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As he returns to the intricate polyrhythms and hypnotic vocal chops of footwork, the Chicago producer’s approach remains almost single-minded in its focus. | As he returns to the intricate polyrhythms and hypnotic vocal chops of footwork, the Chicago producer’s approach remains almost single-minded in its focus. | DJ Nate: Take Off Mode | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-nate-take-off-mode/ | Take Off Mode | The first thing that many outside Chicago’s footworking community ever heard from its native son DJ Nate was “Hatas Our Motivation,” a dizzying track in which the titular phrase, gravelly and defiant, looped ad nauseum over rapid-fire drum machine as brooding synths and pitched-down vocal samples churned ominously underneath. It was 2010, and Nate, just 20 years old, was the first footwork artist to sign to Planet Mu, a UK label better known for jewel-toned IDM. To outsiders, it sounded like a hole had opened in the earth’s crust, exposing some heretofore undiscovered gyroscopic contraption swiveling below. Four months before Planet Mu’s compilation Bangs & Works Vol. 1 shone an international spotlight on the Chicago footwork scene, it was Nate’s intricate polyrhythms and hypnotic vocal chops that first captured the radical strangeness of the style’s kinetic essence.
Not long after, Nate released his debut full-length, Da Trak Genious, extending the tightly coiled repetitions of his debut EP across 70 delirious minutes. But while DJ Rashad, Traxman, DJ Spinn, RP Boo, and other Teklife affiliates were taking footwork worldwide, Nate largely left the style behind, trying his hand at rap and R&B production—he scored a regional hit with the 2012 bop anthem “Gucci Goggles”—before a back injury in 2016 left him hospitalized and, for a time, paralyzed from the waist down.
Take Off Mode represents his pivot back to footwork. He’s been teasing one for a while, with occasional tweets promising the imminent arrival of Da Trak Genious 2, though, until now, he’d never followed up. The return to his original style may come as some surprise, given that his YouTube channel remains largely devoted to rap productions reliant on syrupy synths and Auto-Tuned vocals. But on Take Off Mode, he sounds as brittle as ever. Its 17 tracks are a mixture of new and old productions; some date back to the 2010 batch that first got him signed, though nothing in the sound makes obvious which are recent and which archival.
DJ Nate’s approach to footwork remains almost single-minded in its focus. He’s a minimalist at heart. His tracks are unsteady balancing acts between programmed drums, cut-up vocal samples, and the occasional smear of synthesizer, dissonant and unsettling. Again and again, his drum sequences are built around tuned toms that tumble forward, an endless succession of three-note somersaults; around these propulsive dotted-eighth rhythms, he wraps tangled hi-hat patterns, whizzing fast then slowing to triplets, like crisscrossing zippers.
It’s the vocals that provide the color. Nate chops them like confetti, stretches them like taffy, explores every crevice of their contours. On “Bring Your Best Crack,” he runs the titular phrase at regular speed, playing its spoken-word intonation against a chipmunked R&B a cappella, then begins playing with the pitch of each vocal track, unlocking the musicality of looped speech—the same principle Steve Reich explored with Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain—and making the most of the accidental harmonies created by his layered voices.
It sounds complicated—from a technical standpoint, it is complicated—but the results are surprisingly easy on the ear. “Get Rid of Em,” with its acoustic guitars and pristine digital synths, is particularly gratifying; it sounds almost like a collision between footwork and vaporwave. The ultra-minimalist “Fuck Dat” hammers its stuttering refusal over queasy synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Occasionally, as on “Just Be Truu,” a sample of vintage soul floods in like light from a stained-glass window. Ultimately, though, these songs’ differences are less important than what they share in common: eerie frequencies and seemingly impossible rhythms, drums and vocals slicing angles in the air like hummingbirds. Just as he did in the very beginning, DJ Nate makes the most convoluted movements feel intuitive. | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | May 1, 2019 | 7.6 | b66ea5f6-f857-4d32-b3ce-d7ef854227ee | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Following 2002's killer Suicide Invoice, former Drive Like Jehu frontmen John Reis and Rick Froberg replace Hot Snakes' original drummer Jason Kourkounis with Mario Rubalcaba of Rocket from the Crypt and Black Heart Procession. | Following 2002's killer Suicide Invoice, former Drive Like Jehu frontmen John Reis and Rick Froberg replace Hot Snakes' original drummer Jason Kourkounis with Mario Rubalcaba of Rocket from the Crypt and Black Heart Procession. | Hot Snakes: Audit in Progress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3932-audit-in-progress/ | Audit in Progress | Let it never be said that the Swami doesn't love the rock. When the turbaned one isn't disinterring forgotten gems from the lightless mines of classic punk, to reissue them with bonus tracks and modern production values, he's seeking out new bands that replicate the glory of '77 with striking fidelity and a rigid perma-sneer. Thus has it come to pass that Swami has reissued infamous San Fran garage-punks Crime twice in 2004-- first, the Crime CD San Francisco's Still Doomed, and again, in the guise of the third Hot Snakes LP of heat-seeking proto-punk, Audit in Progress.
Hot Snakes is the latest chapter in a long-running partnership between John Reis and Rick Froberg, who began grinding out antic, gasoline-doused rock together in the band Pitchfork, then attained indie immortality with their math-punk band Drive Like Jehu. The duo parted ways for a while in the mid-to-late-90s, as Reis attempted to capitalize upon the temporary commercial viability of his other band, Rocket from the Crypt, and Froberg pursued his visual art, the distinctive, stylized line work that now adorns Hot Snakes CDs.
Reis and Froberg reunited around the turn of the millennium, with Delta 72 drummer Jason Kourkounis providing the robust rhythmic chassis. Unexpectedly, the spirit of Jehu was revived, to the enduring elation of fans still lamenting their break-up after their seminal swan song, Yank Crime. There are numerous, comparative ways of understanding Hot Snakes-- a more concise, streamlined version of Jehu, or RFTC without the greaser sensibility and wailing saxes. But they're best discerned on their own terms: a desire to carry on the legacy of classic punk bands like Crime (roiling, distressed rock riffs) and Suicide (menacing, propulsive rhythms) with a minimum of modern revision.
Reviews of familiar bands often deal predominantly with progressions, a tactic that fails to find purchase in music that seems resistant to change and intent on holding its ground. Hot Snakes have staked out their sonic territory like a lion guarding the carcass of a slain gazelle, snarling in an unassailable splay-legged stance. As such, we'll examine their scanty alterations straightaway. The most glaring is the replacement of Kourkounis by RFTC/Black Heart Procession drummer Mario Rubalcaba, and if Audit in Progress evinces a slight decline in raw power, this embryonic dynamic is the likely cause. While Rubalcaba is a proficient percussionist possessed of a distinct style, his crisper, more rigid drumming simply doesn't mesh as well with Hot Snakes' metallic doom-rock guitars and monotone shout-alongs as Kourkounis's rumbling, primal pounding did. Audit in Progress remains sufficiently fierce, but sounds a little tinny when compared to the rippling muscles of 2002's Suicide Invoice.
Besides this foundational shift, Hot Snakes pick up right where they left off-- perhaps the songs are a little shorter, a bit more compressed, but are still of a piece with anything from Suicide Invoice and Automatic Midnight. The new album opens with "Braintrust". A rapid-fire rhythm guitar recalling Black Flag paves the way for a cyclical, trebly lead, frantic drums, and the locked groove of Gar Wood's fleet bass. Froberg takes on the role of misanthropic sloganeer or street-corner proselytizer, belting out his apocalyptic aphorisms over furiously oscillating punk rock. Like many a Hot Snakes song, it's a runaway bus that drags the listener in its wake like a loose muffler, bouncing and sparking on asphalt. The chorus manifests an immediately recognizable Hot Snakes' tactic: the relentless momentum accordion-wrecks into ominous, anthemic chords that are sustained like a held breath before the panting exhalations of the verses kick in again.
Other standout tracks include "Hi-Lites", "Think About Carbs", and album closer "Plenty for All". "Hi-Lites" attains a hysterically seesawing balance, pivoting violently on the fulcrum of Froberg's hollered non-sequiturs. "Think About Carbs" is one of a couple tracks that break the album's hypnotic drive, forfeiting it for a starker sound: Sparse, staccato guitars allow the muted bassline to shine, and both collude to create a platform for the record's most polychromatic singing. Froberg's more variegated vocal inflections and unusual prolixity border on a hoarse, punk version of rap, and strategic phrase repetitions ("boxes boxes boxes boxes") grace the song with a mounting urgency akin to Richard Hell's "New Pleasure" ("automatic automatic automatic automatic"). And "Plenty for All", which one would have expected to find sequenced earlier in the album for its instant appeal, kicks off with a gleaming lead cribbed from GnR's "Sweet Child o' Mine", harmonically twinned with chugging power chords. It's as close as Hot Snakes come to fashionable, limpid indie rock, a concession to the power of melody amid a brutal homage to scorched ozone and ruinous riffage.
For those familiar with Hot Snakes' back-catalog, there are few surprises to be found on Audit in Progress, but Jehu is so beloved that fans tend to adore anything Reis and Froberg touch, as long as it doesn't stray too far from their established dynamic. Their third Hot Snakes album finds them hunkering down inside it, and should find favor with those who don't understand why such a high premium is placed on newness in rock, a genre that once consisted of barre chords and simple fury. I don't know if Aesop had any fables about snakes; if not, Reis and Froberg are writing one for him. The ostensive moral: Revision is for pussies, and reinvention the last refuge of the depleted and uninspired. | 2004-10-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-10-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Swami | October 3, 2004 | 7.7 | b67988f3-278b-41f2-a206-534be59fac07 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Swans close their current chapter on a subdued but powerful note. | Swans close their current chapter on a subdued but powerful note. | Swans: The Glowing Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21994-the-glowing-man/ | The Glowing Man | Musical careers rarely end with clean resolutions, which makes sense given that bands usually don’t get to plan their own exits. And even when they do, farewell gestures tend to leave a lingering taste of anticlimax. The Glowing Man, the final album by the current lineup of Swans, marks an exception to this rule, much as Swans have broken pretty much all modern rock norms.
From 1982 to 1997, and then again from 2010 until now, Swans leader Michael Gira has charted a fiercely uncompromising path. Not unlike King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp, he has re-invented Swans several times, with new iterations bearing little resemblance to previous ones. Along the way, Swans have drawn from no wave, art-rock, industrial, sludge, drone, folk, and more while flagrantly disregarding genre boundaries. Gira built Swans by subjecting audiences to unrelenting torrents of abrasion, but latter-day Swans tunes are built like spiderwebs: delicate enough to blow on, yet surprisingly durable against wind and rain, elegant but dotted with gruesome shapes in a complex, shifting geometry. Who knows what they will become next; Gira says he plans to continue under the Swans name “with a revolving cast of collaborators” and with far less emphasis on touring.
On The Glowing Man, for almost two hours, Swans say again with whispers what they once roared. However, while their previous albums The Seer and To Be Kind merged groove, intensity and riffs into a new form of orchestral rock, The Glowing Man is more slight, constantly on the verge of fading into the ether. Gira and co. spend much of the album suspended in a kind of ambient trance, scarcely growing louder even as their parts grow denser and hint at more emotional volatility. The sum is deceptively sedate but far from an easy listen—at times, it’s akin to sitting next to a still pool and watching for ripples on the surface.
On this album (as in real life), love grows like an ivy that entwines with suffering. On “When Will I Return?,” for example, Gira's spouse Jennifer sings about her assault experience: “His hands are on my throat/My key is in his eye/I’m splayed here on some curb/Shards of glass—a starry night.” Gira wrote the song well before assault allegations against him surfaced earlier this year, but hearing it in the episode's wake amplifies the song's unsettling effect and provokes a slew of difficult questions. On the 25-minute “Cloud of Unknowing,” he denounces a “Jesus feeler, zombie sucker, zombie healer, monster eater,” a post-traumatic residue lingering in the air like a static charge. About five minutes in, a Mellotron bubbles up courtesy of regular collaborator Bill Rieflin as droning strings bob, weave, and disappear like firefly lights. The resemblance to Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” is uncanny but passing. (Rieflin, a onetime drummer for Nine Inch Nails and King Crimson, plays multiple instruments on the record, including bastardized jazz piano on the opening track “Cloud of Forgetting.”)
Likewise Gira’s vocals on “Unknowing” vaguely recall an Arabic call to prayer while percussionist Thor Harris’ church bells ring in panic and the noise-improvisational cellist Okkyung Lee contributes a sharp solo with anxious overtones. In her own career, Lee has arguably done for the cello what Jimi Hendrix did for the guitar, turning unexpected sound patterns into graceful forms we can understand. It’s a testament to how flexible Swans have become that a force of nature like Lee simply blends into the music rather than disrupting it.
When Gira announced this Swans incarnation would end, he referred to “LOVE” (in all caps) as his reason for working with the musicians on The Glowing Man. Of course, Gira was not talking about the over-sweetened form we often get in pop music. The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career. | 2016-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Young God | June 21, 2016 | 8.1 | b68129ca-d95a-4b07-8638-df451ff19eab | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Neither rawboned nor ramshackle, the New York group’s elegantly composed brand of ambient country stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots. | Neither rawboned nor ramshackle, the New York group’s elegantly composed brand of ambient country stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots. | SUSS: SUSS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suss-suss/ | SUSS | When their self-released 2018 debut blew up—at least by ambient standards—the New York City quartet SUSS seemed to have appeared from out of nowhere, seasoned with secret history. Gray-maned and black-jacketed, they looked like the kinds of downtown art-rock trenchers who live in the depths of John Zorn liner notes, yet they sounded how a Ry Cooder film score might if heard upon waking from light medical sedation to a beautiful sunrise. In fact, their background was both more predictive and more offbeat than could have been guessed: Two of the four multi-instrumentalists, Bob Holmes and Gary Leib, had origins in Rubber Rodeo, a lively bronco in the 1980s cowpunk pen, before they galloped off into careers in cartooning and children’s shows.
As SUSS, with Jonathan Gregg and Pat Irwin, instead of chicken-frying new wave’s theatrics, they would cast the holy relics of country and bluegrass—pedal steel, mandolin, dobro, harmonica—into a sonorous desert where concepts like slow and fast and then and now become meaningless. Their music dilates the world to a high-lonesome point, a pastoral quintessence that doesn’t change so much as it gradually opens and closes, telescopes and recedes. That city boys are conjuring these mythic plains and wide Western skies makes it a double-glazed dream—the sort of outside that exists only in the cinema of the mind. They call it “ambient country,” which they claim to have pioneered.
It was savvy to embrace this term, whose “rise” was duly touted by The Guardian in a 2020 piece on SUSS, the pedal-steel experimenter Chuck Johnson, and a few others. No doubt the stifling early days of the pandemic were the perfect time for such a genre to rear its head, though it’s puzzling that no one had really tried out the framing before. After all, the distance between Brian Eno and Ennio Morricone, the two brightest lodestars of SUSS’s music, is not so great—not with the likes of Daniel Lanois already waiting patiently at the midpoint. Americana itself is full of droning instruments and atmospheric minimalism, and feeding it into ambient music’s gentle jaws is nothing new. If anyone has ever pulled off the inverse, it’s probably Richard Buckner.
So if you enter SUSS’s new, self-titled double LP primed for the revelation of a new genre hybrid, you might be let down. Much of it is more like contemporary concert music, of the adventurous yet rigorous type you’d hear at the Big Ears Festival, than either ambient or country. The sound design is sculpted, structural, and gorgeous. The music is not rawboned or ramshackle; it stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots. But it undoubtedly does brim with strikingly recontextualized country tropes, and it pulses with dolor, power, inspiration, and consolation, no matter what you call it.
If you missed the band’s first few records for Northern Spy and need a starting point, SUSS serves as a relatively foldable roadmap of everywhere they’ve been, even as it charts an unexpected new course. The double LP collects four recent digital EPs, the first of which appeared in 2021. Gary Leib passed away that year, as the initial EP took shape, and they forged on as a trio for the rest. As the hollow of a resonator guitar gathers and amplifies sound, Leib’s absence concentrates the mortal profundity already present in the music.
SUSS feels almost as if the band is replaying its brief yet busy career without him as a way to both mourn and move on. Ghost Box, the band’s twangy 2018 debut, was sunbaked and simmering, which correlates with the orange, cactus-dotted landscape of Heat Haze, the second side of the new LP. Their second album, 2020’s High Line, was set under a hissing desert moon, the same nocturnal environment in which this LP begins, with Night Suite. Third album Promise and third side Winter Was Hard are well-matched in how they extend the pastoral into the cosmic. And Across the Horizon, the final side, sounds like a digest of them all, in which SUSS solidifies itself as a trio for the next foray.
Of course, these divisions seem suspiciously neat, but it’s only human to find shapes in shadows when confronted with such a dwarfing scale. Taken as a whole, the LP’s tonal divisions are as long and liquid as day melting into night in the absence of electric light, though sharply seared leads rise and fall in Gregg’s pedal steel and Holmes’ baritone guitar. Irwin’s autoharp is a pleasure whenever it ripples across stereo space, so numinous yet so physical that you can almost reach out and touch it, feeling its ridges. That, more than anything conceptual, is the thrust of SUSS: This is weighty, enveloping music that somehow fits in the palm of your hand and the scope of your heart. | 2023-01-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | January 9, 2023 | 7.6 | b682362b-4b3d-4fa8-bb33-f3949b5ea87c | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Satirizing the mindset of the alt-right internet troll requires more gravitas than these Swedish punks can pull off consistently. But what Cave World lacks in bite, it tends to make up for in groove. | Satirizing the mindset of the alt-right internet troll requires more gravitas than these Swedish punks can pull off consistently. But what Cave World lacks in bite, it tends to make up for in groove. | Viagra Boys: Cave World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/viagra-boys-cave-world/ | Cave World | Shocking listeners with punk-rock satire about humans turning back into monkeys used to be as simple as donning an energy dome and a yellow jumpsuit and refusing to get off the stage until the audience was appropriately repulsed. These days, when cultural and political devolution feel like the starting point rather than a bleak warning, Stockholm’s forehead-tatted Viagra Boys have their work cut out for them.
Their latest LP, Cave World, is fascinated by the conspiracy theories and regressive tendencies of an increasingly visible subset of the online right, following its obsession with traditional values and gender roles to an only somewhat less logical conclusion: a full-on reversion to the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. After last year’s well-received Welfare Jazz, the Boys re-recorded a cache of existing material while American-born vocalist Sebastian Murphy rewrote the lyrics from scratch, stewing on the buzzwords and crises of summer 2021: anti-vaxxers, adrenochrome, mental health, gun violence. Howling loudly and often that “they’re putting little creepy crawlies in the vaccines” (“Creepy Crawlers”), or that a dose might turn you into a computer (“Return to Monke”), Murphy nails the talking points with humor and near zero gravity.
Try as they might to curry offense by embodying the mindset of the alt-right internet troll, Cave World’s weaker moments recall a late-night television monologue: toothless, expendable, and not particularly interested in convincing the uninitiated. The opening lines of “Creepy Crawlers”—“I can’t believe what I read last night/Man, there’s little kids growing up with animal hair/Some of ’em are growing up with tails, maybe even two tails, man”—lays it on too thick to be dangerous. If the merits of Capital-S Satire might be judged by locating it on a spectrum ranging from prescience to disposability, one might ask: Will this project continue to engage (or enrage) audiences 25 years from now? What about five? Viagra Boys’ ripped-from-the-headlines caricature sketches are better timed to get you through the afternoon.
Luckily, what Cave World lacks in bite, it tends to make up for in groove. The production is cleaner than Viagra Boys’ first two albums, bringing their ever-present drive to the fore. The interplay of the rhythm section, vocal layering, and the occasional sax tear elides some of the weaker lyrics, and the album’s bass-forward gloss recalls Danger Mouse’s back catalog of rock-oriented production work (Parquet Courts’ Wide Awake, the Black Keys’ El Camino, Portugal. The Man’s Woodstock). Sieving out the grit from the arrangements introduces crossover potential. Take “Troglodyte,” a Fun House-era Stooges song squeezed through the discourse ringer. Over bouncing bass, Murphy’s verses introduce a WFH-addled gun nut before gleefully asserting that, even in prehistoric times, he’d be as much of an outcast as he is today: “You ain’t no ape/You’re a troglodyte.” It’s their silliest and most salient point on the record: Turning back the clock might not be the salvation that the song’s subject imagines.
Other cuts, like opener “Baby Criminal” and “Punk Rock Loser,” ditch the Trevor Noah-level satire for the band’s inexhaustible pet subject: the 21st-century manchild. Ever since their debut single, “Sports,” Viagra Boys have been intimately acquainted with the half-drunk, half-stoned, laptop-scrolling ex-boyfriend type. He’s a doofus, and a dick, but ultimately harmless. Write what you know, they say, and on their less explicitly political songs, the Boys’ perspective feels more fully and compassionately realized. The digressions from Cave World’s primary theme are welcome reprieves, fun and dumb in equal measure. They bring to mind Viagra Boys’ Swedish rock predecessors, the Hives: Both bands are at their best when they aren’t taking their output too seriously, maybe even when they’re having a little too much fun for what they’re saying to matter.
In press materials, Murphy opines that, while the world feels weird and “stupid” right now, “I kind of like when stuff is a little stupid.” The big-time stupid stuff—the kind of stupid more accurately described as frightening, disturbing, or unnerving—requires a defter, steadier touch than Viagra Boys’ hops-stained hands can manage. Not every punk band in the world needs to ponder the big picture, though; there’s room on the dial both for those who warn of impending devolution, and those who are content to just monkey around. | 2022-07-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Year0001 | July 12, 2022 | 6.2 | b683eed2-0bb4-4930-9630-857b517e2918 | P.J. McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/p.j.-mccormick/ | |
Terminal Redux, from the Philadelphia outfit Vektor, is one of the most thrilling, forward-thinking metal albums of the year. | Terminal Redux, from the Philadelphia outfit Vektor, is one of the most thrilling, forward-thinking metal albums of the year. | Vektor: Terminal Redux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21645-vektor-terminal-redux/ | Terminal Redux | It seemed like only a matter of time before Vektor made their first full-blown concept album. The Philadelphia four-piece has, since its inception, been compared endlessly to Voivod (thanks in no small part to their nearly identical logo, made even more conspicuous when placed side-by-side on a tour poster), but there’s always been more to their music than pure '80s revivalism. Of course, there’s plenty of that – particularly on their crushing debut Black Future. But, on their 2011 follow-up Outer Isolation, Vektor garnished their speedy, pummeling metal with proggier flirtations: lengthy, knotty compositions about space and alternate universes. Terminal Redux, their third and finest album, takes the band’s cerebral tendencies to the next level: over the course of the album’s ten songs, vocalist and guitarist David DiSanto tells the fairly elaborate story of a military general astronaut who rises to political power among the intergalactic Cygnus regime after finding an interstellar mineral that just might be the key to immortality. Even if you choose to ignore a few minor plot points, Terminal Redux stands as one of the most thrilling, forward-thinking metal albums of the year: one that should finally shed any remaining detractors who find the band’s music to be at all derivative.
In the first track alone, Vektor manages to invoke something like an entire discography's worth of ideas. Ranging from black metal riffage to harmonic chanting to an anthemic closing guitar solo straight out of Rush’s Hemispheres, "Charging the Void" showcases a revitalized band bursting with energy and creativity. "A sky that once brought hope and light," sings DiSanto, "now brings me desolation," as his screech reaches throat-shredding levels to convey his desperation. As the song progresses, the band is intent on matching the intensity of the lyrics: setting the stage for what’s to come like an overture before an opera. While the following tracks are not all quite as virtuosic and dazzling as that opener, there are hardly any dull moments.
With its seventy-plus minute runtime, Terminal Redux occasionally threatens to become Vektor’s Tales from Topographic Oceans – a moment where their pretensions reach a head and alienate all but the already initiated. Their intensity, however, makes even the headier moments feel like breakthroughs. Tracks like "Ultimate Artificer" and "LCD (Liquid Crystal Disease)" should appease fans of the band’s more straightforward thrash material, while much of the album’s second half seems aimed at breaking the band to a larger, non-metal audience. Indeed, with this release marking the band’s upgrade to Earache Records, there are a few moments that hint at modern rock radio and festival audiences, calling to mind Baroness’ similarly expansive Yellow & Green. In the album’s most divisive moments, DiSanto sings in a surprisingly pretty, shoegaze whisper. The crawling intro to "Collapse," for example, would not sound out of place on either of Red House Painter’s self-titled albums (that is, of course, until it launches into its galloping, duel-guitar-soaked second half).
And then there’s "Recharging the Void," a song that mimics the album opener both in title and ambition. In thirteen-and-a-half minutes, it is burdened with the task of closing the album and tying the loose ends of the story (incidentally, it also seems to be where 75% of the narrative takes place). In an almost ambient middle section, DiSanto sings as melodically and sweetly as he can, while psychedelic falsetto vocals swiped from a Pentangle record float in the background like bits of meteoric dust hurtling through the cosmos. "All we ask is our story to be told," DiSanto sings, "To young, beckoning, yearning worlds." You can practically see the intergalactic cast of characters returning to the stage, swaying back and forth in solidarity.
Like most prog albums – and, hell, a good deal of metal – it’s a lot to handle all at once, and maybe a bit silly, but Vektor plays it with the straight-faced intensity of a big-budget sci-fi movie. In that sense, the album calls to mind a few wider-scope metal breakthroughs from the genre’s golden era – the raising-the-stakes intensity of Death’s Human or the laser-beam focus of Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill. In fact, if there’s anything Vektor has prominently coopted from '80s metal, it’s that specific fearlessness: a devotion to their craft and an insistence on evolving clearly from album to album. Terminal Redux presents their most fully-formed evolution yet and offers more proof that they are beholden to no one’s artistic path but their own. In fact, more bands should be following their lead. | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Earache | May 6, 2016 | 8.2 | b684c158-b1b0-4361-bc35-6600214954a2 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Released shortly before his group Yellow Magic Orchestra’s historic debut, the Japanese synthesizer icon’s first solo LP balances kitsch, complexity, and a critical geopolitical perspective. | Released shortly before his group Yellow Magic Orchestra’s historic debut, the Japanese synthesizer icon’s first solo LP balances kitsch, complexity, and a critical geopolitical perspective. | Ryuichi Sakamoto: Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryuichi-sakamoto-thousand-knives-of-ryuichi-sakamoto/ | Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto | By the time 1978 rolled around, electronic music was old hat. Switched On Bach had hit shelves a decade earlier, Tangerine Dream had already made their best work, and Kraftwerk had cruised the Trans Europe Express. The Minimoog, released in 1971, no longer sounded so novel, and genre-defining pieces of gear like the TR-808, SP-1200, and DX7 were still a few years off. Punk rock, meanwhile, was laying waste to prog rock’s noodly, keyboard-augmented excesses. One could be forgiven, nearing the dawn of the 1980s, for dismissing all the bleeps and bloops as just a fad. “I really don’t see it” said Lester Bangs. “A lot of these synthesizer groups… Kraftwek did it a lot better a half decade ago.”
Perhaps not seeing it was the point: Many of electronic music’s greatest innovations occurred in the shadows, through misuse, amateurism, or accident. Phuture invented acid house when they stumbled upon design quirks in Roland’s TB-303; hip-hop was born at a block party; and, in 1978, one of electronic music’s most distinctive voices got his start in a parody group. At the time, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a respected session musician in Japan, working his way through the industry, when he was recruited by Haruomi Hosono for a one-off album of electronic exotica. The point was to send up the ridiculous orientalism peddled by artists like Les Baxter, reclaiming a fanciful Western take on the far East. The result was the historic self-titled debut album from Yellow Magic Orchestra. But before it was released, Sakamoto slipped out an album of his own: Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Though the record was quickly eclipsed by his band’s smash success, this reissue serves to reintroduce the world to an overlooked gem by a now canonical voice.
As with all of Sakamoto’s work, there’s no distinction between pop and experimentalism. Nearly a decade into his career as a sideman, Sakamoto’s musical fluency is in full effect here. Each of Thousand Knives’ six pieces swerves with a deft touch through complex arrangements, playful voicings, and cheeky key changes. The title track opens with a reading of a poem through a haunting vocoder, drifting with gentle restraint in a field of silence. The mood is somber and yearning, but then the music locks in, and it’s a fusion-tinged instrumental whose main theme is just a little too heavy for an elevator ride. One can imagine the cosmic-disco DJ Daniele Baldelli’s ears perking up—the chugging tempo and twisting atmosphere were a perfect match for the sound he was pioneering in Italy at that time. And, perhaps responding to the disco craze well underway, Sakamoto also lets the track run long. At nearly 10 minutes, his opening salvo is a slo-mo barnburner soaked in guitar solos, breezy melodic flourishes, and gloopy drums. It’s wonderful.
But then “Island of Woods” changes course. A collage of nature sounds, atonal synthesizer squiggles, and new-age flourishes, it answers the ebullient fizz of “Thousand Knives” with a funky take on musique concrete. What stands out is how well the two songs mesh. One senses an intuitive bond—Sakamoto works less in contrasts than in connections. As with Can before him, there’s no friction between dancefloor groove and laboratory explorations. YMO’s exotica remains in full effect on Thousand Knives; listeners with an allergy to kitsch perhaps need not waste their time. But it’s a winking kitsch, a garish beauty. “Plastic Bamboo” takes supreme delight in a melody that seems best serves for a farcical chase scene. Though exquisitely crafted, it’s silly as hell.
The closing song’s title, “The End of Asia,” evokes a number of interpretations: Japan had not so long ago been devastated by the atomic bomb. The influx of the West was radically changing society, and in Japan the economy was exploding, thanks to the surge of technological production that provided many of the instruments Sakamoto used on Thousand Knives. Then again, in line with YMO’s inversion of exotica, perhaps “The End of Asia” refers to the death of a hazy, romantic dream of the Orient. The song, syrupy and effervescent, reprises the shredding guitar from the album’s opening. Is it serious work or a sweet confection? Sakamoto gets to have it both ways. In a recent interview, he says, “At that time, my view of technology was still very positive —I believed in technology, even though I was looking for a dark future.” Thousand Knives foregrounds blinding light, but it’s the subtly traced shadows that give the album its enduring depth.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Wewantsounds | November 13, 2019 | 8.2 | b685dd05-e27a-46a6-bad7-1ea598d6c019 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Hellfyre Club associate milo's debut LP does just as much to play up the commonalities milo has with his labelmates (and his place in the underground hip-hop world) as it does to show off just who he is himself. He possesses a heavy-lidded deadpan flow that calmly lets the punchlines deliver themselves. | Hellfyre Club associate milo's debut LP does just as much to play up the commonalities milo has with his labelmates (and his place in the underground hip-hop world) as it does to show off just who he is himself. He possesses a heavy-lidded deadpan flow that calmly lets the punchlines deliver themselves. | milo: a toothpaste suburb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19878-milo-a-toothpaste-suburb/ | a toothpaste suburb | Less than 12 months after the Dorner vs. Tookie compilation proved just how thorough an assbeating the Hellfyre Club is capable of, the crew members have spent 2014 releasing a quartet of albums to back that promise up. The first three—Nocando's spirited battler-turned-grown-man study Jimmy the Burnout, the melancholy, melodic humor of Open Mike Eagle's Dark Comedy, and Busdriver's slippery virtuoso poetry on Perfect Hair—were valuable reinforcements of the three names at the group's nucleus, a chance for them to gain a following outside their core constituency of L.A.-geared Project Blowed rap-nerd connoisseurs. milo isn't a total unknown by comparison, but with a couple scattered EPs and personality-switching alter ego side project Scallops Hotel providing most of his background on record, the Kenosha, Wisconsin-grown vet needs a bigger context to grow into.
His debut album, a toothpaste suburb, does just as much to play up the commonalities milo has with his labelmates (and his place in the underground hip-hop world) as it does to show off just who he is himself. milo's own qualities are obvious from his first 16 bars: a heavy-lidded deadpan whose flow calmly lets the punchlines deliver themselves, whether they're references to Arthur Schopenhauer (this album has a few) or shameless fart jokes (ditto). Those aren't rare qualities—you get similar approaches on this very album from guests like Open Mike Eagle, who pulls Shel Silverstein wordplay ("Call me tiger 'cause I tige for a living") on "objectifying rabbits", and Kool A.D., who is dementedly meta with a thinking-aloud verse on "in gaol". With the burbling, usually mellow digitalisms of producers iglooghost, Riley Lake, Greyhat, and Tastenothing giving his voice both gravity and lightness where it's needed, there's a feeling that milo's been able to get in where he fit in, not just got in 'cause he fought in.
But the realm of the West Coast art-wiseass black intellectual is neither one to take for granted or one to set a low barrier of entry for, and milo's place in and radiating outside of it is well earned off his own synthesis of experience. His referential eclecticism might otherwise seem random for its own sake in isolation, a string of phrases hammered into place; the second verse of "sanssouci palace" alone drops references to Avril Lavigne, Clerks, "Squidbillies", and the self-descriptor "Rap messiah agitator/ Chronic bathroom masturbator," but the track starts cohering to depict a more complete identity the further it knits together.
And when it does, there's some deep rumination and staring into the void that exists beneath all the jokes. "salladhor saan, smuggler" is a stark autobio alluding to isolation and suicidal thoughts staved off by a steady diet of Jean Genet, Office Space, and the subsequent realization that milo was capable of total artistic freedom. And a recurring throughline, the too-soon passing of his friend Rob, is both alluded to and directly addressed with a mixture of survivor's guilt ("Now kids write me about being their favorite rapper/ And I'm the asshole who gets to live forever after"), yearning ("Ought implies can and I cannot"), and resignation (from "Yafet's song": "Death is where we all go/ It can't be that bad"). So milo's voice acts fairly slow to reveal the intentions beneath the words' surface, trusting listeners to connect the dots. That's one way of staking a claim on curious ears, a connection to someone who, per "a day trip to the nightosphere," doesn't dabble in secret societies. milo's society is far more open. | 2014-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Hellfyre Club | October 2, 2014 | 7.8 | b68d76e7-d12c-4d92-aa79-50234e9aa5b4 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Brooklyn indie rock outfit Widowspeak's new The Swamps EP was inspired by a tour itinerary through the Southern United States, a region whose hazy, bluesy music proves to be a tangible and versatile anchor for Widowspeak’s songwriting. | Brooklyn indie rock outfit Widowspeak's new The Swamps EP was inspired by a tour itinerary through the Southern United States, a region whose hazy, bluesy music proves to be a tangible and versatile anchor for Widowspeak’s songwriting. | Widowspeak: The Swamps EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18688-widowspeak-the-swamps/ | The Swamps EP | Spanish moss, brass beds, overgrown yards, burning sage. To Widowspeak, these artifacts represent the hazy, lazy birthplace of swamp rock and Delta blues, which singer Molly Hamilton and multi-instrumentalist Robert Earl Thomas fell in love with last year after touring their sophomore LP Almanac across the American Southeast. The duo incorporated these sights, sounds, and smoke into a six-note guitar riff they had been sitting on for awhile. That became the motif for The Swamps, a stopgap EP between Widowspeak’s last full-length and their next one. After hopscotching across the country from the Pacific Northwest and Chicago to Brooklyn and exploring that wanderlust in Almanac, Widowspeak have settled on a thematically consistent aesthetic that suits them.
“True Believer” is the first song Widowspeak recorded for The Swamps, and fittingly it’s the one that sounds closest to Almanac. (Thomas has said this EP, which Kevin McMahon also produced, leans more toward Widowspeak’s last record than their putative third LP). It opens much like “Locusts”, with a similarly note-bent but lower-pitched bloom from Thomas’ Fender Telecaster. Where the latter track was tightly coiled like a tense calm before the plague, on “True Believer” Hamilton literally lets her hair down (“tangled sheets, tangled hair”) and swoons into the romanticized slide guitar. The religious imagery on Almanac’s “Dyed in the Wool” can also be found in "True Believer"–“speak in tongues,” “shake off that devil fever,” “pilgrim lips”–but this time Hamilton tinges her turns of phrase with the vivid mysticism of the South’s voodoo culture rather than falling back on idiomatic poetry in the vein of “cut from the cloth."
Hamilton’s lyrics “The house was a good one, but the yard was overgrown” on “Calico” are actually a good metaphor for Almanac, a fine record that still occasionally got lost on its forays into Western and Latin themes. Most of The Swamps, by contrast, rides on opening instrumental “Theme From the Swamps”, obviously a kind of mission statement for the EP. Those six creaky, twangy, back-porch rocking-chair notes prove to be a tangible yet versatile anchor for Widowspeak’s songwriting. This time, most of the genre-specific accents–the castanet rolls on “Smoke and Mirrors”, shakers rattling in the background of “The Swamps”, tambourines stalking through “Calico” like spurs on a cowboy boot–enhance what’s already there instead of distracting from it. The only weak spot on The Swamps might be “Brass Bed”, a lovely track that suffers from simply too much going on–multi-part harmonies, twinkling pianos, and “That’s Amore”-esque guitar stylings, and awkward lyrical syntax (“Find me underneath the linen/ Trying hard to get forgiven”).
Widowspeak do their best work when they take a minute to smell the sage, not necessarily when they forge ahead into new territories; and to a certain extent the band recognizes this and embraces it on The Swamps. In a recent interview, Thomas suggested that Almanac, with its big, brassy arrangements and relatively quick tempos, was an exercise in nostalgia “backlash” while their latest collection of songs takes the opposite tack. “You can’t be too nostalgic, you can’t get caught in something like that,” he said, referring to the former. “In the swamps, you feel sticky, and slowed down, and caught. And in terms of our music, we’re never like a really fast, loud band.” He’s right: Hamilton’s languorous croon will never be able to fully escape Hope Sandoval’s shadow–nor should she try–and Thomas’ arrangements will probably always owe a fair piece to the 60s' gun-slinging theme songs of the Wild West, which have been the band's bread and butter since Widowspeak's album cover re-imagined the giant spiders from Wild Wild West. Widowspeak seem to have found a home in the swamps, and now they're inviting us in to set awhile. | 2013-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | November 5, 2013 | 7.4 | b6979a8f-70d9-4ffb-9ee0-58cd393d477e | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
The latest in a long line of box sets and anthologies collects the pioneering disco duo’s core albums. Despite the songs’ deep familiarity, they still represent pop at its most triumphant and complex. | The latest in a long line of box sets and anthologies collects the pioneering disco duo’s core albums. Despite the songs’ deep familiarity, they still represent pop at its most triumphant and complex. | Chic / Sister Sledge: The Chic Organization 1977-1979 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chic-sister-sledge-the-chic-organization-1977-1979/ | The Chic Organization 1977-1979 | There’s probably never been a 10-dollar investment that yielded multi-million-dollar, multi-platinum, multigenerational returns quite like Chic. After slipping Alexander Hamilton’s portrait to the elevator operator so he wouldn’t say anything to the studio bosses, “Sesame Street” touring guitarist (and Black Panther) Nile Rodgers and journeyman R&B bassist Bernard Edwards snuck into Sound Ideas studio after hours to cut their first song, “Everybody Dance.” With a fascinating heritage in jazz, soul, psychedelia, and funk—while also taking direct inspiration from Roxy Music and KISS—Chic were simply tagged “disco,” and their swift rise and Icarus-like fall mirrored the genre’s own course. The dismissal by rock critics continues: Eleven times they’ve been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and 11 times they’ve been snubbed.
In the span of 22 months, between 1977 and 1979 Chic went from haute couture to passé, and by the start of a new decade, they were deemed all but dead. (Though they released four more albums in the 1980s, just try naming a single from them.) That isn’t to say they were no longer relevant. In reality, Rodgers and Edwards were just starting to exert their enduring influence on all kinds of popular music. Tireless as sherpas, they ushered seemingly everyone up the charts in the new decade: Diana Ross, David Bowie, the B-52’s, Duran Duran, INXS, Madonna. They powered hip-hop from its its Bronx birth through its Hamptons coming out and continue to exert sway over dancefloors, from the dustiest to the shiniest. When Rodgers appeared alongside Pharrell and Daft Punk, it guaranteed at least another decade of inescapability.
Like almost everything in the wake of Rodgers “getting lucky” in the new century, these already comprehensively repackaged hits get another go. We already had a box of their biggest singles and a two-disc set of dance numbers whose title quoted Daft Punk outright. Now comes the latest repackaging of Chic’s catalog, using five CDs (or six pieces of vinyl) to frustratingly under-document their truly prodigious productivity. A handsome, hefty, and redundant set, The Chic Organization 1977-1979 does little more than bundle up their ubiquitous hits and multi-million-selling albums from that heady time in an exhaustive format that’s still woefully incomplete. There are three iterations of “Everybody Dance,” “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” and “My Forbidden Lover,” but no room to shine a light on their sorcery for the likes of Norma Jean and Sheila & B. Devotion. During this period, Rodgers and Edwards did function like a business, diversifying their portfolios and working with an array of artists. Were it not for some useless remixes, the import-only Savoir Faire set, from 2010, remains the closest to capturing the essence of Chic.
Still, no matter the box set’s shortcomings, the genius of Rodgers and Edwards can never be contained nor re-stated enough, and in addition to the brilliant songs that have been heard ad nauseam, The Chic Organization still makes the case for more. Building on the formidable legacies of Hamilton Bohannon and Eddie Kendricks’ “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” Chic’s innovation was to re-cast the breakdown part of old R&B songs as the meat of the song. But every Chic song also had to contain another element: the Deep Hidden Meaning, or DHM. “All our songs had to have this ingredient… understanding the song’s DNA and seeing it from many angles,” as Rodgers put it in his autobiography, Le Freak.
So call Rodgers and Edwards the Watson and Crick of groove; they stripped it down to its most basic building blocks, twisting it in such a way to reveal something both primeval and elegant. Chic exhibited complex simplicity at its finest. According to that same theory, style could be substance, the backing band could be the rock stars, and the background was the foreground. Why else craft a silky vibe laced with cocktail-party chatter on “(Funny) Bone” and then, right at the end, winkingly add, “The whole world is a circus, don’t you be the clown”? Is it that the in-store music overheard at Uniqlo recently sounded like Chic? Or that Chic can always cagily slide in as background music?
Is it even possible, four decades later, to hear “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” and “We Are Family” free from the filters of over-familiarity and over-sampling that automatically kick them from the conscious mind to the subliminal? It’s unlikely, but the set’s most curious aspect is the slotting of Sister Sledge’s third album alongside Chic’s classic long-players—no doubt the result of Rodgers’ estimation that the album is the finest he and Edwards ever wrote, “the best example of DHM perfection.” Go to enough weddings and “We Are Family” might seem too clichéd, possibly even tarnished by visions of your aunties flashing an overbite as they get funky on the dancefloor. But those are the pitfalls of achieving pop perfection: The song (and then-19-year-old Kathy Sledge’s awesome lead vocal) are today as ingrained in family ritual as Thanksgiving dinner.
That theory of DHM allowed all manner of paradoxes to delectably tussle right on the silken surface of Chic’s music, making it still feel alluring so many generations on. “Everybody Dance” was nothing but “do-do-dos” and musical calculus, “a mixture of harmonically extended chords” and “two strict chromatic movements in the bass,” as Rodgers put it. They could turn “fuck off” into a catchy earworm and list fashionable designers in a way that bequeathed either status or hollowness, depending on how you read the lyrics. “Good Times” remains ecstatic and despairing, its string stabs as thrilling as they are nerve-jangling and anxious, an aural metaphor encompassing the full spectrum of cocaine’s effects. “At Last I Am Free” is a gaseous, glorious, zero-gravity ballad, as liberating as it is exhausted. “My Feet Keep Dancing” is a dancefloor anthem in the vein of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Referencing fads like the Savoy, Studio 54, Depression-era lingo, the Latin Hustle, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Chic flashed a deep knowledge of history, including the foresight to know that their time—or even time itself—was not for long. “Our overhead was low, and the return on investment was very high,” Rodgers says of their artistic endeavors. “Our early investors and business colleagues all did very well indeed.” And Chic continue to pay dividends. | 2018-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | null | December 12, 2018 | 8.2 | b6997c65-6711-47b3-b698-6d30543b98bb | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Nigerian-born, London-based musician pulls from blues, highlife, post-punk, and more on a short, fiery EP that details the struggle to rise above the pain of the everyday. | The Nigerian-born, London-based musician pulls from blues, highlife, post-punk, and more on a short, fiery EP that details the struggle to rise above the pain of the everyday. | Loshh: Ífaradá EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loshh-ifarada-ep/ | Ífaradá EP | Loshh Aje has PMA in spades. The Nigerian-born, London-based musician doesn’t recoil from the world as it is, and, in his music, searches for a way to express the inherent joyfulness of the struggle to feel okay. That’s how, deep into this winter of our discontent, he has managed to produce this EP full of unremitting fire, a collection of tunes that confidently argue against the idea that our current problems will form the permanent fabric of our lives. The traditions that influence him lead him to take this path; it’s one that doesn’t look away from hierarchies of exploitation, but it also does not allow history to cast its shadow over one’s every step. On his latest EP, ÍFARADÁ, he refuses to halt the progression of his celebration of life even as he confronts racial oppression.
To do this, Loshh goes all over the place musically, and this short EP manages to take its inspiration from ’00s post-punk revival, ’70s highlife, and straight-up blues. Take “Faji,” an elemental take on Lovers Rock that floats on a gnarled guitar melody and subdued horns. Over this aquatic dub, Loshh exhorts the listener to “Faji right now,” which (according to him) means “to enjoy to de fullest.” He speaks of “oppression for a long time” and says “we’ve been helpless for a long time/so let us faji.” It might sound desperate at first, but it isn’t a paean to dissolution as much as it’s a passionate sideswipe against the pain of the everyday.
Most of these songs occupy that uneasy space of rave and reflection that Linton Kwesi Johnson mapped out in records like Bass Culture and Forces of Victory. On “Revolution,” his casual condemnation of England’s participation in the slave trade parallels Johnson’s non-plussed recognition of imperial rot in “Inglan Is a Bitch”. Voice and guitar form the background to most of these tracks, and Loshh follows the twists and turns his guitar makes. Built around what sounds like the ca-ching of a cash register, sinuous album opener “É Beré” is the Loshh at his most Afrobeat. A whirring groove—a swell of congos horns, and strings—lifts Loshh up “to the moon and stars” and a guitar solo that appears at the midpoint takes him to the outer reaches of consciousness. From on high, Loshh muses on a place where he won’t be judged by the color of his skin, and where Black women are supported and loved. To punctuate his point, he screams, and his voice and the guitar become distorted in tandem; it almost sounds like he’s being transported to the place he dreams of.
Elsewhere on the album, Loshh feels content to merely make you move. The medley “Í” switches back and forth between gentle keys and gospel organ depending on what mood Loshh is in; when he confesses to just wanting to help his mom out you hear the former, and when he just wants to lose himself in forward movement you hear the latter. A song like “Feelam” radiates energy with its rolling drumbeat and high energy guitar, and the Rain Dogs-like atmosphere of “Brown” matches its boozy flirtation with self-reflection (“Look into my mind and tell me what you see/A beautiful soul?”).
On ÍFARADÁ, Loshh carries himself with the gravitas of a preacher, commanding you to reject what is inhumane without falling into despair. It’s a difficult ask, but it’s one that seems necessary at a time where much of the dominant discourse can lock one into a parade of pessimism. Loshh doesn’t ask you to ignore what is wrong with the world, and, in fact, he spends much of the record detailing the litany of horrors that have led us here. Yet, his way of engaging with this is through embracing the possibilities for joy inherent in this life. It is for that reason that he is ready to fight all that stands in his way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | TENNNN | February 22, 2021 | 7.8 | b69a59c5-7473-42b6-baa1-9bc087c0a543 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
Infused with his own rapping, the debut album from Teklife’s youngest member makes a strong case for the way footwork has been strengthened, not diluted, as its form has loosened up. | Infused with his own rapping, the debut album from Teklife’s youngest member makes a strong case for the way footwork has been strengthened, not diluted, as its form has loosened up. | DJ Taye : Still Trippin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-taye-still-trippin/ | Still Trippin’ | For as long as non-Chicagoans have been listening to footwork, the form has been presented as something of an outsider art. Early reviews, circa Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works comps, threw around descriptors like “alien.” There’s certainly a learning curve when it comes to acclimating to the intensity of the sound, with its reckless polyrhythms and chaotic sampling techniques. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that sense of inaccessibility was exactly what a lot of early adopters liked about the music; it’s fun to belong to an exclusive club. As the Teklife crew has spent the 2010s on an evangelical mission to spread footwork’s gospel worldwide, there’s been some concern that the genre’s increasing popularity might iron out the unorthodoxy that made it so thrilling. If anything, the opposite has been true; footwork’s evolution hasn’t been linear so much as it’s expanded in a dozen fractured directions, creating a fascinating composite of what footwork can be.
The late DJ Rashad’s Double Cup is commonly understood as the genre’s crossover moment—a work that proved footwork could transcend the dancefloor functionality of its origins and flourish in the full-length album format. But the movement hasn’t seemed to shake that outsider status in the same way that, say, dubstep once did. I wonder if that’s in part because of the way it continues to be framed as an anomaly within the dance-music underground—understood as a niche concern rather than placing it within the broader spectrum of electronic music at large, even as guys like DJ Earl release songs with Oneohtrix Point Never. That should change with Still Trippin’, the long-awaited debut album from Teklife’s youngest member, DJ Taye. More than any footwork release to date—Double Cup included—it offers a vision of just how naturally, even gracefully, its signature sounds can live in the world. Taye makes it look easy for footwork to coexist with more popular styles without sacrificing its hardcore essence. His album is at once beyond footwork and of it completely—a case for the form being strengthened, not diluted, by the push and pull of influences over the years. And in that sense, it is a tribute to Rashad, who knew that before anyone else did.
Taye is not the first footwork producer to incorporate their own raps into tracks, a tradition that extends back to early-1990s ghetto house, but he is pretty easily the best at it, having originally gotten into music as an aspiring MC and rap producer. “Trippin,” with arpeggiated 8-bit synths that sound like how the beginning of a mushroom trip feels, might be the biggest formal leap for Teklife since Double Cup—not just for Taye’s Three 6 Mafia-inspired bars, but the overall structure. With verses, bridges, and choruses, the track takes the outward shape of a pop or rap song but remains undeniably footwork; that’s partly because of how Taye treats his own vocals, warping and chopping them to correspond with the hyper-technical drum programming. But while the album’s rap-oriented moments head-fake towards more traditional song structures, they’re complicating them, too. “Get It Jukin” lets Chuck Inglish’s verse breathe, drums riding low in the mix before climaxing into a percussive fireworks display. This is not the simple halfway point between two genres, but a rap song understood through the framework of footwork; the “hook” is not the words, but the rhythms, which communicate for themselves.
Lest you think Taye had abandoned the straight-up works, there are songs like “Truu” or “Bonfire,” two DJ Paypal collaborations that ground Still Trippin’s fusion experiments in the raw energy of footwork as it existed a decade ago, in basements and at Battle Groundz. A third Paypal collab, “Pop Drop,” might be the strangest juke track I’ve ever heard, warping a familiar Dance Mania tempo into increasingly unpredictable patterns, like a game of Bop It played on an MPC mid acid trip. “Need It,” with Teklife mainstay DJ Manny, doesn’t sound like any footwork song you’ve heard before; over stuttering breakbeats, a delirious acid bassline, and subtly encroaching dubstep wubs, a chipmunked vocal sample splits into two parallel paths in real time. It’s a feat that it all manages to remain legible, the track’s constantly moving parts at once informing one another and getting out of each other’s way. In a sense, the footwork element lies in the construction that could only come from a dancer’s perspective—an intuitive sense of rhythmic grace that transcends songwriting logic.
