were flat, glaring, and high-tech. Classical Curves isn't much different, only more distilled. Some electronic musicians strive to make their sound as humanistic as possible; Classical Curves is basically disinfectant set to a beat. It borrows its jazz chords from artists like Prince and the 1980s electro-soul group Zapp-- artists who found glamor in the cleanliness of machines. It's an album of bangers, though less in the vernacular sense than in the sense that it often sounds like stuff banging together.
About a minute into the album's intro, we hear the sound of breaking glass. Then more glass. Then a little more. Then, as it transitions into "Her", a drum machine that sounds like a jackhammer and a flurry of camera shutters. "The Courts"-- a single Latham released in advance of the album-- is built on a web of what sounds like new sneakers being streaked across freshly waxed wood. Later on, dogs bark over some more broken glass. In all likelihood you'll know whether this album will repulse you within about two minutes. There's a good chance it may. Latham's single-mindedness, though, is a rare and admirable quality-- a quality that makes Classical Curves sound more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks.
As with all Night Slugs' best releases, Classical Curves creates a world that belongs to the music-- a visual world, a world of ideas. The album's cover is a slick little motorbike lying on its side in a marble atrium in front of a huge fern, with a silky yellow piece of fabric draped over a wall behind the bike. It's a seductive image, an image of perfect objects in an imperfect, disarrayed scene. During a recent email exchange, Latham didn't share with me exactly where the shot-- or some accompanying videos-- were taken, but he mentioned that a year ago he worked for a company "stealing and selling information about their rivals," a job that forced him to spend a lot of time hanging out in similar kinds of lobbies, spaces he calls "glamorous looking in a kind of... corporate, rich-people way, I suppose... but pretty lonely and alienating and not the safest career option." At another point in his career, he produced chrome prostheses for fashion shows. One track here is called "How We Relate to the Body." Latham's answer, I imagine, is "with ambivalence and heavy machinery."
Beauty, bodies, science fiction, ideas of cleanliness and perfection-- it's all suggested here in sound. In a lot of ways, this album is more conceptually in touch with prime-era Kraftwerk or, as previously mentioned, early industrial music: music that highlights its own sense of soul by being as comprehensively soulless as possible. This is music that achieves as much of its effect through silence as through sound: Between every beat, the space is so absolute and empty that getting to the next piece of solid ground is a kind of perpetual thrill. Not a warm one, not a nice one, just a perpetual one, one that mechanically follows the one before it, no variation, no room for error. | 2012-05-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-05-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Night Slugs | May 25, 2012 | 7.3 | 0840cc7c-d1c7-4ac7-9bc2-8067568a3ab9 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On her third album for Hyperdub, Laurel Halo continues to resist classification and deflect interpretation by treating the human voice like a synthetic material to be molded and shattered. | On her third album for Hyperdub, Laurel Halo continues to resist classification and deflect interpretation by treating the human voice like a synthetic material to be molded and shattered. | Laurel Halo: Dust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurel-halo-dust/ | Dust | Laurel Halo has taken a winding, unpredictable route to her third album for Hyperdub, and once again, her new record feels like a reaction against the last. The American-born, Berlin-based musician has consistently deflected interpretations of her music’s meaning, eluding attempts to classify her by genre, gender, or otherwise. While her club-focused EPs have been influenced by various foundational elements of Detroit techno, those same elements—jazz, funk, a certain sci-fi sensibility—have fused in entirely unexpected ways on her full-lengths.
On her Hyperdub debut, Quarantine, her untreated vocals and intimate lyrics told a story which, though perhaps not entirely literal, seemed deeply personal. Yet on Chance of Rain, its 2013 follow-up, she abandoned vocals in favour of flickering, jazzy keys and iridescent synth baths—perhaps an escape route from being bracketed by gender. “People tend to heavily focus on female artists’ voices and define their work by it,” she argued in an interview with Truants last year, noting that her instrumental work had been interpreted as having “an ‘absence of authentic human presence’.”
On the ferociously ambitious Dust, an album that feels like it was constructed in zero-gravity conditions, Halo has reached a kind of synthesis of all that came before. If, as she reminds us, her instrumental music is no less “authentically human” than her vocal music, then Dust sets out to show that the human voice is not much guarantee of authentic humanity either.
The album opens with Halo’s voice on “Sun to Solar.” Over slippery rhythms and topsy-turvy keys (provided throughout by Shit and Shine’s Craig Clouse) she half-sings an adaptation of “Servidão de Passagem,” a 1962 work by Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos: “Stacked man, sacked man/Served and swallowed/Sun to salt, island man/Socko sick, who's hangman.” Halo processes her words beyond recognition, blurring them with the hyper-melismatic vocals of British singer and collage-pop artist Klein, one of the many guests on Dust. It’s a disorienting starting point on an album that revels in indeterminacy.
The album’s graspable melodic moments come between longer expanses of confusing and chaotic sound; on “Nicht Ohne Risiko” and “Like an L,” instruments arrange themselves in abstract patterns, orbiting loosely like weightless space debris. “Arschkriecher” drifts toward mysticism as dissonant gong strikes are drowned in dub effects and ribbons of tenor saxophone float by. On “Koinos,” the gravitational pull is barely strong enough to hold the song together; a flurry of found sound is warped by transmission errors and Halo’s voice fades into a crackle, lost beneath percussion and glockenspiel from composer Eli Keszler, who contributes throughout the album.
Concrete poets like de Campos were preoccupied with fusing text and image, often in purely visual or spatial ways, and their influence is tangible here. Halo treats her words in a similarly plastic fashion: dividing them between voices, breaking sentences into cryptic fragments, and using vocals to texture a broader lattice of bass, percussion, and keys. Rhythm, alliteration, and an ASMR-like sensitivity to mouth-made sounds seem to drive the lyrical content as much as any urge to tell a story: “Cancerous secrets like trails from Panama/Their thirst was once a mellow fantasma.”
On the phenomenal “Jelly,” a surreal narrative is traced between Halo, Klein, and a third guest vocalist, the Warp-signed fantasy-pop artist Lafawndah. Their words seem snatched from the air, like an argument overheard accidentally: “You don't meet my ideal standards for a friend/And you are a thief,/And you drink too much!” Underneath, an oozing bassline recalls the hazy techno grooves of Theo Parrish, interrupted by tactile bursts of acoustic percussion from Keszler and cowbell from dreamy house producer Max D.
“Moontalk” is the next most songlike track, fusing Latin percussion with highlife guitar and blinding synth bursts to build the album’s most addictive groove. Halo switches to Japanese for the chorus and heightens the mood of uncanny intrigue with lyrics served straight from the subconscious: “What if you slept/And what if in your sleep you dreamed/And what if in your dream/You went to heaven/And there thumbed a glasslit flower?” On “Who Won?,” she enlists artist and writer Michael Salu to deliver affectless phrasebook sentences like a gloomy male cyborg: “I'll call back later/I don't know/I'm single/No, this is the first time.” With this constant slippage between voices, Halo scuppers any attempt to read her lyrics as directly autobiographical—another way of wriggling free of “female songwriter” stereotypes.
Far beyond a cut-and-paste collage of genres and moods, Dust is a thrilling attempt to escape all the usual points of classification, to collapse the primacy of the human voice, and to obscure and reveal at unexpected moments. It’s easy to feel a little lost in these conditions—Dust is a dense and heady record, and from certain angles can seem intimidating, even impenetrable. But between the clever track sequencing and a handful of irresistible outcrops of groove and melody, Halo provides plenty of footholds to cling onto while you acclimatise to her lawless universe. | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | June 28, 2017 | 8.2 | 08414166-e16c-4e2e-984a-2cdf9fa3503a | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | null |
The Brooklyn-based, Barcelona-born musician’s debut album is a dense but cohesive statement on duality, equally shaped by Catalan identity and future-leaning cosmic pop. | The Brooklyn-based, Barcelona-born musician’s debut album is a dense but cohesive statement on duality, equally shaped by Catalan identity and future-leaning cosmic pop. | NOIA: gisela | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/noia-gisela/ | gisela | “I sing in Catalan in some of my songs because it’s my most private language and I want to keep it alive,” says Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, aka NOIA. The Brooklyn-based Barcelona native is the daughter of activist parents (her father was the member of a Communist party who fought against the Francoist dictatorship), and her work as NOIA comes at a time where Catalan musicians and singers such as Rosalía and Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés are at the forefront of an internationally recognized cultural moment. On her audacious full-length debut, gisela, NOIA builds her own private universe by melding rich Catalan and Spanish folkloric musical traditions with buoyant electronics.
While similar Auto-Tune flutters and gurgling synths adorned 2019’s dancier Crisàlida EP, NOIA shifts into opulent art-pop eclecticism on gisela. On “didn’t know,” an undaunted, Don Draperesque femme spotlights middling hookups with insufferable fuckboys over a drum-machine beat. Caricaturing the song’s shallow, frivolous subjects in Pedro Almodovar levels of Technicolor, she admits, “Quisiera ser como tú/Liviana y ligera,” adding, “Dime como lo haces tú sin deep feelings en la vena,” (“I wanted to be like you/Light and lithe/Tell me how you do it without deep feelings in your veins”). It’s a riff on an infamous “post-coital pillowtalk” scene in Mad Men, but the focus shifts to camaraderie between a close-knit circle of friends as they laugh off the mishaps that come with dating in a swipe-left dominant landscape, steadfast in their refusal to submit to basic men.
