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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 oddball rock maverick’s final studio album, a MIDI-powered vision of the uncanny and bizarre future of music. | 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 oddball rock maverick’s final studio album, a MIDI-powered vision of the uncanny and bizarre future of music. | Frank Zappa: Jazz From Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frank-zappa-jazz-from-hell/ | Jazz From Hell | Imagine the dismay on Frank Zappa’s face when he concluded that not even the London Symphony Orchestra could help him realize his dreams of being a classical composer. With an entire philharmonic at his disposal, their three-day recording session in early 1983 was a complete mess. Members of the orchestra were skeptical of Zappa’s work, the sessions ran short on time, and the resulting albums, London Symphony Orchestra Vols. I & II, required laborious editing to correct all of the ensemble’s out-of-tune mistakes. After years of smashing his head against the wall trying to corral flakey rock musicians into pulling off his sky-high musical ambitions, the classical world turned out to be the biggest joke of all.
Though employing the LSO might come off as needlessly opulent for most rock musicians, for Zappa it was a logical next step. Growing up in suburban Southern California, he had begun notating sheet music at 14, obsessing over Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky records and forcing his friends to listen to them after school to test whether they got it or not. Varèse in particular enthralled a young Zappa, both in the French composer’s unbounded embrace of new electronics and the way he deconstructed his rhythms to question the very nature of what constitutes music. He embodied everything hilarious and futuristic that Zappa wanted to achieve.
Of course, for an aspiring young musician, forming a rock band in your friend’s garage is a lot easier than assembling a chamber orchestra. But as Zappa climbed through the ranks of L.A.’s fried, shaggy underground scene in the ’60s and ’70s alongside his Mothers of Invention, he never shook off the habit of handling his band as if he were a conductor. Lined with twinkling marimbas and woodwinds, his albums were feats of studio wizardry that constantly seemed as if they were ripping apart at the seams. Whether he was stitching together tape collages on surreal opuses like 1969’s Uncle Meat, giving the prog bands a run for their money with the ornate rock symphonies of 1970’s Burnt Weeny Sandwich, or stirring together jazz fusion with big band arrangements on Hot Rats, he continually found ways to incorporate new, popular sounds while never fitting neatly into one box.
The only thing that could outpace Zappa’s pen was his desire to blow raspberries at the hypocrisies of American culture, and in his classically Californian way, Zappa always let his own need for personal expression steer the ship. His juvenile sense of humor wasn’t for everyone—even if he saw his greatest commercial successes when he put it front and center on albums like Apostrophe (’) and Over-Nite Sensation—and his jokes often teetered between harmlessly eccentric and tastelessly bitter. He used his songs to make a stand against the mass-produced counterculture of the day, and to call out what he saw as corporate-approved rebellion being packaged and sold to the brainwashed masses. He came off as a crank, but for every cynical loogie spat at hippies, L.A. scenesters, and anybody else he deemed phony, there was a guitar solo so rippling with feeling that it was impossible to deny his freewheeling spirit.
By the ’80s, however, Zappa had majorly cleaned up his image, trimming his mane and donning suits to go to battle against the censorship hawks in the PMRC and secure late-night spots lambasting Ronald Reagan on Crossfire. Though his eloquence in interviews made him a trustworthy advocate against conservatism in music, artistically he had found himself at a crossroads. After his scathing suburban screed “Valley Girl” shockingly became his biggest radio hit ever (and ironically helped to popularize the very stereotype it lampooned), Zappa responded by plunging deeper than ever before into classical music, as if to cement his identity as a real-deal composer lest his reputation forever be that of a mere novelty act. Thus the London Symphony Orchestra fiasco, whose two ensuing albums hardly lived up to Zappa’s high standards. He found slightly more luck with smaller ensemble performances, but with little commercial recognition, Zappa’s composerly prospects seemed dimmer than ever—until he got his hands on a Synclavier.
One of the first MIDI composition tools, the Synclavier was a breakthrough in studio synthesis that allowed users to sample sounds, create them digitally, and edit their compositions endlessly via a computer interface. It was a bulky, prohibitively expensive piece of equipment—mostly reserved for high-end studios—that nevertheless paved the way for the DAWs of today. As state-of-the-art as it once was, its dinky textures might now seem laughably primitive in all their rubbery simplicity (just listen to the first 10 seconds of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”; that cartoonish clang is how the Synclavier reproduces the sound of a gong).
Luckily for Zappa, laughter at his music was never anything to be ashamed of, and with the Synclavier he had finally found a way to wield a pocket symphony capable of creating songs he believed no human performer could ever replicate in a thousand hours of rehearsal time. (In interviews he proclaimed that if he’d had a Synclavier as a teenager, he never would’ve bothered starting a rock band.) “Right now we have a president from hell, and a National Security Council from hell,” he explained in a promotional video for his new album on which he’d showcase everything he could do with the new instrument. “So we should have Jazz From Hell, also.”
Compared to the warm analog Moogs and ARPs that dominated popular electronic music in the ’70s, Zappa’s MIDI tones on Jazz From Hell exist in a disembodied negative space. Live sampled instruments emerge from silence only to instantly vanish again, their tactile tone adding to the overall uncanniness. While some critics deemed this digital sound too cold and lifeless, the album’s half-rendered hooks and keyboard-locked rhythms now seem shockingly ahead of their time, predating much of the experimental electronic music that would come to define the 2010s. In its playful plasticity, Jazz From Hell prefigures the chintzy ideas of Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Fire-Toolz, and even 100 gecs.
Throughout Jazz From Hell, Zappa becomes the brain-scrambling maestro he always wanted to be, calling back to the lush, snaking melodies of earlier instrumentals like “King Kong” and “Peaches en Regalia.” The album’s time signatures shift so rapidly that anything resembling a downbeat tends to catch you off guard. But that disorientation is precisely the point; “What are the physical limits of what a listener can comprehend in terms of rhythm?” he asked Sound on Sound in 1987, explaining how his songwriting process usually revolved around testing music theory concepts to see how far he could push them. “How big is the ‘data universe’ that people can take in and still perceive it as a musical composition?”
For all its complexity, Jazz From Hell is hardly a serious listen—it squiggles and dashes about like stock music that’s broken out of its cage, begging to find new ways to be played with. “Night School” launches the album with a pep rally whose bassline bounces as enthusiastically as workout music on the Wii Sports island. The song shares a name with an absurdist political talk show Zappa had been pitching around that time, and its punchy synths could easily make for a twisted version of a newsdesk’s “this just in!” theme.
Mischievous as it might be, there’s a surprising softness to Zappa’s songwriting that hints at the whimsical soul hiding underneath; you can hear it in the delightful keyboard that cruises up and down “Night School” before ending in a scattering of digitized pixie dust, and especially on the album’s central knockout “While You Were Art II.” As the track tumbles about in a cyclone of desktop tones, Zappa refuses to let any instrument settle into one place for even a second, yet amid the chaos its flutes and strings betray an almost sweet sense of curiosity. After a midsection that slows down to take a breath, the song roars back with a smorgasbord of ersatz slap bass and marimbas, swerving through a wondrous display of freeform silliness.
Save for the joyous “G-Spot Tornado,” the remainder of the album is more atonal, allowing Zappa to push his compositions into truly bizarre realms. On “The Beltway Bandits,” he slinks through a sinister jungle nightmare, while “Massaggio Galore” mutates vocal samples of Zappa and his children into something that sounds like a death metal band playing the Seinfeld theme. The title track represents some of the most esoteric music Zappa ever wrote, which is really saying something.
Jazz From Hell certainly doesn’t offer much to challenge the critics who accused Zappa of being too stiff. Committed though he may have been to expanding the possibilities of rock percussion, grooves were never really his thing. But he was overflowing with melody, and his love of live improvisation served to counterbalance all his tightly wound compositions. “St. Etienne,” the lone guitar track on Jazz From Hell, embodies this dichotomy: Taken from a concert recording of “Drowning Witch” from several years earlier, it floats in a jazzy, gaseous haze, clearing room for Zappa to fire off one fluttering lead after another. It encapsulates his approach to the guitar—virtuosic yet messy, a wild scribbler trying to make sense of his oceanic toolbox. In the song’s final minute, Zappa’s fingers begin to swirl around the upper neck of the guitar, blurring together into a golden shimmer of notes. In moments like these, you can see Zappa’s shroud of mockery dissipating away to let his fountainous ideas erupt forth all at once.
Against all odds, Jazz From Hell earned Zappa his first Grammy. Zappa responded by going on TV to question whether any of the voters had actually heard it. His congressional battles with Tipper Gore over censorship couldn’t prevent the album from being slapped with a Parental Advisory sticker in certain stores, though the music was entirely instrumental (the title of “G-Spot Tornado” turned some record store owners’ heads). In the following years he continued to work with the Synclavier, completing an entire other concept album that contained some of the darkest and most challenging music of his career. And he finally found an ensemble capable of bringing his classical compositions to life: The Yellow Shark, released in 1993, captured a concert by Zappa and the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern, in which Zappa conducted a program of selections from throughout his career with a group that respected and understood his craft. They even proved him wrong about humans being incapable of performing his Synclavier songs, closing out the setlist with a nimble performance of “G-Spot Tornado.”
A month after the release of The Yellow Shark, Zappa died from prostate cancer. Jazz From Hell was the last studio album he released in his lifetime, and in many ways, it is the culmination of his career: purposefully confrontational, proudly ridiculous, a winking ploy to force listeners to question their own boundaries and tastes. He had always been a composer trapped in the body of a rock star, and like the avant-gardists who inspired him, he didn’t always make music for regular rotation—his work lives just as much in the mind, assembling jungle gyms of logic, tugging at the limits of what constitutes rock, classical, comedy, sincerity, intelligence, stupidity. In diving headfirst into a new world of elastic artificial sound, Zappa found his calling, a concerto so willfully harebrained you can’t help but crack a grin. | 2023-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Barking Pumpkin | November 19, 2023 | 8 | b40f9011-68aa-4397-ad2a-68fba87d44f5 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Dua Lipa’s star power sounds muffled on her much-anticipated third album, which has many interesting ideas for songs and a surprisingly low hit rate. | Dua Lipa’s star power sounds muffled on her much-anticipated third album, which has many interesting ideas for songs and a surprisingly low hit rate. | Dua Lipa: Radical Optimism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-lipa-radical-optimism/ | Radical Optimism | Dua Lipa is a pop star who stridently resists personal disclosure in her work. This added an irresistible biographical quirk to “Houdini,” the hard-edged, darting lead single of her third album. As she often does, Lipa was challenging a guy to impress her before she gave him the slip. Lipa herself is an elusive presence, which isn’t to say she’s reclusive. Although it’s been four years since her second album Future Nostalgia, the British Albanian-Kosovar 28-year-old has remained omnipresent thanks to various luxury brand campaigns and the contractually attendant magazine covers, roles in Barbie and Argylle, her podcast and book club, and the album’s pandemic-delayed tour. Despite that visibility, she appears glamorous, distant. It’s quite admirable that she refuses to trade on her private life for intrigue, especially when celebrity subtext has never been a more powerful driver of pop success. At the same time, it’s hard to decipher what she stands for as an artist, and harder than ever on the confused Radical Optimism.
Lipa’s 2017 self-titled album was the sound of a young pop star coming into focus. A long-gestating grab-bag of thrusting nightclub staples seared by her white-hot burn of a voice, it finally took flight when the sisterly video for “New Rules” turned an album track into a whopping hit (and seemingly just in the nick of time to avoid being sent to guest-vocalist purgatory). It bought her the right to become an artiste on the focused Future Nostalgia, which transmuted the sounds of Lipa’s ’90s youth, the playfulness of the Spice Girls and the funkiness of Jamiroquai, into weightless disco reverie. Hers was the first major lockdown promotional campaign, and you wonder whether COVID curbed the lifespan of these lusty bops by depriving them of their natural dancefloor dominion, or in fact cultivated it, giving them a lasting power no marketing team could have dreamt of.
Going by the curiously opaque, even defensive press that led into Radical Optimism, you begin to suspect the pandemic did a fair bit of the heavy lifting. Of her new album, Lipa, er, divulged to Time recently, “I’m just a different person, so of course this record is going to be different. I have different thoughts, wants, needs, and perspectives.” Go girl, give us something? She’s bristled at the entirely accurate notion that “Houdini” has anything to do with disco; elsewhere in the promotional word salad, she has spoken frequently of the inspiration of Britpop and the energy and experimentation she hears in the likes of Primal Scream and Oasis. But listening to Radical Optimism with Britpop in mind might recall the Arrested Development bit in which Michael Bluth is forced to ask, “Has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken?”
Of course, despite Lipa’s well-touted business acumen (her own production and management company; media-empire ambitions), it’s not her job to boil Radical Optimism down to the elevator pitch. So what is it? The album opens with a sensual invitation in “End of an Era,” a psychedelic, Avalanches-style candyland about kisses driving you mad that sounds convincingly lightheaded—but it then leaves Oz never to return. For all the Britpop chatter, it’s actually a strikingly European-sounding record, for good and bad, made primarily with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Danny L Harle, “New Rules” co-writer Caroline Ailin, and Tobias Jesso Jr. In that Time interview, Lipa said that as far back as her debut, she hoped she would one day be “deserving” enough to get in a room with Parker. Before you ask, she did manifest it—but more important is what you do once you get there.
Considering the pedigree of its personnel, Radical Optimism is oddly incoherent. The absence of Future Nostalgia’s many topline writers is notable both in the lack of ironclad melodies and unfamiliarity with how to handle Lipa’s vocal weaponry. This results in leaden thumpers like the bell-ringing Euro-pop of “Illusion,” in which Lipa taunts some other sap who thinks he can outmaneuver her. It climaxes in a primary-colored synth burble: filter house stripped of the filter, French touch gone heavy-handed.
A handful of songs reach for ABBA’s wounded-but-persistent pride and golden songcraft: “Training Season” has the vigor of a “Lay All Your Love on Me” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”; “These Walls” the bittersweet valediction of “The Winner Takes It All.” But as with much of Radical Optimism, both songs are brutally overstuffed and desperately in need of breathing space. Parker (absent on the latter) has a taste for clutter, the rhythm section always firing like pistons, and the too-vigorous effort grounds Lipa’s gift for airborne fantasia.
A few songs even wade into Eurovision-worthy schlager. “Happy for You” welds a vulnerable sentiment about Lipa’s benevolence towards her ex and his new girlfriend (“She’s really pret-ty/I think she’s a model”) to a gaping, cavernous breakbeat that provides a strange big-tent conclusion to an album with an otherwise busy affect. Similarly, “Falling Forever,” which swaps Parker for the other “New Rules” co-writers Ian Kirkpatrick and Emily Warren, is a bizarre assault, with Lipa yodeling “how loooooooooong” against galloping drums. Both are almost as odd and awkward as anything off Rina Sawayama’s Hold the Girl, as individual songwriting choices and within the context of the album—although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were written with the climactic fireworks of her impending headline set at Glastonbury in mind.
It’s not that Lipa and her collaborators can’t make unusual sound clashes work. Two standout songs are elegantly odd, as uncanny yet comforting as the memory of that one foreign radio hit that dominated a great holiday. The understated “French Exit” splices a Café del Mar acoustic guitar refrain amid skittish flute runs and conversational verses, and climaxes in a sophisticated, string-laden kiss-off and one of the album’s best choruses. (Lipa has a taste for spoken-word interstitials in her stiffest R.P., but her almost mournful “filer à l’Anglaise” finishes the song like a drop of good olive oil.)
And “Maria” ditches Parker, brings in Andrew Wyatt and Julia Michaels, and makes especially good on Harle’s involvement. He co-produced Caroline Polachek’s Pang and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You; the latter did bravura things with the influence of British and continental pop from the early 2000s. “Maria” dabbles in the pacy acoustica of French DJ Bob Sinclair’s “Love Generation” and Alizée’s “Moi… Lolita” as Lipa sings a paean to her lover’s ex for making him the man he is today. “Faintly Sapphic fixation with the other woman” is a well-worn pop trope by this point, but the force of Lipa’s cries in the chorus—“Maria!/I know you’re gone/But I feel ya/When we’re alone”—resounds with a curiosity and emotional richness that’s all but absent elsewhere.
To hear Lipa talk about Radical Optimism is to hear her talk about weathering chaos gracefully; or as the cover puts it very literally, keeping your cool while swimming in shark-infested waters. But most of the lyrics are about dodging depth rather than diving in: outsmarting advances, clean breaks, clean hands, no mess. The lover-on-the-lam vibe belies the sentiment of “Anything for Love,” a scrap of a song that mines Janet Jackson at her sweetest as Lipa laments a time when “we used to do anything for love”—a romantic notion not particularly in evidence here. Similarly, the half-baked lyrical conceit and unconvincingly winsome tone of “These Walls”—as in, “If these walls could talk, they’d tell us to break up”—positively shrugs as a relationship meets its death knell.
The Cher cosplay of “Whatcha Doing” is another inadvertent reveal: Late at night, Lipa debates making her move on a guy she likes but worries about ceding her power. “If control is my religion,” she sings, somewhat mixing her metaphors, “then I’m heading for collision.” She decides against the approach, able to imagine them together in the future but not right now. It’s telling: The overthought Radical Optimism puts Lipa so many steps ahead she’s hard to make out. Her tight grip reveals an empty hand. | 2024-05-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | May 3, 2024 | 6.6 | b42265e5-24e7-4445-95c8-5dc7d943177f | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
On his debut album, the N.Y. electronic producer Anthony Naples' vision is fully formed, and it's original enough for him to stand out from the scads of producers trying similar hybrids of house, techno, and beat-up home-listening fare. | On his debut album, the N.Y. electronic producer Anthony Naples' vision is fully formed, and it's original enough for him to stand out from the scads of producers trying similar hybrids of house, techno, and beat-up home-listening fare. | Anthony Naples: Body Pill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20075-body-pill/ | Body Pill | To call Body Pill Anthony Naples' debut album should probably come with a big fat caveat: its eight tracks only amount to 29 minutes' total running time, and two of its cuts are just a sketch-like two minutes long. But who cares when the record holds together this well? It feels like an album, which, in the post-format day and age, is the only guideline that matters. And it certainly doesn't feel like a debut—at least, not in the sense of baby steps or half-measures. The New York electronic musician's vision is fully formed here, and it's original enough for him to stand out from the scads of producers trying similar hybrids of house, techno, and beat-up home-listening fare.
That confidence is all the more striking given that Naples is a relative newcomer. He put out his first record in 2012, on Mister Saturday Night, the label arm of a popular New York party series. Strikingly, "Mad Disrespect" was the first song he had ever completed—not bad at all, given how effortlessly it flitted between the cut-up soul of artists like Andrés and the slightly off-kilter vibe of artists like Four Tet and Caribou in dancefloor mode. Since then, he's recorded a handful of singles and EPs that have built upon the foundation established by his debut. They've all tended towards snapping house rhythms marked by flayed hi-hats and nervous, syncopated kick drums; he's fond of chopped-up keys and copious overdrive. Equal parts sweet and gruff, his club tracks are typically as juicy as a bruised blood orange.
But Body Pill, despite the title, swerves away from the club. Its opening track, "Ris", opens with two minutes of beatless drones, and the drums-and-synth figure that rises up out of the fog sounds less like dance music than a Casiotone reconstruction of the opening bars of Sonic Youth's "Teen Age Riot". "Abrazo", which follows, is a proper club track (even if that 3:25 running time may send DJs scrambling to come up with a follow-up before it fades out); its keening string loops and keyboard counterpoints are clearly in the vein of Pépé Bradock or Andrés, and it employs some of the toughest, most declarative drums on the whole record. Still, it doesn't take long to see that Naples' idea of dance music is a little bit different from the norm. The drums are sort of lumpy and disheveled; the hi-hat is turned up a hair too loud, and the snare sticks out like a broken front tooth. All that roughness is a way of balancing out the melancholy strings, but it also highlights the way even the strings are a little bit raw, their fidelity rough and their waveform crudely truncated; if this were a visual collage, there'd be Scotch tape visible over the corners of the picture.
The closing track, "Miles", seems like it'll be another of the record's go-to dancefloor cuts, given its overlapping layers of drum machine and sampled percussion and its eyes-closed deep house vibes; it rings like a lawn sprinkler aimed at a gamelan ensemble. But then a curious thing happens: shortly before the three-minute marker, it fades out, the tempo shifts from 120 to 110 beats per minute, and we're ushered out with tapped hi-hats and a tentative, burbling melody, as though someone had stepped on the hose. The rest of the album proceeds along similar lines, in which club-music convention is tweaked ever so slightly, its tropes repurposed for squirrelier aims. "Changes" balances absent-minded keys—a tinkly little up-and-down melody, an unbroken chord—with a cutting machine beat that spins idly in place, throwing off sparks. It's tough and drowsy all at once, and so is "Refugio", its tarnished counterpoints sounding like a conversation between two lonely robots. Most producers tend to visualize packed dancefloors when they're writing music, but I suspect this one was made with an empty room in mind, given the way its melody scoots like an idle gobo pattern across buffed hardwood. The only club-oriented track here that doesn't work so well is "Used to Be", which swathes swaggering, dubstep-inspired bass and drums in rosy Twin Peaks chords. It's not bad, but it feels aimless—even though, ironically, it's one of the record's most clearly defined tracks.
Perhaps he's simply better at abstraction. The drum-free, two-minute "Pale" sounds even more like a '70s public-television soundtrack cue than Boards of Canada's music does; "Way Stone", with its tight ripples of delay, might be sourced from rocks skipped across a still lake. Its wooden lead sounds like a kalimba wrapped in layers of sticky masking tape; at the short track's end, there's a rush of white noise like a seashell being held up to the ear. It's not terribly hard to make music that signifies varying shades of melancholy or unease; "moody" seems to be the default setting in dance music these days, from the underground to the main stage. But Body Pill is different: it's moody, but in a way that feels like he's not entirely clear about what the underlying mood really is. And there's an honesty to that. It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough. | 2015-02-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Text / Proibito | February 13, 2015 | 7.8 | b42c9839-e839-46e5-a92d-31cf750075d4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On her third album, the Los Angeles artist weaves samples of Iranian music into a rugged blend of dub and industrial. | On her third album, the Los Angeles artist weaves samples of Iranian music into a rugged blend of dub and industrial. | Maral: Ground Groove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maral-ground-groove/ | Ground Groove | Maral’s music doubles as a means of fantastic transport. Soldered together from elements of dub, industrial, and anarcho-punk, it reflects both 1970s Jamaica and 1980s London, but the Los Angeles musician’s work draws most of its spiritual sustenance from Iran. For a decade now, Maral has been assembling a library of samples of Iranian folk, classical, and pop music. Her source material has come from far and wide: specialty record stores in L.A.’s Persian Square; her parents’ cassette collections; and trips to the homeland itself. From her childhood until her early twenties, the Virginia native regularly visited Iran with her family, soaking up the language, culture, and music. In the early 2010s, DJing around L.A., she began layering those samples over blown-out beats inspired by moombahton and Jersey club. By her landmark 2018 mixtape Voices From the Land of Iran, her style had crystallized, and she continued to develop it across wide-ranging mixes and original productions. She likened her debut album, 2019’s Mahur Club, to the memory of a trip overseas: “I wanted the release to feel like you are in a taxi in Iran with the windows down and the taxi driver is playing an old cassette and the sounds from outside are mixing in to create a whole new song.”
If Maral’s previous albums were diesel beaters zigzagging through crowded city streets, Ground Groove is a high-powered all-terrain vehicle putting its suspension to the test. Her third album follows the hybrid template of its predecessors, but the beats are more rugged, the range more adventurous. Distortion has always played a key role in her music, but it has never sung in quite the way it does here. She wreathes electronic percussion in fuzz, sculpting overdriven 808 kicks into ominously throbbing bass ostinatos; she drenches guitars in the no-nonsense scuzz of bands like Crass, a longtime favorite. Her grooves are indebted to dub reggae, and she balances terse electronic beats with loose, muscular drumming on an acoustic kit that lends a live, jammy feel to her rhythms. There’s something fundamentally Californian about the blend; “That’s Okay, Ruin It” sounds like a garage band navigating dub and stoner metal in an empty swimming pool.
It’s a short album, covering 11 tracks in just half an hour, and it doesn’t vary much in tone or mood: Most songs use the same sludgy bass and bone-dry drums. But the short track lengths work in the record’s favor. The songs are all clearly cut from the same cloth, yet they’re just different enough to catch the ear, one after the next. It’s not always obvious where one track ends and another begins, and some, like the twisting “Mari’s Groove,” blow through numerous contrasting passages in just two or three minutes. If the sullen atmospheres keep you locked into Ground Groove’s labyrinthine confines, then the sudden glimmers of light make you forget about looking for a way out.
The heart of Maral’s music remains the classical and folkloric Iranian samples that are woven throughout. They’ve never sounded as carefully integrated as they do here: While some of her previous productions were essentially edits—“Hayedeh,” from Push, grafted an extended sample of the iconic exiled singer over a loping beat—here it’s more difficult to tease out her sources. In “Heart Shimmer,” a snakelike tar melody is run through reverb and delay until it’s barely recognizable. In “Avaz-e-Del,” a doleful a cappella flits behind grinding trip-hop beats, like a mysterious creature glinting beneath the surface of a murky lake. The pitched-down lament running through “Behind the Rock & Into the Tunnel” could be a field recording of a regional folk song, but the way it’s been slowed and processed, it might as well be a transmission from the other side of the galaxy.
Rarely do these sounds assume center stage; instead, they lurk in the background, where the keening intonation and microtonal melodies add color to the battered, blackened beats. They also add considerable emotional weight. Maral has spoken of the “ingrained melancholy” of Iranian identity and culture, a sensibility handed down from classical Persian music and poetry, and the same melancholy runs deep in Ground Groove. If Maral’s rough-hewn drums and guitars evoke the aggression of punk and industrial, her samples convey a profound heaviness; the halting drums and minor-key or quarter-tone intervals sound not just mournful but positively exhausted. You don’t need to understand the lyrics or even the background of Maral’s source material to grasp its spirit. Her choices are intuitive, not didactic; she has said that her sampling is typically inspired by encountering a particularly captivating snippet “and wanting to see what that sound can do in a different context.” A child of the diaspora as committed to her culture’s future as its past, Maral turns roots into branches. | 2022-12-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Leaving | December 22, 2022 | 7.7 | b42d9a8e-b0f9-42ce-af7d-b2a642c87ecc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Ren Schofield continues to straddle noise and techno on his fourth album, pushing his ramshackle rave music to its breaking point. | Ren Schofield continues to straddle noise and techno on his fourth album, pushing his ramshackle rave music to its breaking point. | Container: LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/container-lp/ | LP | For all the noise, chaos, and dysfunction flowing through Ren Schofield’s work as Container, the Nashville techno producer never aims for less than total euphoria. That trancelike drive—as indebted to minimal techno greats like Daniel Bell and Robert Hood as it is Schofield’s early days in the Providence, Rhode Island noise scene—allows his music to sound perpetually on the verge of rattling apart. Even when spiraling into ear-searing psychedelia, Container is sturdily reinforced by a core of pure joy, an impish glee fueling its destructive drive. On his fourth album, LP, Schofield pushes his ramshackle rave music to its breaking point—and yet he’s never made an album that holds together quite as well as this.
All Container full-lengths have the same anonymous title of “LP,” a sign of the full-impact maximalism they share. Each one locks into its dissonant grooves, drilling deep into a seemingly limited palette of sputtering drums, mangled vocals, and synths. Under that unifying tunnel vision, each vividly named highlight could hold the weight of a title track (“Refract,” “Dripping,” “Rattler” suggest Schofield’s as great at naming tracks as he is terrible at naming albums). This LP continues that tradition with nine comparatively shorter pieces, each a convulsive vignette that tumbles into the next. With names like “Drain,” “Leaker,” “Juicer,” and “Chunked,” many are as efficiently self-descriptive as blender settings.
While the shorter tracks don’t form a cohesive arc exactly, placing slower atmosphere-builders next to LP’s manic sprints pays off in the long run. Moments like “Peppered” or “Leaker’ also show Container moves just as well when he‘s creeping and lurching. The latter rides a heavy, propulsive drum machine that lays a foundation for a squeaking synth that sounds pulled from the higher frequencies of noise mainstays Wolf Eyes. It sets up “Vacancy,” a two-minute burst of short-circuiting noise rock, where fluttering drum triggers and overdriven synth filters ratchet the tension every 20 seconds or so. Schofield speeds up before slamming into a breakdown that recalls Lightning Bolt’s classic Load Records releases. For a project that often surprises by how well it works on a dancefloor, it’s a moment aimed directly for the mosh pit.
In proper Container fashion, the extremes tend to hit all at once. Opener “Drain” barrels forward with wounded drum patterns, but hinges on a playfully bent synth melody pinballing throughout. It continues a shift from the fractal-like quality of Schofield’s early LPs, cramming more twists and turns into tracks less than half the length. The album closes with a tightly repetitive counterpoint to “Drain” on the aforementioned “Chunked,” which violently loops like a locked groove trying to bust out of its cycle. With so many moments playing off one another like that over the short run-time, it benefits more than earlier releases as a start-to-finish listen.
You can start to see trajectory to Container’s LPs after this fourth edition, though the changes are deceptively subtle considering how unruly any specific release is. What’s never changed (and likely the reason the series remains so consistent) is simply how much fun Schofield makes all this mayhem sound. Both noise and techno are genres beloved for their sonic freedom—but they can also earn the occasional gripe for stuffy self-seriousness. Schofield still straddles the two precariously, but he also embodies the best of the genres’ shared ideals. Both should be happy to have him. | 2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Spectrum Spools | July 10, 2018 | 7.5 | b436d765-ceac-4aca-afc3-5d60818698ae | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Chicago rockers Twin Peaks' first album ran a compact twenty minutes and was refreshing and ephemeral. Their new one is twice the length, offering two distinct versions of themselves—one of which sounds really good, and the other just okay. | Chicago rockers Twin Peaks' first album ran a compact twenty minutes and was refreshing and ephemeral. Their new one is twice the length, offering two distinct versions of themselves—one of which sounds really good, and the other just okay. | Twin Peaks: Wild Onion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19515-twin-peaks-wild-onion/ | Wild Onion | The Chicago rock band Twin Peaks spend half their time as a chugging power chord factory and half as a winsome power-pop band. Their first album, Sunken, which ran a compact twenty minutes and was as refreshing and ephemeral as a popped Schlitz can, contained hints of both. Their second, Wild Onion, is more than twice the length, in which they seem to be offering two distinct versions of themselves: in one, they're good-times party rockers, and in the other they're heartbroken sweethearts. You could cull down Wild Onion to make one nine-song version of either album, and one would be just okay and one would be really good.
The really good one would be the quieter one, probably: Twin Peaks are better melancholy than they are raucous. The mid-tempo rocker "Making Breakfast" has a riff and a wryly rueful air that recalls Tom Petty. "Mirror of Time" is a loopy and sweet psychedelic pop song, with a twinkling and watery mix of guitars and a melody like a pinwheel; "Telephone" is uptempo but light-footed and soft.
The melodies for their slower and more winsome songs hit harder and soar higher than the power chord explosions, which can feel a little stale, like maybe someone forgot about that Schlitz can. "Flavor" sounds suspiciously like Weezer's "Dope Nose" by way of "Rock And Roll All Nite." Their best songwriting flashes the joyful interplay of the guitars—Twin Peaks are the kind of guitar rock band who write riffs and solos you can hum—so the straight power chord stompers cut off their brio, a little bit.
There is one song they write on each record that feels like a next step: on Sunken, it was the chiming "Irene", and here it's the cool breeze of "Ordinary People", which channels the Kinks and Os Mutantes. It is a new mode for Twin Peaks; neither heartbroken nor fist-pumping, it's musing, distant, and a little dazed, like a good Clientele song. Also, like a good Clientele song, it makes you think of rain, whether it's mentioned in the lyrics or not. It is a bemused-thirtysomething song, written by some kids who have barely rounded 20, and it's a fresh testament to their talent. | 2014-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | August 6, 2014 | 6.9 | b43aa3c9-ca5e-4ed8-bab0-bd5946106e98 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Summoning the communal energy of a live band, the indie rock songwriter’s debut explores uneasy emotions, anxiety spirals, and perseverance. | Summoning the communal energy of a live band, the indie rock songwriter’s debut explores uneasy emotions, anxiety spirals, and perseverance. | Pictoria Vark: The Parts I Dread | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pictoria-vark-the-parts-i-dread/ | The Parts I Dread | When Victoria Park was 19, her parents relocated from her lifelong home of New Jersey to Wyoming while she was away at college. Having already written a song called “New Jersey,” she wrote a new song called “Wyoming,” about forces beyond her control: “Can’t I blame you for everything/Market crashes, mood swings?” Recording under the spoonerism Pictoria Vark, she spent the next few years assembling songs, recording around the country, and utilizing the talents of close friends and remote musicians. Along the way, she played bass for Squirrel Flower and ingratiated herself in a DIY community that includes like-minded rockers Riverby and Harmony Woods. For someone who admits she’s “scared of change” in “Demarest,” a highlight from her debut record The Parts I Dread, Park has been forced to experience a lot of it, and these eight songs are filled with uneasy emotions, even at their most easygoing.
The production on The Parts I Dread, from Park and Boston musician Gavin Caine, benefits from the lengthy writing and meticulous recording process: This album sounds as polished as anything from higher-profile contemporaries Soccer Mommy or Snail Mail. Even though no two people were in the same room while recording, Park and Caine manage to capture the energy of a live band in explosive moments like the sudden, distorted climax of “I Can’t Bike.” It’s not just the production: On “Wyoming,” a routine indie backbeat gradually slows down for a dreamy chorus. Even the more mundane passages of “Wyoming” include panned percussion and shiny synths, creeping into the mix as if mirroring Park’s anxiety. That attention to detail makes up for the occasional weaknesses in Park’s endearingly light vocals: When she can’t belt the way a slow-burner like “Out” requires, a last-second whirlwind of feedback picks up the slack.
Park’s lyrics mostly focus on small interactions and idle thoughts, the kind of introspection born of abject loneliness. In “Good For,” she writes about a friend’s betrayal and the kind of “bad kid” who “fail[s] upwards on the backs of good ones.” The most invigorating moments are the most ambitious, when Park’s attempts at self-reflection spiral into anxiety. On “Bloodline II,” she tries to understand her parents’ decision to move (“Been tired your whole life/It’s what drove you out west”) before admitting her fear of turning out like them. The penultimate track, “Demarest,” leaves the biggest impression. It’s a surprisingly dark, ambitious song about perseverance, with lyrics that allude to a suicide attempt and the fallout from a toxic relationship. And yet, Park refuses to let the pain consume her: “It’s not that I’m into punishment,” she insists. “There’s more to live for than I know yet.”
While more minimal songs like “Twin” are almost too economical in their arrangement, Park’s lyrics are rarely ever that bare. Her best lines are direct and resonate with the force of a full band. When 30 people suddenly show up screaming on “Good For,” or when field recordings and chatter enter the mix on closer “Friend Song,” they’re refreshing bursts outside of Park’s own head. The record never feels self-indulgent or self-loathing—it just helps to have other people there to listen. | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Get Better | April 11, 2022 | 7 | b4427de7-19fc-4340-bb6a-a731df2a942f | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Ferreira’s latest album is rich and rewarding, the mark of a prolific artist arriving at the perfect unity between content and presentation. | Ferreira’s latest album is rich and rewarding, the mark of a prolific artist arriving at the perfect unity between content and presentation. | R.A.P. Ferreira: The Light-Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rap-ferreira-the-light-emitting-diamond-cutter-scriptures/ | The Light-Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures | Over the past decade or so, Rory Ferreira has built a deep, consistent, and strikingly versatile catalog. The nomadic artist, who now goes by R.A.P. Ferreira, was born in Chicago but subsequently lived in Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Maine, and currently Nashville; much of his early work was issued under the name milo, though his masterpiece, to this point, is the beautifully fluid sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face, released in 2018 as scallops hotel. His new album, the Light-Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures, is rich and rewarding, channeling sovereign nose’s improvisatory air and pairing it with the aqueous vocals Ferreira has been refining since he left L.A. in 2015.
The album is packed with some of his most impressive, thematically sophisticated writing to date, and his most vivid imagery: ontologically curious snakes in one song, “pythons on leashes” in the next. Yet Ferreira has arranged it in such a way that the timbres of each song create and relieve tension on their own. Scriptures opens with “contrapuntal,” where his vocals are subdued—maybe tranquil, maybe weary. That voice disappears for much of the album. When it resurfaces toward the end on “praise & worship,” it’s imbued with something closer to dread, effectively recasting everything that came before it. On that latter song, Ferreira raps in near-monotone, “Guess I’ll follow that North Star home/Sure as the porn star moans,” an airtight couplet that gets at the tension between the elemental and the artificial—between what is inherent and what is performed—that so much of his work is about.
The music is texturally rich and rhythmically varied, even between songs by the same producers. See, for instance, the way the Tel Aviv-based argov balances the somber “contrapuntal” with the bright jazz bounce of “humboldt park jibaritos,” or how Nashville’s Brainweight lets his percussion shift from light and skittering to woozily full when “brother mouzone library card” becomes “hyperion.” Ferreira has never interacted so virtuosically with drums as he does on Scriptures. He cascades over them on “Blackmissionfigs” and leans his syllables toward the end of each measure on “gemilut hasadim”; on “uptown 37,” he jumps from pocket to pocket like a frog between lily pads. Some of the beats are microcosms for the larger intersections Ferreira himself embodies—take the gibbsfreelance-produced “wedding cake eighths,” which recalls the Los Angeles beat music scene of a decade ago but has all the hand-stitched grit and open space of those Freestyle Fellowship records he occasionally evokes.
In his videos, Ferreira has also developed a unique visual language that eschews elaborate plotting, conventional color correction, or any of the other markers meant to indicate a work has been professionally finished. Sometimes his videos flirt with the same aesthetics of internet ephemera that he references in his writing: The clip for who told you to think??!!?!?!?!’s “sorcerer” frequently looks like a fan-made edit, an illusion that’s punctured when Ferreira raps directly into the camera. The “east nashville” video is in this vein. He ambles across a bridge in no hurry, stopping to underline passages in the song; he dances in front of a minimally tagged wall, his body lit only from the chest down. It is not unfinished; it is not sloppy or “lo-fi.” It is a prolific artist arriving at the perfect unity between content and presentation, his carefully considered thoughts allowed to move his body, the camera, the microphone as if those things were animated by impulse alone.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | November 30, 2021 | 7.9 | b449e826-2c98-49e5-b205-8916a885454c | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Fabric's latest was created by an up-and-coming Detroit techno producer, but not one genuflecting before his city's rich dance history. | Fabric's latest was created by an up-and-coming Detroit techno producer, but not one genuflecting before his city's rich dance history. | Omar S: Fabric 45 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12824-fabric-45/ | Fabric 45 | For a world still actively exploring its own boundaries, techno is history obsessed and ferociously insular. So when relatively unknown Detroit producer Omar S told the dance-music site Resident Advisor, "I don't even know who Ricardo Willalobo is"-- backhanding Ricardo Villalobos, techno's frustrating, progressive king-- pundits rushed to their keyboards, birthing messageboard threads that reached 10 pages in length but rarely moved past a collective oh no he didn't. On the one hand, Omar S knows how to handle press-- curse, a lot (nine instances of "fuck" in under 150 words!); show more interest in illegal auto racing than the genre you perform in; claim to not buy music; claim, even, not to really like it. On the other hand, the prospect that he really is a know-nothing-- or, at least, that he doesn't care about his environment-- is magnetic. In a scene that often seems to feed off itself, it's hard not to wonder what Omar S is eating.
So London club and label Fabric asks him to make his own mix, and he turns in 80 minutes of his own tracks, some dating back to 2004. ("I don't need other people's music; I got over 100 songs released.") Whether that's heresy or not, I don't care. Most of this stuff was only on vinyl until now, and it's just as easy-- and as rewarding-- for me to think of this disc as a compilation of his productions as a DJ mix.
His music isn't unlike his public persona-- brash, bitter, soulful, and vaguely threatening. The tracks collected on Fabric 45 aren't funky, but they have a zombie-like imperative to them. They're not melodically complex, either, and when he builds a half-memorable tune-- "Oasis 13 ½" or "Psychotic Photosynthesis", both which resemble Kraftwerk, a little-- he straps it to the bassline in a way that suggests he thinks melody is frivolous. They're built on blocky, simple sounds, but structured with subtlety and control. For someone who flaunts as much confidence and ego as Omar S does, his music is almost impetuously basic at times-- he's like a woodsman who builds a lean-to in your living room when you already set up the air mattress. It's not conservative, it's gutter, it's flamboyant.
The occasional vocalists-- on "U" or "The Maker"-- sound lonely and disoriented, like deep-house divas who collapsed in alleyways before ambling home in the last few minutes before dawn. Video-game samples pollute 19th century church organ ("Strider's World"); and brutish, deadlocked four-four gets syncopated with noise ("Simple Than Sorry"). Zealots say the crown is "Psychotic Photosynthesis", a dizzy, slow-bubbling track whose melody peels out of its bassline so carefully that it's hard to notice until it's fully arrived-- it definitely stands out, but doesn't overshadow.
While it's tempting to draw Omar S into the long narrative of Detroit techno, he doesn't fit the mold: Detroit, as I always heard it, represented a banging but sophisticated futurism; Omar S, by comparison, is definitively unrefined. The cover of his one full-length album, 2005's Just Ask the Lonely, is a sloppily altered photo of him playing an arcade console whose display shows a picture of what are presumably his kids. He claims to sign his white labels with the same marker he uses working a day job at Ford. Just Ask the Lonely takes its name from a Four Tops song-- another Detroit institution, Motown. "Day", on the Fabric mix, samples the Supremes' "Come See About Me", briefly. Omar S' music doesn't have any of the charm of Motown-- it's unfriendly, nocturnal stuff. But in a way, Motown's an even better touchstone than Detroit techno: Music made with efficiency and confidence; music that didn't have to be too aware of what was going on around it because it was busy trying to make a little world of its own. | 2009-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | March 19, 2009 | 7.9 | b4528254-def2-40ab-bff5-c27c6fce0ad3 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On their latest set, Mali’s Tinariwen ensemble mix Western African styles, feverish group workouts, and world-weary lyrics, collaborating with Kurt Vile and Mark Lanegan in the process. | On their latest set, Mali’s Tinariwen ensemble mix Western African styles, feverish group workouts, and world-weary lyrics, collaborating with Kurt Vile and Mark Lanegan in the process. | Tinariwen: Elwan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22865-elwan/ | Elwan | Since coming to the attention of Western listeners in the 2000s, the Tuareg artists in Tinariwen have managed to keep their “desert blues” sound intact, while varying some elements of songwriting craft. The largely acoustic aesthetic of 2011’s Tassili saw input from American indie talents, like TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and Wilco’s Nels Cline. On 2014’s Emmaar, Tinariwen reveled in some funkier arrangements.
Elwan offers another solid collection of tunes that merge West African styles and guitar riffs inspired by American folk forms. The album can swing quickly across a wide range of moods, moving dramatically between feverish group workouts and more personal, acoustic laments. And the continued political turmoil in their native northern Mali—including the targeting of the band’s members by Islamist militants—has provided these songwriters with no shortage of inspiration for world-weary lyrics.
This time around, Tinariwen’s collaborations work more ideally than on previous outings. Sometime Queens of the Stone Age member Alain Johannes brings his “cigar box guitar” to the grooving, communal song “Talyat.” And on the uptempo opener, “Tiwàyyen,” guest guitarist Kurt Vile merges fully with the other members of the ensemble. During this first appearance, there’s little sense that he’s interested in calling attention to himself. (The song’s real stars are the spirited backing vocalists, who swarm during the choruses.)
On bassist Eyadou Ag Leche’s “Nànnuflày,” though, Vile’s reverb-heavy guitar tone is more easily recognized. The romanticized sense of reverie in his playing—familiar from albums like 2013’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze—seems to exert a strong influence over the entire band’s performance, thereby giving Tinariwen a new vibe to inhabit. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, one of the group’s principal singer-guitarists, makes the most of this opportunity, turning in a chilled-out performance that is threaded with less vocal ornamentation than usual. The final minute’s vocals are turned over to Mark Lanegan’s coolheaded baritone: a choice that risks merely gilding the lily, but just plain works.
Naturally, this core group of players doesn’t really need any help when it comes to fashioning sublime performances. On “Assàwt,” acoustic arpeggios are sometimes joined by darts of electric-guitar filigree—a mirroring of the way the song’s solo vocalist routinely welcomes a chorus of companions by his side. Elsewhere, the propulsive rock energy of “Sastanàqqàm” leavens the mood for a spell, while the mantra of “Ittus” reflects a seriousness of intent. (The latter song’s lyric reads, in its entirety: “I ask you, what is our goal/It is the unity of our nation/And to carry our standard high.”)
It can be tempting, at this point, to take all the strengths of Tinariwen for granted. Once again, all their music is crisply played, and smartly sequenced. Yet while Elwan may not herald any grand stylistic breakthrough, it does manage to synthesize some of the group’s most recent experiments in a way that helps distinguish it within their overall catalog. English translations for the lyrics are available on their label’s website, but the spirit of each song is generally discernible from the performance choices. The purpose of Tinariwen’s music doesn’t undergo radical redefinition—and it doesn’t need to do so. From their beginnings in a refugee camp to their latest iteration as a world-touring entity, they can provide exultation and encouragement like few other ensembles, on any continent. | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Epitaph / Anti- | February 18, 2017 | 8.2 | b456a023-7d27-4a46-a09d-583249eb6244 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Paramore singer’s debut solo album is emotionally vulnerable and musically ambitious, one that seeks catharsis and enlightenment in tangled corners of pop music. | The Paramore singer’s debut solo album is emotionally vulnerable and musically ambitious, one that seeks catharsis and enlightenment in tangled corners of pop music. | Hayley Williams: Petals for Armor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayley-williams-petals-for-armor/ | Petals for Armor | The use of voice memos in pop music—whether the dry, abstract interludes of Sonic Youth or the litany of voicemails throughout hip hop history—necessarily signals a pause, a moment to listen closely. But rather than a message from a missed connection or words of wisdom from a mentor, the new record from Paramore’s singer Hayley Williams features an intimate dispatch from her home. With her goldendoodle Alf barking in the background, Williams describes, sheepishly, a potential delay in the production process: “Uh, sorry, I was in a depression,” she offers by way of explanation. Trailing off, she adds, “Trying to come out of it now…” That moment of quiet reflection, understated in its depiction of the murkiness inherent to mental health, is an exemplary snapshot from her solo debut, Petals for Armor: intense emotional vulnerability couched in the creature comforts of her homestead.
As Williams describes it, Petals for Armor began as an organic outgrowth of extreme introspection—specifically intensive, full-body therapy through a process called EMDR, in which the person in treatment is asked to recall distressing imagery, processing the experience through sensory input under the guidance of a therapist. For Williams, whose 2017 was marked with both immense highs—the release of Paramore’s triumphantly pop-oriented After Laughter—and definitive lows—a divorce from her partner of 10 years—therapy invoked powerful, at times grotesque imagery of nature. “I started having this vision where I was so gross, covered in dirt and soil, and there were vines and flowers,” she recounted. But that surreal vision became a sign of the inherent power and resilience in a body so outwardly fragile and feminine. Williams began writing songs around the same period, at the advice of a therapist.
On Petals for Armor—originally released as three distinct EPs—Williams traces a meandering, multi-faceted path to recovery, one that might ring familiar to anyone who’s undergone the taxing process of intensive therapy. “Leave It Alone,” one of the earliest songs Williams wrote for the record, addresses the cruelty and irony of loss with chilling clarity: “If you know how to love/Best prepare to grieve,” she sings, her voice tipping upward, knowingly, on the last word of each line. The instrumentation, thick with gently sloping violins, brings to mind a post-rock dirge, invoking the leaden air of mourning without veering into maudlin sap.
On “Rose/Lotus/Violet/Iris,” joined by the disaffected chorus of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, she conjures a similarly haunted atmosphere, opening with ghostly, swirling vocals dense with delay. But despite the overcast mood, the lyrics hesitantly tell a story of regrowth. Through floral metaphors—“he loves me now, he loves me not,” wilting and blooming—she captures the history of women’s suffering, gesturing to intergenerational trauma without falling into hackneyed, broad-sweeping statements of feel-good empowerment. These hazy moments, which often reveal their depths only upon repeated listen, invoke a careful, considered path to self-love, one that doesn’t avoid its darker corners.
The more hushed tones scattered throughout the album contrast her bolder statements, the musical equivalents of sudden breakthroughs. On “Cinnamon,” an uptempo ode to the comforts of nesting and making a home, Williams creates layered melodies with her vocals, beginning with animalistic yells of “ahh” and “ooh” and taking a sharp turn with highly syncopated, all-business enunciation on the versus: “Home is where I’m feminine/Smells like citrus and cinnamon,” she sings cooly, moving through the syllables of the final words like a percussive triplet. Here, as on “Creepin’,” with its robotic digital processing, Williams’ vocals sound towering and all-encompassing, as if she’s not simply claiming her power through words, but through taking up more space in the mix.
Though the strength of Petals for Armor is derived from the complexities inherent in self-actualization, it is, at times, weakened by its musical and lyrical scope. Shifts in mood, as when the downtempo, shuffling ode to friendship “My Friend” leads into the propulsive synth-pop anthem “Over Yet,” are slightly jarring within the progression of the album, even if they’re expected within the context of therapeutic treatment. And after rage and recovery are discussed with such nuanced sensitivity early on in the record, it’s disappointing to hear her sing about love and sensuality with easy platitudes, as on the sophomoric refrain of “Taken.”
Occasionally, these shifting moods occur within the span of a single song, as on “Dead Horse.” The song opens with that candid voice recording, which fades discomfitingly into bright, party-ready synths. Though it’s not new for Paramore to hide dark lyrics—the song details Williams’ affair with her now-ex-husband—within fluorescent melodies, the carefree nature of the somewhat-tropical house production can come off as if Williams is wearing a costume, playing the role of scorned ex through the lens of a dancehall singer. “Watch Me While I Bloom,” with its upbeat jazz rhythm and winking lyrics, similarly grates with its forced brightness, Williams’ cheery delivery coming across like a precocious lead actor in a school play.
But even these weaker moments are small inside a record that is revelatory in its breadth, a manifestation of trust between its personnel: Taylor York, the record’s sole producer, and Zac Farro, who provided instrumentation, are long-time Paramore bandmates, lifers after the group’s many tumultuous shake-ups; Joey Howard, who helped pen several songs, is the band’s touring bassist. Somewhat counterintuitively, considering the familiarity among the players, the record, at its best, transcends the boundaries defined by their previous music, creating new soundscapes that recontextualize Williams’ powerful tenor.
“Crystal Clear,” a pared-back march into the terrifying unknown, showcases the malleability of her voice. Beginning with woozy synths, the song picks up rhythm with skittering drum blasts, both of which take a backseat as soon as Williams’ swinging vocal enters. Here, Williams flows with the thematic current, her voice swaying and hanging heavy as she discusses overcoming romantic hang-ups. But by the time it reaches the chorus’ simple, hesitantly hopeful refrain, there’s a distinct lightness in her vocals, the relief palpable as she repeats, “Won’t give in to the fear.” We’re left with a vision of Williams that mirrors the strongest moments on Petals for Armor, one that takes the long way to enlightenment.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Atlantic | May 12, 2020 | 7.2 | b46acd7b-c213-495c-9be7-88592db17dd2 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
This engaging compilation of work by the former Japan vocalist begins begins with a version of a song from his old band, moves through material from his solo LPs, and closes with a new song. | This engaging compilation of work by the former Japan vocalist begins begins with a version of a song from his old band, moves through material from his solo LPs, and closes with a new song. | David Sylvian: A Victim of Stars: 1982-2012 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16332-a-victim-of-stars-1982-2012/ | A Victim of Stars: 1982-2012 | David Sylvian's voice bears such a calmly forceful cadence, full of carefully enunciated words that trail off into a pristine nasal murmur, that he can dart between genres and surface with music positioned resolutely in his own sound world. The former Japan singer has spent a great deal of time reflecting on his solo output in recent times. In 2010 he released a retrospective of his non-album collaborative work, Sleepwalkers. If that record was a treat for fans, A Victim of Stars feels like a crack opening in the door for anyone left behind, a way to get a feel for Sylvian's far-reaching mood swings since Japan disbanded in 1982. It's neatly ordered, beginning with a hint of the early trappings of his solo career via a version of his former band's "Ghosts"; taking in a smattering of material from his full-length albums; and closing with a new song bearing a title that summarizes the divisive areas of exploration that break-up his career arc: "Where's Your Gravity?"
