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Chan Marshall's new album comes 17 years after her debut as Cat Power and six years after her most recent collection of original material. Sun, her first album to feature synthesizers, Auto-Tune, and Iggy Pop, exists completely and defiantly outside of any larger musical trends. | Chan Marshall's new album comes 17 years after her debut as Cat Power and six years after her most recent collection of original material. Sun, her first album to feature synthesizers, Auto-Tune, and Iggy Pop, exists completely and defiantly outside of any larger musical trends. | Cat Power: Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16984-sun/ | Sun | Seventeen years after Chan Marshall's debut as Cat Power and six years after her most recent album of original material, comes Sun, her ninth album. But let's drop the math right there. Because Sun is a record with its own peculiar temporal logic, one that's circular rather than linear. Take that picture on the cover, for example. It's Marshall 20 years ago, but toward the end of Sun's almost six-year gestation period, she chopped off her hair and looks, once again, like the image in the photo. At the risk of engaging in cheap analysis, this fact feels not entirely trivial. "When we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky," she sang on her enduringly haunting 1998 record Moon Pix, her voice warbling at that moment as if she were delivering an elegy, like it's a shame we all at some point give up on those lofty and poetically illogical dreams. But Sun is a testament to what happens when that sensibility and logic somehow survive a turbulent adulthood: This, these weather-beaten and irrepressibly hopeful songs all seem to say, is what it sounds like when you still want to be the sky at 40.
In just about every way, Sun is a declaration of independence. There are, of course, the biographical facts, the things the record's defiant tone feels like a direct break with-- stage fright, substance abuse, break-ups, creative demons (it's been reported that Marshall scrapped some early demos because a friend told her they sounded too much like her older stuff). It is also the first Cat Power record to feature prominent synthesizers and (occasionally) Auto-Tune, though that doesn't exactly mean it sounds like anything on the radio right now. But you'd get these ideas about autonomy and independence just from perusing the lyric sheet, too. "I want to live my way of living," she chants on the meditative "Always on My Own". The next song, "Real Life", is about the universality of grass-is-always-greener yearning ("I met a doctor/ He want to be a dancer/ I met a mother/ She want to be alone"). Spinning her years of tour-induced wanderlust into wisdom, Marshall offers them all some sage advice: "Sometimes you gotta do what you don't wanna do/ To get away with an unordinary life."
In the way it simultaneously embraces darkness and light and exists completely and defiantly outside of any larger musical trends (and clearly operates with no particular fear or hang-ups about kitsch-- check out that eagle sound effect on "Cherokee"), the closest thing to Sun we've heard this year is probably Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel. But whereas Apple focuses on the highly idiosyncratic clockwork of her own brain, Marshall is more interested in the ways in which she is, in some fundamental human way, no different from anybody else. In some cases, this means grappling with her own privileges ("Ruin"'s deceivingly upbeat chorus actually goes: "Bitchin'/ Complainin'/ When some people ain't got shit to eat"). And in others, it means those sorts of bald-faced cosmic statements about mortality that few other artists can pull off (see: a song called "Human Being" that goes, "You got a right to breathe/ You got a right/ You're a human being.") In her recent profile of Marshall, Amanda Petrusich linked Cat Power's songwriting philosophy back to an earlier time when ownership was a much looser concept and all songs were considered public domain. She sees people like this, too, including herself. So in the moments when Sun feels kitschy, it's because it's got a generousness of spirit that's fallen sharply out of fashion at some point, that something about our experience is public and shared, that we're all pretty alike just by virtue of being human.
Sun's middle stretch from "Always on My Own" to "Human Being" suffers from being a little muddy and unmelodic, but stick around for the finale. It starts with the late-night, long-walk-home soundtrack "Manhattan"-- gorgeous, hypnotic, and quietly, unsentimentally lonely ("All the friends we used to know ain't coming back"). And then there's Sun's late-sequenced, 11-minute centerpiece, "Nothin But Time". Which brings us back to that "public domain" idea: With its parade-float pace and self-consciously anthemic lyrics ("You got nothing but time/ And it ain't got nothing on you... It's up to you/ To be a superhero"), it is, yes, a clear homage to Bowie's "Heroes". But it's "Hey Jude", too: Marshall wrote it to cheer up her ex's teenage daughter, and the longer it goes on, the truer its optimistic truisms ring, the stronger the urge to holler them along with the rest of of voices ("You wanna live!"). It's an odd but fitting peak. By the sixth minute, when Iggy Pop's voice comes in god-sized and benevolent, it's like some sort of peyote daydream where one of the faces on Mount Rushmore stoops to talk to you and has only the kindest things to say.
Then again, maybe she's just talking to herself. "Time, nothing but time," was another lyric she sang on Moon Pix, except there she moaned it a little bit like it was a prison sentence. Here it's a mantra. Sun doesn't reach the heights (or more accurately, wallow in the depths) of Moon Pix, but more than anything else she's made, it feels like a companion piece to that record, a conversation with an older and wiser voice. But what she seems to have learned out there is that wisdom means knowing less than you once thought you did, whether that means embracing some new instruments even if you have no idea how they work, or seeing sense where others see paradox. Sun is a double-exposed photo. You know those afternoons when the sun's high but somehow the moon's just unexpectedly hanging out, too? That's the kind of sky Marshall got to be. | 2012-09-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 5, 2012 | 7.9 | 0868e163-a047-48c6-927d-1564211211ee | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Justice Tripp has a blast channeling the affirming and aggressive spirit of Southern California, even if it sounds a little stuck between stations. | Justice Tripp has a blast channeling the affirming and aggressive spirit of Southern California, even if it sounds a little stuck between stations. | Angel Du$t: Brand New Soul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-dust-brand-new-soul/ | Brand New Soul | Justice Tripp probably gets a good laugh whenever he’s included in the “next Turnstile?” dialogue—in a lot of ways, Angel Du$t was supposed to be the first one. When Turnstile’s 2015 album Nonstop Feeling was still a twinkle in the eye of Baltimore hardcore, the Trapped Under Ice frontman was already imagining a future where the Lemonheads and acoustic guitars were every bit as welcome as Bad Brains and blast beats. But while Tripp has shared band members and bills with Turnstile, Angel Du$t albums lack their brethren’s ambitions to define hardcore’s worldwide agenda, preferring to remain a loose collective that can pop in and out at will to contribute to the conversation. And in their latest incarnation, Angel Du$t convince their friends from Toledo, New York and Seattle that their Brand New Soul lies in sunny Southern California.
Encompassing Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego in equal measure, Brand New Soul is every bit as SoCal in sound as it is in spirit; “Love Slam” is the title of one song, but it’s really the M.O. for the entire album collectively. Or really, just about everything Angel Du$t has done up to this point, including the similarly self-explanatory Rock the Fuck on Forever, Pretty Buff and YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs, that all expressions of camaraderie for one’s fellow man should be as affirming as they are aggressive.
Does Tripp truly believe that “ain’t no flame burn like my fiyah?” Or is writing a fake Chili Peppers rap-rock hook even more fun to do in the studio than it is on Twitter? Challenging hardcore audiences to circle pit to an acoustic guitar? Also a blast. Mocking naysayers with doo-wop basso vocals? Hell yeah. Retconning Wavves’ King of the Beach as a progressive punk classic? That was basically the template for an Angel Du$t/Panda Bear collab and “I’m Not Ready” cuts out the middleman this time around. Whether or not Rob Schnapf had a tangible impact in the mixing process is immaterial; his mere presence places Brand New Soul in a proud lineage of punk bands who decamped to Sunset Sounds because they had a chance to work with the guy who wrangled all of those harpsichords and horns on Elliott Smith’s XO.
Yet, the uplift mofo party plan of Brand New Soul is occasionally at odds with Tripp’s bluster, at least on the title track and “Racecar,” when it sounds like he’s still addressing the scene puritans who shunned Angel Du$t a decade ago. You can take him at his word when he says that Angel Du$t was even more divisive than the Trapped Under Ice album produced by a guy from New Found Glory. But for a band that touts its progressive approach to hardcore as a primary draw (and, often, subject matter), Angel Du$t seem hemmed in at this point—not as distinct as the bands who’ve honed in on a singular sound, more conventional than the ones who’ve ventured far beyond the requisite Weezer and power-pop influences. “Born 2 Run” is an impressive accomplishment in its own right, making fine use of Mary Jane Dunphe’s harmonies, squiggly Captured Tracks guitars, and Tripp’s most impassioned lyrics. It would be inconceivable in Baltimore even five years ago. In 2023, it might trick a new listener into thinking that Angel Du$t formed immediately after hearing Turnstile’s Glow On. Such is the mixed blessing of Brand New Soul as Angel Du$t’s culminating achievement—a record that only sounds conventional due to their own massive influence. | 2023-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pop Wig | September 12, 2023 | 6.9 | 086b9363-bc03-4c5d-8357-7e47c6cd62a1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Sidewoman to the stars (well, Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree, at least) Annie Clark steps into the spotlight for her St. Vincent debut, with results so inventive and impressive you wonder what took her so long. | Sidewoman to the stars (well, Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree, at least) Annie Clark steps into the spotlight for her St. Vincent debut, with results so inventive and impressive you wonder what took her so long. | St. Vincent: Marry Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10457-marry-me/ | Marry Me | "The most powerful weapon to conquer the devil is humility. For, as he does not know at all how to employ it, neither does he know how to defend himself from it."
-Saint Vincent de Paul (b. 1581 - d. 1660)
Maybe that explains it. Maybe that quote from the real Saint Vincent, namesake of multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark's nom du rock, explains why, rather than step right into the spotlight, Clark instead chose to spend so much of her time as an oft-befrocked member of both Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree's flock.
One might have assumed that, hey, maybe she was just more comfortable as a group utility player, but like most assumptions it's simply not borne out by the imposing reality of her various talents. As her St. Vincent debut immediately asserts, Clark's more than ready to be out front. In fact, it's amazing she didn't step into the spotlight sooner, considering the countless ideas swirling about Marry Me, an art-rock album at times redolent of prime Kate Bush and Lodger-era David Bowie.
Maybe "humility" isn't the first word that springs to mind when you read the liners crediting Clark with "voices, guitars, bass, piano, organ, Moog, synthesizers, clavieta, xylophone, vibraphone, dulcimer, drum programming, triangle, percussion." Triangle? Is that really something to boast about? Then again, with its brilliant production flourishes and impeccably left-field arrangements, false modesty does not behoove the disc.
In the case of music like this, the devil to conquer is preciousness and indulgence. No doubt, in lesser hands Clark's quirks and eccentricities would mark the St. Vincent project a no-go from the start. But at every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life.
Clark's hardly alone in the endeavor. Not to be out-Spreed, Marry Me features, among other helpers, a chorus (used mostly as melodic and rhythmic counterpoint), Bowie pianist Mike Garson, and Polyphonic Spree/Man Or Astro-Man? drummer Brian Teasley, a wiz at picking the right beats for all the perfectly wrong places. But from the frenetic first half of the disc, where the ideas are coming fast and furious and Clark lets her inner prog run wild, to the mellow second, Marry Me is clearly the product of one person's fertile-- and clearly very well organized-- subconscious.
"Now, Now" dances around a tricky little guitar pattern and Clark's sweet vocal melodies-- her big-girl voice a welcome respite from indie rock's lame habit of faux naivety-- as bass and drums push and pull the song taut then loose again. The grace of the track suddenly gives way to explosive guitar, the previous precision dissolved into distorted passion. "Jesus Saves, I Spend" bounds along in 6/8, with the chorus and sped-up vocals countering Clark's own coo. "Your Lips Are Red" mutates from throb to tribal freakout, a croaking, scraping guitar and sinewy lead hinting at the chaos that never quite comes. "Apocalypse Song" features a polyrhythmic voice, drum and handclap breakdown that vies with strings and more skronking noise.
The war-is-not-over "Paris is Burning" is a woozy Weimar-esque waltz filled out by phased effects, a martial groove and sneaking, cynical lines like the Shakespeare allusion "Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear." Elsewhere Clark slips in a few other memorable lyrics as well. In "Your Lips Are Red" she complains, "Your skin so fair it's not fair." In the title track, Clark gets off the lasciviously blasphemous come-on "we'll do what Mary and Joseph did...without the kid."
The slower vibe of the last few tracks isn't as immediate as what came before it, but that doesn't make it any less impressive. "Landmines" is like "Subterranean Homesick Alien" redone as a torch song. "All the Stars Aligned" plods along like a pleasant Beatles outtake, at least until Clark's mini-orchestra briefly (and curiously) quotes John Barry's "James Bond Theme". "Human Racing" begins as a gentle bossa nova before blossoming into a hypnotic pulse for its fade-out. The jazzy final song, "What Me Worry?" is as traditional as the disc gets, except for the fact that Clark picked it to end an album that spends most of its previous minutes exploring the unconventional.
"Love is just a bloodmatch to see who endures lash after lash with panache," Clark sings, without coming across nearly as precociously as she could have. "Have I fooled you, dear? The time is coming near when I'll give you my hand and I'll say, 'It's been grand, but...I'm out of here.'" And then she's gone.
Oh, and the final sound you hear before you inevitably press play and listen to the whole beguiling thing again? A triangle. Guess those lessons paid off after all. | 2007-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | July 27, 2007 | 8 | 086e0596-067f-4953-874a-2d71503a185f | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The back-to-basics album Wasting Light reunites Dave Grohl with producer Butch Vig and former Nirvana mates Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear. | The back-to-basics album Wasting Light reunites Dave Grohl with producer Butch Vig and former Nirvana mates Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear. | Foo Fighters: Wasting Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15328-wasting-light/ | Wasting Light | Dave Grohl didn't make it easy for himself. Not long after Nirvana dissolved in April 1994, following Kurt Cobain's suicide, Grohl was offered the opportunity to back Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. For him, a Petty fan, that was a dream job. Though he would drum with them during a "Saturday Night Live" performance later that year, Grohl ultimately declined, to start over from scratch and do what he's still doing today: front a band.
At the time, that decision was probably daunting. Grohl had already spent some time in a Seattle studio recording a humble demo tape that would become Foo Fighters' debut, one for whose release rights major labels were already grappling. But the sizable shadow cast by Cobain and the weight of his legacy and death was immense. This week, coupled with Wasting Light, their seventh full-length, Foo Fighters have been screening their new, somewhat revisionist, sometimes 3-D retrospective documentary, Back and Forth. There's some great footage early on during what was Grohl's very first tour (opening for Mike Watt) with his brand new band. There, despite having never heard any of the yet-to-be-released Foo Fighters songs, young Nirvana fans were showing up early and in numbers. "Marigold!" they'd scream out between songs, in hopes of hearing the one Grohl-penned Nirvana tune there was. He never played it.
The idea of Grohl opening for anyone now seems just as ridiculous as him having to field requests for anything but one of the two dozen modern rock hits he's released since. But in Wasting Light, Grohl is attempting to come full circle. The plan was to go back to basics, in a few ways: 1) record the album to tape in Grohl's San Fernando Valley garage, 2) hire famed Nevermind producer Butch Vig to man the boards, 3) bring former Germs, Nirvana, and Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear back into the mix, 4) have founding Nirvana member and bassist Krist Novoselic down from Seattle to guest on some of the recordings. As Grohl says during Back and Forth, before recording began in earnest, "I love that we're going to make an album at home. It's going to sound like it was recorded in a house. I know it will."
It doesn't. In fact, said garage was built with the arena in mind, and as a result Wasting Light sounds just as mammoth and capable of knocking out teeth as anything Foo Fighters have recorded since the late 90s. That's more a product of force than hooks. As evidenced by the opening roar of "Bridge Burning" and "Rope" or metallic uppercuts of "White Limo", the new, three-guitar attack in place provides a wallop that wasn't there before. Vig is renowned for sugaring up recordings, but here, the aim seems solely about knocking down walls. Front to back, Wasting Light meets that cause with lean, workmanlike aplomb. Grohl's screams haven't registered this dangerously, gleefully shredded in years-- if he was hoping to exorcise some demons, it sounds as though he made that happen.
But Foo Fighters' long-standing foundation has been built on fist-pumpers. While Wasting Light features a host of worthy set-openers, few prove to be as sticky or memorable as any number of their previous singles. There just isn't a melody or hook to really amplify. Those songs here that hold tightly to Grohl's long perfected, quiet-LOUD formula and crescendos-- see: alt-rock lullabies "Arlandria" and "These Days", or the pop-punk door-to-ass closer "Walk"-- come closest to matching the energy of his best work. In theory, as a form of therapy, it still works. Former Hüsker Dü frontman and fellow 80s punker Bob Mould guests semi-audibly on the Zeppelin-like crunch of "Dear Rosemary" and then of course, there's Novoselic's turn on "I Should Have Known", where the latter's bass sounds as round and bowling ball-heavy as it did on Nirvana's "Sliver".
There's a scene not long into Back and Forth, when Grohl remembers, "People really resented me for starting this band, for making music they thought 'sounded just like Nirvana.' What? You mean loud rock guitars? Melodies? Cymbals crashing? Big-ass drums? Well, that's what I do." It's true. He always did. It's just that, this time out, it's his melodies that are missed most. | 2011-04-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Roswell | April 15, 2011 | 6.4 | 08725264-f2b7-4e56-92a8-4f65d918724d | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
A peerless storyteller gazes deep into domestic life and offers a long, sun-warmed double album that is a highlight of his career. | A peerless storyteller gazes deep into domestic life and offers a long, sun-warmed double album that is a highlight of his career. | Bill Callahan: Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-callahan-shepherd-in-a-sheepskin-vest/ | Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest | Listening to a Bill Callahan album used to mean contemplating solitude. His music wasn’t about aloneness, but the man making it sounded supremely alone. His baritone voice rumbled near the bottom of his arrangements, and it sounded so serious, so grave: If you weren’t paying attention to what he was saying, you might have conscripted his music into all sorts of cliched lone-wolf expeditions: staring at mountains, nighttime highway drives, reading Hemingway on a fishing trip.
On his long, sun-warmed new album, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, Callahan doesn’t sound alone. He sounds surrounded. For one thing, the woman he loves isn’t an absence haunting his nightmares, as she was on 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle; she’s in his house. His son, their son, is in the next room. The sights, sounds, smells, and textures of domesticity are everywhere: “Sesame Street” is on the television in his living room, and in the bedroom, his wife is laying out a towel on the bed so that they can start “making love.” Does Callahan underline exactly what he means by this scenario? He does: “It’s late,” his wife tells him. “I’m bleeding.” There you have it: The first Bill Callahan album ever to mention period sex.
All of this might sound disarming or odd, but what is tremendously rewarding about Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is how thoughtfully Callahan writes about his happiness, and how much his happiness proves to be enlightening for us. Happiness is a difficult emotion to plumb for wisdom, after all—we tend to reserve intensity of observation for the feelings we are trying desperately get rid of, hoping that if we study them hard enough we might never have them again. Happiness? Well, happiness we just try to enjoy, praying we don’t fuck it up.
And yet Callahan seems unafraid of fucking up his contentment by thinking too hard about it. Somehow, Callahan with a mile-wide grin on his face has as much to say about the universe as the grave, stoic guy he used to be. His career—from his early lo-fi instrumental experiments as Smog, to his slow evolution into the singer-songwriter he is today— is too rich and storied for easy superlatives, but Shepherd feels like his most something album ever—his warmest, his most generous, possibly his most profound. It is his longest, for sure, lounging comfortably across four sides of vinyl, none of it wasted. It is a high note, fond and deep and sustained.
The sound is looser than is typical on Bill Callahan records. The arrangements are full of sensual touches, like the upright bass that wriggles with pleasure in response to Callahan’s announcement, “You can call me anything just as long as I can sing” on "Call Me Anything.” There is a beery honky-tonk lilt to “Black Dog on the Beach,” a single muted pedal steel guitar crying in the background. On “Confederate Jasmine,” he compares the scent of the flowers to “a soft note from a dented horn”—a precise and lovely image, and also a perfect evocation of the album’s sound and feel.
It is a livelier record than his last two, full of quiet noodling in the edges. “What Comes After Certainty” foregrounds two acoustic guitars, one fingerpicking and the other doubling up an octave higher, traveling up the neck to find little improvised-sounding turnarounds. The two guitars are not tightly in sync, and some of those little solos sound messy, like the player chimed before they figured out what to play, but the smudged notes add a texture of rumpled joy to the songs. His records tend to sound monastic and spare, but this is a living-room record, made in and around a roomful of clutter.
Every note, no matter how spontaneous-sounding responds lightly and immediately to Callahan’s voice, which remains the central character. “I never thought I’d make it this far/Little old house, recent-model car/And I’ve got the woman of my dreams,” he sings on “Certainty,” and as if shuddering a little at the unlikeliness of all this, the song dropping briefly into two minor chords at the words “dreams.” Contentment, after all, can feel terrifyingly fragile, particularly when you are in the full flush of it. “True love is not magic, it is certainty/And what comes after certainty?” he wonders. He does not answer.
Callahan writes about his contentment in the same vivid, tender, and elegiac way that Leonard Cohen did. Any sunburned grinning idiot in a hammock could admonish you to “live in the present”—irritating, if technically good advice. But Callahan examines that same wisdom more closely and retrieves this: “Well, the past has always lied to me/The past has never given me anything but the blues,” he sings on “Young Icarus.”
Writing classes call this work “defamiliarization” but it’s not really a technique to teach as much as a habit of mind, a peculiar way of seeing the world: “We are flies on a mule, and we’re good at what we do,” he concludes on “747.” The song is one of a handful of masterpieces on Shepherd. On it, Callahan is on a plane, writing about the thoughts that slide into and out of his head as the plane ascends to 30,000 feet. Mark Kozelek, another would-be poet of the mundane, might stare into his vacuum-sealed airplane dinner and wonder about the last time he was served pasta primavera, and which pro wrestler had just died; Callahan wonders about the border between birth and death, about the clouds he’s flying through and the light seen by the born and the dying: “I woke up on a 747 flying through some stock footage of heaven,” he begins, before giving us this: “There was blood when you were born and the blood was wiped from your eyes/This must be the light you saw that just left you screaming/And this must be the light you saw before our eyes could disguise true meaning/And this must be the light you saw just as you were leaving.”
Callahan isn’t the first writer to identify, in the deep and elemental stillness of the soul that comes with true contentment, a note of death. On the album’s fourth and final side, death looms over everything, without darkening the landscape: “Death is beautiful,” Callahan tells us. “We say goodbye to many friends who have no equal.” One of the last songs is a cover of the Carter Family’s “Lonesome Valley,” a song essentially about facing the terror of your ending alone. But Callahan tweaks the words so that the verses are about all his loved ones—not only does he have to “walk the lonesome valley” by himself, but so do his mother and his father. We all share this passage, he realizes. A cognitive dissonance, maybe, more than a paradox, a thought to be savored more than a puzzle to be solved. As Callahan adds new verses, killing new family members each time—“My sister’s got to walk that lonesome valley”—the song swells behind him. Women’s voices appear behind his, as does a piano and a few different guitars, all of them wandering into what feels like a curtain-call. Perhaps in this moment, he suggests, we won’t be nearly as alone as we imagine. | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | June 13, 2019 | 8.5 | 0874dd28-cfa3-4761-ba60-e2b72b7e2950 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Focusing on new material, this live 2xCD collection from Swans' first tour in more than a decade finds the loud, mean, and complicated Michael Gira-led sextet beating past successes with the purpose of the present. | Focusing on new material, this live 2xCD collection from Swans' first tour in more than a decade finds the loud, mean, and complicated Michael Gira-led sextet beating past successes with the purpose of the present. | Swans: We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16588-we-rose-from-your-bed-with-the-sun-in-our-head/ | We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head | The voice of Swans frontman and founder Michael Gira is one of stentorian command. Even during the lightest moments of his three-decade career, Gira's bellow has been deep, dark, and direct, both an apt vehicle for his raw lines about spiritual tumult and human filth and a compelling accompaniment to Swans' stylized roil. But at least on We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head, the new live double-disc set from his rebuilt old band, Gira sounds exhausted. That Pentecostal bark has weathered into a battered bleat. At the start of "Eden Prison", for instance, Gira's voice shakes and breaks, barely shaping the syllables into their proper forms. "Within the walls of Eden Prison," he opens, struggling to climb over the relative quiet of drifting guitar and a twinkling vibraphone, "there is a mark upon our stone." We Rose comes culled from Swans' first tour in more than a decade, an intercalary period in which Gira introduced the world to Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family, played solo acoustic shows, and led the comparatively mild-mannered Angels of Light. Pushing 60, maybe he just doesn't have the requisite stamina to lead Swans, a band once so loud and dangerous they made fans vomit.
But sit tight. The 100 minutes of music that precede "Eden Prison" on We Rose make for an exhaustive listen, with 15-minute sprawls of suffocating noise, drums that suggest a fleet of fists to the face and loads of shouts about praising God, committing infanticide, and welcoming slavery. It's the kind of hyper-brutal album that requires an intermission or, at the very least, a long hard look at a plain white wall when its two hours have ended. Though We Rose pulls from gigs in Melbourne, Berlin, and New York City, this collection offers a mostly accurate recapitulation of the 102 sets that this iteration of Swans played since the 2010 release of My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the band's first album in 13 years. Loud, mean, and complicated, this six-piece is an articulate goliath, capable of drowning out Gira in waves before disappearing into pools of silence without warning. Each piece of this unit deserves mention: The finesse of Norman Westberg's guitar playing offers the perfect foil for Gira's general force. Christopher Pravdica's bass snaps as much as it throbs, while Christoph Hahn uses his double-lap steel guitar not as a country-music accent mark but as an origin of general abrasion. Drummer Phil Puleo and multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris often double the rhythm, giving that old Swans stomp bigger feet. This band is at once visceral and subtle, reverent with the source but relentless with the sound. During "Sex, God, Sex", Swans suggest the sound of a thousand whips lashing at once; during "The Seer", they shape feedback into geometric patterns that Sonic Youth and Sunn O))) alike might admire.
So back to Gira's apparent feebleness: Both times I saw Swans on this tour, they pounded harder than I could have remembered or imagined; Gira lead them through these live shows for two years, so of course he was tired. For one gapless, 30-minute expanse, Swans segue a new sheet-of-noise instrumental, "The Seer", into the barking-and-marching classic "I Crawled". Gira spends the last quarter of the track moaning, sighing, and doing whatever else he can to sound completely mad. The band lashes together one more time, more malevolent and urgent than before, Gira hollering like he's finally lost. When it's over, he verifies the drain: "If I had a fucking knife, I'd cut my head off right now." Somehow, Swans then manage to play a 12-minute version of "Eden Prison" that starts and finishes like a whisper but, at its middle, reaches an apogee of high-volume repetition and reward. It's a marvelous payoff of perseverance, a promise that, no, this band or its leader isn't done.
In January of 2010, when Gira announced that he was reforming Swans, he wrote a predictably didactic open letter that made his purpose with the band clear: "After five Angels of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that... THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It's not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past." Some will see this 10-song tracklist and bemoan the absence of old material; four of the tracks come from 2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, while two supposedly come from The Seer, the new Swans album that the first, very-limited edition of this package helped fund in a sort of de facto Kickstarter campaign. ("I decided to start touring Swans, and it's like mainlining heroin," Gira told me just before the tour started, prophesying the apparent addiction.) But there are plenty of other Swans live albums if you need to hear that old stuff, and Gira has long clung close to what's most recent, trying new sounds and new members and new modes with admittedly variable results. We Rose is a perfect void of nostalgia that comes at a moment when similar indie rock heroes have reunited to defile the corpses of early works for lump sums of cash. For the last two years, one of the world's most bellicose bands has paid respect to its legacy largely by leaving it alone and tried to expand it by testing its old limits. Here, they do just that, beating past successes with the purpose of the present and showing that-- reunion or no, 58-year-old frontman or no-- this is exactly the kind of forward-pointing roadmark Swans deserve. | 2012-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Young God | May 8, 2012 | 8 | 0879734e-1635-484e-b62d-1c4f586c8dca | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Drive-By Trucker's second solo album features many songs written years ago, but the whole still hangs together and comes across as cohesive and sharp. | Drive-By Trucker's second solo album features many songs written years ago, but the whole still hangs together and comes across as cohesive and sharp. | Patterson Hood: Murdering Oscar (and Other Love Songs) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13106-murdering-oscar-and-other-love-songs/ | Murdering Oscar (and Other Love Songs) | Patterson Hood's a prolific songwriter, cranking out tunes at a relatively rapid clip, premiering them at solo shows, and posting them to his site. But team player that he is, there's only so much space for Hood's material on each Drive-By Truckers disc, making room for partner in crime Mike Cooley and now contributions from bassist Shonna Tucker as well. It's a balance that pays off, too: last year's Brighter Than Creation's Dark was sprawling and diverse-- and possibly the group's best record.
Still, there's the matter of that backlog of songs, and churning out solo albums doesn't seem to be Hood's M.O. But even if it were, saying you're going to get it done apparently doesn't make doing it any easier. Hood's ostensible solo debut, 2004's Killers and Stars, was made three years before its belated release, as a form of what Hood branded "therapy." Yet that's nothing compared to the set of songs that comprise Murdering Oscar (and Other Love Songs), Hood's second album, whose origins stretch back even further than his previous solo disc. One case in point: "Heavy and Hanging", which was written in response to Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide.
That year also marked Hood's relocation to Athens, Georgia, from his home in Alabama, setting in motion the events that would lead to the Drive-By Truckers. Plenty of things have happened to Hood since then, including a new marriage, fatherhood, and the gradual success of the DBTs, and all these things inform Murdering Oscar to some degree. Even the musicians backing Hood offer a sort of career overview, from fellow Truckers Brad Morgan, Cooley, and Tucker and longtime associate John Neff to producer and Athens staple David Barbe to frequent tourmates Will Johnson and Scott Danbom of Centro-matic, and finally to dad David Hood, legendary Muscle Shoals session bassist. Even the name of Hood's new label, Ruth St., refers to the address of the apartment he and a friend shared when he first moved to Georgia and began work on this record some 15 years ago.
That said, this is hardly the stuff of either nostalgia or what one imagines a Truckers disc full of Hood-only songs would sound like. To his credit Hood has collected 13 tracks that, for whatever reason, hang together well. If anything, the title track (inspired by Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors) and "Heavy and Hanging" (which is paired with the Crazy Horse-y "Walking Around Sense", which may be taking aim at Courtney Love's parenting skills) are among the album's darker moments. The rest largely feature Hood sometimes mirthful, sometimes rueful, but always surprisingly sanguine, even mature, in the way he addresses life's ups and downs.
"Pollyanna", for example, the oldest song on the album, was written as Hood realized his marriage and band Adam's House Cat (which he formed with Cooley before the two reconnected in the Truckers) were both falling apart, but the song's a genial classic rock nugget, while "Foolish Young Bastard", a put-down aimed at an old manager, comes off oddly forgiving and c'est la vie optimistic rather than mean-spirited. "Screwtopia" was written as a sardonic portrait of suburban domestic tranquility, and seems almost wistful (at least until Hood suggests his hypothetical wife take a few more pills to ease her worries, and gives his son a loaded gun to play with).
On the domestic front, Hood's life has turned out better than he predicted all those years ago, at least if his post-marriage and fatherhood tracks are any indication. The moving "Pride of the Yankees" is Hood throwing his protective arms around his newborn child in a post-9/11 world, while "Grandaddy" finds him fast forwarding several more years to a time when he can spoil his future descendants with candy hidden around the house. The poppy "I Understand Now" is Hood happy and content, "She's a Little Randy" is Hood in a silly (and, um, sexy) mood, and "Back of a Bible" is a love song to his wife the singer literally scribbled in the final blank pages of a motel's good book while out on tour.
Nothing here totally upends what we already know of Hood's talents via the Truckers, but it does serve as a supplementary capsule capturing how he ticks, right down to his cover of the Runt-era Todd Rundgren proto alt-country gem "The Range War", a response to anyone that, in Hood's words, thinks all he does is "sit around and listen to Molly Hatchet." What it and the originals on Murdering Oscar do is emphasize Hood's respect for and attraction to lyrical and emotional honestly above all else, the universals that have linked a lot of good music from the past to present. With every note, with every song, Hood sounds like he increasingly, if modestly, recognizes he's part of that great songwriting continuum, working hard to live up to his end of the obligation, as long as it takes. | 2009-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Ruth St. | June 22, 2009 | 7.6 | 087eb538-d4b0-4e72-ae18-7962e1bd8a72 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper’s new project stumbles around in search of a hit and comes very close to finding one. | The Atlanta rapper’s new project stumbles around in search of a hit and comes very close to finding one. | Lil Gotit: Crazy But It’s True | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-gotit-crazy-but-its-true/ | Crazy But It’s True | In Atlanta, they don’t pledge allegiance to the flag, they pledge allegiance to a burned copy of Young Thug’s Slime Season 2. There’s a never-ending flow of artists springing from Thug’s garden—the most prominent being the drip-enamored pair of Lil Baby and Gunna. Last year, Lil Gotit, alongside his older brother Lil Keed, joined the ranks of rappers inspired by Thug’s quirky delivery. Lil Keed made his stamp instantly, dropping in a guest verse on Thug’s Slime Language, followed by his breakout song, “Nameless.” Unlike Keed, Gotit wasn’t off to such a fast start, as the 19-year-old’s instinct for melody wasn’t nearly as developed. But, in a matter of months, Lil Gotit’s verses have become more lively, his delivery more animated, and his songs often feel like a fantasy set in Atlanta’s Lenox Mall. His latest project, Crazy But It’s True, has one purpose: to capitalize on this improvement by finding Lil Gotit a hit song, so he can officially be knighted as one of Atlanta’s next stars.
For Lil Gotit, the concept of an album is meaningless. Crazy But It’s True isn’t meant to be a cohesive body of work or made to be consumed in one sitting, it’s 18 darts thrown at the board and hopefully one hits the bullseye. Lil Gotit’s dire search for a hit first began when he dropped a few unenthused Triller videos on Instagram that seemed like an Alamo Records executive was behind the camera holding a match to his contract if he didn’t. Then, he tried to create a viral dance challenge, which of course didn’t work because the dance was overly complex.
The gimmicks were unnecessary Crazy But It’s True has more than enough potential to end Gotit’s tireless search for a hit, especially with “Da Real Hoodbabies.” Gotit’s music sounds best when his only cares in the world are letting us know about his love of Percocets and ignoring morals and fashion brands getting canceled to drape himself in a designer that most can’t afford: “Gucci ain’t racist, I still rock their clothes.”
Gotit isn’t as much of a crooner as Thug or Lil Keed, his voice is harsher. “Now” is Gotit at his most belligerent, taking a break from the fanciful flexing for lyrics that warn others not to test him in the streets of Atlanta: “I can get the Glock and squeeze it like a lemon, oh/I take his top and twist it red just like its Trippie, huh.” But similar to Lil Baby and Gunna, Gotit’s search for a hit song may end with pairing up with Lil Keed. Next to Keed’s high-pitched delivery, Gotit sounds menacing. And together they are able to successfully replicate the “Drip Too Hard” acoustic guitar formula on their second collaboration on the project, “Drop The Top.”
Though a handful of the album’s tracks are duds, it’s to be expected when the project bets on them all becoming breakouts. There’s the generic collaboration with Hoodrich Pablo Juan called “Off White”—we get it, Virgil sends you free clothes—that could be mistaken for any Atlanta-based leak that’s surfaced on Spinrilla in the last year. Then there are songs that are bogged down with features like “We Da Gang” and “OverT” that take away from Lil Gotit’s moment.
For some rappers, albums are nothing more than a vehicle to push singles and videos premiered on WorldStarHipHop. Lil Gotit doesn’t care if a portion of his album winds up unessential filler, as long as fans gravitate to a chosen few—songs like “Da Real Hoodbabies” and “Now” are good enough to do that. Crazy But It’s True is Lil Gotit not waiting for fate to take its course, he wants to see if the Atlanta crown fits comfortably on his dome. | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | March 20, 2019 | 6.5 | 087efc30-7c2b-45c4-8ae8-ab0867198864 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Brooklyn-based funk singer’s latest project strikes a balance between sweet and larger than life, aided by Chromeo’s sleek production. | The Brooklyn-based funk singer’s latest project strikes a balance between sweet and larger than life, aided by Chromeo’s sleek production. | Ian Isiah: AUNTIE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-isiah-auntie/ | AUNTIE | In Black culture, the title of “auntie” holds specific, almost folkloric meaning. So much more than an aunt (merely the sister of a parent), aunties may or may not be blood relatives but always serve as a vector for an extravagant, all-encompassing feminine force, not as nurturing and direct as motherhood but still having a hand in shaping a young child’s perceptions. They are the women whose Sunday outfits are the most glamorous, whose nails are always freshly done, whose presence is the most anticipated at Thanksgiving like a midpoint between Anita Baker and Mary Poppins.
The fact that Ian Isiah, the multi-faceted, unapologetically freaky singer-songwriter, has named his new project Auntie isn’t a coincidence, and it’s not just a nod to his Black lineage. To anyone in the know, it positions him as the benevolent diva, the fun-loving, streetwise pastor preaching to the neighborhood kids. It says that his ever-changing hairstyles, his half-shaved eyebrows, and his bejeweled grill are not “alternative” by Black standards, but rather firmly anchored in his heritage.
This is abundantly clear as soon as Auntie takes off, with “N.U.T.S” (which, amazingly, stands for “Nigga U the Shit”), a velvety mid-tempo funk number built around plaintive saxophones, a slack and supple bassline, and twinkling electric keys. However, a dark current runs through the groove—the opening and closing sample of the track is a woman screaming homophobic slurs in the middle of a busy street (“He’s a man, he’s a woman? That’s a disgrace! An abomination!”). It’s ugly and unsettling, but Isiah’s lush falsetto completely embraces you by the time the chorus kicks in: “You gotta make some room for the people that wanna love ya.” You can hear the carefree smile in his voice, and like that, the tone of Auntie is set—one of self-love, self-acceptance, and self-assurance.
On his two previous mixtapes (2013’s The Love Champion and 2018’s Shugga Sextape Vol. 1) , Isiah explored a more contemporary side of neo-R&B, melding hip-hop, electro, experimental, and trap into his funk and gospel background. Auntie, however, is produced as a collaborative project with Canadian duo Chromeo, who have spent nearly two decades perfecting their own retro-’80s signature. The marriage of these two sounds—Isiah’s futurism and Chromeo’s nostalgia—sets a mood that’s less envelope-pushing than what we’re used to hearing from Isiah, but still marks a definite evolution in music and vision. This is far from a bad thing. Sleek, hi-fi production choices make Auntie’s message of exuberance all the more explicit.
Isiah, raised Pentecostal, is blessed with the kind of voice that only an upbringing in the church can produce—deeply soulful, grippingly melodic, downright heavenly. While a dancefloor-ready track like “Lady Bug” sees Isiah delivering sexed-up vocal runs to rival Rick James at his slinkiest, it’s on “Loose Truth,” the project’s tender closer, that he truly soars. “This is my truth,” he repeats, elevating the lyric to a mantra, his voice taking on a different flavor at every turn: soul, gospel, funk, R&B. The harmonies are impeccable, like a choir beamed directly into your skull. He’s harking back to summer block parties where open fire hydrants sprayed the street with rainbows, where a Holy Trinity of Patti LaBelle, Luther Vandross, and Chaka Khan blasted from cars parked on the corner. On a record so sure of itself, “Loose Truth” stands out for its vulnerability, embodying Isiah’s own experiences and sense of community. Like its namesakes, Auntie revels in being larger than life while retaining a sweetness that only amplifies its sass.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Juliet | October 14, 2020 | 7.6 | 087effa8-a121-4362-a336-b498c2361a39 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
Kehlani has been compared to Tinashe and other alt-R&B singers, but a closer comparison is Frank Ocean. Kehlani, along with right-hand-man producer Jahaan Sweet, shares Ocean’s auteuristic vision and plainspoken eloquence. You Should Be Here’s dynamism and generosity is something to be amazed by, especially considering Kehlani is all of 19 years old. | Kehlani has been compared to Tinashe and other alt-R&B singers, but a closer comparison is Frank Ocean. Kehlani, along with right-hand-man producer Jahaan Sweet, shares Ocean’s auteuristic vision and plainspoken eloquence. You Should Be Here’s dynamism and generosity is something to be amazed by, especially considering Kehlani is all of 19 years old. | Kehlani: You Should Be Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20543-you-should-be-here/ | You Should Be Here | As red herrings go, first single "The Way" off Kehlani’s first official album, You Should Be Here, is a doozy. The song is a sensual shuffle that channels SZA, Jhené Aiko, and Kelela, from spacey, hesitant vocals, to a slowed-and-pitched-down rap (from the typically nimble Chance the Rapper), to the lyrics—it’s a straightforward ode to lust, all about desire and longing and waiting for the moment where wanting and having your partner collide. It’s a fascinating song, and only in the most superficial ways does it suggest anything about You Should Be Here’s loftier goals.
The song’s lyrics might be the biggest red herring of all. Kehlani spends most of You Should Be Here switching between telling various dudes to get their shit together and the rest on a mission to inspire humanity. Kehlani has little in common with other former-child-stars-turned-singers Zendaya or Tinashe (Kehlani and her band made it to the finals on "America’s Got Talent"), and she has little in common with the music of cool, casually misogynistic R&B bros, and in spite of a connection to PARTYNEXTDOOR and hailing from Oakland, neither of those facts figure much into her music, at least on an obvious level. If there’s a contemporary comparison to be made, it’s Frank Ocean. Kehlani, along with right-hand-man producer Jahaan Sweet, shares Ocean’s auteuristic vision and plainspoken eloquence. And, much like Ocean, when Kehlani veers toward the maudlin, somehow the sincerity of it all redeems itself.
The beating heart at the center of You Should Be Here forgives some of these dips into mawkishness. You Should Be Here’s dynamism and generosity is something to be amazed by, especially considering Kehlani is all of 19 years old. On the stunning "Wanted", she sings, "As a woman/ When you are broken/ You make a choice to stay down or go in," but the chorus, one of resounding triumph, begins with the declaration, "He makes me feel wanted/ Like no one has before." Kehlani weaves an emotional, stirring thread through her songs that mostly feels joyful, even when she’s lurking on Instagram ("Jealous") or being vexed by a new flame ("Yet").
When some of these songs soar in their choruses, like on "Wanted", the title track, and the synthy, bubble-gummy kiss-off "How That Taste", Kehlani’s full-throated vocals and live-band sound recall '90s R&B groups like Total. But the album also strays to lots of other places: into jazzy, new jack swing-influenced R&B, straight-ahead devotion hymns (penultimate stomper "Bright"), capital-P pop ballads (closer "Alive", which would not sound out of place in a current adult-contemporary rotation). It’s this unabashed ambition that makes You Should Be Here resonate long after one has internalized its motivational urges ("Can't nobody love somebody that do not love themselves") and tender observations on the mechanics of relationships (see the wistful "Unconditional"). That Kehlani manages to breathe new life into these sounds and romantic musings is inspirational. She keeps telling people to follow her lead, too—just refer to the album’s title*.* | 2015-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | May 6, 2015 | 7.4 | 0881bfa6-c41c-4eb0-805b-ebaf14270eb4 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Initially conceived as an orchestral tribute to Iceland’s remote majesty, the Blur and Gorillaz frontman’s second solo album blossoms into a wide-angle commentary on grief, loss, and climate crisis. | Initially conceived as an orchestral tribute to Iceland’s remote majesty, the Blur and Gorillaz frontman’s second solo album blossoms into a wide-angle commentary on grief, loss, and climate crisis. | Damon Albarn: The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damon-albarn-the-nearer-the-fountain-more-pure-the-stream-flows/ | The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows | For Damon Albarn, the ability to disconnect is vital for creativity. It’s what drew the Blur and Gorillaz frontman to Iceland’s remote wilderness nearly 25 years ago (he wrote “Song 2” on his first visit), and what has kept him returning so frequently that he’s now a dual citizen. The British singer-songwriter and musical polymath is rarely short on inspiration; he’s made more than a dozen albums spanning Britpop, Mali folk, film soundtracks, and opera (next up, he recently said, is a ballet). But in recent years, and especially during lockdown, he’s spent considerable time sitting by his piano at his home near Reykjavik, gazing out the window into the extraordinary countryside.
His sprawling second studio solo album, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, is a tribute to this landscape—a majestic panorama of grassy meadows, black sand beaches, glaciers, and active volcanoes. It’s the sort of otherworldly vista that makes you think big and feel small, and Albarn, now in his fifties and increasingly worried about the climate crisis, has become protective of its quiet, pristine beauty. Using misty, classical atmospheres and melancholy pop melodies that evoke a sense of awe and loss, he presents a love letter to a beloved landscape that he wants to preserve but is already mourning.
Albarn’s initial vision for the record wasn’t quite so sentimental. In 2019, he was commissioned by Lyon’s Fête des Lumières to take on any project of his choosing, and suggested creating an orchestral interpretation of the view outside his living room window. With the help of local Reykjavik musicians, who came over for long improvisation sessions, he began to build an instrumental sketch of the terrain. “Someone would be in charge of the clouds, someone would be in charge of the outline of [Mount] Esja, someone would be on waves, and birds, and golf carts,” he told Reykjavik’s Grapevine. “Once you take it out of the moment and the environment... immediately it becomes very abstract.” When the pandemic shut the sessions down in early 2020, Albarn had to reimagine what the project might become. He enlisted two old friends, Verve guitarist Simon Tong and Gorillaz collaborator Mike Smith, to help turn the recordings into a more song-based, pop-oriented LP.
The final product is loosely based on the pandemic-inspired concept of particles (a lyrical point that Albarn overuses), but it feels larger, like a stream-of-consciousness meditation on earth’s natural forces—extreme weather systems, gravitational pulls, the migratory patterns of birds. They’re rendered in swirls of ambient soundscapes, waltzing lullabies, and stormy, jazzy inflections, and you can hear threads of those early orchestral sessions seeping through. At times, the wide mix of sounds feels erratic, and the instrumentals don’t always work (“Combustion” has dizzying, you-had-to-be-there energy), but perhaps there’s an argument for discomforting friction. Nature is volatile, unpredictable, and clearly in charge.
Albarn is notorious for rejecting fame and protecting his private life (see: Iceland), so it’s surprising that so much of The Nearer the Fountain feels biographical. Drifting from Iranian funeral ceremonies (“Daft Wader”) to Uruguayan architecture (“The Tower of Montevideo”) to the foggy beaches where his daughter grew up (“The Cormorant”), he reminisces about all that is lost with the passage of time. “I now drift, daydreaming, to when we were happy here on this beach,” he sings. “We played with our children and they were happy, too.” Although he has often used his musical projects as travel diaries of sorts, there’s an intimacy to his solo work that we simply don’t get elsewhere. These songs are more like vivid journal entries than faded photographs, with rare glimpses at how he thinks, feels, grieves, and remembers.
There’s another reason for all this existential thinking. In the middle of the recording process, Albarn lost his longtime friend and close collaborator, the legendary drummer Tony Allen, sending Albarn on what he’s called “his own dark journey.” That phrase, along with the album title and opening track, are references to the elegiac poem “Love and Memory,” by the 19th-century English poet John Clare. Albarn’s mother had gifted him an anthology of the writer’s work when he was a teenager. When he rediscovered it during lockdown, it became a companion text for grappling with the magnitude of loss happening all around him.
Clare was a champion of the countryside and his own era’s voice of environmental alarm. He regarded mortality and nature as one, death as natural and certain as the seasons. Albarn found solace in this wide-angle thinking, and began considering the human condition as an extension of nature rather than the other way around. The album’s dark cover art—a large rock with a poetic epigraph, the artist’s name, and the year—feels like a visual reference to a gravestone. At first the boulder seems enormous, nearly taking up the whole canvas. But the sea just beyond it, ceaseless and sparkling, has a way of lending everything a new perspective.
The album’s most affecting moments zero in on Albarn’s close relationship with nature, one built on trust and deference. In the wistful piano ballad “The Cormorant,” he describes his daily swims in Devon Bay, off the English coast, and the helplessness he feels being swept up in the ocean’s cold, black currents, which have recently become inhabited by great white sharks. “Tipping goes the cormorant, I think she knows I’m a pathetic intruder into the abyss,” he sings, his melodies dipping and diving as gracefully as a shorebird.
On the deceptively lighthearted “Royal Morning Blue,” he marvels at the way a slight shift in temperature can turn rain into snow and transform an entire landscape, only to disappear. Everything is fleeting, he seems to say. Don’t get too comfortable. When he starts to sing about “the end of the world,” his voice is suddenly slanted and uneasy, as if the day has shifted from a far-off theoretical to a palpable, inconvenient truth.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Transgressive | December 23, 2021 | 7.3 | 088631ae-726b-4a27-ae56-e8be92bd5b44 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
On My Everything, Ariana Grande ditches the manic-Disney-dream-girl ballads that made up her debut and goes straight for the bangers. As a whole, the album feels like Grande’s arrival as a true pop fixture, not just a charming novelty. The Weeknd, Childish Gambino, Big Sean, and others guest. | On My Everything, Ariana Grande ditches the manic-Disney-dream-girl ballads that made up her debut and goes straight for the bangers. As a whole, the album feels like Grande’s arrival as a true pop fixture, not just a charming novelty. The Weeknd, Childish Gambino, Big Sean, and others guest. | Ariana Grande: My Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19765-ariana-grande-my-everything/ | My Everything | The debut album from Nickelodeon star-turned-pop force Ariana Grande, last year's Yours Truly, had charming qualities that also turned out to be unsustainable. Marked by the sort of puerile whimsy that can only really happen once a career, it split the difference between doe-eyed doo-wop and remember-the-'90s pop-R&B (the latter intentionally courting the ensuing Mariah comparisons). Grande proved just the type to pull off this sort of broad-stroked pastiche: she’s a theater kid at heart, slipping in and out of characters with practiced finesse (she’s got an arsenal of impressions on YouTube, from Britney Spears to a crying lamb). In a way, it was a risk—these sorts of throwbacks were, if not totally unfashionable, decidedly out of season.
But it was a calculated risk, one that blatantly positioned Grande as a wholesome, PG-rated alternative to the ratchet Mileys of the 2013 pop spectrum. Despite her obvious training—what more can be said about That Voice?—there was a pointed adolescence to Yours Truly, down to the eerily infantilized (and wisely scrapped) initial album art. And the Instagram-filter nostalgia, though pretty damn adorable, often rendered the project impersonal. Though it’s her calling card, Grande’s voice doubles as a weapon and a shield; amid all the puppy-love ballads, the album’s emotional centerpiece had her professing her undying love, not for a boy, but for a piano. And fittingly so: the emotional charge of Grande’s music comes from the rush of singing as an act, the clear delight she takes in the power of her own voice, moreso than whatever she’s actually singing about.
On My Everything, Grande ditches the manic-Disney-dream-girl ballads and goes straight for the bangers; while it may not be as consistent a statement as Yours Truly, it’s refreshingly grown-up. It’s no coincidence that the album’s two lead singles were produced by Max Martin, the guy who practically defined millennial pop bildungsroman and, 14 years ago, penned “Oops!…I Did It Again” and “Stronger” for a transitional Britney. They might be the year’s strongest one-two punch of singles: “Problem”, with its alluringly strange reverse-build-up (Grande’s howling pre-chorus primes us for an even bigger release, only to drop impishly into Big Sean whispers, mirroring the un-met expectations of the song’s bad-news boyfriend), and the Zedd-produced stomper “Break Free”, a colossal kiss-off that doubles as a “Stronger” for the EDM age. Grande’s side-step to the dancefloor feels pre-ordained, rather than a cash-out: “Break Free”’s festival-closing ambition perfectly pairs with her stadium-sized voice, and injects some much-needed femininity into EDM’s typical machismo.
Where Yours Truly was willfully off-trend, My Everything reveals a better understanding of “cool,” even if it occasionally misses the mark. Here, Grande exists gleefully in her own age, rather than gesturing vaguely towards a second-hand idea of “retro.” Even when the plinky soda-fountain sounds of her debut trickle back in, as on Cashmere Cat-produced “Be My Baby”, the effect is more Terius Nash than Pinterest-board pastiche. The features represent more grown-up choices, and coax some stunning performances out of typically middle-of-the-road guests: the Weeknd skulks out from the shadows and into the light on throbbing big-room ballad “Love Me Harder”, and A$AP Ferg delivers arguably his best guest spot ever on the Christina Aguilera-nodding sex jam “Hands On Me”.
It’s fitting that the two most sexually explicit songs on the album are some of its best; Yours Truly’s blinky innocence would’ve bordered on patronizing if carried on any longer. It’s bigger than sex-positivity, though—Grande’s directness in general is what's so refreshing. Where she once coyly avoided her crush’s gaze, here she stares him dead in the eyes with to-the-point come-ons like “May be a little thing, but I like that long.” In a recent New York Times feature, Grande says longingly, of the uphill battle against her squeaky-clean image, “Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty.” This certainly feels like a start.
Thanks to those chameleonic theater roots, Grande’s always been able to pull off rap crossovers better than peers like Katy Perry, but despite the handful of successful guest spots, her taste in rap features remains tragic. My Everything’s worst moments revolve around hokey appearances from serial cornballs Big Sean and Childish Gambino. The former drops clunker after clunker on “Best Mistake”, making a mockery of the song’s serious tone with hysterically awful lines like “How can we keep the feelings fresh/ How do we Ziploc it?” The latter takes the “he’s cheating… with a MAN!” storyline and rubs its face in its own feces with the beyond questionable punchline “Yes, I’m a G, from the A, and they ask Y” (get it, guys?)—as though the message wasn’t already made painfully obvious by the dorky, distracting “I’m Coming Out” sample running underneath Grande’s vocals. It's a bizarre choice for a singer whose occasional unintelligibility is already something of a meme.
Still, despite its missteps, My Everything feels like Grande’s arrival as a true pop fixture, not just a charming novelty. Where she once felt like an actor dutifully playing the part of blinky-eyed, malt-sipping romantic, here Grande slowly but confidently comes into her own; and while her personality may still take a backseat to her technical skill, it’s beginning to wink through the theatrics. Turns out, so-called mini-Mariah can hold her own in 2014; and while the best songs here may not be timeless, they certainly feel right for right now. | 2014-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | August 29, 2014 | 7.7 | 0886a4d7-ace0-4396-b28e-d442952f98cc | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Black Laden Crown is Danzig’s strongest album in some time, because he’s mostly built it around his own limitations. His thunder has quelled, but his ear is sharpening again on these metal blues. | Black Laden Crown is Danzig’s strongest album in some time, because he’s mostly built it around his own limitations. His thunder has quelled, but his ear is sharpening again on these metal blues. | Danzig: Black Laden Crown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23271-black-laden-crown/ | Black Laden Crown | Being a metal singer is physically demanding, and even the most seemingly triumphant of them know you can’t slay age. Rob Halford knows it, James Hetfield knows it—does Glenn Danzig know it? His “metal Elvis” voice isn’t what it used to be, and he is his voice. It hasn’t kept him away from touring—the Misfits reunion finally happened last year, after all—but his performances have suffered live and in the studio. He’s not known for being self-aware (except for when dealing with photographers at shows), and an eccentric like him can’t be too self-aware. That doesn’t excuse his sloppy wreck of a covers album, 2015’s Skeletons, or the fact that he put footage of one of his teeth falling off into his “’68 Comeback Special” homage “Legacy.” But perhaps he has found a critical voice within. Black Laden Crown is Danzig’s strongest album in some time, because he’s mostly built it around his own limitations.
Many of the song here are on the slower end of the metal-blues he pioneered with his first three records, and his aged croon needs that slack. “Last Ride” feels like it could have come from the in-the-round jams on the “Danzig Legacy” television special—it’s primitive and laid-back, his lack of self-awareness working in his favor at last. He doesn’t overextend himself, gliding over the swampy buzzes of “The Witching Hour” and the pounding chugs in “Skulls & Daisies.” Like the more extreme bands he’s taken on the road over the past decade, his vocals are becoming more textural and less the main focus. That actually works, as Crown has his smartest writing in years, keeping his youthful demons alive, if not running amok. He may have matured, but we don’t want to him to grow up.
While Crown exists to show that there’s optimism about Danzig, “Devil On Hwy 9” is an argument to be cynical (and it wasn’t the wisest choice as the album’s lead single). Vocals notwithstanding, it lands among his most charging songs, like “Dirty Black Summer” and “Am I Demon.” He wants to capture the biker spirit he’s singing about, but when he tries to rage, he’s just hoarse. There’s none of the warmth fused with menace that he once singularly commanded. He should heed “Eyes Ripping Fire” as a better model for what he can do in a more rocking mode, as its sludgier pace meshes better with his moan. Even if “Devil” is the only real misstep on this record, it confirms the worst fear about him: he just isn’t built for the more driving songs anymore.
Guitarist Tommy Victor deserves a lot of credit for Crown’s successes. The mechanical playing style that suited him in Prong was initially a mismatch for Danzig’s heavy blues, and 2004’s Circle of Snakes tried to graft both styles to no avail. 2010’s Deth Red Sabaoth made headway into restoring the classic Danzig sound, and while it would be presumptuous to say he’s transformed into O.G. Danzig guitarist John Christ, this record is the closest Victor has sounded to him. Repressing your own style to ape your most beloved predecessor would seem like a disaster, but Victor has loosened up, scaling back on the pinch harmonics and embracing fluidity. The title track also shows how Victor takes the pressure off of Danzig to go grand, furiously soloing where the singer would once howl into abandon.
Danzig III: How the Gods Kill will turn 25 in July, and Danzig is well aware; he says he’ll play more material from that record in his upcoming live shows. On Gods, he found a tenderness in his dark craft, focusing on slower songs—which is also what works with Crown. The anniversary might overshadow this new album, and that may have been a welcome distraction in the past—but Danzig is, for once, on the right path here. His thunder has quelled, but his ear is sharpening again. And it’s that ear that made some of the most approachable yet enduring metal of the late ’80s and early ’90s. | 2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | May 30, 2017 | 6.4 | 088da57c-a2d5-4079-a8fe-8caea802bcde | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Backed by his live band, the rapper remixes and elaborates the autobiographical themes and gospel uplift of 2023’s Michael. | Backed by his live band, the rapper remixes and elaborates the autobiographical themes and gospel uplift of 2023’s Michael. | Killer Mike: Michael & the Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners and Saints | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/killer-mike-michael-and-the-mighty-midnight-revival-songs-for-sinners-and-saints/ | Michael & the Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners and Saints | Twenty years ago, Killer Mike was the upstart landing I’m-up-next spots on Jay-Z and Outkast records. His verse on Big Boi’s “Flip Flop Rock,” which features Jay, casts Mike’s good fortune as both salvation and destiny. “I foregoed the crime and I focused on rhyme/Focused on every word and line/Like a young Cassius Clay in his prime/I was born to talk shit and prove mine,” he raps with brio. This sense of deliverance has remained a fixture of his work, from the hopeful “gospel music for the ghetto” of his mixtape days, to the rowdy agitprop of R.A.P. Music and Run the Jewels, through last year’s ponderous bildungsroman Michael. He often likens music to a religious experience, zooming in on the ways his career has transported him mentally and materially to a better life.
Michael & the Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners and Saints continues this tradition. Part remix album, part somber coda to the gospel-influenced Michael, it burrows further into Mike’s formative memories, beliefs, and sounds. Backed by his touring band the Mighty Midnight Revival, and producers and guests from the many eras of his career, Killer Mike cycles through trap, gospel, and Memphis rap as he extols the virtues of staying the course. “I’m bearin’ witness,” he says on the intro, invoking the custom of Southern Black church testimonies. This is rap as outreach.
The album comes six months after a whirlwind Grammy night during which Killer Mike won three awards and got arrested for an altercation with a security guard. He describes the evening’s whiplash on the bluesy “Humble Me,” likening his booking to the biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den and boasting that he was proud to be handcuffed because he shares the experience with his civil rights heroes. After spending the night praying, he’s seemingly rewarded when the next day, his son is confirmed for a kidney transplant. Like many Killer Mike stories, the tale is dramatic and a bit self-aggrandizing—is getting cuffed at the Grammys really the same as being targeted by the FBI?—but Mike’s faith powers his performance. He raps with the conviction of someone who has been touched by the divine and feels newly attuned to its power.
The production, mostly helmed by Cuz Lightyear, plays up the feeling of spiritual awakening. The slow, open arrangements use jubilant choir fills, warm keyboard and organ melodies, and swinging rhythms to channel gospel uplift. While a few songs boom and rattle, most sway with relief. “Slummer 4 Junkies” combines the Michael tracks “Slummer” and “Something for Junkies” into a slow-burning epic that swells with the Mighty Midnight Revival’s joyful harmonies and then contracts into a penitent elegy. The songs felt episodic on Michael, but combined they evoke the haze of memory, the narratives blurring together.
Mike is still an unabashed Black capitalist preaching a queasy prosperity gospel, but compared to Michael, Songs for Sinners and Saints prioritizes gratitude. Mike dials back the hater screeds and straw man- (and gay-) bashing to revisit his own battles and count his blessings. The shift loosens his rapping, which was somewhat stiff on Michael. On “Had to Go Get It,” he casually transitions from hitting the downbeat to chopping: “Used to sell grams of that white coke on Ponce de Leon to white folk/Knew to do better, but I wanted cheddar, so dance with the devil/Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did it.” Over a slick flip of Trillville’s crunk anthem “Neva Eva” on the bouncy standout “Higher Level,” Mike thanks his wife for confronting him about cheating. “I had a white girlfriend and mistress, good fella like I was Henry/’Til I woke up with that trey-eight to my face held by my missus,” he raps.
Songs for Sinners and Saints doesn’t cover as much ground as Michael, which offered the rich multi-genre sprawl of a classic Dungeon Family release. But the narrower palette and lower stakes of the project restore the focus and play of his “Snappin’ & Trappin” days, when he approached rap as a calling rather than a pulpit. “’97 3-6 Freestyle,” produced by DJ Paul and TWhy, delivers all the hallmarks of a Killer Mike song: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King; Memphis-inspired triplets; sneers about elitists and broke people. But even the familiar beats exist in service of his relentless soul-searching. He sounds like a believer—in his God, in his talent, and in rap as a hallowed art. | 2024-08-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | August 7, 2024 | 7 | 088e05cd-e376-4ab3-bacb-16c832a64b3d | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Sharing passing similarities to two of modern indie hip-hop's top producers, Madlib and the late J Dilla, L.A.-based Warp recording artist Flying Lotus has created a darkly meditative fusion of debris and warmth, b-boy head-nod, and laptopper experimentalism out of static, texture, and rhythm. | Sharing passing similarities to two of modern indie hip-hop's top producers, Madlib and the late J Dilla, L.A.-based Warp recording artist Flying Lotus has created a darkly meditative fusion of debris and warmth, b-boy head-nod, and laptopper experimentalism out of static, texture, and rhythm. | Flying Lotus: Los Angeles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12132-los-angeles/ | Los Angeles | Hip-hop's earliest records often relied on faded, scratchy source material run through entry-level equipment. Even as technology advanced, the grain and the gristle stuck around-- sometimes out of necessity, sometimes as an extra ingredient. Over time, those aged, decaying sounds burrowed their way underground to crop up in pockets of IDM, dubstep, and indie hip-hop, resulting in music, built around texture more than bass or treble, that often sounded ragged at birth.
