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Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? is a collaboration between underground Chicago rappers Vic Spencer and Chris Crack. It's a concept album that seems less concerned with its concept—Chris $pencer is ostensibly a fictionalized fusion of the two MCs—than in world-building, in craft, and devotion to an acerbic, pointed sensibility. This is lyrical rap which reclaims the word "lyrical," so it is reborn as a synonym for freedom, where verses operate by their own volatile logic. | Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? is a collaboration between underground Chicago rappers Vic Spencer and Chris Crack. It's a concept album that seems less concerned with its concept—Chris $pencer is ostensibly a fictionalized fusion of the two MCs—than in world-building, in craft, and devotion to an acerbic, pointed sensibility. This is lyrical rap which reclaims the word "lyrical," so it is reborn as a synonym for freedom, where verses operate by their own volatile logic. | Vic Spencer / Chris Crack: Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21520-who-the-fuck-is-chris-spencer/ | Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? | On their collaborative new album Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer??, underground Chicago rappers Vic Spencer and Chris Crack appear wholly ignorant of all recent trends, as if they've emerged untouched from a late-'90s time capsule. The record goes against the popular grain in every sense, from the production—sample-based, replete with chiming vibraphones—to the duo's explicit allegiance to capital-L Lyricism. It's a concept album that seems less concerned with its concept—Chris $pencer is ostensibly a fictionalized fusion of the two MCs—than in world-building, in craft, and devotion to an acerbic, pointed sensibility. Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? draws attention to lost traditions, evoking forgotten and under-explored tributaries of rap—the freestyle- and battle-rooted styles of Lyricist's Lounge CDs and classic hip-hop radio (Stretch and Bobbito, Sway & King Tech). It plays not on what we remember from the past, but on what we've forgotten.
Both Vic and Chris' solo work is worth exploring, but together, their powers are magnified. These are not radio records; they are not "bangers." Their songs take up space, as if the duo were less interested in persuading listeners to jump on the bandwagon than in drawing a line between their Backwoods-smoke-filled living room and the one outside. Needless to say, their songs are also not paeans to positivity. (Vic: "Y'all got an A plus for suckin' balls/Leave your ass blind in your house, left you touchin' walls.") Yet they are invigorating, the kind of music which gives voice to all our righteous suspicions that the wider world is smugly disingenuous—an especially resonant, if unpopular, sentiment in an age built on friendly alliances. Chris enjoys a good conspiracy theory, and Vic is the self-described "rapping bastard." Both rappers revel in playing the heel. Where other artists seem obligated to veer experimental or populist, they choose neither.
Yet the album is bold, forward-thinking, and singular nonetheless, because it treats hip-hop as a lineage inherently worthy of celebration, with no other justification needed. Like high school cafeteria battles taken to their outer limit, Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? focuses on the art of rapping not as a technical exercise but as a freewheeling session of shit-talking. This is the dozens on steroids. Songs are shaped by verses rather than the other way around. Their flows never fall into familiar patterns, nor do their twisting narratives, which weave in and out like a boxer, defiantly unpredictable. On "What's Saturday?," Chris Crack's tale of breaking and entering suddenly goes left, as he fantasizes about being smothered by "big girls," before glossing over the story's expected climax ("we got the money, nobody was hurt") and hitting the highway. The story arc is incidental. This is lyrical rap which reclaims the word "lyrical": no longer a trap for those who would fetishize arbitrary formal techniques, it is reborn as a synonym for freedom—where verses operate by their own volatile logic.
The closest thing to a "single" on the album is "No Biggie," a record which flips the same Screamin' Jay Hawkins sample as Biggie's "Kick in the Door." Even there, the underlying "pop" impulse of the DJ Premier flip is cut into jagged shards, while Vic's corkscrew baritone and Chris' raw, high-pitched sneer move at hard angles. The album's main compositional framework comes not from the immediacy of the pop song, but from the smoky, expansive comfort of its atmosphere. Chris and Vic's world is never entirely exposed to the light: The tranquil "Cement," for example, with its melodious chorus from C. Rich, makes one feel as if they've nodded off in a beanbag chair at the recording session, lyrics filtering in while flitting in and out of consciousness.
Their work expresses a contradiction: Chris $pencer cares too deeply while not giving a fuck. Something important is at stake, and yet Chris and Vic live precariously, as if truth and provocation are the only things worth holding onto. If there's a theme which unites Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer??, it's one of perpetual skepticism: distrust of ideologies, of consensus, of hype, propaganda, publicity, and bullshit. This oppositional spirit is best captured by a younger generation in the sardonic, cutting perspectives of Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples. But unlike the stoned mumble of the Odd Future-affiliated, Vic and Chris' vocals carve through beats with a wiry, manic, animated energy—best described in the sampled interview with Chicago rapper Drunken Monkee on the song "Drunken Monkee": "It's a lot of niggas that can rap over ill beats but they don't know how to bring that shit to life. And that's what we do, we bring the motherfucking beats to fucking life, dawg." | 2016-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 8, 2016 | 8.1 | b8d4e8ce-3eed-43db-bf54-15a042dc3c20 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
The electronic artist Martin Glass makes lounge music informed by exotica, emulating 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient. Most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous. | The electronic artist Martin Glass makes lounge music informed by exotica, emulating 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient. Most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous. | Martin Glass: The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martin-glass-the-pacific-visions-of-martin-glass/ | The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass | Perhaps as a bulwark against the internet’s information overload, a few peculiar “lost” electronic artists have been rediscovered in the past few years. There’s the marine biologist and self-taught composer Jürgen Müller, the electronic-dabbling housewife Ursula Bogner, and the Endless House Foundation, a series of fictitious compositions set in a “multimedia discotheque” in an Eastern European forest circa 1973. Maybe Martin Glass doesn’t completely belong in this imaginary stable of artists, but he is presented as an American businessman by day who sips fancy cocktails and finds himself “exiled in Taiwan… [falling] under the hypnotic spell of the Pacific.” Perhaps it’s that his name is one vowel away from becoming “Martini Glass” that makes you think about his debut album as the type of lounge music that returned to nostalgic reappraisal during the 1990s and is perhaps due for a return.
Much like the 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient music that is emulated on The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass, Glass is also taken by the sound of exotica. During that same era, Japanese artists like Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto playfully engaged with and subverted these conjured images of tiki bars, bamboo huts, mysterious seaports, mountain-top pagodas, and the like. In their music, these cliché cultural reference points became bent and distorted, lending an otherworldly sound to the compositions. Glass may also draw on this palette, but most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous, suggesting the soundtrack for a kitsch and leisurely lifestyle spent largely in a big leather booth.
The marimba tones that open “Okinawa Fantasia” are beckoning, warm enough to sound luminous. But just as a flute line enters and entwines with the melodic bed, the track fades away after just a minute-and-a-half. “Sound & Image” is Balearic almost to a fault, full of gauzy 1980s sounds looping against a shimmer of wind chimes, bird calls, and a twanging guitar line. It hovers in place and then slowly dissolves.
“Greetings From Under the Ocean” and “Floating to Work” are clear standouts, their gong-like tones and ambient haze unmoored and blissfully drifting like clouds. Nothing much happens on either track, but Glass strikes the right balance here between movement and inertia. But “Paradise Bubble” leans too far towards the latter. It’s ideal for walking slowly across sand, but not towards the horizon so much as in circles.
While most of the elements are there to make for a dreamy listen through the early digital tropes of ’80s Japanese music, Glass has two things working against him. One is that, once a handful of elements are in place, Glass is content to just leave them as is rather than push (or for music this mellow, nudge) them towards anything innovative or revitalized. The other is that by this point, any number of acts have already revisited this same sound. Beyond the stylistic ephemera of the era copped by plenty of fly-by-night vaporwave acts, artists like Jessy Lanza and Kate NV take cues from Japanese City Pop, while Visible Cloaks’ ardent and expert approach to that region’s abstract electronics has played out in vivid new ways. There are more thrilling engagements with this period of Japanese music and hopefully many more to come. Perhaps Glass himself will quit his day job and escape his purported “exile.” In the meantime, Pacific Visions is a missed chance at total immersion into such an ocean of sound, instead reduced to a mere toe dip. | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kit / Dramatic | September 2, 2017 | 6.4 | b8d82fcd-1ebb-4232-99cc-291161314ca3 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Ukrainian electronic musician collages a decade of field recordings into a moving tribute to the resilience of his hometown in wartime. | The Ukrainian electronic musician collages a decade of field recordings into a moving tribute to the resilience of his hometown in wartime. | Heinali: Kyiv Eternal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heinali-kyiv-eternal/ | Kyiv Eternal | When Oleh Shpudeiko bought a handheld recorder to capture the sounds of his hometown, Kyiv, it’s unlikely he imagined the significance those recordings would one day take on. It was 2012, and Shpudeiko, who makes experimental electronic music as Heinali, was interested in the concept of acoustic ecology—that is, the relationship between a place, its sounds, and its inhabitants. Recorder in hand, he roamed the city in search of its “soundmarks”: birds twittering in O.V. Fomin Botanical Gardens; the distinctive bleeping of the cash registers at Silpo, a Ukrainian grocery-store chain; the nighttime ambience of Borshchahivka, a bedroom community full of aging khrushchevkas, low-cost apartment blocks common across the former Soviet Union. Shpudeiko kept recording over the next decade, building out his soundmap as Kyiv underwent radical changes in the years following the Maidan Uprising. Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, shredding the normalcy of daily life—and along with it, the familiar fabric of Kyiv’s soundscape.
On Kyiv Eternal, Shpudeiko folds his archival field recordings into a love letter to the city of his birth. The album was inspired by a trip back home after briefly fleeing Kyiv’s air raids, in the initial phase of the invasion, to take refuge in Lviv. “Kyiv was more alive than ever, but I wanted to protect it from harm, to console it,” he says. “This was a city where I had spent 37 years of my life. So this album became a hymn to this part of my identity.” That “hymn” takes the form of a luminous web of atmospheric abstractions interwoven with processed piano, wordless voices, and synthesizer.
The album proceeds as a loosely structured travelogue. It begins with “Tramvai 14,” sourced from recordings Shpudeiko made on Kyiv’s light-rail tram system: The doors chime; a station announcement plays in Ukrainian and English; an overdriven stream of what might be pedal steel, reminiscent of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, extends like a pastel fog over the rattle of train wheels. There are hints of history embedded in the reverie: The English-language announcements, added when Kyiv hosted Eurovision in 2017, offer a glimpse of the city’s contemporary self-conception as a part of Europe. “Stantsiia Maidan Nezalezhnosti” goes inside the Metro stop at Maidan Square, where footfalls and the sounds of the subway are faintly audible beneath a warm, vaporous drone. Shpudeiko doesn’t dwell on the many associations that might attach themselves to Maidan Square: the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014, which expelled the Russophilic president Viktor Yanukovych; the many city residents who took shelter underground in early 2022, turning subway stations into subterranean tent cities. The atmosphere is hazy, almost blissful, like a freeze frame of a shoegaze song.
Much of the album follows a similar template, whipping up billowing, Tim Hecker-like clouds around indistinct scraps of everyday life. Some tracks, like the largely static “Rare Birds” or “Shuliavka in Winter,” feel less like standalone compositions than pieces of a mosaic, meaningful primarily as contrasting blocks of color. But the most compelling tracks are suffused in emotion. In “Silpo,” pinging cash registers intertwine with what sound like bright guitar harmonics above wave after wave of ethereal, rising and falling tones, telegraphing a woozy mix of bucolic ambience and bittersweet nostalgia. “Borshchahivka at Night,” a quietly gripping highlight, is as still as a Philip-Lorca diCorcia photograph, capturing the solitude of the sleeping neighborhood in clicking and rustling sounds that evoke the image of trash being blown, like tumbleweeds, down empty, dimly lit streets. A flickering mist has a ghostly choral effect, as though summoning the voices of all those residents who were forced to seek safety elsewhere, lost souls scattered to the winds.
Kyiv Eternal marks a departure from Heinali’s 2020 album Madrigals, in which Shpudeiko adapted Renaissance polyphony for modular synthesizers, and its sequel, Organa, a work in progress interrupted by the war. The new record’s ethereal drones and gossamer collages lack the formal complexity of his more exacting compositions. But there are spiritual parallels, if you know where to listen for them. In his pre-war work, keeping his oscillators tuned is a delicate business; they tend to drift at will, subject to the vicissitudes of the environment. Baroque counterpoints pile up in towering assemblages that might collapse at any moment, like a cathedral tumbling under the weight of its stained glass. That interplay between fragility and resilience lay at the heart of Shpudeiko’s performance from deep in a Lviv bomb shelter last year. A similar tension also animates Kyiv Eternal, encoded directly in sounds imperiled by the threat of extinction. You can hear it in the title track, the album’s gorgeous and hopeful climax, in which arpeggios slip and stumble, yet keep pushing doggedly forward; between the sounds of rainfall above and the muddy bass below, a spirit of determination abides. Kyiv Eternal is a journal of endangered memories and a talisman against loss; above all, it’s a testament to survival. | 2023-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Injazero | March 9, 2023 | 7.8 | b8ddd474-5e39-40a3-a073-518a16751855 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Former GBV partner and Robert Pollard creative foil Tobin Sprout offers his reliable blend of lo-fi. At his best, he still proves that simplicity doesn’t equate to half-assery. | Former GBV partner and Robert Pollard creative foil Tobin Sprout offers his reliable blend of lo-fi. At his best, he still proves that simplicity doesn’t equate to half-assery. | Tobin Sprout: The Universe and Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22792-the-universe-and-me/ | The Universe and Me | When you hit play on The Universe and Me, “Future Boy Today/Man of Tomorrow” begins as if the “record” button had been pressed just a hair too late. This creates the sensation that the listener is stumbling in on the music and reinforces the idea that it exists in a kind of perpetual flow independent of its recorded form. Of course, anyone who is already familiar with Tobin Sprout’s m.o. won’t be surprised. For decades now, Sprout and his longtime on/off collaborator, Guided By Voices leader Robert Pollard, have generated massive piles of songs that they’ve presented as works in progress, parlaying shoeboxes of rough homemade cassette demos into remarkably durable careers.
Most known for his work as Guided By Voices’ guitarist for two crucial runs during that band’s long and storied history, Sprout has pretty much been the only additional songwriter GBV has ever had, and the closest to a Lennon-McCartney style foil for Pollard. The duo’s shared sense that production values basically don't matter positions Sprout as one of the key pioneers of the early-’90s lo-fi aesthetic alongside Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow and Pavement founders Stephen Malkmus and Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg.
Almost 30 years later, though, Sprout’s dogged insistence on sticking to his original strategy casts him as the AC/DC of lo-fi rock. If you’re still attached to the scratchiest Guided By Voices efforts that most bear Sprout's creative stamp—1993’s Vampire on Titus, ’94’s Bee Thousand, and ’95’s Alien Lanes—then The Universe and Me will likely hit you as both a bold reassertion by an artist saying “this is who I am” and a sly step towards progress. If not, it will probably sound like more of the same.
Sprout’s crude recording of piano, for example, drapes a cozy familiarity over the title track. The song’s warm, pleasant ambience also prevents lines like “I’ll take along my wings/So all my dreams can fly” from tipping over into maudlin confessional. On “A Walk Across the Human Bridge,” Sprout wears Bowie’s “Suffragette City” on his sleeve as he offers a way for humankind to avert a future that’s “carnaged all to waste.” The ever-economical Sprout devotes but two lines to the verse before introducing the main hook that repeats over and over. You can’t listen without hearing Bowie’s iconic line “wham-bam, thank you ma’am” in your head, but you also can’t help but notice that Sprout’s head is in a totally different—and strikingly current—place.
At his best, he still proves that simplicity doesn’t equate to half-assery. Still, despite his voluminous output, Sprout’s solo work doesn’t always distinguish his style from Pollard’s. If you’re partial to Sprout’s second tour of duty in GBV—six relatively more developed albums spanning from 2010 to ’14—it might be hard to shake the feeling of been-there-done-that as The Universe and Me unfolds in typically haphazard fashion. Some of Sprout's choices just come off as downright careless. “Honor Guard,” for example, begins with absentminded strums that start out of alignment with the rest of the song, snap into place, and then fall out of sync again—over a drumbeat that’s so unsteady it could have been played by a toddler. Such moves blunt the impact of Sprout’s lyrics, which pop with personality and wisdom.
When an artist spends an entire career riding the line between resolve and stagnation, maybe it’s unfair to take them to task on not changing their tune. By this point, Sprout has made it perfectly clear what he’s going to give us each time. The thing is, The Universe and Me also gives us plenty of indication that Sprout is capable of more. Some minor touch-ups would have gone a long way. Had Sprout tightened a few loose screws here and there, it would have told us more about who he is now. | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Burger | February 6, 2017 | 6.7 | b8e7127f-3cd4-4b49-989f-1980d04d10bc | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
After a brief detour as Th' Corn Gangg, former Unicorns Nick Diamonds and J'aime Tambeur return with a gorgeous collection of pop songs that draws from disparate sources such as calypso, country, and hip-hop. | After a brief detour as Th' Corn Gangg, former Unicorns Nick Diamonds and J'aime Tambeur return with a gorgeous collection of pop songs that draws from disparate sources such as calypso, country, and hip-hop. | Islands: Return to the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4170-return-to-the-sea/ | Return to the Sea | After dropping their gloriously goofy and endlessly inventive 2003 LP Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, the Unicorns became extinct. Following a brief resurrection as Th' Corn Gangg, a live side project in which Unicorns songs were recast as backing tracks for MCs like Subtitle and Busdriver, multi-instrumentalist Nick Diamonds and drummer J'aime Tambeur announced they'd soldier on without guitarist Alden Penner (née Ginger) as Islands. To prove it wasn't just another one of their bat-shit crazy antics, they leaked two mp3s: "Abominable Snow", an epic about surviving a yeti sighting, and "Flesh", which revealed a sweaty, sexy side to Diamonds' and Tambeur's songwriting. Both songs were outstanding and, just as important, sounded like the work of the Unicorns. (In fact, they were live staples in the band's last days.) But when Diamonds explained they wouldn't be on the new album and then gushed to Pitchfork about how the band's record would be, of all things, inspired by Paul Simon's Graceland, it was anybody's guess as to what Return to the Sea would actually sound like.
It turns out that, while Diamonds' Graceland references weren't just snarcastic pranks, Return to the Sea is a sprawling, gorgeous collection of pop songs that draws from disparate sources such as calypso, country, and hip-hop. The record also relies more heavily on organic sounds and structure than the Unicorns' LP did: Where Who Will Cut Our Hair rewarded listeners with unexpected eruptions in the middle of songs or flat-out rockers dropped off a sonic cliff into plaintive minor chords, Islands present a more linear approach in their arrangements. Songs like album opener "Swans (Life After Death)" propel forward, picking up steam to the point of bursting. Only after "Swans" has marinated for nearly seven minutes, for example, does Tambeur abandon his shuffling and stuttering beats for cathartic, straight-ahead drumming. Islands' charm, then, is all wrapped up in the richness of the production: unusual instrumentation and tiny flourishes create dense compositions that demand repeated listening.
For example, on "Rough Gem"-- a song so insidiously infectious that trepanation may be the only way to get it out of your head-- the main riff is begun by an understated keyboard, picked up midway by plucked violin strings, and completed by a second, more cartoonish synthesizer. All the while, Diamonds cracks puns on his name, declaring "I'm a girl's best friend/ Can you cut?/ I can cut!/ I'm a rough gem."
"Volcanoes", on the other hand, starts by layering meandering lap steel, intermittent triangle, and violins. By the chorus, those violins shed their hillbilly act to become soaring and angelic, like a melodramatic score. Against the strings, Diamonds strums chords and croons in his strained timbre, "We washed our mouths at the riverbed/ When we noticed something glowing/ It was growing/ Things are going to change," before predicting a catastrophic volcano blast that melts Alaska and turns Argentina into some kind of ice land. The lyrics are ridiculous but fun, and "Volcanoes" fittingly features the album's most explosive finale, in which all the instrumental elements that have wandered in and out of the song converge for the song's climax.
Return to the Sea is a case of Diamonds and Tambeur yanking up their anchor and setting sail for new waters, enjoying the freedoms of exploration and discovery. At no point in the record does it feel as if Diamonds is settling into any one genre or style-- hardly a surprise from this shape-shifting songwriter. It won't be a shock if, say, Diamonds and Tambeur announce 18 months from now that Islands is kaput and they're kickstarting another new band. And who really cares? As long as they continue to write songs as striking and immediate as the batch on Return to the Sea, their fans will follow them anywhere. | 2006-04-05T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-04-05T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Equator | April 5, 2006 | 8.4 | b8eec8cc-06e8-4f2d-a20f-79997976ea05 | John Motley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-motley/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the iconoclastic German singer’s solo debut, an album inspired by punk rock, Jesus, aliens, and a mother’s love. | 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 iconoclastic German singer’s solo debut, an album inspired by punk rock, Jesus, aliens, and a mother’s love. | Nina Hagen: Nunsexmonkrock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nina-hagen-nunsexmonkrock/ | NunSexMonkRock | Nina Hagen was an opera-singing punk rock incendiary from Germany who entered 1980 with a major label deal, massive sales figures in Europe, and an outsized fanbase that packed most of the rooms she played. After two albums fronting the Nina Hagen Band in her native language, the 25-year-old signed with Frank Zappa’s manager and landed in New York City to record her solo debut and inaugural English-language LP. There was every reason to believe that this woman with unteachable rock’n’roll magnetism had crossover appeal in the U.S. market. She was riveting not because of her flashy clothes, thick eye makeup, or neon hair—anyone can dress the part. It was the way she screamed, the way she fell into deep and bizarre voices and contorted her face to the delight of her fans. Nunsexmonkrock, released in 1982, was an opportunity to introduce even more people to Hagen—an incomparable performer, a new mother, an activist, a clown, a disciple of Christ, a true believer in UFOs, and without question, a star.
Hagen did not waste a moment playing it safe or easing the listener in. Instead, she charged immediately into a multi-tracked pan-religious chaos sphere. The first time you hear her voice over thundering drums, she’s telling a Bible story about Jesus exorcising a demon out of a man and into a litter of pigs. The overall aesthetic of the album is distilled in Hagen’s desperate, frantic vocals on “Antiworld” as she shrieks about the pigs “running away, screaming.” Her voice is harrowing. It’s calm momentarily, but then her deep demonic growl shifts quickly into an authoritative bark like she’s preaching over an ocean of bodies, and then again, she pivots entirely and becomes tongue-tied like a man possessed. Her intense wailing, her proselytizing about deities and black holes, and her deep commitment to character work is a thrown gauntlet—you’re either in the tank for this maximalist credo or you can’t hang with her at all.
Hagen was born in East Berlin a few years after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic and a few years before the construction of the Berlin Wall. She grew up a member of a creative family in a country that censored cultural works deemed politically inconvenient. Her mother, Eva Maria Hagen, was an actress and singer who regularly brought her young daughter to work; at age 9, Nina picked up operatic singing from professionals. After her father left the family, Nina’s stepfather, Wolf Biermann—the East German dissident folk singer and poet who was regularly blacklisted and ultimately exiled for his views in 1976—became a formative figure in her life.
“Wolf Biermann gave me power,” Hagen told the International Herald Tribune in 1980. “When I was in school in East Germany, parents forbade their children to speak to me. That sort of thing can make you strong. Biermann is a rebel. I took what he gave me and survived the hate against me. Now I am a rebel, too.” There’s a 1974 Bavarian pop hit that Hagen recorded with the band Automobil called “Du Hast den Farbfilm Vergessen”—a bubblegum tune about forgetting to pack color film on a vacation. In actuality, it was written as a teenager’s veiled and upbeat takedown of the GDR—artistic bravery born of courage being a day-to-day necessity.
Hagen joined Biermann in exile, met his contacts at CBS Records, and got a recording contract. Encouraged by the label to travel and immerse herself in the world of rock music, she ended up in London, where she befriended Ari Up and the Slits. Soon enough, she was fronting the Nina Hagen Band and barking over the hard rock sound of their self-titled 1978 album, which featured a cover of the Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope.” Her playful, erratic, and fried vocals on 1979’s Unbehagen hinted at what would come. Those albums led to media attention, especially after a 1979 TV appearance in Austria where she got the host fired by simulating masturbation on camera.
Nunsexmonkrock’s cover shows Hagen cradling a baby in an ostensible homage to Madonna-and-child iconography. One 1982 headline described her as “Blasphemy From Abroad,” and it would’ve been easy enough to read Hagen’s album title and artwork as provocative sacrilege for the sake of irony or shock value. But she’s not doing a Johnny Rotten “I am the Antichrist” spiel; when Hagen growls the words “I believe in Jesus,” her voice is a caricature but her intentions are pure. After being baptized in 2009, she would point back to Nunsexmonkrock as an example of her piety: “Look at my lyrics and you’ll see that I’ve always struggled and preached in the name of love, in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Amid Hagen’s unhinged performances are raucous and emphatic expressions of love. Just look at the baby she was clutching on the album art: her daughter, Cosma Shiva Hagen. Cosma was born in 1981, and not long after, she contributed cooing and giggling vocals to a slinking song on Nunsexmonkrock titled “Cosma Shiva.” Hagen grunts a countdown before singing her daughter’s name in a high-pitched peek-a-boo voice that feels designed for an infant’s amusement: “Cosma. SHIVA! Galax-INA!” Over Karl Rucker’s bouncing bass riff, Hagen trills about outer space in an ethereal alien register. When she contorts her voice into shrill acrobatics and offers a funky transmission to her baby from the cosmos, she is so committed to playfulness that the song’s deep absurdity is overpowered by the radiant, joyful act of becoming a dance music clown for her baby. When Cosma laughs, it’s not hard to follow suit.
Hagen was pregnant when she was preparing to record the album in the early ’80s, and in interviews, she vilified Bennett Glotzer—the manager she shared with Zappa—for allegedly imposing a correlated album delay. “I was sitting there with these wonderful ideas and wonderful musicians and always Glotzer would go to CBS and say she’s not ready, she’s pregnant,” she told the magazine Shades in 1982. “I would love to [record] when I was pregnant, it would be the holiest record in the whole wide world.” She still inserts the requisite holiness in her song for her daughter, deepening her voice for a solemn outro: “And my little baby, I tell you—God is your father.”
Cosma’s actual birth father was Ferdinand Karmelk, a guitarist and songwriter who’s credited as a writer on Nunsexmonkrock. Hagen met Karmelk in Amsterdam when he was a member of Dutch rock’n’roll star Herman Brood’s band; from looking at the raw footage, it’s clear they had a strong connection. In the infamous 1979 Austrian TV appearance, Hagen sat next to (and sometimes on top of) Karmelk, wearing a homemade shirt emblazoned with his name. When they performed some songs that would appear on Nunsexmonkrock together, his choppy power chords took a backseat to Hagen shrieking and roaring while facing the camera. When she simulated masturbation with a calm and determined look in her eye, he laughed.
Karmelk is the sole writer credited on the album’s synthesizer-led single and dark heart, “Smack Jack.” Hagen multi-tracks her voice over a languid guitar groove to form a demonic choir yelping about a junkie looking to score. “You are always running out, and you are always running short,” she purrs with a deep rasp. When the sped-up chorus hits, she’s a frantic devil on your shoulder screaming the words “shoot it up.” Because it was written from a place of experience by a man who didn’t play on the record as planned, the song’s darkness is tough to shake. Hagen told Interview in 1980 that Karmelk was clean after going to rehab, but by the time Nunsexmonkrock was recorded, he was no longer in the band. He “loved the drug more than me and our baby,” she wrote in her memoir.
In a 1980 interview, Hagen outlined her intended personnel for her debut solo album, naming musicians like Karmelk who do not perform on Nunsexmonkrock—seemingly a casualty of the externally imposed recording delays. The band she ended up with is not always a good fit. There’s a grainy video of the Nunsexmonkrock sessions where you can see Hagen and bassist Karl Rucker pulling faces and doing schtick. This was their first collaboration, and the two would go on to work together for years to come. But seasoned session musicians like Chris Spedding and Paul Shaffer were one-time Hagen collaborators, and when they briefly appear in the video, they’re relatively sedate.
On songs like “Dread Love,” you can sense the disconnect between Hagen’s wildness and the comparably underwhelming performances of the label’s hired guns. Hagen’s screams during that song are perhaps the album’s most boldly unhinged, and they remain jarring nearly 40 years later. She’s backed by crisp, thin synthesizers and guitars whose attempts at volatility are undercut by a decidedly early ’80s vintage. The band’s best performances on the album don’t go for a contemporary punk or new wave sound—they’re minimal bordering on ambient (like the elegiac “Dr. Art”) or exaggeratedly grandiose (like the over-the-top theatrical piano work on “Future Is Now”). Hagen thrives at these extremes and handily overpowers more middle-of-the-road efforts.
While Hagen and the band flirt with funk, minimalism, operatic bombast, and ’80s synth-pop, the best song on the album, “Born in Xixax,” is a definitive punk song. The electric guitar power chords are percussive and swift, while the beat feels more stiff and electronic—a catchy jam from the jump. Hagen offers a fabricated origin story that’s played for laughs. “Ugh, sorry, got to turn on the machine,” she grunts at the intro. “My name is Hans Ivanovich Hagen, and this is the news.” In a half-muttered deep voice, she sings about growing up poor on a farm with her junkie father, her Vietnam vet brother, and her Soviet Union spy uncle. She percussively whispers a bit of Cold War gossip—that Mr. Brezhnev is “planning a reunion.” Lyrically she’s joking around in the Radio Yerevan formula, but Hagen’s haunted multitude of multi-tracked voices offers a surprisingly hopeful message: “One day we will be free! We will be free one day!”
Not all of Hagen’s lyrics and character work have aged well. On “Taitschi Tarot,” she adopts a high-pitched voice to sing about Buddha, reincarnation, and yoga. Regardless of her intentions or the social standards of the time, the song’s casual Orientalism is wildly unpalatable, and it’s just one example of cultural appropriation from Hagen’s discography. On 1979’s “African Reggae,” she sang about the “Black Jah rasta man,” and just last year, she released a dub song called “Unity” as an homage to George Floyd that prominently featured the slave spiritual “Wade in the Water.” They’re big aesthetic swings under the guise of solidarity, but difficult to digest.
Hagen built her career on boldness, and often, it earned her ridicule. When she sat down for an interview on Letterman in 1985, the conversation pivoted from her hair extensions to the place all Hagen interviews in the ’80s eventually landed: her story about spotting a UFO on a beach in Malibu while pregnant. “It was in the middle of the night and it was great. I was mesmerized,” she said. “And it was showing all kinds of colors—a real light show.” Letterman dryly asked some follow-up questions: “How big was it? Glowing? Was it doing any hair extending?” Hagen smiled just a little bit, tolerating his playful barb. It was an easy punchline for the media. “E.T., phone home,” one Canadian local news broadcaster proudly quipped after a similar interview.
Hagen is an entertainer, and she wants you to have fun, but she also wants you to know that she really means what she says. She told SPIN in 1986 that the UFO experience “cleansed me of all my hangups”—that she woke up the next morning “the happiest pregnant woman on the planet.” On the Nunsexmonkrock song “UFO,” a simmering ambient synthesizer backs the ASMR of Hagen’s whispered experience before she loudly proclaims: “And you are not alone.” For all the times she boldly declares herself a literal prophet or shifts from one wild voice to another, Hagen spends so much of Nunsexmonkrock parting the chaotic waters to reveal one grounded, genuine message of hope—a maternal assurance to the listening faithful that it’s going to be OK. When she says that you’re not alone and that we’ll be free one day, she’s pulling from her own life. Nunsexmonkrock is fun and wild, and it’s the work of an exiled woman in her twenties processing new motherhood and loss.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | CBS | March 14, 2021 | 7.5 | b8ef387a-6c51-448d-94d0-5dd2fe6fb81b | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
The latest Strand of Oaks album has a sunnier outlook and a hedonistic streak, evoking Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Oasis. But it never really adds up to a bold statement. | The latest Strand of Oaks album has a sunnier outlook and a hedonistic streak, evoking Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Oasis. But it never really adds up to a bold statement. | Strand of Oaks: Hard Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22911-hard-love/ | Hard Love | On 2014’s HEAL, his fifth album as Strand of Oaks, Timothy Showalter emerged as his own most compelling lead character. Showalter was a grown-up adolescent still mired in dark thoughts and intense desires: for the opposite sex, for self-eradication through drugs or worse, for his favorite song to come on the radio. Making or simply listening to music was a lifeline out of the confusion of youth and the disappointments of adulthood, which informed a song cycle simultaneously bleak and optimistic, as big as an arena yet as personal as an inner monologue. Showalter reminisced about “singing Pumpkins in the mirror,” and it’s not hard to imagine his fans finding similar salvation in “JM” or “Goshen ’97.”
And yet: “HEAL was bullshit, man.” In an exhaustive, candid Stereogum article, Showalter distanced himself from his breakthrough album, which he seems to think is too dark, too self-absorbed. “I’m sick of being the sad white guy with an acoustic guitar… We’re done with that shit,” he said. There’s not much acoustic guitar on the album, but that’s besides the point: Newly committed to his marriage and to a sunnier outlook on everything, Showalter no longer wants to rip his soul out and play harrowing songs night after night. That’s understandable: Who could fault the guy for wanting to be happy?
Consequently, Hard Love is more than a follow-up—it sounds like a direct response to HEAL. These new songs are never quite as dark or as deep, never quite as probing, which is not to say they’re superficial. Showalter seems to have made an effort not to sound quite as troubled. If his relationship to music once seemed desperate, he now sounds like a guy thrilled to be evoking Creation Records, one of the major touchstones on Hard Love. Featuring wobbly guitars and big drumbeats, “Everything” and “On the Hill” nod to bands like Primal Scream, the Jesus & Mary Chain, and even Oasis without making too obvious a reference.
Instead of sulking in his car blasting Songs: Ohia, as he did on “JM,” Hard Love shows Showalter out in the world, engaging with other people through music and, notably, through drugs. This is a peculiarly hedonistic album, one that will doubtless play well on the summer festival circuit. “I have the good drugs now,” he boasts in that Stereogum article, but they’re not especially potent sources of inspiration. Influenced by a mind-expanding episode at Boogie Festival in Australia, “On the Hill” bounds forward with a big, brash sound, but it never really goes anywhere. Instead, it just stays on that hill, blissed out and barely relatable if you weren’t at Boogie and on those good drugs with him.
More rewarding are the smaller moments, the songs that show Strand of Oaks morphing into a formidable rock band. “Quit It” is gloriously raw blues, “Rest of It” a trash-glam stomp. Both sound tossed off in the best way: less burdened with concepts and therefore freer, more fun. They represent a more relatable form of hedonism, with Showalter simply rocking the fuck out. That less-is-more quality extends to those moments when everything falls away except for one or two instruments: The title track builds to a climactic chorus, but instead of pushing everything into the red, Showalter removes everything but the drums. It redefines and redirects the anthem, turning it into an overture for the album that follows.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of Hard Love is how far it doesn’t stray from HEAL. Everything sounds weirdly familiar, as though Showalter hasn’t figured out how to move on from that breakthrough. He still makes the most of his murky production, despite bringing in French producer Nicolas Vernhes (Speedy Ortiz, Deerhunter) and multi-instrumentalist Jason Anderson. “Radio Kids” sounds a bit too similar to previous songs about adolescent alienation, and “Salt Brothers” leans too closely toward better cryptic anthems, most notably the apocalyptic “Sterling,” off 2010’s enduringly strange Pope Killdragon. Hard Love never really adds up to a particularly clear or bold statement; there are some strong songs and big moments, but very little that moves the story forward or develops that rich character. It’s a perfectly fine album by a guy who wants to be much more than perfectly fine. | 2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | February 23, 2017 | 6.5 | b8f02e83-c092-4db9-b946-87f472fb6e91 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Improvising on trumpet and two guitars, the avant-garde composer and his collaborators mourn the natural world while asking us to forget what we know about conventional musical hierarchies. | Improvising on trumpet and two guitars, the avant-garde composer and his collaborators mourn the natural world while asking us to forget what we know about conventional musical hierarchies. | Wadada Leo Smith / Henry Kaiser / Alex Varty: Pacifica Koral Reef | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wadada-leo-smith-henry-kaiser-alex-v-pacifica-koral-reef/ | Pacifica Koral Reef | With abstract jazz, Wadada Leo Smith writes eulogies. Since 2012’s rapturously received Ten Freedom Summers, his records have memorialized Civil Rights heroes, musical legends, and America’s threatened landscape, bolstering the trumpeter’s compositions with history. The 80-year-old knows that what a country commemorates testifies to its character. But what it protects speaks louder: His monumental 2016 release America’s National Parks suggests expanding the safeguards of natural refuges to include havens for culture, such as New Orleans.
Smith’s latest, Pacifica Koral Reef, fits in with the scope of his past decade’s oeuvre, if not its sounds. He turns his horn to endangered coral reefs, which the U.S. and other countries have been sluggish to defend from climate change. While Smith’s a true conservationist, the thematic focus is reinforced by his two younger collaborators, inveterate improviser (and scientific diver) Henry Kaiser, and Canadian music journalist (and amateur diver) Alex Varty, who plays the guitar as though it’s his full-time job. Using a score Smith wrote in his own visual-musical dialect, Ankhrasmation, they provide a transformative 55-minute tour through acoustic drones and outboard distortion, sporadically awash in the sparse, Miles Davis-inspired phrasing that’s always been Smith’s bread and butter.
The record is a revelation for all three musicians. Varty, who’s previously played in alt-rock bands, shows himself to be a soulful, supple improviser of Indian raga, strumming unaccompanied for the album’s first 10 minutes. Kaiser, who has collaborated with luminaries from Terry Riley to Herbie Hancock, achieves a delicacy of effects and engineering that echoes David Torn, and Smith’s overdubs demonstrate his flair for gentle, almost ambient soundscapes. The unusual trio setup—two guitars and a trumpet—encourages us to forget what we know about genre. Is this jazz? Classical? Or—god forbid—“world music”? And what, exactly, is the difference? After all, avoiding labels and hierarchies is integral to the philosophy behind Smith’s score.
A portmanteau of three words, Ankhrasmation, Smith says, is “a language, not a notation system.” It consists of works on paper, paintings as much as musical instruction, full of bright pictographs that propose ambiguous sets of rules. Colors and representational shapes are open-ended, prompting musicians to ponder both their personal experience and broad concepts such as science. Tempo is marked more ordinarily, as a dynamic of slow and fast notes that increase unconventionally in “density level,” or how much noise fills the composition. These guidelines slyly limit the egos of both performers and composers, letting the former extemporize, but only within boundaries. The players interpret the art as though they’re writing ekphrastic poems with music. They, too, become the pieces’ authors.
We can hear Smith’s score in Pacifica Koral Reef’s languid, thoughtful pace, which quickens when Kaiser and Varty trade blues riffs. It’s audible, too, in the album’s abundant space, the ways that luxurious fits and starts split the single-track piece into something like movements, and in the wide gulfs between the three musicians’ tones: Kaiser’s sculpted feedback, Varty’s acoustic picking, and Smith’s mournful horn are all deeply individual, while working together toward a cohesive composition. The result unsettles the idea of a band leader. Each player cues the others, running a relay race of instrumentation, swirling toward a center that doesn’t quite exist. And why should it? Centers are tricks of perspective. All roads never led to Rome, and the U.S. isn’t the nucleus of the 21st century, either. The very form of music like Pacifica Koral Reef subverts this faulty solipsism.
Such a concept isn’t new, and neither is the core of Smith’s indeterminate scores—he owes a debt to John Cage, among others. But Ankhrasmation allows for commentary, which so much of the avant-garde from Smith’s generation and earlier eschewed in favor of process. With its gorgeous, contemplative interplay of instruments, Pacifica Koral Reef lets itself be a swan song for our ailing environment, and while some may find this topicality pretentious or an easy marketing narrative, examining the outside world is built into the frame of Smith’s musical practice. It’s also human: In our time of desperation, suffering, callousness, and uncertainty, fear about the future can’t be considered an imposition on creativity. For Smith, Kaiser, and Varty, concern lives alongside music. We may not be able to pinpoint it in the sounds they make, or label it with the literal language we’ve learned to use, but the earth wails to them, and they reply, “I hear you.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Global / Rock | 577 | January 20, 2022 | 7.8 | b8f70bb5-0be1-4ae4-81fd-37e4c0b2e3d7 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The singular hip-hop band’s second album is a story about America and Philadelphia, memory and survival. Like a good book, it goes by quickly, yet you force yourself to linger. | The singular hip-hop band’s second album is a story about America and Philadelphia, memory and survival. Like a good book, it goes by quickly, yet you force yourself to linger. | The Roots: Do You Want More?!!!??! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-roots-do-you-want-more/ | Do You Want More?!!!??! | For Black Thought, it all really started with his prologue on “Essawahmah.” In the early 1990s, when recording companies and mainstream media thought they’d figured out hip-hop via the popularity of its most beloved torchbearers, he drastically flipped the script. The track from the Roots’ 1993 debut Organix (a precursor to the later “Essaywhuman?!!!??!”) kicks off with a casual back-and-forth between the band and their audience, reminiscent of the ambiance from Gil Scott-Heron’s conversational songs on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. The energy is lighthearted and the mood easygoing, until the lead MC decides to shake things up and introduce himself to the uninitiated. What follows is some beatboxing, scatting, vocal riffs, more scatting, more beatboxing, trading fours with the band, all the while telling you a story. It’s about hip-hop, jazz, collaboration, Philadelphia, and everything in between Black artistry and corporate America. What began on Organix arrived on 1995’s Do You Want More?!!!??!, now reissued in 3xLP and 4xLP packages. But the album title wasn’t really a question—it was more of a dare challenging you to say no, because how could you not want to hear the rest? And when you did listen, could you handle it?
The thing about the very best writers, whether Gayl Jones or Toni Morrison, Kiese Laymon or Jesmyn Ward, Paul Beatty or Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that their introductions never waver in clarity or intention. They reveal characters whose journeys take readers into places that force us to forget our own centers, to spend time in the universe of others. To be a good writer, storytelling chops are essential; a non-negotiable requirement. In music, mediocre characters can be shielded behind flamboyant production, drawing your ear to the magician’s assistant so you don’t perceive the sleight of hand. Black Thought is not a magician. He’s an alchemist who’s spent a large part of his career mutating the ephemera of memory into tangible reminders of life, connecting everything, always, back to the root.
The 16 tracks on the 1995 version of Do You Want More?!!!??! run like a good book that you want to get through immediately, but because you need to savor each moment, you force yourself to take your time. His literary intentions are ferocious on “I Remain Calm,” where he fires shots at anyone delivering average or merely good bars: “My rated-X larynx wrecks your context/I’m complex, confusin’, lyrically amusin’/I drink brews then when I’m groovin’/I’m no longer human.” He carries these bold claims of superiority forward into the album’s title track, which reads like a more unruly “Ego Tripping,” echoing Nikki Giovanni’s boastful bravado and always backing it up; different sides of the same literary coin.
Storytelling can be a lonely endeavor, but it’s rarely a solitary one, and while Black Thought tells his own stories, the Roots crew is the echo transmitting his words beyond the scope of any one individual. With ?uestlove on the drums and any other place where soul needs a melody, Black Thought has a reliable anchor. From their very first album, the drummer and joint frontman has written and produced alongside his childhood friend, lending a special gravitas to the idea of “coming up together.” Do You Want More?!!!??! could be read as a question between friends, each urging the other to take more artistic liberties, to up the ante with each level surpassed.
“The Lesson, Pt. 1,” a brief rundown of a life on the margins, is the pair at their most revealing; it sounds like a tentative prequel to Undun, which would be released in 2011. Here, Black Thought brought a different type of cold steel up to his face for protection. Both are heavy in different ways: the weight of taking a life or that of trying to save one with the words projected from your mic. It’s a battle of survivor’s remorse, filled with the gratitude immortalized in essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s Politico essay on the group. “Most people from my neighborhood are just surprised they live to be 30,” Black Thought told Ghansah. “I know I was. And to see the world, to survive, I know I was lucky, I know I was saved.”