Years ago, listeners often responded to footwork by asking questions: Was it meant to be functional rather than formal? What setting was it meant to be heard in? How the hell do you dance to it? Still Trippin’ begs a different question: Why isn’t everyone rapping or singing over footwork beats? It represents not a shift in how footwork should sound, but an expansion of how it could sound, bigger than Chicago but Chicago to the core. And it makes early concerns about accessibility seem petty. One thing way cooler than membership in an exclusive club is making the world as weird as you want it. | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | March 5, 2018 | 7.8 | b6ab9621-a817-4447-beae-50103c567b9a | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Keen pop instincts, a good sense of space, and a penchant for self-sabotage: That’s the Beta Band, epitomized by this 20th-anniversary reissue of their earliest works. | Keen pop instincts, a good sense of space, and a penchant for self-sabotage: That’s the Beta Band, epitomized by this 20th-anniversary reissue of their earliest works. | The Beta Band: The Three EPs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beta-band-the-three-eps/ | The Three EPs | At a key moment in Let It Beta—a fly-on-the-wall chronicle of the sessions for Heroes to Zeros, the final bow from beloved Edinburgh oddballs the Beta Band—the business of making music creeps into the frame. The label is looking for a single, for artwork approval, for anything, and the Betas won’t budge. The Nigel Godrich-mixed Heroes arrived to near-universal praise but fair-to-middling sales, the fate of most every other Beta Band record. They broke up less than a year later, amid rumors they were in hock to the label for 1.2 million pounds. “Bands like us should be the norm,” frontman Steve Mason sneered to The Guardian in 2001. “There should be something really crazy, like… a guy whose album is the sound of him sawing his limbs off with a rusty spoon. And he only makes four albums: one for each arm and one for each leg.”
The Beta Band never got around to that fourth album. By the time they bowed out in 2004, they had the air of a band the industry had found, salivated over, and torn apart limb by limb. The Betas were never huge; their second album spent precisely one week on the U.S. charts, peaking at No. 200. Still, there was a period right around 2002 when no Case Logic was complete without “Beta Band” scrawled across at least one Verbatim CD-R.
But their career always moved in fits and starts: Their label insisted on spackling their rush-released debut in a thick coat of paisley, leading Mason to call it “fucking awful.” They gave famously standoffish interviews. They came at their label boss at every opportunity, even namechecking the unlucky sod during a song. They carried themselves at once like a band who wanted to be very famous and a band who just wanted to be left the hell alone. In that push-and-pull—between all-out experimentation and commercial appeal, delicate songcraft and wild-eyed sonic tinkering, expanse and intimacy—the Beta Band legend was born. That essence is captured anew on a twentieth-anniversary reissue of their first three EPs.
After recording Champion Versions, the first of the band’s fabled EPs, the band decamped to London, where a roommate took their demo to Parlophone A&R representative (and future Warner UK president) Miles Leonard. Parlophone issued Champion Versions, the first and most immediate of the EPs, in July 1997. The Patty Patty Sound, the strangest, followed in March 1998, with the musical midpoint of Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos landing in July. After the EPs arrived as a set in September, the buzz at home and abroad was instantaneous. The Betas went from playing the basement of the International Students House in London to the second stage at Glastonbury.
The breadth of the Betas’ powers are on display through these Three EPs, from the rousing chipmunk hosannahs of “She’s the One” to the lonesome howls of the late-EP stunner “Dr. Baker.” Whether you came from High Fidelity expecting wall-to-wall uplift à la “Dry the Rain” or you’d been taken in by the wild-eyed press notices, The Three EPs were likely not the record you expected. Slinking grooves, oddball folk tunes, deconstructed house rhythms, exotic flits, yawning mantras, real raps in fake Japanese: It’s all swirling around somewhere in this multi-hyphenate hodgepodge. Maybe half of these dozen tracks meet the qualifications of what most people would consider “a song,” with the rest given to wriggling sound-collage and expansive Floydian drift.
Somehow, it all works. The British press was particularly keen on anointment in those days, but what separated the Beta Band from scads of contemporaries was their unbelievable range. A few turns toward the light, and they could have been Coldplay; another two steps into the abyss, and they could have been the Orb. On these EPs, they managed to be both—and all points in between. The EPs don’t relegate their more outre excursions to swirling one-minute intros, either. They take up serious space, even sneaking into some of the most pop-oriented material. Look no further than the choir of helium-sucking Masons that close out not-a-dry-eye devotional, “She’s the One.” Keen pop instincts, a good sense of space, and a penchant for self-sabotage: That’s the Beta Band.
Mason’s lyrics—all quotidian vignettes, pep talks, and good old-fashioned gobbledigook—are an ideal foil for the music’s spectral weirdness. Sometimes he sounds like Ray Davies just up from a nap; sometimes, as on the haunting “Dr. Baker,” he’s a one-man Tabernacle Choir, his voice ringing out over some great expanse. Richard Greentree’s elegiac low-end work glides between acid jazz and Astral Weeks. Synth player and sampler-tender John Maclean is everywhere and nowhere, laying out the terrain with big swaths of sound and then populating it with bits of static. The mark of hip-hop on The Three EPs has always seemed a bit overstated, but the lingua franca was certainly a tool in the kit.
The remastering job for this reissue is largely unobtrusive; sound was never really the issue, though this edition is a bit cleaner, a touch hotter. The label’s claim that this is the first time the EPs have been issued on vinyl is, however, misleading. Yes, it’s the first time on vinyl for these brand new remasters, and, yes, this is the first time the The Three EPs have been sold together on vinyl. But 10 seconds on Discogs proves that the original, non-deluxe variety is not exactly in short supply. (While there is no bonus music here, this edition does come with a reprinting of the band’s Flower Press zine, far rarer than an OG VG+ Patty Patty Sound.)
This set never lent itself to the vinyl format, anyway. A 78-minute odyssey, The Three EPs is suited to uninterrupted listening. In college, we’d throw the CD on during a study session (of course) and wonder aloud if this was still the Beta Band halfway stop “The Monolith.” Getting up to flip these eight sides every ten minutes or so breaks that spell; there’s no way to get lost in the slipstream when you’re making that many trips to the turntable. If you’re anything like me, you’ll gaze admiringly at the deluxe edition nestled on your shelf while you load the record on Spotify.
These crackling, chameleonic EPs still seem to hold secrets, surprising and confounding in equal measure. A lot has changed in 20 years, but the very existence of the Beta Band—four rave-damaged, dub-inflected, spacecase pop savants, briefly given the keys to the kingdom—is still enough to spin your head. “I always imagined we’d be as big as Radiohead,” Mason told The Guardian in 2004. The music industry was not always kind to the Betas, but the Beta Band’s work after these EPs, built with an ostentatious arsenal of vintage equipment, wouldn’t exist without major-label patronage. Yet the Betas are precisely the kind of band the risk-averse majors would likely never sign now. Maybe Mason was right all along: Bands like this should be the norm. | 2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Because Music | September 24, 2018 | 8.4 | b6b1098d-907e-429b-9179-ee1e4d13a36e | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
Megan Thee Stallion’s debut is steeped in sex, pimpin, and power; it sounds like a once and future Houston rap classic. | Megan Thee Stallion’s debut is steeped in sex, pimpin, and power; it sounds like a once and future Houston rap classic. | Megan Thee Stallion: Fever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/megan-thee-stallion-fever/ | Fever | When Megan Thee Stallion’s “Big Ole Freak” landed on Billboard’s Hot 100 in April, it was a testament to years of viral freestyles and her devoted “hotties,” whose faithful support on social media helped the song rise to mainstream recognition. The 24-year-old has been prolific—her evolution is displayed through the invention of various rap personas, such as Tina Snow, Megan Thee Stallion, and Hot Girl Meg, the turn-up queen with serious ambition on her mind. “We have so many legends and so many greats,” she recently said of her hometown of Houston, Texas. “But I don’t feel like we ever really had a female rapper from Houston or Texas shut that shit down.” With her debut project Fever, she hopes to succeed in doing just that.
At its core is the intersection of two beautiful rap legacies: the women rap tradition started by MC Lyte and Queen Latifah, and Southern rap dynasty ushered in by Houston’s Geto Boys and Underground Kings. From the first song, Megan weaponizes misogyny through the execution of bars worthy of XXL Freshman Class President. South Park’s influence, home to fellow Houston legends Scarface and Lil’ Keke, is felt throughout “Hood Rat Shit,” which transitions into an ass-and clit-eating tutorial for her male tricks on “Pimpin,” where the spirit of Houston’s pimp tradition is embedded within every word. Sinister beats by producers Concept P and KC Supreme amplify Megan’s dedication to her set and willingness to actively to engage in ghetto affairs, despite her newfound rich bitch lifestyle. The track serves as a compliment to Juicy J’s production, which empowered Megan’s passionate highlight reel of recent wins of Houston’s champ.
Reminiscent of Pam Grier’s dynasty of heroine Blaxploitation films that inspired Fever’s album cover, Megan’s sexual politics take center stage. For decades, black women in rap have been reduced to one-dimensional characters that lacked complexity, but Megan asserts herself as “Thee Stallion” and undoes the historically male-centered framework in favor of black women’s sexual narratives. Her assertiveness in the fulfillment of sexual desires and pleasures is highlighted by Southern laced samples of UGK, Three 6 Mafia, and Project Pat to illustrate a sizzurp-induced night of ecstasy, where Megan is in charge of her body, and models to “hotties” how to enjoy theirs.
“Nine times out of 10, I’m the realest bitch you know/If you ain’t want a pimp then what you fuckin’ with me for,” she raps in “Running Up Freestyle,” challenging any pimps wary of power. Megan’s delivery of perfectly executed bars are comparable to successions from a fully automatic machine gun; a carefully studied aim of fiery stanzas that could only be carried by a rapper with extensive knowledge of the genre’s early practices of battle rap. Her reign is amplified by the embrace of a rich bitch identity, who takes pleasure in ending the lives of those attempt to block her financial avenues and asserts herself as the number one pimp in “Money Good.”
Departing from Tina Snow (her pimp persona), Megan shows us more of theHot Girl Meg on “Sex Talk” where the party girl finds sweet delight in ruining her partner’s life in an endless night of cowgirl and oral sex. Although the track’s origins are rooted in sex positivity, its stanzas reveal a character who is all assertion and dominance. It isn’t until “Shake That”—a song that delightfully includes a tribute to Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc.’s talent for cunnilingus—that you sense a few cracks in the project, both in sound and subject, that Megan is still finding out what works and what doesn’t for her singular style. Though, imagine being heralded as the future of Houston rap, an iconic sound that marries generational, regional, and gendered heritages of her intersecting identities as a black woman from the South. It's a journey.
Just a few months ago, Megan Thee Stallion lost her mother, Holly Thomas, to brain cancer. She was one of her biggest influences, taking her to the studio when she was young to witness her laying down tracks as the rapper Holly-Wood. In the harder tracks on Fever, you can almost see Megan’s mother sparring with daughter, each of them delivering Rocky Balboa-blows to the jaw, becoming stronger together. Megan Thee Stallion is now a piece of Houston’s heart, so when you listen to Fever, you hear lean-induced nights at the strip club, freestyles in South Park, house parties at Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern University, but most importantly you’re starting to hear her. She has prepared her whole life for the opportunity to challenge the coastal elites for a seat at rap’s table, and Fever is her folding chair. | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment | May 23, 2019 | 8 | b6bb936d-ba80-4c57-8bdc-f3cc378e8525 | Taylor Crumpton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/taylor-crumpton/ | |
The Danish electro-pop chart-topper’s second album is dedicated to the quest for eternal youth; too often, though, her overbearing club songs merely kick against the onset of adulthood. | The Danish electro-pop chart-topper’s second album is dedicated to the quest for eternal youth; too often, though, her overbearing club songs merely kick against the onset of adulthood. | MØ: Forever Neverland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mo-forever-neverland/ | Forever Neverland | MØ’s debut album, 2014’s No Mythologies to Follow, was all about savoring adolescence, a quest the Danish electro-pop singer born Karen Marie Ørsted captured in glittery production and wailing vocals. So what do you do at age 30 when you’ve made a career out of singing about being young, so much so that your Instagram handle is “momomoyouth”? Four years later—the unit of time typically used to measure a stint in high school or college—Forever Neverland is about the way adulthood yanks us out of former selves, and the way we thrash and fight against it. The title, it goes without saying, is an homage to Peter Pan.
Electro-pop is currently going through a poetry phase: Think of the Lorde lines that could pass for Anne Sexton or the incisive imagery in a Let’s Eat Grandma song. Even Halsey, a closer match to MØ in style, can sound like a Rupi Kaur poem set to a trap beat. MØ’s songs strive for a similarly literary feel—“Purple like summer rain,” she sings at the album’s outset, venturing into literally purple prose—and sometimes she succeeds. She’s at her best when her songs paint simple, concrete images: flipping through the radio in search of “old shit,” calling her mom on her drive out of Hollywood, searching for a party to crash or a bed to share or an excuse to get high. But elsewhere, the songs try too hard to earn their metaphors.
In between full–length projects, MØ contributed to the Major Lazer/Justin Bieber amalgam “Cold Water” and Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s inescapable “Lean On,” two of the most-streamed songs in recent pop. Her tracklist here reads like a who’s who of frat-party EDM: Diplo once again makes his mark, as does the former Flume appendage What So Not. They know how to build earworms, but MØ and her team also take risks to expand her reach. She attempts something adjacent to rap on “If It’s Over,” and it works; she experiments with country-era Taylor Swift twang on “Blur.” We see MØ cast through a prism, splitting into different colors. She’s done with California. She’s heartbroken. Most of the album dissolves into tingly club tracks with more texture than the average dancefloor hit.
The production is more complex than in her previous work, which may be the result of a blurry blend of producers. While her last album was almost entirely produced by the frenetic club hitmaker Ronni Vindahl, of No Wav. fame, Forever Neverland bears the thumbprints of roughly a dozen different producers. It shows. Sometimes the production screeches like Shygirl; sometimes it sounds like a less-than-palatable burst of trap kazoos. Each track seems specifically constructed to get stuck in your head, leaving you humming its tune for a week after, but it’s mostly an empty resonance. These are conspicuously competent club songs that strain for self-importance.
Even if you deleted MØ from her own music—cut out the lyrics, threw out her vocals—the tracks would border on overwhelming. Each track is its own kind of cacophony. There are moments of real shimmer here, particularly in the Charli XCX-featuring “If It’s Over.” But too much of the album is oversaturated and exhausting. Instead of cementing her place in “eternal youth,” as she shouts in the last track, Forever Neverland seems more like the lurch towards adulthood itself—going from a bang to a whimper as you haul your tired body back from the club. | 2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | October 22, 2018 | 6 | b6bbc7d2-0d97-457b-a1a3-119d799cab7a | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Seattle artist inverts the minimal techno aesthetic of Gas-- burying the thump and emphasizing the ambience. | Seattle artist inverts the minimal techno aesthetic of Gas-- burying the thump and emphasizing the ambience. | The Sight Below: Glider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12741-glider/ | Glider | The style of ambient techno that Wolfgang Voigt (Gas, Burger/Ink) minted has proved to be massively influential. It gave us the Field, who leans heavily on the techno side of the Gas aesthetic, arranging pithy scraps of musical information into deathless pulsations. It also gives us Seattle's the Sight Below, a mirror image of the Field. Burying the thump and emphasizing the ambiance, Glider could have been marketed as a lost Gas album while raising only the most initiated eyebrows. It's a cunning facsimile, but a facsimile nonetheless. Luckily, Glider gets by just fine on the sensual pleasure of Voigt's style.
And there is a key distinction: While Voigt worked mostly with samples, the Sight Below creates his tracks with autonomously generated sounds. Running a guitar through a variety of looping, reverb, and delay stations, he uses the E-bow, the slide, and tentative picking techniques to circumvent the physical essence of the strings and to marshal clouds of edgeless tone. Only the 4/4 drum tracks-- consisting of cymbal snips, crisp snares, and hypnotic bass bumps-- keep these translucent songs from floating away.
The Sight Below's emphasis on melodic and rhythmic regularity makes his music serene and contemplative; it also creates a limitation. This is largely static work, with very little by way of build or release. Ideas presented near the beginning of each track tend to vary only cosmetically, then peter out. Some songs are extremely abstract: On "At First Touch", a continuous sub-tone breathes out long, celestial resonances for a few minutes, then gently rocks to a stop. The gusty, towering "Without Motion" describes itself accurately. The tracks where palpable textures are admitted tend, naturally, to be more engaging. On "Dour", fragments of discernible guitar glint through the streaming haze; on "Life's Fading Light", they seem to pull backwards against the pneumatic beat and atmospheric hum.
Glider 's derivativeness and inertia put a cap on its capacity to astonish, but it has a protracted shelf life. It's consummate mood music, which goes a long way toward compensating for its shortcomings. And the more I listen, the more esoteric divergences from Gas I start to perceive-- a different personality shining through, aloof and expansively pensive. Voigt alleged that he wanted to "bring the forest to the disco"-- the Sight Below lines up behind the velvet rope arm-in-arm with the sky. | 2009-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Ghostly International | March 5, 2009 | 6.8 | b6d22750-dc32-46c6-88e1-3ac2dce26365 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
This limited, tour-only cassette feels spontaneous yet brimming with ideas. It sounds somewhere between ghostly demos and a lo-fi avant-garde ambient composition. | This limited, tour-only cassette feels spontaneous yet brimming with ideas. It sounds somewhere between ghostly demos and a lo-fi avant-garde ambient composition. | Deerhunter: Double Dream of Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhunter-double-dream-of-spring/ | Double Dream of Spring | If you didn’t realize Deerhunter have a new release out, that’s kind of the point. A proper follow-up to 2015’s vibrant Fading Frontier is still in the works, but Double Dream of Spring is available on cassette, and that’s it. No vinyl. No streaming services. Not, by the looks of it, even a digital leak. The mostly instrumental, 40-minute tape was supposed to be on sale throughout the band’s current tour, but it sold out on the first night. The only way to hear the music was to wait in line and buy one of 300 copies at the inaugural Brooklyn show. The result, as anachronistic in content as in its format, arrives right on time.
It’s here and then it’s not. It’s vanishingly limited and—in theory, in a world of digital rips and frictionless file-sharing—infinitely available to whatever audience might be interested. Frontman Bradford Cox said the music was released on tape because of the long lead times for vinyl coupled with the flood of content that has diminished the rationale for giving away music online. He was regretful about how insanely fast the tapes sold out and said he couldn’t comment about plans for a repressing. Because the music here is (almost) all original material recorded with the full Deerhunter lineup (Cox, drummer Moses Archuleta, guitarist Lockett Pundt, bassist Josh McKay, and keyboardist Javier Morales) in their home base of Atlanta, this outing feels more substantial than most of the Deerhunter family’s other non-album releases, from a John Peel tribute tape to bedroom-recorded blog freebies.
The resulting album feels spontaneous yet brimming with ideas. It’s also a bit of a left turn: The tape tries on passions both old (krautrock jams) and new (a harpsichord). In that spirit, Double Dream of Spring is an engrossing if endearingly scraggly excursion into the avant-garde, a great, minor work from a great, major band.
Side A, which is wordless, sounds as much like spring as can be expected from a band who even managed to turn a Diplo remix into something dreadful and morbid. The warped bird calls of opener “Clorox Creek Chorus” quickly give way to standout “Dial’s Metal Patterns,” a latticework of woodwinds, keys, and clip-clop percussion that sprawls out for the next dozen-ish minutes, like Stereolab building a clock in Atlanta outsider artist Lonnie Holley’s backyard art studio. The side closes with “Strang’s Glacier,” a giddy reverie built around piano bass notes, splashing cymbals, and ethereal sighs that storm up like an eerie portent from the band’s clamorous 2007 breakout album, Cryptograms.
Side B, which has some words, is only a bit less wayward. The stately piano instrumental “The Primitive Baptists” sets up the tape’s first song with proper vocals, “Denim Opera,” and after so much build-up, it’s a thrill to hear frontman Bradford Cox belt out the rallying-cry charge, or yelp a high note on the word “believe,” singing a song about crimes and salvation. The track’s lo-fi clatter wouldn’t have been out of place on Deerhunter’s bountiful 2008 disc Weird Era Cont. Listening to this song, it’s hard to tell whether to fix a serious face or burst out laughing, and that feels purposeful.
After a couple of instrumentals that feature the buzzing of a cord being plugged into an amp and a plinking marimba, Deerhunter save their most powerful revelation for the finale: a faithful take on composer Charles Ives’ sparse 1919 masterpiece “Serenity,” with lyrics by Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. By the end of this whole bemusing, Wonka’s boat ride of a collection, a song that Ives himself once damned as “nice” sounds a bit like an amen, or at least a bittersweet Benadryl equivalent.
Its title nods to both a hermetic 1970 book by the poet John Ashbery and that text’s namesake, a 1915 trompe l’oeil painting by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. These references are fair warning that we’re entering an erudite, uncanny conversation: a weird era that continues because it’s passed down between artists like folk culture. Just as relevant, though, is the “doubles” conceit, which Deerhunter neatly apply to the two-sided structure of a cassette.
Cox has said Deerhunter’s upcoming, Cate Le Bon-produced full-length will carry the working title Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, which, strikingly enough, is also the name of one of the final essays the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote before he died in 2007. “Behind every image,” Baudrillard said, “something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination.” Double Dream of Spring is a boutique tape that most of us will only ever encounter as ones and zeroes, and for as far as that goes—whether until the next Deerhunter record, or beyond—it’s fascinating. Ephemeral though it may be, it’s also an achievement to celebrate. Even, or especially if, as Baudrillard would have it, we must ask: “Is it, in fact, the real we worship, or its disappearance?” | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 24, 2018 | 7.2 | b6e09f37-aeef-4f82-a66e-3a4c13f06248 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Following his recent collaborations with Skrillex and Four Tet, hitmaker Fred Gibson teams up with the elder statesman of ambient. Unlike that anarchic trio, this project is dutifully, dully solemn. | Following his recent collaborations with Skrillex and Four Tet, hitmaker Fred Gibson teams up with the elder statesman of ambient. Unlike that anarchic trio, this project is dutifully, dully solemn. | Fred again.. / Brian Eno: Secret Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fred-again-brian-eno-secret-life/ | Secret Life | Fred again.. seemingly blinked into existence fully formed, a shining new star in the EDM firmament. His debut album, Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020), released late into the pandemic lockdowns, made his reputation globally by giving hope to ravers and clubbers pining for the dancefloor. Across the Actual Life trilogy, Fred again.. sampled audio from YouTube, Instagram, and FaceTime in club-ready mixes that pulled a disparate community of artists into his orbit: open-mic slam poets and established rappers, close friends and complete strangers. In the past year, Fred again.. has only burned brighter: He’s played a breakout Boiler Room set and a viral NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and formed an unlikely alliance with Four Tet and Skrillex for a riotous series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, Times Square, and Coachella.
Of course, Fred again.. did not come out of nowhere; his rise was abetted by a background that granted him access to people like Brian Eno. After a family friend netted 16-year-old Fred Gibson an invitation to Eno’s a cappella singing group, Gibson convinced Eno of his considerable production talents. Eno took him under his wing and gave him his first credits on Eno’s two 2014 albums with Underworld’s Karl Hyde. Eno’s manager also worked with Roots Manuva and landed Gibson a spot on 2015’s Bleeds; from there, he wrote and produced for high-profile projects from Swedish House Mafia, Ellie Goulding, Headie One, and Ed Sheeran. In the late 2010s Gibson worked behind the scenes on a long list of No. 1 hits, but it was Eno who encouraged him to step out on his own and complete the Actual Life albums.
Secret Life is a collaboration between Fred again.. and Eno, recorded during the Actual Life era and released on Four Tet’s Text label. The album features Fred again..’s sample collages slowed down to the ambient pioneer’s glacial pace. Eno has said of Gibson, “I didn’t really understand a lot of what he was doing. It took me quite a while to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really a new idea about how you can make music.’” Secret Life suggests that Eno still doesn’t understand Fred again..’s appeal. Gibson is a talented producer, but his methods are not new. His YouTube plundering has been done by the Range, his sample mangling borrows from Burial, and his vulnerable singing style recalls James Blake. Fred again..’s work is mainly impressive for the way it upcycles these techniques into the mainstream, creating dazzling new patterns in a rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of influences.
Secret Life is immaculately produced—how could it not be?—but lacks the communal spirit that made Actual Life feel fresh and accessible. The most exciting element of the Fred again.. project is Gibson’s magpie approach to gathering samples and the deceptive ease with which he deploys them. Any audio clip that crosses Gibson’s social media feed may end up in his mixes, creating the illusion of a party that anyone can join. Eno has cordoned off this egalitarian free-for-all and turned it into a museum exhibit where somber whispers are more appropriate than joyful shouts.
Many hallmarks of corporate ambient are here: slowly decaying piano notes, time-stretched vocals, lazily strummed acoustic guitar, and hazy synths, all wrapped in rustling static. There are moments when these elements come together beautifully, as with the nostalgic dreamscape that surrounds Lola Young’s soaring vocals on “Trying.” At other times, Fred again..’s songcraft struggles, and fails, to break through. A case in point is “Cmon,” which recycles Fred Again..’s “Lydia (please make it better)” (which itself samples Bad Honey’s “Hjem (Please Make It Better).” Whereas the bare-bones introduction to “Lydia” presages a bass-heavy groove, the same material stops short just as it gains momentum at the halfway point of “Cmon,” and the rest of the song staggers along on the strength of a chopped and panned vocal line with little other development.
In a puzzling move for an accomplished songwriter like Gibson, many of the lyrics on Secret Life are taken piecemeal from other songs. At times, Fred again..’s emotional delivery benefits the lyrics he has adapted, as with the minimalist take on a verse from Leonard Cohen’s “In My Secret Life” on “Secret,” which saves Cohen’s musings on loneliness and duplicity from the overdone schmaltz of the original. Elsewhere, though, Gibson unnecessarily flattens melodies, as when he strips the soul from Winnie Raeder’s “Don’t You Dare” on “Enough.” The lines “Come on home/Come on home/You don’t have to be alone” are eerily familiar when they are barely murmured on “Radio.” When Gibson reunites these words with their original melody on album closer “Come on Home,” it’s easy to recognize John Prine’s “Summer’s End,” and hard not to simply play that song instead. Borrowing lyrics is nothing new—M.I.A. quoted both the Modern Lovers and the Pixies to great effect, for example—but these songs sound more like half-remembered covers than clever appropriations.
Despite his celebrity and his apparent openness, much about Fred again..’s life remains, well, secret. Though the emotional undercurrent of the Actual Life series gave the impression of diaristic confession, its digital fragments ultimately reflected others more than himself. Secret Life multiplies this effect like a hall of mirrors distorted through Eno’s influence. Every way forward turns us back again toward Gibson’s recent work, each song providing little more than a different angle on what we’ve seen before. | 2023-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap / Electronic | Text | May 10, 2023 | 6 | b6e891c6-ad5e-4088-be5f-f7a364c70004 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Lil Wop—the newest and most adamant Gucci Mane disciple—carves his own grotty, horrorcore path on his fourth mixtape of 2017, a wildly fun but sometimes rough listen. | Lil Wop—the newest and most adamant Gucci Mane disciple—carves his own grotty, horrorcore path on his fourth mixtape of 2017, a wildly fun but sometimes rough listen. | Lil Wop: Wopavelli 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-wop-wopavelli-3/ | Wopavelli 3 | On his breakthrough single “Lost My Mind,” Lil Wop reminisced about growing up wanting to be like Gucci Mane. Of course, Gucci has inspired his share of disciples, but none of them have taken their hero worship to such extremes as Wop, who not only christened himself after his favorite rapper but also had his signature electric ice cream cone tattooed on his own cheek. Even before he signed to Gucci’s 1017 label this summer, Wop was rapping about wearing a Rolex permanently stopped at 10:17—that Oct. 17 also happens to be his birthday is either a fateful coincidence or the kind of lie a determined psychopath might tell as part of an All About Eve-esque plot to infiltrate their idol’s life.
If Wop’s biography paints him as rap’s most shameless sycophant, his over the top Gucci fandom belies just how original his own vision is. The two share some of the same bone-dry comedic sensibilities, but beyond that, Lil Wop doesn’t borrow much from the elder Wop. He’s his own creation, and easily the most distinctive 1017 signee since Young Thug: a demonic, blood-crazed madman who likens himself to Michael Myers, brags about his zombie walk, and raps in the same unnerving croak as Tony, Danny Torrance’s freaky imaginary friend from The Shining. All cobwebs and sawdust, it’s a voice so pained and parched it makes you vicariously crave the drink of water he apparently denies himself between takes. It also makes his 1017 debut Wopavelli 3, for all its infectious lunacy, a very acquired taste, and a rough listen on headphones.
Wop plays on more or less the same horrorcore tropes that have periodically come into vogue since the Gravediggaz days, but he tackles them with a rare commitment to character. “Fresh as hell, I just woke up in a coffin,” he rasps on “Topgolf,” “Red tape around the trap, bitch don’t cross it.” He’s still early in his career, but already his rapping is considerably richer, weirder, and more vivid than it was on this year’s “Lost My Mind.” Wopavelli 3, his fourth mixtape of 2017, captures him just as his persona begins to click, but still in the creation stage of writing his own mythos. Sometimes he leaves open the possibility all the violence is a Percocet-fueled fantasy; sometimes he hints at a Jekyll/Hyde relationship with his body spurred by his indiscriminate drug intake. Mostly, he doesn’t overanalyze it. “I raise the murder rate, put a nigga on a plate,” he raps with typical brevity on “Murder Rate.”
Where vanguard rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty have modeled themselves in part after rock stars, Wop has taken that mentality to its logical extreme. “This ain’t rap it’s hard rock,” he repeats throughout the tape, and although that’s not literally true, he taps into the same vein of showmanship and exploitation as so many ’80s metal acts. He’s aided in his spectacle by a sharp cast of producers, mostly talented upstarts like Digital Nas and Kenny Beats, who conjure a similar mix of whimsy and brutality, creating beats that fall somewhere between Saturday morning cartoons and torture porn.
Early on the mixtape, there’s a moment that Wop’s been anticipating for his entire career: his first Gucci Mane feature. If you can judge how vested Gucci is in his protégés based on the quality of guest verses, then “Paid in Full” bodes well for Wop. But as charismatic as Gucci is, he sounds irreconcilably out of place. He’s too mirthful for his surroundings, and he tips the scale a little too far toward silliness—it’s a bit like watching your favorite sitcom character wander into a slasher film for a scene. Lil Wop’s aesthetic is already so singular that it doesn’t leave a lot of room for outsiders, even ones he grew up idolizing. He may adore Gucci Mane, but with Wopavelli 3 he proves that he doesn’t need him. | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 1017 Eskimos | November 30, 2017 | 6.8 | b6e997e2-65ad-49cb-a7f3-5304cbe48dca | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Fake Boyfriend's debut EP Mercy merges post-punk with the poppier indie-rock stylings associated with acts like Waxatachee and Girlpool, full of thrashing guitar blasts and churning bass. | Fake Boyfriend's debut EP Mercy merges post-punk with the poppier indie-rock stylings associated with acts like Waxatachee and Girlpool, full of thrashing guitar blasts and churning bass. | Fake Boyfriend: Mercy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21658-mercy-ep/ | Mercy EP | For almost a year, the band Fake Boyfriend has had no music available, their website offering only a 27-second recording titled "gimmick." "Hi, um, we’re Fake Boyfriend," a voice begins with a vacant affect, before building up to a screaming eruption "and we’re—a… GIMMICK!" The last word’s howl hovers uncertainly between complaint and celebration, but, musically, "Gimmick" is a statement of pure vocal power. Fake Boyfriend pits that power against "the preconceived notions of how women are supposed to behave and process emotions," as band member Abi Reimold, who just put out her own acclaimed solo LP, recently told Stereogum. If the songs "are about giving into your feelings," then "Gimmick" gives into and lets out its rage over the inevitable equation that Fake Boyfriend is a girl band and being a "girl band" equals being a gimmick. By yawping their self-identification with the label, Fake Boyfriend reclaims the "girl band" moniker but still acknowledges the commoditizing function it otherwise performs.
Their debut EP Mercy merges post-punk with the poppier indie-rock stylings associated with acts like Waxatachee and Girlpool, full of thrashing guitar blasts and churning bass. "Expire" has the fiercest snarl on the EP, but "Ship" best exemplifies the soft/hard, light/dark interplay of their songwriting—a juxtaposition of screaming and soft vocals. Midway through "Ship," the chugging guitar and drums dissolve, leaving only bass as singer and guitarist Ashley Tryba shifts into narcotic tones for the 40-second bridge’s intonation: "In my dreams, in my dreams…" When the drums and guitar come back, this fugue state ends and returns the speaker to her post-traumatic reality. "I’ve got a room of my own but nothing to write/ I’ve got an anger that burns but no one to fight," Tryba sings, chants, and finally shouts—invoking the classic Virginia Woolf essay and suggesting that a room of one’s own offers no reprieve.
Throughout, Fake Boyfriend make it clear they're determined to tackle bigger ills than ex-lovers. At the Mercy release party, Tryba prefaced the performance of "Ship" with an angry redress: "This song is about the self-blame, shame, and confusion that comes after being sexually harassed… Despite what the fucking journalists say." They seem unconcerned with the rituals and niceties of getting covered or noticed by press, a refreshing resurgence of true punk ethos within the often-sycophantic world of of contemporary indie rock. This attitude has its most potent expression in their clunky, obnoxious, unpolished, and often rapturous live shows: "Sometimes we mix Trans-Siberian Orchestra with Evanescence, and that’s us," bassist Sarah Myers once informed an audience.
Each band member plays a different instrument than she learned prior to joining Fake Boyfriend. Far from sounding amateurish, this quality gives Mercy’s four songs their special beauty, an improvisational intimacy like two new lovers undressing each other—fumbling into just the right groove. The compositional unsteadiness to "Bumtown," which seems to stumble and drag its way through its verses, only adds to the force of the explosion into the chorus. "Bumtown" and the hypnotic "Wax" display latent pop sensibilities that best serve Mercy as brief flashes of contrast to the album’s abrasive swirl. But they also sounds like hints at a capacity for full-throttle pop anthems as well. Who would have thought the Hole heard on 1991’s Pretty On The Inside would later produce a song like "Heaven Tonight"? On Mercy, Fake Boyfriend bristle with all manner of possibility. | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sad Cactus | March 14, 2016 | 7.8 | b6ef14ad-d92d-4fb4-ab96-08433709e78a | Andy Emitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-emitt/ | null |
Fronted by an Afghanistan war veteran turned firefighter and EMT, the Athens, Georgia, goths offer a compellingly melodic take on the genre that’s informed by the horrors of lived experience. | Fronted by an Afghanistan war veteran turned firefighter and EMT, the Athens, Georgia, goths offer a compellingly melodic take on the genre that’s informed by the horrors of lived experience. | Vision Video: Inked in Red | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vision-video-inked-in-red/ | Inked in Red | In its darkest form, post-punk is an atrocity exhibition, drawing on horrors both real and imagined to hold up a mirror to humankind’s worst tendencies. On their debut album, Inked in Red, the Athens, Georgia, ultra-goth outfit Vision Video honor this tradition by closing with a cover of “Agent Orange,” a grim, Vietnam War-inspired song released in 1980 by the brooding Brixton dub-punk outfit Ski Patrol. Vision Video’s take is largely reverential, right down to the near-identical running times, but with one crucial difference. Ski Patrol singer Ian Lowery sings about being burned alive on the battlefield with an icy detachment that gradually thaws into hot-blooded panic, but Vision Video frontman Dusty Gannon sounds unsettled from the jump. In fact, for Gannon, singing from the perspective of a besieged soldier isn’t mere cosplay.
Long before he formed Vision Video in 2017, Gannon was a disaffected teen who joined the army to escape a life of menial labor; he eventually found himself leading a rifle platoon in the streets of Kandahar during America’s never-ending war with Afghanistan. Disheartened by his experience as a cog in the war machine, he quit the military upon his return home. Yet in his current day jobs—as a firefighter and a paramedic treating COVID-19 patients—he’s still surrounded by people suffering through the worst, if not the last, days of their lives.
Given Gannon’s background, it’s not surprising that his lyrics are filled with images of blood, death, and burning skies. What is unexpected, however, is that those dark thoughts have yielded a record full of such vim and vigor. Vision Video essentially have one kind of song, but it’s a good, highly durable one—i.e., the sort of taut, energetic, yet oddly dreamy tune that’s tailor-made for the sort of wallflower who sprints to the dancefloor the instant the DJ drops “Age of Consent” or “Primary” at Goth Night. But in Gannon, Vision Video are blessed with a singer whose voice soars instead of sulks. And when he blends his with that of keyboardist Emily Fredock, the group exhibits a radiance that distinguishes them from fellow black-lipstick aficionados.
Even as Gannon sings of heartbreak in gory, slasher-flick terms on “In My Side” (“My body’s bare in this murder scene/And it’s always there reminding me /That I feel your knife in my back”), there’s a triumphant quality to the chorus that reflects his ability to withstand the pain. He confronts his post-war PTSD in discomfiting detail on Inked in Red’s stirring title track and the haunting “Kandahar,” but the group’s sing-along hooks and soothing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” synth lines amplify the songs’ emotional resonance. Unlike more mannered peers, Vision Video leave little doubt that their unspeakable imagery is the product of lived experience rather than horror-flick fiction. “Each way I turn I’m searching for a guiding light/But there just don’t seem to be any signs of life,” Gannon sings on “Inked in Red,” suggesting he’ll never outrun the shadows of his past. But the bravado in his delivery indicates he’s going to keep trying. As a frontline worker, Gannon has devoted his post-Afghanistan life to helping other people; with Vision Video, he gets to help himself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Icy Cold | April 26, 2021 | 7 | b6f433bb-7e95-4ed5-9ef6-0a832942975a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
There's nothing more American than marijuana and masturbation, and when you combine the two, well, that's Zen. Don ... | There's nothing more American than marijuana and masturbation, and when you combine the two, well, that's Zen. Don ... | Sebadoh: The Sebadoh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7051-the-sebadoh/ | The Sebadoh | There's nothing more American than marijuana and masturbation, and when you combine the two, well, that's Zen. Don't let the hippies fool you, there's nothing communal about pot. It's all about that high, and the only reason you want people around when you get high is so they can witness how good pot makes you feel. They're there so they can enjoy you, not enjoy pot with you. Masturbation is that joint you save for yourself and smoke when everyone has gone home.
The beauty of Sebadoh is that they not only understand how selfish weed and wacking off are, but, to quote Malcom X, they "talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand." There's no false conception that you're getting one band when you buy a Sebadoh CD-- you're getting a bunch of songs that sound like the person who wrote them. Sebadoh isn't a band as much as it's a means to an end.
For the most part, the ends have been worth the means. Lou Barlow's always depressed, Jason Loewenstein's always pissed and Eric Gaffney always sounded like he took a wrong turn and ended up in Sebadoh's studio instead of GWAR's. That's part of the fun. If your girlfriend just shit on your heart, Lou was there to empathize. If you felt like letting off some steam, Jason was your man. If the crank was taking a minute to kick in, Eric could kickstart it.
Then came Harmacy, by which time Eric was long gone and Lou and Jason, along with Bob Fay, decided they were a band. They weren't yet. The overproduction and cohesiveness was a wimpy kick in the nuts. No high, no climax, no thank you.
The curious thing about The Sebadoh is that it is, in fact, The Sebadoh. You get the multiple personalities and the whole unit. "Bird in the Hand" is Jason Loewenstein at full tilt, screaming like an unwelcome orgasm and clanging out arrhythmic chords. "Break Free," new drummer Russ Pollard's only song credit, sends out signals of longing without being overdrawn. "Love is Strong" is so distant and depressing that it could only have been written by Lou Barlow. Behind the personalities, though, all the songs are coming from the same place.
Some people won't take to the cohesiveness, and the added production won't make them any happier. Change scares people, especially people accustomed to the stasis of weed. The warm organ and warped guitar on "Tree" may as well be aliens bursting out of the stomachs of musicians who made an entire album as bedroomy as Weed Forestin, but the rest of the track is as soothingly analog as any Nick Drake sobber. Likewise, the sci-fi noodlings and tambourine of "It's All You" sound polished, but retain that special Sebadoh quality.
For Sebadoh, it's been a while since giving the pleasure of the two M's meant blatantly singing about them, but after a dismal attempt at coming together, Sebadoh seems to have made an album that's both communal and self- gratifying. Fuckin' hippies. | 1999-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 1999-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sub Pop / Sire | February 23, 1999 | 7.4 | b6f9ad04-3c01-4be9-9f7d-f397e609ca3d | Pitchfork | null |
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The Chicago rapper moves away from his recent commercially-minded exploits and embraces a more mature style of writing. | The Chicago rapper moves away from his recent commercially-minded exploits and embraces a more mature style of writing. | Lil Durk: Love Songs for the Streets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23025-love-songs-for-the-streets/ | Love Songs for the Streets | Will Lil Durk get another chance to be a rap star? He's the last great hope of the class of 2012, back when drill music first crumbled the city’s pavements to dust. Chief Keef’s indiscipline killed his momentum. Lil Reese sank under the weight of a charge sheet. King Louie is still around, making the kind of graphene-tough drill that sledgehammered its way into hip-hop’s collective conscious a half-decade ago. But only one rapper calls himself the Allah of Chi-Town.
Durk Banks was still in his teens when he signed to Def Jam in 2012, ostensibly becoming one of drill’s great crossover hopes. He dropped two commercially-minded albums on the label and scored minor hits with “Like Me” and “My Beyoncé,” syrupy jams that made good use of the rapper’s pop instincts. But he’s never been able to parlay any of these achievements into large-scale embracement. Or even, say, Meek Mill-esque sales. The final few steps always elude him.
Love Song for the Streets doesn’t concern itself with mainstream acceptance. Instead, we get no false starts or unwise experiments, just Durk unfiltered: nine shots of garbled Auto-Tune vocals, punchy lyricism, goofy sex jams, and hooks that stick.
Unshackled from any kind of outline, Durk’s pen game shines. His rise was dotted with blood-soaked tales that summarized much of drill’s appeal: ground-level glimpses at Chicago's South Side that colored in the outline offered by grim murder statistics. Love Song for the Streets, though, finds the father-of-two in a more mournful mood. He’s still only 24, but he raps with the weariness of someone who has seen too damn much.
“Pick Your Poison” is a robust smack down of so-called friends that abandoned him when goings got tough. “Hell yeah I hold a grudge,” Durk spits over Will-A-Fool’s dark production, “these niggas ain’t show no love.” Later, he offers some open-book revelations: “I used to chew on them xannies to get me through the times.” There’s a touch of Curtis Mayfield in Durk’s gloss-free depiction of urban living—hard times in this crazy town.
In Durk’s world, viciousness is a part of life’s mundanity. Moments of youthful innocence are precious in the “trenches”: “My uncle died in a stabbing/I moved to the A now I’m dabbing,” he raps on “Handouts.” It’s about finding something to cling onto, a thin sliver of light—in this case, a dab—in the vast darkness. Durk’s ugly-beautiful vocals punctuate one of coldest visions of Chicago.
As a front-to-back production job, Love Song for the Streets feels raw, dinky, and inexpensive. The gritty orchestration melds itself inseparably from Durk’s synthetic vocals. “No Love,” produced by S Breezy, is built on some twisted guitar notes, a thumping bass line, and lots of dead space for Durk and guest Young Thug to fill. Tracks like “Mood” have more in common with Thugger’s favored future-cop production style than the horror movie theatrics of drill, while Durk’s strong sense of melody shines on the sleazy ode to his girl, “Uzi.”
Drill was largely built around incredibly young rappers burdened with many of the troubles listeners found so thrilling. Five years later, Durk is reporting from the firestorm while trying to grow up within it. Love Song for the Streets lacks the kind of breadth required of a classic release, but as a table setter to Durk’s next episode, it gets the message across. | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 14, 2017 | 7.1 | b6f9fb44-5690-44f5-bc2c-b608ba88a752 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
The acclaimed solo guitarist sets aside his beloved instrument for nearly half the tracks on his new album, seeking new routes to convey familiar moods. | The acclaimed solo guitarist sets aside his beloved instrument for nearly half the tracks on his new album, seeking new routes to convey familiar moods. | Sir Richard Bishop: Oneiric Formulary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sir-richard-bishop-oneiric-formulary/ | Oneiric Formulary | Sir Richard Bishop is one of the most riveting and dynamic acoustic guitarists on the planet, but he’s seldom seemed interested in the tropes of the solo guitar tradition. Since his 1998 debut on Revenant, John Fahey’s own label and a bastion of stylistic misfits, the Sun City Girls cofounder has indulged a deep restless streak, making records that nod toward his six-string contemporaries before racing off in a dozen directions. In the span of a few tracks, he might conjure the endless ecstasy of Munir Bashir, the cinematic elegance of Chet Atkins, and the spare beauty of Libba Cotten. The title of Polytheistic Fragments, his staggering 2007 Drag City album, still feels like a mission statement: Rather than subscribe to one belief system, Bishop has marshalled a more useful personal theology by borrowing a bit from everything he loves.
Given Bishop’s insatiable curiosity, an album like his new Oneiric Formulary was inevitable. On his first solo outing since 2015’s Tangier Sessions, a painstaking exploration of every sound he could wring from a mysteriously salvaged guitar, Bishop doesn’t actually pick up a guitar for nearly half these tracks. Instead, he chops samples into spooky sequences as though he were RZA’s wayward understudy for “Call to Order” and surrenders himself to a nearly nine-minute morass of maligned circuits like a half-asleep Yellow Swans for “Graveyard Wanderers.” Yes, Bishop takes the guitar on a few mesmerizing turns, alternately embracing frenetic strums and pleasant licks familiar from his past. But on an album inspired by the sounds and scenes of his dreams, Bishop finally seems tired of being confined to one instrument.
Of course, realizing Bishop isn’t here just to play guitar (or even piano, where his dizzying notes recall the puffy, cloudlike shapes of La Monte Young’s music) brings an initial twinge of disappointment. Imagine the letdown of going to see Michael Jordan man the outfield or paying handsomely to hear a member of Led Zeppelin plunge into microtonal improvisation. But even without the guitar, Bishop communicates his endearing sentimentality and his boundless instrumental ambitions. The dizzying pace and radiant tones of “Dust Devils”—a game approximation of frame drum and the strident Arabic mizmar, played with a MIDI keyboard—are as gripping as his most bristling Freak of Araby pieces. And his electronic lute lines for “Renaissance Nod” recall the contemplative pace of Bishop’s piano works: Same moods, different deliveries.
Still, when Bishop grabs the guitar, you remember what you were missing. During the “The Coming of the Rats,” he thumbs out a staccato acoustic strut while fluorescent electric drones pirouette in slow-motion. It’s eerie and gorgeous, like Robert Fripp scoring some dimly lit alley scene in a gangster movie. And on “Celerity,” Bishop’s heavy strums are so fast, angular, and agile it sounds like Aphex Twin sampled him and built the track one meter at a time. Bishop somehow fits notes inside of rests that don’t seem to exist—the effect is exhilarating, like a motivational speech crammed into four breathless minutes.
Bishop seems to understand it’s still reassuring to hear his particular sort of guitar mastery, where the emotions run as deep and free as the peerless technique. To wit, he ends the mid-album triptych of songs without guitar with “Enville,” a piece so brisk and resplendent it would be the standout on almost any record by the latest generation of solo acoustic guitarists. Aside from the introduction, it’s the shortest track here, so you might overlook it between the clangor of “Dust Devils” and the speed of “Black Sara.” But listen again to how cleanly Bishop plays and how many images he’s able to evoke in about two minutes. In one moment, I picture a tree-lined pasture, birdsong dancing at the edge of the field; in another, the quiet bliss of crossing a tedious item off a too-old to-do list. Hearing “Enville,” you get why Bishop might want to write beyond the guitar now—how can one instrument get more exquisite or evocative than this? | 2020-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | April 24, 2020 | 7.1 | b700fa53-5872-4844-bb1f-755bae5bcacc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On his second joint effort with producer Evidence, and with his habitual loop-based rap now dominating the independent sphere, the Odd Future member sounds more confident than he has in years. | On his second joint effort with producer Evidence, and with his habitual loop-based rap now dominating the independent sphere, the Odd Future member sounds more confident than he has in years. | Domo Genesis: *Intros, Outros & Interludes * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/domo-genesis-intros-outros-and-interludes/ | Intros, Outros & Interludes | Domo Genesis was one of the first rappers to have a project produced entirely by fellow Californian Alchemist, and their 2012 album together, No Idols, proved revelatory. Genesis had spent years playing the sidelines within Odd Future, a talented spitter struggling to stand out next to his more flamboyant and prodigious friends. But over Alchemist’s unfussed loops and minimal drums, Genesis’ presence hardened like magma exposed to air. He sounded invigorated, as ready to zig-zag through tangled rhyme schemes on “Elimination Chamber” as he was to slow down and pay tribute to his beloved marijuana on “Me and My Bitch.” No Idols was warmly received in its heyday, but no one could’ve predicted just how ahead of its time it would be.
Today, loop-based rap music dominates the independent sphere, and Alchemist-produced projects warrant interviews with GQ. Genesis has carved out his own niche as well, switching between the hazy boom-bap of 2017’s Red Corolla and 2018’s Aren’t U Glad You’re U?*—*his team-up with veteran rapper-producer Evidence—and the expansive live-band arrangements of 2016’s Genesis and 2018’s Facade Records. On those earlier projects, Genesis seemed lost, his gifts for rhyming merely a tool to help piece his life back together. Intros, Outros & Interludes, his second joint effort with Evidence, puts all that uncertainty in the past tense. “What I get, I deserve, I’m undeferred, I’m too ahead of the curve,” he says nonchalantly on intro track “Don’t Believe Half,” finding the worth in his peaks and valleys: “I had my head fully submerged under the current/They don’t wanna see me flourish, though.” It’s the most confident he’s sounded in years.
Even though Evidence handles all the production, Intros, Outros & Interludes feels like a mirror reflection of the Alchemist-produced No Idols. Genesis is still hungry and willing to fight for what’s his, but he’s more weathered, more cognizant of when to use his energy to bolster his strength. He rarely references specific hardships, but his delivery sells whatever lessons he’s gleaned. On “Trust the Process,” he doesn’t just work with the “weight of the world on my shoulders”—he approaches it with the strength of a Super Soldier from Marvel Comics. Genesis has a way of sprinkling in quick allusions that map out his mindstate in the fewest moves possible: He compares his skills to wrestler Booker T.’s infamous 1997 speech to Hulk Hogan on “Campfire,” and makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the Righteous Gemstones on “Victories and Losses.” Even at his most dour, there’s always some fun to be had on a Domo Genesis song.
It’s remarkable how much the two have grown since the last time they joined forces. Aren’t U Glad You’re U? was an instance of two artists who clearly liked each other still figuring out how to fit in each other’s universe. Those growing pains are gone on Intros, Outros & Interludes, where their styles interlock effortlessly. Evidence’s production leans hazy and psychedelic, somewhere between a pleasant daydream and a neo-noir soundtrack. The horns and pattering drums of “Don’t Believe Half” are a soft fanfare that Genesis skips over with a smirk. “Victories and Losses” slides by on a slinky lounge-piano sample while “Reverse Card” and “Campfire” seethe with synths. Melancholy mixes with triumph to create a disorienting but inviting atmosphere.
There’s no better place for a rapper as thoughtful and precise as Genesis. He’s comfortable with his lot in life and his skills have stood the test of time. It’s a testament to his vision that Remy Banks, Navy Blue, and Boldy James—all rappers who got their start in the 2010s but took years to truly etch out their space—are all guests on Intros, Outros & Interludes. They’ve watched the modern underground mold itself after a blueprint they’ve long embraced. But unlike Joey Bada$$, who pulled a similar feat on a grander scale with his comeback album 2000, Genesis is still operating with some bite, an animating sense of purpose that goes beyond money and status. “I’m more so in that duffle than I ever been/I’m tussling with the weights, can’t let the devil win,” he says at the end of closing track “Tallulah.” On Intros, Outros & Interludes, it’s easy to believe him. | 2022-08-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bigger Picture | August 4, 2022 | 7.3 | b7048c8f-2e89-4ee7-a75b-3913c3ff8b17 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Surf-rock riffs, oddball humor, and warped Americana storytelling define the Austin band’s raucous debut. | Surf-rock riffs, oddball humor, and warped Americana storytelling define the Austin band’s raucous debut. | Being Dead: When Horses Would Run | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/being-dead-when-horses-would-run/ | When Horses Would Run | You don’t see a lot of bands with their own theme songs these days. Time was, Black Sabbath introduced themselves with a spooky dirge called “Black Sabbath,” Bad Company peddled a slow-burning anthem called “Bad Company,” and Iron Maiden ended their sets with the satanic braggadocio of “Iron Maiden.” That sort of showboating might seem gaudy among today’s more tasteful rockers, but Being Dead have an old-fashioned knack for self-mythologizing. The core members, best friends and songwriting partners, call themselves Falcon Bitch and Gumball and alternately claim to have met as coworkers at Cinnabon or chimney sweeps in the 1700s. Their long-gestating first album, When Horses Would Run, delivers a cheery singalong three-quarters of the way through: “We are Being Dead,” they sing in harmony, teeing up solos like giddy children. “We’re having a good time/We hope you’re having a good time, too!”