NOIA summons up the extraterrestrial dynamics of Björk’s “Hyperballad” on “reveal yourself,” layering airy falsettos and distorted, pitched-up vocals over a shuffling four-on-the-floor pulse. On the moonlit “otra vida por vivir,” featuring Maria Arnal, she weaves in and out of Catalan beside stuttering circuitry and a gentle but rapturous house-like beat.
On “canço del bes sense port” (Catalan for “song of the kiss without a harbor”), NOIA interpolates fragments of a poem written by Catalan feminist, essayist, and poet Maria Mercè Marçal—who similarly strove to preserve the suppressed language—into a folkloric interlude. “L'aigua roba gessamins/Al cor de la nit morena” (“The water steals jasmines/From the heart of the dark night”), she coos, building on the enigmatic energy of the origina beside Spanish avant-garde jazz musician Agustí Fernández. “La tristesa dins la mar/La mar dins la lluna cega/I la lluna al grat del vent com una trena negra (“The sadness in the sea/The sea in the blind moon/And the moon at the mercy of the wind/Like a black braid”). A tender reprieve following the all-consuming (and slightly toxic) entanglement in “eclipse de amor,” the Barcelona singer’s reworking of the poem further underscores gisela’s meticulous sequencing and greater vision of centering Catalan culture.
“verano adentro,” a glowing standout, is one of the album’s rare peeks into quietude. Beneath the spacey synth lines and deliberately choppy refrains lies a beautifully simple ode to basking in the sun on Barcelona’s rooftops, but it stands as one of the most candid and straightforward pop songs NOIA has yet written.
It’s easy, at first, to get lost in gisela’s many points of reference. Just 30 minutes long, it’s novella-short, but the record traverses numerous genres and forms: acidic glitch pop, pummeling dembow rhythms, and abrasive industrial textures. It’s steeped in the graceful laments and improvised intensity of flamenco, from the reinterpretation of a traditional vidalita sung by fellow Barcelonesa Mayte Martín on “anoche” to the channeling of Estrella Morente on the oceanic “glitter blanca.”
When Fullà-Silvestre first adopted the pseudonym NOIA (Catalan for “girl”), it was to distinguish her electro-experimental solo productions from her work as a designer, mixer, and composer for film and television. While there are moments where the footnotes and sound-collagist maximalism obscure her own perspective as a songwriter, the record never feels labored or overembellished. It’s a dense but cohesive statement on duality, equally shaped by Catalan identity and future-leaning cosmic pop. | 2023-04-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Cascine | April 4, 2023 | 7.2 | 0845b235-631d-4d0a-928c-6ef689fdc81b | Nayeli Portillo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nayeli-portillo/ | |
On the Streets’ first album in nine years, the UK rapper returns to the simple snark of his early music, but his youthful misadventures have been replaced by the jaded pronouncements of middle age. | On the Streets’ first album in nine years, the UK rapper returns to the simple snark of his early music, but his youthful misadventures have been replaced by the jaded pronouncements of middle age. | The Streets: None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-streets-none-of-us-are-getting-out-of-this-life-alive/ | None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive | In 2011, after nearly a decade of attempted reinventions, Mike Skinner walked away from the Streets. His debut, Original Pirate Material, was a landmark for UK rap, and its follow-up, the concept LP A Grand Don’t Come for Free, was an even more ambitious and experimental storytelling experience, but subsequent albums brought diminishing returns. He’d already revealed he was “fucking sick” of the name and its implications, and he was exhausted and running out of ideas. “I think it would devalue it to say that it was cynical but I know what I’m doing with the Streets—I’ve been doing it for too long,” he told The Guardian. “I don’t want to do the Streets anymore. I should have moved on a long time ago.” In 2009, he told NME he wouldn’t revisit it unless he was 40 and broke. He stayed busy after 2011’s supposed swan song, Computers and Blues, starting a new project with the Music’s Rob Harvey, restarting his indie label, and even DJing. In 2017, Skinner announced a Streets greatest-hits tour, then formally resurrected the project. He says he isn’t broke but there are other reasons to be pessimistic about this revival: “The reason I finished the Streets was to make a film,” he told Mr. Porter, “and the reason I started the Streets up again was to make a film.” This new album is, in part, a marketing campaign to produce a movie.
None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive is his first album in nine years; Skinner also happens to be 40 now. It’s that kind of funny coincidence that seems fit for a candid Streets lyric, but he doesn’t mine his departure or return, or the reasoning behind either, for material. Dubbing this a “mixtape” instead of a proper album implies a clear effort to take some of the pressure off, especially from an artist so serious about craft and process, but the distinction does feel apt: Every single song has a feature, following a format similar to his only other mixtape, 2011’s Cyberspace and Reds. That record showed a curiosity for British rap that was missing on Computers and Blues and is rekindled here. A cadre of young rhymers appear across the tape eager to make the most out of the opportunity. But in doing so they make Skinner feel archaic.
He returns to the simple snark of his early music, only the cheeky misadventures of his youth have been replaced by jaded pronouncements from middle-aged life, where dating is an ordeal and the hangovers are longer. The mixtape is better produced than his last few outings, with slicker songs where he once again futzes with dance music, rap beats, and UK garage rhythms, as well as sampling UK funky and drum’n’bass. He told Apple Music his focus was to avoid getting bogged down by concepts and just say “some cool shit,” and there are flashes of that irreverent charm. On “Same Direction,” his raps embody the awkwardness, hilarity, and thrill of a tryst gone awry. Unfortunately, most songs on the tape fail to harness that same sense of in-the-moment acuteness.
Much of None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive is fixated on smartphones—specifically, using them to ignore people. Phones can be an excellent talisman for examining our deteriorating interpersonality; take, for example, the photobook Screen Time, or another mixtape, Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone. Yet these songs have about as much insight into our pocket screens as Quibi execs. On more than one occasion, Skinner cringes at the state of women’s DMs, weighing unsolicited come-ons with the insight of someone who was hipped to this by the short story Cat Person. (Seriously.) There’s the super literal song “Phone Is Always in My Hand,” which is lazy and obvious in its depictions of avoidance (“You’re ignoring me, but you’re watching my stories”). There’s even a flatness to his quips about the primacy we place on always being on: “You know I’d give you my kidney/Just don’t take my charger,” he raps on opener “Call My Phone Thinking I’m Doing Nothing Better.”
His sense of humor remains intact (“Plans always become dead/I told you I’d come for the jokes/But that was two hours ago, I was younger back then/I was full of hope”), but the bits land with far less frequency and force. In the early ’00s, he introduced what felt like a novel and necessary perspective to rap, stumbling between clubs and pubs, flitting aimlessly between rap and garage, bringing to light the nuances of lad culture, its gags and slang and monotony. He was an observer rapper surveying his insular world with a wink and a shrug. On this tape, his scrutiny mostly feels pointless. “Man, God has it backward, God has seen it all/But if God had dropped acid, would God see people?” he asks clumsily, barely rhyming his inane attempt at stoner profundity.
The main knock on Skinner throughout his career has been that his spoken-word flows can be clunky and out of pocket. There can be a disarming and charming quality to his rapping when his wit is sharpest, and the phonetics of the title track’s last verse distract from its frivolousness, but in the moments where his raps are edgeless and obtuse they can really grate, and it has only gotten worse with age. His rapping on None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive often lacks any sense of rhythm or finesse. This problem is only exacerbated in the company of nimbler peers, especially Ms. Banks, Jesse James Solomon, and Oscar #Worldpeace. His rhymes don’t always catch the beat, and, when running side by side with a new crop of MCs, he is usually outpaced. Reading his explanations for choosing the guest rappers, it’s clear they moved him, but he might’ve been better off simply ceding them the space and stepping away. With this new tape, the Streets are officially back, but Skinner never convinces us why they should stay.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Island | July 16, 2020 | 5.5 | 0848b5c0-84bc-45cf-bce4-f2fd67b27449 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Bursting forth with some of the most pungent yarns, potent barbs, and peerless production of the Wu member's remarkably consistent career, Fishscale is the choice outcome of an endlessly creative mind using experience as a compass en route to triumph. | Bursting forth with some of the most pungent yarns, potent barbs, and peerless production of the Wu member's remarkably consistent career, Fishscale is the choice outcome of an endlessly creative mind using experience as a compass en route to triumph. | Ghostface Killah: Fishscale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3637-fishscale/ | Fishscale | More than 12 years after he emoted all over the first verse on the first track on the first Wu-Tang Clan album, the now 35-year-old Ghostface Killah is still starving for respect, understanding, and acceptance. Hypnotically restless, the East Coast purist has homed in on a rap palette full of vivid hurt and strafing alarm-- and bursting forth with some of the most potent yarns, barbs, and production of his remarkably consistent career, Fishscale is the choice outcome of a creative mind using experience as a compass en route to triumph.
Though Ghostface's veteran status informs much of his fifth solo album, his father-knows-best pose is led by breathless rhymes, not nostalgia. To wit, "Whip You With a Strap" rails against the lack of consequences brought upon today's youth with a smooth cleverness, while "Big Girl" moans about three fast-living women wasting their potential on cocaine mounds. Tellingly, it's Ghost's own coke the girls can't stop sniffing. Such ambiguities eschew didacticism for a lived-in wisdom that's as wicked as it is worthwhile.