On “Lazy Afternoon,” we hear Black Thought’s monologue about the delicate joy of being alive. It’s a theme that flows through the work of artists who grew up to see themselves as the blessed ones who made it through the battlefield. While Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” summarizes a dreamy 24 hours, “Lazy Afternoon” moves like a line-by-line breakdown on the luxury of leisure.
We see him at his most vulnerable on “Silent Treatment,” which sounds like reading aloud a love letter written by someone with nothing to say except “I fucked up.” His tone moves from matter-of-fact to begrudging acceptance of reality, and then dejection. It’s something very few can replicate. At times, Black Thought’s reiterations that he is the best around mean the album starts to lag, but some things really do bear repeating. And for naysayers, the subtext is clear: If you think I am wrong, show me somebody better. Someone who can take a song that flows atop a reggae beat, lyrics that invoke obscure music moments from fellow hip-hop heads (Digable Planets), and coherently turn Afrika Bambaataa and Joe into adjectives, coloring a song about neither person.
Black Thought meets his lyrical equal when Malik B. comes to the page to “write an anthem, throw a tantrum and remain handsome.” Both are sinister narrators on “Distortion to Static,” outlining the truth in all its ugliness without losing sight of the desperation that leads to violence. They go toe-to-toe on “Proceed,” reliving childhood shenanigans and reveling in the spotlight of self-made success. Band member Leonard Hubbard, on bass, and collaborators Steven Coleman, Graham Haynes, and Joshua Roseman, on the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, respectively, bring a cool jazz sensibility to the album, flowing with the steady production of ?uestlove, who evokes the physicality of a classic turntable set: scratching, connection with the audience, and the performance appeal of a cypher.
That concept of creating within a community is where the Roots are uniquely unmatched. Hip-hop has often elevated a sole figure supported by a behind-the-scenes team, and yet for the majority of their career the Roots have worked with over a dozen artists whose musicianship is as diverse as their artistic impulses. “Essaywhuman” (not to be confused with “Essawahmah”) is a prime example of this musical curation. Coleman is having so much fun on the sax it breeds both shoe-throwing annoyance and awe, while Hubbard, on bass, strums along at the same frequency as the riled-up live crowd. With Scott Storch on the keyboard, the whole show becomes not only a performance by a hip-hop group, but a type of orchestral fusion, syncing elements you might expect on stage at Carnegie Hall alongside those you would see and hear on a basketball court in Philadelphia.
Do You Want More?!!!??! showcased the Lead MC at home, at ease with his ability to sink his pen deep into the hidden truths of power, belonging, survival, and hustle. These truths related to his hometown and the legacy of art-making of which he is part. The stories of Philadelphia have only ever truly been distilled by writers who intentionally focused on the city, tracing the source of the intuitive innovation that emerges so fearlessly from those who call it home. The flight of Allen Iverson, the ecstatic sorrow of Patti LaBelle, the sensual nods of Teddy Pendergrass have never been fully articulated by outsiders. But when Black Thought steps to the mic, he is able to translate the very best of his kin. Zoom in on his layered storytelling and get a picture of a breathing, healing, and fighting city, an endless ledger of change documented by its scribe and hometown boy.
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. | 2021-03-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Geffen / UMe | March 13, 2021 | 9 | b900f776-a614-4115-b11f-a7555d568889 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/604a40c1ef88baf05a8e2b4d/1:1/w_3000,h_3000,c_limit/The%20Roots:%20Do%20You%20Want%20More |
The Berlin- and London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has long had ties to music and club culture, and now he has released a musing and quizzical techno release of his own. | The Berlin- and London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has long had ties to music and club culture, and now he has released a musing and quizzical techno release of his own. | Wolfgang Tillmans: 2016 / 1986 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22155-2016-1986/ | 2016 / 1986 | Wolfgang Tillmans has been taking pictures for three decades, beginning with photographs from the Hamburg nightclubs he frequented in late 1980s, published in *i-D *and Prinz, and moving into an expansive practice that earned him the Turner Prize in 2000 and numerous major gallery and museum shows since. Though certainly associated with an eye for European youth subcultures, and youth in general, at the heart of Tillmans’ work is a particular relationship with the world, rather than a consistent subject. Whether abstract color field, an image of sinewy youths embracing, or an urban landscape, the images he makes are imbued with emotional resonance.
Still, music and club culture have long been intertwined with the Berlin- and London-based artist’s work (and life), in ways both nostalgic and decidedly forward-facing. In addition to documenting the early 1990s European acid house scene for i-D, Tillmans’ photographs currently hang in Berghain’s Panorama Bar (he’s allegedly also the one exception to the club’s notorious no-photographs rule), and a recent solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York included pages of a Fade to Mind label profile in German music magazine Spex, featuring his portraits of Kingdom, Kelela, Mike Q, and other label affiliates. He’s also DJed and installed “playback rooms,” spaces equipped with top-of-the line stereo equipment and Tillmans’ own playlists, in galleries and museums. So it’s not altogether surprising that the artist now has what could vaguely be termed a techno release of his own, consisting of a pair of tracks made this year and a trio of recordings from 1986.
The EP starts in the present, opening with what is ultimately its only straightforward dance track, “Make It Up As You Go Along.” A familiar bass groove and upbeat kick drum are met with the shuffling sound of a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL printing press, combining to produce a subtly collaged deep house. While the printing press works to provide a rhythmic spine, it’s Tillmans’ charmingly ungainly vocals—he reiterates the titular phrase and harmonizes with a synth melody—that introduce a degree of instability. It’s a warm and catchy track, but rather than proposing a seamless sublimation into a club environment, it reminds listeners of the conditions of its making—a useful fact, as it turns out, as the song that follows lacks any semblance of a dance vocabulary. “Triangle / Gong / What” follows the literal progression laid out in its title, consisting of a rather minimal sequence of barely-processed sounds: First, the artist plays a triangle, tapping it urgently but irregularly; the tinny crashing gives way to the ambient swell of a gong, at one point quieting to near-stillness. Finally, Tillmans—in a robotic, self-serious monotone—intones the line “what we do here is a crime in most countries. But it’s not. There is no victim. Leave us alone.” It’s a little goofy, particularly in juxtaposition to the jovial track that precedes it.
But his relationship to sound, found and recorded, reminds me of his description in a 2015 interview with Peter Halley of one of his first-ever photographs, Lacanau [self], a self-portrait taken on a French beach in 1986. “It’s a pink shape,” he says, “which is my T-shirt, and then a bit of black, which is my shorts, and then a bit of skin, which is my knee, and then a big space of sand. It’s also my first abstract picture: you can’t make out what it is, but it’s actually totally concrete at the same time.” A compositional element, for Tillmans, can be at once documentary and pure abstraction, and there’s a recurring sense of curiosity in the way he negotiates between the two as he sees—or hears.
The same year that he took Lacanau, Tillmans recorded a series of synth-driven postpunk tracks in a one-night session with Burt Leßmann in Wuppertal, Germany. Restored from their original cassette recordings, three of these songs—with vocals and lyrics by Tillmans and synths by Leßmann—comprise the EP’s B-side. As standalone pop songs, they’re fairly orthodox for the era in which they were produced. However, in addition to their sentimental value (for a fan of Tillmans’ photography, it’s sort of amazing to picture him at age 18 in a rehearsal room in provincial West Germany delivering these affected vocal lines), they temper the meandering restraint of the EP’s A-side with a gust of youthful energy.
Aesthetically cohesive this EP is not, which is, of course, not really its point to begin with—2016/1986’s uneven nature speaks to its status as a less an entry into the club cultures of which Tillmans has long been a part and more a brief aural document of his involvement with and attachment to sound. And that awkwardness is what lends this release its charm, centering the photographer as an enthusiastic experimenter, engaging with memory while using it to produce a colorful present. | 2016-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Fragile | July 19, 2016 | 6.9 | b902722d-7fc9-4240-9cc8-d15c1a9931c3 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The Chicago quartet play nervy post-punk with a groundedness and poise that suggests if your back is up against the wall, you might be able to lean on it for support. | The Chicago quartet play nervy post-punk with a groundedness and poise that suggests if your back is up against the wall, you might be able to lean on it for support. | Ganser: Nothing You Do Matters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ganser-nothing-you-do-matters-ep/ | Nothing You Do Matters EP | Anyone can play punk rock. For Ganser, that’s no excuse for low standards. Over a pair of albums, including 2020’s marvelous Just Look at That Sky, the Chicago quartet deployed simple phrasing to make increasingly complicated thematic and artistic statements. On Nothing You Do Matters, a short EP produced by Liars’ Angus Andrew, they offer up their most sophisticated music yet.
Plenty of bands over the past five or so years have distilled the nausea-inducing spirit of the age into limber, rainy post-punk. While those groups have tended to play it lean and feisty, as if chaos might be pinned in a cage fight, Ganser’s groundedness and poise suggests that if your back is up against the wall, you might be able to lean on it for support. Co-lead singers Nadia Garofalo and Alicia Gaines sing from deep within themselves—you can practically hear Garofalo’s rueful laugh as she reflects on a “hell of a day” in Just Look at That Sky’s “Lucky”—as guitarist Charlie Landsman scribbles and flashes. Both singers treat the ferocious noise they generate with their band with the respect and detachment one might a major weather event: It’s nothing personal, but they still stay dry.
Taking inspiration from Adrian Sherwood’s industrial dubs, Nothing You Do Matters’ two original tracks (Andrew also provides a remix of “People Watching”) feel like oil paintings smeared as they dry. Every part washes into another; at any given moment, they could be gathering breath in the middle of a verse or rounding through a chorus. Garofalo’s voice scatters through the background of “People Watching,” her insistent reminder that “No one is asking, everyone’s taking” coming from all directions like people in a train station. Drummer Brian Cundiff seems to drag the rhythm, making the song a little sluggish, a little irked, and it thickens when Garofalo’s synth fills the chorus like injection foam filling the gap in a wall. “Gotta take it all,” Gaines sings in counterpoint. She’s a taunting Greek chorus, the collective knowingness aiming dramatic irony out at the listener, rather than toward the on-stage subject.
Andrew brings the same ethos of ever-expanding mischief to these songs that he did in Liars’ mid-period highs, Drum’s Not Dead and Liars, setting traps throughout “What Me Worry?” Some of his best tricks are present—the single fingersnap recalls the abrupt ping of “It Fit When I Was a Kid,” to similarly unnerving effect—but Just Look at That Sky’s spooked-out details and clipped rhythms suggest that much of his task here was to give Ganser more space for their own ideas. Twinkles of keyboard ring through the scuzz; guitars and programmed strings seem to hum at the same frequency. Everything is dazzling and terrible. It’s as if the music is springing up from a haunted casino.
On both tracks, Gaines plays her basslines like they’re sentences she knows she doesn’t need to complete; they wear their melodicism as if it’s beside the point. She takes the opposite approach to her singing in “What Me Worry?”, luxuriating in the words, her rich tone turned away from the competing stabs and scrapes. Gaines has written about the particular marginalization she’s experienced as a Black woman in indie rock, a position that forces her to maintain a kind of steeliness to survive, and she seems to channel that same steeliness here, with good reason. “When did I agree to this,” she wonders in the chorus, after quoting the title of Nina Simone’s 1964 song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” A classic in Simone’s hands, it was a massive single the next year for rockers the Animals, who had already hit No. 1 with their version of the blues song “House of the Rising Sun.” It’s a canny reference that suggests the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t the only place where Black contributions to rock music’s development go unnoticed. Like Simone, Gaines sounds both resigned to and empowered by the idea that her only hope is to express herself clearly.
The candy-colored chaos of Andrew’s “People Watching” remix notwithstanding, Nothing You Do Matters suggests a deep connection between artist and producer. Like Liars, Ganser know that an otherwise-innocuous set of notes can begin to sound terrifying if it’s repeated enough, just as they’ve always confronted dread by making themselves more dreadful. On this EP, the stakes Ganser find themselves up against have grown, but so has their ability to define and answer to them. As the world becomes more chaotic, their defiance grows more elegant. | 2022-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Felte | November 14, 2022 | 7.5 | b908c402-3c14-4798-a02b-e61cc2f2caa9 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The New Orleans country singer’s heartsick, headstrong third album chronicles the fallout of bad breakup with sly humor and empathy. | The New Orleans country singer’s heartsick, headstrong third album chronicles the fallout of bad breakup with sly humor and empathy. | Esther Rose: How Many Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esther-rose-how-many-times/ | How Many Times | Alongside its rich history of R&B, jazz, and second line parades, New Orleans is also a bustling hub for country music. The city has had one of the more interesting scenes of the 2010s, a hodgepodge community comprising artists like Sundown Songs, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and the Deslondes, who ground their twang in old-school rock and soul formats. Originally from Columbiaville, Michigan, Esther Rose has been bouncing around the city for more than a decade, first writing and singing with then-husband Luke Winslow-King before striking out on her own. Her albums typify New Orleans country, right down to her high-flying vocal delivery. If her vocals bear strong similarities to those of Riff Raff’s Alynda Lee Segarra, it’s not because either singer is copying the other; it’s because they’re both drawing from the same well.
Rose lets those influences settle a bit more on her heartsick, headstrong third album, How Many Times, which chronicles the fallout of a hard breakup. Her songs revel in subtle rhythms, especially on the thrumming “Keeps Me Running,” and she even channels Fats Domino on the gently rolling “Are You Out There.” Those elements keep these songs anchored to her city, although she moves through it differently than she once did. She’s more closed off, her armor up. “Walking through the Quarter with my hood pulled up/Don’t you stand beside me, boys, I got bad luck,” she sings on the title track, conveying a local’s frustration with the city’s most popular tourist attraction.
There’s a strong sense of place on How Many Times, but even if you’ve never set foot in Louisiana, Rose’s stories still resonate. She’s always had a flair for details, the moments other writers ignore, and she retains a sly sense of humor even in heartbreak. She ends the pained title track with near-ecstatic “Sha la la”s, as though turning her pain into a pop punchline. On “When You Go,” she tells a straying lover, “I think I might just let you go,” immediately following it with: “Can I come with you?” You might chuckle at the turnaround if her fear and desperation weren’t palpable.
If How Many Times is a breakup record, then “Songs Remain” is its denouement. Rather than recrimination and blame, Rose offers a more measured appreciation of their time together, recalling the specifics of the relationship in evocative detail—early mornings of “black coffee and bacon fat,” for instance—and bids her “inner city lumberjack” a sad farewell: “I am glad it was you who broke my heart.” Rarely do breakup songs sound so genuinely generous and tender. How Many Times necessarily loses some of its steam after that song, and how could it not? “Songs Remain” is the heart of this album as well as one of the finest moments in Rose’s catalog so far, showing how heartache can change how you experience a city and how music can keep you running.
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. | 2021-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Father/Daughter | April 1, 2021 | 7.4 | b90e0d18-9c0f-4e58-9200-efcd3974f0dd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
A sampler of music recorded at Chris Blackwell's studio in the Bahamas, this record is also a symposium on the polyglot tendencies that made the dance underground of the first half of the 1980s so unpredictably rich in ideas. | A sampler of music recorded at Chris Blackwell's studio in the Bahamas, this record is also a symposium on the polyglot tendencies that made the dance underground of the first half of the 1980s so unpredictably rich in ideas. | Various Artists: Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11374-funky-nassau-the-compass-point-story-1980-1986/ | Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986 | On the surface, this compilation is intended to be a broad rundown of a specific studio's output-- that of Compass Point, the Bahamian outpost established by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and manned by a who's who of reggae session players including the ace production team/rhythm section of Sly & Robbie. But it might as well be a symposium on the polyglot tendencies that made the dance underground of the first half of the 1980s so unpredictably rich in ideas. Name a genre that either established itself or peaked in the late 70s or early 80s-- electro-funk, disco, reggae, dub, post-punk, old-school hip-hop-- and it's represented in the music on this compilation, rarely without being comfortably fused to another genre to spectacular effect.
The most well-known cuts on Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986 might as well be shorthand for this type of fusion-- Tom Tom Club's chirpy, blissed-out Caribbean/new wave/rap pastiche "Genius of Love", Talking Heads' jittery Afrobeat-inflected digital rave-up "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", and an extended version of Ian Dury's BBC-banned "Spasticus Autisticus", which retorted to Britain's patronizing declaration of 1981 as "Year of the Disabled" with Spartacus-lifted shouts of solidarity, bitingly arch lyrics ("So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin/ And thank the creator you're not in the state I'm in") and a vertigo-inducing bass/synth interplay. There's just one baffling decision in the famous names department-- instead of something from the superb Nightclubbing, Grace Jones' tenure at Compass Point is represented by the digital reggae of "My Jamaican Guy", and the combination of her flat singing and the gradual tedium of its seven-minute extended mix makes for an unexciting way to open the compilation.
But Funky Nassau gets better in a hurry, thanks not just to the usual post-punk suspects but also due to the fringe artists, obscurities, and ostensible novelty records (emphasis on novel) that fill out the bulk of the collection. There are two tracks that, thanks largely to house music pioneer François Kevorkian, prove to be the collection's most surprising highlights. Cuban-born Guy Cuevas' 1982 France-exclusive "Obsession" piles glimmering keyboards on top of a Bernard Edwards-caliber bassline and comes up with a late-disco gem that sounds triangulated between Havana, Paris, and NYC. And the Kevorkian mix of "Dance Sucker", the 1983 debut single from Scottish obscurities Set the Tone, sounds like a uprocker's take on a circa-1988 Nine Inch Nails demo, with a lead singer belting out sneering Reznor-isms (and the occasional Nic Offer-ism) over a packed wall of electro.
Where most of the tracks on Funky Nassau breathe free with loose-jointed smoothness, disco deconstructionist Cristina's "You Rented a Space" is a claustrophobic slab of electronic dub where the percolating bass and the staggering but sure-footed rhythms practically corner you in a hallway and breathe down your neck. (Cristina's decadently sly voice knows better, and aims directly at your inner ear: "Your lovin' is as cold as the cold clasp of death.") And then there's Bits & Pieces-- basically Sly & Robbie working under an alias- - cranking out a playful but heavy cover of Yarbrough & Peoples' 1980 hit "Don't Stop the Music", replicating its fuzzed-out synth-funk faithfully but throwing in a subtle reggae backbeat and, for kicks, a few likeably daft rap lyrics about hairstyles. The Compass Point sound proved that the sound of the Caribbean could cover just about anywhere-- and, at the same time, helped create music that couldn't have come from anywhere else. | 2008-05-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-05-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Strut | May 7, 2008 | 8.2 | b9127eff-b344-478a-9c5f-f6a02aa8a020 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
With Hesaitix, the Berlin-based DJ and producer has built a strange world that lives and breathes. It’s a catchy, fascinating electronic album that lives in a lucid unreality. | With Hesaitix, the Berlin-based DJ and producer has built a strange world that lives and breathes. It’s a catchy, fascinating electronic album that lives in a lucid unreality. | M.E.S.H.: Hesaitix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mesh-hesaitix/ | Hesaitix | “For me, music is a different place,” said DJ and producer M.E.S.H. in a 2016 interview. As a resident with the Berlin collective Janus, James Whipple—aka M.E.S.H.—has been instrumental in developing the splintered, genre-bending sound for which Janus’ club nights (and its members’ productions) have come to be known. Though engaged with club tropes, his own productions stray outside the formal bounds of dance music, developing oblique narratives that circle around the weird underbelly of life with technology. His second full-length Hesaitix offers a loamy sonic futurism that breaks from the digitized universes we’ve come to expect of these kinds of projects.
Though a sly sense of humor runs through Whipple’s productions, there’s also an unwavering sincerity. On Piteous Gate, this quality felt distinctly cinematic—interested, maybe, in its own artifice—but with Hesaitix he builds a world that lives and breathes. Though the album is anchored by percussive epics, Whipple uses uneasy ambient passages to carve out the environment in which Hesaitix takes place. Opener “Nemorum Incola” (whose title, per a rough translation from the Latin, means “forest dweller”), layers a rippling metallic phrase over a sample of insects, birds, and burbling water. “Blurred Cicada I” and “Blurred Cicada II” each recall the warbling sound of bells or an organ, stretched to woozy effect. These songs open up strange corners, lending a sense of the cavernous: the place we’ve entered seems to exist beyond what we can hear.
Elsewhere, ideas assume a more tumultuous pace, held together by sharply designed percussion that’s made to physically engage the listener. With Janus, Whipple and his associates find links between sounds beyond genre or BPM. In their arrangements, they speak to a kind of contemporary listening that’s delocalized in appetite, but still somehow hyper-located in the enthusiasm it digests. Those omnivorous tendencies motivate this collection of tracks, and where previous M.E.S.H. releases might have had a deconstructed aesthetic, here it feels slippery but solid. The claustrophobic “Coercer” offers a mutant take on drum ‘n’ bass, hissing and sputtering as textures rub against one another; “Search. Reveal.” paints synthesizer impasto over a galloping dry rattle (and its melodic refrain proves as sticky as that of Whipple’s 2014 “Imperial Sewers,”). When Hesaitix’s pace picks up, an urgent kind of heaviness envelops the listener, mooring you to M.E.S.H.’s world.
I think of video games as a touchstone for Whipple’s high-definition world-building—the environments he creates often glossy and fantastical—but the organic realism of landscape painting also comes to mind. Work that’s technologically engaged often equates the organic with the real and the synthetic with imaginary; Whipple seems unconcerned with such binaries, locating a lucid unreality throughout. Hesaitix contains some of the earthiest dance music I’ve encountered, but that’s not to say that listening to it is a particularly human experience. And yet, this release has a strong sense of a center: a thoughtfulness comes from both its moments of fury and its more level interludes, as with “Ihnaemiauimx,” the sweet note on which the album concludes. It’s peaceful in a dark-night kind of way, the kind of serenity that can only be achieved through some comfort with the unknown.
Though there’s an impulse to process this sort of sonic radicality in ideological terms (take, for instance, a recent editorial for Resident Advisor that charted the popularity of CDJs among Whipple and his peers along a Jamesonian conception of postmodernity), I can’t help but believe that the implications of the forms mapped here are somehow more mysterious. Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form. | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Pan | November 11, 2017 | 7.6 | b913f49d-9683-4da5-8f9e-ad80aa6e3035 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
On this woozy collaborative EP, the grime producers Mr. Mitch and Yamaneko trade the genre’s brute force for restraint, drawing out subtle threads and small pockets of emotion. | On this woozy collaborative EP, the grime producers Mr. Mitch and Yamaneko trade the genre’s brute force for restraint, drawing out subtle threads and small pockets of emotion. | Yaroze Dream Suite: Yaroze Dream Suite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22552-yaroze-dream-suite/ | Yaroze Dream Suite | Few genres ride the cutting edge as efficiently and boldly as grime. Much like hip-hop, grime’s startlingly adventurous productions have often predicted the shapes and sounds that will bubble up from the underground and into the pop sector. Recent innovations from the likes of Rabit, Logos, Murlo, and Visionist have stretched grime’s boundaries, nudging the genre into ever more surreal and unexpected directions.
In 2014, Gobstopper label boss Mr. Mitch and London-based producer Yamaneko further solidified their places among this new wave, with the release of Parallel Memories and Pixel Wave Embrace, respectively. Parallel Memories contained gossamer textures and breathless tracts of negative space. Pixel Wave Embrace was animated by the idyllic moods and vivid colors of meditation tapes and video game soundtracks. Both pointed to a softer, slower, and sparser approach to a genre infamous for its whiplash juxtapositions and hardline tenacity.
Over the last year, Mitch and Yamaneko have been working intermittently on a joint project, Yaroze Dream Suite, the results of which are collected in this four-track EP. “There’s a Venn diagram where Parallel Memories and Pixel Wave Embrace meet and a lot of this project came from there,” Yamaneko has said, and for the most part that sentiment holds true. Opener “Pixel Dreams” sets the tone for the EP’s woozy, climate-controlled atmosphere. Built around a strikingly simple melody and spacey, shivering synth tones, the track is the most successful marriage of the two producers’ styles: Mitch’s love for cool, weightless minimalism and Yamaneko’s new age-mining ambience. Plinking chirps, video game sound FX, and trap-like snaps lend the song additional heft, but the outcome remains keenly delicate, dulcet.
Closer “Spirit Temple” is similarly jaunty—all skeletal beat programming and melodious synths. Like “Pixel Dreams,” it trades grime’s brute force for restraint, as its arrangements unspool slowly. This scenic take on grime allows the listener to zoom in on each component, drawing out subtle threads and small pockets of emotion that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. “In the Moonlight,” featuring guest vocalist Hannah Mack, flutters with ghostly sirens, prodding synths, and a plaintive sax line; when Mack invites us to “Free your mind/‘Cuz everything’s sublime,” it underscores the EP’s central theme. This is grime engineered to float, not punch.
Despite the EP’s pillowy silhouettes and beguiling tempos—and several moments of outright bliss—Yaroze Dream Suite often falls prey to its own moderation. Where the duo’s solo releases come across meditative and understated, YDS occasionally scans as mild, and, at times, underdone. No where is this more apparent than on “Awakening,” a brooding cut chiseled from rumbling pads and disembodied vocals; it circles itself a half or so dozen times without going anywhere particularly surprising, or novel. The scope of the EP just feels smaller. Still, YDS remains fascinating throughout, and the question of how its ideas will shape the duo’s future output is enough to strike the interest of any grime diehard. | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | 2 B Real | November 19, 2016 | 6.5 | b9144133-6bb6-4bd9-9c04-b312a2d27ac9 | Jonathan Patrick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-patrick/ | null |
Chicago’s Lili Trifilio writes about heartache and insecurity with the wistful, plainspoken honesty of power-pop. | Chicago’s Lili Trifilio writes about heartache and insecurity with the wistful, plainspoken honesty of power-pop. | Beach Bunny: Honeymoon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-bunny-honeymoon/ | Honeymoon | Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio wasn’t familiar with TikTok until after her song went viral on the video-sharing app last summer. The self-released “Prom Queen,” a protest of Euro-centric beauty standards, has soundtracked hundreds of thousands of TikToks, many of which feature a girl posing in front of a phone camera to illustrate Trifilio’s opening lines: “Shut up, count your calories/I never looked good in mom jeans.” Those lyrics distill the Beach Bunny formula: sentimental and wistful, with a plainspokenness that prompts immediate sympathy. TikTok is better known for surfacing meme-ready rap bangers than indie rock, but Trifilio’s heavyhearted charm struck a nerve.
For almost two years, Trifilio was Beach Bunny’s only member. In 2017, eager to compete in a battle of the bands competition near her home in Chicago, she began putting together a group. On “Prom Queen” and its eponymous 2018 EP, she delivered teen-diary anecdotes in a bright voice that complimented the sticky hooks of her band’s twee-leaning pop-punk. With Beach Bunny’s debut LP, Honeymoon, Trifilio—now 23—levels up from Prom Queen’s wide-eyed stories of heartbreak, though the fears instilled by past romantic blunders continue to creep in. “You stay, you go, you say ‘I’m sorry’/I’m sorry too, for wanting you,” she hollers in “Colorblind.” “I’ll change the channel/I’ve seen this show before.”
Trifilio cites Marina Diamandis as a songwriting inspiration, though Beach Bunny’s sound more often echoes the sun-kissed garage rock of Best Coast or the fired-up power-pop of Charly Bliss. While Prom Queen often luxuriated in grief and resisted the notion of moving on, Honeymoon’s most rewarding moments come when Trifilio swaps the insecurities for a newfound assurance: “If you’re gonna love me, make sure that you do it right,” goes the chorus of early single “Dream Boy.” “Cuffing Season” combines a therapy session and a pep talk as Trifilio’s narrator attempts to remain resolute in a case of “are we, or aren’t we?”
At other times, Honeymoon’s lyricism can feel too slight: “She’s your girl, she’s in all your pictures/California girl, I wish I was her,” Trifilio laments in “Ms. California,” rehashing a tired trope of female jealousy. “But I’m confident when I’m with you… When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody,” she sings in closer “Cloud 9,” lines that feel superficial even as the insecurities they describe ring true. Thankfully, the rich, surfy melodies help to distract from the weak points.
Like Crazy For You before it, Honeymoon isn’t especially singular or groundbreaking—but Beach Bunny’s raucous spirit means it never goes stale, either. Trifilio excels in straightforward, recognizable experiences of heartache, while still leaving space for listeners to attach their own nuance. Even as we get a little older, Honeymoon suggests, the adolescent anxieties of earlier Beach Bunny songs never fully wane; we just get a little better at handling them. As long as there are heartbreaks and insecurities, albums like this will have purpose.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of TikTok videos to feature Beach Bunny’s “Prom Queen.” It has been updated with the correct number.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | February 13, 2020 | 7 | b9164e07-e211-4cbf-8fe8-bffa112f3882 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Are We There may be Sharon Van Etten's most present-tense album to date, her most immediate and urgent—the peak of a steady upward trajectory. Her songs emphasize the moment, both in the quality of her performance and in the rawness of her lyrics. | Are We There may be Sharon Van Etten's most present-tense album to date, her most immediate and urgent—the peak of a steady upward trajectory. Her songs emphasize the moment, both in the quality of her performance and in the rawness of her lyrics. | Sharon Van Etten: Are We There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19384-sharon-van-etten-are-we-there/ | Are We There | From the first notes of her 2009 debut, Because I Was in Love, New Jersey native Sharon Van Etten wrote with seeming effortlessness about the depravations of romance and the contortions of a heart either committed or broken, displaying a penchant for wrenching turns of phrase laden with dire implications. When she sang, “The moral of the story is don't lie to me again,” on “Consolation Prize”, it was the “again” that stuck in your gut, suggesting a pattern of aggression and acquiescence that would not necessarily end with the song. Her voice toggled fluidly between brave and broken, dogged and defiant—often within the same line. She whispered, then jumped to a fierce vibrato that could stop an army. Disclosing her darkest moments proved both empowering and unnerving, as though startled by her own strength. Even on her debut, she displayed the poise of a pro.
As with so many singer-songwriters—for whom lyrics and vocals take primacy over every other element—Van Etten never sounded quite so self-assured musically. Because I Was in Love showcased her quiet vocals and surprisingly nimble guitarwork, with producer Greg Weeks of Espers mostly staying out of her way. That subdued sound was going to be impossible to sustain for another album, much less an entire career, so it seemed almost inevitable when she introduced a full-band sound, complete with flourishes of pedal steel, on her follow-up, Epic. On 2012’s career-making Tramp, she worked with the National’s Aaron Dessner and emerged with her fullest and most fully realized album to date, even if it occasionally sounded overly decorous, even fussy. Her catalog has been a series of trials and experiments, driven by restlessness and perfectionism in equal measure, although weirdly the transitions between albums only serve to render each one more volatile and unpredictable.
It is, then, notable that Van Etten herself produced her fourth album, Are We There, with some assistance from Stewart Lerman. The two met while working on the second soundtrack to Boardwalk Empire and decamped to his New Jersey studio to record these new songs. Lerman’s work with Loudon Wainwright III, the Roches, and other singer-songwriters makes him a good fit for Van Etten, but perhaps more than any of her previous records Are We There sounds self-determined and self-directed. The music fits snugly against her vocals, with her guitar and piano foregrounded on opener “Afraid of Nothing”. As a result, these songs move fluidly and dramatically, but never ostentatiously. Even the woodwinds on “Tarifa” sound understated, as though careful not to distract from Van Etten’s performance.
It’s the most comfortable she’s sounded since Because I Was in Love, which is not to say the music lacks color or character. “Your Love Is Killing Me” is built on a Jenga-style assemblage of post-rock guitars and jittery snare taps, and even as it sprawls into a six-minute jam (her longest song to date), it never topples. Instead, the music only reinforces her repeated proclamation, “You tell me that you like it.” Elsewhere, Are We There softens and quietens. A purposefully stiff drum loop lends “Taking Chances” its brooding, conspiratorial tone, reining in the chorus and setting up an effective one-chord organ solo. The stark piano on “I Love You But I’m Lost” flutters nervously, as though reminding you that Van Etten’s whispers can convey screams. There is a live quality to the music, as though she has crafted each note with concerts in mind. Her songs emphasize the moment, both in the quality of her performance and in the rawness of her lyrics. As a result, Are We There may be her most present-tense album to date, her most immediate and urgent—the peak of a steady upward trajectory.
Even as she has settled into a successful solo career, Van Etten continues to write incisively about the volatility of love, with no loss of urgency or investment. Her songs tend to be excruciatingly confessional, largely indistinguishable from the singer herself, and Are We There reveals a new self-awareness with regard to her primary subject. On “I Know”, which features Van Etten alone on piano, she declares, “I sing about my fear and love and what it brings,” as though we didn’t know that already. On closer “Every Time the Sun Comes Up”, she asks, not entirely rhetorically, “People say I'm a one hit wonder, but what happens when I have two?” It’s a sly way to preempt any complaint that she has only one emotional or musical setting, but the next line turns the song upside-down: “I washed your dishes, then I shit in your bathroom.” Recently, Van Etten told Pitchfork that the line was originally a joke with her band, but it’s not hard to see why this incredibly anti-romantic line would have stayed in. It reveals the driving idea behind the album: It’s not the big moments that define or doom a relationship, but the everyday routines, the small sacrifices that accumulate over time, the stark realities of sharing your life with another person. You see them at their best and their worst, their most beautiful and their most vulgar. To her credit, Van Etten has never shrunk from this horrible and wonderful understanding. | 2014-05-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 27, 2014 | 8.2 | b918c79a-7689-4988-8583-d58b7c5b7ea2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Many artists re-record their best work because they’re in a dry spell and/or they’re sick of watching their old label make money off of the songs they made when they were young and signed a bad contract. Neither of these seem to be the case with Villagers though, and the re-recorded songs that make up Where Have You Been All My Life? swell with a different frustration. | Many artists re-record their best work because they’re in a dry spell and/or they’re sick of watching their old label make money off of the songs they made when they were young and signed a bad contract. Neither of these seem to be the case with Villagers though, and the re-recorded songs that make up Where Have You Been All My Life? swell with a different frustration. | Villagers: Where Have You Been All My Life? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21418-where-have-you-been-all-my-life/ | Where Have You Been All My Life? | Look up "re-recorded" on whatever streaming site you use, and you’ll find original performers doing hasty and underwhelming renditions of their biggest hits. Everything from "Hang On Sloopy" to "Pour Some Sugar on Me" to "O.P.P." stand as testaments that it’s nearly impossible to improve upon a definitive version. Villagers prove to be the exception to this rule with Where Have You Been All My Life?, a collection of re-recordings of material from their three previous albums that reframes the songs in an impressively cohesive manner.
Many artists re-record their best work because they’re in a dry spell and/or they’re sick of watching their old label make money off of the songs they made when they were young and signed a bad contract. What usually hinders re-recorded versions is a sense of "we got it right the first time" frustration that undermines the spirit of the original, but the new versions on Where Have You Been… swell with a different determination, one of "We’ve got to get it right this time." Recorded in one day last July, these mostly acoustic versions were reportedly all first or second takes with no overdubs. The band had already been touring in support of last April’s Darling Arithmetic for three months by the time they went into RAK Studios in London. Arithmetic tracks account for half of the songs on here, but Villagers have restructured the older songs to fit the sound of the newer material, unifying them in their delicate harmonies, brushed drums, and double bass arrangements.
A definite highlight on this collection is "Memoir," which Charlotte Gainsbourg recorded a version of in 2011 and which appeared as a Villagers B-side a year later. The distracting crowd noise and flat-tire-on-the-highway rhythm of that version were wisely left off this most recent recording, and the song touches a nerve even more discomfiting than before. Its desperate romantic lyrics hit more directly. "In the orgy I can vaguely hear the outline of your call," singer and songwriter Conor O’Brien sings at one point before telling the subject of the song, "you were the lighthouse to my broken boat." The latter image connects the song on this compilation with "My Lighthouse," which first appeared on 2013’s {Awayland}.
"The Waves," also originally from {Awayland}, is another highlight. On that album, it had an electronic undercurrent, which was later taken several fathoms deeper when remixed by house duo Psychemagik. The drastic acoustic reinterpretation on this album feels like the song’s natural state, the long-building crescendo threatens to swallow the singer before he has finished saying his piece. The Where Have You Been All My Life? title comes from a line in “The Soul Serene,” but naming it as such feels like Villagers begging for new audiences to ask that same question of the album. The music within warrants it.
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__ | 2016-01-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 12, 2016 | 7.5 | b9195eeb-e68c-47cc-b46f-20e91987452c | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
What does Kompakt's annual Pop Ambient series have left to say about the state of contemporary electronic music? | What does Kompakt's annual Pop Ambient series have left to say about the state of contemporary electronic music? | Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2012 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16203-pop-ambient-2012/ | Pop Ambient 2012 | What's left to say about the Pop Ambient series? That it appears every winter? Check. That it has become a bit of a chore? Done. That shifts in its tone and content are subtle? Been there. That it rarely breaks artists of note? Got it. It has become difficult to tease differences out of the series as its chapters have grown voluminous, and I'll submit that the real question we need to ask about the Pop Ambient series is not what remains unsaid but what the series itself has left to say. Pop Ambient 2012 arrives at a time when ambient and experimental artists routinely sing for their supper, offering theoretical frameworks and positioning their works as commentaries on music, media, and memory.
The goals of the PA series and its artists are largely sonic, bridging the gaps, however tenuously, between electronic music, modern classical, and pop. The series' flower motif suggests a kinship with Erik Satie's concept of furniture music, or music explicitly intended for the background. Gorgeous soundtracking is a fair, modest goal of ambient composers, but music of this ilk-- from Leyland Kirby (and his Caretaker alias) to Emeralds to Oneohtrix Point Never-- has felt so vibrant and rich in recent years that the offerings here seem slight. Stop me if you've heard this one before: PA12 contains another new Wolfgang Voigt side project (Mohn, with Jörg Burger), a Kompakt techno stalwart making his first-ever series contribution (Superpitcher), and notable outsiders (Simon Scott). Intrigued? Which volume of the series did you pull off the shelf to listen to in anticipation of these revelations?
Forgive the cynicism. The failure of PA12 has little to do with the individual tracks, most of which could, at worst, be harmlessly swapped out for the third-most-forgettable offering on any given PA compilation. There are highlights, as always: the beautiful simplicity of the piano that steers Superpitcher's "Jackson"; Wolfgang Voigt's ruptured, surprising orchestrations on "Rückverzauberung 5". Five years after lighting up PA07 with the Field's "Kappsta", Axel Wilner debuts his new guise, Loops of Your Heart, whose "Riding the Bikes" closes PA12 with lacy, somnambulent guitar. (In other words, the only new standout on PA12 is the alias of an artist who has already released three full-lengths for Kompakt.) There are more obvious missteps than in previous years, though. On "Richmodis", Triola masses clanging minor chords into a long, useless noir. Mohn's comp-opening offering, "Manifesto", is not just slow and ringing but comically ponderous. Magazine's self-edit of "The Visitors Bureau" is pro-forma symphonic drift.
Just as Now That's What I Call Music 40 hardly suggests permanence, PA12 is damned by its place in a series that grew stale several years ago. This is not even the best ambient compilation Wolfgang Voigt has appeared on in the past year: Kompakt regulars Andrew Thomas and bvdub (who makes an appearance here) compiled Air Texture Vol. 1, a frothy, generous collection that outmaneuvers PA12 at every turn. Ambient music feels rich and diverse right now, willing to engage with wider worlds. The expanses of PA12's tracks belie how cloistered and small the compilation actually is. There's nothing wrong with music that knowingly fades into the background, so long as you accept that sometimes the only room you're wallpapering is your own. | 2012-01-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-01-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Kompakt | January 25, 2012 | 4.5 | b9223974-e7bd-4bab-835f-a649d99e387b | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On her self-produced second album, the Melbourne folk singer embellishes her stark, bluesy songwriting with symphonic touches that occasionally get in the way of her daring vocal performances. | On her self-produced second album, the Melbourne folk singer embellishes her stark, bluesy songwriting with symphonic touches that occasionally get in the way of her daring vocal performances. | Grace Cummings: Storm Queen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grace-cummings-storm-queen/ | Storm Queen | Grace Cummings’ voice is unusually gruff, rootsy and ragged as car wheels skidding over rocks. Born in Victoria, Australia, where the land is constantly under threat by bushfires, Cummings was drawn to the cragginess of Bob Dylan and Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, as well as to the vivid melancholy of traditional Irish folk music. As a teenager, she played drums in a series of AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix cover bands. Today, she performs a mixture of canyon-inspired folk music and blues rock, the full tapestry of her influences on clear display.
Cummings’ debut album, 2019’s Refuge Cove, released by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Flightless Records, felt intensely lonely and alive. Her voice filled the large, reverby atmosphere, mostly unembellished, as she strummed a rusty-sounding guitar. Storm Queen, her self-produced second record, retains the ornate minimalism of its predecessor, although it comes with a smattering of symphonic touches: baritone saxophone, timpani drums, theremin.
The extra instrumentation, provided by an ensemble of local Melbourne musicians, is perhaps an attempt to broaden Cummings’ sonic picture, but it mostly feels unnecessary and arbitrarily deployed. The saxophone skronks like a human scream on the title track, while the theremin whistles like an undulating shriek on “Fly a Kite.” Both sound like a double of Cummings’ voice in a way that seems to rob her of catharsis; they do the yawping for her.
Cummings has a penchant for spontaneity. The majority of the songs on Storm Queen were recorded in three takes or less, and there’s an almost uncomfortable closeness to each recording; it feels intimate and live, as though the band is playing in-the-round. Unfortunately, Cummings’ relationship to the musicians who surround her feels incongruous. Her vocals are as uncontrolled as a volcanic eruption, but the carefully noodled Led Zeppelin-like riffs that accompany her strums tend to diminish her dramatic performances.
Still, Storm Queen possesses a magnificent tension, with each song veering wildly between catharsis and dissonance. “Dreams” is a highlight, with Cummings’ voice exuding seething intensity and world-weariness over an acoustic guitar that sounds both ruddy and psychedelic. She screams like somebody making scary faces in the mirror, filling the space of the song with unfettered energy before undercutting each attempt at release with a dismissive snarl.
The desire to ascend—like a kite or a bird, two recurring motifs throughout the record—is where that tension arrives, in both the lyrics and music. “Go fly a kite/Tie your troubles to the tail,” Cummings sings on “Fly a Kite” with melodramatic, baroque melodicism. The record’s most compelling moments, however, aren’t in their ascents, but in the gritted tension that seems to animate each song and make Cummings’ voice sound like a kite stuck to its tether, a netted bird desperately flapping inside its trap. In these solitary moments, she becomes wild, demonic, and dangerously uncaged.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | ATO | January 19, 2022 | 6.8 | b9265fa9-f8a7-445e-ab08-2ec42d549b09 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Drawing inspiration from the abject state of contemporary Britain and nourished by fantasies of righteous violence, the latest album from the UK producer is his heaviest in years. | Drawing inspiration from the abject state of contemporary Britain and nourished by fantasies of righteous violence, the latest album from the UK producer is his heaviest in years. | The Bug: Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-bug-fire/ | Fire | Twenty years ago, Kevin Martin was a man obsessed. Week in and week out, he did the rounds at reggae shops across London, flicking through bins of imported 7"s in search of the latest, wildest riddims from Jamaica. Martin’s background lay elsewhere: He had started out in the late 1980s as a post-punk saxophonist and screamer—one of his frequent collaborators was Justin K. Broadrick of grindcore legends Napalm Death—and in 1994, he had curated the landmark drone compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism. But dub was slowly creeping into Martin’s music; in the mid ’90s, he compiled Virgin’s Macro Dub Infection series, which traced dub’s pulse through post-rock, hip-hop, noise, and techno. By the end of the millennium, when Jamaican dancehall producers were making some of the most inventive beats on the planet, riddims like Steely and Clevie’s “Street Sweeper” had definitively rewired Martin’s brain. Hunkered down in his studio in Northwest London, Martin attempted to translate that ruthlessly spartan energy to his own doomy sensibilities. The result was 2003’s Pressure, released under his alias the Bug: Pairing Martin’s bare-knuckled bass-and-drum barrages with Caribbean-rooted singers and deejays like Paul St. Hilaire and ragga legend Daddy Freddy, the album established the Bug as one of the heaviest outfits in UK bass music.