Steeped in the careening energy of surf-rock and mid-’60s Jazzmaster tones but open to any stylistic fancy that crosses Falcon Bitch and Gumball’s radar, When Horses Would Run is an unusually raucous and idea-stuffed debut. Its songs burrow into fantasies of warped Americana: a hippie cult that worships trees (“Treeland”) or a languid suburban satire (“Misery Lane”). Their theme song, “We Are Being Dead,” is the simplest thing here, but it’s reflective of the overarching sense of two weirdos ushering you into their own private world.
Not that it’s been entirely private. Being Dead have spent years amassing a live following in Austin and trolling interviewers. When Horses Would Run showcases the confidence of a band that’s already worked out their kinks onstage. Falcon Bitch and Gumball swap instruments often and share lead vocals on nearly every track. Songs thrillingly morph midway through. The shoplifting fantasy “Muriel's Big Day Off” abruptly segues from rollicking acid-pop harmonies to a smoky jazz-pop interval and back. “Treeland” downshifts into a woozy call-and-response breakdown where the bandmates brainstorm sacrificial offerings for trees, then explode into Sung Tongs-like banshee shrieks. The idiosyncrasies of the pair’s friendship bring an endearing quality to the ad-libs and bits of studio chatter.
Because of the comradery, and their tendencies to swap inside jokes and value humor over stuffy self-pity, Being Dead may invite comparisons to Wet Leg. But their sensibility is less sardonic and more absurdist. Quintessential American themes dominate their writing: Western violence, religious evangelism (the a cappella goof “God vs Bible,” the cryptic “Holy Team”), consumerism (“Misery Lane”), acid trips (“Daydream”). It’s all filtered through a kaleidoscope of styles and vocal approaches that are almost perverse in their jolliness.
If Being Dead have a signature sound, it’s anchored in the sun-kissed harmonies and high-octane riffage of surf rock. There was darkness and menace in surf music long before Tarantino foregrounded it in Pulp Fiction, and Being Dead tease out the genre’s violent, disturbed underbelly. “Last Living Buffalo” is a deceptively jaunty lament for the last buffalo on the range snuffed out by hunters. “I see a buffalo lying dead on the floor,” Falcon Bitch sings, assessing the capitalist greed and cruelty that ran rampant in the American West. The climax is a doomy shriek of rage: “You killed them!” the two bellow over a noise explosion. As the song reverts to its buoyant guitar line, the scene becomes just another casualty in a gory, grim history, one that these songwriters have learned to survey with a smirk. | 2023-07-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bayonet | July 17, 2023 | 7.5 | b705d8ee-87b7-43e7-8659-8b57430b97f8 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Synth-pop auteur Nandi Rose renders nuanced, deeply compelling portrait of a woman turning away from the world just when she needs help the most. | Synth-pop auteur Nandi Rose renders nuanced, deeply compelling portrait of a woman turning away from the world just when she needs help the most. | Half Waif: The Caretaker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/half-waif-the-caretaker/ | The Caretaker | There’s always been a sense of disquiet in Half Waif’s swirling electro-pop. Engulfed by clouds of synth and feverish beats, frontwoman Nandi Rose searches for resolution to her nebulous inner turmoil, a constant battle between her desire to be known and her suspicion that she never truly will be. On her last album, Lavender, she looked outwards, hoping to find meaning in the places and people around her. On songs like “Lavender Burning,” New York represented the permanent home and stability she longed for on the road.
While writing her new album The Caretaker, Rose lived in one place (her home in the Hudson Valley) and wrote without a band. Though she grapples with the same turmoil as before—her hunger for love, her need for solitude, the loss of certain friendships—she is now coping alone. The other people on the album largely feel incidental, written into songs, as she says on “Siren,” only when she feels uninspired. Even falling in love, which she describes as “taking on the burn,” is an acquisition of someone else’s pain, a burden she carries by herself. An acutely self-aware writer, Rose realizes the emotional shortcomings of this approach. She renders a nuanced, deeply compelling portrait of a woman turning away from the world just when she needs help the most.
When she finished writing the album, Rose realized the perspective was not hers, but that of a character, someone who has been “entrusted with taking care of this estate, taking care of the land, and she’s not doing a very good job. The weeds are growing everywhere, and she’s not taking care of herself.” There are sonic ties to her home, from the bug sounds in the mix on “Lapsing,” which were recorded in her backyard, to the introductory beat on “Halogen 2,” which incorporated the sound of a train she can hear from her porch. She often sings about her home, though more as a shelter than as an estate she's capable of caring for. On “Window Place,” she anticipates an oncoming winter, a dark period of pain and loneliness that she chooses to wait out from her room, watching her life pass by as if looking out of a window. This sense of passivity permeates throughout the album, often symbolized by the passing of the seasons. Instead of taking action to address her frustrations, on songs like “Blinking Light” she waits for summer, an imagined future when she will inevitably feel better.
Rose’s best songs build into revelations, cracking the surface to reveal another truth buried deep inside. On The Caretaker, she uses this effect to portray the titular character as an unreliable narrator, someone who is trying to assert her independence, but who might be coming apart more than she acknowledges. Album highlight “Ordinary Talk” begins with a bold cry for independence: “Baby don’t worry about me/I don't worry about you.” Buoyed by a relentless drum beat, Rose sounds self-assured. But half-way through, the drums cut out and we’re introduced to her most bare emotional truths; she’s crying in her coffee and sitting in the dark. As the drums work back in and the vocals layer into an ethereal cocoon, she builds her loneliness into a spectacle, allowing it to intermingle beautifully with her desire for solitude. “Blinking Light” further heightens the tension between Rose’s self perception and reality. She sings with such resolution that she’ll be better by June that you’re genuinely startled when the chorus comes in, shepherded by her crystalline vocals: “I know what you’re thinking/I’m circling the drain.” As Rose paints an inept but tenacious character at its center, The Caretaker emerges as a deeply relatable portrayal of attempted self care.
There’s a grandiosity, almost a theatricality, to these songs, from the layered vocals to the flourishes of ornate imagery—morning stars, bodies full of thorns — to the maturity of Rose’s voice, which soars on nearly every chorus on the album. But grounded in mundane moments, the music never feels overwrought; the sun sets, the laundry gets folded, winter comes and then summer does. The instrumentation also expertly mirrors the emotional tenor of the lyrics, like the chugging beat and distorted vocals “Halogen 2,” which convey Rose’s gnawing anxiety and loneliness. As a result, the rich orchestral compositions on The Caretaker sound effortless and fluid like cursive. In crafting such complex, accessible songs, Rose reveals just how ordinary it is to feel at war with yourself, to not know what you want or how to get it.
The Caretaker is roughly divided in half by the improvised, droning synth interlude, “Lapsing,” which marks the distinction between the anxiety-ridden first half to the second half, which emits flickers of hope. Rose was listening to a lot of Robyn when writing this album and the emotional influence is clear; joy and despair intermingle beautifully on every song. The album opens with a wave of inky synth as Rose’s character endlessly runs uphill with no end to her frustration in sight. By contrast, album closer, “Window Place,” a cinematic ballad of piano, synth, and umpteen layers of reverberating vocals, sounds triumphant. She does not overcome her pain, but accepts it as transient, which feels freeing enough. The Caretaker’s fixation on the future and fumbling attempts at self care make it an eerily relevant quarantine listen. This is an album of waiting for things to get better but not knowing exactly how or why they will. At a time when our government has failed us so badly that the best response to a global pandemic is individual action, these songs validate the confusion and anxiety of tackling a colossal burden alone. But as Rose tries to comfort herself with visions of summertime, the Caretaker can ultimately provide some solace that a brighter future will come, and hope in our abilities to care for ourselves, no matter how messy the journey is. | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | April 1, 2020 | 8 | b71629ce-9fee-4a02-9d7a-2b0b8f8632fd | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Priests’ debut expands into a rich diorama of stinging guitar, funk, yearning indie pop, and jazz; there hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself. | Priests’ debut expands into a rich diorama of stinging guitar, funk, yearning indie pop, and jazz; there hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself. | Priests: Nothing Feels Natural | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22740-nothing-feels-natural/ | Nothing Feels Natural | Fire-starting D.C. punks Priests started work on their transcendent debut several years before election day, so don’t blame them if Nothing Feels Natural feels relevant in the extreme at this moment. Since debuting with Tape One five years ago, the four-piece have never stopped shredding through corrupt power hierarchies and attempting to disentangle personal freedom from consumer choice. Across two tapes, a single, and an EP, they’ve used a deranged sort of surf rock to launch lucid, grimly funny exposés of the false binaries and systemic oppressions that built America. This, after all, is the band that screamed, “Barack Obama killed something in me and I’m gonna get him for it.”
As we enter 2017, we’re in danger of tying every faintly despairing new piece of culture to the ascent of America’s Cheeto-in-Chief, as if January 20 flipped a switch that instantly soured all milk. But injustice wasn’t born earlier this month; it just became apparent to many who never had much cause to worry about it before. And the lyrics to Nothing Feels Natural show the existential weight of having spent a lifetime fighting. Priests’ debut has an entirely different energy from their previous releases, expanding into a rich diorama of stinging guitar, funk, yearning indie pop, and jazz. The leap in range and ambition from their 2015 EP Bodies and Control and Money and Power is huge: There hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself.
The title works a few different ways. There’s the obvious what the fuck sensation that accompanies your early morning Twitter scroll these days, and Priests have always done a mean line in sardonic disbelief. There’s less of that on Nothing Feels Natural, though it’s no less potent: “Pink White House” is a hostile cheerleader chant about the illusion of choice, where the disorientation mounts alongside Taylor Mulitz’s spiraling bass. On the boisterously funky “Puff,” Katie Alice Greer sneers at accelerationism—the crackpot academic theory that society hitting rock bottom is good because it will surely engender radical change. And on “JJ,” she balks at how easily we let branding influence the way we construct identity. “I thought I was a cowboy because I smoked Reds,” Greer wails, as surf riffs and battered piano behind her evoke a debauched saloon caper.
Priests have always had a keen eye for fakery and bullshit, though on Nothing Feels Natural, they’re confronting ‘normalcy’, a force far more insidious than artifice, because the partisan values informing it are invisible. “It’s a long movie, a long movie/And you are not you, you are not you,” Greer exhorts on opener “Appropriate.” Adding saxophone, piano and hand percussion to their sound, they change direction from song to song much in the same way that the Clash did with Sandinista!, and commit to every hairpin turn. “Appropriate” hurtles from spiny sloganeering through nihilistic thrash to a condemned doom jazz wasteland, leaving the listener as alienated as Priests feel. The title track brings to mind rain-thrashed British indie pop, and on “Suck,” Priests try their hand at nimble ESG-indebted funk, though Greer’s frustrated pleas expose the dark underbelly of the New Yorkers’ effervescent cool. She had to stop screaming because it was killing her throat. The desperation in her singing voice might be more jarring than her howls.
Priests have always been thrillingly direct, but that hasn’t stopped their words being twisted by publicists who want to profit from them (“You hinge your success on that which you might bleed from me,” Greer sneers on “Nicki”) and guilty parties who interpret their calls for respect as personal attacks (“Please don’t make me be someone with no sympathy,” she pleads on “Suck”). Here, they sound unusually worn down by commodification, a lack of good faith from those around them, and the difficulty of surviving as a punk band: the title Nothing Feels Natural could also signify that the abyss has started to feel like home. We’re told that this is where punk thrives, at the bottom of the barrel—accelerationism, again. Priests reject that idea in the most forceful terms. Led by drummer Daniele Daniele in a relentless, disbelieving sing-speak, the terrifying “No Big Bang” peers into the void of shame and failure that accompanies creativity. On the title track, a depressed Greer satirizes the sacrifices she’d make to feel balanced again. “If I go without for days will I finally hallucinate a real thing?” she pleads. The self becomes a slippery concept: “People are born and dying inside of me all the time,” Greer sings on “Lelia 20.”
When kakistocracy reigns and George Orwell’s 1984 is a bestseller again, you might wonder if now’s the best time for Priests to get introspective. But their insistence on wriggling free from definition and feeling the weight of darkness has roots in resistance. On “Nicki,” which rings with cavernous dread, Greer intones, “I don’t make friends easily or naturally,” sliding over the consonants like an eel escaping grasping hands. Priests’ insistence on mutable identity, and their disinterest in pinning down a 10-point plan to vanquish fascism, let them slip free of those who seek to gentrify, identify, commodify. In a society where it’s becoming increasingly apparent to everyone that your words can and will be used against you, Nothing Feels Natural is a valuable philosophy. | 2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sister Polygon | February 1, 2017 | 8.5 | b71bc708-e569-412f-960c-d158170cc1e7 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The crassly political EP from Andy Gill struggles to capture the power found in the band’s most potent statements. | The crassly political EP from Andy Gill struggles to capture the power found in the band’s most potent statements. | Gang of Four: Complicit EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gang-of-four-complicit-ep/ | Complicit EP | Gang of Four’s 40-year interrogation of complicity has been so thorough, pretty much anything the UK post-punk band has undertaken—signing to EMI, licensing a song to Microsoft, watching their original bassist join the Artist Relations team at Apple Music—became a sort of praxis. You could even view the band’s middling recent years—during which every original member departed save for guitarist Andy Gill—as a meta-narrative about the kind of brand maintenance required by late-stage capitalism. So when Gill came across a clip of presidential daughter Ivanka Trump parrying a CBS interviewer’s question about complicity regarding her father’s white-nationalist policies, how could he not reappropriate it?
Cannily, Gill made his response the centerpiece of the band’s latest project, the rather thin Complicit EP. The brittly funky “Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have)” forswears any legit commentary, settling for that very 21st-century form of discourse: dunking on someone. “Ivanka” feints at inhabiting her headspace, using a quote from the CBS interview (“I don’t know what it means to be complicit”) as a jump-off for some decently snide, but not particularly illuminating barbs. Then, like your Democratic uncle replying to a Chris Hayes tweet, things go off the rails. “In the morning Daddy wants me in his room/It’s where we get together,” winks singer John Sterry, “It’s not true that Daddy calls my name in stormy weather.”
Amazingly, that isn’t the only song on the EP inspired by a television broadcast. Like a Marxist version of Ivanka’s father, Gill has also drawn creative energy from the endless time-fill of cable news. Opening track “Lucky”—the product of Gill watching “six white men in suits arguing about the stock markets”—is a thumping, treble-fuzz indictment of capitalism’s meritocracy myth that lands some glancing blows against its current captain. Gill enlists backing singers to provide the kind of ersatz-funk frisson found on 1982’s Songs of the Free; on the bridge, bassist Thomas McNeice affects some nauseating dubstep wubs. He gets to do some vintage post-punk bell-ringing on “I’m a Liar,” a wind-buffeted slog through our current digital winter. Sterry attempts some prophet-without-honor poignance (“They said I’m a liar/’Cause no one believes when the place is on fire”) before succumbing to the watery vocal processing.
Though the band is planning a full-length follow-up, Complicit doesn’t suggest that we’ll see much of Gang of Four’s particular strengths. In their prime, few acts were better at chronicling the thousands of ways we are induced to sell ourselves—and each other—out. Certainly no one else could make that kind of interrogation sound so crackling and immediate. Complicit, however, is content to thumb its nose at particularly vile actors instead of considering the script they’ve been handed. | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | GO4 Music | April 25, 2018 | 5.7 | b71c07e6-7f33-471e-bf93-a5be189cf97f | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
After another three-year break, Cursive return with a straight shot of melodramatic misery and despair, leavening the shouty intensity with orchestration. | After another three-year break, Cursive return with a straight shot of melodramatic misery and despair, leavening the shouty intensity with orchestration. | Cursive: Mama, I'm Swollen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12818-mama-im-swollen/ | Mama, I'm Swollen | Since the release of their breakthrough album, The Ugly Organ, in 2003, Cursive have taken three-year sabbaticals between recordings. Fans waited until 2006 for Happy Hollow, which showed the quartet developing in leaps and bounds musically while earnestly exploring themes such as the conflict of religion in North American society and the depressing blandness of suburban life. It signaled an enterprising departure for the group, both lyrically and melodically, and seemed to open up abundant possibilities for their future development, as though Cursive could go in any number of directions. So it's a little disappointing that their latest full-length, Mama, I'm Swollen, rarely strays far beyond the most palpable and predictable emo-punk. It's a straight shot of melodramatic misery and despair from beginning to end.
During a tour in 2007, original drummer Clint Schnase left Cursive and was replaced by Cornbread Compton of Engine Down, whose fantastic beats really make their mark on Mama, I'm Swollen. Singer Tim Kasher, also of fellow Saddle Creek band the Good Life, has more than proved his mettle as a lyricist in the past. Here he turns his attention to an obsession with hell, the worthlessness of humanity, and the Peter Pan Syndrome of adults who want to "live life duty free" ("Cavemen") or fuck away their fears ("From the Hips"). Kasher's words, like his vocal delivery, veer from whisper to anguished yowl. At times he is on top form, particularly on "We're Going to Hell" and "Mama, I'm Satan". But lines such as "I'm at my best when I'm at my worst" and "Every record I've written has left me smitten/ It's a career in masturbation" sound like they belong in a teenager's journal and feel somewhat pathetic coming from the mouth of a 34-year-old-- an opinion that Kasher is no doubt slamming throughout the record in his defense of social nonconformity. All the same, it's a bit humdrum in light of what he's capable of.
Musically, Cursive's range is subtler here compared to their previous albums, but there are some satisfying occasions when everything pulls together nicely. Shifting time signatures keep the more straightforward songs from getting dull, and there are plenty of thoughtful guitar hooks interlaced with brass sections, strings, and an intermittent flute. Unfortunately, it's the occasional appearance of these additional instruments that sparks the most excitement while listening to this record. The final song, "What Have I Done", a tale of a man holed up in an El Paso motel scratching lyrics on paper plates instead of writing a great novel, turns out to be the album's most memorable track. It impresses with its swell of electronic ambiance, growling bass, and triumphantly dejected chorus as Kasher keeps screaming "What have I done, what have I done, what have I done!" until he is out of breath.
Considering their devout following, Cursive fans are likely to be divided by Mama, I'm Swollen. There is of course a huge market for their kind of angst-ridden emo, and in many ways-- particularly lyrically-- this album sounds like it's been lifted straight from the emo handbook, which may well satisfy many listeners. For the less committed, however, the lack of the band's usual wit and musical inventiveness will be missed. | 2009-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | March 8, 2009 | 5.2 | b7291181-277d-41e1-9178-3c77ec17c73a | Pitchfork | null |
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Despite Kevin Barnes' role-playing-- he again here inhabits the figurative skin of alter ego Georgie Fruit-- the story on this album is its relentlessly schizophrenic composition, with nearly an hour of song fragments fused into 15 tracks. | Despite Kevin Barnes' role-playing-- he again here inhabits the figurative skin of alter ego Georgie Fruit-- the story on this album is its relentlessly schizophrenic composition, with nearly an hour of song fragments fused into 15 tracks. | Of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12328-skeletal-lamping/ | Skeletal Lamping | If there's any lingering suspicion that alter ego Georgie Fruit was merely an offhand whimsy by Kevin Barnes-- just tongue-in-cheek self-mystification-- Skeletal Lamping will clear things up. Last year's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? was so rich with cathartic pop goodness it's easy to forget Barnes supposedly morphed into a middle-aged African-American transsexual midway through the album. And he hasn't yet changed back. Longtime fans still hoping for a return to The Gay Parade or Cherry Peel days of innocence may want to stop reading, because Skeletal Lamping roofies Hissing Fauna's back half to live out Barnes', er, Georgie's sexual fantasies.
However, the story with Skeletal Lamping isn't Barnes' role playing, but its relentlessly schizophrenic composition. Although broken into 15 tracks, the album seems like nearly an hour of song fragments. The pop hooks are still there, but like the similarly kaleidoscopic material of the Fiery Furnaces or even Girl Talk, Skeletal Lamping can be utterly exhausting, even at its most fun-loving.
The album starts harmlessly with the fractured but hummable one-two punch of "Nonpareil of Favor" and "Wicked Wisdom" before "For Our Elegant Caste"-- which contains one of the most annoying choruses of the year-- kicks off the album's convoluted middle section. Excepting the 90-second Elton John coke crash "Touched Something's Hollow", this middle portion whips the listener through a rollercoaster of orgasms, hangovers, and euphoria, leaving no time in between for a breather. Georgie's funk persona-- he played in a 70s funk band named Arousal apparently-- feels most apropos on the Prince bedroom ballad "St. Exquisite's Confessions", but the laidback tempo doesn't allow Barnes to spew his typical 100 hooks per minute, making the track his most by-the-numbers genre hop.
The brief teases of Barnes' melodic mastery will probably frustrate even more than Lamping's clunkers. Single "Id Engager" closes the album on a surprisingly carefree note, concluding the twisted sexual odyssey with the one song that could've passed prima facie on Hissing Fauna. The stunning chorus on "Plastis Wafers" meanders through disco and cock rock with equal grace, but requires the listener to suffer wandering passages that help push the track over seven minutes. "Wicked Wisdom" finds Georgie not yet a full-blown lothario, and his sympathetic naiveté, whether lamenting his struggles to connect with girls or flaunting his puppy love, is reinforced by gumball hooks ranging from power-pop to psychedelic melodrama.
Ultimately Skeletal Lamping registers as a misstep, but not without loads of silver lining. For one, Kevin Barnes has established himself as the anti-Christ to the polite, erudite indie world, and for all this album's shortcomings, it's a breath of fresh air for those bored by ivory tower indie rock. For that matter, with an overblown live show replete with costume changes, skits, video screens, etc., Of Montreal's hardly pretending to be an album-oriented act anymore, making Lamping feel like a soundtrack to a much more interesting movie. Coming off his magnum opus, it's understandable Barnes takes a victory lap here, but his mad genius-- no matter how outwardly freewheeling and escapist-- sounds better wrung through some semblance of a conventional pop filter. | 2008-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | October 21, 2008 | 5.9 | b7311384-21d5-419f-aa92-2ab9c6628f17 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
Best known as veterans of the beloved, defunct L.A. punk band Mika Miko, Jennifer and Jessica Clavin's new Shangri-Las-inspired project has the incisive, live-feeling production that their alma mater needed, but never quite had on record. | Best known as veterans of the beloved, defunct L.A. punk band Mika Miko, Jennifer and Jessica Clavin's new Shangri-Las-inspired project has the incisive, live-feeling production that their alma mater needed, but never quite had on record. | Bleached: Ride Your Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17826-bleached-ride-your-heart/ | Ride Your Heart | "It's a song about being in love but also being independent," Jennifer Clavin said of "Next Stop", the rollicking single from L.A. garage rockers Bleached's debut LP Ride Your Heart. Like Bleached's sound, the video pays homage to the retro cool of the Shangri-Las (motorcycles, leather jackets, ponytails), but it also mines the tension of that thematic split-screen Clavin mentions. It cuts between Jennifer, lounging around with her guy and joyriding on the back of his motorcycle, and bassist Jessica, causing all sorts of trouble at a party with her friends. Bleached aren't presenting romantic love and roguish independence as two mutually exclusive entities: In the video, both of them seem perfectly happy. But they communicate this same message more viscerally in the sound of their music, where sweet, manicured melodies and and pummeling, dirt-under-the-nails punk energy collide. It's one of the more commanding revisionist takes on the 60s girl group sound to come along in a minute.
The Clavins are best known as veterans of the beloved, now-defunct L.A. punk band Mika Miko, where they both cut more colorful figures than they do in Bleached: Jessica set the pace for the band's manic, pogoing, sped-up surf-rock rhythm section, while Jennifer's (better known then by her Dracula-esque stage name, Victor Fandgore) signature move was singing (though more often, screaming) into a rotary telephone rigged up like a mic. Three years after their break-up, Mika Miko's legend is established yet ephemeral; like so many underground heroes, they never made a record that quite captured the caterwauling craziness of their live show. Not that they cared: "I think we come off better live than we do recorded," Jessica said in a 2009 interview, "It's better to have that impact as a live band though, isn't it?" The rest of the band nodded in agreement.
It's kind of ironic, then, that Ride Your Heart succeeds precisely where the final Mika Miko album-- the spirited but thin-sounding We Be Xuxa-- failed: it manages to capture some of the infectious energy of the Clavins' live show. The difference is all in the production: Ride Your Heart is lush but still maintains a certain loose, inviting sloppiness, which suits the more upbeat songs particularly well. Opener "Looking For a Fight" lurches forward with a grumbling, belligerent swagger, while Jennifer's whiplashed howl on "Next Stop" ("Until next tiiiiiime") makes the song feel like an adrenaline rush: It sounds like she's shouting the whole thing out of a convertible as it zips around a tight corner. Jennifer's vocals sound comparatively stiff and uninspired on "Dreaming Without You" (she doesn't find much emotion in the repeated refrain "Baby, don't cry/ Baby, don't cry"), but the stomping percussion and guitar solo (which sounds straight out of a Flamin' Groovies track and cuts through like a beam of California sunshine) shakes the song out of its stupor.
Not every song on Ride Your Heart is so lucky. Bleached's songcraft often feels bland and unimaginative, relying on familiar, pop-worn imagery ("Waiting by the Telephone") and generic declarations of love. (The inert "Outta My Mind" doesn't move far beyond its girl-group-revival-by-numbers hook, "Get out of my mind, boy/ You know I think about you all of the time.") Though there's an electric current coursing through Ride Your Heart, it's too often wasted on mundane material-- which is especially disappointing given how zany and lyrically imaginative their previous band was. Hopefully more of that signature flair will creep into future Bleached releases: It's hard to be content with them waiting by the telephone when we've seen them scream into it. | 2013-04-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-04-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | April 1, 2013 | 6.6 | b733b7bc-7b60-4b98-80fb-ef1cbc1edf5f | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Australian improv trio the Necks have condensed their approach on this new double LP for Stephen O’Malley’s label. The experience feels like a ceaseless fever dream. | Australian improv trio the Necks have condensed their approach on this new double LP for Stephen O’Malley’s label. The experience feels like a ceaseless fever dream. | The Necks: Unfold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22861-unfold/ | Unfold | The Necks have never been much for tracklists. With some early and not always impressive exceptions near the dawn of the group’s almost three-decade career, the improvisational Australian trio has preferred to go the distance in one, perhaps two extended takes. For an hour or so at a time, restless drummer Tony Buck, patient bassist Lloyd Swanton, and soulful pianist and organist Chris Abrahams would slip into sound worlds of their own design and slowly morph, as if on an evolutionary timeline. Their best records, like 2001’s essential Aether or 2013’s consummate Open, gradually subside and swell, drive and drift. By stretching pieces past the hour mark, they could change one’s very sense of dynamics, where tiny shifts in volume or tone or speed suddenly felt revelatory. With the Necks, it seemed, anything could happen if you listened long enough.
But that approach ends abruptly on Unfold, the Necks’ 19th album and first for Ideologic Organ, the label of fellow slow-motion traveler Stephen O’Malley, of Sunn O))) fame. For this double LP, the Necks devote each of four sides to one improvisation. With runtimes between 15 and 22 minutes, they’ve chopped the typical Necks tune into thirds or quarters. What’s more, there’s no intended sequence for these sides, meaning you could start with the hectic, gamelan-like rumble of “Timepiece” or end there, a move that makes the entire experience feel like a ceaseless fever dream. It’s a surprisingly indeterminate decision for a group whose output has always felt, no matter how improvisational it was, meticulous, even hermetic. Since the mid-’90s, the Necks’ records have invariably offered micromanaged adventure; with Unfold, they let you shape your own tale by giving you tracks without a tracklist.
Still, all of the Necks hallmarks appear at some point during Unfold—hyperactive drumming that expands and contracts any real sense of meter; piano lines that can summon a storm or conjure a presiding calm; bowed bass that rattles the room*.* And though the Necks look like a jazz trio, their swing is tempestuous and their approach nebulous, with touches of post-rock and soul and Stockhausen and gospel wrapped into their orchestrated mess.
But Unfold’s unconventional format forces the Necks to condense its typical approach, to push and pull all the usual peaks, valleys, and arcs into more manageable spans. Everything speeds up just a bit. With that, by the end of the first two minutes of “Blue Mountain,” the bass, drums, piano, and organ are already intertwined and active. Buck’s distended drum rolls ricochet between layers of blue piano fragments and organ peals. And during the tumultuous “Rise,” which is so disorienting that the trio seems to be playing both meter and melody inside-out, the requisite moments of calm are fleeting. Here, the Necks make you gasp for air, never allowing for time or space to breathe very deeply.
Splintering the usual runtime of a Necks album into four largely disconnected pieces seems like it would fragment the experience—that is, turning a Necks record on, then disappearing inside it. Is Unfold the trio’s first album for our ever-shortening attention spans, at least since their salad days of placid bop in the late ’80s?
Turns out, not at all: The Necks’ newfound density is intoxicating. The ideas fly by in a way they never have with this band. Each compressed piece simply pushes you along to the next, eager to witness how a quarter-century-old act can again reshape your perception of drums, piano, and upright bass. After the Necks answer the psychedelic, wildly melismatic organ runs of “Overhear” with the pensive, clinched gaze of “Blue Mountain,” hearing what else is possible becomes a compulsion. (And if you’re new here, the quest can and should send you deep into a rich back catalog.) The relatively succinct tracks of Unfold aren’t some cynical concession to an audience’s fractured attention span or some attempt to become suddenly accessible. They are, instead, the result of a band that’s always tested supposedly solid borders—between jazz and rock, between acoustic and electric, between composition and improvisation. On Unfold, they’ve wondered aloud if the spell of their long-form magic works when stunted by the limitations of physical media and shuffled by the will of the listener. It does. | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Ideologic Organ | February 18, 2017 | 8 | b74a4f53-3695-47a0-88d6-01a1d8eac7f2 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Densely packed and deeply sincere, the latest chapter of David Bazan’s musical memoir project spans a decade of life, from eighth grade into his early 20s. | Densely packed and deeply sincere, the latest chapter of David Bazan’s musical memoir project spans a decade of life, from eighth grade into his early 20s. | Pedro the Lion: Santa Cruz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pedro-the-lion-santa-cruz/ | Santa Cruz | The first song on Santa Cruz, the seventh full-length album from Seattle’s Pedro the Lion, paraphrases no fewer than four separate Bible verses. More to the point, singer-songwriter David Bazan speaks in the kind of idioms that anyone who’s attended a Wednesday night youth group or summer church camp could instantly clock. Bazan repeats the lines, “If I make myself friendly/Put others’ needs before my own/Don’t let my heart be hardened,” then ends “It’ll All Work Out” with one load-bearing word: “Lord.” If the hymnal lyrics, somber synth notes, and slow-boiling discordance hadn’t fully illustrated his cry of prayer, the picture is complete now.
This has been Bazan’s superpower from the start. He speaks to specific experiences with the requisite references, yet he doesn’t alienate the uninitiated. The Conflicted Christian, the Struggling Addict, the Anti-Corporatist, the Angry Ex, the Disillusioned American—all complex viewpoints vividly inhabited across Pedro the Lion’s discography. But since the band’s return from a 15-year hiatus in 2019, Bazan has narrowed his framing devices. Phoenix triumphantly kicked off a planned five-album arc, pairing big, resonant guitar chords with stories of formative years spent in the titular hometown. Three years later, Havasu relaxed its grip on rock theatrics to gently explore the thrills and contradictions of being a lonely, God-fearing seventh grader. With Santa Cruz, Bazan brings the theme of life as the preacher’s kid whose family moved around a lot into tighter focus.
In just over a half hour, Santa Cruz spans a decade of Bazan’s life—from eighth grade into his early 20s, and the four cities he called home during that time. The songs cover an impressive amount of ground in painstaking detail, often within just a few minutes. The title track never drops its mid-tempo pulse as Bazan breathlessly recounts his embarrassing junior high backpack, C.S. Lewis novels, and how he can’t wait to get married and have sex. He’s never sounded so much like Mark Kozelek in his delivery, especially when the glut of stanzas forces him to cram in a line off-rhythm. “Teacher’s Pet” jumps from story to unfortunate story while fleshing out a bristly ode to teenage rebellion and learning through failure. The overtly Beatles-inspired “Little Help” shares how befriending a kid from church and discovering the White Album gave him confidence among the California beach town’s surfers and skaters.
Santa Cruz is packed with memories, musings, and personality, like a well-used diary covered in old stickers. But where the lyrics and themes are consistently charming, the music isn’t always. Bazan frequently uses synths in the arrangements, and their presence in some of the best songs is refreshing: Downcast and dejected, “Don’t Cry Now” revolves around a chunky arpeggio that—somewhat incredibly—sounds lifted from an old Junior Boys single. The bobbing keys and quiet guitar on album standout “Tall Pines,” at first so contained, burst to envelop Bazan’s unflinchingly measured delivery like a sudden fog. “Parting,” however, is about as middling and generic as Pedro the Lion’s indie rock gets—unfortunate given its moving story of a high school senior whose parents move once again, leaving him to finish the year in Seattle. At least when the music is less than compelling, there’s always an affecting story to follow. | 2024-06-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 17, 2024 | 7.3 | b7561676-ede5-44e9-a102-6e79b9e4459a | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
The bohemian Detroit rapper’s latest collaboration with producer Chris Keys feels as blissful as a beer buzz on a hot summer afternoon. | The bohemian Detroit rapper’s latest collaboration with producer Chris Keys feels as blissful as a beer buzz on a hot summer afternoon. | Quelle Chris / Chris Keys: Innocent Country 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quelle-chris-innocent-country-2/ | Innocent Country 2 | You’ll never catch Quelle Chris doing what’s expected of him. The bohemian Detroit rapper-producer hit new levels of excellence on both the Jean Grae joint project Everything’s Fine, and Guns, his meditation on American violence. On the back of those wins, a sequel to Innocent Country—the 2015 collaboration with producer Chris Keys—seemed as unlikely as it was unnecessary. Take it from Quelle Chris himself, who when ranking his projects back in 2017 for Vice, placed the record fourth on a six-album list. But the pair enjoy the relationship of two old buddies naturally cozy in each other’s presence. “I think at that time I would be at Chris’s spot in Oakland and we’d just smoke, chill, watch random shit, get food, listen to some music, make some beats, write songs, repeat,” Quelle told Vice.
On the sequel, the pair recaptures this easy chemistry, serving up a set as blissful as a buzzed-on-beer snooze on a hot summer afternoon. Keys’ soft piano, organ keys, and light rat-tat-tat drums call on the soulful spirit of old Minnie Riperton instrumentals, and the melancholic jazz of “Black Twitter” could pass for an old Bob James cut. It’s fair to say the lack of tension can feel like the album’s weakness—Innocent Country 2 could use something like “Wild Minks,” Chris’s team-up with Mach-Hommy from Guns, to break up the good vibes—but Keys’ beats stay as perfect a fit for Quelle as his high-peaked baseball caps, helping the album’s lengthy running time to breeze by.
Whenever Innocent Country 2 threatens to fade into a pleasant blur, guests help pick up the pace. Homeboy Sandman storms onto “Sacred Safe,” raging that “Every single person on Earth irks me,” while the churchly sounds of “Mirage” might be the brightest beat Earl Sweatshirt has rapped over in ages. Other appearances are less expected. Merrill Garbus appears on three songs, the best of which, “Graphic Bleed Outs,” shows the Tune-Yards singer scale down her usually powerful voice to line up with Keys’ dreamy flutes while she asserts that a lover has slashed at her spirit like a cold blade piercing her lungs. The counterbalance of gore and tranquility is jarring, but if there’s one thing you need to enter Quelle Chris’s world, it’s a mind open enough to reject conventional logic.
It’s Chris, finally, who anchors the project. Unlike Guns, his goals here are modest but fully realized. He can swing from wry one-liners to guy-in-bar observations; he can offer goofy jokes or cutting narratives. “Living Happy” investigates the idea of crossing to the other side; in a delivery that sounds more traveling preacher than rapper, Chris envisions his own death: “Couldn’t find the energy to fight the call of the tunnel’s light,” he asserts before describing the angels on the other side.
The warped and winsome grand pianos of “Sudden Death” honor the flaws of life: “It’s not for certain, but life ain’t perfect,” sings Chris, his voice squeaky and whimsical. Not allowing the pursuit of perfection get in the way of the celebration is a fine microcosm for Quelle Chris, who never lets kinks in his grand plan stop him. There is a fine logic to everything he does, even if it’s apparent only to him; returning to his Innocent Country franchise and outstripping the original just asserts that he always gives you something, even if it’s never what you expect.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | April 24, 2020 | 7.3 | b757f1d3-a8b0-4d95-8bf7-dd97ff51ebbe | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Lucrecia Dalt’s sixth album is a marvelous exploration of mercurial ambient music whose aesthetic is so singular, it feels like she dreamed it into being. | Lucrecia Dalt’s sixth album is a marvelous exploration of mercurial ambient music whose aesthetic is so singular, it feels like she dreamed it into being. | Lucrecia Dalt: Anticlines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucrecia-dalt-anticlines/ | Anticlines | Over the past decade, the albums of Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt have moved steadily away from playfully experimental indie pop into increasingly deeper levels of abstraction. There was a marked shift between 2009’s tuneful Congost—released under a previous alias, the Sound of Lucrecia—and 2012’s murkier Commotus, whose abiding sense of mystery recalled Argentina’s Juana Molina. By 2013’s more electronic Syzygy, her songwriting began to feel like it was tracing the shape of overgrown ruins; melodies jutted to the surface only to be subsumed again in drifting synths and thickets of reverb.
On Anticlines, her sixth album, the former geotechnical engineer’s metamorphosis is complete. Anticlines takes the scraped drones and ethereal tone clusters of 2015’s Ou and distills them into cryptic miniatures reminiscent of the spectral frequencies summoned decades ago by Daphne Oram, of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The palette is suggestive of rubbed wineglass rims, faraway theremins, fields of crickets; it is punctuated by small, dissonant explosions of what might be guitar or a plaintive pump organ. Silence yawns: “Concentric Nothings” is fashioned out of what sounds like a quarter spinning to rest on the floor of a vast, empty chamber, while “Axis Excess” isolates a sound that could be stalactites dripping. The beats, when they occur, are slow, metallic pulses loosely rooted in coldwave and industrial music, though that link feels more like an accidental byproduct of her electronic tools than anything she might have intended. Nothing about Anticlines could be construed as a genre exercise. Quite the opposite: The album’s aesthetic is so singular that it feels like something she has dreamed into being.
Anticlines would be fascinating enough had she left it at that: an exploration of strange, mercurial ambient music with a mind of its own. But what makes this a truly special record is its vocal dimension. A world away from her singing style on previous albums, Dalt’s performance here combines captivating spoken-word passages with subtle vocal processing that sounds like the product of a chromed larynx. Just six of the album’s 14 tracks foreground vocals, but they comprise the record’s emotional and conceptual core. Her lyrics draw upon the language of geoscience and quantum physics—“Glass Brain” nods to the Boltzmann brain paradox, the theory that the universe might be a self-aware system—to unpack metaphysical questions about the nature of being. Those queries double as ruminations on the poetics of boundaries and the limits of communication itself. “Could it be found in errors of skin/Could it be found in gardens of dust,” she asks in “Errors of Skin,” seeking the secret of existence in a concatenation of things (“masses of big,” “leanings of self,” “multiples of stupor”) whose curious grammar suggests the divine hand of an artificial intelligence.
On the opening “Edge,” she speaks from the perspective of el Boraro, a mythological beast said to suck out his victims’ insides and then, blowing through a hole he has pierced in the tops of their skulls, fill them full of air and send them on their way. There’s so much going on here that it’s almost dizzying. There’s the clinical nature of her musing, which is something like the opposite of body horror (“What does the body want except to pass blood through tiny vessels and keep the whole shape intact?”). There’s the unmistakably erotic tenor of the way she enters her interlocutor, pressing against “the inside of your navel, the slippery side of your throat.” And then there’s the sound of her voice itself: a strange, zig-zagging sing-song at once reassuring and unsettling.
There are hints of Laurie Anderson’s incantatory style in her measured tone, but Dalt’s diction is unique. Rushing and slowing unexpectedly, her voice moves like eddying floodwaters seeking a vacuum to fill. In the background, hard-panned clusters of tones sound more like pools of light than notes; a high whine could be air escaping from a leak. The album’s title refers to a kind of geological formation, but Anticlines has more in keeping with the properties of matter as it shifts from liquid to gas and back: It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land. | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | May 4, 2018 | 8 | b7596689-60db-4fb8-a84c-52bb63dd3791 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Drawing as much from punk as roadhouse blues, Lucinda Williams’ loud and unsparing new album is some of the heaviest, most inspiring music of her career. | Drawing as much from punk as roadhouse blues, Lucinda Williams’ loud and unsparing new album is some of the heaviest, most inspiring music of her career. | Lucinda Williams: Good Souls Better Angels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucinda-williams-good-souls-better-angels/ | Good Souls Better Angels | Good Souls Better Angels rises from the darkest corners of Lucinda Williams’ world: down desert roads, in a barren country, through the windows of homes and churches that don’t offer the sanctuary they promise. These 12 songs are tough and haunted, built on simple blues progressions that twist and pull until they fray. Williams recorded the album in Nashville with her touring band, Buick 6, in concentrated bursts, live in the studio. While her recent records have used their sprawl to navigate a wide array of styles and moods, she now finds a range that pulls her into focus. It is roots music, bursting from the ground, changing form in the light of day.
The album arrives after two moments of retrospection for the outlaw country legend: 2017’s re-recorded version of her 1992 album Sweet Old World and 2018’s anniversary tour behind 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Inspired by the latter experience, Williams enlisted a collaborator from that classic record, Ray Kennedy, to co-produce. He joins Williams and her husband, manager, and songwriting partner Tom Overby for an album that collects some of her saddest music along with some of her heaviest and most inspiring. “Let’s break the rules,” Williams said upon launching her own label in 2014 after decades of being misunderstood and mistreated within the music industry. “We can do what we want to do now.” Good Souls follows through.
From the beginning, Williams seemed to exist between genres: too rock for country, too country for rock. She had an ethos aligned with punk but she could also write catchy anthems that became radio hits for acts like Mary Chapin Carpenter. At 67, Williams now has a voice that can make anything she sings sound like a genre unto itself: It is a raspy plume of exhaust, highlighting the shapes of her words as much as their hard meanings. She spent the first decade of the 2000s hardening her delivery into a bluesy speak-sing and the second decade leaning into more varied, psychedelic settings. On Good Souls, she finds an edgy growl that can sound tender or enraged, enlightened or possessed, all within a single couplet. In the opening track, “You Can’t Rule Me,” she lists the things that cannot be taken from her—her soul, her money, her point of view. As she counts them off, she seems to take spiritual inventory, meditating on the desperate fight for each one.
Over this gnarled, electric music, Williams writes in stark, chantlike verse. “Wakin’ Up” is a harrowing portrait of a woman escaping from—or dissociating during—an abusive relationship. Its visceral tug is carried by a vocal delivery like she’s spitting each word from under her tongue. That song finds a spiritual contrast in the serene, breathtaking “Big Black Train.” It’s a soulful ballad carried by a slow pulse—echoing electric guitars, a lapping rhythm section—as Williams narrates from the throes of depression, her voice alternately breaking and soaring. “I don’t wanna get on board,” she sings as the music shows how easy it might be to disappear.
Williams weaves these intimate scenes through other songs that take political aim. As with all her best love songs and travelogues, she sounds more interested in dissecting the heartbreak of modern life than simply railing against it. The righteous “Man Without a Soul” is a protest song full of patience and nuance that culminates with the deepest cut imaginable from Williams’ pen: “You bring nothing good to this world,” she seethes. Above all else, she judges people by the mark we leave behind, the afterlife we build for ourselves.
Without the cinematic detail or rich scenery that once defined her work, Williams draws on the lessons of her years. On the title track of her last solo album, 2016’s The Ghosts of Highway 20, she gestured toward, “Southern secrets still buried deep/Brooding and restless ’neath the cracked concrete.” In these songs, she pulls us down with her, where we can feel the gravel and see for ourselves. Like “Drunken Angel,” her signature ode to the late folk singer Blaze Foley, the gentle “Shadows & Doubts” addresses a tortured, self-destructive figure who might be beyond help: “So many ways/To crush you,” she sings in the chorus with a bleak sense of inevitability. And yet, nearly every one of these songs searches for a way out, a crack of light. “I’m gonna pray the devil back to hell,” she sings. Her guitar rattles and her voice shakes, and suddenly it sounds like an actual, physical battle.
“It’s on the top of everybody’s minds—it’s all anybody talks about,” Williams wrote earlier this year. “Basically, the world’s falling apart.” In her characteristic no-bullshit manner, she was describing the inspiration for these apocalyptic songs and forecasting the landscape she would release them into. Like all the writers she admires, from Bob Dylan to Flannery O’Connor, Williams will always be drawn to capturing the essence of the times she lives in: “All I can do is write about my feelings and the world’s feelings,” she explained. Suspending and swelling for seven-and-a-half minutes, the dreamlike closing track, “Good Souls,” sounds like her version of a prayer: “Help me stay fearless,” she sings. “Help me stay strong.” By the end, the music fades into a kind of sketch, an atmospheric waltz cycling between just two chords, the band leaning forward and waiting for her signal to close. But she keeps on singing; she’s on nobody’s time but her own.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Highway 20 / Thirty Tigers | April 28, 2020 | 8 | b75ca3d5-438d-40d7-8468-1c740542f8a9 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Yūgen is a five-track EP for Young Turks that forms the most significant Koreless release to date, a weightless record that finds Lewis Roberts exploring feelings of loss, hope, and unease. | Yūgen is a five-track EP for Young Turks that forms the most significant Koreless release to date, a weightless record that finds Lewis Roberts exploring feelings of loss, hope, and unease. | Koreless: Yugen EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18080-koreless-yugen-ep/ | Yugen EP | There was once a sense of momentum to the music made by Lewis Roberts, the Glasgow-based producer who records under the name Koreless. "Up Down Up Down" from 2009 matched elegant patterns to a skittering beat, delivered via a YouTube clip depicting traffic pouring in and out of a city. Now, some four years later, Roberts is all about suspending figures in time, chopping out the forward thrust altogether. The basic elements were already in place-- cut the beats from "Up Down Up Down" and the track wouldn't sound out of place on Yūgen, a five-track EP for Young Turks that forms the most significant Koreless release to date. But this isn't simply a case of Roberts figuring out where he can go by muting the drum tracks on his sequencer. There's a whole world of thought in Yūgen, a creeping sense that its weightlessness was only arrived at after long hours of procrastination.
Roberts discussed how his music is positioned far from anything that could be described as
"real" in a recent Rising feature, emphasizing his love of artifice and rigidity. There's no looseness here, no feeling of him trying to overmatch the binary code scrolling down his screen. Instead, there's a sense of parity between man and machine, of Roberts respecting the framing devices his artificial working partner puts around his output. There's a feeling not dissimilar to the one Kraftwerk found on "Computer Love", where a tender synthesis of human emotions and mechanics are set in motion. At its best, on a track like the stuttering closer "Never", this EP resembles something like dialect between Roberts and his computer, getting close to Isaac Asimov's concept of a study of the personalities of intelligent machines. It makes even more sense when you learn that Roberts is a committed sci-fi fan.
If the goal of Yūgen is to remove the everyday from the equation, it only partly succeeds. But this isn't necessarily a failing of the piece; far from it. In fact, the sense of human emotion that bleeds into each track is what makes it so inviting. It shifts through feelings of loss, hope, and unease, with Roberts often fudging the sound to take it to the brink of malfunction. At times it's reminiscent of a clear-eyed take on the experiments Daniel Lopatin has uploaded to YouTube under his SunsetCorp moniker, especially when he splices the vocal sample on "Ivana" across acres of chimerical synths. It's a very visual record, reflecting the way the Haxan Cloak's Excavation conjured up images of a painfully laborious stumble through the afterlife. But Yūgen is more future dystopia than hellish fantasia. "Sun" is all glassy skyscrapers crashing into a purple sea, ripped straight from the cover of a pulpy mid-century science fiction novel.
While lost in Yūgen's world, it is useful to think back at how the Koreless sound has evolved; the earlier "4D" had traces of a soulful vocal, something Roberts would surely balk at now. His remix work for Foals seems even more incongruous, but presumably the paycheck makes up for it. Still, even in those pieces you can hear him slowly beginning to erase the world from his work. Yūgen is likely to feel similarly transitory to those early releases. This feels like a beginning, a place that Roberts has worked toward that isn't necessarily going to be where he's going to land. In the Rising feature he talks of more rules, more restrictions, getting to a point where "I don't get any input into it," as he puts it. That thought echoes common considerations about true artificial intelligence, something that feels potentially terrifying and revelatory, but leaves the future tantalizingly wide open. | 2013-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Turks | June 11, 2013 | 7.4 | b75db1e5-d654-4412-80de-1f938cd6805e | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The amazingly explicit Chicago rapper has begun to embody the totality of her experience on record. Social issues, violence, and wild sex are all approached with the same fiery conviction. | The amazingly explicit Chicago rapper has begun to embody the totality of her experience on record. Social issues, violence, and wild sex are all approached with the same fiery conviction. | CupcakKe: Queen Elizabitch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23173-queen-elizabitch/ | Queen Elizabitch | The opening track of Queen Elizabitch is a scathing onslaught set to disquieting keys and decaying synths as CupcakKe reveals herself as a rapper to be taken seriously alongside songs like “Best Dick Sucker” and “Deepthroat.” She’s the artist that tweets things like “I’m spring cleaning out this pussy” on a Saturday morning and affectionately refers to her fanbase as “slurpers,” but album opener “Scraps” sets a different tone.
She offers a critique on the poverty that marked her upbringing and the crime that came with it, deadbeat fathers (including her own) and the judgmental eyes that pathologize these experiences. This is far from the version of the now 19-year-old that honored her vagina and favorite pastime—“Juggle them balls in my mouth, deep throat circus”—but it remains the most compelling. Born Elizabeth Harris and raised on Chicago’s South Side, CupcakKe attended the same elementary school as Chief Keef and is a musical byproduct of the drill style he helped popularize. Her raps are underscored by the fearless resolve shared by her scene peers, but her versatility in sound and subject adds another weapon to her arsenal.
Like the three albums that preceded it, Queen Elizabitch juxtaposes reality rhymes with the comically obscene. CupcakKe commits fully to her angles, attacking sex, social issues, and violence with the same level of conviction. She sounds no less authentic when she asks, “Can I measure it with a ruler, papi chula/Hit a split on that dick in the back of the Uber” on lead single “Cumshot” than she does on “Tarzan,” one of the album’s few true-to-form drill records, when she raps “Niggas came after me, I took they salary/Pull out the chopper then test out the accuracy.”
Her willingness to embody the totality of her experience on record, to resist the urge to commit fully to only one part of her identity at the expense of others, feels defiant and brave in an industry that tries to shrink artists into marketable boxes. The whimsical moaning on ode to oral “CPR” does an abrupt 180 into “Author,” a combative diatribe depicting the aggravation of trying to trust a man she believes is cheating. The album seesaws often in this manner, but the presentation is both honest and necessary: Women can, at once, be shameless and vulnerable, sexy and brilliant—the former doesn’t cheapen the latter.
In just forty minutes, Queen Elizabitch finds every corner in CupcakKe’s mind. On the jungle-like trance of “Biggie Smalls,” she tackles traditional beauty standards and eating disorders through the lens of body positivity, reassuring her fans that “big or small, I love you all.” She showcases a level of pop sensibility on songs like the effervescent victory lap “33rd,” but that potential is further revealed outside of this album on a spotlight feature on Charli XCX’s cascading “Lipgloss.” Their contrasting voices—Charli’s in cutesy animation, CupcakKe’s passionate and fiery—work well, perhaps foreshadowing a future where CupcakKe embraces more features on her own work. For now, she stands alone.