Ghost's godfather-cause is most noticeably directed at ostentatious modern-day rap hustlers who largely cook up tales with broad lines and no consequences, as he devotes several of Fishscale's 18 songs to the booming drug-rap subgenre he helped launch in 1995 with Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.... On both "R.A.G.U." and "Kilo", Rae turns up to assist his close friend, describing the perils of the drug trade. Hardly akin to the dealer-as-infallible-ghetto-champion guise currently purported by the likes of Young Jeezy, Fishscale's dope peddlers are harried and frayed. Between broken wrists, familial strife, and self-inflicted gunshots to the groin, "R.A.G.U." is anything but glorifying toward its stressed-out, drug-running protagonists.
But the album's most vivid illicit spectacle belongs to Ghost alone; "Shakey Dog" takes the rapper's penchant for eye-popping lyrical imagery to its extreme, offering a twisty Mamet-style narrative about a botched two-man robbery attempt. "Fasten your seatbelts," warns the Staten Island son before unraveling a scene so perfectly lucid that an accompanying video would be redundant. Whether describing the alluring smells coming from his victim's apartment or the ruthless history of an ancillary old lady ("She paid her dues when she smoked her brother-in-law at her boss' wedding") he passes on his way up to the place, Ghost touches on myriad senses and memories-- it's the kind of song that requires several close listens to understand at all. It also strongly suggests that, if Ghost ever loses his appetite for rap, he might find success as a screenwriter.
As the album's other specific tragedies-- shitty haircuts, bus stop infatuation gone awry-- fly by with deft everyman flourishes, it's the surreal "Underwater", with its strange spirituality, that proves most trenchant. The dreamy account finds our hero playing out a possible afterlife allegory while swimming at the bottom of the ocean. "I'm not on my turf," he confesses as mermaids "with Halle Berry haircuts" offer guidance along the way. In the tourist role, Ghost is as compelling as when he's recounting pavement-bred stories of his familiar youth. Sometimes on "Underwater", the two come together brilliantly like when he notices "SpongeBob in a Bentely coup, bangin' the Isleys." Eventually arriving at the "world's banginest mosque," Ghost finds comfort in Muslim chants; the rapper's rare moment of peace is well-deserved amidst Fishscale's enthralling agony. Aiding in the track's calming vibes is a mysterious, flute-laden beat courtesy of MF Doom, who's responsible for four beats on the record. The masked supervillain is in the company of a reputable bevy of soul-stacked sample-masters on Fishscale and their musical backdrops match Ghost's focus and vision.
In an interview with RZA last year, he told me, "Listen to how Ghost sounds rappin' over one of my beats and then over another beat... he sounds like a grown man [on my beat] and he sound younger on [other] producers' beats because they don't know the frequency." But, as the first solo Ghost disc without a RZA production, Fishscale attests he was wrong. Whether it's the late Dilla providing his off-kilter vinyl-hiss haze for "Strap", Pete Rock cutting up Sly Stone's "Family Affair" on the hollow funk of posse cut "Dogs of War", or Just Blaze doing his Banger 101 thing on "The Champ" (which, stripped of its bootleg Rocky samples at the last minute thanks to copyright issues, still packs heat), each producer takes his opportunity to envelop today's most soulful rapper with deep swaths of vintage samples and deep drums. The RZA's sonic influence remains strong-- and he even shows up briefly on the excellent Wu reunion cut "9 Milli Bros"-- but his absence behind the Fishscale boards is largely inconsequential.
Considering Ghost's continued status as one of hip-hop's most revered, relevant elder statesmen, it seems odd that his name was seldom bandied about in most of the last decade's King of New York debates. Fishscale reiterates with cinematic verve that the most vital current Wu Tang Clan member's storytelling can match Biggie's in both excitement and humor. Yet Ghost's songs are unrelenting in their slavishness to density and credibility, and that can turn off casual listeners even as it intoxicates hip-hop purists. "My arts is crafty darts, why y'all stuck with 'Laffy Taffy'?" he asks with utter sincerity on "The Champ". As long as inevitable questions like that continually re-up this heavyweight's unswerving drive, they're probably better left unanswered. | 2006-03-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-03-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | March 27, 2006 | 9 | 084914c9-619a-4d4f-8a2a-d87d171f8166 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer returns with a wild and free-ranging collection of chamber pieces. | The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer returns with a wild and free-ranging collection of chamber pieces. | Caroline Shaw / Attacca Quartet: Orange | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-shaw-attacca-quartet-orange/ | Orange | Orange is Caroline Shaw’s first full release since she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for 8 Voices in 2013, becoming the youngest recipient of the award at age 30. In the time since her Pulitzer, Shaw’s profile has soared dramatically, thanks to her work with Kanye West: She performed with West at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in 2015, reworked his 808s & Heartbreak cut “Say You Will,” and contributed to The Life of Pablo and ye. With West, Shaw emphasized her singing, allowing her glassy voice to ring out with stark clarity and strength, echoing the exactitude and control of the Partita. The works on Orange, performed by Attacca Quartet, don’t adhere to the same engulfing claustrophobia of Shaw’s vocal compositions. They’re not confined to a room. They’re of the earth.
In press materials, Caroline Shaw calls Orange “a garden that she and Attacca Quartet are tending.” Even the expert gardener, however, cannot anticipate her results with certainty, and the pieces on Orange shoot off in thrilling and unpredictable directions. “Entr’acte,” the first piece, ranges in open space. The Attacca Quartet (violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee) begin as if surprised, playing the core motif vigorously and in unison. It’s a small and satisfying pattern, but they quickly abandon it, and the piece turns into a series of lively detours that add texture. They return to its central melody in full only once.
The individually titled movements of “Plan and Elevation” don’t suggest variations on a common set of themes so much as five disparate approaches. The first movement, “The Ellipse” begins with grandiose violin swells before shrinking into jittery plucks. On the fourth movement, “The Orangery,” violinist Keiko Tokunaga plays Glassian arpeggios while the rest of the quartet shifts restlessly behind her. It’s an array of mood and tones that does not cohere to a bigger conclusion. The details are the meaning.
The music of Orange exudes joy and a sense of wildness. The second piece, “Valencia,” is bright and quick. The longest, “Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a,” unfurls itself in many directions, unconfined by a motif or pattern. Taken together, the works of Orange share a curiosity to explore the crevices of a composition, highlighting textures and pacing, like the high-pitched stutters of “Punctum.” Often, as on “Entr’acte,” it feels like the performers are not looking toward an end but giddily chasing each other up the same hill, detouring where they see fit and perhaps stepping on each other’s feet as they climb. | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam / Nonesuch | April 20, 2019 | 8 | 084cc5ec-da61-4ddf-82c2-95361f7b650a | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
The Los Angeles producer's first Stones Throw release takes the bolero, the valse, and other traditional Latin forms and plays them on a solitary Oberheim synthesizer. | The Los Angeles producer's first Stones Throw release takes the bolero, the valse, and other traditional Latin forms and plays them on a solitary Oberheim synthesizer. | Frankie Reyes: Boleros Valses y Mas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22172-boleros-valses-y-mas/ | Boleros Valses y Mas | Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker is a career experimentalist. For more than a decade the Los Angeles producer has made various forms of electronic music, frequently separating his endeavors through specific aliases. His most prominent work is as Gifted And Blessed, or GB, but his side-projects have often left the dance floor in favor of ambient experimentation, explorations into world music, and deep dives into heady electronica.
Reyes-Whittaker’s latest record, Boleros Valses Y Mas, revisits ideas that the beatmaker has explored previously and finds him revisiting the name Frankie Reyes for his first Stones Throw release. Like other Frankie Reyes projects, *Boleros Valses Y Mas *is a forwardly Latin release that mines the producer’s “techno-indigenous studies” concept, in which he embraces ancestral sounds and influences through contemporary technologies. On *Boleros Valses Y Mas, *Reyes plays a solitary Oberheim synthesizer, repositioning ubiquitous Latin American standards into wonky modernism though an unexpected switch in instrument. The release also dovetails with the producer’s sporadic affection for solo instrumental albums, a form he slipped into earlier this year on a spacey ambient record called Emotional Topography.
Boleros are songs most closely associated with Cuba and Puerto Rico but are ubiquitous throughout Latin America. Defined technically by their rhythm—a Cuban 2/4 adjustment to Spanish boleros’ 3/4 count—boleros can be informally rounded up as a specific type of ballad, frequently dramatic and sentimental. Acts like Los Panchos, a Mexican and Puerto Rican trio who began recording in the 1940s, exemplified the sound: fluttering requinto guitar, almost theatrical singing, calculated pace. Instead of the sharpness of the guitar or voices, Reyes’ boleros are channelled through a soft, warm analog synth, a purposefully awkward juxtaposition that can make for an occasionally tedious listen.