Heaviness can take different forms: It can land like a punch or weigh like a lead blanket. Following the Bug’s equally tough London Zoo, Martin shifted his focus to King Midas Sound, a collaboration with British-Trinidadian dub poet Roger Robinson, and the force of his closed-fist blows gradually dissipated, as though melting into pure gravity. There were collaborations with Austrian experimental guitarist Fennesz, post-metal minimalists Earth, even the doleful folk musician Grouper. Over the past couple of years, working under a variety of aliases, Martin has kept up a steady stream of increasingly ethereal recordings, each one more eerily disembodied than the last. But on Fire, the pendulum swings back to the other extreme. Drawing inspiration from the abject state of contemporary Britain, nourished by fury and fantasies of righteous violence, it is Martin’s heaviest album in years.
Following a two-minute intro of pandemic-themed scene-setting, in which Robinson’s grim speculative fiction is set to Sunn O)))-like drones, the album explodes into action with its second track, “Pressure.” The ragged foghorn blast that opens the song feels genuinely apocalyptic, like the last sound you might hear before the world comes crashing down. Variations on this motif turn up across the album, peppering the record with fight-or-flight triggers.
Martin hasn’t sounded this energized since Pressure, and some of his techniques—like the sizzling bass tone of “Demon,” which suggests a smoldering speaker cone flapping in the wind—date all the way back to his ’90s work in the duo Techno Animal. He never overcomplicates: Most of these tracks throb away at 140 BPM, syncopated kick drums telegraphing an anxious, slow/fast cadence, bass writhing like a pit in the stomach. The monochrome character of his onslaught makes small details stand out: In “Fuck Off,” an insistent bass pulse is accompanied with hints of Psycho’s shower-scene string stabs; “Bang” is backlit with coruscating chords, as though a curtain of flames blazed behind his bomb-crater bass. Uniformly sullen, the record’s minor-key basslines do little more than inch up and down, as though they were too exhausted, too sick with rage, to offer anything more. Martin’s melodies aren’t just economical, they’re practically miserly—products of a wartime economy hoarding all of its resources for ordnance.
War is all over these songs, and it’s not just idle chat; it’s a metaphor for the spirit of insurrection that fuels the whole album. “This is a war/Ideological war,” croaks Kingston dub poet Nazamba on “War.” On “Bomb,” veteran grime MC Flowdan promises, “Well if a war man’s more than ready/Done them live on telly/System’s corrupt, needs to get bun up”; on “Pressure,” he is still more explicit in his call for vengeance: “While we a hunt for the food and them a argue about tax/People are dead, mum’s still crying/The fire’s gonna blaze on these aristocrats.” Martin’s bleak backdrops leave plenty of room for his vocalists to shine: “I kick shit, I rip shit, I leave shit with no head,” mutters Moor Mother on “Vexed,” in what must be one of the year’s most apoplectic performances. It’s not just what she seethes, but how she seethes. She snarls like she’s on the prowl, burning up with spite.
For all the omnipresent menace, it’s often a wildly fun listen, particularly when the rising UK MC Logan is on the mic. It’s present in the menacing way he growls, “Tell dem bwoy deh fuck off,” or the death-metal gurgle he puts on his chanted refrain of “War/Clash/War/Clash”—they’re as satisfying as the one-liners in any over-the-top action film. But the album casts a solemn shadow: The album’s final track, “The Missing,” is a spoken-word elegy for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people perished when a council flat went up in flames. (The 2017 disaster highlighted the deadly consequences of inequality in contemporary Britain. A public inquiry cited multiple “systemic failings” that led to the victims’ deaths; survivors called the public-housing development a “death trap.”)
Dub poet Roger Robinson somberly sketches a scene of holy deliverance, mourners attempting to hold onto the feet of their loved ones as the bodies of the dead ascend to the heavens: “A hundred people start floating from the windows of a tower block; from far enough away they could be black smoke from spreading flames.” The synthesizers swell in volume, an ambient lament. “Amongst the cirrus clouds, floating like hair, they begin to look like a separate city,” Robinson intones. “Someone looking on could mistake them for new arrivals to earth. They are the city of the missing. We now, the city of the stayed.” This moment of mournful gravitas puts Fire into context. It’s a reminder that Martin is not just a masterful stylist, in ambient and dancehall alike, but that his best work is grounded in a powerful sense of justice. Burrowing down to the elemental, he and his vocalists tap into an intoxicating wrath. It is electrifying, cleansing, and cathartic, like a fire that razes a corrupt system to the ground.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | September 1, 2021 | 8 | b92d53af-df5f-488a-8eab-5c3fd0504b0b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The L.A. noise-rock band's original score for Max Payne 3 replicates the third-person shooter action game's slow-motion frenzy. | The L.A. noise-rock band's original score for Max Payne 3 replicates the third-person shooter action game's slow-motion frenzy. | HEALTH: Max Payne 3 OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16646-max-payne-3-ost/ | Max Payne 3 OST | The new video game Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter that mixes cover-based and run-and-gun mechanics. Translated from the jargon, this means you peek over Max's shoulder as he hides behind stationary things and shoots at moving ones. He can also slow down time, turning frantic gunplay into underwater choreography in the manner of countless action films. The L.A. noise-rock band HEALTH's original score distinctively replicates this torpid frenzy, mostly by setting slow, languid themes against fast, urgent drums. In between, a moment of suspense is trapped and prolonged, and the feeling that something momentous is about to happen seldom flags. It's a generous and commanding piece of work, slightly checked by the homogenizing pressures of its format.
Max Payne 3 is organized around linear, contained events. This permitted HEALTH to create full-fledged compositions, from drafty FX hymns to throbbing anthems, instead of trying to rig up an album from bits of modular music-- a challenge faced by Amon Tobin with valor but mixed success on his fifth album, the score for Splinter Cell 3. But Max Payne 3 is still a pulse-pounding A-list action game, and the necessity for every rhythm to be impeccably flush, every change clearly telegraphed, keeps the music from feeling as dangerous as it might. It lumbers majestically through two modes, moody and awesome. You can never completely forget that some of it exists solely to make running down generic corridors feel heroic.
HEALTH habitually blend abrasive guitar and synth shards into clouds of heavenly opacity, tethered down by drum circles. This earthy yet ethereal sound, heralded by bands such as Boredoms and Liars, is a natural fit for Max Payne 3's pressurized slowness, although here, HEALTH sound more like their remix records than their mainline catalog, tearing down dance music to a brutish 4/4 thud and building shimmering towers of junk atop it. Any expansive collection of atmospheric instrumentals coming down the pike right now is going to call to mind Symmetry's epic Themes for an Imaginary Film, whose soft, rounded contours HEALTH answer with hard, brittle edges. The worst thing you can say about the score is that it sometimes effectively resorts to clichés.
HEALTH score easy points with liberal use of the musky attack-less string pads we call "cinematic" and rigid synth-and-bass arpeggios whorled with silvery John Carpenter fingerprints. The doomy chord pulses of "Shells" do exactly what they're meant to do: seamlessly get you hyped. You don't want to be distracted by any sonic quirks when you're trying to shoot a Brazilian commando in the face, though you might crave a few when you're not. But HEALTH also manage to sneak in things that freshen up the ears: Persian music inflections on "The Girl", vocal harmonies that find a whimsical seam between early music and Brian Wilson on "+90", and the baile funk slant of "Max Favela", one of the sole hints that the game takes place in sunny São Paulo and not Siberia.
Video gaming and music have a long history. Music helped arcade cabinets snare players. It provided auditory feedback on home consoles. In the 90s, notably in Japanese RPGs such as the Final Fantasy series, the irritatingly catchy ditty gave way to accomplished synthetic orchestral music, which could handle the emotional and narrative nuances emerging in games. In return, video games gave music a new market in lines such as Guitar Hero, plus heavily influenced new genres such as chillwave and, of course, chiptune. The core appeal of playing electronic instruments and playing video games is the same: Getting to release godlike powers in virtual space at the press of a button.
Back in 2005, a major artist like Tobin scoring a game felt novel, and it still slightly does. Plenty of games now use licensed music from indie bands, but few have original scores by name artists. But as games become more respectable and more like movies, as hard-pressed musicians seek out new revenue streams, and as interactivity continues to overtake passivity in our habits of virtual consumption, more frequent and closer collaborations between big-name artists and game designers look inevitable. HEALTH's quality but workmanlike release doesn't convince me that it'll be any great shakes for the standalone music market, but it's going to be fantastic for games. | 2012-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rockstar | May 31, 2012 | 7 | b92e02b4-870b-4334-9af4-273b57c3df5c | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On their earthy new album, the Bay Area metal trio Worm Ouroboros exhibit a literary flair and mysterious, eternal power. | On their earthy new album, the Bay Area metal trio Worm Ouroboros exhibit a literary flair and mysterious, eternal power. | Worm Ouroboros: What Graceless Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22702-what-graceless-dawn/ | What Graceless Dawn | The Bay Area metal lifers who comprise Worm Ouroboros are individually responsible for some of the heaviest music in the underground, but together they take a subtler, slower approach. Equally akin to ’80s acts like This Mortal Coil or Cocteau Twins as their contemporaries on the Profound Lore imprint, Worm Ouroboros inhabit a ghostly, gothy atmosphere. Since debuting in 2007, they have competently inverted the traditional structure of doom metal and post-rock (unrelentingly heavy albums with ambient interludes), making music that glides patiently and quietly, exploding only when the tension can no longer be contained.
Like Come the Thaw, their excellent 2012 album and first with Agalloch/VHOL drummer Aesop Dekker, their follow-up What Graceless Dawn is only six tracks long, though it spans over an hour. Tellingly, it takes Worm Ouroboros 15 minutes into the album and halfway through the second track, “Broken Movements,” before they unleash the full force of their sound. Until then, it’s mostly whispered vocals over Jessica Way’s chilly guitars and Lorraine Rath’s slithering basslines, with Dekker’s artful drumming knocking eerily against the walls. When “Broken Movements” reaches its climax, they all converge into a thunderous roar. Rath and Way wrap their vocals around each other like a string section, soaring over Way’s crushing riffs; together their voices form the guiding light of the album. But while Worm Ouroboros have never sounded more powerful as a three-piece, these type of crescendos are not the focus. The most crushing peaks instead come from its softer moments, like the heartbreaking coda to “(Was It) The Cruelest Thing” or the haunting intro of “Ribbon of Shadow.”
Throughout the record, the trio maintains a consistent, earthy mood, occasionally playing off one another with the intuition of an improv group. It pushes Warm Ouroboros to new heights. Way’s guitar can reverberate with a lonely, Lost Highway howl and sparkle with a metallic shimmer, often lending the album its texture; Rath’s bass playing serves as its melodic foundation. Dekker, meanwhile, eschews his typical assault with a more dynamic palette. His slow patter in the midsection of “Suffering Tree” gives it the feeling of an apocalyptic Christmas carol, while his dramatic, double bass drum rolls in “(Was It) The Cruelest Thing” provide a late-album burst of adrenaline.
While each of the album’s songs take a similar route through their 10-minute runtimes, Worm Ouroboros layer their music with enough nuances to keep things from getting too dense. As indicated by their band name, which is derived from the title of a cultishly beloved 20th century sci-fi novel, Worm Ouroboros have a literary flair. It’s inherent to their deeply poetic lyrics (“Weighing our worth in sacks of black earth/Filling our hearts and our graves with their sum”) and by the whispered passages of William Blake that open and close the album. Blake’s poems also give the record its bookending track titles, “Day” and “Night,” suggesting that What Graceless Dawn thematically covers a 24-hour span. This might be true (particularly if the span of your day mostly involves staring awestruck at a blackening sky, contemplating mortality with a lingering sense of dread). But Worm Ouroboros’ power feels mysterious and eternal: In just an hour, they conjure up an entire lifetime of darkness. | 2016-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | December 29, 2016 | 7.5 | b93434f4-507a-4633-be50-77dc2d5b9e11 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The Brooklyn trio follows 2009's Beast Rest Forth Mouth with a record that's admirable in large part because its ambitions are as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures. | The Brooklyn trio follows 2009's Beast Rest Forth Mouth with a record that's admirable in large part because its ambitions are as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures. | Bear in Heaven: I Love You, It's Cool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16440-bear-in-heaven-i-love-you-its-cool/ | I Love You, It's Cool | For a band that spends more than two years between studio albums, Bear in Heaven don't seem to have hang-ups about fucking around with the final result. This has worked out well for them: 2009's breakthrough Beast Rest Forth Mouth was the result of streamlining the proggy excesses of Red Bloom of the Boom into something familiar, wholly of the moment, and yet impossible to pin down-- you knew some combination of "indie," "rock," "synth," "dance," and "electro" should work, and yet not a single hyphenate stuck satisfactorily. A year later, the band commissioned artists ranging from High Places to Justin Broadrick for Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed, which defied all expectations associated with indie rock remix records by actually being pretty good.
Now a group whose albums can be described as "highly anticipated," Bear in Heaven masterfully punctured the hype cycle by slowing their third LP, I Love You, It's Cool, by 400,000 percent and streaming it on their website for over 2700 consecutive hours-- if you missed it, the deluxe version of I Love You comes with two hours of it. But besides being one hell of a PR stunt, the drone version of I Love You unintentionally laid out a crucial rule of engagement for Bear in Heaven's latest artistic divergence: Don't rush to judgment with this thing. It might not take four months for it to finally click for you-- but it might.
Wisely, the Brooklyn-via-Alabama trio use "Lovesick Teenagers" as the jumping off point for I Love You, specifically the Lindstrom & Christabelle version that appeared on Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed. The result won't be wholly unfamiliar due to Jon Philpot's boyish, confidently projected vocals, and even with all the crystalline textures, you never lose sight of Bear in Heaven as a wood-and-string, flesh-and-bone rock band at its core. The difference here is that while BRFM was a consistently locomative record, it took most of its rhythmic cues from easily identifiable indie precedents: the redneck punk-funk of Modest Mouse, Animal Collective's electronic tribalism. There's more of the Field in the way opener "Idle Heart" and later "Cool Light" play out: short, anticipatory windups that slowly thrust forward into a momentum that's constant throughout and never feels as fast as it actually is. This lends I Love You a structural fluidity that can make it slippery upon the first couple of listens, verses and choruses identifiable while in progress, but ending and beginning a few bars earlier than you'd usually expect.
Though I Love You doubles down on sequencers and digitization and was forged in the midst of Bear in Heaven's seemingly endless touring regimen, it's worth keeping in mind that they're not looking to carry hard drives for your favorite Kompakt producer. As Philpot memorably sings amidst the strobelit propulsion of single "The Reflection of You": "If you could dance with me/ I think you would like my moves." Note "if" and "think," which is really indicative of how Bear in Heaven write more about the idea of dancing than dance music proper-- someone who refers to "my moves" is likely a dead giveaway for a wallflower at heart. It's a contrast that works for them, as I Love You generates a legitimate libidinous charge amidst the friction of their new four-to-the-floor rhythmic constancy and the remnants of their previous itchiness: drummer Joe Stickney dropping flailing solos on "Cool Light", the bent guitar melody that prods Philpot like the sleep-depriving light pollution described on "Noon Moon", penultimate "Space Remains"' laser-tag meltdown. They could just be vessels for the uneasiness spilling over from Philpot's lyrics, which dare to get literal so as to portray the narrator as embittered, self-loathing, morally casual, or just out for a good time. "Kiss Me Crazy" indulges in a mutually destructive and irresistable romance that makes you think its title is missing a comma, while "Warm Water" gives itself up to some of I Love You's most beatific passages while masking its austere rejection. The synths hush as Philpot sings, "get up, c'mon," something that can be mistaken for a call for action when its context calls for closure: "I wanna love/ Without feeling your love."
Tracing back to why I Love You is such a slow burn, there's a fundamental challenge to Bear in Heaven's attempts to integrate the vast, incremental buildups of Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Axel Willner within the context of four-minute indie rock songs with their expected allotment of payoff. Weirdly, it's most evident in "Sinful Nature", even though it immediately jumps out the way "Lovesick Teenagers" did. As with "Lovesick", Philpot's lyrics are simultaneously empathetic ("You're let down by God/ You're let down by boring strangers") and conspiratorial ("Let's get loaded/ And make some strange things come true") toward its subject, and it's a hell of an arrangement, too. After the opening flashbulb pop of disco synths, the deep, liquid undertow of the rhythm section sounds like it could ebb infinitely. And yet, there's a point after Philpot sings the title and the beat drops out that "Sinful Nature" and I Love You beg for release, yet they strangely demur amongst the rising action, leaving a wash of backmasked reverb as the climax. I Love You never allows itself that chance to boil over again, and considering Beast Rest Forth Mouth remained unified despite its occasionally volcanic choruses, the solidarity of I Love You wouldn't necessarily be compromised by a couple of visceral peaks. The protracted cohesiveness leads to other minor quibbles I can't quite shake: the simonized synth textures and Philpot's piecemeal approach to constructing melody causes a couple of lulls where the record bleeds together, and the opium-laced swirl of "Sweetness & Sickness" feels like a closer marooned from some Bear in Heaven record that isn't this one.
Plenty of records from established bands seem to underwhelm on first listen, but what thankfully kept me coming back here? I think of recent releases from Tanlines, the Antlers, Chairlift, and Hooray For Earth that functioned in a similar way-- each from New York, each possibly identifiable as "synth-pop." It's the kind of thing people point to when trying to figure out why Brooklyn doesn't appear to be on the cutting edge of indie rock anymore, but it's an unfair projection to assume that's what Bear in Heaven are aiming for. Similar to Burst Apart or Mixed Emotions or Something, these are songs that feel welcoming because of how they reflect and integrate themselves into real life-- the people, relationships, and emotions described herein are relatable and open-ended, and hell, considering the sound of "urban maturity" is typically seen as strictly the realm of baritones and bassoons, it's refreshing to think Bear in Heaven and their colleagues might be onto a refreshing alternative. It'd be unreasonable to expect Bear in Heaven to keep writing "Lovesick Teenagers" over and over again as adults with messy romantic complications, and I Love You, It's Cool is admirable in large part because its ambitions are every bit as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures-- you don't have to call it "adult indie," but it feels like conflicted indie rock for adults. | 2012-04-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hometapes / Dead Oceans | April 5, 2012 | 7.5 | b94298ea-ff8c-49af-a25b-9dc5af375cfe | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Though the ethereal presence of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell is unmistakable, the UK band’s self-titled debut is often tedious. | Though the ethereal presence of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell is unmistakable, the UK band’s self-titled debut is often tedious. | The Soft Cavalry: The Soft Cavalry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-soft-cavalry-the-soft-cavalry/ | The Soft Cavalry | The old “this isn’t a side project” cliché applies a bit differently to the Soft Cavalry, a UK band centered around the married duo Rachel Goswell and Steve Clarke. Already revered as the sighing singer-guitarist of reunited ’90s dream-pop trailblazers Slowdive and their country-folk successor, Mojave 3, Goswell has built on that legacy in recent years with a low-key supergroup, Minor Victories, and as a guest on new albums from American Football and Mercury Rev. Her ethereal presence is unmistakable on the Soft Cavalry’s self-titled debut. But the dominant voice here belongs to Clarke, who played in various lesser-known acts before meeting Goswell while tour-managing for Slowdive in 2014.
The Soft Cavalry arrives less as a Slowdive extracurricular activity than as a new outlet for Clarke, whose brother and former bandmate Michael Clarke produces. Along with Midlake/Mercury Rev keyboardist Jesse Chandler, the lineup also includes a drummer who has collaborated with the Clarke siblings on other projects (including backing Ricky Gervais in a 2016 mockumentary film). The resulting collection of cavernous electro-rock, elaborately adorned psych-pop, and winsome ambient-folk is polished and professional-sounding, but it’s also as tedious and unmemorable as the group’s name.
There are glimmers of promise. Lead singles “Dive” and “Bulletproof,” also the album’s opening one-two punch, set Steve Clarke’s wispy, overly processed lead vocals and Goswell’s glassy harmonies amid click-tracked gloom that’s passably reminiscent of Radiohead’s early-’00s followers like Doves. Slowdive fans should welcome Goswell’s lead vocal on the pastoral lullaby “Passerby,” though the song is also an example of how the type of nature metaphors often used to describe her other band are something of a tic in Clarke’s lyrics, as “mountains peak,” “rivers flow,” and “waters break.”
Within this lane of poe-faced, British-style, aughts-throwback indie rock, the album doesn’t lack for variety. “Never Be Without You” is a jangling love song that reaches for the Cure but falls short. “Only in Dreams” is drumless and meditative, with fluttering woodwinds. “Mountains” is a painfully cheesy neo-psych power ballad. The biggest departure is “Careless Sun,” which drapes Clarke’s and Goswell’s vocals in vocoder-like effects, though with its orchestral bombast and portentous lyrics about “ancient prophecies,” it’s also the album’s worst clunker.
Most songs are brooding and midtempo, underpinned by one-finger piano lines and bland drum programming, repeating undistinguished metaphors longer than concision might demand. The title of romantic duet “The Velvet Fog” happens to be American crooner Mel Tormé’s nickname, but the song’s trudging pomp-rock recalls any number of early-millennium UK hype bands that most people have rightly forgotten. Finale “The Ever Turning Wheel” is an arena-scale, seven-minute enactment of a commonplace lyrical concept about a wheel that’s “not slowing down.” On the same song, Clarke also urges, awkwardly, “Keep your head above the water that is rising.”
The most intriguing non-single on The Soft Cavalry is “Spiders.” Although still a little ponderous, and at least a minute too long, the song works because the ideas behind it are as remarkable as the album’s always-lavish production. The bass line is so bare and jagged that it’s almost a hook, and the lyrics, which I hear as comparing a new love to two spiders building a fresh web together, are genuinely unusual. “Leave our webs,” Goswell and Clarke’s voices intone, “Begin again/Like spiders.” It’s a shame their first album as an artistic unit isn’t as compelling, but with luck and a little inspiration, there will be more silk to spin. | 2019-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union | August 10, 2019 | 5.8 | b9466aac-b676-40ea-b55b-16f0b3dfb602 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Amadou & Mariam reached international acclaim after 2005's Dimanche à Bamako; they follow that with a more global record featuring guests from France, the Ivory Coast, and Canada, as well as Englishman Damon Albarn. | Amadou & Mariam reached international acclaim after 2005's Dimanche à Bamako; they follow that with a more global record featuring guests from France, the Ivory Coast, and Canada, as well as Englishman Damon Albarn. | Amadou & Mariam: Welcome to Mali | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12435-welcome-to-mali/ | Welcome to Mali | 2005's Dimanche à Bamako rocketed Amadou & Mariam to international acclaim more than three decades after the beginnings of their respective musical careers. It was a richly deserved arrival that retained the spirit of their music with new beats and sounds incorporated by global pop star Manu Chao and his co-producers Marc-Antoine Moreau and Lauren Jais. On Welcome to Mali, Moreau and Jais stick around to steer the duo toward a harder, more outright pop approach.
Damon Albarn also drops in to produce the opening track and first single "Sabali", one of the best things he's been involved in this decade. The song opens in overtly nostalgic territory, with Mariam Doumbia's resigned opening lines run through a light filter, but it soon jumps into a different realm, with her falsetto sweeping over mournful keyboards. It's not every day you hear an African record that uses ELO as a touchstone, but this song does it to devastating emotional effect.
That opening shot is part of an eclectic landscape that at times sounds West African and at others sounds completely divorced from geography. Dimanche à Bamako, which means "Sunday in Bamako", Mali's capital, felt like a product of that city. Welcome to Mali, however, seems a strange title for a record that sounds so global. The dramatic string arrangement on the English-language "I Follow You" is distinctly European, while Canadian/Somali rapper K'Naan's shout-out to the "original West Coast-East Coast collaboration" could either refer to Africa's East and West Coasts or to Africa's West Coast and America's East Coast-- the two ends of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Sequencing is important, too-- the Western strings of "I Follow You" come on the heels of the solo-bowed instrument that lends a place-less feel to "Bozos". Amadou's guitar is a little less prominent on this record than the last, but close listening reveals impressive stylistic dexterity as he moves from simple strumming to fluid melodic playing to staccato rhythmic patterns inspired by the Malian ngoni, a cousin of the guitar.
Somewhat improbably, Amadou & Mariam have become a musical laboratory where the two principle players, the blind couple from Mali, are willing to try nearly anything. Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoli drops in on one track and it feels completely natural. Pianos aren't common in Africa because the weather makes it tough to keep them in tune, but there's piano all over this album, and it sounds great rubbing up against koras (17-string West African harp) and balafons (West African marimba). On the title track, Amadou's guitar accents the chorus with big, bent surf chords, and it sounds not only logical but inevitable.
"Inevitable" is a pretty good word for the stardom of Amadou & Mariam. People this amazingly talented and open to new sounds and ideas rarely remain obscure, especially after so many years honing their craft and building their catalog. On further examination, in fact, Welcome to Mali might not be such a strange title after all. This album is an affirmation of global connectivity and an emerging global culture that transcends and repurposes tradition as it sees fit-- the sound of Mali merging with the world at large. | 2008-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Global | Because | November 18, 2008 | 8.4 | b94969a0-ad08-402f-8a6b-65b06bf668ca | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On his second solo album, Stranger Things actor Joe Keery fights his way through the simulation with winking, off-kilter synth-pop. | On his second solo album, Stranger Things actor Joe Keery fights his way through the simulation with winking, off-kilter synth-pop. | Djo: Decide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/djo-decide/ | Decide | Joe Keery knows what you are probably thinking—another actor with a musical side project? Ugh. To Keery’s credit, making music is more than a passing vanity project; before he found life-altering fame playing Steve Harrington, the reformed bad boy of Stranger Things, he played guitar in the Chicago psych-rock band Post Animal. Over the last few years, in between roles as a murderous rideshare driver and a beleagured video game designer, he’s been kicking around a solo synth-pop project called Djo. As suggested by the moniker, which is pronounced like his first name, it’s still him—but with a wink.
Djo’s vibes-forward second album, Decide, conceals its anxieties about change and identity beneath an onslaught of synthesizers and Auto-Tune, often in the interest of fun but occasionally to its detriment. Written and produced alongside Adam Thein, Decide takes full advantage of studio wizardry. Opener “Runner” begins with a series of borderline 8-bit bleeps as Keery commits to growth—“People never change/But I have to try”—delivered in a crystal-clear falsetto. Soon enough, the song transitions into a slicker, chromatic sound, all vocodered vocals and savvy electronica that wraps up with a strangled shout. Sometimes, the full-bodied pastiche can’t hide some clunky lyricism. “I know my hair looked good in the bathroom at the bar/Turns out I left my wallet at the bathroom bar” goes one such line on the Talking Heads-esque “Gloom.” An exploration of the pitfalls of ego—and potentially good-natured jab at his own famous mane—it’s a charming attempt at nodding to his audience, even if his songwriting isn't quite up for the challenge.
It is ironic, then, that the best tracks on Decide tend to be the longer ones, when Keery’s instrumental impulses are allowed to spiral in unexpected directions (those psych rock roots die hard). While agonizing over the grip of social media, “Half Life” toggles between ominous stillness and bursts of sparkly brightness in a manner that evokes a dopamine loop. “On and On,” a song about doomscrolling, coasts along on a throbby wobble before skyrocketing into an arena rock-sized percussion breakdown.
Decide is a fun, off-kilter synth-pop album that proves Keery’s talent, but by its conclusion, a clearer picture of its maker fails to emerge. (One lovely exception is “End of Beginning” with its lyrics about returning to Chicago and reconnecting with a past version of himself.) As on his debut TWENTY TWENTY, Djo proudly reps influences like Daft Punk and Tame Impala, borrowing their tricks without adding much in the way of innovation. Still, the lack of personal revelations is forgivable: Keery has explicitly said that he hoped the Djo persona—he sports a ’70s bowl cut wig onstage and in promo pics—would help distance himself from his onscreen roles. There is something tragic about an album preoccupied with the fakeries of technology made by someone whose fans have as largely formed a relationship with him through the screen. But with Djo, he is finding his way through the simulation. | 2022-09-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | AWAL | September 22, 2022 | 6.8 | b9537e8d-a726-4b5c-93d5-19477f4af53d | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Since their inception, Kylesa have translated instability into energy, outlasting membership changes and tragedies to create strange and compelling stylistic welds. But on their darker sixth album, the Savannah band sometimes let this genre pillaging overtake their songcraft. | Since their inception, Kylesa have translated instability into energy, outlasting membership changes and tragedies to create strange and compelling stylistic welds. But on their darker sixth album, the Savannah band sometimes let this genre pillaging overtake their songcraft. | Kylesa: Ultraviolet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18057-kylesa-ultraviolet/ | Ultraviolet | Kylesa have always been a moving target. Since their inception, the Savannah, Ga., group has translated instability into energy, outlasting membership changes and tragedies to create strange and compelling stylistic welds. During the last decade, they’ve shouldered themselves nominally somewhere between sludge metal and psychedelic rock, but those terms are simply outsider touchstones for Kylesa’s brilliant internal turbidity. Indeed, their music is a mix of hardcore force and pop approachability, narcotic textures and double-drummer thunder. They are less defined by any one of those elements than the way they treat them as critical components within a grand crucible, parts meant to be steadily whisked into an alchemic whole. To wit, when Brooklyn Vegan asked frontman Phillip Cope to list his favorite songs of the year in 2010, he named the usual suspects and stylistic peers (Torche, High on Fire) alongside dream-state indie rock (Beach House), insurgent post-punk garage rock (Abe Vigoda), and bands that, like Kylesa, still get dubbed metal because of heavy pedigrees and references (Alcest). This variety has long served Kylesa well, too, pushing them toward wider acceptance even as they’ve redoubled their strange syntheses.
After a string of LPs that have consistently found Kylesa fortifying these wayward genre aggregations, Ultraviolet-- their sixth album and second for Season of Mist-- is an unexpected misstep. At first, Ultraviolet might feel passive or polite, as though Kylesa is the metal band auditioning for a roster spot on Sub Pop or Merge. There’s a slow-burning ballad, a straightforward charge or two, and at least one tune that stretches shoegaze reverie over quickly flickering riffs. It’s as if they’ve tempered their approach, eliminating the exciting outliers of their toolkit to arrive at a hard rock album that sounds standard enough to be safe. Past Kylesa albums have felt alternately like bulldozers and magnets; Ultraviolet often feels only like another middling record.
But the problem is that Kylesa have actually let their genre pillaging overtake their actual songcraft-- that is, in trying to give the psychedelic, shoegaze and jam band aspects of their sound more room within the spotlight, they’ve created a mess that sometimes seems rudderless. The first three tracks, for instance, feel like a non-navigable maze with no steady vectors or outlined intentions: Opener “Exhale” shortchanges a great hook from Laura Pleasants with verses that don’t support the same weight and an instrumental breakdown that simply stalls the song. “Unspoken” hides behind an unnecessary 80-second introduction and subsequently plunges into an unremarkable and overly long solo, with Cope dancing around the impressive groove as though he’s ashamed of its simplicity. And during “Grounded”, Cope drowns many of his own vocals in effects, hiding them behind the wallop like coded messages. Likewise, Pleasants harmonizes the chorus with herself, singing in a round that distracts from the song’s sizzling riff. Time and again, from start to finish, Ultraviolet pauses to concede to such extraneous effects and rockpiled elements, as if Kylesa have finally made the mistake of brandishing their eccentricity rather than simply thriving on it. Ultraviolet rarely feels singular or confident; it’s the sound of a band attempting to underline its claims to distinction.
But when Kylesa allows those extrinsic factors to emphasize their momentum rather than detract from it, they are unstoppable: “We’re Taking This”, for instance, is a monstrous flogging, with guitars that twist like rusty corkscrews, drums that push ahead like a cavalcade, and a refrain that feels like a battle cry. Thing is, all of Kylesa’s itinerant weirdness is here, too-- guitars that suddenly warp out of time, drums that pull back enough to give the textures space, and backmasked harmonies that swirl around Cope’s lead like vapor trails. The same holds for the two-minute bruiser “What Does it Take”, which gallops from the gates and doesn’t pull up until the next song begins. But Kylesa shoehorns a kaleidoscopic guitar solo into the tune and saturate the space between the drums and the vocals with guitar effects, not a central riff. “Low Tide,” the album’s best surprise, is a drifting, magnetic ballad; overactive bass, distant harmonies, and streaks of soft guitar noise create an impressionistic web for its starry-eyed hook. In all three instances, Kylesa’s disparate strains work together to create the same inexorable sense of euphoria that unites most of the band’s influences, if no longer their entire catalog. Kylesa albums once seemed cut instantly from whole cloth. Despite its highs, Ultraviolet is a patchwork of arduousness, with some seams still showing. | 2013-05-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Season of Mist | May 30, 2013 | 7 | b9543814-b82d-4006-be14-533e89ffeed9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
There’s nothing redeeming about Tekashi 6ix9ine’s DUMMY BOY, though he surely wishes there was. | There’s nothing redeeming about Tekashi 6ix9ine’s DUMMY BOY, though he surely wishes there was. | 6ix9ine: DUMMY BOY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6ix9ine-dummy-boy/ | DUMMY BOY | That fame is a drug is a cliché, but for Tekashi 6ix9ine there’s no other explanation. The polarizing, 22-year-old Bushwick, Brooklyn-raised, rainbow-haired rapper spent years desperately searching for a way to catapult himself into the limelight. He horrified the fashion world with a now infamous outfit that displayed the words “Pussy Eater” and “Nigga” on a long black jersey in bold, but that brief virality didn’t pan out. Then, an 18-year-old Tekashi 6ix9ine scratched and clawed for internet cool points by posting a heinous video to Instagram in which he performed sexual acts on a 13-year-old, resulting in a plea deal and years of excuses. Finally, when all other tactics proved to be disastrous failures, he dealt himself to a well-known set of Brooklyn-based Bloods that saw Tekashi as their meal ticket. In exchange, Tekashi viewed this as an opportunity to land the credibility he sought.
Just days before DUMMY BOY was set to be released, Tekashi 6ix9ine’s world started to crumble. At a probation violation hearing, a judge required him to disassociate from all gang members. After popping up on the Breakfast Club radio show to speak about his break from the gang, threats against his life were made, and in an effort to avoid a public act of violence, the FBI rushed a racketeering and firearms charge onto the crew, including Tekashi, who now faces life in prison. His album, DUMMY BOY, first delayed, then leaked, then rushed to release, seems aware of this new reality.
The Tory Lanez-assisted “KIKA” is a blatant effort by Tekashi to clear his name. The track, which seems to have been recorded in recent weeks—indicated by Scott Storch’s low rate rip off of Kodak Black’s “Zeze” instrumental—is Tekashi dipping back into his tiresome gruff-voice screamo flow as he attempts to separate himself: “I do my own shit, fuck all them niggas I used to roll with/I know you used to see me with niggas, but that’s that old shit.” He then implements an instantly stale running joke throughout the album of getting cut off before he is allowed to scream his signature ad-lib and call to the gang, “TR3YWAY!,” like on “KIKA” when Tory Lanez says, “‘It’s fuckin’ Tr-’/Oh wait, I forgot you can’t say that shit.” It’s a facade that Tekashi tries to hold up throughout the album with jokes, but instead it comes across as cries for help.
But a majority of DUMMY BOY isn’t about his impending case, and is mostly the standard fare of Tekashi throwing sounds and flows at the wall, praying something sticks. On “BEBE,” he taps South Florida producer Ronny J—known for speaker-blaring production for Denzel Curry and Lil Pump—to lace him up with a cheap, imitation reggaeton track. On the Lil Baby-featuring “TIC TOC,” Tekashi hops on an instrumental that incorporates an acoustic guitar as he tries to repeat the success stories of “Sold Out Dates” and “Drip Too Hard.” But Tekashi does find himself two relevance-seeking confidants in Kanye West and Nicki Minaj, both of whom appear twice on the album, with Kanye considering his plight on “FEEFA”: “They tried to say I wasn’t black no more/About as black as Macklemore.” The album is deeply reliant on guests—on every song but one—and for an artist who made his name solo (“GUMMO” and “KOODA”), it feels like a self-realization that his ideas are running slim.
Online, there’s no trending “free Tekashi” hashtag and no outpouring of support from the artists and influencers—besides Nicki Minaj—who pretended they were blind as they gladly used up every last bit of his stardom. Uninspired as it is, DUMMY BOY is an album that will have an impact and likely would have done more if he was around to promote it. Yet, it will be known as the moment Tekashi 6ix9ine realized that maybe the fame he’s tirelessly tried to achieve and sustain wasn’t worth it at all. | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | ScumGang Records | December 3, 2018 | 3.4 | b963b540-e290-4f07-923f-7a380d951481 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The perpetual Atlanta B-lister sounds like a guest on his own albums, outshone by features from Gunna, Young Thug, Offset, Big Sean, and more. | The perpetual Atlanta B-lister sounds like a guest on his own albums, outshone by features from Gunna, Young Thug, Offset, Big Sean, and more. | Rich the Kid: The World Is Yours 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rich-the-kid-the-world-is-yours-2/ | The World Is Yours 2 | An Atlanta transplant from Queens and the (unofficial) fourth Migo, Rich the Kid has built a career as the perpetual barnacle on the underbelly of better artists. Even in his own music, he is best enjoyed as a side item: on his Kendrick Lamar-led single “New Freezer,” on a series of mixtapes with Migos, on label compilations. As if cognizant of this, his album, The World is Yours 2, boasts 14 features across 16 songs.
And yet, somehow, Rich the Kid thinks he’s a generational voice. “The album is going to be the most streamed album,” he told Billboard, presumably with a straight face. “I know for sure. I am the hottest artist in the fucking world.” To be clear: He isn’t. But he’s probably right that the streaming algorithms will love him: His songs are so generic they could could auto-play after just about any popular rap song of the moment.
He has a ton of money and no imagination; not since Lil Boat 2 has a rapper made flexing sound so boring. “They know I got cash, I ain’t gotta brag no more,” he raps on “4 Phones,” despite the fact that he’s already been bragging for nearly 30 minutes. The rare glimpse of even a half-interesting thought is usually indebted to another rapper. His pinky looks like a waterslide. His racks taller than Yao Ming. His plug’s in Beijing. All ideas repurposed from artists he’s worked with, most of them on this very album.
The best moments all come courtesy of his guests: the Jay Critch hook on “Like Mike,” the Gunna flow on “Fall Threw,” the Vory song Rich basically guests on toward the end of the album (“Ring Ring”). The clunker king Big Sean, of all people, upstages his host with the verse of the album: “I go off, go in, go up, but never go back/I know we in a league of our own, bitch, I’m pro-black/Just hit a lick for my grandsons and I don’t have sons/But that’s how far I’m thinking ahead, bitch, and some,” he raps on “Two Cups.” There is a cleverness, a sense of identity, to his verse that the rest of the album is desperately missing.
Production can be the great equalizer, and The World is Yours 2 is often redeemed by its beatmakers: Frank Dukes, Wheezy Beats, T-Minus, Sevn Thomas, Nard & B, D.A. Doman, and frequent producer Lab Cook. Together, they patch the obvious cracks in his songcraft. The haunted whistling of the intro, the piercing squeal of “Save That,” and the booming drums of “Splashin” all help lacquer over the platitudinous raps. The only thing more engrossing than all this rich production is imagining, while Rich the Kid busily squanders goodwill, what a more engrossing rapper might have made of it. | 2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | March 29, 2019 | 5.6 | b967da7d-401e-4523-bda6-792a5844049c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The second nominally solo album from the former Yuck frontman uses improvisation, repetition, and group interplay as ways of breaking free of traditional modes of songwriting. | The second nominally solo album from the former Yuck frontman uses improvisation, repetition, and group interplay as ways of breaking free of traditional modes of songwriting. | Daniel Blumberg: On&On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-blumberg-onandon/ | On&On | To improvise is to stand at the edge of a precipice and cast yourself over, with the belief that something—your own proficiency, other players, familiar musical meter, or pure luck—will catch you on the way down. The legendary free-music guitarist Derek Bailey referred to it as “playing without memory”: to rid oneself of standard chords and pre-established songwriting expectations and instead allow spontaneity to guide a performance.
When Daniel Blumberg left Yuck in 2013, this was the world he immersed himself in—one that wasn’t predicated on mining ’90s rock nostalgia so much as consummating his ever-evolving vision. He established himself as a fixture at the London experimental music haven Cafe OTO and spent the next five years performing and collaborating with other like-minded musicians, releasing music in various formations—Hebronix, Oupa, and Guo, to name a few—but mostly making art and staying out of the public eye. After going through a breakup, Blumberg dipped his toes back into conventional songwriting, resulting in his 2018 solo debut, Minus. That record was built around unhurried ballads with atonal flourishes, whereas his latest album, On&On, is based on repetition and reinterpretation of recurring themes, like he’s looking to break free from having to arrange traditional songs altogether.
On&On features the same musicians from Minus (Ute Kanngiesser on cello, Billy Steiger on violin, Tom Wheatly on double bass, and Jim White of Dirty Three on drums), who Blumberg has credited with being instrumental to his artistic process. Iterations of the title track are interspersed throughout the record like temporal markers, each of them more formless than the last, with an additional “&On” appended each time to signify the developing nature of the work. These recurrences share just the semblance of a melodic motif; some are gentle, others chaotic. On the opener, he summons a reverie with gentle acoustic guitar and artificial harmonics. “Take a man out for a walk, holding his hand,” he muses, seconds before a sudden, violent thwock punctures the stereo field. Is that a percussive non-sequitur by White or a fortuitously toppled instrument? It doesn’t really matter; it’s forever a part of that one recording, and it will never happen again.
Blumberg and the quartet move with gentle fluidity, displaying a trust that can only be forged by hours of listening to each other play. You can hear this on songs like “Sidestep Summer”—where a discordant groove gives way to a delicate chorus that slips away almost as soon as it arrives, replaced by abrasive splashes of sound—or the simmering pitter-patter and room noise that opens “Silence Breaker,” where the band is joined by Elvin Brandhi, the improvisational lyricist who’s also Blumberg’s partner in the duo BAKH. Though it’s billed as a solo album, On&On captures what is ultimately a community effort. The songs are Blumberg’s, but the performance belongs to them all.
The seven-minute indie-rock centerpiece “Bound” is the closest Blumberg comes to writing something reminiscent of his past projects. There’s a powerful moment at its midpoint when the pining guitar line disintegrates and all momentum suddenly grinds to a halt. “It was a mistake to put that ring on your finger,” Blumberg moans as layers of textural tremolo bowing begin to lift him up. “When I hit the hay/When I end the day… To be online forever/To be offline together.” It’s the only time he makes specific reference to modern-day ailments, as if to remind us that he hasn’t entirely sequestered himself away.
Like Minus, On&On was recorded and seen through completion by producer Pete Walsh, the longtime Scott Walker collaborator who worked with the pop star turned avant-garde enigma for decades. It’s hard not to draw career parallels between Blumberg and artists like Walker or the late David Berman, who mentored Blumberg and to whom the album is dedicated. All of these artists got some taste of music stardom early in their lives before rejecting that premise altogether and dedicating themselves to the notions that moved them: craft, process, and perilous experimentation. Blumberg asserts that even for the creator, a song can be whatever you need it to be in the moment, a vessel for self-exploration. On&On shows that he’s wholly enmeshed his songwriting and improvisation in a way that feels unique to 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. | 2020-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | August 4, 2020 | 7.6 | b9689613-a9fa-4ad9-a618-46616be34e0e | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
The jangle-pop band’s latest is a deceptively cheery-sounding reckoning with the violence of white American history. | The jangle-pop band’s latest is a deceptively cheery-sounding reckoning with the violence of white American history. | Nana Grizol: South Somewhere Else | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nana-grizol-south-somewhere-else/ | South Somewhere Else | Theo Hilton started Nana Grizol in 2007 as a way to express his anxiety as a young gay man in Athens, Georgia. Since then, Nana Grizol has released four albums, all unified in their jangle-pop sound and themes of queerness and American ennui. Their newest album, South Somewhere Else, is similar—it’s equally scrappy, with warbling vocals and booming brass band—but now, Hilton seems to be preoccupied with his own whiteness. On South Somewhere Else, he explores his individual identity within the greater American framework of violent white history.