Sylvian's voice is a unique beast, pitched somewhere between the type of feigned disinterest typical of all the Ferry and Bowie acolytes the New Romantic movement produced, but with greater cracks and world weariness appearing with age. By the time A Victim of Stars lands on "Small Metal Gods" from 2009's excellent Manafon, there's a buckle and strain to his singing, a distinct warble in his throat, a palpable swoop down toward earthier terrain. But it's still grounded in the unreal, demonstrating Sylvian's preference for keeping his audience at arm's length. If there's one element of style that remains in place on this compilation, it's the tendency to untether his voice, to leave it floating in space, while the instrumentation-- sometimes fussy, sometimes so minimal it's barely a whisper-- politely searches for space around it, as though the singer is performing an awkward first dance with his own work.
Dialing back from "Small Metal Gods" to the material from 1984's Brilliant Trees is like taking a leap from someone at peace with their place on the planet to someone still figuring out who they are. But even the shift from "Pulling Punches" to "The Ink in the Well" (the first two tracks from Trees) is substantial, with the former all 1980s lipstick traces and watery slap bass, while the latter is sunk in a bed of acoustic thrumming and gently brushed drums. Both are perfect ease-in access points to Sylvian's solo work and among the best-known material here. But a better early warning of what was to come is "Forbidden Colours", Sylvian's 1983 collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. It's a fully formed piece of orchestral pop, with Sylvian taking on the mantle of wraithlike torch singer-- the vantage point from which he's clearly most comfortable as a performer.
One of Sylvian's biggest detours from that mode of operation was Secrets of the Beehive (1987), a largely acoustic-driven work represented by a clutch of songs here. On "Waterfront" from that album it's easy to detect the Scott Walker influence that continually reemerges in his career, while "Let the Happiness In" is the kind of low-key, jazz-inflected ballad that would fit easily into Mark Hollis' solitary solo album. Fellow outliers such as Walker and Hollis are the kind of company Sylvian has comfortably kept throughout his solo work, and, like them, he has often deviated tangentially in pursuit of untried provinces; Secrets of the Beehive was followed by two protracted instrumental collaborations with members of Can, Plight & Premonition (with Holger Czukay) and Flux and Mutability (again with Czukay, along with Jaki Liebezeit, Marcus Stockhausen, and Michael Karoli).
It would have been difficult to bring in such work on A Victim of Stars, on account of the sheer length of the material in those collaborations. As such, it's important to note this is only a small part of Sylvian's story, a few splintered factions that hint at fuller, more expansive stories told elsewhere on his full-length recordings. But as a handhold into those tales this works surprisingly well, occasionally even dipping into the uninhibited environments Sylvian likes to extend to, such as the subdued funk of the nine-and-a-half-minute opener to 1999's Dead Bees on a Cake, "I Surrender". It also highlights his immaculate taste in collaborators, with earlier work alongside Sakamoto and Robert Fripp complemented by Blemish-era compositions marked by the spooked-out electronics of Christian Fennesz and Derek Bailey's guitar passages. The ghostlike curls of feedback on "Late Night Shopping" from that record are the perfect place to drop Sylvian's voice, where his tenderly accented tones lightly vacillate between calm and disquiet.
Sylvian's partnership with Fennesz now stretches over a number of recordings, with both clearly sharing an appreciation for abstraction in art. It's an impulse that loops back to the earliest song present here, "Ghosts", which fleetingly lapses into glitch-heavy electronics at crucial junctures in its evolution. It's not easy to string a single narrative from A Victim of Stars-- Sylvian's career is in a permanent state of flux and reinvention. But he works best when his songwriting is pulled away from the concrete, when there's open-endedness for him to spin his focus around. But nothing here is ever wholly drawn into that world. Sylvian's role often feels like that of a curator, tugging in elements of free improvisation but never letting it overshadow, lest his absorption with songcraft, opulent orchestration, ambient electronics, and dozens of other impulses suffer. A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind. | 2012-02-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-02-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Virgin | February 28, 2012 | 8.2 | b475f014-ca80-4cb3-9654-c8b058d28da8 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The third album from bassist/songwriter Thundercat is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once. Drunk's oddball soul confronts the challenge of just trying to live life. | The third album from bassist/songwriter Thundercat is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once. Drunk's oddball soul confronts the challenge of just trying to live life. | Thundercat: Drunk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22895-drunk/ | Drunk | Thundercat gives himself a pep talk at the beginning of Drunk: “Comb your beard, brush your teeth … beat your meat, go to sleep.” At least he’s in marginally better spirits these days. Following the death of his friend and collaborator Austin Peralta, his last two releases—2013’s Apocalypse and 2015’s The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam—explored the concept of extinction and what the spirit might endure when the body expires. On these records—along with Flying Lotus’ 2014 album You’re Dead!, where Thundercat contributed bass or vocals to many of its songs—the singer and preeminent bassist (born Stephen Bruner) tried to make sense of a devastating truth. Peralta was gone, and one day, he will be gone too.
All this cosmic morbidity leaned on Thundercat’s music, which takes on many forms all at once: ’70s funk, R&B, punk with tinges of fusion. His art is undeniably black, yet the structures are loose enough to pull in all sorts of listeners. It speaks to those who love soul and ska equally, those who spazz just the same when George Duke or Bad Brains flash across the iPod. Thundercat is equal parts Nintendo generation, ’60s flower child, and hardcore skater bro. His live show is punk as hell; serene studio tracks are given loud, frenetic makeovers. On top of all that rests Thundercat’s smooth falsetto, a transcendent voice that can usher you into some sort of demise (“Descent Into Madness”), sing lovingly to his pet cat (“Tron Song”), or make drugs seem perfectly fine (“DMT Song,” “Oh Sheit It’s X.”).
If Thundercat’s recent work focused on the uncertainty of death, Drunk confronts the challenge of just trying to live life. It’s a marathon through the mind of Bruner that uses his casually humorous and honest songwriting to detail that which is cool and that which sucks. Cool? Kenny Loggins and Dragon Ball Z wrist-slap bracelets. Sucks? Friend zones and the police state. Featuring Kendrick Lamar (“Walk on By”), Wiz Khalifa (“Drink Dat”) and Kamasi Washington (“Them Changes”) among others, Drunk plays like an anxious stoner album, the aural equivalent of late-night channel surfing. Its 23 tracks present a fluid narrative that begins on a somewhat bright note and gradually fades into darkness—a concept record that takes you through a bleary night of drinking, drugs, funk, and heartbreak with Thundercat himself.
He is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once. Each song hovers around the two-minute mark, defying those ‘70s fusion forebears whose tracks could drag on over dense harmonies and time signatures. Drunk hits all the melodic and emotional themes Thundercat aims for without belaboring the point. On openers “Rabbot Ho” and “Captain Stupido,” he comes off a bit goofy and red-eyed, leaving his wallet at the club after a night of partying. “Bus in These Streets,” which resembles the theme of 1980s children show “The Great Space Coaster,” uses a sarcastic nursery rhyme flow to chide our collective social media dependence (“Thank God for technology ‘cause where would we be if we couldn't tweet our thoughts,” Thundercat quips). “Jameel’s Space Ride,” a transitional song near the album’s end, uses a chiptune-inspired beat while he sings of the struggle between minorities and law enforcement: “I’m safe on my block, except for the cops/Will they attack, would it be ‘cause I’m black?” This, of course, is after he literally meows about how cool it must be to be a cat.
All this oddball soul feels more anchored to Thundercat's humanity than his previous releases. We see him here as both a heartbroken insomniac, someone who looks at the world alongside Pharrell on “The Turn Down” and wonders if “everything we do is weak,” and a juvenile jazzbo who wants to “blow all [his] cash on anime.” Much like The Golden Age of Apocalypse and Apocalypse, which leapfrogged several different genres with dizzying results, he’s able to keep it all together, offering a puzzling ride that feels coherent despite its moving parts. Unlike his past work, which put his musicianship on great display, Drunk presents the defining picture of Thundercat as a person: quirky, political, thoughtful, weird—and sometimes drunk. These descriptors aren’t surprising if you follow him on Twitter, but here, Thundercat comes off like the guy who you can hit up at the bar and riff on pretty much anything. Given all he’s gone through personally, it’s an honor to hear Thundercat feeling like himself again. | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Brainfeeder | February 27, 2017 | 8.5 | b4798868-19ef-4ef4-9c4f-28e4368babea | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Raum is the collaborative project of Grouper's Liz Harris and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, a solo artist and member of San Francisco post-rock band Tarentel. Both produce emotionally overwhelming drone abstractions with unconventional beauty, and their debut, Event of Your Leaving, is damaged and euphoric. | Raum is the collaborative project of Grouper's Liz Harris and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, a solo artist and member of San Francisco post-rock band Tarentel. Both produce emotionally overwhelming drone abstractions with unconventional beauty, and their debut, Event of Your Leaving, is damaged and euphoric. | Raum: Event of Your Leaving | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18784-raum-event-of-your-leaving/ | Event of Your Leaving | It's not hard distinguishing the work of Grouper's Liz Harris from that of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on their collaborative debut, Event of Your Leaving, a fact that speaks to the singularity of their respective approaches. Formulating a signature musical language is especially impressive within the abstracted terrain of ambient drone and wordless dream-pop, where they've each made some of the most distinctive sounds of the past decade. Harris, with her analog and oft-depressed toolbox of charcoal drones, acoustic strums, and ethereal singing, has arguably been the most prominent artist working in this realm. But Cantu-Ledesma, also of San Francisco post-rock band Tarentel since the 1990s, is a fixture in his own right, having delivered around two-dozen releases for labels like Type, Blackest Rainbow, and his own, Root Strata. Cantu-Ledesma's drones are dense, bright, and harsh, most cohesively captured on 2010's compulsively listenable Love Is a Stream—a properly mesmeric attempt at teasing the ecstatic essence from Loveless-style shoegaze noise, amping his deconstructions into the red while capturing the blissed out totality of real love.
Event of Your Leaving, a project in-process for at least two years, proves just how complementary these seemingly conflicted aesthetic spirits can be. Where Harris makes subtle, interior, and dread-laced music that often sounds buried underground—it can feel embedded with existential questions of mortality and death, and did so explicitly on this year's The Man Who Died in His Boat—Cantu-Ledesma makes blown-out, skybent music, with the affect of something heavenly pouring down. Where Grouper works with images of the natural world and somber moods, Cantu-Ledesma's beaming washes of pastel-shaded white noise are optimistic; his song titles have included "White Dwarf Butterfly" and "Stained Glass Body", carrying the romance of a love poem or emergency meditation. Grouper's music can recall the tapestry of William Basinski's decaying tape loops, but Cantu-Ledesma's radiates as if possessing regenerative power. If Grouper is the inexplicable feeling just after loss, Cantu-Ledesma's is recovery. Both produce emotionally overwhelming drone abstractions with unconventional beauty. They use idiosyncratic tones to articulate things that are unspeakable.
This duality is absolutely crushing on Side A. Cantu-Ledesma's blistering noise allows crevices of space to fill in and contribute a certain brightness and color, as if poking holes so that rays can shine through, while Harris' drones ground the sound. It is damaged and euphoric, and often sounds as if there is a steady wind churning through while the sun beams down, capped with the somewhat confounding angelic or supernatural aura that is quintessential of Grouper. The repetition of 13-minute opener "In Stellar Orbit" is like a massage for your brain cells—the gentle, circling abrasion underpinned by light and occasionally skull-piercing noise, gorgeous and grating as it floats off. "Blood Moon" is the energetic epitome of the project, reaching the record's visceral peak while simultaneously managing to amp its grace. The defining characteristics of Cantu-Ledesma's sound are here, coupled with layered drones that could be a distant choir.
A noticeable sadness marks Event of Your Leaving's second side. The cinematic title track is the record's shortest, and seems to function like an overture. The light is drained as a swell of downcast drones are marked by minor piano keys and oscillated vocal parts that recall Grouper's earlier records. The flecks of piano are brighter on "In Held Company" and there are sublime negotiations throughout, between the severity of the austere instrumentation and featherlight vocals—and later, between the track's considerable white space and a soliloquy of drone. An anxious, distressing rumble permeates the record as it closes, and though the album imposes no narrative, there is an undeniable trajectory from innate hope to total loss of vitality. Event shows this process with no resolution, just honest closure fading into silence. | 2013-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Glass, house | November 27, 2013 | 7.9 | b47bd4c9-106b-425c-ae66-aedbe80e0dff | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The Catalan composer’s third album creates an immersive and at times thrilling world out of piano, electronics, and her remarkably agile voice, which is processed, stretched, and pulled apart at will. | The Catalan composer’s third album creates an immersive and at times thrilling world out of piano, electronics, and her remarkably agile voice, which is processed, stretched, and pulled apart at will. | Marina Herlop: Pripyat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marina-herlop-pripyat/ | Pripyat | Marina Herlop’s music is driven by her remarkable voice: She is capable of both hopscotching through operatic upper registers and settling into a dreamily dulcet tone, often within the same song. The Catalan experimental musician explored relatively traditional classical styles on her first two albums, 2016’s Nanook and 2018’s Babasha, whose songs for voice and piano, with occasional electronic accents, reflected her conservatory training. Pripyat, Herlop’s third album and first for cult label PAN, takes a surprising left turn. Introducing more pronounced vocal manipulation, drum patterns, and further digital embellishments, Pripyat is her most multidimensional and fascinating work to date, stretching the human voice in seemingly infinite directions.
The addition of a third instrument to Herlop’s toolkit—especially one as boundless as production software—dramatically expands her sound. The decision to focus on electronics was as much practical as artistic. Piano and voice “were the only tools I really had,” she admitted of her previous albums. Yet the computer is essential to Pripyat’s astonishing breadth as it moves between off-kilter rhythms and atmospheric electronics while showcasing the strength of Herlop’s voice. On “Lyssof,” she sings a bounding a cappella verse before glitchy production swarms her: A crinkled electric guitar line, metronomic synth pads, and digital chatter threaten to collapse in on each other before coalescing into a recognizable shape. “Abans Abans” minces a piano melody into tinkling ribbons over a thudding, deconstructed drum beat, taking a full minute before Herlop’s voice arrives in various alien forms to thread each part together. She builds tension with these disparate abstract elements, carefully constructing an immersive world around her voice, which is continually processed, stretched, and pulled apart at will.
As on Herlop’s previous albums, the majority of the lyrics on Pripyat are in an imagined language, forcing her music to rely on syllabic phrasing and harmonies. She was also inspired by the Carnatic music of Southern India, interpolating the style’s percussive vocal expressions on “Miu” over an amniotic backdrop of rippling tones and vibrating feedback. Earlier, during the standout “Shaolin Mantis,” Herlop gasps, coos, and chirps over watery chords and a juddering, danceable drum pattern. Evoking Björk’s mischievous vocal tampering, here Herlop leans into a thrilling sense of play and invention. Listening to Pripyat is a vertiginous experience, like moving through the stops and starts of Herlop’s mind in real time.
A subtle theme of renewal courses throughout Pripyat, conveyed through both its mercurial sound and its title. The album is named after a city in northern Ukraine that was abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986; today it stands as a ghost town overgrown with trees, flowers, and shrubs. It’s a striking, eerie, and surprisingly fitting image of posthuman life to pair with Herlop’s polymorphic music. Pripyat gives shape to a future world, one where language isn’t required to establish deep connections to the earth and to one another. | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | May 27, 2022 | 8 | b4887c56-4d35-452a-9fdf-af8d14da5898 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The second full-length from this Brooklyn band is a striking consolidation of the spiky psych-prog tendencies of its 2007 debut into a pop framework. | The second full-length from this Brooklyn band is a striking consolidation of the spiky psych-prog tendencies of its 2007 debut into a pop framework. | Bear in Heaven: Beast Rest Forth Mouth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13618-beast-rest-forth-mouth/ | Beast Rest Forth Mouth | While it may seem as if there's not a new release without a hyphenated genre to give it birth, Bear in Heaven's second LP feels fresh simply because it resists easy categorization or comparison. This isn't to say it's sonically groundbreaking, though-- fitting for an album whose title references the four main navigational directions, Beast Rest Forth Mouth is as familiar-feeling as it is difficult to pinpoint. Mostly made up of textural, spacious three- to four-minute pop anthems with towering choruses, BRFM is a welcome reminder that an album doesn't have to be bombastic to feel huge and important. Take out the earbuds and let it fill a space: This is music that's bigger than your iPod-- music you'll want to feel all around you.
Though not quite coming out of nowhere, BRFM seems like a surprise gift-- a striking consolidation of the spiky psych-prog tendencies of their debut into a pop framework. In terms of career gear-shifts, the move Caribou made with Andorra is the most recent precedent. Though at 41 minutes the album is economical and sharp in its execution, the band-- all from Georgia and Alabama-- still imbues its compositions with the generosity of spirit that makes the best Southern rock so invigorating. "Beast in Peace" opens the record with a gentle lockstep before shifting seamlessly into a mile-wide chorus. Then, they expand that chorus even further, like switching to the widest camera lens to capture a vista they just realized the full vastness of. Elsewhere, as its title indicates, "Ultimate Satisfaction" is an IMAX-wide ode to what starts out as a simple thought, then turns bodily-- the refrain of "coming down!" charts the sensation spreading like a spasm. That towering exultation is also felt on the primal "Deafening Love". While aiming for a similar sense of awe-inspiring bliss, "Love" widens the focus and luxuriates in the tremors, approximating a more protracted take on Jane's Addiction's "Mountain Song".
Yet Bear in Heaven's greatest trick is creating music that evokes the sort of physicality and scope that could soundtrack a Hollywood film, but also works equally well at stirring up intimate bodily passion. Lush synth beds, warm electronics accenting polyrhythms, and Jon Philpot's yearning, boyish howl coalesce into a vibe that's muscular without being macho, and which strikes a rare balance between nuanced emotion and overwhelming sensation. Even when delving into more disconcerting subject matter-- dabbling in self-loathing on "Wholehearted Mess" or confronting paranoia on the slinky "You Do You"-- Philpot still manages to imbue the songs with an atmosphere of seduction and intrigue.
An album like BRFM couldn't exist without a paean to the most severe and high-stakes of endeavors, and first single "Lovesick Teenagers" more than meets the requirements for 2009's Epic Song About Tortured Young Romance. With briskly alternating synth chords spitting by like fast-moving highway stripes, the titular couple are doomed to crash, but most likely in a JG Ballard sort of way. The pair martyr themselves in order to eternalize their passion, and the band is generous enough to resurrect them later, in the reprise of "Teenagers" that closes the album, seamlessly and surprisingly emerging from "Casual Goodbye". As a gesture, it's a slight nod backwards to the suite-like structures of their debut, but moreoever a celebration of abundance that wraps up an album overflowing with feeling. It's also an exclamation point signaling that Bear in Heaven not only clearly recognize their own best instincts, they're not shy about dwelling on them. Sure, bands can adapt to the current musical climate by adding extras to LPs, tweaking release dates to accommodate fan interest, or even giving away their music free. A curtain call like "Teenagers", though: now that's generosity. | 2009-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Hometapes | November 9, 2009 | 8.4 | b48b9028-f15d-4f96-b427-bcae3444e457 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Newly reissued for its 25th anniversary, STP’s sunbaked album of glam and pop and rock ranks as one of their best, separating them from the pack of post-grunge wannabes. | Newly reissued for its 25th anniversary, STP’s sunbaked album of glam and pop and rock ranks as one of their best, separating them from the pack of post-grunge wannabes. | Stone Temple Pilots: Tiny Music… Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop (Super Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stone-temple-pilots-tiny-music-songs-from-the-vatican-gift-shop-super-deluxe-edition/ | Tiny Music… Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop (Super Deluxe Edition) | Depending on your perspective, Stone Temple Pilots’ debut, 1992’s Core, was either the last of the first wave of big-alt rock records lumped under the name “grunge,” or it was the first major album to arrive in the wake of the genre’s success. Either way, it caused enough chop to trouble the already turbulent waters of Puget Sound. For the first three years of the band’s career, most critics and artists viewed them as poseurs grasping at the hem of Eddie Vedder’s cutoffs. In his 1993 Spin cover story, subtly titled “Steal This Hook,” Jonathan Gold reports that Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was fond of calling STP “Stone Pimple Toilets.”
But for the millions of teenaged Gen-Xers headbanging to “Sex Type Thing” in their Geo Prizms, the question of whether Scott Weiland and his bandmates—brothers Robert and Dean DeLeo on bass and guitar, plus drummer Eric Kretz—had a cultural right to their Big Muff pedals and thrift-store clothing didn’t matter. They wrote killer rock songs, and that was enough. This, it seems, was also STP’s first priority. At a time when authenticity was considered in terms of artistic novelty and personal torment—and when critics thought authenticity was music’s primary aim—STP understood alternative rock as merely another kind of pop music and were content to work within its established forms. When the flannel grew too warm, they simply shrugged it off.
Remarkably, they didn’t bother putting on anything else. Their third album, 1996’s Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop—reissued for its 25th anniversary with a collection of alternate takes and a 1997 live set from Panama City Beach—is glammy and sexy in a way that would make Seattle’s gatekeepers blush. Its experimental streak—while slightly overstated in later years—showed that they were willing to explore new sounds, but only if they resulted in pop gold. The songs themselves are emotionally direct, conjuring T. Rex, Bowie, and Exile-era Rolling Stones; like those totems of exhaustion and bravado, nearly every song sounds like it was made at 4:30 in the morning.
Everything moves quickly and smoothly, Weiland’s voice raspy like a skate blade on old ice. While the band’s early singles like “Plush” and “Dead & Bloated” were more melodically developed, they could come off as plodding and a little pushy, cornering you like a grad student at a party who really wants you to get where he’s coming from. “Pop’s Love Suicide” and “Tumble in the Rough,” which kick off the album, both sound like they’re being hammered out of tin. They move with a newfound speed and ease, but their casual arrangements and flat melodies make them feel slight; you can barely imagine them soundtracking a Surge ad, much less standing against the post-grunge glam that Spacehog were already perfecting.
It may seem unfair to frame Stone Temple Pilots in relation to the artists they were channeling, but originality was never their goal. “The last thing I wanted to do with this band was make everybody believe we invented something,” Robert DeLeo told the L.A. Times in 1994. Accordingly, many of Tiny Music’s best moments come when the band openly embraces its influences. “Lady Picture Show” is a stately piece of Beatles pop that sounds like a version of “You Never Give Me Your Money” that’s been left in the street for a few days. Though Weiland would later say that it’s about “the horrific gang rape of a dancer who winds up falling in love but can’t let go of the pain,” the song never wears its emotional heaviness too proudly; like Paul McCartney delivering “Eleanor Rigby,” Weiland comes off as a concerned—if lyrically obtuse—observer, and the distance he places between himself and the subject gives the song a melancholy air that’s light-years removed from the clumsiness of “Sex Type Thing.”
“Big Bang Baby” goes one step further, namechecking Bowie’s “Station to Station” and directly nicking the chorus melody from the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” While the latter made Pitchfork’s then-editor accuse them of plagiarism in a genuinely deplorable review upon its original release, Weiland was trying to use one of the most famous rock songs of all time as a sly comment on the weight of stardom: “Sell your soul and sign an autograph,” he sings in the preceding lyric. When the band shifts from the churning glam of the chorus to a beautifully chiming refrain of “Nothing’s for free,” the irony is apparent. Rarely had they sounded so in command of their craft.
“Adhesive,” meanwhile, showed that Stone Temple Pilots were still tuned in to alternative radio, its slow blooms of overdriven guitar and subdued vocals floating in the same galaxy as Hum’s 1995 hit “Stars.” Weiland was in the grips of a heroin addiction that would slowly erode his life over the next two decades. But now, roughly two years after the death of Kurt Cobain, he was keenly aware of himself as a product and how his own death would likely be co-opted by the industry. “Sell more records if I’m dead,” he sings. “Hope it’s near corporate records’ fiscal year.” Even as the song rises to a chorus, his voice remains weak and thin; it’s one of the only times on Tiny Music that he returns to the alienation that marked the band’s early work.
Despite the occasional introspective moments, Tiny Music is primarily an album of expansion. It was recorded in a 25,000-square-foot mansion north of Santa Barbara, throughout its bathrooms, hallways, and even on the lawn. The tracks here that were preposterous to critics at the time now seem like the album’s most carefully considered—and daring—moments. NME called “And So I Know” “blatant easy listening” likely because the cool sway of its starry guitar-jazz was wildly at odds with what passed for sensitivity among male-fronted groups at the time. While the song was never released as a single, it showed that a rock band could be sincere without being abrasive, broadening the era’s narrow conceptions of authenticity and masculinity, even if only slightly. A few years later, Incubus would sell a ton of records playing basically the same kind of song. You can also hear the past and future of alt-rock radio in “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart,” whose burning chorus would’ve fit on Alice in Chains’ Dirt, and whose choppy, pepped-up verses cleared a happier path out of grunge that bands like Third Eye Blind would gladly follow.
A complete take of the abbreviated album opener “Press Play” aside, the alternate cuts collected on this reissue are more interesting than essential, but the Panama City Beach concert captures Stone Temple Pilots’ power as a live band. Parts of this set aired on MTV’s Spring Break, and if the crowd chatter during the quieter moments is any indication, this was not the most attentive audience STP ever played for. But the band doesn’t seem to notice or care. Dean DeLeo covers so much ground, he seems to be playing rhythm and lead at once, steering feedback and slide guitar through the verses of “Big Empty” and replicating the ripples of organ in “Lady Picture Show.”
Hearing Weiland toggle between the voice he used on Core and Purple and the coy shout he developed for Tiny Music is a reminder that his vocal transformation in the mid-’90s is arguably Tiny Music’s biggest artistic leap; he takes melodic lines with a tongue-curling insouciance that makes him sound like Bono gone hoarse with jet lag, and his ability to convincingly inhabit both the swirling darkness of the first two records and the bright pop of Tiny Music in this set is remarkable. The tracklist is split evenly among their three albums, highlighting just how many hits these guys had already accumulated by 1997.
In his 1996 review of Tiny Music, Spin’s Charles Aaron suggested that Stone Temple Pilots fundamentally lacked irony. That’s not quite correct, even if by “irony” Aaron meant the kind of cynicism toward the trappings of rock culture that the alternative movement had been so keen to avoid. While that supposed deficiency prevented them from being accepted by the alt- and indie-rock stars of their day, it also allowed them to embrace big, powerful, goofball rock’n’roll without second-guessing their ambition. Sure, that’s probably how Scott Weiland ended up duetting with Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis on Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other and how we all ended up with Velvet Revolver. But it’s also how Stone Temple Pilots managed to evolve into a much more interesting band without losing their pop appeal. For a band who was regularly accused of chasing trends, Tiny Music proved they were willing to buck the defining characteristic of the era: They made being in a hugely famous—if somewhat dopey—rock band sound like it might actually be fun.
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. | 2021-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | July 24, 2021 | 7.4 | b48c9b88-7129-4205-87a0-e5fe1637e7db | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Returning with mightier riffs and wilder improvisations than ever, the trio offers a spiritual vision of metal, one well timed to a moment of crisis. | Returning with mightier riffs and wilder improvisations than ever, the trio offers a spiritual vision of metal, one well timed to a moment of crisis. | Sumac: May You Be Held | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sumac-may-you-be-held/ | May You Be Held | Few bands clad a soft heart in tensile steel quite like Sumac. All of the abstruse metal trio’s four albums over the last five years have been ever more imposing, like self-perpetuating obstacle courses in hell. Ricocheting between formidable doom and barbed improvisation, Sumac sound preternaturally belligerent. But the group’s core is the spiritual yearning of Aaron Turner, who since his later days in Isis has often attempted to repurpose metal’s malevolent mechanics for personal transcendence. Sumac’s May You Be Held might be the closest he has ever come. For a vertiginous hour, Sumac pirouette around riffs and collapse into bedlam, hurtle through feedback and snap back into lockstep. As violent as they may sometimes seem, these songs are timely psalms of perseverance and rebirth, weaponized for whatever comes next.
Three years ago, Sumac traveled to Tokyo to work with Japanese experimental godhead Keiji Haino. That experience not only led to two intriguing collaborative LPs but also challenged Sumac to stretch their parameters; their subsequent full-length, 2018’s colossal Love in Shadow, disrupted their formerly relentless force with unmoored instrumental explorations and extreme dynamics. May You Be Held indulges this tension like a favorite new habit. The metal sections are mightier, tightened with pneumatic precision. The improvisations, meanwhile, are more adventurous, pushing harder against the boundaries of the songs themselves. The uncanny hybrid suggests something Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun band might have made in a different setting, or something his son, Caspar, might have eventually found with his own Massaker. Where those splenetic groups decried our failures, Sumac’s tirades ponder fixing them, too.
Sumac are at their most compelling on tracks that occupy an LP’s entire side, where disparate elements can clash at length. They race, for instance, into the 20-minute title track like a power trio of agile all-stars, moving in perfect lockstep through a rhythm and riff that recall Touch & Go’s best toughies. It begins with a bleak picture of a warming world, scarred by fires and floods and droughts. But in the second half, after an impasse of noise that curdles until it crumbles, Turner shifts into a prayer—perhaps for the next generation (he is a new father, after all), perhaps for the world at large. “May the light dance in your eyes,” he shouts as the song flirts with anthem status, like “Forever Young” for metal-loving parents. “May your limbs move through gleaming waves.” Sumac’s jarring sounds emphasize the long odds of such well wishes.
“Consumed,” likewise, is a hard-won paean to resilience—and perhaps the pinnacle of Sumac’s first six years. For most of these 16 minutes, Sumac seesaw between churning sections so muscular they’d make Mastodon flinch and stark atmospheric spans that feel like walking into the mouth of some haunted cavern. Turner scowls at a world of ruin, a place of acrid smoke and desiccated bodies. The band slams into a wall of feedback only to return twice as heavy, twice as fast, and exponentially more exhilarating. Turner sings of a hero born to save the world, or at least believe that it might be saved. It’s an evangelical moment, enough to make you momentarily trust in deliverance.
May You Be Held works a lot like a church service—tales of tribulation and evil meted out alongside words of encouragement, delivered with the high volume of utter conviction. The album begins with a gorgeous but ghostly invocation in which Nick Yacyshyn’s bowed vibraphone drones wrap around Turner’s meticulous feedback and Brian Cook’s rumbling bass like lace. An hour later, the record ends with a furtively optimistic benediction: A stunted guitar riff and faint percussion crawl from the morass of a church organ played by Turner’s collaborator and wife Faith Coloccia. “Metal has always been for me an affirmation of life, one of the only ways I’ve felt spiritual ecstasy,” Turner recently told me. “Sumac is almost this ritualistic practice of tapping into that energy.”
Both Turner’s stentorian bark and Sumac’s bellicose sound can be off-putting; this is not passive or polite music. But this kind of sermon feels especially galvanizing right now, in a moment where a steady tide of endless dread suggests at least the possibility of actual insurgency. May You Be Held reckons with how bad it may truly get—“Vomit and ash/Spilled across the floor,” Turner grunts at the album’s center—and tries to fight to the other side. | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | October 7, 2020 | 7.8 | b48fbb2e-dde9-4aee-8fb6-f87950e23db5 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The composer and percussionist’s latest work is intricate and eerie, drawing attention to the small sounds that slip unnoticed in the chorus of a busy day. | The composer and percussionist’s latest work is intricate and eerie, drawing attention to the small sounds that slip unnoticed in the chorus of a busy day. | Eli Keszler: Icons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eli-keszler-icons/ | Icons | In the early 2010s, the avant-garde percussionist and composer Eli Keszler created a series of audiovisual installations involving lengths of piano wire hung from massive structures: gallery rafters, the Manhattan Bridge, a water tower in Louisiana. The wires, combined with a network of motorized beaters that strike them according to fluidly shifting patterns, create a quasi-autonomous musical instrument, generating huge masses of pointillistic sound. Sometimes, these installations perform solo; sometimes, they are joined by Keszler and other collaborators. The sounds of the wires are so complex as to be essentially unpredictable, making it difficult for performers to accompany them in conventionally musical ways. For Keszler, the machines’ indifference is part of the point. “There’s just the random information that the installation spits at the piece, which is one of the best parts: you get all these contradictions,” he told NPR Music in an interview about Archway, the Manhattan Bridge piece. “You try to do something, the installation doesn’t care.... It doesn’t respond to the way you’re feeling.”
My initial approaches to Icons, an album Keszler created during a year spent quarantined in Manhattan, put me in the mind of those installations. The music situates his marvelously intricate playing, on a drum set and an array of pitched percussion, within electroacoustic settings that can seem icily disengaged from his feats of expressive humanity. He has said the album was inspired in part by wandering through the sudden stillness of the city in 2020, the way it drew his attention to small sounds that might otherwise slip unnoticed into the chorus of a busy day. The music bears that out in ways that can almost feel literally representative. A drum fill clatters like change on a bodega countertop. A melody behind it loops quietly but insistently, just at the threshold of perception, like the tolling of a church bell newly audible from several blocks away. Uncanny field recordings arrive from nowhere. Monolithic harmonies loom at the edges, empty but illuminated. Like the city itself, this music will happily churn on without you if you fall behind.
Keszler's profile has been on the upswing in recent years. He’s appeared on several Daniel Lopatin projects, including the score for Uncut Gems. His 2018 album Stadium was excellent, and far more approachable than much of his previous work, draping his dizzying rhythms in silky jazz chords and arranging them into miniatures that sometimes resembled instrumental hip-hop. Icons arrives via the dancefloor-friendly UK label LuckyMe; two weeks before its release, the percussionist logged an unlikely collaboration with Skrillex. If Keszler faced any temptation to capitalize on this momentum, tweaking his approach for larger audiences, he resisted it. Icons is a considerably more challenging album than its predecessor. The microscopic funk breaks of Stadium appear occasionally, but more often, the tempo is slow and the atmosphere is eerie. Most of the tracks aren’t calibrated for individual listening, but the album as a whole also resists any linear narrative. Beginnings and endings are difficult to discern. A composition might lurch to what seems like its close, linger in silence for a second or two, then shake itself back to life.
Keszler’s signature as a drummer involves incredible densities of strikes in impossibly tiny temporal spaces, carefully and quietly arranged. He favors a closed hi-hat and tightly tuned snare drum, pinpricks that go silent almost as soon as your ears register them. Even when he rolls across toms and open cymbals, the effect is far from bombastic; more like the patter of soft rain. His mixture of delicacy and abandon, the defining sensibility of Stadium and 2016’s Last Signs of Speed, recedes a bit on Icons. During the most immediately ravishing passages, on tracks like “Civil Sunset” and “The Accident,” he brings his ability on the kit to the fore. Elsewhere, the action is more elusive: barely audible bell tones skittering like skipped pebbles across the void of “God Over Money;” a persistent creaking deep in the background of “Dawn,” which might be a virtuoso performance on the world’s smallest percussion instrument, or just a recording of an old door. Appreciating Icons involves adopting an attitude similar to Keszler’s: actively refusing to tune out these diminutive sounds, paying close attention to their infinite variation, daring to hear them as music.
On my first few listens, I found the album’s layers of contradictory sound distracting and confusing. I wanted to hear Keszler’s playing in an environment with less clutter. Eventually, I started to feel the rhythmic connection between, say, the percussive freakout at the end of “Static Doesn’t Exist” and the looped chatter of the field recording that accompanies it. If I had to guess, I’d say that the musicality of these relationships is deeply intuitive for Keszler. But he might be plotting them according to some elaborate design. A blurred boundary between composition and improvisation is a recurring feature in his work. The wire installations were partially about a John Cage-ish openness to the possibilities of chance, but the sounds they made were not purely random. They were happening according to the rules of a system that Keszler engineered, presumably with great care. Similarly, by feeling or by logic, by intention or by accident, Icons coheres into something strangely wonderful. Listen closely and its stoic surfaces start to open up, seeming less like an abandoned city, or those indifferent wire installations, and more like a living place.
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. | 2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | LuckyMe | June 25, 2021 | 7.5 | b49302ae-641d-47db-a487-2420ba544c41 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On this new mixtape, Oakland rapper and former Das Racist member Kool A.D. collaborates with the producer Trackademicks to focus on a looming Bay Area influence: hyphy. | On this new mixtape, Oakland rapper and former Das Racist member Kool A.D. collaborates with the producer Trackademicks to focus on a looming Bay Area influence: hyphy. | Kool A.D.: Official | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22261-official/ | Official | Kool A.D. has been on a tear lately, even by his own prolific standards. Official marks his sixth release this year; he’s been keeping a pace of a mixtape a month all summer. He continues to steer towards Lil B comparisons (July’s Zig Zag Zig is 100 tracks long and features a “BASED FREESKRYLE”) and he remains similarly willing to put his experiments and process on display. However, unlike Lil B, who—“California Boy” notwithstanding—tends to stay in his lane stylistically, Kool A.D. continues to roam the sonic map. Recent releases have ranged from focused rap mixtapes that recall his work in Das Racist (Gods of Tomorrow) to entire albums of self-sabotagingly spaced-out bedroom pop (Kool A.D. is Dead). With Official, Kool A.D. has now turned his focus to that other looming influence in the Bay: hyphy.
Official is a collaboration of sorts between Kool A.D. and Trackademicks, a Bay Area producer and rapper known for his work with Mistah F.A.B. and an unofficial remix of E-40’s crossover hit “Tell Me When to Go.” Here, Trackademicks provides seven songs’ worth of textbook hyphy beats: heavy thuds of bass, ’90s synth presets, and plenty of 808 claps. In keeping with this sound, Kool A.D. slips, chameleon-like, into a hyphy persona. While he’s dabbled in the hyphy sound plenty of times before, particularly on his “bus route” trilogy of tapes (“California Music Channel” on 2012’s 51 was produced by and featured a verse from Trackademicks), Official represents a sustained and far deeper engagement with the subgenre. Here, Kool A.D. fully embodies the native sounds of his terroir, gliding over these tracks with a smooth E-40-esque flow. Even his use of regional slang and delivery of ad-libs (either whispered or half-sung in a higher register) is on the nose throughout the course of Official.
Unlike his previous work, Kool’s focus here is on staying in character, a task that he seems to delight in. In place of the usual interplay between stoned clowning and profundity we get lines about partying, money, women, and stunting regarding his access to all of the above. Take the chorus of the trunk-rattling “Rollin’ Thru the Town:” “We be rollin’ through the town/Blowin’ hella clouds/Woofers hella loud/With the windows rolled down like/Ay, ay, ay, ay/Ay, ay, ay, ay.” “This Mane” feels a little closer to Kool’s wheelhouse, with the rapper repeating the phrase, “Y’all ‘aint even fucking with this, mane” until it becomes a sort of hater-baiting mantra. “Clapper” is the closest we get to any internal conflict, with Kool slipping into his usual flow during the first verse, though he's back to full hyphy mode in time for the chorus (“This a clapper mane, bruh, this a heater/Slap it in the old school, slap it in the beater”).
This is pretty low-stakes stuff, but it makes for a fun, breezy listen, especially compared to Kool A.D.’s longer, more freewheeling releases, which can feel impenetrable to all but diehard fans. That said, unlike most of those projects, there aren’t any quotables or moments of clarity to be found here, just seven tracks of lighthearted character-study. Kool A.D. has typically repurposed and flipped other rappers’ lines as well as his own and Official feels like a radical extension of that impulse, an album-length exercise in mimicry. Then again, hyphy’s loose energy has always served a primary influence for Kool and Official can be just as easily read as a love letter to the sounds of his hometown. Official probably won’t soundtrack an east Oakland sideshow any time soon, though were it to pop up at one, it wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 17, 2016 | 6.4 | b4947b21-f1d2-4caa-9eae-44b1b0a4a84f | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Taking influence from the legends of Laurel Canyon, the Nashville songwriter crafts an earnest, tranquil listen that opens up a rich world of detail. | Taking influence from the legends of Laurel Canyon, the Nashville songwriter crafts an earnest, tranquil listen that opens up a rich world of detail. | Erin Rae: Lighten Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erin-rae-lighten-up/ | Lighten Up | Erin Rae makes gentle music that’s easy to listen to over and over again, and yet it is never boring. The Nashville songwriter’s 2018 album Putting on Airs established this strength with 12 impeccable, minimalist recordings that showcased her subtle vocal style and acoustic guitar playing: It also demonstrated a consistent gift for writing earworms. With her latest album, Lighten Up, Rae keeps the songwriting focused and tight while broadening her stylistic palette, landing on a sound that’s less acutely folksy and more classic, unpretentious pop music.
Produced by Father John Misty collaborator Jonathan Wilson and recorded at his Topanga Canyon studio, Lighten Up is unabashedly influenced by the vintage sounds of a more famous Los Angeles county canyon: The delicate, organic style of Laurel Canyon legends like Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill is all over this album, as is the light psychedelia of late ‘60s and ‘70s pop-country. Bobbie Gentry, Lee Hazlewood, and Don Williams are among Rae’s named influences, and their heavily-produced, laid-back aesthetic is clearly echoed in her work.
Rae and Wilson wear the weight of these familiar influences well, using buoyant layers—not to mention, appearances from Kevin Morby and Hand Habits—to temper their retrophilia. On the album’s catchiest track, “True Love’s Face,” Wurlitzer, organ, piano, and slide guitar slip in and out to create a pleasant, casual groove—the sound of talented people just having fun in the studio. Five of the album’s 12 songs are supplemented by a string quartet, tapping yet another ’70s cue to provide a more expansive and ambitious sound. Occasionally, as on “Gonna Be Strange,” the grandness can be cold compared to the more intimate moments, but it more often adds heft to her understated vocals.
The themes of Lighten Up are connected to those of Putting on Airs, further exploring the intersection of personal relationships and mental wellness. There’s a tone of of therapy-ready, self-actualization to some songs; “Lighten Up and Try” toys with contemporary country’s didactic strain, radio-ready songs that tell a listener what to do or feel. But there is a sincerity to Rae’s music, both lyrically and stylistically, that makes even those sentiments convincing—it comes through the speakers like a warm hug. “Enemy,” a song about the nemeses that lie within our own heads, is hazy and mellow, a finger-picked jam that sounds like the perfect salve for the kind of spiraling self-loathing it describes. An epic journey, “Cosmic Sigh” skirts trite jargon about personal growth in favor of poetry: “Just before the old ways die/They lure, they lie.”
Rae’s songs are so soothing and serene that some of them almost work as lullabies, earning placements on the dreaded lean-back, “vibe”-oriented playlists with titles like “Indie and Chill” and “Soft + Slow.” Yet her easygoing delivery and meaty accompaniment create a rich sound that stands on its own. Within the tranquil atmosphere of Lighten Up is a world of musical and emotional detail, crafted with earnestness and care. Rae’s lyrics are frank and optimistic, warm and sensitive; her plainspoken honesty speaks to songwriting of an older vintage.
The way Rae sings, with abundant melodic flourishes, clear enunciation, and an even, intentional vibrato, also ties her music to a bygone era. Memorable, refreshing, and most rarely among her “Americana” peers, melodically interesting, her songs bring welcome abstraction and airiness to the sometimes overly literal world of 21st century country music. “Modern Woman,” by title alone, reads as yet another superficial girl-power anthem: Press play, though, and you’ll hear a bouncy reaction to exactly those kinds of songs, one explicitly meant to promote the broadest and most inclusive possible definition of womanhood by going far beyond country’s usual white, straight, cisgender heroines.
“Round up the old perceptions,” Rae sings in “Modern Woman.” “Lay them on down.” It’s as close to politics as she ventures on Lighten Up; she mostly takes an introspective tack instead of an observational one. But there is a core generosity to this music, made to explore one woman’s healing in a style likely to make us feel a little better, ourselves.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Thirty Tigers / Good Memory | February 14, 2022 | 7.3 | b49d2f87-72e0-4419-9f5e-c9bd826cab52 | Natalie Weiner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natalie-weiner/ | |
The debut album from R&B singer Niia, produced by Rhye’s Robin Hannibal, is a placid mix of trip-hop and sophisti-pop. It imparts lovelorn angst and sweet romanticism in equal measure. | The debut album from R&B singer Niia, produced by Rhye’s Robin Hannibal, is a placid mix of trip-hop and sophisti-pop. It imparts lovelorn angst and sweet romanticism in equal measure. | Niia: I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23191-i/ | I | In 2013, Niia Bertino emerged as a mysterious figure in R&B. A classically trained pianist and jazz singer, her first single, “Made for You,” thrived as a haunting soul ballad that, when paired with producer Robin Hannibal’s scant backing track, allowed Niia’s voice to shine. A year later, on “Generation Blue,” she and Hannibal delved into 1980s dream pop, the kind of serene synth-driven melody you’d hear in a John Hughes film. Then, on “Body,” Hannibal’s production took a lighter turn; with its faint guitar riff and barely-there percussion, it closely resembled Hannibal’s work with Rhye, his nostalgic R&B duo with Toronto singer Mike Milosh. Much like Milosh, whose feathery falsetto draws comparisons to Sade, there’s a rich subtlety to Niia’s inflection that fits well with Hannibal’s nuanced soundscapes, no matter what mood they emit.
So while Niia’s debut album, I, is technically a solo endeavor, it feels like a collaborative effort with Hannibal that compiles trip-hop and sophisti-pop into one set. It feels brighter and more streamlined, fusing elements of Niia’s heavier jazz-influenced sound with modern bounce. Keeping with Niia and Hannibal’s previous output, I is a placid affair, in which Niia explores the thrill of new love and the complications that arise along the way. “Last Night in Los Feliz” might be its best song: Amid the composer’s delicate orchestral soul, Niia recalls the softer side of devotion, when she and her partner would embrace each other under the stars. Yet there’s a hint of sadness beneath it all, like Niia is holding on to moments that are slowly beginning to fade.
Compared with songs like “Made for You” and “Libertine Hero,” these tracks are easier to digest, making I a fluid listen that imparts lovelorn angst and sweet romanticism in equal measure. On “Sideline” and “Day & Night,” Niia plays the role of a jilted lover pleading for one more chance. On “Nobody” and “Girl Like Me,” she becomes the innocent pursuer, speaking sweet nothings that land softly on the ear. “I don’t even care what time it is,” she sings on “Nobody,” “... I want to play Mr. and Mrs.” Lyrics like these cut both ways on *I: *Hannibal’s sparse soundtrack draws immediate attention to Niia’s songwriting, which fastens nicely to the beats, leading to a sustained groove. Though as it plays, the words seems secondary to the music and don’t really hold up in the long run.
Niia’s voice is impressive here, but without stronger narratives to reinforce it, the instrumentals emerge as the record’s most enthralling element. To that end, I sets a refreshing vibe that brings to mind groups like Quadron and Zero 7, evoking a grown-up ethos tailor-made for yacht parties or chill Sundays at home. Yet without distinct standouts, *I *fades into the backdrop, resulting in a decent album that’s a bit too comfortable. Given the resonant power of Niia’s tone and the dynamic essence of Hannibal’s arrangements, they could stand to take a few more risks. | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 8, 2017 | 7.1 | b49e56d8-37f7-4cfd-a0d5-2429b1160fc5 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Bringing together members of Interpol, the Walkmen, and Bonny Light Horseman, the indie supergroup’s debut album is a carefully crafted pastoral travelogue. | Bringing together members of Interpol, the Walkmen, and Bonny Light Horseman, the indie supergroup’s debut album is a carefully crafted pastoral travelogue. | Muzz: Muzz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/muzz-muzz/ | Muzz | Like “Superman” or “superfood,” the term “supergroup” conjures an image of energy and might: a many-tentacled mutant band, drawing power from its individually famous members. Muzz, though, is the kind of supergroup that feels more like a nourishing break from other, more demanding endeavors. Paul Banks, whose dour, authoritative baritone can’t help but draw attention to his day job as Interpol’s frontman, formed the new band with two old friends: Matt Barrick, a fellow Meet Me in the Bathroom-era veteran best known for drumming in the Walkmen, and Josh Kaufman, a longtime producer and multi-instrumentalist whose resume includes work with the National and Bob Weir, as well as his own folk group, Bonny Light Horseman.
The trio had the poor fortune of launching the new project in early March 2020—a fluke of timing that ensured their first-ever “live” performance was a socially distanced unplugged session—but this album had been gestating for years before that. (In fact, Banks and Kaufman have been friends since their high-school years, with pictures to prove it.) The earliest Muzz sessions occurred around 2015; later, the band convened at various studios and practice spaces, letting the project evolve at a leisurely pace. Now, at a moment when such in-person collaboration feels impossibly luxurious, the self-titled full-length finally arrives.
Muzz’s music sounds similarly unhurried, from the start-stop murmur of “Bad Feeling” to the foggy folk drift of “Patchouli,” an impressive mood piece colored by synth pads that unfurl like a slow-motion iTunes visualizer. While Banks and his Interpol colleagues have spent decades fending off Joy Division comparisons, Muzz swaps out the icy atmospherics for a warmer, earthier slate of influences, including Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Slide guitar, pedal steel, and horns fill in the margins; one of the better tracks, the somber, dramatic “Broken Tambourine,” boasts a piano overture ornamented with birdcalls, as though it were recorded in an open field many miles from Interpol’s natural habitat.
The result is perhaps the weariest-sounding supergroup album you’ll hear this year. Occasionally the band shifts up a gear, resulting in overcast mid-tempo rockers like “Red Western Sky” or “Knuckleduster,” which reprises the galloping shuffle Barrick used on Walkmen classics like “Juveniles.” Mostly, though, Muzz is an intricately crafted pastoral travelogue, piecing together the sighing psychedelic twang of “Evergreen,” the acoustic jangle of “Everything Like It Used to Be,” the gorgeous campfire reverie of “All Is Dead to Me,” and the folktronica death rattle of “Patchouli.” Though it often sounds lovely—thanks to impressively layered arrangements and Kaufman’s obvious instrumental mastery—it could have benefited from summoning more of the urgency associated with Banks’ and Barrick’s respective bands. Without it, listless songs like “Chubby Checker” and “Trinidad” float by without leaving much of an impression.
Given how distinctive Banks’ voice is, it’s impossible for this stuff not to sound at least a little like Interpol. Once he crooned about the subway being a porno; here his lyrics (written in collaboration with his bandmates) summon images of oceans and red western skies. Still, the singer retains a knack for beguiling, impressionistic imagery (“The bees in the frying pan/The shards in the carpet”). If there’s an inadvertent theme, it’s what Banks describes as “meditations on mental health and the quest for happiness.” That’s apparent on the group’s best song, “Evergreen,” with its velvety groove and cryptic references to an unnamed medication taking over one’s life.
Whether Muzz wind up being a lasting band or a one-off diversion, this is a promising debut from three old friends who have an instinctive grasp of each other’s talents. For Interpol loyalists, it’s a lot less patience-testing than a rap mixtape titled Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. And for Banks, it’s got to be nice to have a band that doesn’t require you to wear a suit all the time. | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 4, 2020 | 6.5 | b49e8edd-f863-4e32-a7dd-f9b3feda547c | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
On their two new albums, Islands explore two sides of their personality: the largely electronic Taste is bitter and sharp-witted, while Should I Remain Here at Sea? is more freewheeling. | On their two new albums, Islands explore two sides of their personality: the largely electronic Taste is bitter and sharp-witted, while Should I Remain Here at Sea? is more freewheeling. | Islands: Taste/Should I Remain Here at Sea? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21955-tasteshould-i-remain-here-at-sea/ | Taste/Should I Remain Here at Sea? | Nick Thorburn’s music has been downloaded more than 80 million times in the past two years, but a majority of those people will likely always associate his work with a girl who can’t pronounce the phrase “MailChimp.” In a perfect world, the two albums his band Islands have simultaneously released would change that.