There isn’t much character in Reyes’ synth playing—he’s frequently leaned on exacting transcription methods that allow for almost no riffing—and there’s a correspondingly programmed quality to the simplicity. While the track list explores a few different styles, both boleros and otherwise, it’s easy to feel a false mastery of the material because of the transplanted single voice. But the potentially boring sameness of the album’s solitary timbre amplifies the core compositions themselves. On “Alma, Corazón y Vida” Reyes’ pace-setting left hand jumps around but is obscured by the shifty and busy right; it’s a complex rhythmic interplay that is easy to overlook in the busier, guitar-driven original. “La Bikina,” a boisterous mariachi classic, loses its symphonic energy in Reyes’ twinkling adaptation, but the core remains intact, as if the heart of the material has been transplanted into a display case with a weird glass tint.
In some cases, like “Espinita,” Reyes translates tense drama into whimsical bounciness, a simple artifact of the Oberheim’s silly-in-an-unexpected-context sound. (Some of Reyes’ taut translations might go unnoticed on the soundtrack to a Super Nintendo video game, for example.) “La Comparsa,” a piece written by the Cuban pianist and composer Ernesto Lecuona Casado, is one of the album’s most natural and pleasing translations given its origins as a piano adaptation of a ballet's central theme. Reyes’ “La Comparsa” shows off the chunkiness of the Oberheim’s deep end and the synth’s awkward and abrupt mood setting.
Because Reyes engages a solitary idea throughout he forces the listener to dwell on the album’s minimalism, an experiment that magnifies every note and makes for a productive exploration of rhythm. The payoff of Boleros Valses Y Mas is more often intellectual than aesthetic. Instead of producing beautiful cover versions, Reyes has driven at the heart of what makes a bolero a bolero and so on, boiling down the song styles into a weird but sound study in Latin American music, unexpectedly unravelling traditions as he updates them. | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Stones Throw | July 29, 2016 | 6.8 | 084dbf79-e2c3-4b85-865d-6b2f570072be | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The London guitar band’s debut is twitchy, hair-raising, always on the move. They harken back to a more esoteric era of indie with a magnetic and dazzling style. | The London guitar band’s debut is twitchy, hair-raising, always on the move. They harken back to a more esoteric era of indie with a magnetic and dazzling style. | Black Midi: Schlagenheim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-midi-schlagenheim/ | Schlagenheim | In January, KEXP uploaded a 26-minute video of four British kids positioned in a homey Icelandic hostel, stepping loosely and methodically through a handful of songs that now appear on black midi’s debut album, Schlagenheim. Two things are immediately apparent while watching: Everyone in black midi looks approximately 8 years old and their drummer is an absolute legend. The performance is hypnotic, hair-raising, maybe a little irritating, and definitely out of time—a bunch of schoolboys producing something so staunchly learned, freeform, and anti-pop in an age when pop reigns supreme.
Before black midi had even announced their album, the video was passed around like samizdat by people who watch drum tutorials online; older dudes who long for the days when prog bands like King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer ruled British rock; weirder sects who love the chaotic grooves of no wave bands like DNA or Mars; younger fans who glommed onto the post-punk sound of Preoccupations or Girl Band; guys who own Butthole Surfers records and sometimes play a Fantômas song when no one’s looking. The 323,000 views for this video comprise an underclass of music nerds who worship all things mathy, noisy, wiry, and aberrant. By the end, when we see guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin put his cell phone up to his guitar pickups and play a recording of a woman ranting ad nauseam, black midi have shown themselves a band so full of glorious potential (and pretension), the only thing people were left wondering was: What do they sound like in an actual studio? If the KEXP performance was the grabby cold open, six months later, Schlagenheim is the first act of a band that teeters on brilliance—a restless, nerve-wracking high wire act that could easily fall off at any moment.
Schlagenheim offers prime counter-programming for our current rich, harmonic, verse-chorus-verse era of indie music. With a froggy-voiced singer and an armful of guitar pedals, black midi sprint in the opposite direction. They are a band for whom references become the main talking point—a chilling thought for anyone who prefers not to think about music through the lens of dudes prattling on about other dudes in older bands. All the indie rock tropes of old are summoned: exclusion, referentiality, insularity, recalling a time in the ’80s and ’90s when the underground just covered each other all the time.
Forget about trying to reach out with a poppy lead single, black midi don’t seem to be trying to reach anyone at all. It’s ego and oddity reclassified as a human stand against the computable nature of pop in the streaming age—prog as proof of life. Or maybe they’re just young and operating without any stakes. Whatever the case, it’s black midi’s ability to write songs that screw in deep and rewire the synapses that make Schlagenheim come alive and burst apart. They play passionately and unselfconsciously, drawing upon their youth, imagination, and what sounds like hours upon hours in a practice room.
Above all, black midi swings. They are an interlocking unit, yet have a recklessness of someone who likes to close their eyes and take their hands off the wheel. This is best captured by the opener, “953,” where you are introduced to drummer Morgan Simpson’s tender and indestructible relationship to the downbeat. You are also introduced to singer Geordie Greep’s divisive, dynamic voice: Imagine someone with the name “Geordie Greep” and that’s essentially who he sounds like (or, Mark E. Smith if he were a Bond villain). Together, with bassist Cameron Picton and guitarist Kwasniewski-Kelvin, black midi shrink and grow, speed up, slow down, get loud, get quiet, find a groove, destroy the groove, find a better groove, and then move on. This music is dense and well-composed, propelled by the adolescent impulses of a band eager to never be bored again.
Part of Schlagenheim’s wonder comes from just how unformed it is. At their best, black midi sound like the first days of Earth: atonal, unstable, a land mass roaring to life before the laws of harmony or rhythm are in place. The thrill of listening to a short burst of gibberish-core on a song like “Years Ago” makes you wonder if they know literally everything or literally nothing about how songs work. On “Western,” they trot through different sections of an eight-minute suite, as Greep channels his inner Lewis Carrol (“a pink caterpillar with six anorexic children”) along his journey to the fictional town of Schlagenheim. At all times, their fellowship of chaos is moored to Simpson’s drumming—shadowy, melodic, crucial to the success of every moment on the album. It is Simpson who elevates these songs from heady improv experiments to a new, exciting language of music.
Though Greep’s subject matter and eccentric delivery are a little too affected, there are a few lyrics that pop out amid all the abstract brain doodles. Picton sings a more straightforward lead on “Near DT, MI,” which alludes to the ongoing Flint water crisis in Michigan: When his voice tears apart the words “dead in the water,” it’s the closest black midi come to evoking righteous anger, or any real ideology or emotion you could put a name to. More to their squirrelly nature is “bmbmbm,” a song made up of one note and one circular thought. Greep sings, “She moves with a purpose/What a magnificent purpose/And they find different ways to suck themselves off, but she does not care at all…” with increasing intensity as if trying to win an argument with a mirror.
It feels like “bmbmbm” is the band’s anthem, not simply because it’s self-involved or because it’s the best song on Schlagenheim or because they’ve been closing their much-lauded live shows with it, but because it’s a blank slate onto which black midi project their truest selves. Greep plays with the lyrics like a cat toying with a dead mouse, really enunciating “suck” as if he’s realizing all the contours of his lips and teeth and throat in real time. The band keeps a no-wave stomp going, with Simpson interrupting occasionally with precision fills that frustrate the rhythm but never lets it fall out of time. It is primordial and juvenile, dumb and clever, arch and true, and captures a band at that rare time before any self-conscious tones creep into their music. All the while, black midi discover what has been pioneered by countless bands before, and still present it as something entirely new.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | June 25, 2019 | 8.2 | 0850b0dd-4603-40e9-a162-e264a1ced876 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
With virtuosic arrangements and cavernous production flourishes, the Brooklyn songwriter’s second full-length is an ambitious record that miraculously does not feel like it’s taking on too much. | With virtuosic arrangements and cavernous production flourishes, the Brooklyn songwriter’s second full-length is an ambitious record that miraculously does not feel like it’s taking on too much. | Katie Von Schleicher: Consummation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-von-schleicher-consummation/ | Consummation | Katie Von Schleicher, a Brooklyn-based musician who also plays in the Americana outfit Wilder Maker, makes psych rock that belongs on empty, scorching interstates. Her decadent and intricate retro-revivalism feels synonymous with chrome finishes, the smell of leather interiors, and endless lonely stretches. Loosely inspired by an alternative reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological masterpiece Vertigo, Von Schleicher’s second full-length album, Consummation, attempts to work through the quiet and often unnoticed struggles that come with feeling invisible in a romantic relationship. It is some of her strongest songwriting to date, complemented by virtuosic arrangements and cavernous production flourishes.
Consummation is a major step forward for Von Schleicher. The jangly glam rock of 2017’s delightfully scrappy Shitty Hits, recorded directly to tape in her childhood home, left plenty of room to grow. Consummation sounds huge. Its arrangements are overstuffed and pristine, indebted to what feels like every subgenre of ’70s rock without ever devolving into outright pastiche. The distorted guitars and painstaking vocal harmonies of “Messenger” scan as both mutant glam rock and sun-drenched AM gold. All lo-fi proclivities are gone—Von Schleicher isn’t hiding behind anything.
“Caged Sleep,” the album’s biggest track, is towering and massive, with urgent pacing and sharp turns. Von Schleicher describes watching herself as though in a dream and questioning her own existence. “The wall was full of green/No one looked at me/How strange/Am I free?” she sings, as her surroundings strobe in the background. Flickering with organs and finger-picked classical guitars, “Gross” verges on Renn Faire at its outset. “If you make honest work you believe it then/Unless no one’s home,” she sings, continually questioning herself and her process. The song maintains its slow, careful pacing until the last minute, when it transforms into a voluminous orchestral pop ballad. Von Schleicher’s best songs never quite go where you might think would make sense.