Considering its topic of choice, the album sounds fairly chipper. Guitars bounce around, distorted and messy, and Hilton has a snotty delivery that makes everything sound like a speech he was forced to give in front of his middle-school gym class. “Plantation Country” bursts with crashing cymbals and a shrieking trumpet while Hilton muses on, well, our plantation country, the “beauty that disguises violence,” white complicity in its “soft, insipid silence.” It’s hard to define the mood of this—Is Hilton angry? Ashamed? Or is he just recounting the facts as they stand? His lyrics are often verbose and vague, which prevents some of words from packing a punch in the way he might wish.
You can hear parallels to bands like P.S. Eliot, white bands defined by their small-town experiences, singing about the insecurities and dissatisfactions that plague everyone. For many non-white listeners, myself included, the appeal of these bands lies in the universality of the emotions, but there is still the issue of place and skin. This makes his reckoning on South Somewhere Else welcome, if a little obscure. He wonders about the “comfort in the dream of simple pasts” and asks himself if he finds accountability “too tough to task.” As listeners, do we feel bad for him here? Are we meant to be glad for the white Americans who find solace in rewritten history? Just as the image of a beautiful, bloody plantation conjures up “aggressions/in the answers that evade the questions,” it’s difficult to know where Hilton stands beside sunshine-y guitar and hard-to-parse lyrics.
On the title track, Hilton makes his feelings more explicit. “It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place somewhere else,” he sings, his lilting voice bouncing on top of toe-tapping piano, like he’s talking over beers at his hometown bar. He visits relatives who “couldn’t quite tell” you about your hometown’s history; he gazes out at the “Jim Crow geographies” that “haunt all of the streetscapes we’d come to know well.” This is when Nana Grizol is best. The production is joyous, but a little embarrassed about feeling so. Hilton’s words are precise, and makes it clear that the only reason that the racism and white supremacism of the South felt like it was somewhere else was because the band itself is white. Hilton says it plainly, while tracking his story through “all white restaurants,” that maybe the South was somewhere else, “we weren’t noticing where power was held/Captivated, the capitol’s … white liberal logics prevailed.” And they will prevail, unless white Americans are willing to concede their faults, their obliviousness, and their history, as Hilton does here.
“About the Purpose That We Serve” is one of the album’s most raucous moments, but still self-consciously so. It feels like Hilton is aiming his displeasure at white people or liberals, offering “Some food for thought, one just might choke on what they’re given/There’s so, so many voices—look around and you’ve got choices — but the/Angle’s always altered for convenience.” It’s impossible to deny the timeliness of this sentiment. We have a government that refuses to care for its people, an indoctrinated population that believes what the government gives them is all that they deserve, and everyone else marching in the street, getting shot, maimed, or killed occasionally for not being like the others. But this album isn’t a protest album. It’s an admission of privilege and of history, and an often catchy, summer-y one at that. Hilton ends the album sarcastically, facetiously instructing that “You’ve got no way of knowing/So leave it to the ones who do/Be it a priest or politician/Know it’s never you.” That’s how the ruling class wants you to feel, isn’t it? That the South is somewhere else, that you’re not smart enough, not strong enough, not white enough, or rich enough to do anything that could change anyone’s life. But the South is here, and so are you.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Arrowhawk / Don Giovanni | June 20, 2020 | 7 | b96f66ec-a468-456b-b3ac-d3d4531db700 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Produced entirely by Kenny Beats, the album’s reserved musical approach magnifies the blunt scene-setting Vince has used to build his name over the last decade. | Produced entirely by Kenny Beats, the album’s reserved musical approach magnifies the blunt scene-setting Vince has used to build his name over the last decade. | Vince Staples: Vince Staples | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vince-staples-vince-staples/ | Vince Staples | Vince Staples thrives on contrasts. His lyrics are filled with first-person accounts of a grim adolescence and isolated moments of anguish that feel both lived-in and distant all at once. And then, before you know it, he cracks a joke and reframes the whole experience. The beats on his last three proper albums—2015’s Summertime ‘06, 2017’s Big Fish Theory, and 2018’s FM!—jump from minimalist hyphy pulses to warbling UK garage tones with a concussive sense of whiplash. Even in the midst of chaos, Vince’s high tenor splits through these walls of sound like a hairline fracture.
The content of Vince’s bars hasn’t changed much, but his latest album, self-titled Vince Staples and produced entirely by EDM-turned-rap producer Kenny Beats, is more uniform in sound. Distorted samples and peppy 808s permeate nearly every track, creating an atmosphere somewhere between the glossy minimalism of his 2016 EP Prima Donna and the muddled gloom of his Michael Uzowuru-produced 2012 mixtape Winter in Prague. There’s no concept or alleged double album conceit at work, no grandiose beat experiments or Big Boy cameos to distract from the artist at the center. Though it’s far from his most exciting music, the album’s reserved musical approach magnifies the blunt scene-setting Vince has used to build his name over the last decade.
For his part, Vince is still in the liminal space between mainstream fame and the business end of a .38. He’s been the face of Sprite campaigns and has an upcoming Netflix show, but death and decaying memories lurk around every corner. Parsing out the difference between the real and fake is hard enough when you’re not famous, but the paranoia lingers in the back of his mind. The end of “Sundown Town” dwells on the fear of meet-and-greets with fans turning into assassination attempts. “Taking Trips” features a striking bar about keeping a gun in his swim trunks when he goes to the beach. On “Are You With That?” Vince reminiscences on a childhood spent with friends who are now “under the ground” before disarming listeners with a hilariously blunt demand: “Fill these voids or fill my bank.” He’s still a smartass operating in a bad man’s world, and money remains both a motivation and a balm.
Stories like these have never been swallowed by any of Vince’s songs in the past. Horrific narratives like “Nate” and “Blue Suede” could bore into your memory without the banging arrangements that power them. This is a point Vince Staples makes often: The stripped-back production on these songs helps new revelations sting and tickle a bit more than usual. Lines like “Shoot cuz he was poppin’ hot shit/Now he on a Pro Club” from “Lil Fade” feel bolder in this context, even if the songs themselves aren’t particularly thrilling. Vince trying his hand at melodies on “Are You With That” or adopting a sputtering flow on “The Shining” are neat and inviting changes delivered with the energy of a shut-in turning down the thermostat. Vince Staples has movement but lacks velocity, which casts his words in the most intimate light imaginable.
Kenny Beats, ever the chameleon, responds by offering up some of his mellowest cuts. Mid-tempo synth chirps and drum claps propel both “Are You With That” and “Mhm” while a ghostly vocal sample gives “Law of Averages” the chill of a James Blake song. Some songs, like “The Shining,” veer into lo-fi territory. Even If you’re looking for the booming pastel energy of Kenny’s recent collaboration with TiaCorine or the breathless vibes of his work on Vince’s FM!, Vince Staples still has plenty to recommend. The sonic palette is grayscale without being boring, stoic without missing bounce.
Vince and Kenny Beats have easy chemistry in and out of the booth because both are consistently proving how adaptable they are to any facet of rap. There’s no beat that Vince’s bleak diarism can’t mutate just like there’s no regional style Kenny can’t add to his collection at will. They’re two unstoppable forces who would rather work together than fight each other. Vince Staples is a minor affair by design, proof that there’s fire to be found even in the duo’s quietest moments.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Blacksmith / Motown | July 9, 2021 | 7.3 | b972587e-e8fe-4f75-8cdd-d09b6d7da9b0 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The producer and visual artist builds an uncanny, disturbing world on his debut LP that recalls his collaborations with Björk, Arca, and FKA twigs. | The producer and visual artist builds an uncanny, disturbing world on his debut LP that recalls his collaborations with Björk, Arca, and FKA twigs. | Doon Kanda: Labyrinth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doon-kanda-labyrinth/ | Labyrinth | Skin is a boundary that Jesse Kanda trespasses in his visual works. A frequent collaborator of Björk, Arca, and FKA twigs, Kanda creates worlds of opalescent membranes and semi-human figures that match those artists’ ideas about the physical body. In the video he directed for twigs’ early track “How’s That,” a glistening human form deflates and then billows like a scrap of silk. His debut LP as Doon Kanda, Labyrinth, is the aural equivalent. While his first two minimalist EPs, 2017’s Heart and last year’s Luna, were fluid and open-ended, the full-length is engraved with baroque detail.
Kanda wrote the majority of Labyrinth in triple meter, a time signature common to formal dance styles like the waltz. He envisions “venues transformed into an alien world” through the dissonant force of his music, but the result is more camp than alien. Opener “Polycephaly,” with its lush synthetic piano, sounds like it could back a nightmare sequence in a gothic horror movie. “Dio” begins with a throbbing beat and machine-like whir before synthetic strings rise up and distort, melting like the twisted bodies that populate Kanda’s visual works. It’s the sound of glamorous decay, and by oozing over the beat, the strings rebel against the rigid formality of the meter, almost throwing it off. The force of the waltz is unbreakable, though, and continues on nearly uninterrupted to closer “Entrance.”
Over the course of its thirteen tracks, Labyrinth loosely chronicles growing anxiety and its dissolution, peaking at “Mino” before settling into a level of serenity at “Bunny.” Kanda is most successful when he interrupts the album’s emotional arc; “Wing” is the first track that departs from triple meter, and consists only of humming synths and the sound of fluttering insect wings. It introduces a more quiet chaos than that of the highly ornamented tracks that surround it. On “Pieridae,” the album’s omnipresent synthetic strings slide around skittering percussion without overwhelming the piece. “Search,” the comedown after “Mino,” features eerie synths and a metallic ring, like something gone awry in the engine of an ancient car. The album’s slower moments allow the music to catch up to its own strangeness.
Labyrinth is not just a musical project; it comes complete with ten visual works, showing Kanda’s emphasis on world-building. The characters rendered in those works are smooth and slick, made of something like flesh or polished stone. The winged figure on the cover of the album is bone-white and pocked with cavernous holes, windows into an inside that’s largely empty. There’s a softness in its pose that counteracts the uncanny form; though it stands erect, its head is slightly bowed, hands gesturing toward prayer. That softness manifests in the music, present in the sweeping, darkly sweet melodies of “Nastasya” and “Bunny.” In these moments of pleasure with discomfort hovering beneath, Kanda reaches synthesis between his visual and musical universes. | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | December 6, 2019 | 6.5 | b9886b71-4412-4b54-92db-a57f4fda0308 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
The experimental ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's In Summer is some of the most emotionally evocative noise music of the year. | The experimental ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's In Summer is some of the most emotionally evocative noise music of the year. | Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: In Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22230-in-summer/ | In Summer | Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has described his latest work, a five-track cassette release called *In Summer, *as a “catalogue of photographs.” The songs are meant as snapshots of people, places, and interests he developed in 2015. It’s not an unusual thing to say about your music; there are ways in which songs can crystallize a memory better than a photograph. Cantu-Ledesma’s work is wordless, often rhythmless, making it a strange vehicle for visuals, but In Summer somehow lives up it’s visual description, and it is possibly one of the most pastoral and emotionally evocative pieces of noise music that’s been released this year.
*In Summer *opens up with a magnificently colorful soundscape, “Love’s Refrain,” which throws a listener into a middle of a blooming world of warm noises: hiccuping warbles, burps of noise, static that fringes the track like pieces of confetti frozen in mid-air. Unlike so much ambient music or noise, it isn’t attempting to be atmospheric or even alien—it is heated, lush, and decidedly terrestrial. The song tears itself apart as it progresses, careening into a wall of noise in its closing minutes. Susan Sontag once wrote that a photograph invited a viewer “to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability” and that in this experience the photograph itself testifies “to time's relentless melt;” in over seven minutes of collaged noise, Cantu-Ledesma somehow manages to convey this feeling without a single word.
He reproduces it throughout *In Summer *with varying levels of success. In “Little Dear Isle” he smashes together found sounds (the rustling of leaves and bird calls) with a menacing drone that transforms around the two-minute mark into something crunchier, distended, and buoyant. It’s a strange contrast to the nature sounds behind it, transforming bucolic trappings into something much more sinister Some others are less successful: The title track is predictable, a beautiful drone that suddenly takes a left turn into a minefield of dissonance. “Blue Nudes (I-IV),” the album’s longest track (over 7 minutes) is more or less a solid block of sound. It’s less evocative or visual than the album’s other songs, and is textured in a more sculptural way. For what it’s worth, Cantu-Ledesma’s makes vases and planters, that he sells on his website. They’re beautiful, colorful, purposefully imperfect, and very layered. There is something of that art present in this song.
The album concludes with “Prelude,” which drops you into pure chaos. The guttural growl of a dog, an indistinct whisper, and roiling static make it one of the most *alive *moments in the record. It’s terrifying and wistful, and it all dissolves away in the presence of a single piano playing the same set of notes over and over again. The last thirty or so seconds are near-silence, a wonderful way to close out a record which is so much about degradation and natural processes. *In Summer *situates itself in a conversation about decay and entropy, and takes a stance that is almost optimistic because it renders chaos and dissonance thoughtfully and beautifully. | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Geographic North | August 20, 2016 | 8 | b98d1caf-2e48-477c-b9b5-c04fe473faf6 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The Philadelphia rapper’s new EP may be more straightforward than usual, but even at her most conventional, Whack is at least attempting to keep you off-balance. | The Philadelphia rapper’s new EP may be more straightforward than usual, but even at her most conventional, Whack is at least attempting to keep you off-balance. | Tierra Whack: Rap? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tierra-whack-rap/ | Rap? | In a world where rappers are all but encouraged to drop music as often as possible, Tierra Whack is content to play the long game. She cut her teeth on the Philadelphia cipher circuit under the name Dizzle Dizz before embracing her birth name and bowling over the music industry with her 2018 debut album Whack World. Part rap album and part experimental film exhibition, the project—15 songs, each only 60 seconds—birthed elaborate worlds from Whack’s demented imagination and sheer rapping skill. It was delightfully weird, catchy, and colorful.
Whack didn’t exactly disappear after Whack World, but her output remained mercurial. She recorded unreleased songs with Meek Mill and Childish Gambino and briefly toured with 6LACK. She dropped a handful of singles through her Whack History Month series in 2019 and found creative partners in Adobe and Adult Swim. Instead of barreling ahead with another project, Whack took advantage of the time and resources afforded to her by Whack World’s success to metamorphize within a technicolor cocoon of her own making.
That sense of fun and feeling things out has permeated the nearly dozen singles Whack has released since 2019—which have seesawed in quality. It’s strange to consider that with all this baggage, Rap?—her first proper project in almost four years—has touched down with very low stakes attached. This isn’t a Whack World sequel; in fact, these three songs have more in common with loosies like “feel good” and “Dora” than a shapeshifting collaboration like the Flying Lotus-produced “Yellow Belly” from 2019. Rap? may be more straightforward than usual, but even at her most conventional, Whack is at least attempting to keep you off-balance.
The most disarming aspect of Rap? is how little of it actually disarms. There are no surprises waiting to be unpacked and few risks taken across its barely 10-minute runtime. Whack’s vocals remain the most exciting part of her music; she’s constantly searching for new pockets to settle in and new melodies to turn into earworms. “Stand Up” and “Millions” are flex anthems that tease at the impish nature of her infamous Instagram freestyles without rocking the boat too hard. That’s not to say she doesn’t occasionally impress—“Millions” has a handful of clever bars (“I’ma do ’em nasty like sugar and grits,” “On these nigga’s head like a white boy beanie”)—but Whack sounds content to push along at a lower gear. “Meagan Good” sidesteps these problems with a story about finding space for self-love in the ashes of a failed relationship, Whack’s growing confidence shining through in her words and steely delivery.
Whack is still rapping well, but the production leaves much to be desired. Producer and frequent collaborator J Melodic handles two cuts, including “Millions,” whose bouncy piano keys and vocal coos make it the most inviting beat of the bunch, while the minimal synths and kick drum of “Stand Up” offer the song a pulse but little else. The submerged sounds of “Meagan Good”—produced by T-Minus, J Louis, and Sam Gellaitry—feel like they were sourced by searching “Meek Mill introspective rap type beat” on YouTube. Whack’s earlier singles like her breakout hit “Mumbo Jumbo” or 2019’s “Unemployed” were as jittery and expansive as Whack herself, their respective pools of personality pushing both higher by association. By contrast, most of the production on Rap? either sounds ready for an Apple commercial or seethes and fades into the background like afternoon shadows swallowed by approaching dusk. It’s a strange dichotomy.
Since she first made it big, Whack has thrived on unpredictability. Her output has been on a hyper-controlled drip, which trains audiences to expect the unexpected and gives her room to expand in any direction she wants creatively. That said, while Rap? has interesting moments and Whack is still engaging as a vocalist, its production renders it largely lowkey and indistinct. Whack’s music doesn’t have to be experimental or off-kilter for it to be good, but these songs are largely lacking in personality, especially compared to those loose singles. Whatever comes next, maybe this will prove to have been a stopgap worth taking.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope | December 7, 2021 | 6 | b9984e3c-aae2-4a97-a98f-fc60eb1705bc | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On his new set of late-night country disco, the Texas singer known as “Big Velvet” leans into the cartoonish undertones of his booming baritone. He always sounded oversized—now he makes music to match. | On his new set of late-night country disco, the Texas singer known as “Big Velvet” leans into the cartoonish undertones of his booming baritone. He always sounded oversized—now he makes music to match. | Paul Cauthen: Country Coming Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-cauthen-country-coming-down/ | Country Coming Down | A native of Tyler, Texas, Paul Cauthen paid his dues on the red-dirt country circuit as part of Sons of Fathers, an Americana duo who released a pair of sturdy LPs in the first half of the 2010s. He went solo in 2016 with My Gospel, an album that emphasized his debt to the original country outlaws; often, it sounded like Johnny Cash fronting Waylon Jennings’ lean, hard-driving backing band. My Gospel and its sequel EP, Have Mercy, were earnest throwback country records that placed his booming baritone—a voice that’s earned him the nickname “Big Velvet”—squarely at center stage. But just when Cauthen appeared to be walking a fairly conventional country road, a devastating breakup led him to a squalid sojourn at the Belmont Hotel in Dallas, where he wrote the roiling, nocturnal songs for 2019’s Room 41.
Country Coming Down, Cauthen’s third full-length album, proves that the outlaw funk of Room 41 highlights like “Cocaine Country Dancing” was no detour: It was a new direction. But where that album documented a dark night of the soul, Country Coming Down is a gaudy funhouse, illuminated by glitterball. In these songs, Cauthen discovers a whole world within the pulsating disco beat of “Cocaine Country Dancing,” doubling down on its after-hours decadence and creating an overblown hedonistic persona to match his nickname.
Listening to Cauthen bellow about drinking a 30-pack a day or brag about visiting a Piggly Wiggly over a big, dumb beat raises a simple question: Is he being serious or is this shtick? Cauthen admitted to Rolling Stone his latest music is a “little bit of mischief, little bit of fun,” suggesting the puffed-chest bravado of first single “Country as Fuck” is satirical. (Lyrics that take a swipe at the old Kenny Chesney hit “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” also suggest as much.) But the odd, ingratiating thing about Country Coming Down is how the tacky thump of its lead-off track echoes through the whole album, blurring the lines between act and authenticity. If the single is intended as a lark, why does it have a close cousin in “Country Clubbin’,” a purportedly straight funk jam propelled by a fuzz guitar so compressed it sounds like a synth? Plenty of other cuts mine a similar country-disco vein, such as the chilled-out groove “Champagne & a Limo," the fuzzed-out blues “Cut a Rug,” and the riotous “Fuck You Money,” a stomping rocker delivered with a nasty sneer.
By indulging the lurid elements of his late-night country, Cauthen has discovered a distinctive voice, one that leans into the slightly cartoonish undertones of his booming baritone: He already sounded oversized, and now he makes music to match. The softer moments also benefit from Cauthen going for broke. The simmering “Caught Me at a Good Time” splices modern R&B inflections with old-fashioned country soul, “High Heels” eases into satin-draped sensuality, and the shimmering keyboards on the placid “Till the Day I Die” give the ballad a slight chillwave air.
Astute listeners will note that the title Country Coming Down is a tip of a hat to Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a hangover treatise that became a standard at the dawn of the 1970s. Cauthen is surely aware of the allusion, and by nodding to the outlaw past, he demonstrates how he no longer follows their blueprint. He’s also not quite following in the footsteps of Kacey Musgraves or Ashley Monroe, who blend modern dance, throwback pop, and country with a distinctly contemporary flair. Cauthen remains a traditionalist in some respects—his sensibility and funky sounds are almost defiantly retro—but Country Coming Down illustrates he’s no longer beholden to the past. He’s ready to have fun with it. | 2022-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thirty Tigers | April 1, 2022 | 7 | b99b2b6f-f001-453a-b900-2e23b8c1bd15 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
With chintzy synths and cryptic lyrics, the artist formerly known as Inga Copeland challenges deep-seated assumptions about musical taste and emotive songcraft. | With chintzy synths and cryptic lyrics, the artist formerly known as Inga Copeland challenges deep-seated assumptions about musical taste and emotive songcraft. | Lolina: The Smoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lolina-the-smoke/ | The Smoke | Lolina doesn’t give the impression that she especially wants to be understood. As one half of the experimental electronic duo Hype Williams and as a solo artist, the musician formerly known as Inga Copeland has resisted easily legible narratives at every turn. She’s said little about herself in the few interviews she’s given, and her music tends to confound most of the expectations a listener might bring to it. Her latest full-length release, The Smoke, centers Lolina’s singing voice more than her solo debut, Because I’m Worth It, but that doesn’t make it any easier to grasp. Where the human voice often asks listeners to identify with the person behind it, Lolina’s only deepens the sense of bewilderment that her music often provokes. Listening to The Smoke is like hearing a voice trying to locate itself in an unstable environment, rubbing up against strange synth textures, asymmetrical beats, and jagged melodic phrases. Like her contemporaries Klein, Mhysa, and Jenny Hval, Lolina challenges ingrained assumptions about what songs are and what they can do, dragging her listeners through an exhilarating funhouse of sound.
Because women are often presumed to make inherently confessional, diaristic music, it’s a thrill to hear a voice like Lolina’s get tangled up in songs that can’t be tied to anyone’s personal life, hers or otherwise. The Smoke is adamantly suspicious of emotionality and literal meaning; like SOPHIE’s songs, whose lyrics often riff on an abstract handful of words, it’s pure play. Lolina harbors skepticism toward the idea of body music, too. While much electronic music lives and dies on the beat, Lolina’s compositions don’t pound or thump. Instead, they inch, squirm, and writhe through their runtimes. Dull bass drums, hand percussion, and finger snaps, often playing polyrhythms, jolt each track along. Above them, Lolina’s voice, an M.I.A.-style speak-sing, floats on a pulse all its own.
Like the Knife often did, Lolina tends to reach for synth patches that sound cheap or chintzy, like they’ve come out of the sound card of a 1990s home computer barely clinging to life. Combined with her queasy, unresolved melodies, those textures compound The Smoke’s dizziness: Nothing sounds quite like it “should,” and everything is always shifting slightly out of place. Against a deep, swaying bassline, an itchy synth figure scrapes its way across “Fake City, Real City”; on “A Path of Weeds and Flowers,” a stiff arpeggio cages a flurry of chirps; fake strings slash through “The River’; and “Style and Punishment” builds on tense, rattling notes that oscillate like a snore. These are all annoying sounds—in a more traditional album, they might be intolerable—but when Lolina deploys them, she tweaks the subliminal cues by which discerning listeners learn to sort the “bad” sounds out from the “good.” The absurd musical hierarchy called “taste” comes into relief here, with all the goalposts moved and all the mirrors concave. The Smoke doesn’t want to prove itself to you so much as it wants to shuffle your foundation, to make you think about what you take for granted when a piece of music makes you feel affinity or aversion.
In her casual, teasing register, Lolina does occasionally sing lyrics that hit on a gut level. When, on the throbbing, swarming “The River,” she murmurs, “You say you care for me/That means you don’t,” she haloes her words with a trace of pathos. All throughout The Smoke float snatches of human movement: desire, disgust, shame, sorrow. They never cohere into anything like narrative, but they’re enough to ground the chaos flitting around them. As soon as she’s lured you into identifying with her, though, Lolina likes to change the subject, to move from something poignant to something inane without missing an off-kilter beat: “Run, baby, run, I’m at the bus stop/One pound fifty takes you anywhere you wanna go.” There is meaning and then it dissipates, leaving you pondering what it takes to make meaning in the first place. | 2018-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | March 23, 2018 | 8 | b9a24295-8eb1-445a-9168-d455e03da469 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
For the first time ever, the Southern metal expats return with the same lineup as their previous album. A little outside input could’ve gone a long way. | For the first time ever, the Southern metal expats return with the same lineup as their previous album. A little outside input could’ve gone a long way. | Baroness: Stone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baroness-stone/ | Stone | The only essential moment on Stone, the sixth album by beloved metal transmogrifiers Baroness, arrives just four minutes after the record begins and lasts only 30 seconds. As the band reaches the end of the chugging chorus that anchors “Last Word,” its newest member, Gina Gleason, rushes ahead, her guitar line swiveling like some snaky Chuck Berry lead that coils so tightly it snaps, leaving her to reassemble the pieces in a rush of squealing notes. It is a perfect guitar solo, a thrill ride so disorientating you’re left to wonder where you are not just in the song but in the world.
Gleason’s paroxysm complete, Baroness retreat into a haze of tremolo guitars, reorienting themselves until they can return to the tune’s main premise—that is, a plodding and byzantine reflection on mortality that suggests the Foo Fighters for a particularly bookish biker gang. Neither “Last Word” nor Stone ever returns to the ecstatic heights of Gleason’s shuddering solo. By record’s end, you may wonder if Baroness can reach them at all.
Baroness emerged in the mid-’00s as perhaps the most exciting and versatile band in a teeming renaissance of Southern metal. Leader John Baizley paired his strong-jawed stentorian bark with an unfailing sense of melody and real compositional ambition—think the Allman Brothers Band, Pink Floyd, and even Genesis, strained through the malevolence of swampy Southern forebears like Eyehategod. Even as the lineup often shifted, they made stepwise career moves, signing to genre bastion Relapse for a series of stunning records. After a devastating 2012 bus crash splintered the lineup, Baroness regrouped, launched their own label, and pursued slightly more commercial impulses, meting out eccentricity inside wildly accessible songs. “Shock Me,” the Grammy-nominated powerhouse from 2015’s Purple, should still be a radio staple, as should “Tourniquet,” from 2019’s Gold & Grey. At multiple points during the last 15 years, Baroness seemed on the verge of becoming a very big rock band.
But Baroness decided to downsize for Stone, their first album in four years, converting an Airbnb along the mountainous edge of Pennsylvania and New York into a studio where they could do everything themselves. This marked the first time that the same group of musicians who recorded the prior Baroness album reconvened to make the next one. Stone, however, begs for an outsider’s input, for someone to have said, “No, that’s not it.” So much of Stone feels like stitched-together composites of what has worked well in the past. Momentum is often squandered, and the electrifying bits rarely rise into something more.
Several minutes after Gleason’s blessed solo, for instance, “Last Word” wanders into a repetitious wash of electric jazz, as if Baroness didn’t know where else to go. These individual pieces are interesting enough, sure; note for note, Baroness remain one of the most remarkable and capable bands at the intersection of heavy metal, hard rock, and psychedelia. But this is Baroness as disjointed prog, their songs now composed of rusting spare parts that don’t work together. “Anodyne” is a pouncing rock song, its four-on-the-floor march boosting a tremendous Baizley hook. As it dips and dives into assorted breakdowns, bridges, and solos, however, Baroness never capitalize on their own might, never overwhelm or even exhilarate. Then it just stops, as if both tape and ideas simply ran out.
Baroness do try a few novel sounds, but they don’t fare much better. Early on, they devote a quarter of the album to a three-song suite that may be the nadir of their career. A ringer for an overly fussy Clutch jam, “Beneath the Rose” slams into “Choir,” a laughable spoken-word tale about Satan’s mistress murmured above an elementary Motorik improvisation. The triptych ends, mercifully, with a minute-long folk farewell that might have made a lo-fi Shrimper Records mixtape in an off year. You can almost picture Baroness in their Appalachian Airbnb, throwing things at the wall just to pretend they stuck.
The songs get stronger toward the end. With its forlorn acoustic preamble slowly yielding to shout-out-loud aplomb, “Magnolia” summons a frail body slipping into extravagantly engraved armor, formidable but delicate in the way Baroness’ best songs have always been. “Under the Wheel,” written by bassist Nick Jost, takes a similar dynamic path from somber to stomping. But its textures—crosshatched dissonance, fluttering falsetto, preening basslines—feel fresh for Baroness.
Even the acoustic closer, “Bloom,” is a corrective for the six-string bauble that begins Stone, a placeholder that even Baizley admits was little more than a mood-setter. “I lost my scepter/I lost my wings,” Baizley and Gleason coo in this sweet little country hymn of mortal homecoming. “Leave me a simple life.” By the time a gentle noise collage marks its end, Stone feels like you’ve sat through a half-hour mixtape of Baroness’ past flotsam just to arrive, possibly, at a 15-minute suggestion of its future.
Baizley often contemplates oblivion and the end during Stone, with bells tolling and suns setting and pyres burning. But near the close of “Under the Wheel,” the album’s clear winner, he sings, “So take the best of us/And burn the rest,” stretching the syllables into an unexpected hook that feels optimistic, as if he looks forward to the serotiny that can come with fire. There is at least a hint of hopeful concession there, of rising above some temporary station by recognizing something’s got to change. Now they just have to set flame to the pieces of the past they no longer need. | 2023-09-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Abraxan Hymns | September 20, 2023 | 6.2 | b9a62cda-8c49-4061-860c-63f830b947cc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Pains of Being Pure at Heart's 2009 debut introduced a band that had not only mastered their influences, but seemed on the brink of doing something truly new with them. On their new Hell EP, which features an original and quick covers of Felt and James, it's clear they have no real interest in that. | Pains of Being Pure at Heart's 2009 debut introduced a band that had not only mastered their influences, but seemed on the brink of doing something truly new with them. On their new Hell EP, which features an original and quick covers of Felt and James, it's clear they have no real interest in that. | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Hell EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21261-hell-ep/ | Hell EP | For all the instant good will they stockpiled with their woozily sincere take on ’80s and ’90s indie-pop, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart have always invited doubts that they were, at their core, little more than gifted impressionists. Mostly they’ve let any criticisms about their originality bounce right off of them. Instead of trying to prove themselves more than the sum of their record collections, they’ve simply continued showing off how vast those record collections are. 2011’s Belong expanded on their debut’s C86 jangle with blood-rushing alternative rock, while last year’s understated Days of Abandon took an even deeper tour through the Hall of Semi-Obscure UK College Rock than their debut did.
That tour continues on their new Hell EP. It’s one of the band’s most low-stakes releases yet: an original song, which band leader Kip Berman first posted as a demo along with several songs that didn’t make the cut for Days of Abandon, and two quick covers. In hindsight, he might have done well to find room for Hell's title track on Days of Abandon; its chipper spirit would have helped lighten an album that sometimes begged for a pick-me-up. Like nearly every Pains of Being Pure at Heart track, it’s obsessively specific in its influences, with a sticky disco groove that nods to Orange Juice and the puppy-dog giddiness of an early Close Lobsters single. Even Berman's vocals feel like an homage; he sings in a warbled sigh that sounds a lot like Pete Shelley.
Given how openly the band has always embraced their influences, it’s surprising they haven’t recorded more covers—Berman often seems to be channeling other artists’ voices and accents anyway, so it’s not much of a leap to sing their words, too. Each of Hell’s covers serve as a statement of taste. One celebrates one of the quintessential overlooked British guitar-pop bands Felt’s “Ballad of the Band”, while the other reclaims a familiar if underappreciated hit, James’ “Laid”, a treasure of a song that lost much of its cache when the American Pie franchise claimed it as its own.
Both are too faithful to offer any real surprises, and the band’s last album already owed so much to Felt that their “Ballad of the Band” almost feels redundant. “Laid” delivers more of a kick. Their version doesn’t quite capture the orgasmic glee of James’ original, but it features a game lead vocal turn from A Sunny Day in Glasgow singer Jen Goma, who’s been moonlighting with Pains since their recent lineup shakeup. Unlike Berman, she’s not afraid to leave her own stamp on her cover, and she punctuates the song’s most biting line with just the right amount of a punk snarl: “Dye my eyes and call me pretttttttty.”
Pains’ debut album introduced a band that had not only clearly mastered their influences, but seemed on the brink of doing something truly new with them. Six years later, it’s now clear they have no interest in that; Berman is too reverentially devoted to his muses to risk bastardizing them. When a band’s output is this consistently pleasant, it's petty to complain too much about originality, but Hell is the group’s second overly safe release in a row, and it’s hard not to wish they’d start taking a few more chances. This band is talented enough to be aiming much higher. | 2015-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Painbow | November 16, 2015 | 5.5 | b9a8a685-03a6-4b93-96d0-79f64eee4750 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
On her first album in six years, Chan Marshall roams the many moods of her songwriting with a careful, soft-spoken power. | On her first album in six years, Chan Marshall roams the many moods of her songwriting with a careful, soft-spoken power. | Cat Power: Wanderer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cat-power-wanderer/ | Wanderer | Chan Marshall’s career is solitary and self-sustaining like few others. Her catalog is a mountain range, each peak indifferent to what preceded it and unconcerned with what follows it. With barely more than her voice and a guitar, she has built a rich and variable universe spanning an array of moods—unnerving, consoling, paranoiac, sensual—and her albums situate themselves along those moods like stations of the cross. They don’t change much from one to the next, but even if they sound similar, they each feel different.
Wanderer is her 10th album, her first in six years, and the first that revisits each and every one of those moods, at least fleetingly. The opening title track brings her wondrous voice to the fore, highlighting the chocolate rasp she used so well on 2006’s The Greatest. “Robbin Hood” is based on the same minor chord as “Werewolf” from 2002’s You Are Free. I spent minutes trying to figure out which song “You Get” directly reminded me of before realizing it reminded me, indirectly, of all of them—any time she’s ever picked up a guitar, summoned a few words of generalized wisdom, and dug into the song’s veins to scrape out all the feeling she could.
These are paths Marshall has led us down before—the piano chords pooling into their own delay pedals, fingerpicked guitars lingering on a minor chord like a blank stare held a beat too long. Rob Schnapf, who’s also produced for Elliott Smith and Beck, shapes the record with an ear for low, bass sounds, both the throatier, huskier notes in Marshall’s voice and the rounded pop of the hand-slapped percussion on “In Your Face.” The resulting mood lands somewhere between swaying hips and nervous rocking. The blissed-out piano of “Horizon” feels both beautiful and slightly vacant, like it could be streaming down from heaven or piping weakly into a drugstore. It is one of the album’s most arresting songs, in part for the brittle, anxious energy rattling around inside it.
Marshall’s lyrics, as they often do, arrow themselves towards an unnamed “you,” carrying notes of resentment and affirmation. On Wanderer, she often blends the two, warning, indicting, and soothing all in the same breath. “There is nothing like time to give you things you can need,” she advises on “You Get,” an echo of Sun highlight “Nothin’ But Time,” and a piece of wisdom near-grandmotherly in its affect. But then, from the same song: “You never listen to time, you never build up the times.” Only a slight rewording, and yet it feels pregnant with meaning, an accusation lobbed at someone who has never had to rebuild themselves after trauma.
Most of her lyrics don’t ask to be typed, because they live inside her phrasing, the hesitant way she holds the words in her mouth, like she is considering them as she sings them. This oblique, ambulatory phrasing can sound like rambling, but within the music, it works more like pacing—her repetition loosens you up, and then she slips the knife. Consider this stretch from “Black”:
A dead man now, once was a friend
Ran all the way upstairs just to make my defense saved me
Threw me in the bath, with the ice and a slap
Can of Coke down my throat, almost his whole hand fittin’ in—I was dying
First I was amused, close to death ever been
But when the white light went away I knew death was setting in
It is a crystalline, harrowing short story in one verse, and the entire album could stop here for you to live inside its bleak details—the can of Coke, the “dead man now, once was a friend,” the “first I was amused.” But Marshall, and the song, murmurs onward.
There are a few other moments on Wanderer that truly freeze time this way. The Rihanna cover “Stay” reminds us how Marshall can rearrange a song simply by squinting at it—suddenly the most important line was buried somewhere in the middle. The lyrics on “Stay” are pared back but otherwise recognizable, as is the arrangement, but the pauses happen in all different places, making Marshall’s “I want you to stay” a completely different sentence from Rihanna’s.
Another time-stopper is the Lana Del Rey collaboration “Woman.” Their voices—deep, confident, hooded—blend into one, with Del Rey technically on backup. Del Rey’s universe, full of bright candy reds and pastels, does not resemble Marshall’s on the surface, but the two of them share a weary resignation, a survivor’s determination, that makes their duet feel like two halves of one circling thought. The chorus is simply “I’m a woman,” but repeated with varying shades of defiance, pain, pride, warmth, and urgency. The word “woman”—as label, as cultural identity, as epithet—streaks its way up into the sky, glittering and burning off the fog.
Apart from these moments, Wanderer drags just the tiniest bit. It speaks softly from the echoes of the best Cat Power moments, which means it doesn’t ice-pick you in the center of your most treasured insecurities the way some of her most celebrated music has. She just doesn’t aim there—she aims for your affirmation, she pierces your armor. It seems churlish to miss the impact, but it’s equally difficult not to yearn for it. | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 5, 2018 | 7.4 | b9aa6b56-a36b-47f0-a07b-cd7d95003905 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Chicago rapper’s collaborative EP with the L.A. producer Terrace Martin is a jubilant six-song burst of summertime grooves and throwback funk. | The Chicago rapper’s collaborative EP with the L.A. producer Terrace Martin is a jubilant six-song burst of summertime grooves and throwback funk. | Ric Wilson / Terrace Martin: They Call Me Disco EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ric-wilson-terrace-martin-they-call-me-disco-ep/ | They Call Me Disco EP | Burgeoning Chicago rapper Ric Wilson is a throwback to a certain type of ’70s-era do-everything star: part MC, part bandleader, he’d be at home rapping with the Sugarhill Gang or shouting adlibs over fellow Chicagoan Frankie Knuckles’ thumping, soulful house. Wilson, who has a string of singles and EPs to his name, came up with the same Young Chicago Authors collective that birthed Noname, Saba, and Chance the Rapper, among others; like those artists, his verses often veer toward the poetic and cerebral, eschewing traditional rhyme patterns and subject matter for free-associative dives into the personal, political, and nonsensical.
They Call Me Disco, Wilson’s collaborative EP with the prolific Los Angeles producer and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin, is a jubilant six-song burst of summertime grooves and throwback funk. Martin, a longstanding collaborator of Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, and a producer for several other West Coast mainstays, is in his comfort zone, assembling four-on-the-floor drums, thick slabs of bass, and simple but rich chords throughout to create a warm facsimile of old school funk—spanning Lakeside to The Gap Band—with a dose of neo-soul sprinkled in. Wilson and Martin’s chemistry is undeniable; while not nearly as nimble (technically or lyrically) as Kendrick, Kurupt, DJ Quik, or any other of Martin’s nasally L.A. collaborators, Wilson’s conversational verses nonetheless sound just as natural over Martin’s layered beats. They’re not reinventing the wheel by any means, but on They Call Me Disco, Martin and Wilson know how to make your feet move, and, more importantly, how to make you feel good.
Wilson’s greatest strength—his undeniable enthusiasm and charisma—is also at times his biggest downfall. His obvious musicality and inventiveness notwithstanding, Wilson’s eagerness can exacerbate the fact that he’s often stringing together irreverent non-sequiturs. When he tries too hard to espouse a worldview beyond peace, love, and confidence, he can come off as cringey (“Slappin’ hoes with my left/Fight for rights with my right,” he raps on “Breakin Rules”) or sophomoric (“Global warming is swarming/Beyond the matrix/While we out killing /For colorism and hatred,” he ponders on closer “Beyond Me”). They Call Me Disco, as a title, suggests the birth of a new persona, but in reality it’s more like Wilson figuring out what he wants to say in real time.
Despite these moments of little sibling-like eagerness, Wilson’s—and by extension, Martin’s—giddiness is mostly contagious. And when Wilson doesn’t try too hard, the EP is pure joy, a transportive, funkified missive from another, happier dimension. “Don’t Kill the Wave” is the best of the project’s collection of dancefloor-fillers (though “Move Like This” is a close second): a foot-stomping, synth-flooded smash, it takes a page from Kendrick’s pulsing, Martin-produced “King Kunta” and adds some Dâm-Funk flair, as Wilson gleefully anoints himself “the disco Kaepernick.” Wilson and Martin have more than one gear, too—standout “Before You Let Go,” which features a lush contribution from singer Malaya, has shades of frequent Martin collaborator Thundercat, complete with spaced-out chords and a slinking half-time groove as Wilson courts a potential lover.
Wilson ends the EP with a question. “Why do I see color when I’m livin’ in gray?” he asks, uncharacteristically somber. Instead of an answer, They Call Me Disco provides a perspective shift: in a moment when we’re all living gray, Wilson and Martin are here to remind us of the color that never left. | 2020-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Free Disco / Empire | May 11, 2020 | 7 | b9b3a75d-02b8-49df-a096-12295f53e720 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
Australian band with radio-friendly ambitions follows its "Sweet Disposition" single with a record that shoots for the heights of the Arctic Monkeys or U2. | Australian band with radio-friendly ambitions follows its "Sweet Disposition" single with a record that shoots for the heights of the Arctic Monkeys or U2. | The Temper Trap: Conditions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13368-conditions/ | Conditions | The Temper Trap didn't come out of nowhere. But even in an age of instant global communication, Australia is still pretty far away from most of the rest of us. So when this Melbourne rock foursome with stadium-sized ambitions first landed in my inbox last October, it was a modest revelation. Curtis Vodka, Alaska's remixer extraordinaire, was pushing all the right tech-textural buttons on an epic reworking of "Sweet Disposition", a majestic anthem which, if annoyingly derivative, had "mainstream hit" written all over it. Listeners who Shazam'd the original after hearing it in ads for Sky Sports TV in the UK-- or, stateside, on the trailer and soundtrack to alt-emo romcom (500) Days of Summer-- probably know the feeling.
Hemispheric differences may have given the Temper Trap room to develop their radio-friendly sound without getting pushed prematurely into the spotlight (for real: sorry, Black Kids), but otherwise their debut album could've been made just about anywhere. Conditions is one for the Coldplay set-- all tightly executed grandiosity and U2 pedals, generally with [pounding](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbE1-ZPz-Cg "The Doves, "Pounding"" ) drums, soaring vocals about steadfastness or mortality or whatever, one rumbling bass note per arpeggiated guitar chord, and a modest drizzling of synths. Unfortunately, when you adopt the trappings of revolutionary significance without showing much interest in advancing beyond the revolutions of 20 years ago, you sound ridiculous. Southern conservatives are super concerned about racial discrimination now, you guys.
Defined by almost any measure except musical creativity or lyrical ingenuity, the Temper Trap are a lot better than I'm making them sound. Dougie Mandagi's virtuosic falsetto is the kind of instrument that should come with a money-back Jeff-Buckley-comparison guarantee. When Mandagi comes in, over ecclesiastical keyboard stabs and handclaps on opener "Love Lost", there's a brief glimmer of hope Conditions will end up being more like TV on the Radio, with all that New York group's restless adventurousness, than, um, whichever band we gave that "U.2" rating. His bandmates are no slouches, either, as instrumental finale "Drum Song" shows. If its jagged rhythmic attack owes something to Arctic Monkeys, then it's no coincidence-- producer Jim Abbiss also helmed the brainy Brits' fateful debut, along with albums for Kasabian, Adele, and others.