*Taste *and Should I Remain Here at Sea? * *are Islands’ first releases since 2013. In the intervening years, Thorburn busied himself by composing for the podcast, Serial, including the tinny minor-chord piano theme that starts each episode. That his band has released these somewhat-different albums on the same day should come as no surprise to those familiar with Thorburn’s output. After coming to prominence as a leading force in the Unicorns, a band that arguably helped lift indie rock out of a self-serious rut in 2003, he formed Islands, as well as several other projects that blur the line between serious and silly, including Mister Heavenly, Th’ Corn Gangg, Reefer, and Human Highway. To say nothing of his solo work that he releases as Nick Diamonds. Basically, he is a compulsive music maker, and his foray into soundtracking the most popular podcast ever made him antsy to get back to Islands.
It also seems to have focused him. *Taste *is a largely electronic affair, while Should I Remain Here at Sea? * *is more guitar-based. But it’s not their instrumentation that gives these albums their distinct personalities. The recording notes show that the band switched between working on Taste and *Should I Remain... *for bursts, completing both within a few months of each other. The resulting two albums seem to offer two ways of dealing with personal devastation: for the first few days you try to make sense of it all while talking to those who are close to you. The wounds are still fresh and you can only speak of it with an air of gravitas. A few days later and you’re able to gain some perspective on the event and perhaps even make light of it. Taste is the bitter sharp-witted album immediately dealing with the fallout. *Should I Remain… *is lighter, looser and more concise, in the same way that you refine your story once you’ve tried telling it a few times.
There’s a heavy theme of a fracturing relationship on both albums, as well as unlikely recurrences of fierce gripes about American cops and benign complaints about California weather. These releases are also united in their robust choruses, which could get stadiums to sing along if Thorburn dumbed it down and wrote more formulaically. But that’s not in his nature: He’s not aggressively courting those millions of Serial listeners. Thorburn’s greatest skill is creating subliminal hooks that will stay with you even if you didn’t notice them at first. A lyrical line will swim around in your head until it offers an unexpected truth, like the advice he offers about dealing with personal tragedies soberly: “Turn to face it, resist the narcotic embrace,” he sings in Taste’s lead single, “Charm Offensive.” It’s the type of line that will come floating to the front of consciousness when you’re thinking about throwing up your hands and giving into your worst impulses.
While Islands have gotten progressively more serious with each release, the band do still know how to keep proceedings from getting too staid. A tap dance solo highlights “Stop Me Now” on Should I Remain…, the whistle line from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” finds its way into “The Joke,” and one of the most exquisite songs in the collection is given the irreverent title of “Outspoken Dirtbiker.” As far as absurd titles go, it’s no “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby,” but it does showcase Thorburn’s ability to keep his sense of humor when dealing with weighty issues.
The band is in top form here. On both albums, Thorburn shares producer credit with bassist Evan Gordon, who is also responsible for the programming. The uneasy beats on Taste are part of what give that album its kick. Guitarist Geordie Gordon and drummer Adam Halferty also make both albums richer by providing dense textures and strong background vocals. Should I Remain Here at Sea? has the feel of friends blowing off steam the only way they know how, after working so hard on something outside of their comfort zone. The process of the band working through Taste together has united them in this shared experience, and they rock out accordingly on “Back Into It,” the track that opens *Should I Remain… *
This relationship between records makes Islands’ induction to the Two-Separate-Releases-at-the-Same-Time Club a different proposition than more famous double offerings from Guns N’ Roses, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Westerberg, and Bright Eyes. Of course, when all of those acts did it, we weren’t living in the streaming society we are now, and I’d be writing this review to tell you which one of these is more worth your money. For the most part, it’s now just a matter of which one is worth your time, and they both are. These albums may be decidedly separate, but they’re only complete when experienced together. | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 26, 2016 | 7.4 | b4a0ea1a-1492-4e71-b91d-ed81ee858270 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
A set of reissues of the British experimental trio’s non-album work, including a Peel sessions EP, live LP, and posthumous anthology, reveals the group’s restless, radical openness. | A set of reissues of the British experimental trio’s non-album work, including a Peel sessions EP, live LP, and posthumous anthology, reveals the group’s restless, radical openness. | This Heat: Repeat/Metal/Made Available/Live 80-81 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/this-heat-repeatmetalmade-availablelive-80-81/ | null | This Heat’s music has always felt unstable and unsettled. The work that this London post-punk trio created between 1979 and 1981, over two studio albums and a lone EP, was a charged concoction made from equal parts dub, world music, musique concrète-inspired tape-loop experiments, and progressive rock. But perfection was never the goal: The records were rough, unpolished flashes of an ongoing, ferocious creative process, with nearly all the material starting abruptly and ending with either a hard edit or a slow fadeout. Listening to them felt like catching little snapshots when the studio door swung open for a few tantalizing minutes.
This aesthetic was born of This Heat’s working methods, which found the three men (drummer Charles Hayward and multi-instrumentalists Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams) spending hours recording jam sessions in their studio, Cold Storage, a former meat locker in a disused factory. They would choose the best bits from those experiments to build upon and refine, or use snippets of tape as samples during their live sets. That didn’t end once they got into a proper recording studio. The neck-snapping version of “Horizontal Hold” on their self-titled debut, from 1979, opens with a snippet of a lo-fi demo of the song, and “Graphic/Varispeed,” the 11-minute drone piece that serves as the flipside of 1980’s “Health and Efficiency,” is an unsettling flood of organ tones warped by pitch control. Nothing was left well enough alone. As the working motto for This Heat went: “All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four-hour alert.”
The evolution of their songs didn’t begin or end there, as proven by the three reissues out this month from Light in the Attic. Filling in the gaps of the six fertile, volatile years the original trio had together (Williams left in 1982 and, after one last European tour with a pair of replacements, the band dissolved), these collections of live recordings and radio sessions, as well as a posthumously released EP of material from 1979 and 1980, find This Heat feeling their way around this still-fresh material or attacking it from new angles as they stretched the music’s crinkled edges as far as they could.
While they had only been together a year when they entered Maida Vale Studios to record a pair of 1977 sessions for the tastemaking BBC radio DJ John Peel, that material, compiled as Made Available (originally released in 1996), reveals just how clear their collective vision was from the start. Hayward and Bullen were already veterans of the UK music scene, with the former having played in Phil Manzanera’s pre-Roxy Music prog-jazz outfit Quiet Sun. Williams, on the other hand, had never picked up an instrument before being coaxed into the fold. That combination of practiced abilities and naive playfulness was key to This Heat’s sound. On Made Available’s “Horizontal Hold,” Williams wrestles with rumbling bass tones and squealing organ chords while Bullen and Hayward settle into a jagged, stop-start groove; the three instrumentals unique to this recording (“Basement Boy,” “Sitting,” and “Slither”) fold droning tape loops in with clarinet swells and shards of piano, giving them all a grey pallor.
The four songs from these sessions that wound up re-recorded for This Heat and Deceit both gain and lose something in comparison to their later renditions. The Maida Vale recording of “Not Waving,” for example, suggests the sensation of being on a creaking ship with slowly yawing loops and clanking percussion—a fitting accompaniment to a song about drowning. The album version, with its emphasis on piercing organ tones and a more agitated vocal turn, feels like the aftermath, a call from the beyond. It’s far less affecting. Meanwhile, the impact of the oblique rhythms and convulsing guitar chords on the Maida Vale sessions’ “Horizontal” and “Makeshift Swahili” is even greater without the tape splices and unnatural BPM jumps of their later renditions.
Live 80/81 lacks some of the nuance of both the studio albums and Made Available, which could likely be blamed on the very rough sound quality. (According to the liner notes, this compilation comes from recordings made “to cassette using a stereo mic placed near the soundboard.”) But what shines through the murk is twofold: not just the way their experiments yielded such a sturdy framework for each song, but also the extent to which the band was willing to continue manipulating and stretching those forms. That could be something as simple as Bullen’s guitar solo on “Horizontal,” which slips East African-inspired phrases in with some piercing Sonny Sharrock-like flurries. Or it could be slightly more extreme like the more emphatic drumming on “Twilight Furniture” that takes a once-pleasant ramble into a tumble down a rocky bluff.
This Heat’s commitment to treating everything they recorded as raw material is most clearly represented on Repeat/Metal, a vinyl re-release of a 1993 CD (minus a 33 1/3 version of “Graphic/Varispeed,” from the Health & Efficiency EP). For “Repeat,” the band returns to the stunning “24 Track Loop” from This Heat, extending it out to a glorious 20 minutes. The effect was akin to a dub remix or an early hip-hop DJ juggling a perfect drum break, cutting between two records as the dancefloor reached increasingly higher levels of ecstasy. This Heat achieved the same effect through the mixing board and the use of Harmonizer, sending the undulating, narcotic grooves of the original even further into the infinite. The counterpart on the flipside, “Metal,” is another marvel of loops and edits, like listening to a wagon carrying scraps of sheet metal and lengths of pipes trundling along an uneven pass.
In a recent interview with David Grubbs, Hayward called the music of This Heat “a living thing that’s actually forty years old.” He and Bullen have returned to this material in recent years, performing with a gaggle of younger musicians as This Is Not This Heat. The footage of the band that’s available, including their set at this year’s Pitchfork Fest, bears out what Hayward, Bullen, and Williams were attempting to show in the late ’70s and early ’80s and what these reissues confirm: To create music that will remain alive for four decades, it needs to be pliable and open to transformation. | 2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | August 2, 2018 | 8 | b4a794b2-54c9-41ff-b06d-0e6471bc80e5 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | null |
On her 16th album, begun early this year as the UK entered its third lockdown, the Cornwall-based singer-songwriter grapples with personal loss, the cruelty of the world, and the will to keep going. | On her 16th album, begun early this year as the UK entered its third lockdown, the Cornwall-based singer-songwriter grapples with personal loss, the cruelty of the world, and the will to keep going. | Tori Amos: Ocean to Ocean | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tori-amos-ocean-to-ocean/ | Ocean to Ocean | For nearly three decades, Tori Amos has been one of pop’s most compelling personalities, combining a keen knowledge of musical composition with southern Gothic overtones, otherworldly poetics, and a sharp wit. On her 16th album, Ocean to Ocean, she continues to alchemize those qualities into an alloy like no other.
In interviews about Ocean to Ocean, Amos has said that she was inspired by the natural landscapes and dense mythology of Cornwall, the peninsular English county where she’s lived since 1999, as well as the loss of her mother, close observations of her late-twenties niece, and the lockdowns and chaos that have loomed so large over the past two years. The resulting album—which she began working on earlier this year, when England entered its third national lockdown—grapples with grief and the cruelty of the world, and how those things are felt both cosmically and personally.
Amos has long been celebrated for her cutting lyrics, and on Ocean to Ocean, the gravity of her subject matter means they leave an even deeper wound. “Metal Water Wood,” which Amos has said was one of the first tracks she wrote for the album, contains the extremely timely lament, “I know, dear/It has been a brutal year”; the song stomps in circles, its fractured chords echoing the “shattered dreams of mine” that have turned Amos’ life unfamiliar and unsettling. On the title track, over pianos and guitars that roil like storm clouds, Amos gazes despairingly upon the world and growls, “There are those who don’t give a goddamn/That we’re near mass extinction/There are those who never give a goddamn/For anything that they are breaking”: An indictment of all those who are ruining the planet, it’s a protest song delivered with the plainspoken candor of porch chats and phone calls. And “Birthday Baby,” the album’s closer, could be a minor-key rallying cry for all those who celebrate the anniversary of their arrival on Earth by toasting their very survival.
Loss is woven throughout the record, particularly the death of Amos’ mother. “Flowers Burn to Gold” is a spare, gorgeous eulogy in which Amos and her piano take center stage as a choir of backing vocalists occasionally swoops in to comfort her. On the sinewy “Speaking With Trees,” Amos speaks to her mother while a serpentine guitar winds around her: “I’ve been hiding your ashes under the tree house,” she sings, contemplating the unknowability of nature and the way it connects us all.
"Spies,” the album’s midpoint, is one of its highlights, pairing a straightforward ’90s alt-rock chug with fantastically vivid lyrics (“They may say they're on holiday/Grabbing a latte in a coquelicot beret”) and heaven-sent elements like icy strings and arpeggiated piano—as well as a baroque bridge, which breaks from the beat and ratchets up the surrealistic imagery. Its propulsive rhythm makes “Spies” too urgent to be a lullaby, but it is designed to calm: “Knowing this may help you to/Help you close your eyes/Get some shuteye,” she soothes at the song’s close, seemingly to herself as much as to her audience.
On “29 Years,” Amos addresses her legacy as an artist and as a woman, and how the process of figuring herself out in public has affected both sides of her. A plush electric piano and razor-wire guitars engage in a back-and-forth while Amos calls back to ancient myths, with a chorus of furies moaning, “How does this happen?” Then the song opens up, and Amos’ vista widens: “These tattered bits of me/I’ve been piecing/For 29 years,” she muses—still in search of “a most elusive truth,” but using all of her talents to bring herself and her listeners ever closer to it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Decca | December 3, 2021 | 7.3 | b4aa2db8-c741-4baa-9406-4c99df17322a | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
Marrow have been making the rounds in Chicago for a few years, and even though they're still in their very early twenties, the band's members have impressive resumes that include work with Chance the Rapper and Tweedy. The group tout themselves as being schooled in jazz and classical, and it’s something you can hear consistently in how they compose the songs on their debut. | Marrow have been making the rounds in Chicago for a few years, and even though they're still in their very early twenties, the band's members have impressive resumes that include work with Chance the Rapper and Tweedy. The group tout themselves as being schooled in jazz and classical, and it’s something you can hear consistently in how they compose the songs on their debut. | Marrow: The Gold Standard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20973-the-gold-standard/ | The Gold Standard | Marrow have been making the rounds in Chicago venues for a few years now, and even though they're still in their very early twenties, the band's members have impressive resumes. Lead singers Macie Stewart has toured with Chance the Rapper and Liam Kazar with Tweedy, and both were members of the now defunct hip-hop group Kids These Days. Still, even with their city’s cred behind them, Marrow is very much a blank slate.
The Gold Standard doesn’t feel like a cohesive debut statement by any means. You get the sense the band was trying to display range, settling for writing an album filled with certain types of songs rather than a unified collective vision. They can do classic rock on "She Chose You", they’re Edward Sharpe-leaning faux-folk on "Ocean of Glory", and then spinning apocalyptic, Hozier-sounding ballads with songs like "Cities" and "Leave Grounds Stay".
Marrow tout themselves as being schooled in jazz and classical, and it’s something you can hear consistently in how they compose their songs. The group likes using a diverse smattering of instrumentals, from horn arrangements to classical piano to violins and harp. It’s like they made a list of what sounds they wanted on the record and then ordered them up like a diner’s Hungry Man Special, though it doesn’t feel like overkill.
There’s an authentic-sounding tinkering, improvisational quality that emanates throughout The Gold Standard’s instrumentals; music boxes break down on "Darling Divine", cowbells ring and guiros scratch at the tail end of the "Mother of Maladies", a xylophone dings under an electric guitar solo on "Quarter to Three". Though, this improv quality becomes their downfall when it sounds like they got stuck in a groove and couldn’t get out. "Corsicana" plays like a completely anonymous and derivative piano ballad and the nearly six-minute "The Gold Standard" is severely tedious, coming off like a somber pre-performance guitar tuning with slow percussion before erupting into repetitive, roaring guitar solos.
Still, there are diamonds here. The album’s lead single "Paulson" is a furious, head-banging, shred-heavy rock song with Stewart’s voice like a bolt of lightning; you can practically see the spotlight on her. The charming "Mother of Maladies", carried by a peppy organ melody, is sweet, waltzing in a sort of theatrical romance as Stewart sings of how love feels. "Every night I am with you, I feel it/ Every night’s not every night enough," she sings. And as ho-dunk as "Ocean of Glory" might be ("You could make love to me when I’m older/ You’re a bootstrap, I’ll pull you closer," Stewart and Kazar sing), at the five-minute mark the song feels like opening a trap door and finding a party as it wigs out into frantic psychedelia.
You wonder why they didn’t make a whole new song; then again, letting a saccharine, cult-evoking sing-along dissolve into a shrilly-sung wacky trip isn’t an entirely bad move either. Still, on the whole, The Gold Standard feels like Marrow are in the midst of trying to define their sound, throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick. They're a band that can build a great three-minute song, but they lose themselves in the construction of anything bigger. | 2015-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 4, 2015 | 6 | b4b1131d-d9cb-4a59-bdef-57fcd7af5822 | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
The four-year-old pop phenom and famous pig’s second album is a charming and self-assured celebration of family, friendship, and muddy puddles. | The four-year-old pop phenom and famous pig’s second album is a charming and self-assured celebration of family, friendship, and muddy puddles. | Peppa Pig: Peppa’s Adventures: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peppa-pig-peppas-adventures-the-album/ | Peppa’s Adventures: The Album | Peppa’s Adventures: The Album, the second LP by UK singer-songwriter and television star Peppa Pig, arrives at a critical moment for the young artist. Only 4 years old, and one of very few pigs working in the music industry today, Peppa’s rise has been as rapid as it was unlikely. Her 2019 debut, My First Album, was an unexpected smash upon release. The record racked up 136 million streams, reached No. 1 on the UK Independent Albums Breakers chart, and won accolades from fellow pop renegades Charli XCX and Lil Nas X. As Peppa readied her sophomore effort, critics wondered: Was My First Album a fluke? Or is Peppa equipped to play in the UK’s crowded pop big leagues, alongside more established stars like Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran?
On My First Album, Peppa made a careful study of Brian Wilson’s sunny melodies and progressive pop structure. She hews closely to this formula throughout Peppa’s Adventures, particularly on the wistful “Perfect Day” and on “Recycling,” which evokes Fiona Apple in its percussive use of glass bottles and tin cans. Reaching further into pop’s past, she interpolates British and American folk music on the cheery “The School Bus Song” and the contemplative “Winter Days.” The traditionalist approach to production pairs well with Peppa’s efficient songwriting. She’s adept at mining the mundane stuff of suburban life for glittering moments of camaraderie. “Perfect Day” celebrates the simple pleasures of friendship, particularly poignant after more than a year of social distancing. “Digging With Mr. Bull” turns the inconvenience of road construction into an exhilarating block party. Loveliest of all is “North Star Lullaby”; Peppa wrote the elegant, understated song for her 2-year-old brother, George. “I’d fly to space if I had wings,” she sings, her voice a near-whisper, “and play with George on Saturn’s rings.” The lullaby’s verses, written in iambic tetrameter, demonstrate a gift for poetic construction well beyond her years.
Yet Peppa’s Adventures is most compelling when Peppa departs from her standard chamber-pop formula. Lead single “Bing Bong Champion” is an ambitiously maximalist shot across the bow at those who called My First Album a Sarah Records retread. A tribute to sport in a fraught Olympic year, it moves with the grand air of Taylor Swift’s “State of Grace.” Chimes and brassy horns abound, but Peppa, a nimble vocalist, ably holds her own. On the bridge, she assumes the role of coach and leads her backing singers in rhythmic cheering. It is among her best work to date.
Similarly expansive is the opener and title track, “Peppa’s Adventures,” a celebration of the natural world. Like her contemporary Lorde’s “Solar Power,” the song throws off the past year’s miseries and flies through life with every pore open. “Adventures” relies heavily on a fiddle riff that recalls, or perhaps revives, the heyday of Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, and Edward Sharpe. It’s a little gauche and though it doesn’t quite sink the song, it does raise questions about Peppa’s taste.
This minor concern aside, Peppa has proven herself a graceful navigator of a pop scene often hostile to her species. When My First Album debuted, in 2019, on the same day as Iggy Azalea’s In My Defense, Azalea cruelly threatened to turn Peppa into “a breakfast special.” In light of such attacks, Peppa’s unapologetic embrace of her identity is all the more inspirational. She oinks without shame; she celebrates “jumping in muddy puddles” on no fewer than four of this record’s nine tracks. “Birdy Birdy Woof Woof” demolishes preconceived notions about animal vocalists—“The birds go woof, and the dogs go tweet!”—as Peppa enlists friends and frequent collaborators Suzy Sheep, Pedro Pony, and Candy Cat to sing in one another’s styles.
The other political moments of Peppa’s Adventures are not as successful. “Recycling,” for all its delightful percussive flourishes, fails to consider the impact of the UK’s recycling programs on Southeast Asia, where landfills overflow with Western waste. A brief reference to private spaceflight in “The School Bus Song” is similarly ill-advised, given that billionaire astronauts continue to exploit the working-class and classroom-working listeners whom Peppa courts.
Peppa is, of course, a very young artist; one hopes that she will refine her political sensibility as she matures. Her influence, within and beyond the pop scene, is immense. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Peppa’s most devoted American fans have developed British accents and adopted her slang. Peppa seems to have borne up remarkably well in this position of influence, with all its attendant pressures. She clearly benefits from the closeness of her family and friends, who appear throughout Peppa’s Adventures. As her profile rises, and her music reaches an even wider audience, Peppa will need their support to stay grounded. If her abundantly successful new record signals one thing, it is this: Peppa is some pig.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | eOne | July 31, 2021 | 6.5 | b4b32566-92ec-4d53-909d-f1e9c92561d7 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an electronic producer and saxophone player, and his third album Petrol is a major step forward for him. It's a portrait of his native Los Angeles, and the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon. | Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an electronic producer and saxophone player, and his third album Petrol is a major step forward for him. It's a portrait of his native Los Angeles, and the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon. | Anenon: Petrol | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21512-petrol/ | Petrol | Anenon's Petrol is bookended by the sounds of freeway noise, so you don't have to look very far to find the meaning behind the title. But it's fortuitous that the album, with its viscous, reverberant swirls of reeds and violin, has the same dusky resonance as the color. If this is an album about Anenon's native Los Angeles, the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon like rivers full of embers.
Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an electronic producer and saxophone player, and Petrol is his third album. It represents a major step forward for him. His debut, 2012's Inner Hue, evoked Tycho and the Field in its shimmering ambient sketches and crisp drums; 2014's Sagrada went further in its pursuit of a new kind of beat music composed using acoustic instruments, Fender Rhodes, and tons of reverb. But its rhythms lacked distinction—"Lights and Rocks" was basically an Aphex Twin pastiche, and the TR-808 sounds elsewhere on the album seemed out of place—while his saxophone melodies sometimes scanned as rote. But Petrol, a looser, messier album, does a better job of communicating new ideas, and its emotional depth feels less gestural and more genuine.
The album's raw material comes from an improvisation session alongside violinist Yvette Holzwarth and bass clarinetist Max Kaplan; back in his studio, working with the drummer Jon-Kyle Mohr, he reworked those tapes, cutting and resampling them into their final, hybrid electronic form. The opening "Body" is typical for the album, with cool, analog-style synthesizers and the humming of distant cars creating a buoyant cushion for Simon's melancholy saxophone riffing. The mood is evocative of Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, but elsewhere things are less placid and misty-eyed; the drums on "Once" and "CXP" recreate the head-over-heels tumble of drum 'n' bass, inspiring greater urgency in Simon's sax work. "Mouth" and "Petrol," meanwhile, bring to mind Philip Glass' work. Simon has described how the album was partly inspired by the experience of standing on a pedestrian walkway above the freeway—"I found a sense of Zen in that as I was making the record," he told the Fader—and it's easy to hear parallels between the spinning chrome wheels his music evokes and the sped-up industrial choreography of the Glass-scored Koyaanisqatsi.
But some of the finest moments on Petrol turn out to be the simplest. "Hinoki" is nothing but two minutes of downcast sax melody over fathomless reverb, and "Panes" takes a similar idea and adds a bassline fashioned from bleating bass clarinet. In the first few seconds of "Panes," a human voice is briefly audible—as far as I can make out, it says "Maybe"—before it disappears into the murk again. It's the only voice on the album, but its appearance seems fitting; if Petrol's twin themes are the way that cars and distance define the experience of Los Angeles, that snippet of speech is what creates a sense of human scale before the album's lonely denouement, when everything that has come before disappears beneath the din of freeway noise. | 2016-03-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Friends of Friends | March 3, 2016 | 7.6 | b4ba871f-e2c0-4cd4-a78f-2437cb5a0f54 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Over a three-night stand in London last December, the UK group evolved from rousing post-punks to an irreverent dinner-theater act. Yet the soundtrack of all-new songs feels like a natural evolution. | Over a three-night stand in London last December, the UK group evolved from rousing post-punks to an irreverent dinner-theater act. Yet the soundtrack of all-new songs feels like a natural evolution. | Black Country, New Road: Live at Bush Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-country-new-road-live-at-bush-hall/ | Live at Bush Hall | There’s a long, storied tradition of alt-rock band names that employ superfluous punctuation (and annoy the music journalists forced to type them out), but in the case of Black Country, New Road, that comma is significant. It effectively elevates an arcane regional reference into a mission statement for a group of musicians that—be it through scandal, aesthetic fatigue, or sudden personnel changes—has taken a scorched-earth approach to the past before setting out for unchartered territory. What is “Black Country, New Road” if not a more poetic way of saying, “Been there, done that”?
For most bands, the release of a new album marks the start of its next chapter, heralding the impending cycle of promotion and touring and audience expansion. But for Black Country, New Road, albums are tombstones marking the end of an era, and an opportunity for reincarnation. Their debut, 2021’s For the first time, was a collection of early singles whose panicked spoken-word narratives and staccato, scabrous guitars could’ve tricked you into thinking Black Country, New Road were another pack of post-punk chancers—that is, if you ignored the avant-jazz orchestration and klezmer delirium burbling underneath. Then, on 2022’s stupendous Ants From Up There, they went from being Britain’s most imposing new indie band to its most inviting, embracing a theatrical maximalism that threads Springsteen with Sufjan. Frontman Isaac Wood switched his default setting from antic to romantic, sashaying through the slowly unfurling, sax-sweetened anthems like a drunken Jarvis Cocker rallying his fellow mis-shapes out of the pubs and into the streets, or a Matt Berninger who spends the whole show dangling from the balcony.
In its tightrope act between fragile and fearless, Ants From Up There was the sort of album where every song felt like a mic drop, each falling higher than the last, culminating in an epic, album-closing triptych that would cement Black Country, New Road’s place in the UK indie firmament even if they never released another note of music. So what could Wood possibly do for an encore? Quit the band, of course, mere days before the album’s release. On the cusp of a career breakthrough, he chose his mental health over impending stardom, opting for a quiet life working in a cake shop.
But if Black Country, New Road are miles away from their doomy post-punk origins, they still adhere to that genre’s core philosophy: Rip it up and start again. Instead of searching for a new singer, or delegating frontperson responsibilities to one of their own, they decided to share the load, with bassist Tyler Hyde, saxophonist/flutist Lewis Evans, and keyboardist May Kershaw taking turns at the mic. Rather than try to mimic the charismatic intensity Wood brought to their repertoire, they opted to scrap the entire songbook and write all new material for their summer 2022 festival dates. And rather than try to fine-tune these new songs into proper recordings for their next studio album, they decided to make a movie.
Filmed over a three-night stand in London last December, and unveiled on YouTube last month, Live at Bush Hall is hardly the typical concert doc. At Bush Hall, Black Country, New Road ceased to be England’s buzziest indie band and instead turned themselves into the country’s most irreverent dinner-theater act, organizing each evening around a fake play concept, complete with costumes, DIY stage props, and souvenir programs detailing imaginary plot synopses set at a farm, an Italian restaurant, and a high-school dance, respectively. But even if Live at Bush Hall wasn’t intended to be the next official entry in their canon, the accompanying soundtrack album certainly earns its right to be considered as such. Notwithstanding the occasional bit of stage banter that makes no sense without the film (“Happy prom night!”), Live at Bush Hall is as cohesive a statement as any other record in the band’s discography.
Where the glorious peaks on Ants From Up There had to be earned—you don’t get to experience the rapturous chorus of “Snow Globes” without first taking the five-minute trek up the mountain to get there—this iteration of Black Country, New Road go straight for the joy, opening the shows with a celebratory theme-song tribute to themselves, the aptly titled “Up Song.” As Evans squawks out a sax melody that sounds like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” being played at a school recital, the band unleashes a torrent of wild, piano-pounding, old-time rock’n’roll that climaxes with an ecstatic group hug of a chorus: “Look at what we did together!/BC,NR friends forever!” But within that cheeky refrain is a serious, blood-pact reaffirmation of the group’s unshakeable camaraderie. “Up Song” is more than just a readymade curtain-raiser; it’s proof that a band can, within months, lose its most integral member, reallocate musical roles, scramble to write an entirely new setlist (all while violinist Georgia Ellery withstood the strong gravitational pull of her other, equally buzzworthy band, Jockstrap), and come out sounding wholly reenergized.
None of Black Country, New Road’s newly anointed vocalists can match Wood’s natural, scenery-chewing gravitas—nor do they try to. But each singer subtly carves out a distinct personality that helps nudge BC,NR toward both giddy new heights and devastating new depths. Where Wood could invest pop-cultural references with the metaphorical weight of scripture, the messaging and delivery here are more matter-of-fact and heart-on-sleeve. Hyde recounts the push-pull of a toxic relationship on “I Won’t Always Love You,” her deadpan tone transforming the song into a piece of post-rock cabaret, while the stirring, string-quivering “Laughing Song” is as vulnerable and tender as a fresh bruise, with Hyde not only eulogizing a failed relationship but also admitting her own self-sabotaging role in its demise. Evans, conversely, plays the lovestruck fool on “Across the Pond Friend,” a swashbuckling serenade detailing those rare weekend getaways when long-distance relationships become IRL couplings, where even the most mundane activities (“On our last night/We watched a film and had a cry”) feel like minor miracles.
With songs like these, Black Country, New Road creep ever closer to becoming the prog Belle and Sebastian, and even without a Stuart Murdoch-like figure at the center, Evans makes for a highly capable Stevie Jackson, an eager foil who personifies this band’s playful spirit and tough-twee sentimentality. But the tracks helmed by keyboardist May Kershaw have no precedent in this band’s catalog. Her two leads are a study in contrasts: “The Boy” is a fantastical multi-sectional fable about a wounded bird that sounds like Björk singing a Celtic sea shanty over a Steve Reich movement, with frequent shifts in perspective and arrangement—she even calls out the chapter breaks. And then there’s “Turbines/Pigs,” a nine-minute masterstroke of candelabra-lit piano balladry where Kershaw strikes the sweet spot between the gentle melodicism of the Carpenters and the gothic folklore of Kate Bush to paint a portrait of a would-be witch stewing in self-pity: “Don’t waste your pearls on me,” Kershaw sings, on the verge of tears. “I’m only a pig.”
But just as the song is about to fade to black, Kershaw’s piano rallies the group for a hair-raising three-minute crescendo as if casting a spell, reframing the song’s outsider subject as a superhero. The story it tells could very well be the band’s own: Pushed to the brink, their future uncertain, Black Country, New Road magically summoned the strength to survive and thrive, and Live at Bush Hall is their champagne-popping send-off to a tough, turbulent year. | 2023-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ninja Tune | March 25, 2023 | 7.6 | b4bae021-cba5-481b-baf6-3883beb6a65d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Toronto duo of Anna Mayberry and David Psutka take folk music as a starting point, but walk an unfamiliar path, warping the genre with a dose of future shock. | The Toronto duo of Anna Mayberry and David Psutka take folk music as a starting point, but walk an unfamiliar path, warping the genre with a dose of future shock. | ANAMAI: What Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23182-what-mountain/ | What Mountain | The future wasn’t supposed to sound this way. In 2017, folk music can feel borderline ubiquitous—from the hokey balladeering of Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers to the latest lovingly restored private press side on Drag City or Tompkins Square, it tends to offers a space to retreat from the modern world. Besides a few exceptions—rare maverick figures like Grouper or Richard Dawson—it is notable how little contemporary folk sets out to interrogate its own structures. To that short list, you can add ANAMAI. Their second album What Mountain takes folk music as a starting point, but walks an unfamiliar path, warping the genre’s familiar signifiers and shattering its bucolic reverie with a dose of future shock.
ANAMAI began as the solo project of Anna Mayberry, a Toronto-based experimental dancer and co-vocalist of noise rockers HSY. But the project found a new direction when Mayberry shared her early songs with David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, and soon the pair had joined forces as a duo. On paper at least, the two share little musical common ground. Mayberry grew up in a close-knit folk community, where she learned traditional songs from her elders and practiced singing in close harmony. Psutka, meanwhile, has taken an unconventional path through electronic music. While his Egyptrixx project rose to attention through a string of releases on the UK label Night Slugs around the turn of the decade, he briefly slotted into a post-grime club movement before switching lanes for 2015’s Transfer of Energy (Feelings of Power), a record with harsh, metallic textures influenced by industrial noise acts like Ramleh and Anenzephalia.
Aspects of all of this are present in What Mountain. Mastered by seasoned metal engineer James Plotkin, it feels like the product of a strange, sometimes unprecedented collision. Moments recall the enigmatic chamber folk of groups like Espers, other times the avant-garde computer music released on labels like Editions Mego, but the lines it draws are porous; often it sounds like both at once. Alone, Mayberry might pass as a conventional folk singer. She has a pretty but strangely blank voice that purrs, and curls like burning newsprint. But backed by Psutka’s rhythmic synth throbs, her vocal augmented by digital effects, her songs expand into another realm, sprouting with cryptic possibilities and hidden metaphors.
“Some State” and “Crossing” offer a sort of New Aesthetic take on folk music, Laurel Canyon by way of Silicon Valley. On the latter, intricate fingerpicked guitar drifts through deep lagoons of reverb, and Mayberry sings about a journey across a lake that plays strange tricks with spatial and temporal dimensions. Elsewhere, a restrained heaviness enters the frame. “Hailstorm” multitracks Mayberry’s vocal over chinking, Slint-like melodic motifs and watery ripples, while “Brother Green, Sister Blue” and “Sun Saw” deploy sludgy, Sunn O)))-like guitar drones with clinical surety.
The mountain of the title feels significant. Mayberry returns over and over to images of nature, but they feel like metaphor, a looming symbol of something—sometimes to represent emotional devastation or mental blockage, other times to suggest new avenues of exploration. The cavernous, reverb-laden opener “The Choss” is titled after a climbing term for loose or unstable rock, implying territory untrod. (In a neat moment of disorientation, after two minutes of desolate ambience, Mayberry suddenly drops into the track; we hear the clatter of equipment and a few muttered words, like she’s taking a seat at an open mic.) On perhaps the album’s most arresting track, “Air to Blood,” she speaks of climbing the mountain as guitars snag and groan like thunder at the horizon. “Discarding your touch,” she sings, “It’s something I’ve done/I’m breathing all wrong…”
While formally exciting, What Mountain doesn’t fully deliver on its promise. Its blankness of affect can come over a little stifling; there is evidently a lot bound up in these songs, but sometimes you hope for something more concrete in the way of climactic revelation or emotional resolution. Still, if the pair’s ambition was to jolt folk music, then this stark, challenging record is a step in the right direction, rich with possibilities. | 2017-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Halocline Trance | April 29, 2017 | 6.8 | b4c9791f-92df-4e33-a327-929228282ade | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Philadelphia singer-songwriter Francie Medosch’s band combines the weepy twang of old-school country with the cozy intimacy of DIY rock. | Philadelphia singer-songwriter Francie Medosch’s band combines the weepy twang of old-school country with the cozy intimacy of DIY rock. | Florry: The Holey Bible | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florry-the-holey-bible/ | The Holey Bible | Like tourmate MJ Lenderman and his other band Wednesday, Florry are a part of a crop of rising DIY rock acts whose influences are more in the vein of Kris Kristofferson or Drive-By Truckers than anything 4AD or Sub Pop released in the ’90s. Singer-songwriter Francie Medosch started out as a teenager recording tense, depressive lo-fi indie rock, but during the pandemic, she had a realization: She wasn’t depressed anymore. “I think it’s cool to have art that reflects where you are in the moment,” she said then. She’d also been revisiting old favorites like Gram Parsons and Neil Young, planting seeds for the folksy new sound that would take hold on 2021’s Big Fall. Florry’s second proper album, The Holey Bible, posits an alternative to nihilistic indifference: What if instead of dispassionately accepting disaster as inevitable, we use the bitter end as a motivator to make the best of what time is left?
Though Florry’s sound has always had a homespun quality, on The Holey Bible, Medosch and her backing band—complete with 12-string guitar, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica, and plenty of pedal steel—push further toward old-school country. Medosch lets her melodies wander somewhat aimlessly, her voice meandering like she’s strolling through her rural Pennsylvania hometown. Even in moments where her androgynous yowl threatens to break, like when she pleads, “Try to make seeense” on “Big Winter,” her understated confidence makes it feel intentional.
That nerve translates into Medosch’s lyrics, which tend to feel like accounts of daily life, footnoted with the things she wished she could’ve said but didn’t. “The show was good and the beer was cheap,” she sings on the spunky opener “Drunk and High,” addressing a would-be lover: “You can take me home in my SUV, you can tuck me into bed, but you can’t kiss me.” On the especially twangy “Take My Heart,” Medosch recounts a memory of a sex dream that turns out to be surprisingly emotionally poignant: “You took my trust and placed it inside of you/That’s something I need, it’s something you can teach me.” But not all love songs address another person, and Medosch’s are full of love for life in general, like the fervor of summer (“Hot Weather”) or the exhilaration of the open road. “I’m the travelin’ amoeba takin’ you for a ride,” she proclaims on “Cowgirl in a Ditch,” underscoring the odd thrill of feeling microscopic in a world so vast.
All the while, Medosch and her charmingly nasal drawl strike a note of realism that keeps The Holey Bible from tipping into toxic positivity. On the gentle, plodding “Song for My Art,” she captures the persistent moral back-and-forths of the creative life, reckoning with her desire to be understood while simultaneously fending off insecurity, egotism, and writer’s block. “You hate your art but you love it too/You hate your love but you love it too,” she sings. The Holey Bible doesn’t care to gloss over human imperfection and frailty. Nothing is ever guaranteed to work out, Florry seem to say—but isn’t it worth sticking around just in case? | 2023-08-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dear Life | August 7, 2023 | 7.6 | b4d060ea-6bc3-44a5-a0a5-8386858a130f | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Former Joanna Gruesome guitarist Owen “O” Williams’ new group taps into the chiming sound of ’80s college rock, channeling a wide range of jangly inspirations. | Former Joanna Gruesome guitarist Owen “O” Williams’ new group taps into the chiming sound of ’80s college rock, channeling a wide range of jangly inspirations. | The Tubs: Dead Meat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-tubs-dead-meat/ | Dead Meat | Joanna Gruesome’s breakup felt premature in 2017, but in hindsight it was more a beginning than an end. Since the Cardiff noise-pop ensemble disbanded, its members have spun off a constellation of new, interconnected bands, among them the jittery indie-pop quartet Ex-Vöid and the lacerating punk act Sniffany & the Nits, both of which released endearingly scrappy debut LPs last year. On their heels comes the debut from yet another group featuring former Gruesome guitarist Owen “O” Williams, this time cast into a lead singer-songwriter role: the Tubs’ Dead Meat, the crispest, jangliest record yet from this crowded Venn diagram of scrappy guitar bands.
Ex-Vöid and Joanna Gruesome weren’t shy about peppering their records with jangle either, but the Tubs commit to chiming ’80s underground rock as a driving inspiration, playing up every tuneful lick for maximum pretty persuasion. Dead Meat pulls from a vast spectrum of college rock, ranging from the melancholic, shimmering guitar pop of Felt to the nervier churn of Pylon and, on its most kicking tracks, the melodic rush of Bob Mould’s Sugar albums. It all works because the Tubs have a record collector’s love for this sound. They see jangle not as a narrow style but a vast and varied world of moods and muses.
Williams sings in a woeful quiver that’s just pronounced enough to stand out against all those pleasing, whirling guitars, although he occasionally channels the fiercer punk record this band just as easily could have made. His lyrics tend toward the dour. Cast against post-punk guitar slashes and bright guest vocals from fellow Gruesome vet Lan McArdle on “Sniveller,” he curls his voice into a contemptuous sneer as he derides himself as a “bootlicker,” an “arselicker,” and a “sniveling sycophant.” On the title track, he’s even more self-lacerating, admonishing his grimy flat and lax grooming habits. He’s got a bad rash on his groin and he can’t even be bothered to refill his steroid cream.
Though Williams doesn’t overplay the squalid details, he has described his blunter lyrics as a way of pushing back against the romanticization of mental illness, including recent books and empowerment memes that have celebrated it as “a superpower.” In these songs, mental illness is primarily a threat to happiness and personal relationships. On “Round the Bend,” Williams sings about “another manic episode” as if it’s a routine pain in the ass. It’s only on the stinger that he processes the broader implications: “Soon you’re going to be sick of me.”
In another setting, lyrics like that might cut, but ringing guitars have a way of disarming sobering sentiments. A great jangle-pop record’s primary objective is to go down easy, and Dead Meat always does. The album saves one of its niftiest nods to the genre’s heyday for last, nodding to The Queen Is Dead on “Wretched Lie,” right down to the frolicking Johnny Marr guitars and “Bigmouth Strikes Again” chipmunk vocal warps. It offers a bit of context for the 25 minutes of music that preceded it, a reminder that this niche style was once one of the dominant aesthetics in independent rock. Dead Meat’s sound may be a throwback, but it’s so tunefully crafted that it charms the way it did the first time around. | 2023-02-01T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-01T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | February 1, 2023 | 7 | b4d28d6b-fbee-467c-8716-e3654fca5d4a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Chinx's second posthumous album misses the mark, but these scraps and drafts are still a reminder of his promise. | Chinx's second posthumous album misses the mark, but these scraps and drafts are still a reminder of his promise. | Chinx: Legends Never Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22146-legends-never-die/ | Legends Never Die | On May 17, 2015, Lionel Pickens, known as the Coke Boys rapper Chinx (or Chinx Drugz), was killed in a drive-by shooting while sitting behind the wheel of his Porsche in Queens. Chinx was a street savvy rapper with solid pop instincts and singsong sensibilities (not unlike his label boss French Montana) who was cut down just as he’d begun to blossom. His posthumous debut album, Welcome to JFK, was a reflection of his promise, and served as both a finely-curated introduction and a proper send-off. JFK was a swan song capped by the closer “Die Young” with the powerful and prescient final bar “I pray I be okay when I grow up a little bigger/If I don’t, tell my babies daddy was a real nigga.” As endnotes go, it doesn’t get more fitting than that. So releasing another record postmortem, with a myth-building title like Legends Never Die, feels suspiciously like a branding play, less concerned with eulogizing Chinx’s art and instead setting its sights on his legacy. In its rush to glory, Legends Never Die becomes the one thing a legacy album can’t be: forgettable.
When remembering Chinx’s brief career, listeners should refer to his Cocaine Riot mixtape series, which fully captured his bellowed melodies and joyous dope dealer romps without the stakes. In an attempting to build an obelisk out of scraps, the stakes are simply too high on Legends Never Die and these hard-drive cloggers couldn’t hope to live up to them. The songs are all clearly outtakes from the same cobbled together sessions and recordings that birthed Welcome to JFK—it has the same cast of producers (Blickie Blaze, Young Stokes, Lee on the Beats, Austin Powerz, and Remo the Hitmaker) and many of the same guests (Montana, Meet Sims, and another verse from the late Stack Bundles), only worse execution. The feature verses are bland and the album is poorly sequenced. The middle section is scattered and uneven, sandwiching a grating poacher tune like “Slide Up in Ya Bitch” in between a ballad (“Yeah I Do”) and a ride or die anthem (“Real Bitch”). The album should end with the Montana-assisted “Legendary,” but doesn’t. None of these tracks are among Chinx’s best or even his most fun work, and attempting to use them to cement his legend, ironically, seems shortsighted.
Despite missing its mark, Legends Never Die isn’t without purpose—it's still refreshing to hear new Chinx verses and hooks, which are surprisingly earwormy. In a way, the album unfolds as the Book of Chinx, recounting how he lived and died: getting rich selling coke, living a luxurious lifestyle, and trading shots with bitter enemies and jealous rivals. A song like “Around Me,” which applies “fuck nigga” repellant, reads like his mantra and there’s some haunting foreshadowing in lyrics like “Shit a nigga seen, couldn’t live through it/Nigga used to stop at the red light/Now a nigga dip through it.” (There’s even a bar about coming through the block in a Porsche.) But inside these songs he’s present; he wins, he reflects, he prays, he jokes, he loves, he loots, and he lives. For 50 minutes, Chinx breathes again.
When Legends Never Die is working well, it embodies Chinx’s spirit, showing off his versatility in the process. The strobing “For the Love” finds him in full croon, delivering one of his strongest vocal performances of his career with Meet Sims at his back. On “Crown Royal,” he wades into a wave of heavy 808 bass with choppy cadences crowning himself a coke kingpin (“Got the accolades on the corner/Dope from Peru, sniff from Tijuana”). “Like This,” which features smooth Chrisette Michele background vocals, is radio ready with plush synth arrangements and a hook that rattles around the brain. He does his cleanest writing on “Match That,” challenging competitors to match his accomplishments and drawing parallels in the same breath.
In fits and starts, you can hear the gears turning; Chinx was finding his rhythm and might’ve developed into an astute craftsman given time. Now, all that remains are the drafts he left behind. Legends Never Die won’t preserve his legacy, but it’s another reminder of what could’ve been. | 2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One | September 27, 2016 | 6 | b4d5a886-ff1d-420d-bc4d-c248218a5fef | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
A new reissue of Elton John’s pivotal seventh album highlights its whimsical, rough-hewn charm just as the artist was becoming a superstar. | A new reissue of Elton John’s pivotal seventh album highlights its whimsical, rough-hewn charm just as the artist was becoming a superstar. | Elton John: Honky Château (50th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elton-john-honky-chateau-50th-anniversary-edition/ | Honky Château (50th Anniversary Edition) | Elton John has said that Honky Château did for him what Revolver did for the Beatles: It pried open the gilded gates, lifting him “onto a higher plane” as an artist. In 1972, when Honky Château went to No. 1, ending the Rolling Stones’ five-week reign with Exile on Main St., Elton was still a rascal. He had just turned 25 with seven records to his name, and he had yet to ascend into bona fide rockstardom. He was still small-time enough to be coerced to record outside of England to cut down on costs, his day could still be ruined if a hot American album arrived at an import shop a day late, and he still wore somewhat flat shoes on stage.
In its quaint intimacy and drama, Honky Château was a signpost of Elton’s imminent success, and four back-to-back classic records were waiting in the wings. The title honors Château d’Hérouville, the French countryside studio where it was recorded, the same one in which Vincent Van Gogh painted and Frederic Chopin had a mad love affair. Many fellow ’70s musicians, from Brian Eno to David Bowie, claimed the Château hosts centuries’ worth of something supernatural, with some going so far as to suggest that each record made there—think T. Rex’s “The Slider” and Bowie’s “Pin Ups”—holds a certain mystic quality.
Elton’s signature whimsy cloaks Honky Château like mist, so palpable that it almost confirms that fabled spirits must have come to his aid. The 50th-anniversary reissue continues to phantomize the soul-stirring and profound sentiments first cast in 1972, while remaining a tender portrait of Elton pre-rhinestones, as a fledgling celebrity. It boasts the option of a double LP or double CD, the latter featuring eight live recordings from Honky Château’s inaugural performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall in addition to bare outtakes from the Château, as well as a 40-page booklet. In these early recordings, Elton’s passion and dedication pleads to be heard. Whether nitpicking intros almost to the point of nausea or infusing vitality into each syllable like a mad scientist, a young Elton is constantly straining towards vein-popping perfection. And he’ll stop at nothing until he gets it.
“Rocket Man,” a smash hit that was finished on his first day at the Château, sent Elton spaceward, much to Bowie’s chagrin. The common thread of “man in space” drew frequent comparisons, including from the Starman himself, who once agreed with a radio host who implied that Elton was riding his coattails. Longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin said in 2016 that the true inspiration for “Rocket Man” came from a 1951 short story by Ray Bradbury, about an astronaut father who leaves his wife and son for months on end to patrol planets and sweep stardust. Elton’s version of the tale soars on an electric slide guitar that melds the ordinary with the cosmic, defining how quietly devastating it is to have something you must leave behind.
Honky Château wears many hats, some more crooked than others. The springy step of songs like “Honky Cat” and the morbidly satirical “I Think I’m Going To Kill Myself” are split by the cozy love song “Mellow.” The record then momentarily darts to two consecutive ballads that—despite pure intentions—miss the mark: the humanitarian anthem “Salvation” and the freedom-seeking “Slave” (neither of which Elton has performed since the 1970s). Though the attempt at activism seems sincere, it’s an odd diversion from the otherwise whimsical material on Honky Château. The pursed-lip, head-bobbing dueling piano and guitar groove of “Susie (Dramas)” is a more worthy overlooked gem. Elton’s tough-guy piano riff could strongarm any rival instrument into submission, save for guitarist Davey Johnstone’s street-smart, tomcat electric.
One track on Honky Château stands alone, without fanfare or hit-making fantasies of lonely rocketeers. Not unlike the rose of its “Spanish Harlem” inspiration, “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” gracefully slips out of the sullied fog that blankets New York City streets at dawn. Drawing from Taupin’s disappointing experience as a first-time visitor—arriving with starry eyes only to have the illusion shattered by a gunshot outside of his hotel room window—Elton sings of a silent observer who wades through disillusionment as reality bears down on him.
Though wonderland ideals of the big city fall short, the innocence of Johnstone’s childlike mandolin promises something better. As the track pieces together a mosaic of the madness of the “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” that parade past him, lucky to be doomed, Elton insists, “I thank the Lord for the people I have found.” It is a message of unshakable resilience, as when the gunsmoke clears, the observer is forced to toss city hopes aside and search for beauty elsewhere: in his fellow man. This is not without conscious effort and the help of a certain cosmic grace (he does not sing, “I thank the Lord for the people I have met,” after all), but as the song draws to a close, the lasting truth of shared humanity is resplendent in spite of adversity.
On Honky Château, Elton nurtures his budding legacy as he navigates out of his youth. From his time standing wide-eyed and naive at the edge of recognition to his time spent facedown in the gutter of disenchantment, one nameless, cockeyed hope of “making it” still tantalizes him, and will eventually carry him into lasting eminence. Much like what haunts the walls of Château d’Hérouville, the charm of Honky Château lingers in low lamplight, crystallizing Elton’s last anticipative, moonshot glance towards stardom before it swallows him whole. | 2023-04-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe | April 3, 2023 | 8.4 | b4dff153-b70a-4527-a5fb-eb0461600d14 | Olivia Lane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-lane/ | |
Syrian singer Omar Souleyman’s Wenu Wenu is technically his first proper recording, having been cut in a studio in Brooklyn rather than on site at one of the thousands of weddings he’s performed over the past two decades. Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, who produced, made the wise decision not to try and improve on a sound that doesn’t need fixing. | Syrian singer Omar Souleyman’s Wenu Wenu is technically his first proper recording, having been cut in a studio in Brooklyn rather than on site at one of the thousands of weddings he’s performed over the past two decades. Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, who produced, made the wise decision not to try and improve on a sound that doesn’t need fixing. | Omar Souleyman: Wenu Wenu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18665-omar-souleyman-wenu-wenu/ | Wenu Wenu | It seems wrong to refer to a musician with a 20-year long career and a catalog of recordings that allegedly runs into the mid-triple-digits as having a “debut” anything. But Omar Souleyman’s Wenu Wenu is in fact technically his first proper recording, having been cut in a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn rather than on site at one of the thousands of weddings he’s performed over the past two decades around his home in northern Syria, where his reputation as a performer par excellence once drove an entire economy of bootleg cassette recordings.
Souleyman’s milieu is dabke, a style of folk dance music found at social gatherings across large swaths of the Middle East, built around intricately filigreed instrumental leads, exhortative singing, and pounding, trance-inducing rhythms. It’s an old style, but in recent years it’s had a creative renaissance as dabke artists, realizing that the form shares structural similarities with Western electronic dance music, began incorporating synthesizers and four-on-the-floor drum machines into their compositions.