With his second album, Flying Lotus (aka Steven Ellison) has mastered this texture. Los Angeles is filled with the crackle of static, but there's something about this ambient noise-- a nuisance to audiophiles, a sign of weakness in radio signals-- that feels oddly comforting. Rather than audio damage or interference, this deceptively entrancing record (stick with it, it's a grower) feels like nature; it's almost as though Ellison went out of his way to digitize and filter the sound of rain hitting a sidewalk to accompany its beats. Opener "Brainfeeder" bristles with sharp rattling taps, while "Breathe. Something/Stellar STar" transmutes it into boiling-water burble, and even the 1960s sci-fi foley-room chatter on the 43-second "Orbit 405" is underpinned by snarling, distorted, pre-amp buzz. It sounds less like an album built on damaged, beat-up, pre-existing vinyl loops than a clean, shiny new LP put through four decades' worth of wear and mishandling.
The static, of course, is just a single (if crucial) ingredient in the character of Los Angeles: What this album relies on specifically is the way that crackle and buzz reacts to the rhythm at the core. Flying Lotus shares passing similarities to the late J Dilla and fellow Cali beat creator Madlib in the way he puts together his beats, and it's not hard to hear touches of James Yancey's Ummah-era production tricks infused with the same off-kilter slipperiness you might find on a recent Beat Konducta release. And in Ellison's hands, these tricks are stridently odd where they could have been safely derivative, revealing a deep affinity for psychedelic lushness and digital distortion that puts him in his own class.
Los Angeles is also prone to letting its beats hang loosely in the air. Ellison often slips empty space inside the rhythm (another place where the ambient static comes in handy), and even when the tempo accelerates past the album's typical leisurely pace and finds itself driving a track packed with wall-to-wall bass, little of it seems hectic or jarring-- even the jittery tweaker-electro of "Parisian Goldfish" smoothes out into a pleasant pulse once it sets in. At its most stirring moments, the music can be soothingly meditative, though the booming low-end, sharp drums, and all that crackle and fuzz keep it from sounding too polite. With its accomplished fusion of debris and warmth in a place somewhere between b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism, Los Angeles is a big step forward for a still-young career, an album well worth revisiting years from now-- preferably on vinyl, where the pops and clicks can only multiply. | 2008-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 29, 2008 | 8.5 | 08929525-9946-442f-a867-129a58d7666f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Reissued here as a wood-paneled box set with 25 bonus tracks, Louisiana singer Robert Charles' lone album from the 1970s, featuring four members of the Band as his backup group, is one of the most sublime Americana records ever cut. | Reissued here as a wood-paneled box set with 25 bonus tracks, Louisiana singer Robert Charles' lone album from the 1970s, featuring four members of the Band as his backup group, is one of the most sublime Americana records ever cut. | Bobby Charles: Bobby Charles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16118-bobby-charles/ | Bobby Charles | On the third disc of this wood-paneled box set of Louisiana singer Robert "Bobby" Charles Guidry's lone album from the 1970s, there's a half-hour interview with radio disc jockey Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento. They laundry-list the records released that week in 1972, ranging from a posthumous Jimi Hendrix LP to John Fahey, Tim Buckley, Bonnie Raitt, Nazareth, Wet Willie, and Martin Mull. To which Bobby Charles comments in his gentle, stoned Cajun drawl: "It's too bad, a lot of good ones just have to get lost. It's unexplainable, but they just do." To which Hansen replies: "Well... a lot of times they get picked up the second or third time around."
Warm and crackling as a campfire, easeful and understated, all of it suffused with Charles' nuanced blend of humor and empathy, this 1972 eponymous album was one of the "good ones" that got lost. Think of this as the second or third time around for the album to finally find its people-- and there should be plenty of them. Considering that 4/5ths of the Band served as Charles' back up group here (augmented by Dr. John and Neil Young pedal steel guitarist Ben E. Keith), this is-- simply put-- one of the most sublime Americana records ever cut.
Charles' story started two decades earlier, when he wrote and recorded R&B standards like "See You Later, Alligator" and "Walking to New Orleans". The story goes that Chess Records signed the then-14-year-old sight unseen after he sang them "Alligator" over the phone. When he arrived in their Chicago offices, though, Leonard Chess flipped out: Not because Charles was underage, but because he was white. After touring through a pre-integration South, he wound up in Nashville by the late 1960s. A marijuana rap led him to head further north, where he ultimately fell in with the musical community centered around Woodstock, N.Y., recording at Dylan manager Albert Grossman's Bearsville Studios.
From the opening twang and snare snap of "Street People", it's clear Charles' songwriting acumen had grown beyond his early R&B roots. Over the slinking beat, he details an itinerant life of what one would label a "bum." But rather than spin some tale of hard luck and woe, Charles makes drifting from town to town and panhandling for spare change sound idyllic. "Wouldn't trade places with no one I know/ I'm happy with where I'm at," he drawls. A cowbell accents the punchline: "Some people would rather work/ We need people like that."
Elsewhere, there are organ-gurgling numbers about new love and community gossip, lilting ballads about watching butterflies, honking barroom numbers about growing old, and gentle, country-tinged numbers about spending all day in bed with your honey. And then there's the ode to Jesus to save him from his followers. All of it gets delivered with a sly grin and at a pace with which you might sip a beer on a back porch, cast a fishing line into a creek, or barbecue a rack of ribs: slow, unhurried, a sunny afternoon ahead of you.
Some 25 previously unreleased tracks augment the original 10-song album, ranging from the pleasant to revelatory. There are differently mixed singles, three songs released only on a Japanese box set, some half-baked songs, but also the sound of Charles' shuffling toward a follow-up album that he never quite got around to finishing. Or, as he put his M.O. on one chorus: "(I'm) staying stoned and singing homemade songs." There's the Band's telltale funk on "Why Are People Like That?", Dr. John's piano commingling with Garth Hudson's gospel organ swells on the elegant crest of "You Came Along". Fans of Will Oldham's Arise Therefore will swoon for demos of Charles dueting with the Band's Rick Danko over a sputtering drum machine.
When this set was originally made available through Rhino Handmade back in August (it's in stores now via distribution partner Light in the Attic), mid-album track "He's Got All the Whiskey" was already an album highlight. So it's uncanny hearing both it and "Street People" in a post-Occupy mindset. About as loud as "Chappelle's Show"'s intro, Dixieland horns, Danko's bass, and a snare's pop skitter about as Charles gripes: "He got all the money." It, of course, follows that "The Man" also has all the "whiskey/ power/ women," the biggest crime of it being that "he won't give me none." It's a simple protest from Bobby Charles-- good-natured at its heart-- and hopefully it won't get ignored this time around. | 2012-01-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-01-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Rhino Handmade | January 10, 2012 | 8.6 | 0893edc2-bc5e-4631-8e87-0ebbf14802e4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Over a woozy mixture of house, funk, and R&B, the Los Angeles rapper-producer recalls the pleasures of life before lockdown. | Over a woozy mixture of house, funk, and R&B, the Los Angeles rapper-producer recalls the pleasures of life before lockdown. | Channel Tres: i can’t go outside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/channel-tres-i-cant-go-outside/ | I Can’t Go Outside | As the pandemic creeps into its second year, the minutiae of social interactions begin to feel less familiar. Dinners, hookups, and long drives with unmasked passengers are distant memories. Channel Tres’ i can’t go outside is a hazy recollection of life before everything changed. Inspired by his time in lockdown, the Compton-born producer and rapper uses thumping West Coast g-funk and the sensual swagger of Chicago and Detroit house as backdrops for odes to the simple things in life—cruising in his Chevy, roller skating to Frankie Beverly, even waiting in line at IKEA—interspersed with reflections on ambition and growing up Black in America.
These songs are all about vibe. As a storyteller, Tres favors fragments over narrative, sprinkling biographical hints into the mix like breadcrumbs. On “2000 chevy malibu,” Tres recalls his first car and the newfound independence of being a teenager with endless miles at his disposal. It unfolds like a rose-colored dream sequence, leaning heavily into Tres’ R&B background via woozy backing vocals that complement his mumbly talk-rap delivery. “skate depot,” a sparkling ode to Los Angeles’ namesake roller-skating destination, which closed in 2014, captures the funk-filled joy that has made roller rinks a sacred destination for many Black Americans.
The EP’s collaborations are its highlights. Tyler, the Creator briefly snaps back into his Goblin days on “fuego” as the two swap snapshots of quarantine horniness that devolve into Tres’ realization, “Human contact don’t exist/Human contact is a risk.” On “take your time,” an R&B/house hybrid that’s begging for placement on summer 2021’s late-night playlists, Tinashe commands the spotlight over a lush, slowed-down groove. But Channel Tres’ vocals too often feel like an afterthought, which is a shame considering the potential he showed in 2020 with his one-off single “Weedman” and his collaboration with SG Lewis and Robyn.
There are hints of vulnerability here—particularly on “broke down kid interlude,” where Tres ponders survivor’s guilt over a gliding house groove—but the EP is missing the spark of his best singles, like “Controller” and “Black Moses.” He’s at his best when he toys with the cadence of his rhyming, as on “fuego,” but when it comes to grappling with the loneliness of isolation, he pushes up against the limits of his comfort zone. “I miss the time we had shows,” he raps on the closing “unfinished business,” but then gets stuck in a looping half-thought: “More than what it seems.” Tres’ pursuit of the vibe can only take him so far.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Art For Their Good | January 7, 2021 | 6.5 | 089542fd-70b4-4fea-bec4-c5e36d494567 | Jade Gomez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jade-gomez/ | |
The Philly band's rousing punk anthems lose a little luster on an album that feels more motivated by desperation than starry-eyed belief. | The Philly band's rousing punk anthems lose a little luster on an album that feels more motivated by desperation than starry-eyed belief. | Beach Slang: The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-slang-the-deadbeat-bang-of-heartbreak-city/ | The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City | If you feel embarrassed to identify as a Beach Slang fan in 2020, rest assured that for frontman James Alex, embarrassment is the whole point. He has an umbilical connection to the awkward and tender teenage sentiments of bands like the Replacements or Jawbreaker and he carries the flag for adults who feel ashamed of their younger selves. Most Beach Slang fans would admit that their 2015 debut, The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us, was pandering to a certain kind of washed-up rock fan, but hey, at least someone was actually pandering to them.
Coming after nearly four years of lost momentum and squandered goodwill, The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City lacks the near-delusional devotion to the redemptive possibilities of rock music that sustained Beach Slang’s early work. There’s something far less communal at play here: a desperation to keep Beach Slang alive. When Alex shouts “Did you come to watch me choke...again” on “Let It Ride,” he raises the unexpected possibility of finding pathos in all of this—in the shame and moral trade-offs that come with a white-knuckle grip on fleeting relevance, in his own band’s troubled history—the near-breakups, the personnel controversies, the erratic shows, the disdain from peers. Though “Let It Ride” is virtually indistinguishable from 90 percent of other Beach Slang songs—maybe intentionally so—a lyric like “Rock ‘n’ roll’s my favorite sin/Man, I don’t know if I’m good at it/But I’m too in love or dumb to quit” hits differently than any number of Beach Slang lyrics that uses virtually the same exact words. Maybe the backhanded compliments suggesting Alex is willfully dumb or naive were off-base; maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.
The announcement of lead single “Bam Rang Rang”—basically a repeat of “Atom Bomb,” except twice as long for some reason—accompanied a run of dates opening for the Goo Goo Dolls, a band whose pre-“Name” Westerberg cosplay is a more apt reference point for Beach Slang than the Mats themselves. After years of writing de facto Replacements fanfic, Alex actually rips off the one Replacement song about fanfic itself with “Tommy in the ’80s.” “I figured if Westerberg could write about Alex Chilton, for all those right reasons, I could write something about Tommy Keene for all the same ones,” Alex explained, preemptively correcting a valid assumption that “Tommy in the ‘80s” is about Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson—now an actual member of Beach Slang—and saving the thing from total contextual collapse. He is also the only artist in 2020 still namedropping Fast Times at Ridgemont High and “Jessie’s Girl” as fresh sources of inspiration. Imagine what life could be like if you could silence your inner (or outer) critic the way Alex does. It’s kind of inspiring.
On the other hand, a little self-censoring could prevent Alex from continuing to try his hand at modes almost completely incompatible with his strengths. On past albums, his stabs at shoegaze and chamber-pop were endearingly clumsy nudges against Beach Slang’s hard limitations. But the mismatch is even more pronounced on The Deadbeat Bang’s attempts at glam, a subversive subgenre by definition that requires sex or sneer to pull off, while all Alex has to work with is his adamantine earnestness. Best case scenario, he’s able to turn out something as lovably goofy as Def Leppard’s “Rocket,” but “Sticky Thumbs” and “Born to Raise Hell” are passable facsimile at best, and the nicest thing you can say about “Stiff” is that it isn’t called “Moist.” I’m not sure who was asking for a six-minute piano ballad or more acoustic solo tracks after Quiet Slang, and yet here are “Bar No One” and “Nobody Say Nothing,” both notable solely for isolated moments of real human interactions strewn amongst the garden-variety Beach Slang-isms (“I’m murdering songs on a dead guitar,” “I’m a skeleton wrapped in gasoline”).
The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City is too harmless to hate, but it’s hard to feel much of anything about it—which is a fatal flaw for a band that leverages an uncanny ability to rid people of inhibitions against their better judgment. This is why the soused, sudsy production of The Things We Do is much better suited to them than the polished professionalism of Brad Wood. Ever since Beach Slang made its name on making people feel seen, everything they’ve done since had one job, and it’s one that The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City barely accomplishes: to make us feel like we weren’t suckers for believing in the first place.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bridge Nine | January 9, 2020 | 5.2 | 0895bd30-6b89-46d7-99b3-b9bb162905f1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Wand frontman’s third solo album offers a funhouse-mirror take on classic rock, combining surreal lyrical vignettes and laid-back delivery with incendiary guitar shredding. | The Wand frontman’s third solo album offers a funhouse-mirror take on classic rock, combining surreal lyrical vignettes and laid-back delivery with incendiary guitar shredding. | Cory Hanson: Western Cum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cory-hanson-western-cum/ | Western Cum | Classic rock, as it has come down to us from decades of radio play, is less a defined genre than a no-worries vibe, an invitation to blissfully relive past glories real or imagined. Wand frontman Cory Hanson’s third solo album may sound at first like a bid to join that tradition—Neil Young, the Allman Brothers, and Thin Lizzy are just a few of the FM-radio warhorses that his playing and singing bring to mind—but Western Cum isn’t really a classic-rock album. (For one thing, that NSFW title would probably get your local Morning Zoo crew fired for saying it on air.) While the record bears all the guitar-charged euphoria and carefree spirit of a ’70s rock staple, Hanson’s absurdist lyrical vignettes and counterintuitive arrangements don’t exactly induce a peaceful, easy feeling. Western Cum is a perfect road-trip album, but it’s one that encourages sudden accelerations, sharp left turns, and the occasional swerve into the ditch.
Compared to the dazed Americana travelogs of Hanson’s previous solo outing, Pale Horse Rider, Western Cum is more flagrant in its pursuit of pleasure, making its high-voltage riffs and hair-raising solos the featured attraction of every track. For a genre founded on a premise of anti-virtuosity, indie rock has nonetheless produced its share of Guitar World-worthy string-benders over the past 40 years, and Western Cum constitutes Hanson’s induction to that fretboard fraternity. But where J Mascis or Doug Martsch or Jim James might use a squealing solo to wring out extra pathos from their crestfallen tunes, Hanson likes to let ’er rip for a more basic reason: because it’s fun as fuck. He layers leads upon leads as if he were drizzling syrup on his breakfast bacon, gleefully gorging himself on the gluttony of it all.
Where guitar riffs often function as a preamble to the vocal melody, Hanson’s turns at the mic feel like mere warm-up exercises for his guitar solos, which serve as his off-ramps into alternate dimensions and altered states. His effects-laden excursions practically function as stand-alone mini-songs within the songs: He spends the first half of “Wings” singing along to his restless noodling, as if his guitar were his backing vocalist, before putting on an extended clinic in the unsung art of fusing Southern rock guitar harmonics with proggy mathematics. The whiplashing “Persuasion Architecture” is part Ace of Spades thrasher, part After the Gold Rush reverie, finding common ground between those extremes in a puddle of gooey arpeggios. And while “Horsebait Sabotage” initially busts out the boogie like a Texan T. Rex, it lands somewhere a million miles away, floating off in a rippling infinity pool of new-age textures.
But for all the guitar heroism on display, Hanson maintains a humble, soft-spoken presence as a singer—so much so, you may not initially notice all the strange shit he’s singing about. He’s got the gentle demeanor of a kindergarten circle-time storybook reader and the mind of a cubist poet, framing everyday scenes in wondrous terms (“Housefly” could be the most heroic song you’ll ever hear about about swatting a household pest), or infusing fragmented folk tales with contemporary plot twists. The seafaring “Ghost Ship” could easily pass for some bygone Lauren Canyon country-rock ballad, at least until you get to the line about the guy smuggling cocaine by taping it under his junk; the pedal-steel-smeared “Twins” has the timeless feel of a Gram Parsons cosmic-cowboy odyssey, yet its existential musings revolve around a shout-out to the namesake Schwarzenegger/DeVito flick. But rather than disrupt the album’s mood, those sort of oddball lines enhance its absorbing sense of surreality. Hanson blurs the line between reality and dreaming, and fact and fable, like a documentarian filming a fantasy feature.
Once you spend enough time seeing the world through Hanson’s looking glass, Western Cum seems less like a crass joke of an album title and more like an artisanal spin on the crude language so often applied to displays of six-string excess (cock-rock, etc.)—a reflection of Hanson’s sincere attempt at elevating the rusted-out gold sounds of yesteryear into something artfully modern. If there was ever a song to redeem the art of the guitar solo in this day and age, it’s Western Cum’s 10-minute climax, “Driving Through Heaven,” an ecstatic open-road anthem on which Hanson outruns killer hitchhikers, storm clouds, and wildfire blazes before achieving liftoff in a sustained, cyclonic surge of majestic shredding. It’s Hanson’s “Free Bird” and “Marquee Moon” and “Real Emotional Trash” and “Let’s Call It Love” all rolled into one, a song that not only makes you think epic guitar solos belong back in fashion, but that they could damn well save the world, too. Classic rock is a genre that’s endured through its mythology. With Western Cum, Cory Hanson gives us some new myths to believe in. | 2023-07-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 18, 2023 | 7.6 | 089b02b9-a44b-4a24-9aad-fb76e6a8a503 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Miguel’s fourth album has a kinetic sexual and political energy. With less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, his R&B psychedelia for uncertain times shows his maturation as a songwriter. | Miguel’s fourth album has a kinetic sexual and political energy. With less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, his R&B psychedelia for uncertain times shows his maturation as a songwriter. | Miguel: War & Leisure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miguel-war-and-leisure/ | War & Leisure | Miguel’s ascent into the position of freaky-deaky, celestial sex mystic has been inevitable. Prince Rogers Nelson paved this path so guys like Miguel could thrive, and in Prince’s absence the parallels between the two are even starker and more urgent: a rich voice and richer songwriting extolling eroticism as a balm to heal the vicissitudes of our time and get through this thing called life. Flange and echo pedals are their shared sensual vessels. There’s always going to be a place in contemporary American music for musicians like Miguel, a stony guitarist with an innate sense of the desire behind R&B psychedelia. It’s escapism as a stand-in for freedom both spiritual and actual, a way to shake loose within ever-lusher soundscapes. As Miguel sings on War & Leisure’s homage to his Purpleness, “Pineapple Skies”: “Can we look up, look up, baby/There’s pineapple purple skies/Promise everything’s goin’ be all right.”
Like his musical predecessors—Prince, Hendrix, collaborator Lenny Kravitz—all deepened their erotic pull with a sense of justice and moral fortitude, War & Leisure would imply Miguel’s got more than your body on his mind. He’s said as much, at least; in early November, he told Billboard that War & Leisure “is intentionally about the ethos right now, that we are right in the middle of all this.” This would imply a more overtly political album than, say, 2015’s sublime Wildheart, which made Congressional lobbying and the 42nd President into a slinky simile for a come-on, and parsed the feeling of being misplaced in a rigid society; or more political than “Candles in the Sun,” his 2012 call for peace and harmony.
But Miguel is a savvy songwriter, and so he swerves on those expectations. His allusions to “the ethos right now” are so far mostly visual, with the video for “I Told You So” featuring clips of Trump protests and earthly ills like nuclear missile launches and glacial melt, as he croons to “baby” about the freedom and pleasure in his love. (In October, Miguel also debuted “Now,” War & Leisure’s most overt social-conscious joint, at a benefit for Schools Not Prisons, a California public education campaign). Instead of offering the more woke/political album he’s been suggesting, this fraught moment has infused Miguel with a kinetic energy that is still mostly centered in his sacral chakra, a pelvic mind concern. It’s juiced-up sex Miguel but with a fire in it, less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, a virile, wavy palette and a clear step forward in his maturation as a writer. He’s weaved an album that’s taut and economical, like a featherweight champion landing smoothly choreographed jabs in the form of powerfully raspy harmonies and tight, lusty blues runs.
He’s also, like most of us, a bit more on edge this year. Miguel has employed guns-as-sex-metaphors before, in 2010’s “My Piece” and 2015’s too-smoking-to-deal “Coffee,” which characterized cis hetero sex as “gunplay” a flip on the guitar-as-cock trope. On “Banana Clip,” a sneaky grin of a mid-tempo romance serenade, he asserts that he’d do just about anything for his love, up to and including homicide: “M-16 on my lap/Missiles in the sky/No matter where I go on the map/You got my protection/Banana clip on my love for you/Let it ring like braapp.” And on “Criminal,” an evocative Rick Ross-featuring track for when the stroke game’s just too good, it seems like despite the copious pleasure he’s spouting, everything might just be getting to him. Over a chunky guitar riff and the requisite sex-reverb with a Tame Impala-style psych-harmony propping it all up, Miguel declares, “I got a mind like Columbine/Vigilante, I’m volatile/...I just want someone that I can trust,” before the chorus: “It’s so good it feels criminal/This shit’s gotta be criminal.”
Yet behind Miguel’s addled thoughts and swaggering cocksmanship, he’s still a consummate dreamer, mitigating his darker impulses with a perpetually sunny sound. Even his more post-apocalyptic songs take an optimistic bent, like “City of Angels,” a pared-down blues croon about doing a woman wrong that also celebrates a deeper outcome. On the upbeat “Caramelo Duro,” assisted by Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, Miguel sings in Spanish about a sweet and freaky sucia he’s trying to flow down, and while the español is fine, his hefty vocal depth places him in another distinct musical lineage, that of romantic Mexican crooners like Juan Gabriel and Vicente Fernández. Let’s all will a Miguel/Romeo Santos full-length collaboration into existence, too, if only because bachata's falsetto king could use his West Coast, low-end counterpoint.
While Miguel, who is black and Mexican American, has sung in Spanish before, the inclusion feels like a statement in and of itself when his very existence is politicized, and perhaps a resolution to the questions he posed on Wildheart’s “What’s Normal Anyway”—the answer to people rejecting your multiplicities is to be yourself even harder. It’s something that Miguel has always done, as an iconoclast in a musical landscape where genres are ever flattening and merging into each other. On War & Leisure, he sounds unconflicted and ready to rumble. The freedom he promises his lovers in his music extends to himself, and he’s better than ever at just letting go. | 2017-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Bystorm / RCA | December 1, 2017 | 8.1 | 089b7b5b-50d5-4544-ad99-99fdbe33b3ef | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The latest album from the Tampa duo is a hard rap record made by and for music geeks. | The latest album from the Tampa duo is a hard rap record made by and for music geeks. | They Hate Change: Finally, New | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/they-hate-change-finally-new/ | Finally, New | In the late 1980s, the world experienced a second Summer of Love, when the spirit of freedom—and hedonism—once shared by psychedelic San Francisco hippies in 1967 was revitalized in the United Kingdom, fostered in illegal underground raves fueled by MDMA and acid house imported from the shores of Ibiza. Rave culture spread around the world like wildfire, and few places embraced it like Florida, where scenes coalesced in places like Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Gainesville, making the state a rave capital for much of the ’90s. They Hate Change, a rap duo from Tampa steeped in the myriad electronic subgenres that permeated their home state, represent the latest stage in the evolution of sounds that traveled from Chicago to Ibiza, from London to Miami. On their latest LP, Finally, New, they spit aggressive, East Coast-flavored braggadocio raps over UK breaks and drum’n’bass beats filtered through local styles like Tampa jook and Miami bass. Even amid a deluge of rap music made with sounds from the club, little else sounds like this.
THC’s Vonne Parks and Andre Gainey self-produce bedroom rap records with dance beats, producing bouncy, propulsive records with syncopated percussion that stutters and skitters, creating pockets big enough for them to slide in and out of with a casual flair. They’re certainly not the first artists at the intersection of rap and electronic dance music, but they’ve somehow managed to synthesize the dialogue between Florida and the UK, adding a Southern hip-hop swagger that scans more art school than Magic City. Vonne and Andre got their first taste of the club scene at all-ages “teen night” dance parties in Tampa soundtracked by jook and krank music; if you squint you can hear the homage to Iceberg’s stripper anthem “Naked Hustle” on “Certi.” They tip their caps throughout to the Tampa scene in which they came up, even granting a guest spot to local MC Sarge, who first taught Vonne how to rap. But mostly, Finally, New is the result of a group that outgrew its local scene—one they never truly fit into anyway.
Many of the references will be intimately familiar to a certain subset of club denizens; the album’s lone instrumental track “Perm” is their version of a Schematic record, an IDM-obsessed Miami label that bridged the gap between the sample-and-static-heavy sounds of Boards of Canada and Autechre and the “ghetto bass” that was taking over South Florida.
The most fun parts of Finally, New are distinctly Floridian: Miami Bass slaps and nods to the various substyles that sprouted in Tampa. There’s hints of jook legends Tom G and Khia, who had the subgenre’s biggest hit in 2002 with “My Neck, My Back,” and they once again sample the iconic “Come on baby…” hook from Duice’s classic booty bass jam “Dazzey Duks.” And while they produced the record themselves, they managed to find a kindred spirit in Nick León, a Miami producer who has also carved out space at the intersection of European club music and rap on solo albums and early tracks with Denzel Curry. León contributes co-production to the record’s final tracks (“X-Ray Spex” and “From the Floor”), sending the album out in a swirl of fluttering snares that owes as much to Chicago footwork as the bass does to Bristol.
A surface scan of the tough talk and boasts that pepper Finally, New can obscure the fact that it’s a hard rap record made by music geeks; Vonne and Andre are internet seekers, curious aesthetes diving into the deepest nether regions of a culture they’ve only ever been able to observe from afar, even as they immersed themselves in their local scene. Their lyrics reflect their outsider status, with signifiers meant to place them in opposition to the mainstream. Instead of private jets and gold jewelry, they flex vintage instant cameras and designer dogs. Vonne references their gender fluidity with flip references to makeup and Fenty lingerie, name dropping icons like Jackie Shane, X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, and 100 Gecs’ Laura Les. The result is a significant amount of dissonance; swagger with obscure signifiers, tough guy talk from someone experiencing dysmorphia.
It’s in these moments that They Hate Change transcend the sum of their influences and find something truly new. On the standout “Some Days I Hate My Voice,” co-produced by Titmouse, Vonne explores the latent power of an identity in flux. “Some days I hate my voice, some days I feel like I’m the Metatron/Some days I’m basic, some days I’m dolled up like a debutante/Some day I’ll have a closet full of tweed Chanel, pastel on my Black self/Showed up like can’t these cats tell how to rap well?” Holding vulnerability with the same hands as power, Vonne renders their queerness in three dimensions, seeking neither pity nor praise. On a record full of boasts, it’s the moment with the most impact.
Finally, New is They Hate Change’s first LP for Jagjaguwar—a storied indie label better known for Bon Iver and Sharon Van Etten than any hip-hop or electronic music—but they are no rookies, having dropped eight releases since debuting in 2015 with Cycles. So while they may benefit from a nostalgic dance music resurgence embraced by reggaetón stars and TikTok zoomers alike, they’ve distilled an encyclopedia worth of references into a sound distinct enough that it’s unlikely to wash out when the wave recedes. | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Jagjaguwar | May 25, 2022 | 8 | 089bd4a8-6f49-4889-b477-5d7541b792ac | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
This classically trained Brit's debut album has seen her compared to the likes of Nina Simone and David Axelrod. Although her lyrics sometimes communicate an impersonal strain of melancholy, the music is anything but, dazzling with powerful, vibrant arrangements. | This classically trained Brit's debut album has seen her compared to the likes of Nina Simone and David Axelrod. Although her lyrics sometimes communicate an impersonal strain of melancholy, the music is anything but, dazzling with powerful, vibrant arrangements. | Laura Mvula: Sing to the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17813-laura-mvula-sing-to-the-moon/ | Sing to the Moon | Birmingham singer Laura Mvula has been garnering plenty of adoring reviews across the pond. Even before her debut album Sing to the Moon was released in Britain, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Critics Choice Award at the 2013 BRIT awards. Since the album was released, Mvula’s bright-hued retro-soul has been praised to the heavens for originality while simultaneously being compared to the luminary likes of Nina Simone and David Axelrod. Much of the praise is richly deserved. Sing to the Moon, which was just released here in the States, is a triumph of arrangement and melody: Songs like opener “Like the Morning Dew”, or the gorgeous title track, combine earworm hooks with beautiful, uniquely shaped verses, and showcase the open-hearted faith in the world that is clearly Mvula’s calling card. Even when her lyrics communicate melancholy, it seems the singer has no choice but to sound defiantly anti-blue.
The formal complexity of Mvula’s best songs is testament to an education at the esteemed Birmingham Conservatoire, whose graduates often stray towards jazz, opera, and classical composition. You can hear that training in the stately processional entrance of “Make Me Lovely”, which soon blooms into a full-fledged, powerful chorus, or in the prettily drawn piano and alternating tones of “I Don’t Know What the Weather Will Be”. Beyond her studied compositional ear, Mvula’s voice is also a winning draw. There’s a hitch in her dusky alto that recalls a mix of Jill Scott and a demure version of Amy Winehouse. Her voice is classically beautiful but there’s enough oddity-- a sort of gravelly undertone-- in her pronunciation to keep it interesting throughout the album.
A lot of anonymity is built into Mvula’s topics of choice: beauty, love, faith, heartbreak, and hardship are all discussed on the album with the same generalized air. This can be a strength when it comes to pop songwriting-- the stories here are universal enough to be broadly relatable. But Mvula shines when she gets a bit more personal: She shows a snappy attitude on the show tune-like “That’s Alright”, an affirmation of her faith in who she is, which doubles as one of the most exciting tracks here. Mvula sounds best on her more upbeat songs, so it's a shame there are so few of them.
It’s an odd choice, given the success of singles "Green Garden" and "Like the Morning Dew", to fill the album with so many slow-burning, hopeful anthems. Though they show off Mvula’s vocal talents as well as anything else here, over the full record they can become mundane and somewhat repetitious. “Is There Anybody Out There?” and “Father Father” might work as one-offs for someone encountering Mvula’s voice and compositional abilities for the first time. But they sink in comparison to the songs they follow, leaving the album with almost 10 minutes of under-utilized space.
Mvula's music hearkens back to an earlier era than that of her many British contemporaries: She hovers on the edge of pop, but the majority of her songs are too reserved to fully break through. Mvula's debut is filled with visceral and musical beauty--that is its strong spot. Once she rids her work of thematic repetition and lyrical mundanity, she'll be on to something truly special. | 2013-05-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | May 20, 2013 | 7.4 | 089c3d0e-4427-45f4-b815-d8a01b548830 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Working with Jeff Tweedy, the soul veteran sounds energetic and artful on a collection of covers and re-imagined hits from her past. | Working with Jeff Tweedy, the soul veteran sounds energetic and artful on a collection of covers and re-imagined hits from her past. | Mavis Staples: You Are Not Alone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14666-you-are-not-alone/ | You Are Not Alone | Mavis Staples has a mighty voice. Even into her 70s, she still has dynamic range that goes from a full-throated shout to an intimate whisper without losing her easy authority over a song. Over the decades, many musicians and producers have tried to wrangle that voice onto record, with varying degrees of success. With her father, Pops Staples, she recorded a string of songs that combined gospel and folk music, many of which-- "Respect Yourself" and the sublime "(If You're Ready) Come Go with Me"-- became hits that soundtracked the tumultuous civil rights movement. In the 1970s and 80s, she worked with Curtis Mayfield, Steve Cropper, and Prince, even signing to his Purpleness' Paisley Park label for a brief period.
In the 2000s, Staples has entered an unlikely third stage in her career, with a string of inspired albums that exhibit new range. We'll Never Turn Back, recorded with producer Ry Cooder, revived civil rights anthems for the dying days of the Bush era, and they still sound prescient and powerful. Following the fierce Live: Hope at the Hideout in 2008, her latest album, You Are Not Alone, was recorded with Wilco frontman and fellow Chicago resident Jeff Tweedy. Tweedy clearly has a deep knowledge of and appreciation for Staples' career, and he gives her a warmly textured backdrop that's both familiar and inventive, with nods to past glories. He cherrypicks a number of her old hits to revive and chooses some new covers for her to sing, with a keen understanding of her strengths and weaknesses. In turn, Staples gives him intuitive and moving performances on each song, whether she's celebrating her own salvation or bemoaning a lost love.
On "Downward Road", a Pops favorite that the Staples Singers recorded decades ago, she's casually scolding as she relates the story of a woman who revels in sin and pays a hefty price. A fat bass thwacks along, creating a strange gospel plod that makes Staples sound like she's marching against the downward tide. By contrast, "In Christ There Is No East or West" is so delicate that it threatens to blow away with the breeze. It's a risky tack, as Staples could very easily have bulldozed such light accompaniment, but she adjusts her delivery to convey her awe in God's unfathomable omnipresence. This, she seems to say, is something to celebrate, and "I Belong to the Band - Hallelujah" and "Creep Along Moses" sound like party gospel-- jubilant cries heavenward.
As covers go, Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Wrote a Song for Everyone" is an obvious choice considering the public quality of Staples' music, and she sings it with such humility that it's surprising she's never recorded it before. On the other hand, Randy Newman's "Losing You" is much more private, and Staples communicates stoic, dignified heartbreak with every syllable. It's a remarkable performance, matched only by the reassuring title track, which Tweedy wrote especially for her. "You Are Not Alone", as its title suggests, intends to be a salve in hard times, and Staples rallies her most sympathetic delivery, as if comforting her listeners individually.
Rather than protest the state of the world, Staples is toasting human endurance-- hers as well as ours. After decades in the music industry, she still sounds invigorated and ecstatic, unburdened by cynicism or disappointment. With Tweedy, she has created a record that is mindful of her own past, yet these songs sound fresh, original, and often inspiring. | 2010-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | September 23, 2010 | 8.2 | 089c8f42-05cb-4ce4-b33b-db071aefd599 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On a new piano trio album, the jazz visionary delights in reverent arrangements from the Great American Songbook and beyond. | On a new piano trio album, the jazz visionary delights in reverent arrangements from the Great American Songbook and beyond. | Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Mesmerism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyshawn-sorey-trio-mesmerism/ | Mesmerism | Tyshawn Sorey is a renowned drummer, known for accompanying artists such as Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, and John Zorn, but over the past decade, he has made increasing critical waves for his work as a composer and bandleader, creating vivid landscapes for players and listeners to inhabit. With his latest album, Mesmerism, Sorey continues branching out, with a collection of six covers performed by a newly-formed piano trio. Instead of deconstructing the songs, he approaches each composition with reverence. Staying mostly faithful to the spirit of the originals, Mesmerism aligns itself with Bill Evans’ piano trio albums or Duke Ellington’s collaboration with Max Roach and Charles Mingus on Money Jungle.
The sound of the new trio is warm and intimate, putting melody and rhythm at the forefront. Matt Brewer’s bass playing is adventurous, poking and prodding the songs with contrapuntal grooves, while Aaron Diehl brings the melody, both under the guidance of Sorey’s supervision and percussive voice. Mesmerism is more accessible in contrast to Sorey’s previous piano trio albums, Alloy and Verisimilitude, which shared a focus on sophisticated harmony and texture.
The songs that Sorey has selected for Mesmerism range in style and time period. “For a long time, I felt an intense desire to record some of my favorite songs from the Great American Songbook as well as those by composers whose work I feel should also exist in this canon,” he has stated, and the selections range from standards like “Autumn Leaves” to modern compositions like Muhal Richard Abrams’ “Two Over One” and Paul Motian’s “From Time to Time.” Like Sorey, Abrams was a renowned composer who also taught composition, while Paul Motian was the drummer of the Bill Evans Trio. Sorey makes it clear they belong alongside older classics.
Depending on the song, the trio varies their approach. On “REM Blues,” they stick close to the original, leaning into the melodic lead. With “From Time to Time,” they transform the song into a dense fog as bass and piano notes bump into one another, searching for an exit. Only in the final moments do they introduce the central melody of the original composition. Meanwhile, for their take on “Detour Ahead,” the trio relishes the song’s title, allowing Diehl an extended piano solo that unhurriedly explores every possible avenue while Sorey and Brewer egg him on.
Sorey’s love for each of these songs is on full-window display. He explores them inside and out, with a group of collaborators who have never performed together on stage. Given his penchant for exciting, sprawling compositions, the project might seem like a bit of a trifle. But Sorey’s career thus far has offered proof that composition and improvisation, standards and the avant-garde, experimentation and tradition, are not different universes. They all exist in the same solar system, waiting to be rediscovered. | 2022-07-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Yeros7 Music | July 11, 2022 | 7.2 | 089fbd78-1d5a-4cb0-ac9f-eec7c2d4516d | Marshall Gu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marshall-gu/ | |
Neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern, the North Carolina folk scholar honors the past through transformation rather than reinvention. | Neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern, the North Carolina folk scholar honors the past through transformation rather than reinvention. | Jake Xerxes Fussell: Out of Sight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jake-xerxes-fussell-out-of-sight/ | Out of Sight | Musicians like Jake Xerxes Fussell are nearly as rare nowadays as the material he performs. “All songs are traditional & in the public domain,” reads the sole composition credit on Out of Sight, Fussell’s often-transcendent third album. Put another way: Each of these nine songs survived the great folk-pop copyright round-up of the 1950s and ’60s (and beyond), when publishers hunted down and claimed untold numbers of “traditional” melodies as their own. Fussell, as well as contemporaries like House and Land, Marisa Anderson, and others, are folk’s equivalent of organic farmers, reclaiming the genre from clever songwriters and pop mutators alike and expressing their voices by different parameters. Calling something “traditional” can be misleading—as House and Land’s Sarah Louise recently pointed out—but Out of Sight is a powerful reminder of music’s many vital, noncommercial pathways.
More than a mere interpreter, Fussell is a folkie in the preservationist, pre-Bob Dylan sense—learning from field recordings, folklorists’ transcriptions, archives, other musicians, and even YouTube videos, notating his sources, and reanimating the music through rites of joyous antiquarianism. Arrangements like “Jubilee” and “The River St. Johns” honor the past through transformation rather than reinvention, placing Fussell closer to the ideals of the reverent ’50s folk revivalists than their radical ’60s counterparts. Most often playing a clean electric guitar rather than the expected acoustic, a subtle and effective twist, Fussell’s touch is light and dreamy. While the tempo and density might scan as “chill,” the music is so elegant as to resist stereotyping. It’s relaxing in the way that pondering a Zen koan is relaxing, and sweet in the way that the wounded, honey-voiced blues of Mississippi John Hurt are sweet.
At its best, Out of Sight is timeless, both contemporary and not, its logic and concerns relatable, its arrangements neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern. While this strategy might yield middlebrow twang in lesser hands, Fussell steps into the space naturally. On his earlier solo recordings, he created an ambience with only his guitar and voice; this album is his first to feature a band on all tracks. Drums make any patch of folk melody sound “new,” but can be a challenge to pull off without diminishing the music’s atemporal mysteries. On “The Rainbow Willow,” especially, Fussell’s next-level mellowness seems to emanate through the surrounding players, particularly pedal steel guitarist Nathan Golub and drummer Nathan Bowles (himself an acclaimed modern folk revivifier). When the rhythm section falls into this mode, they find that ambience, too—a warm and collective musical charisma that defines the sound of Out of Sight.
On occasion, the album hovers at the fine line between laid-back and merely tasteful. The Irish song “Michael Was Hearty” (“See: ‘The Grand Match,’ Moira O’Neill, Songs of the Glens of Antrim, 1900”) edges on pub-folk fare. The music loses some of Fussell’s glow when it builds more on Bowles’ drums, finding grooves that veer towards the earthier sides of classic rock. “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” (learned via Pete Seeger) sounds a bit like the Band, and the conversational pocket of “Oh Captain” (“a variant of deckhand’s song” first recorded in 1927) isn’t far from off-brand early-’70s Grateful Dead. It’s all enjoyable, but Fussell’s uniqueness gets lost.
Most often, his bliss comes through in the atmosphere, which is when the music transcends notions of new or old, and Fussell’s particular creative voice rings most clearly. On “16-20,” a minimalist interpretation of a folk dance, Libby Rodenbough’s violin, Casey Toll’s bowed upright bass, and James Anthony Wallace’s organ combine and shift under Fussell’s guitar. It is perhaps the album’s most startling and contemporary-sounding moment, the instruments locking together into a powerful and nearly electronic vibration. It’s easiest to call it folk music, but it also resembles some of Yo La Tengo’s dronier moments.
Though the music isn’t always urgent, Fussell is no nostalgic channeler, either, even if the songs are nearly 100 years old. For all its wholesome ingredients and folk-on-sleeve earnestness, Out of Sight settles into a space out of time, one immediately adjacent to our own, where perhaps the ancient magic hasn’t dissipated. The past is always present; Fussell’s trick is to reveal that—if you know how to look—the present is always past, too. | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | June 6, 2019 | 7.4 | 08a0fe19-ce9c-4027-8bba-7c567120e814 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
In my nascent days of free-jazz lapping, it was much easier to hear of Sonny Sharrock than to actually hear ... | In my nascent days of free-jazz lapping, it was much easier to hear of Sonny Sharrock than to actually hear ... | Sonny Sharrock / Linda Sharrock: Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7101-paradise/ | Paradise | In my nascent days of free-jazz lapping, it was much easier to hear of Sonny Sharrock than to actually hear him. Sure, there were snatches, be it from his last (and convolutedly enough, most popular) work, the theme to Space Ghost, or his extra-dimensional tremors as sideman on Pharoah Sanders' Tauhid. But unless you felt like digging for some buried moments on Herbie Mann records (or his unaccredited turn on Miles' Jack Johnson), you were stuck with his 80s and 90s work. While Ask the Ages was furious (again teaming him with Sanders), and Guitar burned through Bill Laswell's slickness, most of us were stuck gleaming his six-string prophecies from the sludgy supergroup Last Exit, where he shared earspace with Laswell, Peter Brötzmann, and Ronald Shannon Jackson.
Only in the last two years has this changed, with a CD version of Black Woman finally unveiling the free-jazz fury that Sharrock concocted at the end of the 60s with wife Linda, pianist Don Pullen, and percussive octopus Milford Graves. A singular testament in the proto-forms of fire music's freedom skronk and feral rock howl, a follow-up would be daunting to any artist. And so, when he next turned up, in the BYG-Actuel series with Monkey Pocky Boo, Sharrock avoided the instrument that he reinvented for the free jazz genre, instead reaching for the, uh... slide whistle for half of side one.
Paradise was released five years later, and it headed straight for the cutout bins, rarely even filed under the "jazz" section in record stores. Looking like a disco-diva record, it came at a time when George Benson and Chuck Mangione were what "jazz" sounded like. And while the free and furious improvising of Sharrock's past two records could arguably not be called jazz, either, this time around the Sharrocks did away with their own history, as well as that of the genre, letting out something that defiantly remains unclassifiable and as outside of human time as that oft-idealized Paradise itself.
Taking their cue from modern R&B; radio and slick funk, "Apollo" commences with a dusted Diana Ross-like sighing before Linda decides to have a deep-throating contest, taking the mic far down her gullet for some gurgling. Meanwhile, the backing band starts acting like a zooted Gap Band before morphing into a prog band midway through, escalating into the upper registers of the synth. Sonny Sharrock starts off with a jubilant, almost African guitar tone, but then performs some positively dripping primordial No-Wave slobber in endlessly cascading/ascending guitar lines that slurp and go just far enough out, setting the table for the next 20 years of New York guitarists-- right up to Sonic Youth's shredding on "100%". By the time Linda's punched back into the track, with her salving vocal sighs and soft instrumental bedding, the crazy jag that just occurred is all but forgotten.
Producer (and noted tape composer in his own right) Ilhan Mimaroglu has a definite hand here in mashing the disparate strands of "Apollo" together, somewhere between his graceful massaging of the exotic jungle into the hairy back of Mingus' Cumbia & Jazz Fusion and his political acid-trip tape-splicing frenzy of Freddie Hubbard's Sing a Song of Song My, but it still makes little sense in the overall scheme of things, a belle confusion.
Continuing the schizophrenic oscillations between barbed Ono-outburst and velvety vowel abstraction is the beautiful respite of "End of the Rainbow", where Linda's wordless serenity swirls with washes of cymbals. The concord doesn't remain for long-- "Miss Doris" comes along clanking cowbells and timbales that bleed into a clavinet quiver. The sound quickly reaches g-funk frequencies as piercing as the continued caterwauls of the Missus, which go to that unholy place between Diamanda Galas and Curly of the Three Stooges. For more glottal oddities, she turns her lingua into a wah pedal on "1953 Blue Boogie Children", mixing Mellotron with Morse code as Sonny alternates channels of ping and pulverization brilliantly. The climax comes with the closer, "Gary's Step", which continually crescendos and then levitates even higher into the stratosphere for eight minutes, invoking the Ecclesiastics of classic free jazz's soulful wail, the one such piece that harkens to their past.
This is a strain of funk far from that of the Mothership, or even the tumultuous punched-in lurch of Miles' On the Corner. It's somewhat like the proto no-wave achieved on Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, combining Yin yips with hubby's masculine string malevolence over a rock-solid rhythmic pulse. No matter how much gibberish is splattered about by the couple, the bass and drums chugs along intact, greasing the broken chunks of tongue and guitar so that it's easier to swallow down. A quarter of a century on, Paradise is coming to be delectably digestible. | 2003-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Atco | February 10, 2003 | 7.9 | 08a2b30c-3d9d-4428-beb6-21b6e8a158ed | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
01 Intro
\n\ For Shawn Carter, the last seven years have been ridiculous. In 1996, he came up from an ... | 01 Intro
\n\ For Shawn Carter, the last seven years have been ridiculous. In 1996, he came up from an ... | Jay-Z: The Black Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4219-the-black-album/ | The Black Album | 01 Intro [w. Ryan Schreiber]
For Shawn Carter, the last seven years have been ridiculous. In 1996, he came up from an impoverished childhood in New York's Marcy projects to record a debut that would eventually come to be considered one of hip-hop's landmark albums, and spent the succeeding six years dominating Billboard charts, filling the East Coast void left by Biggie's death, and building a hip-hop empire to rival Puffy's Bad Boy Entertainment. In that time, he's seen as many failures as successes-- critics panned him for selling out after the critical reverence of Reasonable Doubt, La Roc Familia was a disaster from any angle, and, by Jay's standards, last year's The Blueprint 2 couldn't even claim to be a commercial success. Still, he's come out on top time and again: Today, he's reclaimed the title as hip-hop's reigning emcee, and his Rocafella record label, clothing line, and film company together are said to be valued at more than $4.4 billion.
So why would he want out now, at the peak of his popularity? The Black Album, touted as his final release, offers some answers, though none as clear-cut as what may or may not be the truth: that it's all an elaborate publicity stunt. Or maybe it's not: Jay has cut an album every year for the past seven years; that he'd want a break of some sort now is understandable. Certain lyrics hint that this isn't the last record he'll cut, but if that's true, will his game still be as tight when gets around to the comeback? It's anyone's guess, and that mystery is part of what makes this album such an intriguing listen.
The prospect of hip-hop's finest producers laying down tracks for the final LP from the rap world's brightest talent has made The Black Album one of the most anticipated rap records of the decade. What's stunning is that it delivers rap's greatest career-ender since Outkast's Stankonia. Even in falling short of Jay's classics, Reasonable Doubt and 2001's The Blueprint, it manages to eclipse 1999's brilliant Vol. 3: Life and Times of S. Carter as his third-best album-- which in itself makes it one of the year's best.
In light of the hype this record's received for its choice of beatmakers, we egomaniacally matched the personalities of our staff writers to Jay's producers. (However, we regret that we could not take the concept to its logical extreme and cease operations after publishing it.)
02 December 4th [p. Just Blaze; w. Rollie Pemberton]
In this game of stick-and-move with triumphantly spiraling Chi-Lites strings, Hova's mother Gloria narrates a dizzying tale of growth through adversity, unusual childhood circumstances, and the catalysts for our protagonist's career. The victorious overtone gives Carter the opportunity to apply his unwavering flow and powerful control of conceptual direction to his own personal experiences: When he details that he "had demons deep inside that would raise when confronted" and that "this is the life I chose, or rather, the life that chose me," the emotional context of the lines quickly turns to dumbstruck awe. Regardless of the reasonably simple Blueprint-tempered backing and familiar topical terrain, "December 4th" stands not just as one of Jay's finest performances to date, but Blaze's, too.
03 What More Can I Say [p. The Buchannans; w. Hartley Goldstein]
"What More Can I Say" is the sprawling pinnacle of every element that makes The Black Album an unrelentingly inspired future classic. Buchannans, one of two unknown producers featured here, supplies a triumphant instrumental that serves as a perfect counterpoint to Jay's trademark hubris and incendiary braggadocio. I mean, the track is introduced by a sample of dialogue from Gladiator: It doesn't get more epic than that, people! Merciless horn blasts, tender guitar licks, and turbulent string crescendos distract you when he identifies Martha Stewart as "Jewish," but the one element that makes "What More Can I Say" a true marvel is that, despite it serving as Jay-Z's alleged last hurrah, it manages to sound more like a celebratory changing of the guard than a self-penned elegy by one of hip-hop's greatest emcees.
04 Encore [p. Kanye West; w. Rob Mitchum]
It's a little hard to take Jay's claims of retirement at face value when The Black Album's first three songs all claim to be his last and this one makes reference to "when I come back like Jordan wearing the 45." But the concept of "Encore" makes such nitpicking irrelevant-- a track like this leaves you waiting for the comeback. Kanye West whips up a soul revue backing band complete with melancholy trumpet line and miasma-happy backup singers ("Hooo-woahhh-WOAHHH-ohvveee") for an imaginary mini-gig, while Jay contributes a very live-sounding performance. A posse chants for the hook while an emcee encourages crowd participation and the band idles between verses two and three. Sure, it sounds gimmicky on paper, but if anyone can pull it off it's "rap's Grateful Dead"... whatever that's supposed to mean. Keep on truckin', Jay.
05 Change Clothes [p. Neptunes; w. Ryan Schreiber]
The first single! And you know it's a hit already 'cause it's rocking the world's most reliable (and expensive) hip-hop production team. But no, and here's why not: The Neptunes, talented though they may be, have spread themselves a bit thin lately, coasting on Neptunes-by-numbers beats and Pharrell's by-now-goddamn-insidious falsetto. "Change Clothes" is, unfortunately, one of their worst productions since Busta's "Pass the Courvoisier"-- the vapid, forgettable chorus and cheesy piano loop are the obvious product of an off day in the studio. Jay fares no better, like he almost knows it's subpar-- just spits out a couple recycled lines, and forgoes his visual style to make room for crap like, "Young Hov in the house it's so necessary/ No bra with the blouse it's so necessary/ No panties and jeans that's so necessary." If they could afford to cut the Dre-produced "The Theater", surely this-- one of two Neptunes productions on a 14-track album-- could have been scrapped, too.
06 Dirt Off Your Shoulder [p. Timbaland; w. William Bowers]
If you're old, you probably macked in a maroon Fiero ten years ago, listening to Timbaland "get sticky" with Jodeci. If you're young, you could still spot him behind the curtain of this anthem's anti-syncopation and arcade-shogun keyboard coils. Don't be fooled by the title; the song is not a cave-in to Charlotte Beers (the dandruff-shampoo ad-exec who was until recently Bush's Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs), but that doesn't stop it from being a commercial for itself and its brand. Recapping the story of how Jay clambered from shooting birds at God while holding his testicles to being synonymous with overexposure, the song lives and dies by Timbaland's battering-ram beat and laser-tag riff. "Dirt" is gregarious but exclusive: It's meant to shake balcony barstools, but it coyly congratulates only those who have been beaten down. The chorus is about shedding a stigma, about the actualization of a capitalist dream, about legitimacy, about arrival-- for a guy ending his career, Jay's tone is suspiciously akin to pre-game smack. Because I'm old, I hear the Joeski Love ("Pee Wee's Dance") in Jay-Z's obtuse voice. Because I'm young, I acknowledge that he's larger than, er, life.
07 The Threat [p. 9th Wonder; w. Sam Chennault]
I can't decide what's stranger: that Little Brother producer 9th Wonder contributed a track on Jay-Z's final album, or that he's flipping a sample of R. Kelly. But it's 2003, and the entire underground/mainstream divide has been so flipped and conflated that it should come as no surprise. Nor should 9th's tendency to sound both hopelessly derivative and endlessly enjoyable; the track's rolling piano line and classic boom-bap breakbeat recall a smoother Primo, or a Pete Rock on autopilot.
Given a title like "The Threat" and Jigga's infamous street credentials, you'd expect a fairly macabre affair, but remember: This is a post-therapy Jigga (who dates Beyoncé and listens to Coldplay), not the crack slinger Reasonable Doubt introduced us to in '96. As such, the tone of the track is more comical than maudlin, and Cedric the Entertainer's guest spot won't let you forget it. Here, Jigga puts Larry King on his ass and namedrops Christina Aguilera, Bill O'Reilly, George Bush, Halle Berry, Warren Buffet, Joe Pesci, Sammy Davis Jr., Jet Li, David Blaine, and Frank Sinatra, and, in the second verse, even tries (only half-successfully) to twist them into verbs a la GZA's "Fame". The song is a disappointment, unfortunately-- an easy concept lazily executed. There are a couple of decent lines (e.g. "I will kill you, commit suicide, and kill you again"), but it's far from Jay's finest hour.
08 Moment of Clarity [p. Eminem; w. Ryan Schreiber, c/o Mullah Omar]
We asked Mullah Omar to write this part but he wanted all kinds of special treatment. Man, you should have seen his rider, it was totally nuts! It just proves Mullah makes the perfect Eminem: he's got his gimmick ("I WILL NOT BE EDITED!!!") and he just keeps beating you with it over and over. But for his outrageous demands, he still hits it out of the park; the same can't be said for Em, whose shit is all just the same these days: You get your minor-chord, downtempo horror-esque piano sample (a white boy copping a white boy-- where's Shadow's kickback on that shit?), your loping/plodding canned beat, some ominous strings, and you're done. The only difference between this and his Blueprint track, "Renagade", is that his sound was slightly less tired two years ago. Jay, fortunately, delivers a determined verse about his father's death, and one for Beanie Sigel. But saying he wants to "rhyme like Common Sense"? I cannot express my disappointment.
09 99 Problems [p. Rick Rubin; w. Brent DiCrescenzo]
Ain't-It-Cool rumor has it Hollywood plans for a live-action Transformers film. Feasibility of visual effects aside, the true question of the production is how to modernize Soundwave, the behemoth audio cassette "ghetto blaster" Transformer, for the MP3 generation. To the director, take a note from Rick Rubin's Jay-Z soundbomb: Keep it old school. Some studio suit surely wants a giant robot iPod smashing trucks, but the original concept still slays. Likewise, "99 Problems" towers over The Black Album's supposedly forward-looking tracks. Carrying the Decepticon analogy: The 808 kick quakes like Rumble's pistons. As the back of his toy box boasts, Frenzy's "screaming voice and belligerent manner alone could shake up an opponent, but he can enhance this effect by spinning the drum-like devices in his torso." So, too, does Rubin eject seismic, metallic blasts from his deck's chest like tornado-thrown telephone poles taking out a, um, transformer.
After years of intimate, acoustic productions for Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and his sawing work with Slayer and System of a Down, "99 Problems" re-establishes Rubin as THE mutherfucker with a swami's beard who invented this minimalist trunk rumble. And unlike any other track on this record, it can be said that Jay's vocals matter little. Close inspection reveals dubious claims such as, "Got beef with radio/ If I don't play their show/ They don't play my hits/ Well, I don't give a shit." His lips rip like Lazerbeak, but the meaning is inconsequential. Do Jay's problems run deeper than Rocawear inseam durability or Bentley electrical recalls? His self-aware braggadocio goes back to those days of comedic Jamaican toasts, which potentially amuse if you're ever tempted to turn down the volume.
10 Public Service Announcement [p. Just Blaze; w. Rollie Pemberton]
Dictating to a labored ringing piano roll and a thunderously high-toned extended organ riff, Jay-Z once again decimates his peers in their own game, handling the school of violent hubris in a manner that embodies not just mere lyrical supremacy but actual metaphorical depth. Hova is one of few artists who can ask his listenership to follow his fashion sense while simultaneously schooling the talent pool on rhyming style in a single line: "I got a hustler's spirit, nigga, period/ Check out my hat, yo, peep the way I wear it." It's also a way of saying that the genre's old hat to him these days, even while it was his style that so ridiculously raised the bar. A bold statement among bold statements, this track is mastery of a style, regardless of brevity, repetition, or random use of quotations.
11 Justify My Thug [p. DJ Quik; w. Chris Dahlen]
The big story behind this track is that Madonna was supposed to give it live vocals but couldn't make the deadline. Instead, they went with Sharlotte Gibson, a longtime backup vocalist for Whitney Houston, who pulls off an adequate impression. The track is all about DJ Quik's electro beat, though, which starts out whomping and wears itself out through repetition. Sadly, not much else happens. It's easy to tag this as the simplest, weakest moment on the record-- I don't think anyone could reasonably contest that-- but on the other hand, it is nice 'n' nasty, and hilarious for how it makes Jay's thug life lyrics so unromantic and just-for-show. The lyrics moan on about gangsta code and social ills, but over that beat, he just sounds like he wants to get some ass on his face.
12 Lucifer [p. Kanye West; w. Rob Mitchum]
On first listen, "Lucifer" comes off a bit too close to flavor-of-the-month material for an album that promised to avoid easy singles: The accelerated Max Romeo sample could be construed as pandering to the Jamaican influences back in favor with hip-hop, and the refrain, "I'm from the murder capitol where we murder for capital," is wordplay a little too beginner's-level for Hov. Fortunately, his verses make up for these slights by following an incredibly intricate structure, somehow managing to land on religious imagery every time the sample comes up, while Kanye's beat retains a snaky bounce without going down the obvious ragga route. If it does indeed end up a single, like "Beware of the Boys" it'll still be jagged enough to stand out in the trend-pile.
13 Allure [p. Neptunes; w. Ryan Schreiber]
This is more like it. The Neptunes come back hard from their substandard earlier offering, riding a string section slick enough to rival Love Unlimited, a pulsing kick/snare combo, and gunshots for percussive effect and good measure. Jay is particularly on point, killing line after line like a Blueprint standout. It's the penultimate Jay-Z track ever, and buoyed on that stormy, oceanic orchestra, Hov comes damn close to teary-eyed: "Shit, I know how this movie ends/ Still I play/ The starring role in Hovito's Way." "Allure" is Jay in eternal struggle with his vices, confident as ever he can give up the game, but even the title forebodes. He knows, and when the Neptunes downshift and the chorus kicks in, reality strikes: "But every time I felt that was that, it called me right back/ OHHH NOOOO!" This is the sound of a career high.
14 My 1st Song [p. Aqua and Joe "3H" Weinberger; w. Scott Plagenhoef]
After spending most of the record summing up his life and career, Jay thankfully doesn't try to end it with the Cliff's Notes version. He instead handles his "second major breakup" by coupling his typically self-celebratory language with avuncular advice-- from himself and Biggie, who drops in from the afterlife-- and a rare display of humility. Throughout the sentimental closer, Jay keeps his chin up and makes the song cry with emotive, bolero-tinged production from the previously unknown team of Aqua and Joe "3H" Weinberger. Always the entrepreneur, Hova abdicates his throne and slips into his full-time CEO role with a series of almost memoir-like shoutouts that double as teasers for his upcoming bio, The Black Book-- in stores soon! | 2003-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Roc-A-Fella | November 16, 2003 | 8 | 08a3014c-3eae-4748-a886-605610149543 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
The first spoils of the fabled Dreamville sessions feature J. Cole and his label mostly thriving in a collaborative environment. | The first spoils of the fabled Dreamville sessions feature J. Cole and his label mostly thriving in a collaborative environment. | Various Artists: Revenge of the Dreamers III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-revenge-of-the-dreamers-iii/ | Revenge of the Dreamers III | The only person to rap on three J. Cole albums released over the last five years has been, well, J. Cole. “I’m reaching a point in my career over this past year where I don’t want to look back 20 years from now and be like, ‘I never worked with nobody; I never had no fun’,” he says early in the new making-of documentary REVENGE. What started as an empty gesture flaunted by a passionate fanbase soon became a meme wielded by his haters. Going it solo affords you full credit for your ideas and successes, to be sure, but the flip side of that coin is isolation. When you’re the only voice in the studio, or at least the only one that matters, the booth can become an echo chamber.
The Revenge of the Dreamers III compilation is an attempt to reconnect J. Cole with his peers. He seems humbled by his interactions with younger rappers in the wake of the abstinence-core of KOD and the schoolmarmish “1985 (Intro to The Fall Off).” He’s hungry for collaborative energy, to find a new sense of community that can both enlighten and inspire him. Though not always unified in vision, Dreamers III reveals new bonds born of passion, circumstance, and shared experience.