Musically, Consummation is an ambitious record that miraculously does not feel like it’s taking on too much. Its concept is more elusive. Von Schleicher reveals quiet flickers of pain, hinting at feelings of isolation and smallness with occasionally muddled results. But on “Nowhere,” she is at her most candid. She watches her past slip out of focus from the side mirror of a car, surveying the road behind and ahead. “I’ll buy my childhood home/All comfort in the end/And when it fills me up/I’ll be alone again,” she sings soberly as the roofline slips past the horizon. A synthesizer unspools beneath her words like a thread in an ancient sweater.
Von Schleicher doesn’t necessarily need to be transparent; more often than not, teasing out the hidden messages that lie beneath her impressionistic songwriting is genuinely enjoyable. Calling one’s pain by name can be terrifying, and she has a great talent for subtlety. Still, Consummation is at its most transfixing when it is at its most legible. | 2020-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | May 22, 2020 | 7.4 | 08525963-eef8-4573-9753-d08ce67971d0 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The Australian producer and vocalist tells stories of anguished romance over crisp drums and crystalline melodies. When she’s not dragged down by bland hooks and generic beats, she glitters. | The Australian producer and vocalist tells stories of anguished romance over crisp drums and crystalline melodies. When she’s not dragged down by bland hooks and generic beats, she glitters. | KUČKA: Can You Hear Me Dreaming? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kucka-can-you-hear-me-dreaming/ | Can You Hear Me Dreaming? | As KUČKA, Laura Jane Lowther makes moody electronic music that flickers with angst and glee. After breaking through as a background vocalist on LongLiveA$AP and cutting her teeth on the Perth, Australia live circuit, she made her name as a singer for club-ready rap and dance tracks. Her diaphanous voice can slink through or float over a mix, a quality that has landed Lowther placements on madcap beats by SOPHIE and Flume, and on mellower arrangements by Mount Kimbie and Andrei Eremin. On features, many of which are uncredited, KUČKA’s singing tends to function more as a texture than as a centerpiece—but in her solo work, she pushes against that reputation.
“Absolutely no vocal features,” she declared as she prepared Wrestling, her 2021 debut album. The mostly self-produced record showcased the anguished romantic beneath the ethereal voice, its misty and brooding beats bringing out a sensuality and tension often muted in KUČKA’s guest spots. She sounded less like a manic pixie dream girl—or an “alien, sexy space lady” as regular collaborator Flume once more colorfully described her timbre—and more like a person navigating life’s ups and downs. Follow-up Can You Hear Me Dreaming? has a similarly corrective mission, showcasing KUČKA’s takes on synth-pop, R&B, and dance while emphasizing narrative. If Wrestling was a waking dream, this album is a lucid one.
KUČKA again handles most of the production, assisted by Flume, sauna6, and pnkblnkt. The beats vary in style but generally feature crisp drums, crystalline melodies, and lots of negative space. The minimalism somewhat recalls Jessy Lanza and early SBTRKT, but KUČKA’s low ends aren’t as deep, nor are her synth melodies as syncopated. As an arranger, she’s more concerned with clarity than propulsion. Even the brisker songs feel inviting, their breezy arrangements as beckoning as a body pillow.
Leaning into this cozy mode, KUČKA structures these songs around stories of intimacy and romance. Opener “Wasting Time (til the end of the world)” centers on a fault that emerges in a relationship as a pair tries to outrun the apocalypse. “We got the music blasting along the motorway/But nowhere left to go/Why can’t you understand?/Look at me I’m serious,” KUČKA sings with irritation. The shuffling garage beat ups the tension; the couple might bottom out before the world does. Other lovers mentioned across the album fare better. The earnest narrator of chippy single “Cry Cry Cry” is brought to tears by the accepting gaze of her partner. And “Heaven,” a minimal R&B track flecked with icy synth melodies and chimes, turns vacation planning into seduction. “Nothing but our sweat and our own skin/We don’t need a week on an island,” KUČKA sings, her voice both pleading and affirmative.
She’s not a theatrical singer or a powerhouse, but she understands the inherent drama of a voice stretching or warbling even slightly, and uses such flourishes to make her characters personable. On “Wedding,” a song about being a witness to a shitty marriage, her smug delivery doubles as homegirl intimacy. “Every time he lets you down/On your face I know,” she laments in solidarity with her miserable bestie. Highlight “Not There,” an ode to an absent paramour, offers pure longing. “There’s a craving/In my bones/Subtle aching/When you’re not there,” she sings, stretching “bones” into four wounded syllables.
A few concepts don’t congeal. “Can’t Help It” attempts a sarcastic takedown of control freaks (or is it insecure men?), but is tanked by a bland hook and a generic beat that sounds like a throwaway from AlunaGeorge’s Body Music. Flume team-up “One More Night” also stumbles, its mix of heavy bass and airy vocals a retread of their past work. The obvious lyrics don’t help, either: “I’m your addiction now/You can’t resist when I’m around,” KUČKA sings, overexplaining an already cliché metaphor. Both songs sound like the kind of plug-and-play fare she’s trying to distance herself from.
“Communal Reverie” and “Gross Body,” tracks featuring her new band PESH, point in more promising directions. For both, KUČKA cedes the mic to her bandmate and wife Dillon Howl, who performs charged spoken word. The buzzy, growling beats practically crackle with energy, the chaos barely tamed by Howl’s witchy and tender verses. Though the songs slot into the overall vision of Can You Hear Me Dreaming?, there is a feral quality to them that could further complicate the image of KUČKA as a twee singer. Imagine it: KUČKA making rage beats for rap sparkplugs Cochise and OsamaSon, or droning trap for Kim Gordon and Fever Ray, or angry industrial for herself. Sounds far-fetched, but there’s a craving. | 2024-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | July 12, 2024 | 6.9 | 0856b862-cd72-4b73-b8ed-d5ce18bf4918 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/6674888c20cd57b4bacd2bae/2:3/w_2000,h_3000,c_limit/Kuc%CC%8Cka-%20Can%20You%20Hear%20Me%20Dreaming |
At the time of Dangerous, Michael Jackson's universal popularity was on par with pizza and the polio vaccine. It was the last time that Michael Jackson was Michael Jackson. | At the time of Dangerous, Michael Jackson's universal popularity was on par with pizza and the polio vaccine. It was the last time that Michael Jackson was Michael Jackson. | Michael Jackson: Dangerous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22044-dangerous/ | Dangerous | On the night of November 14, 1991, 500 million people scattered across 27 nations simultaneously watched Michael Jackson grab his crotch 17 times. He simulated masturbation, shattered car windows with crowbars, and unleashed the primal screams expected from a man who owned publishing rights to the Beatles catalogue. Then he turned into a black panther. The video ends with Bart Simpson striking a B-Boy pose in a Michael Jackson shirt, and ordering Homer to “chill out, homeboy.” It shattered all previous viewing records on Fox.
The $4 million, 11-minute unedited telecast of “Black or White” ranks among the Smithsonian-worthy artifacts of ’90s pop monoculture—up there with Nirvana trashing their instruments at the ’92 VMAs, the premiere of “Summertime” after The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Hillary Clinton hitting the Macarena at the ’96 DNC. No one ever had more juice than Jackson did at the time, and it’s difficult to imagine that anyone ever will again.
This was right around the time when they named him an official king of the Ivory Coast. In Gabon, 100,000 greeted him with signs reading “Welcome Home, Michael.” His universal popularity was on par with pizza and the polio vaccine. Safe enough to be Captain EO at Disneyland, hood-certified enough to throw up the set with the Crips.
The 33-year-old had recently signed the most lucrative contract in recording history, worth hundreds of millions, giving him his own label and the highest royalty rate in the industry. What’s more, no one thought it was out of line for someone who had sold close to 70 million records in the previous decade. In the press, Sony claimed the deal would reap them billions.
So when he released the first single from Dangerous, his first album in four years, fanatical interest led MTV, VH1, BET, and Fox to televise it at the same time—offering the greatest strategic victory since the Berlin Wall tumbled two years prior. And even though Jackson technically didn’t cause the collapse of East German Communism, his star wattage was so supreme that the Stasi secret police spied on him during his 1988 Berlin concert, fearing that obsessive MJ fans would accomplish what Reagan couldn’t.
With “Black or White,” Jackson lashed out at his public perception. In the interim since 1987’s Bad, he’d grappled with both outlandish rumors (buying the Elephant Man’s bones, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber) and some that drew blood (allegations of bleaching his skin). The innocent popcorn-eating Michael of Thriller was gone, but calling him “Wacko Jacko” was slander. He wanted us to know he was a man, an eccentric sure, but an adult with deeply rooted beliefs.
Released only five months before the LA Riots, the Rodney King beating and murder of Latasha Harlins almost certainly factored into Jackson’s increasingly political slant. “Black or White” articulated a utopian vision of a post-racial future while acknowledging the sins of contemporary bigotry. He demands equality, shouting that he “ain’t second to none.” He growls, “I ain’t scared of no sheets” (presumably Klansmen). Its hook offers his dream of a color-blind society, echoing Martin Luther King.