What the Temper Trap do devastatingly well is drape post-office-party mistake-hookup tackiness in the lofty imagery of global struggle. You can just picture Mandagi standing on a mountaintop for "Sweet Disposition", his hair blowing in Bono's wind, but remember, ladies: Some insincere sketchball with limited imagination is going to use this to try to get you to have sex with him. "Just stay there/ 'Cause I'll be coming over," Mandagi booms. "Won't stop to surrender." Well, love is a battlefield, right?
Elsewhere, the Temper Trap's pairing of sweeping portentousness with mundane douchebaggery is trickier to overlook. "I pledge myself allegiance to a battle not to sleep at home," Mandagi clarifies on another single, the reasonably catchy uptempo electro-rocker "Fader". Synth-dripping slow jam "Fools" adds, "I want it, I want it, I want it," amid rebukes to unnamed, uhh, fools. Cold War Kids-ish indie nod "Down River" pulls out all the orchestral, choral, and vaguely baptismal flourishes in Neon Bible's book to repeat, "Go, don't stop." And remember "Love Lost"? It adapts a line from "Amazing Grace" into a request to "flash your heart." Yeah, open up your shirt and-- ohhh. One more in the name of love: Latest UK single "Science of Fear" samples Robert F. Kennedy's famous remarks on the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I take it Mandagi still hasn't found what he's looking for.
It's telling to learn where, in fact, the Temper Trap did come from. The first thing producer Abbiss apparently heard from the band was a demo of "Soldier On", Conditions' Muse-rific nadir. Mandagi tells the BBC, "His wife really liked it so apparently they had a moment together and out of obedience to his wife Jim decided to record us." The six-minute track moves from Grace-ful guitar and falsetto into gnashing prog-rock bombast, until Mandagi is seriously howling at "death." I'm gonna assume he means the little one-- what the French call "la petite mort." | 2009-08-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-08-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Liberation / Glassnote | August 24, 2009 | 4.6 | b9b7203f-18f0-4375-bffe-d182fe3a3215 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Recorded in 2010, Prince’s first posthumous album of all unreleased material is a state-of-the-union concept record in which he bluntly broadcasts his opinions on taxes, technology, drugs, religion, and the music industry. | Recorded in 2010, Prince’s first posthumous album of all unreleased material is a state-of-the-union concept record in which he bluntly broadcasts his opinions on taxes, technology, drugs, religion, and the music industry. | Prince: Welcome 2 America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-welcome-2-america/ | Welcome 2 America | Prince has some great protest songs—“Sign o’ the Times,” “1999,” “America,” “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” and “Love Sign,” to name a few—but he was never a great protest songwriter. Amid all of the dizzying ups and downs of his four-decade career, one of the few things that remained constant was his willingness to put subtlety and artifice aside if there was a message that he felt needed to get across, be it “Abraham Lincoln was a racist,” “Let’s take all the guns away,” or “Don’t let your children watch television until they know how to read.” He had some good points, and he could be passionate in his conviction and poignant in his starry-eyed pleas for peace, but the intricacies of his songs about love, sex, and God didn’t always carry over to his polemics.
Welcome 2 America is the first posthumous Prince album to consist entirely of unreleased material, discovered by the late pop star’s archivist Michael Howe in the form of a fistful of CD-Rs with tracklists scrawled on their surfaces. As the title suggests, it’s a state-of-the-union concept album, with Prince’s opinions on taxes, technology, drugs, religion, and the music industry broadcast clearly and bluntly over taut power-trio backing by bassist Tal Wilkenfeld and drummer Chris Coleman. The 12-song set was recorded in 2010, and he had high enough hopes for it to name a tour after it. Then he shelved it for unknown reasons, most likely because Wilkenfeld couldn’t join the tour, making the album an obsolete representation of his live sound—though, given how consistently his performances outpaced his recorded work in the latter part of his career, it wouldn’t seem to matter much.
Prince had a lot on his mind in 2010, and contemporaneous Prince albums like Lotusflow3r and 20Ten were no less shy in making dire predictions and grave diagnoses. Those were not among his strongest albums, and neither is this one. But Welcome 2 America fares a little better because of the construction of the album itself. At 54 minutes, it finds a nice middle ground between the bloat of the Lotusflow3r triple-album package and the slightness of 20Ten. Welcome 2 America is well sequenced; none of the songs feel like filler; the trio format imposes a consistent sound and style. But a Prince album devoted almost entirely to socially conscious material inherently plays against his strengths as a writer, and he gets in his own way too much for Welcome 2 America to occupy the upper tier of his catalog.
The opening track, “Welcome 2 America,” is by turns funny, embarrassing, and preposterous. A chestnut like “land of the free, home of the slave” actually has the potential to be controversial in a time when the term “critical race theory” has been recast as a red herring to avoid acknowledging systemic racism in the first place, but most of the targets on Prince’s laundry list are too broad for us to really know what he’s pissed about. “Distracted by the features of the iPhone”? Instagram, sure—but did he really have a problem with Voice Memos? “You think today’s music will last”? Elixer hasn’t. “Truth is a new minority” could be a jab at double-talking politicians, but he could just as well be telling us to keep our third eye open; this is a man who apparently believed tuning his songs to 432 Hz made them more aligned with the universe. The best line he manages is razor-sharp and searingly specific. “Hope and change?” he scoffs at President Obama, then a year into his first term. “Everything takes forever.”
Prince sounds strangely detached from this material. He narrates “Welcome 2 America” in a petulant monotone that sounds more smug than righteously angry. “Born 2 Die” is a morality play about a drug-pushing drifter, and it’s so dispassionately narrated it doesn’t really seem to wound him that this girl threw her life away. “Hot Summer” deserves a scorching vocal, but he’s so sedate that we don’t really believe he’s going to have a hot summer, just that he’s writing a song for someone else’s. He cedes the microphone to an animated lineup of female singers for much of the record’s runtime, and they sound like they’re having a lot more fun than he is (though “Same Page, Different Book” does not break the “Cindy C” / “Alphabet St.” streak of unfortunate backup-singer rap verses). Prince slinks between these vocalists instead of standing in front and taking charge. He’s the master of ceremonies on his own album, forever welcoming us to America, never really showing us around.
“Sign o’ the Times” worked because Prince set a scene rather than flatly reading the country’s diagnosis. Each verse focused on a person, not a platitude, and his guitars and LinnDrums generated enough heat and pollution that the song seemed to take place in the very urban hellscape he described. Welcome 2 America, meanwhile, doesn’t take place anywhere but within the cloud-painted walls of Paisley Park. The production is immaculate throughout, cushioned with chimes and big swooning synths, as if Prince is delivering his missives from within the folds of a zebra-print couch. The reverb synonymous with his production style is absent, along with any sense of grit, space, or atmosphere. “Check the Record” wants to be a mid-tempo glam-rock rave-up like “Darling Nikki” and “She’s Always in My Hair,” but it’s so dryly produced that it comes across like a pale idea of a rocker rather than getting into our bones.
Given the incongruously plush sound, it makes sense that one of the record’s best songs, “When She Comes,” isn’t about Uncle Sam at all but is simply one of those Prince sex jams that’s way more ambitious than it needs to be. He luxuriates in the silky spaces between the beats, making lines like “she can see stars shoot all over her sky” somehow sound like affirmations of the beauty of life even as we know he’s just being naughty. It’s one of the few moments on Welcome 2 America where form meets content. Another is the cryptic “1010 (Rin Tin Tin),” whose eerie synth stabs summon the right atmosphere of impenetrability; it lives in mystery, which is always a good place for Prince. There’s also a cover of fellow Minneapolitans Soul Asylum’s “Stand Up and B Strong,” good enough to raise the question of why “Stand Up and B Strong” wasn’t always a half-time slow jam.
It’s easy to praise Welcome 2 America just for being protest music, so long as you believe any ammunition against ignorance is worth throwing into the cannon. This stuff might strike more of a chord now with a disillusioned American public than if he’d released it amid the tentative optimism of the early Obama years, but the recordings have not grown any more or less inspired since they were made, and if they’re “prescient” or “timely,” those are facts, not virtues. He could’ve opened this album by predicting a Trump presidency and a Capitol riot, and it wouldn’t make Welcome 2 America the next Sign o’ the Times; it was and is a spotty album from a time when Prince was making a lot of those.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Legacy | August 4, 2021 | 6.2 | b9bbfbcb-543c-4e76-a9a9-f125b52421fa | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Combining archival material and contemporary reflections, the composers and sound artists’ joint album celebrates their long and resonant partnership in art and life. | Combining archival material and contemporary reflections, the composers and sound artists’ joint album celebrates their long and resonant partnership in art and life. | Ruth Anderson / Annea Lockwood: Tête-à-tête | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ruth-anderson-annea-lockwood-tete-a-tete/ | Tête-à-tête | In 1973, the late Ruth Anderson wrote an exercise for her students at Hunter College in New York City. It was titled Sound Portrait: Hearing a Person, and its instructions reveal a remarkable sensitivity for how art and interpersonal relationships are intertwined. “Listen to a piece of music,” it begins. “Think of someone you love. Do not think of the music. When you find your thought of the person is gone, bring it back gently.” Sound, Anderson believed, held the power to increase “wholeness of self and unity with others.” Later that year, Anderson went on sabbatical and her post was filled by Annea Lockwood, a New Zealand composer recommended by Pauline Oliveros. Anderson and Lockwood fell in love within three days of meeting. “Ruth was totally enchanting,” Lockwood has reminisced about their initial encounter. “How could I not fall in love with her on the spot?”
Tête-à-tête, an arresting new album featuring works from the couple, is a testament to their lasting romance. Its centerpiece is “Conversations,” a joyous 19-minute track built from phone calls they had while living more than 200 miles apart: Lockwood teaching in New York, Anderson away on sabbatical in Hancock, New Hampshire. For nine months, Anderson secretly recorded their calls, and in 1974 she pieced them together into a longform sound collage. Eschewing extended dialogue, she collaged scores of brief utterances into a mosaic of their growing affection. While prior works like “DUMP” and “SUM (State of the Union Message)” were just as funny and spirited in their reconstructions, “Conversations” is rooted in the giddiness and surprise of passion. By incorporating pop standards from yesteryear, including “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” Anderson revels in a shared feeling that’s as pure and grand as those old love songs promised.
Anderson made “Conversations” as a private gift for Lockwood, and until now, no one else had heard it in full. While only they could fully appreciate everything it contains, the rhapsodic honeymoon phase on display overflows with emotion. In this piece, much like her Sound Portrait exercise, Anderson engages in a form of deep listening that encourages intimacy. To hear it as an outsider, decades removed from its conception, is to marvel at the way love is sensed in smaller details of speech. “Conversations” is not really the sound of anything in particular: It’s just two people who are madly obsessed with each other, who struggle to hang up the phone because every second is a chance to listen and understand someone in all their mannerisms—every plosive and fricative, every chuckle and creasing smile.
If “Conversations” is a playful manifestation of Anderson’s listening practices, then 1984’s “Resolutions” is an austere counterpart. “They slow me down to a state in which I’m just at peace,” Lockwood has said of her partner’s works. “She intended that with them.” For 17 minutes, we listen as rich tones extend and gradually descend in pitch. This was Anderson’s final completed electronic composition, and as with previous works like “Points” and “I Come Out of Your Sleep,” it is deliberately minimalist. To fully appreciate the hypnotic pull of its drones requires a complete surrender to its subtle rhythms and pulses. By the time it concludes, its meditative purrs recall the wild cats in Lockwood’s erotic sound-art piece “Tiger Balm.” This synergy is a reminder that everything Anderson and Lockwood composed was in pursuit of understanding—be it the world around them, themselves, or each other.
Tête-à-tête’s greatest accomplishment, more so than with their previous albums together, is in demonstrating how attentive listening fosters closeness. On 2021’s “For Ruth,” the album’s third and final piece, Lockwood revisits “Conversations” and adds field recordings made in and around Hancock. We get a sense of the local flora and fauna, but it’s the sustained tones that supply the piece with its multitude of emotions: a sense of mystique, a sacrosanct aura, even a bit of mourning. We hear clips from the same 1973 phone calls, though Anderson’s death in 2019 now casts them in a different light. The piece merges the formalism of “Resolutions” with the diaristic nature of “Conversations,” but is framed by the riveting three-dimensionality of Lockwood’s sound maps. Where her maps trace real geographic space, “For Ruth” points only to the couple’s boundless, eternal love. “We’re really gonna do everything together?” we hear at one point. The answer is immediate: “Yes.” | 2023-05-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ergot | May 12, 2023 | 8 | b9bca654-e854-4478-b74f-03a8eb09c01d | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The rising EDM star swerves left on an insular, personal record that's more suited for winding down than turning up. | The rising EDM star swerves left on an insular, personal record that's more suited for winding down than turning up. | Mija : How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mija-how-to-measure-the-distance-between-lovers-ep/ | How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers EP | Amber Giles has been a rising star in the EDM world since 2014, when a DJ set with Skrillex vaulted her from the Phoenix rave scene to the world stage. Giles, who records and performs as Mija, has gone on to play Coachella and experiment with styles ranging from tropical house to chiptune to drum ‘n’ bass. In 2016, she put her DIY promoter skills to the test, organizing a 12-city tour with support from dance and hip-hop acts like A-Trak, Nosaj Thing, and Joey Purp under the banner of “Fk A Genre,” her own name for her eclectic aesthetic. It’s been a swift, dazzling ascent, with plenty of next-big-thing buzz. There’s one question Mija hasn’t gotten around to answering yet, though: Can she follow through on her growing popularity with a cohesive full-length statement?
How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers, Mija’s new seven-track EP, sidesteps that debate. Where her past output has suggested a possible future in mainstream dance-pop or something wackier (she loves happy hardcore, for instance), these songs opt for another path entirely. It’s an insular, personal record about relationships, more suited for winding down than turning up.
Lovers uses negative space and hushed vocals to create intimate pop songs, many of which Mija—a former choir member and a classically trained vocalist—sings herself. Lead single “Bad for U,” featuring Portland singer Kelli Schaefer, echoes Purity Ring and the chilly futurism of UK label Night Slugs. Its most compelling moment comes after the drop, which slides the track from subdued synth-pop into experimental R&B territory, à la Kelela. Elsewhere, “Notice Me” is a subdued torch song that turns turbulent: “I want you so badly in this weather/If only we could be together,” Mija sings.
Even at this EP’s clubbiest, Mija’s palette stays dark and remote. “5AM in Paris” is a bit of icy trance that chops her vocal like the wind whipping through a just-barely-opened car window. On “Falling apART (again),” she paints a picture of a failed relationship, assuring an ex that he’ll come back to her eventually. “Speak to Me,” another love song, has self-aware but clunky lyrics (“Speak to me in philosophies/Then drown my heart in poetry”), and a somewhat overwrought backing of sitar, orchestral strings, and pan pipes. (Shout-out to Yanni.) Still, it’s a bold gamble and the only point on the EP where genres are truly and meaningfully fk’d.
Mija has already proved that she can draw crowds and hold her own alongside EDM’s biggest stars. With How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers, she shows that she is also an earnest, convincing songwriter. Whether she wants to combine those talents more directly is up to her. Earlier this week, days before the EP arrived, Mija released a remix of Justin Bieber, BloodPop, and Julia Michaels’ “Friends,” turning that 2017 hit into an off-kilter banger—stranger, catchier, and way more fun than the original. The pop star path is still open to her, if she wants it. | 2018-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | never_b_alone.mp3 | February 10, 2018 | 7 | b9bfee78-576d-47bd-abbf-bf6bc5d0c7b6 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | |
When last we left our D\xFCsseldorfer heroes, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger,\n\ they had left Kraftwerk, overcome their ... | When last we left our D\xFCsseldorfer heroes, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger,\n\ they had left Kraftwerk, overcome their ... | Neu!: Neu! 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5757-neu-2/ | Neu! 2 | When last we left our Düsseldorfer heroes, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, they had left Kraftwerk, overcome their fear of broccoli, saved Camp Chippewa from the machinations of an unscrupulous real estate developer, and recorded a masterpiece that would influence independent music for decades to come. The year is 1973, and again the dynamic duo is holed up in a studio with Can/Kraftwerk producer Conrad Plank to record their sophomore effort.
Neu 2 stands primarily on the strength of its eleven-minute lead-in track, "Für Immer." The song is pounding and serpentine, its straight-ahead rhythms approaching punk, while guitars buzz like helicopters overhead. As Plank twists the knobs, the drums take on a thin, mechanical quality. The guitars are banished to the background, only to be inverted again with renewed force. Washed-out feedback drones in and out, while the bass plods on with undeterred aggression.
"Spitzenqualitat" is equally confrontational, dominated by hard, reverberating drums pounding at various tempos somewhere in the deep space of whispering guitar effects. The track proceeds as if Plank somehow turned up the gravity in the studio: the percussion becomes slower and heavier, as the guitars grow emptier. "Spitzenqualitat" simply falls apart as if it can't be sustained; the silence is too dense. "Gedenkminute" is nothing but the sound of that dissipation; something of a throwaway, it consists of nothing but wind and the occasional clock chime. "Lila Engel" is truly krautpunk, featuring Dinger's nonsensical chant: a cross between Damo Suzuki and Johnny Rotten. It's dour but explosive, channeling Neu's fierce repetition into something anthemic.
Then something happens. In the Nintendo world, the sound of tinkling electronic music suddenly running at double-time can only signal one thing: you are running out of time. But in the real world, it means something else entirely: you are running out of money. I guess it's to their credit that our insolvent heroes didn't simply pad out the remainder of Neu 2 with a giant sucking sound, or the minimalist ambient textures of Rother and Dinger turning out their pocket linings. Instead, they proceeded by inventing the modern remix.
"Neusachanee 78," "Super 76" and "Super 78" are surgically deformed versions of the album's two singles, "Neuschnee" and "Super." Fragmented, spliced, and filled with background noise and studio chatter, these tracks lay bare the process of studio production. Likewise, the tapes in "Hallo Ecentrico!" rewind, fast-forward, and are eaten up by the machine. An inventive way to compensate for lack of funds, and even an ingeniously subversive commentary on music-making, these broke-ass experiments don't satisfy like the original tracks. Thankfully, the budget allowed for the album's superb closer, "Super," a heavy, yet fluid assault of pounding drums and rubbery bass, complete with Dinger's savage howls; "Super" may just be the Boredoms' long lost uncle.
And so, with an album, half-brilliant, half-ludicrous, in their hands, our heroes go out to face a cold world armed to the teeth with "You so poor..." jokes. Will they redeem themselves before God, country and indie posterity? Will their albums ever see U.S. release? Will East and West Germany ever be reunited, and if so, will Roger Waters make good on his promise to stage The Wall live in Berlin? Will Pink Floyd even record The Wall?
Stay tuned, true believers. | 2001-06-05T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-06-05T01:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Astralwerks | June 5, 2001 | 7.5 | b9c92676-c0ef-4eed-ac56-3810a17d71f6 | Brent S. Sirota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-s. sirota/ | null |
Assisted by Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger, and Joachim Schütz, the iconoclastic instrument builder lays down a hypnotic set of minimalist, microtonal guitar music. | Assisted by Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger, and Joachim Schütz, the iconoclastic instrument builder lays down a hypnotic set of minimalist, microtonal guitar music. | Arnold Dreyblatt: Resolve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arnold-dreyblatt-resolve/ | Resolve | As a child, Arnold Dreyblatt quit his piano lessons instead of learning to read sheet music. He was expelled from music class for only pretending to play the recorder. Later, his guitar teacher labeled him “tone deaf and unteachable.” Dreyblatt read the writing scrawled across the wall and opted to study video art instead of music at SUNY Buffalo, but a 1974 performance of Alvin Lucier’s “Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas” changed his mind. The piece, in which pure sine waves ricochet off the walls to vibrate the head of a playerless snare drum, reduced the sheer physicality of music to its simplest elements: air moving through space. Dreyblatt immediately moved to New York to study under La Monte Young. He spent the rest of the ’70s turning his defunct musical education to his advantage, designing his own instruments and developing a new tuning system unencumbered by Western notions of melody or harmony.
After years of deconstructing and rebuilding string instruments, Dreyblatt made a name for himself with the Excited Strings Bass, an upright bass strung with piano wire from which performers can coax complex overtones by applying gentle pressure on the strings while striking with the bow. His Orchestra of Excited Strings combines this bass with other instruments modified to play in the Dreyblatt tuning system of 20 tones per octave. The Orchestra went through several iterations in New York before Dreyblatt reformed it in Berlin in the early ’80s, leaving the notorious downtown scene to peers like Rhys Chatham and Arthur Russell. But beginning in 1995, Jim O’Rourke led a revival of Dreyblatt’s work that resulted in a series of reissues on Drag City, Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle, and Konrad Sprenger’s Choose Records. Though his work as a composer with other groups has continued apace, Resolve features the first new music from the Orchestra itself in over 20 years. Unlike the New York and Berlin ensembles, the current lineup of the Orchestra consists of younger musicians—Ambarchi, Sprenger, and Joachim Schütz—whose sensibilities have been formed within Dreyblatt’s increasingly long shadow.
This trio makes for a perfectly sympathetic collaboration on Resolve. Schütz and Sprenger play modified guitars—including Sprenger’s computer-controlled ax showcased on 2017’s excellent Stack Music—that ring out with unnerving clarity, sounding utterly human despite their robotic precision. As on Ambarchi’s recent work, the band plays with more abandon as the music grows more complex, accelerating like a bullet train. Album opener “Container” is built on a driving, relatively straightforward stomp that allows the harmonic density of the three-guitar attack to spiral out in slow, lofty arcs. On “Shuffle Effect,” the steady patter of closed hi-hats complicates the beat, while the guitars wind outward in complicated interlocking figures. The quartet takes off in a tightly controlled launch on “Flight Path,” propelled by Sprenger’s bouncy uptempo percussion. Dreyblatt has compared his bass playing to juggling, hitting the strings at just the right moment to send resonances skyward. The ensemble joins his act, keeping those resonances aloft in arabesques of shimmering guitar.
On the 17-minute B-side “Auditoria,” Dreyblatt’s backing trio summons a shapeshifting drone that recalls Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument, with microtones humming, buzzing, and fluttering in metallic dissonance. Halfway through, Dreyblatt introduces his Excited Strings Bass with the simple bowing exercise that opens the first Orchestra album, 1982’s Nodal Excitation. It’s a wonderful moment, as if the band had unrolled a grand red carpet for Dreyblatt’s entrance. He and his bass then step out in front, parading the guitars through a meditative groove that accumulates layers of harmonic complexity until it fades out in a swirling, shuddering hum.
Resolve is dazzling proof of this Orchestra’s musical prowess as well as an astonishing technical achievement. With longtime Ambarchi collaborator Joe Talia mixing and mastering, the subtleties of Dreyblatt’s microtonal tuning system are rendered in vivid constellations of minuscule details. And by circling back to some of Dreyblatt’s earliest ideas, the album proves him to be a crucial link between the New York minimalists and the newest generation of the avant-garde. For all the microtonal discord of his music, this is a moment in which his career resolves in perfect harmony. | 2023-08-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | August 18, 2023 | 8 | b9ca93a3-f7b2-40f8-b333-a17f73c13caf | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
On her split EP with the producer Kingdom, Dawn Richard offers a diorama for love’s life cycle, encompassing everything from death defying adoration and righteous anger to, best of all, forgiveness. | On her split EP with the producer Kingdom, Dawn Richard offers a diorama for love’s life cycle, encompassing everything from death defying adoration and righteous anger to, best of all, forgiveness. | Dawn Richard: Infrared | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21923-infrared/ | Infrared | In the middle of her new song “Paint it Blue,” Dawn Richard sings to the high heavens, “Even if I wanted too/I could not be with you/How did you paint it blue?” The loaded lyrics define the mood of her newest release, a collaborative 4-track EP with Fade to Mind’s Kingdom (aka Ezra Rubin) titled Infrared. She told us earlier this year that her artistic career was entering the red era, defined by a new vibrancy and “full of rhythm.” And even though the title of this EP is Infrared, a kind of prologue to the forthcoming RED•emp•tion, the atmosphere, the production, and lyrics of this beautifully gauzy and experimental R&B journey, amidst all that red, points to a brief flirtation with a sort of “blue” period as well.
The collaborations between Kingdom and Richard were teased last year in both a Rinse FM mix and at an event called “WAVES: Nexus Re-Morph” for the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. At “WAVES,” Kingdom, Richard, and the visual artist Kyselina™ designed a “non-linear R&B opera” complete with a sixty-minute performance filled with insane visuals, Kingdom’s razor-sharp beats, and Richard’s inimitable voice. The event was supposed to capture “the soul of R&B distorted in space-time, and rendered as a high-tech video vortex.” What we get in *Infrared *is a concentrated form of that vortex, rendered across 14 engrossing minutes.
Opening up with the three-minute echo-chamber of a love song, “Honest” lays out the themes of the EP: She “just wants to be honest” about the pain of love, the contradictions of break-ups. Her smoky, dulcet voice is at its most raw when she sings lines like “Loving you is like smoking spliffs/It's a temporary high laced with side effects” or “Hate you unless I touch you..I should light this cess smoke until I choke then.”
It's all complemented by Kingdom’s most pared-down and cushioned production effort. In *Infrared *he’s reached a new level, dissolving down all the best parts of his tropes (very heavy bass, knife-sharp synths, and echoing percussion) into an ideal backdrop for Richard’s velvet voice. He works low key magic all over “How I Get It” where he plays with expectation and hesitance in spectacularly novel ways. As Richard sings “Bitch I don’t lose,” Kingdom lets loose a gentle waterfall of synth notes, elevating her war cry with victorious energy. The two move seamlessly from the swagger of “How I Get It” to the plaintive doubt of “Paint it Blue” and “Baptize.” She sung “Baptize,” the album’s closer, during her set at the Pérez last year. In the performance, a kaleidoscopic beam of light shines down on her as she pleads to her lover and the world at large to let her voice cure all it all, “Don't be frightened by the thunder/Let the water wash all over...So please be forgiven then we'll baptize you.” In the 14 minutes of Dawn’s brief blue period, she and Kingdom did what few can do—build a diorama for love’s life cycle, encompassing everything from death defying adoration and righteous anger to, best of all, forgiveness. | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fade to Mind | May 24, 2016 | 7.7 | b9cb458e-990d-4f74-bd11-0c2956ab6c9e | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Having abandoned his lo-fi roots in the South Florida rap scene, Lil Pump has become a caricature of himself. His second album is sometimes fun but mostly unnecessary. | Having abandoned his lo-fi roots in the South Florida rap scene, Lil Pump has become a caricature of himself. His second album is sometimes fun but mostly unnecessary. | Lil Pump: Harverd Dropout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-pump-harverd-dropout/ | Harverd Dropout | Since becoming an internet phenom at 16, it seems like Lil Pump has spent the better part of his life surrounded by yes-men. Every impulse, every idea sprouted from Pump’s mind is, without hesitation, ushered into this world on a major label’s red carpet. For his 17th birthday, the label rented out a strip club and watched cheerfully as Pump cut into his Xanax-themed cake. Maybe these people are paid to gas Pump up while he plays “Fortnite” like, “Bro you’re the shit, Mr. Pump” or “Damn, Mr. Pump, you have so much money.” Then on very special days, they would chauffeur Pump into a studio, tell him to hop on a beat with EDM horns that will sound great at Rolling Loud, and let Pump churn out enough songs to make his second album, Harverd Dropout.
Lil Pump never needed a first album, let alone a second. In late 2016, when Pump shed his label as Smokepurpp’s younger sidekick and rose to the top of South Florida’s rap scene, he became the prototypical one-song rapper. Everything Pump released was tightly crafted to fit his polarizing, pink-dread-swaying character. Each Pump single hovered around the two-minute mark, featured sinister keys, distorted bass, and lyrics that made more sense if you frequented DJ Akademiks Twitch streams. And importantly, Pump didn’t flood the market or suffer from leaks like many of his peers; his singles would drop months apart and he’d ride the wave expertly until the hype died out.
Eventually, as the labels preyed on Lil Pump, he abandoned his near-flawless template and pushed away from the Chief Keef-by-way-of-Miami aesthetic in favor of being positioned as a pop star. In 2017, Pump was a sensation who felt like he was famous by mistake, but on Harverd Dropout that feeling has vanished, his act is contrived, and the catchphrases sound like they were spat out through predictive text. Often, Pump doesn’t even feel like a real person. The only sign on the album that Pump wasn’t actually born as a 16-year-old in a SoundCloud-funded lab is an occasional pop culture reference like “iCarly” or Derek Fisher.
On Harverd Dropout, Pump exists as a less edgy version of a former Odd Future slogan, “Kill People, Burn Shit, Fuck School.” Pump’s only motivation is to stunt on his old high school teachers. That theme is heavy-handed on the album, as Pump bashes us with a running joke about how he used to go to Harvard before dropping out. Do you get it? It’s because Harvard is for smart people and Lil Pump is, as he says, “A millionaire, but I don’t know how to read.” Pump doubles down on his vendetta against adults on the album opener “Drop Out,” inserting flexes that don't really flex: “Dropped out, now I’m richer than your mom.” (My mom is a high school teacher, Pump.) And most of his money-motivated boasts are similarly head-scratching, like on “Multi Millionaire” when Pump says he’s so rich that he gets on a plane to get Wingstop; download the Yelp app Pump, there are definitely some good local wings in your area.
It’s off-putting when, in the wake of Lil Peep and Mac Miller, Pump trades in his anti-education bars for some easygoing gloats about his drug addiction. “I been smokin’ since I was 11/I been poppin’ pills since I was seven,” Pump says on “Drug Addicts.” His need to brag about drug addiction isn’t alluring, it comes off as a desperate ploy for attention.
Pump’s poor decision making carries over to his beat selection, rapping over instrumentals that sound like he got really into DJ Carnage EDM sets in the last year. The high-budget production does have some bright spots, like unleashing Pump’s purest pop form on the Lil Wayne assisted “Be Like Me.” But a contribution from the reliable Ronny J, who delivers the signature South Florida distortion on “Vroom Vroom Vroom,” is a reminder how far removed Pump is from his lo-fi roots.
And so Lil Pump has become a caricature of himself. He could use a reinvention, or he could reconnect with his hometown scene where he made his name. But with nearly 18 million Instagram followers, Pump has become a behemoth, unlikely to look back. This is now Lil Pump: a timestamp of pop culture clinging to his youth, who just also happens to rap. | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | February 28, 2019 | 3.8 | b9cd377a-ae3c-48c3-bc82-4cb8882fb89e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Wayne's new mixtape sounds like the work of a mortal-- who raps very well. | Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Wayne's new mixtape sounds like the work of a mortal-- who raps very well. | Lil Wayne: Sorry 4 the Wait | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15663-sorry-4-the-wait/ | Sorry 4 the Wait | Lil Wayne spends so much of Sorry 4 the Wait, his new mixtape, rapping about guns and drugs and sex that it's easy to miss one telling little lyrical detail. Rapping over Rick Ross associate Gunplay's riotous bass-bomb "Rollin'", Wayne says, "I cut down on the syrup/ Now I'm in better shape." That qualifies as a big admission for Wayne. Back when he was on his historic mid-2000s mixtape rampage, Wayne's constant consumption of codeine cough syrup, a drug that has contributed to the death of more than a couple of Southern rap legends, was a genuine cause for concern. But Wayne's on parole now after serving eight months in Rikers Island. He has a whole lot of consequences in store if he gets caught with drugs anytime soon. Wayne's bottomless appetites once informed both his public persona and his firing-in-every-direction, mad-genius rap style. But on Sorry 4 the Wait, he sounds at least somewhat reserved and controlled; that sense that he could fly off into pure gibberish at any moment is gone. Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Sorry 4 the Wait sounds like the work of a mortal human being. Happily, that mortal human being still happens to be very good at rapping.
Wayne's actually having an excellent 2011. On Sorry 4 the Wait, he revives his old mixtape trick of rapping over a bunch of the songs currently tearing up rap radio. It feels a bit incomplete, though, since so many of those songs-- the ones conspicuously absent from the tape-- already feature Lil Wayne rapping on them: Chris Brown's "Look at Me Now", DJ Khaled's "I'm on One", Ace Hood's "Hustle Hard Remix", Wayne's own "6 Foot 7 Foot" and "John". On those tracks, Wayne sounds like a man possessed, completely missing the rust and out-of-time lostness that affects so many rappers just out of prison. (Wayne's time in prison was short, and it ended several months ago, which almost certainly has something to do with his relative freshness. Still, it's notable and impressive.)
Relative to those tracks, he sounds subdued and uncommitted through most of Sorry 4 the Wait. The title itself speaks to a certain just-fucking-around modesty; it's just a quick-and-dirty collection thrown out into the world to atone for all the delays in Tha Carter IV's release date. Compare that to his last mixtape, No Ceilings, its title itself an act of sky's-the-limit bravado. Even when Wayne dropped No Ceilings nearly two years ago, it seemed weirdly lazy and passe for an A-list rapper to drop a mix of freestyles and nothing else; after all, guys like Gucci Mane crank out entire tapes of fully realized songs at frightening speeds. But if Sorry 4 the Wait is a throwaway, it's an awfully fun one.
Occasionally, Wayne will come up with an extended piece of casual, free-associative lyrical inventiveness, like this one, from his version of Miguel's "Sure Thing": "Lord knows I'm a sinner/ Pain pills for dinner/ Bitch, I'm getting money like I got a money printer/ Got a chopper and a trimmer/ Shooting like Jimmer/ You're coming in that water, boy, you better be a swimmer." More often, though, he's letting off silly Drake-style hashtag-rap punchlines and sticking with blunt-but-effective Rick Ross rhyme patterns. And yet it mostly works, because it's just a blast to hear him having fun for 41 minutes straight instead. He can get overwhelmingly self-aggrandizing: "My girl pussy feel like heaven to a god." He can get goofily puerile, using Drake's gorgeously conflicted sensitive synth-rap confession "Marvin's Room" to bust off some irreverently nasty sex talk: "She take it every way except personal." He indulges in plenty of singsong cadence, but all of it sounds like rapping, and none of it comes with the Auto-Tune he kept using for too long. When Lil B, a stylistic descendant in many ways, shows up on a freestyle of Waka Flocka Flame's "Grove St. Party", Wayne sounds comparatively focused-- and "focused" isn't a word I would've used to describe Wayne at any point over the last couple of years. Even on autopilot, as he often is here, Wayne sounds like a man reawakened and re-energized.
The most-fun part of the mixtape doesn't really have anything to do with rapping at all. The final track is a six-minute non-rapping rant over the clipped, fired-up dancehall of Beyoncé's "Run the World (Girls)" (itself a flip of Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor"). Wayne's track is a sort of extended multi-tracked ad-lib, with a whole mob of Waynes yelling incoherently throughout. One of those Waynes yells about all the things going right with his life right now: "I am happy! I'm in love! I'm in love! I picked up a new hobby! I make way too much money! My kids are growing up healthy and beautiful and intelligent! My mom's getting married! Congratulations!" Another Wayne shouts out an endless parade of random people. Still another indulges in some pure non-sequitur ridiculousness: "Rest in peace John F. Kennedy! Rest in peace Marilyn Monroe!" The tape is an encouraging indication that even a cleaned-up Wayne has plenty of insanity left in him. And I, for one, hope that insanity is all over Tha Carter IV. | 2011-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 27, 2011 | 7.1 | b9ce3320-0450-4849-afc9-6dd55d2e0dd7 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The Salon des Amateurs resident DJ combs his collection of exotica to produce a compilation of globe-trotting ambient and drum-driven dancefloor cuts. | The Salon des Amateurs resident DJ combs his collection of exotica to produce a compilation of globe-trotting ambient and drum-driven dancefloor cuts. | Various Artists: Tropical Drums of Deutschland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-tropical-drums-of-deutschland/ | Tropical Drums of Deutschland | It takes a singular DJ to find dancefloor material in the catalogs of artists like Rüdiger Oppermann’s Harp Attack—a German who specialized in Celtic harp and whose taste in puns led to titles like “Harper’s Delight” and “Unchain My Harp”—but that’s Jan Schulte for you. In his years of digging, Schulte, a resident DJ at Düsseldorf’s famously eclectic Salon des Amateurs, has amassed legions of peculiar albums from forgotten German artists who were fascinated by sounds from other cultures. Dabbling in fusion, classical, folk, and ethno-jazz at a time when “world music” was just coming into its own as a category, these European artists absorbed sounds from around the world—African drums, Indonesian gamelan, Irish flutes—and worked them into their own compositions. Now, Schulte combs his collection of globetrotting German oddballs to produce Tropical Drums of Deutschland, a compilation that hangs in the balance between cultural appropriation, kitsch, and the kinds of fourth world sounds that are currently in vogue in electronic music.
Om Buschman’s 1988 album Total provides three tracks. The set opens with his “Klang Fängt An” (“Sound Begins”), a fake-ethnographic ambient track full of spare, clattering percussion, tinkling wind chimes, and strummed zither that evokes Laraaji. Similar chimes shimmer amid the bird calls, water sounds, and wordless chants of Total Art of Percussion’s “Wuhan Wuchang,” and Argile’s “Kleine Rosa Wolke” drifts into new-age territory with its placid strings and floating flutes. In a similar vein, Rüdiger Oppermann also contributes a beguiling track entitled “Troubadix In Afrika,” full of dizzying kora runs, rattled gourds, and Indian tabla.
The latter half of the compilation utilizes those titular tropical drums less for texture and more for tempo. Om Buschman’s “Prima Kalimba” takes the instrument, also known as mbira or thumb piano, and bolsters it with a battery of hand drums. (Running water also features here, though in this baffling instance, it comes from a flushing toilet.) At the comp’s heart are its two heaviest percussion tracks. The duo Drumming Birds’ “Boat Song” is a kind of conversation for talking drums, while Ralf Nowy’s “Akili Mali” sounds like a library-music version of a Voudou ritual, the drums deep and entrancing while the flute line is full of whimsy.
For the last two selections, Schulte appears as Wolf Müller, the alias he has used on percussive, polyrhythmic remixes for artists like Africaine 808, Jose Padilla, and Wildbirds & Peacedrums’ Mariam the Believer. Reworking Om Buschman’s “Hey Tata Gorem,” he foregrounds an eerie tribal chant and peels back all the extraneous percussion until one drum part throbs like a migraine. His edit of Toney Carey’s “At the Water-Hole” is the compilation’s outlier, if only because Carey (who once manned synths in the hard-rock outfit Rainbow) is American, but it might also be the most crackling track here. Carey utilized scales and tones from Japan and Egypt on his 1984 album TCP, which he recorded in Frankfurt and released on Germany’s X-Records. Here, Müller’s edit accentuates the drums’ tropical thunder and the shrill synthesized bird calls that evoke that most absurd of imaginary landscapes, the German rainforest.
Without Discogs, it would have been easy to guess that Schulte had slyly made all these tracks himself; the well-paced set deftly traces an arc through ambient rainforests and gong baths into imaginary rituals and drunken drum tracks. While the original artists’ acts of appropriation might seem problematic from today’s perspective, Tropical Drums of Deutschland succeeds on a purely sonic level: Sounds that once seemed cheesy have aged into a form that now sounds strangely contemporary. | 2017-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Music For Dreams | August 22, 2017 | 7.4 | b9d59ace-285f-4562-9862-8de7f010799e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The New Orleans trumpeter and composer’s latest album continues to stretch the language of jazz, further embracing electronics and an increasingly broad approach to rhythm. | The New Orleans trumpeter and composer’s latest album continues to stretch the language of jazz, further embracing electronics and an increasingly broad approach to rhythm. | Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ancestral Recall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christian-scott-atunde-adjuah-ancestral-recall/ | Ancestral Recall | Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been working toward a unified, multicultural idea of improvised music for much of his career. But the New Orleans-raised, Berklee-trained trumpet prodigy could hardly have known that the concept he dubbed “stretch music” (on a 2015 album of the same name) would be so well timed to jazz’s reemergence into mainstream consciousness. What he has called an attempt to “stretch—not replace—jazz's rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can” coincides with an erosion of boundaries that is central to the current jazz renaissance. Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.
What makes Ancestral Recall’s radicalism beguiling is that stretch music’s insurgency is a product of jazz’s oldest and most traditional wing. aTunde Adjuah’s status as a third-generation Mardi Gras Indians chief (grandson to legendary Big Chief Donald Harrison, Sr.) is often overshadowed by his youthful experience in his acclaimed saxophonist uncle Donald Harrison, Jr.’s group, but the influences worked hand in hand. Scott’s community-minded education in the tribe, coupled with an unorthodox relationship to his instrument—he started playing late (for a New Orleanian) and once said that he began designing his own horns with unusual tonal ranges because of his “hate” for the sound of the trumpet—fostered a creative and social perspective atop NOLA’s canonical jazz studies. aTunde Adjuah recognizes that “Tiger Rag” and, say, Juvenile’s bounce emanate from the same source, and he rejects their segregation, whether by race, class, technology, cultural narrative, or media distribution, among other factors. Stretch music is less a marketing plan than an expression of the philosophical necessity to make sense of the world.
Stretch Music was aTunde Adjuah’s initial attempt to reconcile change with tradition. The easiest way to track his intentions was in the beat. The fractured, polyrhythmic base he had already spent two albums developing with drummer Jamire Williams (now a central figure in his own right among L.A.’s new breed) had mutated into a technologically robust structure: Joe Dyson Jr. and Corey Fonville’s interlocking beats (some programmed, some hand-played) spoke to planet drum not in some pidgin blend but in precise polyglot, while aTunde Adjuah and flautist Elena Pinderhughes soared above them. Two years later, over the course of 2017’s sprawling The Centennial Trilogy, the explicit musical nods to tradition became rarer. aTunde Adjuah’s pieces stepped further from the blues vernacular, toward something more environmental, while the digital beats became even more pronounced. His strong, cinematic horn lines could still invoke classic players and familiar phrases, but the territory around him was now an ocean of sound. On the surface, it harked back to fusion recordings that Bill Laswell made with all-star casts of jazz, hip-hop, “world,” and experimental musicians for Celluloid and Axiom in the 1980 and 1990s. Yet occasionally, the deep dives harvested glorious originals, like “Encryption” (on The Centennial Trilogy’s Ruler Rebel), a spectacularly organic synthesis of jazz improvisation with trance-like rhythms and Detroit techno’s sci-fi dread.
On Ancestral Recall, few elements are left tethered to the time-worn rules of “jazz,” yet, as the title makes abundantly clear, the past remains paramount, and old global cultures the preferred engines into the future. Led by voice, drums, and electronics, this version of stretch music cuts most recognizable instrumental sounds loose. Players, too. Pinderhughes features on three of 12 tracks, longtime keyboardist Lawrence Fields and bassist Kriss Funn on two apiece; the only other horn present, Logan Richardson’s alto, is reduced to a solitary feature. That otherworldly quintet track, “Songs She Never Heard,” is one of two instances where Recall approaches standard song form, yet even its textural presentation—mixed through a digital filter, with light percussive loops bouncing throughout, a synth wash arriving late in the song—implies that maybe some standards did indeed arrive from Saturn.
The drum corps, on the other hand, feels omnipresent. On Recall, it is the harmonic center that builds on aTunde Adjuah’s previous rhythm forays. Fonville, master djembe player Weedie Braimah, and aTunde Adjuah’s own extensive electronics are the core, providing scaffolding for almost all the tracks here; three other percussionists join the proceedings for the electric one-two opening, “Her Arrival” and “I Own the Night.” The latter is among the three appearances by Saul Williams, whose vocal timbre and poetic charge provide the perfect narrative foil whenever it appears, and whose in situ delivery bears a majesty not dissimilar to that of aTunde Adjuah’s horn. “I Own the Night” is one of Recall’s hard-to-describe masterpieces, that rare track that naturally splits the difference between electronic club music and ritualistic trance.