While many of them have used the possibilities that electronic instruments offer to build epically rococo arrangements, Souleyman’s take on dabke is almost brutalist in its simplicity. Live, and on the five LPs of material he’s released through the American ethnographic music label Sublime Frequencies, the music is performed by Souleyman and his accompanists Ali Shaker (electric saz) and Rizan Sa'id. Sa'id plays dense bursts of melody on a synthesizer emulating traditional reed sounds over a relentless beat, and with Souleyman’s inimitable quavering bark laid over them, the entire mix is overdriven to a point you more commonly encounter with punk bands.
This combination of vivid minimalism and in-the-red performance is as essential to his popularity with Western avant garde audiences as his striking uniform of white thawb, red keffiyeh, and aviator shades, which adds a retro ABSCAM visual flair and produces an interesting aesthetic frisson when combined with the music’s techno-futuristic glare. Kieran Hebden, who produced Wenu Wenu, made the wise decision not to try and improve on a sound that doesn’t need fixing.
Wenu Wenu succeeds at capturing the hypnotic energy of Souleyman’s incredible live performances, but backs off the overdriven sonics to give the music newfound room to breathe. In the process we can finally appreciate some of the nuances in Sa’id’s playing, like the funky inflections in his basslines and the finger rolls sequenced into his drum patterns. Hearing the keyboards more clearly also gives the sound more stylistic flexibility. Synthy horn stabs in the earwormy titular opening track evoke 80s and 90s club pop, while the ersatz strings and fretless bass in the midtempo “Khattaba” add a not unwelcome layer of glossy schmaltz to the mix.
While some of those choices in synth patches were undoubtedly Hebden’s, they’re never obvious. There are touches here and there—the subtle modulated delay on a synthesizer lead, the odd filter sweep—where his participation comes through, but it never sounds like he’s trying to make Wenu Wenu a Four Tet album, or make Souleyman fit the parameters of Western dance music or, god forbid, sound fashionable.
Still, the music here can compete against any kind of dance music being made right now, and succeed. Dabke lives or dies by its ability to make people move, and although Souleyman is no-frills, and borderline gruff compared to other dabke performers, there’s something in his stentorian singing that’s irresistible. It’s still best experienced live, but after 20 years of mostly bootleg-quality tapes, there’s finally a recording worthy of calling the next best thing. | 2013-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Ribbon Music | October 25, 2013 | 7.2 | b4f137e5-4b28-4b91-b0c0-7abcb660152d | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The unfortunate thing about Peaches is that she's turned into a one-woman referendum on the worthiness of the genre ... | The unfortunate thing about Peaches is that she's turned into a one-woman referendum on the worthiness of the genre ... | Peaches: The Teaches of Peaches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6203-the-teaches-of-peaches/ | The Teaches of Peaches | The unfortunate thing about Peaches is that she's turned into a one-woman referendum on the worthiness of the genre we'll go ahead and call electroclash: the widespread misconception that this stuff is all hucksterism and schtick can be traced pretty directly back to her lyrics and Fischerspooner's stage wardrobe. The one possibly good thing, for our bar conversation and general sense that Something Is Happening, is that this makes her a little like The Strokes used to be: we all know she's out there, and most of us feel obligated to have some sort of opinion about that. So now that her album, The Teaches of Peaches, has been re-released to the U.S. with a second disc of bonus material, and I've devised a brief questionnaire to help you sort out your feelings.
1. What is Peaches all about?
Sex. This starts with a triple-punch: you (a) look at her crotch on the cover, (b) put on the first track, which is called "Fuck the Pain Away", and then (c) Peaches leads in with the immortal words, "Suckin' on my titties": she doesn't work up to it at all. The remainder of the album includes a lot of grunting and squealing and songs about sucking on different things.
2. Am I meant to find that sexy, or revolting, or shocking, or what?
Peaches is really big on crotch-shots lately, only she's made it official Peaches policy not to shave her bikini line, so all of these crotch photos feature pubic hair straggling out under her panties and down her thigh. I'm guessing that, however you feel about that mental image-- hot, foul, offensive, or lame-- is pretty much how you'll feel about this record.
3. What, precisely, is the point of that?
There is an interesting aesthetic element to it: electro is captivated by the idea of machines as clean, perfect things, next to which the human body-- particularly sex-- seems messy and organic, maybe even scary or disgusting. Sweaty, sticky, hairy: this is the world of Peaches. It's possible, if you're so inclined, to read it as a performance-art take on pro-sex feminism; it's also possible to read Peaches as the sort of person who thinks she's "challenging" supposedly "inhibited" people, who are actually just indifferent, irritated by the crazy woman sticking her bits in their faces. Which of these is actually the case is not really important.
4. So is the music any good?
Sure, totally... it's pretty okay. Just like the lyrics, the sounds are stripped down and dirty, all stiff, minimalist grime: here in the capitol of Electroclash sleaze are the echoes of post-punk electronic abuse, ghetto-tech booty-bass, and the grind-fests of the nastiest hip-hop. Remember how Salt 'n' Pepa's "Push It" sounded when it came out-- all fuzzed-up and raunchy? This is what Peaches tends to shoot for.
And she's reasonably good about it, apart from one thing: her dedication to the sex-show antics sometimes comes at the expense of the tracks themselves, which makes her failures pretty grueling for the listener. "Fuck the Pain Away", on one hand, is great: big blurts of bass and stiff drums pump away under one of her better vamps (and better lyrics: "I.U.D., S.I.S., stay in school, 'cause it's the best"-- good lord, is Peaches self-aware?). The pure forward motion of "Cum Undun" actually manages to get off the ground a little, revving up progressively into one of Peaches' most effective tracks. On the other hand, you get stuff like "Diddle My Skittle", an interminable miasma of crawling beats, static noise, and dull babble. Yes, sure, there's "only one Peach with the hole in the middle," but six tracks in, talk like that is pretty much just wallpaper.
Every track is memorable, though rarely on a musical level. "AA XXX" actually has an unconfident nuance to its sex-talk (that's double-A as in cup size, not stimulator batteries); "Lovertits" strips its beats down to the barest strut to accommodate that rather talented squeal, and "Hot Rod" milks a loving chuckle out of its chorus, which runs, "Come on/ Hot rod/ Give me/ Your wad." There are also some rock moments, like "Rock Show", which is way too much of a theatrical gag to work on a record, or the clumsy "Sucker", which I like to imagine certain people would be crazy about if only it were a lost Sleater-Kinney drum-machine demo.
5. What's up with the new material?
Covers, for one thing, which strikes me as a pretty lame thing for Peaches, of all people, to be doing. Jeans Team's "Keine Melodien" originally sounded like a robotic Prussian dictator stomping his army over a hill, where Peaches minimizes it to an ominous cruise; her version of Berlin's "Sex (I'm A)" invites unflattering comparisons with Teri Nunn. The only new track is "Casanova", which pairs Peaches up with Mignon for a surprisingly playful and girly romp.
And then there are remixes, obviously. Tobi Neumann's reworking of "Set It Off" bulks up the beat and adds actual dynamics, with which Peaches seems to have only a passing familiarity. You'd think Kid606 having his way with "Fuck the Pain Away" would be fascinating, but you'd be wrong: he's a lot more restrained than usual-- no splattering snare drums-- and he uses a lot of major-key loops to rewrite the track's fairly grim tone. It's plunderphonia of the least order: "Look at me, I worked a bunch of different samples together."
Also, there are two videos. Enjoy.
6. So should I buy it?
God, I have no idea. Do you prefer listening to stuff because it's "interesting," or because it's "good?" | 2002-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-12-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | XL / Beggars / Kitty-Yo | December 1, 2002 | 7.5 | b4f77cfe-73ac-4ba7-a1df-a20bd6b6f05a | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The Oakland rock band responds to tragedy with grace on their most musically diverse and lyrically affecting album yet. | The Oakland rock band responds to tragedy with grace on their most musically diverse and lyrically affecting album yet. | Shannon and the Clams: Year of the Spider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannon-and-the-clams-year-of-the-spider/ | Year of the Spider | Two years ago, after a series of misfortunes left her questioning everything, Shannon Shaw did what anyone in the midst of such crisis would do: She visited an astrologist. The vocalist and bassist for the Oakland rock band Shannon and the Clams was advised to channel the power of Durga, a vigilant Hindu goddess who can be recognized by her eight arms; Shaw, a noted arachnophobe, caught onto this irony right away. “I was getting protection from the thing I feared the most,” she explained. These tentative but notable steps outside her comfort zone drive Shannon and the Clams’ sixth studio album, Year of the Spider.
Since forming in 2009, Shannon and the Clams have infused garage rock with flourishes of ‘60s doo-wop and neo-psychedelia; their last record, 2018’s Onion, was especially indebted to that era. On Year of the Spider, they dig even deeper into their old-school repertoire and its various off-shoots: “All of My Cryin’,” written and sung by guitarist Cody Blanchard, struts with a disco flair before bursting into ABBA-lite harmonies. The atmospheric synths of “Midnight Wine” approximate those of Suicide, while the eerie “Snakes Crawl” feels like a take on classic country. By incorporating a wider array of subgenres without losing their core identity, Shannon and the Clams create music that’s familiar without feeling redundant.
Year of the Spider is not only the most musically diverse Shannon and the Clams record, but it’s also the most lyrically affecting. The highlight “Mary, Don’t Go” references a stalker who forced Shaw to move out of her apartment. The chorus evokes the heartbreak of bidding farewell to her roommate: “I’d like to protect you, but what if I can’t?” “In the Hills, In the Pines” mourns shuttered fixtures of the Clams’ Bay Area DIY scene and the relationships that fizzled out as a result: “And the people I knew/They just fled in the night,” Blanchard sings. The Motown saunter of “Vanishing” backdrops Shaw’s heartbreaking reflection on her father’s diagnosis with cancer: “Open up, open up/You’re still here/Weary mind, bleary eyes/You’re not vanishing.” While Year of the Spider is devoid of love songs in the most traditional sense, Shaw depicts the bond between her family, her community, and her friends with just as much passion and empathy.
Sometimes, Year of the Spider can feel a bit cluttered. “I Need You Bad,” a song addressing the deep, hidden parts of the self, is a melodramatic ballad that gets in its own way. The thrashing cymbals of “Godstone” nearly wipe out Shaw and Blanchard’s harmonies altogether. But if these are the result of trying new things, then they are minor blips in Shannon and the Clams’ progression. Year of the Spider’s centerpiece is its deceptively chipper title track, which summarizes the traumatic period Shaw experienced prior to writing the album: “I know that change is good/But it hurts, and it is frightful,” she bellows over an instrumental that weaves early R&B with a surf-rock riff. For all the struggle that inspired the record, Shannon and the Clams embrace the change with grace.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Easy Eye Sound | August 26, 2021 | 7.2 | b4f870be-b4a6-4e27-af88-d03a8043067b | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Dolly Parton’s star-powered, overly reverential, 30-song rock album aims straight down the middle. | Dolly Parton’s star-powered, overly reverential, 30-song rock album aims straight down the middle. | Dolly Parton: Rockstar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dolly-parton-rockstar/ | Rockstar | Dolly Parton is a feminist heroine who won’t say the F-word, a queer icon who conservatives can’t quit. She’s declined presidential honors from both sides of the aisle in her efforts to stay apolitical. For more than 50 years, she’s maintained an equal focus on the creative and commercial sides of the industry, developing an unparalleled brand management strategy that’s earned her millions. She extends that ethos to her new 30-song rock album, Rockstar, a dense and star-studded collection that sounds like the millennium’s most expensive karaoke party. Dolly Parton has never been one for minimalism, and who else could bring together Michael McDonald, P!nk, and Debbie Harry alongside Kid Rock and the current iteration of Lynyrd Skynyrd?
Parton’s path to Rockstar was a straight shot from her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, an honor she initially declined so as not to “stir up controversy.” Rock and country fans volleyed questions about genre, artistic merit, and supposed imposter syndrome before Parton changed her mind, eventually attending the ceremony and performing “Jolene” with Rob Halford, Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, and more. Parton has said that the experience compelled her to make a “real” rock record, but on Rockstar, the framework of rock music is relatively narrow, with covers of songs by Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, and Peter Frampton. She sings “Let It Be” with the last two living Beatles yelping absent-minded harmonies. Formulaic arrangements keep the arena-size guitars, keys, and drums all turned up to 11. Apart from the occasional piano ballad reprieve, everything frantically signals rock music. The unrelenting emphasis on a single sound obliterates the careful details that made most of the originals so striking to begin with.
Parton delivers an abundance of material that vacillates between boilerplate and downright baffling. Her original song “World on Fire” cribs Queen’s signature stomp-claps, which she revisits when she stitches together “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You.” The contested king of rock’n’roll takes the spotlight in another Parton original, the alarming sock-hop fever dream “I Dreamed About Elvis,” which re-hashes the history of “I Will Always Love You” and imagines the singers in a duet that never happened. She dutifully churns through songs like Journey’s “Open Arms” and REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You.” And sure, fuck it, get Lizzo to toot a flute on “Stairway to Heaven”! The record ends with “Free Bird,” an 11-minute fart of a closing cliché.
Amid songs first cut by Sting and Elton John and an eight-minute “Purple Rain,” Parton almost branches out when she embraces more contemporary material. Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” is one of the most recent selections, a song that Parton said nearly made her weep the first time she heard it. Cyrus sings alongside her godmother on the re-work, which sags under dramatic orchestral flourishes, and Parton again reminds listeners of “I Will Always Love You” in the coda. 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” gets a faithful lift from original writer (and current Nashville heavy hitter) Linda Perry, but Parton’s sweeping vocals in the chorus don’t quite reach the power that Perry’s original take commands.
Rockstar has a strange storybook quality, in part due to Parton’s penchant for ending some of her lines in a spoken whisper. The record opens with “Rockstar,” where the 77-year-old Parton rebukes her fictional parents in an exchange that echoes Macaulay Culkin’s opening scenes in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. The song plays up Parton’s desire to be a “rockstar,” singing about chasing her dreams as former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora follows along with competently crunchy riffs. There’s more hokiness jammed in the album’s interstitial spaces, as when Parton banters with Joan Jett (“I Hate Myself for Loving You”) and Stevie Nicks (“What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done for You”). She returns to the rock-referential theme with Melissa Etheridge on “Tried to Rock and Roll Me,” but the subject never really finds enough traction to stick.
It seems there is some deeper degree of sincerity to Rockstar, which Parton has also heralded as a tribute to Carl Dean, her reclusive husband of more than 50 years. He gets a nod in the “Carl Version” of “Magic Man,” which otherwise sounds a lot like the Heart version of “Magic Man.” With Dean in mind, Parton also revamps “My Blue Tears,” which she’d previously recorded with her Trio companions Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. This time, she’s got Simon Le Bon, a sentimental tin whistle, and massive-sounding drums. She nods at Trio again when she takes on “You’re No Good,” a signature Ronstadt number, with Harris and Sheryl Crow. But even these songs with a personal legacy for Parton are more interested in upholding the Rock Hall’s hidebound ideals than revealing her own relationship with rock music.
The album’s more tender moments can’t outrun its subtextual baggage. Guest appearances from Perry, Etheridge, and Brandi Carlile gesture toward queer inclusion, but their contributions sit alongside other figures whose presence negates any hope that Rockstar could make the rock institution feel like a more welcoming place. Steven Tyler, whose sexual relationships with minors were public knowledge long before the lawsuits filed earlier this year, makes an appearance on “I Want You Back.” “Either Or” is a horn-heavy duet with Kid Rock, who recently shot up several cases of Bud Light with an assault rifle because the beer company recruited a trans spokesperson. Parton herself insists that she “loves everybody,” but only she seems to benefit from the comfort of the harmonious middle ground she’s staked out. Her ascension to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame highlighted plenty of legitimate open questions, not least that of the institution’s continued relevance. But Rockstar adds almost nothing to the conversation, and the powerful allure of “playing to the middle” feels like a black hole instead. | 2023-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Butterfly | November 24, 2023 | 5.2 | b5013f36-7738-4a55-9812-21438913cd1b | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Nestling heavy-hitting cuts inside a protective ambient cushion, the Bristol producer’s debut builds on his dancefloor sensibilities while making good on his experimental tendencies. | Nestling heavy-hitting cuts inside a protective ambient cushion, the Bristol producer’s debut builds on his dancefloor sensibilities while making good on his experimental tendencies. | Hodge: Shadows in Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hodge-shadows-in-blue/ | Shadows in Blue | Hodge’s signature is his drum programming. It pecks and prods, at once brutal and exacting, surgical and relentless in its staccato attack. Those drums instantly telegraph to dancers that they’re listening to a Hodge track. The Bristol musician, aka Jacob Martin, has applied that signature to all kinds of canvases in the past nine years. He has made fast tracks and slow ones; bludgeoning peak-time barnstormers and wobbly-legged sun-up jams; broken-beat syncopations and four-to-the-floor pulses.
While the bulk of Hodge’s output has appeared on labels like Livity Sound, Hemlock, and Punch Drunk—hubs for the dynamic, resolutely UK-rooted strain of 21st-century dance music that Hodge has grown up alongside—he has also turned up on European labels better known for house and techno. He’s collaborated with post-dubstep peers like Peverelist and Randomer but also maverick experimentalists like Laurel Halo and Fever Ray co-producer Peder Mannerfelt. No matter how recognizable his touch, Hodge might be one of the most versatile figures in contemporary UK club music. His debut album, Shadows in Blue, makes the most of that flexibility, building on his dancefloor sensibilities while making good on the experimental tendencies that have long lain just beneath the surface of his music.
This wouldn’t be a Hodge record without some certified bangers. A less ambitious producer could have packaged a handful of these tracks into one of heaviest EPs of the year. “Sense Inversion,” “Lanes,” and “Cutie” are all built around his unflinching use of force, with sternum-punching drum patterns forming a protective circle around sullen, slow-moving bass tones. His assault is so coordinated, with layered drum parts hammering away on multiple fronts, that you feel provoked, cornered, as in a fight-or-flight situation. But these are weirder and more graceful than your garden-variety industrial-techno stompers. Take “Cutie,” with its air-raid sirens firing over a tough, rolling beat: Halfway through, its synths thicken and congeal into unexpectedly beautiful melodic forms. The effect is part battering ram, part tearjerker. “Sense Inversion” is largely in keeping with Hodge’s percussive club style, but the beat quickly drops out, leaving ominous synth drones glistening like a patch of black ice; even at full swing, the tape-warped bells smeared atop the beat feel like an unstable fusion of Saturday-night floor-filler and 1950s Bell Labs patent application.
What makes Shadows in Blue so captivating—like a proper album, a notoriously tricky category for a dance producer to master—is the way these heavy-hitting cuts nestle inside a protective ambient cushion. Beginning with the avian chatter and Foley thunder sheets of the opening “Canopy Shy,” the record takes its time kicking into gear, and its exploratory passages are essential to the overall mood. “The World Is New Again,” the album’s first real song, boasts a big, ebullient riff—jagged, almost jaunty—that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Oneohtrix Point Never album. The song’s physically modeled sounds—plucked and hammered strings, vaguely Asian-sounding flutes, something that might be prepared piano—accentuate the uncanny valley between “real” and synthetic instruments, setting up the spongy terrain to come. “Sol,” with its resonant tympani and gaseous radar pings, sounds like Hodge’s bid for soundtrack work; it would be perfect for a submarine-hunt scene. And “Shadows in Blue” is the ideal mix of worlds: It so effortlessly layers classical-minimalist pulses with flutes and strings that by the time the beat finally drops, you had forgotten the very possibility of it turning into a club anthem. Even the glistening breakbeat trance of the climactic “Ghost of Akina (Rainbow Edition)” abides by this principle: It bangs and envelops in equal measure.
It’s a fine time for this kind of album. With clubbing on hold indefinitely, there’s little need for floor-filling DJ tools, even as dance-music fans pine for the energy of the club at its idealized best—as a space not just for socialization but also for experimentation, a place where musical forms might mutate on a weekly basis, thanks to artists’ keen ears and audacious productions. Entirely by coincidence, Hodge has turned up with an album of adventurous club music—as well suited for dreaming as raving—at exactly the right moment. Last week, Hodge made a plea that DJs, once the lockdown finally lifts, become more adventurous in their sets. With Shadows in Blue, he provides the material to do just that.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | April 29, 2020 | 7.5 | b501a126-0a0c-437b-85e7-62727b0db42c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
This comic-book crossover between MF DOOM, Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck, and Boston duo 7L & Esoteric attempts to evoke the heyday of underground rap, with mixed results. | This comic-book crossover between MF DOOM, Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck, and Boston duo 7L & Esoteric attempts to evoke the heyday of underground rap, with mixed results. | Czarface / MF DOOM: Czarface Meets Metal Face | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/czarface-mf-doom-czarface-meets-metal-face/ | Czarface Meets Metal Face | Czarface, the hip-hop supergroup consisting of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck and Boston boom-bap revivalists 7L & Esoteric, has never been apologetic when it comes to their nostalgia for the good old days. Drawing from a childhood love of superhero comics, the trio devised the robot ghoul Czarface to serve as their collective avatar. His mission? “[T]o save hip-hop,” Inspectah Deck told HipHopDX in 2013, echoing the rallying cry of rap traditionalists everywhere. Whether or not you agree that hip-hop needs saving, you can’t accuse Czarface of not trying: The group has put out three full-lengths and an instrumental album over the course of the last five years. While hardly groundbreaking, these records have provided a reliable source of low-stakes fun for people who miss things like dusty samples, goofy skits, and dense rhymes. A few of those people have even lent their talents as guests: Action Bronson, Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, DJ Premier, and half of Deck’s Wu-Tang colleagues.
But as Czarface likes to remind us, Every Hero Needs a Villain. And none is more qualified for the job than MF DOOM (the “MF” is apparently back, DOOM’s near pathological aversion to having his records filed next to each other notwithstanding). He’s the last man standing from New York’s “Golden Era,” an emcee whose once-peerless wordplay was the very embodiment of the synergy of hip-hop and comic-book culture. Following a one-off track with Czarface (2015’s “Ka-Bang!”), DOOM now returns for a full-length collaboration with the group.
As you may know, the last decade hasn’t been kind to the man behind the mask. DOOM was forced to decamp to London after being denied entry to the United States (a country he had lived in nearly all of his life) and announced last year that his teenage son had died. With the exception of his undated Missing Notebook Rhymes verses, he’s sounded increasingly lethargic and dull on the mic, even slurring his speech at times. But he’s remained active, regularly surfacing for guest verses, remixes, and production gigs, even while marquee projects like Madvillainy 2 and DOOMSTARKS remain eternally on the back burner. If nothing else, he’s been a prolific collaborator, working with kindred spirits like Ghostface, Flying Lotus, Earl Sweatshirt, Cannibal Ox, Busta Rhymes, and the Avalanches. It’s as if he’s been searching for his perfect foil, that opponent who can draw out his inner supervillain.
Czarface is not quite that ideal nemesis, though on a few tracks, the group does manage to coax more energy out of DOOM than we’ve heard in a few years. Lead single “Nautical Depth” provides the best example. Here DOOM delivers his most sprightly verse on the album over a grimy bassline, even offering a few flashes of his once razor-sharp lyricism (“No friendly warfare, this ain’t wrestling/There’s nothing staged over here, you’re trippin’, mescaline”). “Phantoms,” the record’s highlight, is even more successful overall. The Czar-Keys beat here is surprisingly modern, building a groove out of bubbly 8-bit chirps that collapse halfway through the track, revealing a chasm of groaning synths below. DOOM kicks things off with a competent but forgettable verse, Deck spits furiously, landing a few satisfying lines (“Stared death in the face, left him with a sore neck”) and even Esoteric, the weakest rapper of the bunch, shows up with a surplus of energy. The real star here, though, is Open Mike Eagle, who barely breaks a sweat rapping circles around his hosts. His verse spins a pun-filled yarn about a supernatural houseguest who chastises Mike for not buying into BitCoin, drives a Rolls-Royce Phantom and plays the exquisite corpse parlor game obsessively. In another era, this is precisely the caliber of storytelling and wit we might have expected from DOOM.
Unfortunately, the rest of the record can’t meet the bar set by these highlights. “Forever People” is clearly meant to be a mic-skills showcase, the dialed-back beat consisting of little more than palm-muted guitar and a looped drum break. But none of its verses are particularly notable: DOOM is mealy-mouthed, Esoteric leans more on references than ability, and Deck’s verse, while dynamic, feels simplistic (“I stay woke like seven cups of coffee”). On “Don’t Spoil It,” Deck stuffs his bars with references to classic rap albums, but the song feels more pandering than clever. And Esoteric, at his best, sounds like a JAY-Z impersonator (Blueprint era, of course); it certainly doesn’t help that he regularly drops lines like “My interest, fly Benzes.”
You can’t knock Czarface Meets Metal Face too much for sounding like a period piece, since that’s so clearly the intention. Czarface has always spoken directly to a specific audience, one that values familiarity over progression. And if what you’re looking for is a hip-hop album that sounds like it could have been recorded 15 years ago, Czarface Meets Metal Face certainly delivers. Everything from the production to the corny pulp-movie skits feels frozen in time. But if you want to be reminded why DOOM and Deck are held in such high esteem, you’d be better off sticking to the classics. Just ask any traditionalist: They don’t make ‘em like they used to. | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Get on Down | April 2, 2018 | 6.4 | b5020dd6-5ad8-4fb5-9d88-8267e9efc259 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
It's Cosy Inside is one of those happily obscure records: Released in 1989 by two new age-obsessed brothers, it recalls Animal Collective's homebody side, and stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard. | It's Cosy Inside is one of those happily obscure records: Released in 1989 by two new age-obsessed brothers, it recalls Animal Collective's homebody side, and stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard. | Woo: It's Cosy Inside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17263-its-cosy-inside/ | It's Cosy Inside | It's Cosy Inside is one of those happily obscure records: not essential, but not replaceable either, singular and weird, but so comically gentle that it's easy to see how it was ignored and just as easy to see how it was forgotten. It was released in 1989 on Independent Project Records by two English brothers, Mark and Clive Ives. Their website says they make "Indie Electronic New Age for meditation, relaxation, yoga & shiatsu." Below the text, you can see them, the Ives brothers. One is wearing a dashiki; both are wearing what appear to be sailor hats. They are smiling big toothy smiles. "Hi!" the photo says. "We're friendly!"
Woo have at least 10 albums; It's Cosy Inside is only one of four that I've heard, and the best, too; A La Luna is a close second. Though they were never attached to any particular scene, It's Cosy Inside can easily be connected to a whole subterranean history of quiet, gooey music: certain songs by the English folk/new-age band Penguin Café Orchestra, the audio collage project the Focus Group, the Krautrock/kosmische band Cluster, instrumental interludes by the opera composer Robert Ashley, the homebody sides of Animal Collective, Sun Araw, and several other more contemporary bands. Call it board-game psychedelia, maybe; armchair ambient.
"Ambient" is a word usually used to describe albums that create wide-open spaces: the sky, the desert, the highway at night, etc. Even Brian Eno's imagined airport-- from 1978's Music for Airports-- is a place of wide tunnels, high ceilings, and windows all around. The difference between Woo and most ambient music is scale: It's Cosy Inside is a domestic album whose map is drawn in its song titles: "Wallpaper", "No More Telly", "End of the Attic", "It's Cosy Inside". It gets as far as "Downtown Suburbia", then turns around (and note that this is downtown suburbia). But the album's limited imagined space is also what makes it so wonderful and disorienting: Like the second side of Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, It's Cosy Inside stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard.
Most of it is made with acoustic guitars, gently strummed and run through effects pedals that make them sound slinky and liquid. Sometimes, clarinets come in. Melodies are pretty, sweet, almost sing-songy, but never assertive-- they ebb in, they ebb out. Knowing how little to play in situations like this is probably more important than knowing how much to play, and while there's never any silence on It's Cosy Inside, the album has a barely-there quality-- music as cobwebs, music as mist.
Music this strange certainly has the right to present itself as serious, mystical shit doing all kinds of serious, mystical investigation. It's to Woo's credit that they don't. Every level of It's Cosy Inside*--* from the cartoonish front cover to the song titles to the sound itself-- is chipper and inviting. They're just two smiling brothers in sailor hats making quiet guitar ooze for you to get massaged to. I first heard about them from the reliably interesting Mutant Sounds blog about five years ago. "Hello," one of the post's comments read. "This is my first ever blog-- how exciting to be talking to the computer-- we went to visit a crop circle last week just outside Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, and that was pretty exciting-- but this is-- Wow!!!!" Crop circles, yeah-- "pretty exciting." The post, of course, was signed by Mark Ives-- half of Woo. | 2012-10-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Drag City | October 8, 2012 | 7.8 | b5086cf6-75d3-48f1-b57f-7d1f910d15c6 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Spoon’s eighth album is their most booming LP, most resembling a companion piece to 2007’s masterwork Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Joe Chiccarelli and Dave Fridmann share co-production credits along with the band themselves, and They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now. | Spoon’s eighth album is their most booming LP, most resembling a companion piece to 2007’s masterwork Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Joe Chiccarelli and Dave Fridmann share co-production credits along with the band themselves, and They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now. | Spoon: They Want My Soul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19514-spoon-they-want-my-soul/ | They Want My Soul | All these soulsuckers, they’re among us. They’re stealing our privacy, our convictions, the very essence of our being, and leaving behind little more than a “for sale” sign and some vague, constant hollowness. In music, a dwindling whirlpool of funds only spurs on these parasites as they scavenge for scraps of humanity wherever ears can hear. Their thirst is real. And artists—those blasphemous and holy conduits for truth, liberty, and whatever else is missing from our lives—can’t help but succumb. To last more than 20 years in rock’n’roll without sacrificing a lethal amount of one’s soul requires a certain vigilance; to navigate around the pitfalls of both punk and ambition without tripping-up on either can seem just as hard as making a great album. But Spoon, one of the most stand-up bands of their generation, have figured all of this out. On their eighth album, they laugh in the face of leeches, defy gravity, suspend time. “All they want’s my soul, yes, yes, I know!” hollers Britt Daniel, stretching every crevice of his 43-year-old throat. His message is clear: They can’t have it.
Spoon’s soul is theirs alone. It’s not James Brown’s soul, and though Daniel was raised Christian in conservative small-town Texas, it’s not God’s soul, either. It’s not exactly classic rock, not quite post-punk. It’s not the soul of indie idealists blindly conflating modesty and virtue. Instead, this band is about capturing the unknown—those “finer feelings,” as Daniel once put it—and simply letting it float. Many of their songs are meticulously crafted, but they also breathe and break with crackling spontaneity. Theirs is an in-between soul happily seeking limbo as its own destination. It’s manly in an old-fashioned way, but still scuffed-up and vulnerable. It’s allergic to empty sentiment. It’s smart but not eggheaded, tough but not dumb. It’s Costello, Lennon, Can, and the Cure. It’s all-knowing and hopelessly fallible, mysterious with a purpose. It’s going to be crushed by life and love, and it’s going to endure.
They Want My Soul is the quintet’s most booming LP, eons ahead of their Pixies-worshipping beginnings and a far cry from the relatively small-scale charm of their early-2000s touchstones Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight, as well as their self-consciously lo-fi 2010 record, Transference. The album sounds like a proper follow-up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the clear-eyed 2007 LP where everything clicked into place and a restless band finally hammered themselves into stone. Some of the new record’s sonic forthrightness comes courtesy of two indie-hit-making producers new to Spoon’s world: über-pro Joe Chiccarelli, who’s worked with everyone from Frank Zappa to the Shins to Jazon Mraz over the last 35 years, and psychedelic guru Dave Fridmann, who’s helped turn unapologetic weirdos Flaming Lips and MGMT into festival headliners. Spoon, who also co-produced every song on the album, lie somewhere between those two poles—pop and outré—and the triangulations happening throughout They Want My Soul flow out unencumbered. These songs rip and burst and go.
As guitar rock continues its slow and inevitable transition into a bygone art, They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now, if not new. There’s an inherent nostalgia in the kind of alchemy Spoon are mixing up here, and the band is wise enough not to shy away from it. But instead of glowing in the light of good times past, They Want My Soul is constantly negotiating with the memories that make up our minds, trying to decide if they’re traps or blessings. “Do You” plays it both ways, starting off with Daniel wistfully reminiscing about vomiting on a curb—“I was half out of a bag,” he grins—before zooming out with a succinct world-weariness that comes from chronicling humanity’s small giveaways for more than two decades: “You tiptoe for ages, but lose yourself/Flippin’ back pages, unbuckling belts.” Daniel has talked about how he was a “mean and ornery” teenage outcast, and much of his subsequent years have been spent wearing-down that sharpness with empathy while trying to retain bits of its hard-nosed rigor. On the barreling “Rainy Taxi,” he has trouble living in the grays, describing an all-or-nothing romance he can’t help but fall for. “When you stand beside me I feel something stronger than I ever could,” he says with hope, before the ultimatum: “But if you leave you better run away for good.” A happy ending is a boring ending.
And who wants an ending anyway? “Inside Out” finds submissive contentment amidst a drift that hints at eternity. “There’s intense gravity in you,” Daniel lilts, “I’m just your satellite.” And then the track willingly enters that ether as koi-pond synths twinkle in the distance, its tranquility tempered by the fact that Spoon have never made a song quite this pretty before. So have Spoon gone soft? Have they been watered-down by commercially-minded collaborators? Have they crushed the DIY dream by leaving indie utopia label Merge? They Want My Soul makes such questions sound about as petty and irrelevant as the thousands of bands that have come and gone (or come, gone, and reunited) since Daniel and drummer Jim Eno started Spoon in the months just before Kurt Cobain’s death. They didn’t burn out. They’re not fading away. | 2014-08-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | August 4, 2014 | 8.6 | b512e161-156c-45a7-9cd1-5429eea7735f | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
null | In promotional photos, the Dreijer siblings appear in comically oversized crow's masks; when performing live, they obscure the stage with a gauzy mesh overhang and peer out impassively from behind bodysuits and balaclavas; on record, they delight in vocal distortions, each one emanating some inhuman grotesquerie. Theatre is the Knife's lifeblood. It's incorporated so completely and convincingly into their persona that, much like Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich's conviction that Tom Waits "exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios," it's next to impossible to reconcile Karin and Olof with the banalities of day-to-day | The Knife: The Knife / Deep Cuts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11891-the-knife-deep-cuts/ | The Knife / Deep Cuts | In promotional photos, the Dreijer siblings appear in comically oversized crow's masks; when performing live, they obscure the stage with a gauzy mesh overhang and peer out impassively from behind bodysuits and balaclavas; on record, they delight in vocal distortions, each one emanating some inhuman grotesquerie. Theatre is the Knife's lifeblood. It's incorporated so completely and convincingly into their persona that, much like Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich's conviction that Tom Waits "exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios," it's next to impossible to reconcile Karin and Olof with the banalities of day-to-day life.
That desire to transcend the mundane drives lots of art, but despite that they've been making music for the better part of the decade, it didn't really crystallize for The Knife until earlier this year. That moment came, of course, with the release of their third album, Silent Shout. More than just a great pop album, the record boasted a truck of exotic characters, textures, and ideas. In the sense that it etched out a world with a strange but identifiable internal logic, it felt a little bit like a fantasy writer's breakthrough novel, except with the Dreijers playacting their way through every goblin, ghost, and spook.
Not surprisingly, the relative success of Silent Shout has paved the way for a re-examination of the band's first two albums. Issued in America for the first time courtesy of Mute Records, neither 2001's eponymous debut nor 2004's Deep Cuts approach the feral highs of Silent Shout; but, taken in a lump, this streaky collection of buoyant pop, creepy denouements, ill-advised genre exercises, and flashes of brilliance spell out the Knife's journey from a sprightly, steel drum sampling, electropop outfit to something much darker and more refined.
Stacked side-by-side-by-side, the Knife's discography is pretty much a textbook example of increasing returns, which means 2001's The Knife is the weakest link in the chain. With the exception of the sproingy "Kino", the nasty guitar squalls of "I Take Time" and the retooled Celtic folkisms of "Parade" (all of which are great), everything else here feels a little limp and unsure; latter-half tracks like "Bird" and "A Lung" practically crumble to an end. Nonetheless, between Dreijer's voice (a thing of strange beauty, even in untouched form), the mutated vocals in "A Lung", and the gently percolating synths of opener "Neon", there are plenty of moments to suggest the Knife's future greatness.
Brandishing a bona fide calling card single (the superb "Heartbeats"), a toothier production approach, and an increasing debt to house music, 2004's Deep Cuts marked a double-step forward for the duo. If The Knife suffered from seeming a little too tentative and domesticized, Deep Cuts came across as brash and untamed, a streamroller that left overturned chunks of everything from steel drums ("Pass This On") and marimbas ("Rock Classics") to hi-NRG ("Listen Now") and slinky, Timbaland-inspired r&b ("You Make Me Like Charity") in its path. It wasn't always pretty, but the highs-- "Heartbeats", "One For You", "She's Having a Baby", "You Take My Breath Away"-- were more rewarding, and the sense of drama noticeably heightened.
Where The Knife comes reissued as-is, without extras, Deep Cuts arrives packaged with six bonus tracks and an additional DVD of videos. Between standout Deep Cuts-era remixes from Dahlback & Dahlback, Rex the Dog, and Mylo-- the likes of which would become standard practice for Silent Shout's singles-- and a DVD showing signs of the band's increasing attention to their visual aspect, the bulk of these bonuses have the effect of further bridging the gap between records two and three. Of course, whether you actually want to peek at the duo fumbling behind the curtain in the years before they hit their stride is another question altogether; at the least, any grousing over the unavailability of these records can end now. | 2006-12-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-12-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | null | December 4, 2006 | 6.3 | b513b505-bfa4-4300-81dd-ba99d70ac4a9 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Led by singer Frances Quinlan and her remarkable songcraft, the Philly band’s third album is warm and spacious, filled with rich stories rendered beautifully in the abstract. | Led by singer Frances Quinlan and her remarkable songcraft, the Philly band’s third album is warm and spacious, filled with rich stories rendered beautifully in the abstract. | Hop Along: Bark Your Head Off, Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hop-along-bark-your-head-off-dog/ | Bark Your Head Off, Dog | If you listen to Frances Quinlan sing long enough, you will attempt to describe her voice. This is a trap, and you should not do this. The frontwoman for Philadelphia indie rock band Hop Along doesn’t have one voice—she might have 10. Listing them would yield no insight, only a deranged sommelier’s tasting notes: cat, bugle, Rod Stewart, roaring motorcycle.
Howling, hooting, crooning, cracking—the real intrigue behind these magnificent sounds isn’t how but why. Quinlan is one of rock’s great listeners, keen to the way people’s internal monologues fill a space like bad weather, and she seems to be trying to channel them all at once in her voice. She wields her empathy the way some rock singers brandish anger, and it’s a smarter tool; empathy cuts cleaner. Her singing is a reasonable response to an impossible task—you try being this many people and see how you sound.
Bark Your Head Off, Dog is only Hop Along’s third studio album, but they’ve assumed so many guises, and lit on so many moods, that they have the poise and gravitas of lifers. On 2015’s Painted Shut alone, we were given the unloved old man of “Texas Funeral,” angry at California, his own memories, his uncomprehending children; the waitress frozen by the appearance of a wronged woman at her restaurant; the forgotten jazz cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden, thrashing and foaming in the street in front of horrified crowds.
Bark Your Head Off, Dog adds new characters to this gallery, but now they are painted in abstractions. Some of them seem to be Quinlan, seen at an angle or from the third-person—“I was asleep with my mouth open the whole drive down,” she remembers on “The Fox in Motion.” Some of them are angry men, a headspace she occupies with disarming ease. Many of them are just blips of color, impossible to either discern or forget. On “Somewhere a Judge,” she sings, “There you have it, the beginning and the end/The intern’s shovel still covered in shit/Death, indiscriminate, drags off the newborn buck with the broken leg.” Like Elvis Costello, Quinlan subtracts time and place from an otherwise-specific scenario. You are left with the flavor of a story, maddening, on your tongue.
“How You Got Your Limp” feels like the album in miniature. Like Painted Shut’s “Waitress,” it’s set in the fraught arena of the service industry, where your thoughts remain your own but your time is not. The lyrics detail various indignities: A bar hop on probation shows up to work on time and is arrested anyway, while a drunken professor is escorted out of the bar, shouting at his students, safe in his power. “I can hear you, the whole bar can,” Quinlan observes acidly. On previous albums, this line would be an incitement to shouting. Here, the delivery is nearly tender, suggesting that scorn and contempt foster their own kind of intimacy.
The album as a whole feels warmer, more spacious. The songs on Painted Shut were doled out like 10 fist-shaped car door dents, but Bark Your Head Off, Dog moves at an agitated hum. The band softens its pugilist’s stance and pokes at some of the folk roots that showed through on Get Disowned, their first album. There are flecks of mandolin, saloon piano, and the dusty caw of some fiddles on “What the Writer Meant.” The string arrangement on “How You Got Your Limp” feels as unruly as their guitars used to.
The most revelatory moments on Bark Your Head Off, Dog open up onto calmer spaces: “Not Abel” plinks and bristles with harps and pizzicato. Quinlan’s lyrics, as ever, are densely wrought, but her voice knows how to loosen them up and make them flow over the music. (“In an open field, man is guilty always/Mud is yellow, and the ground is moving/Sun is yellow, and the ground is moving.” How would you sing these lines? Quinlan will show you why your way is wrong.)
Interestingly, the rockers feel a little staid this time around. The speckled rhythm guitar in “Somewhere a Judge” feels like a tentative nod towards Paramore territory, but Hop Along is a little too intense to really bounce. “How Simple” adopts a cheery lilt that feels too tucked-in, too starchy, for a heart as unruly as Quinlan’s. The thrill of this band often comes with the seething sense that they are pacing inside their own arrangements, yearning to burst free. The disappearing guitar scrapes and cymbal splashes introduce a slightly unwelcome tidiness.
When Quinlan applies her acoustic guitar like a Brillo pad and the arrangements sprout into new corners, you can hear Hop Along tracing lines that will carry them forward. The album’s final third, in particular, gleams with promise, a liquid, fleet-footed, and surprising suite of songs that contain some of Quinlan’s most devastating observations. On “Look of Love,” she remembers listening with relief as a dog she doesn’t like is run over, then reckons with her lingering shame. A dead dog—who has the nerve to kill off a pooch just for the discomfited laughs? She does, and she makes us stay with it until the laughter dies. This is Quinlan’s brand of empathy; it makes your eyes water, not from sadness but pain. The dog’s bark won’t leave her alone, not for a minute, nor does she want it to, and she intends to make you hear it. | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | April 6, 2018 | 8 | b514912f-216e-4fbf-8064-db451d2ba768 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
A collection of the duo’s 12" singles from the past six years proves their dancefloor nous but lacks the playfully eclectic spirit of previous albums. | A collection of the duo’s 12" singles from the past six years proves their dancefloor nous but lacks the playfully eclectic spirit of previous albums. | The Juan MacLean: The Brighter the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-juan-maclean-the-brighter-the-light/ | The Brighter the Light | Variety is the spice of the Juan MacLean. Like label co-founder James Murphy, this core DFA act—comprising frontwoman and LCD Soundsystem alum Nancy Whang and Six Finger Satellite guitarist turned synth wizard John MacLean—has historically taken a magpie approach to dance and electronic sounds. That’s how a Heaven 17 pastiche like The Future Will Come’s 2009 title track can accompany a piano-house banger like “Happy Home,” or how the New Order-esque “Love Stops Here” can share real estate on 2014’s In a Dream with “Charlotte,” a song that sounds more like Beaucoup Fish–era Underworld than anything Underworld have recorded since. Derivative? Pshaw: Whang and MacLean are so proficient and so soulful in their craft that TJM always feels like its own life-affirming entity.
So what to make of The Brighter the Light, an album assembled with sameness in mind? A collection of previously released 12" singles with fresh mastering and editing, along with a pair of new tracks (“Quiet Magician” and “Pressure Danger”), it is wall-to-wall four-on-the-floor. From the anthemic opener “What Do You Feel Free About?” to the closing title track (an instrumental, and the longest on the record), every song could be extracted from the record and inserted into a club night without missing a beat.
The problem is that you can take “without missing a beat” literally, as nearly every track on the album moves along at the same brisk pace. Which, granted, is the express purpose of the record: a home for all of the group’s recent club-ready 12"s, with no distractions and no need to deliver on any other vibe or mood. Minor details differentiate tracks that share the same basic template: “Zone Non Linear” has a repeated, chill-inducing arpeggiated synth hook; the instrumental “Quiet Magician” has a dub vibe, which the following track, “Pressure Danger,” echoes with an even sparser soundscape. Leadoff track “What Do You Feel Free About?” has a distinctive whistle/tom break, albeit a lackluster one. There’s nothing wrong with creating a club LP, but when you stack it up against TJM’s other, more adventurous albums, the consistency can’t help but drag.
Much of the impetus to make individual tracks pop falls on Whang’s shoulders, and she more than holds up her end of the bargain. On “Zone Non Linear” she takes an appropriately non-linear approach to romance by singing about it before it occurs. “I wanna race to that moment when we meet,” she sings to a partner who’s not even in the picture just yet. That line, and the song’s repeated refrain of “I can’t wait to find out if I’m in love,” are reminiscent of similar sentiments in Björk’s “I Miss You” (as in “but I haven’t met you yet”); they present love as a thrilling discovery waiting to be made.
Whang can pack a lot of power into wordplay. She spends “Can You Ever Really Know Somebody” wondering aloud in slight variations of the titular phrase: “Do you ever really know somebody? … Can you ever really love somebody?” But when she switches to “Can you ever really know my body?”—well, that’s a very different question, and it hits like an adrenaline rush.
At times it’s less the phrasing of the lyrics than their delivery that stands out. “Feel Like Movin’” seems at first like a standard exhortation to shake your ass, but Whang chants the repeated hook of “Put your feet on the dance floor, show me what you’re made of” with the sing-song cadence of a schoolyard taunt, like she’s triple-dog-daring you to get down. Coupled with the peppiest production on the record—a bubbly bassline playing off spectral vocal snippets—it’s Brighter’s standout moment.
But words can only get you so far, and even they often fall short. You’ve heard the sentiments animating “What Do You Feel Free About?,” “You Are My Destiny,” “Get Down (With My Love),” and “Pressure Danger” before, and there’s nothing particularly special about the variations presented here, whether lyrically, vocally, or musically. That’s the danger of drawing from the same well nine times in a row, even for a band as generally brilliant as the Juan MacLean: Each effort just leaves you thirsting for something new.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | DFA | September 23, 2019 | 6.3 | b5154a6a-146f-4fb0-9f89-ccc2c9665573 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
In 2014, noise maverick Spencer Clark recorded this psychedelic tribute to the visionary biomechanical designer. Its far-out electronic sketches are rich with visceral detail and dripping with horror. | In 2014, noise maverick Spencer Clark recorded this psychedelic tribute to the visionary biomechanical designer. Its far-out electronic sketches are rich with visceral detail and dripping with horror. | H.R. Giger’s Studiolo: H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hr-gigers-studiolo-hr-gigers-studiolo-vol-1-and-vol-2/ | H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 | “World-building” is too pat a phrase to describe what Spencer Clark does. Ever since the mulched hypnagogia of his duo the Skaters, with James Ferraro, the California native has been tearing open rifts to the kind of dimensions you usually only read about in pamphlets about lizard people, or find tucked away in the occult section of old VHS stores. Unlike the new-age music Clark’s albums sometimes invoke, his vision of utopia has more to do with Jon Hassell’s extraterrestrial landscapes than with crystals or incense. Like his old bandmate, Clark is entrenched in the psychedelia of plastic pop culture, but where Ferraro spent the ’10s diving deep into the emptiness of smartphone sterility, Clark took a more colorful path. Stitching together childhood memories of dozing off at the San Diego Zoo with half-remembered dreams of ’80s curio kitsch, Clark creates Frankenstein monsters of collagist, tropical synesthesia unlike anything else in noise music.
Though Clark has always toiled away more or less in obscurity (almost willfully so, as he adopts and discards aliases at the drop of a hat—Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Fourth World Magazine, Vodka Soap, and Typhonian Highlife only begin to scratch the surface), a handful of his records have stood out. Released in 2014, Pinhead in Fantasia brought an operatic grandiosity to his smeared keyboard hallucinations and became one of his most acclaimed releases. Around the same time as Pinhead in Fantasia, Clark utilized many of that album’s textures and samples in an even more baffling endeavor: a massive, four-disc behemoth titled H.R. Giger’s Studiolo, issued under the Typhonian Highlife moniker. Inspired by a trip to the H.R. Giger Museum shortly following the Swiss artist’s death, Clark left feeling disappointed by what he saw and decided to record his own exhibit of perverse, biomechanical sound objects to match the fantastical monstrosities he pictured in his head. The resulting album represents some of the deepest, most unwieldy music of Clark’s career. Remastered and condensed here into a friendlier 2xLP set, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 offers a more welcoming peek into a freewheeling visionary of the DIY era working at his most far-fetched.
Clark’s palette throughout H.R. Giger’s Studiolo is rich with uncanny detail: bongo drums mapped to keyboard samplers in order to play at dizzyingly nimble speeds; pitch-shifted vocals looped and distorted until they sound like the echolalia of an amphibious alien species; dinky harpsichords dancing as if accompanying some loony royal procession. Befitting its industrial theme, however, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo drips with a dank, dungeon-dwelling horror. “Giger’s Bust of Mantegna” moves with the slithery menace of an anaconda, Clark’s clickety percussion drip-dropping all over his ballooning B-movie drones. On “Flesh Ribbons Streaming Water Spiders,” high-pitched wails materialize like imprisoned wraiths crying to be freed from their cages. It’d all seem macabre if it didn’t come across like the soundtrack to the most bugged-out haunted house you’ve ever set foot in. As tracks like “Aquatic Flush of Harpishord Vacui” swell with proggy keyboard solos and opulent timpani rolls, Clark’s mutilated world hums with energy both majestic and hilarious.
Clark’s a shredder at heart, never too shy to just let his gurgling rhythms sit back while he goes haywire on the keys. But the true magic is in how he wrangles all those oblique building blocks into place. See how the glimmering synths of “Grotesqueries Metallic Wallpaper” lurch their way into a tense, ribbiting drum pattern. Or how the brief, Theremin-esqe lead that appears halfway through “Giger’s Zodiac Fountains” casts a floating sense of whimsy over the track. Or how the gnome-like grunts of “Giger’s Balinese Green Vaults” slowly build into a chamber of ’80s sci-fi synths that practically radiate chromium light. Clark’s tape-hissy production gives his work the feel of an artifact rescued from oblivion; a similarly hermetic logic governs his loops, which interact like self-contained environments, miniature societies we weren’t meant to see.
Clark would go onto make much lighter, sillier albums than this, like the imaginary James Cameron scores of Avatar Blue, or the Darth Maul-inspired incantations of The World of Shells. But rarely has Clark’s music been this aesthetically rich, as cursed and profane as it is dazzling. In all its winding, nightmarish pathways, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 probably doesn’t make for the ideal starting point for newcomers to Clark’s universe (that honor would go to his UFO-obsessed opus The Spectacle of Light Abductions). But accessibility is pretty antithetical to Clark’s outsider project to begin with. Like his best work, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo begs to be pored over like a harebrained conspiracy theory, something to sink into fully rather than listen to in passing. Eighty minutes is an ideal amount of time to spend in this delirium; the deeper one succumbs to Clark’s murky transmissions, the more his mutant language actually starts to make sense. | 2024-04-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Pacific City Sound Visions | April 30, 2024 | 7.6 | b51a51cb-ce43-496c-9a5a-e463be7760f5 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The prolific veteran producer Knxwledge enjoyed a national breakthrough when he was featured on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015. His Wraptaypes series, which is anthologized here, is a good place to get a feel for his aesthetic: Basically, he strips original works of their elements, samples the remains he deems useful, and engraves them with his signature. | The prolific veteran producer Knxwledge enjoyed a national breakthrough when he was featured on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015. His Wraptaypes series, which is anthologized here, is a good place to get a feel for his aesthetic: Basically, he strips original works of their elements, samples the remains he deems useful, and engraves them with his signature. | Knxwledge: Wraptaypes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21532-wraptaypes/ | Wraptaypes | Despite having a Bandcamp page as thick as a double-stuffed booklet of CDs, Knxwledge's semi-breakthrough didn't arrive until he contributed to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly last year. "Momma," equal parts slow-burning soul and dazed funk, is emblematic of the producer's style: You can hear conspicuous traces of Madlib and J Dilla, but an individual sound emanates through their influence. Knxwledge's ongoing Wraptaypes series is a good place to get a feel for his aesthetic: On these mixes, he layers a mixture of vocals and audio clips laid atop his production—vintage beat tapes with voices for added emphasis. The Wraptaypes anthology compiles 26 such productions created between 2011 and 2015 into a highlight reel. His sample selections are noteworthy, but his repurposing of them is the resonant accomplishment.