The album closes the way she started it: somber and introspective. “Reality, Pt. 4,” is an a capella confessional and a continuation of the respective tracks from 2016’s S.T.D. and Cum Cake. It’s a reminder that this party didn’t come without a cost, that CupcakKe herself is nothing short of a miracle. She emerged from some of the worst life can offer with an extraordinary sense of humor and music that makes the case for subversion by magnification. She turns any semblance of respectability politics inside out, walking in a truth, exaggerated or not, that she’s earned the right to tell. But assigning buzzwords like “sex positive” or “body positive” is to miss the point. While she is certainly all of those things, her mere existence in rap and as a whole is resistance, and CupcakKe is mostly just doing whatever the hell she wants. If she just so happens to shift a dominant paradigm or two, well, we’re all the better for it. | 2017-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 14, 2017 | 7.6 | b761e038-3c7e-42ab-a9aa-88be620ec5f4 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
DJ Quik's new album is sharper and more brittle-sounding than his last album, 2011's The Book of David. The Midnight Life is a reminder that 25 years into Quik's career, he is still discovering how two or three sounds can make you momentarily forget how rap songs usually go, the directions they head in. | DJ Quik's new album is sharper and more brittle-sounding than his last album, 2011's The Book of David. The Midnight Life is a reminder that 25 years into Quik's career, he is still discovering how two or three sounds can make you momentarily forget how rap songs usually go, the directions they head in. | DJ Quik: The Midnight Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19930-dj-quik-the-midnight-life/ | The Midnight Life | The sun is always shining in DJ Quik's music. You can hear it in his light, affable voice, the bright and exuberant sounds he surrounds it with. But death and rot and despair are always nearby. Estranged family members stalk his lyrics, threatening to bring chaos. He flirts with bitterness and jaundice—"Anything I do in music is never celebrated," he laments on "Pet Sematary," from his new album The Midnight Life—but he backs away carefully, with a chuckle. This peculiar brand of pathos, a mixture of the antic and the mournful, should have its own word—"Quikenfreude," maybe.
And The Midnight Life is rich in Quikenfreude. The album opens with a goofy, self-deprecating skit in which some reverent young rappers ask Quik what the rap game needs, and he responds, to their bewilderment, "a banjo." It's a little joke about the West Coast pioneer's career-long preference for obscure, unfashionable sounds and instruments, and he dials up a banjo sound on the first full song to underline the point. Against this playful backdrop, though, he unleashes a torrent of bile and resentment, lashing out against men, women, fans, and enemies alike. "You're lucky my security don't want it to pop/ They looking out for you bastards, if it was me you'd be shot," he warns. The picture he paints of himself—alone, ridiculed and envied by locals, and preyed upon relentlessly by close friends and associates—is bleak.
The Midnight Life is accordingly sharper and more brittle-sounding than The Book of David from 2011, which glowed with warm horns and jazz piano. But the enlivening Quik touch is everywhere: 25 years into his career, he is still discovering how 2 or 3 sounds can make you momentarily forget how rap songs usually go, the directions they head in. "Trapped On The Tracks" begins like his version of hyphy before rewinding and fast-forwarding itself into something much stranger and unclassifiable. "Shine" is one long loop of piano that keeps doubling back on itself, as if the track is gasping, while warped bells chime like bowed cymbals dipped in water. Even the straightforward rap/R&B hybrids have something startling going on in them.
His records are also increasingly beautiful in his late career, matching pristine clarity with palpable warmth. He loves session musicians, and keeps a small army of them in business— including guitarist Robert "Fonksta" Bacon, whose clipped rhythm guitar murmurs from every corner and who gets his own interlude to stretch out. On "El's Interlude 2", bongos start playing, and they are simply the most gorgeously recorded bongos you've ever heard in your life. This might sound insanely trivial, but really—you need to hear them. You can hear the thumb callouses.
These little moments are far from trivial for Quik's music--they comprise its essence. To hear the loving way he treats synths and keys, letting them blur into a composite glimmer, on "Pet Sematary", is to appreciate what lifelong love, diligently applied, sounds like. Few rap producers have communicated as much visceral joy in the craft of record-making as Quik."And when I play this guitar, it's gonna make my dick hard," he crows on "Life Jacket", and it might be the most quintessentially Quik line ever.
He's claimed this is his most carefree, unencumbered record, but if that's true, free time only makes him fiercer. "I got niggas in my hood that can't even buy gold/ But swearin' up and down they ballin out of control/ You niggas is fakin, acting like they got cocaine bakin/ With a fuckin' day job at the train station," he sneers on "Pet Sematary". Enough? No, not quite, as he adds, "And they gotta apply every year for that job." Nothing summons eloquence from Quik quite like scorn. "Produce Whitney and Janet!/ Oh, you can't." Can you shut someone down faster than that?
Quik has been complicit in downplaying his own rapping occasionally—"I almost talk; I don't even rap," he observed to Complex—but he's criminally under-appreciated as a lyricist,and might be the best and most original of his generation of producer/rappers. On "The Conduct", he's on his "Third passport, poppin Ambien on international flights." He pulls the top back on his car on "Puffin Tha Dragon" to "Let the raindrops kiss me on my angelic face." He's poetic; he's hilarious; he's catchy; he's poignant. "I'm a geek I suppose/ I'm a freak I suppose/ I'm whatever you want me to be this week I suppose," he offers slyly on "That Getter". He's the tortoise and the hare, impossible to pin down and sure to outlast us all. | 2014-10-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mad Science | October 17, 2014 | 8.2 | b76ae121-5c54-47c2-b8a6-01d191cc8325 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
After perfecting anthemic dancefloor fantasies with fine-tuned tracks like “Yoohoo,” Dusky offer a sentimentalist hodge-podge designed to prove that their mettle extends beyond the dancefloor. | After perfecting anthemic dancefloor fantasies with fine-tuned tracks like “Yoohoo,” Dusky offer a sentimentalist hodge-podge designed to prove that their mettle extends beyond the dancefloor. | Dusky: Outer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22411-outer/ | Outer | In the UK, they’ve gotten dance music down to an exact science. Just listen to an artist like Duke Dumont or Disclosure: From the methodical arrangements to the meticulous sound design, every element is perfectly deployed to ensure maximum dancefloor impact and maximum earworm potential. The decade’s reigning blend of pop melodies and ’90s house tropes is lush, polished, and it sounds expensive—which is ironic for a decade in which the music industry has cratered and actual nightclubs are increasingly gentrified out of business. Still, fantasy is a hell of a drug.
Dusky haven’t had the chart success of Disclosure or Dumont, but they represent a similar impulse. Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman got their start in the late ’00s as Solarity, recording bright, melodic progressive house for the trance trio Above & Beyond’s Anjunadeep label. As they moved toward a darker, deeper sound, they adopted a new alias at the opposite end of the spectrum: Dusky. Their career until now has constituted a search for the perfect fusion of underground affect, big-room punch, and just enough heart-on-sleeve emotion to make their productions sound weightier than the club tracks that bookend them. It’s safe to say they perfected that mix on tracks like “Yoohoo” and “Love Taking Over,” both marked by the duo’s characteristic balance of hard and soft: While drums and bassline thump you sternly in the chest, echo-soaked loops of vocals swirl like victory pennants over a smoldering battlefield, at once triumphant and sad. So here, on their second album, the question becomes: Where now? To answer that, they follow the same course as a million dance long-players before: a sentimentalist hodge-podge designed to prove that their mettle extends beyond the dancefloor.
You may have already figured out how this story goes. Soaring, percussion-free intro and ambient interludes; wavering falsetto vocals; slow, sensitive closing song—all the tropes of the grown-up electronic album are here. So are the requisite guest appearances, beginning with an awkward Wiley cameo, “Sort It Out Sharon.” It’s an obvious nod to the broad sweep of British rave history—the intro is a nearly note-for-note rewrite of 808 State’s “Pacific State”—and perhaps there’s something novel about putting a grime MC over a Balearic house beat. But Wiley feels hemmed in by all those steady kick drums, and the rest of the track, with bass like a Foley artist’s thunder sheet, can’t escape the shadow of influences like Joy Orbison and Boddika. The Gary Numan feature “Swansea,” on the other hand, is too reverent: A slow, chugging, gothy number with Numan in peak warble, it offers no compelling reason to listen to it instead of virtually any song from Numan’s own back catalog.
The album isn't without its moments: The genuinely thrilling “Trough” finds a new sweet spot somewhere in between James Holden’s synth flare, M83’s widescreen drama, and the needle-nosed tone clusters of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. You can hear Granger-Howell’s formal training in composition paying off here, where they stuff every available crevice with harmonies until the spectrum sparkles like diamond pavé. And their finesse comes to the fore in other places as well: the synthesizers in the lumbering “Songs of Phase” flicker like colored flames, and “Tiers” masterfully layers its interlocking synths.
The real problem is that their moments of pathos don't often feel earned. The album opens on such a dramatic peak—part ambient come-up, part breast-beating cry into the void—that it leaves little room to progress from there. The close-harmonized vocals of “Tiers” (“Like tears falling,” unless that's supposed to be “Like tiers falling,” which wouldn't make any sense at all—but why title it “Tiers,” then?) are cloying and sticky-sweet, and the same goes for “Long Wait,” whose DNA can be traced back to songs like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and Moderat’s “Bad Kingdom”: the surging strings and Solomon Grey’s pinched wail are simply syrupy. “Marble,” topped with Granger-Howell’s own surprisingly capable falsetto, is actually pretty effective for a downtempo Bon Iver knockoff; freed from the need to move bodies on the dancefloor, it can settle into its melancholy and wallow for a pleasant while.
The dancefloor cuts, on the other hand, are torn between competing impulses. After “Yoohoo,” the soaring piano-driven uplift of “Ingrid is a Hybrid” feels pat. “Runny Nose” opens with what I hope is a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of coked-up nightlife philosophizing and shifts into a peak-time techno take on Banco de Gaia’s vague exoticism. And “Songs of Phase,” the toughest, most effective club track on the album, sells itself short by falling back on snippets of an instantly recognizable Ursula Rucker a cappella, sourced from a 1994 King Britt production, that’s been reused in many, many songs over the years. (Budding producers can even get it for themselves on Beatport.) “As I journey deeper inside myself,” she gravely intones, but nothing on the album suggests much in the way of inner quests; Outer, fittingly enough, projects its energies relentlessly outward, broadcasting its emotional content in a way that too often feels heavy-handed. It’s as though Dusky didn't quite trust their listeners to meet them on their own terms. With every laser sweep and strobe burst, you can imagine them anxiously scanning the audience's faces, looking for evidence of rapture and pushing their faders further into the red. | 2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Polydor | October 14, 2016 | 5.7 | b76effa1-f19b-426f-911e-b18813aecf0f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Composer Olga Bell's Tempo resembles dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level. | Composer Olga Bell's Tempo resembles dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level. | Olga Bell: Tempo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21922-tempo/ | Tempo | Where Olga Bell's last album, Край (Krai), offered an imaginary tour of her native Russia's hinterlands, Tempo represents a very different sort of ethnographical expedition: into contemporary club culture and '90s dance pop. In preparing for the album, the conservatory-educated musician made a habit of frequenting events like François Kevorkian's Sunday-night Deep Space parties at New York's Cielo club, where she would dance, Shazam, and, above all, listen closely to the inner workings of what she heard. (She made these research trips alone, she says, in order to avoid the distractions that would have accompanied going with friends.) Back in her studio, she browsed producers' forums to find out which VSTs young EDM producers currently favor—"I wanted to use sounds that I thought of as really commercial and almost kind of gross," she says—and she wrote out measure-by-measure transcriptions of vintage songs like Snap!'s classic "Rhythm Is a Dancer" and 2 Bad Mice's "Like It Deep," the better to understand their structural underpinnings.
But if this all sounds very academic, the project was motivated by a far simpler impulse: The desire to make joyful, body-moving music. She was especially inspired by the way that different tempos evoke different physical responses, so she began most songs by deciding which tempo matched her mood that day—hence the album's title—and then letting the music come to her as the metronome tick-tocked steadily away. The process yielded an array of rhythms across the spectrum, from woozy trip-hop to peak-time house to 160-BPM footwork.
The results resemble dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level. Pitch-shifted voices zoom across the stereo field like unknotted balloons, and bursts of tuned 808 toms and rimshots chatter like wind-up teeth. Common dance music tropes get magnified to exaggerated proportions: Trap finger-snaps echo through hangar-sized reverb in "ATA," and in the giddy "Randomness," trance stabs and synthesizer leads congeal into an ungainly heap, like a Jell-O mold filled with Eurodance. The bridge of "Power User" turns hip-hop's call to throw your hands up into a sing-song jump-rope rhyme. Stylistically, the music has little in common with Край; last year's Incitation EP anticipates Tempo's electronic palette but not its spunky sense of play. But what unites the three records is Bell's evident delight in the plasticity and malleability of sound. She's particularly fond of portamento, the effect that connects a run of notes in a long, sweeping motion, which she applies liberally to synths and voice alike, giving her melodies a springy, elastic sense of movement.
Bell may have trained as a pianist, but she proves to be a formidable singer: expressive, playful, inventive, and acrobatic without being showy. Just listen to the finely calibrated timing and the carefully cracked pitch of the way she sings, "You sulk, sit alone in a bar / Looking a little like a punchline, buddy" (from "Power User," which is decidedly not a toast for the douchebags). She can go from operatic finesse to a conspiratorial whisper in a single phrase, and she's never too polished to make time for hiccups, chuckles, and vocal fry. In fact it's often her voice that carries the day: Subtract the synths and beats from the gooey R&B jam "Zone," and the tune would hold up just fine as an a cappella, her multi-tracked harmonies stretched across the frame like a web of chewing gum.
Fortunately, despite Tempo's unusual backstory, nothing here scans as ironic. And in a few cases, Bell's outsider-looking-in setup has little bearing on the music itself. "Ritual," a full-blooded house anthem featuring the singer Sara Lucas (sounding a lot like Roísín Murphy in late-night-diva mode), wouldn't sound at all out of place on a crowded dancefloor at three in the morning. And the closing song, "America," makes for an uneasy comedown from all the carefree hijinks that have preceded it. Over a minor-key dirge, she gives her adopted homeland a stern talking-to—"Is that what you fear? That you're not forever?"—while tremulous organs and gleaming sawtooths explode like a halftime show. In the song's refrain, she jams an extra pause into the world and accents the final syllable—"Ameri-ca"—to make it suddenly sound foreign and strange. If the message of the song is that we can't dance away the end of empire, there's a subtler truth being made here: that we can wear our otherness like a badge of pride. | 2016-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | One Little Indian | May 30, 2016 | 7.9 | b76f7c50-303e-416c-8ebc-52bf4b308b1d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The prolific Maryland rapper is alternately serious, silly, and soulful. | The prolific Maryland rapper is alternately serious, silly, and soulful. | Xanman: Broken | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xanman-broken/ | Broken | There might be more than one other rapper taking their name from one of America’s most popular anti-anxiety medications, but Prince George’s County, Maryland’s Xanman raps better than any of them. The only thing faster than the 19-year-old rapper’s flow is the prolific pace at which he releases music—Xan has released almost 30 projects on mixtape-hosting service Spinrilla in the past three years, though only a handful of those have made it over to Spotify. He’s been making music for much longer than he’s been releasing it: Xan started rapping at age 5 and had his own studio by the time he was a preteen. A six-month stint behind bars on undisclosed charges briefly interrupted his output, but he’s been grinding harder than ever since his release in May. He’s released multiple projects this year, but Broken is the first that approaches retail-album length.
Given his age, Xanman’s extensive discography is made even more impressive by being mostly self-produced. Like the state he hails from, Xan’s beats—which he refers to as “Xanstyles”—split the difference between North and South. There’s heavy Zaytoven influence to the glittering keys, MIDI strings, and organ swells on songs like “Broken, Pt. 1,” but an undeniable East Coast love that comes through in his affection for hip-hop instrumentals that he’s barely old enough to remember, like 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair,” and Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing).”
Whether his words arrive over straight-up trap or something more soulful, Xanman has a fondness for hashtag rap, using punchlines to detail his plans to cause physical harm: “Flava Flav/You get clocked in the head,” “I put that bitch underground/Harriet Tubman.” At its best, Xan’s love of non-sequiturs gives his lyrics a light surrealism, but it encourages some cringier instincts: casual homophobia, jokes about Paul Walker’s death, and some especially regrettable bars about R. Kelly and Bill Cosby.
Even then, he lets out his soulful side enough to keep the whole project mostly serious. For as many colorful metaphors Xanman comes up with to describe his guns, there’s an underlying sense of heartbreak, as the album title and cover indicate. His hooks are more often repeated expressions of emotional uncertainty—“Why you gotta be like that?”; “Have you ever been in love?”; “How would you feel?”—than declarative statements.
In classic DMV fashion, Xanman doesn’t let the beat dictate the direction his flow takes, almost as if he’s in competition with it. He crams words into tight spaces and lets them spray in rapid bursts, sounding most at home over menacing, mosh-ready beats like “Brick Paper” and “Back Up.” Reigning rap queen Rico Nasty shows up for a co-signing spot on the remix to “Gucci Down,” the closest thing Xan has had to a hit thus far.
Xan’s vocal delivery is the kind we’re used to hearing digitally manipulated, but he’s comfortable enough pushing himself into different registers, from a gruff low end to a twinkling falsetto, that he doesn’t need a computer to do it for him. Xanman has a mixtape series called “Luther Xandross,” which seems to suggest how he’d like to think of himself: as a soulful vocalist, not just a rapper. It’s hard to catch every single word he says, but the skill is clear enough. | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 16, 2019 | 6.7 | b772ca6e-4290-45e3-b921-ca0373fa0c76 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Working within a fairly heavy philosophical framework, New York’s Photay has made some of his most captivating electronic music yet, with nimble house and disco rhythms and real emotional weight. | Working within a fairly heavy philosophical framework, New York’s Photay has made some of his most captivating electronic music yet, with nimble house and disco rhythms and real emotional weight. | Photay : Onism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/photay-onism/ | Onism | Photay’s Onism begins from what sounds like a fairly heavy premise: The album takes its title from John Koenig’s philosophy of the same name, which deals with “the frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits only one place at a time.” (Honestly, the idea that it might be otherwise had never occurred to me, which makes learning about onism feel a little bit like having your first experience of Santa Claus being told that he doesn’t exist.) Fortunately, there’s nothing frustrating about the record. Onism—his third album, following the self-released 1st and a self-titled album for Astro Nautico—is playful, joyful, and downright frisky in places. It takes the Woodstock, N.Y., musician’s interests in African percussion and zippy electronic funk and weaves them into the most captivating and inventive music he’s made yet.
Despite the philosophical subject matter, Onism is first and foremost about pleasure. When he turns his thoughts to the dancefloor, Photay (aka Evan Shornstein) trots out nimble house and disco rhythms touched up with live drumming and rolling Latin percussion. “Inharmonious Slog”—definitely a misnomer—boasts the same kind of effortlessly gliding synth melodies that marked early Floating Points singles like “Truly” and “Vacuum Boogie.” The record’s clubbiest cut, “Screens,” tips its hat to Four Tet in main-room mode and piles on strings and winking brass synths.
When he eases into slower tempos, his wheezy organs and spacious beats share something in common with James Blake. But unlike the reams of “chillstep” producers that came along in the latter’s wake, Photay is less interested in industrial-strength side-chain tricks or vertigo-inducing drops than he is in intrigue and surprise, which manifest themselves in odd arrangements and hidden trap doors. In “Off-Piste,” the rickety drum groove and fat, stacked chords perpetually build toward a climax that never comes; where other producers might insert a Pavlovian drop, Photay simply lets the floor fall out, and a good quarter of the song’s running time is taken up by an extended denouement. “Eco Friend” is a polyrhythmic tug-of-war between African percussion and 808, but after two minutes of stark slinking and strutting, it tips over into creamy sax riffs evocative of late-night cable-access television: potted palms, red and blue neon, the works.
But it’s the tactile nature of his sound design that really makes Onism so thrilling. His synths have the warbling quality of audio tape drifting through someone’s fingertips; his drum sounds come wrapped in a weird, crinkly sheen, rattling like gelcaps in blister packs. “Screens” sets warm, naturalistic piano and strings against a beat imbued with an otherworldly quiver; the bass synth in “Balsam Massacre” sounds like an asthmatic duck honking through fan blades. In “The Everyday Push,” one of the album’s two damn-near perfect songs, the clicky intro hiccups like a stuck alarm clock; a series of small, splotchy chords makes the most of the electric piano’s overdriven harmonics; and somewhere there’s a sound like an old guitar amp being kicked. The buzzing tone of the balafon, a West African xylophone Shornstein learned to play during a stint in Guinea, only serves to accentuate the song’s ragged textures, and when the kick drum hits, you can practically feel torn speaker cones flapping in the wind.
All these pleasures are hardly limited to the visceral realm; the record’s best songs are imbued with real emotional weight. “Outré Lux,” the album’s other highlight, doubles as a showcase for the remarkable voice of New York’s Madison McFerrin, the daughter of Bobby McFerrin. She first appears as a pastel swirl of close harmonies bobbing above footwork-paced 808s: “Can you see me,” she murmurs over and over, half hidden in software. But when she steps out from behind all the computer processing and sings, “‘Cause I don’t wanna play this game again,” it’s as though Photay’s expertly constructed digital world had dissolved beneath her breath. “Why must I always defend/What it means to be free/To be myself,” she sings at the song’s climax, splitting once more into umpteen-part harmonies. Strings swell; there’s a harsh digital crackle, like a cable being jiggled in a socket; the song hovers hesitantly between the real world and the virtual. If we can’t truly inhabit any perspective other than our own, Photay seems to say, here’s a workaround, via multi-tracked vocal parts that refract a single voice into a rainbow of tone, and drum sounds that dissolve into tiny droplets. Everywhere you listen, unities are breaking down. | 2017-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astro Nautico | August 11, 2017 | 7.9 | b77a8715-175f-40b6-be0f-760575857ed7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Rhye leader Michael Milosh remains king of the most respectable horny music possible. His new album testifies to those talents without calling too much attention to itself. | Rhye leader Michael Milosh remains king of the most respectable horny music possible. His new album testifies to those talents without calling too much attention to itself. | Rhye: Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rhye-home/ | Home | Michael Milosh was born with the gift of a golden voice. His swooning, androgynous countertenor—which has been compared to Sade’s so many times she should probably receive a portion of Milosh’s royalties by now—seems to radiate desire and longing with every vibration. At times, he sounds a little like Marvin Gaye at his most weightless, with the anguish shaved off.
That voice has been the beating heart of nearly every song released by Rhye, the musical project Milosh founded a decade ago with producer Robin Hannibal and of which he is the only continuous member. So it’s striking that Home, the group’s latest, is the first Rhye album to make significant use of voices other than Milosh’s. Forty-nine voices, in fact: Home begins and ends with ghostly, wordless cantos sung by the 49-piece Danish National Girls’ Choir, which took advantage of Danish grant money to travel to Los Angeles to record with Rhye. Midway through “Holy,” the album’s muted climax, those cherubic voices “Oooh” and “Aaaah” their way into the groove, like sunlight streaming into a dim room.
Perhaps the moment resonates because it evokes a particular kind of musical togetherness that’s been lost to the pandemic: large choral groups singing together in the same space. (Since the early spread of COVID-19, choir performances have been linked to outbreaks in the United States, Germany, England, and other countries; these recordings, thankfully, are from 2019.) It’s a form of communion that’s clearly meaningful to Milosh, who sang in a choir as a child. Or maybe it’s just a supremely well-engineered slice of downtempo bliss, as Rhye is wont to deliver. But the choir also stands out as one of the few aspects of Home that breaks substantially from the group’s by-now-familiar soft-pop formula.
Otherwise, all the usual elements of a Rhye album are here and accounted for. Milosh still slips in and out of falsetto with enviable grace. He still addresses most of his lyrics in the second-person—“The more I love your face/The more I get to taste,” “Can you feel my fire deep inside/Can you feel my fire growing high,” etc.—cooing sweet innuendos to the object of his desire. The album cover once again depicts a woman, naked and tastefully cropped. And the title is another one-word noun—Home—meant to signify the house in the Santa Monica Mountains that has been both a home and creative base for Milosh and his partner/collaborator, Geneviève Medow-Jenkins, since 2019. (That’s where the album first took shape, and where the couple has been broadcasting experiential events incorporating ambient music, massage, and meditation in recent months.)
On Home, Rhye remains enamored with the sonic touchstones of early ’80s sophisti-pop and smooth R&B: softly puttering beats, slinky bass lines, half-whispered vocals, and sultry grooves that rarely rise above a sleek, expensive-sounding murmur. (Milosh doesn’t just borrow from the aesthetic of quiet storm—he literally incorporates the phrase “quiet storm” into the lyrics of his songs, like Sade did on “The Sweetest Taboo.”) Analog synthesizers fill out the sound on “Helpless,” whose velvety groove sounds a little like Steely Dan’s “My Rival” with the urgency sucked out.
On tracks like “Holy,” the mix is so intimate you can hear the piano creak and rattle. Elsewhere, Milosh revs up the tempos and arrangements from 2019’s meditative, piano-driven Spirit, incorporating ornate string arrangements. “Come in Closer” is a particular delight: The track opens with little more than a tapping Wurlitzer and some falling rain. After the drums come in—forming an unexpected syncopated counterpart with the Wurlitzer—the song builds to a stirring orchestral climax. The retro disco-pop of “Black Rain” is an appealing jolt of adrenaline, and the Danish choir makes a welcome return in “Hold You Down.”
But a solid chunk of Home blends into the background, with songs that introduce all their moving parts at the beginning and don’t particularly build anywhere. Lyrically, the album’s carnal imagery hints at an interest in dominant and submissive play: There’s “Safeword,” with its thumping drum programming and tightly coiled strings, and there’s “Sweetest Revenge,” with its lurching funk licks and lines like “Oh, I don’t like to behave/No more master to slave.” But the music is so bloodless and restrained that it doesn’t evoke freaky sex at all. Milosh remains king of the most respectable, dignified horny music possible, and Home testifies to those talents without calling too much attention to itself.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Home is that, including Spirit, it’s Rhye’s third release in three years—an impressively prolific burst, considering the five-year gap between 2013’s Woman and 2018’s Blood. But as the albums pile up, they can also blur together. Like those meditation broadcasts, Home works as a sensual mood-setting exercise, but less so as a distinct creative statement.
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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. | 2021-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Loma Vista | January 25, 2021 | 6.6 | b7836aa8-c93a-4c1a-8363-02515bf7edd0 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
After training as a traditional Nguni spiritual healer, the South African musician returns with a 13-piece band for an album of divine orchestral soul. | After training as a traditional Nguni spiritual healer, the South African musician returns with a 13-piece band for an album of divine orchestral soul. | Desire Marea: On the Romance of Being | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/desire-marea-on-the-romance-of-being/ | On the Romance of Being | Desire Marea’s healing powers don’t vanish when he steps off stage, and now he has the credentials to prove it. After the release of his eponymous debut, a record of otherworldly club music suffused with erotic vitality, the queer South African artist underwent training as a traditional Nguni spiritual healer, or sangoma, accepting the call from above to serve his earthly and ancestral communities. His second album, On the Romance of Being, is a collective affair, with Marea stepping out from behind the laptop to front a 13-piece band culled from South Africa’s avant-garde jazz and experimental music scenes. Together, they take a leap from Desire’s digitized churn to swooning orchestral soul, dancing across the divide between flesh and spirit.
Opener “Ezulwini” slowly rolls out the record’s cast of musicians as it conjures a seance. Sibusiso Mashiloane and Sbu Zondi hold down the rhythm section on piano and drums respectively, stirring up a gentle mist of twinkling keys and light cymbal taps before Portia Sibiya and Andrei Van Wyk activate a volcanic eruption of distorted bass and guitar, giving On the Romance of Being its decisive moment of liftoff. Marea explores the full range of his operatic vocals over their triumphant post-rock stomp: “I want to see you levitate,” he repeats, rising from a piercing falsetto to a commanding shout.
The album burns brightest on a pair of songs in which Marea recognizes the limits of his grace in the face of emotionally unavailable lovers. On the bilingual “Be Free,” he sways between mockery in English (“I find it very lame/That you fear yourself”) and generosity in Zulu (“My cup runneth over, yet you are afraid/Why do you cower in the face of love?”). Eventually, his patience runs thin, and the song erupts into a blast of strings and wordless cries as he chooses himself. “Makhukhu” takes a softer approach: Marea’s bitterness toward a partner’s opacity—“It’s oh so quizzical/Perplexing perhaps/All the depth that you lack”—is framed by quivering eighth-note piano chords and a slinky bassline. He sings of mountains piercing clouds and gateways to bliss, but as the band climbs towards a glittering crescendo, hopes for a shared romantic vision crystallize into a lonely mirage.
Given the density of demanding vocal performances and show-stopping instrumental shredding, it’s natural that Marea and his bandmates would want to catch their breath. While “Skhathi”’s new wave guitar figures and warbled vocals are pleasant enough, its comparatively tame groove feels out of step with the album’s dazzling hairpin turns. But Marea redeems himself immediately with closer “Banzi,” a nine-minute electronic free jazz workout featuring four gloriously grueling minutes of rhythmic shouts and growls. With one final naked cymbal crash, the room clears, leaving Marea alone at the microphone—a vessel for two worlds, eager to be refilled. | 2023-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mute | April 13, 2023 | 7.5 | b78852f4-aa70-4298-9d97-fd478d0965a1 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Kieran Hebden’s new live album reminds us that he is a stellar performer, not just a producer. | Kieran Hebden’s new live album reminds us that he is a stellar performer, not just a producer. | Four Tet: Live at Alexandra Palace London, 8th and 9th May 2019 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/four-tet-live-at-alexandra-palace-london-8th-and-9th-may-2019/ | Live at Alexandra Palace London, 8th and 9th May 2019 | The British producer Kieran Hebden has one of the most distinctive signatures in electronic music. First, a gravelly drum machine; then, some jewel-toned synth pads; and, finally, a strip of harp or chimes or wordless cooing, unspooling like wrinkled ribbon.
Hebden gets plenty of mileage out of this trim set of sounds, and Live at Alexandra Palace, London 8th and 9th May 2019 makes for a good display of his range. Drawing mostly from 2017’s New Energy and 2013’s Beautiful Rewind, he fuses everything into nearly two hours of surging buildups, placid comedowns, and hard lefts. The album shows just how dynamic his modest toolkit can be—and proves, by extension, that he is a stellar performer, not just a producer.
Last year’s Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 was Four Tet’s first official live album in 14 years (on Bandcamp and on a clandestine Spotify page, he has since added archival live recordings dating from 2004, 2010, and 2013). The Funkhaus show wasn’t as radically improvisational as his live shows once were; instead, it offered a medley of catalog favorites. Live at Alexandra Palace follows almost the same setlist as the Funkhaus, but the crescendos are more forceful, the moments of chaos more tumultuous, the transitions more drawn out.
Alexandra Palace does away with song titles, with tracks named simply “Part 1” through “Part 5,” an implicit acknowledgment that Four Tet’s catalog is a series of variations on a theme. “Part 1,” an extended mash-up between “Planet” and “Dreamer,” opens the album on a high note, hitting Four Tet’s sweet spot of muscular groove and wistful melody and then drawing it out for 16 minutes. “Part 2” turns more labyrinthine: First an ambient snippet of “Ba Teaches Yoga” leads into the stately “Two Thousand and Seventeen”; then, after eight lulling minutes, that song abruptly twists into an extended passage of rapid-fire machine hits, alarm bells, and analog squeals. It’s a neat trick, flipping Four Tet at his most sentimental into an ear-splitting din.
Parts three and four, with a combined runtime of 75 minutes, comprise the bulk of the album. Here, Hebden whips through “Scientists,” “Ocoras,” “Only Human,” “Lush,” “Kool FM,” and “Spirit Fingers,” followed by “LA Trance,” “SW9 9SL,” “Locked,” and “Teenage Birdsong”—though close listening reveals trace elements of songs like “Sing” woven into the mix. “Part 4” is particularly impressive: The way he flips melodies and tone colors over shifting beats brings to mind someone snapping the rows of a Rubik’s Cube back and forth.
The live shows must have been something to behold: Visual designer team Squidsoup turned the 10,000-capacity hall into a space reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms, stringing up 40,000 digitally controlled LEDs in a massive, three-dimensional grid surrounding Hebden, who performed at crowd level. Video of the event suggests a translation of Four Tet’s flickering rhythms and textures into something you could almost reach out and touch. The audio recording doesn’t capture any of that, of course, but it’s still gratifyingly immersive. There’s just enough crowd noise mixed in to lend the suggestion of being there without being distracting. And for those who haven’t caught Four Tet in concert, Live at Alexandra Palace offers a new way of hearing his music. Much like Daft Punk did with their 2006 Coachella pyramid show, it suggests that Four Tet’s catalog is essentially one endlessly remixable song. | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Text | July 30, 2019 | 7.7 | b789e1fb-41f2-4eec-8957-a46322068070 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The fist-pumping Nashville pop punk band Diarrhea Planet's sophomore album I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams is fun and ingratiating (many of the songs could pass for KISS). It's an album you yell along to, preferably into the face of someone else who is yelling back. | The fist-pumping Nashville pop punk band Diarrhea Planet's sophomore album I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams is fun and ingratiating (many of the songs could pass for KISS). It's an album you yell along to, preferably into the face of someone else who is yelling back. | Diarrhea Planet: I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18410-diarrhea-planet-im-rich-beyond-your-wildest-dreams/ | I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams | I was lucky: I was spared the knowledge of Diarrhea Planet's name when I discovered them. Walking into a low-ceilinged club in Austin at this year's South by Southwest, I was assaulted by the sight of six twenty-something guys, all shirtless, seemingly none of them over 5"4, essentially scaling the walls. There were guitars played behind backs, over heads, with teeth. I'm pretty sure three guitar solos were happening at once. The people in the audience looked happier than anyone I'd ever seen. It was only when I tapped someone on the shoulder to find out what this band, this epochal experience, called itself, that I learned the awful truth. It didn't help that the exhilarating song they were blasting out, the fan-favorite encore, was called "Ghost With a Boner".
My experience is a luxury you have been denied, which is unfair and I am sorry. You are, naturally, wisely skeptical-- this picture probably doesn't help. But "skepticism" and "Diarrhea Planet" cannot meaningfully coexist. They are matter and antimatter, Superman and Kryptonite. Their new album, I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, is fun and ingratiating, and you can hear some of their joyfully fist-pumping spirit coursing through it. But by itself, it doesn't make the case for why you should take a band with this name to your bosom. Aggressive ridiculousness is a wonderful tool for inducing joy, but it's tricky and risky getting the dosage correct, and the main problem with a Diarrhea Planet full-length, amazingly, is that it's somehow not quite ridiculous enough.
There are some really good moments, here, to be sure. Diarrhea Planet are a pop punk band, essentially, one that has iron-enriched its sound with the good-times hedonism of hair metal and Tenacious D-style guitar heroics. Their songs sound as much like teen-movie ideas about rock-and-roll bands-- the Wyld Stallyns, the Lone Rangers-- as they do the work real-world rock bands.
Tellingly, many of the songs on I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams could pass for KISS: "Lite Dream", in particular, sounds like an Ace Frehley vocal take. There are furtively odd moments in the songs that remind you they are being made in 2013, not 1977, like "Lite Dream"'s shivery little outbreak of Sonic Youth guitars in the bridge, or the almost-Strokes high notes in the intro to "Separations". But they are usually shoulder-checked into a locker, moments later, by a battalion of wind-milled power chords.
This is an album you yell along to, preferably into the face of someone else who is yelling back. Listening to it on headphones at a cubicle desk is like playing It's Dark and Hell Is Hot while doing your taxes: It may work, it may not, but it was certainly not designed for those listening conditions. The most satisfying songs on I'm Rich are the ones that adapt a bit to the fact that all six members, logistically speaking, cannot be present to scream every note in your face as you listen. The wistful tinge in "Kids", for instance, makes the song stand out.
Some of the lyrics hint at love and longing, sort of: "White Girls" sketches out a break-up happening amid a "drunken chorus of bros." But the back-to-back songs "Skeleton Head" and "Baby Head" are little more indicative. Some of it grows a little same-y. But seriously, and I simply cannot stress this enough: if Diarrhea Planet are playing in a 100-mile radius of where you are sitting, go there. (And for God's sake, make sure you stay for "Ghost With A Boner.") The next day, this album will be here to remind you, however faintly, of the experience. | 2013-08-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-08-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Infinity Cat Recordings | August 19, 2013 | 6.9 | b789e4c3-5a64-4f53-8c5a-768d01b73327 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Savant was the early-'80s project of Kerry Leimer, and their recombinant avant-funk approach had something in common with Brian Eno’s work during the period, particularly his David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. | Savant was the early-'80s project of Kerry Leimer, and their recombinant avant-funk approach had something in common with Brian Eno’s work during the period, particularly his David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. | Savant: Artificial Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20953-artificial-dance/ | Artificial Dance | "The intelligence resides in the work, not the individual," explains Kerry Leimer in the liner notes to Artificial Dance, a retrospective collection that highlights the unpredictable alchemy of his early 1980s studio project Savant. The Seattle experimentalist is best known for the woozy ambient music he has released as K. Leimer, but Savant’s approach was something like an avant-garde jam band re-imagined as musique concrète. Riffs, grooves, and rhythms were crafted on a wide array of instruments—electric bass, drums, Oberheim DMX, Prophet 5 synthesizer, and objects identified in the credits with names like "Percussion (Wood, Silver, Plastic)," "Guitar (Prepared, China)," and "Guitar (Cloud Guitars)"—and then broken apart, looped, layered, run through primitive effects, and reassembled at last by the razor-wielding producer across lengthy spools of reel-to-reel tape.
The recombinant approach had something in common with Brian Eno’s work during the period, particularly his David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Eno, too, was fond of fanciful instruments like “snake guitar”), and the results similarly hovered somewhere between funk, loosely speaking, and more abstracted forms of ambient sound. Debut single "Stationary Dance", with its breakbeat structure and a voiceover sampled from an instructional LP, anticipated cut-and-paste artists like M|A|R|R|S and Coldcut by six or seven years, while the watery B-side, "Sensible Music", sounds today like a more muscular, lo-fi version of Talk Talk’s later work. Listeners familiar with Leimer’s solo catalog will detect echoes of that music here: the glassy synthesizers of his ambient recordings trace serpentine paths through Savant’s songs, and the rolling, otherworldly drum programming of K. Leimer’s 1983 album Imposed Order bleeds through into the stop-start rhythms of "The Neo-Realist" and "Indifference".
But the bulk of Savant’s catalog sounds like nothing else that had come before. These tracks, where skeletal dub rhythms underpin an array of daubed-on splotches of electric bass and Clavinet and atonal guitar, feel less like "songs" than amorphous organisms where a rippling pulse is the only constant. The structure can be hard to follow but in a fascinating way—long and convoluted 10-bar phrases are not uncommon, and it often feels like a rug is being pulled out from under you, even when the bassline plunges deep in the pocket. "Shadow in Deceit" begins with a flurry of bells and post-punk bass and gradually transforms, via interlocking marimbas, into a vivid template for Four Tet’s brand of new-age techno. "Heart of Stillness", with its unsteady pitter-patter percussion and dripping guitar tones, has an even headier rainforest vibe; it feels like sound just on the cusp of coalescing into music, or perhaps vice versa.
Given that the bulk of the album’s tracks were made between 1981 and 1985, it’s harder to judge the final three cuts, all previously unreleased, which date from between 2009 and 2014. "Facility" is dark and alluring, and it’s not hard to imagine it appearing on a contemporary label like R&S. But the context differs so radically from the early work that the later songs might as well constitute a different project altogether. But that’s OK—the 11 songs that comprise Savant’s prime output amount to some of the most striking and original American electronic music of that period, so much so that it seems almost inconceivable that it went largely overlooked until now. Had a tastemaker like Detroit’s Electrifying Mojo gotten his hands on Savant’s slim catalog, who knows how things might have turned out. Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era—and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered. | 2015-09-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | September 8, 2015 | 7.8 | b78afc2f-66cb-4fbe-b602-f02781d9f3be | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
In a way, Black Moon Spell is King Tuff mastermind Kyle Thomas' post-fame record: the tales are taller, the drugs are better, the women wilder, and there’s a conquering hero at the record's center to tell us all about it. If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the songs remain the same. | In a way, Black Moon Spell is King Tuff mastermind Kyle Thomas' post-fame record: the tales are taller, the drugs are better, the women wilder, and there’s a conquering hero at the record's center to tell us all about it. If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the songs remain the same. | King Tuff: Black Moon Spell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19810-king-tuff-black-moon-spell/ | Black Moon Spell | There has to be some chemical in vinyl that brings out the most embarrassing kind of rockism in people who sing about it. Obviously, U2 would fall victim—you could only acquire Songs of Innocence by doing the exact opposite of crate digging, and yet they put a damn LP on the cover anyway—and even a goofball like King Tuff (aka Kyle Thomas) is not immune. “Black Holes in Stereo” is the tenth song on his new album Black Moon Spell, and it threatens to topple his entire garage-glam enterprise. As you might be able to tell from the title, it’s a tribute to wax for people who felt “Spin the Black Circle” and “45” were a bit too wishy-washy. Imagine what it takes to out-earnest the likes of Pearl Jam and Gaslight Anthem, and then see if Thomas’ lyrics do the trick: “Girls and boys come from outer space and so does music too/ I learned more workin’ at the record store than I ever did in high school.”
Fortunately, he’s got a sense of humor about himself that counteracts all of that, and besides, “Black Holes in Stereo” is actually the truth—for him, classic rock is elementary, glam is higher education, and a masters degree is earned by trolling through the deepest recesses of garage rock obscurity. That’s the world in which King Tuff lives and thrives, where airbrushed van paintings come to life and “stoner rock” still means something Spicoli or Wooderson would listen to, not the slow and low likes of Sleep or Kyuss. Likewise, there are no institutions of the square—and that includes school, monogamous relationships, jobs, and standards of beauty. Black Moon Spell lives life with a foam dome and beer-colored goggles.
This world may be Thomas' construction, but it’s real to King Tuff, and on his self-titled sophomore bow from 2012, he pronounced himself as the universal rock star—songs like “Anthem”, “Bad Thing”, and “Keep On Movin’” were self-fulfilling prophecies, assumed classics delivered with a playfulness and unabashed hookiness that his more mannered peers like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees lack. In a way, Black Moon Spell makes King Tuff realer by continuing that narrative, as it’s a post-fame record in that sense: the tales are taller, the drugs are better, the women wilder, and there’s a conquering hero at the record's center to tell us all about it. The title track, “Rainbow's Run”, and “Eyes of the Muse” seem to be tributes to rock mythology itself, King Tuff ascending to the level of the gods before returning to let the common man in on what gets discussed up there.
If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the song remains the same. King Tuff is kind of a knucklehead, but Thomas can be a clever songwriter; the slight modulation in the title track’s brown-sound riff makes its very insistent repetition warranted, while “Headbanger” is a love affair between metal record collectors set to riffs that jut like Iron Maiden’s font and melted psych-rock harmonies. And though he’s more hi-fi than most in his field, Black Moon Spell is still all treble and midrange in a logical way—pre-EQ’d to sound like it’s playing in a car’s cassette deck.
But otherwise, if Black Moon Spell doesn’t instantly recall “Bad Thing” (“Beautiful Thing”) or “Keep On Movin’” (“Black Holes in Stereo”) in either structure or melody, it ends up recalling other songs on Black Moon Spell. Both narrower than King Tuff and with a longer tracklist as well, Black Moon Spell scraps the surprisingly lovely midtempo “ballads" from its predecessor, which allowed a sigh of relief amidst the beer-bonging. He's too genial for the stock characterization of women on “Sick Mind” and “I Love You Ugly” to cause much alarm, though “She was born with a filthy desire/ More sex, more drugs, she can always get higher” is meant as a compliment and thus forces the issue. Just as disappointing is Thomas’ stock characterization of himself; halfway through his third album, he sings “King Tuff is my name/ I got madness in my brain/ Pleased to meet you, I’m gonna eat you/ Cause I’m batshit insane.” It's a presentation of King Tuff for the sake of King Tuff on a record that already didn’t lack for filler.
On King Tuff’s prettiest song, Thomas sang,“ You always wanna know you’re not alone/ In the unpopular world,” a show of empathy towards the listener who hadn’t found their own personal King Tuff-style way out of being a misfit yet. He then offered some do-as-I-say and do-as-I-do advice: “I’m going deeper into the unusual world.” He's gone even deeper on Black Moon Spell, but with the release of any sort of emotional tether to Kyle Thomas, he might've left the rest of us behind. | 2014-09-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 22, 2014 | 6.4 | b78deb75-cf3f-4285-ae6f-9e50278fab9c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The National's other pair of brothers, Brian and Scott Devendorf, team up with Beirut's Benjamin Lanz to pay homage to the headier aspects of the 4AD catalog with an enjoyable yet uneven debut. | The National's other pair of brothers, Brian and Scott Devendorf, team up with Beirut's Benjamin Lanz to pay homage to the headier aspects of the 4AD catalog with an enjoyable yet uneven debut. | LNZNDRF: LNZNDRF | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21663-lnzndrf/ | LNZNDRF | Whether you are a hardcore fan of the National or think the Brooklyn-based band is everything wrong and annoying about indie rock (and to judge from their YouTube comments, there are a fair number of you in both camps), it's hard to argue against the prowess of the Dessner twins, Bryce and Aaron, who help power the band's sound. They are frequently namechecked as the engine behind the band: Both help run the venerable artpop boutique label Brassland Records, whose flagship act Clogs is one of the foremost names in indie classical. Bryce, meanwhile, collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto on the Golden Globe-nominated score to The Revenant and recently saw his compositions interpreted by the Kronos Quartet. Additionally, both Dessners performed in Scandinavia last year with the Copenhagen Philharmonic and the Amsterdam Sinfonetta.
But now it's time for the National's other pair of brothers, Bryan and Scott Devendorf, to show their willingness to go off the grid. Working in collaboration with fellow 4AD signee Benjamin Lanz of Beirut, the newly minted trio LNZNDRF recorded their eight-song debut LP in two and a half days inside of an old church in the brothers' hometown of Cincinnati. Yet from the direction the group is taking here, you'd think they transported themselves to Conny Plank's Cologne studio in the early days of Sky Records. The group chose to play Germany before New York on their brief international tour leading up to the album's release, and the pulse of motorik powers the songs here. Yet this is no aimless joyride down the Autobahn: Lanz and the Devendorfs are as much fans of the 4AD label as they are clientele, and the influence of the imprint's more psychedelic excursions are palpable, especially across the four mesmerizing instrumental cuts here, all of which were mostly improvised as producer Justin Newton rolled tape.
The hypnotic groove of Lanz's guitar on opening cut "Future You," for instance, invokes a more visceral variation of Michael Brook's work with Pieter Nooten of Clan of Xymox. As the backbone of the National, Bryan Devendorf isn't really given the kind of material that really brings out his true chops as a drummer, but on the perpetual-motion machine of "Hypno-Skate" or the bubbling, Spacemen 3-spiced closer "Samarra," he gets to reveal himself as a student of such krautrock masters as Jaki Liebezeit of Can and Neu!'s Klaus Dinger in ways he never could otherwise.
That the Achilles' heel of LNZNDRF comes from the vocal territory should come as no surprise. But it's not as though the singing, done by both Lanz and Scott Devendorf, is no good. It's just that when you hear a pedestrian, moderately chillwave-ish song like "Mt. Storm" or "Kind Things" sitting amongst the instrumentals that tower over them, it feels woefully mismatched in the same way that cover of David Essex's "Rock On" sits like a wart in the middle of the new Tortoise album. The two sides finally come together on the record's penultimate cut, "Monument," a convincing homage to the Pale Saints.
The Pale Saints are ancient history to 4AD now: These days, the label is more known for their advancements in the world of next-level dance pop like Grimes, Purity Ring, Holly Herndon, and tUnE-yArDs. LNZNDRF is a fine-if-flawed testament to the company's Thatcher years, but it could have been tremendous if they had kept it strictly instrumental. If the Devendorfs were allowed to bring some of this fried psychedelia to the National, alongside the Dessner twins' neo-classical grandiloquence, the National's next album could really be something. | 2016-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | March 1, 2016 | 6.5 | b793e92d-1a80-4922-994a-c07bfdeb273e | Ron Hart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ron-hart/ | null |
This four-song EP features two versions of its title track-- one recorded in the studio, another recorded live-- plus a Feels-like ballad and a vocal effects-laden piece. | This four-song EP features two versions of its title track-- one recorded in the studio, another recorded live-- plus a Feels-like ballad and a vocal effects-laden piece. | Animal Collective: People EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9818-people-ep/ | People EP | "People" is a pretty good example of what turns some off from Animal Collective. The whole song is just a repeating guitar line, a held chord, some squiggly percussion, and Avey Tare doing a little self-stim call-and-response, alternating "Yeah, ye-AH" with the equally profound "Yeah, YE-ah". Oh, and screaming "People!!!" at throat-shredding volume through a distortion pedal every few bars, followed by a banshee wail that echoes between the speakers via a crude delay. And that's about it. Add to this the usual speculation about the sincerity of a young pack of art-rockers based in Brooklyn, and it's not hard to imagine large swaths of indie music fans moving on to something else.
Here's the thing though: "People" is also a good example of what turns the rest of us on to Animal Collective. I'm hearing a horizontal piece of music, built from a single idea that takes its time to explore the (admittedly limited) possibilities of its premise, and then moves on. And the peaks are thrilling; with sufficient volume this thing induces the sort of satisfying bliss only possible through well-executed drone rock. The song doesn't mean anything, of course, and I'm sure it wasn't difficult to make, but none of that matters: It still sounds damn good while managing to transport me to a very specific place. Animal Collective thinks enough of "People" to include an additional live version at the end of this four-song EP, a track with a bit less power and focus that nonetheless suggests how well the song could blend into a show. Its recording date indicates that they've been playing it live for close to two years, meaning it's incubated long enough to get it onto a record.
As far as the other two songs here, "Tikwid" is a sweet, slightly twisted ballad very much in the vein of Feels, specifically echoing bits of "Grass" with its sing-songy melody. It's almost good enough to work on that record, actually, becoming even more appealing during its soaring wordless section where Avey Tare airs out his falsetto and cuts the sunny warmth with odd vocal effects. Speaking of which, vocal effects are the sole focus of the two-minute snippet "My Favorite Colors". Here the Collective channels their barnyard brethren, wrapping their exaggerated vibratos around a wisp of tinkly piano to sound like Ethel Merman slurring her way through a version of "Old MacDonald". It's an ultimately inconsequential track deservedly fated to round out a stopgap EP, but it's another example of something that Animal Collective fans are likely to find interesting, while most of humanity lurches for the skip button. | 2007-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | FatCat | January 25, 2007 | 7.1 | b7941be7-37f1-47a0-b464-badb8e63a56b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After his Willie Nelson-inspired record, Matthew Houck stays firmly in the world of country music rather than the wilderness folk he'd previously crafted. | After his Willie Nelson-inspired record, Matthew Houck stays firmly in the world of country music rather than the wilderness folk he'd previously crafted. | Phosphorescent: Here's to Taking It Easy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14220-heres-to-taking-it-easy/ | Here's to Taking It Easy | In 2009, Phosphorescent released To Willie, an album dedicated to covering songs written or popularized by Willie Nelson. At the time it seemed like a stylistic sidetrack-- not only did Phosphorescent mastermind Matthew Houck dig more deeply into traditional country music than ever before, a few of his interpretations also evinced far more playfulness and fun than any of his original offerings. Surely, the next proper Phosphorescent effort would find Houck returning to the forlorn wilderness folk he'd howled out on his first three albums though, right?
Not so fast: To Willie turned out to be more harbinger than lark. Phosphorescent's latest record, Here's to Taking It Easy-- with a full recording band in tow-- is by far the most conventional music he's ever made. Luckily, Houck and his cohorts compensate for a dip in idiosyncrasy by inhabiting the tropes of beer-soaked, sun-baked country-rock with fullness, commitment, and chops, all while finding enough room for Phosphorescent's trademark ragged lonesomeness.