J. Cole’s label Dreamville touts itself as “the label of the connected age,” but it has been all but sequestered from the wider rap community until earlier this year. After previous Dreamville comps were produced as an assortment of solo songs with a few features spliced in over email, the label heads wanted to get everyone in the same room. So for 10 days in January, the Dreamville roster convened at Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta. Gilded posters requesting the “presence and participation” of over 100 rappers, singers, and producers were sent out. Invited participants started posting their summons on Twitter and Instagram, and the mystique and intrigue of the thing started to take hold. But the Dreamville bosses never imagined these sessions would turn from a label summit to massive assembly of the rap Avengers.
Of the more than 124 songs created during those creative powwows, Cole and Dreamville president Ibrahim Hamad settled on 18 for the final Revenge of the Dreamers III project. A handful are big posse cuts, but it’s largely run-of-the-mill team-ups, solo singles, and a few songs split into two. The Dreamville natives take precedence on the comp, pushing everyone else into the margins. Atlanta’s J.I.D gets to chop it up with one-time king T.I. over old flames, their “Ladies, Ladies, Ladies” a more cordial spin on JAY-Z’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.” “Down Bad” cuts a Young Nudy verse short to get into a Dreamville posse cut. Though the outsiders sometimes feel like window-dressing, they do get some quality time. The idea of the comp is perfectly realized on “Got Me,” where three producers warp Faith Evans’ “Come Over” into an aphrodisiac for mixed company; Ari Lennox, Ty Dolla $ign, Omen, and Dreezy pair off for a jam that feels like being wrapped in the embrace at a slow dance.
Then there’s “1993,” a cypher inside a smoke session, where each rapper’s verse gets interrupted by someone yelling to pass the blunt and keep the rotation moving. It’s an apt and unwitting commentary on how the compilation is at its most organic when the rotations are fluid, no one says too much, and everyone’s on the same page. The best parts of DreamersIII are when Cole & Friends mix it up with their guests and step outside of their comfort zones. “Don’t Hit Me Right Now” pairs Dreamville’s Bas, Cozz, and Ari Lennox with Buddy, Guapdad 4000, and Yung Baby Tate and they mesh into a muggy Galimatias production. On “LamboTruck,” Dreamville’s Cozz and TDE’s Reason brainstorm robbing each other’s respective label bosses in one of the few coherent ideas that extends beyond just outrapping one another.
Few verses on the album are particularly memorable outside of spots from Maxo Kream, Vince Staples, a string of appearances from the consistently good J.I.D, and the standalone moments of introspection from J. Cole himself. But the comp works because it never feels forced or closed off to ideas. Cole sheds the trap parody of KOD to really identify with those younger than him, even if it’s just to reach an understanding: We’ll all be better off if we work together. “Everything grows/It’s destined to change/I love you lil niggas/I’m glad that you came,” Cole raps on “Middle Child,” and though he’s speaking generally, it feels representative of this successful meeting of the minds. | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Dreamville / Interscope | July 9, 2019 | 7.1 | 08a58b2c-ac9d-43f5-bace-8674871f5245 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The singer’s seventh album moves between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave her talents largely underused. | The singer’s seventh album moves between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave her talents largely underused. | Ciara: Beauty Marks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ciara-beauty-marks/ | Beauty Marks | Over the past 15 years, Ciara’s career has become emblematic of a certain kind of pop star resilience: With six albums totaling over 23 million sales and a Grammy to her name, Ciara endures as a radio mainstay, but following the highs of her stellar 2013 self-titled fifth album, she reverted to momentum-killing, paint-by-number songwriting on follow-up Jackie. Beauty Marks is Ciara’s seventh album and first release since signing to Warner Bros. and forming her own company, Beauty Marks Entertainment, a creative departure that should have paved the way for the singer to create music more firmly in her own image. Yet despite a handful of highlights, Beauty Marks is marred by filler, moving between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave Ciara’s talents largely underused.
Beauty Marks prolongs the breakup and redemption narrative Ciara introduced on Jackie, focusing on a steadfast dedication to marriage, friendship, and emotional catharsis. But the message of persevering through struggle is kneecapped instantly by “I Love Myself,” a stiff ballad with a mystifying feature from Macklemore, here to complete his evolution into the John Mayer of rap: “Don’t want the ’Gram telling my daughters what beauty is, nah/I ain’t raising princesses/I’m raising warriors.” The song is negligible next to the frantic Jersey club beat of “Level Up,” a polyrhythmic romp and far better conduit for Ciara’s energetic self-encouragement. The DJ Telly Tellz–sampling song inspired a bonafide dance challenge last summer, evoking the vitalizing heyday of Ciara’s breakthrough single “Goodies” even despite its goofy lyrics (“Know you want this yummy, yummy all in your tummy”).
That divide, however, exemplifies Beauty Marks: Own your self-love with bouncy verve, but keep it all just beige enough for radio. She recruits a guest verse from Kelly Rowland over a flurry of sampled horns and trap beats on squad highlight “Girl Gang,” but it’s at odds with “Set,” a merely serviceable club song that sounds like a watered-down version of hard-hitting singles like “I’m Out” or “Gimmie Dat.” Still, Ciara is at her freest on Beauty Marks, both personally and professionally. On “Dose,” a Darkchild production with marching band horns and a stomping drumline, she quite literally cheerleads you on your journey to the same triumphant state of mind. Unfortunately, it sounds like a gimmick fit for an NFL commercial. The title track, a heartfelt ballad, is less overdone and better for it. The song paints her marriage to quarterback Russell Wilson in refreshingly earnest, real terms: “What did I do to deserve someone to hold me like you do?”
Despite the unevenness, Ciara manages to add a few new wrinkles to her career with Beauty Marks. She relaxes into a featherlight flow alongside Nigerian pop star Tekno on the balmy “Freak Me,” and she shines on the bubbly single “Thinkin Bout You,” a full-on Whitney confection that’s her most capital-P pop moment in recent memory. “Thinkin Bout You” is a snug fit for her fluttering vocals, revealing a side of Ciara we haven’t heard before—breezy and lovestruck, with chintzy, ’80s production as a glittering backdrop. It just happens to be a brief bright spot on an otherwise minor entry in her catalog. | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Beauty Marks | May 16, 2019 | 6.5 | 08a8e993-c89b-49a4-9f2b-db5f96036d33 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The Australian singer-songwriter’s debut album brings her captivating voice and keen eye to songs that demolish expectations. Fierce, funny, and unsettling, her music is empathetic to the core. | The Australian singer-songwriter’s debut album brings her captivating voice and keen eye to songs that demolish expectations. Fierce, funny, and unsettling, her music is empathetic to the core. | Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stella-donnelly-beware-of-the-dogs/ | Beware of the Dogs | Stella Donnelly arrived on American shores with a message that cut through a noisy indie-rock landscape. In the U.S., the Perth-based songwriter’s debut was “Boys Will Be Boys,” a commanding song about rape culture that landed in the fall of 2017, just as #MeToo crescendoed. In that moment, Donnelly’s indictment of victim-blamers echoed the sentiment of the thousands of women called upon to publicly excavate their trauma. The single introduced then 25-year-old Donnelly—who already had a following and an EP (Thrush Metal, reissued in the U.S. last year) back at home—as an artist with a captivating voice and a powerful message.
“Boys Will Be Boys” feels as vital and affecting today as when it first came out, but it divulges just a fraction of what makes Donnelly’s songwriting so special. On Beware of the Dogs, her first full-length, a more robust picture emerges. Her songs are complex and surprising, full of sharp corners poised to bruise unsuspecting limbs. Trading in humor as well as gravitas, they are often pulled taut with genuine pain and then snapped with a well-placed punch line. Opener “Old Man,” where Donnelly inveighs against abusers, sets the tone for the record. Its weighty subject matter grates against the chipper guitar tone and Donnelly’s breezy delivery of the song’s most vivid line: “Your personality traits don’t count if you put your dick in someone’s face.” Is she going for a laugh, or a cringe, or both? It sounds like a crass joke, even as it lays out a grim reality.
This sort of irony is the crux of Donnelly’s songwriting. It inserts a consistent point of view across an album whose songs range considerably in scope, at times contracting around the singer’s idle thoughts, at others expanding to bigger sociopolitical topics. Donnelly loves the element of surprise so much she’s built it right into the track list, writing songs that demolish the expectations set by their titles—like “Die,” an upbeat take on a crumbling relationship that likens a partner’s inconsistency to errant driving, and ends with Donnelly gleefully chanting, “I don’t wanna die!” You can picture her drop-and-rolling, Lady Bird-style, from the passenger seat. “Watching Telly,” on the other hand, isn’t at all about the titular activity; it’s a jittery synth number addressing men who rob women of corporeal agency (“They tape dollar signs to our bodies/And tell us not to show our skin”).
The way Donnelly wields her humor can be uplifting, empowering listeners to find the levity in tough situations. It can also be deeply unnerving. Devoid of context, the line “Like a mower in the morning/I will never let you rest”—a legitimate threat couched in language befitting suburban dads—is a hoot. When I first heard Donnelly sing it on “Boys Will Be Boys,” I giggled, then squirmed in my seat, furious at myself for having laughed aloud at a song about rape. Then again, that may just be the point—discomfort is perhaps the most appropriate sensation to experience while listening to this song.
In some ways, Beware of the Dogs feels like a relative of recent work by Donnelly’s countrywoman Courtney Barnett. Both writers wander between the mundane and the momentous; they showcase their wit and punkish attitudes in songs known to turn on a dime. Donnelly has one tool in her kit which Barnett lacks—an impressively dexterous voice, which she puts to work in service of some of her album’s most winsome moments. She can coax out a lovely vibrato, as on “Allergies,” a forlorn breakup tune that unfolds over delicate solo guitar; she can yelp and tease like she does on “Tricks,” a cheerful caricature of moronic Australian men. Donnelly got her start in cover bands, singing AC/DC and Aretha to drunk pharmaceutical reps (whose lewd behavior, incidentally, inspired “Tricks”) at conventions, which explains her versatility and range. That’s not to say that Donnelly’s an imitator—what she accomplishes with these 13 tracks is distinctive.
Fierce as Donnelly’s writing can be, it’s empathetic to the core. Her concern for vulnerable bodies surfaces repeatedly; she sings for friends who have suffered abuse, for women who feel the pinch of objectification, and, on the album’s title track, for her country’s First Nations population and the injustices they have endured. These songs don’t contain much promise of resolution—how could they, really—but they offer solidarity and, in their humor, grace, and rampant unpredictability, are perfectly human. “I like the way that you tell all your tales,” Donnelly sings to her companion on one track; “Would it kill you to listen for once?” With Beware of the Dogs, she shows off a singular talent in both arenas. | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | March 11, 2019 | 7.6 | 08ad51ac-47df-4d70-a6fc-491edf59b00e | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Originally conceived for a New Year's Eve show, the Flaming Lips and guests Peaches and Henry Rollins cover the Pink Floyd classic. | Originally conceived for a New Year's Eve show, the Flaming Lips and guests Peaches and Henry Rollins cover the Pink Floyd classic. | The Flaming Lips / Stardeath and White Dwarfs: The Dark Side of the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13836-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/ | The Dark Side of the Moon | Like the prism on the iconic cover of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd's legacy can be refracted many different ways. For one, there's the different eras marked by different bandleaders, from Syd Barrett's storybook psychedelia to Roger Waters misanthropic art-rock to David Gilmour's inoffensive arena-filling stuff. But there are also more subjective takes on the Floyd's influence: you could view them as psych-prog pioneers or the bloat that inspired punk, the band that pushed the limit of the rock concert or the band that made the concert more about theatrics than music, studio wizards or mere inventors of a popular stereo test record.
You might divine then why Floyd appeals to the Flaming Lips right now. I count at least five of those things on that list that could be lobbed (fairly or un-) at the Lips after 27 years; being hated by Johnny Rotten is the only one (probably) beyond their reach. And their appreciation runs deep-- in an interview with Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal, Wayne Coyne remembered goofing on Jesus and Mary Chain fans by covering "Wish You Were Here", when the bands toured together in 1984. But why tackle hoary old Dark Side now, on the heels of the band's triumphant return to in-your-face psychedelic weirdness on last year's Embryonic? And why invite a cavalcade of characters-- Peaches, Henry Rollins, Coyne's nephew's band-- certain to make people think it's all a gag?
After all, Dark Side of the Moon is an album so ingrained in the collective consciousness your grandma can probably call "Money” from the first ring of the cash register. It was also, arguably, Floyd's big money play-- a strange thing to say for a 40-minute continuous song cycle, but a clear conclusion when you look at the swollen 20-minute epics and found-sound experiments that came before it on Meddle and Atom Heart Mother. Ambitious and as tightly wound as a symphony, Dark Side is nevertheless made up of detachable movements that can double as standalone pop songs and classic rock staples.
The Lips, of course, don't go for precision or radio-friendliness, even as they seem to be paying tribute rather than taking the piss out of Pink Floyd. Perhaps the Soft Bulletin-era Lips would've had some interest in recreating the grandeur of the Floyd's original, but the run-through sometimes resembles a sibling of Embyronic's oddities. "Breathe", in both its appearances, reprises the jagged bass grooves and guitar sqwonk of "Convinced of the Hex" and "See the Leaves", while "On the Run" and "Any Colour You Like" are fractured space-boogie that echo the gloriously messy sprawl of "Powerless" and "The Ego's Last Stand".
Those standout instrumentals are collaborations with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, the band fronted by Wayne Coyne's nephew Dennis Coyne, and both make Coyne family reunions sound like good, illegal fun-- jammy affairs that sprinkle some much needed disco dust on Floyd's austere originals. Left to their own devices, Stardeath's take on "Time" and "Brain Damage" are less inspired, the former replacing the clockwork rhythm with coughing and panting and lost lyrics, the latter coming off relatively flat compared to the original, despite well-deployed singing saw. The kids shouldn't feel so bad, as the old guys don't fare too well themselves, neutering "Money" into a mechanized 8-bit lope, and minimally adjusting the track that needs the most help, the plodding "Us and Them".
The second tier of guests are also a split decision. Peaches' job is basically to moan orgasmically through "Great Gig in the Sky". But Henry Rollins, tasked with recreating the snippets of dialogue from Floyd's crew that float around the original, contributes all the line-reading talent you'd expect from the star of "The Chase" and "Feast". At least he doesn't attempt an English accent.
The guest star clusterfuck brings to mind the similar project of the Lips' former tourmate Beck, whose Record Club series brings a random cast of characters to record an album in one day. The comparison doesn't reflect well on this Dark Side though, which comes off stiffer than Beck's ramshackle recreations, but without much in the way of thoughtful annotations to add to the original text. At its best, it's a more unhinged take on Floyd's song cycle of insanity-- like putting the Floyd that played "Interstellar Overdrive" into a time machine to meet the Floyd that wrote "Money". But the Flaming Lips and their co-conspirators can't settle on a color of the Floyd spectrum and run with it, leaving this Dark Side as a lunar capsule lost somewhere between a love letter and a joke. | 2010-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | January 18, 2010 | 5.2 | 08af9a4a-a423-46a3-891c-8a510475f40d | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
True Panther collects 7" tracks released over the past few years by Seth Bogart's homoerotic, rock'n'roll throwbacks. | True Panther collects 7" tracks released over the past few years by Seth Bogart's homoerotic, rock'n'roll throwbacks. | Hunx and His Punx: Gay Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14015-gay-singles/ | Gay Singles | Despite the fact that Gay Singles is Hunx and His Punx's trashy-excellent first full-length, you may be familiar with the group's frontman Hunx, aka Seth Bogart, whether you know it or not. Perhaps you know him from his keyboard and vocal duties in Oakland's garishly theatrical, ambisexual band Gravy Train!!!!. Or perhaps you recognize him from his very naked appearance in the "hardcore" version of his labelmates Girls' "Lust For Life" video. Or maybe you're one of the fans that have been trolling eBay for the five hard-to-find, sold-out Hunx and His Punx singles that have been released (and just as quickly snapped up) over the past two years.
If you count yourself in the latter category, then you're in luck; this album collects the tunes from those 7”s, presenting them (along with new bonus track "Do the Make Up") together for the first time. If you count yourself in the first category, however, you may be quite surprised by Gay Singles. There are no cartoonish synthesizer melodies, cheap Casio beats, or party-starting cacophonies of cowbell. There's no tongue-in-cheek rapping, either. Yes, the content is still overtly sexual, but it is softer and sweeter-- both lyrically and musically-- than anything you'd expect from a Gravy Train!!!! member.
Hunx and His Punx make swooning bubblegum-punk, and though they aren't the first group to marry the effortless, sugary pop of 60s girl groups with the garage-rock revival, they might be the first whose skuzzy "My Boyfriend's Back"-like songs are explicitly homoerotic. There is a wry dissonance between the songs' easy three-chord strums, resonant vintage organ flourishes, and hand-clapped percussion and their plainspoken lyrics about getting into someone's pants. The songwriters (most tracks are credited to a combination of Bogart and Justin Champlin, the garage-punk character known as Nobunny) may think they're being shocking, but the lyrics are actually charmingly innocent. While Gravy Train!!!! sing explicitly raunchy lyrics about masturbation, lap dances, and hand jobs, Hunx are more interested in winning over straight guys ("I don't think he's gonna miss her/ Cuz I'm a really good kisser," Bogart sings on "Good Kisser"), and flipping 60s girl-pop tropes like waiting for boys to call.
The outrageously tarty presentation plus faux naïve musical content highlights a winning group of influences-- John Waters, the Shangri-Las, the Ramones-- and the collection is surprisingly cohesive for a singles compilation. Bogart sings with a whining, nasal bray that may be off-putting or gratingly flat to some, but swathed in cheap, tinny reverb, it gets the rebellious, adolescent vibe right. After all the homoeroticism, this is at heart a record about the thrust and vitality of rock'n'roll: "You like Morrissey, you like U2/ What the fuck is wrong with you?" Bogart sings on opener "You Don't Like Rock'n'Roll", and if you think it's a legit question you might want to sing it along with him. | 2010-03-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-03-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / True Panther | March 16, 2010 | 7.3 | 08b6b3af-7152-4886-aeab-5c305ca3a6ec | Pitchfork | null |
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On her second album, the New Jersey singer-songwriter recenters her romantic anguish through a more muted delivery, but her plaintive songwriting hasn’t lost its intoxicating touch. | On her second album, the New Jersey singer-songwriter recenters her romantic anguish through a more muted delivery, but her plaintive songwriting hasn’t lost its intoxicating touch. | 070 Shake: You Can’t Kill Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/070-shake-you-cant-kill-me/ | You Can’t Kill Me | 070 Shake’s tormented, cathartic blend of rap and R&B was a thrilling anomaly in 2020, when a pair of star-turn guest features on GOOD Music albums led to her striking debut, Modus Vivendi. Two years later, Shake’s despairing, rafters-reaching voice still holds the same weight, but it’s accrued a more subtle context. On You Can’t Kill Me, her second album, the New Jersey singer-songwriter retains her style while also reining it in, recentering the push-and-pull of romantic anguish that lives at the heart of her music through a more muted delivery. Here, her sound is full of keening synths, electric guitars, and heavy drum beats, furnished by co-executive producer and regular collaborator Dave Hamelin. Even Shake’s delivery is more measured on You Can’t Kill Me, as she reaches for mumbled melodies rather than shout-along choruses, but her woozy, plaintive songwriting doesn’t lose its intoxicating touch.
You Can’t Kill Me is at its best when it offers surprising, welcome wrinkles to Shake’s sound. “Vibrations” opens with over a minute of echoing, ambient vocal experimentation before pivoting into triumphant, head-nodding rap-pop; “Blue Velvet” coasts on breezy, bossa nova strings and hand percussion, a deviation in style that Shake uses for a tormented ballad about a lover’s dress. On the sultry “Body,” a co-production between Dave Sitek and Mike Dean, Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens offers a punchy counterbalance, matching her low-key vocals with Shake’s to evoke the pangs of physical attraction. Yet she rarely stays in a contented frame of mind for long before the eventual spiral. “I wanted your body,” Shake insists in a frayed, last-ditch plea, “but it came with your soul.”
Like Modus Vivendi, most of the lyrics on You Can’t Kill Me focus on difficult heartache and self-reflection, but here she comes to sharper realizations about becoming another source of her own pain. “I wanna drink all night and stay inside/I think I been the problem,” she croons on early standout “Invited,” the words sparse against a billowing, delicately plucked melody. The album traces a loose arc toward moving on from a past flame. By “Vibrations,” a confident Shake is ready to bet on herself and reach the other side: “You will never lead me to where you want me.”
The contemplation and growth takes You Can’t Kill Me a little deeper than her past work, but sometimes the softened vocal delivery underscores her weaker songwriting. Songs vacillate between affecting ruminations on romantic confusion and mushy philosophical musings. On the frictionless “Wine and Spirits,” a dirgey ballad about how fame has deteriorated a relationship, she fumbles over repeated clumsy phrasing. “Yin and the yang is more than just a symbol,” she trills beneath melodramatic peals of guitar. “Life is ’bout balance, war and harmony.” The koan-like setups frustratingly hinder the album’s more gripping moments of self-examination.
Whether in art or in life, Shake appears exceedingly aware of impending criticism. “It don’t matter what you’re doin’/People gonna judge you too,” she warns on “Come Back Home.” Plainspokenness is part of her charm; she sings from the heart of whatever anxious moment is troubling her. On the tense highlight “Cocoon,” she proves it—over a hypnotic, nervous synth line, she describes coming into her own through the uneasy process of outgrowing a partner. “Why you didn’t grow now I don’t know/It’s making me so emotional,” she sings with coolly detached restraint, just before the song detonates with an earthshaking bassline at the last word. Even when she sounds like she’s nearing the end of her rope, Shake stabilizes the chaos with a sharp sense of control. | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | June 7, 2022 | 7 | 08b9af40-0fe9-4aa1-89f1-46e4a136d6a0 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The recent breakout band follows its delightful 2006 album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, with a long-awaited new folk-pop record. | The recent breakout band follows its delightful 2006 album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, with a long-awaited new folk-pop record. | Midlake: The Courage of Others | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13885-the-courage-of-others/ | The Courage of Others | In the middle of 2006, Midlake released The Trials of Van Occupanther, a record of Ren Faire-infused folk-pop shot through with a healthy dose of post-blues, pre-bitterness Fleetwood Mac. Van Occupanther was full of small delights and the occasional major triumph. Its charms were subtle; occasionally a shimmering melodic flourish or a shade in singer Tim Smith's earthy throat would float into the mix and really knock you out. Though it dragged a touch toward the end and sometimes felt a bit self-satisfied in its smoothness, it was a pleaser and-- because it moved them light years beyond the gooey Grandaddy-lite of their debut without much apparent effort-- seemed to promise good stuff on the bound.
At long last, we have The Courage of Others, reportedly the product of the perennial touring band's newfound obsession with the British folk of Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and the like. It was, they've said in interviews, an attempt to distance themselves from Van Occupanther, which is understandable; after three and a half years of touring behind a record, ripping it up and starting again is what you do. But there were shades of the kind of British folk they're talking about all over Van Occupanther; fewer flutes, maybe, but the same sort of compositional fussiness and hushed, dulcet tones matched with rich harmonies. And they were, virtually without exception, woven together into far better songs. Van Occupanther, low-key though it was, kept the arrangements frothy and dynamic, the tunes multifaceted and sweeping, the playing precise but limber. The Courage of Others is a step down on songcraft, atmosphere, and apparently, even self-awareness: If you're trying to distance yourself from something, you wouldn't plunge headfirst into it, would you?
Without calling too much attention to it, Van Occupanter swayed and squirmed, and as a result of this constant shift, songs rarely ended up where they started. Save the occasional flittery fingerpicked intro, the tunes on The Courage of Others take up the same languid, near-narcotic pace, and they stick with it. Van Occupanther's best songs seemed to match up a couple of disparate ideas and found ways to slowly lead one toward the other-- the prim verse melody of "We Gathered in Spring" didn't seem an easy fit with that song's gooey choral descent, but they patiently bring the two together, and the resulting payoff lent the lovely but lethargic tune some drama. There are no stakes like that with the Courage songs, no sense that things might fly off into uncharted territory. Theirs is an exceptionally polite reading of these British folk constructions, and as nearly every tune tumbles through its ornate intro, its hushed first verse, and the minor lift of its chorus, your patience wears as thin as the tunes.
It's no help that Smith, never the most expressive vocalist, sounds at times uninterested; his vocal melodies have gotten simpler to match the music, but he himself seems detached, delivering every line with the kind of passion you might reserve for courtesy calls. Lyrically, Van Occupanther's man-out-of-time treatments of honor and family were admirably antiquated, but while Courage picks up Occupanther's naturalistic bent, it lacks a thesis to tie it all together. That, I suppose, it leaves to the all-too-similar execution. With precious little exception, these songs are just so wispy, and the band's treatment of them so delicate, it turns Courage into a museum piece, stuffy, bloodless. A lot of those Britfolk cats were really hot players and there's not even that to hold onto; every performance is a few notches above adequate, but there's no bite to any of it, no intensity, precious little conveyance of emotion. I wish there were a single great song, one shining moment to point to as a beacon of hope for what's to come for these guys, but Courage just feels so monochromatic, so flatlined, even the tiniest signs of life have no power to resuscitate. | 2010-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Bella Union | February 3, 2010 | 3.6 | 08bc9394-359d-4940-b5a1-80fe8967fb46 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
After the Western soundscapes of their debut album took hold through Spotify, the New York quintet return with an expanded edition of their meditative, magnetic debut. | After the Western soundscapes of their debut album took hold through Spotify, the New York quintet return with an expanded edition of their meditative, magnetic debut. | SUSS: Ghost Box (Expanded) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suss-ghost-box-expanded/ | Ghost Box (Expanded) | If you want to approximate the hypothetical essence of time travel, consider a drive through the southwestern United States. Mountains and mesas rise from the landscape in improbable ways, making it impossible for a new arrival to tell if a geographic feature is 25 or 250 miles away. A four-hour drive down an empty desert highway can feel as sublime and effortless as a Sunday stroll in a city park. The New York quintet SUSS capture these surreal sensations with uncanny precision on Ghost Box, their debut album. The band self-released a seven-song edition of Ghost Box in February; it took surprising hold through Spotify, with the whistle-laced “Late Night Call” alone accruing several million streams. Now, under the aegis of experimental syndicate Northern Spy, they have updated it with four unreleased tracks. What was once a neatly rendered portrait is now an immersive panorama.
During the 1980s, SUSS founder Bob Holmes and Gary Lieb, who manipulates electronic loops here, were part of Rubber Rodeo, a country-fried New Wave ensemble that suggests a midpoint between the B-52’s and Southern Culture on the Skids. In SUSS, their spirit is less hurried, favoring slow-motion ascension over neon ricochets. Jonathan Gregg’s elastic pedal steel playing summons shifting desert views, while the gently twangy guitars of Pat Irwin and William Garrett shape a distinct country sensibility, so these pieces feel more like songs than mere soundscapes.
The environments SUSS create aren’t populated by swaggering buckaroos or shoot-’em-up showdowns; they instead survey the vast swaths of nothing and no one that cover so much of the Western landscape. “Wichita” begins with wobbly circles of guitar and pedal steel, spiraling around two alternating bass notes. It’s immediately hypnotizing, almost narcotic, suggesting it could go on forever. Other tracks are hazy or ambling. “Steam,” an addition for this edition, expands and contracts repeatedly over its seven-and-a-half-minute stretch; soft puffs of static offset pools of pedal steel and guitar, which reverberate through layers of distortion. The drift recalls the vague anxiety of watching a serious storm approach, especially as thundering low-end builds during the back half.
Like the desert, which secretly teems with life, SUSS’s ambiance reveals greater nuance and depth upon inspection. A throbbing industrial rhythm and distorted snippets from cowboy movies nearly make “Gunfighter” unnerving, creating menacing tension by wrapping inky rhythms in pedal steel. “Canyonlands (Return to Wichita)” is wistful and marked by the slightest trace of uplift, while the echoes of someone whistling through the hum of “Late Night Call” lends the song a sense of aimless searching. The whistle is gentle and loose, used to fend off boredom or announce one’s presence to figures unseen, not a sounded alarm.
The animating principle of Ghost Box is less one of manifest destiny than deliberate moseying, underscored by the expansive guitar ripples of “Rain” and the moderate rhythmic patter of closer “After the Storm.” Ambient music aims to build an environment, be it one that can be relegated to the background or create an all-encompassing wonderland. With Ghost Box, SUSS favors the latter interpretation through a vivid landscape where mellifluous tones foster the mystery and magic of a fabled landscape. | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | November 26, 2018 | 7.6 | 08c024be-2125-4fef-b0ae-d8113aed20d3 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Camae Ayewa channels the politics of noise music and Afrofuturism for a deeply confrontational and affecting album that makes real and visceral the trauma of the past. | Camae Ayewa channels the politics of noise music and Afrofuturism for a deeply confrontational and affecting album that makes real and visceral the trauma of the past. | Moor Mother: Fetish Bones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22424-fetish-bones/ | Fetish Bones | The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany wrote that the raison d'être of the genre was not about creating an imagined future, but to consider a world in which art can provide “a significant distortion of the present.” To travel through time, to be plopped out on the other end of a wormhole was to excavate the present moment and remix the past.
For the Afrofuturist music critic Kodwo Eshun, this thinking was essential. The art of the Afrodiaspora, from Du Bois’ double consciousness to Sun Ra’s extraterrestrial imagination, was united by a desire to create contexts “that encourage a process of disalienation,” by reconsidering what was possible in the present. Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) follows in the footsteps of these radical time travelers. Her latest LP *Fetish Bones, *is a discombobulating journey from the 19th century to the end of the world—through government-sponsored racism, redlining, and the carceral state, revisiting every single wrongful slaying from Emmett Till to Sandra Bland. It’s music that implicates, reveals culpabilities, and creates a space to learn from its inherent difficulty.
Ayewa is a Philadelphia-based artist and community activist who has been a fixture in the city for over a decade. Moor Mother began in 2012 as a solo project, and under the moniker she’s released dozens of EPs on Bandcamp, recasting the protest song as a moving electronic collage. According to her own description of the music, it falls within “blk girl blues” and “project housing bop” to “slaveship punk.” These self-made categories allow Ayewa’s music to be fluid in terms of expression, yet consistently grounded in a sense of history. It is very much influenced by the idiosyncrasies and formal experimentation of Sun Ra, but also aligned with the chaotic joy of Shabazz Palaces. Her music is without a doubt confrontational, it often asks you to not only suspend your disbelief, but open yourself up to punishment as well. *Fetish Bones *is her masterclass on creating a sensory experience that interrogates your complicity, pushing you through a door that sends you hurtling through time.
The opener “Creation Myth,” is an astonishing stand-alone musical experience. The way Ayewa arranges sounds reflects a non-hierarchical kind of thinking. Dissonant textures are forced to work in tandem, creating a strange but discomforting beauty. The opening seconds find an electronic warble resembling a tractor beam sharing space with serene flutes, a whispered poem, and a percussive pitter-patter.
If you pay attention to the whispered voice beneath the noise, the content of the nearly inaudible words becomes chilling: “Four out of five every day a slaying/Two black girls hanging/Three black men choking/Gun to your face when you praying/Or get lynch in ya cell for changing lanes.” When Ayewa enters the scene, digital noise starts to coalesce at the song’s center, and she begins reciting for the next four minutes a harrowing poem that tries to get a handle on the black experience at a nearly molecular level: “Your DNA, the processes of your chromosomes, systematically forming to prevent one's own annihilation.” The narrator of Ayewa’s poem reconstructs the feeling of racing through history by revisiting moments of historical trauma: “The idea is to travel throughout the race riots from 1866 to the present time...I’ve been bleeding since 1866/Dragged my bloody self to 1919/And bled thru the summer being slaughtered by whites.” The writing here is allusive and surrealist but powerfully direct in its effect. It’s a piece that could be endlessly analyzed: The mixture of words and sounds evoke the visceral intimacy of shared trauma, and it turns a history of abstract suffering into a close-proximity experience.
This is not to say the other 12 tracks are slouches. The album is made up of a series of noise poems, mostly just over two minutes long, wherein Ayewa crafts remarkably dense stories. Take “Deadbeat Protest,” which resembles a Death Grips song in its frenetic pace and howling flow. “Trying to save my black life by fetishizing my dead life” Ayewa gasps, making clear the pitfalls of self-centered allyship. In other moments, like in “KBGK,” she looks at how not only the government but capitalism has not only failed the black community but commodified them: “No use for crying/They catalog buying/And everything for sale/Even ya swag in ya public housing.”
To live in this album is to be escorted from the past, to present, to future in thirty-second chunks. It happens in part by Ayewa’s woozy selection of both futuristic and anachronistic sounds: needling synths interact with saxophones and grainy sermons in dizzying fashion. This is most evident in “Chain Gang Quantum Blues,” a dazzling and temporally unmoored collage made from the recordings of a chain gang singing through static dissonance. In moments like these, where found sound is heavily processed and queered, the album showcases a frank and unsparing documentarian touch. Ayewa’s great skill is to make the evidence of the past even more uncomfortable, somehow even more present.
The last words you hear on the album in “Time Float” are: “Use my dead body as a raft to survive the flooding that’s coming.” In a sentence, she compacts an entire economy of images and events and fears into a single imagined event. Yet in Ayewa’s delivery, it is not brutally sad or even wistful, it is a reminder of the hardships of love under the regime of historical trauma. In those last words there is a sense of sacrifice and duty to the community, that at the end, even under duress, someone is there. It embodies the experience of the album: You will never be able to unhear *Fetish Bones *because it will have made you a witness. | 2016-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Don Giovanni | September 29, 2016 | 8.2 | 08c42ca6-bd3f-4bef-8e6e-39a870fdcbab | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
With pastoral folk roots, New York singer-songwriter Will Stratton has gotten more discreet in his approach. Not a single note sounds out of place here, meshing into a breathtaking whole. | With pastoral folk roots, New York singer-songwriter Will Stratton has gotten more discreet in his approach. Not a single note sounds out of place here, meshing into a breathtaking whole. | Will Stratton: Rosewood Almanac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23234-rosewood-almanac/ | Rosewood Almanac | The sixth full-length album from singer-songwriter Will Stratton begins with the sound of chirping birds—a nod, perhaps, to the pastoral folk roots that Stratton has worn on his sleeve for the better part of his career. The birds set a comfortable tone for an exceedingly comfortable, if engrossing, set of songs that bare the influence of English folk pioneers like Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. But these days, Stratton wears them like an old jacket he’s grown into with ease, one that now conforms to his own features.
When Stratton debuted in 2007 with What the Night Said at the age of 20, his prodigious technique distinguished him from the slew of other artists drawing on the same sounds. Over time, his touch on the 12-string acoustic in particular has only gotten more graceful. But it wasn’t really until his fourth album, 2012’s moody, almost filmic Post-Empire, that Stratton showed signs of coming into his own voice. Up to that point, it had been easy to dismiss his music as exceptionally well-executed but otherwise typical coffee house fare, the stuff one might expect to find in the charming spaces that dot Stratton’s beloved Hudson River Valley.
Stratton’s next album, 2014’s Gray Lodge Wisdom, addressed his life-threatening bout with cancer, so it was only natural that his music would reflect a more seasoned personal outlook. Rosewood Almanac, named for the rosewood guitar stock whose sound Stratton describes as darker and “ almost menacing,” contains one explicit reference to Stratton’s cancer experience, on the closing track “Ribbons,” when he sings “my brain just ain’t the same since the poison in my veins.” Otherwise, the album gives no other direct indication of what Stratton went through and, ultimately, survived.
If Stratton’s brain hasn’t been the same, his hands most certainly are—at least from a listener’s standpoint. On Rosewood Almanac, he supplies all the guitars, bass, keyboards, and dulcimer himself. Right from opening track, “Light Blue,” the music practically overflows with Stratton’s handiwork. “Light Blue” initially resembles your average plaintive folk ballad—nothing more than Stratton accompanying himself on guitar—but the song quickly swells into a whirl of parts so dense the song moves and breathes more like an orchestral piece than a folk tune.
Stratton has gotten more discreet with his approach. Where he could be something of a gunslinger in the past, not a single note sounds out of place here, and all of the instruments mesh together into a greater whole of breathtaking scale. As he’s done in the past, he also features violins, viola, and cello with a keen eye for intensifying the drama of his chord changes, which would pack quite a punch even without the extra trimmings.
Overall, Rosewood Almanac plays like the musical equivalent of going from one aquarium display to another, with lots of small, brightly colored objects darting in all directions yet moving somehow in unison. In that respect, Stratton shrugs off some of the baggage of his influences and steps decisively into the present. Sure, Rosewood Almanac couldn’t exist without Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, but in terms of sonic dimension Stratton follows more closely in the footsteps of classic Joni Mitchell titles like Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Stratton’s ambitions are far more modest, but the new album quite successfully transports your attention away from the banal.
When Stratton dials up the melancholy, as he does on the eerie, wide-open space of “Thick Skin,” he shows that his music can verge on heart-rending without histrionics or melodrama. And when he sings “You can move if you want to but your problems, they move too,” Stratton conveys a sense of grave warning without over-affecting the tone in his voice, which has grown by leaps and bounds as well. Where his high pitch once appeared overwhelmed and at-odds with the stories and mood of his songs, here his David Gray-like timbre finally supports the weight of the music.
“I don’t want to front like I’m from another decade/And I don’t want to feel like I’m part of a decaying past,” he sings on “Whatever’s Divine.” Stratton might next want to focus on the present—he still arguably lags behind contemporary trends—but Rosewood Almanac contains plenty of hints that he’s in prime position to get ahead of them. | 2017-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Bella Union | May 22, 2017 | 7 | 08c4367a-8d24-46f4-819b-eb29dbfe0561 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Recording in the duo’s respective hometowns yields Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort yet, in which the limits of human understanding are a source of fascination, not frustration. | Recording in the duo’s respective hometowns yields Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort yet, in which the limits of human understanding are a source of fascination, not frustration. | Wye Oak: The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wye-oak-the-louder-i-call-the-faster-it-runs/ | The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs | Wye Oak’s 2011 album Civilian was a major inflection point for the band. Supporting the record brought the Baltimore duo of Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner across oceans, onto “The Tonight Show,” and into the arsenal of Hollywood music supervisors. By the end of the year, after wringing every possible variation out of their setlist, they were spent. “I feel like our band is going to change very, very drastically from here on out in order to remain vital to us,” Wasner noted in an interview with the Village Voice. And so they did, situationally and stylistically. Stack moved to the artistic enclave of Marfa, Texas, and then on to Portland, Oregon. At the same time, Wasner set her guitar aside as she worked on her throwback chirp-pop project Dungeonesse; the results were sufficiently freeing that Wye Oak’s 2014 follow-up, Shriek, eschewed the six-string almost entirely.
This is a standard narrative: a band that has to evolve or die. But more than that, it’s the story of trying to maintain relationships as adulthood scatters everyone to the winds. In order to make Shriek, Stack and Wasner passed demos back and forth. This time, they opted for a series of home/away dates, alternating weeks recording in Marfa (to which Stack returned after Shriek) and Durham, North Carolina (Wasner’s home since 2015). The strategy forced more direct collaboration, as well as a spirit of first-thought-best-thought. The result is The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, which, for all its weight, has the particular giddiness of conspirators reuniting.
Pound for pound, The Louder I Call is Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort. Like the best of 2016’s retooled outtakes set, Tween, it fuses the dream pop of the band’s middle period to galvanic backbeats. On a number of tracks, synth ostinatos provide the connective tissue between Stack’s machine-tooled timekeeping and Wasner’s array of guitar daubs and squalls. The duo is urgent yet unhurried. On the pan-happy “Say Hello,” Wasner’s higher register—a doodle of strange skywriting over the buzz—recalls Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser. “Five hundred aerial miles to go,” she sings before dipping some desperately gorgeous howls into the serration of her guitar. On “It Was Not Natural,” the popping bassline—the foundation of so much of Shriek—returns the band to earth. Wasner takes a walk, overturns a strange object with her foot. “It was not natural/All along,” she decides over synth twinkle and piano thud, “Only human hands/Could give us/Something so unforgiving.”
As if to prove the point, they follow “It Was Not Natural” with “Symmetry,” a bassy, doomy St. Vincent homage, right down to the screen paranoia (“The accident/To video/Awareness in the afterglow”) and the broken-modem crackle of the solo. It’s as blunt as the group gets. Doggedly allusive in their early years, they have settled for merely elliptical: the quick-fire thoughts of born observers. “I fear we speak a broken language,” goes a line on “Over and Over,” as Stack keeps chopping into an oompah beat. That’s generally how it goes here: Wye Oak puzzle over the limits of understanding, but their compositions treat the mystery as a source of fascination rather than frustration. “I believed that life could be better,” Wasner sighs on “Lifer,” just before uncorking a ragged solo that gently chides her belief.
Wasner has described the album’s title as “sort of psychological litmus test,” one which revealed the band members’ varying levels of acidity. Wasner envisioned “it” as a sort of approaching menace; Stack interpreted it as receding hope. Those ideas aren’t entirely in tension: either way, something is about to be lost. It could be peace, or comprehension. It could be connection. “My people are all over/Spread out and thin,” Wasner croons midway through the album, on the string-quartet-backed tone poem “My Signal.” “I’m watching them/And we may never breathe the same air again.” But I can’t discern any regret, only reverie: It’s just another note shared by two old friends across the intervening miles. | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | April 6, 2018 | 8 | 08c71b1b-4a93-4cca-8e67-d166cc28ff89 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
The Torrance, California band’s new and allegedly improved rarities collection is the punk record they always wanted to make, and a chance to redefine their legacy for newer listeners. | The Torrance, California band’s new and allegedly improved rarities collection is the punk record they always wanted to make, and a chance to redefine their legacy for newer listeners. | Joyce Manor: Songs From Northern Torrance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joyce-manor-songs-from-northern-torrance/ | Songs From Northern Torrance | Barry Johnson just wants to be a punk. When Joyce Manor released their polished second album Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired in 2012, even he seemed a little unenthusiastic: “I’m really, really happy with it, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time I wish we would have just done a punk record.” Six years later, still seeking to recapture a grittier sound, the band tapped Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou to produce Million Dollars to Kill Me—their most gently melodic record to date. It’s a tension that’s long existed in Joyce Manor’s music, where the wry power pop of Guided by Voices and the fiery, grating screamo vocals of a band like Orchid combine to produce massive hooks. At live shows the band often mines its history, playing early demos to explosive response. What fans who came onboard after 2014’s Epitaph debut Never Hungover Again might not realize is that clean vocals used to be the exception, not the rule, on a Joyce Manor song. With the new rarities compilation Songs From Northern Torrance, they revisit their formative years and finally get the punk record they always wanted to make.
As a band whose early interviews directed readers to Myspace, Joyce Manor’s history isn’t necessarily hard to access. Some Songs From Northern Torrance are already familiar: The record opens with crowd favorite “House Warning Party,” and its second half is taken track-for-track from 2010’s Constant Headache EP. Astute fans noted that Joyce Manor removed a rarities compilation with a similar tracklist from streaming platforms just prior to the new record’s release; the band clarified that Songs From Northern Torrance represents a “thoughtfully curated compilation.” Their second run at a rarities album is a chance to redefine their legacy for newer listeners. These sequencing and song choices are less enamored with the bouncing post-hardcore zeal of early tracks like “My Elise,” and more indebted to the embittered anger of folk-punk and screamo. It’s also telling what history the band omits, like Johnson’s early brushes with ska.
The compilation’s abrasive edge evokes the basements, bowling alleys, and backyards that dot Joyce Manor’s southern California home. “DFHP?” (short for “Do Fish Have Periods?”) and “Who Gave You a Baby” rely on acoustic guitar and Johnson’s voice to carry their rhythms, trading the power of distortion pedals for earnest, unfiltered vocals and the brushing of fingers against strings. The inclusion of these pared-back demos, rather than the more robust versions released previously, offers a sense of bedroom-recording intimacy missing from their robust, professionally produced recent albums. For longtime fans—those who’ve continued to find catharsis by screaming along at concerts as the band leveled up to headlining slots—it is perhaps a necessary reassurance.
The remaining new additions to the tracklist are reminiscent of the scrappy folk-punk scene Johnson frequented pre-Joyce Manor. The clipped vocals and loose, jangling guitar of “House Warning Party” certainly recall the defining traits of aughts folk-punk revival. But it’s the lyrics—a vision of romance as a salve against economic depression and broken homes—that sound surprisingly political coming from a band better known for dejected lamentations on growing pains and arrested development. The narrative recalls the brutally bold lyricism of former tour mates AJJ, while “Fuck Koalacaust” serves as a permanent reminder of the days when obscure SoCal band rivalries could inspire whole songs (both Johnson and Koalacaust claim ownership of the opening riff). As with “Who Gave You a Baby,” hearing Johnson express his rage so clearly and pointedly is invigorating. His scream of “Fuck you, Dad” on “House Warning Party” is the quintessence of frustrated anti-authoritarian anger.
The final five songs, all taken from the Constant Headache EP, come closest to Johnson’s elusive holy grail of punk. The rapid cymbal hits and downtuned guitar of “Constant Nothing” convey newfound intensity after half a record of smaller, more anxious acoustic sounds, and the shrieking chords of “Done Right Discount Flooring” build the energy. Other songs, especially popular live picks, lose steam in the studio; setlist staple “Five Beer Plan” lacks ferocity in its recorded version, the long pauses and the absence of a circle pit noticeable even if concerts weren’t indefinitely on pause. There’s also something faintly ironic about listening for marginally higher fidelity in remastered versions of recordings that were often comically blown out in the first place. As a second rarities compilation that shares most songs with its predecessor, it’s hard not to see Songs From Northern Torrance as an effort to hold fans’ attention between new records. But for newcomers looking for a sense of Joyce Manor’s earliest days, these scrappy, bare-bones demos serve as an idealized backstory, one that lends the band a hardened edge as their arc bends further towards pop. | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | June 10, 2020 | 7.2 | 08cab899-9e6d-4043-a6fc-48bbbd3e4db2 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
On his latest album-- and first for Merge-- Dan Snaith fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and the Beach Boys. | On his latest album-- and first for Merge-- Dan Snaith fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and the Beach Boys. | Caribou: Andorra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10559-andorra/ | Andorra | Dan Snaith's Caribou project, to borrow a line from another Canadian songwriter, has been a zigzagging journey through the past. He was most entrenched in the present moment on his 2001 debut Start Breaking My Heart, but even that record's soft-focus, post-Aphex Twin electronica seemed pulled from two or three years earlier. By 2003's Up in Flames he began glancing at psychedelia, but through a distinctly 1990s lens, mixing the cracked sensibility of Boces-era Mercury Rev with the ecstatic come-together crescendos of big beat. Milk of Human Kindness from 2005 was connected closely to its predecessor, but it added the unblinking rhythms and tidy instrumental efficiency of 70s krautrock. And now, with his latest album Andorra, Snaith finally and fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, of the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and, of course, the Beach Boys.
The significant factor in Snaith's transformation from his instrumental beginnings is his increased confidence as a singer. On Up in Flames, the voice was another sound to be fed into the computer, a way to reference the idea of songs rather than actually sing them. From there, it's been an unsteady trajectory pointing toward songwriting proper, and with Andorra, Snaith seems to be paying attention to chords and melodic progression first. He may have even titled a song to commemorate the new development: "Melody Day", Andorra's first track and lead single, is the most tuneful of the bunch, with Snaith's high tenor sitting squarely in the center of the rolling drums, sleigh bells, flute, and what sound like vintage synths.
"Melody Day" is also significant for being the only track to fully embrace what has become a Caribou trademark: the brief pause at the end of a bar which explodes into an enormous volley of percussion. The album as a whole is a touch more subdued; these "big" moments-- which were at risk of becoming a cliché, anyway-- appear sporadically, and generally with less intensity. Instead, in Andorra's more song-oriented first half, Snaith creates tracks that startle with their lightness of touch and joyous evocation of honeyed late-60s guitar pop. A half-decade after the Elephant 6 movement first started to fade, Snaith's move can be seen as risky, but it succeeds, oddly enough, in part because of the one-man-band nature of his project. He still works essentially alone, playing and sampling instruments and building tracks with a computer, and his music, with its loops and thick production, retains the markers of his process. He's also not aiming his music at any sort of radio; the mid-range is jammed full, distortion pops up regularly without apology, and weird sounds appear from nowhere and zoom between the speakers.
The sunshine daydream reaches peak intensity five songs in with "Desiree", whose very title dates it perfectly: we know from her name that this girl might trip down the streets with the Association's Windy, perhaps looking for kicks or waiting for Mary to come along. There's barely any percussion to speak of, just swells of synthetic strings, bits of flute, zooming harp runs, and chiming guitar leading to a big chorus that's all Snaith's multi-layered voice. Then there's "Sandy" and "Irene", also names more likely in 2007 to belong to grandmothers. The former is a Andorra's most dynamic track aside from "Melody Day", and also has the most interesting vocal arrangement, its highly reverbed streaks of harmony suggesting of a pop-minded church choir. It hints that Snaith might also be taking lyrical inspiration from a earlier time: "Sometimes in her eyes I see forever/ I can't believe what we've found." The words here are not always intelligible-- there's often a lot going on, so they're easy to miss-- but it's safe to say that the music carries the bulk of the emotional meaning.
Andorra takes an odd detour over its final three songs. "Sundialing" returns to the repetitious Neu!-isms of Milk of Human Kindness but dresses up the steady rhythm with Day-Glo swirls. "Irene" is a short mid-tempo ballad that is instrumental through its first half, and even then the only sound is essentially a drum machine. The tune in its second half is vague, suggesting a more fleshed-out song sitting somewhere else that's never quite articulated. The eight-minute closer "Niobe" builds from bubbling, acidic synths and folds in tightly sequenced, Orb-like pulses, an extended slow-burn that occasionally threatens a big climax with a sampled drum fill but never quite goes there.
Considering its length and placement at the end of the record, "Niobe" is a tad disappointing, never quite acquiring the momentum its structure would seem to suggest. Still, it's also an encouraging sign that Snaith is thinking in these more open-ended terms, that's he's not confining himself to the retro pop explosion that, as he demonstrates here, he has essentially mastered. Andorra will undoubtedly win Caribou a lot of new fans and rightfully so; it's a big, bold, tuneful collection that impresses with its ambition and meticulous arrangement. But it's also nice to think that Caribou's course is not fixed, that the future might hold a few more surprises than what's found here. | 2007-08-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Merge | August 23, 2007 | 8.3 | 08cb8157-2967-412f-b97f-7344462ee329 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The only minor album in the Beatles' catalogue is this soundtrack to a feature-length cartoon, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement. | The only minor album in the Beatles' catalogue is this soundtrack to a feature-length cartoon, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement. | The Beatles: Yellow Submarine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13429-yellow-submarine/ | Yellow Submarine | Hey, nobody's perfect. The only truly minor album in the Beatles' catalogue isn't really an album at all. Yellow Submarine, released in January 1969, is the soundtrack to the feature-length cartoon of the same name, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement. The idea of an animated film stretched back to 1965, but these were busy years for the band, and the project was pushed to the backburner. Once the movie finally got underway in 1967, the Beatles had no real interest in the details.
In one sense, the Yellow Submarine project is the opposite of Magical Mystery Tour. While the latter film was derided as pretentious and incoherent, the Yellow Submarine feature was well-received. And while the record releases associated with Magical Mystery Tour are of staggeringly high quality, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack is like the work of a supremely talented band that couldn't really be bothered. Brian Epstein had died in August, and with him gone, there was little motivation for the Beatles to participate in any meaningful way. So actors mimicked their voices, their input into the story consisted of a meeting or two with the filmmakers, and when it came time to assemble the soundtrack, they combed through the vault to see what was left over.
Of the six tracks by the Beatles on the album's first side, two, "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love", are already familiar from their original contexts (as part of Revolver and as a single, respectively). The other four were holdovers from sessions in 1967 (Paul McCartney's "All Together Now", George Harrison's "It's All Too Much" and "It's Only a Northern Song") and 1968 (John Lennon's "Hey Bulldog"). They never found release during the time they were recorded because, well, they weren't good enough. Granted, we're talking about a time when the Beatles were making some of the finest pop albums of all time, so the question of what constitutes "good enough" is relative. But even setting aside their exceedingly high standards, this lot is pretty middling, if certainly still enjoyable.
Neither of Harrison's songs ranks with his best. "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much" are filled with swirling psychedelic production-- tooting horns, backward instruments, shimmering percussion-- but beneath the din there's not much else interesting going on. "Only a Northern Song" at least has a good joke going for it, simultaneously alluding to the North of England and the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney-dominated publishing company (i.e., no matter what Harrison wrote for this particular number, it belonged to Northern Songs, Ltd.). But "It's All Too Much" stretches on for an endless six and a half minutes, the constipated production in fruitless search of a tune. For McCartney's part, "All Together Now" is a cheery and pleasant sing-along befitting an animated soundtrack, and Lennon's "Hey Bulldog" is a tough and funky piano-driven rocker, by a good margin the best song here. They might be second-rate Beatles songs, but still.
To round out the album, the second side of Yellow Submarine is filled with George Martin's score for the film. Pieces like "Pepperland", "Sea of Holes", and "March of the Meanies", however they were received at the time, function now primarily as garish kitsch, lushly orchestrated orchestral music that could have come from anywhere. Personally, I can enjoy this stuff when I'm in the mood. The blandly anonymous but beautifully recorded swoop of strings, self-consciously "exotic" percussion, and recurring thematic motifs serve as an intriguing sort of time capsule of a time when light "beautiful music" still commanded the ears of a sizeable listening pubic. But it's very easy to forget that the music has anything to do with the Beatles, or even popular music of the last 50 years, at least until the "Yellow Submarine" melody returns in "Yellow Submarine in Pepperland". As a souvenir of the film, Yellow Submarine has its place, and in fairness, it was never intended as a major release. But as an album it's ultimately forgettable, which is something the Beatles so rarely were otherwise.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 10, 2009 | 6.2 | 08cbef03-3f83-48d8-9365-aa82c6647f08 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After a stint as Waxahatchee’s backing band, the Detroit folk-rockers subtly sharpen their musicianship on a laid-back album suffused in positive vibes. | After a stint as Waxahatchee’s backing band, the Detroit folk-rockers subtly sharpen their musicianship on a laid-back album suffused in positive vibes. | Bonny Doon: Let There Be Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonny-doon-let-there-be-music/ | Let There Be Music | Let There Be Music, the third album from Bonny Doon, feels as if it was created over the course of a few sunny afternoons. That carefree quality is an illusion: The Detroit band took the better part of five years to deliver the sequel to 2018’s Longwave, a slightly ragged collection of tenderly tuneful folk rock. In the meantime, the group endured a number of personal traumas. Bobby Colombo recovered from a brain injury and Lyme disease; drummer Jake Kmiecik experienced a worsening of Crohn’s, an autoimmune disorder.
A bright spot in this period was Bonny Doon’s steady gig with Waxahatchee. A longtime friend of the group, singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield declared Longwave “my immediate favorite record” and recruited the trio as her backing band; then, after taking them out on the road, she had Bonny Doon play on her 2020 album Saint Cloud and accompanying tour. You can hear how that experience helped subtly sharpen the trio’s musicianship on Let There Be Music.
Bonny Doon remain anchored by the gentle, empathetic interplay of guitarists Colombo and Bill Lennox, yet they show less inclination to ramble than they did on Longwave. Quiet assurance and precise execution dictate the record’s shape and mood: Songs unfold at an unhurried pace, planting seeds that grow in the subconscious. Steering away from artisanal folk, Bonny Doon deftly expand their palette, moving closer toward pop. Piano plays a prominent role and drives the jaunty title track, reinforcing the impression that the group is drawing from a deep river of 1970s soft rock—artists like Harry Nilsson and Gilbert O’Sullivan, who themselves are tributaries of Paul McCartney.
Despite the laid-back vibe, Bonny Doon still prize subtlety. The mellow electric pianos on “Naturally” are mere coloring, highlighting the sun-kissed air of relaxation at the heart of the songs, as is the fuzztone guitar that weaves through the ramshackle “On My Mind.” They haven’t abandoned the folkier elements of their sound—“You Can’t Stay the Same” carries echoes of the Band’s rendition of “I Shall Be Released”—but it’s now one strand in a tapestry, not the main motif.
Apart from “Crooked Creek,” whose primitive thump and monotone melody suggest Maureen Tucker supporting Stephen Malkmus, Let There Be Music doesn’t particularly sound like indie rock, save for one factor: Both Lennox and Colombo sing with the deadpan delivery common among bands inspired by 1990s lo-fi rockers. There’s a crucial difference between that era’s slackers and this group, though: The trio’s flat affect never reads as irony. It’s earnest. At no point on Let There Be Music do Bonny Doon give the sense of looking askew at a subject—or themselves. Everything is presented at face value. On the album’s title track, they sing, simply: “Let there be love/Let there be laughter, more than enough.”
Such an embrace of positivity runs the risk of sounding saccharine, but Bonny Doon are saved by their modesty. They take no big swings on Let There Be Music, and they tackle no grand subjects; they merely concentrate on sculpting sweet, sincere songs about subjects like being vaguely homesick on a fine afternoon (“Fine Afternoon”), allowing emotions to evolve organically (“Naturally”), and trusting that hope will arrive as soon as today (“Maybe Today”). Each song is a carefully constructed miniature, and the album itself is endearingly small-scale too—a record where life lessons aren’t preached, just lived. | 2023-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | June 22, 2023 | 7.1 | 08cd8f82-6b28-454d-82d4-8f0a6f13818c | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The UK rapper-producer’s new album is an indelible rush of free-associative rhymes, ghostly textures, and shapeshifting vocals. | The UK rapper-producer’s new album is an indelible rush of free-associative rhymes, ghostly textures, and shapeshifting vocals. | Iceboy Violet: Not a Dream But a Controlled Explosion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iceboy-violet-not-a-dream-but-a-controlled-explosion/ | Not a Dream But a Controlled Explosion | Iceboy Violet found a lifeline in noise. They were 18 years old and making hip-hop beats influenced by Madlib and Dilla—satisfying enough on a formal level, perhaps, but there were deeper, more conflicted emotions that classic boom-bap couldn’t assuage. Their housemate, though, listened to noise music, and the two would sit up until 7 a.m., bathing in the chaos. “It was the only thing that could drown out the voice in my head,” they said. At the same time, they were delving into the sounds of grime, whose chest-puffed rage seemed to mask a deep well of anguish—“all this pain that’s kept hidden by the pressures of hyper-masculinity,” said Iceboy, who is nonbinary, in another interview.
On their debut mixtape, 2018’s wild, bracing MOOK, they brought those two strains of music together—burying Dizzee Rascal samples in cavernous reverb, looping snippets of homophobic MC taunts over concussive waves of bass, and whipping white noise into corrosive whirlwinds. Not until the final track, woven from delicate filaments of drone, did they reveal their own rapping voice: a plaintive snarl, cracked and swollen. “Father, father/Why won’t you unburden me/My chest feels heavy/Can’t breathe,” they pleaded, sounding as though a foreign mass were lodged in their throat.
Since that shot across the bow, Iceboy Violet has continued to shape their voice into a peerless instrument. They contributed a handful of guest features to artists like Loraine James and aya, and on last year’s The Vanity Project mixtape, they explored new cadences and registers over beats by likeminded producers that stirred drill, ambient, grime, and noise into an ominous miasma of melted textures. Not a Dream but a Controlled Explosion is the first project to fully combine Iceboy’s rapping with their own production, and if it is less noisy than MOOK—marginally, anyway—it is no less cathartic, and no less unusual. It’s a major step forward for the artist.
The album opens with a fake-out: a half minute of synth shimmer and crystalline pinging, as gentle and ethereal as Fennesz, before an overdriven, drill-inspired beat breaks through with the force of an earthmover. Blending sensuousness with violence, this is the palette that will carry across the whole record: thundering, distorted 808 kicks; clouds of vaporous tone color; bass frequencies that smolder like a mine fire, sucking all the oxygen out of the mix. “Black Gold” borrows the choral pads of so-called weightless grime and tips them toward chilly, mid-’90s ambient techno; “Refracted” pairs deadweight drums with ghostly wails before trailing off into an a cappella phrase of almost liturgical grace. The production is so enveloping that an instrumental version of the album would not seem to be missing anything at all.
But there’s no missing Iceboy Violet’s voice: Even when their rapping is hard to make out, which is often, they are a commanding presence. Words ride roughshod over the beat, a tumultuous stream of images almost too fast to keep up with. Despite their immediately recognizable tone, they stretch themselves in striking ways: In “Refracted,” their insistent, broken yelp is reminiscent of a hardcore singer’s bark, while in “Ekklipse,” they dip into a gravelly baritone over a scabrous dancehall beat.
Their lyrics unspool in a free-associative stream of assonant rhymes. “Baby we’re survivors/Flowers turned to fertilizer/What’s going on inside ya?” Iceboy riffs on “Black Gold,” trading verses with Florence Sinclair, whose sandpapery drawl here evokes Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog character. In “Ekklipse,” they offer a vision with the force of a soothsayer’s premonition: “Idols to false gods lie/Like dogs in the water/Dreams ekklipse the sun/And whistle like mortar.” Songs rarely can be pinned down to a single, clear meaning, but certain themes—religious imagery, the inseparability of longing and shame, repeated instances of shattering and breaking—pile up into a suggestion of ambient desperation, of a self grappling with its own identity.