Wraptaypes involves Knxwledge stripping original works of their elements, taking the remains he deemed useful and engraving them with his signature. It's an aggressive, dissociative process, in which he basically decapitates source material like action figures and sews the heads onto music he's composed. The face (or, rather, the voice) is the same, but the limbs, extremities, and heart are all different. As a result, the ensemble of bit players Knxwledge weaves into each web becomes part of something original.
Knxwledge allows each track—no matter how short or unpolished it is—to stand as its own entity. In each instance, the outcome is rewardingly distinct. "Strtdfrmthebttm" slows Drake's "humble" recollections, trading urgency for a warm, mellow haze for the better part of two minutes. (Kudos to Knxwledge for reimagining a club anthem as a lush, scenic Urban Outfitters composition—that's a feat.) An Eazy-E verse from "Tha Muthaphukkin Real" contrasts the lazy strings and 808s on "Iwish" before Carl Thomas' voice literally chirps in, accelerated to Alvin and the Chipmunks speeds, Heatmakerz style. Inebriated keys turn Sheek Louch and Jadakiss into charming lounge singers on "Choosewun"; the first portion of "Choppas" does the same to Lil Wayne.
The anthology also showcases Knxwledge's perceptive grasp of how certain instruments drive songs, namely the unrestrained '80s sitcom sax on "21kwestions" and Ernie Isley's screaming guitar on "Allwegot." Details count, so artifacts like different parts of the same Boyz n the Hood scene used at the beginning of "Ignorntsht" and end of "Gotstaprove" are welcome pop culture Easter Eggs for the film enthusiasts. Anthologies have no hidden messages or intricate narrative structures; they're collections meant to be taken at face value. Wraptaypes, however, is as much a snapshot of Knxwledge's mind as it is an aggregate of music. Each component and pairing speaks to how he interprets music and assembles his own. | 2016-02-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | All City | February 11, 2016 | 7.4 | b51c22da-1d3d-4cfa-af61-d96b9ab5fb5b | Julian Kimble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julian-kimble/ | null |
A year after headlining a night of the tragic Route 91 Harvest festival, the popular country renegade forgoes the obvious references on one of the most modest but poignant albums of his career. | A year after headlining a night of the tragic Route 91 Harvest festival, the popular country renegade forgoes the obvious references on one of the most modest but poignant albums of his career. | Eric Church: Desperate Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eric-church-desperate-man/ | Desperate Man | Three days after the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival last year in Las Vegas, Eric Church debuted “Why Not Me.” He wrote the song in tribute to Sonny Melton, one of the 58 people murdered that October night. Melton had gone to Route 91 to see Church, something the singer learned when he saw Sonny’s widow, Heather, speaking on CNN. Eric Church wasn’t the only country artist to write about Route 91—Maren Morris also released “Dear Hate”—but Church’s news bulletin of a song speaks to his unique place in the modern country firmament. He is a self-styled maverick who named an album The Outsiders, but his numbers dwarf those of an alt-country renegade like Sturgill Simpson. And he isn’t a purist, instead embracing everything that comes with arena rock, from the volume to the crowds. Church has the artistic and popular credibility, then, to write compassionately about an event that ripped through the country and country music.
Which is why it’s odd that “Why Not Me” isn’t on Desperate Man, the album Church delivered a year after Route 91. The shooting isn’t mentioned even in passing during these swift 36 minutes, nor is the illness of his brother, Brandon, who died just after the album was finished. But Church doesn’t dodge emotions on Desperate Man. He grapples with existential threats on “Monsters,” admitting that true devils lurk inside the head. He swaps confessions for universal feelings, a trick he works with politics, too. Church doesn’t turn a blind eye to the problems plaguing the nation, even if the narrator of “Drowning Man” doesn’t want to think about Lady Liberty turning her back while “Uncle Sam just turns around.” During “The Snake,” the United States’ bitter partisanship is framed as a whataboutism fable; it doesn’t matter which species a copperhead or rattlesnake is, as they all prey on the weak.
“The Snake” is rightly positioned as Desperate Man’s opening track not for its clever extended metaphor or theme but for its swampy aesthetic. Church doesn’t stray far from its thick, steamy vibe throughout these 11 songs, bending other styles to suit this sound instead of vice versa. “Solid” starts as a slice of trippy arena rock, its spacey organ and phased guitars offering a sly nod to Dark Side of the Moon. Church soon steers it back to soul, confirming that the heady prog days of the burly The Outsiders are long gone. Church burrows instead into the Southern funk of 2015’s Mr. Misunderstood, keeping things so lean and spare that it can first seem slight.
Desperate Man doesn’t offer a grand statement of purpose along the lines of Mr. Misunderstood, which gained its power from Church’s ability to self-mythologize as a rebel existing on Nashville’s fringes. This is the sound of a renegade settling into his mature period. He’s trimming away excesses that were once endearing but are now extraneous. Whenever Church wants to rock hard here, he ramps up the rhythms more than he cranks the amps, making music that begs the audience to dance. His ballads are stripped so bare he seems like he’s singing alone. Other elements would distract from his nuanced vocal performances; everything that needs to be here is here.
The songs themselves are strikingly uncluttered, too, containing just enough emotion to give them considerable resonance. Though Church isn’t working through his grief in public, he’s not stoic. The mismatched lovers of “Heart Like a Wheel” make for perhaps the most tender song he’s ever written, while his paean to the connective power of “Hippie Radio” is cut by a bittersweet melodic undercurrent. The deliberate decision not to indulge in a grand gesture—combined with the consciously compact scale of Desperate Man—means this album seems smaller than every record he’s made since 2011’s Chief. That modesty is the key to its very appeal: This is an album designed not for the moment but the long haul. | 2018-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | EMI | October 13, 2018 | 7.6 | b52274a2-790b-4044-ab77-5f06efba4101 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Dolls of Highland melds the voodoo-infused mythology of the South with rambunctious glam rock, and Kyle Craft summons you into its world like a carnival barker wooing customers into a funhouse. | Dolls of Highland melds the voodoo-infused mythology of the South with rambunctious glam rock, and Kyle Craft summons you into its world like a carnival barker wooing customers into a funhouse. | Kyle Craft: Dolls of Highland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21717-dolls-of-highland/ | Dolls of Highland | True to its penchant for lipstick and lingerie, glam rock has proven to be the most promiscuous of musical genres. Its sneering, transgressive attitude and electric-warmongering paved the way for punk, but its theatrical flair also connects it to the caped crusaders of prog. And since its early ’70s heyday, glam rock’s aesthetics have been revamped by everyone from synth-pop androgynes to hair-metal shriekers to 21st-century boys and toys alike. But this looseness has its limits—Elton John’s Honky Château residency notwithstanding, the world is still waiting for its first true glitter-speckled, roots-rock renegade. And though Portland (via Shreveport, Louisiana) maverick Kyle Craft doesn’t really tart himself up beyond the occasional silver-hair dye job, his frisky, fantastical debut album, Dolls of Highland, proves the gig is his for the taking.
Dolls of Highland is reportedly a break-up album, cobbled from the ashes of a flamed-out eight-year relationship and recorded in a makeshift home studio set up in a friend’s laundry room. But you’d never know about that heart-rending inspiration from the stage-crashing gusto on display here. If Dolls of Highland has a basis in autobiography—the title references the Shreveport neighborhood where it was made—Craft spends the album imagining himself as Ziggy Sawdust, a flamboyant fop working the barrelhouse piano in the front room of the seediest bayou bordello. His songs illustrate how the intense religiosity and voodoo-infused mythology of the South make it fertile turf for the sort of colorful characterization and freak-scenery on which glam rock was founded. This is an album populated by burlesque dancers, bloodsuckers, lonely nightclub singers, goth girls, one-night stands, suicide victims, and otherwise innocent folk going crazy from the heat. Craft summons you into their world like a carnival barker wooing unsuspecting customers into a funhouse attraction.
Like all good Southern boys, Craft grew up in the church before discovering the devil’s music, and he’s prone to casting his songs’ female protagonists as temptresses who can corrupt the most pious of choir boys. There’s the undead damsel of “Eye of a Hurricane” who lures oblivious paramours to their demise with a “kiss down in the catacombs,” and the pole-dancing star of “Berlin” (the stripper’s stage name, not the German city) who renders her most loyal customer a blubbering, blue-balled mess hiding in a rear corner booth. But Craft transcends witchy-woman cliches through both self-deprecating humor and surprisingly sympathetic portrayals—like the vampiric hero of “Jane Beat the Reaper” who wears “medallions on a string, she said they warded off the boredom/ Of life alone and the constant sting of what she was before them.” The further you venture into Dolls of Highland, the more its laundry-room recording locale makes sense: This is an album where dirty souls can go to be cleansed.
Craft is one of those singers who is always on, with a moonstruck howl of a voice that seizes you by the lapels. Its audacity is only amplified by the relatively rustic environs: the beautiful barstool serenade “Balmorhea” could pass for a Bat Out of Hell ballad if Meat Loaf was backed by The Band, while the vivacious countrified romp “Future Midcity Massacre” sounds like a Styx from the sticks. His performances are extravagant, but never excessive, using a folk singer’s sepia-toned palette—acoustic guitars, piano, harmonica—to make radiant, rambunctious rock ‘n’ roll, while subtly bending time and space with electrified guitar slides that hearken back to the heartland psychedelia of early-'90s Flaming Lips.
But Craft’s outsized personality is matched by less flashy, more fundamental skills: vivid, immersive storytelling and sharply focused, fat-free songs that have the lived-in feel of 40-year-old FM-radio favorites. And he can dial down the irreverence and deliver the drama on more sobering turns like “Trinidad Beach (Before I Ride)” (where Craft forges a spiritual kinship with another southern Anglophilic misfit, the late Chris Bell of Big Star), and the astounding “Lady of the Ark,” a strummed-out song for a silenced siren that’s launched heavenward atop Spectorized drum crashes and sleigh-bell rattles. “Swing low, sweet heathen/ Swing for the wretch and the rock ‘n’ roll kid,” Craft belts out in the song’s dying moments. “Roam this earth, repeat it/ All this sin until this wicked world makes sense.” Kyle Craft may no longer go to church, but he nonetheless commands a congregation, united in ostracization and a fundamental belief in blasphemy. | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 25, 2016 | 8.1 | b52dd691-a9b7-4dd3-8433-d459e1893b5d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
There's a scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock is relaxing in the pool, directly after the montage that ... | There's a scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock is relaxing in the pool, directly after the montage that ... | Aix Em Klemm: Aix Em Klemm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/87-aix-em-klemm/ | Aix Em Klemm | There's a scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock is relaxing in the pool, directly after the montage that follows his first sexual encounter with Mrs. Robinson. His father asks him what he's doing, and Benjamin says, "Well, I would say that I'm just drifting here in the pool." His father wants to know why, and Ben answers, "Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here." Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid and Bobby Donne of Labradford are two men who understand such comforts. And together, as Aix Em Klemm, they've created a very pleasant place to drift.
It's fun to hear a collaborative record like this, where every note can easily be traced to its creator. I imagine Wiltzie to be responsible for the gorgeous guitar drones that pulsate through "Prue Lewarne" and "The Girl with the Flesh Colored Crayon." Both tracks feature the delicate, low-level hum that his full-time band perfected on The Ballasted Orchestra. Wiltzie also vocalizes on both these tracks (calling it singing isn't quite right) in hushed, reverberating tones. His vocals are just another shading, really, the melody flowing with the current instead of paddling anywhere on its own. The voice is effective, adding a welcome layer of gloomy ambience.
Labradford's brand of quiet music has always been too ordered and precise for my taste, somehow lacking a vital emotional component. But on Aix Em Klemm, Bobby Donne's contributions seem the perfect counterpoint to Wiltzie's organic guitar sculpture. On "3x2 (exit)," I'm guessing that Donne contributes the high-pitched buzz that burrows between the sheets of feedback, as I remember something similar from E Luxo So. And the otherwise respectful "Sophteonal," which consists mostly of slowly repeated electric guitar picking and delicate piano, gains much from a disorienting layer of computer manipulation. I'm reminded of Markus Popp's contributions to Gastr del Sol's Camoufleur, the way he ran the acoustic information through his notebook computer and returned a digital ghost to the mix. These high-tech embellishments add textures that the lo-fi Stars of the Lid would be unlikely to attempt, and are a large part of what makes this collaboration unusual.
The final track, "Twentyone," is a theft of Angelo Badalamenti's "Twin Peaks" theme, with its dreamy piano chords and too-pure bassline, but it's so pretty we can forgive the transgression. This is a lovely piece of ambient drone rock, and fans of either band will not be disappointed. | 2000-10-27T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2000-10-27T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Kranky | October 27, 2000 | 7.4 | b5304794-f4d5-40cb-9817-040825f8d430 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Cellars is the synth-pop project of Allene Norton. Her second album, produced by Ariel Pink, sounds zapped straight from the sepia-toned dance floor of a long-forgotten high school prom. | Cellars is the synth-pop project of Allene Norton. Her second album, produced by Ariel Pink, sounds zapped straight from the sepia-toned dance floor of a long-forgotten high school prom. | Cellars: Phases | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21792-phases/ | Phases | In a bar in L.A.'s Echo Park, Ariel Pink met Allene Norton, a twenty-something Seattle transplant with a good ear for the '80s. She had been hard at work on Cellars, her unabashedly vintage synth pop project since she moved to L.A., with one LP already under her belt. With her second album, Phases, a Pink-produced project of sparkling electro ballads, it looks like the '80s revival Simon Reynolds foresaw at its end in 2010 keeps on pushing forward. And in the 16th year of our 21st century, a question needs to be asked: Does it matter if the revival ever ends? Should we just stop calling it revival, and just settle for the plasticity of reinvention?
The first quarter of 2016 has been kind to someone particularly dedicated to such tropes, with Kristin Kontrol's impressively glacial "X-Communicate" and Jessy Lanza’s minimalist pop experiments. But unlike either of those, the music of Phases sounds, even if not intentionally, zapped straight from an anachronistic radio transmission, or the sepia-toned dance floor of a long-forgotten high school prom. Norton, from what we can hear in Phases, has committed herself to digging around in the archive, perfecting a photocopy of not just sounds, but affects and emotions that don't feel of this time.__
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A lot of this power comes from an intelligent reliance on a form of schmaltz that is virtually missing from even the most heated and heavy of contemporary pop music. Things aren't as wilfully corny, campy, or self effacingly sentimental anymore. Even the most melodramatic music can feel cool to the touch, over-processed to a fault. Etymologically one of the roots of schmaltz is the old German word smelzan, a verb that literally signifies to melt. One of its other roots is chicken fat, a high cholesterol substance that makes you feel bad in the long run, yet so good at the moment you consume it. Phases perfectly internalizes these two ways of being, excess and constant evaporation. You feel the overload in the album’s selection of palatial synths, bubbling percussion, sugary bass lines. And the threat of melt is in Norton’s voice and drawn out intonation, which hangs like a diffuse cloud of dry ice around the soupy mixture of sounds.
This effect is best achieved in songs like "Real Good Day" and the album’s centerpiece, "Still in Love." In "Real Good Day" twinkling arpeggios and a cooing chorus carry Norton’s voice down the PCH like a convertible driving towards the sunset. Even if never stated explicitly, the album as a whole is rather optimistic. It comes from what is at times a goofy erotic sheen, indebted to Giorgio Moroder or YMO. *Phases *might be the only the album this year to capture camp in all its classic glory: Even the missed beats have a kernel of fun and whimsy, like a teen movie montage. The sounds they have made and the emotions they've referenced here are always in the back of your mind, on the tip of your tongue, never new or old, just pure plastic. | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Manifesto | April 21, 2016 | 7 | b5305d4f-4876-4b02-84be-ffdf6bd685de | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Producer and DJ Collin Strange draws inspiration from Chicago acid house and New York hardcore in equal measure, but his new EP exists in its own moment. | Producer and DJ Collin Strange draws inspiration from Chicago acid house and New York hardcore in equal measure, but his new EP exists in its own moment. | Collin Strange: How I Creep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23199-collin-strange-how-i-creep/ | How I Creep | Collin Strange is a fount of history from the rougher edges of downtown New York dance music in the 1990s. Now based in Seattle, the DJ and producer ran a record store in the East Village called Strange?, which found its footing somewhere between punk and the evolving strains of techno being imported from the UK. Before landing in New York, Strange was in Chicago, where he overlapped—however incidentally—with the heyday of acid house there. In a recent interview, he discusses this all with a casual record collector’s enthusiasm, noting, too, that he first got into electronic music through a relative deeper in its academic side, grounding his interest in a more learned approach than his druggier anecdotes might imply.
This history is embedded somewhere in Strange’s productions, industrial-leaning acid techno built from Roland’s 909 drum machine and 303 synth (the same building blocks that defined the sound of early acid). But, ultimately, his tracks are too straightforward to accommodate much in the way of nostalgia. The four tracks that make up How I Creep exist in their own moment, one that’s frenetic enough to override the listener’s sense of a past or future.
The EP opens on an unforgiving note and somewhat relentlessly carries on from there. “No Remorse” is steady—only around 120 BPM, which in a few tracks’ time will come to seem laid back—but still blisters, its driving beat fanned by drawn-out gusts of texture. Strange builds out from the thunderous, bristling textures of his tools, leading to a sound that’s both elemental and asphyxiatingly outsized. (In terms of contemporary analogs, I think of a severely less playful Container.) In that same interview, after playing a song by New York hardcore band Born Against, he notes, “I don’t want to make techno that sounds like a Labworks record from ’92, I don’t care about that… I want to sound like that Born Against 45. I want to sound like the first Crucifix album.” Indeed, while How I Creep and, say, Cellblock-X’s The Trip share certain aesthetic signifiers, Strange seems uninterested here in the liquid capabilities of acid, prizing instead a pummeling quality.
Though this sort of uncompromising intensity is more or less the draw here, it can be a lot when it runs on unchanging and unchecked. “Unemployed” luxuriates a bit more in its resonant squelches before settling into a grim, industrial march. The hyperactive “It’s a Dog’s World” makes use of an ominous synthesizer melody, which reiterates over barely-modulating drum machines for nearly the entirety of the track.
“More Alive Than You Will Ever Be,” a 16-minute live acid workout, is both the release’s most exciting and most exhausting offering. Once one assimilates to its forceful ground, it becomes trancelike, its incremental shifts and flourishes subtly engaging the mind while its fixed rhythm engages the body. As electronic music goes, it’s not particularly fashionable or innovative, but there’s still something absorbing in the non-referential way Strange distills his reverent listening habits. | 2017-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Clan Destine | April 27, 2017 | 6.8 | b5318893-bc7b-48d0-a319-c520ba8e0bda | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The dyed-in-the-wool psych-rock band returns with some of their most accessible songs to date, full of fuzz-pedal jams that capture moments of fleeting happiness in dark days. | The dyed-in-the-wool psych-rock band returns with some of their most accessible songs to date, full of fuzz-pedal jams that capture moments of fleeting happiness in dark days. | Wooden Shjips: V. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wooden-shjips-v/ | V. | The cover of Wooden Shjips’ fifth album centers around a visual pun—a hand making a peace sign that doubles as the record’s Roman-numeral title, V. On paper, it sounds like a perfectly on-brand gesture from a band of West Coast psychedelic jammers who, even at their noisiest, always seems to be striving for tranquility through rhythmic hypnosis. But while the cover’s backdrop presents a splendorous tropical utopia straight out of an “H.R. Pufnstuf” episode, the peace sign itself is rendered as cold, cracked concrete.
Perhaps it’s intended as a decaying monument to the death of ‘60s idealism, or a comment on how that era’s most incendiary protest music has fossilized into summer-barbecue soundtracks. Or perhaps it’s mourning the very notion of non-violent protest at a time when it’s become a fireable offense. Wooden Shjips have never been ones for overtly political statements; 90 percent of the time, you can barely tell what lead singer/guitarist Ripley Johnson is talking about in his smeared murmur. But if V. doesn’t exactly represent a shift toward newsticker topicality, its overall vibe—chill, yet resolute—suggests a desire to take that crumbling grey peace sign and rehabilitate it with some Poly-Fil and Day-Glo paint.
Johnson has said that his goal for V. was to make a summer album—but in his case, he started writing it last year during a summer where the sun was being obscured by black clouds both figurative (the Trump administration) and literal (the fiery ash that was raining down on his home city of Portland due to the inferno consuming the nearby Columbia River Gorge). Instead, he came up with a record that’s all about savoring those fleeting moments of happiness when you can find them. Which is not to say V. is a record of passive escapism—the opening “Eclipse” marches in on a fuzz groove that suggests Suicide gone Motown, while a saxocalypse threatens to erupt from below. But Johnson’s liquid guitar fills serve as the emergency sprinkler system that keeps the blaze in check, gradually tilting the track from sinister to serene.
In the past, listening to a Wooden Shjips record felt a lot like lane-merging onto an endless freeway where everyone’s going 100mph—your only option was to go with the flow and get lost in the blur. But if “Eclipse” assumes a familiar motorik motion, the rest of V. opens up a series of off-ramps. “Red Line” has all the hallmarks of a typical Wooden Shjips jam—rhythmic repetition, droning keyboards, backward-swirled guitar solos—but molds them into pop-song proportions and infuses them with an uncharacteristic bonhomie, yielding the most upbeat, immediately engaging tune in the band’s repertoire. And even when the band threatens to drift into a classic-rock cul-de-sac, they correct course with some inspired embellishments, like the woozy synths that permeate the Stonesy country rock of “Already Gone” or the keyboard clusters that brighten up the bluesy lurch of “In the Fall” like slow-motion shooting stars.
But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition. The grungy gospel ballad “Ride on” is Wooden Shjips’ bid for “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”-level gravitas, but in lieu of a proper, belt-it-out chorus, Johnson just lets the song’s church-organ tones and fuzz-pedal flourishes fulfill his mission to “head to higher ground.” Ironically, V.’s greatest moment of clarity comes from the song about gazing upon the city you love through a smoky haze. “Staring at the Sun” is at once V.’s most earthbound and interstellar track, and, fitting for a song that sounds just like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” reinterpreted by Spacemen 3, it finds Ripley coolly mediating between outer turmoil and inner peace. “I was feeling low, staring at the sun,” he sings calmly from his Portland perch, before revisiting last summer’s scenes of “ashes falling ‘round the town.” But in Johnson’s hands, the apocalyptic destruction is rendered as a wondrous hallucination, with each mercurial guitar line glimmering like an ember floating in the sky. Because in this day and age, no summer album is complete without a laid-back, feel-good anthem for watching the world burn. | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | May 31, 2018 | 7.3 | b5340ee4-ff3e-4260-b2b1-b026d5aaa426 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Britta Phillips' first solo album, post-Luna and post-Dean & Britta, relies heavily on covers, including one of Stevie Nicks' "Landslide." | Britta Phillips' first solo album, post-Luna and post-Dean & Britta, relies heavily on covers, including one of Stevie Nicks' "Landslide." | Britta Phillips: Luck or Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21856-luck-or-magic/ | Luck or Magic | Britta Phillips' first solo album, Luck or Magic, is an attempt to leave the drowsy, Belle and Sebastian-y sound of Dean & Britta—the band she formed with husband Dean Wareham when Luna originally broke up—behind. Unfortunately, she couldn't shake the couple's penchant for covers. Luck or Magic totals 10 tracks and half are Phillips' interpretations of other people's work. This move winds up feeling like album filler, despite the offbeat quirkiness of her picks. (A cover of Agnetha Fältskog's "Wrap Your Arms Around Me" is a highlight. When's the last time you listened to that song and remembered how great it is?) Ultimately, the covers feel more like a security blanket than a homage, as if Phillips couldn't quite trust her own work to make the cut.
Truly, it's her sweet voice that suffers the consequences. She has a honeyed touch that can be as soothing as it is airy and bright, even when the songs are tinged with tragedy—think "The Sun Is Still Sunny." Now, her vocals have been run through the same flat, echo effect that Lana Del Rey seems to live inside. Nowhere is this comparison more apparent than on the album's opener "Daydream." It becomes quite easy to swap out Phillips for Del Rey in your mind, minus Del Rey's pouty affect. Similar vocal effects are applied to the cover of "Fallin' In Love," written by Dennis Wilson and originally titled "Lady." Phillips plays it safe and willfully changes the song's subject by replacing "lady" with "baby," which comes off as cutesy and trite, negating her ability to take a deep dive into the Beach Boys' catalog and make an offbeat selection.
Sadly, that's not the album's worst transgression when it comes to tapering with originals. She opens her cover of "Landslide" with a cheerful, bubbly synth line, dubs in a child's voice right before the line "Can the child in my heart rise above?," and adds electric guitar solos so out of place they're just downright bizarre. If you're going to tackle Stevie Nicks, it's best not to rob her work of its emotional power by pummeling the song with unnecessary flourishes. Not to mention, the world needs another "Landslide" cover like it needs another version of Cohen's "Hallelujah."
It's not as if the album is devoid of its bright spots. "Do It Last" is pleasant enough to listen to. "Million Dollar Doll" is catchy. The cover of "One Fine Summer Morning" is perfectly lovely because Phillips sticks close to the original, which is a relief. The slowed-down version of "Drive" is also well-suited to the tone of her voice and worth a listen. But all in all, the sparks are overshadowed by poor choices and general lack of direction. Phillips recently told The Wall Street Journal that producer Erik Broucek kept the album from "sound[ing] like a random playlist," when in fact that's exactly how it ends up sounding.
It would be nice to see her trust herself more and cut down on the plethora of embellishments. Phillips can stand on her own, her talent will support her. (She was Jem for God's sake!) But the ability to make decent music doesn't need to rely on a rabbit's foot, or a stroke of good fortune, or mimicry. It does, however, tend to require a belief in oneself. A continued search for Luck or Magic probably isn't going to be very fruitful when what you really need is confidence. | 2016-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Feature | May 7, 2016 | 5 | b5345e2a-6da5-4cff-9486-8a96d56e28c5 | Lindsay Hood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-hood/ | null |
On her fourth album Cocksure, Laura Stevenson disguises depressive sentiments in plain sight by pairing them with chiming guitars and tuneful fuzz. It's her most disaffected record yet, but it's so spirited you could easily mistake it for her happiest. | On her fourth album Cocksure, Laura Stevenson disguises depressive sentiments in plain sight by pairing them with chiming guitars and tuneful fuzz. It's her most disaffected record yet, but it's so spirited you could easily mistake it for her happiest. | Laura Stevenson: Cocksure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21204-cocksure/ | Cocksure | Though it wasn't as heavy as the brooding grunge it shared Modern Rock airwaves with at the time, the peppier alterna-pop of the '90s often cut just as deep. Acts like the Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield, and Matthew Sweet disguised depressive sentiments in plain sight by pairing them with chiming guitars and tuneful fuzz—you could sing along to some of their songs for weeks before even noticing they might be a cry for help. So it's easy to see why Laura Stevenson looked to power pop's flannelled era for her fourth album, Cocksure. The New York singer-songwriter has never shied from self-effacing thoughts, and by dialing up the pop she gives herself even more cover to let her antipathy run wild. It's her most disaffected record yet, but it's so spirited you could easily mistake it for her happiest.
Stevenson's '90s makeover represents a sharp course correction from her sleeper 2013 album Wheel. That record was a true singer-songwriter affair, rooted in folk-rock and country and highlighted by ornate ballads flushed with tasteful strings and horns. She clearly poured a lot of time into it. Cocksure, on the other hand, is as assured and impulsive as its title. Though it's bookended by two big, showy numbers that would have would have slotted seamlessly onto Wheel— "Out With a Whimper", a Rilo Kiley-sized emotional wallop, and the regal grand finale "Tom Sawyer / You Know Where You Can Find Me"—the rest is driven by swift riffs and bubblegum hooks. Listeners who thought Stevenson's former Don Giovanni labelmate Waxahatchee might have done well to lighten Ivy Tripp with another "Coast to Coast" or two will find plenty of instant gratification on this one.
Stevenson's old Bomb the Music Industry! bandmate Jeff Rosenstock rejoins her here in a producer role, which might partially account for some of Cocksure's punk moxie, but underneath the speedy tempos Stevenson is consumed by the same delicate subjects that have driven all of her solo records: emotional retreat, the nagging fear that she's squandered her youth, and the irrational disdain she feels for those who care enough to try to lift her from her funk. "I'm fucking hideous and spiteful when I'm left to my devices," she lashes out on "Jellyfish", which juxtaposes the album's sweetest hook with its sourest image: Stevenson as a gelatinous blob sprawled flat on the couch, motionless and essentially dead to the world but with a stinger pointed at anybody who might dare to poke her. She doesn't need to be told it's an awful way to live; she knows. "I'm wasting away my life and gifts on being a piece of shit," she concedes, if only so she doesn't have to hear somebody else say it.
That all might make the album seem like a buzzkill, but it never is. One of the joys of the album is simply hearing her cycle through so many slight variations of '90s alternative, and how she always manages to find the right shade to counter her dour mood. "Happier, Etc." matches another plea to be left alone to slaphappy pop-punk. The exuberant guitars on "Claustrophobe" blast out of the same Kitty Pryde-postered garage as the Blue Album, while the jangly "Life Is Long" channels the great, underrated heroes of sad-sack '90s guitar-pop: the Gin Blossoms. That band may not be the hippest touchstone for a millennial songwriter, yet perhaps more than any other they embodied the same mantra that Stevenson wears so well on Cocksure: When life gives you lemons, sugar the fuck out of them. | 2015-11-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | November 3, 2015 | 7 | b53922de-d5d6-4014-83e3-73d6e02b611c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
On the follow-up to her 2020 debut, the Tunisian producer flips trap samples and lounge jazz into idiosyncratic, blissed-out footwork and club music. | On the follow-up to her 2020 debut, the Tunisian producer flips trap samples and lounge jazz into idiosyncratic, blissed-out footwork and club music. | Khadija Al Hanafi: Slime Patrol 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khadija-al-hanafi-slime-patrol-2/ | Slime Patrol 2 | “Hammam Lif Footwork,” reads an underlined message on the back flap of Slime Patrol, Khadija Al Hanafi’s 2020 debut cassette release. The tagline refers to one of the northernmost towns in the producer’s native Tunisia, named for its historic baths and hot springs. The geotag is important. Though footwork and juke are intrinsically linked to their Chicago roots—even as the genres have spawned regional movements in Tokyo, Poland, and the United States’ coastal metropolitan areas—Al Hanafi belongs to a more recent wave of practitioners, like Pennsylvania’s Nondi_, who approach the genre from a headphone-oriented, autobiographical perspective.
Bolstered by a collaborative cut with Teklife’s DJ Earl, the inaugural Slime Patrol tape was as relaxing and steamy as a sauna session, maintaining footwork’s bass-driven pulse while placing heightened importance on melody and texture. Tracks like “Mnaïch’alik” and “Moulaga” wove field recordings and trap a cappellas into dusty jazz chops that would feel at home on a Madlib beat tape, percolating for just over a minute before transitioning into the next cut for a continuous mix-like experience. Over its brief 20-minute runtime, the album established Al Hanafi’s uniquely poetic voice as a producer. Each song was as intimate and ephemeral as memory itself.
Slime Patrol’s sequel, which arrived on January 1, 2024, is also a bricolage of cozy lounge loops, but its inspirations are more varied, and Al Hanfi has nixed the seamless segues in favor of quick fadeouts, allowing her to expand her rhythmic palette. She molds Jersey club in her own image on “Rounia,” stretching out a dreamy canvas of saxophone and electric keys that tastefully muffles her choice of percussion. The genre’s typical gun-cocking samples are pitched up and layered into flurries of cochlea-tickling clicks that sound excerpted from an Alva Noto record, and soft tufts of 808 bass create the sensation of floating. You can dance to the beat, but the song’s nebulous shape is even more conducive to blissful dissociation. Listening feels like being suspended in jelly, unsure which way is up. “Throwsom$,” on the other hand, is a study in footwork’s ghetto-house roots, emulating its gritty hedonism beneath impressionist piano glissando. Even at its rawest, Slime Patrol 2 is still dripping in elegance.
The most thrilling moments of the first Slime Patrol stemmed from Al Hanafi’s extensive sampling of 2010s rap, particularly on “&iLovemyloot,” which fused Playboi Carti’s chorus from “Shoota” with a twangy standup bass riff and warped the final product into a psychedelic haze. The same is true for Slime Patrol 2, which opens with a celebration of Waka Flocka Flame’s trademark ad-libs. Though pairing Flocka’s manic imitations of gunfire with dainty jazz flute risks sounding gimmicky, Al Hanafi rearranges her source material so self-assuredly that it transcends novelty. Flocka’s voice flickers in and out of the mix, sometimes shuffled with a short, nicely contrasting R&B vocal run. “2TwinDracos” fast-forwards an excerpt from Lil Keed’s “Anybody” into near unintelligibility over skittering jungle breaks and what sounds like a vintage city-pop sample. It’s a pure sugar rush, punctuated by breakneck detours into trap production.
While Slime Patrol 2 isn’t a radical departure from its predecessor, Al Hanafi’s modest updates serve to highlight the qualities that make her one of footwork’s freshest, most unpredictable new voices. Whether she’s chopping it up over traditional 160-BPM drum patterns or bending club music’s conventions to her own will, she flips unexpected sounds and obscure samples into music that sounds like nothing else out there. | 2024-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Fada | January 10, 2024 | 7.5 | b53cc2bf-cfe7-48c3-973e-34df0ea8774f | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
Three players with deep roots in Chicago’s contemporary jazz scene come together in an unusually empathetic exchange of ideas, where the gap between listening and reacting is practically nonexistent. | Three players with deep roots in Chicago’s contemporary jazz scene come together in an unusually empathetic exchange of ideas, where the gap between listening and reacting is practically nonexistent. | Dave Rempis / Tomeka Reid / Joshua Abrams: Ithra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-rempis-tomeka-reid-joshua-abram-ithra/ | Ithra | If you wanted to distill the last three decades of Chicago jazz down to a single disc, you could do worse than Ithra, a meeting of three formidable players on the scene: saxophonist Dave Rempis, cellist Tomeka Reid, and bassist Joshua Abrams. The tendons that connect the city’s jazz community to post-rock, folk, electronic music, and the avant-garde can be readily gleaned from their work. Of the three, Abrams might be the best known outside of the Windy City’s jazz circle: The tireless composer/improviser bridges numerous worlds, his churning bass work propelling everyone from the Roots and Tortoise in the 1990s to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Bitchin Bajas in the 21st century. Reid, now based in New York City, has accompanied legends like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell as well as thrilling new voices in jazz like flutist Nicole Mitchell and trumpeter Jaimie Branch.
Rempis may not be as well known outside Chicago, but he has long served as a nexus for the city’s influx of creative players. From his days on the frontline alongside Ken Vandermark’s feted Vandermark Five at the end of the ’90s to his long-running weekly improvised-music series, Rempis has nurtured and strengthened the bonds between players—both out-of-towners and locals—keeping the scene’s culture and community intact. Five years ago, he established the Aerophonic imprint in order to document his spontaneous encounters with any number of musicians, primarily at the Elastic Arts Foundation. As one fellow player has noted, Rempis’ work is part of a vital Chicago tradition of community-building: “He has become part of the continuum of self-starting musicians, and does it with lots of integrity and respect,” says the D.C. bassist Luke Stewart.
While the players had previously performed together in different iterations on Rempis’ label, this 53-minute set from December 2017 documents them as a trio. The eight pieces blend together so that it’s almost impossible to separate them, not unlike the empathetic interplay between Rempis’ horn, Reid’s cello, and Abrams’ bass. Unlike some improv dates involving a new configuration of players, there’s no sense of feeling one another out: Right from the start, on “Lerna,” they are already in dialogue, bow scrapes and pizzicato strings chasing after Rempis’ fluttering reeds. The gap between listening and reacting is so small so as to seem instantaneous. It also means that the mood can turn from wistful to bristling, melancholic to apprehensive.
As in her work with other ensembles, Reid’s cello serves as a fulcrum, able to provide rhythmic patterns as well as harmonize with the reeds, and she toggles between the two roles with aplomb. Try to track her movements and you’ll soon lose her in the crisscrossing lines. One moment she’s bowing in synchronization with Abrams, and the next she’s shadowing Rempis’ sax. Abrams is just as spry, replacing the pulsing, mesmerizing cyclical vamps of his Natural Information Society project with mercurial figures that pulse along with Reid’s cello on “Many Labors” and crackle with Rempis’ clacking keys elsewhere.
Whether the somber bowing that opens “Morphallaxis”—the longest piece here, and a highlight—comes from Abrams or Reid is hard to determine, but as the piece moves along, the strings quiver and cry. Rempis’ horn at first bobs along before prodding them into more pointillistic territory. In spontaneous composition, attuned improvisation, and extended technique explorations, Rempis, Reid and Abrams are all formidable players. But the trio also moves with ease, and while Ithra isn’t exactly playful, at times the musicians resemble children in a garden, focusing on one small aspect of the sound before drifting apart, making new discoveries, and then reconvening elsewhere. Pick virtually any point on the album and you’ll find them wholly immersed in the beauty of the moment. | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Aerophonic | September 20, 2018 | 7.4 | b53ed09a-451c-4db9-b2ec-c061cd86c320 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s third album since returning from his decades-long obscurity is his sparest and most tender. | The singer-songwriter’s third album since returning from his decades-long obscurity is his sparest and most tender. | Bill Fay: Countless Branches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-fay-countless-branches/ | Countless Branches | After his first two albums sold next to nothing and his music career sputtered out in the early 1970s, Bill Fay settled into what you might call a normal life. He worked as a groundskeeper for a London park, then as a fish packer in a supermarket, all the while raising his children. He never tried to launch a comeback, but he did keep writing and recording songs with a keyboard and a small 8-track. Between Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, his unreleased studio album from the late ’70s, and Life Is People, his comeback album in 2012, Fay wrote hundreds if not thousands of spare hymns about the world around him and his place in it, with no other audience in mind beyond himself. “I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life,” he told the New York Times recently, “finding songs in the corner of the room.”
Countless Branches, his third album since being coaxed back into releasing music, hints at what those unreleased recordings might sound like. Compared to Life Is People and 2015’s Who Is the Sender?, both of which fleshed out his songs with folk-rock accompaniment, this album adds so little that when a simple timekeeping beat arrives on “Your Little Face,” it feels almost deafening. The palette recalls Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call, another album whose austerity makes the songs sound louder, their sentiments thornier, their melodies more elegant. Producer Joshua Henry, who brought Fay out of obscurity nearly 10 years ago, keeps the focus squarely on the singer-songwriter himself and his troubled relationship with the world. His time-tempered voice may have lost the accusatory power it had on 1971’s Time of Last Persecution, but it has gained a tenderness that imbues even the smallest moments with immense gravity.
The spare palette also heightens the conflicts Fay addresses in his lyrics. They’re essentially the same ones he’s been singing about his entire life, at least on the songs that he has released: the individual versus the community, the draw of other people versus the need to escape in nature and solitude, and his own wavering faith in humanity. “Yeah, everyone knows it, it’s self-evident,” he sings on opener “In Human Hands,” “this world ain’t safe in human hands.” And when he’s overcome with awe on “Filled with Wonder Once Again,” it’s accompanied by the horror of “how this world sure can keep a man in chains.”
The album is beautifully and judiciously arranged, but a collection of bonus tracks on the expanded edition show how Countless Branches might have sounded with more instruments and more people. The music is lovely and lush, but these band versions of “How Long, How Long” and “Love Will Remain” point more to Henry as a producer than to Fay as an artist. They’re a useful point of comparison, showing just how complex this album is, how tender and forgiving and wonderstruck. That quiet corner of the room affords him an inspiring view of the world.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | February 11, 2020 | 7.8 | b546b103-d307-4aa6-b566-4e21fbe03a31 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Led by Nicolás Jaar and featuring Angel Bat Dawid, Aho Ssan, Oren Ambarchi, and more, this 2021 performance of collective improvisation is by turns brooding, ecstatic, and surreal. | Led by Nicolás Jaar and featuring Angel Bat Dawid, Aho Ssan, Oren Ambarchi, and more, this 2021 performance of collective improvisation is by turns brooding, ecstatic, and surreal. | Various Artists: Weavings 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-weavings-2/ | Weavings 2 | Back in the thick of the pandemic’s first year, with concerts definitively off the table for the foreseeable future, Nicolás Jaar created Weavings as a way of fostering a sense of virtual togetherness. The piece brought together 13 artists from around the world to play together over the internet in real time. Commissioned by Krakow’s Unsound festival, Jaar’s collective improvisation took the form of a round-robin in which successive pairings of players performed overlapping duets. At the end of each segment, one player fell silent while another took their place until the next cue, when a new player joined and another dropped out, etc. Thus they went about “weaving” together their parts in an unbroken exchange of ideas that touched on drone, spiritual jazz, noise, and ambient. For technical reasons, the piece wasn’t streamed as it was played; Jaar recorded each track to disc on separate channels, then spent a feverish 24 hours mixing it down before the 92-minute set was broadcast from the Unsound website.
One year later, with concerts back in action, Jaar brought an updated version of the piece to the stage at the 2021 Krakow edition of the festival, recruiting 11 artists—noise musician Aho Ssan, jazz polymath Angel Bat Dawid, experimental vocalist Antonina Nowacka, oud player Khyam Allami, guitarists Oren Ambarchi and Raphael Rogiński, multi-instrumentalist Pak Yan Lau, clarinetist Paweł Szamburski, cellist Resina, hydrophonist Tomoko Sauvage, and drummer Valentina Magaletti—to cycle through a series of seven-minute pairings, with Jaar mixing and dubbing their output while they played. Weavings 2 collects the entirety of that performance in an 84-minute recording that sprawls through a host of different modes and moods, by turns brooding, ecstatic, and surreal.
Per its title, the piece unspools like a bolt of cloth being slowly unrolled. Tone is generally secondary to texture: On the rare occasion that melody makes a fleeting appearance, it’s swiftly swallowed by churning waves of rustle and drone. The players favor long sustained tones and slippery harmonizing; percussion, electronics, and noise are primarily vehicles for friction, like fabrics chosen less for their color or heft than for the ways in which they rub together. Even during the busiest moments—like the collective fanfare of the introduction, where five artists play off each other at once—they seem at pains to fuse their voices as one. There’s no showboating.
The most exciting passages are those where contrast comes to the fore. In “Pt. 3,” Szamburski teases repeated riffs on his bass clarinet while Dawid sings a wordless, supplicating melody before mashing out dissonant, fist-and-forearm chords on her keyboard. In “Pt. 4,” Dawid alternates between short, tangled bursts of clarinet and vocals that sound like she’s speaking in tongues while Rogiński slashes sideways at his strings. Magaletti and Ambarchi perform an eerie pas de deux, Magaletti’s extended drum rolls and hammered cymbals mirrored in Ambarchi’s trembling streaks of feedback. The album’s most spellbinding moment comes toward the end, as Nowacka’s ghostly vibrato floats mournfully over the patient, melancholy tones of Allami’s oud.
One striking thing about experiencing Weavings 2 in person was looking at the stage and seeing so many musicians sitting silently, listening, just like the rest of us in the audience. Each one was allotted a relatively short amount of time in the spotlight; they spent the majority of their time on stage patiently waiting. Given the context of the piece, as a composition that had been written in the pandemic’s early days, it felt like an echo of the waiting that we’d all been forced to endure during lockdown. Now that life had returned to the public sphere, Jaar seemed to say, we would do well to remember the altruism inherent in acts of patience. At the recording’s rumbling, creaking climax, in the final minutes of the piece, a sense of focused collective effort is palpable; even at this moment of wooly discord, the players shoulder their burden with grace. | 2023-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Other People / Unsound | December 27, 2023 | 7.5 | b54dffd5-50cf-45c3-88e8-6f35d1712113 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The New York saxophonist’s breakup album subverts what we’ve come to expect from the genre. Covering songs by Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and others, he finds new emotions in familiar songs. | The New York saxophonist’s breakup album subverts what we’ve come to expect from the genre. Covering songs by Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and others, he finds new emotions in familiar songs. | Darius Jones: Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/darius-jones-raw-demoon-alchemy-a-lone-operation/ | Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) | In an era when avant-garde jazz increasingly incorporates speech samples, rapping, and spoken word, Darius Jones stands out for his narrative sensibility. Granted, his music is abstract, even when it occasionally includes vocals. Yet we intuit a story, in part because the alto saxophonist tells us one exists. Jones’ first two trio albums, 2009’s reputation-making Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) and 2011’s giant step Big Gurl (Smell My Dream), documented his Virginian beginnings, and he accompanied later releases with philosophical texts about language’s obsolescence. Jones makes his point by showing, not just telling. His compositions are so intensely honed and performed they seem to talk, moan, and cry about intimate experience in ways we might expect to find in novels, not instrumental records.
The 43-year-old’s latest, the live recording Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation), isn’t necessarily his best—many of his releases vie for that title—yet its document of personal flux is more convincing than ever. Playing alone for the first time on a full-length, Jones communes with his influences, responding to the dissolution of his marriage by tackling the classics. His versions stray far from the source material; it never feels as though he’s seeking stability in the tunes of others. With wild shifts of energy and plenty of silence, Raw Demoon Alchemy reminds us that the sorrow of splitting up can’t be defined by one emotion: Rather, its components are diffuse, disorienting, and sometimes contradictory.
The album begins where most romances end—with the blues. The doleful opener, a cover of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s previously unreleased “Figure No. 2,” consists of an ostinato he subtly transforms by varying tempo, volume, and emphasis. Jones chews on sullenness, sees how it sounds—but never succumbs. Ornette Coleman’s deep cut “Sadness” keeps us mostly in the comfort of the blues, but its flashes of giddiness both undermine the titular sentiment and reveal the terror of its extremes, as Jones’ sax screeches with reverb and murmurs at its low end. The original arrangement of Victor Young’s “Beautiful Love,” from 1931, merged jazz and classical orchestration on turf wide enough for both genres—a film score. Jones repaves the piece with an intentionally cracked and uneven cover: He repeats four ascending, half-jeering notes, as though he wants to mock love itself, before his angst resolves in a few fluid melodies. The record rejiggers our own hearing, and we wonder: Must the blues, with its familiar comforts, be a sign of heartbreak? Might the dissonant stretches, with their spirit of restless reinvention, signal both searing pain and the resourcefulness of the newly single moving on?
When we expect his sax to wallow in gloom, Jones offers sudden mood swings. He plays ambiguous music that lacks any prescription of glumness. His take on Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah” begins with a sputtering deconstruction of the original’s eight-note refrain. Playing live in Brooklyn this October, Jones discussed his admiration for Mitchell’s courage: Audiences booed the elder saxophonist, a founding member of the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago, when he first performed “Nonaah” in the 1970s, before they found themselves moved by his persistence. Jones’ relatively sparse version keeps accumulating notes like a snowball rolling down a hill, until it arrives at a faithful rendition of the original. He summons his bravery in front of us, letting conventional expressions of heartbreak eat his dust.
By the last track, Sun Ra’s “Love In Outer Space,” we’re unmoored entirely from jazz orthodoxy, blasted off to a distant planet where prettiness has little currency. Without mutes or pedals, Jones imbues his sax with timbres that approximate those of a jackhammer, then a teakettle. Yet his horn does something even more unusual—it offers a sense of beginning, middle, and end, without resorting to the often powerful verbal directness that bolsters the jazz of so many of his contemporaries. Using a drastically limited palette, Raw Demoon Alchemy makes us question why we associate certain musical styles and scales with particular sentiments. Isn’t emotion, after all, in the ear of the beholder? And doesn’t the music Jones interprets contain shades of many feelings—loss and love, confusion and serenity—all of which can be drawn out, sometimes simultaneously, by a masterful player? I was hurt, but I’m healing, we expect Darius Jones to tell us on his breakup record. Instead, we learn that while he may never recover completely, he’s expanding nonetheless.
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. | 2021-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Northern Spy | November 5, 2021 | 8 | b54edc76-f819-4728-b611-b65fdbc36c4e | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The 23-year-old vibraphonist shines on his debut album with an approach that feels sly and mysterious; he also proves himself a sharp bandleader attuned to the importance of group dynamics. | The 23-year-old vibraphonist shines on his debut album with an approach that feels sly and mysterious; he also proves himself a sharp bandleader attuned to the importance of group dynamics. | Joel Ross: KingMaker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joel-ross-kingmaker/ | KingMaker | The list of notable jazz vibraphonists is a short one. The instrument is about as unwieldy as the double bass but not nearly as practical for the purposes of getting regular gigs, and it doesn’t have the sex appeal of, say, the tenor saxophone. So when a promising young vibraphonist like Joel Ross comes along, your ears perk up. Ross is 23 and an in-demand presence in the New York club scene. In 2018, he appeared as a sideman on some of the most exciting records in jazz, including the drummer Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings and the pianist James Francies’ Flight. Ross’ Blue Note debut, KingMaker, is his first as a leader, and it is a marvel.
Blue Note has a robust history when it comes to documenting vibraphonists, having recorded the likes of Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson, and Stefon Harris. Ross, whose bell-like tone occasionally evokes the sound of a wind chime, is indebted to all three musicians. But he puts his own stamp on things with KingMaker, which features his cleverly named working quintet, Good Vibes, including Immanuel Wilkins on alto saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, Benjamin Tiberio on bass, and Jeremy Dutton on drums. (The vocalist Gretchen Parlato makes a guest appearance on one tune, “Freda’s Disposition.”) At 12 tracks—11 of which are Ross originals, sly and satisfyingly mysterious—the album is capacious but never feels overstuffed or drawn out.
Though KingMaker is in Ross’ name, he is already mature enough as a leader to know that jazz albums work best when the band operates as a single organism. The group interplay here is the key to the record’s success. It’s clear that he is a maestro at the vibraphone, malleting out repeated patterns and complex phrases that work as melodic statements as well as percussive shapes. You can practically visualize the sound emanating from his instrument as he works his way through shifting harmonies, as on the opening track, “Touched by an Angel,” which begins with an airy solo vibraphone introduction full of shimmering chords. But for the most part, Ross isn’t trying to show off; his solos are often short and suggestive, breaking off at their peak and producing further tension. Every note counts.
Ross scrambles the dynamic typical of so many jazz records, in which a soloist emerges and then bows out until the end of the song. Instead, he creates ample space for call and response, particularly with Wilkins, whose sweet and occasionally earthy tone complements the ethereal quality of the vibraphone. On “Ill Relations,” Ross and Wilkins state the theme in unison and then break off, alternating on a series of short, declarative passages that build in intensity as the rhythm section heats up.
Such exchanges give the music a cyclical quality, an ebb and flow that keeps things floating just above the surface. Dutton’s loose, gnashing funk beats over complex time signatures play no small part in this high-wire act, while Tiberio’s resonant bass lines and Corren’s gospel-inflected vamps—he sounds like a cross between John Lewis and Sonny Clark, with a dash of Cecil Taylor thrown in for good measure—act as thickening agents.