The opening "It's Hard to Be Humble (When You're From Alabama)" announces its shit-kicking intentions with hot guitar licks and blaring horn charts; it may be the first Phosphorescent song more impressive for what the music's doing than for what Houck's singing or how he's singing it, but it ain't the last. "I Don't Care If There's Cursing" is lyrically monotonous but boasts a vibrant bassline and sterling pedal steel while "We'll Be Here Soon" expertly recreates the feel of a late-night Mexican cantina (proving Houck's internalized Nelson exceedingly well). Then there's the closing "Los Angeles", which offers up a faithful facsimile (maybe a little too faithful) of Neil Young's bruised guitar heroics.
Speaking of L.A., it plays a substantial role in the album's lyrics, which chiefly concern the strain placed on relationships by life on the road. Perhaps the touring-man blues of "Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough)" feel a bit shopworn, but Houck proves himself capable of redeeming the tropes with a line like, "I wish those nights of pleasure and days of pain weren't so tightly bound," (from "Heaven, Sittin' Down"). And that's nothing next to the staggering, heart-crushing "The Mermaid Parade", the record's runaway best song, which finds Houck's narrator wandering around Coney Island to shake his mind off of a broken marriage, finally sputtering out with gut-piercing specificty, "Goddamn it, Amanda, goddamn it all."
All that said, there's no need to fret that quavering nature boy Houck's been lost entirely beneath all the musical carousing and Angeleno smog, not when the album also contains the spectral, gospel-haunted "Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)" and the evanescent, elliptical "Hej, Me I'm Light". Here's to Taking It Easy is a great record, but I feel like Houck's best is still in him-- the one where the deep roots of tradition will finally be inextricably fused with his own weird, shambling soul. | 2010-05-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | May 12, 2010 | 8.2 | b79f817c-fdc4-4dd0-8585-a47e51019ebf | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
On the UK road rapper’s heavy third album, Nines ably explores the conflict between his old life and his new one with typical flair. | On the UK road rapper’s heavy third album, Nines ably explores the conflict between his old life and his new one with typical flair. | Nines: Crabs in a Bucket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nines-crabs-in-a-bucket/ | Crabs in a Bucket | On Christmas Eve 2011, UK road rapper Nines uploaded an 8-minute video to accompany his new song “My Hood”—a standout from his From Church Road To Hollywood mixtape. In the video, he hands out Christmas turkeys to needy members of his community in North West London. The track itself is a lyrical collage, as he runs through shout-outs and namechecks for his friends. Almost 10 years on, Nines has signed to a major label and his third studio album features a track called “Monsters.” Here, the namechecks come for his peers in the UK’s blossoming rap scene. “The fame ain’t changed me/I’m still the same, I just live in the suburbs next to AJ Tracey,” he spits, “Or I’m overseas ’cause the ends is dead.” It’s not clear whether he’s trying to convince himself or his listeners. The song’s second half returns to familiar subjects—flipping weed, making money, and the Church Road housing estate that raised him—and becomes a microcosm of Crabs in a Bucket. As a street documentarian, Nines’ authenticity is both his yardstick and his biggest source of inspiration: Can he hold onto it even as he leaves his old life behind?
This conflict sits at the heart of the album, and is one Nines has documented throughout his career: He titled a 2015 mixtape One Foot In, while his debut studio album was called One Foot Out. With Crabs in a Bucket, Nines claims he’s moving on, all the way out—escaping the people and behaviors set on dragging him down. His last two albums broke new ground for UK rap, both entering the top five in the UK album charts.
But his retreat to the same old tropes and tribulations suggest street life will always have a pull on him. “I ain’t a rapper, I’m a drug dealer that raps,” he goes on “NIC.” It’s a mantra that appears throughout, and a personal mythology evoked in his series of comic short-films that depict a semi-fictionalized account of his drug-dealing come-up. “Intro” lays the dilemma out with rare vulnerability. Nines opens up about his father’s cancer diagnosis, a knife attack that left his face badly scarred, and paranoia about street surveillance, before submitting himself to the pressures of his environment: “I guess the hood got me institutionalized.” Where the same internal wrestling played out 2018’s Crop Circle with some levity, here it weighs heavier.
The album isn’t entirely devoid of light relief, and Nines’ characteristic wit still sparkles in punchlines like “Fuck a middleman, I even get my water from the spring,” on “Lights.” The production remains laid-back and luxurious too, more suited to road trips in the high-end cars that pepper his lyrics than the live stages he rarely graces. Despite signing with Warner, Nines forgoes the draw of the major label contact book for the most part—choosing instead to pull in features from those who deserve some shine. “All Stars 2,” a follow-up from its namesake on One Foot In, pushes up-and-comers Frosty, Clavish, Q2T, and Chappo CSB into the limelight to piercing, edgy effect; long-time sparring partner Skrapz adds a swift dose of street wisdom on “Energy;” Tiggs Da Author contributes a soulful flourish to “NIC.” Elsewhere, UK drill’s crown prince Headie One glides effortlessly on “Ringaling,” while Afrobeats boyband NSG prove the exception to the rule on playlist bait “Airplane Mode.”
The rare confessional glimpses on tracks like “Intro” and “Energy” are what sets this album apart from Nines’ previous releases. But when he raps on the former “This shit got my blood pressure high/I just wanna be free like some doves in the sky,” he could equally be talking about the new demands of his music career as the stresses of street life. He sounds most free when he’s spitting thin gruel about weed, money, and blowjobs on the swaggering “Clout.” As he pulls himself from the bucket, he’ll need to decide which crabs to fling back into the brine behind him.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner | August 28, 2020 | 7 | b7a43532-de85-463a-9bc4-351fb330cf2f | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The Brooklyn-based singer adds new wrinkles to a sound based on looped and layered voices, and the result is flat-out gorgeous. | The Brooklyn-based singer adds new wrinkles to a sound based on looped and layered voices, and the result is flat-out gorgeous. | Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15147-the-magic-place/ | The Magic Place | The interface between the voice and technology is central to Juliana Barwick's art. A Louisiana-born, Brooklyn-based singer who previously released the album Sanguine and the EP Florine, Barwick makes music whose raw material is almost exclusively her voice. But it's hard to know what she might sound like alone in a room. When she records, Barwick layers and processes and twists her utterances into figures that can alternately be described as familiar, soothing, alien, and tense. She might bring to mind the bright harmonies of Panda Bear or the mystical invocations of Elizabeth Fraser, but her approach is her own.
That's partly because her music feels homemade. We know that she spent a lot of time in church as a kid, so it's tempting to think of her work as a digital update on sacred hymns. The heavy reverb and layering brings to mind cathedrals, light refracted through stained glass, some kind of surrender to or celebration of the eternal. But while Barwick can seem to be reaching for these grand themes and overwhelming statements, there's something in her music that brings it back down to earth. It feels human, imperfect, and intimate, and the line of communication is one-to-one. Despite her music's often epic sweep, it can feel like she is whispering in our ears. So the sense of the sublime, which permeates every note of her material, ultimately works on a humble scale.
We've grown used to following along with artists from their first demo to their first self-released EP to their debut album and then their breakthrough moment courtesy of a company that specializes in caffeinated sugar water. But Barwick works slowly and carefully. She had a little bump with the issue of her debut in 2007, returned with a small-scale EP two years later that received a handful of positive reviews, and has presumably been spending the interim figuring out how to make something even better. The Magic Place, her first album for Asthmatic Kitty, stands above her earlier work in virtually every way. She sings better, the structures are more patient and enveloping, the layering is more precise, and she makes much more effective use of instrumentation. It has the feel of a modest classic of post-millennial ambient music, the kind of record that sounds gorgeous and immersive on first listen and never loses its sparkle, whether playing in the background or filling a room with its swells.
One of the secrets to The Magic Place's enduring appeal, the way it holds up to repeated listens, has to do with that aforementioned imperfection. Though Barwick's essential tool is the loop, she has a way of structuring them so they never seem too locked into the grid. They tumble and unspool and break into the silence like waves, but they are not easily reduced to units of sound dragged from a window onto a timeline. The imperfection gives a feeling of instability to these tracks. So "Keep Up the Good Work" mixes piercing high-pitched voices that a friend compared to the malevolent siren calling distant ships into the rocks and then folds in indecipherable low-pitched murmurs, hints of bass, and a piano line that sounds like a bag of pebbles falling onto the keys. It rolls forward but with an unstable gait, so the shimmering prettiness of the layers never feels too ordered and predictable.
She takes a similar approach on "Cloak", but the effect is less creepy and leans more in the direction of awe, a mini celebration of the idea of ethereality. "Prizewinning" combines her high/low voices in loops that spread like fractals with a marching guitar/drum figure that bores through the center of the track and makes it feel a little like two complementary songs playing at once. It's in these moments, where loops dangle and collide but don't quite line up, that Barwick seems most indebted to the process music of Eno. The way the units of sound in Thursday Afternoon and the reconstituted Pachelbel of Discreet Music develop bears a marked similarity to the easy unpredictability these tracks present.
Is something beautiful and ethereal that feels timeless and transcendent enough? What keeps Barwick from being the "indie rock Enya," which is the phrase that popped into my head when I first heard her music in 2007? It's not an easy question to answer. I want to say that the encroaching creepiness and human blemishes elevate Barwick's music above the soothing Calgon bath of new age, but I'm not quite convinced that's true. I'm also not sure that it matters. Part of it has to do with where we are living now, and how music functions in our lives. Complaints about the one-dimensionality of new age feel less relevant when we have so much music easily at our disposal. The Magic Place is music for a specific constellation of feelings. They are real, many people share them, and this album owns them completely. So while there are few identifiable words here and the titles don't really register, there's a hell of a lot being expressed. We may not need Barwick to go deep into darkness or to write words that mean something, because she has tapped a vein of expression that is rich and powerful and affecting and even useful. And for the time being, the vein seems to be hers alone, though we can visit any time we like. | 2011-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | February 23, 2011 | 8.5 | b7a4afb3-3f4d-40e3-a904-e8fdf62537bc | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
With its pithy, searing songs about sex, groupies, and ennui, the self-titled 1995 debut from Elastica captured the whirlwind of the early-’90s Britpop explosion. | With its pithy, searing songs about sex, groupies, and ennui, the self-titled 1995 debut from Elastica captured the whirlwind of the early-’90s Britpop explosion. | Elastica: Elastica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elastica-elastica/ | Elastica | Elastica hid from the media over a year before the release of their self-titled debut album. In early 1994, after putting out just two singles, they took six months off from performing and giving interviews. When the sabbatical ended, the band’s frontwoman and primary songwriter, Justine Frischmann, explained to Melody Maker’s Everett True “it’s imperative that you should be written about for your music, which is why we decided, after January, we needed to go away and prove ourselves. I’d seen the pressures close at hand before Elastica started—‘Oh my God, are we going to be A-listed? Are we going to get that cover?’ It seemed to be missing the point.”
Critics had adored Elastica’s lacerating, punkish singles, “Stutter” and “Line Up,” but the gossipy British music press had devoted far more attention to Frischmann’s personal life. A founding member of Suede, she’d also dated the band’s androgynous heartthrob singer, Brett Anderson. An item with the unfortunate title “Pulling Power” in the August 1993 issue of Britpop bible Select posed the question, “Elastica are the hottest property in town, but does this have anything to do with a (sssshh!) Suede link?” By then, Frischmann had moved on to Damon Albarn. They’d go on to earn the dubious honor of being nicknamed the “First Couple of Britpop.”
But Elastica’s music didn’t resemble anything their peers had recorded. Britpop was a movement, not a sound, and the bands constantly trashed each other in the press, annoyed at being mentioned in the same breath as acts with whom they had little in common. “It was irritating to be lumped in with Oasis,” Frischmann recalled in a typically blunt 2015 interview. “None of us liked their music. I remember being confused when I first heard them—it sounded like classic-rock power ballads.” By contrast, Elastica’s first album packed 15 loud and fast tracks into 40 minutes. They had no interest in mimicking Blur’s droll eclecticism or Suede’s orchestral glam, either.
The pithy songs on Elastica, with their searing lyrics about sex, groupies, and ennui, capture the whirlwind of the early-’90s Britpop explosion. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, the Kinks, and Bowie, Elastica blended the jagged guitars of Wire, Buzzcocks, and other English punks with the pop hooks of American new wave acts like Blondie and Talking Heads. The band didn’t have a full-time keyboard player until Dave Bush joined the lineup in 1996, but Albarn (credited as Dan Abnormal) punched up some of the melodies on their debut with scratchy synth lines.
That simultaneously edgy and catchy sound helped them break through to a U.S. alt-rock audience raised on poppy punk bands like Nirvana and Green Day. After Geffen won a bidding war over the right to distribute Elastica outside of the UK, their stateside fame quickly eclipsed that of Suede and a pre-“Song 2” Blur. A Rolling Stone critics’ poll named them them the best new band of 1995 and music writers who didn’t care about Albarn or Anderson focused on the songs. “American journalists seem a lot more interested in the music,” Frischmann, who would later settle down in California, has observed. “Britain is so up its ass in terms of journalism; people have been unable to remove themselves or separate the baggage from the music and the gossip.”
Elastica’s influences may have secured them a wider audience, but they also got the band into a lot of well-publicized trouble. Wire sued them, charging that “Line Up” too closely resembled one of their best-known songs, “I Am the Fly,” while Elastica’s biggest hit, “Connection,” stole a riff from Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba.” The Stranglers’ publishing company filed suit, too, alleging that there were unmistakable similarities between another single, “Waking Up,” and their client’s “No More Heroes.” Both plaintiffs had a point, and both cases settled out of court.
In the instance of “Connection,” at least, it’s the song’s ferocious physicality that makes it a classic, not one particular chord progression. Its meaning is a bit murky. Vague lyrics like “I don’t understand how a heart is a spade/But somehow the vital connection is made” suggest luck and precarity, but could refer to love, success in the fickle music industry, or both. The confusion is intentional. “In the same way I think a partly clothed body is sexier than a naked one, it’s more interesting to do a partially cloaked lyric than a blatant one,” Frischmann told Rolling Stone in 1995. But the nonverbal sounds on “Connection” create an unambiguously steamy atmosphere. The “Three Girl Rhumba” riff kicks off a long slide into the first verse, punctuated by thrusting down strums and suggestive, guttural grunting. After two more minutes of taunting couplets and sweaty instrumental breaks, it cuts off early enough to make you desperate for more.
“I have a low boredom threshold,” Frischmann once explained. “I want the best bits—verse-chorus, verse-chorus, that’s it.” This hit-it-and-quit-it approach to songwriting suited her lyrical preoccupations: fast cars, unromantic fucks, getting wasted on wine and jittery with caffeine and cigarettes. While some songs on Elastica are as opaque as “Connection,” others couldn’t be more explicit. The band’s debut single, “Stutter,” condenses their aesthetic into 142 seconds of Matthews’ power-drill guitars, Annie Holland’s slithery bass lines and drummer Justin Welch’s frantic bursts of percussion, with Frischmann’s vocals matching their hectic pace as she delivers a diatribe on the subject of erectile dysfunction. “Vaseline,” a goofy, noisy sketch of a song, advertises the titular lubricant as a remedy for “when you’re stuck like glue.”
Frischmann’s self-assured, aggressive yet not explicitly feminist persona was something new, even in an early-’90s rock landscape where powerful women were everywhere. She had no patience for the riot grrrl movement. Like its male critics, she took issue with many of the associated bands’ rudimentary musicianship. “It seems stupid to me to be in a band if you’ve no actual talent or gift for it,” she told Select. But Frischmann’s objection to the movement was more personal: “A lot of the riot grrrl bands I’ve seen have made me feel ashamed to be a girl.” The women agitating for revolution grrrl-style now may well have been equally put off by “Line Up,” a single that would undoubtedly have been called misogynistic if a male singer had recorded it. A scathing portrait of a groupie referred to only as “drivel head,” who follows bands around and “loves to suck their shining guitars,” its placement as the opening track of Elastica’s first album seems like a way of immediately drawing a line in the sand between women who are rock stars and women who merely sleep with them.
Female identity, in general, held little appeal for Frischmann. Unlike her contemporaries Liz Phair, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Polly Jean Harvey, and Salt-N-Pepa—all of whom brought rare, explicitly female perspectives to their male-dominated genres and scenes—she had little interest in enumerating the highs and lows of womanhood. “We’re not writing songs for women or things women might feel,” she explained to Manning. “We try not to marginalize ourselves.”
There has always been a sharp philosophical divide between women artists whose work is explicitly feminist, or at least openly concerned with representing the female experience, and women artists who would prefer to be thought of simply as artists. “As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag,” Patti Smith, one of the latter camp’s most notable members, once famously opined. The riot grrrls’ approach to female agency has won out in 21st-century pop culture. That may well be for the best, but it’s still worth stepping outside that relatively new progressive orthodoxy for long enough to remember that refusing to be defined by your gender can also be a revolutionary act. “I’m 68 years old now and I still don’t bend to anybody’s concept of gender,” Smith explained in 2015. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was create freedom.” Elastica did exactly that on their debut album.
Surely that approach played a part in their success within a Britpop scene ruled by men. But instead of styling herself as one of the boys as Janis Joplin did, Frischmann cultivated a bold and unique brand of androgyny with her band—one that rejected gender essentialism while embracing heterosexual eroticism. On the cover of Elastica, all four members stand against a brick wall in black tops and pants. No one’s hair falls past their shoulders. The women don’t look butch, like Annie Lennox or k.d. lang. Welch isn’t even close to being in drag. They seem to belong to a reality where the categories of male and female are simply irrelevant.
The band’s look echoes Frischmann’s songs, which swagger, sneer, and claim romantic agency without calling attention to the subversiveness of a woman flaunting her dominance. On “Stutter,” she accepts zero blame for her lover’s impotence. The chorus takes the form of an interrogation: “Is it something you lack/When I’m flat on my back?/...Is it just that I’m much too much for you?” she demands of her intoxicated partner. Frischmann doesn’t even sound vulnerable when she’s admitting that she has a soft spot for someone. “I might just understand if you obey me,” she sings on the midtempo crush anthem “Hold Me Now,” in a bored drawl that suggests she wishes the object of her affection would be a bit quicker on the uptake.
This irresistible combination of casual androgyny and performative arrogance, along with the healthy sense of humor that brought “Vaseline” into being, allows Frischmann to let her dirty mind run wild without objectifying herself. “All-Nighter” packs a whole sleepless night’s worth of sexual frustration into a minute and a half of hyperactive drumming, as Frischmann propositions her date with such eloquent negs as, “You’re a cloud short of heaven/But I’d love to see you strut your stuff.” She’s the one sweet-talking a conquest into a roadside hookup on “Car Song”—a track that somehow manages to make the Ford Fiesta sound alluring—over synths that beep like horns and “oohs” that approximate the whoosh of hair blowing in the wind. When she confesses, “Every shining bonnet/Makes me think of my back on it,” it’s Frischmann who’s getting off on that image of herself, not some dude.
Whether it came naturally or was carefully constructed, her novel persona is what elevates the album above catchy post-punk revivalism. It also casts those notorious lawsuits in a different light. Now that sampling has spread from hip-hop and dance to just about every genre of popular music, and we acknowledge that entire albums constructed out of other people’s recordings can be masterpieces, Elastica’s obvious appropriation of two male bands’ riffs looks like citation more than theft. In borrowing from “Three Girl Rhumba,” “I Am the Fly,” and “No More Heroes,” they align themselves with Wire and the Stranglers—not riot grrrl, and not the music of Frischmann’s boyfriends. Painted by the press as a hanger-on and a beneficiary of nepotism, she used the album to reintroduce herself as a discrete artist, with influences, a personality, and a sex drive all her own.
Not that Elastica is all public sex and odes to lube. It has a few great solitary moments, too. “Waking Up,” a rare track that leaves room for sprawling instrumental passages evocative of early-morning disorientation, may be the best song ever written about the horrors of dragging yourself out of bed so you can accomplish something in this life. Frischmann lets the tough-girl mask slip on “Never Here,” which chronicles the final days of an isolating, codependent relationship with a self-absorbed musician and is rumored to recount her breakup with Anderson. (Its minute-long intro may well be a rejoinder to his sprawling compositions.) “I thought of our lives left on the shelf,” she recalls in the album’s most poignant verse. “Too much TV and curry/Too much time spent on ourselves.”
These songs might have been a preview of the more mature Elastica that would develop as Frischmann, who was 25 when their self-titled album came out, and her bandmates grew older. Unfortunately, fame didn’t agree with them. “I just wasn’t ready for that kind of headfuck,” Frischmann told SPIN in 2010. “I found the whole process of seeing my own image in front of me very difficult to deal with.” Most of the band developed drug problems. New members entered and exited. Matthews and Holland quit, although Holland returned a few years later. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the studio, endlessly tinkering with new songs. Eventually, everyone got clean. Matthews found God.
When their second and final album, the underrated but overworked The Menace, finally came out in 2000, Elastica had become a different, less cohesive band. They seemed to want to move past the sublime minimalism of their early hits, but couldn’t settle on a new sound. A year later, they would break up—and, unlike almost every other Britpop band, they’ve resisted the temptation to reunite. Frischmann contributed one last classic to the pop canon, co-writing M.I.A.’s breakout single “Galang,” then moved to America and became a visual artist.
Looking back on her time in Elastica in 2013, Frischmann mused that the band should have been a “one-album project.” While it’s good to have The Menace, she’s probably right. The persona she assumes on Elastica is as confining for a mature artist as it is thrilling for a young upstart. The album is a product of libido, bravado, and enthusiasm for the music of Gen Xers’ childhoods—all things that start to fade with age. That exhilaration can’t be recaptured, but it can be preserved for future generations of kids wired on sex, cheap wine, and punk rock. | 2017-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Deceptive | September 24, 2017 | 8.5 | b7a82578-2a0d-497b-ba57-0b1d3f429423 | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | |
The popular rapped musical Hamilton tells the story of the United States founding father Alexander Hamilton. Executive produced by the Roots' Black Thought and ?uestlove, the 46 songs, here split across two discs, show an impressive command of both showtunes and golden-era hip-hop. | The popular rapped musical Hamilton tells the story of the United States founding father Alexander Hamilton. Executive produced by the Roots' Black Thought and ?uestlove, the 46 songs, here split across two discs, show an impressive command of both showtunes and golden-era hip-hop. | Various Artists: Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21122-hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording/ | Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording | Hip hop is nothing if not rich in drama. Beyond even the competitive feuding, the best rap music chronicles its makers' highs and lows, detailing the gnarly realities of difficult lives lived triumphantly. Hip hop and theater, with their shared fondness for linear narrative, should make for more frequent bedfellows, but it took until this year for the two genres to combine to properly resounding effect. Debuting at the Public Theater to raves earlier this year and accumulating hype ever since, the rapped musical Hamilton tells the story of the United States founding father born and orphaned in the Caribbean, who used a prodigious writing talent to catapult himself off the island of St. Croix and leave as deep a thumbprint in United States history as has been made.
Hamilton could not have been an easy show to write, even for a theater savant like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 35 year-old Grammy-winning author of In The Heights and recent MacAuthur "Genius Grant" recipient. The play is composed of 46 individual songs, here split between two discs (Acts I and II) that make up the album. Adopted by Miranda from Ron Chernow’s biography, Alexander Hamilton*,* the songs are vehicles for Hamilton’s life experiences, and great pains have been taken to maintain the accuracy of an already-fascinating story amidst the likewise-necessary shimmer of theatrical performance. Pairing early US history with one of the country’s youngest musical art forms, one born of the underprivileged especially, could have been as painful as listening to one of your history teachers "bust a rhyme," but Miranda’s command of both golden era hip hop and showtunes allows him to turn the pomp and circumstance of even congressional proceedings on its head.
Though ostensibly a rap record, from the show opener, "Alexander Hamilton", it’s immediately apparent that we are still essentially in musical-theater territory. Theatrical dialogue must be clear and audible to reach its audience—even when presented in song—which denies the cast the freedom to indulge in grand tonal flourishes or vocal tics. Miranda and his cast’s delivery is steadfast and well-enunciated, the flows delivered with a watchmaker’s precision. It helps that the song itself is a bracingly economical synopsis of Hamilton’s early years: The treacherous hurricane that destroyed St. Croix, the letter he wrote to his absentee father that published by a local paper and caused such a fervor on the island that a group of businessmen took up a collection to send the then 17 year-old Hamilton to New York for college.
Disc one is the more jovial of the pair, chronicling Hamilton’s rise to prominence, and flexing a number of smile-inducing touchtones. Over beatboxing and a drum breakdown replicating hands banging on a lunch table, we get introduced to eventual Hamilton murderer, Aaron Burr. "My Shot" is Miranda spouting couplets in a manner a little too close to slam poetry for anyone’s good, but a number introducing "The Schuyler Sisters", (one of whom Hamilton would marry and another of whom he’d keep a suspiciously affectionate pen pal correspondence with) sounds like it could have been a last-second album exclusion for one hit wonder and infamous Wyclef protégés, City High. "Wait For It" moves with a dancehall lilt and "The Ten Duel Commandments" pays homage to the Notorious B.I.G.’s "10 Crack Commandments".
Disc two is Hamilton’s unraveling, covering, among other things, his affair with one Maria Reynolds and the very public fallout that followed and the death of his 19-year old son in a duel defending his father’s honor. Musically, there are direct allusions to LL Cool J and Mobb Deep ("I’m only 19 but my mind is older," Phillip Hamilton spouts on "Blow Us All Away", a near-quote of "Shook Ones Pt. II") and an a capella verse from Miranda on the second-to-last track "The World Was Wide Enough" is thoroughly reminiscent of the prayers that used to close out DMX albums.
The Hamilton cast recording was executive produced by Black Thought and ?uestlove of the Roots, who know maybe better than anyone the intricacies of presenting hip hop over live instrumentation successfully. These are, however, still very much showtunes. An audience for musical theater comes to hear a story first and foremost (they bury the backing musicians in a pit, for goodness sakes) and the songs of Hamilton work to that end with every bar, even when seamlessly formatted for storyline, as in the case of the show’s freestyle battles by way of cabinet debates.
As an educational tool, Hamilton is a new standard, a piece that will very likely do more to cement Hamilton’s legacy into the consciousness of the general public than any history class ever could. Kaplan would be wise to commission volumes of these kinds of hip hop-driven biographies from Miranda and force him into some kind of lifetime contract. As an album, however, the audio removed from visual context, it’s a lot to digest. It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.
The closest thing to it in popular rap in recent memory would be Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. Just like Hamilton, GKMC is an album that requires time and attention, and rewards that investment handsomely. Hamilton, though, is an album for a very specific audience. It’s for theater lovers, sure, but more generally for people who probably wish they were watching a production of Hamilton. There’s an argument to be made that GKMC’s songs, too, work best within the context of the entire album, as a holistic production to be devoured whole hog. But many of those songs are able to live on their own as great radio singles in a way Miranda’s songs never could. For Hamilton there is no such debate. You need the whole of it, from curtain rise to call. | 2015-10-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Atlantic | October 2, 2015 | 6.9 | b7afc402-7283-467c-ad27-9584ea3fa0f4 | Felipe Delerme | https://pitchfork.com/staff/felipe-delerme/ | null |
With an eclectic mosaic of sounds across 1980s and ’90s freestyle, Miami bass, house, and old-school reggaeton, the Puerto Rican star’s new album delivers floor-fillers that actually try something different. | With an eclectic mosaic of sounds across 1980s and ’90s freestyle, Miami bass, house, and old-school reggaeton, the Puerto Rican star’s new album delivers floor-fillers that actually try something different. | Rauw Alejandro: SATURNO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rauw-alejandro-saturno/ | SATURNO | Do celebrities dream of BeReal? On “Dime Quién????,” a would-be standard heartbreak track, Rauw Alejandro gets uncomfortably real as he recalls the terror of seeing an ex with someone else on the supposedly low-pressure social app for candid photos. In the song’s video, he skulks around New York like he’s caught in The Matrix. He’s broached these topics in his music before, but this time, Alejandro’s confessional is a synth-powered reggaeton spaceship. And while the science-fiction concept of his new album SATURNO doesn’t ever fully solidify, it doesn’t need to. Combined with Alejandro’s charisma, the record’s eclectic mosaic of throwback sounds across 1980s and ’90s freestyle, Miami bass, house, and old-school reggaeton proves there’s room to innovate in pop reggaeton yet.
Latin pop has ventured into space recently. On 2018’s “Yo Le Llego,” from his collab album with J Balvin, Bad Bunny introduced himself as “Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, directamente del espacio” (“direct from space”). Ozuna’s Nibiru (2019), titled after a fictional planet, didn’t quite reach the heights promised by the extra-galactic premise. In each case, these Goliaths sought to prove their singular merit against the most popular backbeat in the world. While neoperreo artists have long embraced the digital sounds of the other in service of a liberatory cyberpunk vision, it’s rare to see pop reggaeton enter similar territory.
In a mainstream Latin music industry that favors a proven formula, popetón doesn’t often pair a big, extraterrestrial concept with an experimental sound to match, even if the concept doesn’t aspire to much beyond another “we’re in space now” aesthetic. With his 2021 single “Todo de Ti,” Alejandro led the Latin pop push into disco retrofuturism; the subsequent Vice Versa proved his dexterity in crafting an album, rather than a collection of songs. Fans of Spanish-language pop, often condescended to by the industry, crave experimentation. “¿Cuándo Fue?,” Vice Versa’s foray into drum’n’bass, signaled that Alejandro was prepared to use a new toolbox not only to surprise, but to underline the emotional potency of his lyrics.
With a trusty production crew (including Alejandro’s own producer alias, El Zorro), SATURNO’s landscape of synths, snares, and samples is airtight—ripe for scene-setting and narrative, if that were the artist’s intention. Instead Alejandro succeeds on vibe alone, delivering floor-fillers that actually try something different, from chiptune loops to hyperpop inflections, and calling on references and collaborators who represent authorities in their genres. “Punto 40” feels lab-created, TikTok trend and all, by expert Latin pop scientists, teaming Alejandro with veteran Baby Rasta for a digitized iteration of Baby Rasta & Gringo’s 1998 track “Tengo Una Punto 40.” “Más De Una Vez” infuses a dreamy sample of Spanish singer Susana Estrada’s 1981 pop track “Gózame Ya.” On “Cazadores,” his collaboration with reggaeton and Latin trap titan Arcángel, a darkwave outro scores Alejandro’s claim to multi-genre fluency: “Listen to me/Nosotros fronteamos en cualquier ritmo” (“We front in whatever rhythm”). “Corazón Despeinado” combines a singsong chorus, a bridge born for rock en español, and a dance-punk beat, all illustrating the same romantic desperation: “Puedo hacer mainstream o alternativo/Pero nunca la pego contigo” (“I can do mainstream or alternative/But I’ll never be a hit with you”).
For all its ambition, SATURNO isn’t consistently adventurous: A few tracks that could easily have been B-sides abandon the already loose concept in favor of straightforward pop reggaeton, and the earlier single “Lokera,” though exciting, feels tacked-on. While Alejandro is certainly capable of a more substantive concept, it’s the specificity of his experiments that make the best tracks work. “De Carolina,” dedicated to his hometown where reggaeton flourished in the ’90s, enlists legendary mixtape architect DJ Playero (who co-produced a few tracks across the album). Layering a nostalgic Playero 38 sample against sharp beat switches and the organic energy of crowd recordings, the track enacts a dynamic flow between new and old that keeps community at its center—the signifier of authentic reggaeton. Since its inception, the genre has been variably derided, criminalized, and defanged; it is rendered utterly toothless when played safe. If pop reggaeton has largely lost its sense of a good time, then Alejandro is kicking a soccer ball in space among the aliens. As true reggaeton duro becomes scarcer in supply, SATURNO charts a course to its pop future. | 2022-11-30T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-30T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Duars Entertainment / Sony Music Latin | November 30, 2022 | 7.6 | b7b6bc60-312d-4f5e-82a5-ecca3acbc626 | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
Max Clarke balances vintage recording methods with expressive songwriting on the ’60s-style pop ballads that fill his debut album as Cut Worms. | Max Clarke balances vintage recording methods with expressive songwriting on the ’60s-style pop ballads that fill his debut album as Cut Worms. | Cut Worms : Hollow Ground | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cut-worms-hollow-ground/ | Hollow Ground | Max Clarke is one of those musicians who worship relics of bygone eras. His eagerness to revisit the art of periods he was born too late to experience permeates the 8-track recordings he makes as Cut Worms, an alias lifted from William Blake’s 18th-century poem “Proverbs of Hell.” But he’s more than just a throwback. His debut album, Hollow Ground, is a collection of ’60s-style pop ballads that balance vintage aesthetics with expressive songwriting.
In his other life, as an illustrator, Clarke relies on old-fashioned drawing skills. (He also designed Hollow Ground’s cover art.) The combination of ingenuity and patience that this work requires is also reflected in Cut Worms’ music. Clarke rotates between electric, acoustic, and lap steel guitars, as well as bass and keyboards, stacking instruments to create the illusion of simple songwriting. “Till Tomorrow Goes Away” sets a foggy mood, then lets a trickling guitar melody clear it away. “Like Going Down Sideways” sounds slow and rough, like a demo recorded outdoors, with Clarke’s voice cracking as he confesses the pain of an old love. He serenades listeners with jaunty acoustic guitar and a sweet croon on “Don’t Want to Say Good-bye.” But, as he switches up instruments throughout the album, Clarke maintains a warmth akin to the honeyed tones of the Everly Brothers and the Kinks.
Clarke doesn’t give his words the same attention as the music, though, too often recycling generic phrases. On “Mad About You,” he stumbles from cliché to irksome cliché: “But wouldn’t it be nice to see you/Somewhere else beside my dreams/I’m mad about you.” But he does, at least, breathe life into those lyrics with a voice like a more melodic Bob Dylan, his unexpectedly pleasant nasal coarseness apparently emanating from some remote inner idyll. He effectively masks his weakness by elongating the notes he sings or, in “Coward’s Confidence,” letting baritone sax and doo-wop backing vocals steal the spotlight.
It’s the way Clarke uses the grainy texture of 8-track tape that gives the album its amber glow. Recorded at the Los Angeles home studio of Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and at New York’s versatile Gary’s Electric with producer Jason Finkel, Hollow Ground filters cozy bedroom-pop sketches through studio boards, drawing out the details in Clarke’s songwriting without stripping the songs of their dusty appeal. The relatively clean production on “Cash for Gold” complements the energy of Clarke’s full-lunged hollers and enthusiastic harmonica solo, instead of coming off as a meaningless ploy to make the track stand out.
What’s most impressive about Hollow Ground is the way Clarke prevents even its most unassuming songs from fading into the background. While a mellow number like “How It Can Be” isn’t groundbreaking in its approach to soft rock, Clarke brings its otherwise hazy evocation of the ’60s into focus by harmonizing with himself in the simplified style of early Beatles material, all endearing croons and power-pop charm. There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway. | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 3, 2018 | 7.2 | b7c66c96-738b-493a-9abf-17424f969ce3 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The reborn art-music crusader reprises himself as a curious classical composer and a singer whose vocal presence proves monumental in surprising ways. | The reborn art-music crusader reprises himself as a curious classical composer and a singer whose vocal presence proves monumental in surprising ways. | Scott Walker: And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10734-and-who-shall-go-to-the-ball-and-what-shall-go-to-the-ball/ | And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? | Industrial hums are not inherently dramatic or musical. There are numerous ways engender a sense of drama, most of them suggestive of intent or austere to the point of making the presence of "art" unmistakable. Musicians can lean on what's signified in their names (Labradford, Iannis Xenakis) or the imagery on their album covers (graphs, power lines, nothing), or they can set industrial hums within surroundings that amplify their abstract nature (atmospheres, beats, more industrial hums).
Another way to engender drama is to simply be Scott Walker. Since reestablishing himself with his 1995 comeback album Tilt, Walker has maintained a formidable presence in art-music circles. If singing about Ingmar Bergman in the 1960s wasn't enough, everything Walker has done in his fertile later years has skewed as work that aspires to the heights of High Modernism. He's assayed atonal sounds. He's bedded down with formalism. He's invested his process with gestures, such as making a rhythm track for last year's The Drift by punching a big slab of meat found hung on a hook in a butcher shop.
Walker has banked lots of reasons to be taken seriously no matter the context, and that figures highly into hearing And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball?, a score written to accompany a dance piece in England. It all starts with an industrial hum: an ominous, throbbing pulse that pushes the air out of a room when played loud. The fact that it was recorded by Walker ups the sense of foreboding already there, but the drama ticks up with sparse flickers of static and then a mad clash of what sounds like demonic klezmer-- a rush of reeds and expressive strings that fall apart as soon as they've struck a melody.
The score develops from there in a fashion similar to The Drift, with a focus on classical music delivered and denuded in an avant-garde vein. Intricate strings drive the action throughout the course of four movements, but sections give way to the dramatic rumble of drums (the kind played with mallets by guys in tuxedoes) and surprising bursts of brightness in which Walker sounds attuned to old Alfred Hitchcock scores composed by Bernard Herrmann.
The most dramatic aspect of the piece, however, involves reconciling the fact that Walker doesn't sing a single note from start to finish. If the absence of a voice when you're expecting it can play games with the mind, then the absence of Scott Walker's-- a tremendous, trembling voice that sounds deep, eerie, gorgeous, and terrifying all at once-- arouses a special kind of dramatic tension. For its voicelessness alone (as well as its short 25-minute running time), And Who Shall… can't be classed as a Walker album proper. But it goes a long way toward revealing the strengths of an artist who has established himself as a serious composer as well as a monumental presence-- even when he's not there to be heard. | 2007-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 2, 2007 | 7 | b7c71681-eb04-40d2-8480-c09b353e59bc | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
The Bronx rapper’s second album in two months has the intimacy of voicemails to a close friend and the warmth of Lil B in his most generous BasedGod form. | The Bronx rapper’s second album in two months has the intimacy of voicemails to a close friend and the warmth of Lil B in his most generous BasedGod form. | MIKE: Renaissance Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-renaissance-man/ | Renaissance Man | Music argues for itself as it plays: This is how you should listen to me. You can tell from how it’s mixed and presented in your speakers how it hopes to be experienced, and MIKE’s Renaissance Man does not want you to play it loud. Splitting production duties with Daryl Johnson, the Bronx rapper muddies the textures of his songs so that the drums feel like drawn breath and small sighs resound like snare claps. MIKE’s own voice is often hard to pick out among the sampled, pitched-down voices moaning in the background. These are deliberate choices, and they lead you to clap your headphones tighter and concentrate. This is music of secrets, internal monologues, intensely specific revelations.
The album follows 2017’s May God Bless Your Hustle and last month’s Black Soap, fleshing out a body of work that presents itself humbly on the outside but swells with fierce pride and self-love within. The video for Renaissance Man single “Time Will Tell” says it all: MIKE peers at you from beneath his bedsheets, a self-made fort that you’re invited to enter if you accept him. Under here, you’ll find a teeming kingdom, a world of sighs, small cries, and under-the-breath mantras, where small gestures can turn superheroic.
MIKE’s flow remains a thing of wonder, for those who stop to notice it. His rhyme schemes map back onto themselves in a gratifying way reminiscent of Earl Sweatshirt, or MF DOOM, or Reddit threads of things fitting perfectly into other things. One small stretch, for illustration: “My feet on the ground but my head over heels/The beast on the prowl for his bread and his will/No lease on my doubt, I’m expecting a thrill.” But he buries these verses inside the music, seemingly unconcerned about whether we notice their intricacy. What he wants us to feel is the size of his heart, and the pain and empathy filling it. He is the spiritual heir of Lil B, in his most generous BasedGod form, the truth-speaker radiating magnanimity from his pores.
For all the twisting-vine paths his verses can take, the album opens with his friend Joygill Moriah just talking, on “Negro World (Intro),” while the track warps and curls around him like a burning Polaroid: “It’s the mental game that matters the most. Knowing where your seeds is planted. Where you keep the water at.” He adds, “For what it’s worth—thanks. Thanks for not giving up. Thanks for not holding back.” It’s not clear who he’s talking to, but he makes us feel how much it matters.
The album feels like a series of voicemails to close friends—in fact, “Goliath” concludes with one such actual voicemail. “On the streets is the worst way to hear about you/And that’s only cuz a nigga really care about you, dude,” he mutters on “Sidewalk Soldier.” There are glints of confidence and bluster—“I made it this far from ducking all your feedback/You ain’t done enough to see that”—but the dominant gesture here is the outstretched palm, the overwhelming message: “Come and spread your arms if you really need a hug.”
The production glimmers in place. You can stare into these tracks and feel your eyes dilate: The synths on “Decision Tower” mimic the gentle ripple of a pool filter. Nothing here insists, nothing shouts, nothing demands. You can often lose track of yourself listening to the album, in the best possible way. MIKE sums up this effect nicely on “Time Will Tell”: “Don’t really like attention, but I bring it around."
Even live, MIKE insists on this disarming intimacy. I saw him on a bewildering bill where he opened for the indie rock outfit Amen Dunes; it was just him and two others onstage. He encouraged the audience to dance, launched into a song, but stopped a few seconds in to observe, “But y’all ain’t dancing, though.” Then he shrugged and plowed forward, giving the moment all he had. | 2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | June 28, 2018 | 7.5 | b7c7d6a9-b625-4409-972a-e4214c9bef1b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Ed Sheeran sells trite innocence by the pound. He uses bland wisdom and unimaginative music to ponder the basic good and bad in people around him, without once looking inward. | Ed Sheeran sells trite innocence by the pound. He uses bland wisdom and unimaginative music to ponder the basic good and bad in people around him, without once looking inward. | Ed Sheeran: ÷ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22960-divide/ | ÷ (Divide) | Ed Sheeran needs you to know that he did not go to university. Instead, he spent his teens slogging around the UK pub circuit, and by the age of 20, he was on his way to becoming Britain’s biggest male pop star. Still, he likes to come back to the uni thing. He sings about not having a degree twice on his new album, ÷, after at least three earlier instances in his catalog. He’s fashioned this weighty chip on his shoulder into an arrow in his quiver, using it to shore up his everyman image and personable nature, while distinguishing himself as a bit of a cheeky system-shunning maverick who’s made it this far on chops alone. His shtick is aspirational: All you need is free will, a little song in your heart, and perhaps you too could one day be playing for 270,000 people across three nights at Wembley Stadium.
Innocence is key to the Ed Sheeran brand. His self-proclaimed uncoolness is what makes him both cool and impervious to bad-tempered criticism. He regularly describes his true love as an angel, refers to his father—a perpetually lingering prophet—as “daddy,” and sings tenderly about his grandparents. On ÷’s release day, he sold copies of his record in an HMV superstore, and looked indistinguishable from the full-time staff. There’s no doubt that Sheeran is calculating, but then he told you as much in his album titles (÷, 2014’s x, and 2011’s +). Like Sia, the Chainsmokers, and Charli XCX, he marvels at his ability to turn out generic hooks like nobody’s business—so many, he doesn’t even remember writing them when they hit No. 1 in 17 countries.
This is the genial, antiseptic frame through which we’re to view Ed Sheeran. But considering he is among the most successful songwriters in the world, a lot of his lyrics do not even scan. “I’m just a boy with a one-man show, no un-er-ver-si-tee..., just a song I wrote,” he sings in “What Do I Know?” like a teenage boy trying to knot a cherry stem with his tongue. When he raps, as he does on “Eraser,” his words fit together with the elegance of Stickle Bricks. Good taste is of no concern: He lets John Mayer sleaze all over the tender ode to his girlfriend “How Would You Feel? (Paean)” with his guitar. Although you can practically hear Rihanna’s laugh after being offered the tropical house concession “Shape of You,” the song generally fares fine until Sheeran, the seventh richest British musician under the age of 30, admits to his dating style: “You and me are thrifty so go all you can eat/Fill up your bag and I fill up a plate/We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour.”
There is no greater evidence of Sheeran’s commercial power than his label acquiescing to keep Corrs tribute “Galway Girl” on this album. Set to bodhrán and uileann pipes, it’s the latest of many Sheeran barnstormers about meeting a great gal (who is definitely real) on a boozy night out. A check from the Irish tourist board for him name-dropping Guinness, Jameson, John Powers, and Van Morrison may be forthcoming, which would certainly cover any forthcoming lawsuit from B*Witched for infringing on their 1998 hit “C’est La Vie.” Sheeran traveled the world for a year before making this record, and considering his cultural takeaway from County Galway, we should be thankful his travels didn’t also inspire him to write a song about lassoing une mademoiselle with a string of onions beneath the Eiffel Tower, or how love sprang eternal with a girl in a dirndl in Austria.
On his past records, Sheeran often painted himself as a drunken mess, at the mercy of bad girls and dark situations. Whatever you made of them, they felt, to use a dirty word, honest. Here, “Eraser” feels like the only true reflection of his psyche, where he acknowledges his unrelatable predicament (“Ain’t nobody wanna see you down in the dumps/Because you’re living your dream, man/This shit should be fun”). For the rest of the record, he switches to a mode of bland wisdom that allows him to ponder the good and bad in people around him rather than look inwards. The lack of honesty doesn’t really matter—nobody’s going to Sheeran for gritty soul-searching. But the lack of imagination does. As with Adele, who was also told by Rick Rubin to go back to the drawing board, you suspect that more interesting songs may have been left off the record for commercial reasons.
If there’s a personal touch to Sheeran’s generic sentiments, it’s his unwavering belief in love. He’s often burned for it, he’s desperate for kids, he sees the future in his girlfriend’s eyes. Over the simpering groove of “What Do I Know?” he talks about how his “daddy” told him, “Son, don’t you get involved in politics, religion or other people’s quarrel.” Instead, like a Disney woodland creature, he just wants to pass on “the things my family’s given to me: just love and understanding, positivity.” His feeble message falls apart when the self-confessed careerist sighs at someone surely in his same tax bracket for talking “‘bout exponential growth, and the stock market crashing and their portfolios/While I’ll be sitting here with a song that I wrote.” Sheeran’s conditional optimism flashes back into view, and shows his judgmental ass: “I’m all for people following their dreams/Just remember life is more than fit-tin’ in your jeans,” he sings, in a chummy, winking dig at the basic, vapid women who do not share his own basic, vapid worldview.
It’s one of several striking lyrics about appearances on ÷, which is where the Nice Guy façade comes undone. Sheeran has always loved to neg and to position himself as an innocent victim. If you thought he’d got all that out of his system when he co-wrote Bieber’s risible “Love Yourself,” you were wrong. “Perfect” is “Unchained Melody” by way of Westlife, and a tender assurance to his beloved that she’s not a mess, but a beauty. The barely suppressed creepiness of “Happier” is his attempt at post-breakup maturity, but it doesn’t even last into the next track, “New Man,” a wounded sketch of his ex’s new boyfriend who has “his eyebrows plucked and his arsehole bleached,” and “wears a man bag on his shoulder but I call it a purse.” One nil, Sheeran. He turns his attentions to his ex. What happened to that sweet, sylvan girl who used to read and eat crisps by the river? “Now she’s eatin’ kale/Hittin’ the gym/Keepin’ up with Kylie and Kim.” You mean, when she could be listening to Sheeran rap about his daddy?
This is not to say that anyone should expect Sheeran—who is popular at weddings and funerals for a reason—to present a nuanced interpretation of gender politics within his songs (though his fans deserve more than depictions of women as angels or traitors). But more than his weak balladry, it's this disingenuous side that rankles. In the nostalgic vein of Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” and Drake’s “Weston Road Flows,” Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill” yearns for a childhood idyll. It’s pure sentimentality, another key to how he uses humblebraggadocio and innocence to shore up his moral high ground over shallow girls and unfair beauty standards. On “Eraser,” Sheeran sings, “I’m well aware of certain things that will befall a man like me.” He means booze and drugs, but it’s his inability to reconcile his early underdog status with his titanic popularity that’ll ensnare him. Sheeran wants it both ways: artist and celebrity, nice guy who doesn’t want to alienate his fans with political convictions, anti-consumerist while gagging to dominate pop’s arms race. He’s the guy she told you not to worry about, and he’s wearing your clothes. | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | March 10, 2017 | 2.8 | b7cc9fd2-3d61-4adb-ad32-c4e34826a108 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
On his first album as Huerco S. in six years, the Kansas musician trades his customary ambient textures for an hour’s worth of intricate, off-center head trips. | On his first album as Huerco S. in six years, the Kansas musician trades his customary ambient textures for an hour’s worth of intricate, off-center head trips. | Huerco S.: Plonk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/huerco-s-plonk/ | Plonk | Brian Leeds has been wrestling with electronic music’s utilitarian aspects since he was barely out of his teens. He started his career as Huerco S. in 2011 with a series of 12"s that subverted house music’s rhapsodic abandon, buffing its surface until the dancefloor seemed to lie behind a pane of frosted glass. As he became recognized in dance music circles as an innovator of what was inelegantly called “outsider” house, he dipped in and out of club-centric styles until he abandoned them altogether on 2016’s For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have). Despite its stature as one of the defining ambient albums of the past decade, many tracks on For Those of You cut to stark, disorienting silence mid-phrase, insistently reminding the listener that any blissful state is by nature temporary. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone using the album in their next savasana.
Still, Leeds seems to conflate the album’s success with the slow spread of more docile strains of ambient music. “[Ambient] is like productivity music, capitalist music,” he told Bandcamp last year. “It doesn’t get in your way, like you can still work your job. It kinda makes me cringe a bit. And maybe I feel responsible for that.” In the past five years, under the name Pendant, he’s released just two albums of abstract, billowing sound that few would call easy listening. Whenever consensus builds around whatever he’s doing, Leeds, seemingly feeling his back against the wall creatively, sheds his skin and walks away—not just from a sound or style, but from how listeners engage with his music as a part of their daily life.
Plonk is Leeds’ first album as Huerco S. in six years, and once again the album’s brilliance comes from the way it subverts its utilitarian framing. The titular sound that acts as the music’s aesthetic anchor is inspired by the mechanics of an automobile, metal against metal working in concert to produce forward motion. Car culture and electronic music share intersecting histories that bridge the gap between Germany and Detroit, but there is no motorik pulse signifying the steady passing of highway lines here. It’s hard to say that its ideal setting is a long drive, as Leeds has tentatively suggested, either; the depth of the album’s production is lost beneath the hum of the motor and the rush of the road. Plonk is much more inventive, much more varied and surprising, than the framework suggests.
One Plonk’s most striking aspects is Leeds’ Escher-esque approach to rhythm and song structure, with repetitive loops often taking a backseat to translucent drift and illusory syncopation. The first two tracks are percussive without relying on a pulse; in fact, they forgo almost any hint of a steady tempo. “Plonk I” opens with flickering beads of sound tapping at the ears like droplets hitting a windowpane, and they become more insistent, but never more coherent, as the first track develops. Tessellating pulses of synthesizer detonate at irregular intervals before evaporating into hiss and bassy rumble on “Plonk II,” punctuated by expectant periods of dead silence. Only as “Plonk III” ramps up is there any semblance of rhythmic continuity, and with a rush of drum machine the music becomes a multi-dimensional current of interlocking grooves.
Plonk follows a parabolic arc, with the highest energy tracks all clustered near the center of the album. The meatiest, most propulsive zone, primarily concentrated in “Plonk III” and “Plonk IV,” consists of dazzling rhythmic workouts that draw on Leeds’ experience as a peak-time DJ but maintain the unwavering asymmetry of the album’s expository tracks. Textural layers whirl and collide in tandem with melodic synth lines and seemingly autonomous drum patterns that reconfigure themselves every few bars. These tracks reference various corners of the zeitgeist—traces of melodic IDM, atmospheric glitch, dread-laden trap, and the psychedelic bounce of trance are all present—but ultimately they are subservient to the grand, vividly rendered swirl.
Even the steady unraveling that occurs during the album’s second half is full of surprises and sharp left turns. After a couple digressions into low-lit, downtempo loops (some of the most uncomplicated, undemanding productions on the album), Leeds brings in rapper Sir E.U, a linchpin of Washington, DC’s experimental hip-hop scene, for “Plonk IX.” E.U is a perfect foil for Leeds; both make music that is playful, skewed, and profound, but where Leeds’ productions feel meticulous, E.U follows every lyrical tangent as they occur to him. A kick drum fires sporadically, accenting E.U’s whimsical flow, while garbled synths cluster around his voice like bees on honeycomb. Ending the album with the silky ambient flutter of “Plonk X” feels almost as provocative. After 50 minutes of intricate and off-kilter head trips, its gentleness, recalling some of the most blissful moments of For Those of You, is disarming.