The most crucial throughline might be the centrality of desire. Iceboy Violet has said that the record is fundamentally about the ways that everyday perception of reality is molded by feelings of want—“daydreaming, hallucination, yearning & cum.” Peer behind the wreckage of the beats, and an unabashedly romantic sensibility is palpable in imagery of bodies tasting and enfolding one another. In “Paris, Bradford,” Iceboy reveals an unexpected tenderness: “Burn after reading/You lead the slow foxtrot into the evening,” they murmur over a pastel swirl of what might be guitar feedback. “Silk threads connect our spines/Lost track of what limbs are mine/I feel everything but fine/I hope I know that you need me.” Beneath the bass’s crushing weight, a lightness stirs: a dizzying blend of spiritual rapture and physical pleasure that refuses to be kept down. | 2023-08-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | Fixed Abode | August 7, 2023 | 7.7 | 08ce8d0a-5c45-4c56-a4c7-45401e3ae7b2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Welsh band with Britpop-sized ambition offers its long-awaited full-length and it includes re-worked tracks from last year's mini album. | The Welsh band with Britpop-sized ambition offers its long-awaited full-length and it includes re-worked tracks from last year's mini album. | The Joy Formidable: The Big Roar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15160-the-big-roar/ | The Big Roar | The Joy Formidable's long-gestating debut full-length opens with roughly 45 seconds of some unspecified, arrhythmic clatter-- it could be hail stones pelting a cold tin roof, or a door opening and closing, or fireworks, or just the over-amplified sound of typewriter keys hitting paper. On their own terms, these noises might feel jarring and bothersome, but compared to what transpires over the next 49 minutes, they seem like an oddly naturalistic, curiously imprecise element on album that sounds otherwise scientifically engineered to make the Joy Formidable sound like the Biggest Band in the World, rendering traditional metrics like No. 1 chart rankings and platinum records as mere formalities.
After a decade that saw Britpop break down into Franz Ferdinandian funk, Arctic Monkeys insolence, and xx-ian austerity, the Joy Formidable project a certain guileless bravado rarely heard since the mid-1990s. For this Welsh trio, a Glastonbury main-stage headlining slot doesn't represent some distant career goal to gradually aspire to, but a deeply ingrained spiritual state of mind. This notion informs every rocket-launcher riff and back-of-the-bleacher chorus heard throughout The Big Roar, the title of which is but a surface indication of the band's wanton disregard for subtlety. The deliberate nature of the Joy Formidable's aesthetic can be evinced by the fact that four of the songs here first appeared in alternate form on the 2009 mini-LP A Balloon Called Moaning and have been retooled for this big-league debut on Atlantic. And in some cases rather dramatically: the sprightly pop single "Whirring" now comes appended with an extended, accelerated and supremely arse-kicking coda-- complete will dual bass-drum triggers-- that suggests "You Made Me Realise"-era My Bloody Valentine with a young Lars Ulrich behind the kit.
But with her Corgan-like tendency to slather the songs with infinite layers of grungy guitar gloss, Ritzy Bryan at times comes perilously close to overpowering her own bracing voice, which becomes an increasingly important humanizing element amid The Big Roar's in-the-red onslaught. It's somewhat telling that the album's massive opener "The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie" fades out rather uneventfully after a dramatic seven-minute build, as if the band members suddenly lost their place in its thickening thundercloud of noise and didn't know where else to go. The Joy Formidable are wise to offset their more colossal tracks with shorter, snappier, new-wavy numbers ("I Don't Want to See You Like This", "Cradle"), but even in smaller doses, they rarely relent in their pedal-through-the-metal ballast. As a result, songs like the dancefloor-bound "Austere" and the slow-motion lurch of "Buoy" are robbed of their dynamic variation and definition. The atmospheric late-album ballad "Llaw = Wall"-- the lone vocal turn by bassist Rhydian Dafydd-- initially marks a change of pace, but even that cedes to an inevitable quiet-to-loud mid-song eruption. (A he-said/she-said duet along the lines of 2010's spirited Paul Draper collab "Greyhounds in the Slips" would've added a welcome new dimension to the sound here.) There's no denying the Joy Formidable's passion, vigor, and pop smarts; it would just be easier to appreciate those qualities if The Big Roar didn't so often sound like a big blur. | 2011-03-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-03-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Canvasback | March 11, 2011 | 6.8 | 08d0092e-bfe8-4cc9-abdc-a337e2aad884 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Erykah Badu's second album is dense with ideas and sounds that draw from the past and look toward the future. Released in November 2000, it embodies the millennial tensions of that pivotal year. | Erykah Badu's second album is dense with ideas and sounds that draw from the past and look toward the future. Released in November 2000, it embodies the millennial tensions of that pivotal year. | Erykah Badu: Mama’s Gun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22045-mamas-gun/ | Mama’s Gun | From the moment Prince’s party ran out of time and the ball dropped in Times Square to signal a new millennium, people were waiting. They were waiting in the wee moments of the new year for ominous, Y2K catastrophe to hit, for worldwide web grids to collapse, for large scale chaos of another order to afflict the globe. That the calamity didn’t drop in the form of a Roland Emmerich summer blockbuster sparked an initial sigh of relief. But the phenomenon of collective waiting—to see whether the recent impeachment of a president would lead to the end of the Clinton good-times era, to see whether the courts would order the family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez to return him to Cuba across the Cold War divide, to see whether the officers who fired 41 shots into unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo would do any time at all, to see whether hanging chads would tip the balance of a presidential election—all that waiting would roll out across the entire year in waves of succession. Long spells of anxiety and watchfulness would punctuate the year 2000, a pivotal period that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when trying to pinpoint the origins of new millennium unrest and epic uncertainty.
When she stepped into New York’s historic Electric Lady studios in 1999 and began recording her much-anticipated sophomore album, Erykah Badu had her finger to the wind. The tracks she was laying down extended what had quickly become her trademark vibe: that of deep-groove tarrying, wrestling with time, pushing up against and pulling at the beat but also lingering in the pocket while delivering pithy observations about temporal lag and the will to move. Her music brimmed with the suggestion—albeit a conflicted one—to wait for it. “On & On,” Badu’s breakthrough single from her 1997 smash debut Baduizm, became an anthem for this kind of indelible, cool-breeze, fitfulness. “Oh my my my I’m feeling high,” she sings with the distinct horn-like phrasings that brought Billie Holiday comparisons, “my money’s gone, I’m all alone/The world keeps turning…” It all came together in Badu’s sound and style: the image of a sister who couldn’t be bothered, who couldn’t care less about the time (“I think I need a cup of tea…”), yet who simultaneously recognized and paid reverence to black time, that which is past and that which is still to come. Her many references to the Five Percent Nation and Afrocentric cosmologies on Baduizm announced the arrival of new black nationalist soul, steeped in astrologically configured wisdom (“My cypher keeps moving like a rolling stone”) and headed toward an Afrofuturist destination to be determined.
To be rooted in the here and now while also resolutely and speculatively elsewhere—this was Erykah Badu’s distinct gambit early in her career. But Mama’s Gun turned an important page as she set out to pair songs that evoked the art of exquisite and romantically-charged lingering and hanging (the “urban hang suite,” as Maxwell would call it on his own debut album from 1996) alongside songs about being fed up with stasis, isolation, restriction and aborted dreams. In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head.
Those voices open the record’s first side in a cacophony of whispers as Badu admonishes herself about a laundry-list of unfinished tasks, nagging fears, and floating enigmas swirling through her mind (“I have to write a song… I have to remember to turn on the oven… warm up the apartment… Malcolm… Malcolm… I need to take my vitamin”). What cuts through the noise is a burst of sonic muscle—pure soul energy compressed into 10 initial seconds: the joyful ensemble (Chinah Blac and YahZarah) bellowing in Rufus-meets-Brand New Heavies unison as longtime collaborators Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, James Poyser on piano, Pino Palladino on bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar lay down a robust opening riff that sounds definitive and defiant. The opening moments of Mama’s Gun sound much less like anything off of Badu’s first record and instead resonate unmistakably in the vein of two other releases from earlier that year, Common’s fourth studio album, Like Water for Chocolate, and D’Angelo’s game-changing Voodoo. All three albums were recorded simultaneously at Electric Lady. All three benefitted from the skilled hand of legendary engineer Russell Elevado, who mixed each LP and drew on vintage recording techniques to evoke the ghosts of venerable albums past. And most crucially, all three featured MVP player Questlove acting improvisationally at the center of an alternative black pop universe at the turn of the millennium, one with clearly nostalgic tenets that nonetheless held fast to present communal concerns and future Wonder-inflected aspirations.
This was neo soul at arguably its most prolific and thrilling moment of growth and possibility. Innovated by black Gen-Xers who ardently valued and sought to revive their parents’ and their older siblings’ music and the albums that soundtracked their childhood, neo soul runs best on a seductive combination of cultural nostalgia, black solidarity dreams, and the will to couple sensually with an ideal partner while paying attention (somewhat but not always) to the politics of gender equality. And the list of remarkable artists who broke onto the scene alongside of Badu working this sound in the year of and leading up to 2000 underscores what a busy, passionate, and productive time it was.
From 1993, when Me’shell NdegéOcello stepped out ahead of everyone with Plantation Lullabies on Madonna’s Maverick label to D’Angelo’s 1995 first effort Brown Sugar (often erroneously referred to as the first in the genre) a year later to Maxwell’s debut (Urban Hang Suite) to Lauryn Hill’s insta-classic Miseducation in ’98 to oddball soulster Macy Gray’s one-hit smash On How Life Is in ’99, to the year 2000 when Jill Scott made her first LP (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Volume I), these were exciting times when black singer-songwriter musicians were referencing Black Panther memoirs, African-American Studies history books, and deep cuts from reluctant soul icons like Bill Withers. In the days after Voodoo dropped into the world, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff would famously describe the genre as “a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than for the streets.”
“Penitentiary Philosophy,” the charging, opening track on Mama’s Gun pulls all of these ambitions together. Bursting with the energy and the righteous discontent of King’s letter from a Birmingham jail (in which he declared to the world “why we can’t wait” for liberation), it recalls the sonic palette of Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic while venturing further down the road of trenchant social critique that Badu had already begun to walk on Baduizm’s “Other Side of the Game,” her third single off of that album and one that planted her firmly in the run of socially-conscious hip-hop culture. With its looped sample of Stevie’s “Ordinary Pain,” “Penitentiary Philosophy” stays focused on the perils and corrosive effects of streets that don’t love you, streets that can trap you. “Here’s my philosophy/Livin’ in a penitentiary…” she declares, dropping verses like Gil Scott-Heron, “Brothers all on the corner/Tryin’ to make believe/Turn around ain’t got no pot to pee/Make me mad when I see you sad… you can’t win when your will is weak/When you’re knocked on the ground….” In the same year that David Simon dropped “The Corner” and two years before his masterpiece “The Wire,” Badu was still singing about the effects of the game from a woman’s point of view (something Simon’s shows were often, at best, half-assed about doing). Still the caring sister who observes the ensuing crisis from the sidelines, Badu has morphed on this track out of the role of devoted bystander into full-scale Last Poet.
Badu gently admonishes her listeners to get to going, drawing on the Brixton trans-Atlantic migratory sound of Soul II Soul on “Time’s a Wastin,” a “Keep On Movin’”-style new-millennium anthem and something of a partner song to “Penitentiary Philosophy” that warns against drifting and advises listeners to “Make your money last/Learn from your past…. Don’t take your time, young man…” The brothers who are lost, the brothers who can’t find their way in an “oh-so-strange world” remain near and dear to Badu’s heart, and she offers them visions of the beautiful journey that awaits them, one that can change and restore their hope because “oh baby we need to smile…” Badu is no prophetess or preacher like her counterpart Hill, but she leans into this song’s alluring keyboard arrangement which, at the bridge, evokes the sound of the “incidental” church organ, what black studies critic Ashon Crawley brilliantly refers to as “nothing music,” the music of the organist doodling and improvising underneath the riffing of the deacon or the pastor or the volunteer bake sale representative. It’s the sound of sitting in the sanctuary together and having frank and easy conversations with one another as she wistfully warns of a future without a plan (“Ain’t no tellin where you’ll land…”).
The Badu of hope, headwraps, and incense is still very much present on this record, voicing anthems about correcting one’s path and questing on tracks like “Didn’t Cha Know” and the sequel jam, “… & On.” The former track wraps itself around a hypnotic sample from New York-based fusion jazz-funk ensemble Tarika Blue’s 1977 “Dreamflower” record, a Badu obsession that she discovered while crate-digging, at the behest of J Dilla, through his extraordinary collection. Badu rides the chillout vibe of this song in the face of despair (“Think I made a wrong turn back there somewhere/Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know/Knew the toll, but I would not pay…”). In the Oprahfied age of black female self-help narratives led by Iyanla Vanzant and novelist Terry McMillan, she continued her rise as an icon of black bohemian positivity (“Free your mind and find your way/There will be a brighter day”). What set her apart from other neo-soul women of this era was her unabashedly quirky, black hippie stance which she kicks into high gear throughout “…& On,” spinning like the earth on its axis like a “Gypsy/Flippin’ life game from the right brain/Ascension maintained/Rolling through like a burning flame…” Badu’s rhymes summon the sound and feeling of late 1990s Nuyorican Café poetry slams and basement club, late night jazz improv.
For sure, some of the album’s metaphors flirt with cabaret cliché. Badu got flack from some critics for the beatnik flute and cosmic references on “Orange Moon.” But the thread that ties these tracks together is the flow that is freedom—freedom to pursue new love (on “In Love With You,” a birds-tweeting, Spanish-inflected guitar ballad that finds Badu doing her best Deniece Williams impression and in duet with Stephen Marley), freedom to pursue pleasure (“Kiss Me on My Neck (Hesi)”) for herself. It’s a distinct kind of liberation from that of Lauryn’s redemption song sermons, Me’shell’s brooding tales of struggle and conflict, and even Jill Scott’s earnest Black Arts era feminist poetry.
Ironically, it is Mary J to whom she most clearly pays homage on the aptly titled “My Life,” which swings with the hip-hop soul queen’s b-girl cadences. With its Puffy-designed excess and materialism, hip-hop soul was always at odds with the political earthiness of the neo bunch. Yet the bounce on this track clearly echoes that of the Yonkers R&B diva’s album of the same name. Here in Badu’s version of “My Life,” as on other tracks, she stalls to figure out a plan (“Standing downtown… tryin to figure out a way up out of this town”) and vows that “one day” she’ll be “flyin’ high.” Songs of strength and self-worth like her “Cleva” chronicle a moment when artists like India.Arie were using their music to reject Eurocentric beauty standards in pop (on 2000’s “Video Girl”) and megastars TLC were waxing contemplative about self love rather than outer beauty (on their 1999 track “Unpretty”).
But Badu would consistently put her own bold and wickedly sharp twist on such themes. “This is how I look without makeup/And with no bra my ninny’s sag down,” she sings on “Cleva,” sounding like a modern day Moms Mabley. Badu lifts the boast and braggadocio so clearly associated with hip-hop MCs of both genders and turns it into the language of the R&B goddess, a lesson that one Texas-bred superstar would follow and master as the ’00s would further unfold. Badu is by far the slyest and most playful wordsmith of the neosoulsters as is evident on her brilliant feminist critique, “Booty,” the fierce, signifying answer to NdegéOcello’s bellicose (and casually mean-spirited) “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” Backed by a horn section doing its best take on the Quincy Jones-circa 1972-black sitcom theme song sound, “Booty”’s I don’t-want-to-fight-you resolve still stands out in a sea of pop songs across this (and last) century cataloguing lost-my-man, you-can’t-have-my-man, and give-me-back-my-man crises. It’s a song that also eschews woman vs. woman “bad blood” posturing in favor of extolling shrewd observations about the crazy things patriarchy makes women do to each other.
It’s a singular feminist statement on the album topped only by Mama’s Gun’s first single and accompanying video for the track “Bag Lady,” arguably the first pop song by an African-American musician to overtly engage tropes and images from a classic work of black women’s literature. In loving tribute to Ntozake Shange’s 1975 pathbreaking choreopoem drama For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, the video for “Bag Lady” re-stages signature scenes and images from the play as the song revisits its major themes of self-love, self-discovery, unrequited love, gender conflict and communication, emotional and psychological bruising, failure, redemption, and personal fulfillment for black women. Produced and directed by Badu, the clip, “a poemeography by Erykah Badu,” features five women (as opposed to seven in Shange’s play) who represent the colors of the rainbow. Badu, the Lady in Red, begins by literally breaking out of the wide-screen cinematic format and moves in the next scene with our five “colored” women, strolling the streets together before ending up in the enclosed space of the classroom, a constricted site in more ways than one since it’s here that, as Badu sings “I guess nobody every told you/All you must hold on to/Is you/Is you/Is you!”
The inadequacies of institutional education—it’s inability to address the specific needs and concerns of black women—are put on blast as each “colored woman” shrugs her shoulders to the beat of Elevado’s mix and Badu’s own deft production. To the church they head for a spiritual revival to “let it go, let it go, let it go.” Badu’s Red Lady advises her sisteren to “pack light”—let go of the harmful elements of the past--or else “you gon’ miss your bus.” It’s a song that contemplates how to not let the baggage weigh you down and make you wait, and it offers a way forward for women of color (many colors here) by way of a text from the bygone 1970s black feminist renaissance era.
Like Hill and her sometime Soulquarian sister Scott in particular, Erykah Badu was not willing, on Mama’s Gun, to sacrifice extolling narratives of black feminist self-care for ones that exposed black communal peril, trauma, and tragedy. “A.D. 2000,” her broken-hearted yet clear-eyed elegy for Amadou Diallo is, in fact, a song that weaves together the profound sadness arising out of the recognition about how little black life matters in American culture. In the wake of the acquittal of the four plain-clothed police officers who took Diallo’s life, Badu sings a song for him (A.D.) and for the after-death era, one in which no monuments will mark the passing of those who were killed by the hands of the state. Thirteen years before Bay Area community organizer Alicia Garza would lament the chronic disregard for the slaughter of black life and, with her fellow queer black feminist activists, create a hashtag that subsequently ignited a global movement, Badu recorded a dirge for the newly-woke age of no justice. That she did so while enlisting soul legend Betty “Clean Up Woman” Wright to contribute vocals drives home the ways that she yokes together gender solidarity and black uplift politics in the 2.0 version of her career.
At its core, Mama’s Gun is an album that understands just how essential black love is to any movement to fight the power, and it also recognizes just how expensive it is to lose it. Badu went through a high profile break-up with Outkast’s Andre “3000” Benjamin, the father of her first child, as she began to work on the album. In the wake of the split, she penned the aching, Chaka Khan-inflected epic that closes the record, the 10-minute “Green Eyes,” which moves through several different suites that capture the many moods of a relationship coming to an end. Opening with a nod to Lady Day-era jazz vocalizing, “Green Eyes” crackles with the sound of vinyl as Badu croons a torch song lament that rolls with fits and starts through jealousy, fear, resignation, regret, resolution. We move with her as she travels the abyss of her unbearable “growing pains.” It is a song that underscores the fact that, more than a decade before Queen Yoncé, Erykah Badu laid down the blueprint for a black feminist album that went well beyond documenting tales of heartbreak to address issues greater than the sum of any one relationship. She made a record that wore its awareness of the larger traumas and challenges that complicate human intimacy on its sleeves. It was music for the revolution that wasn’t televised. | 2016-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Motown | September 25, 2016 | 9.4 | 08d3b356-3d93-4eed-a63e-a426dc3c00c0 | Daphne A. Brooks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daphne-a. brooks/ | null |
Philly-based artist who also plays in Birds of Maya releases an album of warped and raw guitar-pop experimentation. | Philly-based artist who also plays in Birds of Maya releases an album of warped and raw guitar-pop experimentation. | Purling Hiss: Public Service Announcement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14916-public-service-announcement/ | Public Service Announcement | It's not normally a good sign when you put on an album and the first thought that comes to mind is a dude in acid washed jeans noodling for hours on a guitar in the middle of a music store. The opening bars of Public Service Announcement by Purling Hiss bring to mind such an image, but the album turns out to be a little more complicated than that.
If underground rock music has spent the past couple of years skewing rough and lo-fi, toying with ideas that lean away from actual structure or fully completed pieces, then Purling Hiss (aka Mike Polizze, who also plays in Birds of Maya, a band that kicks around Philadelphia with Kurt Vile) takes the idea to its logical conclusion. Songs bend under warped tape while guitars jam up into upper-register treble. Listen to Public Service Announcement on mediocre headphones, and it can sound like watery background static. But a situation involving staring at a wall and focusing on the record while accepting its controlled mania can be rewarding.
Tracks like "Porch Dude/Slight Return" begin with a perfectly normal riff. But then the tape wobbles and the music sounds like an accident that's been reigned in and controlled. The jams are given shape and then ripped apart by recording technique. And these days, when an album sounds this imperfect, you have to assume there's a reason. It's 2010, and recording pristine songs takes little more than a good mic and some pirated editing software. It's up to artists to recreate primitive, raw recordings artificially, and Purling Hiss uses this rawness as a dominant instrument. Without these smudges, Public Service Announcement could play out as an off-kilter, potentially flat version of recycled AM radio gold. With these imperfections, though, it sits comfortably beside other sonic innovators with a vital pop music heart: Ariel Pink, John Maus, and even at times a stony version of Phil Elverum's warm, all encompassing ambient hiss.
But if Public Service Announcement finds its comfort in rambling experimentation, then its main fault is how drawn out it is. It's the risk that comes when you stuff the music with a million ideas that are about halfway there. Nothing sticks around too long-- except, unfortunately, on "Malice in Wonderland", when the guitar grind sounds like a propeller plane taking off for about five solid minutes. Beyond that, it's a challenging record in the best way, splitting the difference between easy nostalgia and a windswept take on pop experimentation. | 2010-12-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-12-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Woodsist | December 7, 2010 | 7.4 | 08d4af05-00c1-41e5-ad5c-e9cb74783470 | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | null |
More interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends, Taylor Swift’s 10th album pursues a newly subdued and amorphous pop sound. | More interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends, Taylor Swift’s 10th album pursues a newly subdued and amorphous pop sound. | Taylor Swift: Midnights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-midnights/ | Midnights | Midnights is about reflection, not reinvention. Taylor Swift has explained that at length, in her own flowery vernacular: These 13 songs are “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” The thoughts that keep the 32-year-old songwriter up late are the ones she’s spent nine albums excavating: the unpredictable rise and devastating fall of romance; the binary of the “good girl” and the “bad girl,” and the chafing of societal expectation (that “1950s shit”); and the uncomfortable acceptance of her own fallibility. Life, she declares, “is emotionally abusive.”
Midnights is Swift’s first album to be recorded entirely with Jack Antonoff, after nearly a decade of ever higher-profile collaborations. In the past, he has accentuated Swift’s ambitiously vivid storytelling with expressive, technicolor synth pop. Here, in accordance with the lateness of the hour, they explore moodier, more subdued hues. Built around vocal effects and vintage synths, it’s an understated sound more interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends. On the mid-album centerpiece “Midnight Rain,” against a backdrop as crystalline as the titular weather, Swift examines the pursuit of career over partnership. Exaggerating her natural uptalk, the production morphs her voice into a dramatic slant: “He wanted comfortable/I wanted that pain.” The woozy “Snow on the Beach” sketches an image of strange beauty in twinkling synth and violin, as Lana Del Rey’s warm background harmonies add a welcome coziness. Later, as Swift hesitantly enters a new relationship on “Labyrinth,” the production mirrors the ice melting around her heart, each synth quiver a pump of new blood.
Building on the softly stuttering Reputation tracks “Delicate” and “Dress,” the album at times recalls the way the spare, hazy beats of Lorde’s Pure Heroine cut through the denser radio hits of the early 2010s. While it’s gratifying to hear Swift push her idea of pop beyond the fireworks of her pre-2020 material, the evolution can feel uneven. In her transition from the Americana-lite of Folklore back to sparkling synths, she’s also restored some of her more theatric impulses. On “Karma” she conjures her sassy, shit-stirring alter ego in a less vindictive mood, luxuriating in her rivals’ inevitable comeuppance. The ominous, wobbly murmur lurking beneath the revenge fantasy “Vigilante Shit” recalls Billie Eilish’s debut, though Swift’s attempts at edginess come across as a costume; she was a far more believable killer on Evermore’s murder-mystery ballad “No Body, No Crime.”
If Swift’s previous recordings were full-blown productions with radically distinct aesthetics, this one would be best staged in a black-box theater, where the stories change but the physical space remains consistently austere. The effect is most curious on “Maroon,” which opens in medias res on the aftermath of a night fueled by some roommate’s “cheap-ass screw-top rosé,” a syllabic feat. This doomed romance unwinds atop a downcast rumbling, with drums that echo as if from within a black hole; by the final chorus, Swift’s vocals are processed within an inch of their life. In stark contrast to the passionate hue of her words, the overall effect is oddly impersonal, bordering on numb. Of all of the songs on Midnights, “Maroon” may be the one that keeps me awake at night.
On 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, Swift stepped away from autobiographical songwriting and found new depths of feeling in fictional narratives. For perhaps the first time in a career built on curated lyrical bloodletting, she gave herself the gift of emotional distance. With Midnights, she returns to a diaristic style, addressing the central conflict of Taylor Swift, the individual and the persona: She’s self-conscious to a fault but rarely self-aware. “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror,” she sings on lead single “Anti-Hero,” more weary than winking. She has fun with her self-loathing, likening herself to a performatively selfless politician and a Godzilla trampling a city of sexy babies; “It’s me, hi/I’m the problem,” she says at the bridge, cracking a wincing smile and imagining the memes to come. Owning the “problem” isn’t quite the same thing as changing, and she’s betting that you can relate.
Swift revisits this tension in the final minutes of Midnights, on “Mastermind”: “I swear/I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.” Movingly, she writes herself a twist ending: The lover whose attention she’s spent the entire song scheming to capture sees right through her designs. Swift has often portrayed love as something that happens to her; from “You Belong With Me” to “Don’t Blame Me,” she is forever at romance’s whims. But the “Mastermind” not only achieves what she wants and deserves through her own efforts, she finds someone who recognizes how important it is for her to assert creative agency. The sentiment is echoed again on “Sweet Nothing,” a hiccuping nursery rhyme written alongside her partner, actor Joe Alwyn (credited as William Bowery): “On the way home/I wrote a poem/You say, ‘What a mind’/This happens all the time.”
As has become Swift’s recent custom, this latest release is accompanied by a suite of bonus material: The seven additional songs on the surprise “3am Edition” vary in quality and offer little insight into the album proper. “Glitch” and “Paris” are just dumb fun, at least when considering the hilariously overwrought lines, “Sit quiet by my side in the shade/And not the kind that’s thrown/I mean, the kind under where a tree has grown.” The best of the 3am songs reunite Swift with the National’s Aaron Dessner, her collaborator for the bulk of Folklore and Evermore. One of these, “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” is seemingly a follow-up to 2010’s “Dear John,” drawing out the complexities of a teenage girl’s relationship with a manipulative older man and considering the weight of his violations with mature, nuanced perspective. It’s one of the best songs of her career, but its charging gallop would have pierced Midnights’ blanket of fog.
The closest comparison from the original release is the radiant “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” which indulges in some classic Swiftian mythmaking: Fueled by unrequited love, the outsider holes up in her bedroom and writes the songs that allow her to escape small-town stasis. The reality she finds is no fairytale. “I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this/I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss,” she sings, quietly nodding to her struggles with disordered eating. She concludes on an uplifting note, urging her audience to “make the friendship bracelets,” recognizing every misstep is a lesson learned. But the painful memories linger in the back of her mind, ready to creep into focus at the stroke of midnight. | 2022-10-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | October 24, 2022 | 7 | 08d7599e-312d-4585-8227-6fc932ad5558 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The only American release to become part of the Beatles' canon, Magical Mystery Tour combines a soundtrack EP and some brilliant singles. | The only American release to become part of the Beatles' canon, Magical Mystery Tour combines a soundtrack EP and some brilliant singles. | The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13436-magical-mystery-tour/ | Magical Mystery Tour | After the death of manager Brian Epstein, the Beatles took a series of rather poor turns, the first of which was the Magical Mystery Tour film. Conceived as a low-key art project, the Beatles were oddly nonchalant about the challenges of putting together a movie. They'd assembled records, they'd worked on A Hard Day's Night and Help!-- how hard could it be? Without Epstein to advise, however, things like budgeting and time management became a challenge, and this understated experimental film turned into a sapping distraction.
Musically, however, the accompanying EP was an overwhelming success. The EP format apparently freed the band to experiment a bit, not having to fill sides of a 45 with pop songs or make the grand statements of an album. The title track is a rousing set piece, meant to introduce the travelogue concept of the film. The remaining four songs released exclusive to the EP are low-key marvels-- Paul McCartney's graceful "The Fool on the Hill" and music-hall throwback "Your Mother Should Know", George Harrison's droning "Blue Jay Way", and the percolating instrumental "Flying". Few of them are anyone's all-time favorite Beatles songs, only one had a prayer of being played on the radio, and yet this run seems to achieve a majesty in part because of that: It's a rare stretch of amazing Beatles music that can seem like a private obsession rather than a permanent part of our shared culture.
As a more laid-back release, the EP suggested the direction the band might have taken on the White Album had it remained a full band, happy to shed the outsized conceptualism and big statements and craft atmospheric, evocative pieces. In the U.S., the EP was paired with three recent double-sided singles, ballooning Magical Mystery Tour into an album-- the only instance in which a U.S. release, often mangled by Capitol, became Beatles canon. With only the EP's title track married specifically to the film's themes, the overall effect of a title track/album sleeve as shell game was in line with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Of the three singles, the undisputed highlight is "Strawberry Fields Forever"/ "Penny Lane", John Lennon and Paul McCartney's tributes to their hometown, Liverpool. Slyly surreal, assisted by studio experimentation but not in debt to it, full of brass, harmonium, and strings, unmistakably English-- when critics call eccentric or baroque UK pop bands "Beatlesesque," this is the closest there is to a root for that adjective. There is no definitive Beatles sound, of course, but with a band that now functions as much as a common, multi-generational language as a group of musicians, it's no surprise that songs rooted in childhood-- the one experience most likely to seem shared and have common touchpoints-- are among their most universally beloved.
The rest of the singles collected here are no less familiar: Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" was initially completed up for an international TV special on BBC1-- its basic message was meant to translate to any language. Harrison's guitar solo, producer George Martin's strings, and the parade of intertextual musical references that start and close the piece elevate it above hippie hymn. Its flipside, "Baby You're a Rich Man", is less successful, a second-rate take on John Lennon's money-isn't-everything theme from the considerably stronger "And Your Bird Can Sing". It's the one lesser moment on an otherwise massively rewarding compilation.
Much better from Lennon is "I Am the Walrus", crafted for the Magical Mystery Tour film and EP but also released as a double-sided single with McCartney's "Hello Goodbye". One of Lennon's signature songs, "Walrus" channels the singer's longtime fascinations with Lewis Carroll, puns and turns of phrase, and non sequiturs. "Hello Goodbye" echoes the same contradictory logic found in the verses of "All You Need Is Love", a vague sense of disorientation that still does little to balance its relentlessly upbeat tone. McCartney excelled at selling simplistic lyrics that risk seeming cloying, though, and he again does here-- plus, the kaleidoscopic, carnival-ride melody and interplay between lead and backing vocals ensure it's a much better record than it is a song.
In almost every instance on those singles, the Beatles are either whimsical or borderline simplistic, releasing songs that don't seem sophisticated or heavy or monumental (even though most of them are). In that sense, they're all like "All You Need Is Love" or childhood memories or Lewis Carroll-- easy to love, fit for all ages, rich in multi-textual details, deceptively trippy (see Paul's "Penny Lane" in particular, with images of it raining despite blue skies, or the songs here that revel in contradictions-- "Hello Goodbye"'s title, the verses in "All You Need Is Love"). More than any other place in the band's catalogue, this is where the group seems to crack open a unique world, and for many young kids then and since this was their introduction to music as imagination, or adventure. The rest of the Magical Mystery Tour LP is the opposite of the middle four tracks on the EP-- songs so universal that, like "Yellow Submarine", they are practically implanted in your brain from birth. Seemingly innocent, completely soaked through with humor and fantasy, Magical Mystery Tour slots in my mind almost closer to the original Willy Wonka or The Wizard of Oz as it does other Beatles records or even other music-- timeless entertainment crafted with a childlike curiosity and appeal but filled with wit and wonder.
On the whole, Magical Mystery Tour is quietly one of the most rewarding listens in the Beatles' career. True, it doesn't represent some sort of forward momentum or clear new idea-- largely in part because it wasn't conceived as an album. The accompanying pieces on the EP are anomalies in the Beatles oeuvre but they aren't statements per se, or indications that the group is in any sort of transition. But if there was ever a moment in the Beatles' lifetime that listeners would have been happy to have the group just settle in and release songs as soon as possible, it was just before and after the then-interminable 10-month gap between the Revolver and *Sgt. Pepper'*s. Without that context, the results could seem slight-- a sort-of canonized version of Past Masters perhaps-- but whether it's an album, a collection of separate pieces, or whatnot matters little when the music itself is so incredible.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-09-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 9, 2009 | 10 | 08d76a76-5cbe-45b7-9020-4bc3da4be7ae | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Grimes is the one-woman cyborg-pop project of Montreal's Claire Boucher. Visions, her compulsively listenable third album, is an electro cotton-candy entryway to her peculiar kind of bliss. | Grimes is the one-woman cyborg-pop project of Montreal's Claire Boucher. Visions, her compulsively listenable third album, is an electro cotton-candy entryway to her peculiar kind of bliss. | Grimes: Visions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16211-grimes-visions/ | Visions | As a child I feared the day the world would be taken over by robots; these days I am seized by a much more potent fear that I am becoming one. Digital interfaces invade our imagination in strange, tangible ways, and with each day I spend in front of my computer screen, the red Gchat dots representing my friends and co-workers start to look more and more like HAL. Have you ever caught yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain? Was the Wikipedia blackout of 2012 as important a cultural moment as the New York City blackout of '77? Do androids dream of electric sheep, or do you not have an app for that yet?
"Post-internet" is a term that's stuck all too easily (guilty as charged) to Grimes' airy cyborg-pop, thanks in part to her endless quotability in acknowledging the digital world's influence on her aesthetic ("The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything.") But Visions, the latest and best album from the one-woman project of Montreal-based Claire Boucher, complicates the all-too-tidy "post-internet" tag by bringing into focus the many contrasts at the heart of her music: tensions between pop structure and diffuse atmosphere, between technology and the human body, between sensory-overloaded hyper-presence and transcendence. More solidly constructed and a lot more fun to listen to than anything she's put her name to so far, the electro cotton-candy of Visions is an inviting entrance into Grimes' peculiar kind of bliss.
On her first albums, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, Grimes buried pop impulses within textured muck and gloomy tones. But Visions finds Boucher mining not just the clean brightness of Aphex Twin-like atmospherics but also the immediacy of straight-up mall-pop: "Vowels = space and time" recalls nothing so much as Stacey Q's 1986 hit "Two of Hearts", while "Infinite Love Without Fulfillment" sounds like Boucher broke into the Apple store after hours and turned on all the display iPads to the same Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam video, rhythmically looped into something sublime. Some of Grimes' reference points call to mind the experimental pop of Nite Jewel or some of the artists on the 100% Silk roster. But that music seems interested in obscuring pop's immediacy or keeping a distance from the pleasure center, while Visions is an unabashed embrace of its source material, whether it's K-pop, new age, or bubblegum.
Boucher spends most of Visions singing in a vaporous falsetto. She occasionally manipulates her voice (as on the steely, Transformers-jam "Eight") but mostly she just loops it, layers it, and cloaks it in reverb; there are moments when what she's doing doesn't sound too far off from what Julianna Barwick's music might sound like if she were interested in making a synth-pop record. The most common complaint I've heard of Grimes come from people wishing her songs were more structured or hooky, or that her voice was more "present." But-- never mind the fact that even the haziest moments on the record are anchored by melody-- this diffuseness is one of Visions' most refreshing charms. Another oft-cited quote from Boucher the "post-internet" poster girl: "Basically I'm really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do." This is pop music for ambient fans, but it's also a welcome change for anyone exhausted by post-Gaga pop's tethers to artifice, theatricality, and skronky, turned-up-to-11 beats. To reach out and touch this music would be like putting your hand through a cloud.
But there's still that tension: Song titles such as "Be a Body", "Visiting Statue", and "Skin" are all testaments to Visions' interest in the corporeal. When she sings the titular lyric on "Be a Body", it sounds like a nagging request to come back down to earth, while "Skin" (which has a sputtering sensuality, like a robot programmed to write a slow jam) feels even more revealing: "Soft skin/ You touch me with it and so I know I can be human once again." Still, don't confuse these moments with any kind of new-agey, back-to-nature longing. One spin of "Genesis" is enough prove it: Post-humanism sounds like a blast.
Late last year, Simon Reynolds described electronic music's response to our digitized world as a new kind of maximalism: "a hell of a lot of inputs... in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs." That's an apt description for the music that Grimes was making before, but Visions showcases a streamlined aesthetic, resulting in a statement that feels focused, cohesive, and assured. It's simple enough to leave room for Grimes to grow, but this thing is so compulsively listenable it's hard to come away from it wanting much more. Anchored to the digital imagination but unbridled from its skittish anxiety and concerns, Visions gestures skyward and beyond. | 2012-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD / Arbutus | February 17, 2012 | 8.5 | 08da50db-4f1e-414d-b860-30054f1063ab | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Warp's entry into the New Wave revival play jaunty, precise power pop with punk's antipathies, all while exuding a tentative cool. | Warp's entry into the New Wave revival play jaunty, precise power pop with punk's antipathies, all while exuding a tentative cool. | Mäximo Park: A Certain Trigger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5646-a-certain-trigger/ | A Certain Trigger | There are two kinds of rock bands: Those who discovered the music first, and those who spent their allowance on leather and had nothing left for records. If Maxïmo Park fall into the latter category, they do a good job of hiding it. A Certain Trigger, the band's debut full-length, is rife with enough peripatetic song structures and lithe arpeggios to convince substance-questioning naysayers of the Newcastle quintet's musical smarts. But, to an extent, yes, they're bandwagon-riders, and latecomers at that. The New Wave revival has already dined out on the charts. That's why, working with the scraps of a restless trend-seeking audience, Maxïmo Park's recent success in their homeland is so surprising.
Rather than turning up pebbles for the next Big Thing or exploiting a quirk, Maxïmo Park hone in on the specifics of an umbrella genre. Like the Futureheads or Postcard, they play jaunty, precise power pop with punk's antipathies, exuding a tentative cool. Managing (mostly) without fashonista caginess and attendant snark, Maxïmo Park are an easy sell. Occasionally, there's the requisite sneer at an ex or a self-deprecating barb, but A Certain Trigger is seldom anything short of gentlemanly.
That civility translates to a sort of sneakiness. Maxïmo Park's muted dynamics, understated vocals, and starchy production stack up to a weak first impression. But over the course of a slow'n'steady courtship, the album develops character. The tug comes partly from deceptively complicated song structures. Maxïmo Park dispense with traditional verse/chorus/verse formatting while the melodies, insouciantly catchy, play dumb. Songs slide from verse to pre-chorus to chorus to bridge to post-bridge with little fanfare. You're lucky to get a repeat, but who needs one when the band whip out with one-time, eight-bar dalliances like the ecstatic, whirling bridge on upwardly mobile single "Graffiti"?
"Apply Some Pressure", the album's lead single, is typically roundabout. The song twists through some punchy, stiffly syncopated verses, each capped by a unison fill, before slipping into an extended bridge, driven by the type of harmony most bands would have been content to ride for an entire song. "Going Missing", with its propulsive beat and manic mood swings, is an overstuffed suitcase of post-breakup ambivalence: Lead singer Paul Smith is resilient while awake ("I'm going missing for awhile/ I've got nothing left to lose"), mournful in repose ("I sleep with my hands across my chest/ And I dream of you with someone else"). Aforementioned "Graffiti", which features a wiry, Voidoids-style non-groove, is aberrantly loose-limbed, but the architecture is anything but perfunctory, sprouting little detours at every intersection.
The band's lack of swagger is refreshing amid the hot fussed-over convicts and misogynistic sun kings of the New Wave sphere, but it also hampers the less convincing tracks (i.e., "Once a Glimpse" and "The Coast Is Always Changing"). There's also the question of why Maxïmo Park, a pop band, are on Warp, home to electronic visionaries Squarepusher and Autechre. The only reason I can think of is "Acrobat", an amazingly tender, drone-seeped song that harkens back to shoegaze and Velvet Underground while embracing modern gadgetry. It's Maxïmo Park's "Maps", a song at once exemplary of and antithetical to its brethren.
Don't take the comparisons as caveats. Maxïmo Park don't use their forebears as stepping stones out of creative desperation; it's a mark of their business savvy. Even if you know what's hot, you still have to make it pop, and nearly every song on A Certain Trigger succeeds. Maxïmo Park leave their grubby prints on each track, be it the teeth-grinding squall riding atop "Signal & Sign"'s second verse or the synths and organs lurking merrily underneath every song like a loner kid who snuck in to the dance party. | 2005-05-16T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-05-16T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | May 16, 2005 | 8.4 | 08de0f8c-f661-4d68-b4a5-e1979c4d320d | Pitchfork | null |
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Working again with Aaron Dessner, Swift challenges herself to find new dimensions within the moody atmosphere: fingerpicked ballads, colorful pop music, and her first country songs in years. | Working again with Aaron Dessner, Swift challenges herself to find new dimensions within the moody atmosphere: fingerpicked ballads, colorful pop music, and her first country songs in years. | Taylor Swift: Evermore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-evermore/ | Evermore | The tale of how Evermore came to be is the stuff of first loves, holiday rom-coms, Taylor Swift songs. Crafting the woodsy surprise album Folklore in isolation, she felt the spark of something exciting and new, and knowing all things must pass, wanted to make it linger just a little longer. Swift started telling romantic, bittersweet stories like this as a teenage songwriter in the mid-2000s, and her first instinct was to pair her words with glossy, plainspoken country-pop. As she became one of the most famous artists on the planet, the sound of her music followed the trajectory of fame itself: boundless and airborne through the early 2010s—then omnipresent and colossal, on the verge of suffocating by 2017’s Reputation.
Now 31, Swift is enjoying a phase characterized by great unburdenings. She described her 2019 album Lover like a deep breath, and she has spent the 16 months since its release in a kind of elongated exhale. Early this year, she attempted to unload a career’s worth of self-analysis and confessions in a documentary titled Miss Americana. In one scene, filmed just ahead of her 29th birthday, she experienced a minor panic attack while eating a burrito in the studio: “I kind of don’t really have the luxury of figuring stuff out,” she said, “because my life is planned two years ahead of time.” Any day now, she predicted, her proposed tour dates would start rolling in and her future would, once again, harden into a string of obligations.
Of course, most people’s plans were canceled in 2020, and Swift is instead making the quietest, most elegant music of her career with an unexpected collaborator, the National’s Aaron Dessner. In contrast with the producers who helped amplify and smooth her songwriting for the masses, Dessner invited Swift to ramble and elaborate, to tell stories from beginning to end, to invent fictional characters with interconnected storylines. He is the friend who offers a comfortable place to spiral, leaning in and refilling their wine glasses. In other words, he would probably be really stoked about the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” with the extra verses and cursing.
The way Swift tells it, she and Dessner were so invigorated by the process of making Folklore that, without a standard press cycle and tour to follow its release this summer, they decided to just keep working. Five months later, we have Evermore, a companion album built from the same general sounds and personnel, with Jack Antonoff, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and Swift’s boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, all returning to the fold. It’s the fastest follow-up in her career and her first album to not directly overhaul the sound of its predecessor: The goal isn’t to recapture the glow of Folklore’s cabin getaway but rather to extend her stay for another season.
While Folklore seemed to materialize from nowhere as a complete, cohesive vision, Evermore is structurally akin to something like 2012’s Red, where the breadth of her songwriting is as important as the depth. Within its 15-song, hourlong tracklist, you will find the closest things to country music she has written in years (the gorgeous “Cowboy Like Me,” the Haim-assisted true-crime anthem “No Body, No Crime”) and colorful pop music she largely avoided in her last batch of recordings (“Long Story Short,” “Gold Rush”). Elsewhere, there’s a ballad in a 5/4 time and another that bursts suddenly into a Bon Iver song halfway through before gently floating down to earth. “I haven’t met the new me yet,” Swift sings at one point. While that may be true, she has found plenty of new ideas for the old one.
Dessner’s fingerpicked guitar and somber piano, along with wintry string arrangements from his brother Bryce, remain crucial to this music, and Swift challenges herself to find new dimensions within the moody atmosphere they’ve honed over the past two decades with the National. Their instinct together is to leave her songwriting artfully uncluttered, as in the spacious piano ballad “Champagne Problems,” or to furnish her voice in cozy chambers of acoustic guitar, cello, and male duet partners. (Ironically, the National’s own Matt Berninger ends up sounding somewhat out of place in “Coney Island,” especially compared to Vernon, the most natural and inventive vocal accompanist Swift has found to date.)
On her own, Swift remains a versatile and expressive vocalist—hear the scare quotes in her delivery through the lightly clattering kiss-off of “Closure” (“Don’t treat me like some situation that needs to be ‘handled’”). She has always been a wordy lyricist, often seeking to mimic the sound of rushing, restless endorphins, and here, she uses that skill to magnify sad, small moments like the home-for-the-holidays fling in “‘Tis the Damn Season.” In a near whisper, she treats Dessner’s electric guitar framework as an empty diary page, her notes spilling into the margins, using every inch of space he offers to describe the fog on the windshield, the mud on the tires, the parking spot by her old school.
Another stunner is “Ivy,” a knotty fairytale that reveals darker characters in the storybook setting of Swift’s early work. Backed by banjo, trumpet, and gentle harmonies from Vernon, she begins with an allusion to Miller Williams’ 1997 poem “Compassion.” “I’ll meet you where the spirit meets the bone,” she sings before describing a forest dreamland corrupted by someone else’s roots. The Arkansas poet she quotes happens to be the father of outlaw country legend Lucinda Williams, who used the same line as the title of the first album she released on her own label, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. (“We can do what we want to do now,” Williams said at the time, after decades of mistreatment from the music industry. “Plus we own the masters, everything we record.”)
Allowing her own biography to fall to the background, Swift loosens her need for narrative resolution and emotional clarity, sometimes letting the music speak for her. (An uncharacteristic retraction in “Happiness”—“No, I didn’t mean that/Sorry, I can’t see facts through all of my fury”—suggests she’s striving toward more stoic, distanced writing.) The climactic “Marjorie” is named after her maternal grandmother, an opera singer who died during Swift’s adolescence. Over Dessner’s pulsing keyboard arrangement, her lyrics are fragmented, almost chantlike, composed from bits of memories, advice, and regrets. As Swift considers how legacy works, she offers the album’s most forthright summoning of a ghost: “You’re alive/So alive,” she sings. “And if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were singing to me now.”
If the periods of hibernation between Swift’s records once felt crucial to the drama of her returns, her music now is filled with these momentary silences and breakthroughs. After a career spent striving for the next level of stardom, she has discovered a more sustainable path for evolution. I think about the caustic 2017 music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” where she depicted herself as a zombie, lining up all her past selves to taunt each other; she seemed spent, haunted, sick of competing with herself. And I think of 2006’s “Our Song,” one of her first great songs, which took comfort in the idea that no music can capture the chaos of a lifetime, its moments of hope and loss, the familiar routines and sudden jolts. On Evermore, she seems at peace with her past, in a suspended moment of transition, letting us follow along as she learns: Don’t just get settled, she tells us through this bounty of material. Get stronger. | 2020-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | December 15, 2020 | 7.9 | 08e0fbd1-9605-4ca4-b61b-2a1933487c0e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the New York rapper’s unsuspecting 2001 debut, a breath of fresh air for a city who needed it. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the New York rapper’s unsuspecting 2001 debut, a breath of fresh air for a city who needed it. | Fabolous: Ghetto Fabolous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fabolous-ghetto-fabolous/ | Ghetto Fabolous | Everything Fabolous knew could be found in blocks encompassed by the Brevoort Houses in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. There, his personality developed: skeptical, quiet, unbothered, the type to stand around the freestyle circle but never contribute a verse himself. Throughout his childhood, he watched hip-hop blossom in Brooklyn, from the sound of the underground to something he couldn’t walk out of his home without hearing. One of the first rappers he became enamored with was Big Daddy Kane, his swag was undeniable—the chains, the high-top fade, Madonna—and everyone in the neighborhood had a story about Biggie Smalls and Lil’ Kim. In high school, before he was known as Fabolous, and before his debut album was released on September 11, 2001, the kid born John Jackson would draw at an art and design school in Midtown Manhattan, another world. But even as he traveled to the city, he couldn’t help but notice rap’s impact around him—it was the soundtrack of neighborhood fish fries and basketball games, and he would hear about hip-hop duo Smif-N-Wessun outside like local celebrities. He wanted to have that effect.
After a few small-time recordings, Jackson laid down a verse on a local producer’s flip of Puff Daddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins.” The track became a neighborhood hit and eventually, the word spread to Queens-born party promoter and manager Kevin Webb. Together, they recorded a proper demo, and Webb made a promise that he could get Jackson’s music to the ears of a DJ who was breaking hits in New York like a one-man WorldStarHipHop.
DJ Clue, raised in Jamaica, Queens, was a pioneer of the rap mixtape. In the 1990s, after landing an internship at RCA, Clue began to get access to unreleased exclusives. His mixtapes, known as Clue Tapes, were essentially curated playlists and goldmines for everything New York hip-hop. Coated with his signature DJ drops, Clue Tapes were launching pads for iconic New York rap records of the ’90s from Method Man to JAY-Z to Biggie. Often his tapes would include songs acquired without permission, like the time he ignited a beef with Bad Boy Records after leaking a track from Ready to Die and Biggie traveled to the Bronx with a gun in search of Clue. But by the time 1997 rolled around, Clue’s platform was so powerful—from the clubs to the streets—that Diddy invited him to get an advance listen of Biggie’s Life After Death and choose any two songs to include on a mixtape. Clue chose two records that would become timeless: “Hypnotize” and “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems.” Hot 97, New York’s premier radio station, desperately wanted access to the pair of Life After Death songs so they began to spin the records with Clue’s DJ tags still attached. The success led to Hot 97 recruiting DJ Clue for his own show on the station, “Monday Night Mixtapes.”
Kevin Webb had known DJ Clue from parties he used to throw—Webb would secure the venue, Clue would DJ. Webb played the demo for Clue’s partner and manager, Rich Skane. “Yo, I heard some stuff from this kid, he sounds aight,” Skane said to Clue. “You should check him out.” Clue invited Jackson to meet him at Hot 97. In 1998, Jackson, at this point a high school senior who had yet to even form an official rap pseudonym, pulled up to Hot 97 with an Avirex jacket draped over his lanky frame, expecting nothing more than a typical sit-down meeting. But that day, he would leave Hot 97 with a rap name and the support of hip-hop’s most influential DJ.
In 1998, the New York rap dream was simple: secure a record deal and get a song played on Hot 97. When Jackson arrived, Clue was fumbling around the radio station’s headquarters and told Jackson to wait in the studio with Noreaga, who at the time was one of New York’s hottest rappers. After a commercial break, Clue told Jackson and Noreaga they were going to freestyle live on Hot 97’s airwaves. Clue dropped the beat for The Lox’s “Money, Power, and Respect,” and suddenly, the typically quiet and reserved Jackson erupted.
“Just in case y’all was lost, I’m the face in the sauce/Long Cuban, white ice, placed in the cross,” raps Jackson on the opening line, an introduction to his smooth wordplay and blase delivery. Noreaga followed him with a verse, but Jackson wanted to leave his mark, and surprisingly dropped a second. In this verse, Jackson washes Noreaga and misspells a word that DJ Clue would stamp as his rap name: “It’s the F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S/In a new S, circling the U.S.” The next day the DJ gave him a call, and soon enough the first signee of Clue’s Desert Storm Records was Fabolous.
Fabolous spent the next few years being touted around New York by DJ Clue like an up-and-coming boxer and his promoter. He became a staple of DJ Clue’s mixtapes, as the fresh-voiced kid who delivered clever punchlines effortlessly. On The Professional, DJ Clue’s platinum 1998 debut album, Fab made two appearances, one with Foxy Brown and Mase, another solo. As a part of Desert Storm Records, Fabolous joined Interscope, where he began to put together a debut album. It was a rough introduction to the music industry for Fabolous: Once, the label paid Lil Wayne $100,000 and four bottles Cristal out of Fabolous’ budget to record a guest verse for the Brooklyn rapper. Lil Wayne showed up for 15 minutes, laid down a verse, grabbed the bottles of Cristal, and left without as much as acknowledging Fab.
When Clue left Interscope, Fab followed, and together they signed a distribution deal with Elektra Records. But still, Fabolous was rooted in the mixtape world—spitting verses was all he knew, hooks and song structure were an afterthought. In 2001, on “Fantastic Four Pt. 2,” one of rap’s signature mixtape posse cuts, Fabolous held his own, but was ultimately in the shadow of Cam’ron, Styles P, and Jadakiss. Compared to those larger than life personalities, Fab’s laid back persona was easy to overlook. But his appeal would fully emerge when a fledgling R&B singer asked DJ Clue for help.
Lil Mo, a Long Island-born singer who emerged in the late ’90s as a protege of Missy Elliott, was in search of a hit of her own. Her first attempt “Superwoman (Part I)” was a misfire, and the desperate R&B singer brought the song to DJ Clue and convinced him to do a remix using a beat originally intended for the rap duo M.O.P. Next, she needed a guest verse, and instead of turning to Missy, Mo asked Clue about Fabolous. “She came to Clue and was like, ‘Who’s that kid on your mixtapes doing those freestyles? That kid is hot,’” Fabolous later said. Featuring Fabolous, “Superwoman Pt. II,” was released in early 2001, and pushed on DJ Clue’s preferred platform: radio and mixtape placements. Over a quintessential early 2000s beat, which similar to an early Missy and Timabland track sounds like demented funk, Fabolous balances the punchline-driven rhymes the underground loved with a swag and good looks perfect for MTV. That summer, “Superwoman Pt. II” hit No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Within months, Fabolous went from an underground mixtape rapper to a rising Brooklyn phenom, with a highly anticipated debut album set to be released on September 11.
On the morning of Ghetto Fabolous, Fabolous was prepared to begin his rollout and ready to face what he thought would be his biggest obstacle: JAY-Z. Earlier in the year, the Roc-A-Fella overlord moved the release date up a week for The Blueprint, soon to be one of hip-hop’s definitive albums. Fab was unconcerned and delusional—he shrugged off JAY’s competition on an episode of 106 & Park—until he woke up the morning of his debut to a phone call where he was told his press day was cancelled and he should turn on the television. “I thought Hov had sabotaged everything,” Fabolous later said. But when he tuned in, it was just in time to see the second plane crash into the twin towers.
Fabolous climbed on the roof of the Brevoort Houses in Bed-Stuy and watched the smoke from the World Trade Center’s towers fill the sky. New York was thrust into panic mode: first responders flooded the scene, parents fought to reach their kids at schools, and the city began to shut down. While the world watched in horror, a nation and by extension its culture, began to rally around the flag. In the coming months, patriotic anthems suddenly became Billboard charting hits: Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning.” Films, television, and even comics became either a source of unity—Marvel comics published an issue which featured major superheroes as sidekicks to firefighters and police officers, and The West Wing responded with a preachy special on terrorism—or unintended escapism: the boom in fantasy films. Everything was looked at through the lens of 9/11, even Ghetto Fabolous.
Ghetto Fabolous—the name a spin on a term credited to record executive Andre Harrell—was reinterpreted by listeners in whichever way they see fit. The music video for his lead single “Can’t Deny It,” featuring smooth-talking G-Funk crooner Nate Dogg, unintentionally became a patriotic symbol because of its red, white, and blue color scheme. “We ended up having the No. 1 video at MTV when the stats came back, they pushed that forward on their own,” Fab said in an interview. “They wanted that video to be No. 1 because of what it symbolized and what it showed visually.”
No matter how much he raps about drug dealing and murder, the album always feels like a celebratory rags-to-riches story. “Most broads I done met, ain’t see a guy/Who spend a G on Gucci T’s, five for sweats/I’m what chicks strive to get, I stay in the PJ’s/You thinkin’ Brevoort, I’m talkin’ private jets,” he says on “Ma’ Be Easy.” But Ghetto Fabolous is most effective when he embraces the hip-hop and R&B formula, which began to pick up steam after Diddy organized Jodeci’s “Come and Talk to Me (Hip Hop Remix)” in the early ’90s, but exploded with a big-budget pop-friendly slickness in the early 2000s. Fab would inject the style with his wordy punchlines, nonchalant delivery, and constantly spelling his name like he’s afraid you’ll forget.
On “Take You Home,” Fab reunites with Lil Mo and her soothing hook seamlessly complements his raps that sound like they were pulled from the back half of a lengthy Clue Tape. “I love the way you smirk and giggle, jerk and wiggle/Throw yo’ legs up while I work the middle,” he says, with a bold confidence that makes up for cheesiness and a lack of originality. He captures similar energy with Jagged Edge on “Trade It All,” though the crew belts a chorus that could have been recorded by any of the R&B groups of the era. Yet, with Fab’s calm demeanor, the song is low stakes and breezy, ready for a day of consuming nutcrackers at the beach.
Beatmakers of the moment like Timbaland and Just Blaze briefly appear and hand Fab instrumentals fitting for the celebration. Timbaland’s beat on “Right Now and Later On” is true to his signature organized chaos, and Fab’s verses are pure escapism. “Fab’s hard to be found/But most likely I’m with a foreign dame who name’s hard to pronounce/I started out, gettin’ hard by the ounce/No more cash in stashes, it’s cards in accounts,” he raps, blurring the lines between reflections on his past and fiction. Just Blaze’s “Ma’ Be Easy” instrumental would make any New Yorker Harlem Shake after a sip or two of brown liquor, and Fab catches the perfect balance between punchlines you can’t wait to forget and memorable ones: “I be the club king with diamonds shuffling your friends.”
On the album’s centerpiece, “Young’n (Holla Back),” the Neptunes convince Fabolous to embrace the goofier side of his personality. Initially, Fab was against the idea, he wanted to make something harder, but Pharrell pushed him to be inspired by rap flows of the past. “He said, ‘You should rhyme like Rob Base or Vanilla Ice,’” Fab reflected. “Then he went into the vocal booth and did a reference vocal himself. We was laughing, but it sounded alright.” He makes Pharell’s vision, which certainly would have been corny in someone else’s hands, come to life, while still getting off the chest-puffing street raps he was known for: “Thuggin’ jeans and Timbs/Fitted to the front lean the brim/Ride but never on teenage rims/And I keep a chick’s face between my limbs.” Part of the broadly appealing balance that made Ghetto Fabolous the perfect album to lighten the city’s mood.
In the years since, Fabolous has become a debated figure in Brooklyn rap lore: To some, he’s forever synonymous with cheesy punchlines, uninspired beat selection, and questionable fashion choices, and to others, he’s an example of consistency, a trusted guest feature, and an underappreciated ability to adapt his style to fit the times. In reality, it’s probably a bit of both, though Ghetto Fabolous is by far the best iteration of Fab, for a moment the only person cooler in Brooklyn was JAY-Z. It’s easy to look back at the formulaic R&B hooks, dated production, and mixed bag of punchlines, and say that Ghetto Fabolous was never any good. But that would be removing the context of a moment, where Fabolous was a breath of fresh air for a city grappling with a new normal. | 2020-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Desert Storm / Elektra | May 31, 2020 | 7.2 | 08e2942e-2629-40a7-8512-d9863b3bc621 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Help! soundtrack album is as haphazard as Beatles For Sale, but it lacks that record's glowering intensity; it's a great but confusing record. | The Help! soundtrack album is as haphazard as Beatles For Sale, but it lacks that record's glowering intensity; it's a great but confusing record. | The Beatles: Help! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13428-help/ | Help! | In A Hard Days Night, after throwing a sarky George Harrison out of their studio, a fashion-maven TV producer and his assistant try and make sense of him. Such a rude young man-- but is he "an early clue to the new direction"? They consult the calendar: no, the new trend isn't due for another three weeks.
It's a gag, and not an original one, but born of truth: the fashion watcher's assumption was that things ran on a two to three year cycle. As 1965 began, the Beatles obviously weren't going away, but being pop's aristocracy didn't necessarily make you pop's leading edge. The kids were coming up from behind. Commentators like Nik Cohn had noted sections of the pop audience looking to R&B clubs for their harder-edged, bluesier sound, and this was bleeding into the mainstream. The Animals could claim a no. 1, the Stones had two. So did London's Kinks, and if the Who didn't it was only because their routines were too extreme.
And so, two years and four albums into their career, the Beatles at last had rivals. Serious ones, who'd rampaged through the door the Beatles opened and blithely ignored the showbiz conventions the Beatles were contractually tied to. While the Rolling Stones recorded "Satisfaction", the Beatles were being trotted around the world shooting the ambitious, ridiculous Help!. Its soundtrack album is as haphazard as Beatles For Sale, but lacks that record's glowering intensity.
Luckily, it replaces moodiness with curiosity and a much-expanded instrumental palette. They'd been intermittent experimenters from the start, but Help! is where the band's interest in sound and arrangement really starts to flower, and this remastered version is a particular feast of new timbres and ideas: the percussion on "You're Gonna Lose That Girl", Indian instrumentation appearing on "Ticket to Ride", the weary woodwind on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away".
All this is put into the service of some of the band's best pop songs. The title track, for instance, where Lennon's as confused and angry as he was on "I'm a Loser", but now the music doesn't follow suit-- its briskness blanks his pleas, and his bandmates sound more mocking than sympathetic. Paul gets similar finger-wagging backing on "The Night Before", a wonderfully jaunty song about being dumped after a one-night stand. "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" is another song happy to marry beauty to venom-- its words an explicit threat, its harmonies an example of the seemingly effortless loveliness that makes people go gooey and mystical when the Beatles are mentioned.
Obviously, their new interest in texture wasn't wholly distinct from their new interest in drugs. The "reference" in "It's Only Love" is played for laughs, but "Tell Me What You See" falls halfway between romance and mysticism and is rather awkward despite its marvelous period percussion. The album has other murky spots-- Harrison's songs are fine, but "Act Naturally" suggests that finding a tune for Ringo every album was becoming an issue. And the closing version of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" is a farewell to the "end it with a rocker" formula that drags despite Lennon's best efforts to rouse it.
It doesn't help "Dizzy" that it's placed just after two personal breakthroughs for McCartney. "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Yesterday" are both love songs, rich with feeling but never overwrought, with the deceptive lightness that would become trademark and millstone for their writer. "Face", a folksy country song, demonstrated the gift for pastiche that would help give the rest of the Beatles' career such convincing variety. "Yesterday" went further, demonstrating that you could arrange a pop song orchestrally in a way that might deepen it, not just turn it into kitsch. Of all their tracks, "Yesterday" is surely the one that's hardest to listen to with new ears. This remaster, capturing its preternatural serenity, is a terrific opportunity to do exactly that.