But this was Michael Jackson, not O’ Shea. Being King of Pop meant the need for mass appeal. The “Black or White” video exists as a microcosm of Dangerous itself. It potently affirms Jackson’s manhood, offers passionate screeds against racial strife, gang violence, and a parasitic American media. This is the album as multi-media spectacle, a precursor to Lemonade, with accusations of infidelity substituted for videos of Macaulay Culkin doing air guitar windmills to a Slash guitar solo and lip sync rapping about turf wars.
The lone #1 single from the 32-million selling Dangerous, “Black or White” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts. Directed by John Landis (“Thriller,” National Lampoon’s Animal House) the first quarter of its video reveals Jackson’s mischievous child-like streak, with Culkin towing out Spinal Tap-sized speakers, amplifying the volume to “ARE YOU NUTS!?!,” and shredding so hard that George Wendt gets ejected into the stratosphere screaming “Da Bears.”
It blends into his idealistic visionary side that wanted to heal the world through philanthropy and moonwalking. There is pop locking with Balinese dancers, rain dances with Native Americans, folk dances in front of the Kremlin, and the serenade of a Hindu goddess on a freeway. This is the magical Michael Jackson of our early memories—the man with the graceful dance moves and lithe falsetto that seemed celestially ordained (masking a notoriously intense perfectionist streak). Faces of all races harmoniously morph into one another, the most cutting edge FX that 1991 had to offer.
In the third section, boy becomes man: Jackson struts through a wall of flames, Henley shirt open, screaming at his enemies like a mad king. It gives way to Culkin rapping in shades and oversized gold chains, which is just as well considering that this is the man who actually spit the bars. Jackson’s embrace of hip-hop not only aligned him with the popular sound of black (and white) youth culture, it adds an aggressive masculinity unseen in his catalogue, and ultimately paved the way for the late period Biggie therapy session.
Of course, in the final section, Jackson turns into a black panther. You understand that meaning. So did millions of parents in Tipper Gore America, who flooded Fox and its local affiliates with phone calls, forcing Jackson’s team to re-cut and sanitize the video.
A quarter century later, it seems absurd that Michael Jackson smashing a few windows before turning into a Jungle Book character could be cause for mass protest, but you have to remember how adored and family-friendly Michael Jackson was. My parents only owned two records: Thriller and *Bad. *So until I was 9 years old, I listened to those two almost every single day of my life, and honestly I didn’t really need anything else. Michael Jackson was my entire conception of music. Millions more could say the same thing.
So when he dropped “Black or White,” it was shocking. If he was previously pop’s Peter Pan figure, Jackson had suddenly adopted a more carnal streak, but even here it was cartoonish. If the adult world looked dull and stifling, Jackson’s imagination offered a hope that it was possible not to wind up like George Wendt, bloated on a couch with a bored housewife. You could hang out with Macaulay Culkin, dance on top of the Statue of Liberty, and if all else failed, you could transform into a panther and bounce.
Imagine being Teddy Riley in 1991. You’ve gone from humble origins in Harlem to inventing New Jack Swing; you've produced multiple hits for your own band Guy, Bobby Brown, and Keith Sweat (“I Want Her”). Then late one night, you get a phone call from Michael Jackson telling you that he needs you to produce his new album—in effect making you the new Quincy Jones. All before your 24th birthday.
Before Riley headed west, Jackson had labored on* Dangerous* for over a year to varying degrees of success. Something always seemed off. Bad might have been the last album before hip-hop became the de facto soundtrack of urban culture. 1988 changed everything. Public Enemy, Rakim, and Big Daddy Kane left the competition sounding effete and timid. Gang wars and the crack epidemic continued to inflame inner cities. Songs like “Smooth Criminal” seemed obsolete.
Meanwhile Jackson’s sister Janet had recently delivered a hard-stomping R&B-pop classic in 1989’s Rhythm Nation 1814. Its influence on her older brother was so great that he even asked Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis to produce Dangerous. Out of loyalty to Janet, they turned him down. According to his engineer, Bruce Swedien, Michael was searching for something “very street that young people would be able to identify with.”
He wasn’t alone. His longtime competition Prince sought to re-connect in a similar fashion, forming the New Power Generation with rapper, Tony M. Released just one month before* Dangerous*, the purple one’s Diamonds and Pearls* *exists as a companion piece, documents of blurring eras. As ’80s pop gave way to ’90s hip-hop, they sought to find their place in the re-configured landscape. Except while Prince predictably constructed his own insular unit, Jackson looked outwards to Riley, the hottest producer of the moment.
If that seems obvious today, it wasn’t at the start of 1991. Many mainstream artists still saw hip-hop as a passing fad or stereotyped it as nihilistic and violent. Jackson needed to walk the fine line between disposable bubblegum rap like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and alienating longtime disciples with something too radical.
After preparing grooves in Q-Tip’s Soundtrack Studio in Queens, Riley flew out to the Neverland Ranch to meet the master. There was a tour of the trophy room, the carousel, and the zoo, and then after they talked late into the night, Jackson put Riley on his personal helicopter and had him flown to the Universal City Hilton, a short distance from the San Fernando Valley studios where they recorded Dangerous. Riley began work the next day.
Jackson established nerve centers at Record One and Larrabee Studios, just a few miles down Ventura Blvd. The latter had the SSL mixing console that Riley needed to make the tracks slap, and despite his pop reputation, Jackson wanted his new songs as hard as humanly possible. Engineers remember Jackson demanding that they play the New Jack Swing songs so loud that your ears bled. He invariably blew up a pair of headphones each session.
As you’d expect, the recording process boasted its requisite share of idiosyncrasy. Nancy Reagan visited the studio once, requiring the Secret Service to search the place for hours prior to her visit. Brooke Shields called frequently to talk to Michael, who materialized every day in the same black dress pants and red button-down shirt (he had a clothing rack of just two items).
One night, he left early to go to Tower Records, which had been shut down just for him to spend $1,500 on CDs. Another afternoon, he ordered several $900 remote controlled motorcycles brought to the studio. Despite usually eating meals prepared by a personal chef, Jackson requested McDonald’s for lunch on one occasion. He’d never actually eaten there before, but someone told him it was good, so he ordered one of everything on the menu and took a small bite of each. (The fish sandwich particularly wowed him.)
Then there was Madonna. During March and April of 1991, Jackson and Madonna went out to dinner at least three times, which led tabloids to immediately report that they were dating. During these conversations, Jackson reportedly asked her to duet on the unfinished version of what became, “In the Closet.”
“I think all he wanted was a provocative title, and ultimately he didn’t want the content of the song to live up to the title,” Madonna said at the time. “I said, ‘Look, Michael, if you want to do something with me, you have to be willing to go all the way or I’m not going to do it.’”
His engineers remember her visiting him once at the studio, where they spent a little time in his private room in the back. “When I asked Michael later about her visit he said that she ‘scared’ him,” his engineer Rob Disner later said. “I think we all speculated that she tried to make a ‘move’ on him but Michael never said. In any event, we never saw her again.”
The creative union most likely fizzled due to major stylistic divergences. Madonna imagined an extreme makeover: giving him a Caesar haircut, getting him out of his bedazzled military uniforms, taking him to New York and hanging out with the voguers, House of Xtravaganza. Michael wanted to go hip-hop and ultimately enlisted rappers Heavy D and Aqil Davidson of Wreckx N’ Effect as the principal guest vocalists.
During the summer of ’91, competition broke out within the two studios and three rooms dedicated to *Dangerous. At Record One, *Bill Bottrell and Bruce Swedien worked on the album’s softer more adult contemporary material (and “Black or White”). At Larrabee, Riley handled the New Jack Swing half. Even though engineers remember the sessions as “giggly, innocent, and so much fun,” Jackson did his part to foster a friendly rivalry—bouncing back and forth between studios and taunting his teams, “Oh boy, they got some smelly jelly going on in there.”
As Sony’s deadlines kept getting blown, Riley’s beats began forming the spine of the record. After being initially awestruck, Riley asserted more and more control at Jackson’s behest. “It worked itself out when he shook me,” Riley told HipHopWired in 2009. “[He was like] listen, you’re going to have to really produce me like you’ve produced a new artist. I need you to talk to me, I need you to criticize me, I need you to comment, I need you to give me all of you. I want the Teddy Riley that got that record out of Guy and the records out of your previous artists.”
If Michael danced in the studio, it meant that a track sounded right. No matter what, Jackson ensured that the melodies were his own, while Riley sought to merge his trademark New Jack Swing with Quincy Jones’ baroque pop. At one point, L.A. Reid and Babyface were brought in to help produce, but none of their contributions made the final cut. Over 60 songs wound up being written over a period of 18 months. It cost $10 million in total, not counting video costs.
When Jackson revealed the final tracklist to Riley, the latter expected to see his name once or twice. Instead, Riley produced six of the 14 songs—arguably all the material that has aged the best. As a result of his contributions, you can convincingly argue that Dangerous is Jackson’s final classic album and the best full-length of the New Jack Swing era.