Plonk shows Leeds evolving in real time as he throws an abundant number of very sticky ideas at the wall. Its most cohesive element is the onomatopoeia that gives the album its name, which appears in various forms: Sometimes it’s a literal clank of metal, other times a synthetic scrap of errant sound that whizzes by. But the record’s multiplicity results in a strange kind of approachability, with each errant turn inviting us to hear what those obscure corners of the music have to say. To give in slightly and breathe some life back into Leeds’ car metaphor, perhaps this music provides a safe, impeccably designed environment in which to traverse those unknown spaces; at its heart, this is music about and for the daily explorations that offer new perspectives on the world. In that sense, Plonk is nothing if not transportive. | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Incienso | February 25, 2022 | 8.4 | b7cdca07-bb9b-4196-96a6-7d2ed262d62b | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
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 debut album by the Go-Go’s, a ’70s punk band that beat the odds to become ’80s pop superstars. | 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 debut album by the Go-Go’s, a ’70s punk band that beat the odds to become ’80s pop superstars. | The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-go-gos-beauty-and-the-beat/ | Beauty and the Beat | In 1982, the debut album from the Go-Go’s, Beauty and the Beat, went to No. 1, making the California band the first all-woman group to top the charts with songs they’d written and performed themselves. It was such a big hit that the Go-Go’s were constantly misnomered as the first successful female band, ever. While this conveniently ignored the achievements of their pioneering predecessors and contemporaries, there was some truth to the idea. Unlike the girl groups of the ’60s, the Go-Go’s operated without any men pulling the strings, without a Svengali figure as their shepherd. Their singles “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed” were international successes, and the band’s faces were all over MTV and on the covers of People and Rolling Stone. It was a long way from where they’d started.
As the Los Angeles punk scene emerged in the late 1970s, it was inclusive, diverse, and pioneered by marginalized voices. Bands like the Zeros and the Bags spearheaded a community that encouraged the freedom of self-expression and self-celebration. The scene centered largely around The Canterbury, a derelict, roach-infested apartment building where members of the future Go-Go’s lived. As one version of the story goes, outside a house party in Venice, bassist Margot Olavarria invited two girls to join a band she was starting with drummer Elisa Bello: guitarist Jane Wiedlin, a helium-voiced former glitter rocker known as Jane Drano who was studying fashion design, and vocalist Belinda Carlisle, a former high school cheerleader and Monkees fan-club member who was supposed to play drums in the Germs under the name Dottie Danger until she was sidelined by mono. (Subsequent tellings of the band’s mythology often ignore Olavarria’s contributions, but as Carlisle wrote in her memoir, “she lit the match that started the fire.”) The four novice musicians dubbed themselves the Misfits; they quickly renamed themselves the Go-Go’s.
“Everyone we hung out with were all in a band and they weren’t any good,” Wiedlin later told Sounds. “So we figured if they could do it, why couldn’t we?” Inspired by the Buzzcocks’ pop-punk, they wore dresses made of garbage bags and wrote noisy, shambolic songs that celebrated BDSM, taunted music critics, satirized pretentious poseurs, and extolled the grimy hedonism of their digs. “I wanted to throw up on stage, rip my clothes off, and dye my hair,” Wiedlin told Flipside in 1979. Olavarria just wanted to “spit at Valley girls.”
Down the street from The Canterbury was The Masque, a ramshackle, heavily graffitied DIY venue in the basement of a porn theater on Hollywood Boulevard where, in May 1978, the Go-Go’s played their first show. Missing at that debut gig was Charlotte Caffey, who they had invited to join as lead guitarist. Caffey, who had previously played bass in the L.A. punk group the Eyes, had never played lead before. Yet her presence in the band was transformative, and not just because, as the band often joked, she was the only one who knew how to plug a guitar into an amplifier. Caffey brought in a pop sensibility, and she and Wiedlin quickly became a writing team; as the Go-Go’s became more technically proficient, their music evolved from punk to pop. “One must admit that the wildly amateurish musical approach of their early days has been replaced by a very competent barrage of near melodic tunes and singing,” one Slash magazine critic noted in May 1979.
In the summer of 1979, Bello was replaced by Gina Schock, a recent transplant from Baltimore. Of the five, Schock had the most experience on her instrument and, sensing the band’s potential, she imposed a tighter rehearsal schedule and work ethic. And so the Go-Go’s began their slow transition away from “a serious joke” to simply serious.
In 1980, while overseas on tour, the band released a demo for the UK punk label Stiff, led by a rough and tumble version of “We Got the Beat.” Composed quickly by Caffey on New Year’s Day 1980 while “listening to Motown songs, watching a Twilight Zone marathon, and getting high on a cocktail of stuff,” the band’s first hit is a two-minute ode to lighthearted bliss driven by a supercharged, Duracell Bunny rhythm section. Though the song failed to take off in Britain, it was big enough back home in California that their audience began to expand beyond the L.A. punk crowd. In December, facing a competing vision for the band and a nasty case of Hepatitis A, founding bassist Olavarria was replaced by Kathy Valentine, who had been playing guitar professionally since she was a teenager in Texas. With a series of sold-out shows at famed Sunset Strip rock club the Whiskey a Go Go looming, Valentine buckled down and learned the bass in four days. As the L.A. punk scene gravitated toward the hardcore sounds of Black Flag, the Go-Go’s were moving in the opposite direction.
Still, the group struggled to find a label. “The one thing I was greeted with without exception from every [record] company was ‘Oh, it’s an all-girl band,’” the band’s manager Ginger Canzoneri later explained. “‘Fanny didn’t make it, the Runaways didn’t make it, therefore girl bands don’t make it.’” Neither of these bands were failures by any definition: Fanny wrote their own songs and were the first all-female band to release a rock album on a major label; teenage rockers the Runaways also wrote and performed their own songs while challenging the confines of girl-group sexuality. Though both bands carved out space for the Go-Go’s to thrive, their successes were defined by a system outside of their creation, a system never intended to empower them.
On April 1, 1981, after countless rejections, the Go-Go’s finally signed with I.R.S., a small label that was home to the Cramps and the Buzzcocks. I.R.S. wasn’t their top choice, but its willingness to take a risk on the band was meaningful in the face of pervasive sexist prejudice they’d faced elsewhere. “The other record companies could only see that we were girls; they could never get past that point,” explained Wiedlin in a 1981 issue of Trouser Press. “It was either that we were girls so they didn’t want to take a chance, or we were girls and they wanted to capitalize on that.”
Soon after, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut, Beauty and the Beat, with producer Richard Gottehrer, a former Brill Building songwriter who co-wrote and produced the Angels’ hit “My Boyfriend’s Back” and later produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut and Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ Blank Generation. The record’s two singles, a polished version of “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed,” fit neatly into Gottehrer’s résumé of pop perfection. The latter, based on a love letter Wiedlin received from the Specials’ Terry Hall, with whom she was having an affair, encourages optimism amid rumblings of hurtful rumors. “Can you hear them/They talk about us/Telling lies/Well, that’s no surprise,” Carlisle sings, brushing off gossip with the relentless pep of a trained cheerleader.
The easygoing pleasure of these two singles is embodied in Beauty and the Beat’s cover. With a washed-out Jacuzzi color palette, it shows the five bandmates posed in towels, terrycloth turbans, and face masks, while on the back cover, individual members lounged in a bathtub pouring champagne, eating chocolates, and reading pulp novels. It was a far cry from the band’s grimy roots; many critics interpreted the girly photos as proof that the Go-Go’s had lost all punk credibility. (In reality, the shoot wasn’t so posh: The group had to return the towels to Macy’s in order to afford food and the Mr. Bubble gave them infections.)
Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark. “Tonite” captures the exhilaration of cruising down Hollywood Boulevard, where the band “get dressed up/And messed up/Blow our cares away.” “This Town” digs deeper into the city’s scuzzy glamour. “We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores/Discarded stars, like worn-out cars,” Carlisle snarls before Valentine rips a gigantic guitar solo. “Bet you’d live here if you could/And be one of us,” she taunts, offering a thrilling taste of their freedom.
While their attitude might be cooler-than-thou, the Go-Go’s offer an unabashedly sincere window into their hearts. On “Lust to Love,” Carlisle plunges into her vulnerabilities to chronicle the transformation from casual flirt to lovesick prisoner. Later, on “Fading Fast,” love’s spell breaks after one too many lies. As her bandmates cushion her devastation with mournful harmonies, Carlisle holds the pieces of her heart in her hands and looks forward with herculean resolve. Beauty and the Beat concludes with a chipper mantra: “Can’t stop the world/Don’t let it stop you.” Originally written by Valentine for her band the Textones, the song is not so much about blithe optimism as it is understanding your own potential, a reminder of the determination that fueled the band’s creation.
The Go-Go’s later claimed that the first time they heard Beauty and the Beat, huddled together in a car, they wept. “In the studio, we had thought we were making a great punk album,” wrote Carlisle in her memoir. “On hearing the final version, it sounded more pop than we had anticipated.” Here, they worried, was the final proof the Go-Go’s had entirely traded their punk roots for mainstream popularity. But once Beauty and the Beat was released in July 1981, many critics felt differently, calling it a record that “those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.” The band quickly changed their tune.
One month after Beauty and the Beat was released, MTV began broadcasting. The new channel helped catapult the Go-Go’s toward superstardom. In the video for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the band drives through Beverly Hills in a convertible, their trademark garbage bags replaced by colorful summer dresses. Dubbed “America’s Sweethearts,” the Go-Go’s were considered “safe, wholesome, and proudly commercial.” Beauty and the Beat hit No. 1, they were nominated for a Grammy, and they opened for the Police on a massive stadium tour.
But the trappings of mainstream success did not shield the Go-Go’s from the sexism of the male-centric music industry. “It sounds like a joyous, bubbling celebration by five cute girls, with no thought inside their darling little heads save for tonight’s beach party,” griped NME’s review of Beauty and the Beat. “If this was an album by five guys from the USA it’d be hacked to bits by the critics,” said Sounds. Interviews and reviews focused on the band’s love lives, outfits, and novelty; when Annie Liebowitz photographed them in their underwear for their first Rolling Stone cover, the photo ran beneath the headline “Go-Go’s Put Out.”
The band was well aware of their sugar-coated image (Wieldlin once compared the band to Twinkies) but privately rebelled against it. They partied relentlessly, while Carlisle and Caffey struggled with cocaine and heroin addictions, respectively; rumors spread of pranks that involved harassing their tour manager with explicit Polaroids and an alleged sex tape. This dark underbelly of an outwardly bubbly band feels indicative of the contradictions that lurked around the band.
While the Go-Go’s achieved unprecedented chart success, there was a cost to this insurrection, one that brings up complicated issues of identity, integrity, and the blurring of genre lines—topics still fully relevant today. Would the Go-Go’s have become so popular if they retained the punk spirit of their early days? Probably not. But was there a way for them to retain this essence and still be successful? Yes, and to an extent, they did. The Go-Go’s wrote and performed their own songs, songs about independence and desire and control. They shifted a paradigm and inspired a new generation of women—from the Bangles to Hole to Bikini Kill to Sleater-Kinney—to make noise on their own terms. The Go-Go’s never hid from where they came from, and they never apologized for where it took them. | 2019-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | IRS | October 20, 2019 | 8.3 | b7cf4f8a-d267-4dcd-8129-8f9e85b1f206 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Röyksopp's third album finds them synthesizing the highs and lows from their previous records to strike a knowing middle ground. Robyn and Lykke Li guest. | Röyksopp's third album finds them synthesizing the highs and lows from their previous records to strike a knowing middle ground. Robyn and Lykke Li guest. | Röyksopp: Junior | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12860-junior/ | Junior | Listen to it now and you might beg to differ, but history's current take on The Understanding (Röyksopp's 2005 answer to their relentlessly smiley faced debut) seems to be that it was a misstep. Despite a lead single ("Only This Moment") that foresaw trance's miniature mainstream resurgence and memorable contributions from Karin Driejer (whose "What Else Is There" ranks among Röyksopp's finest songs) and Chelonis R. Jones (whose syncopated "49 Percent" helped eke the Norwegian duo into more credible techno territory), this darker, more textured follow-up stalled at the gate. In retrospect, it was probably done under by both expectation and competition: Not only did The Understanding fail to deliver anything as relentlessly chirpy as early single "Eple" or as friendly and as instantaneous as the Geico Caveman-endorsed "Remind Me", but it was also up against increasingly significant competition from the emergent Scandinavian electro-pop scene.
Junior is Röyksopp's third album in eight years and finds them synthesizing the highs and lows from their previous records to strike a knowing middle ground. While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Röyksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Röyksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide. In doing so, they've managed to solve the niggling problems inherent to Melody A.M. and The Understanding-- neither sickly sweet or unsuitably gloomy, Junior is arguably the pair's strongest album.
If you're a production duo like Röyksopp, a lot of your success is dependent upon the singers you surround yourself with, and they've chosen wisely here: In addition to a pair of encore performances from Dreijer, Junior also includes turns from Robyn, Lykke Li, and frequent contributor Anneli Drecker. The high points are pretty much as you'd expect; Driejer does double duty, lending an uncharacteristically creamy falsetto to the disco-inflected workout "This Must Be It" as well as a typically nervy vocal to the double-timed horrorshow piece "Tricky Tricky". Elsewhere, Robyn overdelivers, accounting not only for the best track on the album, but possibly of the year: Influenced in equal parts by Italo disco and "Blue Monday", "The Girl and the Robot" is a frigid, winding bit of electro that combines a powerhouse vocal with some slippery chord changes and one of the biggest choruses of 2009 so far.
Meanwhile, fans of Röyksopp's pop confectionaries needn't look farther than lead single "Happy Up Here", whose dumb, gloopy loop is so infectious that it manages to coast along without the aid of (or need for) any supporting song structure. The pair also hit with "Röyksopp Forever", a starry, string-aided instrumental that starts out sounding like a proggier, second-rate Air before saving itself with a legitimately momentous key change. Some of the other album cuts flirt with downtempo conventions to less flattering outcomes; in fact, if there are any criticisms to be made here, they probably have to do with Röyksopp's tendency to veer into over-produced tastefulness. The worst offender is probably "Silver Cruiser", which exposes the pair's overly finessed production skills and temporarily veers the record into Zero 7/Lemon Jelly/Groove Armada territory. Mostly, though, it's a divide they manage to stay on the right side of; if rumors are true and Junior is in the fact the companion to a slower, more ambient album called Senior due for release later this year, it'll be interesting to see just how long they can keep that up. | 2009-03-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Astralwerks | March 25, 2009 | 7.9 | b7d47224-6b95-4ef3-b60c-6d3067d45314 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
On his new EP, the 21-year-old Queens singer presents a series of heart-rending song sketches inspired by loss. | On his new EP, the 21-year-old Queens singer presents a series of heart-rending song sketches inspired by loss. | Deem Spencer: we think we alone EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deem-spencer-we-think-we-alone-ep/ | we think we alone EP | Deem Spencer sings through a fog of grief on we think we alone, a hazy EP inspired by the death of his grandfather last winter. “There was this super heavy feeling that I’d never felt before...[that] brought me home and showed me what’s really important,” the 21-year old Queens artist recently told The Fader. Spencer—ostensibly a rapper but really a restrained, pattering singer on most of his songs—sounds perpetually subdued as a result, grasping at a sense of purpose and stumbling through romance. Last year, Spencer began slowly trickling out precocious tracks that cast him as a heady, free association lyricist. But his recent heartache has catalyzed some lonely revelations that carry more weight, even if he has a pesky way of obscuring them in his brooding.
Spencer writes with the worldliness of someone who has learned sorrow too early, and transforms the banal into tragedy with a wistful turn of phrase. “Our loved one left last Friday but he still get mail to the crib,” he sings numbly on “Moonflower.” Though it’s severe, Spencer’s desolation is tranquil and measured. “Everybody knew, I’m sad to say came too late/I just threw out the reverend,” he mumbles, sick of glad-handing well-wishers. At times like these, Spencer illuminates clumsy details with a matter-of-fact poeticism.
Elsewhere, his lyricism slips by in the daze of his delivery. “I was never lonely when I walked alone/I prefer the fall of my own bones,” he sings distantly on “Dirt,” content to let a good line glimmer without over-coddling. “Eve’s Titties” is we think we alone’s buzzy lead single, and it’s representative of his knotty, stream-of-conscious verses. Opening track “There Was Plenty Time Before Us” utilizes the same abbreviated but philosophical phrases, this time over quivering strings. “Soul Atlantis/Dolo antics/YOLO and it’s/So low-handed/Goal abandoned,” Spencer raps, letting his loneliness tumble into disappointment.
Throughout we think we alone, Spencer sings affectively, but his voice sometimes fails to do the lyrics justice. Most of the vocal performances feature Spencer drifting away from or mumbling into the mic, and he often sounds hushed to the point of rendering himself camouflaged in a beat. Singing in a thin and barely moving mid-range exacerbates the effect since many of the songs on the EP plod in a similar atmospheric hue. But when Spencer lets his voice ring clear, it sounds much better and lends his lyrics a deserving spotlight.
It’s what makes “Sex Makes Babies” the most vulnerable vocal track of the bunch, with Spencer crooning in a strained but bold style over an electric piano and softly brushed drums for a sort of jazz lullaby. Like a handful of the songs on we think we alone, it ends abruptly with a zap, shortcutting the problem of writing out a resolution and framing tracks as sketches. To Spencer’s credit, they’re the type worth poring over, wishing there was more. | 2017-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 1, 2017 | 6.5 | b7d638ba-9915-427d-9f2a-64e98efe59a9 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The debut EP from the UK metalcore revivalists is a triumph of concision. Whatever you like about the genre, you can find it here. | The debut EP from the UK metalcore revivalists is a triumph of concision. Whatever you like about the genre, you can find it here. | Heriot: Profound Morality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heriot-profound-morality/ | Profound Morality | Metalcore is experiencing a surprising, unprecedented era of critical cachet, all without ceding an inch toward “good taste.” Whether it’s splatterhouse gore, WWE entrance music, MySpace emo, great southern trendkills, or “Bring Me to Life” revival, this 21st-century subculture has already proven to be fertile roots music. Amid this wave of extremists and specialists, Heriot make for a curious Next Big Thing. The Midlands quartet hadn’t developed much of a reputation prior to the pandemic; a string of early releases was followed by a four-year hiatus and the addition of guitarist/vocalist Deb Gough in 2020. Gough’s presence infused Heriot with greater instrumental flexibility and, more importantly, charisma: From their reboot single “Cleansed Existence,” it was clear that Heriot had it, even if that quality couldn’t be reduced to sonic signifiers. With Profound Morality, it’s easier to define—whatever it is you find intriguing about metalcore, you’ll find it here.
More than their peers, Heriot maintain a healthy degree of respect toward the genre’s formative figures. The cover’s font and blurred, igneous imagery hearkens back to Roadrunner’s 1990s commercial peak, and in late 2021, Heriot made good on the title of “Ten Ton Hammer,” a cover of the 1997 hit from Machine Head—a key liaison between groove- and nu-metal, and also subject of some of the era’s most withering reviews in Heriot’s native UK. Gough has the chops of a Guitar World guest columnist but can also be found jamming along with Turnstile on her Twitter account. Numerous writeups of Heriot’s guitar tones have assumed the reader is familiar with Boss’ HM-2 pedal, in the same way hip-hop critics will namedrop the 808 drum machine—the sound of a formative piece of “golden age” equipment whose sonic character remains timeless.
And so it’s fitting that instrumental opener “Abaddon” evokes one of the most memorable instances of early ’90s futurism, the final scene of Terminator 2 where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets lowered into a vat of smoldering steel, obscured by chains—the sound is metal, some of it cybernetic, some of it forged from steel, all of it merging towards a molten end. And immediately afterwards, “Coalescence” imagines the T800 reemerging as an amoral killing machine, the track itself a self-contained syllabus of everything Heriot has done and will do through Profound Morality: bionic percussion, blast beats, vocals that span blackened, death and goth metal, tempos alternating between sludge and speed.
With eight tracks in about 20 minutes and judicious use of silence, Profound Morality is a triumph of concision, Heriot concentrating the overwhelming effect of past masters who were far more reliant on sprawl and space. “Abaddon” and the title track miniaturize Godflesh’s colossal, cautionary tales of machine turning against man. Rather than compartmentalizing metalgaze, the flagrant thrash of “Enter the Flesh” is covered with a layer of gauze equally steel and wool. Gough’s vocals occasionally edge towards the haunted forests of doom-folk and Deftones’ drug dens and quickly find their way out. At any given moment, Profound Morality presents as maximalism, but taken as a whole it’s a work of restraint and craft—a band whose shapeshifting happens organically rather than as a series of jarring growth spurts.
At times the band betrays its interest in influences outside of metalcore, as the erratic pulses and ambient synth washes of “Mutagen” and “Abattoir” could’ve been smuggled onto the more confrontational and abstract stretches of Arca’s KICK series. The band’s voice is also in a state of development: The lyrics themselves are mostly vivid, tactile ways of making explicit what the music itself implies (“blood soaked brick, meaningless living,” “scorned by the blaze of death,” “Feel the wrath of mass terror”). While a weighty statement on its own, Profound Morality arrives as only a teaser of their boundless potential—the past, present, and possible future of metalcore. | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Church Road | May 11, 2022 | 7.6 | b7d8b521-6b9f-4822-bb0f-d03efb91bf0d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Luke Temple hires a band and, led by the outstanding "Collector" single, expands upon the promise of his debut as Here We Go Magic. | Luke Temple hires a band and, led by the outstanding "Collector" single, expands upon the promise of his debut as Here We Go Magic. | Here We Go Magic: Pigeons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14318-pigeons/ | Pigeons | Listeners crave tidy narratives. Thus, when "Collector", the second track from Here We Go Magic's second LP and first as a full band, Pigeons, began to make the blog rounds, there was quite a bit of chatter about the album possibly being the band's-- and its bandleader, Luke Temple's-- breakout moment. Makes sense: It's hard to listen to "Collector"-- one of the finest pieces of post-Sufjan Stevens chamber pop-- and not get excited about something. Can anyone be blamed for hoping that the rest of the record would endlessly vibe on that theme?
Whatever the case, Pigeons is not the sparkling, fully realized breakout effort many of us hoped from this band. Nothing is as precisely organized and self-contained as "Collector", as the album's other similarly rhythmic, pulsing moments arise more from Here We Go Magic's reliance on looped melodic fragments than any discernible krautrock influence. As such, Pigeons feels less divorced from the bedroom freak-folk of the project's self-titled debut (recorded by Temple all by his lonesome, with the assistance of a looping pedal or two) than it seems the logical extension of that aesthetic.
Somewhat surprisingly, especially given the debut's minor faults, the woodshedded feel of Pigeons is a good look for the band. Here We Go Magic are doing something more interesting-- something weirder; they're trying out takes on jittery new wave, tone-smeared dream-pop, and high-pitched Kiwi pop with success. The normally frustrating aspect of transitional albums is that bands that make them tend to get lost in their own experimentation; instead, Here We Go Magic attack their shape-shifting sounds with enthusiasm and purpose, applying details like the honking keyboard line in "Old World United" and "Hibernation"'s bouncy bass to flesh out songs rather than as affectations.
As such, Pigeons' most straightforward and formal moment, the shuffling ballad "Bottom Feeder", is the big brick here, mostly because of how comparatively uncomplicated it is. Sure, Temple's voice can be most affecting when accompanying an unadorned, superficially pretty melody but sandwiched between the spiky psych-rock of "Surprise" and the (literally) astral throb of "Moon", the song is a momentum killer. Temple saves his biggest curveballs for the end-- the abstract 1-2 punch of "Vegetable or Native" and "Herbie I Love You, Now I Know"-- but they don't feel tossed-off or willfully obscured. Like the bulk of Pigeons, they represent a good band still finding its way to becoming a great one. Whether they'll reach the end of that path is another debate, but for now, listening to this group of folks mess around is still a treat. | 2010-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | June 7, 2010 | 7.5 | b7e23663-23f2-447c-934e-0bb8c9951d4f | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
With richly textured psychedelic folk music, the Los Angeles artist draws complex emotions out of simple love songs. | With richly textured psychedelic folk music, the Los Angeles artist draws complex emotions out of simple love songs. | Ryan Pollie: Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryan-pollie-stars/ | Stars | Ryan Pollie makes guitar-centric dream pop that recalls the staples of classic rock radio while sticking to his DIY roots. Since debuting under the pseudonym Los Angeles Police Department in 2014, the Philadelphia-born, L.A.-based songwriter has sharpened his California bedroom pop with a breezy country twang, reaching an emotional peak on 2019’s self-titled album under his birth name, which he completed while undergoing chemotherapy. On Stars, his fourth studio album, Pollie expands his musical palette and wades into richly textured psychedelic folk.
Produced entirely by Pollie himself, the sound of Stars is clean and loose. Some songs are grounded by crisp snare hits and bright piano, while others embody the kaleidoscopic haze of late-‘60s Beach Boys records. “The Shore House” borrows the charming whimsy of Magical Mystery Tour, while “On the Nose” is reminiscent of summer nights with the Grateful Dead—so much so that guitarist Rob Dobson’s spot-on Jerry impression could have prompted the song’s title. Inspiration verges on imitation, but Pollie’s interplay between string instruments and brass and woodwind keep things fresh for the duration of the record.
What distinguishes Stars from Pollie’s back catalog is its flirtation with psychedelia. Take, for example, “Steal Away,” a hearty piano jaunt laced with wailing pedal steel notes that spiral under a moody cloud of saxophone and distorted guitar. All of a sudden, a ticking hi-hat breaches a sonic dam, and cascades of jazz horns, folk accents, and prog guitar gush into one another: It is the most astonishing moment on the album. “The Thing,” meanwhile, nosedives into a synth and sax-laden daze that sounds somewhere between Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” and “Any Colour You Like,” while “Out of It” embraces the shape-shifting surrealism of Syd Barrett’s solo material.
While his experimentation often proves successful, Pollie’s playfulness turns hokey on “Harriton House,” a twee parade of piano, banjo, and a trumpet solo filtered to sound like a kazoo. At best, it’s a charming, off-kilter folk tune. At worst: a ragtime number at a Disneyland restaurant. For the most part, the album makes good use of eccentric instrumentation, although Pollie sounds just as strong without all the bells and whistles. In “Don’t Lie,” the most affecting song here, dreamy vocal harmonies and melancholy acoustic guitar bring out the sadness in his lyrics. “I want you to like me/Reminds me of grade school,” he sings. Pollie’s voice is delicate and wispy, sparking a feeling of wonder that runs through the entire album. Take the talk-sung hooks about marriage in “Best Love I Ever Had” (“I picked out a ring/It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen”) that brim with childlike excitement. Through plunky piano and waves of slide guitar, he squeezes rich emotion out of an otherwise simple song.
Forming a subtle narrative about love and heartbreak, Pollie’s lyrics document the excitement of a blossoming relationship before peeling back his insecurities and expressing sugary devotion. Near the end of the album, he laments a fizzling flame, recounting details like walking the dog on summer days. On the closing track “Market,” he faces the rubble of his romance: “She’d never marry me.” As the story unfolds, Pollie draws a map of pivotal locations, guiding us through the beach where he wants to raise his kids; the third floor of a bar where he used to smoke. But Pollie’s heartfelt conviction suggests that the most meaningful part of the ride is the gentle moments of joy and disappointment scattered along the way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Forged Artifacts | January 6, 2022 | 7.2 | b7f045a9-4984-4a53-9b69-99c8850a2765 | Ethan Shanfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ethan-shanfeld/ | |
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 1981 debut from the mysterious Los Angeles post-punk band, who developed a cult following and vanished just as quickly. | 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 1981 debut from the mysterious Los Angeles post-punk band, who developed a cult following and vanished just as quickly. | Suburban Lawns: Suburban Lawns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suburban-lawns-suburban-lawns/ | Suburban Lawns | Before Su disappeared, she was an extraterrestrial in her city. This was Los Angeles in the ’80s: the cokey, sad, grayscale Los Angeles where what you did was go to porno theaters and go to gigs on the Strip to listen to hair metal. This was also the era of Los Angeles that Bret Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero, where the vibe was disaffected and rich kids took joy rides in their parents’ cars to pick up drugs. This era, the primordial ’80s in LA, was tinged with that flavor of pleasant numbness, of swerving under the influence, putting on Mötley Crüe and tuning out. But it was also an era of punk rock coming alive. It birthed Su Tissue and the Suburban Lawns. And in 1981, they released a self-titled LP that felt awake. Suburban Lawns presented an alternate reality where you join a cult and light cars on fire, where you dress up like a Manson girl and obliterate your brain on post-punk.
For a small, mighty, and disaffected sect, the Los Angeles of the early-’80s was all about rebelling against any notion that the city was a generic backdrop, a place to reinvent yourself into another pretty face. X, Circle Jerks, and Fear were writing nihilistic, disaffected punk rock. It was the era of Madame Wong’s, a Chinese restaurant that also featured performances from local punk bands and the short-lived Jett’s. Somewhere in between lay the Suburban Lawns: They weren’t really a punk band, nor were they really a new wave band. Most of their songs were a minute and a half long and not particularly compositionally complicated. And when it came to Los Angeles, they wrote about it from the margins, freeways, and from a deep anger towards the superficial quality of Hollywood. They wrote about West Coast disaffection not from the vantage point of punk rock but from something more feral and strange. They were post-punk Vivian Girls.
They weren’t so into revealing too much about their true identities. The cold hard facts are sparse. They were probably art school kids. They all had stage names: Frankie Ennui, Vex Billingsgate, Chuck Roast, John McBurney, Su Tissue. Su and Vex lived together in an old corner store in Long Beach where the band also practiced. At first, they released their own music and put on their own shows; this was 1979 or 1980 and people weren’t really doing that quite yet. The band self-released an EP called Gidget Goes to Hell in 1979, and a young, newly famous director named Jonathan Demme found out about it and made them a music video that involves a girl in a pink bikini trying to have some fun at the beach and ends up getting eaten by a shark. It ended up airing on Saturday Night Live, and the band went from being DIY freaks who booked their own shows to being beloved freaks who regularly drew crowds on the Los Angeles club circuit. They were no longer semi-anonymous Long Beach guerillas who trekked into Los Angeles for the occasional gig, they were a band on TV.
Around this time, they began working on their first and only record, which would eventually be released by IRS, the same label as the Go-Go’s and R.E.M. They recorded at Paramount Studios late at night, on the cheap, with producer EJ Emmons, whose goal was to faithfully translate the energy of Suburban Lawns as a live band on tape. The songs they recorded in those sessions became Suburban Lawns, a devious cocktail of surf rock, post-punk, and new wave. The best songs are the ones Su sings on, like “Gossip,” which glows green like vaseline glass as she sings and chants at the low end of her register, like a sleepwalker. “Lies/Paradox/A parade of rest,” she sings as a guitar cuts through the song like a rusty steak knife. Or “Flying Saucer Safari,” where the band sounds like they’re all wearing tinfoil hats and contacting each other purely via ESP.
And then there’s “Janitor,” the band’s closest thing to a pop song, their biggest hit. There’s a video of Su performing it, one of the very few videos of the band that exist on the web. In the grainy and distorted video, Su wears a baby yellow button-up and a high-waisted plaid skirt. She stands there, not dancing, not interacting with the band, not smiling. She looks bored. She looks like a Dickensian street urchin, or the Orphan from the movie Orphan. “All action is reaction/Expansion, contraction/Man the manipulator,” she sings, looking at the microphone. “Underwater/Does it matter/Antimatter/Nuclear reactor/Boom boom boom boom.” Her voice ricochets, gets louder, and inflates with imaginary helium.
The success of the video as a strange post-punk ur text is largely because of Su and the way she moved. In the video, she sings like she’s in a trance, her brows furrowed, pivoting her body slightly, but more or less staying in the exact place. In one moment, a guitar solo erupts and Su stares at her feet. Like she wants to be anywhere else in the world, like she’s deliberately trying to fuck with you. It’s almost disturbing, vaguely satanic, the stuff of cults.
Her instrument was the kind of voice that you might call “disturbing” or “jarring ” or “difficult.” She was hypnotic in the way that Nico was hypnotic, she had an icy gaze, she looked permanently plagued with ennui. She was Kim Gordon and Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom in a surf punk band, or Haley Fohr from Circuit des Yeux if she could jackhammer her way from her rich, warm alto to a terrifying devil shriek. That’s what Su’s voice did: bungee itself from the low and meaty to the high-pitched and deranged. That’s what made Suburban Lawns tick the Geiger counter of the punk and new wave scene of Los Angeles circa 1981: Su’s voice. Without it, they’d have sounded kind of like Devo.
After all, there isn’t much to a Suburban Lawns song. On a surface level, they wrote straightforward post-punk tracks. Take “Anything”: fast and loud, just under two minutes long, all choppy guitars that occasionally venture off into frenetic solos. What elevates the song is the humor of her paranoid delivery, and Su’s soprano yodel. “Don’t blame it on me!” she sings alongside her bandmates. “If you want it good, get it!” When Su sings, she sounds like her mind is racing, like she has a story to tell you in extreme detail.
As the band gained momentum, writers began to comment on Su, specifically her stage presence, in increasingly comical and confused ways. “While her voice goes to Mars, her lanky, childlike body is in its own private Idaho,” wrote one critic after seeing the band play at the Starwood punk club. “That strange unfashionably dressed girl sang like others slip into the first stage of an epileptic fit,” wrote another. “As hard as it may be to believe, I think she’s really ‘like that,’” opined a writer for the LA Weekly. “In other, less tolerant societies, she would be dismissed as a ‘wacko’ or burned at the stake as a witch.” Here was this woman dressed like Miss Trunchbull from the book Matilda who looked so bored and uncomfortable standing on stage with all of these boys that looked like they were having so much fun. What do you do with a woman who doesn’t meet your expectations? How do you enjoy music when you have a frontwoman who basically wants to be left alone to yodel and then get off stage?
Very few critics knew what to make of Su. Maybe she did communicate with her bandmates with ESP. Maybe “Flying Saucer Safari,” was autobiographical. Maybe Su was a chick from a Diane Arbus photo or a depraved villainess with a fucked up backstory from a David Lynch movie. In reality, Su was just Su.
In an interview she gave with the Los Angeles Times in 1981, she’s described as being quiet and withdrawn—like she doesn’t want to be there. Within the first few beats, she speaks about how when people singled her out for special attention they “don’t understand what this project is about.” And then quickly goes on to say that she thinks that interviews were “obsolete,” which can be interpreted as Su being punk (which she was) or Su being reluctant about being put on any form of a pedestal.
In reality, it was probably both, and as a result, she maintains an air of unknowable mystery. Later in the interview, when she’s asked to talk about her thoughts on songwriting, she’s even more cryptic. “I just like music. I didn’t even think of people singing words.” Su and the Suburban Lawns treated their music like an art project or an accident. Everything they did was part of a performance of being in a band and being public-facing. Maybe that’s why they burned out so fast. They couldn’t sustain that momentum, literally-go-fuck-yourself level of punk rock anonymity.
The band got bigger, enjoying the kind of cult rock band success that led the freaky miscreants to open for U2 and the Clash. And after the release of Suburban Lawns, they went on to release one more EP for IRS, Baby, where they ditched Emmons as a producer for Richard Mazda, who had produced the Fall and the Fleshtones. It wasn’t nearly as well-received, and the band split up shortly afterwards. Su went to Berklee and released an album of experimental solo piano music called Salon de Musique. She appeared in a bit part in Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild as a pregnant housewife who wears a tiny Uncle Sam hat. After that, like cult bedroom artist Connie Converse before her, she completely disappeared.
What happened to Su Tissue is a question that is difficult to answer. In a 2019 article for The Outline, Scott Beauchamp reported on rumors of her being a housewife, a lawyer, or a piano teacher. Spend any amount of time searching the internet for Su Tissue and you’ll find all sorts of bizarre, fetishistic tributes to her, like covers and albums and a super slowed-down video of “Janitor” that sounds like an airport terminal. There’s a whole universe of content about Su Tissue as muse, as an untouchable, unknowable cool girl. Suburban Lawns are a band whose mystery is intrinsic to their identity. So much is left unsaid, and in that empty space, the band lives on.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | IRS | February 20, 2022 | 8.5 | b7f08746-cd06-4bb1-8d1b-df1dad56251d | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
On his third solo album, the former Foxygen player indulges his mischievous instincts while mourning dead friends. | On his third solo album, the former Foxygen player indulges his mischievous instincts while mourning dead friends. | Jonathan Rado: For Who the Bell Tolls For | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonathan-rado-for-who-the-bell-tolls-for/ | For Who the Bell Tolls For | As one half of Foxygen, Jonathan Rado rode shotgun with one of the most notoriously volatile indie acts of the early 2010s. His duo with Sam France balanced classic-rock worship and home-recording hijinks with Behind the Music-worthy drama and onstage meltdowns, but out of that dysfunction came another, less sensationalistic narrative: the emergence of Rado as the go-to producer for fellow retro-minded mavericks like the Lemon Twigs and Father John Misty. With Foxygen inactive since 2019’s Seeing Other People, Rado has been free to adapt his old-school aesthetic to the modern pop marketplace, giving him a foothold in the liners of buzzworthy records by the likes of Weyes Blood and Crumb. And through his associations with Aussie eccentric Alex Cameron—aka Brandon Flowers’ bestie—he wound up co-producing and co-writing the most recent albums by the Killers, a gig that completed his transformation into something akin to a West Coast-reared Jack Antonoff.
But if his career trajectory suggests a desire to trade the hand-to-mouth drudgery of band life for a more stable seat behind the mixing desk, Rado isn’t farming out all of his good ideas to his high-profile clients. For Who the Bell Tolls For is technically Rado’s third solo release, following a pair of low-stakes records that reconfirmed what we already knew about him—he’s a fan of lo-fi lunacy (2013’s glorified demo collection Law and Order) and a student of classic-rock mythology (a faithful 2017 full-album cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run). But For Who the Bell Tolls For feels like a proper coming-out party for Rado the artist/auteur, an opportunity to flex his elevated production chops on a set of songs that embody his cavalier boho spirit while striking a more personal chord. For Who the Bell Tolls For was written in response to the deaths of two dear friends: musician/producer (and early Foxygen champion) Richard Swift and actor/visual artist Danny Lacy. But the album is less an act of mourning than a celebration of life, befitting its simultaneously serious and tongue-in-cheek title. For Who the Bell Tolls For is equally profound and playful, a work of art-pop grandeur that’s grounded by its self-effacing, homespun charm.
As a producer, Rado is quick to cite the influence of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on his process, but as a songwriter he remains very much in thrall to a familiar Foxygen influence: Todd Rundgren. And so on the album’s momentous title track, he rolls the sumptuous songcraft of Something/Anything? into the theatrical irreverence of Here Comes the Warm Jets, creating a runaway snowball of a song that—thanks to guests like Brad Oberhofer and the Lemon Twigs’ D’Addario brothers—accumulates layers of brass, choral harmonies, and crashing percussion until it’s big enough to flatten cities. On top of serving as a business card for a producer who can nurture a simple repeated melody into a skyscraping epic, the song also establishes the album’s defiant, life-goes-on tenor, and its refusal to be overcome with grief.
But Rado need not always trigger an orchestral avalanche in order to get his feelings across. For Who the Bell Tolls For is anchored by more compact delights like “Easier,” where Rado speaks directly to Swift over a jaunty piano-pop arrangement that could’ve come out of his mentor’s playbook, while threading in symphonic textures that heighten the poignancy without getting schmaltzy. Likewise, “Blue Moon” invokes Lacy’s death by suicide—“I could see there was something wrong/Gone forever, took too long/Now you vanished behind the seas”—yet it’s an infectiously upbeat glam-soul romp thrown delightfully off balance by twinkling marimbas and mechanistic shocks of distortion.
For Who the Bell Tolls For is the musical equivalent of reacting to awful news with a nervous laugh—a perfectly irrational yet natural response to life-altering events that seem too inconceivable to fathom. True to that counterintuitive logic, the album’s purest expression of sorrow is the one song with no words in it. Though the title “Yer Funeral” references a Swiftian inside joke, this seven-minute hymnstrumental is like Rado’s very own “Here Come the Warm Jets”-style curtain closer, albeit one that avoids liftoff to marinate in its vibraphone-gilded, slide-guitar-stained melancholy. For its final minute, Rado lets the arrangement slowly corrode and decompose into the ether, until it sounds like some muffled transmission from the afterlife. It’s a sobering finale to an otherwise vivacious record, but a necessary one: Rado spends the bulk of For Who the Bell Tolls For putting on a brave face and powering his way through the pain, but he leaves us with a reminder that it’s healthy to cry once in a while. | 2023-12-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | December 19, 2023 | 7.5 | b7f0a0f6-dade-47cc-8e07-5d756d57ee33 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their first new album in three years, the Toronto punk band tear down everything they’ve ever known about making music and rebuild themselves for the better. | On their first new album in three years, the Toronto punk band tear down everything they’ve ever known about making music and rebuild themselves for the better. | Greys: Age Hasn’t Spoiled You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greys-age-hasnt-spoiled-you/ | Age Hasn’t Spoiled You | In 2011, then nascent Toronto punk band Greys released a vinyl 10" called Ultra Sorta. It was an energetic five-song suite that sounded like the embodiment of a mosh pit; limbs flying from every direction, kicking up dust, and leaving no room to breathe. While it was exhilarating, it didn’t stand apart from the work of other punk revivalists at the time. But over the course of eight years, Greys have steadily refined their approach to rock music, allowing space and thoughtful arrangements to shout louder than frontman Shehzaad Jiwani. In 2016, the quartet released a pair of records—Outer Heaven and Warm Shadow—that played with pace and allowed for new influences to sneak in, namely shoegaze, dream pop, and slow-simmering psych. On their new album Age Hasn’t Spoiled You, however, Greys tear down everything they’ve ever known about making music, and piece it back together from the ragged-but-arresting wreckage. This dark incarnation of the band is one that their 2011 selves wouldn’t recognize—and they wear the change well.
Age Hasn’t Spoiled You was bound to be a grand departure from Greys’ earlier output; it was recorded in the wake of the 2016 election, and coincided with the decline of the group’s creative community. In Greys’ native Toronto, beloved DIY venues shuttered, and fellow bands were calling it quits. “I think this record is largely informed by that sense of instability, musically as well as lyrically,” Jiwani recently told The Fader. “You can’t go back, but how do you know which way to push forward?” Despite the onslaught of discouraging events, Greys managed to push in the right direction, relinquishing sloppy punk velocity for a collection of focused, slow-simmering tracks that are as versatile as they are detailed.
The record is full of surprises, something we don’t often get to say about rock music in 2019. The single “Kill Appeal” kicks off as a driving post-punk cut propelled by blast beats before it crashes and erupts into free jazz. “These Things Happen” and “Western Guilt” recall the spaced-out psych pop of early Blur. Maybe the most striking, however, are opening tracks “A-440” and “Arc Light.” The former serves more as a test pattern than a proper tune, intertwining static thrums and whispers and a shrill buzzing. “Arc Light” cuts through “A-440”’s disintegration with squeals that could be either be from an effects pedal or whales in distress, instantly recalling My Bloody Valentine’s “Touched.” Tiny details are embedded throughout the record, enriching reminders of process and precision.
Jiwani has expressed his fatigue with contemporary guitar music, and he took reactionary measures to that exhaustion while making Age Hasn’t Spoiled You. The record’s success owes a lot to that pushback; Greys flipped their well-worn process inside-out, repurposing instruments until they coalesced into a dizzying whole. Here, the guitar-bass-drums template of their previous music is either shrouded in discord or abandoned entirely. But Greys also took their time. Warm Shadow was laid down in three days; Age Hasn’t Spoiled You, on the other hand, was made over the course of a year, marking the band’s first album since 2016. The space they’ve allowed themselves as artists has translated beautifully into Greys’ new work. In an accelerating industry that demands high turnover, Age Hasn’t Spoiled You is a testament to patience and method. | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | May 14, 2019 | 7.9 | b7f16616-e1ac-44c8-b4c0-2f340ee8bb71 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Early in the pandemic, the Toronto multi-instrumentalist’s bedroom videos made her a viral sensation. Now, her debut album puts a widescreen spin on those whimsical miniatures. | Early in the pandemic, the Toronto multi-instrumentalist’s bedroom videos made her a viral sensation. Now, her debut album puts a widescreen spin on those whimsical miniatures. | Luna Li: Duality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luna-li-duality/ | Duality | Years from now, everything we experienced during this pandemic—Tiger King, the sourdough uprising, Zoom background filters, spraying Lysol on your produce—will be compiled into a Buzzfeed list titled something like “57 Things Only People Who Lived Though COVID Will Understand.” And somewhere on that list, between “pre-New York Times Wordle” and “bespoke Loveless face masks,” you might find Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist Hannah Bussere Kim, aka Luna Li. In the midst of the first lockdown wave, Li used isolation to her advantage, posting a series of brief clips to social media that savvily edited together discrete performances on a variety of instruments—violin, bass, keyboards, guitar, a big-ass harp—into splendorous one-woman-band bedroom jams. Thanks to her engaging on-camera enthusiasm and the sheer blissfulness of her instrumentals, Li swiftly became a viral sensation, accumulating millions of views, tour offers from her hero Japanese Breakfast, and copious fan art created in her honor.
But those micro-tunes were more than just fleeting feel-good distractions to take our minds off the ambulance sirens blaring outside; they were also trailers for the widescreen retro-futurist vision that unfurls on Li’s debut album, Duality. For Li, that title carries multiple meanings: It speaks to her experience as a mixed-race Korean-Canadian, a classically trained musician who found her true calling in DIY pop, and an overnight novelty star who’s actually been cultivating her musical aesthetic for a good half decade. Duality also speaks to the experience of the album itself. On the one hand, this is an intensely introspective record, a diary-like catalog of intimate exchanges, wistful memories, and ruminations on loneliness. But on the other, it’s pure fantasy, situating its everyday dramas in a dreamy wonderland illuminated by lava lamps, moonbeams, and wizard-wand sparkles.
In sharp contrast to her soothing videos, Duality begins in mayhem, with the sort of guitar-smashing, drum-bashing cacophony that arena-rock bands deploy as their grand finale. But after 15 seconds, the noise disappears as if sucked up by a vacuum, giving way to the minimal drum-machine beat and winsome guitar melody of “Cherry Pit.” The effect might mirror the unsettling dualism of many people’s lockdown experience—that odd, irreconcilable contrast between the chaos raging in the world outside and the quiet sanctity of work-from-home living. Only here, Li to applies her layer-by-layer bedroom-jam blueprint to an epically scaled romantic reverie: “Spit your cherry pit down in the forest/I will find it, and carry it in my pocket,” she sings, as if secretly nurturing the seed to a blossoming relationship. Sure enough, over its five-minute span, the song grows and grows, gradually adding gently plucked harp and overlapping vocal lines to intensify that light-headed lovestruck feeling. By the time “Cherry Pit” reaches its climactic phased-out guitar solo, it becomes clear the song’s crashing intro wasn’t just some random snippet, but a sneak preview of Li’s psych-rock majesty in full bloom.
Duality’s sound feels instantly familiar, though exactly what it reminds you of could depend on your age: Over the course of its 13 tracks, Li and producer/bandmate Braden Sauder pass a thread through the buoyant harmonies of late-’60s Beach Boys and ELO, the acidic soul of Shuggie Otis and Eddie Hazel-era Funkadelic, the space-age synth-phonies of Stereolab and Air, and the post-chillwave R&B of We Are KING and recent Tame Impala. (The album’s daydreamy milieu is disrupted only by “Star Stuff,” a garage-rock sprint where Li channels her inner Karen O.) But where Li’s viral videos showcased her talents as a musician and arranger, Duality is a testament to her pop songwriting smarts, whether she’s using softly cooed verses to slowly lure you toward the luxuriant stargazing hook of “Silver Into Rain,” or scoring a direct hit with “Alone But Not Lonely,” an all-chorus/no-verse self-help affirmation set to funky drumbeat, disco strings, and mirror-balled Nile Rodgers jangle.
“Alone But Not Lonely” effectively sums up Li’s state of mind while making the album: Though many of its songs feel like interior monologues on the pros and cons of being on your own, Duality is also a summit for the wider community of BIPOC indie artists she’s connected with in recent years. Alt-rock upstart beabadoobee helps thrust the aforementioned “Silver Into Rain” toward the heavens, while dream-pop dynamo Jay Som turns up in the dazed cocktail-soul serenade “Boring Again.” And in its dance between ’60s pop sunshine and ’90s R&B heartache, “Flower” seamlessly slips in a guest verse from Chicago rapper Dreamer Isioma, who uncorks the tension underpinning this seemingly whimsical record when she declares, “I miss making love/Making art!”
Certainly, it’s a feeling a lot of people can relate to after two dispiriting, emotionally numbing years spent in pandemic purgatory. But just as her online videos saw Li making the most out of a shitty situation, the fanciful pop of Duality applies the same silver-lining logic to interpersonal afflictions like dead-end romances, communication breakdowns, and quarter-life-crisis inertia. “I wish you’d see the world as I do,” Li sings on “Magic,” as a stormy gust of strings and a glammy guitar solo whisk her away to another dimension. Her message is clear: When real life has you feeling powerless, you can always rule the universe of your own imagination. | 2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | March 7, 2022 | 7.3 | b7f7c1bd-d9db-48c5-805f-218c55730535 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The legendary pop duo’s first new album in 18 years approaches the challenges of middle life with familiar sensitivity and shared intimacy. It’s a strikingly unguarded and forthright record. | The legendary pop duo’s first new album in 18 years approaches the challenges of middle life with familiar sensitivity and shared intimacy. It’s a strikingly unguarded and forthright record. | Tears for Fears: The Tipping Point | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tears-for-fears-the-tipping-point/ | The Tipping Point | Sincerity is embedded in the DNA of Tears for Fears, the duo Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith formed in the early 1980s, when they were just out of their teens. Riddled with adolescent angst and besotted with psychotherapy, they named their group after a phrase from the writings of psychologist Arthur Janov, who pioneered primal scream therapy. Janov’s theory that psychic turmoil had its root in childhood trauma resonated. John Lennon introduced the practice into rock with his 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band; Bobby Gillespie would later name his band after it. During those early years, Tears for Fears camouflaged some of their psychic pain with clamoring synthesizers and sprightly melodies, a combination that dampened the melancholy undercurrents of their first UK hit, “Mad World.” Yet the very title of their 1983 debut, The Hurting, made it plain they embraced sensitive emotional issues in a way that such new wave peers as, say, Adam and the Ants did not.
The Tipping Point, the duo’s first album in 18 years, feels spiritually connected to The Hurting. Where Tears for Fears spent their debut articulating roiling interior torment, writing as empaths as much as from experience, The Tipping Point is the work of middle-aged survivors who have absorbed the lessons of therapy and loss; its alternate title could’ve been The Healing. Orzabal in particular suffered a series of painful losses in recent years, chief among them the death of his wife of 35 years due to alcohol-related dementia in 2017. He subsequently went through a stint of rehab himself, an experience that led him to recognize the depth of his bond with Smith, a lifelong friend and collaborator.
The pair split at the dawn of the 1990s, an acrimonious fracture that took many years to mend. They reunited in 2004, delivering Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, an album whose very title carried an air of finality. For the next decade and a half, Tears for Fears tended to deluxe reissues of their catalog, mounting the occasional tour with fellow ’80s survivors and releasing covers of songs from new artists like Arcade Fire and Hot Chip. The audience wanted to hear the hits, the band’s management assumed; their reasoning carried over to the first attempt at a long-delayed successor to Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, which paired Orzabal and Smith with fashionable producers and songwriters in hopes of returning to the charts. Displeased with the results, Tears for Fears fired everybody—the collaborators, the management, the label—saved a few tunes, then wrote the bulk of The Tipping Point as they did The Hurting: Alone with guitars, sitting eyeball to eyeball.
That shared intimacy is apparent on The Tipping Point, a strikingly unguarded and forthright record. Tears for Fears never shied away from letting their feelings flood the page—underneath its rallying cry of a chorus, their breakthrough hit “Shout” is about moving forward with only what you truly need. The urgency has faded, and the bruises Orzabel and Smith now bear are evident in how they’ve softened their touch, allowing for moments of sweetly resigned reflection and an overarching sense of contentment. Apart from “Break the Man”—Smith’s pseudo-sequel to 1989’s “Woman in Chains” and an insistent, inspirational anthem for allies of the #MeToo movement—The Tipping Point benefits from being notably light on the kind of broad, open-ended anthems that were long a Tears for Fears speciality; these songs benefit from their specificity.