Help! is almost the last twitch of the Beatles as a working, gigging beat group. It's a great but confusing record, and no wonder contemporaries felt they might at last be losing direction. With hindsight confusion looks like transition, and the remasters-- issued all at once and linked to a game designed to present the band's story as a story-- can't help but invite that hindsight. But the story could have turned out differently, and these early records are still so fierce and alive. Taking the Beatles one disc at a time lets us recover their precariousness, the risks they took, what they lost as well as what they gained.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-09-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 8, 2009 | 9.2 | 08e2dd0b-581f-474f-90dd-6cd7033e2834 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Breeders’ debut album, a warped and indispensable piece of the ’90s alternative canon. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Breeders’ debut album, a warped and indispensable piece of the ’90s alternative canon. | The Breeders: Pod | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-breeders-pod/ | Pod | Sex may be the engine of pop music, but what of breeding? Nothing looks less cool (to those for whom the appearance of coolness is of prime importance) than changing diapers, starting a college fund, and being optimistic enough to believe in the long-term survival of the human species. More than that, though, even the word breeding carries the humiliating connotation of intimate acts performed in captivity, under surveillance. It makes the Breeders kind of a gross band name, as Kim Deal was well aware. “Back in the late ’80s, there was so much shit given to gay people,” she has said, “but at the same time gay people thought heterosexuality was disgusting, and I loved that.”
Although it dates back to Deal’s pre-Pixies teenage duo with twin sister Kelley, the moniker is eerily well-suited to the band’s debut album. Released amid the bursting buds of May 1990, Pod is vividly sensual and sexual without being sexy in an alluring sense, like the music of the era’s biggest pop stars: Madonna, Janet Jackson, Prince. It is also, in its close atmosphere as well as its lyrics, a little disgusting. Deal has described the record as a collection of “ugly, stinking gross songs.” One of the best of the bunch, “When I Was a Painter,” captures the record’s tension between intimacy and revulsion, describing a room thick with “bad sex and bad TV.”
Maybe it was this hermetic, almost fermented quality that kept the collaboration between Deal and Throwing Muses co-frontwoman Tanya Donelly from attracting nearly as much attention as they were getting in their more extroverted main gigs. In the 16 months between 1989’s Doolittle and 1990’s Bossanova, Black Francis barely needed to cough to have NME and Spin asking for a quote. But Pod was mostly dispatched with faint praise by that same rock press whose support was so critical to independent artists at the time. Just a few years later, by which time Donelly had left and Kelley had rejoined the lineup to replace her, alt-rock had become an unlikely music-industry gold rush. The Breeders’ sunnier, airier second album, 1993’s Last Splash, rode the “Cannonball” wave to platinum certification and relegated their earlier releases to footnotes. Only in retrospect did it become apparent how crucial Pod was in creating the necessary conditions for the Breeders—and so many other bands—to thrive.
Like so many underground bands that prominently featured women (the Raincoats, the Vaselines, Shonen Knife), the Breeders got a boost in visibility during the early ’90s through the effusive support of Kurt Cobain. Speaking to Melody Maker in 1992, the world’s biggest rock star explained: “The main reason I like them is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song and Kim wrote it.” The same year, Nirvana would take the Breeders on tour and Cobain would later admit to Deal, in a joint interview with UK ambassador to grunge Everett True, “I loved Pod so much that I was really freaked out to meet you.”
Much has been made of Cobain’s characteristically self-deprecating insistence that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was really just a Pixies rip-off, appropriating a dynamic that was “soft and quiet and then loud and hard.” But the influence of Pod seems to run even deeper in his music. Its sensibility is palpable not just in the song structures on Nirvana’s two major-label studio albums, or in their decision to hire Pod’s producer, Steve Albini, to record In Utero. (Though Albini also produced the Pixies’ debut album, Surfer Rosa, he has often expressed his preference for the Breeders. On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2015, he opined that Deal was a “genius,” but “the Pixies, as a band, they were fine. Whatever.”) There is also a striking similarity between Cobain’s preoccupations and the themes of the Breeders’ debut: loneliness, disgust, trauma, sex, childhood, introspection, anatomy, intoxication, psychosis. The songs evoke isolation but never feel desolate, swaddled as they are, almost to the point of suffocation, in the warm, druggy, dissociative fog that the Cobain of In Utero would name “your magnet tar-pit trap” and “the comfort in being sad” and “a Leonard Cohen afterworld.”
Nothing could’ve been farther from the kind of music Deal and Donelly started out trying to make, the night they left a Sugarcubes show in 1989 determined to get rich off a dance hit. Unfortunately for their bank accounts, neither had a “Regina” in her. “We started it and figured out we couldn’t do it for beans,” Donelly told the L.A. Times in 1990. “We had no idea what to do.” They also realized that their existing record deals would prohibit them—both impressive songwriters whose contributions to their original bands were being minimized or overshadowed by bigger personalities—from sharing primary writing credits on any Breeders album. So they decided to take turns. Pod turned out to be a half-hour of brooding sketches Deal had already written. Donelly was supposed to be next, but her material got kicked far enough down the road that she wound up extricating herself from the Breeders and Throwing Muses’ fragile visionary Kristin Hersh to found Belly.
Deal recounted the often grotesque backstory behind each track in early interviews. “Glorious” opens the album with playful, preverbal babble, as the dual guitars wind around each other, Pixies style. Deal repeats the minimal chorus—“It’s glorious”—as if in a reverie, stretching the final syllable like she’s desperate to hold onto the word. This, apparently, is a song about being molested by an aunt; the tea she mentions in one verse is made of psychedelic mushrooms. Built on a skeletal bassline from Josephine Wiggs, formerly the bassist for onetime Pixies openers the Perfect Disaster, and fleshed out with meaty arena-rock riffs, “Hellbound” is the cartoonishly gory tale of a fetus that survives an abortion. In a less literal sense, Deal told Option, it’s “about creating stupid stuff, creating messes. Sometimes we all do dumb things and say, ‘Oh look, I've created an abortion and it lives.’” “Oh!” shares its languid, alt-country vibe with Mazzy Star, whose first album came out the same month as Pod. But what sounds like a delicate love song, softened by gentle backing vocals from Michael Allen of the Wolfgang Press and plaintive violin from Ed’s Redeeming Qualities co-founder Carrie Bradley, is allegedly about what it’s like to be an insect.
But this is information you can only really get from reading about the album. Though the lyrics are technically in English, it might as well have been recorded in a private language. When you’re actually listening to Pod, what resonates, more than any specific narrative, is the mood. Each line of Deal’s songwriting is a discreet smear of paint, legible in isolation or as part of the composite whole, but rarely as part of its immediate surroundings. “Fortunately Gone,” a concise little sock-hop jam that bounces atop drum beats from Slint’s Britt Walford (a last-minute addition to the group, on the advice of Albini), makes its torch-song wistfulness felt in Deal and Donelly’s sweetly overlapping vocals and in images like the one that opens the track: “I wait for you in heaven/On this perfect string of love.” Try to follow that train of thought through the next few lines—“And drink your soup of magpies in a/Pottery bowl that looks/As I am now, brown, round and warm”—and you’re lost. At the same time, “brown, round and warm” makes its own kind of sense; it describes the song’s sensory effect completely.
Pod can be so intensely physical as to test the line between exhilaration and obliteration. “Hour by hour!” Deal howls over and over as cymbals clang and guitars scratch on “Iris”—a track whose snarl contains the DNA of Hole’s blistering 1991 debut, Pretty on the Inside—and you’re imprisoned with her, watching the hands of the clock crawl. “Limehouse” is tactile in the extreme; so vivid it’s almost sticky, Deal’s description of how “warm black tar forms balls” cements the title’s reference to East London’s 19th-century opium district. Then she hands us the pipe as the interplay between verses creates a narcotic tunnel vision on one or two instruments between maximal choruses that whip the band into an ecstatic frenzy. “I’m in a lime house!” Deal keeps screaming, building up to sensory overload. There are plenty of charming hooks on Pod, but it’s most powerful at moments like this, with its lurid imagery amplified to the max and churned up by repetition into an annihilating force.
The Breeders’ shoegaze contemporaries also lived to overwhelm, but they required so much studio embellishment to get there. Albini, in his usual self-demoted capacity as engineer, did the opposite. After Deal and Donelly’s considerably bouncier demo tape convinced 4AD head Ivo Watts-Russell to invest $11,000 in the project, the band spent a couple weeks at Edinburgh’s Palladium Studios with Albini, who wrapped up the sessions early and sent them home with recordings that were slower, rougher and sludgier than the material they’d brought him. The isolation and darkness and physicality and rot had always been present in Deal’s songs. Just as he’d go on to do with many other classic alternative albums, from PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me to In Utero, Albini simply kept the Breeders from tempering the weirdness and abjection in what they’d created.
Yet Pod turned out to be every bit as inviting as it was creepy. As Albini understands it, “The two elements always at war in Kim’s music are prettiness and decadence, the deb and the dirtbag each holding a ladder for the other.” For all its rawness, his production also establishes intimacy. By weaving in snippets of casual studio conversation and abruptly halting tracks before they have a chance to get boring, he recreates the messy energy of a DIY show in the listener’s headphones. The album’s comforting aspects may have also reflected how pleasant the recording process was. Deal told stories about the band’s time in Scotland, rhapsodizing over “sheep walking along the front lawn of the house we were recording in,” and summing up the experience as “cozy, like going to winter camp, or being in a pajama party."
Whatever alchemy was at work, it made Pod the kind of record that feels like the listener’s own secret no matter how popular it gets. The Raincoats’ self-titled debut, the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World or Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth—all Cobain favorites—have the same quality. With the partial exception of Nevermind, Nirvana albums are just the same: intimate, sensory, and psychological rather than cerebral or distanced. Deal articulated the difference between her music and the Pixies’ in 1990: “Do I write the same kind of songs as Charles? No! Get outta here! I don’t care about the Bible! I don’t care about UFOs!” You can imagine Cobain, who wrote about bodies and babies and heroin and feeling alone, heartily agreeing. If he shaped grunge, then the Breeders helped shape him. And he returned the favor, unintentionally, by creating a captive audience for their future releases.
I wish Deal got more credit for her impact on Cobain. It seems like a small thing, but Nirvana marked the convergence of mainstream and underground rock, catalyzing a permanent shift that only accelerated in the 21st century. And they’re usually placed in a lineage that begins with the Beatles, touches on punk and winds down with a list of mostly male ’80s indie acts: Mudhoney, R.E.M., the Meat Puppets, Pixies. Even as pop culture grows ever more eager to vanquish the appearance of sexism, we hear so little about how female musicians—or female artists in any medium—influence their male peers. It’s as though such a relationship would violate some natural hierarchy of creativity. And that’s one way pioneering women get written out of the history of their art form (see: Hilma af Klint, Clarice Lispector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe). It took Last Splash for the Breeders to win a place in the alt-rock canon, land of sold-out reunion tours and fat licensing checks. But without Pod, that canon might have looked very different.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 13, 2020 | 9 | 08e466ba-56ab-49d7-9a9f-f6e835f64c2b | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | |
Steve Buscemi reads the cut-up passages of William Burroughs while backed by the drones of Elliott Sharp. It rarely works. | Steve Buscemi reads the cut-up passages of William Burroughs while backed by the drones of Elliott Sharp. It rarely works. | Steve Buscemi / Elliott Sharp: Rub Out the Word | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22356-rub-out-the-word/ | Rub Out the Word | Despite his unassailable stature as a literary giant, modernist trailblazer, and fringe icon, we continue to sell William Burroughs short by the way we remember him. The late author is celebrated for his unparalleled ability to disfigure the language, both via his “cut-up” approach to non-linear narrative flow and also for the unrelenting hideousness of his subject matter. But let’s imagine, by comparison, that Jackson Pollock or John Coltrane had gone down in history solely for the audacious splatter of their technique, rather than the innate grace they brought to those techniques.
In Burroughs’ case, even though he structured several of his key works so that readers can start on any page and work through the text in any order, we shouldn’t ignore his gift for putting words together in the first place. If it weren’t for their underlying lyricism, Burroughs’ harrowing portraits of heroin use and pederasty wouldn’t have the arresting impact that they continue to have more than half a century later. And yet, after all that time, even highly creative artists like composer/instrumentalist Elliott Sharp and actor Steve Buscemi miss the mark. Both of them should know better.
A live performance that took place as part of a month-long celebration of Burroughs’ birthday centennial in 2014, Rub Out the Word will likely satisfy the author’s most avid cheerleaders, but anyone looking for a fresh take should look elsewhere (such as Burroughs’ spoken-word collaborations with the bands Material, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and his 1990 album of readings with various artists, Dead City Radio). It’s not that Buscemi and Sharp don’t mean well, or that they don’t bring a great deal of attention to their respective crafts here. They also deserve credit for not fetishizing Burroughs’ most reprehensible qualities (i.e: his unapologetic fascination with guns even after recklessly killing his second wife with one, and his celebrity among junkies as “the pope of dope”). And yet the pair apparently couldn’t resist looking at their subject through a superficial lens.
Rub Out the Word zigzags between the author’s prose and his musings on the art of writing itself. On paper, it would seem as if Sharp chose wisely from the vast body of text that Burroughs left behind, especially where Buscemi recites passages that tease at offering insight into the author’s process. It is in this area that Rub Out the Word fails the most to deliver on its potential. Unfortunately, Buscemi and Sharp fall into the trap of being seduced by the cut-up technique as the defining aspect of Burroughs’ legacy. They even unwittingly ring the death knell for this album right off the bat, when Buscemi reads, “What better way to invoke a writer than to cut and re-arrange his very own words? Like all keys to be used with caution, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.” Too true, as this album would've benefitted hugely from a mix of random and structured flow. Sharp, presumably taken by his attraction to chaos theory, copy/pasted Burroughs' texts and ran them through an online word scrambler, an unnecessary step akin to filtering an innovative guitarist's parts through the same effects pedal twice.
Burroughs was capable of keeping readers spellbound through the jagged shifts in his train of thought, but it’s obvious within this album’s first few minutes that the cut-up technique doesn’t have the same verve in spoken form that it does on paper—at least not the way it’s delivered here. As an extended oral work, Rub Out the Word simply lacks coherence. And though Sharp’s eerie background drones complement the more nightmarish passages, what begins as a compelling exercise in texture ultimately falls flat from a lack of sonic variety or buildup. Which leaves the spotlight on Buscemi’s stylized voice, an egregious affectation that the material just didn’t need.
Buscemi actually breathes life into the final track “Taking the Virus” by reading in a rapid-fire, low-pitched whisper that conjures images of an auctioneer making a hushed speech at a funeral. The difference between the vocal technique on this piece and the previous ones is startling. It also shows how much Burroughs’ writing breathes when subjected to new interpretations. Buscemi treats “Taking the Virus” like a script where he has room to invent the narrator’s character, which works wonders. And when Buscemi slows down, he does so with the agility of a seasoned musician. The shift in pacing is revelatory and also creates room for Sharp’s accompaniment to shine through. It’s the one moment where Rub Out the Word has dynamics and dimension. By that point, though, it’s far too late. | 2016-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Infrequent Seams | September 12, 2016 | 4.6 | 08e58672-a531-4cab-a286-64dbd3553a00 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
This Chicago six-piece plays heavy, proggy psychedelic rock with just the right amount of power-pop sugar to sweeten the mix. | This Chicago six-piece plays heavy, proggy psychedelic rock with just the right amount of power-pop sugar to sweeten the mix. | Post Animal: When I Think of You in a Castle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/post-animal-when-i-think-of-you-in-a-castle/ | When I Think of You in a Castle | Psychedelia comes in many guises, and Post Animal wear just about all of them. The Chicago sextet’s debut, When I Think of You in a Castle, is a practical travelogue through the genre’s more melodic and explicitly rock-y incarnations, tempered with just the right amount of brawny power-pop. At times, they resemble the ’70s-radio dreams of ELO and Wings, or an alternate-universe Thin Lizzy that came up in Athens, Georgia’s storied Elephant 6 collective instead of the pubs of Dublin. The band’s previous EPs—Post Animal Perform the Most Curious Water Activities from 2015, and 2016’s The Garden Series—leaned hard on haze and fuzz, and while those elements are far from absent on When I Think of You in a Castle, there’s a new sense of clarity and realization. As far as first LPs go, it’s shockingly confident.
Among the members of Post Animal is actor Joe Keery, whom you might recognize from the depths of your Chromecast as “Stranger Things” mimbo Steve Harrington. The six musicians in the group collectively share writing credits for the album, and they frequently swap lead vocal duties, so Keery’s contributions wouldn’t necessarily stand out—except for the fact that his other gig almost prevented Post Animal from continuing at all. “We weren’t sure what the future of the band was going to look like,” drummer Wesley Toledo states in a one-sheet. “We didn’t know where we were all going, but we knew we wanted to make an album with all of us in the same room.”
Good thing, too: A self-produced effort recorded in a cabin by Michigan’s Paw Paw Lake, When I Think of You in a Castle at its best resembles six guys jostling for elbow room as they pile colorful, blocky riffs atop one another like an intense game of Jenga. “Heavy” is an adjective often applied to variants of psych-rock and pop, and Post Animal often sound like they weigh a thousand tons, breaking into doomy sludge in the middle of the dizzying “Gelatin Mode” and melding Toledo’s arrhythmia-inducing bass hits and Keery’s frantic vocals on “Dirtpicker” to create an endlessly building, ziggurat-like effect.
If those descriptors sound like they hew closely to the nerdy sonic calculus of prog rock, you’re not too far off. Mountain-scaling arpeggios and showy chord progressions are practically in the band’s DNA, and there’s a sense of old-fashioned skill emanating from When I Think of You in a Castle that is, at times, gloriously unfashionable compared to the current indie rock landscape. But focusing on Post Animal’s considerable chops also risks overlooking the band’s impressive skill for crafting memorable melodic baubles. Dalton Allison’s satisfying high register punctuates the turned-loose drum solos and stop-start breakdowns of “Tire Eyes,” and “Ralphie” opens up from a six-stringed air raid to reveal a sweet power-pop gem with interlocking vocal hooks crafted to raise your blood sugar levels.
Despite being a clear album standout, the panting horndog-isms of “Ralphie” also represent Post Animal’s true Achilles heel: They may have no trouble getting creative musically, but their lyrical content isn’t quite as inventive. The band recently admitted in a track-by-track breakdown that the lyrics of “Gelatin Mode” are essentially interchangeable placeholders, and Post Animal’s subject matter—generally falling into the two broad categories of lusting after women and expanding your mind—confirms the impression that words aren’t their focal point. This is, for now, fine; there’s a long legacy of psychedelic music where what’s being said is of far lesser concern than what’s being played. But the lyrical efforts from some of Post Animal’s clearest predecessors—MGMT’s saucer-eyed apocalyptic visions, the Magic Eye-like emotional anxiety of Tame Impala—highlight the fact that this band has nowhere to grow but up. | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 21, 2018 | 6.9 | 08e5c5cd-3340-4e31-82b6-fda59f55e282 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
null | When *Is This It* landed in 2001, prognosticators claimed the Strokes would break big, reassert New York's post-punk primacy, and save rock and roll. One out of three ain't bad. Though early references were made to canonical art-rock legends such as Television and the Velvet Underground-- bands that achieved more popularity after disbanding than at their creative peaks-- the Strokes were superstars by comparison: Their debut sold more than 2 million copies worldwide; the Velvets wouldn't crack *Billboard*'s top 100 albums chart until the release of 1985's posthumous *VU*. But that's where the glory fades: The Strokes simply ascended to | The Strokes: First Impressions of Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7539-first-impressions-of-earth/ | First Impressions of Earth | When Is This It landed in 2001, prognosticators claimed the Strokes would break big, reassert New York's post-punk primacy, and save rock and roll. One out of three ain't bad. Though early references were made to canonical art-rock legends such as Television and the Velvet Underground-- bands that achieved more popularity after disbanding than at their creative peaks-- the Strokes were superstars by comparison: Their debut sold more than 2 million copies worldwide; the Velvets wouldn't crack Billboard's top 100 albums chart until the release of 1985's posthumous VU. But that's where the glory fades: The Strokes simply ascended to mainstream acceptance, leaving a potential underdog rock legacy in the dust, and accruing a truckload of backlash in the process. So one can hardly blame them for cutting their losses and going for broke on their boorishly titled third album, First Impressions of Earth.
Here, the Strokes simultaneously settle into diminished expectations (delaying an album until just after Christmas = not screening a movie for film critics) and wildly ratchet up their sound, trying new things, getting weirder, but remaining true to the core of their sound. Though always inhumanly taut, the band has grown even tighter, and now plays with a precision that, while coldly machinelike at times, is impressive more often than not. On songs like "Juicebox" and the standout "Electricityscape", drummer Fab Moretti and bassist Nicolai Fraiture form a no-nonsense rhythm section that keeps these songs as concise and focused as possible. Albert Hammond and Nic Valensi, meanwhile, build a complex weapons system out of just two guitars, interlocking like Thundercats and launching short singsongy riffs that add tension and spark, particularly on tracks like "Heart in a Cage" and "Razorblade".
But if the group has grown deadlier and more dynamic in their five years together, singer Julian Casablancas still struggles as a lyricist. Perhaps dogged by persistent assertions that he has nothing to say, he finally cracks here, asserting that no one does. "Seven billion people got nothing to say," he moans on album closer "Red Light", "Are you coming on to me?" And leading up to that summary statement is an insistent defensiveness that curdles otherwise decent songs into tedious self-consciousness. On "Ask Me Anything", he admits, "I've got nothing to say", and tempers his cynicism with nonsense as proof: "Don't be a coconut/ God is trying to talk to you."
Of course, no one ever listened to the Strokes for deep insight into the human condition. They benefitted from being in the right place at the right time, coming into their own while the dominant trends of the late 90s were fizzling out. Just like many of the flannel-clad Seattle-ites of that decade (and, arguably, the spandex-sporting hair-metal bands of the 80s), the Strokes encapsulated numerous trends at once, projecting more meaning through their style and sound-- that scruffy hair, weathered denim, slouchy throwback punk-- than through their songs. And regardless of message, Casablancas has proven himself a large and important part of that appeal, for both his physical presence and his vocals, which remain ragged and loose in opposition to the band's rock-solid dynamic. On First Impressions, however, he seems eager to break the mold, but unsure how: On "Vision of Division" and "The Ize of the World", he strains harder, screaming through gritted teeth; "Heart in a Cage" and "Fear of Sleep" find him leaning too heavily on repetition of phrases that quickly become grating; during the Pogues-like stomp "Evening Sun", he fakes a Shane MacGowan accent for the first few lines before dropping the schtick altogether; and on "Ask Me Anything" and "On the Other Side", he makes this album the Strokes' loungiest to date.
A handful of these modifications are welcome as a change of pace, and at times make First Impressions sound prickly and confident. When the band is on, the songs attain the force and fury of previous outings. Unfortunately, the album is also clogged with a number of tracks that are as sloppy as titles like "The Ize of the World" and "Vision of Division" suggest. But the band's failures do, if nothing else, possess a certain schadenfreude, allowing a fascinating glimpse at a band futilely grasping in all directions for something new and meaningful, only to fumble with a half-fragment of unformed idea between its desperate fingers. | 2006-01-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-01-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | January 2, 2006 | 5.9 | 08e87a08-fa9a-4c8b-b454-3d27a4b425c2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
null | John Lennon's "Glass Onion", a daffy throwaway from the Beatles' self-titled album, isn't among the band's best songs. But a snippet fits very nicely in the third position on *Love*, the Beatles catalog remix album and Cirque de Soleil soundtrack created by George Martin and his son Giles. After an angelic "Because"-- a capella, but here fluffed up with bird songs-- there's the "A Hard Days Night" chord into Ringo's drum solo on "The End", which then fades into "Get Back".
"Glass Onion" was Lennon having fun with the Beatles myth, referencing his earlier songs and mocking the tendency to "decode" | The Beatles: Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9669-love/ | Love | John Lennon's "Glass Onion", a daffy throwaway from the Beatles' self-titled album, isn't among the band's best songs. But a snippet fits very nicely in the third position on Love, the Beatles catalog remix album and Cirque de Soleil soundtrack created by George Martin and his son Giles. After an angelic "Because"-- a capella, but here fluffed up with bird songs-- there's the "A Hard Days Night" chord into Ringo's drum solo on "The End", which then fades into "Get Back".
"Glass Onion" was Lennon having fun with the Beatles myth, referencing his earlier songs and mocking the tendency to "decode" them that would eventually get way out of hand when Beach Boys pal and "Never Learn Not to Love" composer Charles Manson sent his minions into Beverly Hills to commit mass murder. "Glass Onion" was Lennon's attempt-- on the fly, while the band was at its peak-- at recontextualizing his Beatles work, to remind us all that music is supposed to be fun. The joker was laughing with us, jabbing an elbow in our sides to say, "Hey, we're just a pop band here, folks."
That's a good thing to keep in mind with the Beatles. They were just a pop band, even if they were possibly the greatest entity ever to fit that particular classification. The Beatles were so good that they're not very interesting to talk about-- it's like listening to someone drone on about the Grand Canyon. No other band has generated as much dull commentary, even as the music remains unimpeachable.
They're certainly the best band I almost never listen to. I'm guessing I share this with a lot of music obsessives; the Beatles' music has been so thoroughly absorbed into our consciousness that we can play the songs in our heads any time we like. Which is why the idea of someone doing something new with the catalog-- mixing and matching different songs, blending the whole thing into an epic suite-- is potentially exciting. Any attempt to fiddle with this music is like long-distance brain surgery, toying with our collective memory with the hope of creating something new.
Listening to Love I'm reminded first of a few artists that took from the Beatles without their permission, and how illicit beginnings gave their samples an extra hit of fun. There's the entire Danger Mouse/Jay-Z mashup The Grey Album, of course, but I'm thinking of smaller details. When Ringo Starr's solo from "The End" appears early here I go immediately to Jason Forrest's "Ten Amazing Years", not Abbey Road. The swirl of strings from "Good Night" stitched here to Ringo's "Octopus's Garden" brings to mind Ekkehard Ehlers' drawn-out loop of the same phrase that comprises the entirety of one side of "Ekkehard Ehlers Plays John Cassavetes". Having all the mixes band-sanctioned loses a little something. Paul McCartney is said to have heard Love and remarked that he wished it went a bit further out. And it's hard not to agree, especially for people used to hearing mash-ups and guerilla sonic deconstruction via laptop. How badly do you want Yamatsuka Eye to do a Rebore Vol. 0 on this material?
Really, the mashed-up bits here are just a seasoning, the occasional jarring effect to remind us that we're not just sitting around listening to Beatles records. Who knew that the backing track for "Drive My Car" fit perfectly over verses from "The Word" and "What You're Doing"? The a capella "Sun King" sounds great backward on "Gnik Nus" leading beautifully into "Something" and doesn't contain any hidden messages beyond the one conveyed by the opening "Because"-- that the Beatles were great singers. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" seems a natural soundtrack for tumbling acrobats, and the coda to "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" sounds like it was made for this project.
As the album wears on, the songs get "bigger" and are also made to stand on their own, without the mix trickery. But they also suffer from truncation. It's great to hear a round of the "Hey Jude"'s epic chorus with just voice and drums, but the song means so much less at four minutes than it does at seven, with a full verse cut and the final fade happening earlier. I will say that hearing it pulled apart finally confirms that Beta Band's "Dry the Rain" steals from it almost completely, one instrument after another.
It seems impossible to follow the final chord of "A Day in the Life", but the Martins are just closing the door on the darker, artier aspect of the Beatles, letting the uplifting pop band carry the day during the album's final section. The trimmed "Hey Jude", the reprise of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (let's face it-- not great, but included because of all the showbiz connotations) and then closing with "All You Need Is Love".
What seems to consume people most about this record is the sound of the thing, just how beautifully the original material was recorded and how great it comes over on a purely sonic level. The art of recording a rock band, it seems, reached its zenith in the late 1960s. In terms of capturing guitar, bass, drums, and voice, nothing since-- no matter how many tracks-- sounds as pure and lovely as what the Beatles did at Abbey Road studios. Love is turning everyone into an audiophile, then, which means it's making younger people a little older. And it's also a mashup remix, which means it's making older people a little younger. They were just a pop band, yes, but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it's the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately all about. | 2006-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2006-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | November 30, 2006 | 8.5 | 08e8d0e1-a599-4bcb-a2ba-d3220a8551a9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Pacific Northwest metal duo’s riveting new album is a sludgy and simmering call to action. | The Pacific Northwest metal duo’s riveting new album is a sludgy and simmering call to action. | Ragana: Desolation’s Flower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ragana-desolations-flower/ | Desolation’s Flower | Ragana’s saints weren’t canonized by a specific religion; they were forged by fire. In the sanctuary of a century-old Catholic church-turned-studio in Anacortes, Washington, the Oakland via Olympia metal duo of Coley and Maria (who do not publicly share their last names) paid their respects to their queer and trans predecessors with what they’ve described as a hymn of gratitude. “Desolation’s Flower,” the opening title track of their new album, is simmering and righteous. Coley’s obliterating, fuzz-slathered, single-note guitar melodies echo alongside Maria’s massive and gradual percussive crash. From that foundation, they build to multiple movements of feverish drumming and soaring black-metal riffs. Coley’s screams suggest anger, but instead of unleashing pure rage, their words express gratitude for their forebears and a promise to live in their example.
“Holy are the names,” they repeatedly insist, of those who withstood the relentless hell of oppression to find a hidden world of reprieve. Their symbolism evokes the 19th-century Romantics, offering an indelible image beyond the confines of this music: “They found desolation’s flower.” As the song winds down after eight minutes, each of Maria’s evenly spaced bass drum thuds lands like a firm, persistent reminder. In both its gradual climb and its focus on forebears who cleaved through volatile terrain, the song provides the sonic and conceptual groundwork for the entirety of their sixth album, Desolation’s Flower.
The seven tracks on Desolation’s Flower splice panoptic frenzy with near-ambient calm to underscore the present fraught moment in history where oppression is written into law. Ragana’s anarchist politics have carried through as the conceptual undercurrent to all of their records to date, and that continues here. In their lyrics, the metaphorical ecosystems of the world are all freezing cold, dense fog, untenable fires, and brutal winds. It’s a setting that breeds desperation and intense longing. “There is no return to a place before pain,” Coley reveals on “Winter’s Light Pt. 2.” The best way to survive out there is together; the duo recently discussed how easy it is to find community and connection through protest. “May we find shelter in what remains,” the song concludes.
For all its heft and darkness, Desolation’s Flower is never full-on bleak. The emphasis on collective strength, on reaching out when everything seems hopeless, is a call to action when crumbling feels like the default. It’s there in their lyrics, and there’s also something intrinsically motivating about this Pacific Northwest queer anarchist black metal duo’s shredded vocals and raw, slow-building sound. Even the way the album is put together mirrors it’s focus on finding power through solidarity: Coley screams and plays guitar on all the odd-numbered songs, and for the rest, they sit behind the drums while Maria takes the lead. Ragana have spoken about consciously balancing their individual styles on their records—Coley’s more elaborate odysseys next to Maria’s quieter and more minimal compositions—and that melding of aesthetics keeps Desolation’s Flower riveting.
Their division of labor leads to a stark diptych on the back half. “Winter’s Light Pt. 2” is a sparse build that turns torrential. Coley shrieks about feeling empty and wild, praying for relief from the decimating elements. Maria seems to respond with its follow-up “Pain,” a gentle and lolling sprawl of a song that feels more indebted to ’90s alt rock and grunge than all-out metal. Her voice is soft as she offers an outstretched hand: “I want to feel your pain with you/I want to know what it feels like.” Much of the album's emotional content and its landscapes feel elemental. “Wind blows through the ruins,” Coley screams longingly on “Ruins” before distortion whips through the church studio. There’s an analogy on “Winter’s Light Pt. 2” about a small deer surviving in its winter home. In several moments, fire is meager and distant—once this great destroyer that left behind an unforgiving aftermath.
Then, on “DTA,” Ragana’s rage and sadness come into a sharp contemporary focus. “Death to America and everything you’ve done/I can’t feel anything, I am numb,” Maria repeats in a quiet voice. When the duo kicks up a cyclone of scuzzy distortion, Maria’s guitar sounding suddenly like a Crazy Horse bootleg, there’s a “fuck the police” chant sampled from a video of a recent protest and riot in Oakland. For one song, they no longer offer a poetically ambiguous look at oppression—they’re reacting to acts of hatred right outside their window. Maria closes with the same words from before, this time in a harrowing scream as though she’s desperate to feel anything after withstanding a daily tidal wave of heartbreak.
All that’s left in the final seconds of Desolation’s Flower is the sound of lapping waves. It’s an appropriate conclusion to an album where the natural world is foregrounded as a punisher, but also because Ragana required a boat to get from the studio to Phil Elverum’s off-site gong. Everything about the album—the heaviness and quiet, the steady build and the massive cathartic payoff, the solitude and the solace—heaves steadily forward and back, forward and back in the same direction. Every song is in service of the same message, and each one cuts stillness with show-stopping slow metal heroics, like a massive scream or an unbelievable riff. “We live in the light of the burning world,” Coley and Maria sing—and yes, shriek—in solidarity with one another. | 2023-10-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Metal | The Flenser | October 31, 2023 | 8.3 | 08e9193c-24ac-44f2-90c2-249216cc53ae | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
Three years after he galvanized a new class of grime MCs, the UK rapper tries to meet the high bar he set for himself. | Three years after he galvanized a new class of grime MCs, the UK rapper tries to meet the high bar he set for himself. | Skepta: Ignorance Is Bliss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skepta-ignorance-is-bliss/ | Ignorance Is Bliss | In May 2016—before Brexit, before Trump, before plastic straw bans—Skepta released Konnichiwa, an uncompromising blow to the establishment and one of the best grime albums of the decade. The Mercury Prize-winning album quickly turned the heads of UK execs bent on ignoring homegrown talent, becoming a beacon to younger MCs who sought broader recognition. It received an unprecedented Top 10 placement in the UK charts, leading the way for a number of rappers who would follow in his slipstream. Now, with Ignorance Is Bliss, Skepta is faced with meeting the high-water mark he set for grime what seemed like ages ago.
In the years following Konnichiwa, Skepta dropped a handful of new tracks and features but mostly occupied himself with designing Nike trainers, launching a high-end streetwear line, and causing a mild tabloid stir by posing unclad with supermodel Naomi Campbell for the cover of GQ. He also set up a youth music facility in his hometown of Tottenham, London, was made a chief in Nigeria, and, late last year, became a father. Somewhat fittingly, Ignorance Is Bliss is an album that swings between the glamorous life of a tastemaker and someone grappling with new responsibilities both practical and esoteric in nature.
Searing political barbs and fiery rhetoric have become the lingua franca of the UK’s new class of MCs. Breakthrough rappers such as Dave, Stormzy, and slowthai are lauded as dissident voices for a young audience largely overlooked by the country’s legislators. This arguably comes less easily to Skepta (last year he became a short-lived meme after sticking his fingers in his ears at the very mention of politics.) Of course, he can engage when he wants to. “Glow In The Dark” offers deft commentary on political hypocrisy and identity politics. On album opener “Bullet From A Gun,” he flows effortlessly over a skittish slice of grime, covering everything from petty break-ups and juvenile braggadocio, to the never-ending rotation of the earth and his role in the long bloodline of Adenuga men. Skepta is at his best when he nails this kind of disaffected nonchalance. It makes the occasional flash of intimacy or vulnerability all the more powerful—“Recently I’ve been learning a lot/All I know is there’s no better feeling/Than getting home and seeing my little girl in her cot,” he off-hands on “Bullet From A Gun.”
Some of the flourishes in his production are exquisite here. The beat to “Same Old Story” is a fresh take on the kind of golden-era emotive grime peddled by Ruff Sqwad, and the 90 seconds of glistening synths and stream-of-conscious monologue that begin “Animal Instinct” feels genuinely inventive, too. But these bright moments stand out against a sometimes patchy showing: The beat to “No Sleep” is as jarring as the insomnia it conjures and serves only to mask Skepta’s skippy flow; “Going Through It” feels like a half-baked idea that should have been left on the cutting room floor; “You Wish” is a lesson in how chorus-led grime tunes will always be a hit-or-miss affair. In a statement accompanying the album, Skepta said: “The internet is making everything and everyone politically correct but that takes away the artistry.” But in the context of tone-deaf metaphors such as “slap it like Ike Turner” on “Redrum,” the freedom of speech he’s so aggrieved about hardly seems worth it.
In the video for “Bullet From A Gun,” Skepta sits in a North London underground station watching over a stroller while the trials of inner city life swirl around him. As so often with Skepta, whose tight one-liners and impeccable diction have set him apart since the days of fuzzy pirate radio broadcasts, the message is clear and unselfconsciously simple: Fatherhood has offered him a new perspective. But as the album plays out with its series of sketches that flip between the trivial and contemplative, and as Skepta tussles to find his place in the world, you’re left wondering whether he craves the bliss of youthful innocence or the responsibility of being a voice for a generation. Unfortunately, Ignorance Is Bliss is a deferral, splitting the difference with a series of half-measures. When he apes fellow UK rapper J Hus’ freestyle flow on the second verse of “What Do You Mean” it’s hard to determine whether it’s pure homage or a kind of time-warped nostalgia, a yearning to return to his own breakthrough days. | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Boy Better Know | May 31, 2019 | 6.4 | 08eb562d-349f-4449-9835-9f4cf2566f13 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Drake's fourth proper album feels claustrophobic and too long and weirdly monotone, but the occasional tweaks in sound lead to a few great moments. | Drake's fourth proper album feels claustrophobic and too long and weirdly monotone, but the occasional tweaks in sound lead to a few great moments. | Drake: VIEWS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21836-drake-views/ | VIEWS | “Know thyself.” — Socrates
“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.” — Benjamin Franklin
“I’ve always been me, I guess I know myself.” — Drake
Know yourself, the theory goes, and you will know all. The world will open up to you. Existence will be made plain. You will be one with the matrix. Yadda yadda yadda. From arenas to memes, Drake has always had a skill for turning his innermost thoughts, feelings, and anxieties into breakthrough group therapy sessions—he articulates what we know to be true and then lets us rap or sing those truths en masse, exalting in common bonds that are as vulnerable as they are revealing. When he confides his fears, we become a little more fearless. When he turns his woes into anthems, we all get lifted. But there is a razor-sharp line between self-awareness and self-absorption: Whereas self-awareness can expand wisdom by reflecting it outward, self-absorption often festers, drawing things in only to let them rot. For the past seven years, Drake has expertly glided along that line. But on his fourth proper album, he edges closer than ever to a mirrored abyss, a suffocating echo chamber of self.
The record is called VIEWS but its perspective is decidedly singular. “This album, I’m very proud to say, is just—I feel like I told everybody how I’m actually feeling,” Drake told Zane Lowe in a toothless recent interview, differentiating VIEWS from his previous work. This might seem like a ridiculous distinction—there’s never any question that Drake is the star of his own show—but it’s apt, and it hints at why this album feels like more of a claustrophobic mindfuck than a collective catharsis. VIEWS is what happens when venting turns into whining. Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.
Until the last minute, the album was to be called Views from the 6, and it still serves as an ode to Drake’s hometown of Toronto. After having other producers handle the lion’s share of beats on his last two mixtapes, Drake's longtime musical consigliere, Noah “40” Shebib, returns to the head of the table here, with production credits on 12 of the album’s 20 tracks. The atmosphere 40 creates with his music is now synonymous with Drake’s Toronto; the harsh chill of winter is brought forth via cold snares and ice-cube synths, with the summer’s relief often rendered through sped-up ‘90s R&B samples that quietly churn in the background. It’s essentially a screwed-down take on Kanye West’s chipmunk soul, and it has provided a perfect backdrop for Drake’s poignant introspection while ushering in an entire stage of hip-hop’s evolution.
But on VIEWS, the style is simply getting tired, its wintry mood now actively blocking any springtime salvation. It’s also bringing out some of Drake’s most self-loathing tendencies, playing into his groaning paranoia on tracks like “9,” where he laments, “Life is always on, man, I never get a break from it/Doesn’t matter where I go, I can never get away from it.” Songs like these play out like dour self-fulfilling prophecies, puffed-up bad attitudes drunk on their own misery. They also expose the downside of a “no new friends” mindset and how a bunker mentality can snub out curiosity. Marked by frigidness and a furrowed brow, much of VIEWS may be true to Toronto’s darker months, but it also makes the city sound like a pretty inhospitable place.
Fact is, the 6 is one of the most multicultural places on Earth, a sprawling metropolis in which more than 140 different languages and dialects are spoken. And it’s when VIEWS embraces this more inviting and open-minded side of Toronto that it points to a better way forward. Drake’s fascination with the city’s Caribbean enclaves take root in the effervescent rhythms of songs like “With You,” “One Dance,” and “Too Good”—all of them featuring welcomed guest vocals that break up the monotony and also allow Drake to get out of his own brain for a second.
Rihanna co-stars on “Too Good,” finally offering a counterpoint to Drake’s constant disappointment with the opposite sex; when she sings “You take my love for granted, I just don’t understand it,” she’s giving voice to all of the women Drake has spurned on record over the years. (Perhaps tellingly, she only gets to sing the line alongside her duet partner.) Because while Drake’s relationship dissections were once questioning and openly hurt, they too have hardened—at this point, it’s getting impossible to believe he’s not the one to blame for so many squandered attempts at love.
Even slight tweaks to Drake’s usual sound pay dividends here. “Childs Play” finds 40 putting his spin on New Orleans bounce, bringing out Drake’s more playful side as he raps about a lady friend who gets in a fight with him at The Cheesecake Factory and takes his Bugatti for a spin to pick up some tampons. The song’s angst plays out more like a jokey spat than another existential treatise on the hopelessness of searching for the girl of his dreams. “Feel No Ways” is another sad story, but its beat—which zips up Malcolm McClaren’s 1983 hip-hop experiment “World’s Famous”—harkens back to Drake’s masterpiece, Take Care, adding levity and the sense that these feelings, like all feelings, will not be so heavy in time. “Weston Road Flows” is another throwback, with Drake reminiscing about his salad days over a gorgeous Mary J. Blige sample, another instance of a woman’s voice helping to add humanity to the rapper’s toughened exterior. The song finds Drake looking back on his come-up with fondness and, naturally, some melancholy. But when he lets out a little cackle at the end of the track, it’s not out of spite. He sounds like he’s genuinely enjoying himself on the song. It’s nice to hear.
If last year’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late had Drake doing his best all-guns-blazing Tony Montana, shedding his softness for an untouchable-don pose, VIEWS has him on his Tony Soprano, trying to reach deep into his own psyche for revelations but often just falling back on a sour version of what got him this far. Perhaps its shortcomings are in part due to a cloistered view of what being candid really means. “I’m an honest person, I can’t write fiction,” Drake said last week. “It all directly has to do with me or else I can’t make the music.” While artistic honesty is certainly something to aspire to, it doesn’t have to equate with blinding selfishness or even concrete reality. Drake’s most apparent current rap peers, Kanye and Kendrick Lamar, have both let their minds wander to surreal places in order to add depth and intrigue to their own music, and nobody would accuse them of dishonesty. Such inventiveness is required for the type of longevity Drake seems to crave. Because knowing thyself is a quest. It never ends. | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cash Money / Young Money Entertainment | May 2, 2016 | 6.8 | 08ee517d-9fe7-4d61-adf5-7f83e8f674ee | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
For the first time, the singles/EPs/leftovers compilations Past Masters are combined and sold in one glorious package. | For the first time, the singles/EPs/leftovers compilations Past Masters are combined and sold in one glorious package. | The Beatles: Past Masters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13408-past-masters/ | Past Masters | Past Masters is the ugly but brilliant sibling of the Beatles discography. Originally released as two separate discs in 1988, it's a catchall for all the stuff the Beatles officially released during their existence that wasn't intended for their albums (and didn't end up on the after-the-fact album Magical Mystery Tour). It's slapped together chronologically, so it begins with an unprepossessing alternate take of "Love Me Do" and ends with the ludicrous doodle "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". And, between them, it includes some of the best pop songs ever recorded-- scratch that: some of the best pop singles ever recorded.
It can be hard to grasp the way it used to work if you've grown up with the basic unit of pop music as the album or the individual song, but the model the Beatles grew up with-- and arguably broke-- was the 45 RPM single: two songs sold together, one of them aspiring to popular success and the other one a sort of lagniappe. They treated their own singles not just as hit-plus-filler but as an often-complementary pair: the massive humanist crescendo of "Hey Jude" paired with the corrective political fireball of "Revolution", the frantic urgency of "Paperback Writer" paired with the dreamy involution of "Rain", John Lennon's bitter, betrayed "Day Tripper" paired with Paul McCartney's hopeful, clear-eyed "We Can Work It Out".
For that matter, their singles weren't simply teasers for an album: Of the 22 singles (and two EPs) the Beatles released in the UK between 1962 and 1970, more than half weren't initially part of a bigger unit. Their first non-album single, "From Me to You", came out all of three weeks after Please Please Me; "I Want to Hold Your Hand" emerged a week after With the Beatles. "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" was actually released-- as a double A-side-- the same day as Rubber Soul, on which neither side appeared. By that point, they were basically just showing off.
Most of the first disc of Past Masters is the product the Beatles were being pushed to crank out over the first three years of their recording career: The three-covers-and-a-leftover Long Tall Sally EP, German recordings of a couple of hits, a version of Larry Williams' "Bad Boy" that filled out an American LP. It also features the two phenomenal, headlong late 1963 singles that transformed them from a perfectly nice Liverpool band to The Goddamn Beatles: "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". It's a testament to the Beatles' gamechanging originality that the opportunistic American bands who tried to make a few bucks by covering those songs over the following few months couldn't even play them right-- the harmonies of "She Loves You" and the delicious rhythmic trick that introduces "I Want to Hold Your Hand" flummoxed every one of them.
The astonishing stuff continues on the second disc: seven A-side/B-side pairs, plus an alternate version of John's devotional "Across the Universe". "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" was the single where they moved away from their great subject of love, and where Ringo Starr perfected his uncanny ability to shift the beat just enough that the band seemed to be hovering a few inches above the ground. George Harrison's "The Inner Light"-- a spaced-out setting from the Tao Te Ching, on which he's backed up by Indian musicians-- is a momentum-killer in the context of an album (as it is here), but it made sense as part of a yin-and-yang pair with Paul's earthy Fats Domino homage "Lady Madonna".
"The Ballad of John and Yoko", rushed out seven weeks after "Get Back", looked like a colossal act of vanity on its surface-- John messing with the Lennon/McCartney copyright juggernaut by reporting so literally on what he'd been up to for the past couple of months that the result was basically impossible to cover, and getting Paul into the studio to bang it out with him, even though Ringo and George were due back in town just a few days later. It's a triumph, anyway. As usual with their singles, there's something new and ear-catching jumping out of the speakers every few seconds (the shaker that doubles the rhythm right after the bridge, Paul's improvised-sounding last-word-of-each-line harmonies, John singing "Gibraltar near Spain" at a moment when that was a political assertion), and honestly Lennon had been having a pretty interesting spring.
And then there's their biggest-selling single and deepest pairing of songs, "Hey Jude"/"Revolution". McCartney is singing about Lennon's son, Lennon is shouting about the system and culture about which they're embedded; "Jude" wraps its arms around the world and gets everyone to join in its mantra, "Revolution" pushes the idiots away with the nastiest noise the Beatles had ever made. It was also the first release on the Beatles' own label, Apple Records-- or, rather, one of two singles that came out the same day. (The other was Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days", which knocked it off the top of the British charts after a couple of weeks.) As a seven-minute song on an album of three-minute songs, "Hey Jude" inevitably overpowers its context; as a free-floating sound file without "Revolution", it's missing the sting that tempers its sweetness. But if you find yourself taking advantage of the reissue-and-"Rock Band" frenzy to sit down and really listen to the magnificent recordings that have spent the last four decades or so as inescapable background music, remember the way much of these two discs were meant to be heard and understood: two by two.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-09-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 10, 2009 | 9.2 | 08f06f93-16b9-4414-b13d-4b553d0c0660 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Almost 20 years after it was recorded and rejected by London Records and then made public as unofficial bootlegs or unagreeable edits, stoner-rock legends Sleep's storied one-song, hour-long third album is finally available through a remastered, re-illustrated reissue. | Almost 20 years after it was recorded and rejected by London Records and then made public as unofficial bootlegs or unagreeable edits, stoner-rock legends Sleep's storied one-song, hour-long third album is finally available through a remastered, re-illustrated reissue. | Sleep: Dopesmoker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16601-dopesmoker/ | Dopesmoker | Three stoned kids walk into an expensive studio with the idea of recording one song that lasts for an hour and opens with the line, "Drop out of life with bong in hand." During the course of the tune, which changes every time they play it, they equate weed with most every sacred religious symbol, take solos that stretch for minutes, and sing in some malevolent half-chant incantation. They won't allow it to be edited for radio play, and they don't want to break it into tracks. And, by the way, the label footing the bill is the same 50-year-old institution that released music by the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles and, the Moody Blues: With every year that passes, both the tale and the tape of Dopesmoker seem a little more ridiculous.
The third album by a trio of 20-something San Jose, Calif., burnouts called Sleep, Dopesmoker resulted from a major-label skirmish over a band that had made two very good but not altogether great LPs of distorted, bluesy, and bleary-eyed rock. But those records-- 1991's Volume One and 1993's Holy Mountain-- sported would-be singles, editable jams like "Holy Mountain", "Snowblind", and "The Wall of Yawn" that might have found a home on the radio dial in the filthy backwash of grunge. In the battle between Elektra and London Records, however, Sleep didn't seem so interested in who might pay the most to get their stoner rock on the air; as guitarist Matt Pike, bassist Al Cisneros, and drummer Chris Hakius have said since, they wanted to go with the label that would pay for the album and mostly leave the music alone. London ostensibly signed off on such creative control. So after more than a year of legal wrangling to slip out of an old label contract, Sleep finally went with London and, in 1996, entered Record Two, the aforementioned well-equipped Northern California studio, with producer Billy Anderson and, as the fable goes, a lot of weed.
Their plan was to record the one-song album they'd been writing and testing live for at least four years. As Cisneros told Decibel writer J. Bennett a decade later, London had approved the idea, but the deep pockets began to get concerned as soon as they started to hear the music. Despite London's anxiety, technical troubles, and interpersonal tensions, Sleep finally finished the track in two month-long sessions. The label would never release it: After a series of contentious remixes and edits by a number of different hands hired by London, the imprint eked out a few cheap promos before deciding to can Sleep. The band broke up (in retrospect, they've said, they were headed this way with or without London), and during the next decade, three labels issued unofficial bootlegs or unagreeable edits of Dopesmoker, or as the band later called it, Jerusalem.
Now, 16 years after it was recorded, Sleep's storied third and easily best album is finally available through a remastered, re-illustrated reissue. Loud and more lucid, Southern Lord's greenest version of Dopesmoker pushes the record's highs to higher places and gives the whole hour just a bit more power. The trio has long complained that the previous versions didn't understand their intended aesthetic-- the art, the mixing, any of it. But a brilliant new cover by artist Arik Roper, who also designed the previously popular Tee-Pee version of the disc, pictures the "Weedians" of which Cisernos sings, making their pilgrimage to Nazareth, endless bongs strapped to their backs, an extra-terrestrial landscape in the distance. As Pike exclaimed to The Quietus earlier this year, "This one is going to look so fucking cool, it's so rad." That statement should rightly apply not only to the cover but also to this entire reissue, which at long lasts fulfills the red-eyed vision of the people who made Dopesmoker while confirming the record's legacy both as a stoner-metal and psychedelic-rock masterpiece. This is one of the great major-label casualties, finally available in proper form.
When Sleep broke up after the failure of Dopesmoker, the trio split into two unequal halves: Almost immediately, Matt Pike started High on Fire, who have continued adding different kinds of fuel to the same generalized burn. Years later, Hakius and Cisneros would return as Om to explore the same iterative modalities that made listening to Dopesmoker feel like an instant inhalation. Dopesmoker is the perfect culmination before the collapse; Pike's bombast meet Om's repetition, a friction that rendered ideal sparks. Though the lengths of his solos are anything but modest, his playing itself is largely textural; when he steps into the spotlight, Pike lets repeated notes follow each other into a kaleidoscopic flurry. The persona of the shirtless, shouting dude at the helm of High on Fire remained in check, so as not to distract from the music's naturally meditative state.
To that end, Hakius and Cisneros weren't quite locked into Om's repetition addiction yet, either. Instead, they pushed against each other, Cisneros countering Pike's lumbering riffs with ample burl and perfectly sculpted tone. Historically, Hakius has criticized his own playing during the Dopesmoker sessions. But Dopesmoker is an infinitely explorable listen, the kind of record that will goad your attention through miniscule rabbit holes whether or not you're as stoned as the people who made it. Hakius' pulse is the constant carrot, then, filling the spaces when the band aggresses, forcing them forward when they pull back. He is a reminder to continue toward Nazareth.
And that's perhaps what remains most impressive about Dopesmoker, especially hearing it again for the first time through yet another reissue: It's an hour of adventure and momentum, where the lumber and the repetition somehow always push ahead. At a moment when black metal reinventers and D-beat revivers seem to dominate large sections of the heavy music world, maybe the thought of a resin-voiced singer intoning for an hour over riffs that wrap into themselves and drums that aim ever for infinity seems boring. But no matter how many times they had to record or rehearse "Dopesmoker" to master it, or no matter how much pressure London placed on them to make something more commercial than personal, Sleep sound as if their very existence depends upon the successful exercise of this weed ritual. In a sense, it's safe to say it did. This record's influence on substance, style, and simple ambition within heavy metal has long outlived the band that made it.
Southern Lord's reissue comes with no elaborate set of liner notes or verbose essay concerning the serpentine origin of the release itself. Rather, the tracklist is simply offered on the back cover, as well as the written-and-performed-by bona fides and the production credits. The insert consists entirely of a triptych of Pike, Hakius, and Cisneros performing and a photo of a massive piece of cardboard itemizing the contents of the titanic tune: "Hot Lava Man 4x All Slow (Vocals)", it reads in one spot. The only bonus is a fidelity-compromised live take of "Holy Mountain". It might be tempting to attribute this lack of archival scholarship to stoner lassitude, or to wish for the official story to serve as a sort of reverse score for the long-evasive music. But the story of Dopesmoker and the dissolution of Sleep have been passed around enough-- written about in books, discussed in interviews, warped and exaggerated by years of bong-ripping bros sharing the record with a friend for the first time. This reissue of Dopesmoker doesn't waste time with an introduction that this record no longer requires. | 2012-05-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | May 10, 2012 | 8.5 | 08f0b662-4a49-4b36-b13f-f7ac2747d828 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Rochester rapper is at his best when he isn’t folding to the pressures of wider appeal or tightly-packaged collaborations on his latest project. | The Rochester rapper is at his best when he isn’t folding to the pressures of wider appeal or tightly-packaged collaborations on his latest project. | RXK Nephew: Slitherman Activated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rxk-nephew-slitherman-activated/ | Slitherman Activated | The best way to experience Rxk Nephew is to go to his YouTube channel, click on literally anything, and walk away confused, blown away, slightly disturbed, and/or laughing your ass off. In any case, you’ll probably let the next song auto-play. The Rochester rapper’s rambling stream of trapping, Hennessy, hardships, heartbreak, rapper disses, and global conspiracies is a constantly updated document of his churning mindstate. The album format puts arbitrary bounds on an artist who, since 2019, has released at least one song nearly every day.
So what separates Slitherman Activated from the 30 other projects he’s dumped on the internet? For one, it’s released via Towhead Recordings, the New York dance music label at the center of the scene’s ascent. A known aficionado for atypical beats (or maybe everything that lands in his inbox), Nephew brings his relentless, Lil B-inflected flow to a swirl of techno, house, and hip-hop courtesy of city stalwarts like Color Plus and DJ Swisha. On “Beam On Ya Toes,” you’re at a rave in a Brooklyn warehouse watching the Slitherman hand out cocaine and whisper “Poltergeist had the drip.”
The issue is that this can often feel like dance producers trying to make rap beats, which cuts against Nephew’s authenticity. When they’re leaning into their truest instincts, like on the clubby “Early Age Death,” Nephew responds with some of his wildest freestyles to date (in this one, he threatens to kill his parents and the producer, then disses Biggie and 2Pac for good measure). Other highlights are low-stakes exhales, like the Color Plus-produced “Strange Death,” wherein Nephew sounds like an old Screw freestyler with an internet-fried brain: “Nephew got drugs on ya? Hell yeah/Nephew think they cloned Kodak Black? Hell yeah.” But more often, the producers try their hardest to dress up regional rap styles with the occasional wobbly bass or dissonant synth. This becomes apparent when you realize how quickly the record drops off after the opener “Dark Noise,” which isn’t produced by any of these guys but by Detroit rap veteran Black Noi$e.
As if to emphasize how Strange and Cool these beats are, Nephew’s voice throughout is frequently mixed to sound tinny and distant. This feels intentional, perhaps to give his raps a kind of surreal, alien quality, but it makes Nephew seem secondary to the production. We’re here for the Slitherman, not your new VST! It all reminds me of that Hoodrich Pablo Juan and Brodinski tape from a few years ago, which sounded cool and might’ve been a gateway for non-rap fans but had me itching to listen to Pablo Juan’s Designer Drugz series instead. Luckily, Nephew maintains intrigue. On the mind melt that is “I Forgot My Day,” he details quite possibly the biggest bout of amnesia ever in a rap song. The one thing he remembers is “I take my shirt off and all the hoes stop breathin’,” (the Gucci Mane version, probably), which he raps at the song’s end like an uncle reading the lyrics off Genius.
While Rxk Nephew was serving time a couple of years ago, he devoured all the books he could find about conspiracy theories. “I talked to my bunkie about conspiracy theories all day,” he said in an interview on FILO TV. “Area 51, Christopher Columbus, British people wooden teeth… Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks.” He studied texts about aliens, weather control, and lies in the Bible. He read William Cooper’s infamous bestseller Behold A Pale Horse, praised by Alex Jones and the Wu-Tang Clan. Then he got out and recorded “American tterroristt,” his nine-minute retelling of the past, present, and future; the lives of Adam and Eve; Ben Franklin and Santa Claus; Will Smith; and SpongeBob SquarePants—this delirious opus somehow enraptured the rap internet for a moment last winter.
It’d be crazy to expect anything resembling “American tterroristt” ever again, but Rxk Nephew is at his best when he isn’t folding to the pressures of wider appeal or tightly-packaged collaborations. Give him a pack of plugg beats and a night in a studio and he’ll make magic. Slitherman Activated occasionally gets there, too, but is mostly a series of limp attempts at crossover. At least you’ll be able to go on YouTube tomorrow and find a new Rxk Nephew song waiting.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Towhead | June 15, 2021 | 5.9 | 08f7d483-b1f6-407c-a336-494017ae0db7 | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
It's the return of the... Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding: Eminem's relapse is just an update of his shock tactics? It still beats most of Encore. | It's the return of the... Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding: Eminem's relapse is just an update of his shock tactics? It still beats most of Encore. | Eminem: Relapse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13034-relapse/ | Relapse | You might think calling Eminem "divisive" in 2009 would give him too much credit. After all, nearly every piece of promotion that's led up to the release of Relapse has caused the internet to stop whatever it was doing and form a unified chorus exclaiming how washed up it made the guy look. But did you know that after "We Made You" hit the airwaves, major networks ran segments on whether Eminem's "controversial" new video went too far? Let's think big picture here: In some corners of the indie community, people quibble about whether Wavves are overhyped, even though 99% of America have absolutely no fucking clue who they are. Eminem is divisive the way BIG people are. Like A-Rod. Or George W. Bush.
Relapse makes it abundantly clear where the line gets drawn in 2009. It's appropriate that the title character from "Stan" has become web argot for "obsessive fanboy," because Eminem drives both Stan and stan alike crazy in the same exact way-- by completely ignoring them until it's too late to make amends. Star Trek isn't the only franchise reboot expected to do big numbers this summer-- instead of the 13-year-old who got into The Slim Shady LP and found that underground shit he did with Scam, Relapse is for that guy's little brother who's 13-years old right now, and Eminem is fully committed to upping the ante for today's desensitized sensibilities. Do a double-take when he rapped "I just found out my mom does more dope than I do"? This time, you get to untangle the knotty word thickets of "My Mom", wherein young Marshall gets bullied and tricked by you-know-who into an addiction to prescription pills. Recoil when he threatened to push a fat girl off the high dive in swim class? He's now murdering his cousin in a tub and drinking the bathwater. Cringe at Eminem advocating roofies at a kegger? Get ready for the term "felching" to enter the public consciousness as Eminem gets anally raped by his stepfather in a tool shed. Got all that? Congrats, you're now four songs into Relapse.
It's smart for Em to revert to the shock tactics of his glory days-- Encore was a Chinese Democracy/HIStory-style catastrophe of self-exile with no real exit strategy. Though saddled with a terribly awkward rhythm that Eminem thankfully ignores, "Underground" finds him laying waste to a murderer's row of horror movie franchises with focused, devilish glee. If Relapse were Eminem in Michael Myers mode, it would be fantastic, but instead he's gone Mike Myers or even Robin Williams, subjecting us to "wacky" accents and a delusional sense that he still has a grip on what's edgy.
Favoring a voice more staccato and pinched than ever, Eminem jacks off to Hannah Montana, hunts Lindsay Lohan for sport, sings about Valium in Auto-Tune, clowns Jessica Simpson, and raps a verse in character as Christopher Reeve. Much like The Love Guru, it's so painfully unfunny that you can't even bother to act offended. And then there's "Bagpipes From Baghdad". As with much of the record, you have to get past your initial inclination to absolutely not give a shit about a deader than dead topic, but when Eminem spits poison at Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, he comes off as so annoying and misguided that you end up taking Mimi's side. On "If I Had", Em rapped that he was "tired of hearing people say they're tired of hearing me rap about drugs." He begins "My Mom" by rapping "I know people are tired of hearing about my mom," before rattling off one of the record's many choruses that are catchy in the way all grating but effective hooks are-- "my mom loved Valium and lots of drugs."
As for the singles, well, they're still here, but fortunately lacking any visual component. As easy as it is to ride Eminem for such sub-Jackie Harvey cultural mockups, it's possible to argue in his defense that instantly dated references have been part of the package since day one (Spice Girls, Tom Green, etc.). Truth is, the tracks where Eminem turns on himself usually end up carrying the water, and it's no different on Relapse: "Deja Vu" explains in exhaustive, darkly comedic detail how he managed to disappear in a cocktail of nearly every available intoxicant for the past Olympiad before summarizing, "See, me and you, we almost had the same outcome, Heath." Immediately after, it feels like Relapse hits something of a stride with "Beautiful", the "what do I think of success? It sucks" rant, succeeding despite clichés both metaphorical (if you're doing "woe is me," pick "tears of a clown" or "walk in my shoes," not both) and musical.