When the drummers do recede, much of Ancestral Recall unfolds as a set of ceremonial processionals: music for holy and open space. With the exception of “Diviner [Devan],” made from layers of horns and flute in astral interplay, it also finds aTunde Adjuah often working alone. The trumpet (or some digitized facsimile of it) is rarely missing, abetted by hand drums, an occasional MPC, and industrial loops, with electronic vocal samples unfolding as melodic blankets to keep this increasingly melancholy tone afloat; aTunde Adjuah’s instrument appears primarily as a tool of composition rather than spontaneous expression.
Inasmuch as it invests in rhythmic expansion, Ancestral Recall also marks a turn inward. It is an exciting strategic choice for stretch music, the philosophy born of cultural amplification and group interplay. It almost feels like a hint that simply playing the changes—no matter how many different kinds, or with how broad a cast—is no substitute for understanding how to live through them. | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Ropeadope | March 28, 2019 | 8 | b9def23f-8b30-4405-8ad8-3bd6d104eeb7 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
Eighteen months after Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross released the Giza EP under their Gatekeeper alias, they return with a 35-minute LP that sounds gigantic, often gloriously dumb, and, in its finest moments, promisingly brazen. | Eighteen months after Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross released the Giza EP under their Gatekeeper alias, they return with a 35-minute LP that sounds gigantic, often gloriously dumb, and, in its finest moments, promisingly brazen. | Gatekeeper: Exo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16829-exo/ | Exo | It's around 18 months since the New York-based duo Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross released the Giza EP under their Gatekeeper alias, positioning themselves as another act to ride one of the plentiful waves of 1980s nostalgia. That release was fixed as a dystopian electronic fantasia, which Pitchfork's Jess Harvell correctly placed somewhere between Cabaret Voltaire, Detroit techno, and Vangelis' bled-dry soundtrack to Blade Runner. Here on Exo, the duo's debut album for Hippos in Tanks, the fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past. It's muscular and brutish, often gaining mettle from a Lords of Acid-style mesh of post-industrial density and Shoom-era acid house sounds. But there are other elements at work, including an adherence to playfulness, humor, and a rich seam of pomposity, all of which prevent it from becoming a straight-down-the-line exercise in po-faced replication.
There's an unashamed ambition that takes hold of Exo from its first few seconds and doesn’t let up until the last strains of the wonderfully over-the-top closer "Encarta" fade to black. Occasionally there's a sonic similarity to big beat in its prime, particularly when the twists of acidic synth bleed firmly into the red. But there's also a shared sense that all this work was deliberately mapped out in a gigantic space, where every last synth line and beat is designed to sound as "big" as possible-- a notion Gatekeeper share with acts like the Chemical Brothers in their prime. There isn't much room for subtlety and nor should there be-- "Exolift" and "Hydrus" find their weight from being gloriously dumb, driven by sledgehammer riffs that only increase in intensity as each track progresses. Even tracks that take more subtle turns ("Bog", "Pre-Gen") are propped up by an overwhelming feeling of grandiosity, lending a magisterial quality to the entire enterprise.
The media campaign for Exo matches the sense of aspiration that percolates throughout the LP, with special fonts released to decipher hidden messages, plus an as-yet unseen first-person gaming environment designed by Tabor Robak to help explore "various worlds inspired by the tracks on the album." Such ideas mirror the prog leanings the album sometimes buffers up against, although Exo is mercifully untethered from that world by its brief, 35-minute runtime. Gatekeeper never fully reach down into that environment in the same way Justice did on Audio, Video, Disco, instead choosing to take their rock cues from even more unlikely sources. "Encarta" is the kind of ludicrously grand musical gesture that would have Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman beaming with pride, with its bombastic vocal chants leading the march toward a bedlam-fueled conclusion that bears more of a resemblance to a battering ram than it does to anything musical.
Ending Exo in such a supercilious way is a marvelous act of insolence, hopefully hinting at freshly brazen territories Gatekeeper can move into on further releases. It would certainly be better than the tendency this duo has for dipping a little too hard into the acid vaults. On "Encarta" they can overcome that by the sheer vigor of the other musical ideas, and occasionally that tendency does hit odd moments of inspiration-- the opening "Imax" pines for an era that's yet to pass, attempting to accelerate the nostalgia cycle by retro-frying the present-- but elsewhere their leap into the future is stunted by the past bearing down too hard on their coattails. | 2012-07-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-07-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Hippos in Tanks | July 20, 2012 | 5.8 | b9e3d6a3-c198-4bb4-a745-53f38d82fa3a | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the oft-overshadowed debut from indie rock icons, a smaller and more intimate look into the mercurial world of Jeff Mangum. | 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 oft-overshadowed debut from indie rock icons, a smaller and more intimate look into the mercurial world of Jeff Mangum. | Neutral Milk Hotel: On Avery Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neutral-milk-hotel-on-avery-island/ | On Avery Island | In the mid-’90s, Jeff Mangum moved into a haunted closet in Denver where he had dreams of women in fur coats drinking champagne, yelling at him to get out of their house. During a snowy Colorado winter, the Louisiana-born songwriter and his childhood friend Robert Schneider set about recording what would become Neutral Milk Hotel’s debut album. They worked feverishly, going out to smoke cigarettes when they hit a roadblock, until, in May of 1995, they had a finished record. The North Carolina indie label Merge scooped up the young band and quietly released On Avery Island the following March.
At the time, Neutral Milk Hotel were bit players in a wave of buzzy psychedelic indie pop. Virginia songwriter Mark Linkous released his debut album as Sparklehorse in August of 1995; Oklahoma City stalwarts the Flaming Lips released the cult favorite Clouds Taste Metallic later that same year. Beck’s omnivorous breakthrough Odelay and Super Furry Animals’ debut Fuzzy Logic both came out midway through 1996, while Grandaddy issued their first LP in 1997. The record industry was in the best shape it’s ever been in, and even majors were willing to take chances on messy, ramshackle bands that took cues from the 1972 psych-rock compilation Nuggets as they coasted on the drift of college radio powerhouses like R.E.M. It was a good time to make weird shit.
Unlike the Flaming Lips and Beck, Neutral Milk Hotel didn’t set their sights on breaking through to the mainstream. They subsisted happily as part of the Elephant 6 collective, a group of psychedelic musicians based first in Denver and then in Athens, Georgia, who played unlikely instruments like the singing saw and the accordion in each other’s bands. Alongside Neutral Milk Hotel, the collective included the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Elf Power. They issued a few early records before most of their groups signed to established and better-resourced labels. In the midst of a college radio renaissance, Elephant 6 carved out a colorful niche.
On Avery Island earned a handful of positive reviews from music magazines, and after its release, Mangum got a band together and toured steadily. In February 1998, Merge released the band’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, expecting to move about 7,000 copies. It did sell modestly at first, receiving warm but not effusive reviews in the music press. Mangum kept touring, and the band’s profile grew; fans showed up at NMH gigs knowing every word to his songs, and often sang them louder than the frontman did. Music magazines started asking for interviews, and Mangum found that he hated explaining himself. By the end of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel turned down the opportunity to open for R.E.M. Disturbed by the unexpected success of his project, Mangum withdrew from music and spent a few years in a state of panic. Neutral Milk Hotel vanished almost as soon as it had arrived. And then music nerds figured out they could share mp3s with each other on the internet.
In the early aughts, Aeroplane became a cherished totem among people who hid from the world in strange music. A sweeping, surrealist concept album loosely based on the life and death of Anne Frank, its carnivalesque singalongs and horny, apocalyptic lyrics attracted people too young to have followed NMH while they were active. That the band was in stasis and Mangum gone from the public eye only added to the record’s mystique. It was just a few years old, but it felt like an artifact unearthed and shared covertly among those in the know.
Aeroplane might be an offbeat record—its unwieldy title, its songs about cum and communism, Mangum’s brassy, abrasive voice—but its songs are simple and tuneful enough to be played at expensive weddings. In 2005, the teen drama “The O.C.” featured a cover of the album’s title track in an episode, causing a mild uproar over possessive fans who didn’t want normies in their midst. But the word was already out, and Aeroplane became something of a sensation, a living record of an extinct band.
There are NMH devotees who will argue that On Avery Island is the better of Mangum’s two official LPs. It’s certainly less spoiled by exposure, and certain songs, like “You’ve Passed” and “Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone,” easily rank among NMH’s best. Within the fan community, On Avery Island served as a throttle between Aeroplane’s broadening pop appeal and the sprawling collection of bootleg concert tapes that could be easily snapped up via file-sharing programs. There are some curios in Mangum’s back catalog—minutes of unintelligible screaming, rackets of ear-scraping noise, a prank call where Mangum pretends to be an old man asking a phone sex hotline for bestiality roleplay—and there are also some of the most moving, sublime songs he’s ever written, preserved only in the tape hiss of early demos and live recordings. On Avery Island bridges these two worlds. It offers a glimpse of a pivotal songwriter in transition, moving from making shoddy cassettes for his friends to making art rock that spoke to untold thousands of lonely teens listening to pilfered mp3s late into the night.
All the seeds of Aeroplane can be heard scattered throughout On Avery Island. Mangum already balanced the gross and the transcendent in his lyrics: On “A Baby for Pree,” he imagines a pregnant woman full of bees who spews infants until they fill up her bedroom. Throughout the course of the rambunctious, trombone-heavy opener “Song Against Sex,” the speaker kisses another boy while the apocalypse sets in, complains about the porn he hates and the drugs he won’t take, and then lights himself on fire.
Certain songs hit closer to the bone than anything on Aeroplane. “You’ve Passed” envisions a woman’s spirit coursing away from the hospital where she’s just died, while “Three Peaches” articulates an uncanny emotional register between mourning and celebration as Mangum sings to a friend who survived a suicide attempt. It’s one of the hardest NMH songs to endure; Mangum sings from the very bottom of his diaphragm as if dredging up muck from beneath the earth’s crust, dragging out the words “I’m so happy” while sounding like he’s about to keel over with grief.
There are love songs here, too, like the effervescent “Naomi” and “Leave Me Alone,” and there are spooling, chaotic instrumental tracks: “Marching Theme,” which rolls along on a breathing drone, and the 14-minute closer “Pree Sisters Swallowing A Donkey’s Eye,” which rides the album’s final triumphant burst out into a slow-growing silence. The album veers wildly between the accessible and the inscrutable, like putting the Velvet Underground’s best-of collection on shuffle with excerpts from Lou Reed’s squalling feedback symphony Metal Machine Music interspersed. The abrupt transitions between perfect pop melodies and gaseous balls of noise lend the album a certain wildfire charm. It has less varnish than Aeroplane, and that raw face makes it a little easier to see into the mind of the guy who wrote it.
Aeroplane’s thematic ambitions can make it feel bigger than any one person: It’s an album about death and loss and evil, and about how human beings keep searching for the good in ourselves despite our long history of being awful to each other. On Avery Island’s scope is narrower. Mangum sings about himself and the people he knows. Instead of mountaintops and oceans, he sets his songs in bedrooms and public parks. His characters smoke cigarettes and hate themselves for being horny. They break up and hook up and yearn for each other like teenagers. They fall asleep on other people’s floors, listening to the rain hit the streets outside.
Mangum swirls mundane imagery into surrealist fantasy, sprinkling bizarre references to angels and halos throughout, as if contemplating an aunt’s ceramic cherubim while on an acid trip. Grounding these jerky lyrical turns are horns, organ, and fuzz bass, which all sprout distortion like moss. If Aeroplane sweeps you off your feet through time and space, rocketing back and forth between World War II and the present, On Avery Island roots you in the here and now, strange as it may be.
In their postmortem popularity, Neutral Milk Hotel would become a beacon for a glut of aughts bands who never quite achieved their idols’ specificity. Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wolf Parade, and Beirut all sprang up on the ground Mangum cleared, mixing boisterous vocals with antique instrumentation. But even the most lyrically adventurous songwriters of the aughts never approached the way Mangum saw the whole world as if it were melting. On his first official release, he established himself as the sort of artist who feels everything at full volume, who bellows through the mess of his life because it’s the only thing he knows how to do.
I was biking home from a movie one summer night in Denver when it crept up on me, a feast of color illuminating the riverside trail. There is an old amusement park on the other side of the river from the buildings that make up the skyline. It pops into view unexpectedly when you’re driving on Route 25, a tangle of wooden roller coasters and Starflyer rides rubbing up against the Colorado sky. It looks out of place, especially at night, when it leaks neon into the dark. In “Gardenhead,” Mangum sings about a roller coaster that crashes into the ocean, and there’s a B-side from 1996, a fan favorite, called “Ferris Wheel on Fire.” On Avery Island is a theme park plopped down on a city: It rushes the fantastical into the everyday, conjuring the weird sensation of getting knocked loose from a rut into the intoxicating unknown of what’s still to come. | 2019-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 23, 2019 | 8.8 | b9e90f74-f65e-4c39-9217-78efc403b938 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On his debut mixtape, the south London rapper floats over some great jungle and grime grooves—you just wish he’d loosen up a little. | On his debut mixtape, the south London rapper floats over some great jungle and grime grooves—you just wish he’d loosen up a little. | Jawnino: 40 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jawnino-40/ | 40 | Jawnino is prone to the type of errant observations that stumble across your mind when the drugs and drinks are hitting especially hard, glitchy epiphanies spurred by Red Stripe and ketamine. His raps drape languidly over jungle and grime grooves; no matter the BPM, his bars rarely move faster than a jog, refusing to break a sweat. Across his debut mixtape 40, the south London grime rapper comes off calm, cool, and collected—you just wish he’d loosen up a little.
Jawnino isn’t too straight-laced for ecstasy or situationships, but he’s no blissfully unaware club rat: hedonistic inclinations aside, his eye for detail can’t ignore the “needles on the pavement” littering a drunk walk home. This gritty realism is paired with a wonky sort of transcendentalism, the kind of simple metaphysics that would lead someone to earnestly deploy a koan like, “If time exists, then it heals.” This is less annoying on record thanks to his ear for instrumentals, which ensconces Jawnino in warping breakbeats and incorporeal synths.
These digital backdrops suitably accentuate the placid bounce of Jawnino’s flows, like when he murmurs, “Never went to art school/likkle in me artsy” on “Scr33nTim3” or when he scoffs, “who d’you think brought all the girls outside?” on opener “2trains.” Although his bars can be bland, 40 remains broadly compelling whether stalking through icy nights or throwing its hands up in packed-out nightclubs. Woesum-produced “40wave” buzzes like a brood of cicadas; the wubby jungle of “Lost My Brain” papers over mundane one-liners like, “I need me a leather jacket, I told Renzo I want it in brown.”
Jawnino’s stoic vocals rarely betray any serious feeling, leaving emotional regulation up to the producers behind the boards. That can be a problem on slinkier tunes like “Dance2,” where Jawnino adds little to the song’s groove, or on more grandiose tracks like “Wind,” where his smoldering verses are doused by a heavy-handed chorus. Or take the rushing strings of album peak “Westfield.” Jawnino sounds pretty good until fellow Gen Z grime MC Kibo comes barrelling in: “The game is bossman’s fridge/The coldest ones will stay at the back.” Being shown up by your guests can be a mark of respect, but as with the MIKE feature “Short Stories,” Jawnino’s inability to stand tall beside his peers only emphasizes the room he has to grow as a lyricist.
A trio of remixes at the record’s close help to tease out latent emotional threads by treating Jawnino as just another musical element to be pitch-shifted and skewed. Evilgiane preserves the squeaky nightcore hook of 2022’s “3styl3” but swaps the spare shuffle of the original for wrecking ball 808s; Airhead ditches the woozy melodies of “Can’t Be” in favor of eerily pinging synthesizers. “sentfromheaven” ranks among 40’s better solo outings thanks to Jawnino sedately detailing a faded tryst, but a remix by Night Slugs co-founder Bok Bok pushes the track into far headier terrain; the effect is akin to seeing the same painting with and without glasses.
On his 2019 breakthrough single “It’s Cold Out,” Jawnino turned his steely eye toward the grinding economics squeezing Britain’s working class ever tighter. Here, that same song is appended with an agile new verse that crushes romantic fallout up against the thrill of dating around. Still, even with money coming in, he can’t escape the rat race: “Jawns is hot property like when you got a yard in Shoreditch with no mortgage.” Everything’s paid off—who needs to go hard? | 2024-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | True Panther | May 3, 2024 | 7 | b9f8e3fc-cf07-4ebf-88b5-cc2969ae3e55 | Vivian Medithi | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vivian-medithi/ | |
The PC Music producer’s first EP in eight years is a loving paean to the earnest euphoria of 2010s EDM. | The PC Music producer’s first EP in eight years is a loving paean to the earnest euphoria of 2010s EDM. | easyFun: ELECTRIC EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/easyfun-electric-ep/ | ELECTRIC EP | Although less of a name brand than his PC Music buddies A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle, Easyfun has played just as significant a role in pushing modern pop to its extremes. The debut EP by the British producer, born Finn Keane, was PC Music’s first ever release, a gaseous and disorienting beat tape that sounded a little like a methed-out take on TNGHT’s permanently in-the-red hip-hop experiments. Since then, his name has continued to pop up in unexpected places—he co-wrote Rita Ora’s “Let You Love Me,” a massive hit everywhere except America—and all the expected ones: He’s worked on many of Charli XCX’s best tracks, including Pop 2 opener “Backseat” and her recent Billboard-charting Barbie cut “Speed Drive.”
As a writer and producer, Keane is more of a traditionalist than Cook or Harle. His songs have become aerodynamic and tightly structured over time, the straight-ahead nature of his music belying his origins as a producer of punishing, footwork-adjacent experimental tracks. His first EP in eight years, ELECTRIC, parlays those pop instincts into a set of songs that’s dynamic, rich, and bright. “Audio,” the EP’s opening track, is perpetual-motion-machine-EDM with a bubbly, infectious refrain: “Audio, all you ever want.”
There’s always been an earnest core to PC Music releases, and the same goes here. Although two of the songs on ELECTRIC, “HARDPAIN” and “carelesscarelesscarelesscarelesscareless,” are built around aggressive jackhammer synths, the rest of it is comprised of fairly traditional songs about love and heartbreak. All that sentimentality is in service of a greater purpose. With the exception of “Know Who You Are”—the EP’s weakest track, and not coincidentally its most contemporary-sounding selection—ELECTRIC feels, in many ways, like a loving tribute to late-aughts and early-2010s EDM, recreating its spine-tingling drops, ecstatic chord progressions, and heart-on-sleeve affect. “Audio” plays like a more sugary take on Aviici’s “Levels.” The upbeat but downcast “Be Your USA” sounds like a more sophisticated version of The Chainsmokers’ first hit, the Daya-featuring EDM-R&B hybrid “Don’t Let Me Down.” Rubberised wub-wub-wub basslines, the type once favored by Skrillex, tear through “HARDPAIN” and “No Body.”
These are works of unadulterated nostalgia, replete with the kind of shellacked, high-saturation cast that entails. If you were partial to that style of music, as I was, listening to ELECTRIC can be a surprisingly emotional experience: The EP’s deep, shuddering bass notes and unashamedly romantic melodies give me the same shiver-inducing thrill I felt when I first heard, say, Calvin Harris’s “How Deep Is Your Love (Chris Lake Remix)” or Grey, Zedd, and Hailee Steinfeld’s “Starving.” Is that embarrassing to admit? Maybe a little—but Keane graciously references this sound without a whiff of irony or cruelty. 2010s-style EDM-pop is coming back into vogue right now—evidenced by Kim Petras’ latest album, as well as the recent chart resurgence of David Guetta—and EASYFUN’s take on big-tent euphoria is more interesting than most. | 2023-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | PC Music | August 21, 2023 | 7.1 | b9fb5ce9-310c-4138-9a32-d2b71cf3a4a1 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The Pro Era rapper channels the adolescent moodiness of Machine Gun Kelly and the aspiration navel-gazing of J. Cole. | The Pro Era rapper channels the adolescent moodiness of Machine Gun Kelly and the aspiration navel-gazing of J. Cole. | Nyck Caution: Anywhere but Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nyck-caution-anywhere-but-here/ | Anywhere but Here | Anywhere But Here, the latest effort from Pro Era rapper Nyck Caution, opens with a slice of devastating imagery. On “December 24th,” Caution recalls returning to his native Brooklyn after a tour date in Philadelphia to surprise his father for Christmas. When he arrives, the NYPD has blocked the entrance to his childhood home like a crime scene; his father, he learns, lies dead inside. As a narrative hook, it’s the sort of deftly captured, life-altering precipice found on the intros to Ready to Die and Me Against the World, Clinton-era coming-of-age classics that Pro Era has long attempted to replicate. But the gut-punch specificity of “December 24th” makes it an outlier on Anywhere But Here, the album’s hollow interiority representative of the collective’s ongoing identity crisis.
When Joey Bada$$ introduced his Murrow High schoolmates on 2012’s 1999, they arrived with the verve of eager theater kids who’d stumbled upon a shopworn copy of Enta da Stage. As the years passed, Pro Era strove to shake the revivalist tag but struggled to to distinguish themselves otherwise. On 2017’s All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, Joey flitted between street-corner chronicles and we-the-people generational spokesmanship, yet couldn’t quite commit to either; the group clung to a nebulous ideal of New York City as a cultural institution in hopes of ascribing their music with secondhand prestige. 2019’s supergroup outing Escape From New York sought an updated musical context, but by that point the prospect of Kirk Knight and CJ Fly rapping over trap beats landed like a joke without a punchline.
The conundrum is particularly acute for Caution, a 27-year-old white man from suburban Mill Basin (Nyck is an acronym for, sigh, “New York City Kid”) who befriended the late Capital STEEZ as a teenager. His nimble vocal technique evinces his outerborough roots, but his writing is more akin to J. Cole’s aspirational navel-gazing and Machine Gun Kelly’s opaque melodrama. On the one hand, he’s a working-class, middle-American underdog; on the other, he’s convinced of his claim to a hip-hop legacy. This self-styled contradiction imbues Anywhere But Here with adolescent moodiness. “I need a reason to be better than I am/At the moment I been broken, putting pieces of the puzzle back again,” he raps on the title track. Both the sentiment and rhyme pattern are echoed on “Session 47”: “Every tomorrow I’m runnin’ again/Don’t really know who I’m runnin’ against.” Caution’s ambiguous tales teem with nameless demons, detractors, and lonely-at-the-top laments.
That’s not to say his targeted vitriol is any more effective. On the Joey Bada$$ duet “How You Live It,” Caution’s verse opens, “I drop the bag off, early morning I jack off/So when I fuck your chick, afternoon, I last long”; within a few bars, he’s bemoaning the vanity of Instagram models. He gripes about mumble rappers and internet hype on “Dirt on Your Name,” threatening to take his ball and go home if he doesn’t get his overdue accolades. His grievances are informed by a peculiar bootstraps logic—a conviction that only those who’ve put in their 10,000 hours are entitled to rap glory. Of course, if that were actually the case, Nyck Caution would have to find something else to grumble about.
Like his group members, Caution has taken pains to distance himself from Pro Era’s earlier golden-age sound. Production-wise, Anywhere But Here models a frictionless anonymity, with contemplative, Statik Selektah-type beats courtesy of Canis Major, Dreamlife, and Erick the Architect. Caution is a chameleonic collaborator, which works in his favor: the Denzel Curry track “Bad Day” sounds like a Denzel Curry track, with both rappers speed-rhyming over a frenetic bassline. Caution’s third-person autobiography on “Product of My Environment” doesn’t stick the landing, but the song is redeemed by Kota the Friend’s guest verse and producer Freddie Joachim’s lively groove. In the company of his pals, Caution is notably less morose.
But on his own, he’s such a blank canvas that you can more or less project whichever attributes you’d like upon him. Is he a true-school torchbearer? Sort of. A solemn diarist? Sometimes. A token of middle-class angst, adapted for an audience who came to hip-hop through their smartphones? Maybe so. Anywhere But Here exposes the limits of Pro Era’s student-of-the-game reverence, their submersion in technical and aesthetic trappings at the expense of the bigger picture: Jay and B.I.G. weren’t just interesting people because they were rappers, they were great rappers because they were also interesting people.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Pro Era / ADA Worldwide | January 26, 2021 | 5.6 | b9fcb304-51ff-4bfb-be9c-81f4881b6f9f | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The mad scientists of UK psych-rock take an unexpected turn toward pop on their third album. | The mad scientists of UK psych-rock take an unexpected turn toward pop on their third album. | Django Django: Marble Skies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/django-django-marble-skies/ | Marble Skies | Ever since their 2012 debut, Django Django have banked their popularity on their ability to mash as many genres as possible into one dense, heady sound. At their best, they sound like wide-eyed kids toying gleefully with an impressive arsenal of influences, ranging from ’60s psych to ’70s space rock, ’80s pop and ’90s indie, often within the same track. While this stylistic dexterity helped break them into the competitive independent UK scene of the early 2010s, it failed them on their overthought second record, 2015’s Born Under Saturn, where entire songs got lost in a fog of moody synths and splashy hi-hats.
On the band’s third album, Marble Skies, all the typical elements of their music are front-and-center: the noodly vintage synthesizers, the bouncy disco basslines, frontman Vincent Neff’s falsetto. But where much of Saturn got buried under the weight of its own grandeur, here Django turn the dial ever so gingerly back towards the sound that, at one point, made them Mercury Prize-nominated electro-psych-rock children of tomorrow. At the same time, you can hear them striving for the evolutionary jump that eludes so many indie bands on their third records—trying to concoct something fresh and exciting without losing the momentum they’ve built thus far. While Marble Skies doesn’t always quite get there, the planets it frantically orbits while awaiting touchdown are worth the journey.
Take the album’s title track. As straightforwardly enjoyable as anything Django has ever released, “Marble Skies” is a galloping, chugging pop song that positions the LP as not only spacey but fun—a quality that Django sometimes sacrifice in the name of intellectualism. It’s an explosion of vocoders, sing-along choruses, post-punk bass and harpsichord-styled keys straight out of “The Safety Dance.” The mixed-up sound is pure Django, but the commitment to good times feels new.
They continue to take risks with “Surface to Air,” a vocal collaboration with Rebecca Taylor of the British folk duo Slow Club. Her smooth contralto, overlaid with a crackly sheen of reverb, recalls vintage Marianne Faithfull, while strange flourishes in the production, like a snare drum that sounds almost exactly like an asthmatic cough, give the track an out-of-time feel. The most memorable element of the song, though, is its dancehall-influenced melodies and percussion, which fit perfectly with the post-Rihanna tropical pop that has been dominating the charts for the better part of this decade.
Elsewhere, Django Django battle their inclination for wink-nudge nerdism (there’s a slow, heavy track called “Beam Me Up,” which, we get it). And “Further,” which is supposed to be a country-tinged, desert-rock stomper, instead drones away without really anchoring to any one idea that Django haven’t explored many times before. “Tic Tac Toe” makes much better use of the band’s propensity for throwback sounds, taking sunbleached ’60s harmonies and punching them up with layered blasts of prog-rock.
If the best songs on this album propose the idea of Django as pop stars, “In Your Beat” blows it into the stratosphere. The most realized song that the group has released since its debut, it’s a huge-sounding dance-rock groove that would have been an international hit had it been released in 2007. That sounds like a dig, but it’s really a testament to how well Django evoke the now-distant time when the intersection of indie and dance was at its strongest. Here in the present, Marbles Skies suggests that they still have either a great pop record or a mind-bending rock opus in them, if they ever feel like going all the way. | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Ribbon Music | January 25, 2018 | 6.9 | ba03502d-849e-4d40-99cd-8f11ff8d127c | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
After 30 years, the London duo sounds more refined than ever, though their mix of ethereal jazz, ambient electronics, and mechanized drums has rarely been harder to define. | After 30 years, the London duo sounds more refined than ever, though their mix of ethereal jazz, ambient electronics, and mechanized drums has rarely been harder to define. | Ultramarine: Signals Into Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ultramarine-signals-into-space/ | Signals Into Space | Ultramarine have always seemed to exist slightly outside their time. Their 1989 debut EP, Wyndham Lewis, incorporated recordings of the work of Lewis, the futurist painter and writer who died three decades earlier. And where their first album, 1990’s Folk, bore certain hallmarks of its era—a mix of breakbeats, funk bass, and keening saxophone, embedded within groove-heavy, sampledelic post-punk—subsequent albums ventured further afield. Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper made good on the promise of what Simon Reynolds called “pastoral techno”: an unorthodox fusion of sleek machine funk with woolly jazz, wonky soul, and occasional vocals from Robert Wyatt, an iconoclastic legend of the Canterbury scene.
Signals Into Space, only their second album in two decades, distills elements that have always been present in Ultramarine’s music into a potent new brew. Their sound is more refined than ever, but it’s hard to put your finger on what, exactly, that sound is. Warm, liquid synths and gently pulsing grooves scan as ambient, but vintage drum machines add teeth. The tone of the electric bass, muscular but understated, flashes to Tortoise’s spacious brand of post-rock. The watercolor wash of Ric Elsworth’s vibraphone and the searching saxophone of Iain Ballamy (a member of the group Food, with multiple albums for ECM and Rune Grammofon to his name) nod to ethereal jazz. The most fitting tag might be “Balearic,” given the album’s drowsy drift; there’s even a sample of a 1983 song by Orquesta de las Nubes, Suso Sáiz’s balmily experimental Spanish group.
Ultramarine call Signals Into Space—composed in a small, windowless room in an industrial complex in their native Essex—“an escapist record.” But it’s no mere pastiche of palm trees and Mediterranean tides. Its effects are more complex, even contradictory—a picture of white-sand beaches superimposed on dull cement walls, a dream of summer bundled in heavy down. Atmospheric and skeletal, their music projects outward yet turns inward.
Their oblique way of working tends to smudge edges. Instead of taking the lead, guitar and bass riffs add subtle adornment to softly cycling synth arpeggios and mysterious streaks of tone, bounced from tape to tape so many times that they’ve lost all trace of their original contours. On the title track, you can identify the provenance of some sounds, like the scrape of fingertips against coiled strings or the rustle of muted vibraphone. Others swim just past the limits of perception, like dark shapes beneath the surface of the water.
Still, Ultramarine’s music isn’t murky, exactly. They have learned from dub how to get the most out of empty space, from Talk Talk how to make elaborate studio artifice sound as natural as a single mic hung in the center of a candlelit room. Their sleight-of-hand sometimes makes it difficult to fix your attention on the music’s outlines. These are not melodies that stick with you after the song is finished. Instead, they’re rewarding while you’re in them, and that elusive quality has its own magnetism.
Their only real concession to center stage comes with Anna Domino, a singer who made a string of idiosyncratic synth-pop records for Les Disques du Crépuscule in the 1980s. She sings on four songs here, with mixed results. Her lovely voice is cool and controlled, but the presence of a vocal melody throws the music’s proportions out of whack. The jazzy lilt of “$10 Heel” and “Spark From Flint to Clay” feel out of keeping with the diffuseness of the music. Ballamy’s saxophone is a more natural fit, sometimes sliding like a blurry brushstroke across wet canvas. He’s often content just to add the faintest spot of color to the duo’s electronic textures, like a blush coming to the surface.
On the most successful of Domino’s songs, “Arithmetic,” her voice is harmonized, vocoded, and folded back into the fabric of the music, restoring the balance. The arrangement is beyond subtle: just reeds, Rhodes, reverb, and a twinge of birdsong, like a chain reaction of glancing accents and hints of things not quite heard. There’s a snatch of some foreign language, as though the recording has alighted on a distant radio station, and a powerful sense of groove. “Arithmetic,” sings Domino, her voice quiet and low, “Skies are streaming/You look up and get carried away.” It’s a fine approximation of how, at its best, Ultramarine’s music feels: a flash of logic and a fog of unknowing, the trace of an equation on a chalkboard wiped clean. | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Les Disques du Crépuscule | January 30, 2019 | 7.6 | ba0bd92f-44be-41fe-be05-961e5b5889f2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
A posthumous 1973 solo album from the Texas singer-songwriter, released the week he would’ve turned 75, displays his careful sense of craft across a set of covers, favorites, and unheard songs. | A posthumous 1973 solo album from the Texas singer-songwriter, released the week he would’ve turned 75, displays his careful sense of craft across a set of covers, favorites, and unheard songs. | Townes Van Zandt: Sky Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/townes-van-zandt-sky-blue/ | Sky Blue | Townes Van Zandt often seemed indifferent to his recording career—or anything resembling a career, really. He certainly gave the music business his best shot, traveling from his native Texas to Nashville to cut a series of albums for the tiny label Poppy between 1968 and 1972, frequently collaborating with Jack Clement, a producer who decided to ostentatiously augment the songwriter’s eccentricities instead of accentuate them. It wasn’t a winning formula commercially, and his lack of success during his only prolific period helped fate him to decades of wandering on the margins of country and Americana. Hits came for other people—Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson took “Pancho and Lefty” to the top of Billboard’s country charts in 1987—but not for Van Zandt, who wound up amassing not so much a body of work as a deep, varied songbook, which could be brought to life either by himself or other singers.
On Sky Blue, a posthumous album released the week he would’ve turned 75, underscores the notion of a songbook, Townes Van Zandt rifles through his drafts and recent work, punctuating his original work with covers. Van Zandt recorded the 11 tracks that comprise Sky Blue in 1973 with Bill Hedgepeth, a journalist who also was one of the singer-songwriter’s buddies. At the time, Van Zandt had just wrapped up his run at Poppy with The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Nobody knew it at the time, but there was more than a kernel of truth in that title. It took him five years to return to action with 1978’s Flyin’ Shoes—the same span of time in which he had churned out six records for Poppy. Such long gaps between albums became standard operating procedure for Van Zandt, with the singer-songwriter buying time and generating cash by putting out the occasional live album, such as the celebrated 1977 LP Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas.
The set captured on Live at the Old Quarter was recorded in 1973, the same year Van Zandt cut the material that wound up on Sky Blue. Both albums were made at the outset of Van Zandt’s years of rambling, so they share a sense of freshness and immediacy; he’s hardly brimming with optimism but he’s yet to be hardened by the alcoholism that later took his life. On Live at the Old Quarter, he’s blessed by the addition of an audience, whose very presence cajoles Van Zandt to display the wry sense of playfulness that’s so often overlooked within his work. There’s no such chance of such understated humor surfacing on Sky Blue, however. Recorded on his lonesome at Hedgepeth’s home studio, Van Zandt is singing to himself. He runs no risk of unexpected digressions, unless the choice of songs counts.
On that front, Sky Blue offers a few surprises, chief among them two unheard Van Zandt originals. “All I Need” opens the album on a soft, wistful note, achieving a comforting melancholy sway that’s countered by the delicate, bruised “Sky Blue,” which barely keeps the sadness at bay. Neither are major items but that’s their appeal: They’re finely-etched yet modest, the product of a songwriter who remains dedicated to the craft. In that light, it’s easy to hear his covers of Richard Dobson’s “Forever for Always for Certain” and Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind,” along with the traditional folk tune “Hills of Roane County,” as roundabout inspirations, song where Van Zandt began exploring ideas he’d later develop on his own, but within the context of Sky Blue, they help make the album feel a bit like an intimate live set. Van Zandt may not be playing for punters but he’s playing songs that would suit a small, attentive crowd, balancing covers, favorites (“Pancho and Lefty,” then new but already seeming like a classic) and newer songs.
Much of Sky Blue’s charm derives from how it doesn’t quite slide into any particular category. It’s neither a live album nor an album of its own, yet it’s also not a set of demos for a forthcoming record. Instead, it’s a vivid snapshot of a particular moment, preserving a time when he had yet to fritter away his good will, and capturing Townes Van Zandt when it still seemed like he was on the verge of great things. | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | March 11, 2019 | 6.9 | ba185bc6-86ec-48a8-9fea-2531d128a778 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
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 grandiose British rock band’s second album, a supranatural space odyssey powered by all-too-human emotion. | 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 grandiose British rock band’s second album, a supranatural space odyssey powered by all-too-human emotion. | Muse: Origin of Symmetry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/muse-origin-of-symmetry/ | Origin of Symmetry | In 2001, on a Saturday-morning show with celebrity guests and a slime tank, a rakish man appears onstage with hair spiked into dyed black blades. The man is a little scary, a little sinister, like anyone cool. He wears dark shades and wiggles his arms, conjuring a lullaby from the keyboard like a hired magician. Then the guitar swings around his neck and he summons a perfect squall of distortion.
The song, introduced as “New Born,” begins to overwhelm him. He throttles the guitar, hops about the stage, barely pretends to sing and play. You know he is miming, but he also performs the artifice of mime—that is, he is miming miming—and as the credits roll another man bursts in and inexplicably breakdances. What are you watching? A satire of an empty TV spectacle, perhaps. Unless you are nine years old. At nine, you are witnessing genius.
By this point, Matthew Bellamy’s heavy rock laments had already won Muse a global cult, gripped by his softness and oddness. But that is not how the British trio got to be stars. For that, they were shipped out to studio sets for Live & Kicking and The Pepsi Chart Show, learning to peddle the shamelessly real while embracing the shamelessly fake. By the end of it, Bellamy could fluently translate his grandiose, pentatonic misery into four minutes of thrillingly throwaway pop. Stuff would get smashed, but most of the time he was freakishly good at the job.
To straddle the sincere and absurd, the real and fake, was never a stretch for a man who did not resemble his straight-faced Britrock contemporaries so much as the swaggering peacocks of ’70s glam. Before his myriad quirks congealed into lovable schtick, and arena floodlights greeted Muse’s rebirth as prog-pop conspiracists, the band released a pair of fascinating LPs: 2003’s pop opus Absolution and their 2001 space odyssey, the formidable Origin of Symmetry.
Origin of Symmetry depicts life as the school-friend trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dom Howard saw it: a war zone where tyrant guitars and drums vie for space with balletic miniatures and stargazing synths. Muse were playing melodrama as teenage realism, an extremely, ridiculously honest noise. My sense they were overblown—that scaling the heights of psychic tumult might not require galactic pomp and an actual jetpack—would take a few years to kick in. In the meantime, I listened to Origin of Symmetry as if to a documentary. “Space dementia in your eyes/And peace will arise and tear us apart,” Bellamy sang, machines clipping his voice to a slithery alien rasp. Wow, yes, I thought, frowning seriously into my lunchbox.
Formed in the seaside town of Teignmouth, Muse signed their first deal in 1998 in Los Angeles, before amassing a giant fanbase in continental Europe. Their province back home transpired not to be London (too jaded and skeptical) but rather in pockets of smalltown and middle Britain, where latent ambition and stifled bombast can thrive among thwarted romantics. Where Is This It, released two weeks later, garnered the Strokes a coalition of hedonists and neurotics drawn to the big city, Origin of Symmetry positioned Muse as an outpost of Radiohead’s broad church of the alienated.
The album soundtracked a pipeline out of outsiderdom for suburban students and scruffy skate kids—the next generation of techno gourmands and bong-ripping metalheads, math-rock nerds and hardcore loyalists. For at least the next decade, slapdash “Plug in Baby” covers blasted from provincial pub stages, anointing a new mainstay on the popular front of radio rock. To legions of longhair disciples, Origin of Symmetry sounded a final alarm before the tractor beam of domesticity beckoned, promising annual trips to Download Fest and pet cats curled up in Korn hoodies. The album’s cult has endured not so much by converting new fans as by presenting a pungent memory box.
Muse themselves never stopped being teenagers, happiest whipping up us-versus-them screeds and epic expansions of boyish obsessions. But nor would they nail adolescence with such panache as they do on their second LP. Origin of Symmetry romanticizes a time when pop was primal, titanic, and camp. By combining goth vulnerability with sci-fi scale and hard-rock drama, it captures a paradox of young romance: On one hand, Bellamy sounds wracked with despair, but he proclaims his heartbreak with the glee of an ecstatic preacher. Origin of Symmetry’s mercurial range honors those dueling emotions: in “Space Dementia”’s barbarian opera, “Feeling Good”’s benevolent vaudeville, “Bliss”’s Nintendo-prog fantasia, “Plug in Baby”’s widdly licks.
Their radio A-list forebears were the mannered realists of kitchen-sink Britpop, whose fetish for authenticity had awakened an everyman army of Coldplays and Travises. Across the pond, grunge had transformed goofball rock into lucrative torment, unloosing a glut of disaffected Nirvana clones. Muse’s debut, Showbiz, tried the self-serious angst thing, too. But Bellamy, emboldened by nu-metal’s reign, was nudging it into the hyperbolic. He sang with real pain—Muse are ruthlessly unironic—and channeled Berlioz and Mahler, minting a sound so ludicrously over-the-top it broke the serious/piss-take binary.
Despite little retrospective attention, Showbiz had been a commercial success, outselling higher-profile late-’90s records by bands like the Offspring and Korn. From a backwater filled with “a load of old biddies” (as Wolstenholme put it), the debut had flung Muse into orbit—playing arenas with the Foos and the Chilis and prancing about at their backstage parties. As his ego played catch-up, Bellamy dubbed Showbiz “a bit faffy and bollocks.” He had reacquainted himself with the mischievous Russian composer Rachmaninoff: both traditionalists in accelerating worlds, fond of naive melodies that sweep and lurch into sudden turbulence. Inspirited, Bellamy delayed the second album sessions to dispense with faff and bollocks.
Finally, in a rural English studio abutting a field of magic mushrooms, Muse and Tool producer Dave Bottrill recorded “New Born,” “Bliss,” “Darkshines,” and “Plug in Baby”—the latter while tripping. (They wound up “naked in a jacuzzi,” with Bellamy “deaf in one ear from falling asleep in the sauna,” he told the writer Ben Myers.) The earthy energies lingered when they reunited with Showbiz producer John Leckie, who filled their studios with percussive animal bones, llama-claw necklaces, and wind chimes for ceremonial clanging, as well as introducing the band to madcap bards Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.
By then, their songwriting had already transformed, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. The riff and chorus of “Hyper Music” could have come from the debut, but not the flirty flair of the pinball-bumper bassline, nor the playful, fuzzy jangle that drops us into the verse. The vocal production sensationalizes the falsetto that writhes loose from Bellamy’s body—his revelry in every wet gasp before he belts out another battle cry.
At the same time, amid the clamor, Bellamy oozes sensuality. He groans like a four-poster bed, elongating “ooh”s with erotic decadence. It is possible for the casual listener to imagine the frontman a meat-and-potatoes rocker, conjuring women as shallow conduits of lust and disdain. Then he tickles you with a quietly odd lyric like the ones that pepper “Bliss”:
Give me the peace and joy in your mind.
Everything about you is how I’d wanna be.
That second one in particular, innocuous as it sounds, strikes me as wonderfully offbeat. Bellamy identifies not with the conquest but with the object of desire. It is a sentiment closer to sexually ambivalent goth (as in “Why Can’t I Be You?”) than downtuned, guitar-slinging rock.
Bellamy uses operatics to act out gender transgression, albeit while taking equal relish in what makes rock machismo click. The desire to be “over-the-top,” he said in 2001, “is inside every human being on the planet, but sexism has said that that was female….None of us are embarrassed about expressing [our] feminine side.” In lyrics delivered with enough falsetto and tremolo to shatter a mirror, his submissive “Space Dementia” narrator practically begs for emasculation. “I love all the dirty tricks and twisted games you play,” he snarls, quivering with hammy deviance. The tension lies in his tightrope walk from the sub- to the super-human, balancing claims of being a lowly worm with flashes of the sublime.
Where other virtuoso bands would marry rock with opera, Muse present the two in the midst of a messy divorce. The obliterating power of “New Born” derives from the contrast between its devilish riff and its intro, the saintly piano lullaby. “Citizen Erased,” a metallic storm, concludes with a piano coda drenched in post-apocalyptic bliss. In downtime throughout the record, where others would merely solo, Bellamy ferrets away glitzy cadenzas and sanctuaries of stillness. Muse’s sadness, like their ecstasy, is always joyfully lavish.
In press around the release, an increasingly inscrutable Bellamy outed himself as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps playing the media the same way he had played the keyboard on Live & Kicking. Aliens had planted ancient star charts on tablets in Middle Eastern catacombs. The U.S. government was performing mind control with radiation and electronics. All this made his zeal for advanced science hard to parse. Pinched from the physicist Michio Kaku, Origin of Symmetry’s title alludes to an outcrop of string theory describing an apparent symmetry of matter in a mooted 11th dimension. To find its origin, as Bellamy understood it, could lead to a sort of god. In the frontman’s personal universe, the source of stability—the origin of symmetry—was the act of creating music, he said. “Plug in Baby,” then, is as much an ode to his mythic guitar as a riff on dystopian tech.