Naturally, Orzabal writes about his departed wife, hoping she finds peace on “Please Be Happy,” a stately, McCartney-esque ballad sweetened with swelling strings and muted trumpet. He spends “The Tipping Point” waiting for the moment when she passes from this world into the next. Heavy subjects, yet the sound of The Tipping Point isn’t weighty: It’s a warm, even soothing, blend of acoustic and electronic instruments. Tears for Fears also spike the record with a couple of numbers that break the contemplative spell, taking a swipe at their former management on the swirling, sneering “Master Plan” and ratcheting up the rhythm and volume on “My Demons,” the one cut that’s a clear throwback to their shiny ’80s synth-pop.
Despite these fleeting moments of ire, The Tipping Point is grounded by a sense of acceptance, a realization that life goes on—and is worth living—after periods of grief. Nowhere is that clearer than on “Rivers of Mercy,” a lovely, calming ballad that finds solace within images of flowing water washing away pain. Here, Tears for Fears intertwine the ideas that run throughout The Tipping Point, emphasizing grace and growth in the face of trauma. It’s the centerpiece of an album that feels like the most fully realized record Tears for Fears have ever made, a culmination of the musical and emotional themes they’ve held dear since their inception.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Concord | March 2, 2022 | 7.5 | b807723f-48af-4da6-94f5-407bdb8a8d9a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The third album by maximalist art-poppers Everything Everything feels like the final part of a trilogy about mankind's desperate self-destruction. Get to Heaven pivots on the violent last resorts of the disenfranchised, and the false prophets who claim to save them. | The third album by maximalist art-poppers Everything Everything feels like the final part of a trilogy about mankind's desperate self-destruction. Get to Heaven pivots on the violent last resorts of the disenfranchised, and the false prophets who claim to save them. | Everything Everything: Get to Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20443-get-to-heaven/ | Get to Heaven | It's apt, if dismal, that Get to Heaven arrives the same week as scientists say earth is entering a sixth "mass extinction". We've no one to blame but ourselves, they report; meanwhile the third album by maximalist art-poppers Everything Everything feels like the final part of a trilogy about mankind's desperate self-destruction.
In its appealingly hyperactive way, the Manchester-based four-piece's 2010 debut, Man Alive, confronted the human effects of media manipulation around war, body image, and the environment. 2013's Arc took a morbid turn, casting depression and the shame of social inaction as a hopeless apocalyptic landscape. "I'm lawful, I kept my head down/ I turned a blind eye, I played my cards right," frontman Jonathan Higgs sang on "Undrowned". And yet: "I'm in debt, man!" In an age of ISIS, mass shootings, and the rise of the UK right, there's no need for fictional catastrophes on their third record. Get to Heaven pivots on the violent last resorts of the disenfranchised, and the false prophets who claim to save them.
Perhaps it's rich of four middle-class white guys to think they have anything to say about being marginalized, but Higgs tries to empathize with what drives people to drastic measures—the subtext being that he's lingered on that emotional cusp. The booming "Regret" glimpses a vanishing act on the TV news—perhaps of young people joining ISIS, or volunteers signing up to help aid efforts. "Maybe you're the coldest if you never felt it," sings Higgs of that desperation to do something, as the rest of the band chant the song's title like monks, over a '60s girl-group beat. "Maybe you're the luckiest if you never did it."
The intense, raging narratives on Get to Heaven are frequently rooted in character studies: The terrorist attempting to kill the queen, the convert to right-wing ideologies, the Good Man who admits that he too would be corrupted by power. The driving vantage point, though, is still his frantic mind. Where the forlorn Arc could feel like a study in learned helplessness, Everything Everything sound more enervated than ever on Get to Heaven. They push their maximalist tendencies to extremes, stretching every second with sound as a way of staving off the death that looms everywhere: "I don't want to get older," as Higgs sings on "Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread". And on "Zero Pharaoh": "They tell me there's a way to cheat death."
Lead single "Distant Past" is the standout track, in which Higgs pleads for escape from the present day only to realize that certain backwards ideologies want to revive mentalities from a darker age. Underpinning it is a massive, strafing chorus that stokes the escapist fantasy with its hints to Edenic rave culture. Elsewhere, though, he gawks head on at horror. "To the Blade" is a yowling opening salvo about prejudice that splutters into a paranoid guitar solo borrowed from Hail to the Thief. Over "Fortune 500"'s grave, burbling synths, Higgs sings sadly of a "trail of destruction—but at least it's a trail," as he envisages being at the center of a plot to murder the queen. Heavy kick drums and more chanted vocals kick in at the chorus, ramping the tension somewhere nervy and disquieting.
They don't really let up on the lyrical desperation, but thankfully there are lighter shades on Get to Heaven, like the title track's jaunty Afrobeat guitar and nonchalant whistle, or the chorus of "The Wheel (Is Turning Now)", which erupts in warm euphoria that wouldn't shame Coldplay. The last two songs also offer welcome respite. On "No Reptiles", Higgs dismisses theories that world leaders are evil reptilian shapeshifters by pointing out that they're just "soft-boiled eggs in shirts and ties". And "Warm Healer" abandons the record's scheme altogether—it's a slow, sparkling song about losing the ability to love. There's doubt and desperation in everyone, they seem to suggest, and a little more empathy might go some way to preventing the destruction we wreak on the planet, and on each other. While Get to Heaven's ceaseless terror and heavy arrangements can be overwhelming, more power to Everything Everything for attempting to offer a nuanced understanding of a broken world at a time when a lot of their significantly less imaginative British indie rock peers say worse than nothing. | 2015-06-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-06-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | June 26, 2015 | 7.2 | b80d36ee-a8e1-4970-8ba0-61b82a113c0f | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The Athens, GA indie-folk outfit Mothers’ debut record finds its strength in the raw, striking vulnerability of frontwoman Kristine Leschper. | The Athens, GA indie-folk outfit Mothers’ debut record finds its strength in the raw, striking vulnerability of frontwoman Kristine Leschper. | Mothers: When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21486-when-you-walk-a-long-distance-you-are-tired/ | When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired | Vulnerability is the driving force behind indie-folk outfit Mothers’ debut record When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired. Born from the solo project of lead singer Kristine Leschper, Mothers found its niche in the arts-saturated community of Athens, GA. Their debut is composed of only eight songs, but it covers a surprising amount of emotional ground in that short time. Perhaps, it’s because the songs have had some time to sink in with Leschper and co.: When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired was written while Leschper was finishing art school two years ago and she later fleshed them out with band member Matthew Andregg.
With her high, haunted cries, Leschper evokes singer-songwriters Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten. The music runs from the delicacy of single tiny mandolin (on "Too Small For Eyes") to billowing, unhurried full-band roots rock ("It Hurts Until It Doesn't," "Copper Mines"), but Leschper's struggles to move past two broken relationships—one with her lover, one with herself—give the album a powerful undertow.
Leschper's trembling voice often breaks into wails, ones that feel like longing stares. On opener "Too Small For Eyes," she sings "I hate my body, I love your taste/Bird stirring in my chest, you give and take away." It’s a harsh truth to begin an album with: the idea of someone not giving you what you want or need, and the crippling analysis that comes from acknowledging it. "I've buried you in compromise/Never mind, never mind never mind," she howls on "Copper Mines," the song's pace quickening like an encroaching panic attack.
Despite the agitation and raw nerves, the album feels like a therapeutic offering. The album sequencing traces an uphill battle alongside Leschper as she identifies her insecurities and musters the inner strength to fight against them. The lovedrunk lullabye "Nesting Behavior," arriving at the midpoint, feels like a hard-fought breath of contentment, scored by a sawing fiddle and weeping cello. But there is a sickly pall to the song, and to Leschper's broken-yodel delivery, that gives the song an ominous tinge: "You always made it easy/Reminding me not to bloom," are her parting words on the song, a harbinger of rot and death.
The album title feels wistful in context, an admission of exhaustion and an invitation to join the journey that led there. "You love me mostly when I’m leaving" she sings next on "Lockjaw," as she flippantly dismisses the idea of any reconciliation with a lover and deals with her own ego. On grand finale "Hold Your Own Hand," we’re left with Leschper finding relief while floating through a late-night waltz. The melodic prog-rock fade-out of the song even reflects something Leschper utterly lacking elsewhere on the record: hope. It’s Leschper’s attempt to find strength through storytelling, and she is so transparent on When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired that you find yourself rooting for her. | 2016-03-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | March 8, 2016 | 7.1 | b815022a-3648-4aa4-bf88-c3cd65389bed | Ilana Kaplan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ilana-kaplan/ | null |
The soundtrack to the The Game's three-part documentary series Streets of Compton feels like a missed opportunity for the rapper to embrace his comfort zone. | The soundtrack to the The Game's three-part documentary series Streets of Compton feels like a missed opportunity for the rapper to embrace his comfort zone. | The Game: Streets of Compton | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22089-streets-of-compton/ | Streets of Compton | Sprawled out across the Game’s heavily tattooed upper abdomen, in huge decorative letters, is the word “Compton.” It’s a branding that reflects Game’s loyalty to his roots—a loyalty that has stood firm even as his fingertips touched the highest peaks of rap stardom. Inked on his chest are the letters ‘NWA’, a reminder that long before the glossy Hollywood biopic and LA gangster rap resurgence, he was pitching himself as the heir apparent to his regional forefathers.
Jayceon Taylor’s love of his hometown is laid bare in three-part documentary series Streets of Compton. The city’s often-bleak history is covered extensively, with the rapper’s upbringing serving as a test sample of the hardships the people face. His parents recall the drug addiction, violence and sexual abuse that occurred under the family’s roof. The Game opens up about violent dope deals and shakes his head at the bullets that once punctured his son’s car seat. His whole life, warts and all, is out for all to see. It’s disappointing, then, that stacked next to the show, the accompanying soundtrack feels so slight and impersonal.
Game should be in his element with this kind of project. His back catalogue has been built on rhymes about dope slinging and the ghost of Eazy-E. Despite tugging at just about all the popular sounds in the rap play book over the last decade, he probably wishes he could rap over mid-era Dr. Dre beats every time he steps into the booth. Working within Streets of Compton’s framework was an opportunity to abandon all pretense of keeping up with trends and do just that. Instead, it’s a record that feels like a hastily-assembled collection of loosies with the series’ logo slapped on the cover.
Some songs do stay thematically on-point. Highlight “Death Row Chain” is a play-by-play of west coast rap history through the lens of Game’s criminal resumé. The throwback street-level narrative depicts the world his South Central rap heroes once stood over. “But, shit, everything changed when Ice Cube went solo/Riding shotgun in my brother’s Fase Lolo,” he spits over the rattle and ping of producer Jelly Roll’s swarming electronics.
Unlike last year’s sprawling 40-track set The Documentary 2 and 2.5, there’s no expensive list of star guests. Local Compton rappers are instead given the space to shine. There’s an excellent draft pick in rising star Boogie on “Roped Off.” The young father stacks his thoughtful ruminations next to Game’s more gritty rhymes, dropping a punchy verse that decries the violence in his city: “With your kid out shopping, you gon’ still yell ‘Bompton!’?/Man, I done lost hope.”
Of course, Game’s turbulent relationship with his one-time mentor comes up. He raps about Dr. Dre with the burning intensity that Rick Ross raps about money, but any lingering beef seemed to be buried when the pair traded guest verses on their respective projects last year. It’s absolutely incredible, then, that Game decides to use Streets of Compton to taunt a legend he spent the series paying tribute to. The audaciously titled “The Chronic” provokes The Good Doctor about his lost opus Detox over the kind of beat that he’s probably collected in stacks of hundreds during the abandoned sessions. On day-in-the-life-of-a-hustler joint “Like Me”, Game calls out the billionaire headphone magnate for losing touch with his roots: “Dr Dre ain’t got time for this/He wearing Beats, I’ve got my ear to the ground, lil nigga, I’m in these streets.” It’s like Game can’t help himself.
Elsewhere, too many of the songs are standard issue commercial rap tracks that make zero sense in the context of the heartfelt documentary. “Can’t Wait” sees Game boast about his relationship with two twin sisters. There’s a song called “Unfollow Me Bitch.” And the lack of vested interest in the album is underlined with “Hit The News” and “Bullshit,” which both use instrumentals by producer Jay Nari that are similar enough to qualify as alternate versions of the same beat.
Despite the lack of lateral thinking—and limited technical proficiency—Game has always been an oddly engaging presence on the mic. His gruff voice can’t hide his fragile nature any more than he can cover up those tattoos. These are strengths that made Streets of Compton such an engaging documentary—strengths that just aren’t harnessed enough here. With the weight of the series pressing down on it, the album feels like a career footnote when it could have been a defining moment. | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One | July 7, 2016 | 6.3 | b82c601b-5be9-4600-82c9-ae6544c9592b | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
The Norwegian quartet’s second album effortlessly waltzes between technical art-rock, dissonant post-punk, and pop’s irresponsible sugar high. It’s as daring as it is darling. | The Norwegian quartet’s second album effortlessly waltzes between technical art-rock, dissonant post-punk, and pop’s irresponsible sugar high. It’s as daring as it is darling. | Pom Poko: Cheater | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pom-poko-cheater/ | Cheater | Over the course of 33 minutes, Pom Poko capture the feeling of adorable debauchery. Though their second album, Cheater, may sound unserious at first, angst and snark bubble up through cutting riffs and heart-shaped chaos. For a band named after a Studio Ghibli film about a pack of malicious but fun-loving mythical pot-bellied raccoon-dogs who also use their testicles to shape-shift, this energy makes a good deal of sense. The Norwegian quartet effortlessly waltzes between technical art-rock, dissonant post-punk, and pop’s irresponsible sugar high. It is a record as daring as it is darling.
Lead singer Ragnhild Fangel’s sing-song falsetto immediately commands the mix. Paired with fuzz riffs and abrupt changes in time signature, the band’s sound recalls any number of prog-pop bands like Palm, Deerhoof, Preoccupations, even Bitte Orca-era Dirty Projectors. But for all its clear touchstones, Fangel’s versatility makes her stand out. She bounces between chants, yelps, and guttural, Björkian snarls with ease. It’s both a buttoned-up homage to indie rock’s frenetic heyday and the indulgent afterparty ushering in a new class.
The title track is the perfect homecoming. It begins wearing a scuzzy residue before launching into Pom Poko’s high-wire act. Crunchy guitars fall alongside menacing drum breakdowns, underscored by bass-led funk. By the song’s end, mathy guitar licks orbit an enormous crescendo with all the whimsy of a runaway flute section. It’s an electric delight.
The record is peppered with other interesting snags: the bouncy guitars of “Danger Baby,” the synth cowbell of “Andrew,” the medieval harpsichord of “My Candidacy,” the glitzy synth arpeggios and warbled vocals of “Andy Go to School.” On a record predominantly composed of unprocessed rock instrumentation, these brief excursions let in some gorgeous nuance.
Lyrically, Fangel is tangled in similar knots. These songs unabashedly honor struggles with identity, acceptance, and self-worth. “Cheater” narrates barriers to achievement and success, and contemplates the false promise of cutting corners to appear smart: “Our work was never enough/So dream on dream on/Next time I’ll cheat,” she sings with snarky pity. “You’re a cool girl, your recognition’s all I need,” she chants on “My Candidacy.” On “Curly Romance,” she sings of uncertain normalcy: “My heart is just as normal as I think a normal heart would be.” Each song tries to fit in by waving its arms and screaming; at times, quivering in defeat.
Pom Poko might not be reinventing any wheels, but they have built a well-oiled machine to gleefully ride out rock’s proverbial free fall. Cheater is concise, well-paced, and thought-through. Its chaos is held together precariously, a ride that feels at once dangerous and secure. Though you know exactly what to expect, you keep getting back in the line.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bella Union | January 27, 2021 | 7.5 | b82d26fc-8c75-460a-aace-c90a347077ae | Drew Litowitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-litowitz/ | |
Haley Fohr’s latest and best record of experimental folk folds in some of the simpler songwriting of her countrified Jackie Lynn project. | Haley Fohr’s latest and best record of experimental folk folds in some of the simpler songwriting of her countrified Jackie Lynn project. | Circuit des Yeux: Reaching for Indigo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/circuit-des-yeux-reaching-for-indigo/ | Reaching for Indigo | The events that inspired Reaching for Indigo—Haley Fohr’s stunning fifth album as Circuit Des Yeux—sound at once like an exorcism and an epiphany. As the Lafayette, Ind.-born, Chicago-based songwriter tells it, she mysteriously collapsed one night in early 2016 and found herself “convulsing and vomiting and crying” on the floor. Afterwards, she moved out of her home and eventually adopted a more open understanding of the world around her. In the liner notes, she dedicates Reaching for Indigo to that moment in her life. The jarring story is a fitting progression in the strange evolution of her music, which has always grappled with the way life and nature can change us, despite our efforts to find some thread of logic through it all.
Last year, Fohr took a break from Circuit Des Yeux to pursue a simpler, more straightforward project. The self-titled album she released under the name Jackie Lynn was essentially country music, a set of rumbling, catchy, low-stakes tunes that eschewed the formless sprawl of her previous work. But the quiet, one-off experiment developed a life of its own. The album soon found her faced with new fans, festival slots, and cover stories. “I’m not saying I changed the course of modern music or anything like that,” she reflected at the time, “But it has got a little bit out of hand.”
Reaching for Indigo is Fohr’s first Circuit Des Yeux album since 2015’s In Plain Speech, but it has a lot in common with Jackie Lynn. While In Plain Speech was exceptionally heavy and adventurous—in one song, she played guitar, noisily and viciously, using a butter knife—Reaching for Indigo makes a more immediate connection, marked by warmer, more sophisticated tones. It’s an album bursting with ambition, alternating between moments of intimate beauty and stretches of dense, disorienting fog. Sometimes, the eight-song record plays like a more traditional set of music transforming and corrupting itself in real time. The long, winding “Paper Bag” builds from a spacey ambient burble into a staggering primal chant. In the lyrics, she instructs the listener to breathe into a paper bag. Then she narrates, with a dazzling, somewhat unstable intensity, as you find yourself exploring a surreal new world inside of it.
More than anything, Reaching for Indigo is a showcase for Fohr’s voice: a singular, transformative instrument. “At one point a few years ago I was really concerned because my voice was getting lower and lower and lower,” she recently observed, “It has its own life.” These songs are the most effective showcases for her singing yet, as she hums and warbles and howls over music that refuses to sit still. The apocalyptic, amorphous “Black Fly” begins on acoustic guitar and billows away into something darker, and it’s emblematic of the album as a whole; Fohr’s deep yet fragile singing dictates its shifting moods like a conductor before an orchestra. Other songs take a more pummeling approach that reflects the straightforward songwriting of Jackie Lynn. “Philo” is based on a single piano motif, played by avant garde multi-instrumentalist Ka Baird, while Fohr ascends from cryptic ghost story to full-on battle cry.
Recent years have seen an influx of artists pushing folk music toward more experimental territory, from William Tyler’s wordless, wayward Americana to House and Land’s trad-arr drones. Reaching for Indigo is another bold step in this direction, recalling at times Popol Vuh’s dark, luscious soundtrack work and the vigorous sweep of avant-folk guitarist Robbie Basho’s Visions of the Country. Even when Fohr steps away from the microphone—as she does through most of “A Story Of This World Part II”’s psychedelic storm—the world she crafts feels entirely based around the slow, heady cadence of her baritone. Shouting a few unintelligible lines near the end of the song, she suggests another outlet for her work that could eschew words altogether. “Create your own language,” she transcribes in the lyric sheet. On Reaching for Indigo, she’s started to do precisely that. | 2017-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 20, 2017 | 8.2 | b82dfd95-b8f3-477c-8bdb-b07c84ad2ee6 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Beyoncé protégé Chloe Bailey is a generational talent, but the generic songwriting and chemistry-free features on her solo debut don’t make the case. | Beyoncé protégé Chloe Bailey is a generational talent, but the generic songwriting and chemistry-free features on her solo debut don’t make the case. | Chlöe: In Pieces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chloe-in-pieces/ | In Pieces | We’re well acquainted with Chloe x Halle—“gospel-raised,” genre-bending wunderkinds who didn’t utter a curse word until their second studio album, 2020’s Ungodly Hour. Now a 24-year-old solo star, Chlöe is ready to flaunt her goodies to a pop-trap beat, capitalize on the ’90s R&B revival, and tell anyone who disagrees how much she doesn’t give a fuck. Her debut solo album In Pieces is a compilation of soulless singles curated to produce kiss-off captions. It spends so much time defining what Chlöe isn’t—Halle, a Bible-thumping prude, a moral absolutist—that by the end, we have no clue who the mononymous singer actually is.
Beyoncé, Chlöe’s mentor, set her star project into motion when she stepped onstage at the 2003 BET Awards to perform “Crazy in Love.” Chlöe’s solo debut single, “Have Mercy,” aspired to a similar “debuting on top of a neon sign of her name” moment, but landed like a song from the Empire soundtrack—“body language like speaking Spanglish” is something Lucious Lyon would come up with. Eclectic, hands-on production and crafty hooks were a huge part of Chloe x Halle’s magic as a duo, but Chlöe’s solo material feels manufactured to the point of sterility. The forced strut of her delivery and unimaginative “Ms. New Booty” sample made “Treat Me” feel optimized for mainstream radio, and album cuts “Worried” and “Looze U” (the latter co-written by The-Dream) suffer similar genericism.
Chlöe pulls some high-profile features, but they’re all clinical. “Told Ya” wastes a Missy Elliott collab on vocal warm-up exercises. (Meanwhile, the rising British group FLO, who’ve been out for less than a year, managed to refreshingly reimagine one of Missy’s hits and host her brilliantly on their recent “Fly Girl.”) In what reads as a desperate attempt to secure a hit, Chlöe aligns herself with “bad boy” and notorious abuser Chris Brown for “How Does It Feel,” a song with the sexual appeal and emotional intimacy of Apple’s Terms and Conditions. She recruits Future for “Cheatback,” an acoustic ballad that relies on his playboy persona as a sort of meta-commentary on infidelity.
She’s credited Imogen Heap, Donna Summer, and Kelis as influences, which helps explain some of the album’s jarring vocal experimentations. But her yelped “shiieeett” and “wiieeth” on “Told Ya” are mystifying because Chlöe is one of the greatest vocalists of her generation. Dipping into her lower register, she stuns as a contralto. I found myself rewinding her runs on hymnal parts of “Heart on My Sleeve” and could’ve sworn I was levitating during the awe-inspiring bridge of “Pray It Away” and “Make It Look Easy.” This is the Chlöe with an ear for otherworldly vocal arrangements that caught the attention of Parkwood and the world. Her first entertainment jobs were as a gospel singer in the Disney Channel movie Let It Shine and as a church girl—the younger version of Beyoncé’s character—in the 2003 musical comedy The Fighting Temptations, so it was a given that she was gonna take us to church. The operatic arias and bluesy cadences of opener “Someone’s Calling” would’ve been the perfect introduction to an infidelity album, in the vein of Lemonade’s “Pray You Catch Me.”
But In Pieces is not a concept album. If it is, someone please tell everyone involved in its production. The emotionally charged conversational interludes and narrative intros (“Do you ever wonder, like, who else is fucking your man?”) are out of place amid the redundant themes and mind-numbingly online songwriting. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure with only two endings: There’s a good-for-nothing man in her life who keeps betraying her, so will she A) give it to God or B) shake some ass and show him what he’s missing? The unfaithful men and nameless “fuck niggas” she croons about are so abstract it’s impossible to connect with her devastation. Does he buy you nice stuff? Is the dick good? Do you not want another woman to profit from your emotional labor? Moments that could’ve built up to rewarding catharsis are dead on arrival.
Standout single “Body Do,” a bumping dance track overlaid with ethereal falsettos, is flirty and upbeat: a convincing introduction to Chlöe the pop star. Still, her most compelling work has been with Halle by her side, complementing her maximalist tendencies. Together, their music struck a golden balance of lively, introspective, and evocative. Though they’re two years apart, the sisters’ matching outfits and roles on the TV series Grown-ish had people confusing them for twins. As the younger sister of identical twins, I know firsthand the lengths they will go to differentiate themselves when they come of age. Now that Halle is a Disney princess, Chlöe cosplays as a dominatrix. In Pieces meets a fate worse than controversy: banality. | 2023-03-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Parkwood Entertainment / Columbia | March 31, 2023 | 6.1 | b839fe57-0eec-41f1-b9d8-fbd68dbc2fc0 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
The anxieties of isolation and newfound fatherhood are reflected in home recordings the Wolf Parade co-founder made in his rural home studio during the doldrums of 2020 and 2021. | The anxieties of isolation and newfound fatherhood are reflected in home recordings the Wolf Parade co-founder made in his rural home studio during the doldrums of 2020 and 2021. | Spencer Krug: Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spencer-krug-twenty-twenty-twenty-twenty-one/ | Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One | Spencer Krug has seldom stood still for long. A founding member of indie rockers Wolf Parade, he has skipped between numerous projects over the past two decades, from Swan Lake—the Canadian supergroup featuring Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and former Frog Eyes bandmate Carey Mercer—to Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, which grew from solo outings into collaborative endeavors. On Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One, his second solo LP under his own name, he ruminates on stasis and change: “First came the death of old ways/Then came the birth of the new,” he sings, just past the record’s halfway point. Recorded between 2020 and 2021 in the seclusion of home studio on rural Vancouver Island, Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One offers an introspective and idiosyncratic look at life during downtime.
Like its self-released 2021 predecessor, Fading Graffiti, Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One is the fruit of Krug’s Patreon output, culled from the collection of songs that he’s released to subscribers every month since 2019. Influenced by both his newfound fatherhood and the stopped clocks of the pandemic, the album channels the claustrophobia and complexities of the last two years. “The days are getting shorter/The nights are without number,” he intones atop melancholy guitar and synths on “Overcast Afternoon.” There’s an overarching air of heaviness throughout: Days are filled with nonstop rain, feelings of vulnerability (“Do you really know how much I need you”), and doomscrolling past articles about “the start of post-humanism” and “the end of time.”
Krug’s wryly imagistic lyrics often feel like pages torn from a diary. He logs his everyday existentialism in conversational couplets (“I sometimes wonder if I haven’t/In some ways already died/Then I think/Of course I have, and so has any person/Who just burns to stay alive”) and finds poetry in dully quotidian words like “podcasters.” He mulls building “a moat around the house” and populating it with sharks, as though isolation was turning out to be preferable to the alternative. Repetition frequently intensifies the songs’ pent-up energy, though Krug rarely allows his songs to form proper choruses. The closest he gets is the occasional repeated refrain (“My muscles are fine, it’s in my fucking bones”). But in the album’s final moments, patterns are ruptured. “You can hurt me for free/Circa 2020,” he intones three times before delivering his wry send-off: “But come 2021/you’ll have to carve me away.”
Where Fading Graffiti was energized by instinctual indie-rock melodies and embellished with slide guitar, Twenty Twenty Twenty Twenty One leans into relatively unadorned production, augmenting strummed acoustic guitar with broad strokes of synthesizer and the occasional programmed rhythm. The seven-minute opus “Cut the Eyeholes Out So I Can See” weaves acoustic and electronic instrumentation together, echoing the lyrics’ contrast between realism and surrealism; on “Bone Grey” he swaps out his voice for a robotic narrator, while the comparatively jovial “Chisel Chisel Stone Stone” floats atop a buoyant krautrock groove.
The sparser arrangements, where Krug is accompanied solely by an acoustic guitar or piano, are plenty vibrant on their own. His voice trembles against thundering piano in “Hanging Off the Edge” and leaps to its upper register in “My Muscles Are Fine,” lifted by insistent guitar chords. In the opening “Slipping In and Out of the Pool,” he strips the song back from a fuller-sounding live-stream performance in 2021, reducing it to the essentials: strummed acoustic, a hint of synth, and that trademark warble of his. The comparison is a reminder of just how elastic his songwriting can be. “I think the world is a rubber band,” he sings; “I think we’re slipping in and out of the pool/I think an hourglass is different than quicksand/I think it’s cool.” It’s a classically Krug stanza—and a reminder that even the doldrums of isolation are fertile soil for a mind as active as his.
#iframe:https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3264448341/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true /allow-popups | 2022-07-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pronounced Kroog | July 1, 2022 | 7.4 | b849587f-caf0-4ffe-9b08-d5709ad307c9 | Zara Hedderman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zara-hedderman / | |
Volatility is Ho99o9’s brand. The L.A.-based duo merge interests in old-school hardcore and hip-hop on their scorching debut album. | Volatility is Ho99o9’s brand. The L.A.-based duo merge interests in old-school hardcore and hip-hop on their scorching debut album. | Ho99o9: United States of Horror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23289-united-states-of-horror/ | United States of Horror | Hardcore shows have a way of prompting eureka moments in attendees. Whether this is owed to the music’s carnal purity, its defiant spirit, or its crass spectacle is uncertain. Either way, these shows are often sites of transformation. Such is the case with Ho99o9, a duo based in Los Angeles who splice old-school hardcore with gritty hip-hop. Growing up in New Jersey’s public housing system, its members—who go by theOGM and Eaddy—stuck mainly to the likes of DMX and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. During their teen years, in the late-2000s, the pair began venturing across the Hudson to see lauded punk bands like Hoax and Dawn of Humans.
Ho99o9 represents a merger of these two worlds. Their live shows—performed with Black Flag drummer Brandon Pertzborn—exist largely to disorient fans and sponsors. For example, shortly before Ho99o9’s scheduled stint on the 2015 Warped Tour, at the festival’s kick-off party, Eaddy took the stage in a wedding dress, like Satan’s bride shimmying and screaming for a crowd of industry types and teenage fans. Unsurprisingly, organizers booted them from the tour. More recently, SXSW organizers had to shut down one of Ho99o9’s sets two songs in because the moshing had grown out of hand. (That’s not even getting into the onstage nudity or the food fights.) Volatility is their brand, both in concert and on United States of Horror, their debut album.
United States of Horror is self-described as Ho99o9’s “crossbreed mutant” baby and rightly so. It’s a proudly ugly Frankenstein, an LP that clambers along at a fitful pace, stopping for the occasional smoke break. TheOGM raps as if he’s got gravel stuck in his windpipes; Eaddy is his more restrained counterpart, though not by much. They trade turns at the mic like a tag-team of shadowboxers, a deadly game plan between them. Following a highly-technical opening salvo of sharp, barked syllables, they bludgeon the listener with hair-raising screams.
The vessels by which Ho99o9’s hellscapes are expressed span the whole spectrum of sonic violence. “Bleed War” and “Face Tatt” tap into Godflesh’s low-res, deadpanned miasma, conjuring up an apocalyptic rave. “Hydrolics” and “Splash” sport the intimidating, bass-boosted palette typically seen in trap music. A glitchy mushroom cloud sends “Knuckle Up” into careening Code Orange territory; similar sounds power the title track’s scorching chorus.
Ho99o9’s reputation for political cynicism, musical disorder, and commercial self-sabotage invites comparisons to Death Grips: another pack of punk-rap provocateurs dead-set on disruption, playing festivals just to revel in the audience’s confusion. But there’s a crucial distinction. Unlike their viral, hermit-like peers, Ho99o9 see a party in the West’s spiral towards oblivion—and United States of Horror is a compelling invitation. | 2017-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Caroline / Toys Have Powers | May 19, 2017 | 6.7 | b856948e-ea62-4ed9-aaf8-6d71871ecd1e | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
This collage work by the Los Angeles composer weaves together stray chamber compositions, ambient recordings, voices, and more, yielding a mesmerizing sound both dense and diaphanous. | This collage work by the Los Angeles composer weaves together stray chamber compositions, ambient recordings, voices, and more, yielding a mesmerizing sound both dense and diaphanous. | Sean McCann: Puck | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sean-mccann-puck/ | Puck | For more than 10 years, Sean McCann has been a purveyor of unabashedly precious ambient music. So sentimental are his works that they could soundtrack euphoric dream states shrouded in soft-hued bliss. Some of his recent albums, Simple Affections in particular, have a childlike wonder to them; they exude the charm of expansive, colorful fantasy worlds. On Puck, McCann continues down this path of evocative storytelling, inviting listeners into a space so soothing that leaving its confines can leave one wistful—like waking up to gray skies after the most comforting slumber.
Puck ensnares its listeners with a peculiar assemblage of recordings drawn from his own archives. Dating from between the late 2000s and 2018, McCann’s source material includes chamber works, ambient, and a quaint piece for guitar. They amass into a lively collage that’s as sprawling as it is cohesive: Odd groaning noises and time-stretched samples sit alongside lavish string arrangements. The constant activity prevents listeners from settling into longform drones. Such liveliness is clever: It leads to a hyper-awareness of every instrument’s role, amplifying the richness of every sound and, consequently, song.
The album begins with a three-part suite titled “Folded Portraits.” The first track, “Nightfall,” is a fanfare in slow motion, with deliquescent strings and brass interwoven with human voices—there’s singing, but also humming, background chatter, and the clearing of throats. All this vocalizing transforms the piece into a domestic drama; it overflows with a queasiness and nostalgia akin to sound artist Graham Lambkin’s own collage works. More crucial is how McCann toys with the arrangement and mixing to ensure the song is as dense as it is diaphanous: The swirling instrumentation wraps around listeners without being overbearing.
“Broth” follows suit, but its longer runtime better demonstrates McCann’s compositional skills. Throughout, musical bibelots and snatches of melody become the central focus, but only for brief moments. Dewy piano chords lead to cartoonish yelps, and on to scratching sounds captured at close range—it’s like a cast of actors rotating the lead role, and the result is the semblance of a musical narrative emerging from the hodgepodge of instrumentation. “Damals” is comparatively bare but nonetheless engrossing: It centers on a manipulated, wavering vocal melody that’s occasionally interjected with piano and voices. Even at their simplest, McCann’s pieces intend to mesmerize.
Puck’s whimsicality evokes childhood, especially on the title track. “Puck” fills much of its 21-minute runtime with McCann and sound artist Lia Mazzari reciting found poetry based on Fabergé eggs. They cull from a multitude of sources—recipes, blog posts, news articles—and their reading of the text grants it new meaning. Mazzari’s intonation makes “Puck” sound like a mother reciting a bedtime story. At one point she says, “The family’s only source of ventilation was in the grand duchesses’ bedroom, but peeking out of it was strictly forbidden.” Without looking it up, you might never have guessed that the text comes from the Wikipedia entry on the execution of the Romanov family. Fifteen minutes into the track, we hear snoring amid the sound of pages turning, as if listeners have finally been put to sleep.
More than any of McCann’s previous albums, Puck makes the saccharine sublime. The restlessness of these tracks, which are composed of works from throughout the Los Angeles composer’s career, mirrors the feeling of reflecting on adolescence: Scraps of faded memories, both pleasant and upsetting, create a deep longing to re-experience emotions, people, and places. Puck makes evident that looking back can be like entering into a dreamworld of your own making. As McCann forges a path between past and present, between waking and sleeping states, these pieces transcend mere sentimentalism; they transform reminiscence into something hyperreal. | 2019-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Recital | December 13, 2019 | 7.7 | b85f2cf7-d518-44f0-8c0f-6afbbaf356e1 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
In the wake of some professional tumult, the snap and ratchet producer stages a solid comeback with more varied production and plenty of celebration. | In the wake of some professional tumult, the snap and ratchet producer stages a solid comeback with more varied production and plenty of celebration. | Mustard: Cold Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22484-cold-summer/ | Cold Summer | 2014 was a banner year for DJ Mustard. He released his debut album, 10 Summers, scored seven Top 15 hits on the rap charts—among them Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck With You,” Tinashe’s “2 On,” and Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ‘Em”—and his mere presence spawned Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” a blatant copy of his sound and aesthetic. He became ubiquitous. In the midst of mainstream notoriety, perhaps his greatest achievement was YG’s My Krazy Life, a cohesive gangsta rap epic that he co-executive produced alongside the Compton rapper, his longtime friend. The album solidified both artists as West Coast rap revivalists, bringing new flavor to decades of SoCal and Bay Area rap tradition, and it jumpstarted Mustard’s run, which was capped by Omarion’s platinum hit “Post to Be” that November. But things went sour for Mustard in the following months: The hit-well dried up, he was sued twice—by producer Mike Free for credits on 20 of Mustard’s hits and by BMG Rights Management over the rights to “Post to Be”—and he and YG had a falling out over money, exchanging threats on social media.
This year, DJ Mustard quietly bounced back, mending bridges and retooling the sounds of his patented “ratchet music,” which has often been dismissed for its simplicity and lack of variety, into something with more range. After landing one of the biggest hits of his career with Rihanna’s “Needed Me” and joining her on her worldwide tour, he settled the lawsuit with Free and reconciled with YG, prepping a mixtape with the latter called 400 Summers. While that tape has yet to materialize, he’s returned with a new full-length album, Cold Summer, another seasonal release that brings the bangers.
The entire concept behind Mustard’s debut was that he had enough hits to run rap for 10 summers straight. But summer also embodies a vibe for Mustard, representative of his native Los Angeles. His music is well-suited for the season with isolated synth stabs, sub-rattling bass lines, and dance-friendly tempos. It’s warm, candy-painted, and radio ready. Every summer since 2013, he’s released a project—Ketchup, 10 Summers, and 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1. Cold Summer is a late entry (hence the name) that attempts to continue the custom, letting big-name guests mingle with his Pushaz Ink stand-ins. But where past projects were flexes for his brand or promotional tools for his friends and artists, this record just feels humbled and appreciative.
It’s fitting that Cold Summer opens with “Been a Long Time,” a reunion with longtime collaborators YG and Ty Dolla $ign. The lyrics reflect their bond and their come-up, with YG rapping, “Three Musketeers back together and they winning/And they getting too much money/Turn niggas rich then the crew must love me.” On the closer, “Another Summer,” which ditches solo riffs for a serene synth wash, Rick Ross seemingly speaks for Mustard with bars like “Look me in my eyes and tell me what you see/You watch the homie come up from a mustard seed/Ain’t looking for no problems, just a chance to eat/And I make mama a promise I’m a plant my feet.” In a monologue, Mustard gives the CliffsNotes version of his year, outlining his triumphs, his misfires, how happy he is to be reunited with YG and how thankful he is to be rich. Everything that happens between these two songs seems celebratory in response to these victories.
Some songs, like the Nicki Minaj and Jeremih-featuring “Don’t Hurt Me” and the unlikely Quavo and YG tag-teamer “Want Her,” are designed specifically with the old blueprint in mind—snaps, claps, “heys,” twittering hi-hats, and booming bass. But much of Cold Summer is a subtle departure from the production that led to the reductive yet understandable “DJ Mustard’s Piano” meme. On “What These Bitches Want,” full piano chords and synth strings give way to rich, G-funky production while Meek Mill and Nipsey Hussle recount street tales from their respective hoods. The Ty Dolla $ign solo joint, “Lil Baby,” is sparse with twangy licks that build around the crooner’s performance. Mustard has always shown much more competence laying R&B tracks (like “2 On,” Trey Songz’ “Na Na,” and Ty’s “Paranoid”), and the standout is “10,000 Hours,” a showcase for London singer Ella Mai that turns the Malcolm Gladwell method into a formula for perfect romance.
Cold Summer doesn’t dazzle on sheer star power the way a Khaled album can, and there isn’t anything as delightfully weird as DJ Drama’s sex-shooter collab “Camera” with Lil Uzi Vert, Mac Miller, and Post Malone, but it consistently jams; it knows what it is, and it never attempts to do too much. It isn’t quite as infectious as his debut, and it may not have the punchy, radio-friendly appeal of his freelance work, but it feels like a win. | 2016-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | October 8, 2016 | 6.9 | b8663962-b2dd-4011-b4a0-f917750e8e2c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
This record, initially issued in a small run in the early 80s, is richly evocative of the natural world and holds up as an immersive ambient experience. | This record, initially issued in a small run in the early 80s, is richly evocative of the natural world and holds up as an immersive ambient experience. | Jürgen Müller: Science of the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15696-science-of-the-sea/ | Science of the Sea | A skeptic might cast aspersions on the tale behind Jürgen Müller's Science of the Sea. The story begins at the University of Kiel in Germany, where the self-taught composer was studying oceanic science in the late 1970s. Müller purchased some electronic instruments and set them up on his houseboat in the town of Heikendorf, where he began crafting instrumental pieces that reflected his love of undersea life. His dream of selling those compositions to film and TV companies for use in documentaries never transpired. But Müller did press fewer than 100 vinyl copies of the recordings in the early 80s and titled them Science of the Sea, giving most of the albums away to friends and family. Fast forward three decades and a copy of the record ends up in the hands of Digitalis Recordings, just as a resurgence of interest in the type of new age recordings Müller was practicing is taking place.
So it's reasonable to wonder if the backstory was constructed as part of a larger concept, the way people continue to wonder about Ursula Bogner or Endless House. One intrepid blog commenter even claims to have contacted the University of Kiel and found no trace of Müller's presence. Either way it doesn't really matter, because the music on Science of the Sea continues that superior strain of contemplative elegance records such as Emeralds' Does It Look Like I'm Here? and Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts have touched on in recent times. Like those releases, the relation Science of the Sea has to actual new age music is tangential at best. There are no Gheorghe Zamfir-esque pan flute solos or anything that will drive you to join a local color therapy group. Instead it's an uncomplicated series of recordings, mostly based around gently unfolding synth arpeggios set to faintly pulsing rhythms.
The tracks are short-- only five of the 12 here make it over the three-minute mark-- although Science of the Sea doesn't really make sense when broken down into its component parts. Instead each song works as a natural evolution of the theme set out in the opening "Beyond the Tide", where great washes of cleansing synth are interrupted by spiky twists of becalming noise that were presumably conceived to mimic dolphin chirps. It's not hard to see why this might have been thought of as a perfect soundtrack to a Jacques Cousteau-style undersea documentary. The following "Sea Bed Meditation" is full of rippling loops tied down by globs of tenderly resonating bass frequencies, not far removed from Klaus Schulze's contemplative solo ventures. Müller also shares Schulze's fondness for vaguely humorous song titles ("Dream Sequence For a Jellyfish", "The Elusive Seahorse").
What's remarkable about this album is how acutely it reflects and comments on the environment that served as its inspiration. "Waterworld" doesn't travel far beyond the coiling melody that ebbs and flows throughout the track, but it feels like the musical equivalent of a trail of oxygen bubbles arcing to the surface as a scuba diver peacefully plunges to the depths. Similarly, "Marine Technology" is all digital interference and signal jams, with zaps of synth noise pinging back and forth across the surface as though an urgent piece of undersea communication were being transmitted. Once you get deep into Science of the Sea, especially on headphones, it feels like Müller is simultaneously replicating that world and conveying his chimerical dreams about what it epitomizes. "Coral Fantasy" and "Vast Worlds Beneath" function as utopian fantasies about the great unknown, with Müller utilizing slowly disentangling sounds to give a sense of scale, wonder, and a natural curiosity about all the things that lay undiscovered down there.
The way Science of the Sea subtly shifts in theme, from then-current meditations on the ocean to quixotic impressions about its unexplored expanses, is its masterstroke. It feels like you're on a journey alongside Müller, carefully mapping out the thoughts and fears the murky depths have come to represent, all laid out in a way that your brain would naturally process if you were immersed in that world. The closing "Lonely Voyage" even feels like a warning of sorts, with its foreboding timbre suggesting that you can plunge a little too deeply into yourself if you spend too much time down there. That's where this album disconnects from anything that could perfunctorily be tagged as "new age." This isn't simple relaxation music, although much of it could easily perform that function. Instead the beautifully uncomplicated surface structures are used to prize open a boundless amount of feelings that are every bit as complex and unfathomable as the ocean itself. | 2011-08-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Digitalis | August 3, 2011 | 8.4 | b86b7df2-ee9a-4abe-871c-c97202c1cf18 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The jazz guitarist is more than able to lead both his band and the listener into far-off rhythmic and harmonic places, and crucially finds a way to bring everyone back, too. | The jazz guitarist is more than able to lead both his band and the listener into far-off rhythmic and harmonic places, and crucially finds a way to bring everyone back, too. | Miles Okazaki: Trickster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22973-trickster/ | Trickster | As a member of jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman’s bands, guitarist Miles Okazaki has learned a few lessons about teasing. Coleman’s music often skates near the R&B mood, while moving restlessly between frequent changes in rhythm and harmony. At its best, tunes by the MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner cycle through the compositional variety with such equanimity, you hardly realize that his ensemble has avoided giving up the straight-ahead funk. On Trickster, Okazaki’s own music proves nearly as ingenious in its play with morphing grooves.
Opening track “Kudzu” begins with a fast flourish: a long, knotty line, played with a clean tone by the guitarist. Then, over the rhythm section’s unusual vamp, Okazaki restates some of this opening music, lingering over the material. Pianist Craig Taborn is in the mix, too, offering some mercurial chords. On a first pass, you might wonder: Where are we, exactly? Is this the main theme? The beginning of a strangely chill avant-garde solo? Before you have time to wallow in the uncertainty, Taborn and Okazaki join forces and display the song’s real hook.
During performances like these, it’s clear that this bandleader is interested in the unstable realm of rhythm and melody, the place where it's easy to get lost. Though he won’t leave you lost for long. On the slowly developing “The Calendar,” Okazaki begins in a contemplative mood. By the end of the track, he solos with fevered inspiration, as if all of time is running out. Like Okazaki, drummer Sean Rickman and bassist Anthony Tidd are also graduates of the Coleman school, which means they make these darting, surprising structures sound fully natural.
Over the hurtling rhythm of “Black Bolt,” one melodic cell travels through different octaves. You know it can’t go on like that forever. This initial lack of a clear destination point creates a suspense that is resolved when the pianist and guitarist begin racing to complete the other’s lines. After a stretch of roaming around in an attractive darkness, you get one clear payoff after another. During the brisk “Caduceus,” the interplay between Tidd, Taborn, and Okazaki results in glorious braids of melody. The execution is obviously complex, the work of virtuosi. But the resulting beauty is easy to appreciate.
Some performances on Trickster don’t quite manage to replicate that feat. A few of the obsessive phrases on the album stop just short of turning into memorable compositions (as with “Box in a Box”). Fortunately, some of the songs that sound the least like puzzles reveal that Okazaki can craft simpler themes that are just as stirring. “Mischief” is anchored by a strutting beat, one that fans of the Meters should appreciate. The relative stability of the song’s pulse allows Taborn the freedom to uncork one of his lengthy, exciting solos. And the miniature “Borderland” offers the album a lyrical coda. While Okazaki can be plenty entertaining as a master of misdirection, he also has a gift for direct communication. | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pi | March 21, 2017 | 7.7 | b87339f7-03ed-468c-8524-a301181cfac7 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Colombian pop star’s latest is low stakes, neither offensive nor remarkable, the sound of a reggaetonero you’d expect to find on a mood board for a fashion campaign. | The Colombian pop star’s latest is low stakes, neither offensive nor remarkable, the sound of a reggaetonero you’d expect to find on a mood board for a fashion campaign. | Maluma: Papi Juancho | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maluma-papi-juancho/ | Papi Juancho | Can you really be macho if your best work comes from other women? Such is the quandary with Colombia’s Maluma. The music of the 26-year-old pop star—born Juan Luis Londoño Arias—has long been defined by a latent machismo. But other than a brief moment where online petitions sprung up in protest of his song “Cuatro Babys”—which one Spanish municipality deemed “an apologia for violence against women”—his biggest moments have been with older, more established women. He first dipped his toe into the mainstream with his fellow Colombian Shakira on their duet “Chantaje,” cracking Billboard’s Hot 100, and then again on Madonna’s ode to his hometown “Medellín” managing to out-sexy the veteran culture vulture with a sultry croon. And when he makes his debut on the silver screen in the forthcoming feature “Marry Me,” it will be at the behest of Jennifer Lopez.
But women artists are conspicuously absent from his latest album Papi Juancho, relegated to the familiar reggaetón roles of emotional foils, signifiers of material wealth, and sex objects. Maluma says the character is an alter ego, lonely horny quarantine sessions while hiding out from the pandemic. But it’s par for the course for the music he’s made throughout his career; after toning down the raunch for his last and most successful album to date, 11:11, he’s digressed to his tried and true lothario persona.
And it mostly works, depending on your perspective. Much of Maluma’s schtick feels prefabricated, the kind of reggaetonero you’d expect to find on a mood board for a fashion campaign. The warm and bright melodies are aesthetically pleasing but hollow. It goes beyond the Calvin Klein campaigns and Miami Vice neon visuals. In a genre where literally every song has the same beat, his music struggles to distinguish him from his peers, his sound lost in a wash of inoffensive pastels and vague tropical motifs. Even his overt attempts to add his own spin to classic sounds provide mixed results. Album opener “Medallo City” stands out lyrically for the slang local to Envigado, his neighborhood in Medellín, and recruits local rapper Teo Grajales. But the hip-hop beat’s attempt to work in some salsa rhythms get lost in the sauce, any unique character Grajales might have brought seems to have been buffed out by the time it made it onto the record.
To his credit, Maluma acknowledges his debts to Puerto Rican forebears—upon whose work Colombia’s entire reggaetón scene is built—a welcome nod to the sonic ancestors that we’ve seen recently from the likes of Bad Bunny and even Romeo Santos. Recorded mostly during the COVID-imposed lockdown with his longtime producer collaborators and co-writers The Rude Boyz (Kevin ADG and Chan “El Genio”), Papi Juancho features guest appearances from OGs Jory Boy, Ñejo y Dálmata, Ñengo Flow, Randy, and Yomo, but the production is so tepid you might not even notice.
The album’s highlight “ADMV” is also its most familiar, released months earlier as a single. An acoustic ballad to growing old with the love of your life (“Amor de mi vida”), its earnestness overcomes the slight hint of cheese. It’s one of the few moments on Papi Juancho that feels honest and genuine.
But for the most part, Papi Juancho is neither exceptionally good or remarkably awful. Despite its considerable bloat, none of its 22 tracks demand a skip, even if few moments particularly stand out. It emits a vibe similar to an algorithmically programmed Spotify station, an amalgamation of every popular reggaetón beat that sounds like everything and nothing all at once.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Sony Music Latin | August 29, 2020 | 6.6 | b8778b0f-f408-4552-828c-e2954292c9e7 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Even as they negotiate complex parameters of rhythm and harmony, the trio’s expertly attuned playing evokes the openness of improvisation, and the urgency of justice. | Even as they negotiate complex parameters of rhythm and harmony, the trio’s expertly attuned playing evokes the openness of improvisation, and the urgency of justice. | Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Uneasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vijay-iyer-linda-may-han-oh-tyshawn-uneasy/ | Uneasy | Uneasy—the title of the taut and enveloping new album by pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey—holds a welter of timely implications, from pandemic precarity to political instability. Another choice, less intuitive but just as apt, would have been Unfinished—not as a comment on the album itself but an allusion to the kind of work these three musicians are doing together.
Creative music, to use their preferred term of art, relies in part on this understanding. As Anthony Reed puts it in Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production, a new scholarly book that Iyer has vocally endorsed, the core project of the improvisational avant-garde is “a commitment to ongoingness, to experimental open-endedness grounded in something other than the circularity and circulation of received forms.” Throughout Uneasy, there’s a strong pull toward that open sensation, even as Sorey, Oh, and Iyer negotiate complex parameters of rhythm and harmony with the soaring precision of raptors on the wing.
The album is credited to all three musicians, with Iyer as the first among equals. His previous working trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, stood as a defining ensemble of the 2010s; its most recent release, Break Stuff, was widely hailed in the jazz press as one of the best albums of 2015. The trio on Uneasy bears no small resemblance to that earlier band—it retains Iyer’s attraction to dark colors, elliptical shapes, and plunging momentum—but there’s a more pronounced expression of equal say among the musicians, along with a powerful sense of shared purpose and a stratospheric level of attunement.
Within the last several years, Sorey has achieved a rarefied stature in creative music: Like Iyer, he’s been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant, joined the faculty of an Ivy League institution, and been the subject of adulatory profiles, which tend to focus on his extravagant inventions as a composer. Oh is on her way to becoming one of the most highly regarded bass players of our time, if she hasn’t already secured that place—and her achievements as a bandleader and composer are estimable. The three musicians first coalesced as a trio at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, Canada, where Iyer and Sorey are co-artistic directors, and Oh a longtime guest instructor. From the start, their interaction was understood as a collective endeavor.