It's been easy to rag on the musical aspect of Eminem's recent output, and the mere fact he's working with Dr. Dre is seen as cause for celebration (the entirety of "Old Time's Sake" is great). But ever since "In Da Club" (and probably because of it), Dre has treated production like a test run for his very expensive headphones, concerning himself with only the most inert, stainless steel sounds. But you don't have to be an audiophile to find fault with the music here-- just a person who has a passing familiarity with Dre's post-2001 output. Relapse can be an intermittently thrilling sonic experience until you realize everything sounds like a variation of "What's the Difference", "If I Can't", or even fucking "30 Something". Granted, Eminem can overpower any beat by sheer force of will, but would it hurt for it to at least sound fun?
Which is really the reason I can't truly dig Relapse, even with all the temptation to do so: When Eminem's on ("Underground", "Must Be the Ganja")-- and he is more often than he's been since 2002-- he can put you in an awfully forgiving mood. Sure, the singles end up being the worst tracks, and it's chocked with filler and has almost no sense of sequencing, but that's the case with all of his albums. Eminem's always been able to manipulate not only his alter egos but his public persona, but here it feels more forced than ever-- as though, as The Onion once quipped about a past-his-peak Marilyn Manson, Em's going door to door trying to shock people. Sure, it's great to have the guy back, if only due to the fact that if we get to ignore him for the next four years. But it'll be on our terms, not his. | 2009-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Aftermath | May 19, 2009 | 4.8 | 08f87a78-6eb8-4750-b3bc-407e818fe371 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The enfant terrible of the pop-rock revival wades deeper into the genre, coming back with even less than before. | The enfant terrible of the pop-rock revival wades deeper into the genre, coming back with even less than before. | Machine Gun Kelly: mainstream sellout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/machine-gun-kelly-mainstream-sellout/ | Mainstream Sellout | It’s been four years since A$AP Ferg declared Lil Uzi Vert “the new Blink-182,” and three since Blink ditched their guitars for synths. But the one-time rapper Machine Gun Kelly, who won “Favorite Rock Artist” at last year’s American Music Awards, sees himself as a savior of pop-punk in its traditional sense: “It needed a face again,” he told Spin. If 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall was a love letter to his mall-punk predecessors, mainstream sellout is a bitter kiss-off, too busy defending himself against the genre’s gatekeepers to bother with the hooks and heartbreak that made his previous effort so surprisingly slick.
Machine Gun Kelly, born Colson Baker, is wading into a far more crowded pool than the one he left in 2020. He tapped Travis Barker to produce Downfall before the Blink-182 drummer became a professional studded-belt whisperer, adding a jagged edge to music from disaffected Hype House e-boys. Situated among his fellow Barker-ians, most of whom were in short pants when Blink first broke up in 2005, it’s understandable why the 31-year-old might feel a sense of ownership over the Zoomer-led Hot Topic revival. Barker joins MGK again on mainstream sellout, but this time, their pairing feels less inspired and more paranoid. These songs feel cut-and-pasted together from a grab bag of adolescent clichés and recycled three-chord solos; the eyeliner and lip ring seem even more like a costume when Baker opens the record with an impassioned “Why is it so hard to live?”
MGK and Barker aren’t exactly known for subtlety, but their latest collaboration is painfully prosaic to the point of meaninglessness. mainstream sellout never bothers to show you how twisted and broken Machine Gun Kelly is when it could just tell you: “I’m damaged,” he whines on “5150.” “make up sex,” featuring blackbear, is somehow more hollow than their collaboration on Tickets to My Downfall, mixing crass sexual references with such lyrics as, “I love chaos/I love toxic/I love wreckage/I love falling.” MGK leans into the worst tendencies of his Victory Records influences, blaming his rampant narcissism and misogyny on his exes and his vices.
Sure, there are suggestions of deeper traumas—late fathers, broken homes, forbidden love—but most of the album is cartoonishly rendered via graveyard walks and vague references to mental illness. “born with horns” and “god save me” feel thin to the point of approaching parody, like “Emo Kid” without a shred of irony. “emo girl,” a duet with fellow pop-punk revivalist Willow Smith, feels both too serious to laugh at itself and too absurd to take seriously. It does little to transcend its tropes and despite Smith’s admirably yelpy delivery, it still lands like a TikTok-ready meme. And while Baker’s vocal tics—“ums” and “yeahs” thrown in for emphasis—are catchy in spite of themselves, as a guitarist, he can barely bother with an original melody. “maybe” includes the requisite “Misery Business” interpolation and a metalcore verse from Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli Sykes for good measure. The distorted riff on “papercuts” sounds suspiciously like Green Day, but perhaps without the draw of controversy, Machine Gun Kelly didn’t feel the need to give them the same credit.
When he’s not threatening self-harm or screaming “fuck your feelings,” Machine Gun Kelly uses mainstream sellout to settle scores: “I hear too many interviews/From these artists in the news/Speaking on my name,” he roars on “WW4,” a followup to his previous record’s breakup anthem “WW3.” If Tickets to My Downfall was built from the restless pitch of the American Pie soundtracks, this record is closer to emo’s brooding, fame-obsessed LiveJournal era. Almost two decades since Panic! At the Disco sang, “Well we’re just a wet dream for the webzine,” and Fall Out Boy declared, “This ain’t a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race,” MGK is retreading long-dormant Myspace subculture wars without the wit or self-awareness to pull it off. Somehow, even the last-picked-in-gym-class losers of The Academy Is… seemed menacing when they told haters to “take a long walk off of the shortest pier”; the best MGK can do is count his toes (he’s got all 10!) and threaten to “stomp the shit out of you.”
When MGK drops the battle for authenticity, he’s still good for a patented mix of partying and pouting. He loosens his white-knuckled grip on his six-string eventually, and his hip-hop past and pop-punk pivot go down easy in a post-Juice WRLD landscape. Baker’s millionaire misery feels like a natural fit on “die in california,” singing about hating his house in the Hills while Gunna warns about “demons on my shoulder.” When the light hits just right, Machine Gun Kelly feels like the inevitable figurehead of “bop-punk”: drum machines and drop-D tunings bonded by shared desperation.
Machine Gun Kelly recently told Billboard he feels like “the kid who was just outcasted from birth.” That chip on his shoulder has only grown with each new album, first as a white rapper beefing with Eminem fighting to prove he had bars, and now as a reinvented rockstar spinning his struggles into power chords. mainstream sellout is too concerned with trying to prove Machine Gun Kelly can be a guitar god to contend with his complicated feelings or innovate on his basic formula in any meaningful way. Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them. But then again—what’s more emo than a God complex? | 2022-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Boy / Interscope | April 2, 2022 | 5.8 | 08fa86f7-7205-47a2-8a24-fb3959a87b29 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
RTJ3 is essentially the Run the Jewels manifesto, an outpouring of rage and defiance that never loses sight of the objectives: rallying the troops, holding all accountable, and toppling oppression. | RTJ3 is essentially the Run the Jewels manifesto, an outpouring of rage and defiance that never loses sight of the objectives: rallying the troops, holding all accountable, and toppling oppression. | Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22745-run-the-jewels-3/ | Run the Jewels 3 | On 2006’s “That’s Life,” Killer Mike boasted “You’d be hard-pressed to find another rapper smart as me,” opening up about Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, poverty, respectability politics, and civil rights, before taking on both Bush Administrations (“George Bush don’t like blacks … and his daddy CIA had flooded the hood with rock”). A few months later, El-P was waging war with the same enemy in the 9/11 conspiracy theory thriller “Run the Numbers,” concluding that “it always comes back to a Bush.” The two songs sounded very little alike, but the music (and the rappers) shared a similar fire and presence: confident, conspiratorial, no-holds-barred, and razor-sharp. Neither were likely to be deemed “political” rappers then, but both were already dissenters and nonconformists; independent artists signed to themselves, free thinkers shooting off at the mouth.
Nearly a decade after airing out the Bush family, the duo, as Run the Jewels, have found a creative renaissance. The group’s latest self-titled album, Run the Jewels 3, is a well timed, finely tuned rap epic that confronts the ruling class (here addressed as “the masters”) with deadly precision; it’s rap as resistance.With a demagogue waiting in the wings to assume the presidency, their particular Molotov mix of explosive shit-talking and unfiltered insubordination feels vital.
Their interplay is instinctual this time around; the songs move and shuffle with its MCs intuitively trading bars, filling the gaps in each others’ phrases, and feeding off each others’ energies, using their booming voices to cut through the startling noises of a future dystopia. “Poor folk love us the rich hate our faces/We talk too loud, won't remain in our places,” El-P raps on “Everybody Stay Calm.” They’re both observers who refuse to sugarcoat. “I just try my best, man, to say something about the shit I see,” Killer Mike told The New Republic in 2015. “Because I don’t want to go crazy. I don’t want to be walking around angry and feeling rage.” To that end, RTJ3 isn’t a response or reaction, it’s a preemptive strike, laying the groundwork for the battleground ahead.
Their methods remain consistent, but the stakes have been raised over the years. RTJ1 was a fun experiment; RTJ2 was a classicist statement, and now RTJ3 is a reckoning. Many of these songs have more urgency than before; If RTJ2 was the music of protest, then this is the music of revolt. In that way, RTJ3 is essentially the Run the Jewels manifesto, an outpouring of rage and defiance that is never overcome by the moment and never loses sight of the objectives: rallying the troops, holding everyone accountable (from lawmakers, to other rappers, to Don Lemon and themselves), and toppling oppression wherever it may reign (on “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” El-P raps, “Fear’s been law for so long rage feels like therapy”). “Thursday in the Danger Room” peers into the duo's personal turmoil and their shared history, and on “2100” Killer Mike lays out their President-Trump survival strategy: “You defeat the devil when you hold onto hope.”
The key to RTJ3 is closer “A Report to the Shareholders,” which is plainspoken about the duo’s message and intent: “Maybe that’s why me and Mike get along / Not from the same part of town, but we both hear the same sound coming / And it sounds like war.” Seconds later, Killer Mike goes full Malcolm X: “Choose the lesser of the evil people, and the devil still gon’ win / It could all be over tomorrow, kill our masters and start again.” This is the ire of a group that’s tired of saying I told you so.
This is by far the best produced record of their trilogy, with beats that find new and interesting ways to wreak havoc. “Call Ticketron” turns automated ticketing technology into a beacon for alien transmissions. On “Hey Kids (Bumaye)” crackling static and thumping bass crater open to reveal whirring, wobbling tones and ghostly whispers, and Danny Brown slots in an exceptional guest verse. On “Panther Like a Panther (Miracle Mix),” furnished by the shouts of Miami rap goddess Trina, rounded blips mimic the patter of hand drums before bursting into a wave of buzzing, distorted noise that slowly dissipates back into nothing. They’re still clearly having fun doing this and it’s still fun to listen to them work.
It isn’t quite as punchy as RTJ2, which was brutish in its tactics, with nonstop bangs and thrills, but RTJ3 is a triumph in its own right that somehow celebrates the success of a seemingly unlikely friendship and mourns the collapse of a nation all at once. “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” a song about riots as a response to violence as opposed to a means to create it, samples an iconic Martin Luther King, Jr. quote from the 1967 speech “The Other America”: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” In keeping with that idea, RTJ3 is a soundtrack for the riots to come. | 2017-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 3, 2017 | 8.6 | 08fd4d83-b079-4296-a1f5-16358425e412 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The angriest, most aggressive record in the Beatles catalogue, For Sale finds them reaching back to their Hamburg club days in both attitude and sound. | The angriest, most aggressive record in the Beatles catalogue, For Sale finds them reaching back to their Hamburg club days in both attitude and sound. | The Beatles: Beatles For Sale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13424-beatles-for-sale/ | Beatles For Sale | The Beatles faced the same pressures every teen sensation has since-- fatigue, frustration, being bounced into recording substandard material. "It isn't a pot-boiling quick-sale any-old-thing-will-do-for-Christmas mixture," claimed Derek Taylor on the Beatles For Sale sleeve. This pre-emptive strike looks more than a little defensive, especially when the cover versions are back in force, and one of them is the notorious and oft-detested "Mr. Moonlight".
The workrate expected of early-1960s pop stars is one of the hardest things for modern listeners to get their heads around. We're used to bands making a record, touring in support, searching for inspiration, trying out new ideas, maybe two years later making another. Because our experience of the early Beatles is structured around their albums, we tend to think of them as doing something similar, except at a much more rapid pace. As Ian Macdonald's superb Revolution in the Head makes clear, this wasn't true: albums, singles, EPs, tours tumbled over one another with hardly a break-- a firehose of almost continuous activity.
There were two reasons for this workload. Firstly the music industry simply hadn't worked out yet how to extend a record's shelf life-- singles weren't taken from albums after all. Secondly the lifespan of acts wasn't expected to be long, so it made sense to get the most work possible out of them. The famous hotch-potch of their early American catalogue was one result. The Beatles themselves were changing how the business worked, but Beatles For Sale, of all the British records, bears the stamp of these business realities. It's a mess.
But it's a really good mess. Taylor's sleevenotes are also interesting because they go out of the way to reassure listeners that everything they're hearing can be reproduced live. Studio experimentation was becoming more important to the band and producer George Martin, but clearly someone viewed it with a little nervousness. You can understand why: The Lennon-McCartney originals on Beatles For Sale are often full of curious arrangements, drones, jagged transitions, and lashings of aggression. Blame pot, or the inspiration of Bob Dylan, or just the pressure-cooker environment the group was in, but the record hits a seam of angry creativity.
This is particularly true of Lennon's amazing first three songs. "No Reply" shatters itself with waves of jealous rage, taking the menace that had flecked Beatles music and bringing it up in the mix: his dangerously quiet "that's a lie" is the most chilling moment in their catalogue. "I'm a Loser" turns that anger inward with just as much brutality. And "Baby's in Black" curdles a nursery rhyme, transforms the group's crisp pop sound into an off-kilter clang, and uses John and Paul McCartney's double vocal to thicken the soupy sound even further. This run of tracks marries the direct attack of their earliest material and the boundary-pushing of their later albums, and stands with the best of both.
Even so it's a relief when "Rock and Roll Music" breaks the tension, especially when you notice that the band are playing their best rock'n'roll since "Twist and Shout". Perhaps the workrate had pushed them back into the Hamburg hot zone, but the uptempo covers on Beatles For Sale are fiercely good-- as ragged, loud and immediate as the songs needed to be. Even "Mr. Moonlight" fits the aggressive mood, the ugliness of its organ solo surely deliberate.
McCartney's songs on Beatles For Sale are more thoughtful than moody, though on his splendid "Every Little Thing"-- given melodramatic thrust by Shangri-Las-style piano and bass drum-- he's distinctly melancholy, his "yes, I know I'm a lucky guy" sounding like an attempt to convince himself of that. But Lennon's anger and the band's rediscovery of rock'n'roll mean For Sale's reputation as the group's meanest album is deserved, even if it has "Eight Days a Week" as its breezy centerpiece. The lumpiest and least welcoming of their early records, it's also one of the most rewarding.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-09-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 8, 2009 | 9.3 | 08ff67a7-e07f-483b-9942-62306e7a6ea9 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
Since forming over three decades ago, the UK shoegaze band’s fifth album is the first to shoulder the weight of those years. The music is wispier, more skeletal, attuned to and aware of fading glories. | Since forming over three decades ago, the UK shoegaze band’s fifth album is the first to shoulder the weight of those years. The music is wispier, more skeletal, attuned to and aware of fading glories. | Slowdive: everything is alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slowdive-everything-is-alive/ | everything is alive | Slowdive were a band built for eternal youth: They were teenagers, only 15 when they met and started rehearsing, not yet 20 when they found themselves signing with the legendary Creation Records, suddenly label mates with bands like My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub. They were riding the crest of a scene predicated on the intensity of adolescent feelings, and like all adolescent feelings, it ended, decisively and dramatically: When the press turned on shoegaze in favor of Britpop, the turn was as decisive as getting dumped senior year by your first love. Their “last” album, 1995’s experimental and loop-based Pygmalion, was dubbed—admiringly—as “career suicide.”
It takes an extraordinary tenderness toward the resonance of teenage feelings to return to a band like this, after 22 years away—after marriage, children, and divorce, greying hair. But tenderness has always been one of Slowdive’s key virtues. Maybe owing to the fact that Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead were childhood friends since age 5, their music always glowed with a familial affection that was hard to quantify or point to: When they played together, or when their whispering voices swirled together, it always felt like the continuation of a private conversation between two former kids.
In 2023, Slowdive are, improbably, the closest thing the strange and ephemeral shoegaze scene has to “survivors”—a band that can still play its catalog to festival audiences decades later, whose new songs occasion cheers instead of drink-line evacuations. Their self-titled 2017 comeback felt exultant: with its thick, overdriven guitars and bolder, cleanly etched pop choruses, it might be the loudest record in Slowdive’s catalog, an invigorated blast from old friends who have fallen joyfully back into each other’s company again.
On everything is alive, those two former kids look up, startled and amused to discover the wrinkles on each other’s faces. It’s the first record where you can hear, and feel, the weight of those previous years, and the shadows of the losses that etch the contours of a life entering its 50s. The music is wispier, more skeletal—a gust of distortion from 2017’s “Sugar For the Pill” would blow it all away. Ironically, it’s the closest they’ve come since reforming to recreating the sound of 1993’s glimmering, jewel-like Souvlaki, but it’s been darkened and complicated by age and perspective. This isn’t summer music; this is sunset music, attuned to and aware of fading glories.
Part of that haunted feeling emerges from the vocals—on “skin in the game” and “andalucia plays,” Halstead’s voice sounds slightly harrowed, closer to Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan than to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid. That character alone, like the appearance of crow’s feet on a handsome leading actor’s face, imparts an appealingly rueful, seen-it-all cast to the music. There is a lot of shared life bound up in the Slowdive project now, after all. Since the group began sessions in April 2020—and then quickly abandoned them for six months as the world shut down—Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father died. Slowdive lyrics are largely imagistic, not narrative, but it doesn’t take much interpretation to pick up mournful signs flashing past in Halstead’s words: “Time runs on once more/Another ghost is born/I feel like change will come/When the night rolls in,” he sings on album opener “shanty.”
Halstead initially conceived of everything is alive as a minimal techno record, closer in spirit to Pygmalion. Although they gradually drifted back into all-band territory, something of the minimal coldness persists in the record’s bones. The first sound you hear is the blurp of a modular synth, which oscillates for a good minute before the first cloud of guitar colors the song’s edges. The perfectly named “chained to a cloud” lays out a loop, layers a few elements, and then lets a single lyric circle in the arrangement like one red sock in the dryer. At eight tracks, three of them mostly instrumental, the length feels purposeful and personal, like these songs are sketches from a journal Halstead and Goswell left open.
Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific. “Remember the first winter/The dark heart of everything/And the dog just laid down/You’ll cry for all of us,” Halstead murmurs on “andalucia plays.” The implication of a dead dog: Surely, this is a first for shoegaze, a genre predicated on recreating the terrifying teenaged conviction that all your strongest feelings would last forever. But this is what it means to be a survivor, even within music built on ephemerality: The longer you live, the further your central drama falls away from the frame, and the more attuned you become to the shifts happening at the corners, the markers of erosion. Everything is alive, yes, but only for a moment or two. | 2023-09-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | September 7, 2023 | 7.7 | 0906b6ad-a9d3-498b-988f-c401346a309e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Curated by Mark Ronson, the pop-heavy soundtrack to the blockbuster doll movie shrivels outside of the magical world of Barbieland. | Curated by Mark Ronson, the pop-heavy soundtrack to the blockbuster doll movie shrivels outside of the magical world of Barbieland. | Various Artists: Barbie the Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-barbie-the-album/ | Barbie the Album | Barbie, the fluorescent new blockbuster helmed by Greta Gerwig, is a sometimes-arch summertime romp about the perfect doll and its not-so-perfect reputation. But the film doesn’t need an introduction: You’ve already seen the brand activations, even fired off your own “Barbieheimer” tweets. At its core, Barbie is a piece of marketing that is being aggressively marketed, and it's succeeding wildly while anticipating its own critique. The movie features a knowing scene in which a real-world tween lambasts Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) for “the glorification of rampant consumerism” while, at the same time, it pumps demand for plastic dollhouses and direct-to-landfill Barbie garb. It casts Mattel’s doltish male executives as antagonists while funding those guys’ next vacation home in Sicily. But Barbie is for the girls, apparently, and the girls are powerless to a little treat.
So who better to oversee the film’s soundtrack than Mark Ronson—a wily nostalgist always trying to squeeze extra life out of the classics, so attuned to the emotional power of women he recruited a suite of them to vocalize the anguish of his own divorce? The 47-year-old industry veteran cultivates a chic, diverse roster—including artists whose identities weren’t fully represented by Mattel until around 2016, when in response to declining sales, the brand started thinking more actively beyond leggy white women with big tits. The soundtrack features mainstream pop stars like Dua Lipa and Lizzo, global phenoms like reggaeton singer Karol G and K-pop girl group Fifty Fifty—and why the hell not—Tame Impala. Mattel may have sued Aqua in 1997 for besmirching Barbie’s reputation, dirtying her into a sex object, but now Ice Spice is rapping over “Barbie Girl” about getting her man “bricked”—and she’s doing so alongside the original Black Barbie, on a ready-made hit that debuted in the Top 10.
What makes Barbie allegedly subversive is how it self-consciously ridicules the blinkered feminism of its eponymous icon and Mattel’s own girlboss marketing. And so you have songs like Lizzo’s “Pink,” which, even with congas, horns, and jubilant backing vocals, scans as a more insipid iteration of her usual you-go-girl jams: “What you wearing? Dress or suit? Either way that power looks so good on you,” she coos, ostensibly satirizing an affirmation culture that blindly validates women’s choices. It doesn’t matter that Barbie will simultaneously critique liberal politics while ending with dolls getting freed from patriarchal brainwashing upon hearing rousing proclamations about how “it’s literally impossible to be a woman.” The movie’s self-awareness is a great trick: The shallowness and frivolity of any generic selection can be justified as winkingly on-theme. Fifty Fifty’s “Barbie Dreams” is a pop jingle as cloyingly bright as Barbie and Ken’s Impala inline skates. Ava Max’s “Choose Your Fighter” is a light-up Eurodance banger that’s just her 2020 single “Kings and Queens” with different plastic accessories.
Barbie is just the beginning of Mattel’s efforts to repackage old I.P. into new media enterprises and dominate pop culture in the process; among the dozens of projects in the works is an “A24-type” Barney movie for dread-filled millennials and a live-action Polly Pocket vehicle directed by Lena Dunham. The film has ignited complaints about indie directors selling out—and finds its most natural collaborator in a pop auteur whose last album cycle wryly proclaimed the joys of selling out. On the relative highlight “Speed Drive,” Charli XCX threads the needle between film’s nostalgia industrial complex and music’s, not only cribbing the ping-ponging synths from “Cobrastyle” and the cheer-squad chants of “Hey Mickey” but recycling her typical themes—being cute, driving fast—and glib, signifier-heavy writing style. “I’m a classic, real deep, Voltaire,” she teases. It’s not her best song, but it’s more clever than the rest of Barbie’s selections; at the very least, Charli delivers on a good time.
Barbie is best when it pursues fun, dumb spectacle, chiefly in scenes with the himbo extraordinaire, Ken (Ryan Gosling). Sick of being an afterthought, he enters the real world and gets pilled on men’s rights, converting Barbie’s Dream Houses into beer-stocked “Casa Mojo Dojo Houses” and looking like dirtbag Macklemore in a fat fur coat. Upon this transformation, we hear Sam Smith’s “Man I Am,” a hammy disco anthem with growled verses from the perspective of a beefcake with slicked hair. “I’m the groove catcha, hottest thing, six pack and tight G-string,” a deep voice utters in the song, before clearing up any misconceptions: “No I’m not gay bro, but I’ve been on that lay low.” The farce escalates as the definitely-not-gay Ken launches into a power ballad about the anguish of being second place: “I’m just Ken/Anywhere else I’d be a 10,” he wails like a boy band member, before pivoting to rock opera bombast in which background singers intone, “Feels so real, my Kenergy.”
True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either, as in the case of Gayle’s scratchy power-pop tantrum “butterflies,” Billie Eilish’s lachrymose piano ballad “What Was I Made For,” and Karol G’s beachtime reggaeton joint “Watati.” There are a few cute selections, like PinkPantheress’ “Angel,” a 2000s rom-com track with cartoon dog barks and ribbons of Irish fiddle. And Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” is a serviceable Future Nostalgia retread that’s partially redeemed by its inclusion in an exuberant dance sequence, a suggestion that all of these songs would sound better under the magical thinking of Barbie Land. But this is the real world, and in the real world, these throwaway products should largely be left on the shelf. | 2023-07-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | null | Atlantic | July 21, 2023 | 5.4 | 09072a21-0ba5-42e1-b111-556f5ab5bf69 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Andrew Bird follows March's poppy, elegant Break It Yourself with Hands of Glory, a set of rustic songs recorded during loose sessions at his western Illinois barn. Bird and his band cover country tunes, strip down their own originals, and explore weighty Biblical themes. | Andrew Bird follows March's poppy, elegant Break It Yourself with Hands of Glory, a set of rustic songs recorded during loose sessions at his western Illinois barn. Bird and his band cover country tunes, strip down their own originals, and explore weighty Biblical themes. | Andrew Bird: Hands of Glory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17209-hands-of-glory/ | Hands of Glory | Andrew Bird's music is in part defined by the way he marries the traditions of the fiddle and violin-- two very different styles played on the same instrument. If March's Break It Yourself was his violin album, full of careful pop-leaning arrangements, then Hands of Glory is its fiddle complement. It's a set of rustic songs born of his old-timey live sets as well as the loose sessions at his barn in western Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Bird and his band cover country tunes, strip down their own originals, and explore such weighty Biblical issues as death and resurrection, sin and salvation, creation and Armageddon.
Hands of Glory possesses an almost academic quality, as though Bird and his cohorts were presenting a musical essay about endtimes imagery in country music. The album begins with "Three White Horses", which, thanks to Bird's bowing, sounds like it's coming from an old acetate. That song is followed by a cover of the Handsome Family's "When That Helicopter Comes", an oddball gospel that deploys Alan Hampton's bouncy bass and Bird's otherworldly bow as a soundtrack to separatist paranoia: "There'll be power in the blood, when the helicopters come." Bird switches theologies for "Orpheo", an austere reimagining of the spry "Orpheo Looks Back" from Break It Yourself, which thrives on the empty spaces between the strums and plucks, such that his gentle falsetto at the end has a beseeching effect. Only "Railroad Bill", with its aw-shucks lyrics hoots and hollers, sounds out of place.
Nevertheless, Bird thrives in this setting, which permits greater emphasis on his stoic vocals and curious playing. He intuits Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" as a kind of secular hymn, directed to an ambivalent God rather than to a departed lover. His vocal cadence and mournful Appalachian airs evoke not so much a spiritual crisis but its resolution-- a place of relative peace after so much soul searching. Those same qualities bolster the inventive storytelling on "Spirograph", originally by the Minneapolis band Alpha Consumer. It's neither old nor country, but Bird treats it with the same care he might bring to a dusty ballad.
Thematically and perhaps musically, closer "Beyond the Valley of the Three White Horses" is intended to evoke some sort of afterlife. It's a lovely set of loops-- long bows, staccato plucks, airy strumming, and ominous ambience-- that draw equally from fiddle styles as well as violin styles, making it the most intriguing use of Bird's instrument on the EP. It's also the longest song on the album, unraveling gradually while never quite settling on one specific mood or theme. Instead, Bird constantly alters the shape of the composition, introduces new ideas, and lets them morph and mutate with each repetition. This technique is not necessarily new for Bird, but "Beyond" is a moment of subdued rapture, and, like the most bracing passages on Hands of Glory, it's one that arises from the way in which Bird's instrument inventively fuses these two disparate styles. | 2012-11-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-11-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | November 1, 2012 | 7.3 | 090d8724-b139-4a2c-8145-4fc48e034cab | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Merrill Garbus' music as tUnE-yArDs has always been playful but extremely confident. Her third album, Nikki Nack, is more reserved than 2011's w h o k i l l; when Garbus calms down here, she does it with the grace and certainty of an archer drawing back her bow—less a concession than a show of power. | Merrill Garbus' music as tUnE-yArDs has always been playful but extremely confident. Her third album, Nikki Nack, is more reserved than 2011's w h o k i l l; when Garbus calms down here, she does it with the grace and certainty of an archer drawing back her bow—less a concession than a show of power. | Tune-Yards: Nikki Nack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19314-tune-yards-nikki-nack/ | Nikki Nack | Merrill Garbus started recording music as tUnE-yArDs while working as a babysitter on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Funny things happen to solitary people in quiet places. You talk to yourself. You expand to fit the space. You realize "you" might be more than one person. Midway through her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus tells a deadbeat lover she no longer needs him because she can always get pregnant with birds, which comes as terrific news. Her backup singers—a bevy of voices that seem to have fluttered out of a 1930s dish-soap ad—agree, which makes sense because they are also Merrill Garbus.
Her music has always been playful but extremely confident. The product of a liberal liberal-arts education, she has worked as a puppeteer and is often photographed wearing facepaint. At the height of the Occupy movement, she lead audiences from the theater into the street, guerrilla-style, and her music embodies an activist's urgency, filled with sounds that elbow their way to the front in order to be heard. She's an introvert's nightmare, and all she wants is for you to open your heart and sing.
Her third album, Nikki Nack, is more reserved than 2011's w h o k i l l, which isn't saying much. There are still songs that sound like playgrounds full of street kids ricocheting off each other like bumper cars. There are still nursery rhymes about body dysmorphia and white liberal guilt set to what sounds like Coke-bottle percussion from the undiscovered country. But there are also songs like "Time of Dark" and "Look Around", where Garbus seems to have made a conscious choice to slow down, and in slowing down, lets us see the muscle in her stride. tUnE-yArDs now sound less like buskers outside the neighborhood co-op than some blues-jazz combo from the near-future, severed from the traditions of the music but still somehow in touch with its spirit. (Two of the songs here were produced by Malay, who also worked on Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and whatever Garbus lacks in marketing appeal to the alt-R&B crowd she makes up for by actually having a powerful voice.)
Subtlety has never been at play for Garbus, who tends to tackle her subject matter like a child after a robotic mole at a carnival game. "I come from the land of slaves/ Let's go Redskins, let's go Braves!" she wails on "Real Thing". Her world is made up of broad irony and clashing patterns—one whose conflicts are obvious but painfully irresolvable. Earlier, on "Water Fountain", there's this vignette: "I saved up all my pennies and I gave them to this special guy/ When he had enough of them he bought himself a cherry pie/ He gave me a dollar, a blood-soaked dollar/ I cannot get the spot out but it's okay, it still works at the store." The imagery is violent but the delivery is sweet—then, you remember the cherry pie, red as blood. The most startling moment on w h o k i l l was when Garbus fantasized about making love to a cop who arrested her brother, then confesses how liberated she feels by violence as the band breaks into an ecstatic calypso.
Nate Brenner reprises his w h o k i l l role here as a bassist, synth player, and co-writer, and the album also features contributions from Roomful of Teeth, a Grammy-winning vocal group who, like Garbus, enjoy doing things with their voices that most people would not classify as singing. But even as Garbus opens up tUnE-yArDs to other collaborators, her albums still appear to be the work of a solitary kid in a basement, jerry-rigging her own fun with the help of imaginary friends. It is private music, splattered outward.
Like Dirty Projectors and St. Vincent, Garbus is an artist who lives with weird but flirts with normal. Gone is the chipper ukulele of w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs; Nikki Nack signifies maturity while still allowing room for Garbus to do zany things like scat-sing "One two three o'clock/ Four o'clock, walk and walk and talk and talk and walk and talk and then/ Five, six, seven—seven—seven—heaven—heaven—take me again" for 90 seconds straight on full tilt. In moments when Garbus does calm down, she does it with the grace and certainty of an archer drawing back her bow—less a concession than a show of power. | 2014-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | May 6, 2014 | 8.1 | 090fed72-246c-4311-97c3-7edd98b64ad2 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
SremmLife 2, the follow-up to the turbocharged rap duo's joyous debut SremmLife, is stranger, artsier, and flat-out ballsier than its predecessor. | SremmLife 2, the follow-up to the turbocharged rap duo's joyous debut SremmLife, is stranger, artsier, and flat-out ballsier than its predecessor. | Rae Sremmurd: SremmLife 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22020-sremmlife-2/ | SremmLife 2 | In 2014, Mississippi rap duo Rae Sremmurd became hugely popular off the strength of oddball party anthems like “No Flex Zone” and “No Type.” The following year’s full-length SremmLife made good on those joyous pop-rap instincts; carried by the outlandish, even cartoonish voices of of brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi, they made joyous inclusive rap that produced enough energy to power a city block. Their music was fun, infectious, whimsical, and a potent (if momentary) remedy for agoraphobia.
And yet some rap fans cried “foul,” dismissed them as empty-calories frat-rap, a mix of LMFAO’s party rock cut with Ying Yang Twins crunk and packaged in the youthful exuberance of Kris Kross. When Complex named SremmLife its third-best album of 2015, former Hot 97 program director and current Beats 1 DJ Ebro Darden launched an all-out assault on the duo, saying that the selection couldn’t be valid. He accused the brothers of not writing their own raps and capped his comments with another diminishing jab: “It was a fabricated thing we all liked.” Two of the most electric new voices in rap were suddenly being reduced to the rap equivalent of Milli Vanilli. Mike WiLL Made-It, the super producer who helped mastermind the duo’s success (and the alleged ghostwriter), addressed the allegations on Twitter as only he can: “See the Problem is niggas be stuck in these old ass boxes they scared to jump out of…”
Jumping out of the box is exactly what SremmLife 2 does. Whether by design, by accident, or simply out of necessity, SremmLife 2 deconstructs the party-rap formula the duo perfected on their debut, zigging and zagging from Drake-esque rap-sung half-ballads (“Now That I Know”) to Mustard’s “ratchet music” (“Set the Roof,” with a Lil Jon-feature nod to crunk) to sugary bubblegum rap (“Just Like Us”), all while maintaining the spirit at the core of SremmLife. The album’s default setting is synthpop, retrofitted with Mike WiLL’s disorienting array of bells, whistles, tones, and clattering drum kits. Its most ambitious outings, like the back-to-back combo of metallic stargazers “Look Alive” and “Black Beatles,” push their talents to new heights by redefining what the duo can and will do. The songs hook into each other at the ends, creating seamless album-friendly transitions.
The weirdest and wildest moments on SremmLife 2 are its lifeblood. The album is stranger, artsier, and flat-out ballsier than its predecessor, especially considering the stakes (SremmLife produced five platinum singles; this is a follow-up that doesn’t seem to care much about that.) It’s a less dance-friendly alternative driven by the yelps and whines of its two stars. Slim Jxmmi tears through the hook and verse on “Start a Party” like a man possessed, moving at a ferocious pace that makes his voice crack. On “Swang,” which strobes in a fluorescent neon glow, Swae Lee floats in and out of a wispy falsetto. The most challenging song is “Take It or Leave It,” with Swae Lee going full crooner, belting out a pitchy-but-charming melody. When Swae jumps too far out of pocket, Jxmmi is there with the answer, settling things with even-keeled verses.
Swae Lee, in particular, is venturing into Young Thug territory: His arsenal of yips, squeals, and whistling falsettos has grown exponentially, and he’s willing to try just about anything now, which results in some strangely liberating artistic choices. But it’s Slim Jxmmi who really grows here. Many past Rae Sremmurd songs were exhibitions for Swae’s vocal acrobatics (“No Type,” in particular), with Jxmmi playing springboard, but Jxmmi is showing greater range and rapping with much more force. He even puts together some of the most quotable bars: “A young nigga so superb/I’m Kool Herc on the herb” on “Real Chill;” on “Over Here,” “Charlie Sheen is my clone/Can they fuck with us? No/Red carpets my home/VIP my throne.” Together they’ve become one of rap’s most exciting tag-teams, and it appears that the brothers are getting the last laugh on those ghostwriting allegations.
Rae Sremmurd were born of the “Crank Dat” and “ringtone rap” eras, where hooks and dances powered entire careers. That era of rap was often considered disposable, too. (Nas made a whole album about it.) But acts like Soulja Boy and Travis Porter have proven durable, and they’ve had a discernable influence on the Brown brothers, not just in their sound but their swagger: the sense of being unbothered, unburdened, and invincible that comes with being super-young, rich, and black. It’s that same sense of liberation that fuels the boldest decisions on this album. SremmLife 2 collects all of the quirks in the margins of its predecessor and develops them; more than anything else, SremmLife 2 is the ultimate middle finger to grouches who think this brand of rap can’t be complex. | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Ear Drummer | August 15, 2016 | 7.6 | 09116263-88de-47f4-8af6-a68f5742db9d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | 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 an album that changed ambient music forever. | 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 an album that changed ambient music forever. | Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aphex-twin-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/ | Selected Ambient Works Volume II | The facts were thin on the ground. Richard D. James was from Cornwall, yes—a geographical outsider in the context of early-1990s UK rave, a kind of coastal cowpoke. He’d been at college for an engineering degree, one he never finished, and was known to pick at the innards of his analog synths. He collected aliases like another young man might sneakers, trotting each one out when the occasion called for it, never letting any of them get too worn: Polygon Window, Caustic Window, Power-Pill, the Dice Man, GAK, Blue Calx, Q-Chastic, AFX, plus his clear favorite, Aphex Twin.
James claimed to sleep just two hours a night; claimed, too, that he could control his dreams, even wrote much of his music in his sleep. He is said to have gotten the jackhammering sounds for “Quoth” from a day job digging tunnels. Did he really drive a decommissioned tank? And as for the bit about being named after his dead brother, you kind of didn’t even want to know. Some people swore he’d cried in interviews, talking about his perished namesake sibling; others were sure it was part of the long con.
Try as you might, you couldn’t quite separate fact from fantasy, or figure out where the truth ended and the fib began. James thrived on ambiguity, possessing a gaslighting nature, David Toop wrote in his 1996 book Ocean of Sound, that “indicates either a serious person who has never been taken seriously or a practical joker who has been taken seriously for way too long.”
I don’t think James ever made anything up maliciously; I think he just liked to talk, to amuse himself, to keep himself from getting bored in the endless parade of interviews a rising star gets subjected to. It’s no wonder an ornery young artist, a prodigy, really, might tell a gullible journalist that, by his 20th birthday, he’d completed 1000 songs, enough to fill 100 albums. No matter how tall the tales grew around this Cornish Paul Bunyan, none of them ever came close to eclipsing the music itself.
James emerged in 1991, at 20 years old, just as UK producers were scrambling to keep up with the newfound domestic demand for electronic dance music. The sound was born in Chicago and Detroit in the mid-1980s and imported to the UK in 1987 when a handful of London DJs stumbled upon acid, the musical style—along with ecstasy, the chemical compound—while on holiday in Ibiza. Their horizons instantly broadened, they connived to bring the stuff back home, and wham: a canary-yellow smiley face landed upon fair Albion like a pallet of rations air-dropped by a benevolent conqueror. Within a few short months, trend-happy (and MDMA-happy) England was consumed with the fever for all things house and techno, but it soon became clear that America simply wasn’t producing enough of the stuff to keep up with British ravers’ ravenous appetites.
Local production went into overdrive, and few native sons or daughters (it was mostly sons) were more determined than James to put their shoulders to the wheel. He’d been making electronic music since he was a young teen, but for years, his output went no further than the cassettes full of demos—not even demos, really, since he had no intention of actually releasing any of it—that he dubbed for friends, who drove around Cornwall unwittingly blasting future classics from their Ford Fiestas.
Finally, though, one of those friends connected James with an Exeter record shop called Mighty Force, which inaugurated its in-house label with James’ debut 12"—Aphex Twin’s Analogue Bubblebath EP—in 1991. The floodgates opened. The following year, he’d release two albums—Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, his full-length debut, and Polygon Window’s Surfing on Sine Waves—along with half a dozen EPs that, with their zigzagging rhythms and eerie, metallic timbres, quickly established James as one of UK techno’s foremost innovators.
In addition to techno, ambient music—more than that, really, the idea of ambient music—was in the air in the early 1990s, even if nobody could quite agree on what the term was supposed to mean. Brian Eno had popularized the concept with 1978’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, positing the idea of a functional sound product, like Muzak but more tasteful, that might be used to “tint” the air. By the late 1980s, it had shifted from Eno’s genre-agnostic ideal to a concept closely aligned with rave culture’s futurist (and hedonist) ethos.
Ambient’s bubble-world atmospheres were well suited to the cybernetic and psychotropic lifestyles then in vogue. As a comedown soundtrack, ambient provided a gentle landing pad for psychonauts returning from the trips of the night before; as a mind-expanding spiritual elixir, it went along with oxygen bars, smart drinks, and other trappings of the dial-up counterculture in the final decade of the 20th century. And, like those AOL free-trial CD-ROMs spilling from mailboxes across the land, it was everywhere.
The KLF’s 1990 album Chill Out and the Orb’s 1991 album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld gave pre-millennial ambient its amoebic form. Both were long, largely seamless journeys whose ebb and flow mimicked the fluid path of a psychedelic trip—swirling collages conjoining bucolic synths, pedal steel, classical strings, dub and acid-house rhythms, the occasional thunderclap or train whistle, and barnyard animals.
By 1993 the ethereal style was unstoppable. Virgin Records launched a compilation series, A Brief History of Ambient, by declaring it “the summer of ambient” in a full-page magazine ad. The independent label Caroline countered with its own franchise, Excursions in Ambience. The burgeoning style made it into the pages of the New York Times in a 1994 article by Simon Reynolds that noted, “Ambient has become a booming album-based genre, appealing both to burned-out ravers and to people who never really cared for dance music in the first place.” Even Moby got in on the act with his 1993 album Ambient—a collection of sedate yet still rhythm-driven techno that, by today’s standards, doesn’t sound terribly ambient at all.
The same could be said for much of Aphex Twin’s debut album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92. It’s true that, even at its most intense, SAW 85-92 was gentler than his abrasive, reputation-making early singles like “Digeridoo” or “Dodeccaheedron.” But the pumping breakbeats and drum machines of tracks like “Xtal” and “Pulsewidth” were light-years from the interesting if ignorable air fresheners that Eno had originally proposed. Only the beatless “I” suggested anything like the tone-poetic purity of ambient at its most ephemeral. But with 1994’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, James made a clean break—with his own prior catalog, and with virtually everything else that was being trafficked in the genre.
Then, as now, the first thing you become aware of with Selected Ambient Works Volume II is its purity, its starkness, its emptiness. There have been quieter records, more minimal records, more difficult records. But few have done so much with so little; few have shown less interest in being any more forthcoming than they are, in meeting the listener anywhere near halfway, in making the slightest attempt at articulating their own ambiguous emotional terrain. SAW II can be warm and it can be chilly; it can be sentimental and it can be forbidding, but it would be hard to call it expressive, exactly. A little like those samples of Mars’ terrain thought to contain evidence of amino acids but which turned out to be merely tainted with the sweat of some careless lab tech who didn’t pull his gloves on tight enough, Aphex Twin’s creation frequently seems only accidentally contaminated by human emotion. Whatever you feel when listening to it—well, that’s on you.
The album opens with a subtle tension: soft synth pads, the most basic, three-chord progression imaginable, cycling uneventfully round and round, while a breathy syllable—a voice, or something remarkably like one—bobs overhead, like a loosed balloon rapidly fading from view. Lilting harp accents turn to steel drums and back. The voice is detuned by just a few nearly imperceptible cents; the delay lags almost unnoticeably behind the beat. It’s a child’s lullaby turned queasy, a music box with a whiff of attic mold.
That tension—between disturbing and reassuring, trouble and calm, mutation and stasis—is the album’s defining characteristic. Across its 23 (or 24, 25, or 26, depending upon the format and edition) mostly untitled tracks, the balance tends to tip from one extreme to the other, like someone nervously shifting body weight from foot to foot. Some tracks, like #3 (known by fans as “Rhubarb”) are soft and consonant, welcoming as a well-kept lawn; others, like #4 (“Hankie”), with its bowed metal and whale-song laments, are deeply unsettling. The lilting chimes of #7 (“Curtains”) suggest a fairground populated only by tumbleweeds; the slow-motion grind and whirr of #22 (“Spots”) might be a chopped-and-screwed edit of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. #23 (“Tassels”), recorded on an EMS Synthi, one of the first synths the young artist ever bought, might come closest to James’ description of the album, in an interview with David Toop, as being like “standing in a power station on acid”: “Power stations are wicked. If you just stand in the middle of a really massive one … you get a really weird presence and you’ve got the hum. You just feel electricity around you. That’s totally dream-like for me.”
The four tracks that open CD2 (both the US and UK editions; tracks #13-16 of the digital release) make for a particularly compelling stretch. “Blue Calx”—the only song to bear an official title, it originally appeared on the 1992 compilation The Philosophy of Sound and Machine, credited to Blue Calx—is surprisingly pretty, placid, dreamlike. #14 (“Parallel Stripes”) delicately balances the album’s most tactile tones—I imagine metal shavings dancing across a magnetic field—with a meandering hint of melody. The shuddering, clanging “#15 (“Shiny Metal Rods”) is a tumultuous counterbalance to the album’s gentlest passages, the closest James comes here to the jagged techno of his earlier singles. And #16 (“Grey Stripe”) is pure filtered white noise; it might be the dying breath of a distant star.
Whatever anyone thought they knew about James, back in 1994, must have dissipated as soon as they finished listening to this album. Where was the ginger enfant terrible with the barbed tongue? Where were the antic flights of fancy? These freezer-hum fantasias were the opposite of James’ class-clown personality; they were radically introverted, defiantly private, almost shockingly serene. For once, he appeared as if with a finger to his lips, head cocked, inviting us to stand beside him in his imaginary power station and revel wordlessly in the vibrations.
The title did not help elucidate the album’s mysteries. Much like its predecessor, it borrowed the language of the classical canon—“works” rather than “tracks” or “songs”—and the music’s austerity only heightened the irony. Were these barely-there miniatures, these etudes for electrical outlet and tuning fork, meant to be taken as high art? Although the album title suggested an anthology, these pieces could hardly stand on their own: Pull them apart and most would seem lightweight or insubstantial, each one a passing experiment or sketchlike work in progress. But, like the notes of a chord, they drew meaning from their proximity to one another.
Then there was the matter of that “Selected”: What pool had these two dozen-odd tracks been selected from? Were there indeed more of them? (It seems entirely possible there were: The New York Times reported that the album’s triple-LP, double-CD final form had been “reluctantly cut down from quintuple length”—leaving open the tantalizing possibility that there are at least two more LPs’ worth of SAW II-era material that has yet to see the light of day.)
The album’s secrets were only amplified by its packaging, beginning with a cover that rendered Aphex Twin’s glyph-like logo as a relic from some strange future-past, like alien markings discovered on some weathered desert pyramid. Where the KLF and the Orb’s strains of chill-out had clung to both a stoner’s giggly sense of humor and wide-eyed appraisal of the cosmos, SAW II had no interest in freaky chakras or zen mindstates or any kind of reference whatsoever. It was so committed to its own hermetic world that it shunned even titles. The album’s cryptic cover art, designed by James’ friend Paul Nicholson, referred to each track only by abstract photographs of pure texture, with color-coded pie charts mapping out the tracks’ respective run times. (The titles that fans today frequently use to refer to the album’s untitled tracks grew out of discussions in places like Hyperreal’s IDM listserv. As Marc Weidenbaum details in his 33 1/3 book on the album, those titles were eventually collated by Greg Eden, an IDM list member and eventual Warp Records employee. Though unofficial, they have taken on the weight of historical fact: If you rip the CDs into your computer, the Gracenote database will automatically tag the tracks according to the fan-sourced titles.) Sitting down with the LP or CD insert could feel like strapping into an alien spacecraft and trying to decipher a flight manual written entirely in pictograms and graphic code. “I don’t really like words in music,” James told Select magazine in 1995. “It’s too restricting… I don’t like words in general because they mean something. Whereas electronic stuff—because it’s so abstract and doesn’t have any meaning… you can interpret it in so many ways.”
SAW II was not initially greeted as an epochal event. In The Wire, it was reviewed alongside Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms and a techno compilation called Usability Now, the music barely touched upon, and it failed to make the magazine’s top 50 of 1994. The following year, SPIN favorably compared Aphex Twin’s 1995 record I Care Because You Do to the “largely drumless synth moans” of the “oddly hailed” SAW II, which “went on for longer than the Use Your Illusion albums combined.” Even Simon Reynolds, one of Aphex Twin’s staunchest early supporters, doubted that listeners might extract the same “use value” out of SAW II, in its “dearth of sheer loveliness,” that the more fetching SAW 85-92 provided.
The fan response detailed in Weidenbaum’s book, in online spaces like the Hyperreal IDM list and the WATMM forums, helped buttress the album’s totemic reputation. Like any quasi-religious text, SAW II has proven uniquely susceptible to sustained exegesis. But the album’s essential mysteries extend far beyond any Da Vinci Code-like attempts to decipher them, even as pieces of the puzzle have begun to fall into place.
Two years go, Paul Nicholson, who designed the sleeve, shared the notebooks in which he jotted down all the calculations that went into the album’s pie charts. Those blurry, abstract images were revealed to be objects from the apartment he and James shared at the time—radiators, “bits of metal”—photographed by James’ then-girlfriend; the logo on the cover turned out to have been done by James himself, carving up an old leather suitcase with a razor and compass. And when Warp launched Aphex Twin’s online store in 2017, James—who has turned out to be surprisingly unguarded in recent years—weighed in with a few choice details. “Blue Calx” was the last track he ever recorded in the bedroom studio in his parents’ house; the indistinct voices of #22 turn out to be a murderer’s taped confession, provided to James by a friend who used to mop floors at the local police precinct. In the world of Aphex arcana, those kinds of revelations can be momentous, discourse-shifting events. But the effect of this newfound knowledge was not like learning how a magician does his tricks. None of these factoids has diminished the album’s fundamental and enduring strangeness.
Despite the occasional ambient track over the years, James has never followed up with a Selected Ambient Works Volume III—even though, as Marc Weidenbaum points out, multiple pieces from Aphex Twin’s 2015 SoundCloud dump approximated the metallic drones of SAW II. In fact, immediately after releasing the album, he abruptly shifted course, tacking into the convoluted drill’n’bass rhythms and general tomfoolery of ...I Care Because You Do and the Richard D. James Album. The aspects of James’ character that SAW II had briefly laid bare—beatific calm, transcendent focus, a wordless sort of vulnerability—were quickly papered over with madcap jags like “Milkman” and “Come to Daddy.” For a long spell, in interviews, his answers got shorter while the tales got taller.
For a fan of the album, it’s easy to wish that James might return to its charged air, its field of pure electricity. But it may be that he mapped every square inch of this otherworldly zone in those two-dozen-odd tracks (give or take all the material that may have gotten left on the cutting-room floor). That possibility is part of the album’s power, too: That it’s a world unto itself, self-contained and self-sufficient.
“Music in the future will almost certainly hybridise hybrids to such an extent that the idea of a traceable source will become an anachronism,” wrote David Toop in Ocean of Sound, ambient music’s most definitive text. He was right. In that sense, SAW was out of step with its pre-millennial peers. While other landmark ambient records of the day hurtled toward the networked future, SAW II was radical in its purism, its refusal to admit anything beyond these slim, quivering frequencies. It’s so rudimental that it verges upon the primeval: music for the latent cave dweller in all of us.
We tend to think that culture today moves faster than it used to. We point to the rapid-fire emergence and collapse of a given musical trend as proof of an accelerated timeline. Yet in the early 1990s, culture was moving just as swiftly: “In a year, ambient has degenerated into little more than shoegazing with a beat,” wrote Reynolds in Melody Maker’s review of SAW II. There was a palpable, self-conscious awareness of watching the genre evolve in real time. Criticism recognized it; marketing recognized it. Just think of that Virgin ad proclaiming 1993 “the summer of ambient.” Critics, listeners, and musicians didn’t always agree on what “ambient” or “intelligent techno” or any other nascent term might mean, but they recognized a common goal in trying to figure it out before the music changed shape, wriggled free of any attempt to define it. Wordlessly, instantly, Selected Ambient Works Volume II marked a freeze-frame moment. It captured the essence of ambient, and in that act of capturing it, changed it, irrevocably. | 2019-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 5, 2019 | 10 | 0911647f-af0e-4e8a-8c80-b89c0cdddb89 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Two reissues from the Manchester veterans track the progress of their post-punk/disco fusions into the 1990s and 2000s—an uneven path, but their freewheeling energy still charms. | Two reissues from the Manchester veterans track the progress of their post-punk/disco fusions into the 1990s and 2000s—an uneven path, but their freewheeling energy still charms. | A Certain Ratio: Change the Station / Mind Made Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-certain-ratio-change-the-station-mind-made-up/ | Change the Station / Mind Made Up | “My heart was just an open sore/Which you picked at ’til it was raw/It bled away my existence/Shriveled under your insistence.” Who writes lyrics like these? Nihilist poets, emo singers, hyperliterate teenagers, sure—but a disco group? Dance music has often addressed themes of alienation, pain, and loss, but rarely has a band been both as enticingly funky and harrowingly bleak as Manchester’s A Certain Ratio. In their first decade, ACR made some of the most seminal yet underrated post-punk, avant-pop, and tweaked funk of an era filled with hybrid explorations. Early tracks like “Knife Slits Water” and “Do the Du” ruthlessly deconstructed the pleasures of the flesh while simultaneously urging listeners to succumb to them. Part of the fun remains in trying to decide if ACR were, at heart, party boys who couldn’t get out of their heads or overburdened cultural theorists looking for an escape hatch. As they moved into the 1980s, this binary juxtaposition would fall away in favor of a more expansive approach to dance music: brainy, jazzy, adventurous, yet keenly aware of exhilarating developments in the Top 40.
The group had intimate ties to their hometown’s “Madchester” scene, a community of musicians and DJs clustered around Factory Records and its legendary nightclub, the Haçienda. Alongside fellow Mancunians New Order and the Happy Mondays as well as Leeds’ Gang of Four and Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, ACR were a historic example of the spontaneous groupthink Brian Eno dubbed “scenius.” These artists exemplified the rushing development from punk’s snotty three-chord “fuck you”s into the nuanced, multifaceted expressions that defined underground music in the ’80s.
By 1996, the dance music revolution that ACR & co. once anticipated had come to fruition beyond anyone’s expectations. House, techno, ambient, downtempo, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, IDM, and their various subgenres (not to mention hip-hop) had exploded across the globe. During their late-1970s/early-’80s peak, ACR’s output was neck and neck with historic releases like Kraftwerk’s Computer World, the Upsetters’ Blackboard Jungle Vol. 1, and Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” But now the funky futurism of the ’80s sounded quaint compared to the blink-and-you-missed it developments in Berlin, London, Detroit, and New York. Change the Station was the band’s first effort in five years—an eternity for dance music at that time. In the meantime, artists as game-changing as Björk, Aphex Twin, Goldie, Underground Resistance, and Basic Channel had all brazenly recalibrated dance music’s DNA.
It would be unfair to expect ACR to have kept up with the hectic pace of this next generation, but revisiting Change the Station today, it feels like the group was flagging. The album goes full Balearic, with lots of smooth downtempo breakbeats, soulful vocals, and unhurried saxophone. Soul II Soul’s 1989 smash “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” is a loose template, itself a commercial success story for the kind of multikulti, house-adjacent pop that ACR had been exploring 10 years prior. What Change the Station lacks is the sense of hyper-intelligent, nervy dissonance that brought depth to earlier albums. Even at their grooviest, ACR maintained an edge—the fun never came entirely free. The band who once asked “Who sold that knife to me?” here blandly implore you to “listen to the sound.” Ok, we’re listening. Now what?
The sound of the album is in fact one of its central flaws. ACR’s songs often functioned more as energy fields than as clear narratives—sonic mobiles rather than roller-coaster rides. This practice was aided by tweaked timbres and attention to texture and effects. The production values on Change the Station are wholly professional, yet they lack strong personality. It feels like a mock-up for the record it should have been, its elements stock stand-ins for more riveting performances that never arrive. It’s unfortunate, because the core concept might have worked. The late 1990s were rife with jazzy, laid-back electronic music of all sorts, from A Tribe Called Quest to Massive Attack. But Change the Station’s session-musician sheen keeps these tracks at arm’s length. Play it in the background of your sushi restaurant all you want; it’s hard to imagine another scenario where it would thrive.
After Change the Station, ACR retreated once again. It would be another 12 years before they regrouped to record 2008’s Mind Made Up in loose sessions guided by a spirit of openness. Compared with Change the Station, the later album embraces the band’s rock roots, shifting perspective from ecstasy-tinged inclusiveness to aloof, knowing narrations of modern ennui. The tasty RHCP-esque lick that opens “Way to Escape” suggests a slow-mo strut down the avenue, past junkies, businessmen, hustlers, crooks, and their victims. Mind Made Up feels rooted in a rotting metropolis, each expression of hope balanced by something dour. But this isn’t protest music—ACR are level-headed observers, thriving and surviving amid the chaos of modernity, smart enough to comment but powerless to change. “Just try stay funky/Just try to be cool,” sings Denise Johnson on “Rialto 2006,” nearly buried by waves of horns, guitar squall, and echo. Good advice.
Overall, Mind Made Up is an improvement on its predecessor. The group allows itself to experiment and stretch out, and that alone gives the album a spark. It suffers from some of the dad-friendly blandness of Change the Station, particularly when the band attempts a driving groove, but their freewheeling energy is not without its charms. “Teri” is an awkward but affecting ballad built around a simple piano figure, while “Starlight” tries to manage a bit of the throwback disco that Hercules and Love Affair had recently reinvigorated.
Both albums close with tracks that are notably stronger than anything on their respective LPs. Change the Station wraps with “Groove (E),” a beatless reprise of opener “Listen to the Sound.” By clearing out the arrangement, the song shifts gears from overeager to sensual. It’s not a masterpiece, but it has a smoky, penetrating vibe. Meanwhile, Mind Made Up finishes with the tumultuous “Very Busy Man.” Roiling and formless, it feels like a jam bashed out at the end of a long, frustrating day in the studio. Bass accents are cribbed from Miles Davis’ On the Corner, while the drums splinter into rolling waves of energy.
Deep into their career, ACR’s strengths lay in the extreme ends of their personal spectrum: “Groove (E)” draws you in with a whisper while “Very Busy Man” lunges. One wonders the albums would have looked like if these last tracks had been the jumping-off point for a new direction. Neither Change the Station nor Mind Made Up could be expected to accomplish what their first records had done; few artists surf the zeitgeist so gracefully even once, and for most a second shot is unheard of. In these moments, though, it’s good to hear traces of that fevered energy—the razor’s edge of pleasure and pain that once made ACR one of the most vital bands of their time. | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | August 1, 2018 | 6 | 0917581c-76a4-497c-b50e-4cc6e7c071ba | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
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 Seal’s 1991 debut, a luxurious album that grew out of the UK rave scene and took his inimitable voice to the world. | 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 Seal’s 1991 debut, a luxurious album that grew out of the UK rave scene and took his inimitable voice to the world. | Seal: Seal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seal-seal/ | Seal | In London’s Trafalgar Square, thousands of young people gathered to fight for their right to rave. Brightly colored tracksuits and baggy denim rippled in waves, as far as the eye could see. Demonstrators at this 1990 Freedom to Party Rally were protesting legislation aimed at kneecapping the acid-house bacchanals that had recently revolutionized UK youth culture. The stakes were high: “IF YOU DONT STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS THERE WON’T BE ANY MORE ‘SUMMER OF LOVE’, THERE WONT EVEN BE ANY MORE RAVES,” warned an all-caps flyer for the event, apostrophes breathlessly optional.
Despite the cold January rain, the mood was jovial. There were boomboxes, a bullhorn, a beach ball. Pirate station Obsession FM broadcasted live from the event. People danced in empty fountains and clambered atop the bronze lions sternly guarding Nelson’s Column. Later that night, revelers would break into a warehouse in the village of Radlett, near the M25 orbital—the motorway that had funneled so many convoys full of party people into the English countryside over the previous year—and there, despite skirmishes with police, the party would run until 9 the following morning.
Weaving through the London crowd were two young men who had nipped down to soak up the vibe. One of them was Adam Tinley, 22, better known as Adamski. Already deep in the rave scene, he had scored a minor hit with the previous year’s squelchy “N-R-G” and even appeared on the BBC’s Top of the Pops—the first instrumental act to play the show in a decade, by his reckoning. The other was Sealhenry Samuel, known simply as Seal, nearly five years Tinley’s senior but a relative newcomer to the swiftly evolving rave movement. The two had come to the protest to feed off its energy before heading back to Adamski’s studio, a 20-minute walk away, where they were laying down Seal’s vocals over Adamski’s beats. There, hunched over a Roland 909 drum machine, feeding floppy disks into an Ensoniq SQ-80 synthesizer, they channeled the energy of the moment into a song about freedom.
They made for a curious duo. Adamski, bearing a “fragile, little-boy-lost demeanor,” was a studio tinkerer and technophile who had played in Diskord Datkord, a Dadaist electro-pop group known for chaotic multimedia spectacles—a dog was sometimes involved—that often ended in nudity. Seal, on the other hand, was imposingly tall, with jagged scars on his cheeks and bits of tinsel woven into his dreadlocks, partial to musicians like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, and, his favorite, Joni Mitchell. Seal had recently returned from a year-long stint in Asia; while the UK’s day-one ravers were necking their first pills in muddy fields, he’d been playing in funk and blues bands in Japan and Thailand. Upon his return to the UK, a friend, determined to show Seal what he’d been missing, had taken him to the Santa Pod Raceway for Sunrise 5000, an 8,000-strong rave where Adamski was holding court in an airplane hangar. The sound and the spectacle hit Seal with the force of an epiphany. (“I don’t think I really knew myself before then,” he would later admit.)
Seal had already been singing and writing songs for a number of years, multi-tracking instrumental parts into a Portastudio with just his voice. Now, he immersed himself in the rave scene, singing along to the DJ at the top of his voice while crowds swirled around him. Somewhere in the rush of ’89–there are multiple, contradictory versions of the tale, which isn’t surprising, given the blurry circumstances—Seal handed his demo to Adamski’s MC and flatmate, Daddy Chester, and the two soon met. On New Year’s Eve, “in a haze on the dancefloor,” as Seal remembers it, they decided to work together.