In spite of this refreshing approach, at points throughout KingMaker, you may find yourself yearning for more Ross. “It Is Love That Inspires You,” featuring just vibraphone, bass, and drums, shows Ross unburdened of his role as accompanist, and his sound is so appealingly crisp and bright that you get the sense he could produce an hour’s worth of solo material that would hold your attention. KingMaker is one of the most promising albums to have emerged from the jazz world this year, but it’s clear that Ross is just getting started. | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | May 4, 2019 | 7.8 | b54fb726-27b4-469c-8086-33d60a097323 | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
The Brighton producer works with a light touch, resulting in subtle, pliant songs that evolve in sneaky ways. | The Brighton producer works with a light touch, resulting in subtle, pliant songs that evolve in sneaky ways. | K-LONE: Swells | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/k-lone-swells/ | Swells | Eliza Rose’s 2022 single “B.O.T.A. (Baddest of Them All)” was a serious contender for last year’s song of the summer: a throwback house banger made for boisterous crowd sing-alongs, with generations of rave nostalgia baked into its Korg M1 organ bass. It was a genuine crossover smash, hitting No. 1 in the UK and yielding more than a quarter of a billion plays on Spotify. Rose is the lone featured vocalist on UK producer K-Lone’s new album Swells, but even her biggest fans might not recognize her here: On “With U,” a slow drip of woozy, after-hours mood music, the London singer’s sandy voice is smeared with echo and rendered largely indecipherable. K-Lone clearly isn’t cashing in on his guest’s clout; it’s as though he read the KLF’s hit-making handbook The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) and decided to do exactly the opposite of what its authors prescribe.
But for K-Lone, aka Wisdom Teeth label co-founder Josiah Gladwell, making an anti-pop song with a rising pop star seems perfectly in character. It’s not that he’s averse to busting loose—his EPs for the Sweet ’n’ Tasty label have trafficked in bubbly UK garage and rambunctious footwork and jungle—but the Brighton producer has historically favored subtler modes. His early EPs struck a ruminative balance between post-dubstep and dub techno; his debut album, 2020’s Cape Cira, was cool, brittle, and colorfully percussive, as though it had been performed on an array of pastel-hued icicles. Swells is more forceful than Cape Cira, with more prominent drums and two skippy, ebullient house jams. Still, its uptempo cuts are distinguished by their lightness of touch; the more laid-back ones ripple like reflecting pools, exquisitely rendered studies in purple, silver, and aquamarine.
Swells boasts a broader mix of moods and styles, but it’s held together by a palette that’s been carefully pared back to essentials. For drums, K-Lone defaults to trim, understated sounds—lumpy toms, hissing hi-hats, sandpapery snares—reminiscent of early analog drum machines like the Korg Mini Pops and Univox SR-55. His synths are warm and pliant, worlds away from the ruthlessly efficient sound design of contemporary club orthodoxy. The bleepy tones and major-key intervals of the opening “Saws” evoke the eerie glow of computer-music pioneer Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 album The Expanding Universe; the wheezy chords and pitch-bent G-funk leads of “Oddball” recall early James Blake EPs.
Two songs swing for the fences—at least, within the confines of the album’s verdant, well-tended landscaping. “Love Me a Little” deploys a springy, irrepressible bass melody over a bouncy house groove crafted from the same diminutive drum sounds as the rest of the album, with a few lilting bars of dancehall a cappella billowing above. The bassline is unusually buoyant—throw in reggae-inspired synth pings on the upbeats, and everything feels designed to go soaring upward as effortlessly as the balloon house in Pixar’s Up. “Gel,” the other relatively peak-time track, moves with similar dexterity. The drums are ever so slightly heftier, the bassline punchier; it comes across as a response to Floating Points’ early stabs at vintage boogie.
Some of the album’s best songs are its most idiosyncratic. In “Volcane,” contrapuntal synth arpeggios spin round and round over pattering, dubbed-out drums, gently tangling and drifting free once again; the syncopated groove is weirdly hard to parse—one moment it feels like a dembow cadence, the next it scans as triplets. It’s a nice example of just how heady even K-Lone simplest constructions can get. And “Strings,” the record’s melodic high point, arranges what sounds like backmasked electric guitar into a winsome little motorik jam, innocent as a children’s song. Even at their most easygoing, Swells’ songs evolve in sneaky, unpredictable ways. Just when you think you’ve got them figured out, they turn out to be something else entirely: turbulence in the guise of tranquility, bangers masquerading as lullabies. With some deft sleight-of-hand, K-Lone makes even the trickiest transmogrifications look like child’s play. | 2023-07-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wisdom Teeth | July 10, 2023 | 7.7 | b55cd78a-6c4e-4699-abc7-48860a4a4f3c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The 28-year-old makes Addis producer makes what he and his peers call "Ethiopiyawi Electronic," which crosses Ethiopian folk and religious traditions with electronica. His latest album collapses not only the past and the present, but also different sacred and secular music forms, and, importantly, the artist’s inner and outer worlds. | The 28-year-old makes Addis producer makes what he and his peers call "Ethiopiyawi Electronic," which crosses Ethiopian folk and religious traditions with electronica. His latest album collapses not only the past and the present, but also different sacred and secular music forms, and, importantly, the artist’s inner and outer worlds. | Mikael Seifu: Zelalem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21534-zelalem/ | Zelalem | "The people instinctively love freedom," Kwame Ture once declared. In his speech, "Converting the Unconscious to the Conscious," the radical civil rights leader otherwise known as Stokely Carmichael goes on to say that, "You can only win freedom on reason. Therefore […] The job of the conscious"—those who react on reason—"is to make the unconscious conscious." These are also the opening remarks of Mikael Seifu’s latest EP, Zelalem, which is itself a quest for enlightenment and freedom.
"Zelalem" translates to "eternity" in Amharic, and the cover of the EP depicts an infinity sign overlapping with a pair of eyes digitally rendered in the style of old Ethiopian Orthodox Church paintings. It’s also an accurate description of the Addis producer’s musical ethos. The 28-year-old makes what he and his peers call "Ethiopiyawi Electronic," which crosses Ethiopian folk and religious traditions with electronica. Seifu’s particular take recalls something of the experimental ingenuity of Mexico City collective NAAFI, with a profound respect for his own city’s historic and sonic pulse. In the past, Seifu has often used UK garage as a rhythmic template (see: "Tuff Ruff," 2015’s The Lost Drum Beat, parts of 2014’s Yarada Lij EP), but Zelalem moves more freely, untethered to any one temporal structure. It collapses not only the past and the present, but also different sacred and secular music forms, and, importantly, the artist’s inner and outer worlds.
In the first half of the five-track EP, we literally hear Seifu's focus shift from the physical world around him to the murkier one inside. "The Solipsist" opens with anonymous, monochromatic cafe chatter: "En'ne'NE'ga'ger, En'ne'NE'ga'ger, En'ne'NE'ga'ger"—"Let’s talk, let’s talk, let’s talk." A bass player warms up nearby, and street sounds tumble in whenever the door swishes open. Slowly, in a sort of drawn-out Proustian moment, the artist’s past rises to meet him: a low liturgical drone emerges as if from thin air; a krar (lyre) melody bubbles to the surface; his reverie thickens; and the listener sinks in deeper with him.
So it comes as something of a shock when Seifu breaks the mood on "Soul Manifest (ft. L.A.)" with a dramatized soliloquy: "It was all a dream/ It was all a dream," he intones. "Released from the wonders of strife/ I wander through your might/ Beginning to see the light/ I stop to wonder…" These musings help give listeners a narrative to latch on to, but Seifu already does such a vivid job of creating this dream state, that the speechifying instead comes off as heavy-handed. Luckily, the moment itself becomes a distant memory in the wake of the tizita that follows, which is as tender as it is ardent. A tizita is a song of love, longing, and nostalgia, and Seifu’s reimagining of the popular song form acts like a portal that opens up yet another emotional dimension for him.
That sense of illumination is the focus of the EP’s front half, but it is on the back half that these various spaces and memories reach critical mass, imploding and consequently expanding the scope of Seifu’s musical universe. On "How to Save a Life (Vector of Eternity)," a bowed one-string mesenqo saws through a wall of kebero drumming and rattling shakers. Flecks of washint flute catch light among colorful washes of synth. On title track and closer "ዘላለም (Vector of Light)," everything comes to a head. Voices chant and exalt in wide sweeping arcs punctuated by sharp hiccuping breaths, marked by insistent repetition. At the very end, the mesenqo from earlier returns, careening into a clanging pile-up that sounds not unlike an accordion being exorcized—in the best way. The whole track, like the EP, feels like a rite of passage. But rather than landing upright, transformed yet somehow unscathed, its architect disappears into the ether, already off through the next portal to another dimension somewhere closer to freedom. | 2016-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | March 4, 2016 | 7.4 | b55e3cc7-c6a7-41a0-98cf-ef2ec07a2966 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
After two singles comps, the Memphis punk makes his Matador studio LP debut and continues to embrace infectious Kiwi pop as well as 60s garage rock. | After two singles comps, the Memphis punk makes his Matador studio LP debut and continues to embrace infectious Kiwi pop as well as 60s garage rock. | Jay Reatard: Watch Me Fall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13371-watch-me-fall/ | Watch Me Fall | Growing up is always a bitch, but maybe more so for a musician who grew up playing punk rock. There's still no right or easy way to mature-- do you stick with what works, playing the music that brought you all your fans, but never getting out from under those initial successes? Or do you slow down, stretch out, and risk sounding nothing like yourself, growing away from the sound that brought in your fans in the first place? This is a conundrum Jay Reatard's facing now, but it isn't the only one: After a successful run of singles on Matador that was compiled last year, Watch Me Fall is the first official full-length since being signed to the label. You can't blame the guy for feeling some pressure, and from the title to the lyrics and even its brooding cover, it's safe to say he might be.
That doesn't mean he hasn't risen to the challenge, however. Opening track and leadoff single "It Ain't Gonna Save Me" is ample proof that Jay Reatard can mature without the dull connotation the word carries, being as relentlessly catchy as it is careful in its arrangement. His seemingly tossed-off, self-hating lyrics may be even more potent over the irrepressibly cheery jangle of the track, especially in its brief, unexpected bridge. The track sets a tall bar for the record, but "Before I Was Caught" comes close, with more tortured lyrics and windmill guitar chords. However, Reatard's factory-like sewing together of hooks begins to overwhelm "Man of Steel", with an urgent ascending melody that leads to an uncertain breakdown that could belong to another song entirely. No doubt that Jay Reatard is a song machine, but some of the earlier album tracks sound assembled from parts lying around.
While the record peaks early, the rest of Watch Me Fall has a welcome diversity in melody and arrangements, and several late-album growers worth returning to-- the kind of thing that makes this an album, and not a singles compilation. "Faking It" gets plenty of mileage out of rapid, clean strumming and a fake British accent, then leads into a re-recorded version of "I'm Watching You", which made an appearance on last year's singles compilation, fleshing out its rough charm with warmer organ and putting Reatard's sweetened vocal up front. And he digs even deeper into New Zealand pop with the delirious "Wounded", cruising by entirely on acoustic guitars and the surprising flexibility of his voice: disarming falsetto, nasal demands, and impatient bark.
A lyric from "Rotten Mind" is where the album gets its title, and where Reatard sings paranoid fantasies in a near-whine in its verses, but is tempered by more of Reatard's falsetto and a rapid drum part that sounds like sneakers in a washing machine. The introversion of "Nothing Now" skirts indulgence through its buoyant Beatles-esque march before each verse returns. The last few tracks are the largest stretches for Reatard, leaving his screaming young self behind almost entirely: "My Reality" builds from more acoustic strumming, but has a sparse, echoing riff winding through it, and leads to a floating, disembodied chorus. "Hang Them All" ends on walls of harmony and a violin-laden outro in waltz time, while "There Is No Sun" has a gentle, natural flow, disturbed only by a hint of feedback in its final moments.
Watch Me Fall is neither a reinvention nor a holding pattern for Reatard-- walking the line between them is tricky, but he continues to make doing so look easy. From his many earlier, artier side projects, to his recent fascination with Kiwi pop, to impromptu covers of tracks like Deerhunter's "Fluorescent Gray", listeners are often discovering music along with Reatard, watching him learn and adapt as he goes-- he's in step with listeners rather than one step ahead, and that makes already wildly accessible tunes even more approachable. Self-exploration may carry a little more pressure with it for Jay Reatard these days, but that joy of discovery-- plus the tunes, of course-- is what will keep listeners tuning in, whether he's freaking out over success or getting ready to conquer the world. | 2009-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 12, 2009 | 7.9 | b569dd27-2783-44ff-ab20-247d5ecc13ab | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Short and fleeting yet bound by a shared aesthetic vision, these 20 songs capture in-between feelings—anticipation, longing, eagerness, hesitation, indecision—with sensitivity and specificity. | Short and fleeting yet bound by a shared aesthetic vision, these 20 songs capture in-between feelings—anticipation, longing, eagerness, hesitation, indecision—with sensitivity and specificity. | Liv.e: Couldn’t Wait to Tell You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/live-couldnt-wait-to-tell-you/ | Couldn’t Wait to Tell You | Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, the debut album from vocalist Liv.e, is like a series of thought bubbles you can hear. This raw, loose, and sometimes shapeless exploration of the R&B form feels like it’s mapping the mind, but instead of diagramming a brain under love’s thrall, it traces the idle musings in the margins. It understands that romance isn’t all dialogue, overtures, and sex; a lot of it is waiting, awkward silences, and deciding what to text back and when. Sung, spoken, and rapped, these delightful songs exude personality. They explore anticipation, longing, eagerness, hesitation, indecision—the in-between moments, when love is passive, when you’re making up your mind, when you’re ready or anxious. Liv.e performs each state of being with skill, sounding more and more confident in her voice.
The Dallas-raised, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, rapper, and producer has eclectic taste. She started her career as a DJ at Dolfin Records, and early mixes on her SoundCloud demonstrate a fascination with the alt rap underground (Knxwledge, Mndsgn, etc.). The turntablist impulse to create something new using familiar components also informs the music she makes as Liv.e, pulling from classic soul, neo soul, jazz, and hip-hop. Her breakout project, the 10.4 ROG-produced ::hoopdreams::, earned her a few famous fans (Erykah Badu and Earl Sweatshirt), but Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is far more evolved. She wrote and recorded it in a month while staying with her mother in St. Louis, and she describes its songs as pages out of a diary representing the perspectives of different characters she made up.
But the 20 tracks feel less like diary entries and more like snippets from an anthology. Their episodic structure resembles the prismatic Whack World; even when the songs sound unrelated, they are still bound by a shared aesthetic vision. Fleeting and intense yet somehow interconnected, they share a sort of dream logic. Several are under 90 seconds; some play with mantra, others with structure. The whimsical elevator Muzak of “Lessons From My Mistakes...but I Lost Your Number” eventually transforms into a groovy upright bass riff as Liv.e explains the concept of entropy. Many songs do not have hooks; they just settle until they dissolve. “About Love at 21” bleeds seamlessly into “She’s My Brand New Crush.” The fluidity of her mindset mirrors the fluidity with which she transitions between rich soul soundscapes.
Many songs are co-produced by experimental jazz looper mejiwahn and multi-instrumentalist Daoud Anthony, producer on Saba’s CARE FOR ME and composer of music for the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project. The music fits somewhere on the spectrum with Nick Hakim’s smelting psychedelic soul, SAULT’s revolutionary synth-funk, and KeiyaA’s third-eye R&B reflections. Liv.e’s sound is unique in its adherence to lo-fi beatmaker aesthetics and reimagining of throwback R&B vibes. The songs on ::hoopdreams:: seemed to smudge together into a continuous 16-minute track, but Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is full of distinctive moments that form a whole. And Liv.e is much surer of herself as a performer, centering her ideas as much as her taste.
Her writing is casual, sometimes bearing the informal tone of an internal monologue, sometimes conversational and curious. Her songs peer into specific scenarios, capturing feelings the way emojis do—with hyper-specific gestures and expressions. There’s the novelty of a crush; the empowering freedom of finally moving on; the certainty that someone is The One (“I want this to last forever more!” she sings on “You the One Fish in the Sea”); the ambivalence of not wanting to pursue a lover, but remaining hopeful that they care enough to close the distance themselves. “I stopped calling, you was acting kinda funny/You expected me to act all types of bubbly,” she sings on “LazyEaterBetsOnHerLikeness.” “I can’t play myself because I’m not over you/I’ma choose myself, I hope that you choose me too.” What might initially scan as a scatterbrained or unrefined approach to songwriting is actually a subtle consideration of several interlinked headspaces.
The storytelling comes into sharper focus than on Liv.e’s previous projects, but the greatest developments on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You are her execution and vocal technique. She has spoken in the past about warping her vocals as if they were a beat in Ableton and getting real “sciencey” with effects, and here it is as if she knows just what is required at a given time. The raw harmonies of “I Been Livin” spill out over the quiet knock of the beat, the reverb echoing across the distorted piano. The spoken-word flows unravel into the spacey production during “Cut to the Chase.” On “How She Stay Conflicted...i Hope He Understands,” she duets with the sample. Her singing has garnered comparisons to Badu and Tweet, but throughout Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e is becoming an unmistakable and singular artist. Even when it feels like we’re merely privy to what’s inside her head, her thoughts resonate outward.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | In Real Life | August 4, 2020 | 8 | b57637b2-df53-40f8-a0c5-f9fec8ebc36a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The bi-coastal quartet fleshes out classic elements of hardcore and metal with industrial, shoegaze, and noise. Even their love songs feel extreme. | The bi-coastal quartet fleshes out classic elements of hardcore and metal with industrial, shoegaze, and noise. Even their love songs feel extreme. | Candy: Heaven Is Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/candy-heaven-is-here/ | Heaven Is Here | Crammed between the jagged peaks of Candy’s new album Heaven Is Here is a strange, disguised tenderness. The shapeshifting hardcore band tends to all of the mandatory themes of heavy music on its sophomore LP: It paints humanity as a colony of parasites, skewers piety, and takes aim at the rich. But the group’s most interesting songs are the ones that deviate from the sonic and thematic tropes of the genre. With the help of co-producer Arthur Rizk, who has honed records by Power Trip and Pissed Jeans, Candy defile hardcore’s typical structures with elements of industrial techno and noise. While their spewed condemnations of society feel expected, Candy occasionally wade into the muck of lust. It is their love songs that feel the most extreme.
The band formed in early 2017, issuing its debut full-length, Good to Feel, the following year. The group’s members—vocalist Zak Quiram, guitarists Michael Quick and Andrew Stark, bassist Kaleb Perdue, and drummer Steve DiGenio—are scattered along the East and West coasts. Candy seem deeply uninterested in being confined, whether to a single coordinate on a map or to a standardized sound. “I want to play music that’s interesting to people who might love Youth of Today and might also love My Bloody Valentine or the Stone Roses,” Quiram said in an interview following the release of Good to Feel, an album that ended with a surprising bit of shoegaze bubblegum.
Candy fancy themselves genre agnostics. Heaven Is Here still leans on quintessential elements of metal and hardcore—big, ripping guitar and bludgeoned drums—but exciting things happen when they contaminate the Petri dish. “Human Condition Above Human Opinion” crackles awake with static and robotic sputtering before Stark tears through with an assault on his floor tom. On “Mutilation,” Quiram’s raw, gristly scream morphs into a breathy echo. Beneath slabs of distortion, a high-pitched, pinpoint guitar solo squirms like an insect trapped under a glass. These details add texture and a bizarre delicacy to otherwise straightforward hardcore tracks.
Candy thrive in this jumble of gothic industrial and digitized metal. The standout, 10-minute closer “Perverse” is a snarl of processed racket: squealing feedback, jackhammer percussion, a bright cluster of notes that sound like the organ jingles that blare from baseball bleachers. It’s the album’s only instrumental, and in lieu of lyrics, Quiram’s delayed bursts of breath have a psychoacoustic effect—is he whispering “kill, kill, kill,” or are the dispatches you hear mere hallucinations? These amorphous vocalizations are often more interesting than his actual words.
The band designed the album to combat anxiety by mimicking it sonically. The dense, clamorous “Perverse” is oddly pacifying—like finding serenity in a circle pit, battered by flailing limbs. Throughout the record, Candy remind us of the physicality required to commune with hardcore music. Playing it can seem like a high-endurance sport, with effort measured in ounces of sweat. Its volume reverberates in the chest. The crowds heave and churn. But Candy take an additional interest in the human form on Heaven Is Here. Buried in the album’s superior second half are two love songs, “Transcend to Wet” and “Kinesthesia.”
Candy write love songs the way David Cronenberg might direct a romantic comedy. Both tracks exalt the sticky mechanics of sex, and the body is discussed in almost alien terms. On “Kinesthesia,” Quiram reveres the “ecstasy of flesh.” On “Transcend to Wet,” he reaches this state deep within a “wet warm hole.” Body parts are reduced to their most basic, animalistic functions on the latter: Nails scratch, teeth bite, lips spit. It is sex at its most elemental—deconstructed fucking. This approach could easily feel clinical, yet Candy’s blistering beats and Quiram’s tortured growl make their subjects feel warm and writhing. When Quiram screams “Cherish touch/Only kiss,” you can almost feel the blood percolating from his shredded vocal cords. It is sensual and radical all at once.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article contained errors regarding the band’s lineup. Kaleb Perdue plays bass, not Cody Mollen. Steve DiGenio plays drums, while Andrew Stark plays guitar. And DiGenio’s name was misspelled as “De Genco.” | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | June 27, 2022 | 7.4 | b5777d6b-3d51-44d3-a41b-e4203a4eb601 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Produced by WHY's Yoni Wolf and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth, the Chicago MC's solo Anticon debut marks a return of sorts for the label. | Produced by WHY's Yoni Wolf and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth, the Chicago MC's solo Anticon debut marks a return of sorts for the label. | Serengeti: Family and Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15639-family-and-friends/ | Family and Friends | As L.A.-based Anticon has expanded its horizons, it has slowly moved away from the navel-gazing, leftfield hip-hop that made its name. Chicago rapper David Cohn, who performs as Serengeti, represents something of a return for the label. Following a 2009 collaborative record with producer and fellow Illinois native Polyphonic, Serengeti's first solo album for Anticon is an unflinching homage to an indie-rap template that has otherwise largely gone the way of the dodo.
Producing Family and Friends are enigmatic WHY? frontman Yoni Wolf and ex-Casiotone for the Painfully Alone mastermind Owen Ashworth (now working as Advance Base), who provide a sparse but sometimes gripping backdrop for Cohn's stable of strange characters-- all down, a few out-- and their struggles. As an MC, Cohn is part broken rambler, part highly attuned people-watcher. He sounds like he could use a drink, but his easy, near-spoken-word delivery is nothing if not welcoming. If you're up for hearing about absentee junkie fathers or suburban malaise, Cohn has a barstool ready for you.
For such a conversational rapper, though, Cohn often makes it difficult to know exactly where you've landed in the conversation. Tracks like the free-associative "A.R.P.", which finds the narrator taking DMT and later stubbing his toe, or the cryptic "Ha-Ha", about falling in love with the girl at the hardware store, would benefit from a bit more coherence. And even when lucid, Cohn frequently has trouble living up to the cleverness of his own concepts. For every moment as arresting as UFC-fighter lament "The Whip", which pairs Cohn's workmanlike flow with spirit-crushing toy keyboard plinks, there are too many where the pieces fit awkwardly. The desperate "PMDD" pines hazily for a girl in a pharmaceutical ad, while the depressive title track echoes the famous "Choose Life" speech from Trainspotting, but both make their points a little clumsily.
Fortunately, Wolf and Ashworth each prove to be positive enablers, adding nuanced touches when things get a bit too ham-fisted. Base's chunky "Ha-Ha" could pass for a minimalist tUnE-yArDs track; Ashworth's soulful, lonely "Dwight" features carousel music piped in from the ends of the earth. Not quite stylistic opposites but still distinctly different, the two producers almost always make sure to stay on the same page, taking skeletal percussive tracks and shocking them with little flecks of light. But as with much of Family and Friends, that light seems to be just out of reach. | 2011-07-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-07-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Anticon | July 21, 2011 | 6.8 | b5841593-78d1-4b7d-b951-1bcd4f14b845 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
On her first record as Yowler, All Dogs frontwoman Maryn Jones uses her guitar and voice to create something more complex than it first appears. Her deep, sad songs don't feel restricted to a single person, and when synthesizers, drums, or extra voices seep in, they show up as naturally as weather. | On her first record as Yowler, All Dogs frontwoman Maryn Jones uses her guitar and voice to create something more complex than it first appears. Her deep, sad songs don't feel restricted to a single person, and when synthesizers, drums, or extra voices seep in, they show up as naturally as weather. | Yowler: The Offer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20202-the-offer/ | The Offer | On her first record as Yowler, Maryn Jones stares down all the water she can find. It comes in the usual forms—oceans, river, rain—and the ones we don't consider as often, like tears and spit and nicks of blood. Jones, known for her work at the front of All Dogs and with Saintseneca, uses The Offer to hunt down form inside a looming infinity. She hungers for the human shapes that break up the drones of time, space, and sea.
Jones' dark guitar and gently creased voice form most of the album on their own, but her songs don't feel restricted to a single person. They spill out of themselves, flow into each other, and cohere into a whole, like circuits in a system. When synthesizers or drums or extra voices seep in, they show up as naturally as weather. Jones might be alone, but there are no seams between her and her atmosphere.
There is a song called "Yowler" on The Offer, a name that resists convention—you don't name your project after a song or vice versa unless you're trying to make a point. Here, it fits; on the chorus, Jones sings, "Your hands look just like mine." She's looking across at another human body, amazed at the mirror image she finds, disturbed by the strange kinship. Hands are dense, complex machines, and yet you can hold your own up to someone else's, and most of the time, they'll match. On Soundcloud, the track appears as "Yowler :: Yowler". The mirror is there before you hear the song.
Jones reveals a love of language just in the way she bends it. She chooses and pronounces her words carefully. She'll invert cliches: "You can lead me to the water but you cannot make me drink," she sings on "Yowler". A chorus of low voices swarms her, like a mob about to dunk her in the river, or a hand guiding her away from the bank. "You will not be avoided/ 'Cause your ghost is haunting me."
She sings about drowning on "Holidays", only she calls it gestating. She imagines her body floating beneath a sheet of ice, and she uses a word intended to describe new life. Is there hope in that image, in the idea that dissolving into death is its own kind of birth? "If I return my body to the running black dark... will it be me? Will I see me?" Jones wonders. Does the person break apart when the body does, or is there a different shape you can't see?
"I am nothing/ I am but a shape," Jones sings on "Water". Those two lines seem to contradict each other, and she spends The Offer negotiating the tension between them. The album is a deep, sad comfort, more complex than it first appears, like a pond frozen over and still writhing with life. | 2015-03-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-03-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | March 10, 2015 | 8 | b589d312-a3e7-44bb-9817-39a971cf962f | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
On spirited songs that shift eagerly among pop, hip-hop, rock, and soul, the voice of standout singer Wolf Weston emerges as a stirring new instrument. | On spirited songs that shift eagerly among pop, hip-hop, rock, and soul, the voice of standout singer Wolf Weston emerges as a stirring new instrument. | Saint Mela: first bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saint-mela-first-bloom/ | first bloom | Wolf Weston is the dynamo singer of the restless New York pop quartet Saint Mela. Across the 13 tracks of her band’s debut album, first bloom, her voice sears and smolders and yearns. The quartet tinkers with genre, moving among traces of rap, pop, and wailing rock, often within the same tune. But Weston’s voice is striking no matter what the rest of Saint Mela does, imbuing every note with a pulse-quickening urgency, like a direct shot of adrenaline.
According to Weston, the album unfolds in three sequential parts, all related to the floral nature of the title—soil, stalk, and sun, a loose movement from pain to anger to dewey, light-dappled hope. The first four songs are the “soil.” During “root(less),” a clamoring, vibrant jumble of fuzzy bass, synth, and keys sets the tone; though Weston is heartbroken and hurt here, her spirit, expressed through her magnetic voice, seems indefatigable. Weston laments the people who take advantage of her time and effort, reiterating that she’s careful with her energy while demonstrating just how potent that energy can be. Likewise, “the bends” is deceptively sunny, with skipping synths and chattering drums setting a chipper framework for a searing class critique embedded inside a love song of longing.
Her pain begins to transform into powerful, righteous anger for the “stalk” section. On “blk,” the pounding drums and distorted guitar elevate Weston’s words into a battle cry. She likens herself to smoke, “thick and stinging, leaving you blind.” Emotions peak with “jericho,” a lilting rock song complete with gnashing guitar and siren-like backing vocals. Even this dense tapestry can’t rival Weston’s intensity, buzzing with the brilliance of a dry pine tree set ablaze as she commands, “Let me in/Let go/Tear it down.”
With her gravelly falsetto pasted over watery synths at the start of the final section, Weston is tender. Recalling the glorious haze of Moses Sumney, she hasn’t yet reached catharsis—her love remains unrequited, and she questions who she is and where she’s going. Still, she sounds hopeful. The prepared piano that introduces album standout “buckley” clears space for Wolf’s voice, which oscillates from raspy highs to a honeyed tenor. As her need intensifies, stuttering drums fill out the atmosphere. At the climax, a distant sound that suggests scraping gears (familiar from Lorde’s “Hard Feelings/Loveless”) fosters a soaring sense of ecstasy before it all vanishes, leaving only Weston’s whispered croon.
Despite Weston’s tremendous voice, the lyrics here are oblique, shaping Mod Podged mood boards rather than clear narratives. Feelings and stories bleed from one song to the next, creating a vagueness that sometimes doesn’t resonate. The songs broadly address emotional scars and wrongdoings, sometimes skipping their real-world grounding. This distracts from the emotion evident in Weston’s voice, tantalizing no matter what she sings. Still, what would a first bloom be without room to grow? | 2019-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | January 12, 2019 | 6.9 | b597053a-aef2-4579-8b16-554c4cec5db4 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder. Their latest is their most varied and compelling yet. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. | In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder. Their latest is their most varied and compelling yet. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. | En: City of Brides | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21233-city-of-brides/ | City of Brides | In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder—a little glimmer of light from the depths of a well. A co-president of the beloved, minimalist-focused Root Strata label, Croy devotes much of his time to building a sophisticated, wonderfully weird roster of artists (Grouper, the Alps, and Driphouse have all issued LPs on the label): but he's also earned a reputation as a gifted electroacoustic auteur. Devane, meanwhile, comes from a guitar background, tempered by a love for the digital greats (as his acoustic cover of Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb" attests). The duo’s latest, City of Brides, is their most cohesive—and perhaps paradoxically, sonically varied—statement to date.
Establishing a sense of momentum when nothing moves is one of the biggest challenges in drone music. On City of Brides, Croy and Devane supply propulsion through juxtaposition: not just between the organic and the artificial, but also between the serious and the playful. For every period of restraint—the two-part, vaguely erotic shadow play of "Songs for Diminished Lovemaking", for instance—there’s a burst of playfulness to balance it. On the buoyant "Mendocino Nature Rave", the duo ventriloquize their motherboards to reproduce the sounds of dolphins, bats, and other wildlife, while "Hall of Mirrors" sounds like a thrilling, grim game of Peek-A-Boo, constantly threatened by melodramatic synth swoops.
There are no samples to speak of on City of Brides; every sound we hear is built from scratch. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. "Blonde Is Back" is the most magnificent, its warm swathes of synths simultaneously soothing and suffocating. The experience of listening to it isn’t that far off from being smothered by a fleece blanket.
The diversity of the instruments here helps distinguish City of Brides from peers like Pete Swanson and Oren Ambarchi, or influencers like La Monte Young. On "Mark of the Slav", En use a koto to create a foggy soundscape before drifting out into the horizon. In addition to honoring its reputation for graceful precision, En challenge the koto’s inherent solemnity by way of energetic arrangements that render it assertive, even abrasive; its shattered-glass-strums break the reverent murmur of "Secret Samba". Indeed, one could make a strong case for Croy’s playing as City of Brides’ secret weapon: a valuable source of energy on an extensive, occasionally exhausting album.
If you’re not a fan of drone, City of Brides probably won’t turn you into an acolyte. The LP gets off to a sluggish, vaguely narcotic start with "Blades" and "Dead Ringer", two relatively straightforward ambient pieces that lack the standout quirks of later tracks. Those looking for a more leaden approach may walk away disappointed as well; Devane’s guitars never reach the intensity of, say, Sunn O))). Nevertheless, there are plenty of secrets refracted through City of Brides' glassine spaces—and peering through such a globally-inspired prism is arguably as compelling as any seismic axe riff. | 2015-11-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Students of Decay | November 20, 2015 | 7.4 | b59c7f50-9eff-4ffe-b6da-f23afd2dcb0f | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The latest from the ambitious British musician is a grim vision of the future: a crumbling, corroding monument that feels strangely devoid of a soul. | The latest from the ambitious British musician is a grim vision of the future: a crumbling, corroding monument that feels strangely devoid of a soul. | Richard Dawson: The Ruby Cord | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-dawson-the-ruby-cord/ | The Ruby Cord | Richard Dawson sings as if he’s waging a one-man war against all of modern civilization. His broken-down style of English folk music feels like it was beamed in from another time, each frayed blemish possessing an ornate, worn-in beauty. All the missed guitar notes and accidental voice cracks betray an intricate design, a refined musicianship somewhere between the brutal virtuosity of Bill Orcutt and the classical elegance of Joanna Newsom. His paranoid voice booms and rumbles like a doomsday sayer hollering from the side of the road, but if you stop to listen, you’ll hear moving tales of squalor, cruelty, and tenuously held hope.
Though Dawson has regularly reconfigured his music into gnarled, sprawling shapes, he’s gradually sharpened his off-kilter style into something more concise and digestible as the years have gone on. His last two solo albums, Peasant and 2020, were twisted song cycles that chronicled the everyday struggles of characters dwelling in the forgotten underbellies of society. The former took us into the Middle Ages, following stories of grieving beggars and vengeful sex workers facing down the malice of their oppressors; the latter flashed forward to the present day, locating that same desperation in the suffering of Amazon warehouse workers and UFO conspiracy theorists. The Ruby Cord, on the other hand, envisions a distant future dominated by virtual realities, where metropolises have begun to decay while Dawson’s protagonists get lost in worlds of their own design. It’s a looser, more free-associative approach for Dawson—one that still bears his uniquely unsettling touch, even if he seems to lose his own way the further his songs drift into abstraction.
If Dawson’s music has previously hinted at a proggy sense of scale, The Ruby Cord launches it to towering extremes with its gargantuan 41-minute opening track, “The Hermit.” The song’s opening 10 minutes are its most entrancing: Dawson and longtime producer Sam Grant concoct a delicate sway of flowing folk music, as brushed drums, a faintly strummed guitar, and hissing violin strings creak and wobble together in unison like some great old barge about to collapse in on itself. Even as the song picks up steam when Dawson’s voice finally enters 11 and a half minutes in, the track never leaves this simmering mood, gently humming along through a capella passages and pedal-harp-laden bridges as if it really could go on forever.
Of course, with Dawson, the music is always only half of the picture—his lyrics are where his songs come alive, and it’s here where “The Hermit” starts to reveal The Ruby Cord’s lack of focus. Dawson’s propensity for surreal and surprising storytelling has been one of the most powerful elements of his music, his arcane vignettes depicting a fractured portrait of humanity at its most harrowing. Comparatively, “The Hermit” never quite finds itself, spending much of its runtime exercising Dawson’s esoteric wordplay as he describes lush swathes of undisturbed nature populated by “vaporous shafts of a burgeoning sun” and “patchwork meadows labyrinthed with hedgerows.” The tale gains a little momentum once Dawson’s narrator is mysteriously granted the ability to perceive his surroundings in unimaginable detail, being moved to tears over each individual follicle of the bees buzzing by and the mushrooms growing beneath his feet. But just as it seems as if the story is starting to go somewhere as the reality of Dawson’s world begins to crumble around him, the thread trails off into nothingness, and a vague 12-minute choral outro carries the song away into the clouds. As hypnotizing as its headspace can be, the song leaves the distinct impression that somehow, even after 41 minutes, Dawson still hasn’t really taken us anywhere.
The remaining tracks on The Ruby Cord offer more pointed parables, though some reward more than others. “Thicker Than Water” marks the album’s high point, as Dawson suddenly brings us into the middle of some kind of apocalyptic event, singing in his whimpering falsetto of how “at the end/I didn't really comprehend that I/was saying goodbye for the last time/to all my friends and family.” Carrying the song on his bittersweetly fingerpicked guitar, Dawson pulls the rug out at the very end, as his protagonist returns to the city only to find his parents hooked up to a Matrix-like alternate reality device, his own unconscious body lying motionless next to them. It’s the kind of pit-in-your-stomach reveal Dawson excels at in his finest moments, the tremble in his voice conveying warmth and fear in the same haunted breath.
Elsewhere, Dawson struggles to deliver the same thematic punch, nor the musical inventiveness that’s made his past work feel so original. After “The Fool” opens with a skronking sci-fi stomp straight out of Mad God, it meanders into a fairly generic love story, and Dawson’s acoustic baroque pop fails to bring the song back to the unexpectedness of its intro. Meanwhile, the stately “Museum” paints some pleasant imagery as it follows a gallery tour guide chronicling the human race long after its extinction. Harps spiral as Dawson reads off his exhibit list with a genteel remove: “Throngs of cheering football fans/A doctor crying alone/Riot police beating climate protestors/Babies being born.” It’s never particularly profound, though Dawson’s skills as a bandleader carry some of the slack as he stretches the song past the eight-minute mark with a swelling, chorus-assisted backend.
As ambitious as The Ruby Cord is, its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise. Dawson’s vision of the future is a grim one, and without the human element that’s made his songs so gut wrenching, The Ruby Cord ends up like a colossal, corroding monument strangely devoid of a soul. | 2022-11-18T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-18T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Weird World | November 18, 2022 | 6.8 | b5a2a434-4045-4fe4-99e1-b258d116277b | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Fashion Week is yet another surprise Death Grips album with a weird and fragmented backstory. This time out, it's a collection of instrumentals and there's no question that MC Ride's vocals are missed. | Fashion Week is yet another surprise Death Grips album with a weird and fragmented backstory. This time out, it's a collection of instrumentals and there's no question that MC Ride's vocals are missed. | Death Grips: Fashion Week | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20102-fashion-week/ | Fashion Week | Remember when Death Grips were as much a band as they were a bunch of agent provocateurs? No slight to the hype cycle-upending stunts they've pulled post-The Money Store—skipping highly anticipated shows (including Lollapalooza), holing up in the Chateau Marmont, sending every fan of theirs a cover-art dickpic, telling Epic to go screw, releasing an album that was supposedly a legitimate Björk collab but presumably merely sampled her voice, breaking up, ditching an opening gig for Nine Inch Nails, maybe not breaking up, and so forth. But even as the sound that made all this relevant in the first place got a fraction of the press as the crazy shit orbiting around it like noisy satellites, the music itself is more notable than the social media gimmickry. Anyone can be an aloof dildo on the Internet; not everyone could bring the trans-genre aggro bravado that those antics were meant to justify at a couple hundred kilobytes per second.
That said, it wouldn't be a Death Grips album without some weird mystery behind it, and Fashion Week has its share. For instance: someone of unknown origin and affiliation downloaded this entire album from some arcane private corner of Death Grips' website a few months back, posted it to the band's fan subreddit, and was widely dismissed as someone trying to pass off a fraudulent leak. Then Death Grips, or a representative thereof, actually posted the album on Soundcloud to prove its legitimacy, gave it a track listing that spelled out "JENNYDEATHWHEN" as a taunting acknowledgement of their supposed last album's all-question-marks release date, and then went off to do who the hell knows what else.
Leaving hungry listeners with some scraps to pick over means that what might be a stopgap release in the context of any other band is going to be pored over fiendishly by one of the more dedicated cult fanbases in music today. So Fashion Week is going to be put through the wringer, and there will be speculation about future direction. Maybe this is a bunch of scraps from the archives that hints at ideas they eventually strengthened and routes they could've taken instead, or maybe it's a few things Zach Hill scraped together to keep Death Grips in the public eye as jenny death struggles to life, or maybe it's an actual Fashion Week soundtrack some designer commissioned, or maybe it's even the instrumentals for jenny death itself, or maybe it's just some record.
Whatever it is, it's pretty bracing—not hellaciously noisy or completely impenetrable, but at least raucous enough to feel legit. That it was so readily dismissed as a hoax when it first leaked months ago gives you some idea of its quality, but what makes this record likable is still pretty elusive. You get careening invocations of trademark ideas all butting up next to each other, riding on sparking, hissing, glitching synthesizers and Zach Hill's drums rattling like a lost-time accident at the corrugated steel warehouse. And it really knocks in a surprising way when some distinct elements jump out through the familiar framework: feverishly lighthearted circus organ on the first "Runway N", occasionally abrasive but otherwise straightforward classic Detroit techno on "Runway D", a nasty, mud-trudging lope driven by oozing nightmare Moogs on the first "Runway H" that plays like a power struggle between Tobacco and Trent Reznor. Hell, "punk" usually seems like a "for lack of a better subculture" term that gets thrown at Death Grips as a Gen-X dadrock assessment, but the second "Runway H" proves that if they wanted to, they could be this decade's Devo.
What Fashion Week's really missing, though, is some kind of central idea—if anybody ever thought this music could melt steel without MC Ride acting as threat-slinging, dinosaur-lunged instrument of corrosion, they'll probably be let down. The album needs the percussive abrasion of his voice, and digging into some of the more typical slabs of Death Grips' instrumental tendencies doesn't unearth much more than a pretty solid workout soundtrack. It makes for a good exercise in how grimy and knuckles-out they can get even when going straight-up electro, but don't try and call "Runway A" or "Runway W" transgressive hardcore art when they barely transcend the possibility of sounding like decent Run the Jewels outtakes. The titles aren't the only parts of the songs that spell out a question about what Death Grips' future is supposed to sound like, and don't expect answers to come easy. | 2015-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap | self-released | January 13, 2015 | 6.6 | b5a5f8d1-7f42-444e-8a2f-e62f86642ac0 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The dancehall artist’s first act at OVO is not to push forward but to look back. The mixtape is a bit like a recent Popcaan retrospective that sounds simply like a companion piece to his last album | The dancehall artist’s first act at OVO is not to push forward but to look back. The mixtape is a bit like a recent Popcaan retrospective that sounds simply like a companion piece to his last album | Popcaan: Vanquish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/popcaan-vanquish/ | Vanquish | Popcaan and Drake have been courting each other for quite some time. There was the OVO Niko directed video, the “No Tellin” interlude, the “Know Yourself” outro, the lost “Controlla” verse. Popcaan appeared in Drake’s short film, Please Forgive Me. Popcaan has shielded Drake from criticism of his vampiric use of dancehall music. Drake got an unruly tattoo. Popcaan remixed Drake’s “Hype” for OVO Sound Radio. In late 2018, Drake finally “officially” signed Popcaan to OVO Sound. His first release on the label, a mixtape called Vanquish, only brings diminishing returns.
The decision to classify Vanquish a “mixtape,” much like the one made for 2015’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, feels like an attempt to control the narrative. Dubbing it a treat for fans takes some of the pressure off of Popcaan’s OVO debut. The distinction between an album and mixtape is even more dubious in dancehall, a subgenre without much industry or infrastructure dominated by deejays and sound clashes, its very name a nod to its function in live settings. Popcaan’s first act at OVO is not to push forward but to look back. The mixtape is a bit like a recent Popcaan retrospective that sounds simply like a companion piece to his last album.
His 2014 album, Where We Come From, was a landmark moment for dancehall, cohesive and autobiographical, as much a pop record as a reggae one. It wasn’t just narratively driven, it felt like an ode to life along the Jamaican coastline. Unlike the uniformity of Where We Come From, his last album, 2018’s Forever, was decidedly less organized. Vibrant and manifold, its 17 tracks didn’t really hold together. It seemed to exist in diametric opposition to his debut. Not only was it more spiritual, but it was also more luxurious.
Vanquish is on the same wave, seeking health, wealth, and love in the new year. Popcaan once sang that he’d “empty di MAK 90 inna your face and gone” and that the police would find his foes dead in the street like a dog on a song called “El Chapo,” but he has turned a corner toward preserving his quality of life. His songs are categorical here: they are either about living extravagantly and skirt-chasing, seeking salvation from a violent world or trying to defend his empire. “Did what is due to Caesar/Dem wan’ see mi life hard, everyday man life is gettin’ easier,” he toasts on “Father God Ah Lead.” Most of the songs, lifted by his weightless and shining vocals, are joyful, but Poppy can’t help peering over his shoulder.
If Popcaan picked up anything from his new boss, it’s a king’s paranoia. Since inheriting the throne from Vybz Kartel, Poppy has been to dancehall what Drake has been to rap; Drake has mostly groused about the many usurpers lurking in the shadows since his coronation, and Popcaan seems to be feeling the same heavy head. Dancehall is hyper-competitive by nature, and Popcaan is no stranger to silencing pretenders to the crown, but Vanquish is the first time he really seems on edge. “Opportunist and di hypocrite par/Badmind and envious, dem always at war/Mi nuh trust dem, mi nuh mek nuh loose par/Pussy dem ah pray fi see mi behind bar,” he sings on “Jah is For Me.” “Can’t wait pon police fi dweet/By time di jeep dem reach/People done spread out pon street,” his sings on “Can’t Wait,” citing poor response times from cops as the reason he’s heavily armed. He makes himself sound like he’s a gunslinger in the Old West, but these anxious moments scattered about feel tonally inconsistent with the rest.
Since Popcaan and his new label made this project low-stakes, it’s only fair to listen on those terms, and it’s hard to hear this as anything other than an intro to Popcaan for OVO fans who haven’t been paying close attention to the impact he’s made across the Drake discography. There’s nothing new or revelatory, but Popcaan is still one of dancehall’s most stunning performers and it’s painless to appreciate this as easy listening. The glistening sheen of “Promise” is a pleasant compliment to his translucent voice. The loverman come-ons of “Gimmi Love” are made passable by the contrasts of his Auto-Tuned grumbles over a xylophonic bounce. The only real ballad is “One Ting Alone,” a dedication to his one true love: weed. He sings the phrase “I can’t do without you” with a profound sense of commitment. So many of the songs find a genre-straddling star in stasis. After all, dancehall has given American pop music in recent years, it’s nice to see Popcaan finally make a serious play for its audience. But a half-measure like Vanquish isn’t going to move the needle. | 2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound / Warner | January 13, 2020 | 6.7 | b5b28b79-c70e-4e09-82f8-28f312812763 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Beck continues his inspired work leading famous friends in covers of older albums. Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell here help him tackle Skip Spence's cult classic. | Beck continues his inspired work leading famous friends in covers of older albums. Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell here help him tackle Skip Spence's cult classic. | Record Club: Oar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13997-oar/ | Oar | On October 10, 2008, I was ready to give up on Beck. That night, the singer looked too embarrassed, bored, or confused to make his show at Manhattan's United Palace Theater anything more than a depressing dud. It wasn't like the album he was touring behind, Modern Guilt, was exceptional, and the same could be said of his previous few LPs, too. Meanwhile, his website was a lumbering, flash-based nightmare that was successful at crashing browsers but little else. At that point, it seemed like a good idea for longtime Beck fans to cut and run.
But perhaps Beck was growing weary of himself around that time as well, because 2009 marked an under-the-radar creative comeback for one of the alternative era's most beloved stars. His team-up with the increasingly ineffectual Danger Mouse on Modern Guilt was so-so, but it apparently spurred his collaborative spirit as he went onto write and produce Charlotte Gainsbourg's surprisingly stunning IRM. And he completely overhauled his website, swinging his online presence from worst to damn-near first almost overnight.
The best feature of the new web space is Record Club, which finds Beck and some (usually quite famous) friends covering an entire album in one day. Along with people like MGMT, Devendra Banhart, Nigel Godrich, and brother-in-law Giovanni Ribisi, Beck tackled the Velvet Underground & Nico's 1967 debut and Leonard Cohen's 1967 bow Songs of Leonard Cohen via weekly videos across the second half of 2009. According to a modest disclaimer on the Record Club homepage, "There is no intention to 'add to' the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording," and, aside from a few flashes of offhand greatness-- usually occurring when the players took more liberties with their source material-- the covers were passable trifles. But hey, seeing Beck, MGMT, and Devendra goofing around in pixelated home movies was a lot more fun than seeing Beck halfheartedly rehash his old hits live.
With Record Club number three, the ante was officially upped: This time Beck wrangled Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell, legendary session drummer James Gadson (Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5), and others to take on Skip Spence's 1969 cult favorite Oar. And most everyone stepped up to the task-- this is the best, most focused Record Club yet, at times transcending the project's transitory, celebrity-cover-band conceit.
Spence originally recorded Oar after a six-month stay at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he was deemed schizophrenic. (The onetime Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape member was committed after hacking a bandmate's door down with an ax during a particularly rowdy LSD trip.) The Summer of Love hangover LP was predictably all-over-the-place-- at times funny, dark, psychedelic, folky, somber, spiritual. And, if nothing else, Beck's diverse group do an admirable job of conveying the album's infinite tangents and possibilities; their many-voiced approach could be descended straight from Spence's cracked psyche.
Since each song comes packaged with its own in-studio video, Record Club gives people a rare glimpse at not just an artist's sound but their creative temperament as well. With this in mind, the undoubted star of Oar is techno twiddler-cum-soul blower Jamie Lidell, who grabs the spotlight on two of the project's most offbeat covers and can be seen spreading merriment throughout. Locking in with Gadson, Lidell transforms folk-blues tracks "Cripple Creek" and "Books of Moses" into skeletal funk workouts while losing none of Spence's tortured soul.
Feist nails her lone solo vocal performance on one of Oar's more indelible tunes, the harrowing lament "Weighted Down". Instead of trying to match the original's heft, the crew wisely backs her with bubbly, Midnite Vultures-style electro-pop and a virtuosic, hummingbird-like solo from Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. And this project's finest moment is also one of the simplest; woozy strut "All Come to Meet Her" is stripped down to a near-a cappella hymn with almost everyone involved forming a half-circle around a microphone. As the voices of Beck, Jeff Tweedy, Lidell, and others blend into one, it's like hearing the imagined goal of Record Club brilliantly coming to life.
Elsewhere, Tweedy does his best with the album's sillier songs, including innuendo-laced sex romp "Dixie Peach Promenade" and the skewed "Margaret/Tiger Rug", but not even he can make such hippie nonsense vaguely contemporary. (He fares better singing with Feist on "Broken Heart", which could pass for a Wilco outtake.) And then there's Beck himself, who takes lead on the least-risky covers, "Little Hands" and "Diana", and often looks more content directing traffic on the sidelines.
In fact, when it comes to Beck, the session's most enlightening moment is featured in a behind-the-scenes mini doc posted in January. In it, we see Gadson and Lidell in a heady funk, grooving on "Books of Moses". Then the camera turns to Beck on the other side of the studio glass, debating whether to fade the jam out or let it ride. "Let's fade it, we've got like 10 more songs to do," he says-- a disappointing-yet-logical choice indicative of his latter-day mien. Then he just stands there, smiling and nodding for a few more seconds. "I hate killing it-- let's fade it back up," he tells the engineer, laughing. He's not ready to call it quits just yet. | 2010-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | self-released | March 5, 2010 | 6.9 | b5b98e15-884d-4896-899a-885ced25c4fe | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Dej Loaf is the rap equivalent of a well-executed eye roll—simple, excellent viciousness. All Jokes Aside is a record full of nonchalant barbs. Men and/or those messing with her money: watch out. | Dej Loaf is the rap equivalent of a well-executed eye roll—simple, excellent viciousness. All Jokes Aside is a record full of nonchalant barbs. Men and/or those messing with her money: watch out. | Dej Loaf: All Jokes Aside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21839-all-jokes-aside/ | All Jokes Aside | Like many of her songs, Dej Loaf’s surprise hit “Back Up,” from last year’s #AndSeeThatsTheThing, was a shoulder check to nameless irritants. It mired in Dej’s patented annoyance, here almost comically blunt: “If I fucking make you cum you’ve gotta promise not to sweat me/ Don’t be blowing up my phone and don’t be leaving voice messages,” she rapped unenthusiastically, laying the ground rules for transactional sex. Those ground rules still apply on All Jokes Aside, her new mixtape, which subjects more men to her relational gauntlet. "I change your life, come spend the night/ I ain't gon' ask you twice/ I asked you once/ You with her? Okay, wrap it up" she raps on “Keep Going,” picking right up where she left off. But men are only the side attractions in Dej’s writing; her attention span is far too short to be preoccupied with any one of them for long. Instead, she dedicates her time to the things she finds most interesting: herself and her money. “I’m single, I’d rather be filthy rich and hardheaded,” she declares on “Who Am I.” All Jokes Aside finds the apathetic wunderkind at her most pragmatic.