As soon as you pressed play on the tape, Riley’s drums attacked with Scud-era force. “Jam.” The sound of glass breaking, bells reminiscent of LL Cool J’s “Jingling Baby,” funky drums that knock like Clyde Stubblefield was behind the kit, and roaring saxophone licks. The words “you want to get up and jam” are initially buried in the mix, but the vocals are as acrobatic as a highlight reel, so it only made sense that the Chicago Bulls used it in their 1992 championship video. Starring Michael Jordan and Kris Kross, the “Jam” clip became almost as iconic as “Black or White.” Filmed in an abandoned rat-infested armory on the South Side of Chicago, it finds Michael Jackson teaching Jordan how to dance and the other MJ teaching him to hoop. Through the wonders of special effects, Jackson ultimately swishes shots that not even Steph Curry can hit; but not even the greatest dancer of the last half-century can teach Jordan how to dance. Point Jackson.
Riley recruited Jackson’s favorite rapper Heavy D for four nimble bars, his baritone artfully offsetting the singer’s falsetto growl. The first song wastes no time in articulating the album’s leitmotif. Jackson urges the world to come together, decries false prophets crying of doom, and admits that the universe is a complicated place full of “tears for fears.” He’s “conditioned by the system” and doesn’t want to be preached to. His ultimate realization is that you have to “live each day like it’s the last,” find inner peace to stay strong against the haters, and when in doubt, jam.
You can see these themes stressed on nearly every song. “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” exists as a mission statement. This is the Michael who fame has isolated and forced into retreat. There’s a newfound menace in his voice, an angelic sneer, as he recites a litany of crippling ailments (world hunger, illiteracy, disease, gangs, homelessness, drug addiction, corruption, police brutality)—and yet ironically, he has somehow become the media’s bullseye. Written during his 33rd year, Jackson can’t help but implicitly compare himself to Jesus—a popular healer who wants to help, misinterpreted and publicly crucified.
But even though Teddy Riley had Jesus, Jesus never had Teddy Riley. These drums could turn stone walls to white sand, the vocals are meticulously layered, the multiple bridges leave just enough room for interpretative dance moves. Jackson adapts seamlessly to the new genre, funkier than Guy, more lyrically incisive than Bobby Brown.
Without Madonna, “In the Closet” received a cameo from Princess Stephanie of Monaco, mainly because Michael liked her sultry speaking voice even though she couldn’t sing. Shot in the desert, the Herb Ritts video stars Naomi Campbell at her pret a porter peak. Michael wears a tank top with a plunging neckline. It’s probably the most erotically charged of his career, about as far from “Thriller” as Basic Instinct is to The Mask. * *
You can trace Timbaland and the Neptunes experiments to a song like “She Drives Me Wild,” in which their former mentor created the percussion tracks from automotive sounds: car horns, motorcycles idling and revving, vehicles starting and screeching. This is probably Jackson’s closest attempt to match his sister’s* Rhythm Nation*.
Some interpreted it as a desire to catch up, but it’s more emblematic of his lust to conquer. If Off the Wall was Jackson mastering late ’70s soul and disco, Thriller was his perfection of ’80s pop. This is Jackson showing that he could blend hip-hop and R&B better than anyone had previously imagined. The new decade starts here, with artists like Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, TLC, R. Kelly, et al. taking cues from Jackson and Riley’s alchemy. To say nothing of Kanye, Drake, and countless others still atop the charts.
Dangerous has its flaws. The ballads on the back (non-Riley) half of the album could pass for gospel renditions of Celine Dion schmaltz. Despite its noble message and Jackson’s statement that it was the song he was most proud of writing, “Heal the World” is essentially “We Are The World Pt. 2.” The theme from Free Willy, “Will You Be There” offers a sweet sentiment, but it’s not exactly “I Believe I Can Fly.” “Gone Too Soon” falls into that same category of beautifully intentioned crooning that ultimately sounds like a dentist office doxology, especially when contrasted with the brilliant funk of the first side.
If nothing else, they display the full range of his sharply targeted social consciousness, one that encompassed environmentalism, the AIDS pandemic, and every other affliction that still plagues the globe. In that sense, Dangerous might be Jackson’s most complete album, spanning dance music to dark nights of the soul. It’s a portrait of a persecuted genius, desperate to stay relevant, burdened with guilt and rage, lashing out at villains and offering inspiration to allies—always making it seem effortless.
My favorite song on Dangerous is “Remember the Time.” Like so many others on this album, it’s inextricable from its video, which also received the MJ treatment: simultaneous premieres on MTV, Fox and BET in February of 1992. Directed by John Singleton, it stars Eddie Murphy, Iman, the Pharcyde, Magic Johnson, Tiny Lister, and some adorable striped tabbies. It’s probably the only song from Dangerous that can still go off in any club on any given night.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the greatest music video ever made, a New Jack Swing hybrid of Cleopatra and Indiana Jones. There are swirling hourglasses, busts of Pharaohs, hand drums, wriggling snakes, and Michael Jackson as a gilded wizard with dance moves so smooth that he can even elude the future Deebo. He’s so cool that steals the Pharaoh’s wife (who also happens to be David Bowie’s future wife) and then disappears into a cloud of gold dust, just as his capture seems imminent.
Being a child of the ’80s and ’90s meant that Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy, and Michael Jordan were your heroes. (Maybe you liked Larry Bird or something, but I assume if that’s the case, you’ve long stopped reading this review.) And in his videos, Michael Jackson managed to best them all, making him the undisputed King. For most of my pre-adolescence, he was a pure sorcerer, a demigod immune to the gravitational pull and perimeters that stifle the rest of us.
At 10 years old, I assumed the video was shot somewhere in Egypt, because even though I no longer believed in bullshit like Santa Claus, I still accepted Michael Jackson at face value. Besides, nothing else he did seemed like it operated under any budgetary constraint. Only about a year ago did I learn that it was shot at Mack Sennett Studios in Silver Lake, a soundstage across the street from my apartment that I’d obliviously walked past thousands of times. It was one of those depressing realizations that makes much less sense than believing that Michael Jackson built a time machine and brought the star of Beverly Hills Cop, a supermodel, and the best point guard ever, along with him to the time of Ramses the Great. Watch that video again and tell me otherwise.
In that same way, it’s difficult to listen to Dangerous without considering the child molestation allegations that greeted him shortly after he came home from its marathon 69-concert tour. It’s tricky not to read too much into a song like “In the Closet.” How do you reconcile that someone as pure of spirit as Jackson could potentially have a monstrous streak?
Whether you believe the allegations or not, it’s clear that he was never the same after Dangerous. The damage became too absolute, the vitriol aimed his way too severe for someone that sensitive. Never again could his music exist on its own merits, the illimitable genius ravaged by prescription pills, insomnia, and obliterating pressure. Dangerous is the last time that Michael Jackson was Michael Jackson.
In an interview given shortly after the release of Dangerous, Jackson said that his goal was to do “an album that was like Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite.’ In a thousand years from now, people would still be listening to it…. Something that would live forever.” He’s been gone for over half a decade, but I still think about this quote every time I walk past that sound stage—considering the possibilities that Michael Jackson unlocked in every song, the infinite magic that he could create out of an empty room, the orphic visions of one of our final myths. | 2016-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | August 7, 2016 | 8.6 | 0857f285-d8a6-4d1b-b3e2-2a3e00854f64 | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
null | When in doubt, use pop psychology. Now, I'm no expert on the mechanics of the human psyche, but I've managed to piece together a semblance of expertise from horoscopes, radio call-in shows, *The Sopranos*, and the smattering of Freud I was forced to read as an undergrad (not to mention the invaluable contribution of my own mental shortcomings-- fuck my mother, indeed!). Sure, it doesn't add up to a diploma on the wall of my office, but it gives me the authority to comment liberally on the emotional well-being of friends and co-workers. Impressive credentials? No shit.
Avey Tare and Panda | Animal Collective: Danse Manatee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7941-danse-manatee/ | Danse Manatee | When in doubt, use pop psychology. Now, I'm no expert on the mechanics of the human psyche, but I've managed to piece together a semblance of expertise from horoscopes, radio call-in shows, The Sopranos, and the smattering of Freud I was forced to read as an undergrad (not to mention the invaluable contribution of my own mental shortcomings-- fuck my mother, indeed!). Sure, it doesn't add up to a diploma on the wall of my office, but it gives me the authority to comment liberally on the emotional well-being of friends and co-workers. Impressive credentials? No shit.
Avey Tare and Panda Bear are undergoing what real psychologists call regression-- that is, a return to a more developmentally immature level of mental functioning. The Animal collective has always evinced a juvenile sensibility, but a line needs to be drawn. There's a difference between playful, spirited getting-in-touch-with-your-inner-child juvenalia and the less wholesome pants-crapping juvenalia. And between Tare and Bear's last effort, the radically inspired Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, and this year's Danse Manatee, our patients have moved unmistakably from the former to the latter.
While Spirit freely colored outside the lines in its pursuit of beauty, Manatee is the musical equivalent of paste-eating. The addition of a third Animal, the Geologist, on keyboards seems to have eviscerated their candy-coated noise-pop rather than augmenting it. Gone are the stylized mod-pop mannerisms, the fevered rhythm guitar, the Daltrey-esque yowls, and the sweet-and-sour lyrics; in their place we find Speak N' Spell vocals, hyperactive clatter, and the single-minded pursuit of the most irritating sounds imaginable.