One month later, back at Adamski’s studio and buzzing off the energy of the Freedom to Party rally, Seal selected an instrumental to sing over: a pounding, grinding staple of Adamski’s live sets that the producer had originally banged out in 15 minutes. It had the working title “The Killer” because Adamski thought the stabbing synths sounded like the soundtrack to a murder scene. But Seal’s presence—the powdery texture of his voice—softened the song. Empathy and optimism coursed through rave’s honeymoon phase, as new sounds and new chemicals promised a radiant pathway out of the grimness of Thatcher’s Britain. But Seal’s bluesy, searching entreaties had a pleading, bittersweet quality at odds with the day’s giddy tumult: “Solitary brother/Is there still a part of you that wants to live?/Solitary sister/Is there still a part of you that wants to give?” The song’s couplets were sometimes awkward, twisting platitudes into nonsense phrases that, from today’s perspective, resemble the output of an AI trained on ’80s power ballads (“Jaded hearts/Heal with time/Shoot that love/So we can stop the bleeding”). But even their clumsiness couldn’t drag down the song’s tender uplift, especially once Seal broke into his heavenly falsetto.
Since 1988, there had been no shortage of dance anthems in the charts—not just feel-good house tracks from acts like Inner City and Soul II Soul, but also headier, more esoteric cuts like 808 State’s blissed-out “Pacific State” and Humanoid’s paranoid “Stakker Humanoid.” But despite its ravey hallmarks—pistoning piano chords, flickering trance synths, and white-hot 909 snares—“Killer” sounded like nothing else at the time. Within six months, it would go to No. 1 on the UK charts and remain there for four weeks, an inviting and inclusive bridge from the underground to the airwaves. And though Seal’s name didn’t even appear on the cover, the song would serve as his launch pad. Just 50 weeks after “Killer” went to No. 1, he released his 1991 self-titled debut and ascended into the upper stratosphere of pop stardom.
Early press accounts painted Seal as a larger-than-life character, a sort of British Paul Bunyan—“a vast, almost monumental figure,” wrote one outlet. “Hands on hips like a fashion model, staring out with an Ancient Egyptian arrogance from behind his dreadlocks, he seemed to look down upon the world from a great height.” In one article he stood 6’1”; in another, 6’4”; still another pegged him at six and a half feet tall. He was said to have inherited his name from a Nigerian patriarch; sometimes, there was Brazilian heritage in the mix, except when there wasn’t. There were hints at a rough background—the mother who gave him up and then reclaimed him, the father who beat him; the squatted flat, the job flyering for sex workers. He’d studied architecture and electrical engineering, yet ended up cutting leather for a fashion designer on King’s Road—hence, perhaps, his own predilection for tailored suits and glistening animal hides.
Rumors swirled about Seal’s scars—they were the result of a bar fight, a wolf bite, ritual scarification gone wrong. He told one interviewer they simply appeared overnight, “at a time when I was dreaming a lot. Perhaps it was a cosmic thing,” he mused. (It later came out that they were a side effect of lupus.) He dated supermodels and played tennis with Andre Agassi and Boris Becker, his new neighbors in the Hollywood Hills. When he was laid low by pneumonia, it was double pneumonia. When he totaled his Range Rover, nearly careening over the cliff of a canyon, he climbed out the shattered sunroof and walked away unscathed. A SKI magazine profile tracked down the avid snowboarder in Whistler, where he bombed backcountry runs by day, and then, back in his cabin, serenaded the locals on acoustic guitar by the light of his fireplace. He rhapsodized about the pleasures of heliboarding, which suited him: Here was a person who, despite his colossal physical attributes, barely seemed to touch the ground.
But in contrast to these magisterial qualities, on his debut album, Seal is an ambiguous, mercurial entity—not so much a singer as a pure source of heat and light. For all the marvels of his voice, the music surrounding him is just as opulent; his singing is just one thread in a vast tapestry of crushed velvet, raw silk, and spun gold. (To paraphrase Project Runway host Heidi Klum, who was married to Seal from 2005 until 2012, it sounds expensive.) Seal is almost ridiculously luxurious: a mahogany wardrobe of strummed acoustic guitar, liquid fretless bass, jazz piano, glossy disco guitars, and gleaming Fairlight orchestral stabs. It is only tenuously connected to the dance music that launched Seal’s career, albeit held together by some of the most sumptuous synthesizer pads electricity is capable of generating. At the edges, tiny slivers of musique concrète—a peal of thunder, a bit of movie dialogue from a TV set tuned low at the other end of the room—seem to hint at the world outside, yet they have the paradoxical effect of cocooning us even deeper inside the album’s folds.
The credits boast a remarkable array of talent stretching back through funk, soul, and hip-hop, among them bassist Doug Wimbish (of Living Colour, Tackhead, the Sugarhill Gang Band), drummer Keith LeBlanc (Tackhead, Little Axe, the Sugarhill Gang Band), percussionist Paulinho da Costa (a session player with credits on Thriller and Purple Rain), drummer John Robinson (Off the Wall), and keyboardist Guy Sigsworth, who wrote and produced for Madonna, Britney Spears, and Björk. Wendy & Lisa, of Prince & the Revolution fame, sat in on “Whirlpool.” At the center of this gauzy web was chief dreamweaver Trevor Horn, who had signed Seal to his ZTT label after “Killer” topped the charts.
In the 1980s, Horn had emerged as one of the most innovative producers in pop music, putting his maverick instincts and vertiginous high tech in the service of artists like ABC, Yes, Grace Jones, and Pet Shop Boys. Horn often gravitated toward big personalities, provocative themes, and camp aesthetics; his work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Art of Noise might be seen as a kind of spiritual precursor of PC Music and hyperpop. By the late ’80s, Horn was wading dangerously deep into shlock: Consider Simple Minds’ overstuffed 1989 album Street Fighting Years, or Rod Stewart’s schmaltzy cover of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train” the same year. In Seal, however, Horn found an opportunity to pursue his most atmospheric interests, extending the lush, HD sound-sculpting of Propaganda’s A Secret Wish and Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” into ambient pop cross-cut with new age and jazz fusion. Where Adamski’s “Killer” had been a hit in Ibiza’s clubs (he and Seal had performed live at Amnesia’s 1989 closing party, in fact), the largely un-clubby Seal represented the full sweep of the idiosyncratic style known as Balearic beat—a sunset-soundtracking strain of chillout that sheltered everything from 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” beneath its shady umbrella.
Though Seal had already written some of the album’s songs on guitar, in Horn’s hands, the material became far more ornate. “The Beginning,” the album’s most straightforward club-centric cut, opens the record on a deceptive note; its rushing snares and snub-nosed FM bass don’t sound too far off from what New Order did on the Ibiza-influenced Technique, just the year before. But Horn manages a more multidimensional sense of space; light-years stretch between the string pads, funk guitars, and layered percussion. New sounds and new variations appear around every corner; two-thirds of the way through, he throws in a completely superfluous eight-bar key change just because he can. From the first moment we hear Seal arcing upward across the stereo field, it’s clear that Horn knew exactly how precious this particular instrument was: As extravagant as the song gets, he never crowds out his singer.
After the uptempo “The Beginning,” the music mellows. Many of the album’s best moments are its most chilled. “Deep Water” begins by pairing a gentle electronic bossa-nova beat with acoustic guitar and slide guitar, like a country-soul reimagining of Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks; halfway through, there’s a false ending, and a swirl of backmasked guitars gives way to a crisp proto-trip-hop beat. (Soul II Soul producer Nellee Hooper, of pre-Massive Attack collective the Wild Bunch, consummated the trip-hop connection that year with his own slow-motion remix of Seal’s “Future Love Paradise.”) “Wild” begins with an errant, overdriven guitar chord before practically melting into a pool of iridescent keys and electric bass. The song’s changes make a breathtaking showcase for Seal’s harmonic facilities. Even “Crazy,” the album’s biggest single, is exquisitely laid back, weaving trance synths, wakka-wakka guitar, and a new jack swing-influenced beat into a billowing backdrop for Seal at his bluesiest. The restraint is no mean feat, given that the song was inspired by nothing less than the falling of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square massacre, two years before.
Unfortunately, Seal’s lyrical gifts were not necessarily up to such grandiose themes. The chorus of “Crazy”—“We’re never gonna survive unless/We get a little crazy”—was meant to capture the yearning for freedom that triggered the world-historical events of 1989, yet it’s essentially “YOLO” stretched out over 17 syllables. Seal’s frequent paeans to freedom were never exactly “Redemption Song,” and sometimes they could be asinine, even offensive. (From “Crazy”: “Crazy yellow people walking through my head/One of them’s got a gun, to shoot the other one/And yet together they were friends at school.”) Even at their most affecting, Seal’s lyrics often don’t stand up under close inspection. “Show me the way to solve your problems and I’ll be there,” he pleads on “Show Me”—an empathetic sentiment, perhaps, but hardly the most proactive.
Seal seemed aware of his limitations as a songwriter, opting not to print lyrics on the album’s sleeve. Occasionally, he could hit upon a truly stellar hook, of course. The chorus of “The Beginning” (“Music takes you round and round and round and round and rou-ound/Hold on to the love”) doesn’t look like much on paper, but the way he delivers it is thrilling: working away at each repeated syllable like a carpenter lovingly sanding down a beveled edge. Many of the record’s most successful songs are those where Seal simply lets the sound of the words take the lead: the snake-like twists of “Wild laces with diamonds in your hair/When you smile you make my world resolve, and you take over”; the plaintive assonance of “Jade, a shade of pain and then we die.”
In interviews, Seal professed his admiration for Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser’s evocatively nonsensical writing; he might have done well to take her lead and wander further into the realm of indecipherability. He has said that “Whirlpool” was the album’s most personal song for him, an attempt to come to terms with the spiral of self-doubt that followed the success of “Crazy,” yet he expresses more in its wordless introduction than in any of the song’s tortured metaphors. Cooing his way through the opening cadenza, he sounds like he’s pulling spirits out of the air, wrangling stray emotions with every blue note.
In general, Seal could stand to be more ambitious, more idiosyncratic, flat-out weirder. Moments like the interstitial passage at the midway point of “Deep Water” hint at paths the record could have taken, the ambient remix album that exists in an alternate universe. Seal and Horn come close on the closing “Violet,” a melancholy ballad that posits Seal as a kind of surrealist Balearic torch singer. There have been times, locked in its swirl of synth pads, fretless bass, and jazz piano, that I’ve been tempted to declare it the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard. Behind its sentimentality and its simplicity lurks an incredible vastness, one made all the more compelling by the bits of movie dialog woven almost inaudibly into the mix. (From the 1987 film The Sicilian: “Why should they come? I was supposed to die back there, but I didn’t!”) The mind reels at what he might have done had he gone further down that path. Instead, in 1994, we got “Kiss From a Rose,” the first step on his reinvention as the adult-contemporary star that he is today.
I don’t know what “Violet” is about; the writing is too vague, too convoluted, to scan in any meaningful way, though Seal manages some lovely images—a “violet unicorn”; a request to “take my tears and wash the sunrise”—along the way. But that hardly matters. Seal may have idolized literary writers like Dylan and Mitchell, but you don’t come to Seal for poetry; you come for that voice and the way it navigates Horn’s productions, like a bird surfing springtime’s swirling air currents. Much the same way that “Killer” fed off the energy of the Freedom to Party rally, Seal drew sustenance from the spirit of that volatile era: It is idealistic, unfocused, and beautiful in its innocence. When I listen to the album, I imagine Seal caught up in the maelstrom of Sunrise 5000, light glinting off the metal tips of his dreads as he towers over fellow dancers’ heads, singing along to techno at the top of his lungs. Whatever the words were, they were lost the moment they melted into the air—he was just one more element in a vast, multi-sensory explosion of color and texture, a voice giving voice to something beautiful.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | ZTT / Warner Music UK / Sire | October 17, 2021 | 7.4 | 091941f9-f40a-402e-867c-6c042708f819 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Australian musician Alex Cameron paints quick, affecting character sketches of losers and creeps, bolstered by elementary synth programming and Cameron’s confident, warm baritone. | The Australian musician Alex Cameron paints quick, affecting character sketches of losers and creeps, bolstered by elementary synth programming and Cameron’s confident, warm baritone. | Alex Cameron: Jumping the Shark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22226-jumping-the-shark/ | Jumping the Shark | Upon leaving electronic outfit Seekae to embark on a solo career, Australian musician Alex Cameron started committing to his stage character by applying latex wrinkles, scars, and pockmarks to his face before each public performance or appearance. These can be seen pretty clearly on the album cover of his debut solo album Jumping the Shark. Though the record is seeing official release this month, the photo was taken back in 2014, when the album was originally given away for free on Cameron’s charming “Remember Geocities, guys ;-))) ???” website. Cameron’s goal was to look the part of the sketchy, down-and-out lounge singer he played in his songs.
However, now that Cameron is on the road, he’s announced that he’s no longer wearing the wrinkles. The decision is a good one: By removing the mask, he renders the character of Alex Cameron even stranger, as there’s now one less layer between the audience and the man giving ridiculous interviews like this, making it feel less of an act and more of an open question: Is this who this guy really is?
Wrinkles or not, what might actually make people care about Alex Cameron is the fact that he’s a great storyteller, one who uses simple song forms to couch vivid messages. Seven of Jumping the Shark’s brief eight tracks are in the first person, and each one depicts a cast of losers and creeps whose unifying thread is “the sort of desperate nature of trying to avoid failure.” Though his characters are caricatures of the downtrodden—e.g., “the drunkest, ugliest girl at the bar;” broken men who’ve moved back in with their parents—Cameron has crafted these characters so convincingly it’s easy to imagine he’s being honest when he says he drew some from his own life.
Cameron’s sketches wouldn’t hit home quite as deeply without his effortless compositions, which perfectly complement his scuzzy, blue-light tales of woe. Driven by elementary synth programming and Cameron’s confident, warm baritone, the music suggests a Nick Cave-meets-second-album-Suicide aesthetic. But unlike Alan Vega’s airy, effect-masked vocals, which included a lot of reverb, gasps and yawps—making them frequently more atmospheric than not—Cameron places his voice audibly front and center, emphasizing his narrative gift. Both “Happy Ending” and recent single “The Comeback” follow this template to great effect, sharing the miseries of freshly jobless men trying to convince themselves that they know how to move on. The latter in particular, with its sunny melody underneath a story of TV host who won’t let go of the past, feels especially devastating—the juxtaposition of warm sounds and bleak words creates a bizarre sense of false comfort that channels the denial of the narrator perfectly.
A few tracks vary this formula to even greater success. On “Real Bad Lookin’,” Cameron provides a circus-carousel oom-pah accompaniment but breaks the song open with a heavily-treated guitar solo in the mold of Robert Fripp. “Mongrel” the only song without first-person narration, conjures the playfulness of White Williams, embracing the poetic freedom that comes from abandoning the perspective of a sad cretin; the poetic closing line “Death is the pulse in your eye on your very last breath” registers as perhaps the most remarkable lyric on the record.
As could be expected for a Vegas-style showman, Cameron saves an elegiac note for last, wrapping up the record with the austere “Take Care of Business,” which meditates slowly for the song’s first few minutes on a simple repeated keyboard and drum program before an organ synth bursts in with climax as Cameron’s reverb-heavy vocals begin chanting the chorus: “I ain’t half the man I wanted to be/You gotta take care of business.” The accompanying video for this single depicts the still-wrinkled Cameron contorted on stage under a harsh blue light (an idea repeated again on the video for “The Comeback”)—making overt the subconscious David Lynch connection.
At only eight songs and thirty-two minutes, Jumping the Shark makes the most of its quick run time to sell you on the idea that Cameron’s “I’ve been cut so I know how to bleed” tales carry the charm and gravitas of authenticity; the fact that he is making it harder to see the difference between himself and his characters only cements this impression. More importantly, the melding of these stories with Cameron’s efficient, minimal compositions create the type of songs that penetrate deeply and linger in your consciousness long after you’ve stopped listening to them. | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 17, 2016 | 7.8 | 0919b48d-af01-49ed-bc59-1de998daa122 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
An unrivaled classic, Supreme Clientele marked a seismic rupture with rap tradition. It’s Tony Starks, invulnerable and silvery, casting stream-of-consciousness hexes from a general who survived hell. | An unrivaled classic, Supreme Clientele marked a seismic rupture with rap tradition. It’s Tony Starks, invulnerable and silvery, casting stream-of-consciousness hexes from a general who survived hell. | Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23207-supreme-clientele/ | Supreme Clientele | ____In the fall of 1997, Ghostface Killah decamped to West Africa. His diabetes had become cataclysmic: dizziness, blurred vision, bloodshot eyes, and concussive headaches. He hadn’t quit drinking, which didn’t help; nor did the joints laced with angel dust he still smoked from time to time.
Even before the diagnosis, he convinced himself of his impending demise, fearing cancer, though more likely AIDS. When medical professionals finally tested his blood sugar it was 500 mg/dl. Anything above 550 is considered fatal.
Wary of Western medicine, Ghostface flew to Benin to be treated by a bush doctor in a remote village several hours outside of Cotonou, the nation’s most populous city. Running water was non-existent. The inhabitants lived in mud huts and slept on the floor. When the RZA showed up to meet Ghostface, he saw his bandmate materialize in a dashiki, full beard, and unkempt hair puffed out. RZA had brought Kung Fu flicks—specifically Blade of Fury—which they watched alone as honored guests, the tribe’s children looking on in awe of them and the village’s only TV.
The spiritual nucleus of Supreme Clientele spawns from that pilgrimage. That’s where Tony Starks wrote “Nutmeg” and several other album tracks in a purge of voodoo spirits, occidental poisons, and crazy visions. It’s a masterpiece of comic absurdity and cosmic exorcisms, existential paradox and mathematic precision.
In an attempt to save his life, he seeks out a medicine man in his ancestral homeland and achieves esoteric and sobering realizations about existence. Sans beats, the Wallabee Champ scrawls countless transmissions snatched from the thundering din in his head. It’s as if Muhammad returned from the cave of Hira to prophesize revelations of seasoned giraffe ribs, Scooby Snacks, dancing with the most sexually vibrant member of the *Golden Girls, *and how his dick made a magazine cover (“count how many veins on it”).
About two years later, a fully clothed Starks actually made the cover of The Source and explained the knowledge self-obtained in Africa.
“Fuck all this Tommy Hilfiger, Polo…all this shit…they don’t give a fuck about none of that over there. Everything is the same,” Ghostface said. “But over here, everybody wanna be better than the next one…They might be fucked up, money-wise, but trust me, them muthafuckas is happy, man. Them niggas in harmony ‘cause they got each other.”
Mind you, Pretty Toney delivers this soliloquy while smoking a Newport in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown, Manhattan, wearing an ankle-length, royal blue robe with a custom-embroidered “W” on the back. The entire time he’s enraged that “BET Rap City” isn’t playing the video for “Apollo Kids”—the one where he’s swaddled in mink coats and eating a golden ice cream cone.
This is Ghost, naturally ridiculous, the supreme smart dumb cat, the genius who embodies the innate contradictions of late American capitalism, gobbling Chinese herbs and getting acupuncture during the day and smoking dust and dodging bullets at night, capable of staggering misogyny and deep reverence towards women. He is both yin and yang, not just from song to song, but syllable to syllable.
He continues about his Africa trip:
“You see them kids that’s on TV? With flies on they face…I don’t like to see that. There’s no reason in this world with all this money that we got, for those babies to be over there with…big stomachs and shit like that,” Ghost adds. “I’m one of them niggas that’ll bring them into their muthafuckin’ family, I don’t give a fuck if it’s ten of them. I’ll get them.”
If Ghost ever adopted ten sub-Saharan kids, it was never mentioned on Couples Therapy. Other interviews followed in which he spoke of lofty plans to recruit Oprah Winfrey and Magic Johnson to help him build a school for the indigent children of Benin. And while his follow-through was shaky, his sincerity was unmatched. He also had a good excuse, considering the grave legal turmoil shadowing him during the recording of Supreme Clientele.
Parole Kids Live Rapunzel
The District Attorney threatened Dennis Coles with “five to 15” if he didn’t cop a plea to attempted robbery charges stemming from an incident outside of the Palladium back in 1995. While parked at the venue, someone slashed Ghost’s tires and a brawl ensued between Starks and his crew against the Palladium attendants. One valet claimed that Ghost tried to rob him. None of this ends well.
As his attorney negotiated for better terms, blue and red lights flashed once again. This time, a friend named Dupree Lane got pulled over as Ghost trailed in a caravan behind. Using “disorderly conduct” as the pretext to search Ghost’s car, cops found a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow-point bullets hidden behind the glove compartment. Ironman was wearing a bulletproof vest—another felony charge.
Throughout this entire period, the NYPD and F.B.I. attempted to launch a RICO case against the Wu, who they branded a “major criminal organization.” It’s bizarre to weigh these accusations in the wake of Method Man starring in network sitcoms, the RZA bong-bonging all over Californication, and Ghostface doing full-length collaborations with Canadian jazz prodigies scarcely old enough to sip Alizé. But just consider the abridged list of alleged criminology: illegal gunrunning, weapons possession, homicide, carjackings, and a bi-coastal drug ring. They attempted to pin the murders of two drug dealers on a hit ordered by RZA and Raekwon. According to the Bureau, Wu-Tang Records was little more than a front for laundering money, which ostensibly explains why RZA kept releasing Wu-Syndicate and Sunz of Man albums.
Even before Ghost copped a plea to rot on Rikers Island for four months, Supreme Clientele’s plotline already felt like Martin Scorsese directing Shaft in Africa. As for the incarceration, it’s difficult to gauge its impact beyond the obvious delays. In the press cycle leading up to Supreme Clientele’s release in February of 2000, Starks attempted to downplay its severity.
One MTV interview describes it as a disguised blessing that allowed him to further refine the record. In* Stress Magazine*, he contextualizes it as a cruel but mundane reality that many young American black men are forced to endure. The liner notes dedicate a section to "my niggas in the Belly": Big Un, Ready Red, Mushy Mush, General, Wah aka Freedom, Born, Shaquel Dueprey Allah from the O Building, and Peace Lord.
Most revealing was a SPIN interview, where he explained its physical ramifications—the times the prison guards refused to give him a proper dose of insulin, causing extreme vertigo and sickness.
“I hold on to times when I had to struggle,” Ghost said. “That’s the science of going through hell and having to come out right—because everybody gots to go through hell to come out right.”
Rather than script a conventional narrative about this purgatory, Ghost focuses on the fractured chaos of the world that led him to the pen. On “Buck 50,” he pauses mid-seduction to tell a woman to “check the grays on the side of my waves/I grew those on Rikers Island/Stressed out, balled up in the cage.” In the next breath, he shouts out Clyde Drexler’s hops, Biggie’s Versace’s, Zulu Nation in the ’80s, and how quickly his back got chiseled after two weeks in the gym. Then he quotes Mary Poppins and eats grouper in Cancun. You’re dealing with Supreme Clientele.
This Rap Is Like Ziti
It was supposed to be called *Ironman. *Instead, the RZA insisted that Ghost bestow that name on his debut album because everyone already knew him as Tony Starks. It just made more sense, marketing-wise. So Ironman dominated the fall of late ’96, the last of that royal flush of solo classics leading up to *Wu-Tang Forever. *It clocked over 800,000 CDs and tapes and debuted at No. 2 on the charts. RZA was probably right.
But if you re-listen to* Ironman*, it’s dark and wounded, the opposite of bulletproof steel. “Wildflower” and “Marvel” are scorched-earth breakup songs, all salted wounds and fresh infection. The plaintive “All That I Got is You” transforms the claustrophobic nightmare of the Staten Island projects into a gorgeous hymn about how a mother’s love conquers all. Ghost was still so heavy in the streets that he accidentally led the Delfonics into a shootout on a recording session gone awry. On the cover, Raekwon and Cappadonna receive co-billing, lending it the feel of an Only Built 4 Cuban Linx sequel more than a radical break from the Wu cosmology.
By Woodstock ‘99, critics and fans wondered if Wu-Tang were washed. Hindsight remembers it as a classic, but most reviews indicted the bloat and filler of 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever. A biblical flood ruined RZA’s studio, waterlogging hundreds of beats and hastening his baptism into Bobby Digital. Method Man and GZA’s follow-up albums disappointed everyone without a “W” tattooed on their clavicle, while Raekwon dropped the biggest No. 2 brick since Sam Bowie. The dollar bins of America were strangled with Shaq’s first record, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and innumerable Wu-Tang C-Listers sworn to omertà in exchange for a release date and two True Master beats.
Into the void Ghostface swaggered, inhaling breakbeats of hell, hitting mics like Ted Koppel, cham-punching Mase, and slapping crooked reverends so hard condoms, dice, and dope fell out of their pockets; sticking up rappers for their chains on New Year’s Eve in Cali and divulging no names; sprinkling snow inside the Optimo and sipping Remy Martin on diamonds. Supreme Clientele is Ironman. It’s invulnerable and silvery, the stream-of-consciousness hexes from a general who survived hell. A shade short of 30, Ghostface had been shot three times, survived multiple stints on Rikers Island, a debilitating battle with diabetes, and mourned the loss of two brothers with muscular dystrophy to become chromatic myth. He’d made religious pilgrimages to the motherland, slept on mud floors and hospital gurneys, prison cots, and silk sheets in $1,000-a-night hotel rooms. Now he was being tasked to save the Wu-Tang Clan.
To understand Supreme Clientele is to be humbled by epistemological limitations. You can see, feel, and taste it, but it can only be decrypted to a point. It’s a psychedelic record moored in reality. The ‘90s didn’t really end on 9/11; the ashes got incinerated with the smoke of RZA’s honey-dipped spliff.
Practically nothing is known about its recording process. In NYC, Starks demolished mics at the Hit Factory, Track, Quad Studios and the Wu’s own 36 Chambers compound in midtown. A trip to Miami yielded “Ghost Deini.” Out of a thousand beats, Ghost selected barely over a dozen. They mostly came from RZA, Mathematics, Inspectah Deck, Carlos “6 July” Broady of The Hitman, and Juju from The Beatnuts. All were logical picks if you’re trying to construct a great New York rap album circa 2000.
Out of a sped-up Solomon Burke loop came “Apollo Kids,” courtesy of Hassan of the UMCs, Staten Island’s first major rap crew. His discogs page shows nothing after Supreme Clientele. A semi-anonymous producer named Carlos Bess furnished his biggest hit “Cherchez La Ghost,” a cocaine opera about Tommy Mottola getting dumped, where U-God brags about busting through condoms and drinking mediocre lime rum. These are the things you can’t account for.
Consider that the beat for “Nutmeg” came from Ghost’s barber, Arthur, who cut hair on Staten Island. Somehow, the only major production credit of Black Moes-Art’s career is one of the hardest beats in history, a clean fade sliced from a forgotten 12” originally cut by Eddie Holman, the falsetto behind “(Hey There) Lonely Girl.” It sounds like he made it for a Saturday morning cartoon about the overcrowded projects of Alpha Centauri where everyone’s hands are semi-automatics; the only currency is angel dust, and the high priest cuts hair in a plutonium suit.
The common denominator was the RZA. He assembled and mixed them, adding uniform layers of grime and radioactivity, bizarre alarms and a dense twisted paranoia. It’s soul music transmogrified into gleaming metal, a tank covered in diamonds. The instrumentals sound like they’re ranting right back at Ghost, who sounds like he’s dripping blood onto the mic stand. As Chris Rock said about those cadaverous scratches on “Stroke of Death,” it makes you want to stab your babysitter.
Supreme Clientele established the template for what Kanye did later on *Yeezus**. *Assemble an arsenal of heat and desecrate it to your personal satisfaction. It’s no coincidence. In Kanye West in the Studio, West claims, “I feel like I got my whole style from Ghostface…my whole mentality about hip-hop.” He later explains that many of the soul-chops that wound up on The Blueprint were originally intended for Ghostface until Jay Z heard them.
A few years ago, Mathematics laid out how it all happened. The RZA protégé never really topped “Mighty Healthy,” the original first single that Kanye lifted for “New God Flow.” It evokes a rare twinkling evil, like some velvet afterlife where you are condemned to sip Ginger Ale and watch Kung Fu movies for eternity. “That whole time period, [Ghostface] had a glow about him,” Mathematics said to HipHopDX. “That was how that whole Supreme Clientele came about. It was because of that glow.”
Maybe that’s the most appropriate metaphor for this album. Ghost had the sort of nuclear phosphorescence that people use to explain what they can’t explain. He rapped like he was a sacred vessel for ancient spirits with a preternatural ardor for Teddy Pendergrass. Ghost says it himself, these are “graveyard spells.” Fog your goggles.
Crushed Out Heavenly
On Supreme Clientele, Ghostface does nothing short of revolutionize the English language. Words like tidal waves drown you as you gulp for air, just trying to tread water and interpret what was said four bars ago. Ears twitch, you catch the aroma of Kansas fried chicken as it whips past, the grievous ululations of mothers mourning their dead sons. It’s like a Weegee photograph of the late Giuliani era, but simultaneously a proto-Adult Swim hallucination where Apollo Kids lounge on gilded thrones, sipping wine coolers in King Tut hats.
“The knowledge is how it sounds,” he said to The Source. “See we funny niggas. I’m a give you a little jewel. A lot of funny niggas know how to rap. The slang that we be saying G, it could mean whatever at that time. We say everything. ‘Lobsterhead.’ Come on man. If a nigga fit that type of category, then he a lobsterhead. It’s just that—slang. It’s real, but it’s what it means at that time.”
If hip-hop’s original rule was the Wild Style, Supreme Clientele shatters every precept while still respecting the foundation. There are scratches, breakbeats, and the (mostly) good-natured insanity to be the greatest. It’s the wildest style, rap stretched to silly putty lengths, as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the needle. There’s the DNA of Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Rammellzee, Slick Rick, Ultramagnetic MCs and Kool Keith, but this marked a seismic rupture with tradition. It was art-rap made for the asphalt—the closest that hip-hop ever came to Ulysses, and not only because Joyce described the “snotgreen sea” and Ghost conjured a “booger-green Pacer.” Both Joyce and Ghost understand that basic idea that a “man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
At times, Supreme Clientele accidentally channels Raymond Chandler translating A Season in Hell. At others, the dirty nasal bark summons Donald Goines on DMT or Lewis Carroll in the slithy toves of Stapleton, where the ambulance don’t come. Ghost intuitively realized what André Breton claimed was the definition of surrealism: the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. How else to categorize the man who arranged the combination of words, “Dicking down Oprah, jump rope/David Dinkins/Watch the black mayor of D.C. hit the mocha.”
You could spend all day deciphering “Malcolm,” with its snippet of Malcolm X condemning the “corrupt, vicious, and hypocritical system that has castrated the black man.” The description of an anonymous phantom as the one “that cut his wrists, talkin’ bout the cuffs did it/He bantamweight, frontin’ majorly/Eyes like Sammy Davis Jr.” He divines the phrase, “Dream merchant tucked in the cloud,” fingers Pamela Lee, and dares someone to make him “catch a Kennedy.” One skit chronicles the travails of a crackhead named after a World War I President. Another mercilessly threatens 50 Cent. For whatever reason, he finishes “Stroke of Death” by bellowing, “White man scream, SWIM STARKS SHARKS!”
Left off the album was a twisted soul death ballad alternately called “In the Rain,” “Wise,” or “In the Rain (Wise).” Ghost claimed that he wrote it stoned on the beach in Florida during a torrential downpour upon learning that one of his best friends had been murdered. The more he wrote, the more the storm thrashed until it ceased four or five hours later; then he stood up with tears in his eyes, noticed a pyramid in the sand, walked around it three times, uttered an “All praises due Allah” incantation, and returned home. He apparently laid it down in Detroit with The Dramatics, the Detroit Orchestra, and Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey. I only know this from the liner notes of the album that I purchased in 2000. The actual song was not on my CD. The tracklist is completely wrong too. In this parallel universe, it makes perfect sense.
Through this warped and sinistral way, Supreme Clientele is about love. *Ironman *unmasked a scorned Lothario simultaneously trying to establish himself as an elite rapper like Raekwon, Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and GZA. It’s a competitive record with something to prove. But here Ghost sounds like he just fucking loves rapping. And he loves children in Africa. And he loves ’70s and ’80s New York. And he loves 2Pac and Biggie and Malcolm and Marvin Gaye and anyone who stood for something. He loves mink coats, cognac, baked ziti, and Allah. He’s extraordinarily pro-black, not because he’s anti-anyone else, but because he profoundly loves his people for their soul, strength, and common heritage.
He loves his crew, who roll deep alongside him: from Trife on the outro of "One" to Superb popping up everywhere, to the posse cuts "We Made It", "Buck 50" and "Wu Banga 101.” It’s Ghost’s show, but the experience of recording it doesn’t sound solitary. He loves them so deeply because he’s acutely aware of how quickly this mirage can vanish. On “We Made It,” Starks celebrates another victory by just a thin thread of electric current. Before 2000 ends, one of its guest rappers, Chip Banks became a chalk outline memory in Harlem, murdered over a small cash dispute, barely 30 years old. Eight children left behind. It’s one more reminder that this was his life’s work—not merely something great made in a crazy period, but the only way that period could have ended.
There’s an old Ghostface quote where he simplifies rap to the most basic prerequisite: get “some official beats and say fly shit over them.” Even if that was all that he did on Supreme Clientele, it would still be a classic. But what makes it transformational are those minor details. The almost tossed-off aside where the vivid laser eye guy spits, “West Brighton pool now I’m into iron duels.” It’s a name-check of the neighborhood spot where he used to swim, a sad glint of far-off nostalgia as he considers who might be lurking the next time he steps outside.
This is the duality that remains constant, the fluid superhero transformation as Starks shifts from retina-searing brightness to black and white grit, comic absurdity to adolescent remembrance, revelations spoken through rap. It’s the testament of a mortal god, hoping to save the world, hoping to free himself. | 2017-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic / Sony / Razor Sharp | June 4, 2017 | 10 | 091b329b-0808-4827-80df-3adbfc205838 | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
Following their critical and commercial breakthrough, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective return with a dense and busy album that serves as the more anxious flipside to its blissed-out predecessor. | Following their critical and commercial breakthrough, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective return with a dense and busy album that serves as the more anxious flipside to its blissed-out predecessor. | Animal Collective: Centipede Hz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16980-centipede-hz/ | Centipede Hz | If it's possible to condense Animal Collective's 12-year career in a single line, Avey Tare does the trick when, deep into Centipede Hz, he cries, "Why am I still looking for a golden age?" By all measurable standards, this is Animal Collective's golden age: Their last album, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, capped a remarkable decade-long journey that saw the band evolve from psych-folk recording project to top-billed digi-pop tweakers. But their popularity hasn't made them any more populist. Even as their songs have grown more melodically and emotionally accessible, their music has grown ever more indefinable. Theirs is the rarest, most enviable form of success: one born not of conforming to audiences' expectations but of constantly confounding them. Avey's refutation of his golden age suggests that, for Animal Collective, happiness is a function of never feeling fully satisfied with what you've accomplished, and continually challenging yourself.
Nowhere in the Animal Collective discography has that sense of unease felt so pronounced as on Centipede Hz. The band's latest album is to Merriweather as Strawberry Jam was to Feels-- the anxious flipside to an ecstatic predecessor. But its execution is even more relentless. Animal Collective have always embraced a certain back-to-nature ethos, but Centipede Hz is noticeably urban in feel. Beyond the references to their native Baltimore, these bustling songs are tied together by radio broadcast snippets and ad samples that feel very much like a comment on 21st-century sensory overload (an experience presaged by the band's own recent experiences as free-form radio hosts). Even the album cover looks like an interstitial from U2's Zoo TV multimedia blitzkrieg.
With multi-instrumentalist Deakin re-joining the band after a four-year hiatus, they've never before hit with such blunt force. The rippling rhythms and aquatic ambience of Merriweather is displaced by industrial-strength ballast: Lead-off track "Moonjock" announces itself with a morse-code crunch that could practically pass for Sleigh Bells, while stuttering lead single "Today's Supernatural" closes with the sort of drum-set-toppling flourish that arena-rock acts use to stretch out their last encore. These songs get Centipede Hz off to a deliriously disorienting start, showcasing the band's ability to coax sing-song melodies out of a melee. But as the album progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that Centipede Hz's over-caffeinated energy comes at the expense of what, for all their restless creativity, has always been Animal Collective's greatest virtue-- their patience.
From Sung Tongs' "Kids on Holiday" and Feels' "Banshee Beat" to Strawberry Jam's "Fireworks" and Merriweather's "My Girls", Animal Collective's greatest moments have conveyed a shared sense of discovery. There's a sense of something special being slowly revealed, of chaotic rhythms, harmonies, and atmospheres gradually cohering into glorious moments of clarity before dissolving into the ether. Centipede Hz, by comparison, feels like someone throwing a burrito on your windshield: The songs hit with a jolt, instantly splaying all their ingredients before you.
The result feels overly busy and static at the same time. And the songwriting here can't always keep pace amid all the percussive clatter and synth-noise splatter jacked up in the mix, the melodic through-lines of ceaselessly twitchy tracks like "Mercury Man" and "Applesauce" getting lost in the whirr. The two contributions from Panda Bear, in particular, underwhelm: "Rosie Oh" is another future-shocked Beach Boys fantasia in the vein of Strawberry Jam's "Chores", but comes to an abrupt, unsatisfying end; the more downcast "New Town Burnout", originally written for his dubwise 2011 solo release Tomboy, is too sluggish and distant to touch the heights of his best Animal Collective songs. And while Deakin's oscillating reverie "Wide Eyed" now makes more sense as a more straightforward mid-album breather than it did as the opening song at the band's main-stage Coachella set last year, his conversational vocal style doesn't have enough character to carry the five-minute song.
Animal Collective have enjoyed a remarkable creative and popular ascent, the sort of trajectory that is almost impossible to sustain in perpetuity. With Centipede Hz, Animal Collective have delivered a cluttered, abrasive album that confirms their naysayers' exaggerated perceptions of the band. But even a patchy Animal Collective album yields several exceptional songs. Beyond the bracing "Moonjock"/"Today's Supernatural" double shot, there's the magnificent "Monkey Riches" (featuring the lyric quoted at the top of this review), where Avey's increasingly exasperated vocal syncs perfectly with the surging, tribal funk.
The resplendent closer "Amanita" arrives with a fanfare fit for a king but also questions its ostentatious surroundings: "What have we done, what have we done," Avey and Panda sing in unison, "Fantasy is falling down." It's a song that seems to acknowledge Animal Collective's unlikely position as a mainstream-breaching phenomenon, before busting open an escape hatch from a world of scrutiny and expectation. As it shifts into its giddy, double-timed denouement, Avey excitedly chants, "What are you gonna do/ Go into the forest/ Until I can't remember my name!" After pushing their maximal, strobe-lit aesthetic to fatiguing extremes, perhaps a retreat back into the wild is just what Animal Collective need. | 2012-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | September 4, 2012 | 7.4 | 091ba319-899a-4385-af6a-c26bc8e10f0f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Glasgow indie pop band (is there any other kind of Glasgow band?) follows its slept-on and charming debut Sing the Greys with another assured set of soulful barnburners and aching ballads. | Glasgow indie pop band (is there any other kind of Glasgow band?) follows its slept-on and charming debut Sing the Greys with another assured set of soulful barnburners and aching ballads. | Frightened Rabbit: Midnight Organ Fight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11351-midnight-organ-fight/ | Midnight Organ Fight | On the surface, Scottish trio Frightened Rabbit are like a lot of other bands. You could file them away with other musicians from their Glasgow scene, or other bassist-free groups, or other bands of literal brothers (frontman Scott and drummer Grant Hutchison are siblings). But somehow, despite the fact that their methods are well-worn, their product is one-of-a-kind, as their consistently great second album (in under a year, no less!) attests.
The key here is Scott's urgent-yet-emotive songwriting. Midnight Organ Fight is full of rousing barnburners that flicker with soul, ballads that ache with masculine vulnerability, and Frightened Rabbit's best song yet, opener "The Modern Leper". Built on insistently downstroked guitars and drums that build from a gallop to a thundering crash, this Pixies-go-acoustic track swells with self-loathing. "Is that you in front of me/ Coming back for even more of exactly the same?/ You must be a masochist/ To love a modern leper on his last leg," sings Scott, and rarely has a song with such anthemic, air-drum-worthy fills been shot through with so much personal revulsion.
Grant's muscular drumming is a highlight throughout the record-- and on stage. At a recent New York show, the band hadn't yet made it through two songs before he'd splintered three drumsticks with his powerful pounding. With the absence of another instrument to hold down the rhythm section (guitarist Billy Kennedy does occasionally fill out the low end with keyboard), he uses his percussion-- the satisfying hiss of his cymbals, the breathless insistence of his thudding kick drum, the delicious sizzle of his marching-band snare-- to saturate the empty space in the compositions. Flailing about at his kit, he keeps time wildly yet melodically, controlled amidst the chaos.
Despite the trio's static (and relatively spare) set-up, Scott's songs imbue the band with an elastic identity. Scuzzed up tracks like "Fast Blood" and almost-bluegrass weepers like "Good Arms Vs. Bad Arms" prove that Frightened Rabbit have stretched beyond the melancholic folk-pop of Sing the Greys. But elsewhere-- most notably "My Backwards Walk" and "Old Old Fashioned"-- they re-confirm their dedication to the sound they perfected on their debut, playing electronic and acoustic guitars against each other for stomping mid-tempo gems that pulse with nervous energy and heart-on-sleeve lyrics.
Though nothing else on the album hits the pop high of its opener-- "Leper" is a tough act to follow-- its I'm-not-worthy sentiments are prevalent on all the album's best tracks. On "The Twist", a desperate yet tender ballad built on a similar freight-train piano line as LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends", the protagonist practically begs for sex-- "I can be who you like," he pleads-- while sadly allowing himself to be used. "Whisper the wrong name," sings Scott in his accented bagpipe drone of a voice, "I don't care and nor do my ears." In track after track, Scott expresses that need for the warmth of another, however unworthy he may feel of it.
Those sentiments are also echoed in "Keep Yourself Warm": "You won't find love in a hole/ It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm." He's wallowing, but Scott's cracked voice sells every word, and his band's rousing rhythms and rough-hewn guitar interplay keep the mood from ever getting lugubrious or maudlin. Sure, Frightened Rabbit aren't the first band to explore loneliness, horniness, or emptiness in song, just like they aren't the first set of siblings to decide to jam together, but their jangly melodies claw their way inside your brain just the same, making them latest in a long line of Glasgow bands to effortlessly combine celebratory sonics and miserablist lyrics into something singular. | 2008-04-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | FatCat | April 14, 2008 | 8.1 | 091cac03-526a-4fff-8f8f-5f0b3655f0aa | Pitchfork | null |
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On her final, posthumously released album, Jones alternates powerful ballads with the upbeat dance numbers that were staples of her live shows, confirming her stature a contemporary soul-music icon. | On her final, posthumously released album, Jones alternates powerful ballads with the upbeat dance numbers that were staples of her live shows, confirming her stature a contemporary soul-music icon. | Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Soul of a Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sharon-jones-and-the-dap-kings-soul-of-a-woman/ | Soul of a Woman | When Sharon Jones passed away last November after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, she died not as a soul revival artist but as a soul artist, period. The distinction is subtle but meaningful. What sounded in the 2000s like a throwback to the era of 1960s and 1970s funk and R&B eventually became something very modern and of its moment. The Dap-Kings may be one of the best backing bands around, and Daptone Records a more diversified and adventurous label than many people think, but it was Jones who rooted the music in the here and now instead of the there and then. A lot is made of her experience as a corrections officer and armored truck guard, but she worked in wedding bands and did session work for decades before she recorded her first single, at 40 years old, and her first full-length album, at 46. She conveyed an unshakable belief that soul music could speak to this or any other moment in time, and her voice, so insistent and expressive, could transform a song like Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately”—or even Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”—into something new and timely.
Remarkably, that voice sounds barely diminished on Soul of a Woman, retaining every ounce of its personality and authority despite how cancer and chemo had sapped her energy, if not her drive. When Jones felt strong enough, she went into the studio and made music with the Dap-Kings. Otherwise, she was either resting or touring. In fact, she didn’t stop playing live until just a few weeks before her death. “I can’t wait too much longer,” she sings on opener “Matter of Time,” which dreams of peace, freedom, and unity. From any other singer, such a statement might speak to the long arc of justice, but in this case Jones sings from the position of knowing she might not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of that struggle. (In fact, she suffered a stroke on election night, which left her hospitalized, unable to speak but still able to sing.)
Yet Soul of a Woman is not an album about facing down death. There’s nothing grim or fearful or despairing in her performances. Rather, most of these songs are lively, even celebratory, as she sings about the age-old subjects of soul music: politics both public and romantic, the state of the world and the state of a relationship. The barnburner “Sail On!” turns the tables on a dismissive lover, the Dap-Kings’ horns blasting around her as Jones works out the moral equation of her situation. “Rumors,” with its effervescent groove and party vibe, wags a soul finger at the gossip mill: “Rumors tell me that you’re no good, baby!”
Soul of a Woman was initially planned to sound very different than it does. Producer Gabriel Roth (aka Bosco Mann) envisioned an album of slower, more lushly orchestrated songs but ultimately decided that Jones’ final statement should include more upbeat dance numbers, the kind that elicited such an excited response at live shows. A few of those original tunes remain: “When I Saw Your Face” shows just how acrobatic Jones’ voice could be, as she soars around in her upper register to convey a sense of romantic ecstasy. “Girl! (You Got to Forgive Him)” throws the kitchen sink at its melodramatic arrangement, but Jones keeps the song anchored in a very real predicament and lends the advice real wisdom and gravity.
By combining these powerful soul ballads with upbeat dance numbers, Soul of a Woman lovingly portrays Jones as an artist with remarkable emotional and interpretive range. Nothing on Soul of a Woman, in fact, suggests that this is actually a posthumous album, that it was recorded by someone who knew she wouldn’t live to see its release. Jones gives perhaps her greatest performance on the final song, “Call on God,” which she wrote decades ago for her choir at Universal Church of God, where she sang before and after she started working with the Dap-Kings. The band provides restrained churchly accompaniment—the gently supportive thrum of the organ, the sympathetic chords of the guitar, the dramatic pulse of the drums—and Jones sounds bigger than life as she sings, “I made up my mind to be with Him all the time/And I won’t let nothing turn me around.” It’s to her credit that it doesn’t sound like a farewell. Instead, the song—the entire album, in fact—is a poignant statement of the determination that motivated her all along. | 2017-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Daptone | November 24, 2017 | 8 | 091dfa86-7917-414e-87df-b49c2fe4cdf6 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
TikTok’s favorite neoclassical jazz singer gives contemporary heartache a misty, out-of-time quality. | TikTok’s favorite neoclassical jazz singer gives contemporary heartache a misty, out-of-time quality. | Laufey: Bewitched | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laufey-bewitched/ | Bewitched | Growing up, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir found that the jazz singers of the past, with their rumbling low registers, resonated more deeply with her than charting pop vocalists. As Laufey, her style falls somewhere between the two, meshing jazz instrumentation and the careful diction of the Great American Songbook with contemporary themes: big city living, social media, the anxiety of being in the “talking stage” with a crush. The Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter learned piano and cello from her mother, violinist Lin Wei, and started making a name for herself on TikTok, posting snippets of original music and covers of songs by Chet Baker and Billie Eilish. There, she found a Gen Z audience eager to hear classic vocal jazz made cool again, including Eilish, who reshared her version of “My Future.”
On Bewitched, Laufey’s second full-length, big feelings—eternal hope, unconditional love—take center stage. It’s bolder and more intentional than her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, which felt like a sketchbook compiling the artist’s assumptions and hesitations on the topic. Here, Laufey doesn’t simply let jazz inform the work; she uses it as a vehicle to enact fantasies and ambitions, lending her contemporary musings a misty, out-of-time quality. On opener “Dreamer,” Laufey rolls her eyes at the doom loop of casual dating. “No boy’s gonna kill the dreamer in me,” she sings, leading an arrangement that develops from soft piano to a blithe cloud of bass, glockenspiel, and jazz brushes. More than its literal commentary, “Dreamer” establishes one of Jónsdóttir’s primary artistic impulses: to never sacrifice a sense of wonder, no matter how painful the circumstances.
This sense of wonder translates even when Laufey experiments with pop, as on “Lovesick.” The narrator pines for an absent lover, so enamored with their presence that silence is frightening. When Laufey abandons her guitar and bursts into the soaring chorus, she takes a page from Taylor Swift’s high-romance songbook—think “Enchanted” or “Treacherous.” Laufey counts Swift as an influence and, as a young musician, “the only music [she] listened to that wasn’t jazz or classical.” Emulating her explosive verse-chorus technique allows the song to arrive at an intensity of emotional release that Laufey’s usual, more tender approach rarely does. The interplay between the smooth, ascending strings and rolling percussion mirror a confusing cross of emotions, like excitement and anxiety dueling in the pit of your stomach.
Bewitched includes one classic song, “Misty,” composed by pianist Erroll Garner with lyrics by Johnny Burke. It’s not the first time Jónsdóttir has recorded a jazz standard, nor her first time covering “Misty,” which she described in a 2021 YouTube video as “one of her all-time favorite songs.” While the video take is bare and gentle as a lullaby, the album track is fleshed out with piano, bass, and drums, as Garner originally recorded it. Jónsdóttir’s voice is nimble, her familiar timbre occasionally dipping into richer tones. The production is straightforward and organic, emphasizing clarity and presenting the song with both personal flair and reverence for history. It’s right at home in Bewitched’s lovelorn tracklist.
Laufey often sings about dreaming of a life that’s just like the movies, but all over Bewitched are hints that she loves the mundane just as much. Her appeal lies in how she narrates this dichotomy, best encapsulated in the album’s penultimate track, “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self.” “I’m so sorry that they pick you last/Try to say your foreign name and laugh,” she sings, as muffled piano and plucked guitar gently rock her adolescent self to sleep. Her words are tinged with the heartache of youth, when being different feels like a nightmare. But when the arrangement expands to include strings, it becomes buoyant and dreamy. Even talking to herself, Laufey’s spell is unbroken. | 2023-09-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | AWAL | September 12, 2023 | 7 | 091fc8ab-b77a-4171-aa63-6701261abca6 | Alex Ramos | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-ramos/ | |
Though she makes the kind of sugary music that might soundtrack a particularly rambunctious children’s show, Rose McDowall will also "cut you with a cake knife." This reissue of the former Strawberry Switchblade singer's '80 solo material is good for murder sprees and/or cuddle sessions. | Though she makes the kind of sugary music that might soundtrack a particularly rambunctious children’s show, Rose McDowall will also "cut you with a cake knife." This reissue of the former Strawberry Switchblade singer's '80 solo material is good for murder sprees and/or cuddle sessions. | Rose McDowall: Cut With the Cake Knife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20912-cut-with-the-cake-knife/ | Cut With the Cake Knife | Everything you need to know about Strawberry Switchblade, the Scottish duo of Rose McDowall and Jill Bryson, is right there in the name. The group, who grew out of the late '70s Glasgow punk scene paired brightly-colored, synth-driven new wave melodies with lyrics that often spoke of sadness and loss. That polarity between light and darkness became even more apparent in the group’s acrimonious dissolution in 1986, just five years after they started. MacDowall had always nursed an interest in the occult, but over the course of the duo's brief run, it deepened, moving beyond a childlike fascination with fairies into the realm of straight-up black magic (in one oft-repeated story, she was so furious with a bad note during the recording of "Let Her Go", she allegedly stared at the tape machine and willed it to burst into flames). Her curiosity only intensified after she and her husband fell in with Genesis P-Orridge, which led to even darker pursuits—in an extensive interview, Bryson claims McDowall developed an obsession with Nazi history, going so far as to hang a Nazi flag in her apartment. While McDowall emphatically denies the claim, her collaborations with suspect artists like Boyd Rice and Death in June in the intervening years seem unwise at best.
Fortunately, none of these matters surface on Cut With the Cake Knife, which McDowall recorded in various locations around the UK in the 1980s, shortly after Strawberry Switchblade’s breakup. Instead, the album’s 11 songs follow the same blueprint that made McDowall’s previous group so bewitching, pairing bleak—and, at times, violent—lyrics to the kind of sugary music that might soundtrack a particularly rambunctious children’s show. Drum machines whirr and rattle, keyboards blink like buggy Lite Brites, and McDowall’s somber alto winds its way through the center like a serpent cutting a path through cellophane Easter grass. On the opening track "Tibet", she seems to be wrestling with Strawberry Switchblade’s breakup, sighing "I don’t want you to go/ But can’t ask you to stay/ I wish I could change your mind/ But wishes sometimes die." The music that surrounds it is a kind of ersatz calypso, with charmingly chintzy rhythms and gurgling keyboards, but the vocal melody is so assured and clear-eyed that the song never feels cloying or saccharine. "Sixty Cowboys" dabbles in the kind of synthetic country that the Magnetic Fields would master on Charm of the Highway Strip, with brittle keyboards filling in for banjos and McDowall’s lonesome voice floating upward like campfire smoke. And while the title "Crystal Nights" takes on an ominous meaning in light of the allegations about McDowall’s hobbies, the song itself harbors no questionable subject matter. Instead, it depicts her in bed daydreaming about her lover as keyboards spiral like fireflies around her.
While its ingredients are undeniably basic—all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it—what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds. That the only bum note is a chirpy cover of "Don’t Fear the Reaper", which comes off like the theme music to an old Commodore 64 game, speaks to how strong the rest of the record is. On Cake Knife, McDowall has created a kind of aural Candy Land, one where she can break off vanilla bark from Jujyfruit trees while she sings about death and despair. The title track—which was originally intended to be a Strawberry Switchblade song—takes that m.o. to its logical extreme. While a comically cartoonish bass and hyperactive synths jitter and pop around her, McDowall beckons a lover closer before announcing in its deliriously euphoric chorus, "I will take you by the hand and lead you/ To my sunny side and I will/ Cut you with the cake knife/ Right between the eyes." In McDowall’s world, cake and chaos go hand in hand. She’s the witch at the door of the gingerbread house, beckoning you inside. | 2015-09-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | September 14, 2015 | 7.7 | 091fd084-d3e9-4eeb-a9d9-5997e08860c6 | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
Following their spectacular Sun Giant EP, Seattle-based Fleet Foxes’ full-length debut has a lot to live up to. Luckily, it more than delivers the goods: Incorporating a broad spectrum of styles—from Appalachian folk and AM country to classic rock and SoCal pop—Fleet Foxes create a personal synthesis of the music of their peers, their parents, and even their grandparents. | Following their spectacular Sun Giant EP, Seattle-based Fleet Foxes’ full-length debut has a lot to live up to. Luckily, it more than delivers the goods: Incorporating a broad spectrum of styles—from Appalachian folk and AM country to classic rock and SoCal pop—Fleet Foxes create a personal synthesis of the music of their peers, their parents, and even their grandparents. | Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11587-fleet-foxes/ | Fleet Foxes | Fleet Foxes may have a firm grasp on rock and folk history, but they never play to their record collection. Rather than revive a particular scene or recreate a lost sound, the Seattle quintet cherrypick their ideas from a broad spectrum of styles, pulling in Appalachian folk, classic rock, AM country, and SoCal pop to create a personal synthesis of the music of their peers, their parents, and even their grandparents.
The band didn’t leave town to record Fleet Foxes, yet it sounds like it could have been recorded anywhere in the United States—Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, Louisville, or more likely some clearing in the woods. That placelessness constitutes an active effacement, considering that Seattle has been a locus for alternative music for nearly two decades. The five-piece is thoroughly embedded in that scene: Their ranks include current and former members of Crystal Skulls, Pedro the Lion, and Seldom. Furthermore, to produce the sessions that created the Sun Giant EP and this debut LP, they hired Phil Ek, best known for his work with Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, and the Shins. Nevertheless, theirs is a studiously rural aesthetic, eschewing urban influences and using reverb like sepia-tone to suggest something much older and more rustic than it really is. The album opens with a short tune (titled “Red Squirrel” on early leaks but not listed on the CD) that could be a field recording sung by a small-town congregation 50 years ago. It ushers us into Fleet Foxes’ old world; after a few bars, the song darts into the heraldic “Sun It Rises,” which sure enough sounds like someone’s idea of a sunrise over an evergreen mountain. But they’re not done yet: Just as the song fades, it rises into a quiet coda that previews two more elements of their sound—the patient guitar lick on “Blue Ridge Mountains” and the vocal harmonies that color numerous songs on the record. All that’s missing are the crackles and hisses of an old LP. (Fortunately, Sub Pop is issuing it on vinyl.)
What follows is surprisingly full and wide ranging, almost as much as the Bruegel painting that graces the album’s cover. Skye Skjelset’s guitar roams wherever it pleases, while drummer Nicholas Peterson keeps the songs in check, allowing the band to move freely but not wander too far into the woods. A flute, half-submerged in the mix, adds lurking menace to the album’s most intense jam, “Your Protector,” and Casey Wescott’s staccato piano rhythm runs through “Blue Ridge Mountains,” heightening the momentum of the chorus.
For all the album’s winding paths and unexpected vistas, Fleet Foxes’ harmonies remain the primary draw, and they’ve written and arranged these songs to showcase their shared vocals. “Heard Them Stirring” has no lyrics, but it’s hard to call it an instrumental. Against a shuffling shaker-and-tambourine rhythm, “Ragged Wood” switches between Robin Pecknold’s lead vocals and the band’s harmonies after each verse, effectively translating classic rock via folk elements. There’s as much Fleetwood Mac as the Band in the song’s rousing finale. On the other hand, Fleet Foxes do restraint just as well: “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” features only a lone acoustic guitar and Pecknold’s forceful vocals, which switch to a spooky falsetto on the outro.
Vocals play such a primary role in Fleet Foxes’ music that Pecknold’s lyrics at times sound like merely a delivery system for harmonies, with references to meadowlarks, rising suns, and streams bolstering the rural and placeless evocations. However, these are ultimately carefully and well-crafted compositions. On “White Winter Hymnal,” a firelit roundelay that best showcases the band’s vocal interplay, the lyrics convey strange, almost Edward Gorey–like imagery: “I was following the pack/All swallowed in their coats/With scarves of red tied ’round their throats/To keep their little heads from falling in the snow/And I turned ’round and there you go.” Who knows exactly what the words mean, but the fairy-tale menace comes through in full color, and Peterson’s floor-tom beat and the intricacy of the band’s harmonies dispel the threat without diluting the mystery.
Fleet Foxes ends with “Oliver James,” another nearly a cappella showcase for Pecknold’s solo vocals. As he thumps out a soft rhythm on his Martin acoustic, he sings about handmade tables and long-gone grandparents, howling the chorus “Oliver James, washed in the rain/No longer.” The brief snippet of “Red Squirrel” and “Sun It Rises” invites you into Fleet Foxes’ debut, but “Oliver James” doesn’t shoo you out the door. Instead, Fleet Foxes let you linger for a few more bars, leaning forward to catch Pecknold’s last syllable as it fades into the air. They don’t seem to want the record to end any more than you will. | 2008-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | June 6, 2008 | 9 | 09246778-4746-4143-b766-04ef6fe722b1 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Working alongside the multidisciplinary troll Freeka Tet, Berlin experimental club duo Amnesia Scanner sound as playful as ever, but there’s a gnawing sense of anxiety behind their fits of delirium. | Working alongside the multidisciplinary troll Freeka Tet, Berlin experimental club duo Amnesia Scanner sound as playful as ever, but there’s a gnawing sense of anxiety behind their fits of delirium. | Amnesia Scanner / Freeka Tet: STROBE.RIP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amnesia-scanner-freeka-tet-stroberip/ | STROBE.RIP | Nina Sun Eidshem begins her 2019 book The Race of Sound with a concept she calls “the acousmatic question.” When you hear a voice and you’re not sure of its source, your nervous system lights up, asking, Who is this? Who is speaking? Or, in the case of Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet: What the fuck is that?
Since their 2018 debut album, Another Life, the Berlin-based electronic duo Amnesia Scanner have coaxed uncanny vocalizations out of a suite of artificially intelligent software they call Oracle. Similarly to Holly Herndon’s AI chorus Spawn, Oracle sings both like and unlike a person: Its phonemes come out nasal, serrated, and tinny, too stiff and jagged to sound fully human, too warm to be completely machine. It cradles enough of its organic source material to catch the ear with a spark of recognition, but corrodes that human kernel until recognition sours into dread. Upon hearing it, the body softens and then flinches in a matter of milliseconds: There’s someone else here, but something’s all wrong.
On their latest release, STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner team up with the New York-based multidisciplinary troll Freeka Tet, whose sardonic work similarly teases out the frayed seam where viscera meets machine. A video of a 2018 performance at MUTEK shows Freeka feeding his face into an algorithm that deadens his eyes and smears his mouth like a bugged-out PS2 avatar. Both Freeka and Amnesia Scanner delight in smashing misaligned elements together into grotesque new forms. In collaboration, they birth plenty of monstrosity, but also plunge deep into an eerily wistful current—a mood that has long coursed behind the flashbangs of Amnesia Scanner’s music. The questions both projects raise with their perceptual distortions—is that another person? Is it like me? Is it something else?—are fundamentally lonely ones. With STROBE.RIP, Freeka Tet and Amnesia Scanner embrace that frigid isolation in between their usual fits of delirium.
Oracle surfaces throughout the album in a mode that’s far more withdrawn and melancholic than the confrontationally playful stance it held on Amnesia Scanner’s past two albums. “I need to learn to say no/I don’t wanna go/I don’t wanna go,” it sings on the lurching, slimy “Giggle,” the vocals wispy and buried in the mix. Against the dusty piano loops of “Bounds,” Oracle takes on a deflated register, singing out from the bottom of a depressive pit: “I’m living it out of bounds/You can’t help me.” The album hits its peaks when Oracle and Freeka Tet’s vocals tangle together. On “Damon,” Freeka’s metallic screeches undergird Oracle’s creeping whine over nu-metal guitar chugs. The uneasy, polyrhythmic “Ledge” drags Freeka’s compressed glossolalia into the heart of the mix, while offsetting the intricate beats with a repeating triplet that splits the difference between voice and drum: percussive but not quite percussion, vocal but not exactly a voice.