Still, Iyer contributed most of the compositions on Uneasy, and it’s his sensibility as a bandleader that informs the album. Part of that sensibility involves his relationship to “the jazz tradition,” less as a construct than as a tangle of relationships. One of the two non-originals on the album is “Drummer’s Song,” a chiming, intricately layered piece by Geri Allen, one of Iyer’s lodestars as a pianist; the trio approaches it with reverence, but not at any kind of respectful remove. (Sorey simultaneously calls to mind a surgical team and a demolition crew.) “Night and Day” is a Cole Porter standard, but as Iyer has confirmed, the key reference point for the trio is Joe Henderson’s version of the song, featuring McCoy Tyner’s ringing chord voicings at the piano. And for a certain type of listener, the backbeat groove of “Combat Breathing,” in a slouchy 11/8 meter, will almost instantly recall Julius Hemphill’s 1972 cut “Dogon A.D.”—a song that Iyer’s previous trio actually covered.
“Combat Breathing,” of course, also comes out of a pressurized context: Iyer composed the piece after the death of Eric Garner in 2014, amid waves of protest aligned with a recently coined movement, Black Lives Matter. (In its premiere, Iyer performed “Combat Breathing” with a modern dance collective, whose members enacted a “die-in” onstage.) The title track of Uneasy, which Iyer created in 2011 with choreographer Karole Armitage, originally alluded to the contradictions and swirling undercurrents of the Obama era, a decade after 9/11. More to the point is “Children of Flint,” whose foreboding intrigue faintly evokes the compositional signature of Andrew Hill, and whose title refers to the plight of communities affected by a contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan.
Each of the musicians on Uneasy has devoted considerable energy to sociopolitical critique; nothing about this expression represents a new impulse. But the immediacy that burns within the group’s cohesion, from one moment to the next, makes this album feel especially urgent. And with that urgency, again, comes an awareness of this art as part of a larger work in progress. “As the arc of history lurches forward and backward, the fact remains: Local and global struggles for equality, justice, and basic human rights are far from over,” Iyer wrote in the liner notes to Far From Over, his 2017 sextet album, which also featured Sorey. (One unused study from that project, “Retrofit,” is among the more fluidly dynamic pieces here; listen for a wind-down coda that underscores Sorey’s facility with post-Dilla beat placement.)
In the face of these weighty ideals, it feels meaningful that Uneasy concludes with “Entrustment,” a slow, resonant piece that registers as a kind of hymn. It occasions some of Iyer’s most delicate pianism on the album: tolling overtones, silvery glissandi. And it serves as a reminder that the work of recovery ahead, as a society or as a scene, will depend on some form of cooperation, and on good faith.
In a recent conversation on the writer Hanif Abdurraqib’s Object of Sound podcast, Iyer acknowledged that the tradition of radical thought has often bent away from hope. “There’s a sense [that] optimism is a trap,” he mused. “But at the same time, there’s no way that you could make music for others without feeling some sense of possibility—possibility for connection, possibility for empathy, possibility for a shared future.” The riveting intensity of the musical exchange throughout Uneasy shows how productive that intermediary space can be when everyone involved embraces it as a challenge.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | April 15, 2021 | 8.6 | b87b8477-15ac-42e6-93e3-4c1b50d7fe3a | Nate Chinen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-chinen/ | |
Who says bows are only for Katniss? South African musician Cara Stacey makes handy use of various strings and wood, bringing in sounds we've never heard before. Things That Grow is a dizzying, beautiful spin. | Who says bows are only for Katniss? South African musician Cara Stacey makes handy use of various strings and wood, bringing in sounds we've never heard before. Things That Grow is a dizzying, beautiful spin. | Cara Stacey: Things That Grow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21114-things-that-grow/ | Things That Grow | Nowadays, a bow usually comes with an arrow in hand and a film camera behind it, though history shows us they've been used as musical instruments ever since 13,000 BCE, a good deal before Katniss ever picked one up. The concept is pretty simple, just string a cord through a bent stick. Then run it over stuff: other strings, other wood, your hands, etc. That’s it. To this day, they’re still frequently used in Africa, including Swaziland—the once-homeland of Cara Stacey.
To call Stacey well-versed as a musician is an understatement. The South African multi-instrumentalist, composer, and researcher received two master's degrees in musicology and musical performance from various universities in London and Edinburgh—and she's still working on a doctorate. With all that knowledge under her belt, Stacey gives South African music a dizzying, beautiful spin, wielding both an uhadi bow and an umrhubhe bow on eight-song voyage Things That Grow. The difference between the two is their resonators, the section of the bow which broadcasts their otherwise quiet sound. The uhadi is a long bow where the player attaches a gourd to the bow, moving it towards and away from their chest to let out pitch-varying overtones. The umrhubhe is a short bow where the player places their mouth on the bow, manipulating their tongue and throat muscles to highlight harmonics coming off the string. The sound hums with an unusually comforting tone, like a saw being sharpened or the coarse bellow of a violin in need of rosin.
Despite its rootsy instrumentation, the album is a raw collision of experimental classical with jazz. Because Cara Stacey didn't grow up in the rural Eastern Cape, nor was she set in the traditional ways of one of South Africa's most traditional instruments, she’s able to explore the bows’ sounds. Opener “Oscillations” hears her scratch the string repeatedly, building up a wall of buzz until the gentle padding of drums come into focus and, almost immediately after, the carefree whistle of someone strolling through the woods. “Durée” places the notes of her bow at the forefront again, even while upright bass begins to grow, so that its resonator captures her every move. There’s the occasional harsh scratch—think a single pinkie nail on a chalkboard—on a few songs, but otherwise the bows act like a never-ending scroll for the other instruments to hammer out a Morse Code message of complex meditation. Joined by Shabaka Hutchings (clarinet, tenor saxophone), Seb Rochford (drums), Ruth Goller (bass), Hugh Jones aka electronic musician Crewdson (concertronica), and Dan Leavers (synths), Stacey darts between animal-like calls over the course of the record, especially on nearly 10-minute album closer “Fox”. On Things That Grow, her companions play sensitively, keeping an eye on her use of the bow as to never overpower it, even with the studio space carefully capturing its nuances. “Sunbird”, full of warm strings and bizarre looped synth, keeps her bow ringing at its core, while it begins to take on the form of a short-seizing robot. Even the eerie bass of “Dark Matter” should go full Wed 21-era Juana Molina on Stacey, its latin-style grooves taking the lead, but they refuse to let it drown her out.
Things That Grow relies heavily on the improvisation of her bandmates and the fluidity with which their melodies play out. The only work composed beforehand by Stacey were melodic aspects and her individual bow parts. Yet that lack of cohesion can drag certain moments of improvisation down. The metal tapping in “Music of the Spheres” veers towards aimlessness in context of the album as a whole. Designated improvisational sections step back for someone else’s solo that occasionally lacks the confidence needed to take over. But improvisation doesn’t have to be indecisive. A track like “Circadian Clocks” treads minimalist repetition with Philip Glass in mind, and, when Stacey reaches far enough, she explores configurations other bow players have yet to publicly investigate, namely bringing the quiet bow into a buzzing room filled with conflicting instruments. For that alone, Things That Grow sees her shoot the image of the bow farther than we’ve come to understand it in the Western world today. | 2015-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kit | October 9, 2015 | 7.1 | b87d5947-e1b6-4768-849c-27ba891e1f96 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
The Denver doom metal band’s third album is streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp. | The Denver doom metal band’s third album is streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp. | Khemmis: Desolation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khemmis-desolation/ | Desolation | Of all the heavy-lidded legions frequenting Denver's thriving doom-metal scene, Khemmis are far and away the most primed to cross over. Their first two records, 2015’s Absolution and 2016’s Hunted, set the parameters (or perhaps more accurately, endless horizons) for their hometown’s blend of metal almost immediately upon their release, uniting Denver’s various underground communities—traditional doom, debaucherous stoner rock, filth-ridden sludge metal, showboating, Thin Lizzy-style hard rock—under one, majestic banner.
Desolation—Khemmis’ third album and first effort since signing with heavy-music institution Nuclear Blast last year—is the band’s most streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp release yet. Its six tracks are the type of long-form rippers tooled for cavernous theaters, as opposed to cramped clubs. The most candidate for radio play is opening track “Bloodletting,” a six-and-a-half-minute doom crusher driven by dueling stoner licks, galloping tempos, and cleanly-sung melodies: accessible to all, but amenable to the acolytes. Not a bad compromise.
Desolation also marks a shift in the primary dynamic engine, the guitar-wielding duo of velvet-throated belter Phil Pendergast and guttural yowler Ben Hutcherson. When Khemmis started out, the pair played more like adversaries than co-frontmen, bellowing into the din from opposite ends on the sonic spectrum. As with Hunted, though, Desolation have put an ever-increasing premium on the former’s swelling croons, reducing the latter’s larynx-shredding outbursts to select moments, like the death-metal-inflected refrains of “Maw of Time.” Hutcherson still has plenty to roar about: It’s just his guitar that does the yelling now.
Granted, Pendergast no pushover: the lithe baritone runs on “Flesh to Nothing” and “Bloodletting,” prove him more than capable of commanding the mic on his own. If there was an “American Idol” for doom metal, this guy would most likely emerge victorious, even as booming, hyper-enunciated delivery style devolving into oversung silliness at times (the chorus on “Isolation,” with its exaggerated, over-extended syllables and grating melodic progression, is by far the worst offender). Still, Khemmis’ power has always stemmed from collective onslaughts, rather than individual displays—and without Hutcherson’s acrid roars to prop up that dynamic buffer, the record’s overarching gravitas takes a hit.
Khemmis’ triumphant arrangements on Desolation—emboldened with care by the band’s longtime producer Dave Otero, who’s lent deep, crisp production to Primitive Man, Cephalic Carnage, and others—are juxtaposed with Pendergast’s plaintive, plainly-stated reflections on mortality, memory, and nature. On album closer “From Ruin,” he frames his personal growth by way of the vernal lexicon typical of a Colorado band: “Sure as the spring casts a light on the snow/I have awakened to the ashes anew/They’re burning away though I yearn to hold on/Knowing that I can accept this life unblinded, renewed.” If that means pissing a few acolytes off, so be it. | 2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin / Nuclear Blast | July 2, 2018 | 6.8 | b8851689-af28-4ca3-b002-1e84d96583f6 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
The California band’s blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending defied easy categorization. Their sharpest tendencies meshed on Hybrid Theory, the most popular rock music of the 21st century. | The California band’s blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending defied easy categorization. Their sharpest tendencies meshed on Hybrid Theory, the most popular rock music of the 21st century. | Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory (20th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/linkin-park-hybrid-theory-20th-anniversary-edition/ | Hybrid Theory (20th Anniversary Edition) | Chester Bennington was 41 years old when he lost the battle he spent life urging people to overcome. The defining characteristic of Linkin Park’s music was how accessible it made the tools to deal with trauma, an offering intended both for their fans and Bennington himself. His death in 2017 was by all accounts a shock: to the band, to his family, and to the legions across the world who treated him as an inspiration, not just for his power as a singer, but for his dignity in recovery and honesty in relapses. He worked through years of sexual abuse and drug addiction on stage, on record, and through community outreach. For those who witnessed Bennington buoyant and free on stage just weeks before he died, the burden of presence is hard to shake.
All of this weighs heavily on 2000’s Hybrid Theory, already the most popular heavy music of the 21st century. With global sales of 32 million—including 12 million in the U.S., a million of which has come in the past three years—Hybrid Theory is the highest-selling debut in any genre since 1988’s Appetite for Destruction. You’d assume being the only diamond-tinted rock album this side of the millennium might afford a smidgen of clout. Yet on lists of the best metal, hard rock, emo or straight-up rock, Hybrid Theory is often conspicuously absent, as if no axe-worshipping subtribe is willing to adopt it as their own.
Nu-metal would seem the obvious category, but even though Linkin Park were saddled with the tag at the time, it was an awkward fit. They knew the nu- was loaded: Their blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending rendered them suspect to the double-denim dinosaurs of rock crit, so they built a street team on chatrooms and trained in on untapped admissions of despondency and failure. They sang about being filled with tension, feeling betrayed by the light, wishing for a way to disappear. In making themselves small, they became colossal.
Rather than re-re-evaluate the era in which they found fame, the 20th anniversary reissue of Hybrid Theory—featuring over 50 unreleased tracks, B-sides, remixes, live performances and rarities—encourages a closer examination of why this band went supernova. Today, it’s hard to look past the buddy act of Bennington and Mike Shinoda as the skeleton key that unlocked Linkin Park’s appeal for a wider spectrum of listeners. It almost didn’t happen. The group had been active for three years before the departure in 1999 of original singer Mark Wakefield (who went on to both manage Taproot and design the cover for System of a Down’s Toxicity). Even after Bennington was installed, Hybrid Theory’s demos show just how far they had to travel before arriving at anything resembling synergy. On early versions of “A Place for My Head” and “Points of Authority,” it seems as if Bennington and Shinoda are reading from different sheets entirely.
Once they found a comfortable nook within vein-popping catharsis, this duality became the heart of Linkin Park’s music. Bennington and Shinoda were clear-eyed in facing down topics of duplicity, control, psychological and physical abuse, and suicidal ideation at a time when few ventured that far. To anyone tucked under a duvet running their portable CD player hot, this was a revelation. The pair switched perspectives and laced verses through one another with guile, playing out a bracing dialogue between id and superego. Bennington was particularly adept at self-analysis, explaining how the tide of anxiety inside of him could retreat only to return as a crushing wave of depression, or watching the last remnants of serotonin circle his mind’s drain like black tap water.
Linkin Park were committed to making sure you knew their tastes lay beyond just riff-o-rama. The album was called Hybrid Theory for a reason (it would have been the group’s name too, if someone else hadn’t beaten them to it). Drummer Rob Bourdon grew up idolizing the limitless groove of funk and R&B musicians. Guitarist Brad Delson and turntablist Joe Hahn shared a love of glitch, boom-bap and trip-hop, which is why “Cure for the Itch” only ever feels one crab-scratch away from dropping into DJ Shadow’s “Organ Donor.” When a friend’s dad chaperoned the 15-year-old Shinoda to see a joint Anthrax/Public Enemy bill, his mind was blown. Across Hybrid Theory’s sprawl of extra material, you can hear numerous attempts to recreate that nuclear fusion—be it 1999’s “Step Up”; the hit it later was sampled on, the X-Ecutioners’ “It’s Goin’ Down”; or Linkin Park’s 2002 remix album Reanimation, a spirited-if-clunky attempt to bring the vibe of RJD2 and Rage Against the Machine under one roof.
Few of the assembled extras eclipse Hybrid Theory’s strongest material—which is to say, everything up until the album’s final three songs. There are some winners on the box set, though. “She Couldn’t,” long withheld from public release due to an uncleared Mos Def sample, removes the band’s spiked exoskeleton to reveal the tenderness within. “Rhinestone,” which dates back to 1997, fares better than its evolved form “Forgotten,” the only track on Hybrid Theory that truly carries the septic taint of nu-metal. “Krwlng” rouses hidden emotion from “Crawling,” bassist Dave Farrell patiently winding cello and violin around a slower take on the original’s intro, the notes as icy as stalactites arrowing down into the mud. Trent Reznor might spit feathers at the comparison, but you could comfortably sub out “A Warm Place” on The Downward Spiral for the opening minutes of “Krwlng” and no one would blink. Like Reznor, Bennington paid the price for leaning so far into tortuous subject matter. “Crawling,” a presumed description of his teenage addiction to meth, often proved too upsetting to perform live without the help of the crowd.
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Deftones’ White Pony earlier this year, Shinoda signalled how Hybrid Theory came to sound both lacerating and palatable enough for mainstream audiences: “Even though [Deftones’] guitars were super heavy, oftentimes they felt smooth like a keyboard, as if the distortion had flattened it so much it was just a wash of chords.” A proper recording process brought out the best in Linkin Park. Collaborating with the Dust Brothers resulted in the low-toned loops of “With You,” though it’s the dynamic shifts which are most striking on playback, the track’s center of gravity lurching so fast it feels like getting socked in the jaw. Skyscraping hooks on songs like “Runaway” and “Papercut” were a by-product of confrontational producer Don Gilmore, who told the group plainly that their cluttered, primitive tunes would be also-rans if they didn’t cough up some melodies for alternative radio. Sufficiently rattled, they retaliated by penning “One Step Closer,” though they probably didn’t envision that Gilmour would react to being told to “shut up” by leaping for joy. One shoot of synchronized headbanging later and the band were on their way to a level of MTV perma-rotation that didn’t abate for years.
And then there’s the crown jewel, “In the End.” Initially titled “Untitled” until D’Angelo’s version rocketed up the video charts, it is the clearest exposition of how the band’s songcraft set them apart from the pack. The glitched drum shuffle and moody piano that lead it off are as immediately recognizable as the nosebleed thrashing which announces “Master of Puppets.” For a song that telegraphs every move so obviously it starts with “it starts with,” “In the End” retains a rare capacity to thrill, even after 10,000 breakdowns-into-bellowed choruses and more late-night karaoke renditions than you might care to admit. Neither Shinoda’s low-risk, mid-reward flow, nor what Bennington would self-critique as “poor, poor me” bawling, would be nearly as captivating without the other one there to flank and fill the space.
Following the emergence of every Stroke, Stripe, and louche derivative, a convenient narrative set in. Indie rock had come down from on high and blasted away the musty dregs of post-grunge and nu-metal, just as grunge once vaporized the cartoonish shredders of hair metal. Linkin Park kept up their hit streak on 2003’s Meteora, particularly with the opening MPC hits of “Numb”—and, by extension, the monoculture moon shoot of JAY-Z team-up “Numb/Encore”—piercing through countless bar mitzvahs, graduation parties, and grocery store speakers. They flashed stadium-sized ambitions by taking one step closer to The Edge on “What I’ve Done,” and came full circle by soundtracking a Transformers film that felt blatantly indebted to the CGI battle fantasies Hahn directed as promo. Four albums in the 2010s treated their internal chemistry as something to be distilled and apportioned: industrial one cycle, electronica the next, synthpop the next.
Yet it is the five-single, international blockbuster Hybrid Theory that people return to time and again. It is here where all the band’s sharpest tendencies meshed and their less attractive aesthetic impulses were suppressed. Open discussion of mental health within pop, rock, rap, and every genre along the heavy axis has been normalized to a level unthinkable 20 years ago, for which Linkin Park—absent a frontman but now endeavoring to make new music together—deserve a significant amount of credit. On Hybrid Theory, Bennington stood tall for as long as possible until that wave washed over him.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | October 10, 2020 | 7.6 | b8a36e2f-3a65-4cea-85c1-990ef5be52a1 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
The Australian producer’s new mini-album is his most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. It mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres. | The Australian producer’s new mini-album is his most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. It mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres. | Tornado Wallace: Lonely Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22801-lonely-planet/ | Lonely Planet | Like a lot of electronic music around the turn of the current decade, Tornado Wallace’s early releases sought a middle path between house and disco. Dissatisfied with dance music’s status quo, they toyed with slower tempos and hypnotic repetitions. Taking inspiration from acts like Metro Area, the Australian producer reverse-engineered his way through his influences, using a variety of ’80s and ’90s signifiers—laser zaps, glassy handclaps, Italo basslines—as stepping stones to time-travel across decades.
His music has consistently gotten spacier and more diffuse, wreathing layered hand percussion in woozy synths and nature sound effects like seagulls and crickets. The approach and the sounds are both straight out of the Balearic textbook, but his new mini-album, the seven-track Lonely Planet, is his most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. Bookended by a pair of gentle, ambient-leaning cuts, the record mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres.
Even at its most driven, the music remains deeply, imperturbably chill. In “Kingdom Animalia,” loons—the unofficial mascots of Balearic house—jibber contentedly over starry-eyed arpeggios and pitter-pat percussion that seems always to be building toward a climax that refuses to come. The whole thing just circles in place at a comfortable andante tempo, like an Escher staircase carved out of jungle palms. “Warp Odyssey” works in a similar way, and while the drums are fuller and richer, it never really kicks off in earnest; a cozy, slightly weary vibe sets the tone. Synth pads flicker like the steady pulse of sunlight filtered through bridge cables, evoking morning-after cab rides home, and a horn-like lead suggests Jon Hassell’s “Fourth World” jazz.
A faint air of sonic déjà vu only contributes to the music’s captivating mixture of the familiar and the strange. On “Trance Encounters,” Wallace tips his hat to the ringing guitars and muscular drumming of Dif Juz, an instrumental rock quartet that was signed to 4AD in the mid ’80s. “Today,” one of the record’s highlights, invokes still more mostly forgotten acts from that decade: There’s a hint of Propaganda’s “Dream Within a Dream” in Sui Zhen’s monotone spoken-word delivery, and the larger-than-life guitars and drums suggest the big-budget studio sound of quasi-New Wave bands like the Fixx.
It all comes quietly to a head on “Voices,” with slowly swirling digital synths framed by colorful thumb piano plucks and cold, stiff LinnDrum thwacks, and shakuhachi flutes rising like morning mist. Everything, from the major-key chords to the synth patches, seems designed to evoke the sound of mid-’80s touchstones like Peter Gabriel’s So, the Cars’ Heartbeat City, and even Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A—just dubbed out and tropically flavored, in keeping with the candy-flipping mood of the Amnesia terrace when Alfredo Fiorito held court there. At the song’s climax, we even get a gooey keytar solo winkingly similar to Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice” theme. That kind of detail is manna for record collectors, but Lonely Planet will be just as appealing to listeners who could care less about an insiders’ guide to Balearic disco. From its muggy opener to the closing dose of blissed-out G-funk, this short, sweet record covers plenty of ground while remaining cozily supine—a round-the-world journey undertaken from the comfort of your couch. | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Running Back | January 20, 2017 | 7.2 | b8a56594-19d9-4a0b-84d0-19a6a51af1dc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The second Verve reunion album, released 11 years after the last one, finds them still trying to be the biggest band in the world-- and still failing. | The second Verve reunion album, released 11 years after the last one, finds them still trying to be the biggest band in the world-- and still failing. | The Verve: Forth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12145-forth/ | Forth | Despite the fact that Verve singer Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe share a mutual regard that's more Sting and Stewart Copeland than Hall and Oates, or that it's been nearly a decade since the Wigan-based group was last functional, their reunion was a pretty easy call. You could take the succession of cheese-scented flops known as "Richard Ashcroft solo albums" as evidence. You might also see the appeal of being a British band that makes epic-sounding symphonic pop at a time when Coldplay are basically the biggest rock band in the world. Really, though, the reason is more elemental-- something everyone from Jay-Z to the Spice Girls knows is true: No self-made messiah can exist without a resurrection.
Of the top-tier Britpop-era heavyweights, Oasis catch the most flak for delusions of grandeur, but all they ever really wanted was for people to sing along in adoration: It's hard to imagine Noel Gallagher writing a song for any reason other than single-minded devotion to 1) hugeness, or 2) the chorus. Ashcroft wants you to sing along, too, sure-- but he also wants to heal, soothe, and illuminate. What else could the parting skies and emergent God rays on Forth's cover mean but that He hath returned?
To be fair, musically speaking, about half of Forth is as good as the band's commercial breakthrough, Urban Hymns-- and, if you consider the general hit/miss ratio of decade-removed comeback albums, that's actually a pretty respectable showing. It also helps to explain why at least some of the British press have met this new record with typically effusive praise: the soft bigotry of low expectations. (Granted, the Verve's two earlier records were actually a lot more interesting than Urban Hymns, but that's ancient history now.)
The most useful thing about Forth is the mirror it reflects back on us now. In 1997, this kind of thing-- crisp, echoing guitars, provincial strings, existential moodiness-- actually sounded kind of exciting. Just over a decade later, though, the exact same recipe, prepared exactly the same way, conjures up new dominant aftertastes: false profundity, compositional laziness, and outsized egos. What changed? Is it just that we now have better access to more and wider varieties of music? Is monoculture dead? Are big-label bands with these sorts of impulses the dinosaur rockers of the 00s?
Maybe it's just that Forth seems so telegraphed and formulaic that its most awful moments, like the watered-down space-rock of the seriously appalling "Judas" (sample lyric: "New York, I was Judas/ She said a latte double shot for Judas") or the toothless blues jamming on the interminable "Noise Epic" (on which Ashcroft, uhh, raps), end up weighing heavier than the album's highlights. Those hoping to find the Verve in full-on cloud-parting mode may be able to plug comfortably into songs like "Sit and Wonder", "Rather Be", "I See Houses", and "Valium Skies", but even these tracks feel simply like safe, calculated throwback exercises. Ashcroft wants this to be his holy hour, but to many of us, it'll sound a lot longer than that. | 2008-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | On Your Own | August 28, 2008 | 5 | b8ad0c6d-8aca-4b40-839f-b12218593eab | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
After rediscovering her creative spark, Nao turns her organic-sounding third album into a kaleidoscopic testament to the pains and pleasures of modern love and the healing process they inspire. | After rediscovering her creative spark, Nao turns her organic-sounding third album into a kaleidoscopic testament to the pains and pleasures of modern love and the healing process they inspire. | Nao: And Then Life Was Beautiful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nao-and-then-life-was-beautiful/ | And Then Life Was Beautiful | Nao’s voice glows even in her darkest moments, warm and radiant as a sparkle of fireflies in a mason jar. Since her breakout 2016 album For All We Know, that voice has channeled love and affection in nearly all its forms: love of self, love for your parents, every stage of romance from intoxicating first contact to awkward break-ups. Sometimes, relationships are redefined on songs like Know’s “In The Morning” or altogether broken on “Make It Out Alive,” a single from her second album, 2018’s astrology-themed Saturn. Regardless, Nao’s ear for the blend of R&B, UK garage, and soul she prefers sweetens whatever sour grapes there might be with the precision and power expected of an artist who grew up listening to both Jill Scott and Burial.
Though by no means a bleak album, Saturn showcased more of Nao’s emotional scars than before. She was cynical without being weary, bruised but always ready to give love another go. And Then Life Was Beautiful, her third studio album, addresses many of the same topics with a sharpened confidence. The album was recorded after a creative dry spell was ended by the birth of her daughter during the early stages of the pandemic, a process she called “healing” during a recent interview with The Independent: “I loved that I had something to focus on...It lit a fire in me.” Nao’s rejuvenation has refined her focus even further, reaching bolder points with fewer words against a more varied sonic palette. At its best, Beautiful is a kaleidoscopic testament to the pains and pleasures of modern love and the healing process they inspire.
The synthetic beats and vocal distortion that drove her trademark “wonky funk” sound in the past are largely absent from Beautiful. Nao’s music has always been full-bodied and percussive but live arrangements dominate these songs, giving the album an explicitly organic feel. The thumping kick-drum, guitar plunks, and vinyl crackle of “Messy Love” and “Glad That You’re Gone” recall turn-of-the-century neo-soul and hip-hop, while “Little Giants” soars on swelling piano and backing vocals. When synths and distortion do appear, they’re pit stops, temporary reminders of what came before. The album’s handful of producers, including longtime collaborators like LOXE and Grades and fresh faces like D’Mile and Sarz, cast a wider musical net and use afrobeats, chamber music, and gospel influences to create a lush and sunny atmosphere.
This variety breathes new life into Nao’s transmissions from the front lines of love. On “Good Luck,” she’s no longer second-guessing dead-end relationships and is unafraid to transfer that energy to herself. “Glad That You’re Gone” is particularly cheeky, with Nao barely able to contain her excitement over leaving her soon-to-be ex: “Got my mouth grinning and I know that it’s wrong/I can’t help smiling either way/You’ve bounced, it’s blessed, I’m celebrating.” The feeling expressed in kiss-offs like “Gone” and the bouncy “Better Friend” are reinforced later by the closing track “Amazing Grace,” which ultimately finds solace in failure as a learning process. All of Nao’s conflicting thoughts and emotions—boredom, dread, confidence, happiness—are in conversation with each other, less isolated snapshots than photos on an ever-morphing mood board.
Nao’s self-assurance also manifests in her voice. Her vocals on “Antidote” are sly and effortless, and though Nao’s porcelain voice isn’t quite powerful enough to fully sell the ending crescendo of “Wait,” the acuity of its lyrics about a relationship on the rocks does the heavy lifting. “Tell me the truth even though it might kill me/We both know that we’re just wasting time/Tryna survive instead of just feeling,” she sings with a twinge of sadness. Compare that to the sunny anthem “Woman,” which is musically peppy and pleasing but lyrically anonymous; the line “I’m living in this magic place/It’s showing me that God’s a woman” reads like it was swiped from a Hallmark card. But even when the writing skews generic, Nao’s voice helps the words buzz like neon.
Throughout her career, Nao has treated uncertainty as a challenge. She’s confronted love as a one-day-at-a-time experience, decorating it at its best while attempting to salvage what she can from the worst. Excessive touring pre-pandemic drained her creative energy, but And Then Life Was Beautiful expands her musical range while deepening its emotional impact. Five years removed from her debut album, Nao’s older, wiser, and better equipped to deal with life’s emotional pitfalls. It isn’t a complete reinvention, and there are still a few awkward turns of phrase, but Beautiful is a big step on Nao’s path to self-actualization.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Little Tokyo | September 28, 2021 | 7.5 | b8b81c21-e98f-42e1-a23c-4f44c1f03767 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
With a collection of outtakes, demos, and acoustic reworkings from his three previous solo records, the Hold Steady frontman re-examines familiar characters from new angles. | With a collection of outtakes, demos, and acoustic reworkings from his three previous solo records, the Hold Steady frontman re-examines familiar characters from new angles. | Craig Finn: All These Perfect Crosses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/craig-finn-all-these-perfect-crosses/ | All These Perfect Crosses | The universe of Craig Finn meshes together imperfectly, like multiple exposures overlaid in the same frame. Its signposts take the form of proper nouns: names, cities, bars, car brands. Occasionally these recur, but in Finn’s recent work they’re more often blurred vignettes—a dancer with a penchant for violence, a troubled former child star, a drug dealer with a vengeance. Finn seems keenly aware of the character details; as the frontman of the Hold Steady, he’s built a career on codifying rambunctious personas in his band’s shout-along choruses. The more intimate lyrics in his solo work extend those characters’ narratives, building on existing frameworks without crafting wholly new stories. “I guess I felt...that visiting them for a song at a time might be more interesting than putting them through a number of phases,” he said after the release of 2019’s I Need a New War. On All These Perfect Crosses, a Record Store Day collection of outtakes, demos, and acoustic reworkings from his three previous solo records, he returns to the small towns and smaller relationships he’s built over the past five years, carving notches in the edge of the puzzle where he can affix new pieces.
But the shift from the Hold Steady—with whom Finn has continued to release rowdy, closing-time anthems—to his solo work was not always so natural. The sparsely recorded songs on 2015’s Faith in the Future almost felt like unfinished demos, the room tone in “Going to a Show” almost loud enough to swallow his guitars. He wanted to write small stories, but his meekness suggested he didn’t know how to recede gracefully. By 2017’s We All Want the Same Things, he’d refined his approach, adding harmonies from Annie Nero and Cassandra Jenkins and the occasional wind instrument to create an appropriately bluesy atmosphere for his already dispirited lyrics.
The retakes and outtakes on All These Perfect Crosses bring his past three records together into more perfect harmony. The parenthetical “Horn Version” of 2017’s “God in Chicago” casts the striking spoken-word journey in elegiac sepia tones. The somber, scorched piano-and-guitar ballad “They Know Where I Live,” originally offered in an EP accompanying Faith in the Future, draws a straight line between that record’s stripped-back approach and the bolder instrumentation of We All Want the Same Things. But on a record with only one brand-new entry, it’s the acoustic versions of songs from Finn’s previous two albums that feel most revitalized. “Magic Marker,” a sauntering blues crooner complete with tambourine hits and brassy horns, is reimagined as coffeehouse folk, the finger-picked guitar a fittingly pensive accompaniment for reminiscences on late nights and wasted youths.
On I Need a New War, Finn wrote about the life of Ulysses S. Grant and the ennui that follows triumph. When the big war, the new album, the cross-country tour is over, what’s left except to rehash the glory days? Judging by “All These Perfect Crosses,” the only new song on the album, solo Finn continues to be, as he sang on I Need A New War, “Grant at Galena,” taking stock of his life over a stiff drink in western Illinois. Backed by the minor piano chords that have become a familiar palette, he sings haltingly about a dead-end romance between two old friends, a pair who are empathetic but mismatched. “It’s hard to force yourself to fall in love with friends,” he sings, voice ticking up a bit mid-sentence, as if struck by its depressing irony. It’s another new relationship in Finn’s grand narrative patchwork, but its pieces match—the lover’s name is Cindy, who we’ve previously met as a name scrawled in a bathroom stall on We All Want the Same Things. Even as he revisits old wounds, Finn’s world-weary explorations continue to reveal new vantage points.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 2, 2020 | 7.3 | b8b98c99-190a-4c73-9c79-942e941bd062 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Performing live in 1987, the avant-garde composers extracted complexity from simple designs and novel instrumentation. A new release captures their meditative and playful collaboration. | Performing live in 1987, the avant-garde composers extracted complexity from simple designs and novel instrumentation. A new release captures their meditative and playful collaboration. | Arnold Dreyblatt / Paul Panhuysen: Duo Geloso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arnold-dreyblatt-paul-panhuysen-duo-geloso/ | Duo Geloso | In December 1987, avant-garde composers Arnold Dreyblatt and Paul Panhuysen performed six original pieces at the Eindhoven, Netherlands experimental space Het Apollohuis. They had spent the previous several weeks extensively workshopping instrumentation and techniques at the art house, co-founded by Panhuysen seven years earlier. The resulting concert was recorded, and now, nearly 35 years later, the duo’s inquisitive creations re-emerge via Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label. Duo Geloso is the first release that details the Dreyblatt-Panhuysen collaborative mind, sitting comfortably within a current experimental context despite its age.
In the 1980s, the American and the Dutch experimental artists bonded over a shared interest in challenging conventional conceptions of classical music. Dreyblatt frequently visited Het Apollohuis while based in Berlin, allowing a mutual admiration to develop into an eventual partnership. Their personal approaches varied: Dreyblatt tended to take fewer musical risks, while Panhuysen was inspired by spontaneity. Their complementary styles resulted in projects with straightforward foundations and exuberant quirks. They called themselves Duo Geloso, after the brand of Italian loudspeakers they used when performing.
The performance captured on Duo Geloso uses alternative versions of traditional instruments to produce a sense of unsettling familiarity. In the relentless opener “Razorburg,” the artists apply motorized picks and the still-novel EBow to rattling detuned electric guitar and bass, forming a slow evolution that indulges both stagnancy and motion. The primary instrument for “Synsonic Batterie” is a Synsonics Drum Machine manufactured by toy company Mattel; the track begins with a steady, muffled beat that quickly devolves as the hits begin to stagger and lose their footing. With concentration it’s possible to track a pulse throughout, but sudden sharp snare-like hits and round rippling kicks throw the ear off balance. Dreyblatt enters with insistent hits on a pedal steel guitar, and Panhuysen brings in a hiccuping bird whistle. The guitar climbs in pitch and the bird whistle becomes desperate, screeching as if being tortured until it dies out. It feels both evocative and nonsensical.
With each track, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen extract a multitude of complexity from relatively simple designs. The duo always establishes a degree of steadiness in the beginning, then introduces subtle, consistent alterations to create a sense of meditative misalignment. The deceptively understated standout “High Life,” a 10-minute drone performed on various string instruments, embodies this approach. One note anchors the piece—an E—but from it blossom bristling branches of overtones, harmonics, and diatonic and non-diatonic pitches. At a certain point, dissonance takes over only to fade away. The piece ends with the release of the lower register, leaving only overtones and harmonics lingering within the walls of Het Apollohuis.
With its contemporary release, Duo Geloso now exists against the contextual padding of nearly four decades of artistic experimentation. Motorized picks, EBows, and electronic drum machines do not carry the same novelty they once did; avant-garde composition, no longer confined to niche artistic spaces, has entered the academy. “I was actually surprised that the recordings had ‘aged’ well with time,” Dreyblatt reflected recently. “Perhaps the interest in these recordings is possible now that the musical universe has been so radically changed and widened!” These days we might imagine the expansive wanderlust of “The Louisiana Purchase” and Panhuysen’s echoing vocals on “Love Call” soundtracking an AI-generated art exhibit. The boundaries of classical convention exist to be tested, and decades on, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen’s earnest inventions for Het Apollohuis convey a sense of playful curiosity that feels unexpired. | 2022-08-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Black Truffle | August 25, 2022 | 7.8 | b8bb822f-76c3-44cb-9942-f84dde39ab2a | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
The Rhode Island trio’s weirdo avant-pop tunes land somewhere between the subversive, no-wave skronk of Bush Tetras and the lo-fi minimalism of Sneaks. | The Rhode Island trio’s weirdo avant-pop tunes land somewhere between the subversive, no-wave skronk of Bush Tetras and the lo-fi minimalism of Sneaks. | babybaby_explores: *Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babybaby-explores-food-near-me-weather-tomorrow/ | Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow | Weeks before quarantine, babybaby_explores were already going feral in the kitchen. In a split-screen YouTube session from February 2020, the avant-pop trio performs “Duck Song” in a house in Rhode Island. As their bandmates scratch out a creepy, cyclical groove on drum machine and guitar, vocalist Lids B-Day stares dead-eyed and delivers frantic vignettes about throwing bread to ducks. During the chorus, Lids performs an arm choreography that resembles a frail vampire attempting the “Macarena.” Then, as the song lurches to climax, they grab some Wonder Bread from a high cabinet, swallow a mouthful, and chuck the rest at the camera.
This clip is a litmus test for whether you’ll find babybaby_explores’ mode of provocation irresistible or intolerable. It also encapsulates the group’s knack for transforming the mundane into a subject of bizarre wonder, much as they manage to turn a drab kitchen into a den of DIY freakiness. Even their new album’s title is a monument to mundanity—“food near me” and “weather tomorrow” are among the most-Googled phrases—while its songs chew up the daily detritus of modern life and spit out garbled humor and absurdist repetition.
Consisting of three high school best friends from a Providence suburb, babybaby_explores began life as a “pseudo research concept project.” As they’ve bloomed into a proper band, you can glean a lot about their aesthetic from the company they keep: They recently toured with Lightning Bolt and signed to an imprint launched by Liars’ Angus Andrew. Their music sits somewhere between the subversive, no-wave skronk of Bush Tetras and the talky, lo-fi minimalism of Sneaks. Songs like “New Band” and “Anthem” are playful and repetitive, forging a bastardized strain of synth-pop from beats that emerge from a Boss DR-670 Dr. Rhythm drum machine, which Gabe C-D plays on nearly every track. The third musician, Sam M-H, specializes in swampy guitar tones that resemble a surf-rock record played at the wrong speed.
On their previous release, 2019’s EP-length Baby;Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk, the Kraftwerk-on-speed synth lines took the lead, while Lids’ vocals either sank deeper in the mix or distorted beyond comprehension. On Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow, the group’s first proper album, the singer comes into their own as a vocalist, reveling in a wacky theatricality that’s unnerving and often hilarious. On “Carolyn,” they evoke Mark Mothersbaugh’s pursed-lip repetitions, exclaiming, “Love you/Miss you/Let’s Facetime soon!” over and over until it blurs into meaninglessness. The thrillingly twisted “Twiddle” dramatizes the inner monologue of someone who’s been cornered by a loud talker at a party: “You, you, you, you/Talk, talk, talk, talk/So much!” Lids vents, giving each syllable its own shade of frustration.
Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow is very funny, very odd, and quite short; it was recorded in just two days. The weaker songs, like “Untitled,” are listless and underdeveloped, never quite landing on a hook or central idea. The best moments pack such bizarre audacity that you can’t help but grin, such as the pitch-shifting “I am a duck!” refrain in “Duck Song.” It sounds like Ween for the hyperpop generation.
In the world of babybaby_explores, the line between radical critique and dadaist nonsense is thin. Past songs, like 2020’s “All Mall,” satirized gender norms and the American dream. On Food Near Me, the jolting, late-capitalist pep talk of “Anthem” or the queer overtones of “Duck Song”—which seemingly plays on the semantic similarity of “ducks” and “dykes”—are equally subversive, but often opaque. Like any longtime friends, these three have some strange inside jokes; we’re on the outside, peering in, waiting to see if they’ll throw us some bread. | 2023-03-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | No Gold | March 7, 2023 | 7 | b8c50ba7-64d4-4086-b324-dad2c4ea449c | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The ambitious new album from the Canadian songwriter features thoughtful and transformative interpretations of traditional music. It is both a meditation on the past and a novel step forward. | The ambitious new album from the Canadian songwriter features thoughtful and transformative interpretations of traditional music. It is both a meditation on the past and a novel step forward. | Myriam Gendron: Ma délire - Songs of love, lost & found | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/myriam-gendron-ma-delire-songs-of-love-lost-and-found/ | Ma délire - Songs of love, lost & found | Born in Canada, Myriam Gendron sings in both English and French, but her translation skills extend beyond bilingualism. As a vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, she’s a masterful musical interpreter, transforming long-past art into present-tense vision. On her stunning debut album, 2014’s Not So Deep As A Well, she sang poems by early 20th century American writer Dorothy Parker over original acoustic guitar arrangements. It felt like both a trove of unearthed ancient folk and a fresh, immediate expression of a new voice.
Two years later, Gendron dreamed up an even more ambitious idea: to reimagine traditional music from Canada, France, and America. The concept was sparked by the discovery of “Au coeur de ma délire” (“At the Heart of My Delirium”), a Québecoise tune covered by Dominique Tremblay and Philippe Gagnon on their 1971 album Présentent Avec Le Stainless Steel Ça Roule. During a one-week residency at an old Québec mill, she recorded her own voice-and-guitar version, accompanied by sounds of nature, mill work, and her then two-year-old daughter. A few years later, buoyed by a writing grant, she chose more traditionals to cover, fused some into hybrid pieces, and crafted originals inspired by, and sometimes even borrowing from, other works of the past.
Like its predecessor, Ma Délire–Songs of Love, Lost & Found is as much a novel step forward as a meditation on the past. This quality is due to Gendron’s impressionistic approach to her material, which exudes respect but never serves as mere homage. On one track, “Poor Girl Blues,” she combines one of the oldest blues songs, “Poor Boy Long Ways From Home,” with the 1800’s tune “Un Canadien Errant” (“A Lost Canadian”), originally about the banishment of French-Canadians and famously covered by Leonard Cohen in 1979. Singing in French, she weaves a story of lost family, lost friends, and a lost country over fingerpicked guitar that nods in all historical directions at once.
Transformation abounds on Ma Délire. Gendron remakes two songs by American folklorist John Jacob Niles, including “I Wonder As I Wander.” It’s essentially a Christmas carol, but Gendron strips away religious aspects to create a secular elegy to love’s power. On two versions of the 19th century sea shanty “Shenandoah”—one instrumental, the other nearly a capella—she morphs the story of a fur trader into a universal paean to nature. Even on originals such as “La jeune fille en pleurs” (“The Young Girl in Tears”), she adapts lyrics from multiple traditional songs into a wandering rumination; with her halting electric guitar and Chris Corsano’s accentual drums, it evokes a lost Dirty Three track.
According to Gendron, what unites the crossbred pieces across this 15-track, 76-minute album are the eternal themes of love and longing. But just as important is Gendron’s own voice, a distinct, clear tool that works on multiple levels. With patient deliberation and gut-level resonance, she often sounds like she’s simultaneously intoning a children’s song and painting a portrait of complex emotion. Some singers approach similar territory—think of how David Berman talked and sang at the same time, how Daniel Johnston treated serious subjects with childlike wonder, or how Haley Fohr uses low tones to vibrate her music—but Gendron’s mesmerizing intonation has no exact parallels. Her voice is often both frank and enigmatic, grounded and limitless.
That combination makes “Farewell,” one of the few outright originals on Ma Délire, the quintessential Gendron song. It has a simple melody and story, sung as a conversation between two characters: one beckoning, one hesitant. But listen again and uncertainties creep in: Is each person hiding something? Why does Gendron drop certain lines like footnotes but repeat others like mantras? Does the dream conclusion make the whole story a mirage? Ultimately, “Farewell” is a mystery, with much to grab on to but no definite center to hold. In that way, it encapsulates Gendron’s music: plainly open about its themes and sources yet reaching depths far beyond the sum of her inspirations.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Feeding Tube | October 6, 2021 | 8 | b8c958b4-ba31-4225-8728-f0fe1dd5a187 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The seventh album from Mew suggests the Danish alt-rock trio could say more with less. It’s a pop record with a light outer frosting of edginess. | The seventh album from Mew suggests the Danish alt-rock trio could say more with less. It’s a pop record with a light outer frosting of edginess. | Mew: Visuals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23117-visuals/ | Visuals | In Sam Gosling’s book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, the psychology professor sheds light on the complex workings of identity—for example, the person who identifies as a cultured world traveler when in fact he never ventures beyond the homogenous comfort of the resort. Mew sound like a band for pop natives who fancy themselves intrepid explorers of indie, prog, and art-rock, but who don’t learn the language. The members of Mew resist an identification with progressive rock themselves, but the grandiosity of their music has led others to tag them as such.
Ever since their 1997 debut A Triumph for Man, Mew also mimicked the wide-open ambience and clean-toned guitar jangle pioneered by ’90s indie icons like Slint. By 2005’s And the Glass Handed Kites, they were showing exceptional agility at pivoting between styles, albeit with a dabbler’s mentality and a thick coat of commercial gloss. If the members of Mew feel any heat when making their music, it hardly ever comes across from under its pristine surface. And so it’s tempting to view the band as Denmark’s answer to Coldplay, though with more chops—but on their seventh album, Visuals, Mew show that’s not the case, if only in flashes.
If you’re looking for pop with a light outer frosting of edginess, Visuals hits the spot and then some. But if you’d like to hear Mew explore those edges and break free from the stultifying safety of their music, Visuals leaves you frustrated. About a quarter of the way through the album, for example, the bombastic synths of “In a Better Place” give way, ever so gracefully, to soft trickles of jazz trumpet in the song’s final minute. Smooth elevator jazz or muzak-grade new age would have fit the mood; instead, Mew create a tastefully solemn atmosphere that would fit right in on a Jon Hassell record.
Likewise, “Candy Pieces All Smeared Out” closes with an almost imperceptibly quiet loop that sounds like a record needle reaching the end of the groove and skipping over and over. It suggests that Mew could say a lot more with less, and that they even might shock the world if they took a serious stab at their own version of ambient music. In reverse, sometimes they try too hard to rough things up. “Candy Pieces” starts with a dissonant hard rock riff that comes off as forced, almost as if the band had imagined itself scoring a Transformers action sequence. Once they arrive at the swooning keyboards that underscore the verse, it makes you wonder why they didn’t just allow the song to remain beautiful in its plain, unassuming way.
Visuals achieves the majesty of classic progressive rock once, in its closing number, “Carry Me to Safety.” An epic done in trademark Mew fashion—grand but also rigidly economical and concise—“Carry Me” bears the most obvious markings of prog. In fact, the song pretty much follows the blueprint for how to segue from pastoral acoustic guitar arpeggios à la Yes and Jethro Tull to tidal swells of keyboard that invoke a feeling of liftoff into the clouds. “Give them hell!/Give them hell until the bell,” sings frontman Jonas Bjerre. Unsurprisingly, Bjerre barely sounds ruffled, much less agitated. If only Bjerre and company would give us hell from time to time. | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Play It Again Sam | April 26, 2017 | 6.2 | b8cf2dc0-ac2d-43ac-8c34-dcd2ad455252 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Pittsburgh quartet the Gotobeds trade in the dour, verbose post-punk of bands like Parquet Courts and Protomartyr, with lyrics that suggest they're aware they walk a well-traveled road. | The Pittsburgh quartet the Gotobeds trade in the dour, verbose post-punk of bands like Parquet Courts and Protomartyr, with lyrics that suggest they're aware they walk a well-traveled road. | The Gotobeds: Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22005-blood-sugar-secs-traffic/ | Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic | The post-punk influences on Pittsburgh quartet the Gotobeds’ sophomore full-length, Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic (Wire, the Fall, etc.) are literally right there on the sleeve, with its cut-up design aesthetic and block fonts. Amusingly, the CD booklet contains a hand-drawn diagram of some basic chords with a caption that reads “Please don't form a band!” The word “ADMISSION” is also stamped over and over on the credits page, which suggests that the Gotobeds might be well aware that the sound they are trafficking in—dour, self-aware post-punk—is a well-traveled road right now, and that perhaps they think they can redeem their sense of irony by turning it on itself.
Case in point: On the first verse of opening track “Real Maths/Too Much,” frontman/guitarist Eli Kasan sings about a “rebel yell,” a self-conscious nod to punker-turned-pop icon Billy Idol over a vintage pogo-punk beat. He then goes on to sing about “phony fuckers and their fucking bands,” a laundry list that includes “BBQ-sauce garage rock, or even worse: gluten free jam rock,” against whom Kasan takes his stand by “think[ing] about carbs.” Then (in the same line!) he waxes existential: “Am I the only punk that is free?” His answer: “BLUH.”
To a large degree, what you get out of this album lies in what you read into the “bluh.” Ever since fellow Fall acolytes Pavement crystallized the “slacker” aesthetic in the ‘90s, indie rock has treasured detachment. But the most compelling artists subvert this malaise by struggling against it while stylizing it and making fun of it at the same time. Kasan fills the songs on Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic with references to sensations that have shaken him enough to write about them—alienation, uncertainty, feeling discarded after a relationship, relationships as traps (a feeling he expresses with supreme poetic acuity on “Rope”), etc. Sometimes his openness is fleeting, but you still get the sense that, even if he isn't quite one step away from despair per se, his feelings are still eating him up. Unsurprisingly, Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic sounds resolute when Kasan walks the razor’s edge between cheeky sarcasm and earnestness.
But when Kasan scoffs about superficiality—a preoccupation of his throughout the album—his lack of irony becomes damning. “I'm from America, where ‘don’t move on, just move’/have you seen LA? They’re non-living proof,” he sings on the Pavement knockoff “Cold Gold (LA’s Alright).” Admittedly, the song’s title (a reference to Pavement’s “Gold Soundz,” maybe?) hints that the band is all too aware of when it’s mimicking, rather than drawing inspiration from its influences. But the (ahem) “ADMISSION” doesn’t excuse the song’s lack of creativity.
Other times, Kasan stumbles into over-earnestness when he lets his passions get the better of him. On the perhaps well-intentioned but painfully literal “Crisis Time,” for example, he rails against “commercial bands [who] make songs for commercial use” and goes on a pedantic tirade: “Fuck Rolling Stone, that trash rag / Supports a predator like R. Kelly.” A few lines later: “God bless Jes Skolnik / To be the only one who’ll call out sexist bands / When did indie culture accept that shit? / It must’ve been when we were downloading the new Taylor Swift.” A line like that leaves you speechless for all the wrong reasons—perhaps there’s a silver lining in that people may one day look back on it as the death knell for “indie culture.”
Kasan takes these shots with a straight face, which makes you wonder how he measures his own music against the stuff he regards as “BBQ sauce.” The Gotobeds hit all the right jangly, jittery post-punk spots for people for whom carrying the torch for Television and Mission of Burma is a noble pursuit. On “Why’d You?” they show us what the Strokes would have sounded like channeling Wire. This will no doubt satisfy listeners who lionize the movements those bands spearheaded. But at this stage, you can’t help but ask: why do this at all? With band after band mining the same territory, the Gotobeds’ exceptional proficiency in this stylistic area threatens to cast them an afterthought, a remnant of an aesthetic we will have moved on from in five years. This isn’t necessarily fair, as the Gotobeds formed in 2009—before current standard-bearers Parquet Courts—but it’s not like Kasan and company couldn’t have done more to avoid dating themselves.
*Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic *smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles. Nevertheless, *Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic *tantalizes by making you wonder whether Kasan’s narrators are as resigned as they sound, or whether their agitation will win out in the end. That this album never answers that question works to its advantage and provides some incentive to keep coming back to it. But, like barbecue sauce, you pretty much know what you're getting on first taste. | 2016-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 23, 2016 | 5.6 | b8d26eb3-33f5-4dc4-a43a-2aab103022ad | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Subsets and Splits