Dej Loaf has always been particularly fond of conservation, whether it be with time, or cash, or emotional effort. She works smarter, not harder. For her, expending energy is a hassle, and her general disinterest in everything, including rapping, makes her fluid raps seem all the more effortless. All Jokes Aside doubles down on both the blank-faced expressionism and the technicality with some of her most arresting wordplay, but maintains the same level of efficiency. There's a lot of compact rapping reminiscent of her boom bap days pre-"Try Me," especially on "Chase Mine," which even has a traditional breakbeat. This is the closest she’s come to unifying the two very different aesthetics she’s honed in recent years: her singsongy, bittersweet villainy and her backpacker repartee. Her ultimate assessment of the competition embodies both: “Niggas got too much time on they hands.”
It's sugary Auto-Tuned hostility that made “Try Me” so intoxicating, and Dej continues to be most comfortable in that space as she settles into a nice rap-sung balance on All Jokes Aside, delivering casual death threats through candied vocals, especially on "How" and “Bout That” (“Put the TEC to his neck while he eating cereal”). On "Bitch Please," she takes on a Big Sean flow, only without the jerky punchlines, and really leans into her disinterest, damn near filing her nails in the booth. Much of the best production comes from frequent collaborator DDS, who seems to know just how to accentuate Dej’s yelped raps. His synths pulsate in the periphery and are usually punched up by a bare-bones keyboard riff. These, along with a rather choice assortment of beats, open up around the Detroit rapper, who gives them life. Dej strings together some of her sharpest, scene-setting raps on All Jokes Aside, yet it remains natural. She still seems so unimpressed by everything, which makes her all the more impressive. | 2016-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 28, 2016 | 7.5 | b5bb3528-6eb1-45e5-8d0f-b4ab73609b64 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Both impressive and tiring, Logic’s seventh studio album stuffs 30 tracks’ worth of throwback beats and technical rapping into overbearing conceptual frameworks. | Both impressive and tiring, Logic’s seventh studio album stuffs 30 tracks’ worth of throwback beats and technical rapping into overbearing conceptual frameworks. | Logic: Vinyl Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic-vinyl-days/ | Vinyl Days | Part of Logic’s appeal relies on his transparency around mental health struggles, regularly sharing narratives about not feeling accepted in the world, and especially in hip-hop. He’s a mixed-race, self-proclaimed comic book nerd who can solve a Rubik’s Cube while freestyling, a boom-bap-loving thirtysomething vying for relevancy in the age of plugg and trap. Naturally, his brand of earnest, wife-guy rap has its supporters and detractors. Joe Budden called him “one of the worst rappers to ever grace a mic”; Ellen DeGeneres labeled him “the voice of his generation.” In 2020, Logic retired from rap to remove himself “from a bunch of negativity” and to focus on being a dad.
He announced his return in the most Logic way possible: By mimicking Michael Jordan’s “I’m back” press release. Like his music, the announcement was derivative and took itself too seriously. (He never really left, either; in his 11-month absence, he released music under an alias, Doc D, and regularly streamed on Twitch.) His first post-retirement project, the 2021 mixtape Bobby Tarantino III, leaned into some of his least compelling qualities: deriding modern rap trends while simultaneously imitating them; hyping up his wife’s hotness; promoting mental health awareness with the directness of a PSA announcement. He’s released 15 projects in 12 years, wrote a novel, retired, unretired, and now he’s ready to show us something new. But what would a good Logic project even sound like nowadays?
His seventh studio album, Vinyl Days, is his strongest project in years. The beats here are the best Logic’s ever rapped on—most of the production is handled by longtime producer 6ix and Logic himself—and his rapping is as technically electrifying as ever. Logic can rap, and rap well, and he showcases this skill ad nauseum on Vinyl Days, which is 30 tracks long. Absent are the forays into ska-rock and Trippie Redd trap; present are the odes to Madlib, J Dilla, and DJ Premier. Just look at the guest list: Action Bronson, RZA, Curren$y, Royce Da 5'9", AZ. Vinyl Days is a YouTube playlist of Funkmaster Flex freestyles, dudes gripping the mic and flaunting an elite arsenal of bars. It’s impressive and tiring, but it nonetheless highlights the reason why Logic’s so famous in the first place: He’s a really good rapper, and, resultantly, has earned the respect of some other really good rappers.
Similar to past projects, Logic’s at his most dynamic when he doesn’t tell us about his rap talent or the state of his crypto portfolio and instead just spits bars. His verse on the Action Bronson-assisted “In My Lifetime” is all slick wordplay and exuberant punchlines, while “Rogue One” boasts a high-energy double-time flow over the same sample as Wu-Tang Clan’s “Protect Ya Neck.” One of the album’s more memorable moments comes on the Beastie Boys-sampling “Bleed It,” where Logic offers imaginative, image-laden verses with a sense of urgency. Another driver of urgency is Flex himself, who serves as Vinyl Days’ omnipresent host, a larger-than-life hype man affirming Logic’s place in the contemporary rap pantheon.
But the choice to hire Flex to host Vinyl Days feels a little cheap given that Tyler, the Creator just deployed this conceit to perfection with DJ Drama on last year’s chart-topping, Grammy-winning Call Me If You Get Lost. Unlike Tyler and Drama’s comedic, experimental, and thematically resonant love letter to hip-hop’s mixtape era, Flex’s presence on Vinyl Days feels less considered. His main purpose is to explosively reiterate whatever Logic says in his verses: He retired but never left!; he’s one of the hardest rappers out!; real hip-hop is back, baby! It’s hard to hate—who doesn’t get an adrenaline jolt from a Flex bomb?—but the playfulness required to pull off a gimmick like this is mostly absent.
It’s not just Flex’s hosting that interferes with an otherwise pleasurable listen. It’s nearly impossible to enjoy Logic’s music without being swarmed with whatever conceptual framework he’s applied to a given song. One can’t simply relish in the sampling nods to Dilla and Madlib; Logic repeatedly reassures us that he reveres these guys, stans them, is an heir to their lineage. In the intro to “Ten Years,” we learn that Logic beat GZA in a chess match. And have you heard that he recorded this album with a microphone once used by JAY-Z? What about the 10-minute outro, where he personally thanks all the people he worked with at Def Jam? Or how, as he tells us on “Introducing Nezi,” he “found a strong Black woman from the land of Nigeria…Helping other musicians is my criteria”? It’s not enough that Nezi Momodu’s verse is excellent on its own; Logic wants his flowers for putting her on.
On a record ostensibly concerned with letting loose and returning to one’s roots, Logic seems set on clearing up the reasons for his retirement. On “BLACKWHITEBOY,” he describes how the up-and-down nature of the industry messed with his psyche; on “LaDonda,” he recalls a fantasy of murdering YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano over a negative review. Although clearly still grappling with these insecurities, Logic seeks to assure us that he’s moved on. Despite the good things going for it, Vinyl Days is weighed down with bitterness and frustration. Logic wants to get his respect and can’t for the life of him understand why it’s being withheld. So he tries harder than ever to elicit our understanding, to force us to see him the way he sees himself. | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | June 22, 2022 | 6.4 | b5bbbcab-126a-44d9-a9bc-790fb14fa4b0 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Seattle indie scene veteran Matt Batey contrasts bouncy power-pop with lyrics about anxiety and failure on his cathartic solo debut for Barsuk. | Seattle indie scene veteran Matt Batey contrasts bouncy power-pop with lyrics about anxiety and failure on his cathartic solo debut for Barsuk. | Ruler: Winning Star Champion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ruler-winning-star-champion/ | Winning Star Champion | Power-pop isn’t necessarily the ideal medium for defeatism, but Matt Batey makes the unexpected combination of style and mood work. On Winning Star Champion, his debut LP as Ruler, the Seattle-based singer-songwriter reckons with anxiety and failure, in lyrics that act as perfect cloud cover for the sunshine his bright, infectious melodies constantly radiate.
It's hard to make feeling bad sound so good, but Batey pulls it off with ease. A fixture of Seattle's indie rock scene over the last decade, he’s played in Rocky Votolato's band and been part of the synth-driven indie-pop outfit Cataldo. Around 2011, he began working on his Ruler material in earnest, paying his compositions sporadic attention while working day shifts at Alaska Airlines. “I'm very poor,” he told Billboard in a remarkably candid interview that accompanied the premiere of his single “Petrified,” explaining that, “Sometimes I had money to spend on stuff, so that's when I would take time in a studio, and when I didn't have money it just kind of stopped."
In the same interview, Batey connected his struggles with anxiety to the experience of turning 30 and watching his friends settle down and start families while he kept making music and barely paying bills. When he left home, at age 18, he told himself, “‘I'm not gonna be one of those guys that just plays in this band forever.’” But now, “12 years later it's like, 'OK, maybe I will be that guy.’” That revelation fuels Winning Star’s “Cars and Houses,” a swinging highlight in which Batey's boyish voice contrasts his peers’ aspirational, suburbs-and-minivan lifestyle with his own days spent gigging through small towns and crashing on floors.
Some songwriters may hit 30 and decide they have it all figured out, but he's forthcoming about not having all the answers—or, really, any of them. “When I get a new book I always draw in straight lines/For at least a couple pages I can pretend that is what I'm like,” Batey sings on the jangly title track, in which he also admits to being "the winning star champion of fucking up.” On “The Cure,” a simple bass-and-drum pairing buoys a dark pronouncement: “One day I'll relax/And it will be perfect/To feel my bones under the ground.” Fatalism often sounds self-pitying or pretentious, but Batey’s admissions don’t come off as performative. He’s simply expressing the salient truth that modern life can be exhausting.
Lest he come across as too much of a mope, though, Winning Star packs even its most morose tracks with bursts of exuberance. Like Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, Batey uses rock music to transmute his anxiety into fist-pumping catharsis. Assisted by a bevy of Pacific Northwest studio geeks (including his co-producer and kindred spirit Michael Lerner, of Seattle power-pop mainstays Telekinesis), he finds joy in joylessness. “Petrified” thrashes with an energy akin to that of late-era Superchunk, while the winding “Unhindered Pace” is garnished with lovely vocal harmonies and a floaty keyboard solo. Smack dab in the middle of “Cars and Houses,” Batey lets loose with an exuberant “whoa-oh-oh” over guitars that sound massive, in a shameless act of rock indulgence that nonetheless feels appropriate to the song.
For much of the current decade, the kind of sugary, hook-laden rock music that predominates on Winning Star has been woefully unfashionable. Meanwhile, the album’s quieter moments (particularly "Get to You," with its chugging drum machine) evoke early Death Cab for Cutie, who’ve maintained their cultural cachet even as their whispery, wordy songwriting style has largely ceased to influence younger bands. So it makes sense that Batey has found a home on Death Cab’s old label, Barsuk, which has persisted for years in supporting this specific variety of indie rock. An alternately raucous and pensive soundtrack to fucking up, getting by, and learning from all of it, Winning Star is proof that the Barsuk sound is still worth championing. | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | June 5, 2018 | 7.1 | b5c13f0b-b075-4d69-bbfa-3d05300e5d95 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, the Russian avant-pop artist emerges with a visionary record that offers an escape from gloom. | Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, the Russian avant-pop artist emerges with a visionary record that offers an escape from gloom. | Kate NV: Room for the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-nv-room-for-the-moon/ | Room for the Moon | The Russian experimental pop performer Kate NV has her feet in two worlds. In one, the artist born Ekaterina Shilonosova sings and plays guitar in the fiery post-punk band ΓШ (Glintshake). In the other, she works with the Moscow Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble inspired by the improvisational pieces of the English composer Cornelius Cardew. In her work as Kate NV, she commits fully to the unpredictability and openness that unites them both.
NV’s sophomore record, 2018’s для FOR, was a whimsical, ambient portrait of her native Moscow made mostly on a synthesizer. But the stiffness of sitting or bending over a Buchla soon took a toll on her body; it was time to return to a more flexible method of making music. The result, Room for the Moon, is a return to the joyful grooves of her 2016 debut, Binasu. If NV’s striking voice was largely absent from для FOR, here it springs forth like an acrobat who has been waiting on the bench for her time to shine. Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, NV emerges with a visionary avant-pop record that offers an escape from gloom.
But even while Room for the Moon bursts with exuberance, NV has explained that the record was finished during “the loneliest period” of her life. With that in mind, it’s easy to see these 10 songs as a sanctuary NV willed into being, a fantasy world where that solitude could be replaced with a cornucopia of melodies. The air of escapism is palpable in the album’s wriggling synth flourishes and chirping flutes like hummingbirds. For one track on для FOR, NV set a poem by the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky to song. While the Russian expressionist is not so explicitly invoked this time around, Room for the Moon gestures towards the synesthetic splashes of color that define Kandinsky’s work. NV’s music feels akin to being sucked into one of his paintings, where there’s no linear thinking, only liberation.
NV has said that Room for the Moon’s influences include Russian children’s movies and television shows and she has described her album as a fairy tale, saying “Each song is like a character who, to one degree or another, is presented in me and shapes me as a person.” For the most part, these studies are loose and upbeat. The blips and bleeps that begin opener “Not Not Not” are soon joined by a mix of bass, saxophone, and synth. “Ça Commence Par” is carried by a symphony of woodwinds, marimba, and faraway giggles that eventually give way to a riddle which NV presents like a Mad Hatter for club kids: “We buy it to eat/But we never eat it/Starts with a ‘p.’”
But beneath these sparkling tracks lie anxious ruminations. The message coursing through “Not Not Not” is considerably less chipper than its squawking horns: “You’ve got no time/Soon!/You’re getting old.” “Sayonara,” which turns wistful repetitions of its titular phrase into a hook, is mired in indecision. On “Marafon 15” NV layers an assortment of eerie synth effects atop a dogged bass line, creating a sensation of creeping uncertainty. “Your hand will grasp and let go of the precious moment/What will happen to it/It will return,” NV blithely murmurs in Russian. The lullaby “If Anyone’s Sleepy” explores the slipperiness of time in a similarly elegiac register.
But ultimately, Room for the Moon emanates a gentle sense of hope. Late album highlight “Plans” is an ’80s dance party featuring a bleating sax solo pulled from Found Sound Nation’s “broken orchestra” sample pack. “Somewhere on the planet there are plans where everything is clear, where we are given words,” NV promises in Russian. Even if that cloudless place is impossible to grab ahold of right now, Room for the Moon offers respite until we find it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | June 17, 2020 | 8 | b5c29b1d-e77f-4f8a-9f03-c7652f8409aa | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Blonde Redhead's first album in four years finds the NYC avant-rock veterans following down the same path they started on with 2010's Penny Sparkle. Calling Barragán halfhearted would be giving it too much credit, both effort-wise and emotion-wise: it’s a cold fish of a record, dead-eyed and clammy. | Blonde Redhead's first album in four years finds the NYC avant-rock veterans following down the same path they started on with 2010's Penny Sparkle. Calling Barragán halfhearted would be giving it too much credit, both effort-wise and emotion-wise: it’s a cold fish of a record, dead-eyed and clammy. | Blonde Redhead: Barragán | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19760-blonde-redhead-barragan/ | Barragán | The next-to-the-last song on Blonde Redhead’s new album, Barragán, is titled “Penultimo”. Since when have Blonde Redhead been so literal? Since 2010’s Penny Sparkle, if we’re being honest, a lackluster album that traded in the trio’s lush, fathomless mystique for little more than a cellophane wisp of no-calorie beauty. It sparkled, and that was about it. Four years have passed since then, and while it may be perfectly reasonable to expect the group responsible for entrancing albums like Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons to return to form at some point, that point is not reached on Barragán.
Calling Barragán halfhearted would be giving it too much credit, both effort-wise and emotion-wise: it’s a cold fish of a record, dead-eyed and clammy. Singer/guitarist Kazu Makino has always kept her voice solemn and controlled, but the sense that there's something vast being held behind that mask is gone. "The One I Love” is about as compelling as tears plopping into a bucket, a hollow exercise in vague, impressionistic storytelling set to an limp art-pop track of acoustic guitars and flutes. “She does nothing all day/ But sit down and cry,” Makino chants like a bored chorister. The ennui is so on-the-nose, it’s oppressive.
The album is stubbornly unassertive. “No More Honey” is the closest Barragán comes to featuring a flesh-and-blood song, but lead guitarist Amedeo Pace’s swells of My Bloody Valentine-like riffage are kept on a short leash, then quickly shooed away. Ambient noises are sprinkled throughout—birds, what sounds like a typewriter, echoes of echoes with no discernable source—but they serve no purpose other than punctuating the emptiness of the music surrounding them. It’s a recurring theme, but one without a point—unless, as with the shuffling, exhausted-by-its-own-existence “Penultimo”, Blonde Redhead are trying to write songs that are featherweight and leaden at the same time.
Blonde Redhead began dabbling in electronic sounds on 1998’s “Missile + +”, and they go down a similar path on two Barragán tracks, “Dripping” and “Mind to Be Had”. Neither use those icy pulses to decent effect; the former teases with glimpses of ghostly melody without fully coming into focus, and the latter is a nine-minute slog of ping-ponged monotone. “Defeatist Anthem” sums it up best: Makino coos and sighs expectantly, and for a second, it seems like something—anything—might take flight. Then it just squirms in a circle of listless prettiness. “We wanted to make something timeless and pure, and perhaps a little minimalist too,” drummer/singer Simone Pace recently said in an interview. Instead of timeless, though, Barrágan is static; instead of pure, it’s blank; instead of minimalist, it’s stingy.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Blonde Redhead’s second single, “Vague”/“Jetstar”, their first for Steve Shelley’s Smells Like Records imprint. Accordingly, the single sounded a lot like Sonic Youth, from its soft, discordant buildup to its cyber-psychedelic climax. The band went on to master that nervy dynamic, and many others, during their late '90s/early '00s peak. They effortlessly recontextualized avant-rock, electro-pop, shoegaze, and white noise. Their back catalog is a deep well of potential to draw from, and it's enough to make you wish that Penny Sparkle had only been a fluke. Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble. | 2014-09-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kobalt | September 3, 2014 | 4.3 | b5c5a8ca-e590-45cc-a976-4a6df032e713 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The Brooklyn quartet Aye Nako's The Blackest Eye, which riffs on Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, is an immense stylistic step from their previous full-length which, while addressing complicated personal experiences with sexual and racial identity, seemed like it was constrained by pop punk subgenre boundaries. | The Brooklyn quartet Aye Nako's The Blackest Eye, which riffs on Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, is an immense stylistic step from their previous full-length which, while addressing complicated personal experiences with sexual and racial identity, seemed like it was constrained by pop punk subgenre boundaries. | Aye Nako: The Blackest Eye EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20927-the-blackest-eye-ep/ | The Blackest Eye EP | The Brooklyn quartet Aye Nako's The Blackest Eye is an immense stylistic step forward for a band whose previous full-length effort, while addressing complicated personal experiences with sexual and racial identity, seemed like it was constrained in places by pop punk subgenre boundaries. Pop punk is not a subgenre known for its attention to nuance.
Their newest EP, The Blackest Eye, the title and lyrical themes of which riff on Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, breaks out of those subgenre forms. On it, Aye Nako are exploring, stretching, and pushing their sound into a unique place. Opening track "Leaving the Body" is a relentlessly catchy but also deeply affecting personal account of living with the cycle of sexual trauma in many of its complex realities: the reiteration of patterns of abuse ("Dead men don't abuse/ Still you resurrect") cemented by the common reaction of disbelief when one tries to tell one's story ("Who would believe me anyway/ It's just the kind of lie a girl would say"). "Killswitch" and "White Noise" examine racial fetishization and the immediate heaviness of a society that prizes whiteness at all costs.
Closer "Sick Fuck" addresses the weariness and predictability of dealing with a society that would rather turn away from you or place you into a box than acknowledge your queer humanity. "Already know what you'd say," main vocalist Mars Ganito and new guitarist Jade Payne sing together on the chorus, which breaks down into a bridge: "In lust we trust." To follow a path away from heteronormativity, away from society's maps, is exhausting, but it is also necessary for so many to live in truth. Is it more exhausting to lie to yourself or to deal with others' approbation, the song asks.
The guitar lines*,* vocal interplay, lyrical poignancy and pointedness, and song structures on The Blackest Eye avoid predictability and heavy-handed formulae; there are plenty of stylistic curveballs. Though there's a lot of music out there that references the '90s by people who experienced their early childhood during that decade, little of it is as playful or as interesting; where others fall into the trap of directly replicating a sound, Aye Nako take scraps of sonic references to any number of early Sub Pop/K/Yoyo artists and manipulate and repurpose them to their own effect.
One gets the sense that Aye Nako are this tightly coiled and elegantly structured because of the urgency of what they have to say; they can't afford to be anything less than precise. This is a band that is "political" because the circumstances of their own lives necessitate it, and we are all lucky to be able to hear their voices. | 2015-08-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | August 12, 2015 | 7.8 | b5c905ae-cf15-42e0-a760-071254cd6eea | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
Atop imposing hardcore, the New York group’s Lebanese-American vocalist tackles politics, identity, and the complexity of his Shia Muslim upbringing. | Atop imposing hardcore, the New York group’s Lebanese-American vocalist tackles politics, identity, and the complexity of his Shia Muslim upbringing. | HARAM: بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haram-when-you-have-won-you-have-lost/ | بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost” | Nader Habibi once said, “Everything about Haram is haram.” The New York hardcore group’s vocalist meant that he was raised to consider his behavior now to be impermissible, deserving of shame, or, as the Arabic word is usually translated, “forbidden.” Fronting the group, who’ve hit upon an imposing sound on their debut, is at once an embrace of his upbringing and an unburdening. He used to pretend he didn’t know Arabic; now he uses the language to untangle the conflict of growing up Lebanese-American in a Shia Muslim household while attending Catholic school in Yonkers. He makes the process sound like flensing flesh from one’s own bone, then grafting it elsewhere on the body—visceral transformation via self-discovery.
The phonology of Arabic is important to Habibi, who’s called it “harsh and intimidating” as well as “beautiful,” and his sputtering delivery of fricative and guttural phrases complements the wily, careening approach of Haram’s instrumentalists on بس ربحت, خسرت “When You Have Won, You Have Lost.” Abrupt dropouts and selective vocal doubling charge uptempo songs with combustible energy; some degenerate into static. Often Habibi retches a few syllables on a measure’s first beat before the guitarist, in a spasm of needling notes, seems to complete the point. Haram makes that kind of joint articulation sound like intuitive interplay, not clinical or overdetermined, like less arresting hardcore groups.
Heard front to back, the album seems to gather purpose and girth, like a hurtling object that absorbs debris in its path. Opener “Who Am I, Who Are You?” is fitful and kinetic; closer “Road to Liberation” conveys dignity and confidence at the pace of a disciplined trudge. It’s a stride from their What Do You See? EP last year, which was a great big leap from a comparatively unremarkable demo released in 2015—a strikingly dramatic progression, one that sounds borne in large part out of relentless and ferocious gigging.
Haram play often with New York groups associated with the labels Katorga Works and Toxic State, a punk and hardcore scene that’s loosely characterized by performative sickliness, trash-compactor fidelity, and local pride to the point of insularity. They seem influenced by their peers, incorporating snare-drum patterns à la Crazy Spirit; bracing, mid-tempo meanness in the style of Warthog; intensely personal lyricism reminiscent of Mommy. Some of these groups own the phrase “ground zero hardcore,” and Hank Wood and the Hammerheads have for some years thrown memorial or benefit gigs on September 11. But Habibi’s vantage is from another side of post-millennial New York, one where the gall to shout in Arabic prompts an investigation by agents in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Habibi, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon to New York in the 1980s, has recalled in interviews how he was bullied at Catholic school and alienated at home by what he’s called a “more conservative” practice of Islam. “I remember a day when I was done with all faiths,” he has said. He formed Haram to confront lingering shame: “I wanted to bend [Arabic] to my will and work it back into my identity.” Last year, cops who suspected him of extremism on account of the band’s imagery interviewed him. Soon bombings rocked New York and New Jersey, so Haram rushed the release of What Do You See? Its title is not only a challenge to outright prejudice, but also to listeners’ implicit biases.
Habibi is not the first punk musician of Middle-Eastern descent to sing about his experience as such in North America. Texas hardcore-turned-thrash outfit Fearless Iranians from Hell satirized ‘80s anti-Iranian sentiment by writing from the perspective of an Islamic extremist. Michael Muhammad Knight, an American convert to Islam, published a novel about Muslim punks in 2003 called The Taqwacores. “Taqwacore,” a portmanteau of hardcore and “taqwa,” which is Arabic for religious piety, was embraced by groups such as the Kominas, who’ve sung in Punjabi and Hindi about their experiences as Pakistani-Americans. But Secret Trial Five, a Canadian group named after five Muslims detained under circumstances eventually deemed unconstitutional, rejected the label, taking offense to a supposed Muslim punk movement invented by a white guy.
This year marked the first installment of YallaPunk, an Arab-American punk festival and conference in Philadelphia. Performers included Baltimore’s Bidet, whose singer is Lebanese-American, and Al-Thawra, a Chicago crust band with some lyrics in Arabic. There’s a parallel movement in electronic music: Oakland label and collective Club Chai was founded by DJs of Turkish and Armenian descent whose mixes emphasize their respective heritages; they’re close with DJ Haram, the Discwoman affiliate who’s said that her handle “refers to my attempt to communicate the nuances of where I’m at—being a Muslim and being queer and being a DJ.” In the 1990s, Los Crudos helped inspire both a contemporary Latino punk scene and a broader reassessment of Latinos’ role in punk since its inception. Haram are illuminating another secret history. | 2017-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Toxic State | November 28, 2017 | 8 | b5d71571-5fc8-4d34-9af2-304915840821 | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | |
As Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann writes fairly plain piano music that winds up sounding bewilderingly elaborate. On his new Abandoned City, songs have a clumsy grace, eagerly tripping over themselves as they rush between frolicsome and ominous moods. | As Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann writes fairly plain piano music that winds up sounding bewilderingly elaborate. On his new Abandoned City, songs have a clumsy grace, eagerly tripping over themselves as they rush between frolicsome and ominous moods. | Hauschka: Abandoned City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19001-hauschka-abandoned-city/ | Abandoned City | As Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann writes fairly plain piano music that winds up sounding bewilderingly elaborate. What he plays matters less than what he does before playing it: shoving bits of junk (wood, foil, paper) in the harp or tacks in the hammers. He feeds this snaggletooth grin a diet of frantic minimalist ostinatos and sweetly lingering right-hand themes. Its digestion produces outlandish sounds, not just percussive but also melodic, thanks to live electronic effects. Even when he's playing alone, as he is on Abandoned City, we seem to hear everything from kick drums and rattles to synth arpeggios and violas. You'd swear there was a plucked lute on "Sanzhi Pod City", a runny music box on "Pripyat". I still can't quite believe there aren't strings on "Who Lived Here?".
Bertelmann says he was unaware of John Cage when he had the idea, though someone must have clued him in after his first album, as his second was dutifully titled The Prepared Piano. Coming from a techno background, he basically wanted to make an acoustic synthesizer where each key could be programmed, after a fashion, with its own timbre. Quite different from the austerity of Cage, his songs have a clumsy grace, eagerly tripping over themselves as they rush between frolicsome and ominous moods. The latter gain ground on Abandoned City, as though Bertelmann were glimpsing a desolate future in the discarded places for which the songs are named.
After learning his way around solo prepared piano improvisations, Bertelmann started branching out. Enlisting collaborators and adding electronics, he enshrined his knack for pert chamber froth on Ferndorf, perfected his acoustic house music concept on Salon des Amateurs, and tried out bracing modern chamber music with a world-renowned young classical violinist on Silfra. Abandoned City brings him full circle to solo piano, but with bits and pieces he's picked up along the way. It's often patterned like electronic dance music, its busy syncopation redoubled by a small fleet of clean and filtered microphones.
Within its limits, the album is fairly diverse, though after so many records, the style might be wearing a bit thin. There's horror-movie buildup music like "Elizabeth Bay", acoustic IDM like "Pripyat", slowly sweeping melancholia like "Craco", techno in homespun disguise like the exhilarating "Agdam". But no matter what Bertelmann puts in his piano, every clever noise it makes necessarily deprives it of another, expanding timbral range at the expense of harmonic. All the skittering pizzicato, clenched syncopation and scudding bass overshadows distinctions in the compositions. When the convulsions relax on "Who Lived Here?", where Bertelmann lets a beautiful melodic structure unfold, it's a nice change of pace to hear more of his voice than his piano's. | 2014-03-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-03-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | City Slang / Temporary Residence Ltd. | March 11, 2014 | 6.5 | b5dc1035-4882-44c4-ac52-93fd9f132a1a | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Three years after an encounter with Pharrell turned her into a viral phenomenon, the accidental star finally delivers her debut album, but her talents are eclipsed by overproduction. | Three years after an encounter with Pharrell turned her into a viral phenomenon, the accidental star finally delivers her debut album, but her talents are eclipsed by overproduction. | Maggie Rogers: Heard It in a Past Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maggie-rogers-heard-it-in-a-past-life/ | Heard It in a Past Life | It is tempting to imagine Maggie Rogers’ career rollout had she not found viral fame from Pharrell’s patronage: the narrative she might have chosen, the songs she could have deployed to establish her aesthetic. This student at the Clive Davis Institute had just started incorporating electronica into her folky songwriting when the visiting producer poured lavish praise on her class project, “Alaska.” It is ironic that a song about a recent personal reclamation (“And I walked off you/And I walked off an old me”) led to a renewed loss of control in Rogers’ life, one that she has likened to a violation, or, in the naturalistic songwriting she prefers, a bout of freak weather.
But how different, really, is Rogers’ ascent from that of any other nascent pop star? A new artist finds traction thanks to a song landing on a Spotify playlist or a celebrity boosting it on Instagram. A game of Battleship ensues as the label triangulates a semblance of strategy around anticipating fickle public tastes. If the shots miss, they try different directions, producers, collaborators. When enough land, an album might appear. Poleaxed by the attention and the demand to produce more music as quickly as possible, Rogers released a hesitant EP but then resisted immediately capitalizing with an album, craving time to figure out what she wanted to say. Understandably, a good part of Heard It in a Past Life is about the crisis induced by losing control, its intimate electronic production tasked with keeping her earthbound. Rogers taking her time seems like a rebuke to the cheapness associated with viral success, though the result melts easily into the algorithmic slipstream.
It’s easy to hear what Pharrell heard in “Alaska.” Rogers has a classic case of consonant-averse indie voice, meaning it’s often hard to decipher the words, but still, the falsetto-layered chorus has a lightheaded euphoria that makes her feeling of freedom plain. She co-produced the song—apparently in 15 minutes—and her production, however self-consciously whimsical (there’s a mourning dove in there somewhere), charmed like fireflies at dusk. Considering this student’s idiosyncratic work left one of the most successful producers in pop history speechless, the sight of so many big-ticket pop aides on Heard It in a Past Life’s credits is depressing: It feels symptomatic of the fate of young female pop producers not to be trusted with their own voices. I would bet cash that if Pharrell had bestowed approval on a male student, his would be the only name on the credits.
Whether it’s down to Greg Kurstin, Rostam and Kid Harpoon, or Rogers’ own intentions, her major-label debut is overproduced. Teeming with cicada hiss, beats as tacky as an army of tongues, synths that reverberate like a pigeon cooing down an exhaust pipe, bell-like resonance, and wan R&B runs, it suggests a more sylvan Sylvan Esso, Haim if they’d grown up in Portland, the last traces of residue from a decade of Bitte Orca.
It’s also melodically indistinct. Songs often hew to similar structures: somber, one- or two-note verses with the emphasis landing at the end of each line, followed by a bolder, boilerplate chorus. The bright, polysyllabic incantation of “Give a Little” has the homespun quirk of a song from a decade-old iPod advert. A tribute to Rogers’ fans, “Light On” feels written to inhabit a rousing spot towards the end of a setlist (and is no “Remember My Name”). “Burning” sparks on the kind of vocal exhortations that Florence Welch uses to rally her players into battle. The innate elegance of “Alaska” is a bug crushed under heel.
While often precious, it’s never bad or incompetent, but there’s a frustrating sense of bets being hedged, particularly once the more ambitious production gives way to mildly anguished stadium boom towards the end. There are some misses: Piano ballad “Past Life” feels like a stab at “Writer in the Dark,” right down to arriving at the album’s halfway point, though it lacks the brazen weirdness that made Lorde’s song so sublime. The opening notes are also heavily reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” though the clunky, folksy repetition of “I could feel the change a-coming” smothers the potential for rueful mysticism à la Stevie.
Rogers actually invokes Nicks on “Retrograde,” an angsty, chugging song about reconciling her past and present that references a line from the title track of Nicks’ 1981 solo debut, Bella Donna. Nicks wrote the song to warn herself to slow down following six years in the biggest band in the world, copious substance abuse, a tumultuous relationship with an autodidact who once kicked her on stage, and a tour of Europe in what transpired to be Hitler’s old train. It puts the stresses of having an indie-pop hit into perspective.
But, to give Rogers credit, those are the moments she communicates most effectively: running around the block twice in Paris to clear her head and convince herself not to run away (“Back in My Body”); being “drenched in madness, tangled blues” (“On + Off”). Maybe it’s something she always had, but perhaps having her life exploded in three minutes and nine seconds has given her an acute sense for the alchemy of transformation. Precise instances of clarity, infatuation, and confusion abound, yet the underdeveloped writing offers mostly exposition instead of the potential for Robyn-like communal revelations.
She is capable of them: Watch her heart-punching performance of “Fallingwater” on “SNL,” which she tackles with a hunter’s bloodlust that puts the album’s benign Spotifycore-friendly version in the shade. Rogers’ voice is often stubborn and serious on record, refusing to give up the expected drama. It’s a compelling refusal in some respects, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying, especially when you know what she is capable of. While Rogers has criticized the Pharrell narrative as “so fucking dainty,” that restraint preserves her as the meek deer in the headlights, the girl who got lucky, not the ambitious auteur ready to set her own fate. | 2019-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | January 22, 2019 | 5.9 | b5dd9498-d377-47a9-94bf-c427247b6e0c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Broken Social Scene member's second full-length is decidedly laid-back and homespun. Every track is built around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment. | The Broken Social Scene member's second full-length is decidedly laid-back and homespun. Every track is built around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment. | Brendan Canning: You Gots 2 Chill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18575-brendan-canning-you-gots-2-chill/ | You Gots 2 Chill | Compared to the messy, sprawling indie rock churned out by his main band Broken Social Scene, Brendan Canning's 2008 solo debut Something for All of Us was a surprisingly low-key affair filled with humble, simply tuneful songs. Canning's kept busy in the half-decade since that album's release with a wide variety of activities, from Broken Social Scene's studio swan song (2010's Forgiveness Rock Record) to film scores (this year's Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle The Canyons) to a complex, mysterious interactive multimedia endeavor involving director David Cronenberg and a biotech lab. Given the scope of these projects, it's easy to understand why Canning's approach to his new solo record You Gots 2 Chill was decidedly laid-back and homespun: he put together his own independent label to handle the album's release (named for his home street, tucked into the heart of downtown Toronto), drew the cover art himself, and recorded without help from any of his Broken Social Scene associates. The album title isn't a command to listeners—it's a note to self, the kind of thing you'd throw on a Post-It note and stick onto your fridge.
The music contained within You Gots 2 Chill is true to the album's low-key origins and winking title. Every track is built up around a spine of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and many stop there, content to exist without vocals or instrumental embellishment; Canning draws a rough-hewn, earthen beauty from the strings on tracks like the misty "Never Go to the Races" and the wistful "Last Song for the Summer Hideaway". There's a refreshing sense of humor present in the album's song titles and sequencing: "Makes You Motor" chuckles at its unhurried mid-tempo groove, while the frisky "Plugged In" lives off the grid just like the rest of the record. Taken together, this sense of humor and the album's unadorned songwriting combine to give You Gots 2 Chill, and Canning, a charmingly unpretentious vibe. That's not to say that the record is entirely devoid of fully realized songs: cuts like the bubbling, slowly layered "However Long" and the pedal steel-flecked lead single "Bullied Days" (sung by Snowblink's Daniela Gesundheit) are fleshed out without sacrificing Canning's ear for gentle, slowly shifting melody.
You Gots 2 Chill also pays quiet tribute to the sound and feel of analog technology, with two interludes ("Long Live Land Lines" and "Once a Lighthouse") recorded directly onto Canning's voicemail and placed onto the album. He tips his cap at the influence of the experimental acoustic guitarist John Fahey on album opener "Post Fahey", and by devoting the remainder of the album to an exploration of the instrument's melodic possibilities and moods, he makes a decent argument for its continued relevance. But You Gots 2 Chill's defining characteristic is also its key weakness: if listeners fail to grant each new mid-tempo acoustic number its fair share of attention, they begin to blur together into one large mid-tempo acoustic blob. This is a bedtime record, in both the complementary and dismissive senses of the word: it invites you to relax and soothes like a warm cup of tea, but can cross the line into powerfully soporific territory. | 2013-10-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-10-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Draper Street/SQE | October 8, 2013 | 6.7 | b5dee85d-1bc8-406a-917a-3c7d120bad43 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
Since its release in the summer of 2002, Rjd2's commercial debut Dead Ringer has become recognized as one of ... | Since its release in the summer of 2002, Rjd2's commercial debut Dead Ringer has become recognized as one of ... | RJD2: Since We Last Spoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6798-since-we-last-spoke/ | Since We Last Spoke | Since its release in the summer of 2002, Rjd2's commercial debut Dead Ringer has become recognized as one of hip-hop's most highly regarded turntablist records. A drum-funk tour-de-force, the record continued Def Jux's then-unparalled creative streak, spotlighting Rjd2 as the only hip-hop producer since DJ Shadow capable of taking to both long-form rhythmic experiments and 3:30 rap cages with such effortless dexterity.
But just as seasons lead to new colors and moods, careers lead to new directions, and in two years, things have changed dramatically for R.J. Krohn. Since We Last Spoke is a dizzying taster's choice that plays like a broken radio dial, jumping from nostalgic A.M. soul and funk-rock cantinas to tech-house jams and retro synth vamps. Yet, while variety has been inherent in all of Rj's work, the mish-mash of styles on display here feels less like a result of intent than of indecision, and as a result, these sudden 180s tend to cut into the record's cohesiveness.
Fortunately, Rjd2's picked up a wealth of new tricks since Dead Ringer to compensate for the unexpected stylistic transformation: Since We Last Spoke is packed with crashing silences and false senses of security, radical mutations of Dead Ringer's gritty electronic textures, and an overall darker tone that conjures rusted bridge girders, fractured kaleidoscopes, and smog-shrouded sunsets. "Making Days Longer" in particular breeds success, opening with the light pluck of oriental strings as a cavern opens to reveal a double helix of Metroid-evoking synth lines. Here, framed by reverberating analog lines and an aorta drum pulse, Krohn sweetly dictates the greatest telephone jingle never made: "Strange how a phone call can change your day, take you away/ Away from the feeling of being alone/ That's the telephone."
For a guy who's been shadowed by a certain comparison throughout his relatively brief career, it's ironic that his sophomore slump, while never as problematic, so closely mirrors that of Josh Davis. Many of the missteps of Shadow's The Private Press are repeated here, as Rj shirks rapping and scratching in lieu of synths, and discovers the gentle strength of the indie rock vocal. On "1976", Krohn dons a leisure suit and bongos out his own copa-cobanger while subtle Moog helicopter drones, machine-gun horns, and car-chase bass spin a tale that might've felt more at home soundtracking Magnum P.I. than serving as the showcase cut from his latest LP.
Rjd2 does return to his strengths on occasion here: "To All of You" is a soft-focus blaxploitation love theme recalling Isaac Hayes' Shaft mood-setting; "One Day" mellows out with gently pressed piano chords and dusky synthtones punctuated by a muted kickdrum and handclap-inflected snare hits; "Exotic Talk" jumps between a reworking of his fiery Urban Renewal Program contribution "True Confessions" and tense dropouts dripping with wah-wah'd clavinet. Still, Since We Last Spoke is something of a checker game: For every track like "Someone's Second Kiss", portraying the emotional severity of an android funeral dirge, there's another in which Rj throws back to the worst of the 1980s with a cheesy, guitar-centric pop/rocker like "Through the Walls".
Over the course of Since We Last Spoke, Rjd2 experiments with indie rock, IDM, metal, Italo-disco, downtempo, and 80s R&B.; Unfortunately, few of these tracks wield the same impact as his tried-and-true hip-hop productions, and more often than not, feel like attempts at being everything to everyone. At the end of "To All of You", there's a minute-long stretch of rugged blues boom-bap and a scratched vocal repeating, "Play that beat." If only Rjd2 had heeded that advice. | 2004-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Definitive Jux | May 16, 2004 | 7 | b5e3c623-07ce-4b17-a8a5-4ac058c97d1d | Rollie Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/ | null |
With its wistful musings on adolescence and nostalgia, the indie rock trio’s first album in eight years picks up right where they left off. | With its wistful musings on adolescence and nostalgia, the indie rock trio’s first album in eight years picks up right where they left off. | A Great Big Pile of Leaves: Pono | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-great-big-pile-of-leaves-pono/ | Pono | For most of their career, A Great Big Pile of Leaves have existed only in fond memory. With their first two albums, 2010’s Have You Seen My Prefrontal Cortex? and 2013’s You’re Always on My Mind, the New England indie rock trio amassed a cult following for their playful songs about classroom banter, carb-heavy meals, and late-night skinny dips. Their disappearance for the better part of the decade only emphasized the wistful nature of those records. Pono, their first album in eight years, picks up right where they left off. An enjoyable if predictable return, AGBPOL’s long-awaited third record sounds less like a sign of progress and more like a grateful nod to the fans who stuck around during the hiatus.
Although AGBPOL’s inception in 2007 coincided with a larger wave of “emo revival” bands, their sound is less abrasive than many of their peers. Their music alternates between the punchy riffs of Algernon Cadwallader and the whimsical breed of 2000s guitar rock dubbed “landfill indie.” Pono often sounds like a postcard from that era, which makes sense: Much of the album’s material was written years ago, some even predating You’re Always on My Mind. So although this isn’t quite a pandemic project, the timing feels appropriate: The narrators of these 10 tracks long for childhood routines like school and summer vacation. Like catching up with an old friend you haven’t seen in god-knows-how-long, the underlying message seems to be, “Weren’t things nice before life got in the way?”
With its nostalgic gaze toward adolescence, Pono sounds nonchalant but never careless. The memories feel precise and purposeful, even if songs about crushes and sneaking out can easily border on hackneyed. In the highlight “Beat Up Shoes,” frontman Pete Weiland recalls indulging in post-curfew cruises over a gradually crescendoing instrumental: “Mrs. Wurmbrand would be happy/That we were using our geometry,” he sings, contemplating the mechanics of leaping from upper-story windows. “Writing Utensils” begins as a tribute to classroom mundanities but soon raises larger existential concerns: “So focused on the parameters of the test/But forget to bring something to write with.” While AGBPOL’s past work addressed similar topics in what felt like the present tense, Pono offers a more bittersweet perspective: With Weiland now a married father, what do these guileless moments represent?
“[The pandemic] glorified a lot of memories, getting you to miss some of the things that you didn’t even like when you were there,” Weiland recently observed, and there’s something poignant about a band like AGBPOL—who, for most of their fanbase, serve as a soundtrack to reminiscence and yearning—releasing an album so focused on this behavior. Many of the anecdotes on Pono are best served with this kind of hindsight; after all, the freedom of adulthood you crave as a teen almost never feels as transformative as you expect, and once-aspirational antics like “waking up in yesterday’s clothes”—as Weiland sings on opener “Yesterday’s Clothes”—become less enchanting with age. Perhaps Pono should be taken less at face value, and more as a case for enjoying whatever season of life you’re experiencing in the moment.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | August 16, 2021 | 7.2 | b5e7efdd-ed72-4a71-a0f0-26af18de8f92 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
As the title implies, the latest New Order release contains extras from the band's Waiting for the Sirens Call era-- their last sessions with Peter Hook. Following tussles over mixes and copyright, they release the leftovers, a remix, and "Hellbent", from 2011's Joy Division/New Order singles cash-in, Total. | As the title implies, the latest New Order release contains extras from the band's Waiting for the Sirens Call era-- their last sessions with Peter Hook. Following tussles over mixes and copyright, they release the leftovers, a remix, and "Hellbent", from 2011's Joy Division/New Order singles cash-in, Total. | New Order: Lost Sirens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17532-lost-sirens/ | Lost Sirens | This isn't a new New Order album, exactly. During the long, expensive sessions that produced 2005's Waiting for the Sirens' Call, New Order recorded a small pile of extra material, the idea being that they'd get a few more songs down after the subsequent tour and call it another album. But they stopped playing together after 2006, then bassist Peter Hook left the band acrimoniously, and the two camps spent a few years bickering at one another. However, since the return of keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, they've been touring again as, effectively, an oldies act-- minus Hook. (Their set lists last year featured, typically, all of two post-1993 songs, and encores from the Joy Division catalogue.)
Now, following extended tussles over mixes and copyright, they're finally releasing the leftovers from their final sessions with Hook: six previously unheard songs, plus one remixed Sirens' Call track and the awesome "Hellbent", which appeared on the 2011 Joy Division/New Order singles cash-in, Total. Eight songs in a bit under 40 minutes; that's an EP by 2013 standards, but it's longer than either Movement or Brotherhood.
Singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner has called Lost Sirens "a non-completed album, [the likes of] which we've never released before." That's not necessarily evident from listening to it, and they've certainly released a lot of more ragged material in the past. These are densely packed, finely detailed arrangements in New Order's late-80s rock-with-keyboards mode-- much more recognizable as the work of the band that recorded "Dream Attack" than the one that recorded "Fine Time". Sumner's lyrics are, as usual, almost half-baked a tad more often than they're almost profound, and his voice still sounds exactly as clear, earnest, and likeably strained as it did when he was a babyfaced ex-punk with a ridiculous haircut.
A lot of what made 80s-era New Order special, though, was their perpetual fascination with body music and the culture around it-- the way they always latched onto the dance music of the moment, from the tail-end of disco to Latin freestyle to acid house, and reworked it in their own idiom. Lost Sirens obviously can't suggest much familiarity with what's going on in dance clubs in 2013, and it doesn't suggest what was going on there when it was recorded close to a decade ago; the clock stopped for their groove sense around the time they first broke up. ("Hellbent" would sound totally natural mixed out of Primal Scream's Madchester anthem "Loaded.")
Peter Hook's presence on Lost Sirens is, understandably, somewhat muted-- there are a few of his signature fretless bass solos scattered around the album, but this is very much a guitar-driven, Sumner-centered record. Aside from occasional New Order-y instrumental flourishes, it wouldn't be a surprise to learn that these were actually recordings by Sumner's 90s band, Electronic. Even so, every time Hook's bass rears up in the mix-- the lead to the chorus of "Californian Grass", or the instrumental break in "I've Got a Feeling"-- it's a reminder of how well Sumner, Hook, and Stephen Morris always played together, and how their collaboration had an instrumental identity as distinctive as any band's. It's worth noting that the titles of both of those songs echo the Beatles' postponed, bickered-over swan song, Let It Be.
"It's been 10 long years since I've been home," begins "I Told You So", the one song here reprised from Sirens' Call. (The very different mix here sounds more like a rewrite of "All Tomorrow's Parties".) That's a doubly barbed line in this context, made more so by how Sumner follows it a moment later: "It's an occupation I don't like/ But it pays the rent and turns on the light." Maybe New Order have some more albums in them; maybe with Gilbert back in the fold they'll recast themselves as a singles act again. Maybe not. These remnants of their most recent burst of creative fecundity are a decent way for them to go out, if they are indeed going to be playing the hits to pay the rent from here on out. As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished. | 2013-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino / Warner Bros. | January 17, 2013 | 6.8 | b5ec83a7-fd6b-4516-b114-c0941b6b5063 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
With battering-ram drums and cavernous bass, the producer’s second album is a high-energy drama about planetary destruction that almost dares you not to take it seriously. | With battering-ram drums and cavernous bass, the producer’s second album is a high-energy drama about planetary destruction that almost dares you not to take it seriously. | Baauer: Planet’s Mad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baauer-planets-mad/ | Planet’s Mad | For a moment, the image was everywhere: the most famous teenager in music, sticking out her tongue and unfurling a shirt reading “No music on a dead planet.” The specter of climate change haunts modern pop: Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey croon about fires in Los Angeles, Grimes embraces global destruction, the 1975 shout “fossil fueling masturbation.” Of course the crisis trickled into festival-core electronica—possibly the genre best equipped to depict the throb and disarray of a decaying world. On his new album, Planet’s Mad, “Harlem Shake” producer Baauer again tries to outrun one-hit-wonder status, this time using battering-ram drums and dancefloor fracas to soundtrack planetary destruction. The clumsy twist is that Baauer means it literally: Through a set of accompanying videos and forced sonic cues, he attempts to convey the tale of a rogue planet crashing into Earth, filling our world with aliens looking to party.
The conceit works when the songs evoke chaos, tangling up tightly controlled instrumentals into an all-out mash. On the title track, sirens wind and screech as the beat builds; a bassline reminiscent of James Bond plunges into thwacking drums. For a producer who gravitates towards trap and tropical house, it’s startlingly guitar-heavy, and the instrumental gnarl creates a lively vision of dystopia—all bang, no whimper. “Aether” erupts in frenetic hi-hats and titanic bass, the notes sounding like muted, glitching screams as they spiral and leap. “Cool One Seven One” opens on a smattering of laughter, climbing with the chatter of a faraway crowd, until the steadily ticking beat and flurry of beeps crescendo in the kind of bassline that blows out speakers. This isn’t necessarily club fodder, but Baauer retains the cavernous bass and drum shuffles that played well at frat parties and proms; most of these tracks have the power to wobble through your body.
The sci-fi narrative disrupts this flow, though, and the interruptions of Baauer’s robot narrator are grating. “Tempo has reached critical level,” says a monotone announcer in “Cool One Seven One.” “This is an emergency.” “Rhythm… sound… rhythm… sound,” a glitchy voice repeats on “Hot 44,” only abating after an avalanche of a beat drop. Countering these are the presumably human voices Baauer employs when his songs soften and slow, a device that only emphasizes how jarring all the beeps and buzzes are. At the end of “Planck,” a mournful sigh floats over a synth; on “Pizzawalla,” one of the few moments the album lurches towards hip-hop, a prayer-like vocal undulates over a wispy chord before getting chopped up over the drums.
Baauer’s last album was stacked with features, including a Future and Pusha T. collab and an M.I.A. banger. On Planet’s Mad, the only guest vocalist is English singer Bipolar Sunshine, who’s best known for crooning on DJ Snake’s diet trop-house hit “The Middle.” “The pain is too strong to hold in,” he cries through AutoTune on “Home.” “I’m on my way, so don’t change your pin.” It’s a sterile, palatable pop song that feels jarringly out of place; it doesn’t make sense in the flimsy alien chronicle, and musically it has nothing to do with the clanging bedlam that animates the rest of the album. Baauer has been pointedly self-aware about his work in the past (he once said he “hated” “Harlem Shake”), but his latest songs are too jittery and goofy to land. Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | June 22, 2020 | 6.8 | b5efa1e0-396a-46c5-abce-83250cf54f7e | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
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 British folk-rock singer’s 1976 album, a brilliant display of musicianship from a songwriter attuned to the mysteries of desire and heartbreak. | 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 British folk-rock singer’s 1976 album, a brilliant display of musicianship from a songwriter attuned to the mysteries of desire and heartbreak. | Joan Armatrading: Joan Armatrading | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joan-armatrading-joan-armatrading/ | Joan Armatrading | Joan Armatrading will render interior mysteries with such forthright clarity, attuned so sensitively to the rhythms of feeling, that she makes the most terrible depths of heartbreak seem, to start, bearable. And then she’ll make you smile. “I am not in love,” Armatrading began her exalted 1976 hit, “Love and Affection,” “But I’m open to persuasion.” Where in pop do openings get better? Armatrading spent the 1970s affirming her status as one of the finest singer-songwriters of her generation: a woman of fierce intelligence and self-effacing wit who never stopped reading your mind or keeping you guessing.