Hallucinatory themes aside, the tone of the lyrics is painfully human, laced with spite. Lies are exposed, bitterness festers, toxic relationships crumble. (Bellamy’s endless press digressions about science and tech may have been, in the end, another bit of misdirection. It sounds to me like a breakup album.) Whatever the cause, antagonism suits him. He sings best in the role of a man possessed: so wretched and pained that histrionics seize him unbidden, expelling bile from his lungs.
In the calm that falls near the album’s end, Bellamy struggles for gravitas. Finale “Megalomania” takes a big plunge into gothic balladry but slightly bungles the landing, overestimating the depth of its existential lyric and stately organ soundscape. “Feeling Good,” as made miraculous by Nina Simone, wants to meander and kick its heels but here feels overcooked, a show tune stiffened with jazz-lounge starch. For now, at least, Muse’s powers would wane the further they ventured from their trademark gaudy discord.
But for six or seven songs—before the side-B slump, before the rock monoculture collapsed and they blasted off into stadium bluster—Muse were briefly the mightiest band in the world. Origin of Symmetry’s endurance, if nothing else, humiliates their former U.S. label Maverick, which reportedly buried the record upon Bellamy’s refusal to re-record “Plug in Baby” with manlier vocals. (The band left their contract as the album hit the UK Top 3, before a belated U.S. release in 2005.)
This year’s impressive new mix and remaster, billed as the XX Anniversary RemiXX, is even more colossal and timeless. It smooths out period giveaways like “New Born”’s dustbin-lid drums and scratchy rhythm guitar, while amplifying the baroque grandeur of the irrepressibly mad “Micro Cuts.” “Space Dementia”’s puny strings become Hollywood symphonic. Bonus track “Futurism,” initially cut over fears of flubbing it live, assumes its rightful place as a second-half pick-me-up. The reissue is definitive.
“If it wasn’t for Muse,” Bellamy once said, “I think I’d be a nasty, violent person.” And if rock is the space reserved for that rage—where bottled-up people (particularly people presented as men) can reach a new emotional tenor—then he may be right: The greatest achievement of bands like Muse is preventing literal murder. To take a humbler view, Origin of Symmetry is propaganda for self-indulgence. In a precarious adolescence, music like this can awaken a brewing madness, summon it up like a haunted shipwreck from a lake and say, “Come take a look—this is actually pretty cool!” Muse’s ilk will always be saving lives in this way or that, looking to mollify teenage mania. But few insist so persuasively that the mania, too, is a gift.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | July 11, 2021 | 8.3 | ba1b82b7-8339-4b75-8cc0-d688db673751 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
This solo debut from a fixture of London’s vital and eclectic jazz community delves into dub, soul, and fusion on a journey from the scene’s diverse roots to its exhilarating present. | This solo debut from a fixture of London’s vital and eclectic jazz community delves into dub, soul, and fusion on a journey from the scene’s diverse roots to its exhilarating present. | Joe Armon-Jones: Starting Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-armon-jones-starting-today/ | Starting Today | In February, the London-based DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson put together a compilation of the city’s vital new wave of jazz talent. Titled We Out Here, its nine tracks are a fiery mix of fervent improvisation and slick grooves united by a tendency to branch out from jazz into hip-hop, dub, and grime. The artists on the album collaborate freely with each other, making We Out Here both a pocket guide to the scene and a launchpad for its members’ solo endeavors. That discography features recent releases like Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile and Nubya Garcia’s When We Are. Now, it has expanded to include Starting Today, a debut album by Joe Armon-Jones that distinguishes the pianist and composer as a soulful, modern producer.
The six-song album opens with a stirring title track whose featured vocalist, Afrikan Revolution bandleader Asheber, proclaims, “Starting today, I’m gonna wipe the blood off these streets/ Starting today, spread love in the community.” Asheber’s reverential tenor casts him as something like the lost son of celestial jazz singer Andy Bey—and his improvised lyrics should resonate deeply in a Britain clouded by the murky haze of Brexit. The song eventually builds into a nine-minute modern-jazz-dance call to arms, complete with poetic guest sax riffs from Garcia and a deconstructed ending that fades to bass tones and atmospheric hiss.
After such a rousing start, the album’s next moves might seem disjointed at first listen. “Almost Went Too Far” is a blissed-out, sun-kissed slice of jazz fusion that nods to Bobbi Humphrey’s ’70s Blue Note output, with Armon-Jones’ Wurlitzer taking the place of her weightless flute. “Mollison Dub” marks another abrupt genre switch, entering a dub realm haunted by a ghost-town echo effect on Moses Boyd’s drumming and elongated bass tones from David Mrakpor. The songs are great showcases for Armon-Jones’ mastery of a range of styles—but, for a moment, they threaten to reduce the project to an academic exercise, demonstrating aptitudes without consideration for the album’s overall arc.
But Armon-Jones’ vision for the record soon comes into focus. “London’s Face” and “Ragify” take the vibes and styles he’s just laid down—the soul of “Almost Went Too Far,” the low-end theory of “Mollison Dub”—and fuse them together into a captivating whole. “London’s Face,” which features South London musician and composer Oscar Jerome on vocals and guitar, brings slinky, Arabic rhythms to a strut through a city defined by cross-cultural exchanges. Anchored by dubby basslines and African-style percussion, Jerome takes aim at “back door prophets—that’s where the hate be.” The album climaxes with the graceful “Ragify,” a track that tosses Armon-Jones’ greatest production tricks into a giant melting pot as his Wurlitzer cascades in psychedelic sheets over stuttering drum patterns.
Collaboration and cross-pollination are at the heart of the We Out Here ethos. On Starting Today, Armon-Jones takes a modern-jazz journey from the discrete influences on that eclectic London sound to its thrillingly diverse present—and stakes his claim as one of the scene’s most promising voices. | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Brownswood | May 7, 2018 | 7.5 | ba20237b-fad8-4df9-a5c9-5aada22e836f | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
This box set gathers the Nonesuch albums featuring the Kronos Quartet playing the music of minimalist composer Terry Riley, and adds another disc of unheard material. Taken all togtether, the set confirms just how fruitful this 35-year partnership has been. | This box set gathers the Nonesuch albums featuring the Kronos Quartet playing the music of minimalist composer Terry Riley, and adds another disc of unheard material. Taken all togtether, the set confirms just how fruitful this 35-year partnership has been. | Kronos Quartet: One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20723-one-earth-one-people-one-love-kronos-plays-terry-riley/ | One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley | After the radical minimalism of his 1964 composition "In C", Terry Riley’s place in music history was secure. The 53 melodic phrases in that one-page piece—available to be played as many times as members of an ensemble cared to repeat them—still inspire a range of artists today. (Composer Nico Muhly was among those contributing to In C Remixed, in 2009, while the musicians of Africa Express gave us their spin with this year’s In C Mali). Even if Riley had never fixed another note to paper, the Who would have name-checked him in the title of "Baba O’Riley" on the strength of his keyboard improvisations. Similarly, you can imagine contemporary connoisseurs like Big Boi taking time to pose for a picture with the composer on godfather status alone.
It almost happened just like that anyway. In the 1970s, as Riley was diving ever deeper into his study of North Indian classical music with the singer Pandit Pran Nath, a legacy based on "In C" and hypnotic live performances seemed probable. But then, in 1979, violinist and Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington intervened. After a year of persuasion, Riley was prevailed upon to write music on paper again. And the lobbying went both ways. Riley changed the way Harrington’s group worked: encouraging the members to improvise and to ditch the romantic vibrato common to mainstream string-quartet sonics. The result was a working relationship that has now lasted for 36 years, resulting in dozens of commissions and four full-length studio albums.
With Riley turning 80 this year, it’s an obvious move for Nonesuch to bring out all of their Kronos-Riley recordings in a box set, along with a half-hour of previously unheard music. The core of the set is a straight-up porting over of Riley-composed Kronos releases that haven’t ever been hard to find: the 1989 tour de force double-album Salome Dances for Peace, 2001’s Requiem for Adam, and 2008’s The Cusp of Magic (which guest-stars Chinese pipa player Wu Man). But taken cumulatively, the result feels less like an anniversary cash-grab than an attempt to help us see a major aspect of Riley’s art on its own terms.
Riley’s string quartet music reveals the interpretive limitation of the "minimalist" tag—the two-hour Salome Dances for Peace is nothing if not maximal music. In his writing for Kronos, Riley variously employs raga patterns, jazz harmonies, and chromatic dissonance. You may need the liner notes to help understand Riley’s mashup of Native American spirituality and New Testament narrative—it involves King Herod’s daughter being brought back to life, in order to inspire compassion instead of violence—but the diversity of the music and its emotional range are anything but compact in scale. Likewise, the surprising synthesized brass section that pops up in Requiem for Adam’s second movement highlights a daring compositional mind at work (one notably unafraid to try out new textures in the service of mourning). While I’d previously paid scant attention to The Cusp of Magic, thinking it a lesser entry in Riley’s catalog, this box set helps prepare the listener for Riley’s increasingly hybrid aesthetic over time.
Those who already own and appreciate these albums may wonder if the half-hour of previously unreleased material justifies purchase of the entire box. But Nonesuch has been generous here (especially in the box-set economy), by making the fifth disc of the set available individually, under the title Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector. And yes: it’s a necessary addition to the catalog—though perhaps not for the reason the composer’s fans will expect. Crate-digging may compel Riley-heads to lunge straight for "Lacrymosa - Remembering Kevin" or "One Earth, One People, One Love", since we haven’t heard those items recorded before. But the highlight of the disc featuring new material winds up being a recent Kronos recording of "Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector". At one level, that’s surprising, since "Sunrise" is the first piece Riley wrote for Kronos, back in 1980, and it’s been a staple of the group’s repertoire for some time.
Employing both a 14-beat structure borrowed from raga and a series of melodic modes (based on A), Riley has said that he originally conceived of the piece as a "jazz head arrangement" that could allow for improvisation and juxtaposition of themes. But Kronos’ 1985 recording doesn’t have that kind of flow at all. It sounds stiff and brittle—as if the players are paying too much attention to the 14-beat pattern. By comparison, the new recording on this box set is a marvel. Instead of leaping right into the work’s hottest rhythmic passage, this version kicks off with a meditative drone section (in which each member of the quartet progressively doles out notes from one of Riley’s scales). Heard against the vibrato-less drone strings, sliding pitches from one violin simultaneously refer to Riley’s North Indian classical studies, as well as his feel for folk-song Americana. And when Kronos does finally launch into the memorable main theme, "Sunrise" has a new wind at its back—perhaps the kind that can only be captured after 36 years of collaborative effort. | 2015-06-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-06-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | June 29, 2015 | 8.4 | ba278c98-7f08-4bc0-8528-58d5a3e819bd | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
On an album that mines failed relationships for self-discovery, the Australian singer-songwriter shows her talent at distilling complex situations into searing couplets. | On an album that mines failed relationships for self-discovery, the Australian singer-songwriter shows her talent at distilling complex situations into searing couplets. | Julia Jacklin: Crushing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-jacklin-crushing/ | Crushing | On her second album, Julia Jacklin is discovering her body, and she just wants to see it for herself. “Give me a full-length mirror/So I can see the whole picture,” the Australian singer-songwriter implores; “My head alone gives nothing away.” She winds up clambering onto a chair to get a better look at herself, grasping for self-knowledge in the reflection staring back at her. It’s a simple shift in perspective, but one that makes all the difference.
This act of reframing lies at the heart of Crushing, an album that charts the devastating duality of its title—the way something innocuous and tender can transform into something so debilitating. Across 10 songs, Jacklin examines relationships in crisis, all the while fighting to center herself in the viewfinder and repossess her body, heart, and mind. “Started listening to your favorite band/The night I stopped listening to you,” she sings on “You Were Right,” a song that kick-starts the arduous process of extracting a one-time partner’s opinions from her own. It seems to have a happy ending: “Started feeling like myself again/The day I stopped saying your name,” is her assured conclusion in the final verse, peppered with energetic bursts of guitar. But most of the time, it’s not so easy; there are a million holes to patch, a million fits of uncertainty to endure before that sort of relief will come.
Take opener “Body,” a somber, simmering epic. The song, rooted in a real-life event, hinges on a compromising photo taken by an ex-boyfriend, and the fear that he’d use it to get back at her. In the end, she can only shrug: “I guess it’s just my life/And it’s just my body.” The repeated phrase is ironic and earnest in equal measure, covering all the ground between the heart’s genuine suffering and the head’s nihilistic recognition that, in the end, it probably doesn’t really matter. The vulnerability in Jacklin’s voice—delicate and fleeting as snow melting on exposed skin—brings real intensity to the song, though it’s built on just a handful of quiet chords and never accelerates past a slow creep. Here, and just about everywhere else on the album, the arrangements are noticeably deprioritized. They’re mostly limited to understated passages of crisp, measured guitar and basic kick-and-snare patterns, there to set Jacklin’s pace, then step aside and let her vocals and storytelling do the heavy lifting.
As much as Jacklin’s writing is steeped in the knowledge that there is work to be done—to fill in the space left behind by a loved one, to practice self-care instead of looking after someone else—some of her most affecting writing is borne of what comes before that process begins. Ahead of the work, there is stillness: prescience, accompanied by temporary paralysis in the face of the truth. On “Good Guy,” Jacklin begs a paramour to profess love for her, knowingly putting off the reality she’ll have to contend with come daylight. “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You” captures a moment of impasse, when she recognizes that she and a partner have grown into each other so much that being together is almost the same as being alone. Instead of wrenching herself away, Jacklin wants to make concessions: “What if I cleaned up, what if I worked on my skin?/I could scrub until I am red, hot, weak, and thin.” Sometimes, breaking our own bodies seems a less daunting task than breaking the hearts of those we love.
“Turn Me Down,” the penultimate track, marks Crushing’s emotional peak, but still hovers in the moment before the moment. Impending breakup looms over a two-day drive to Melbourne; Jacklin, following a gorgeously cascading melodic line, pleads for her partner to end things so she won’t have to summon the courage to do it herself. It’s unclear how much of this drama is spoken out loud and how much takes place in Jacklin’s mind, but as her delivery builds to a near-scream, you can imagine the sentiment beating against the walls of her skull as the two drive silently into the night. Over barely there guitar accompaniment, Jacklin closes out the song with a gut punch: “Don’t look at me, look at the center line/Maybe I’ll see you in a supermarket sometime.”
It’s hard not to tumble into Crushing’s vast emotional depths and look past everything else that makes the album exquisite, but lyrics like this showcase just how clever Jacklin’s songwriting can be. There are the subtle twists of irony, yes—her pan of self-involved dudes on “Convention,” the implied eye-roll in her refrain on “You Were Right”—but also careful choreography behind what scans as raw feeling. Jacklin has an ability to mine minuscule details from immensely complex situations and package them in searing couplets. It’s why you’re likely to walk away from this record thinking about an estranged someone you dread running into at the grocery, or the casual cruelty of giving up on your own body, or the fraught goodbyes you’ve had to say. “Are you thinking of me too?” Jacklin muses in the final moments of the album, “I was so happy all those years with you.” Her well-chosen words reverberate endlessly. | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | February 27, 2019 | 7.7 | ba285b07-258b-448b-95fd-8e5d8ad70f42 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Turning away from the mix of big-room energy and outré sounds that marked his debut, the London producer’s surprisingly muted second album is a catch-all for his varied tastes. | Turning away from the mix of big-room energy and outré sounds that marked his debut, the London producer’s surprisingly muted second album is a catch-all for his varied tastes. | Daniel Avery: Song for Alpha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-avery-song-for-alpha/ | Song for Alpha | A lot has changed for Daniel Avery since 2012, when his mix album for Fabric pushed him beyond his residency at the London club. Fabriclive 66 struck a chord in the dance-music community with its omnivorous, no-nonsense selections. Featuring crowdpleasers like Miss Kittin and Simian Mobile Disco along with underground stalwarts Kassem Mosse and Call Super (under his given name, JR Seaton), the mix reveled in Avery’s taste for big-room energy accentuated by more outré sounds. In 2013, Avery’s debut album, Drone Logic, doubled down on that approach. It presented a powerful yet idiosyncratic amalgam of acid house, techno, and electro, a style Andrew Weatherall once described as “gimmick-free machine-funk of the highest order.” On the back of those two releases, Avery was soon appearing on stages around the world.
“I like weirdness and oddness,” Avery said in a 2012 interview, with one caveat: “I still want to be able to dance to what I make.” Drone Logic for the most part struck that balance eloquently, and the following years found Avery experimenting. There was an ambient collaboration with synth artist and sometime Nine Inch Nails member Alessandro Cortini; a duo with the London producer Volte-Face, called Rote, offered dyed-in-the-wool European techno. Somewhere along the line, perhaps during his extended stay on the touring circuit, Avery’s music began changing.
Five years after Drone Logic, Song for Alpha, Avery’s second album, is mostly an inversion of the music he became known for; its swaggering electro beats smoothed into unchallenging techno precision, its chunky 303 sequences muted and slowed down, and its trampled pads brought into the foreground and given a thick wash of reverb. These new approaches are present across the tracklist, and yet a clear musical direction fails to emerge.
Both “Sensation” and “Clear,” two early singles from 2015, are featured in the album’s first half, and they’re the least interesting wrinkles in the producer’s habitual approach. Only “Diminuendo” delivers similarly druggy, hard-tumbling techno, albeit with an added sense of tension and release that serves the banger well. Much of Song for Alpha is surprisingly understated, at least compared to Drone Logic. There are a few run-of-the-mill ambient interludes, some introverted club oddities, and touches of soporific acid reminiscent of the German producer Recondite.
“Slow Fade” and “Quick Eternity” do the best with Avery’s variations upon subdued dance music, tying airy melodies, glowing pads, and resonant drum machines into a sound not unlike Selected Ambient Works 85-92. In fact, it’s damn near impossible to listen through Song for Alpha without drawing connections to Warp’s early catalog. The softly spooky “Days From Now” could’ve been lifted straight from Music Has the Right to Children, while standout track “Citizen / Nowhere” sounds like a gorgeous homage to Amber-era Autechre. An album full of this Artificial Intelligence-esque electronica would be fascinating in Avery’s hands, even if it meant less straightforward dance music to his name.
Avery has taken a confident step forward in redefining his sound on his own terms, and he has made some remarkable new tracks in the process. Nearly every highlight, however, feels hermetically sealed—produced in a vacuum and unable to feed into or connect with the others. It turns Song for Alpha into a catch-all for Avery’s disparate experiments, something that less resembles a fully realized album than a dynamic, robust playlist from a seasoned DJ taking a break from the road. | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Phantasy / Mute | April 18, 2018 | 6.7 | ba28e392-a71c-44ae-b87e-b00dca7f386c | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
The second album from producer Joe Seaton offers a rush of effervescence. With a childlike and immersive touch, he pulls apart and rearranges small, twinkling sounds. | The second album from producer Joe Seaton offers a rush of effervescence. With a childlike and immersive touch, he pulls apart and rearranges small, twinkling sounds. | Call Super: Arpo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/call-super-arpo/ | Arpo | A totality of vision surfaces on every production Joe Seaton releases as Call Super, from the music to the artwork. That’s true of the slithering tracks he made in collaboration with Beatrice Dillon, as well as his adventurous entry in the Fabric mix series earlier this year. In advance of Seaton’s second full-length, Arpo, that ardor even extended to hand-inking 200 7” sleeves for the album’s first single. Arpo was preceded by a run of crisp yet quicksand-y EPs that thrillingly moved between techno, electro and house brought Seaton more notoriety. But Arpo refines and then traipses further afield than anything else in his discography.
At first listen, it might seem to exist in the shadow of his thrilling debut, 2014’s Suzi Ecto. That album situated Seaton among the likes of Actress and Lee Gamble, straining against the confines of modern dance music tropes. But while that album featured a muggy atmosphere, groggy tones and a metallic menace at its edges, Arpo provides a rush of effervescence instead. The album’s biggest beats rattle around like BBs in a can or clack like a pencil against a Coke bottle; Seaton’s bass tones bear tactile properties closer to being gummy than beefy. Full of such small, playful turns (Seaton cites the silent harp-strumming Marx Brother, Harpo, as inspiration for the title) it makes more sense as soundtrack for strolls through Volkspark Friedrichshain than the wee hours at Berghain.
From the opening theme of “Arpo,” Seaton takes a filigree of woodwind and winds it around an iridescent line and a globule of bass. That theme returns again midway through on “Arpo Sunk,” now cloaked in warm hiss and just a dab of echo, the melodic line of the reed taking the track off to wander far from any typical dance beat. The clarinet and oboe come courtesy of Seaton’s father, painter and Dixieland player David Seaton. His horn arose on both Suzi Ecto and Seaton’s fourth world ambient tracks made as Ondo Fudd, while also providing the fluttering shriek at the core of “Fluo.” The ductile tone that the elder Seaton provides on these tracks—by turns frisky, tuneful, droney and shrieking—keeps the music from ever staying pat on the grid or rolling out in a predictable manner.
The first half of Arpo contains all the heady, mushy sounds of early 1990s ambient house, but it comes in tightly coiled, two-minute bursts. The array of sounds that crop up on the minute-long “Any Pill” might have comprised a 10-minute Orb track some 20 years previous. An iridescent sheen glimmers across the surface of “Music Stand,” making the track feel like a sculpture made entirely out of soap bubbles. Sounds swell and pop, bubble up anew and shift shapes, yet the cumulative effect is one of ineffable airiness.
Small rustling, blipping, twinkling details pop up on longer tracks like “No Wonder We Go Under” and standout “I Look Like I Look in a Tinfoil Mirror.” Such sounds percolate and nip around the headphone space, helixing into new shapes before Seaton pulls them apart again and arranges them anew. The dizzying attention to detail and design rivals that of Seaton’s close mate Objekt (TJ Hertz), but his touch feels less intense and bewildering, more childlike and immersive. Certain instances of Arpo might hearken back to rhythms associated with tech-house, electro, and harsher variants on each (especially the metallic shrieks that cry-out on “Trokel”), but no track sounds like it’d readily slot into a club set. There’s something squishy and slippery about every component here, each moving into the other so that markers and track distinctions begin to feel wholly irrelevant to the listening experience.
“The music and spaces of a time past that preoccupies you can be shaped into something that can drive your own visions,” Seaton wrote in advance of a weekend party he curated for December at Amsterdam’s De School, speaking of dance music histories and places he’s obsessed over but never visited. There’s a sense here that Seaton is seeking to move beyond such tropes in dance music towards something not yet defined. Seaton then adds: “Don’t take me there. Just let me learn and dream.” Arpo might just soundtrack such a speculative night out. | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | November 10, 2017 | 8 | ba30d3f1-73bc-49d9-94d8-fcd3dc6f751e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
No Age follow their 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, with an ambitious Sub Pop debut: Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's friendly and warm and, best of all, unpredictable. | No Age follow their 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, with an ambitious Sub Pop debut: Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's friendly and warm and, best of all, unpredictable. | No Age: Nouns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11449-nouns/ | Nouns | It's disingenuous to talk about Los Angeles' New Yorker-profiled, vegan-snacks-serving, book-lending, all-ages venue the Smell with the same high-art vocabulary you'd use to dissect other creative collectives, like Andy Warhol's Factory-- the Smell's constituency (L.A.'s optimistic experimental art pack) appears un-fixated on fame, self-aggrandizement, or furthering its nascent mythology. To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic, a stroller-friendly, cheap-haircut-hocking haven that's as functional as it is fruitful. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands.
No Age, along with Mika Miko, Abe Vigoda, Lavender Diamond, BARR, and a handful of others, are mainstays at the Smell; the cover of No Age's 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, famously features the exterior of the club, and guitarist Randy Randall reportedly helped mine trenches in the venue's concrete floor so that a second bathroom could be installed to accommodate new crowds. Given the critical success of Weirdo Rippers, No Age's scope has now expanded well beyond Los Angeles, and Nouns, their first full-length, is appropriately ambitious.
A guitar/drums duo (Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt) with a penchant for self-recorded samples, No Age are mostly unconcerned with things like space or pause, and Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's both comforting and disorienting. Opener "Miner" begins and ends in murk, and in between Randall and Spunt sputter and twitch and pound, alternately revealing and concealing a sweet, taut melody-- such is No Age's agenda, burying an addictive little singalong in layers of effects and fuzz.
"Eraser" is more immediately user-friendly, opening with sunny guitar chirps and a knee-slapping drumbeat, before Spunt starts barking intelligible lyrics ("Wait for the foreman now get paid/ Wait and see the list of shit you made") and the music goes steady and frantic. "Eraser" is a summer song in the sweatiest, most realistic sense-- it's not the Beach Boys' gooey, über-idealized, convertibles-and-beach-volleyball version, it's the waiting-for-the-bus, sweaty and desperate but still-sorta-excited-about-all-that-sunshine take. "Here Should Be My Home" is similarly exuberant, full of power chords and distortion; it's arguably the poppiest thing No Age have recorded to date (all those cries of "baby" are practically bubblegum), and accordingly, completely addictive. "Sleeper Hold", meanwhile, is the sound-- both literally and metaphysically-- of everything happening all at once, an ecstatic, feedback-addled lullaby.
Some fans might pine-- at least at first-- for the (vaguely) more experimental, less riff-driven muck of Weirdo Rippers, but Nouns is a more thoughtful, coherent (and still plenty dirty) version of what No Age began building with all those EPs. Listening to Nouns, it's hard to comprehend how just two people can manage to make so much noise while still sounding so subdued and mysterious-- it's easier to imagine Randall and Spunt spewing these songs underwater, bursting forth from some colossal California quarry rather than a tiny, stuffy art space a few blocks from L.A.'s skid row. Nouns is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that parsing out the samples and effects and various layers of guitar is nearly impossible; besides, it's way more satisfying to just close your eyes and just enjoy it. Ultimately, it's part of No Age's allure that Nouns is so difficult to figure out, that it manages to be so big while coming from a place so small: All you'll know for sure is that you want to listen longer. Maybe forever. | 2008-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 5, 2008 | 9.2 | ba34156f-7841-45b3-887d-bf172b9d5802 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The soundtrack to the 2005 documentary of the same name, You're Gonna Miss Me attempts to economically anthologize Roky Erickson, a man whose vast, scattered output all but defies anthologizing. | The soundtrack to the 2005 documentary of the same name, You're Gonna Miss Me attempts to economically anthologize Roky Erickson, a man whose vast, scattered output all but defies anthologizing. | Roky Erickson: You're Gonna Miss Me OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10639-youre-gonna-miss-me-ost/ | You're Gonna Miss Me OST | Roky Erickson didn't invent psychedelic rock, but he did (with the 13th Floor Elevators) give it its name. He didn't invent garage rock, either, but he remains one of the few artists of the Nuggets-era revered as more than a flash in the pan.
This much is made clear in the first few minutes of You're Gonna Miss Me, the excellent 2005 documentary about the life and times of Roky Erickson. In fact, these early biographical touchstones essentially mark both the start and end of the Roky Erickson musical story, since Erickson spent much of his years past his late-1960s prime struggling with drug addiction and alleged schizophrenia. You're Gonna Miss Me is thus less about Erickson's musical legacy than it is about the quest to restore that legacy, allowing Erickson to reclaim his past so that he might have a future.
Obviously, given that Erickson is playing live again, the mission was a success and Erickson's reputation was restored. Still, for many his music remains either hopelessly obscure or too scattered around to get a grip on. Erickson's been anthologized so often that even some of the numerous best-ofs and boxed sets aren't necessarily the best place to begin.
That's where the You're Gonna Miss Me soundtrack steps in: as a well-intentioned one-stop dive-in point for Erickson's colorful and storied 40-year career. Except that even that's been done already, too, by 1995's excellent two disc I Have Always Been Here Before: The Roky Erickson Anthology, which includes all but a couple of the paltry 12 songs included on You're Gonna Miss Me. That leaves this disc a well-intentioned one-stop dive-in point with an asterisk. It's a well-intentioned one-stop dive-in point for anyone that doesn't want or have an earlier, superior one-stop dive-in point.
But that's OK, especially if your introduction to Erickson-- his trademark shriek, his surreal lyrics and, most of all, his otherworldly life-- comes via the documentary's narrative. Certainly Erickson's songs possess different meanings when paired with the sight of this disheveled veteran, victim, and survivor, for years passed over or ignored as an outsider when in the end his mixed-up ways were more a matter of him getting-- or being denied-- the right meds, care, and treatment than the actual effects of madness.
As far as that goes, Erickson's best songs-- the ever-astounding "You're Gonna Miss Me", "Fire Engine", "Red Temple Prayer (Two Headed Dog)", "For You (I'd Do Anything)"-- are no crazier than those of any gifted songwriter whose effortless output marks both a sign of genius and a certain insanity. Where do these things come from? And are all artists able to reach down into themselves and produce music capable of affecting so many perhaps a little bit nuts, too?
The happy ending of movie and man alike is, of course, that Roky Erickson is back up and running, but You're Gonna Miss Me adds one important facet to the tale: he's still good, too. One unique selling point of this disc is an unreleased song of recent vintage, "Goodbye Sweet Dreams", which plays over the ending credits of You're Gonna Miss Me and implies a fresh start to Erickson's stalled career. Is there more where that came from? Of course there is. There always is. But for the first time in his life, Roky Erickson may be in a position to actively expand his legacy rather than simply fade away with it. | 2007-09-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2007-09-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Palm Pictures | September 20, 2007 | 7.4 | ba35b79a-03ce-440a-beeb-799238319430 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The Italian electronic producer and arch conceptualist finds a new flamboyance in astoundingly ornate, song-like pieces of deconstructed trance and video-game chirps. | The Italian electronic producer and arch conceptualist finds a new flamboyance in astoundingly ornate, song-like pieces of deconstructed trance and video-game chirps. | Lorenzo Senni: Scacco Matto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lorenzo-senni-scacco-matto/ | Scacco Matto | To promote Scacco Matto, his first album for Warp Records, Lorenzo Senni challenged his fans to a virtual game of chess. With a penchant for deconstruction and a back catalog defined by monochrome palettes of icy sawtooth waves, the Italian electronic musician does seem like the kind of guy who’d be handy at the game. The rules are fixed but the outcome is unpredictable; within extremely narrow parameters, players can display flair, cunning, and subterfuge.
Scacco Matto, which is Italian for checkmate, is the product of self-imposed limits and rules. The writing process was a back-and-forth volley, according to Senni, with every action followed by a reaction, as he deliberately countered his own moves in a knotty one-player game. The basic material remains familiar—gated synth tones arranged in taut melodies and spindly arpeggios—but Senni has found a new flamboyance in these astoundingly ornate, often song-like pieces.
The Milan-based artist has been working within strict limitations since 2012’s Quantum Jelly, the record that seeded his idea of “pointillistic trance”: a mirage of a familiar genre constructed from the “Super Saw” preset of a Roland JP8080 synthesizer, with no drums to anchor the beat, but big drops for that euphoric release. When Senni joined Warp with 2016’s Persona EP, he added flesh to those bare bones by introducing himself as the “rave voyeur”: a bright-eyed, clean-living soul who gets his late-night fuel from energy drinks and observes our hedonism with calculated interest. Now he leads us gently away from the dancefloor to a more orderly setting, a manicured garden of synthetic topiary and rococo fancies. “Dance Tonight Revolution Tomorrow” is the most relaxed Senni has sounded in a long time; a ponderous melody line makes its way across a grid of synthetic pizzicato strings which pluck-pluck-pluck in tidy formation. It’s a simple phrase, immediately memorable, but over seven and a half minutes Senni keeps finding subtle ways to build tension while barely moving.
“Canone Infinito,” which was originally commissioned for the corridors of an intensive care unit in Bergamo, takes the refined ambience to the extreme. A sad melody ebbs and flows in an endless looping musical round—think Pachelbel’s Canon for furloughed ravers—and the undulating arpeggios feel like a portal to a lost world of straight-backed courtiers and gilded harpsichords. But “Canone Infinito” also points to a long-established link between classical music and trance, which has repurposed plenty of concert hall hits for peak-time euphoria (as established by William Orbit’s ’90s spin on Barber’s Adagio for Strings and its remix by Dutch DJ Ferry Corsten).
Elsewhere, Senni makes this connection through tiny gestures: a few bars of hands-in-the-air piano followed by stabs of harpsichord-like synth, buzzing and metallic, on “XBreakingEdgeX.” There’s a further classical/electronic reference within the squeaky melodies of “THINK BIG” and “Discipline of Enthusiasm,” which recall the 8-bit Bach and Tchaikovsky that once blared from primitive video-game chips.
It speaks to Senni’s increasing dexterity as an electronic auteur that all of this simply makes sense together; his themes and reference points cohere smoothly, right through to the cover art. The image, titled “Zuma #30,” was shot by photographer and conceptual artist John Divola in 1977 as part of a project documenting the dilapidation of an oceanfront house in Malibu. Seen through a window, one of those perfect Californian sunsets burns gold and orange beyond the white walls of the interior, which have been covered in thick black dots of spray paint. Was this an act of vandalism? Or some kind of manic meditation? Either way, it’s a retina-searing image of creativity born of limited means.
Checkmate, the game’s final, winning move, is the chess position in which the king is doomed to be captured. It’s a frustrating quirk of chess that you don’t actually get to capture him—the inevitability of the result is enough to wrap up the game. Senni, so comfortable surfing his endless trance builds, surely thrives in these moments. With Scacco Matto he sweeps the tournament to become a grandmaster of unresolved tension.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 29, 2020 | 7.6 | ba36bb24-9e94-4cd4-831a-16dc34ab7b16 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The dub techno of the Manchester duo’s latest mixtape attempts to capture the violent energy vibrating through the world at this particular moment in history. | The dub techno of the Manchester duo’s latest mixtape attempts to capture the violent energy vibrating through the world at this particular moment in history. | Space Afrika: hybtwibt? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/space-afrika-hybtwibt/ | hybtwibt? | Space Afrika, the Manchester duo of Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid, have always made music that directly responds to their surroundings. In the past, they’ve spoken of the way that Manchester itself, a city of grey skies and concrete, has informed the sparse, overcast nature of their productions. “Everything we do and are is a product of our experience,” they told Truants in 2016. “Manchester is the place that made us [...] It would be hard, maybe even ignorant not to translate that into the sounds we create.” Often wordless, but full of meaning, their downer dub techno and fractured ambient instrumentals have always been a conscious reflection of the world as they see it.
Their new release hybtwibt?—a mixtape based on material from the duo’s recent broadcast on NTS Radio—comes from a similar place, though it operates on a somewhat grander scale. Rather than looking just at their city, the mixtape seems to attempt to capture the energy vibrating through the world at this particular moment in history, as people across the globe take to the streets to protest police violence against Black people and other people of color, only to be met with more violence. (They've said that proceeds from the sales of this release will go to a variety of nonprofits, including Black Lives Matter Global Network and NAACP, among others.) Like a lot of their music, the general mood is downcast and foreboding, full of droning synthesizers and the distant hiss of reverb-hazed noise. But the music is intercut with meaningful samples and field recordings of protests, wrenching cries, wailing sirens, and profound monologues.
The tracks are dense. “Wanna know,” for example, feels more emotionally complicated than much of the music they’ve released to date, pairing a slowly unfolding piano piece with a person talking about the ways that the state antagonizes and entraps people who are already struggling. Were it not for the speech it accompanies, you might call the instrumental ambient, but the feelings it evokes are more complicated, balancing on a knife’s edge between the placidity associated with such music and an urgent call to action.
Other tracks take different tacks. “Kitty” is built on overlapping samples of disembodied voices from lost soul songs. It’s ghostly and shattered, an elegy for a world that shouldn’t have to be this way. Tracks like that, as well as the slivered interludes strewn amid the longer pieces, make hybtwibt? feel of a piece with the dizzying music that the critic Adam Harper once described as “epic collage.” Producers like Chino Amobi and Elysia Crampton stack disparate melodies and samples together to make disorienting music for a society that is more disorienting by the day. Working in this mode, Space Afrika pull together samples that capture the crushing feelings that have come up in these protests, channeling grief, pain, frustration, and desperation all at once.
And yet this record isn’t overwhelmed by these feelings—at its heart, it’s not especially austere. There’s this glowing core amid the chaos, a beauty in the maelstrom, that you can feel them gesturing toward on nearly every track. “DairyDay4” foregrounds this sentiment most clearly, featuring a person talking about the joy they feel about an impending wedding, over an instrumental that swells and swirls in a way that’s reminiscent of classic RPG soundtracks. It’s a spark of warmth and light, a distant dream that a better world might be possible, amid the reminders of how awful the one we live in can be. | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | June 11, 2020 | 7.4 | ba3ea168-e9fa-4371-aeeb-2fdddfcec12b | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5ee135cf7bb7acb328d563d0/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/hybtwibt?_Space%20Afrika.jpg |
HEALTH's debut album attempted to artfully reconcile dance/digital elements with rock/noise textures. The group goes one step further on this remix album, which features contributions from Crystal Castles, Acid Girls, Thrust Lab, and many more. | HEALTH's debut album attempted to artfully reconcile dance/digital elements with rock/noise textures. The group goes one step further on this remix album, which features contributions from Crystal Castles, Acid Girls, Thrust Lab, and many more. | HEALTH: DISCO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11534-disco/ | DISCO | Funniest band name ever (this week only). It's so undangerous and sub-ironics that it seems to circle back around to being scary, snide, and nihilist. I crack up every time I'm getting to see them live and someone wheezes any variation on "I cannot wait to get my fill of...HEALTH!" (How did these guys resist-- especially since, like certain fellow Californians Zach Hill and Spencer Seim, they share a love for maniac percussion and Nintendosonics-- giving themselves the pseudo-metal moniker Hellth?)
HEALTH's self-titled debut earned them sniggering sobriquets like "Boredoms Jr" and "Diet Liars," yet among what kept the admittedly derivative album interesting was the tension produced by its attempts to artfully reconcile dance/digital elements with rock/noise textures (not to mention its ambient fringes and the occasional blotch of straight-up pop). The resulting sound was skeletal, adrenal, and clangorous. Listeners inclined to attribute narrative structure to otherwise chaotically sequenced albums could even consider the debut as bearing a tale of one musical mode's victory over-- or surrender to-- another: The electro-clubbily titled and (eventually) executed "Glitter Pills" was followed by the lurching (dying?) rock of "Perfect Skin", and then the platter closed with the tribal, clipped-Gregorian funereality of "Lost Time".
Which brings us to this remix album that feels like an argument: HEALTH's discography is here to mend those leftover rifty, provincial scenes where the guitar dorks and electro goobers still get aesthetically territorial at each others' keggers. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw opener the Death Set put a crowd of (to safely generalize) dance-kids awaiting a Bonde Do Role and Villains card on edge by screaming "Come on, you motherfuckers, this is a punk rock show!" While, yup, the Death Set remix dance tracks and all, their own stuff is hooky hardcore, in some ways a better bridge from Death From Above 1979 into MSTRKRFT than that, ugh, DFA1979 remix album (plus all them groups are/were kinda dickish on stage). What I'm trying to say is that the overtly dancefloor DISCO/DISCO+ is a whole other thing from HEALTH's previous output, and yet, it works.
HEALTH ran so lean that you wanted to offer it some smoked gouda and cherry pop, so one might expect a rework-roster of blog-friendly artisans to supply the cheese and, well, coke. But DISCO is that rare, not-disposable such collection, largely justifying the charming pomp of the band-- printing their project names in allcaps, the tendency to issue artistic statements, etc. Of DISCO, they decreed: "It is not about market saturation or crossover appeal. It is purely about the music, and we are proud of it. This is an album, and meant to be listened to as one. The goal of this record is not only to present all these songs at once, but also to ensure that they are not forgotten in the constantly updating, content-hungry internet music world." Okay, they've hitched their viral sincerity to their synergy-savvy; just as Crystal Castles gave HEALTH's profile an alley-oop (and like hip-hop and r&b's infamous, infinite "featuring"s), they're boosting this release's electronic acts, to the point of listing them as members in a collective on DISCO's separate-from-regular-ol'-HEALTH MySpace page. And don't get my wallet started on the website for HEALTH FASHION, your mailorder source for American Apparel V-necks boasting pastel mandates.
The bandmembers' names don't appear in this review because I am taking the group up on its insistence that it's not concerned with the pretense/spotlight of individual utterance-- in fact, I kind of wish they, sigh, took it further by wearing masks and adopting glyphic pseudonyms. This dance collage may often push the vocals to the front of the mix much more than its source material did, but those droned-in, genderless, ghost-tech vox are what make HEALTH seem both disembodied and like a superorganism in the first place. The concept/gimmick of identity is further shattered by the diversity of the remixers' approaches; DISCO is like an Oz or Wonkan chocolate factory of beat styles, all proving the point that drum machines can pummel just as cathartically, and as fetchingly, as forearms.
Some of the remixers employ only one processed and reverbed "clonk!" from HEALTH, yet others use the original work's entire structure as an undergirding. DISCO's basic arc is: begin close to home, drift (albeit aggressively) through decades of electronic music, rest for a metronomic eight-minute piece by C.L.A.W.S. to wonder what the point of life is, and backtrack to a computer simulation of HEALTH's OCD assault for a finale. Amateurish DJs might score respect by playing the Acid Girls remixes, because their constant, exciting shifts will leave the impression that you're blending multiple tracks. Thrust Lab's epic "Problem Is" comes off as somehow funny and ominous, tonally coasting from Vangelis' Blade Runner score into Giorgio Moroder into some Weather Report fusion, landing on (duh) M83. CFCF's take on "Triceratops" picks up that dairy product and trumps it by adding Oldfield/Exorcist-y "Tubular Bells" jive, and some of that Steely Dan shit that Adult Swim's Tim and Eric mock/celebrate, all with a sick pulse reminiscent of so many 80s horror movie jams, including Hot Ice's "Theme From Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D".
The bonus material on DISCO+ is less of-a-piece, but just as varied and deserving of widescale distribution. Nastique throws the classically stilted "Blue Monday" beat under HEALTH's prehistoric-squawk bus, Bearded Baby re-remixes Crystal Castles' (also included here) HEALTH remix, and Captain Ahab mashes the band up with Foot Village's wellness-centered "Protective Nourishment". Only DISCO+ is as playful as the cover art's promise of "ALL THE HITS" in an awesomely humorless font. So, forfeit the urge to hold a conviction-o-meter up to these rattle-come-latelies' homages to Swans, Ruins, and Lightning Bolt. DISCO streamlines HEALTH's analog-trance thickets without letting the beats betray the atmospherics. Never merely meager, this project delivers, both when you're waving your orgy-snorkel all blotto on-the-town, and for a soundtrack to serious rumination at your midday desk of harsh reality. None of the parties involved are inventing, or reinventing, anything, necessarily, but damn if they aren't tinkering their asses off. | 2008-05-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Lovepump United | May 23, 2008 | 8 | ba416f59-96dd-4fdc-bde5-d72fe3147185 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
The veteran Chicago dance producer sets aside club conventions in favor of an ultra-smooth hybrid of house, disco, jazz, and new age. | The veteran Chicago dance producer sets aside club conventions in favor of an ultra-smooth hybrid of house, disco, jazz, and new age. | Ron Trent: What Do the Stars Say to You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ron-trent-what-do-the-stars-say-to-you/ | What Do the Stars Say to You | If house music was a human being, it would be in its late thirties and plumb in the season of mid-life crisis, which makes a certain musical maturity an inevitable development. That it should be Chicago producer Ron Trent who brings house music its pipe and slippers on What Do the Stars Say to You is either remarkable or predictable, depending on whether you’re more familiar with Trent as the firebrand who produced the spartan dance classic “Altered States” at the age of 14 or the co-founder of Prescription, a label renowned for its unfathomably unwrinkled deep house.