The bleepy electronic sylvania of the opening track, "A Manatee Dance," is momentarily intriguing, but soon passes into the explosive "Penguin Penguin" (the titles are a dead giveaway). "Penguin" submerges the largely tuneless vocals beneath a thick cacophony of symbol crash, bubbling noise and cricket chirping. "Another White Singer (Little White Glove)" possesses a kind of a sparse tribal funk, sustained by Panda's deep forest bongos, but Avey's vocals are shredded and torturous. "Essplode" is one of the highlights of Manatee, recalling the deftly catchy pop experimentalism of Spirit, as well as the organic drum-n-bass lines that dominated the former release. But "Essplode" is still shot through with the high-pitch squealing of which those Animal boys can't seem to get enough.
"Runnin' the Round Ball" is the album's strongest track and the only one that justifies the frequent comparison to Can and Amon Düül II. It's a thumping, motorized little romp, accented by breathing synths, baby whines, and frenetic glitchcraft. Unfortunately, it's one of the album's briefest tracks, and its incredibly percussive thrust is cut short before it really comes to any fruition. There's also a certain genius in the later track, "Throwin' the Round Ball" (round ball fixation = bedwetting, I'm told), a kind of cut-up pastoral of tinkling organs, spliced with odd, broken-sounding vocals, thunderous rumbling, and violent shreds of noise. The throb and chant of "Ahh, Good Country" is also oddly compelling, reminiscent of the rustic psychedelia of Flying Saucer Attack and the ecstatic primitivism of Hochenkeit. But aside from the few bright experiments, Danse Manatee is mostly intolerable make-believe. It's like having an imaginary friend you simply can't stand.
So, let's say the ideal of all progressive music is Freud's phallic phase: "Wow, this feels good when I touch it! I'll just keep doing it." Then, Danse Manatee might be located firmly in Freud's anal phase: "Mommy, look what I made!" But we must try to be reassuring. After all, Pitchfork has never been in the business of invalidating feelings. So, boys, we're not mad, just bitterly disappointed. And even the stinkiest dump provides an occasion for personal growth. Besides, Avey Tare, Panda Bear and the Geologist are always entitled to seek a second opinion. But before they do that, they should know that some kid I met at a party last week pretty much confirmed my whole diagnosis. And he was almost a psych minor. | 2001-07-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2001-07-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Catsup Plate | July 1, 2001 | 3.9 | 085fd777-c3aa-4c45-9ca7-81960b1a7e0b | Brent S. Sirota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-s. sirota/ | null |
Drake's course correction to VIEWS bursts with energy—more South African house, more grime, more Kanye. It's a long player made for luxuriating and a total immersion into Drake's world-pop lifestyle. | Drake's course correction to VIEWS bursts with energy—more South African house, more grime, more Kanye. It's a long player made for luxuriating and a total immersion into Drake's world-pop lifestyle. | Drake: More Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23048-more-life/ | More Life | Drake’s VIEWS was a commercial pinnacle and a creative and personal dead end. He scored the biggest hit of his career with “One Dance,” but the album surrounding it was so aggrieved and solipsistic you felt like you were insulting Drake by listening to it. His telepathic bond with producer Noah “40” Shebib had turned stale and over its punishing 80-plus minutes he wrung every last drop of sour grapes from his Beta-Male Conqueror persona. He had crushed his frenemies, seen them driven before him, and heard the lamentations of their women—or at least purposefully ignored their texts. What was next but exile?
He seems to be tacitly admitting to this stagnation throughout the warm, pulsing, and generous More Life. His solution is a “Playlist” (not a big old serious Album, the implication goes, nor one of those little “mixtapes” other rappers bother with) that forces Drake out into the sunlight again, where he can once again mingle with the people. On More Life’s closing track “Do Not Disturb,” he acknowledges the bleak spot he was in: “I was an angry youth while I was writing VIEWS/Saw a side of myself that I just never knew.” He even lets his mother pipe in with a voice message two-thirds of the way through the record on “Can’t Have Everything” as she admonishes her son for the hostile, suspicious streak he was nurturing. “That attitude will just hold you back in this life, and you’re going to continue to feel alienated,” she advises.
He doesn’t exactly drop the attitude, but he does play the background on More Life, implicitly acknowledging that he is often the least appealing element of his massively successful art. Dialing back on his self-pity allows all his skills that have kept him on top to float back to the surface: his ear for melodies, his sophisticated tastes, his curation skills. The more voices he lets into the frame, the fuller and richer the results, and More Life bursts with energy and lush sounds—more guests, more genres, more producers, more life. It is as confident, relaxed, and appealing as he’s sounded in a couple of years.
Drake steps back and lets the dusky-voiced 19-year-old British singer Jorja Smith soar over a sinuous club track from the rising South African house producer Black Coffee on the gorgeous “Get It Together.” Black Coffee and Jorja comprise at least 80 percent of the song; Drake is mostly relegated to mumbling or doubling the hook. Sampha bleeds his gorgeous hurt over the entirety of “4422,” with no one else in sight, and Skepta claims an entire track, boasting that he “died and came back as Fela Kuti.” Young Thug steals not one but two songs, spitting a dense verse with no vocal filter on “Sacrifices” and yelping along with the roots-reggae horns of “Ice Melts.”
Throughout, Drake’s appetite for the music of other cultures remains ravenous. “I switch flow like I switch time zone,” he raps on “Gyalchester,” the song title itself a patois nickname for the neighborhood of Manchester. On “Sacrifices,” he boasts “I got Dubai plates in the California state.” In both reach and sound, Drake may now be one of the most global pop stars in history. He is shrewd and relentless about his globe-trotting on More Life: “Dis a habibis ting, yeah?” he asks on the intro to a track called “Portland,” invoking a vivid zone of confusion where Arabic and Caribbean slang collides with Atlanta’s own Quavo somewhere in the rainy Pacific Northwest.
As always, there are moments when it’s unclear what Drake thinks he is borrowing. He tackles “No Long Talk” in an unsteady tough-guy patois—“things” turns to “tings” but then sneaks back into “things” when he’s not watching it, so he sounds a bit more like a kid with a hairbrush in the mirror than he probably intends. He also proudly shouts out his bodyguard Baka Not Nice, a man who faced human trafficking charges and was imprisoned on domestic assault charges (Drake boasts that Baka’s “quick to let a motherfuckin’ TEC slam”). It’s a reminder of his unsavory tendency to borrow street credibility from figures like Baka who have paid the price for it, the same impulse that had him pointing to a “prison visit” on his song “Two Birds, One Stone” as evidence that he wasn’t some “privileged kid.” Who stunts about visiting a prison?
As one of the first rap superstars forged entirely outside the crucible of the American drug war, Drake has always had a confused relationship to the “rules” of hip-hop. This makes his moments of flexing interesting if only for the friction they generate between the role he’s assuming and the figure he cuts. He opens More Life with “Free Smoke,” a hard-charging and take-no-prisoners track, the sort of moment on a rap album where you ruthlessly cut down challengers and re-establish your dominance. But he spends it remembering how he used to eat Applebee’s and Outback, or the time he drunk-texted J. Lo (“It was an old number so it bounced back”). He does address his disgraced foe Meek Mill, who fell on a sword trying to expose Drake as a fraud: "How you let the kid fighting ghostwriting rumors turn you to a ghost?” he taunts. This is a peculiarly self-skewering line of attack, a bit like punching yourself in the face before going for your opponent’s gut. It doesn’t exactly elicit the classic, crowd-of-bystanders “ooooh!” that direct shots are supposed to incite; more of a “uh...hmmm.”
This pluralistic and self-contradicting identity has always been part and parcel of Drake’s inheritance to hip-hop; it will be a large part of his legacy. Name a pop star who has ever had a clearer picture of their place in the culture, who senses exactly what they can get away with and what they can’t (other than Taylor Swift). He knows himself and his worth, at least as a market entity. “They don’t know they gotta be faster than me to get to me, no one’s done it successfully,” he boasts, truthfully, on “Do Not Disturb.” More than anything,* More Life* plays like a just-in-time course correction to the excesses of VIEWS, a remarkable feat of troubleshooting that assures that October’s Very Own—whose catalog passed 10 billion Spotify streams before this release—continues to own several Octobers henceforth.
More Life is long, for sure. It is, of course, designed to be long, to swallow up all of your streaming bandwidth. Twenty-two songs all but asks you forget other rappers and musicians exist for a while. This is the new power play in an age of digital infinitude. He doesn’t offer insight in return, really—eight years into examining the wages of his success, he’s still stumbling on thoughts like, “How you run out of gas on the road to riches?” and, “Winning is problematic” as if they are actual epiphanies. But he does offer immersion. When everything is just right—the mood, the lighting, the production, the melody—that immersion feels total, and it’s hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else. The gorgeous “Since Way Back” stretches the beat way out, the silences in between yawning wide open so you momentarily lose all sense of time and momentum. It stops the album dead in the best way possible. This is the Drake moment, when you exist inside the bubble of a single drunken thought, where all priorities bend like light through a water glass and you find yourself hanging on your phone, watching the twinkling ellipsis of a responding text message like it’s the answer to all of your prayers. | 2017-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cash Money / Young Money Entertainment | March 22, 2017 | 7.8 | 08644042-59eb-42e5-9120-a03ce8c347e9 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Subsets and Splits