In an industry inhospitable to opinionated women, Armatrading mastered the art of saying no. Speaking with the UK women’s liberation magazine Spare Rib in 1974, the singer-songwriter made this irrefutably clear. She had said no to men who suggested she change her androgynous look, no to men who told her to be nicer on stage, no to male producers who tried to control her sound. She said no to critics who argued that her lyrics must be drawn from personal experience (they were composites) and no to the male-prescribed dictum that women ought to “sing pretty.” With every “no,” Armatrading went with herself, and invited others to do the same. “I think it is possible to be yourself and get on in pop music,” she told The Guardian in 1976. “I intend to go on trying.”
Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, Armatrading was 7 years old when she boarded a plane alone from the West Indies to Birmingham, England, to reunite with her parents and two older brothers, from whom she’d been separated for four years. As one of six kids being raised in a small flat, she spent much of her time in the Midlands of England seeking solitude. She would hide at the library, reading Shakespeare and Dickens. “I was on my own a lot… I had a weird childhood,” she told Melody Maker, “and that’s probably been the strongest influence on my character.” Learning young that to be a loner does not necessarily mean being lonely, that in some cases being separate from a crowd brings you closer to yourself and then to everything, Armatrading became a keen observer of others.
She had started writing songs on a pawn shop acoustic guitar and the neglected household piano in her mid-teens. Her inquisitive vision of folk-rock was tinged with the music she grew up around—jazz and soul, gospel and rock’n’roll, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding—especially in the depth of her smoky alto, which voiced the highest heavenly feeling of love as well as its lowest void. Like her idol, Van Morrison—still one of the few influences she’ll point to—her songs have unconventional structures, whether raving up into fiery epiphanies or floating on daydreams. Armatrading didn’t so much bring a Black British identity to the ’70s singer-songwriter tradition as offer proof that a Black British woman played an active role in its creation.
In 1970, after playing out in Birmingham folk clubs, Armatrading met a songwriting partner, the Guyana-born poet Pam Nestor, as stage actors in a traveling production of the hippie rock musical Hair. The cross between Armatrading’s shy introspection and Nestor’s outgoing drive was pivotal. While touring UK theaters, Armatrading set Nestor’s words to music, becoming a dramatist in song, too. “City girl, make life what it should be,” Armatrading sang on a soaring early song she wrote for and about Nestor, a beacon of camaraderie and resilience. In 1974, Armatrading told Spare Rib: “Black women don’t sing sweet because they haven’t been brainwashed so much into thinking they’ve got to be weak. The opposite, they’ve got to be strong. So they just get on with it.”
After their stint in Hair, Nestor and Armatrading headed for London. When Nestor attended the 1971 Glastonbury Festival—where she recalled seeing exactly one other Black person—a fellow festivalgoer encouraged her to take their demos to the publisher Essex Music, which then represented the likes of T. Rex and Black Sabbath. They signed with Essex, and then to Cube Records for Armatrading’s 1972 debut Whatever’s for Us—recorded with Elton John’s producer, Gus Dudgeon—but it soon became clear that the label wanted to market Armatrading as a solo artist, pressuring the partners to go separate ways. Their breakup casts their raw collaborations, like “Whatever’s for Us, for Us” and “Spend a Little Time,” as extraordinarily bittersweet. During the process of recording and promoting her follow-up, 1975’s Back to the Night—Armatrading’s first album for the easy listening establishment at A&M—she was so disillusioned by the process of navigating male egos in the studio that she basically checked out.
But Armatrading would find her footing yet. A year later, the grounded, self-contained energy of Joan Armatrading was hard-earned. It was the first album where Armatrading penned every song, her best by far, entirely alone. The immaculate Joan Armatrading was like her Tapestry: not a debut, but where her confidence caught up to her brilliance, where her nuanced singing and dextrous musicianship—baroque balladeering, burning blues guitar riffs, touches of funk—came alive, dissolving genre lines. In a bid to make her more commercial, A&M enlisted the rock producer Glyn Johns, who’d worked with the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles, and most recently the folk-rock greats Fairport Convention, various members of which back Armatrading on the record. By Johns’ account, he simply stayed out of her way. She knew what she wanted.
Joan Armatrading contained biting personal revelations that you just don’t usually hear in pop songs. On “Somebody Who Loves You,” she punctuates her plaintive should-I-stay-or-go dilemma with a blunt reality check: “So tired of one night stands/Left with longing from misspent passion/With one more human to despise.” Clarifying the titular sentiment of “Tall in the Saddle,” she seethes: “One of these days you’re gonna have to dismount.” And Armatrading’s shining conviction that “I’ve got all the friends that I need” on “Love and Affection” could not be more delightfully transparent—she is not playing. More often, Armatrading’s shyness registered as romantic trepidation: people failing to connect, not having the words, misunderstandings. On three different Joan Armatrading tunes, she sings of “Love, love, love,” “Fun, fun, fun,” “People, people, people,” sounding like she is very much still trying to figure out how to relate to others, which is itself, of course, hugely relatable.
Her songs could be breathtakingly vulnerable. But what she left out said a lot. Few songs on Joan Armatrading are addressed from “I” to a gendered lover, leaving room for queer identity. (She didn’t come out for decades, though a 1978 Melody Maker profile did note that she had a copy of lesbian classic 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle on her bookshelf.) On “Down to Zero,” Armatrading lays bare a breakup that’s left brutally unexplained. She sings of a “brand new dandy” who “takes your man,” and later we hear a woman singing about another woman, who “took the worry from your head” and “put trouble in your heart instead.” Armatrading offers sage-like consolation not just in her lyrics, but in her resolute singing, in her hard strums, in the elegant steel guitar, the sound like Laurel Canyon folk-rock more syncopated. In the face of longing and lack that make no sense, it’s all a kind of armor.
Armatrading was constantly compared to Joni Mitchell, which, for 1976, made some sense. To borrow a phrase from Mitchell, they were “women of heart and mind,” writing the highest caliber of hypersensitive song, and both fought to manifest their musical identities. The comparison still wasn’t wholly accurate. Armatrading’s lyrics were broader in scope, while Mitchell tended toward the granular. If Mitchell’s brilliance was in her details, then Armatrading’s was in her angle, at a smart remove, like a caring friend watching on with the clarity of distance. It gives Armatrading’s writing a useful sweep. Two years prior, Mitchell sang, on her biggest single, “Help me.” Armatrading had another idea for floundering, inadequate, unthinking lovers: “It would help me more if you helped yourself.”
No wonder Armatrading was beloved by feminists: “Help Yourself” is the sound of a woman who will not have her time wasted, who will not be fooled. She calls out cowards who’d rather wait until the morning to tell the truth, who put convenience over compassion. There’s a comic perfection in how she uses her words to casually rebuke her subject, pitching her voice high to underscore that this person has got to get their shit together. Armatrading perfectly communicates the way that people—typically men—so often refuse to communicate. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of such emotional withholding from a supposedly addled person will hear the dry sarcasm that saturates her halting delivery: “Hold up, hold up, hold up/You’re trying to sort out your mind!” A breakdown makes way for a hollered breakthrough—“I’m going out to help myself!”—and it’s positively life-giving.
Armatrading was 25 when she opened “Love and Affection” with those 10 beguiling words about imagining a way out of loneliness. “Love and Affection” begins like a mystic English folk ballad and ends with a proclamation of “Love, love, love”—13 loves, all of them persuasive—that reaches gospel-sized grandeur. She said it was like two songs put together, which makes sense, because it’s about holding two conflicting truths: a desire for love and an inability to feel it. “If I can feel the sun in my eyes/And the rain on my face/Why can’t I feel love?” she sings. It’s tempting to read into the potential confusion underpinning such a lyric. But in 1976, it was a question with no answer. If Armatrading’s writing did share something with Mitchell, maybe it was her very willingness to look straight in the eye of the unresolvable, to hold uncertainty at the heart of her biggest song. Armatrading knew that the purpose of love was to feel changed as it took shape, and the song shape-shifts throughout, transforming like the moment of infatuation. The soulful bass vocal and sax affirm as much. It’s triumphant.
“Love and Affection” was a Top 10 hit in the UK. But in a 2019 BBC Four documentary, Armatrading spoke candidly about her label’s failure to successfully market her music. They didn’t know what to do with a Black woman wielding an acoustic Ovation guitar and singing songs that didn’t fit neatly into any single Black genre. Her music was tinged with flourishes of blues, jazz, funk, soul, but her approach, like many of her singer-songwriter contemporaries, was utterly personal. The Los Angeles label that successfully pushed the milquetoast Carpenters through the ’70s, it turns out, was not up to the task of selling a Black British original. A&M knew how to market music that slotted neatly onto the radio. Armatrading did not slot neatly onto the radio.
Joan Armatrading was still adoringly received: It went gold within a year, remained on the U.S. charts for 27 weeks, and the UK music paper Sounds named it the album of the year over Bob Dylan’s Desire and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. That fall, when she sold out her first massive headlining date at the Hammersmith Odeon, an NME critic wrote that the audience included “more women than I've ever seen at a comparable gig anywhere.” But in the U.S., even by the time of her next great album, ’78’s To the Limit, Armatrading remained “vastly unknown” to young American listeners. An intensely private person, she never sought fame, even as she continued to record prolifically. As the decades progressed—no thanks to the star-making machinery—she gained increasingly greater control over her visionary pop music, turning towards new wave and reggae, producing her own albums, writing ever more daring songs, and eventually creating a recording studio in a barn where she works on her self-determined music independently. Already on Joan Armatrading, that agency resounded.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | A&M | May 2, 2021 | 9.1 | b5f2d001-e04c-4619-bfcc-330ce5d27116 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Volcano Choir is Bon Iver's Justin Vernon with Wisconsin experimental post-rock outfits Collections of Colonies of Bees and All Tiny Creatures. On their second LP Repave, the sextet have created a grandiose record featuring arena-rock ambitions and ostentatious beauty. | Volcano Choir is Bon Iver's Justin Vernon with Wisconsin experimental post-rock outfits Collections of Colonies of Bees and All Tiny Creatures. On their second LP Repave, the sextet have created a grandiose record featuring arena-rock ambitions and ostentatious beauty. | Volcano Choir: Repave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18447-volcano-choir-repave/ | Repave | The music Justin Vernon creates as Bon Iver leaves itself wide open to interpretation, comically so at times. But almost no one interprets it as “fun.” Now consider Wisconsin experimental post-rock outfits Collections of Colonies of Bees and All Tiny Creatures and the fact that “experimental post-rock” never promises a load of laughs either. These are the parties that comprise Volcano Choir and on their second LP Repave, the sextet have created a grandiose record with arena-rock ambitions and ostentatious beauty that is mostly inscrutable on a lyrical level. And yet, here’s the way in: I think this is the sound of them having fun.
This may sound counterintuitive, but it was also the key to unlocking their 2009 debut Unmap. Lyrics such as “conserve it with an omelette/ and you’re on it with the carpet” from “Island, IS” would’ve been a dead giveaway if you could make them out in the slightest. But while all those beatless, free-time mbira excursions could have been interpreted as experimental artists indulging their least accessible ideas, let’s not forget that thumb pianos are really fun to play when you’re stoned.
Repave is a decidedly more extroverted affair-- “with enough kief/ you can really bore someone” is the most straightforward and sound advice you’ll get from Vernon, though he sings it with chesty zeal on “Byegone” like it’s a regal proclamation. Volcano Choir are less interested in getting high this time out as they are achieving spiritual uplift, or at least getting a rise out of the listener-- if you still are doubting the sincerity of Bon Iver’s Hornsby tribute “Beth/Rest”, Repave establishes that some things will never change with Vernon.
The near entirety of it could be described as “power balladry,” a comprehensive denomination that owes plenty to the 1980s’ most popular Bruces, but also those that stood at their periphery and the bands that would ultimately carry their lineage. Overdriven organ, booming drums, and Vernon’s multitracked falsetto push opener “Tiderays” to an elevated plane where post-prog Genesis and pre-Eno Coldplay meet. The magisterial orchestration of “Byegone” enrobes a grizzled folk tune; it’s a place where early Pearl Jam and Arcade Fire find common ground in their ability to reconcile the supposed incongruity of humility and bluster within a cohesive aesthetic. Those bands tended to make songs with “sea” or “ocean” in their title and you don’t need that damn album cover for Volcano Choir to drive the point home. All songs on Repave begin quietly and almost none stay that way for long, so when those crescendos hit, you’re supposed to envision waves crashing on cold, barren outcroppings, white mist spraying as seabirds take majestic flight.
That’s really what “power ballad” means on a literal level-- an intimate song blown out to widescreen proportions to the point where you have to call it epic and it can be shared with thousands of people who all think it was written for them. It’s worth acknowledging the mutual benefit that gets passed on to CoCoB and ATC here: let’s not forget, for all the ill will directed towards any of the influences here, their records were often the outcome of the most technically proficient musicians on earth given frightening sums of money and unlimited studio time with the express purpose of making "it sounds like a million bucks" feel tangible.
And the instrumental contingent of Volcano Choir gets to live out their hockey shed visions by isolating the most bombastic sections of Bon Iver albums and making entire songs out of them. They still fill out the margins playing tricky, off-kilter guitar lines that wouldn’t be out of place in their own work. Here, they’re polished, shellacked, and gilded to the point where you couldn’t imagine Vernon picking up one of their guitars and strumming out “Skinny Love”-- they sound more like harps. The depth of the drums evoke not just canyons and churches, but the Grand Canyon and Sistine Chapel. In short, Repave sounds amazing, almost intimidating in its clarity, so even when “Keel” and "Almanac" start to integrate the more free-form and abrasive sounds of Unmap towards the end, you’re more likely to hear the spirituals of later Talk Talk than anything truly confrontational.
Still, they never overpower Vernon, who focuses solely on his vocals here and anthologizes every mode he’s been in for the past half decade. His most quoted line by now is “I was not magnificent,” and Repave answers “like hell I wasn’t.” A couple of my colleagues noted the influence of Bruce Springsteen on this record, and while I concur, it’s more of a visual than a sound. On late-album lighter-waver “Alaskans”, you can sense a perspirant Vernon two hours into a cathartic, marathon show, toweling himself down, sitting at a piano bench. There’s a performative edge that might seem out of place in Bon Iver-- even though the band’s personnel exploded to over a dozen, you still have the expectation that Vernon’s singing his pain up there. As he explained to Ryan Dombal, Volcano Choir doesn’t just sound romantic or like make-out music, it’s distinctly sexual. When he sings "We're talkin’ real love” in a seductive lower register on “Alaskans”, it’s like the drums were removed so you can hear the adulation of the crowd in your mind. Vernon howls “I won’t beg for you on acetate” and it’s a knowing, self-referential barb from a guy whose music often gets characterized as doing just the opposite.
What Volcano Choir get out of this is the ability to indulge in extravagant power balladry without taking on the seemingly requisite overblown persona where all this heavy lifting is necessary when you're carrying the weight of the world. But just as often, the subtle levity gets a little too heightened. Had Vernon done away with lyrics completely and gone Wisconsin Hopelandic on us, Repave might be worthy of being called the third Bon Iver album, which it sorta is-- the majestic choruses of “Tiderays” and “Comrade” are way more in line with Bon Iver’s “Perth” or “Calgary” than anything on Unmap. But too often, Vernon’s lyrics range from puzzling to utterly too goofy to ignore, creating a discomfiting dissonance with the stone cold sobriety of the music.
Authenticity is always something of a bugaboo outside of Vernon’s main gig-- you use For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver as standards and everything’s going to sound potentially insincere by comparison. Usually, skepticism is succesfully met head on-- the louche and lewd nature of Gayngs assured that while they weren’t winking, they were definitely leering. As far as the blue-collar, cheesehead rawk of Shouting Matches, the whole point is to remind you that Vernon is a Wisconsinite from Eau Claire, not just a dude who happened upon a cabin there. For all I know, Vernon might be entering his Ghostface Killah ca. Supreme Clientele phase-- simply toying with words for maximum surrealistic value. But while Repave's sounds trigger skygazing, googly-eyed emotion, lines like "tossin' off your compliments, wow/ sexin' all your Parliaments" and "that Ticonderoga shit/ made my mind and my heart/ all split up over/ the floor of the jackpot" can make you immediately question how much you should trust them.
Vernon explained Repave's carnality as damn near necessary in the indie rock discussion: "It's been built up so hard and so high that people are afraid...I'm talking about how what happens between people is so misunderstood even between the people who are having sex. Maybe some of the lyrics on this record are my way of cracking the egg." It's a noble cause, but indicative of the obfuscation and loopiness that undermines Repave; he uses a mixed metaphor to describe what might happen if people discuss the emotions that result from a physical act. But in the way its tremendously seductive and overwhelming overtures can be jeopardized by one embarrassing line or wrong move, Repave does become a realistically sexualized record. Just not exactly in the way it intended. | 2013-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 4, 2013 | 7.8 | b5f5b02e-05c0-4f56-8b22-bc8dc73a7098 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
With a focus on the minutiae of grief and heartbreak, the latest album from songwriter Taylor Vick nestles wry, careful lyrics into quiet arrangements that reward close listening. | With a focus on the minutiae of grief and heartbreak, the latest album from songwriter Taylor Vick nestles wry, careful lyrics into quiet arrangements that reward close listening. | Boy Scouts: Wayfinder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boy-scouts-wayfinder/ | Wayfinder | Taylor Vick’s records as Boy Scouts are easy to enjoy and even easier to underrate. Her songs move at an ambling pace; the clean-toned guitars pulse gently and the snares are tapped, while her voice never rises above a murmur. If a song from her latest album, Wayfinder, suddenly began playing out loud in a library, no one would raise an eyebrow.
But her songs intensify under scrutiny. Look closer, and knotty emotions sprout from those placid surfaces. Vick pays near-fetishistic attention to the minutiae of grief and heartbreak: The lyric sheet for Wayfinder quotes exchanges with old lovers and friends in their entirety—“You’d say, ‘Do you even try to see how you took what’s mine’/And I’d say ‘I don’t think you’re right/But here, you can have your light’”—as if stating them for the record.
Vick is prolific—her Bandcamp holds five full-lengths and various EPs stretching back a decade. Like Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo, she sometimes recycles lyrics or ideas from her earlier work, not for lack of inspiration but to see what new truths they might yield. You sense she’s circling around her own songs, waiting to see where they might bring her if she just listens closely enough.
The meticulously spaced guitars, the sweet-sour snap of the chords, and the quiet discipline of the arrangements reveal a deep study of Elliott Smith, particularly the records he made once he migrated to a major label. Vick confirms the affinity on “That’s Life Honey” with the lyric “Bottle it up and you will surely explode,” a near-quote from a highlight of Smith’s 1998 album XO. Vick’s lyrics are more elemental than Smith’s, usually a few phrases boiled down to their essence, but she shares his care in word choice. Listen to her syllable placement in “I Get High”: “’Cause I exist/And I exert/I need a kiss/And some dessert.” The phonetics are as sticky as the melody.
Paying prolonged attention to Vick's music reveals that she is uncommonly spectacular at the art of lyric-setting, which is the kind of thankless gift that usually disappears beneath the song’s surface. But once you notice it, her intelligence is at work with every word. On “Lighter,” she sings, “I always wonder, what do you find,” breaking the word “find” into three chromatically ascending pitches, lifting the melody upward until its shape has become more noticeable than the word it conveys. Her melodies deftly bundle up even lyrics that might look heavy on the page: “The ocean needs no one to blame,” she sings on “That’s Life Honey.” “It’s the master of beautiful rage/I’m the master of inexplicable shame.”
Vick spaces her instruments far apart in the mix but keeps all the voicings close, as if her music is hugging itself for protection in a faraway corner. Every song is midtempo, chugging along with the dreaminess of everyday life. If you want to glean something deeper, you have to lean in. Vick’s truths, like her melodies, are bite-sized, pungent: “Being myself’s a lot to ask,” she shrugs on “A Lot To Ask.”
Under cover of her protective solitude, Vick’s writing is funny, wry, ironic: “Not Today” laughs gently at grief’s persistence. “Could I let it go? Guess today’s not the day, is it,” she sings on the chorus. It’s a diaristic gesture, a joke so small you would never even bother to verbalize it. Maybe someone would see you smile to yourself, faintly, at the thought. Maybe they’d wonder what you were thinking. If they could hear that thought, as it buzzed past, it might sound a lot like Vick’s music.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | October 20, 2021 | 7.3 | b5fe98d7-26bc-4128-8814-64e54f2e6f8c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Frequently pointed to as an underrated shoegaze gem, the debut EP by Pinkshinyultrablast provides an enjoyable (if brief) introduction to the band’s rapturous take on rock. | Frequently pointed to as an underrated shoegaze gem, the debut EP by Pinkshinyultrablast provides an enjoyable (if brief) introduction to the band’s rapturous take on rock. | Pinkshinyultrablast: Happy Songs for Happy Zombies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21869-happy-songs-for-happy-zombies/ | Happy Songs for Happy Zombies | Pinkshinyultrablast have been together nearly a decade, but they’re still chasing the clock. The Russian outfit has been living on borrowed time since 2007, when four lifelong music nerds from Saint Petersburg decided to start a band, knowing full well that they’d have to part ways in a few months’ time to attend university. Determined to defy those temporal restraints, the quartet worked in fits and bursts, using every pocket of free time as a chance to commit their memories to wax.
Somehow, they've found ways to develop as a band even with this scattershot work schedule. Just this February, Pinkshinyultrablast released Grandfeathered, an underrated collection of sophisticated—and thunderous—pop songs. Several months after the band's most intricate release to date, London’s Club AC30 is taking a look back on their hurried early period with a reissue of Happy Songs for Happy Zombies, their debut EP. Frequently pointed to as an underrated gem by the modern shoegaze faithful, the four-track, 15-minute collection provides an enjoyable (if brief) introduction to the band’s rapturous take on rock.
Much like the Astrobrite album that inspired Pinkshinyultrablast's name, Happy Songs for Happy Zombies plays it maximalist. The aptly titled opening salvo “Blaster” spills forth in a rush of massive, fanning guitar riffs, whirring feedback, and bass throb. Guitarist Roman Parinov may not sing lead—that job belongs to frontwoman Lyubov Soloveva—but his screechy axe is the track’s strongest voice, easily engulfing her fragile melodies. Soloveva can’t be contained, however—just as Parinov seems to have her buried on “Blaster” or “Ode to Godzilla,” she phases through him, gently guiding the roar beneath her and preventing the music from dissolving into chaos.
Soloveva, Parinov, and company certainly take cues from amp-stackers like My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver, but their biggest inspiration on Happy Songs for Happy Zombies arguably isn’t shoegaze, or even musical. In a 2015 interview with Indie is Not A Genre, Soloveva revealed the group’s fascination with the Russian custom of dacha: an annual exodus from city apartment to country cabin for a few months of hard-earned rest and reflection. The burbling “Honeybee,” certainly feels like the type of song inspired by a day of cloud-gazing; it sees Parinov loosening up and letting the notes unspool steadily atop a fluttering backbeat. Between the lurching, grunge-y verses on “Deerland” and “Blaster”’s aforementioned wind-tunnel arrangement, calling Happy Songs for Happy Zombies a relaxed effort is certainly a stretch, but the EP's dacha mentality endures: freedom, playfulness, childlike wonder—and most importantly, an appreciation of those rare moments where you’re not chasing time or fretting over its passage, but enjoying the time you do have with the people who matter. Fifteen minutes is no eternity, after all, but it’s ample time for an enjoyable escape—just like Happy Songs for Happy Zombies. | 2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Club AC30 | May 17, 2016 | 6.9 | b5ff8b32-87b2-4617-b5a4-880993ae4044 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Led by singer Eno Williams, Uyai becomes a wildly diverse mix of global sounds whose focus this time has turned to themes of liberation, power, and beauty—specifically that of women. | Led by singer Eno Williams, Uyai becomes a wildly diverse mix of global sounds whose focus this time has turned to themes of liberation, power, and beauty—specifically that of women. | Ibibio Sound Machine: Uyai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22977-uyai/ | Uyai | If you crossed ’70s Nigerian highlife with LCD Soundsystem, you might get something like the opening track of Uyai. On “Give Me a Reason,” highlife trumpets and talking drums punch through buzzy synth lines and metallic drum machine effects. Like most dance music, it seeks liberation. Unlike most, it also laments: “As the story goes, they got sent to a house of wisdom/To learn all that the world can offer/But on setting out, they got lost,” Eno Williams sings in Ibibio, a language of southeast Nigeria. The song speaks about the 276 Chibok girls who were abducted three years ago, the vast majority of whom are still missing.
Led by London-born, Lagos-raised singer Williams, Ibibio Sound Machine are an eight-piece band whose music draws on Nigerian highlife as much as new wave, South African jazz as much as techno, Cameroonian makossa as much as disco. Besides being a nod to the Ibibio language and region that Williams’ family comes from, the band’s name is also a wink at Miami Sound Machine, whose ’80s pop exuberance and cultural mash-up are approaches that Ibibio shares. The band’s new release, Uyai, meaning “Beauty,” is their first since their self-titled debut in 2014. Accompanying a switch from the more vintage-oriented Soundway Records to indie rock label Merge, their sound has expanded to include more electronic and rock influences but has also grown more introspective. They still incorporate the kind of Ibibio storytelling that was at the center of Ibibio Sound Machine, but their focus this time has turned to themes of liberation, power, and beauty—specifically that of women.
Throughout the album, Eno draws on the presence of the women in her life, highlighting the experiences and histories that link them. Her sister and friends join her on several tracks as backing vocalists. On “The Chant (Iquo Isang),” her mom even makes a cameo chanting an improvised prayer, whispering and growling over shakers and a four-on-the-floor thump. Williams too recounts a chant from her schoolgirl days—the chorus from “Zangalewa” (originally by Cameroonian makossa group Golden Sounds; a couple decades later lifted by Shakira for the 2010 World Cup anthem). In writing “Joy (Idaresit),” an experimental techno-rock track, Williams was inspired by an older woman she saw dancing who reminded her of her own mother. By contrast, “Lullaby” shows the singer as the mother figure. It’s one of the gentler tracks, colored by atmospheric reverb, tinkly EKG blips, and bubbling talking drum.
As grounded as Williams is in her own roots, her and Ibibio’s vision also taps into music across the African Diaspora. On “The Pot Is on Fire” and “Guide You (Edu Kpeme),” Ghanaian keyboardist Emmanuel Rentzos, of Osibisa fame, contributes playful synth-work. On tracks peppered with swiveling robot sounds and cowbells, percussionist Anselmo Netto plays Afro-Brazilian percussion, like the squeaky cuíca (as on “Guide You”) or the conga-like atabaque and boomy surdo (as on “Power of 3”). Meanwhile, “One That Lights Up (Andi Domo Ikang Uwem Mi)” is a love song that sounds like watercolors, where the horns reference South African jazz, and distorted mbiras recall Kinshasa’s Konono Nº1.
With all these musical influences and elements at play, Uyai could easily be a chaotic mess. For the most part, it's not, but every element doesn’t always feel necessary. On “Power of 3,” there’s a solid 30-second passage of laser gun sounds. The album as a whole has a lot of laser gun sounds. It also has frequent sudden shifts between high energy songs and mellower songs, so that even though the record has a unified sound, it sometimes feels disjointed. During the last two songs, however, that contrast works. On the tenderest moment of the album, “Cry (Eyed),” Eno intones the word “cry” over and over again over a muted balafon-esque pattern, as if by way of slow repetition we could find some release. On album closer “Trance Dance”—in a whirl of syncopated rhythms, chiptune blips, and guitar fuzz—we finally do. | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Merge | March 7, 2017 | 7 | b60a8e78-1c02-498b-84f8-d22af817e6e3 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
A new collection of the late songwriter’s work celebrates the wit, range, and unpolished charm of his oddball pop. | A new collection of the late songwriter’s work celebrates the wit, range, and unpolished charm of his oddball pop. | Peter Ivers: Becoming Peter Ivers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peter-ivers-becoming-peter-ivers/ | Becoming Peter Ivers | The late songwriter Peter Ivers had a rich life long before he relocated to Southern California in the 1970s—as a Harvard student, a harmonica virtuoso, and a Van Dyke Parks-groomed solo artist—but his legacy wasn’t sealed until he made a home on the West Coast. It was there that Ivers composed “In Heaven” for David Lynch’s debut film Eraserhead, hosted the public access variety show New Wave Theatre, and recorded numerous demo cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes, leaving a mess of pop oddities at the time of his still-unsolved murder in 1983. On Becoming Peter Ivers, RVNG Intl. presents a collection of his bizarre and beautiful recordings, some of which have never before seen the light of day. It is an embarrassment of riches that crowns Ivers as the weirdo king of bedroom pop, decades before the genre existed.
“Demos are often better than records,” Ivers once wrote. “More energy, more soul, more guts.” Becoming Peter Ivers is a testament to that doctrine. The compilation presents 25 tracks culled from over 500 recordings that Ivers laid down at his Laurel Canyon home and studios in L.A. in the mid-to-late ’70s (four songs that appear on Ivers’ earlier albums are absent from the digital edition). Lovingly compiled by RVNG’s Matt Werth with Matthew Sanders, Ivers’ friend Steve Martin, and Ivers’ longtime girlfriend Lucy Fisher, the songs feel close and warm. Opener “Take Your Chances With Me” is one of the record’s most intimate and modern offerings. Ivers’ small voice is pinched into an airy whisper, supported by a scaffold of acoustic guitar and the cry of a distant siren. It’s such a spare piece of music that any additional arrangement would threaten to crush its delicate bones. “Even Stephen Foster” takes a similar approach, uniting subdued piano and Ivers’ half-sung confessions.
Not every song on Becoming is so stripped down, but they all possess an unpolished charm. “I’m Sorry Alice” is a disco-funk romp with horns, harmonica, and back-up singers. “Miraculous Weekend” is even more decadent; Ivers takes a page from Marc Bolan’s book and slips into a trembling falsetto, rhyming “fabulous” and “miraculous” with tossed-off elegance. These tracks are some of the most decorated entries on Becoming, but they sound loose and spontaneous, as if performed live at a house party. At the opposite side of the spectrum, the brief “Untitled” is among the album’s best songs, with a simple keyboard progression and wordless melody that, though written prior to the band’s debut, sound oddly like the Cure. Tracks like “Alpha Centauri” present a middle ground in Ivers’ work—the production is pared back, but the combination of skronking sax and Ivers’ shrill voice lends it an air of absurdity. Comfortably transitioning between lo-fi love songs and full-band glam rock, Ivers’ chameleonic songwriting reflects his professional life: He hosted punk bands like Fear and Dead Kennedys on New Wave Theatre while also befriending Hollywood mainstays like Harold Ramis and composing the theme for Ron Howard’s 1977 film Grand Theft Auto.
Becoming feels assembled from an endless bag of Ivers’ tricks, as delightful and deceptive as Mary Poppins’ suitcase. Just when you think you’ve seen the bottom, Ivers pulls out an umbrella. One such surprise is late-album gem “Happy on the Grill,” a tender track sung from the perspective of a frankfurter. “I’m a little hot dog on the grill,” Ivers sings. “Your love is hot, but there’s the thrill.” No matter how sweetly it’s sung, the line is quite masochistic and strange. Ivers’ dark sense of humor is present throughout, particularly in “Conference Call at Four,” a snide send-up of corporate culture that details a very important phone meeting. “Suppose a baby’s born tonight, or a flood hits, or a gun,” Ivers lilts. “You can bet your bottom dollar, Jack, that they’ll all still be on.” It is the spiritual sibling of Harry Nilsson’s “Good Old Desk,” a cheeky reprimand of those who live to work as opposed to the other way around. One gets the sense that Ivers understood both modes of living—and that he knew where his true allegiance lay.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Rvng Intl. | November 15, 2019 | 8.1 | b619168d-8cbf-4e68-a63d-0ebf6b75201d | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The New York guitarist and his longtime collaborators spend a rollicking, leisurely hour imagining rock music’s role in a world more invested in social justice than commerce. | The New York guitarist and his longtime collaborators spend a rollicking, leisurely hour imagining rock music’s role in a world more invested in social justice than commerce. | Ceramic Dog / Marc Ribot: Connection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ceramic-dog-marc-ribot-connection/ | Connection | Marc Ribot keeps watering the roots of no wave. The New York genre, while it seemed to wither 40 years ago, is a key ingredient in his gloriously messy alchemy, which mixes flippant interpretation, heavy feedback, and agit-prop vocals with lofty traditions. The guitarist and composer has layered his scrappy voice over improvisatory jazz, crafted collections of celebratory Cuban montuno (on one track, Ribot sings in Spanish with a self-consciously bad accent), and recorded a volume of compositions by his mentor, Haitian classical guitarist Frantz Casseus. He’s been most consistent as leader of Ceramic Dog, a power trio of jazz geniuses who inflect literate rock with formidable chops. The synthesis is frenetic, potent, and at odds with the zeitgeist, even if Ribot’s lyrics decry today’s political oppression: Musically, he rejects both the voguish and the virtuosic in favor of his own whims.
The band hitches Ribot with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Ches Smith, musicians known for artfully changing horses midstream. Famously omnivorous, Ismaily is fresh off Love in Exile, a trio collaboration whose gorgeous, glacial changes are the polar opposite of Ceramic Dog. Smith, once the drummer for indie mainstays Xiu Xiu, has carved out a parallel practice as a composer and percussionist whose outsider immersion in Haitian music rivals Ribot’s. Mercurial tendencies can divide groups; they’ve kept Ceramic Dog together for 18 years, guiding the band as it skirts trendiness in favor of conviction. The three-piece offers a playfully naive idea of how rock might be in a world more invested in social justice than commerce: rambling and trenchant, like the dinnertime rant of a pissed-off family member.
Connection, Ceramic Dog’s fifth LP, stretches these abundant qualities into a rollicking, leisurely hour. Ribot and co. roll through rock, free jazz, boogaloo, son cubano, and, on their thrilling cover of “That’s Entertainment,” the popular songbook as filtered through post-punk. Along the way, they bludgeon us with the most direct rock song of their career, the title track and opener, which sacrifices charming bookishness for bruising force. Later, they proffer soul-stirring free jazz on “Swan,” abandoning the irony Ribot once honed as a member of the Lounge Lizards in favor of unambiguous beauty. Aided by James Brandon Lewis’ saxophone, the track is a gem at the record’s center, its prismatic light brightening the rest of Connection’s longform improvisations.
Ceramic Dog’s undersung last album, Hope, was a marvel of structure: Split along a line of symmetry, it separated Ribot’s talky concoctions from the band’s jams, a duality that felt almost spiritual. Connection dispenses with its predecessor’s deliberate formatting and, relatedly, a sense of tension. Ribot’s stylistic fascinations each get a moment in the sun: Hard-rockin’ singles adjoin conga rhythms, which bump shoulders with the political screed of “Soldiers in the Army of Love” and the dadaist babble of “Heart Attack.” Ribot previously complicated his leftist declamations with caustic zigzags, flitting between lucid indignation and cracked reasoning. “Muslim Jewish Resistance,” from 2018’s YRU Still Here, is a surprising, martial plea for the two faiths to unite against bigotry. “Hippies Are Not Nice Anymore,” from 2020’s Bandcamp-only EP What I Did on My ‘Long’ Vacation, hilariously logs the crowded road linking Woodstock idealism and cynical Silicon Valley riches.
On Connection, Ribot makes calls to action without the balancing weights of humor or self-consciousness. His progressive sentiments are welcome, and unfortunately more relevant than ever: “Fascists beat up on our brothers/Take the choice from our sisters/Hurt our non-binary siblings,” he barks on “Soldiers in the Army of Love.” But for the first time, he sounds wrapped so tightly in the Ceramic Dog flag that it muffles his commentary, obscuring his once skeptically raised eyebrow. “I don’t want you to give me nothing/Unless you give me ecstasy,” he announces on the louche “Ecstasy.” Its groove is sexy, rife with infectious syncopation and cool-as-a-cucumber sprechstimme. Ribot’s lyrics, though, are one-dimensional, which is surprising for a singer whose past outings have revealed so many surprises that straightforward passages served as necessary relief from the chaos.
Soaring peaks rise up from Connection’s expanse, such as the slippery transition between verse and chorus on “Soldiers in the Army of Love,” the bluesy build of “No Name,” or the 3/4 riff on “Connection,” which cuts against Smith’s common-time rhythm like a blade through tender beef. But the record can feel like a repository of quality ideas and B-side larks that don’t quite fit into a cohesive album. Last month, Ribot told a reporter that many of his current songs he once hoped other artists would record, before he realized that they were “much too weird.” He continued, “I decided I might as well put them out myself. And that’s what I’m in the process of trying to do now. Only there are so many of them that it’s been difficult to figure out how to put them together.” He’s still dirtying his would-be hits with no-wave scuzz, wearing his outré status as a deserved badge of honor. But Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own. | 2023-07-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental / Jazz | Knockwurst | July 13, 2023 | 6.7 | b62d57cb-594a-4838-b6db-248fba48d343 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Unpretentious Midwestern blues-rock duo delivers its sophomore Fat Possum release. | Unpretentious Midwestern blues-rock duo delivers its sophomore Fat Possum release. | Heartless Bastards: All This Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9316-all-this-time/ | All This Time | All This Time, the Heartless Bastards' sophomore album, begins with a gentle and determined piano line, a melody by no means delicate but genuinely hopeful when it hits those higher notes. Such a subtle start is a little unexpected after the full-on blues-rock assault of their debut, Stairs & Elevators. But you know what those Heartless Bastards do to that little piano part on "Into the Open"? Erika Wennerstrom's guitar starts churning, drummer Kevin Vaughn chomps his teeth, and Mike Lamping's bass sneaks up on it and they devour it whole. Why? ‘Cause they're a rock band and that's what rock bands do. And when they belch it back out for the second verse, that little melody has changed considerably, becoming more fuel for the engine that powers the band along.
Like that digested piano theme, the Bastards have changed considerably since Stairs introduced the band's unpretentious Midwestern blues-rock and Wennerstrom's much-ballyhooed vocals. They still sound heavy enough to level a small city, but they've refined their sonic tonnage to make it tighter and more agile, able to move more quickly even as they incorporate new styles into the mix. With its marching pace, swirling vocals, and cut-loose chorus, "Finding Solutions" sounds soupily psychedelic, like heyday Jefferson Airplane, and "Brazen" fiercely lives up to its title. Best of all, the band actually pull off some quiet moments, like the cooing "I Swallowed a Dragonfly" and the closing "Came a Long Way".
At the center of this maelstrom stands Wennerstrom, who plays a capably muddy blues guitar but commands more attention for her enormous vocals. Perfectly suited for the Bastards' brand of bar rock, her voice is a distinctive and forceful instrument, howling through these songs like a tornado through a trailer park. Furthermore, the gale force of her delivery makes her lyrics sound truly conflicted as she balances self-loathing with self-assurance. On the title track, her declaration of loyalty and affection sounds all the more convincing for being so forcefully stated, and on "Blue Day" you can hear the desperation in her voice when she sings "I get no motivation/ Need some inspiration/ Try to get motivation/to help me get through this day."
Wennerstrom's voice, however, is both a blessing and a curse. Its power demands bold accompaniment, which Lamping and Vaughn are more than capable of providing, but because she doesn't have a tremendous amount of range, the band can't move with much agility or dynamic. For the most part, they've worked around this handicap on All This Time, hitting the big notes with scary ease and sounding bruised and tender on quieter sections—usually within the same song. But there's not much in between these extremes-- no building up or quelling down, just relentless horizontal jamming. As a result, they hit the same emotional notes in every song. Those notes may be distinctive to the band, but the Heartless Bastards nevertheless sound like giants tied to the earth. | 2006-08-31T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-08-31T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | August 31, 2006 | 6.7 | b62efba2-af46-4da4-b6cd-af0e0ff4ce65 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Like predecessor American Idiot, 21st Century Breakdown is another hour-plus slab of jumped-up alt-rock as political/musical theater. | Like predecessor American Idiot, 21st Century Breakdown is another hour-plus slab of jumped-up alt-rock as political/musical theater. | Green Day: 21st Century Breakdown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13045-21st-century-breakdown/ | 21st Century Breakdown | I wanted to like American Idiot. Really. Mostly because I was a Green Day fan, but also because of the soul-numbing run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of those rare moments when even those wary of politicized art wouldn't mind some big-time act addressing the evils of those pissing on us from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Any pop cultural port in a liberty-eroding shitstorm, and all.
Two listens in, though, and it was clear: American Idiot was musically dodgy and politically empty. Political pop has its place, at least when didacticism doesn't drain the wit and life from a band's songwriting. But American Idiot failed utterly as coherent propaganda and as rock invigorating enough to agitate the pleasure centers. Have you tried to parse the lyrics to "Holiday" or "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" lately? This wasn't anti-imperialist dissent set to kick-ass. It was gaudy, way-too-impressionistic, self-congratulatory garbage warbled over lumbering AOR dressed in strings and conceptual malarkey.
The fact that American Idiot had an undercurrent of lukewarm liberal backslapping, and was released during the blackest days of the W. era, certainly gave it a big contextual profile boost at the time. But what really assured its success was the fact that the band had smartly made a grab-bag of proven gestures swiped from the ignoble history of Big Rock, along with some earnest, commercially canny self-cannibalization. And then there was the icky transparency of the band's attempt to shuck their lingering entry-level pop-punk rep, the last of the slack-and-proud generation to reveal their sad, predictable need for "boomer respect."
When a record like that sells a bazillion copies, you can be assured that the band won't be scaling back its ambitions on the follow-up. And 21st Century Breakdown is indeed another hour-plus slab of jumped-up alt-rock as political/musical theater-- overlong, exhausting, and corny as hell.
If American Idiot was an aesthetic failure, you certainly never doubted the band's conviction. Sure, you might cringe when you realized all that effort was in service of fulfilling Billie Joe Armstrong's dreams of merging boneheaded pogo-pop with Broadway shlock. You might have lamented that no one pointed out the inanity of many of the album's creative choices, like naming a protagonist "Jesus of Suburbia", perhaps because Armstrong was a grown-ass millionaire with carte blanche from his corporate masters. Nonetheless, the band really put its backs into that vapid, humorless trash.
21st Century Breakdown is just as pompous and dumb, but it lacks even that old misguided passion. It's a slog, but not the kind that results when a band forgets the importance of editing when in the throes of "trying to say something." Its sprawl feels entirely unearned, three men worried about meeting expectations rather than driven by urgency. The performances are blandly professional, because any major-label rock band of Green Day's abilities could shit this stuff out in their sleep, and emotionally inert. This is the crafting of a modern epic as a dreary day-job routine.
Tré Cool-- a drummer who's never really progressed beyond "fast with a lot of rolls" and "mid-tempo militaristic oompah"-- flaunts his competence level with a metronomic anti-creativity. Mike Dirnt's bass playing, once reliably adding needed punch to band's flimsier tunes, is often buried under Armstrong's claustrophobic, monochromatic guitar. As a songwriter, Armstrong was always juicing the platonic pop-punk tune at best. Listening to him try classic rock moves is cringe-y in the way you'd expect when a guy with a limited skill set pines for stadium godhood. Having exhausted his new tricks on American Idiot, he's descended into repetition, almost self-parody. And what he's recycling wasn't much worth hearing in the first place.
Just count the number of times he falls back on the lame bait-and-switch of the pretty acoustic intro, setting the listener up to expect one of Green Day's oft-regrettable ballads, only to kick in with a faceless blast of ur-mall-punk. Or the lifeless Frankensteins of songs from International Superhits, the sound of man stitching his past hits together out of desperation or callowness or both. It's kind of amazing an album with so many multi-genre suites and deliberate mid-song shifts in mood can also feel so maddeningly static for long stretches. You start to cling to the novelties and experiments, however bad: the way "Peacemaker" sounds like a cutting-room leftover from some ersatz American International Pictures surf/spy movie, or the more-Wings-than-Fabs McCartney bite of "Last Night on Earth".
As for the album's storyline, I plead the most willful kind of ignorance. It seems to be another loosely sketched state-of-the-union about how far up shit creek we are as a nation/planet, with a slight positivist tinge given this weird pause we seem to be in between reconstruction and total collapse. So "desperate, but not hopeless" is about as close as Armstrong gets to a memorably bite-sized universalist sentiment. The lyrics are otherwise another do-you-really-have-the-time-to-unpack-this jumble of inscrutable storytelling, pseudo-profundities, and just-add-bile anti-authoritarianism. Which means I could be mistaking plain ol' love songs for Major Statements. Or it could be that Armstrong's pretensions now completely obscure any remaining bubblegum charmers. You can listen only so long for something catchy and human-scaled while being consistently rewarded with lines like, "When your mind breaks the spirit of your soul, your faith walks on broken glass."
Green Day had been augmenting the three-chords-or-less thrashing since the trad power-pop touches of Nimrod, taking it further with the Brit Invasion homages that peppered Warning. Musically, a self-consciously eclectic and ambitious Green Day had been a reality long before Armstrong began gorging on Headline News and the Springsteenian mythos. But Green Day's late-decade addiction to scale, and reinforcing their own stature, has drained all the immediacy and pleasure from their music. Without some sort of attitude-correcting flop, the band will probably continue to abuse your tolerance for ego-driven padding. And if the CD format finally expires between now and the next one, watch out when Billie Joe convinces Reprise to disseminate his next Economist-meets-Vegas horrorshow on snappily branded external hard drives. | 2009-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | May 22, 2009 | 4.8 | b6416d98-58f9-41d4-b16c-f4f6d9f0e7e3 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | |
On his reflective four-song EP, the Atlanta rapper’s hallmark frivolity and infinite swag keep it short and sweet. | On his reflective four-song EP, the Atlanta rapper’s hallmark frivolity and infinite swag keep it short and sweet. | 2 Chainz: The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2-chainz-the-play-dont-care-who-makes-it-ep/ | The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It EP | With more and more artists milking their own streaming numbers by releasing absurdly long albums, there’s something to be said for concision. 2 Chainz knows about getting to the point: He’s changed the dynamics of countless songs with little more than a quick one-liner, or a well-placed ad-lib, or a four-word bar. And of late, the Atlanta rapper has perfected the art of the EP. Freebase from 2014 and Felt Like Cappin and Hibachi for Lunch from 2016 featured some of his best songs before they found homes on albums. They function like reps ahead of the main event and a way to flood the streets without oversaturating them.
On his latest and most excellently titled EP, The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It, 2 Chainz basks in the fruits of the plays he’s made. It lands well in the aftermath of last year’s phenomenal Pretty Girls Like Trap Music to display an artist who has fully stepped up and into his moment (again) without becoming too self-serious. There’s a sense of reflective appreciation throughout The Play, but his hallmark frivolity keeps the EP from becoming suffocating.
Rap flutes continue their contemporary reign on the trappy “Ok Bitch,” where his flow rides perfectly over an ominous piano loop, the syllables adding their own percussive element. “Proud,” which features the EP’s only guest verses, courtesy of YG and Offset, arrives to give all the flexing a higher purpose than simple egoism. The trio celebrates mothers in a way that only they can, and the result is both tender and cautionary at the same time; on some level, who doesn’t know that feeling of “I ain’t trying to let my mama down,” even if it is by any means necessary. “Land of the Freaks” surges with energy spilling out through lyrical dexterity and infinite swag. Only 2 Chainz can rhyme, “Yeah, I’m a misfit, dipshit, fish sticks, six whips/Times two, I’m cold, swine flu, must I remind you?” and make it work.
The EP’s anchor, “Lamborghini Truck (Atlanta Shit),” reveals a more sentimental side of the rapper whose lightheartedness has been a calling card for the better part of a decade. Over the pillowy vocals of Sitara Kanhai, he crafts an ode to his Georgia hometown. It’s genuinely touching without over-exaggerating the emotion or the subject matter. As the EP’s longest song, it offers a brief history lesson of the city’s legendary and oft-understated rappers—a monument erected in honor of Atlanta, the names of his friends etched in the stones. Everyone from late rappers Shawty Lo and Bankroll Fresh to unsung heroes like Baby D and legends like the Dungeon Family get their love.
In some ways, 2 Chainz is the ultimate embodiment of Atlanta rap. At age 40, he’s old enough to have witnessed the forging of its building blocks but maintains the youthful spirit of an ever-changing genre. His success is the product of a city and—and of an artist—that fundamentally understands the EP’s leading statement: “The play don’t care who makes it.” It’s a quote about the mechanics of football by Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher, but when applied to the music of 2 Chainz, it’s like he’s holding aloft the key to the city because that’s just how it’s done. | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | February 14, 2018 | 7.5 | b646fcab-1f86-4435-903f-418de0b1f1e4 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
The South London band’s third album combines subtle garage-pop grooves and clanging noise-rock for the most full and refined version of the Goat Girl experience. | The South London band’s third album combines subtle garage-pop grooves and clanging noise-rock for the most full and refined version of the Goat Girl experience. | Goat Girl : Below the Waste | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/goat-girl-below-the-waste/ | Below the Waste | Goat Girl are a balancing act, really. The London art rock trio tempered references to cyanide with wry melodies on their eponymous 2018 debut album, and they used cool synths to make having scabies sound more chill on 2021’s On All Fours. Their third album, Below the Waste, once more pilfers the garbage can for inspiration—entrails and mud are some featured lyrics—but they’re not as explicit as they used to be. Now, the band’s mastery of balance lies mostly in their production. Below the Waste welds Goat Girl’s scrap-metal clanging to the more subtle garage-pop groove of On All Fours, creating a more refined version of the band’s music. They’re jumping into filth, and doing it with style.
To commemorate the occasion, the band seems to have dropped their Throbbing Gristle-type monikers. Singer Clottie Cream has turned back into Lottie Pendlebury, bassist Holly Hole has closed and formed Holly Mullineaux, and drummer Rosy Bones welcomes Rosy Jones. Shedding even this thin layer of artifice, with co-production help from black midi engineer John “Spud” Murphy, reflects the band’s fresh interest in analog sounds.
Some of Below the Waste’s most exhilarating moments come from a textural mishmash of orchestral arrangements and the steely glam of synths. A plucked guitar continually cracks the TV static surface of “words fell out” like a faraway bird popping through the clouds, and it softens Pendlebury’s vocal delivery, which has some Tori Amos or red-wine dryness. “perhaps” thickens her voice with a drunken clarinet melody, deepening the phone anxiety she sings about. The flute that comes later is beautiful, but no match for a drooling guitar line’s growing darkness. All of these sounds fight for space in the songs and build an infectious tension throughout the record.
Through these exciting layers, Goat Girl pad Below The Waste with luxurious fullness, occasionally to the album’s detriment. At 16 songs, Below the Waste returns Goat Girl to 2018, when their debut album floundered in its 19-song bloat. Two of Below the Waste’s instrumental interludes, “s.m.o.g.” and “prelude,” sound like lo-fi guitar tuning, and they don’t counter or contribute much to the album’s lithe energy. But, for the rest of its runtime, Below the Waste’s decadent production holds your attention. We hear Pendlebury sigh in infinity circles on “pretty faces,” as if she’s continuously collapsing on the song’s decadent mattress of strings, and it builds our suspense for the coming breakdown: a small windstorm of groaning, chorus pads, and stuttering violin.
While most of Below the Waste’s songs value symmetry in their lush instrumentation and vocal harmonies, it’s thrilling when one overtakes the other. Most of the frantic and fed-up “tcnc” sounds completely swallowed by an earthquake, with synth buzzing through everything like a passing train. On the opposite end, a stabby, brassy keyboard hook guides us down the listless “motorway” like a row of buttons, but Pendlebury’s sleep-deprived vignettes—“Called out shotgun/Motion sickness/Road to nowhere”—make it careful and romantic. This ability to summon intensity without a lyrical shock factor is new for Goat Girl, and they’re better for it. | 2024-06-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | June 10, 2024 | 7.7 | b66d98ab-8956-4741-b2b7-979e449264d1 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ |
Subsets and Splits