Nothing here feels quite so lonely as the calm before the storm that closes out the record. “Clown,” whose treble leads pirouette over a bass throb indebted to Massive Attack’s paranoid “Man Next Door,” bleeds into the shadows of “Abandoned.Club,” whose big-band breakdown meshes Oracle’s unintelligible wails with gossamer guest vocals from Bea1991. The smoke clears for “Scorpions, Bats & Spiders,” a spoken-word confrontation by artist and Instagram phenom Jaakko Pallasvuo, who also wrote the micropoem on STROBE.RIP’s cover. With oblique barbs of language, Pallasvuo satirizes attempts, like the one I’m making now, to render the bodily experience of this kind of music into expository language. “Club abandoned/Deconstructed/A panel discussion,” goes the voiceover, pronounced with perfect classroom diction. Behind these words, Oracle lilts in a treble register, its voice swirling through syllables empty of syntax.
That cerebral mood melts inside the album’s inferno of a finale. The one-two punch of “Cat” and “Merge” satirize EDM’s most obvious elements and savor their blunt pleasure at the same time. The stomping, sneering “Cat” punctures its walls of sawtooth bass with New Jack Swing orchestra stabs and simulated moans from Oracle—the closest this particular AI has come to a sexual awakening. On “Merge,” Oracle’s bristling adolescent howls keep trying to crystallize into language, but never get there. They sputter and squall, rearing up over Freeka’s low growls, demanding all attention within earshot and then spurning it with gibberish.
If you type the name of this album into your web browser, press enter, and click past the demon, you’ll end up at the video for “Ride,” along with a slew of comical error messages that pop up whenever you click the background. Directed by Freeka Tet and Ruby Aldridge, the video offers a first-person view of a white-gloved DoorDasher rushing through New York, dropping off various goods wrapped in shiny black plastic. At the end of the clip, the courier parks their bike and goes home to their apartment. Everything inside—the couch, the modem, the logs in the fireplace—is mummified in the same plastic. Like a lot of good punchlines, its resonances are terrifying. The role you perform in public seeps into who you are in private; daily entanglement with platform capitalism changes you at the root. When Freeka Tet and Amnesia Scanner drop you into their whirlwind of unnerving questions—“What is that? Is it human?”—they prime you for one better: “Am I?” | 2023-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Pan | June 28, 2023 | 7.3 | 092d1b9d-115f-493b-b85c-9b3581247e24 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The second installment of Italians Do It Better's After Dark compilation features muscular updates on their buzzy neon template by the likes of Chromatics, Glass Candy, and Mirage. Its assembly line nature also reminds us that while some strains of classic dance music were meticulous and expert, many were cheap and quick. | The second installment of Italians Do It Better's After Dark compilation features muscular updates on their buzzy neon template by the likes of Chromatics, Glass Candy, and Mirage. Its assembly line nature also reminds us that while some strains of classic dance music were meticulous and expert, many were cheap and quick. | Various Artists: After Dark 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18134-after-dark-2/ | After Dark 2 | When it arrived in 2007, Italians Do It Better's After Dark compilation provided a way forward. "Italo survived electroclash," wrote Marc Hogan; indie rock had too. Six years later, dance music has pervaded that genre to the point where discussing specific movements no longer feels relevant; it's just there, and After Dark had a part in that. Its status as a modern indie/dance classic makes it easy to forget to how thin and stitched-together it felt, how delicate its papier-mache disco. Putting aside the compilation's home-printed artwork and lack of jewel case, the album was rife with cover songs, demos, and remixes. Johnny Jewel's return last year with Chromatics and Symmetry was notable for the music's quality but also for its scope: confirmation, finally, that the Italians Do It Better label had gas left in the tank.
There's always been a factory feel to Italians Do It Better, Jewel the enigmatic visionary farming his disco labor out to acolytes and hangers-on. The cast of characters assembled on After Dark 2 supports this; primary vehicles Chromatics and Glass Candy account for nearly half the tracks, but many contributions come from IDIB B-teamers recording their first music in years. If there's an exemplar of the odd IDIB universe, it's Mirage (officially the 24th artist to adopt that moniker according to Discogs) who show up with only their third-ever track; the first two being available only on the original After Dark.
The assembly-line nature of Jewel's productions provides a counterpoint to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, reminding us that while some strains of classic dance music were meticulous and expert, many were cheap and quick. Jewel's ability to pump out quality tracks with a host of collaborators connects him to the faceless electro/disco producers of the 1980s; presenting the tracks as glammy punk-noir fantasies contemporizes him. Jewel is an expert stylist, able to project fashionable cool without exclusivity or mightiness. Never more so than on After Dark 2; the songs here are big and warm, tighter, more muscular updates of the originals, and they make common sadness-- the search for love, forgiveness, intimacy-- feel heroic and communal.
The IDIB rhythms and affectations-- thrumming Italo disco, icy female coos-- are largely unchanged, but the analog boil beneath them is robust. This is important when working with vocalists whose charm lies largely in their steely contempt for excess. Having Glass Candy back in the fold is crucial. Singer Ida No's flat, artless vocals are a perfect foil for Jewel's metronomic synthesizers. She's also the most compelling songwriter: the resplendent "Warm in the Winter" is the headliner, but "The Possessed" and "Beautiful Object" deliver pleasantly sighing choruses. Chromatics sound at home on the wistful "Cherry", and they parry their last album's title track with the nervy "Looking for Love": "I'm still/ Still looking/ Looking for love," killing for it having failed, apparently.
It's in this context that contributions from Farah-- severe and menacing-- and Desire-- easy and sweet-- can be lovely diversions, and that instrumentals from Mike Simonetti and Jewel (as Symmetry) can feel like luxe interludes. The vocoder funk of Mirage's "Let's Kiss" and Twisted Wire's husky piano house offer crucial variety. Lesser lights are afforded the opportunity to be lesser, in other words. They can thank the compilation's album-like feel: After Dark 2 plays more like Johnny Jewel & Friends Present... than a compendium of disparate acts. It updates the IDIB sound without losing its buzzy neon charm, which remains a hugely attractive mode. | 2013-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Italians Do It Better | May 31, 2013 | 8.3 | 092ed605-16f7-4b7a-85a4-521b1ff609c5 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Pulp got together back in 1978. Frontman Jarvis Cocker was 15. He's now 38. Yes, that's a damn ... | Pulp got together back in 1978. Frontman Jarvis Cocker was 15. He's now 38. Yes, that's a damn ... | Pulp: We Love Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6507-we-love-life/ | We Love Life | Pulp got together back in 1978. Frontman Jarvis Cocker was 15. He's now 38. Yes, that's a damn long time to be in a band, but surprisingly, the group's only original member wears it well. Having withstood 23 years and an indeterminable number of line-up changes, you'd think that Pulp would long since have started repeating themselves. But if there's anything these Yorkshire gents are not, it's stale. In fact, it's possible that on We Love Life, they're fresher than ever. Part of the reason for this is that they've always embraced change, constantly pushing in new directions.
Jarvis Cocker is still speaking up for the outsiders and freaks of the world, and the overt sexuality that's always informed his delivery is still a presence, but its context has changed completely. Cocker's worldview has moved to an alternate plane since the libidinous come-ons of Different Class (perhaps their last album, the ultra-dark masterstroke This Is Hardcore, excised all of those urges). Now, Cocker and the band seem to have grown into their station in life, the misfits stuck in the middle of the limelight.
Pulp worked with the legendary British producer Chris Thomas (who has produced everyone from the Sex Pistols to Roxy Music to John Cale, as well as playing session keyboard on the Beatles' White Album) for both 1995's Different Class and This Is Hardcore. And they attempted to work with him again on We Love Life, but with the sessions half-finished, the band decided to scrap the tapes and start over. They quickly decided on another British legend: songwriter Scott Walker, a man known for his seedy song topics and baroque instrumentation. This switch in producers, having changed nearly everything about the band's sound, is immediately evident.
We Love Life marches in with "Weeds" on top of Nick Banks' militaristic snare drum and unexpected layers of acoustic guitars. For his part, Cocker essentially addresses the double standards that exist in our lives, driving especially hard at the image-conscious upper class who "still come around to visit us when [they] fancy booze and drugs."
This segues seamlessly into the trip-hoppish groove of "Weeds II (The Origin of the Species)," over which Cocker delivers one of his trademark spoken monologues. Over a strangely EQ'd bassline, he deals in metaphors wherein the common folk are the weeds of society. "Weeds must be kept under control or they will destroy everything in their path," he sneers. That's not an idle observation, either; it's delivered like genuine threat to some abstract authority figure. The groove pauses to emphasize the point, evaporating briefly into an ambient ether before the band picks back up.
The album's other spoken track is even better, revolving around a recounting of a visit to the spot where a river has been diverted under a city. Somehow, Cocker manages to conjure all of the dirt and grit of the littered sidewalks and faltering buildings without ever directly referencing them. His personal changes are evident here, as well. In 1995, he wrote to his boyhood crush, "Let's all meet up in the year 2000/ Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?" Now that the year has come and gone, he seems resigned to the fact that he can never meet up with his lost loves or salvage the past. Rather, he has to content himself with visiting the dam where they met, fantasizing about taking a trip down the river, beneath the city and the people living in it.
Elsewhere, we're treated to some of the best traditional songs that Pulp have ever written, in "The Trees" and "Bad Cover Version." A brilliant string ostinato anchors the groove of "The Trees," in which Cocker laments a lost love, similarly coming to terms with the fact that trying to get it back just isn't a possibility. "Might as well go and tell it to the trees," he sings, and it's at this point that you first realize that he seems to be seeking real emotional commitment far removed from the lascivious sportfucking that his older songs favored.
"Bad Cover Version" addresses roughly the same theme from a different angle, with Cocker smirkingly comparing his ex's new boyfriend to himself, offering that "a bad cover version of love is not the real thing." The band's sense of humor enters the fray in the coda, and they even get in a jab at their own producer, likening "the second side of Til the Band Comes In" (Walker's fifth solo album) to an off-brand box of cornflakes and sugar substitutes. Other targets include "the Stones since the 80s," the "Planet of the Apes" TV show, and the late-period "Tom & Jerry" episodes where they could talk.
This is followed by "Roadkill," an acoustic reflection on a trip to the airport to pick up the other half of a doomed relationship. The narrator catches sight of a deer dying in the road, and in retrospect, takes it as a sign that the relationship was doomed to begin with. From this emotional low point, though, comes the phoenix of "Sunrise," the album's stirring closer and one of the most optimistic songs Pulp have ever recorded. "I used to hate the sun/ Because it shone on everything I had done," begins Cocker, ultimately summing up the band's entire career: "You've been awake all night/ So why should you crash out at dawn?" Pulp's long night may be over, but the day looks just as promising.
On their seventh album, Pulp have pulled off yet another remarkable reinvention of their sound and outlook, while simultaneously making their most organic album since their full-length debut, It, was released almost two decades ago. The cheap synths that made their last few albums so delightfully sleazy are almost completely absent, replaced by Mark Webber's well-developed guitar melodies and a more peripheral role for the electronics. And that's all good, because the last thing I'd want is for Pulp to get stale on me. On this evidence, it seems likely that they'll stay fresh well into the new century. | 2001-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2001-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | December 12, 2001 | 8.2 | 092fec6c-d396-4912-a933-c34117a8a02a | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
For anyone who has ever fantasized about dissolving into the dancefloor, the debut solo album from techno artist Sam Barker is as close as it gets. | For anyone who has ever fantasized about dissolving into the dancefloor, the debut solo album from techno artist Sam Barker is as close as it gets. | Barker: Utility | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/barker-utility/ | Utility | There is a small but significant faction of the dance-music underground that seems bent on teaching us that drums are overrated. There’s the UK’s “weightless” contingent, led by Mumdance and Logos, whose productions smear grime’s glassy accents into a viscous shimmer punctuated only by the occasional gunshot; there are flickering, arpeggiated tracks from Actress and Kassem Mosse that take lo-fi aesthetics to a new extreme, suggesting beaten-up cassette tapes where all the heavy bits have simply shriveled up and flaked off. Lorenzo Senni has reimagined trance music as an exercise in pure geometry, unaccompanied synth stabs bobbing as nimbly as knitting needles. And a recent Resident Advisor mix from Objekt, a reigning headliner of the global techno underground, was stitched together entirely from what he calls “no-kick rollers”—heavy-hitting club tracks with no anchoring bass drum.
Sam Barker is the latest to take up this idea, and his debut solo album, Utility, might be its fullest and most satisfying realization to date. The music resembles techno in all the style’s outward characteristics: the pulsing chords, the rippling high end, the gut-punching oomph of the bass. But where you might expect to hear techno’s usual percussive trappings—hardened kick drums, metallic cymbals, meaty snares—there are only the soft, fluid curves of his synthesizers. The closest that Barker comes to techno’s traditional drum palette is when he focuses a spray of white noise into a crisp, chattering attack akin to staccato hi-hats.
In its rose-tinted mood, the album often resembles mid-1990s ambient techno at its most wistful, like Larry Heard’s Alien or John Beltran’s Ten Days of Blue. But where classic ambient techno took club music’s signature elements and made them gentle enough for afterhours comedowns, Barker’s Utility does the opposite, borrowing ambient’s billowing forms and reinforcing them for the needs of the dancefloor. These tracks are weaponized clouds, cotton candy wrapped in Kevlar.
The record begins on a dreamy, romantic note with “Paradise Engineering,” drizzling a honeyed synth melody over buoyant chords, but it quickly turns tougher: On “Posmean,” taut, rubbery synths seem to send calls for help in Morse code; “Hedonic Treadmill” hits you in the chest like a sack of gold dust, even as the fizzy high end mimics the bag’s contents dispersing in slow motion.
For anyone who has ever fantasized about dissolving into the dancefloor, Utility is about as close as it gets. On highlights like “Models of Wellbeing” (which nods to Rhythm & Sound’s aerated dub) and “Utility” (redolent of the fragrant Balearic staple “Sueño Latino”), Barker puts minimalist techniques to opulent ends, conjuring ecstatic visions out of just a handful of sounds, and teasing vast shapes out of a silvery mist. Behind the album’s title lies a crucial irony: By using ambient materials to remake techno, Barker has come up with the exact opposite of a purposefully percussive DJ tool. Instead of rote functionalism, Utility is distinguished by its surfeit of feeling. | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ostgut Ton | September 16, 2019 | 8.2 | 09348a68-2a8c-472e-aad9-8475ff504249 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Toronto group set oddball existential queries at the center of a shapeshifting rhythm section, collaging together pop fundamentals with a vast collection of musical knick-knacks. | The Toronto group set oddball existential queries at the center of a shapeshifting rhythm section, collaging together pop fundamentals with a vast collection of musical knick-knacks. | Bernice: Eau de Bonjourno | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bernice-eau-de-bonjourno/ | Eau de Bonjourno | The rules of nature that keep the world in order can just as easily put it in disarray: The same physics that bring clean water pouring from the kitchen faucet are also responsible for the coffee that slides down the side of the pot and pools on the countertop. A similarly intricate force seems to power Eau de Bonjourno, the third album by Bernice. Under the guidance of bandleader and vocalist Robin Dann, the Toronto group collage together pop fundamentals with musical knick-knacks sourced from a vast palette of synthesizer textures and rhythms that cover every corner of pop and R&B, from lo-fi recordings to the Billboard charts. Like beads of rain dashing across a windshield, Eau de Bonjourno is unusually mesmerizing with its movements, connected by the natural spirit of chaos.
Dann’s spiritual and existential observations lie at the core of the band’s shapeshifting rhythm section. On early highlight “It’s Me, Robin,” she introduces herself in plaintive terms (“I thought if I just expressed this/You might let me be me, and accept that I’m here”), then makes a chorus out of the query, “Who are you?” The question spirals from the listener back to the singer, as the song spreads out into a wide sweep of saxophone and piano. With “Infinite Love,” Bernice sneak a heartfelt endorsement of a radical love ethic into an arrangement that scans like a bedroom-pop sex jam. But when Dann sings about a love that feels “amazing,” she’s not merely addressing earthly bodies—it’s something cosmic, all-encompassing, a connection felt on the atomic level.
Similarly, a song called “Personal Bubble” is less a timely comment on plague-year etiquette than a rarefied invitation to a private world. By the time the novelty of the title starts to erode, the music pivots: a change of rhythm transforms it into a galactic combination of heavily reverbed slap bass, a topsy-turvy sax solo, and a thicker, weirder beat. The record is full of such odd turns, like “Big Mato,” an effervescent expression of vulnerability wrapped in a salad metaphor that takes its title from...a big tomato. Examined piecemeal, the Eau de Bonjourno recipe seems like it shouldn’t work—but it does.
It’s all too easy to apply an “experimental” tag to the type of kinetic, amorphous songs that appear on Eau de Bonjourno and throughout Bernice’s catalog, but the band are no twee tinkerers. Amid the webs of synths, processed guitars, and saxophones, Dann’s writing is intensely focused on the events of the natural world. On “Lone Swan,” she hones in on the titular bird, as well as a beaver gnawing on red bark, a loud waterfall, a hermit thrush building her nest beside a dry riverbed, and a sick maple tree tended by park workers. Though opportunities for quiet communion with nature are fleeting, they are, miraculously, everywhere. It is the contradictions and juxtapositions that make life possible. Eau de Bonjourno takes them in stride, accepting the mess of it all as a benediction.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Telephone Explosion / figureight | March 10, 2021 | 7.6 | 093707cb-9ec4-488f-8d8e-fc1f057e3065 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The ambient guitarist and the breakcore wizard bring diametrically opposed instincts and skill sets to an album that strikes an uneasy balance between calm and chaos. | The ambient guitarist and the breakcore wizard bring diametrically opposed instincts and skill sets to an album that strikes an uneasy balance between calm and chaos. | Venetian Snares / Daniel Lanois: Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/venetian-snares-daniel-lanois-venetian-snares-x-daniel-lanois/ | Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois | Despite the fact that pioneering electronic acts are annually left off the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot and few guitarists ever grace the stage at Ultra Music Festival, guitars and electronics aren’t always diametrically opposed. Nile Rodgers’ upstrokes helped Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” achieve ubiquity, and six-strings pop up everywhere from Boards of Canada to Ben Frost; even Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour once took a trip with the Orb. So a mutual appreciation society between producer and pedal-steel conjuror Daniel Lanois and breakcore/modular synth freak Aaron Funk (aka Venetian Snares) isn’t the strangest of pairings, but it’s pretty damned close.
Despite press photos that look like the duo just rode Harleys across the Trans-Canada Highway together, both men operate at distinctly opposite ends of the musical spectrum. Lanois’ pedal steel evoked a gravity-free state on ambient touchstones like Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, while his Grammy-winning production on U2 albums feels both gradual and grandiose. But even at his most restrained (as on 2005’s classically informed Rossz Csillag Alatt Született), Funk’s music is teeming, always wiggling to fill out every available space.
The collab stems from Lanois reaching out as a fan, and in 2014, the two Canadians set about playing together in Lanois’ Toronto studio. Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois makes for a sonic speedball, a breakdance routine in the middle of a kabuki performance, a Kaws skull smack dab in the middle of a Mark Rothko canvas. Given their drastically different approaches to space, the album doesn’t quite balance out as a true collaboration, but as an overlay of their sensibilities, it still provides for some striking moments.
Rather than stake out a middle ground between their two positions, more often than not the album finds Lanois pulled into Venetian Snares’ formidable gravitational field. “Mag11 P82” opens with Lanois laying down bucolic swells and vibrato tones that evoke soaring eagles and mountain vistas. Funk makes a low-key entrance full of satellite pulses and sparse hits before going haywire just over a minute in, building, deconstructing, and reconstructing breaks all around Lanois’ hovering chords. As much space as Lanois can conjure, Funk fills it all in.
The dizzying, nine-minute “United P92” is the headiest track of the set, a free fall through space junk as Funk stretches out his bleeps, snares, and squelches. That addition of a sliver of extra time between each sound is just enough to allow Lanois’ discombobulating ambience to come to the fore. In moments like this, the duo conjures the AI telepathy of Autechre’s recent work, wherein humanly impossible rhythms are melded to melodic yet melancholic undercurrents.
The sparseness of “Bernard Revisit P81” turns downright eerie, with piercing, chilly tones lacerating the seeming calm. Against the furious churn, robot chitchat, and backspins of “Mothors Pressroll P131,” Lanois can barely break through Funk’s Tasmanian Devil din. The late-night lonesomeness cast by Lanois at the start of “Night MXCMPV1 P74” is also soon dispelled by Funk’s ceaseless contortions. Despite the omnipresent intensity of Venetian Snares’ contributions, the collaborative project does offer a kind of panacea for the hectic pace of modern life. Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle. | 2018-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Timesig / Planet Mu | May 5, 2018 | 6.9 | 09388edc-f908-4bd4-8ed7-c98144b2348d | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Athens, Georgia group Pylon were one of the great unsung heroes of '80s post-punk, and Live captures them in December 1983 at the peak of their local popularity. | The Athens, Georgia group Pylon were one of the great unsung heroes of '80s post-punk, and Live captures them in December 1983 at the peak of their local popularity. | Pylon: Pylon Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22125-pylon-live/ | Pylon Live | In the 33 years that have passed since their initial dissolution, the Athens, Georgia post-punk outfit Pylon have become one of the best-remembered forgotten bands, a group that initially survived through namedrops—notably, from their far-more-famous local contemporaries in R.E.M. and the B-52’s—before a late-2000s reissue campaign from DFA Records and cover-song endorsements from Deerhunter more firmly entrenched their place in the canon. While hindsight may position them as the missing link between the caterwauling poetry of Patti Smith and the pin-pricked grooves of PiL, Pylon’s mix of vigor and verbosity has reverberated throughout 21st-century indie rock, informing early-‘00s eccentrics like Life Without Buildings and Love Is All, all the way up to the propulsive polemics of modern-day descendants like Savages and Shopping.
Pylon parlayed some of that renown into sporadic reunions over the ‘90s and 2000s, but their DFA-abetted resurgence was abruptly cut short with the sudden 2009 death of guitarist Randall Bewley from a heart attack. Seven years later, this release—willed into existence by Chunklet publisher/super-fan Henry Owings—belatedly serves to outfit Pylon with a proper tombstone, through the ultimate mode of canonization for rock legends: a double-live album. (The album’s release date of July 25 falls on what would’ve been Bewley’s 61st birthday.)
Contrary to the long tradition of posthumous concert documents—like the Velvet Underground’s Live 1969 or the Stooges’ Metallic K.O.— that showcase unsung bands performing for small or unsympathetic crowds, Live captures Pylon in December 1983 at the peak of their local popularity. From the get-go, the band receives a hero’s welcome from the roaring, boisterous crowd, who had congregated at the Mad Hatter club for the taping of a PBS pilot project called Athens Shows. Sadly, this moment of triumph was also a swan song: citing creative stagnation, Pylon disbanded shortly thereafter, and—coincidentally, but fittingly—the entire TV series was aborted. But for one night at least, Pylon got the close-up they deserved.
At the time, Pylon were touring in support of their sophomore effort, Chomp, which massaged the taut disco-punk dynamic of their 1980 debut, Gyrate, into more playful art-pop. Live draws equally from those two records, but any sonic distinction between them is obliterated in a performance that emphasizes the band’s innate, white-knuckled intensity and sinewy rhythms. It opens with a wheel-greasing version of Gyrate’s “Working Is No Problem,” and Pylon put that maxim into action with an all-business, no-banter set that sees them streamroll through 20 songs in 70 minutes with assembly-line precision: bassist Michael Lachowski and drummer Curtis Crowe lay the foundation, Bewley sculpts it into strange shapes with his surgical guitar lines, and singer Vanessa Briscoe-Hay splatters her mantric messaging on the walls like a spraycan-wielding prophet.
While first-wave punk produced its share of female icons, Briscoe-Hay was lamentably one of the few frontwomen in an American post-hardcore landscape dominated by dudes—so she worked doubly hard to carve out her place within it. A restlessly inventive singer, Briscoe-Hay couched her sardonic, speaking-in-tongues sloganeering (“Everything is! Everything is! Everything is cool!”) in a voice that could slide without warning from disquieting docility to hyperactive hysterics. This robust-but-grainy recording may not be the ideal forum to appreciate those qualities: While you can certainly feel the tonsil-shredding force of Briscoe-Hay’s performance here, the clarity of her words is often obscured by the band’s momentum.
However, as a snapshot of an influential band in their prime, Live is undeniable, and the set serves as an especially effective tribute to Bewley’s crucial contributions. A devout disciple of the Andy Gill school of guitar-scraping, Bewley also infused Pylon’s greyscale post-punk with luminous streaks of color, whether dropping windmill-worthy, open-chord strums atop the authoritative thrust of “Cool,” or blowing open the motorik pop of “No Clocks” with the sort of radiant refrains that Pylon’s one-time tourmates U2 would eventually ride to Red Rocks.
By the time Live reaches its five-song encore stretch, that sort of looseness has infected the band as a whole: Chomp thumper “M-Train”—with its crowd-abetted “woo woo!” hook—emerges as a spiritual precursor to Blur’s “Song 2,” while the shindig-worthy non-album instrumental “Party Zone” shows that Pylon shared more than just a zip code with the B-52’s. And in this marathon set’s dying moments, Pylon summon their last ounce of energy for, of all things, a bastardized version of the Batman theme. It’s an odd note for such a notoriously steely band to go out on, perhaps. But, like Live itself, it’s a reminder that we can all be heroes, if just for one night. | 2016-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Chunklet | July 19, 2016 | 8 | 0939361d-f554-474b-b7f9-39e6910b4b0e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Portland rapper’s buoyant new project sounds like a controlled sugar rush, folding elements of pop and dance into his bright raps. | The Portland rapper’s buoyant new project sounds like a controlled sugar rush, folding elements of pop and dance into his bright raps. | Aminé: TwoPointFive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amine-twopointfive/ | TwoPointFive | Sunniness has always been a part of Aminé’s image. His 2017 breakout hit, the horny summer anthem “Caroline,” was propelled by synths, drums, and cowbells as warm and yellow as the shorts he’s wearing in the song’s music video. Armed with a sense of humor befitting a millennial raised on TRL and Quentin Tarantino movies, the Portland rapper often uses levity and bouncy melodies to keep even his heaviest songs afloat. Take his 2020 sophomore album Limbo, which conspicuously focused on legacy: “If I die, roll out the yellow carpet/if you fuck with me,” Aminé says on the opener, “Burden.” Whether contemplating death or the responsibility of having kids, he can’t help but throw the gauntlet down with at least a smirk.
Considering all this, it’s no surprise that Aminé would follow his most introspective album with a concentrated burst of color like TWOPOINTFIVE. The sequel to 2018’s ONEPOINTFIVE—both of which are snarkily dubbed as “EP/LP/mixtape/album” to prod at the nebulous nature of retail rap projects in 2021—maintains the low stakes of the first while tinkering with the formula that led him to stardom in the late 2010s. If Aminé’s 2017 debut album Good For You was sunny, TWOPOINTFIVE is saccharine enough to cause tooth decay. The beats, primarily handled by producers Lido and longtime collaborator Pasqué, fold elements of pop and dance into Aminé’s bright raps that jolt and jive on the border of chaos. TWOPOINTFIVE sounds like a controlled sugar rush, an experiment as short, sweet, and stretchy as a fun-size piece of Laffy Taffy.
Critics and fans have compared TWOPOINTFIVE to hyperpop, and the project does contain examples of the burgeoning microgenre. Giddy synths and bells zoom and splash on songs like “Colors” and lead single “Charmander,” and there’s plenty of pitch-shifted vocals and offhand pop culture references. The difference is that much of what’s considered hyperpop is jagged and harsh, turning its syrupy sound palette into audible rock candy. For all the compression and chirpiness, TWOPOINTFIVE is too clean, its drum programming deep, smooth, and firmly rooted in contemporary rap. It honors the scene’s energy without fully conforming to its principles and will most likely serve as a gateway to edgier work for curious fans destined to spend hours laughing at Hyperpop Daily posts.
So it isn’t exactly 100 gecs or Glaive, but Aminé still covers a considerable amount of ground in just under a half-hour. The fast and loose nature of the POINTFIVE series—accented by interludes from comedian and returning host Rickey Thompson—lends itself more naturally to the sugary aesthetic on display in TWO than the drab and hollow atmosphere of ONE. Lyrically, he’s focused on sexcapades (“YiPiYaY”), taking care of his people (“Dididumduhduh”), and securing his bag (“Mad Funny Freestyle”). “Colors,” a glimpse into isolation and loneliness, is the exception to the project’s rule. Otherwise, he’s crooning about sipping Casamigos on a boat near George Clooney’s house over the synthetic marching horns of “NEO” and being with women crawling on the floor like NAVY Seals on “Mad Funny Freestyle.” There’s little pressure to focus on the weighty themes of Limbo, and it offers him room to climb through Lido and Pasqué’s elaborate playhouses without restraint.
The POINTFIVE series is ultimately a lark, a series of “creative freedom projects,” as Aminé recently told Billboard. Nevertheless, TWOPOINTFIVE is an improvement on the original. There’s a sense of life and wonder in these songs, with Aminé and his collaborators lightly bouncing against their boundaries like pinballs. It may be slight by design, but TWOPOINTFIVE understands that “low stakes” doesn’t have to mean running in place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | CLBN | November 18, 2021 | 7 | 093c4dbf-795e-4956-bce3-7c625b8730c6 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Featuring the slickest production of any Bright Eyes album to date, Cassadaga is a logical continuation of Conor Oberst's country-rock evolution. | Featuring the slickest production of any Bright Eyes album to date, Cassadaga is a logical continuation of Conor Oberst's country-rock evolution. | Bright Eyes: Cassadaga | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10095-cassadaga/ | Cassadaga | At 27, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst already has enough career behind him to establish a trajectory. His rise has been uncannily similar to writer Dave Eggers': Both came under public scrutiny for self-conscious, ego-driven Artistic Statements-- Eggers with his meta-memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Oberst with his meta-album Fevers and Mirrors. Soon after, both creators shifted focus to more worldly concerns, and have struggled ever since to imbue their work with the empathy and nuance that its often-political leanings demand. Both have heartfelt ambitions that frequently result in Holden Caulfield-like jabs at consumer culture, religion, and U.S. militarism. And both were generally more fun when they were hermetic.
As Oberst's lyrical themes broaden, his music is following suit. Cassadaga, taking its name from a spiritualist camp in Florida where Oberst spent some time, is a logical continuation of his evolution from haunted lo-fi auteur to country-folk traditionalist, and with it comes the slickest production of any Bright Eyes album to date. Oberst, while retaining the feverish quaver that's become his calling card, finds more mannered ways to express emotion here than sliding in and out of key. The arrangements are unapologetically grand, laden with strings, blaring guitar, and mournful pedal steel. Even the record's packaging seems to declare it an event-- the "spectral decoder" included with the disc translates the artwork's squiggly gray lines into all sorts of pictures and text.
The ambitious arrangements strike just the right balance on some songs: The orchestral work on old-fashioned ballad "Make a Plan to Love Me" never overburdens the song's pliant lilt, while the marching strings in the last verse of "Hot Knives", and the organs that eventually sweep in on the barren "No One Would Riot for Less", provide an acute sense of drama. They also allow Oberst to venture beyond his comfy trad-folk niche: Organic hand percussion, electric piano, and vibraphone bring a Middle Eastern influence to "Coat Check Dream Song" without crossing into caricature-- although the droning Arabic chant at the end comes uncomfortably close to the kind of world music-pillaging we've come to dread from our aging rock stars.
Elsewhere, Oberst's arrangements overreach: "Four Winds", with its squealing guitars and fiddles, sounds like a honky-tonk version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", and the otherwise affecting "If the Brakeman Turns My Way" is held back by its overwrought roots-rock chorus. And the smugness latent in some of the arrangements becomes overt in the problematic lyrics, which cast a shadow over even the best-sounding songs. If only that spectral decoder could reveal hidden depth in lines like, "Heard loud and long the river's Om/ Time marching on to a madman's drum."
This balancing act between obscurity and directness is an attribute Bright Eyes fans are used to: "Don't forget what you've learned, all you give is returned/ And if life seems absurd what you need is some laughter," which at least is an attribute Bright Eyes fans have become accustomed to. But the unbearable condescension masquerading as empathy in "Soul Singer in a Session Band" crosses a line: Does having "a lengthy discussion on The Power of Myth with a postmodern author who didn't exist" really make Oberst "just like" the soul singer in a session band?
The political lyrics are the most troublesome. In his earlier efforts, Oberst was always hard on himself-- the problem is that he's adjusted his scope without adjusting his tone, and now he's just as hard on everyone else. In fact, he hardly appears in these songs, and the self-immolating advice he used to dispense ("Don't degrade yourself the way I do") has given way to self-excluding left-wing boilerplate, all sound and no thunder. "Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)", one of several apocalyptically minded songs, gives us "Get your revolution at a lower price"; elsewhere we get banner-wavers like "Little soldier, little insect" and "the madness of the government" that seem to be little more than applause signs. The anti-religion rocker "Four Winds" is particularly egregious, with its cursory references to great Satans, whores of Babylon, and slouching towards Bethlehem.
Political art is necessary given the current world climate, but empty rhetoric and moral superiority aren't going to do the trick. The simplistic, self-righteous thinking that's at the root of today's political impasses is exactly the sort of thinking Oberst engages in here. This is a shame, because on the songs in which Oberst actually casts himself-- the subtle, lovely "Lime Tree", for instance, which is about loneliness and longing and everything he truly understands-- his musical gifts and emotional intelligence come to the fore. If he would address the political through this personal lens, exploring his own complicity in the military-industrial complex he currently lambastes from a false outside perspective, he might arrive at commentary that's more about insight and confrontation than moral flattery. | 2007-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | April 9, 2007 | 6 | 0941dd30-9ee4-4b55-b7a4-df0d5f2490b5 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s album is a celebration of the qualities—intimacy, ambiguity, physicality, release—that lead to dancefloor catharsis. | Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s album is a celebration of the qualities—intimacy, ambiguity, physicality, release—that lead to dancefloor catharsis. | Octo Octa: Resonant Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/octo-octa-resonant-body/ | Resonant Body | “I loathe crowds,” the novelist Edmund White wrote after visiting the Flamingo, one of New York’s first gay discos. “But tonight the drugs and the music and the exhilaration had stripped me of all such scruples. We were packed in so tightly we were forced to slither across each other’s wet bodies and arms; I felt my arm moving like a piston in synchrony against a stranger’s—and I did not pull away. Freed of my shirt and my touchiness, I surrendered myself to the idea that I was just like everyone else.” Dance music promises relief from self-consciousness, even while the class system reified by many clubs inflames it. Resonant Body, the new album by DJ and producer Octo Octa, celebrates moments like that night at the Flamingo—when temporary intimacy coaxes the bashful into gasping emotion.
Octo Octa named her last record Where Are We Going?, a note of ambivalence that echoed through its tracklist: “Adrift,” “No More Pain (Promises to a Younger Self),” “Fleeting Moments of Freedom (Wooo).” Maya Bouldry-Morrison had just come out as a trans woman, and her songs kept circling discursively, as if feeling their way beyond anxiety. Resonant Body sheds any lingering unease, beating in time with the palpitations of euphoria. Lead single “Spin Girl, Let’s Activate!” is a wry joy, looping together get-on-the-floor vocals before teasing the tempo down again. When Bouldry-Morrison introduces piano stabs, the chords race endlessly upwards, growing more ardent each time they return. “Imminent Spirit Arrival” shows off that ear for dynamics: A shouted “go!” cuts through the bass’s lustrous darkness, like some neon sign flickering briefly to life, until she strips everything back to the hi-hats alone. It’s the shiver of recognition amid collective bliss.
Resonant Body finds words for its exuberance in a raucous chorus of vocal samples. The title phrase of “Move Your Body” blares out over and over, refracted into many parallel variations—a banger that works your subconscious. “Can You See Me?” pinballs around between breakbeats, always returning to the same line: “I know exactly how you feel.” The message could be house music’s oath, but by isolating that intensely tender vocal, Bouldry-Morrison deepens its ambiguities. Resonant Body celebrates 1990s rave anthems with a bittersweet sense of vanished time—the party ended long ago, the dancers shut their eyes against daylight, but balloons still float around the room on inherited breath.
That spiralling ecstasy gets relieved by a late interlude, “My Body Is Powerful,” which calls back to the earlier, more introspective Octo Octa. Its sound world of trilling birds and ambient tones feels both haunting and comforting, an ecosystem recreated from memory. As distant chimes broke the tranquility, I thought of a passage in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell, when the shyly dorky narrator goes clubbing for the first time: “The music possessed him, he lived it with his whole body, but his ear had become so spacious and analytic that he could hear quite distinctly the hubbub of everyone talking, like the booming whisper of tourists in a cathedral.”
At the end of Resonant Body, every lone voice merges into a loud multitude. One short snippet in “Power to the People” comes from a 1980s ACT-UP rally, but otherwise the protest marchers that Bouldry-Morrison samples chant inaudible words. Letting them drown each other out, she captures that moment when individuals become the masses, a divinely ordinary transfiguration; you can even hear an organ playing. Solidarity is the work of relating to strangers, understanding people who might have nothing in common besides a shared cause. Until it finds a sympathetic form to resonate against, music is only noise. | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | T4T LUV NRG | September 11, 2019 | 7.8 | 09436960-db5b-4d07-9802-cdf1081202e2 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
The classically trained 19-year-old musician stands out less for her bars than for intricate melodies and lush soundscapes that push the boundaries of popular rap and R&B. | The classically trained 19-year-old musician stands out less for her bars than for intricate melodies and lush soundscapes that push the boundaries of popular rap and R&B. | Hawa: the One EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hawa-the-one-ep/ | the One EP | There’s a moment in Hawa’s first music video, released in October 2018, when she pushes back the long sleeve of a baggy red tee to reveal her boney, brown wrist. “See these rocks on my wrist, yeah they real son,” she sing-raps in an accent that’s a melange of the Guinean, French, German, and American voices she’s heard growing up around the world. The thing about her wrist, though, is that it’s bare. She boasts about keeping $50 million in the safe and “a chopper tucked” in her waistband, but there’s no sign of wealth or a weapon. There’s just a rascally teenager having a good time.
Now 19 years old and based in New York City, Hawa is releasing her debut EP, the One, with b4, an imprint of the venerable indie label 4AD. She’s still flexing, but across the eight-song collection, her boasts feel less real than her preoccupation with romance and lust. Her bars, swaggy but often unsurprising, aren’t what’s most impressive. Instead, it’s her commitment to escaping the trappings of popular rap and R&B with intricate melodies and lush soundscapes, helmed by producer Tony Seltzer and a small, eclectic group of beatmakers.
In the fifth grade, Hawa intercepted a letter to her parents she feared was filled with bad news about her behavior. Instead, it was an invitation to join a New York Philharmonic composition program for children. She enrolled, and she excelled. By 15, ensembles in China and Venezuela were performing her pieces. Perhaps this is why Hawa’s low yet airy voice sounds made to be manipulated—to be pitched up, brought down, layered and harmonized. The One proves she’s a composer first and a songwriter second; lyrics about love and bad bitches eventually begin to feel repetitive.
But Hawa’s melodies are so strong and so smooth that it’s easy for boring lines like, “I’m making her wet, wet like a sink” to go uninterrogated. The One sounds thoughtful and unified, a series of tiny worlds within the same universe of delicate keys, billowing synths, and subtle 808s. Producer Cadenza leans into his bashment and dancehall expertise on the sultry “My Love,” building record scratches, twinkles, and chimes into a tropical playground. Producer Carlos Truly, who plays guitar and synthesizer in the indie band Ava Luna, uses both with groove and restraint on the EP’s dreamy “Outro.”
Hawa has predecessors in style and subject matter: When she makes threats, her droney sing-rapping calls to mind Dej Loaf. Her simple rhymes about loving women echo Kodie Shane’s Young HeartThrob. When she murmurs lines like, “She in love, but I just pretend,” her caddish tendencies resemble those of Brent Faiyaz. Yet, the One feels new because Hawa approaches these moments from different angles. It’s both tender and bold, both atmospheric and focused. Hawa’s classical training gives her a unique perspective on these contrasting elements, and her natural musical acuity allows her to navigate them with uncommon grace. | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | b4 | March 13, 2020 | 7.3 | 0944d6b3-469a-49ba-9c7a-ec288aa31296 | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
We learned the first and second laws of thermodynamics in my 7th period physics\n\ class junior year. The first ... | We learned the first and second laws of thermodynamics in my 7th period physics\n\ class junior year. The first ... | Loscil: Triple Point | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4866-triple-point/ | Triple Point | We learned the first and second laws of thermodynamics in my 7th period physics class junior year. The first law of thermodynamics states that, in a closed system, the total energy, including heat, is conserved. The second law states that heat flows spontaneously from a hot body to a cool one, that one cannot convert heat completely into useful work, and that every isolated system becomes disorder with time. I stopped doodling long enough to copy these laws into a free corner of my notebook. 8th and 9th period ruminations didn't make the second law any more comfortable, so I went home and cried. Really.
Loscil is both the basic unit that Csound software uses to build a sampling synthesizer, and the pseudonym that Canadian sound designer Scott Morgan performs and records under when he's not drumming for Dan Bejar's Destroyer. I can only assume that Morgan, who has been active in the Vancouver music and new-media scene for some time, has put more than a few loscils to use; possibly even some loscil3's, which use fancy cubic interpolation schemes.
Triple Point, Loscil's debut record was titled for the point when the vapor, liquid, and solid phases of a material are all in equilibrium. And as it so happens, it's an ambient dub concept album about thermodynamics, created with samplers, synths, and a Powerbook. Sure, the idea has some potential, since the dark promise of thermodynamics' second law can bolster nihilism and elicit a very strong emotional response from humans, but the odds aren't on the side of success. After all, most people don't know much-- if anything-- about thermodynamics, and this combination can quickly equal bad art. Bard College might give 2\xBD credits for interpretive dances inspired by "Fuel Exergy," but that doesn't mean you want to listen to its audio counterpart on the way to work in the morning.
Triple Point begins where the periodic table does: the opening track is titled "Hydrogen." The song starts with a muted beat under a looped two-note synth melody, and then neatly adds elements to this base one at a time. It sounds more like Bergheim 34 at half-speed or Aphex Twin than any primary component of the universe to me, but somehow, the music seems like it might be anticipating something.
It anticipates more of the same. The second track, "Ampere," begins with the exact same formula as "Hydrogen." The drum machine starts with what sounds like a heart beating to a mutant rhythm, while the synthtone keeps the pacing of a respirator. While I wait for more sounds I hit the dictionary. "An 'Ampere' is equal to a constant current which when maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length and negligible circular sections..." I notice a three-note melody of synth cello and a dance beat have been introduced. The last element to enter the song is clanking, irregular percussion. For the first time so far on Triple Point, the metallic beat sounds like something that might have been played by a human instead of processed by a sequencer. And though the sound is flatter and more contained than live drums, the excessively sterile quality of the rest of the record seems heightened when it drops out.
The next song, "Pressure," is actually an IDM cover of that ridiculous Billy Joel number. Oh! That was just my imagination! It's actually just spacy music that might lead one's mind to wander. "Pressure" is sparse, and filled with "pssst" noises that leak out with every long slow synth tone. At this point in the record, it becomes clear that Triple Point is less a musical interpretation of thermodynamics-- or a response to the implications of thermodynamics that some might find sad or frightening-- and more a recording of what these processes might sound like if they were closely miked. Morgan's digital dubs add detail to loops as they build throughout the songs, thus creating the impression of "listening in closer" to hear small bubbles popping and delicate echoes pulsating.
"Vapour" is Triple Point's haunted house. A sharp intake of air trails each programmed gong tone. The low ring shifts pitch as swarms of sound swing in and out. A ping-pong ball bounces once and then dribbles off. If the song was longer, the looped ping-pong ball would quickly become the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture. It brings to mind the work of electro-acoustic tape artist Francis Dhomont, who used samples like balls, chains, and gears almost cinematically to create spaces. While Loscil's work is based in rhythm and meditation unlike Dhomont's free compositions, the dampened beat and sterile synths he repeatedly uses on Triple Point could use some of Dhomont's creaks, cranks and flutters.
The concepts of thermodynamics are difficult to express in writing, music or art. Entropy and heat death are famous for being misused in tacky metaphors to explain chaotic social dynamics, atonal music, and relationships in need of therapy. Thomas Pynchon gave it a shot in his early story, "Entropy," but now is very critical of the piece. He's since written that the concept was so forced that the characters themselves were shortchanged. His advice to others is, "Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page." Triple Point might be inspired by thermodynamics, but Loscil's attempts to communicate these ideas through sound are forced. Sure, the placement and timing of the samples is finessed-- Morgan has a clear talent for arranging sound-- but after ten tracks, the muted beats and droning synths just sound dead. But then again, the "triple point" of a material marks a moment of stasis. So that might all be part of his plan. | 2001-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2001-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | October 15, 2001 | 6.9 | 09467766-9eb2-4319-aa1f-43f32cec55bc | Pitchfork | null |
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On her beguiling debut release, the UK musician joins the atmosphere of ambient music with the structure of choral composition and the seeming effortlessness of pop. | On her beguiling debut release, the UK musician joins the atmosphere of ambient music with the structure of choral composition and the seeming effortlessness of pop. | Lucy Gooch: Rushing EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-gooch-rushing-ep/ | Rushing EP | Reverb can be like a drug. It’s easy to overdo it, easy to become dependent upon it. Everything becomes beautiful inside its velvet cocoon; everything feels profound. A few years ago, there was a brief trend for remixes that electronically “stretched” songs into gaseous abstractions many times longer than the original versions, freezing them in a seemingly endless shimmer. The output invariably sounded substantial, no matter how lightweight the source material: A reworking of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” turned the 16-year-old pop star into a “celestial choirboy.” But what sounded like magic was really just simple number-crunching. The technique involved digitally pulverizing an audio file and sustaining each grain of sound in cathedral-grade reverb, like so many dust motes floating in mid-air. The ease with which this simulacrum of grandeur could be attained demonstrates how easily artifice can become a gimmick, a cheap high.
But newcomer Lucy Gooch belongs to a select list of musicians (Juliana Barwick, Grouper, Mary Lattimore) putting reverb to more artful ends—not simply painting on a veneer of readymade emotion, but using the technique to suggest a dimension beyond our ken. Rushing is the Bristol, UK musician’s debut release, and its five tracks are evidence of an unusually developed aesthetic vision, one that joins the atmospheric quality of ambient music with the structure of choral composition and the seeming effortlessness of pop.
Gooch’s music sounds simple on the surface but teems with complexity underneath. “My Lights Kiss Your Thoughts Every Moment,” which opens the record, begins with airy sounds: the glimmer of what might be church bells, the echo of her voice wafting up to the arches of the nave. Below, a seismic synthesized bass tone rumbles the earth beneath our feet. In between those two poles shimmers a world of echo, masking the sources of her sounds. Turn it up loud enough and mercurial details flash out, like what might be the scrape of electric-guitar strings—part of the arrangement or just a trick of the mixdown? Who’s to say?
The song’s lyrics are drawn from the poems of Rabindranath Tagore: “I have kissed this world/With my eyes and limbs/My life when young was like a flower/That loosens a petal or two/They flock around him like bees.” Gooch’s soft, clear voice is trailed by ghosts of itself; the music is rich with color and alive with movement, as layers of wordless singing swarm around her in slow motion. The feeling of weightless rapture recalls A Feather on the Breath of God, a classic recording of choral work by the 12th century Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen.
“Sun,” darker and heavier, is reminiscent of gloomy This Mortal Coil songs like “Waves Become Wings.” Once again, a sustained clanging sound hints at church bells in the distance; Gooch sings ominously of a disappearing sun, of arid fields, her voice turned thick and close, as though bouncing off the walls of a dry well: “All the water’s gone to drain.” She returns to the idea of water on “Stalagmites & Helictites,” whose title invokes surreal, biomorphic-looking cave formations formed by dripping water. Sonically, it’s the record’s simplest cut, just a series of stair-stepping vocal harmonies that fade into lengthy shadows, but it may also indicate a well-developed sense of self-awareness, if not outright irony: a song about caverns that sounds like it was actually recorded in one.
The song that might be the record’s best actually downplays Gooch’s favored effect. In “Rushing,” her close-harmonized vocal loops spin in place while she solos on top of them; buzzing organ tones lend a liturgical atmosphere, but this time her voice is dry and untreated, almost as if she were in the same room as you. The lyrics are psalms taken from the Old Testament and rearranged into song form: “In his hands are the depth of the earth/And unfailing love/Do you know how the clouds hang poised?/The skies proclaim the work of his hands.” The subject matter hints at vastness, but Gooch’s songwriting is marked by its ease and intimacy; the arrangement is fleet of foot in a way that feels closer to pop music than ambient bombast. There’s always the risk of overreaching when trying to capture this kind of boundless yearning. But with “Rushing,” Gooch breaks off a small piece of the sublime and cups it in her hands. | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Past Inside the Present | March 5, 2020 | 7.5 | 094a49fa-bf84-4739-bb04-4adeac081e76 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Plowing Into the Field of Love finds Iceage growing up on their own terms. Here, they make a radical shift away from their hack-and-slash past and towards what is, for them, unexplored territory—morose piano balladeering, sprightly country-rock figures, distinctly Irish-sounding drinking anthems. | Plowing Into the Field of Love finds Iceage growing up on their own terms. Here, they make a radical shift away from their hack-and-slash past and towards what is, for them, unexplored territory—morose piano balladeering, sprightly country-rock figures, distinctly Irish-sounding drinking anthems. | Iceage: Plowing Into the Field of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19806-iceage-plowing-into-the-field-of-love/ | Plowing Into the Field of Love | "All those brash young studs/ They have no idea what it’s like up here," Danish punk Elias Bender Rønnenfelt moans over a rolling midtempo drag on the title track to Iceage’s brilliant third album, Plowing Into the Field of Love. The line first scans as a refined upgrade of the band’s usual alienation—a dark basement swapped for an ivory tower. But it also has the same sardonic self-awareness that coats the instantly iconic video for Plowing’s first single, "The Lord’s Favorite", which featured the really, really, really ridiculously good-looking Rønnenfelt and his youthful comrades smearing lipstick on themselves, taking champagne baths, and enjoying cocktails with (d)ice in their glasses. "Part of me wants to hurt you/ Tear in your hair/ But I don’t do that now," the singer admits, staring into the camera and lighting a cigarette as the band takes on tricky cowpunk shapes underneath his voice; it is, at the least, a unique approach to acknowledging newfound maturity.
Indeed, Plowing Into the Field of Love finds Iceage growing up on their own terms. Up to this point, they’ve developed incrementally, taking a knife to the rough-around-the-edges teenage fury of the 2011 debut LP New Brigade and cutting fresh, sharp ribbons of flesh on last year’s refined sophomore effort You’re Nothing. Essentially a bolder, somewhat brighter update of what came before, You’re Nothing contained few hints of the baroque terrain that Iceage are traversing now. But the dense lockstep drone that closed out that record’s "Morals" suggested that Iceage could slow things down without losing their dead-eyed sense of passion.
On Plowing, Iceage make a radical shift away from their hack-and-slash past and towards what is, for them, unexplored territory—morose piano balladeering, sprightly country-rock figures, distinctly Irish-sounding drinking anthems. Their journey mirrors the transformation that the punks of the '80s underwent when devising the perfect alchemy of hardcore’s youthful burn and Americana’s weary shuffle (see Mekons, X, Meat Puppets). So Iceage aren’t exploring new sounds on Plowing, culturally speaking, but nothing they’ve done in the past five years suggested that they were capable of such a transformation. Despite the new approach, Iceage still sound like themselves, so when Asger Valentin’s mournful trumpet cuts through the rolling stomp of "Glassy Eyed, Dormant and Veiled", the most surprising thing about the instrument isn’t its mere presence, but how at-home it sounds amidst the band’s newly considered arrangements.
A sense of steadiness, a measured approach to abandon, marks Iceage’s transformation from a very good band to a Great Band on Plowing. While New Brigade contained bursts of unexpected melodic sweetness, the gruesome You’re Nothing often sounded like it was held together with little more than congealed blood and matted hair. On Plowing, the band swings to the opposite pole, sounding threateningly tight even when walking the edge of full collapse, similar to '80s-era Sonic Youth’s balance of control and dissonance. Dark piano chords serve as an anchor for "How Many"'s buzzsaw guitars, embracing a half-time tempo change at the song’s midsection that crashes through the burning scenery; "Cimmerian Shade" kicks off with a hollow pound courtesy of drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen, accented by guitars both brawny and thin-sounding that abrasively scrape against each other.
Album centerpiece "Stay" somewhat hilariously opens as a waltz in 3/4 time, speeding up uncontrollably at the command of Rønnenfelt’s most operative, visually arresting lyrical aside on Plowing ("Hands/ Become thundering hooves") before building to a furious burn that stands as Iceage’s finest moment of feral aggression. Plowing’s strangest moment, then, comes in the form of its most straightforward tune: "Abundant Living", the record’s only sub-three-minute song that one could reasonably listen to while skipping down a sidewalk. Jakob Tvilling Pless wields a jaunty mandolin figure over the band’s besotted sway, which takes on a Gaelic punk resemblance as Rønnenfelt promises in a miserable cadence, "I’ll bring it all down here with me/ Soaked in alcohol."
Rønnenfelt’s lyrics are front and center throughout Plowing—partially a result of his improved English, as he told Pitchfork recently—and they paint the type of self-portrait you’d expect from a punkish youth in his twenties: fatalistic, ferociously inquisitive, drunk on the promise of tomorrow and even drunker on whatever’s flowing from the tap at this very moment. Images of absent fathers, prison cells, and drowning are evoked, and the album’s parting line—"I am plowing into the field of love/ They will place me in a hearse"—reads as poetically grim as the limited perspective of youth allows. "I have a sense of utopia/ Of what I truly ought to do," Rønnenfelt proclaims in the middle of "How Many", and that sense of gritted-teeth naïveté comes to define Plowing Into the Field of Love as a whole. This is the sound of Iceage finding a balance between getting older and seeking immortality by way of leaping into an abandoned-lot fire head-first. It’s beautiful and ugly at the same time and, for now, Iceage have found their own unstable sense of peace. | 2014-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 9, 2014 | 8.5 | 094c0b0d-daa2-432c-8322-00d7b7a6b057 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The 20th anniversary remaster of Smith's final solo album before his major label debut highlights its inimitable sound and style: a magical, alchemical mix of intimacy and bombast. | The 20th anniversary remaster of Smith's final solo album before his major label debut highlights its inimitable sound and style: a magical, alchemical mix of intimacy and bombast. | Elliott Smith: Either/Or: Expanded Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22947-eitheror-expanded-edition/ | Either/Or: Expanded Edition | About two minutes into Either/Or opener “Speed Trials,” Elliott Smith’s seamlessly double-tracked lead vocal splits into a two-part harmony. It’s a very subtle gesture, and only lasts for a few seconds—but contrasted with the tight, hushed unison of Smith’s prior solo output, it feels as dramatic as The Wizard of Oz shifting from sepia to technicolor. This moment plays out like a microcosm of Either/Or at large, the sound of Smith conjuring something far bigger than himself and coming into his own as a songwriter, arranger, and performer. The final album in Smith’s catalog before the major label-backed XO and Figure 8, Either/Or marks the last time Smith’s instincts would outpace the studio resources to execute them. It's extraordinary how he embodies a magical, alchemical mix of intimacy and bombast.
By the time Either/Or was released in 1997, Smith was no stranger to the cynical machinations of the post-grunge major label gold rush. A year prior, his former band Heatmiser had been put through that very ringer, an experience captured in Either/Or standouts “Pictures of Me” and “Angeles.” Either/Or sounds like the work of somebody who has zero interest in either conforming to or directly transgressing the “commercial” sounds of the day. It’s too ambitious to read as “lo-fi” and too gritty to read as straightforward pop classicism. Thankfully, this 20th anniversary remaster doesn't smooth out too many of those rough edges—if anything, it brings the unique sound of the record into even clearer focus.
The sounds and words of Either/Or often conjure very specific images, textures, and situations. And yet, Smith—as with many truly great songwriters—used this specificity as a way to explore emotional themes that resonate both deeply and broadly. Nowhere is this clearer than “Between the Bars,” the closest thing to a modern-day standard Smith ever wrote and covered by everyone from Metric to Madonna. It’s not a love song, exactly, and it’s not a song about addiction, exactly. “Between the Bars” is about the ways in which protecting somebody you love turns into the need to control that person. The fact that Smith was able to build this much emotional complexity into a song that sounds at home in a stadium or at a Starbucks speaks to his irreplaceable gift as a songwriter.
Elsewhere, Smith amplifies his well-honed songwriting chops with more fleshed-out arrangements. “Ballad of Big Nothing” propels itself forward with bubbly McCartney-esque bass lines and background vocals that sound like they might have been string arrangements if there were an orchestra handy. “Angeles” and “Cupid’s Trick” provide a back-to-back study in Smith’s versatility as a guitarist, going from intricate fingerpicked pattern to lopey electric riffs. By the time album closer “Say Yes” rolls around, it’s clear that the solo acoustic approach is a specific and purposeful choice, and no longer Smith’s default mode.
This reissue is framed as an “expanded” edition, and the bonus materials included fit the bill nicely. Rather than aiming for comprehensiveness or definitiveness, the bonus tracks provide interesting glimpses into Smith’s growing strength as a live solo performer (some excellent live recordings of album and non-album cuts), sense of humor (a sketch of New Moon track “New Monkey” that sounds like it was played on a baseball organ), and where he would go with his next record (a formative version of XO cut “Bottle Up and Explode!” that shows just how much thoughtful editing and revision went into the final version). And then there’s “I Figured You Out,” a longtime fan favorite that Smith gave to his friend Mary Lou Lord to record because it “sounds like the fuckin’ Eagles.” “I Figured You Out” would have been the most straightforward and polished song on Either/Or, and its omission speaks volumes about how determined Smith was to find his own voice and chart his own path.
In the years that followed the release of Either/Or, Smith managed to do just that, performing “Miss Misery” at the Academy Awards and releasing an uncompromising major label debut. For some of his fans, Either/Or marked the end of Smith’s career as a direct and intimate folk singer-songwriter. For others, Either/Or marked the beginning of Smith’s career as a one-man classic pop band. In truth, Either/Or marks the one moment in Smith’s career when he was truly both. | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | March 7, 2017 | 10 | 095181e0-a998-4aec-b6f1-fa40214d7ee4 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Sometimes I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, appears as ever-changing ... | Sometimes I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, appears as ever-changing ... | M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5006-dead-cities-red-seas-lost-ghosts/ | Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts | Sometimes I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, appears as ever-changing green fluctuations stretched over an infinite black void. The power of music to seemingly construct, alter and distort space can be staggering. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the second album from French electronic duo M83, nicely epitomizes this: The sound is absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys. For fifty-seven glorious minutes, its impossibly intricate tapestry of buzzing techno synthesizers, distorted electric guitars, cheesy drum machines, and subdued vocals generate a sense of bodily movement through a landscape of beauty, disappointment, glory, and decrepitude. Dead Cities not only envelops you, but also affords you room to explore its vast expanse.
One remarkable attribute of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is how vastly M83's sound palette differs from the ones most often used to create music possessing this much beauty and depth. Countless musicians have humanized electronic sounds by generating tones that feel warm or organic, but M83 have undertaken a different challenge: to convey beauty through the familiar, filtered buzz of the kind of cheap synthesizers usually found in techno and dance tracks. Paradoxically, the sounds that have constituted some of the most vapid, hedonistic, and forgettable music of our time have now returned to make us cry.
M83 open Dead Cities with one of their most striking misappropriations of trite instrumentation. In "Birds", a tinny sample of chirping birds is combined with swells of synth strings and a computerized voice repeating, "Sun is shining, birds are singing, flowers are growing, clouds are looming and I am flying." The computerized voice is run through an odd, wavering melodic filter that affords it just the right degree of harmonic dissonance with the accompanying synths, and it takes on a decidedly unsettling feel, repeating its mantra-like invocation of the unsteady world you're about to enter.
Once inside, you're exposed to a landscape of seemingly infinite depth and complexity. Rather than just ending, sounds and songs disappear off into the horizon, continually bringing a promise of something familiar but unforeseen to follow. "Unrecorded", the first full-fledged song on Dead Cities, makes clear the reason M83 have drawn so many My Bloody Valentine comparisons. Building upon a foundation of fuzzed-out guitar, rich bass, synth strings, and a drum machine that sounds surprisingly like the acoustic drums of Loveless, the duo layers burbling techno synthesizers into complex rhythmic intersections as the song's vast backdrop slowly fades away. Just as My Bloody Valentine refashioned distorted electric guitars as instruments capable of divine and volatile sound, M83 recast harsh sawtooth waves as voices of reflection and regret. On "Run into Flowers", almost-real strings and whispered vocals are juxtaposed with overdriven drum machine clicks, as an insistent 4/4 beat evokes lush, green fields as easily as abandoned factories and polluted rivers.
This kind of contrast factors heavily into "In Church", as a clear pipe organ and an angelic, reverb-laden chorus are assaulted by blasts of white noise. Finally, a wrenching, synthesized melody enters, providing a profoundly moving counterpoint to the sterile beauty that preceded it. By the time you get to "0078h", it's impossible to tell whether the heavily altered vocals are of human or computerized origin; it's also completely ceased to matter. Oftentimes, the most organic sounds on Dead Cities are the most formless, and the most glaringly synthetic sounds the most emotional.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts ends fittingly with the 14-minute epic "Beauties Can Die", which recalls at first the melodic, pastoral electronica of Múm's Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK. This peaceful opening is soon overtaken by a sound that gradually transforms from a low, earthquake-like rumble into a blast of synthesized static. Synthesizers and harmony vocals are layered and layered until the sound is so explosively, beautifully gigantic that you won't mind it's damaging your hearing. More earthquake rumbles follow, each ushering in even more layers of ungodly gorgeous sound and evoking a stomach-turning combination of fear and excitement. At the crash of a synthesized cymbal, the song descends into submerged ambience, and ultimately into a long silence, before resurfacing with distorted radar blips and shrieks of howling noise.
As "Beauties Can Die" fades, you're left with the feeling that you've just returned from a journey-- that the images passing through your mind for the last hour couldn't possibly have been the result of mere imagination. An album like this extends far beyond your speakers, guiding you through an impossibly rich, detailed world of sound while also giving you room to explore it yourself; you don't listen to Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, you inhabit it. | 2003-05-12T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-05-12T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Gooom | May 12, 2003 | 9.2 | 09521529-65cf-4934-aadf-789d5a27d702 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
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