What Do the Stars Say to You is the polar opposite of “Altered States” and other early house records that jolted their way out of Chicago and Detroit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It is florid where so much early house was raw; laid back, where its predecessors burst with energy; and smooth, compared to the genre’s typically spiky funk. The album revels in an ultra-languid hybrid of house, disco, jazz, and new age that nods to Stevie Wonder’s sweetly pastoral Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants and the Germanic wooze of Tangerine Dream.
Trent is far from the first producer to bring live instrumentation to house: Masters at Work’s Nuyorican Soul project in the 1990s was a call back to the disco records from which house was born. But few producers have gone quite as far down the rabbit hole as Trent does here. The record features contributions from septuagenarian jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, Ivan Conti and Alex Malheriros from Brazilian jazz fusionists Azymuth, and Texan psych outfit Khruangbin—an unlikely lineup for a house project. A hint of jam-band earthiness floats over the record like weed and patchouli at a Phish concert. (The album is designed, according to Trent, for “harmonizing with spirit, urban life and nature.”)
Synths and electronics do feature throughout the 10 tracks (15 on the mixed edition) but they are intended as a framework for the live musicianship, with Trent himself contributing drums, percussion, keys, piano, and guitar. Throughout, What Do the Stars Say to You keeps things immaculately clean and tidy It’s the kind of record where the mastering credit (New York house and disco legend François Kevorkian) really merits its prominence—an album to be downloaded in WAV and used to test out new speakers.
Maturity, musicality, and finesse are not always welcome words in dance music, and What Do the Stars Say to You makes no concessions to anyone who likes their house rough, ready, and machine-driven. Everything is smooth as velvet and as relaxed as a sloth sleepover, from Lars Bartkuhn’s silvery guitar solo on “Cool Water” to Italian ambient pioneer Gigi Masin’s synth lines on “Admira,” a song for those who consider Manuel Göttsching’s horizontal masterpiece E2-E4 to be a little too belligerent.
Within these criteria, however, there is plenty to admire. The synth melodies that frame much of the album are beautiful, notably the Detroit techno-ish sweeps on “Cycle of Many,” which evoke the cosmic melancholia of space telescope images on a rainy afternoon, and the mournful jazz cycles of the album’s title track. And the album’s blend of electronics and live instrumentation is elegant, suggesting both careful sound design and a certain musical empathy. On “Sphere,” Trent’s layered synth cradles Ponty’s bright violin melodies like a baby in a hammock, while the violin solo betrays its genesis in electronics: Trent initially played the solo on a synth, and Ponty then remade it.
Beneath the music’s supple folds there also lies the odd carefully sharpened knife. “Flos Potentia (Sugar, Cotton, Tabacco),” with Khruangbin, may seem to suggest tie-dyed good times to go with its gilded Afrobeat glide—“flos potentia” means “flower power” in Latin—but the song is subtitled after the three plants that drove the slave trade, hinting at more serious preoccupations. This subtle suggestion of resistance is cleverly played. What Do the Stars Say to You never demands that you pay attention; a record of gentle rewards, gradual discovery, and the slow musical ripening of age, it asks you to come forth and to meet it on home turf. In its idiosyncrasies, it’s quietly defiant. | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Night Time Stories Ltd. | June 22, 2022 | 7.2 | ba458ac6-7a89-4a82-a3ce-cb0c53aa66d1 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Young Americans represented David Bowie's dive into soul music, particularly Philly Soul. Containing the stunning funk single "Fame," the album felt like a vehicle for Bowie to address one of his favorite topics—pop stardom—from a new angle, at a moment when it seemed likely to destroy him. | Young Americans represented David Bowie's dive into soul music, particularly Philly Soul. Containing the stunning funk single "Fame," the album felt like a vehicle for Bowie to address one of his favorite topics—pop stardom—from a new angle, at a moment when it seemed likely to destroy him. | David Bowie: Young Americans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21488-young-americans/ | Young Americans | [Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
In the summer of 1974, as he was traveling across America on his mammoth Diamond Dogs arena-rock tour, David Bowie got deeply into soul music. By July, he was spiking his live sets with covers of the Ohio Players' "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow" and Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood," but he was even more interested in what was happening in dance clubs—particularly the new disco coming out of Philadelphia International Records. Bowie booked a mid-tour recording session at Sigma Sound, the studio where Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were constructing the sound of Philadelphia. But he wasn't working with Gamble and Huff, or indeed any of the studio's house musicians: He had something else in mind.
The soul-inspired album that came out of the Sigma Sound recordings, Young Americans, was yet another new direction for an artist who staked his career on ceaselessly finding new directions. It was also the first time he’d made an album whose chief purpose was pleasure. There’s nothing like the apocalyptic visions of Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs on Young Americans; it’s as smart as anything he’d recorded before it, but also relaxed and limber-hipped enough for his hardcore fans’ less alienated big sisters and little brothers to get into. And it was the first of his records to feature Carlos Alomar, the ingenious rhythm guitarist who would become his live band’s musical director for more than a decade.
Bowie had met Alomar at a session early in the year, when he'd produced the Scottish pop singer Lulu's covers of his own "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Watch That Man." He drafted Alomar in to play at the Sigma Sound sessions, and Alomar brought along a couple of singers: his wife, Robin Clark, and his best friend, the then-unknown Luther Vandross. Always quick to recognize talent, Bowie immediately got Vandross and Clark in on the recording.
At those sessions, Bowie recorded enough songs for an album (reportedly meant to be called either "The Gouster" or, more cynically, "Shilling the Rubes")—although it would've been very different from the Young Americans we know today. Its most radical gesture would have been "John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)," a rewritten and discofied version of a snarling, homoerotic glam-rock single from three years earlier. (Bowie didn't actually release "John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)" until 1979; it was a minor hit in England and ended up on his Changestwobowie compilation.)
"Young Americans" the song was a hybrid of contemporary soul (the Vandross-led backup singers were all over it), the hyper-emotive '50s singer Johnnie Ray, and—another recent obsession of Bowie's—the up-and-coming New Jersey songwriter Bruce Springsteen, whose song "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" Bowie covered at Sigma Sound. It was also very current: Bowie sang "Do you remember President Nixon?" in the middle of a song he'd started recording three days after Nixon's resignation.
After that initial burst of productivity, the Diamond Dogs tour resumed, now so deeply influenced by Philadelphia soul that it was nicknamed the "Philly Dogs" tour. Bowie ditched most of his elaborate stage design, and added an opening set by the "Mike Garson Band"—his own group, fronted by Vandross and Clark. (Their set included a terrific Vandross original, "Funky Music," as well as a reworked version of Bowie's hippie mantra "Memory of a Free Festival.") One of the new additions to Bowie's own set was a medley of the Flares' "Foot Stompin'" and the old jazz standard "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate," powered by a funk riff Alomar had come up with.
When the group returned to the studio in November to try to get a little more uptempo oomph into the album, they unsuccessfully tried to record "Foot Stomping." They did, however, come up with two killer additions to Young Americans: Bowie's dreamy, spiraling slow one "Win," and his lyrical rewrite of Vandross's "Funky Music" as the haunting "Fascination."
Bowie had also befriended John Lennon around that time, and invited him along to play guitar on a cover of his Beatles-era song "Across the Universe" at a final session in January, 1975. (Also present then, for the first time on a Bowie record: drummer Dennis Davis, who would go on to be the hidden rhythmic genius of all of his records up through 1980's Scary Monsters.) "Across the Universe" is the album's one genuine embarrassment, Vegas-y and bathetic. But bringing Lennon in yielded an unexpected dividend: Alomar's "Foot Stompin'" riff, a bit of arrangement brainstorming from Lennon, and a sharp, bitter lyric from Bowie combined, very quickly, into the stunning funk track "Fame." (Young Americans ended up being curiously Lennon-heavy: there's even a slightly mangled line from "A Day in the Life" in the middle of "Young Americans.")
"Fame" was a knockout, the song that gave Bowie his first American #1 single, and the soul world that he so admired took it to heart. By November, 1975, it landed Bowie on "Soul Train." (He wasn't the first white solo performer to play the show, but he was close.) George Clinton, by his own admission, modified its groove into "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)." And James Brown paid Bowie the ultimate backhanded compliment: The instrumental track of his 1976 single "Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" was a note-for-note duplicate of "Fame."
In the context of Bowie's flabbergasting '70s, Young Americans is distinctly a transitional record. It doesn't have the mad theatrical scope of Diamond Dogs or the formal audacity of Station to Station; at times, it comes off as an artist trying very hard to demonstrate how unpredictable he is. You couldn't mistake it for an actual Philly soul record, although like the LPs Bowie was devouring at the time, it often comes off as hits-plus-filler. Still, a good deal of the filler is lovely, and recording funk and disco in 1974 put him way ahead of the curve. While there had already been a handful of disco hits on the pop charts, no other established rock musician had yet tried to do anything similar, and Bowie pulled it off in a way that not only didn't seem crass but gave Luther Vandross his big break.
The album was also a vehicle for Bowie to address one of his favorite topics—pop stardom—from a new angle, at a moment when it seemed likely to destroy him. ("Fame" shares its title with a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe's life that closed after one performance in November, 1974; thanks to Bowie's disastrous management deal at the time, its quarter-million-dollar loss effectively came out of his pocket.) When Bowie talked about lower-case fame with Tracey Emin in 2001, he was a bit more sanguine about it: "There is nothing there to covet.... I understand that it doesn't even get you a Madonna ticket these days. So I won't be recommending it to my offspring. Having influence is more rewarding for feeding ego." He had nothing to worry about on that score. | 2016-01-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | January 22, 2016 | 8.7 | ba4a7c71-e870-4114-b71a-74b8910078e3 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a punk classic, a paragon of songwriting about the pain and joy of love. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a punk classic, a paragon of songwriting about the pain and joy of love. | Buzzcocks: Singles Going Steady | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buzzcocks-singles-going-steady/ | Singles Going Steady | The late Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks once told NME: “Before we do a song, I make sure that song is going to stand the test of time.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, especially in 1978. Punk had sprung into the global consciousness a year earlier thanks largely to the release of the Sex Pistols’ debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, and was already being declared obsolete, a failed revolution whose initial shock had immediately faded into tame self-parody. As quick as punk emerged, a throng of bands started drifting away from the rock’n’roll punch of punk toward a broader post-punk sound. The original movement seemed happy to be a fleeting thing, a bomb that went off leaving nothing but shrapnel.
Yet Buzzcocks forged ahead with a classic punk sound. In 1978 alone, the Manchester band released their first two studio albums, Another Music in a Different Kitchen and Love Bites, and while each bore traces of experimentation, they owed much more to punk mainstays Ramones than to the protracted krautrock of Can. By 1979, groups that had been directly inspired by Buzzcocks—including Joy Division and the Fall—were already releasing some of the most important post-punk records of all time. Buzzcocks’ fellow punk pioneers in the Clash and the Jam were expanding the vocabulary of punk without losing the movement’s edge. Buzzcocks responded to some of these towering post-punk statements not with one of their own, but with a humble collection of singles.
Singles Going Steady, which begins with the band’s first eight singles, came out in 1979 in the U.S.; it wasn’t released in Buzzcocks’ native UK until 1981, as the band was on the verge of a breakup. It didn’t make the charts in either place, but that two-year gap is telling. As the punk ’70s segued into the post-punk ’80s, it was clear that Buzzcocks inspired little confidence about their staying power. Compilation albums, especially back then, often had the uncanny ability to signal the end of a band’s relevance, if not their lifespan. The fact that Buzzcocks released an anthology of singles a mere two years into their recording career made Singles Going Steady—despite the cheery wordplay of its title—seem less like a triumph and more like a tombstone. There was a ring of finality to it, a sense of chips being cashed in. If Shelley wanted to make timeless music and go down in history, he was going about it in the worst way possible.
But history wasn’t counting on Shelley’s songs themselves. From the start, Buzzcocks had no desire to be a typical punk band. With nimbleness and pluck, they pivoted from the sardonic snarl of their debut EP Spiral Scratch—their only studio recording with Howard Devoto, another defector from punk to post-punk, as their lead singer—to their first single, 1977’s “Orgasm Addict.” The song was co-written by Shelley and Devoto but sung by Shelley in his new role as frontman. The contrast was striking. Instead of Devoto’s Spiral Scratch sneer, which felt studied and imitative, “Orgasm Addict” sported Shelley’s chirpy hiccup, a boyish and bracing new sound in punk.
Buzzcocks were the antidote to what was coined then as “punkismo”—four men who projected a new, more nuanced image of punk masculinity, even as Shelley extolled the compulsive joys of masturbation. In fact, it was because Shelley was singing such a juvenile anthem to jacking off that Buzzcocks felt so instantly fresh. What appeared to be yet another willfully offensive punk rant was in effect a stark admission of vulnerability. The song’s underlying message is subtle yet undeniable: Solitude can be turned on its side and harnessed as a liberating sexual energy. Buzzcocks had pioneered punk independence with the self-released Spiral Scratch, but “Orgasm Addict” was a different kind of DIY.
Shelley was born Peter McNeish in 1955, the son of working-class parents in Lancashire who made their living in the cotton mills and coal mines the industrial city was known for. With the nerdy audacity of a precocious blue-collar kid, he took his stage name from his favorite Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Romanticism was not the hippest thing to reference in the iconoclastic British punk scene in the ’70s, nor was literature in any form. But as his fellow punks were assuming visceral or satirical pseudonyms like Strummer, Rotten, and Palmolive, Shelley reached back into his schoolbooks for a name that would later signify his soft and beating heart.
Singles Going Steady is festooned with love songs rendered urgent and rough by the thrust and distortion of punk. Shelley and company understood what few of their peers did: With love songs in the AOR arena growing increasingly cheesy throughout the ’70s, punk demanded a new rawness and credibility if it dared to address love. You can’t spell “romance” without “Ramone,” and it’s no accident that their music owes plenty to their New York counterparts. Buzzcocks, however, jettisoned Ramones’ biker image and campy horror for boy-next-door charm and the everyday concerns of the forlorn. “I won’t be nasty,” Shelley remarked to Melody Maker in 1978. “We’re just four nice lads, the kind of people you could take home to your parents.” Singles Going Steady didn’t weaponize punk with the goal of toppling the dominance of silly love songs in the ’70s; the album is as much Wings as it is Ramones, as sympathetic to Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” as it is to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Buzzcocks mastered that tension at the heart of the love song—the opposing forces of attraction and repulsion, of devotion and betrayal, the thin line between love and hate, for others and for oneself. Singles Going Steady stands as one of the most endearing, intimate, and impeccably crafted batch of earworms in either the love-song or punk-rock realm. After shedding the exhilarating brattiness of “Orgasm Addict,” Singles unleashes “What Do I Get?,” a plea for companionship that’s so free of pretense, it makes “Anarchy in the UK” sound as overblown as “Hotel California.”
“I just want a lover like any other/What do I get?/I only want a friend who will stay to the end/What do I get?” Shelley laments, his voice a dribble of honey over guitars that quiver and churn like a stomach full of butterflies. “I Don’t Mind,” “Love You More,” and “Promises” follow suit, expanding Shelley’s cosmology of anguish. Unrequited longing, severed ties, knock-kneed bashfulness, rash declarations of euphoric infatuation: Shelley delivers it all with jaunty melodies and deceptively complex chord progressions on par with the Beatles and the Kinks. And with “Harmony in My Head,” Shelley’s fellow guitarist and songwriting partner Steve Diggle makes his lone lead-vocal contribution to the record, lending a gruff warmth that serves as a counterpoint to Shelley’s choirboy voice.
The album’s latter half, which gathers the B-sides of these eight singles, is more diverse. From the hilariously bitter “Oh Shit!” to the celebration of punk for punk’s sake, “Noise Annoys,” Singles documents a band at play. Even the love songs, “Just Lust” and “Lipstick,” are lighter in tone—although the latter veers into heavy shadows as its lyrics skim Shelley’s increasingly philosophical take on romance: “When you miss me/In your dreams does my lover have your face?” Together, they’re no less tuneful or indelible than their A-side counterparts. Shelley refused to see punk as an insurrection against pop. It was simply a more efficient delivery system.
Love songs were Shelley’s own brand of post-punk, every bit as radical as PiL’s dissonant dub or Gang of Four’s abrasive funk. As he once told Melody Maker, “People have been saying things like, ‘Punk songs aren’t meant to be about love.’ I didn’t say that, so why should I abide by it?” Not that Buzzcocks were averse to dipping into some easily recognizable post-punk on Singles: “Why Can’t I Touch It?” is an atmospheric sprawl, six and a half minutes of dreamy yearning that evolves into a jagged interplay of riffs between Diggle and Shelley, a punk jam session comparable to the far more celebrated dual-guitar alchemy of their contemporaries Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television.
The peak of Singles Going Steady—and of Buzzcocks’ legacy—is the hit British single “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?).” Paraphrasing a Marlon Brando line from the musical Guys and Dolls, the droll title belies the song’s power. Guitars seethe and beats clench. Shelley sings like a man whose entire existence hangs by a single frayed nerve: “I can’t see much of a future/Unless we find out what’s to blame/What a shame,” he sings without a trace of hope, a lover cast adrift on the cruel winds of indifference. He picks mercilessly at his psychic scabs, his vulnerability as a songwriter is practically agonizing—even as it serves as a perverse source of strength.
“I actually do feel unguarded, and you see it as a joke. It isn’t me who should feel bad,” he said in 1978, in response to a perceived backlash against his sensitive-boy persona. “Ever Fallen in Love” is the apotheosis of that persona. It’s a tribute not only to the notion that punk can be a thoughtful expression of naked feeling, but to Buzzcocks’ idiosyncratic embrace of the finer points of classic pop songcraft. Shelley wasn’t only drawing from the likes of the Beatles, whose cover art for Let It Be is deliberately mirrored on Singles Going Steady; he was, by his own admission, just as envious of the music of the Supremes and Dusty Springfield.
That Diana Ross and Springfield are both icons of the LGBTQ community is not incidental. Shelley was British punk’s first openly bisexual star. He wrote “Love You More” about a woman he dated in 1975; he wrote “Ever Fallen in Love” about Francis Cookson, a man he lived with later in the ’70s while they played together in the side project the Tiller Boys. The clarity of Shelley’s sexual orientation was reflected, paradoxically, in the vagueness of his lyrics. His deft use of pronouns and perspectives made Buzzcocks songs almost entirely indeterminate when it came to the gender of the narrator—or the person at the other end. “I tried to be as gender neutral as possible in writing songs, because for me I could use the same song for either sex,” he once explained. He embraced the fluid sexuality and identity explored previously in a more fantastical fashion by his heroes Ray Davies, Lou Reed, and David Bowie. But Shelley applied that approach to achingly confessional songs that confronted the realities of love with both tenderness and heaviness.
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1820 poem, “To a Skylark.” Inspired by the sight of the bird while strolling with his wife through the Italian countryside, the troubled Romantic writer spiraled into an epiphany—the understanding that pain and joy are inseparable, perhaps even co-dependent. It’s an evergreen idea, in which Pete Shelley found the immortality he sought. Pop-punk and indie rock from then on out—from the Smiths to Green Day to Radiohead to Fucked Up—would not sound remotely the same without Buzzcocks. And Singles Going Steady remains a painful, joyous record, one that makes the lungs quicken and the ribs vibrate with the exquisite heartbreak of it—the sweetest, saddest songs ever skylarked by a punk. | 2019-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | IRS | January 6, 2019 | 9.4 | ba4ca620-a276-4dac-a2f1-3de1118f48d7 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | |
Chastity Belt's second album is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them. | Chastity Belt's second album is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them. | Chastity Belt: Time to Go Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20310-time-to-go-home/ | Time to Go Home | In Sheila Heti’s 2012 highly autobiographical novel How Should a Person Be?, an artist named Margaux tells main character Sheila about a male painter she's struck up a correspondence with, exchanging tips over email. They seemed to be equals exchanging wisdom, Margaux says, except suddenly she realized they weren’t; she was starting to become more like him. "He’s just another man who wants to teach me something," Margaux says dismissively.
A variation of this same line appears in the chorus of Chastity Belt’s "Drone", the opening track on their second album Time to Go Home. It’s a song about the illusion of freedom and respect within a relationship, its context vague but the sentiment arguably universal. "I never expect much from anyone," Julia Shapiro sings. "So I’m never disappointed and I never have to trust."
The past few years have borne witness to a tidal wave of young, female fuck-ups in pop culture. The women who get too drunk on the dance floor, who date men who are bad for them, who don’t have their shit together and are unapologetic about it, are everywhere, from "Girls" to Frances Ha to How Should A Person Be? And Chastity Belt, who preached the joys of fucking boys on the dancefloor and shouted "Pussy Weed Beer" on their last album No Regerts, may as well claim this title too.
But there’s a sadness to Time to Go Home beneath the drunken mayhem, one that leads to serious self-reflection and earnest inquiries about being a functioning human. Where the band once crooned jokingly about healthy punk lifestyles, pretentious tattoos and nip-slips, now they chew away at existential questions. Throughout the record they work through the hurt they’ve accrued, Shapiro singing over twangy electric lines about the lies she’s fed herself, her desire to just skip out on her own thoughts sometimes, and how she envies anyone who just feels alright. "What is real?" guitarist Lydia Lund sings on the gorgeous track "Lydia" before answering herself: "It’s what you feel." Even a song like "Cool Slut", a proud endorsement of sleeping around that would have felt fun and confident on their previous record, feels laden with a layer of doubt here.
Chastity Belt haven't traded their raucous party-girl ways for slow-paced sob stories; "Why Try" and "Trapped" are both shimmy-worthy surf rock jams and "The Thing" is a certified head-banger, a screaming ode to the John Carpenter horror flick of the same name. But you can hear them peering down upon their worries with a drearier set of beer goggles than before. Time to Go Home is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them. And with every hit they seem to take to the heart and head, Chastity Belt proves that sometimes the best response is a big shrug of indifference. | 2015-03-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-03-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | March 25, 2015 | 7.6 | ba4cdac0-e5db-424c-a7d8-6b8bd6ab4353 | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
The Texas rapper’s latest album sounds so damn good that the emptiness of it all is an afterthought. | The Texas rapper’s latest album sounds so damn good that the emptiness of it all is an afterthought. | Don Toliver: Life of a DON | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/don-toliver-life-of-a-don/ | Life of a DON | Don Toliver graduated cum laude from the Travis Scott school of how to make nothing sound like something. The moodiness makes you feel like Don is about to embark on a journey of self-discovery like early Kid Cudi, go on a drunken voicemail rant like “Marvin’s Room”-era Drake, or throw in a splash of spitefulness like post-Honest Future, but that never happens. The Houston rapper and singer’s music is relatively conflict-free, and when things do go wrong, he seems largely unfazed. Sometimes, it’s heartbreak, though he just moves onto the next Instagram model without so much as a shrug. Other times, after a long night of partying, he sulks in his loneliness—at least until he remembers that he has a stacked bank account, luxury goods falling from the sky, radio hits, and a cozy spot as second-in-command to one of the world’s biggest rappers.
As expected, Don Toliver’s latest album Life of a DON is hollow. His life is a blur, blah blah blah. Fame is not all it’s cracked up to be, but also it’s really cool, blah blah blah. (If you care about deeper thoughts on this subject, go listen to any Kanye album before Ye.) But miraculously, the emptiness of it all is an afterthought—it sounds so damn good that who even cares if Don Toliver is an emotionless robot or not (he is). The hooks are catchy and slick. The beats are lush and radiant. And he has this distinctly piercing voice, with a wide range of melodies that could make an extremely basic line jotted down on a dinner napkin sound heartfelt.
If you were to write out the chorus of “Way Bigger,” you might reasonably conclude that it was constructed by the Cactus Jack marketing team (there’s even a subtle callback to Don’s hit song “Lemonade”). But the glistening instrumental and brooding melodies wash away that overwhelming corporate sheen. The same could be said for “What You Need,” which isn’t groundbreaking or that original, yet it’s so easy to get hooked, especially with a couple of drops of booze in your system. The Metro Boomin-produced “Company Pt 2” is a highlight as well, even if it sounds like the type of hazy, melancholy instrumental that comes so easy to the beatmaker that at this point, he could have walked an intern through it without having to press a single button himself. These three records are Don Toliver’s sweet spot, smooth and downbeat; half-assed lyrics aside, they come across intimate enough that they could have been made in a bedroom, not a multi-million-dollar studio.
Whenever the songs are stripped down and his writing has to do more work, it’s noticeably vague and impersonal. Take the R&B ballad “Double Standards,” where it’s hard to believe Don has ever been in a real relationship. Similarly, the Kali Uchis-assisted “Drugs N Hella Melodies” has these dull, meandering musings, saved only by the twinkling instrumental.
Thankfully, this doesn’t happen often on Life of a DON. Given the maximalist approach passed down from Travis, there’s usually an exciting wrinkle in Don’s songs to latch onto, whether it’s the way he fuses with Baby Keem on “OUTERSPACE” over sci-fi movie beeps and boops or the messy falsetto he hits on “2AM” that sounds like it was laid down after taking too many shots at the club. The flashy beat switch-ups, unnecessary Mike Dean-style outros, and flexible vocal arrangements do a good job of camouflaging the mechanical nature of it all. It may be transparently a product of the music industry machine, but it’s a ton of fun anyway.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cactus Jack / Atlantic | October 13, 2021 | 7.2 | ba5413d8-8721-4e16-9923-e519aa7873b3 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Featuring collaborations with Skrillex and Jamie xx, the West Coast transplant’s debut album flips the chamber-folk cello of her debut EP into a contemporary, decidedly Los Angeles hybrid sound. | Featuring collaborations with Skrillex and Jamie xx, the West Coast transplant’s debut album flips the chamber-folk cello of her debut EP into a contemporary, decidedly Los Angeles hybrid sound. | Kelsey Lu: Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelsey-lu-blood/ | Blood | What does a cello sound like? Deep, melancholy resonance: a violin that’s listened to Joy Division on repeat, perhaps; a pale childhood free of grass stains. But ask Kelsey Lu what her cello sounds like, and a whole new world unfurls. Her instrument of choice echoes “a really old wise tree that’s planted in the bottom of the ocean,” she’s explained, with “sea life living within it, specifically sea angels.” It’s a beatific, Laurel Canyon answer as serves this West Coast transplant’s gentle romanticism, not to mention her poetic generosity. (Sea angels, despite their seraphic name, look like a deepwater cross between fireflies and Slimer.)
Rest assured, though, Lu’s cello is on dry land, and firmly planted in L.A. (This following a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a stint in New York, where she recorded her spectral 2016 debut EP, Church.) The spirit of Southern California, and Lu’s subtle experiments with its musical tropes, form the sly engine of Blood, her first full-length album; with an ear still to the elegantly eerie avant-classical compositions of her past, and the chamber-folk philosophizing that anointed Church, she goes more volubly, more unmistakably Los Angeles with the record. There are delicate, deft pizzicato runs on her strings, still, but they precede a genial pop anthem co-produced by Skrillex that begs for montage placement on the next 90210 reboot. A dewy, two-part baroque-folk suite bookends a brassy, spangled disco anthem with Arthur Russell-style string flares. Above all, there is a sense of abundance, of florality; plush orchestrations rush into the spaces where her EP once shunned other instrumentation, preferring instead to let her cello reverberate with sharp-eyed reticence.
Lu’s well-rooted composure anchors these many directions, and her technical flexibility abets them. (Not for nothing has she shared stages and songs with artists as diverse as Solange, King Krule, Florence and the Machine, and Oneohtrix Point Never.) But where Church seemed to prod theological identity—it was even recorded in a house of worship, with the echo in the pews as pontifical backing—Blood has almost as many moments of curious travelogue as it does introspection. “You've even forgotten all about your heartbreak/Something's getting washed off with waves,” she sings somberly in “Atlantic”—and despite her sharp, almost atonal yelps to “jump!” into these waters, her icy cello seems to predict a sinister end. Fingerpicked folk guitar whips through “Pushin Against the Wind,” a gloomy folk requiem with hints of R&B that seems to exist as a conduit for Lu’s stunning vocals, at turns clear, aching, and incanting; it’s a moment of emotional whiplash from this straight into “Due West,” the ambling Skrillex collaboration that celebrates mournful California malaise by conjuring its name repeatedly, rolling and gently lilting like a seaside stretch of highway. It’s a glossy, diligent pop track with every instrument tastefully soaring and Lu’s roaming soul set in amber. It fades immediately and ephemerally in the warm Pacific air. So does her strangely faithful take on 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” a careful beat-by-beat imitation of that Virgin Suicides soundtrack staple—a creative plane away from her previous brazen pop covers. (See: her take on Joni Mitchell’s “River” with Sampha, as architecturally deconstructed as an entree on “Top Chef.”)
Elsewhere, and more beguilingly, Lu tries her hand at another classic California songwriting device: the ode to the hot rod. But here, she subverts it. “Foreign Car”—one of the most eccentric and lush tracks here, and co-produced by Jamie xx —isn’t so much a Beach Boys-style motor sonnet as it is a careful lament for a man in bad straits. “Metal, metal, metal, metal/Pedal to the metal, make you work,” Lu chants flatly in the chorus, with all the drag-racing vivacity of Lana Del Rey on Ambien; when this cedes to deeper words—”Boy, no other loves you/Like no other loves me”—the banal words in the refrain suddenly feel clearer in their intent. It’s a masculine pastime and energy distilled and turned elemental, the priapism of cars and performance sports reconfigured in femininity.
If there is one bulwark of Blood as a pop experiment unlike Church, it is surely the Studio 54 fever dream of “Poor Fake.” Opening with a courtly, half-minute violin preamble, the song snaps suddenly into whimsical disco, Lu’s keening falsetto fluttering around a Moroder-worthy beat. Her cello leaps in duet with her voice; with those string groans commanding central space, it not so much nods as tips over in full curtsy to Arthur Russell and his World of Echo. It’s also the most clearly delighted Lu has ever sounded in her music, not least in a histrionically silly, spoken interlude about a well-appointed art scam. The song’s zany high energy gives Lu somewhere to rise, so her most thoughtful moment, the closing title track, lands with even heavier empathy: “History has taught us hope/Hope is the answer,” she sings with throaty, operatic grandiosity over brooding violins and fluttering xylophonic pulses. It’s halfway to a sermon, and one worth hearing. | 2019-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Columbia | April 26, 2019 | 7.5 | ba5ac9d4-ac85-493b-ade5-42f0437cde61 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
Pond Scum collects a few old John Peel sessions and shapes them into a surprisingly affecting meditation on the nature of faith. It's not a redundant release, but a compilation that emphasizes new ideas and overlooked themes in Will Oldham's prodigious catalog. | Pond Scum collects a few old John Peel sessions and shapes them into a surprisingly affecting meditation on the nature of faith. It's not a redundant release, but a compilation that emphasizes new ideas and overlooked themes in Will Oldham's prodigious catalog. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Pond Scum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21473-pond-scum/ | Pond Scum | When Will Oldham first recorded the song "(I Was Drunk at the Pulpit)" more than 20 years ago, he was going by the name Palace Brothers. The song, from his 1993 album There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, was a meditation on faith and fallibility. With its dense imagery and antiquated language, it gave the impression of an actor treading the footboards, performing the role of an old-time singer, staging a spiritual reckoning.
Around the same time, Oldham recorded a very different version of "Pulpit" for a Peel Session, and it shows just how malleable his songs are. This performance, which opens his new odds-and-ends comp Pond Scum, is slow and deliberate. An acoustic and an electric guitar noodle solemnly. And Oldham’s voice is deeper and less distant; he pushes it up to the front of the song to let the listener relish the richness and texture that age has bestowed on him. Oldham isn’t an actor anymore, but a sinner experiencing a spiritual crisis in real time.
"(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit" is a potent opener to Pond Scum, which collects a few old Peel Sessions into a surprisingly affecting meditation on the nature of faith. As these two versions of the song prove, it’s not a redundancy, but a compilation that emphasizes new ideas and overlooked themes in Oldham’s prodigious catalog. Oldham favors retrospectives that tweak the very idea of retrospectives: Greatest Palace Music, from 2004, featured his Bonnie "Prince" Billy alias covering songs by his Palace persona, and he followed it up eight years later with an EP of self-covers called Now Here’s My Plan. Even as they condense and summarize his catalog, these releases are his most esoteric, rewarding, and engaging in the context of his career, when a listener can grasp the various allusions Oldham is making to himself.
Pond Scum falls squarely into that category, and may therefore be a fans-only album. And yet, taken on its own terms, Pond Scum is also a good-faith effort to plumb the nature of God. Not just any deity, but the distinctively American one born in 1741 in Jonathan Edwards’ hellfire sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and since then praised and perpetuated in countless old-time folk and gospel songs.
Despite its innate humanism ("The world is within you, without is of mud"), "(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit" is the only real brimstone moment on Pond Scum. Other songs are much more generous, some even celebratory: "Death to Everyone" testifies that our days are sweeter for being numbered, and Oldham’s band sound like they’re not wasting a single moment. "When Thy Song Flows Through Me" is lovely in its simplicity, a thank-you note to a higher power that has blessed Oldham with the ability to make music.
Perhaps the big draw here is Oldham’s cover of "The Cross," the most spiritually explicit song by Prince. As it appears toward the end of his 1988 double album Sign 'O' the Times, the song sounds like a slightly perverse altar call, teetering between the sacred and the secular. "We all have our problems, some big, some are small," he sings. "Soon all of our problems will be taken by the Cross." But Oldham undersells the sentiment, hinting that what sounds like a consoling promise might actually be a threat of end times reckoning.
As many people do when talking about God, Oldham occasionally lets language get away from him, and the project, with its strengths and weaknesses, illustrates an interesting tendency in Oldham’s songwriting. He’s not especially well known for writing about spirituality, but that may be due to the fact that he often presents God in negative terms: Oldham sees a darkness and describes it in detail, which implies a light that he either cannot or will not see.
Correction (1/25/16 4:06 p.m.): This review previously incorrectly attributed the lyrics of "Jolly Five (64)" and "Jolly One (2/15)" to Will Oldham. They were originally written by Rabindranath Tagore in his collection of poems, Gitanjali*.* | 2016-01-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | January 25, 2016 | 7 | ba5ae5f4-684d-46d1-ad78-6b72cb57c51f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The synth compositions of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami are deep and romantic, uniquely designed to pull you into them. | The synth compositions of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami are deep and romantic, uniquely designed to pull you into them. | TALsounds: Acquiesce | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talsounds-acquiesce/ | Acquiesce | Meditation and improvisation are very different practices, but the sprawling synth music of Chicago experimentalist Natalie Chami makes that difference nearly imperceptible. The key to doing either successfully is often mindfulness; a focus on the self, an awareness of breath, and the ability to completely give yourself to the moment. Chami proved this in Good Willsmith, her trio with Max Allison and Doug Kaplan, where the commitment to improvisation extended to entire albums of heroically psychedelic single-takes. Allison and Kaplan’s colorful avant-garde label Hausu Mountain provided a launch point for Chami’s solo project TALSounds, where her classically-trained voice flowed calmly through synths, tape-delays, and loop pedals. While early releases were uncut recordings, Chami employed subtle editing on 2018’s Love Sick before going further on her new album Acquiesce, making songs out of longer improvisations and applying vocal overdubs. But don’t mistake the title or enhanced production for any sort of compromise: Acquiesce is the most fully-realized TALsounds album to date.
Acquiesce is TALsounds at their most turbulent, where the additional production emphasizes the rawest and most tender moments. The first track on Acquiesce is an instrumental appropriately titled “Opening,” not for describing a starting point, but implying an action that runs naturally throughout the album. On previous albums, Chami’s voice and synths would often form a dense unified sound, but on “Soar” they take their own trajectories. The soft arpeggios rushing under melismatic vocals compliment each other, but it’s just as engaging when they’re at odds. “Dynasty” begins with silvery synth lines and Chami’s voice in an upper opera register, until an elastic, glitchy synth interrupts and the song unspools into a delirious collage of looping vocals. But rather than disrupting the project’s zen atmosphere, this dynamic enhances it, as if we’re hearing her work through the tension and release in real time. “Dynasty” is reoriented by the fuzzy, heartrending organ instrumental “Conveyor,” the album’s shortest and most breathlessly beautiful track.
Acquiesce always goes deeper rather than bigger. TALsounds has always been an inwardly focused project by nature, but these songs feel uniquely designed to pull you into them. The album grows darker in its second half, but there’s a warmth and safety there just like the dimly lit shot of the bedside table on its cover. The faintly atonal synths streaking through “Else” and “Instance” create a dead-of-night intimacy but Chami, like Grouper’s Liz Harris, has an innate ability to light these moments with her voice like a will-o’-the-wisp. It resolves on the penultimate “Muted Decision,” where she tunes a lone-synth to uncannily mimic a muted-trumpet. It’s a moment akin to stumbling through your home in the dark, only to have your eyes adjust and recognize the people and things you love most.
Chami has described making this album during a period of new love, a time of happiness, but also of questioning that happiness when she found herself recording less. For a project defined by its constant and improvisational process, not to mention one that doubles as meditative practice, it’s an understandable anxiety. But the true brilliance of the album is how she channels those life tensions through that same creative process. As its final track “No Restoring” glimmers into view, Acquiesce reveals itself in hindsight as the now-engaged musician’s most romantic album. It’s easy to confuse acquiescence for a sort of defeat, but TALsounds frames it more as an acceptance of life’s endless change. We are all constantly improvising with what life throws at us, but the meditative majesty of Acquiesce suggests that with a different perspective, we can let it flow straight through us. | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | May 26, 2020 | 7.6 | ba5c175c-07a6-4a30-a1f3-e5df367dd774 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
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 dead prez’s debut, an iconoclastic rap record built around the politics of liberation. | 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 dead prez’s debut, an iconoclastic rap record built around the politics of liberation. | dead prez: Let’s Get Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dead-prez-lets-get-free/ | Let's Get Free | To be woke is not the same as to stay woke. The gap between adjective and verb contains worlds. Before it was co-opted and reframed to signal a certain kind of performative righteousness, wokeness meant honoring an instinct for preservation. Keeping one eye open to the realities of life in a patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist society, for some, has meant the difference between life and death. The phrase is often attributed to Erykah Badu, whose 2008 song “Master Teacher (I Stay Woke)” holds one of its earliest mainstream uses. But I’ve been hearing it, in different variations, for way longer.
Few people embodied the concept more acutely than M-1 and stic.man, a pair of MCs who met as students at a Florida HBCU in the early ’90s, and found some success later as the duo dead prez. Let’s Get Free, their 2000 debut, is one of the most radical rap releases in history. On “Hip Hop,” the mosh pit rumbler that remains the group’s best-known song, having served as the walk-on music for Dave Chappelle’s Chappelle’s Show, stic.man raps, “Still a nigga like me don’t playa hate, I just stay awake.”
While the song’s chanted hook and lines from its fiery verses are often misinterpreted as an endorsement of hip-hop purism, it is more than a judgment on the state of commercial rap at the time. Hip-hop was only a few years off from reaching its status as a billion-dollar industry, and labels were taking expensive bets on all kinds of artists. Puff was flexing furs, artists like Nas and Mobb Deep were experimenting with glossier sounds, and a crew of rappers from New Orleans had everyone calling their jewelry “bling.” On the East Coast, in pockets of Brooklyn and Philadelphia, a neo-conscious subgenre was thriving, with artists like the Roots, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli being positioned as ideologically and aesthetically in opposition to their more commercially successful peers. dead prez were often lumped into this loosely political movement, having come out of the tutelage of Brand Nubian’s Lord Jamar.
Despite their affiliations, dead prez were singular. Over a warped, wobbly bassline written by stic, “Hip Hop” offers a reading of the capitalist functions of the music industry, its reliance on the exploitation of black people, and the dangers of internalizing the values perpetuated by those structures. A potent warning: “These record labels slang our tapes like dope/You can be next in line and signed and still be writing rhymes and broke.” (Ironically, a remix of the song was produced by dead prez acolyte turned preeminent capitalist Kanye West.)
Existing at the turn of the millennium, stic and M-1 sat squarely between the Rodney King riots and the election of Barack Obama, events that would come to define America in radically different ways. Halfway between the carefreeness of the ’90s and the apathy of the aughts, dead prez saw through the false promises of a crooked empire at its height. The music industry is just one of many targets of Let’s Get Free, a statement of political consciousness so specific and carefully articulated that it’s a wonder to think it received major distribution, and charted on the Billboard Hot 100.
The album is dense with words. They tackle public education, the prison system, the police state, media complicity, economic inequity, and more, making historical connections between the oppression of the enslaved and the oppression of the black poor. They identified threats that seemed paranoid then, but from the vantage point of 2019, were deeply prescient: surveillance, food injustice, the fear of false-flag operations. Even when staying woke veers into conspiracy theory (“I don’t believe Bob Marley died from cancer,” goes one line in the hook of “Propaganda”), it is clearly the byproduct of a rightful mistrust in authority.
Lyrics and audio collages from films and speeches are built around layers of soundscapes. The uptempo, Afrotech-y club on songs like “I’m a African” reflect stic’s Tallahassee upbringing and the time the pair spent developing their sound as college students in Florida. But the album was also shaped by the stretches of time the pair spent in Brooklyn, bridging the warm-weather energy of South Florida with the more conventional drums-and-orchestration of the East Coast. One song, “Animal In Man,” is a retelling of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, an allegory for class struggle narrativized in rhyme. The track closes with an extended, cinematic instrumental outro, all strings, guitar, and drums. It sounds ridiculous in theory, but on record translates as a moment of galvanizing storytelling.
Notably, Let’s Get Free wasn’t built around the aesthetics of consciousness—like some of their incense-lighting, kufi-wearing peers in the late-’90s “conscious-rap” boom, one of the most prominent of whom would go on to sell raps advertising Microsoft's artificial intelligence program—but around the politics of liberation. The best rap has often served as a cultural and political diagnosis. But dead prez didn’t simply observe and analyze, they offered a solution: revolution.
They wanted to burn it all down, and then rebuild in a more generous, cooperative, self-sufficient mode. “We live in a society that tells us exploitation and getting over on people is the highest form of civilization as opposed to cooperation and sharing,” said stic in a 2000 Billboard interview. As student organizers and members of the pan-African National Democratic Uhuru Movement, they lived what they rapped. Their approaches were informed by the political action groups and fundamental hopefulness of Eastern spiritualism. But they also follow a rich history of black socialism in the U.S. For decades after emancipation, when black people were free in theory but excluded from economic activity in practice, cooperatives sprung up to fill the gaps in needs and services.
As a teen experiencing a personal awakening through music, I found in Let’s Get Free a blueprint for thinking about the world. This required an emphasis on personal health; a revolution needs strong bodies. Years before Gwyneth Paltrow made veganism and high-intensity workouts facets of an aspirational lifestyle, stic.man and M-1 were tossing apples into crowds and doing push-ups on stage. “Music was a way to do what I couldn’t do with a leaflet in my neighborhood,” M-1 said in an interview celebrating the album’s 15th-year anniversary. They were onto something; one academic study credited Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s public embrace of a plant-based diet as pushing veganism into the mainstream. stic and M-1 are continuing this philosophy; their work spans nutrition, fitness, and mindfulness.
There is a tendency in today’s world to forget that nothing is new. There are no new ideas, no new problems. “I wish our album was obsolete. Unfortunately, it’s still relevant in the present,” stic.man said in a recent interview. As global inequality and anti-corruption activism reach a peak and people in countries like Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, and Iraq take to the streets to advocate on behalf of themselves and their communities, the message of Let’s Get Free remains especially potent: Their system is not working for us. | 2019-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rap | Loud | November 3, 2019 | 8.2 | ba5e0080-4713-45c9-a685-66a3e11eb422 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Grafts is the latest release from Montreal composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, whose work exists somewhere between computer music and Erik Satie. | Grafts is the latest release from Montreal composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, whose work exists somewhere between computer music and Erik Satie. | Kara-Lis Coverdale: Grafts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23224-grafts/ | Grafts | Montreal-based composer Kara-Lis Coverdale’s output exists somewhere between computer music and the understated acoustic melancholy of Erik Satie. Trained as a classical pianist, Coverdale began incorporating electronics into her practice while studying music in Ontario, and has since worked with artists including Tim Hecker and LXV. Her music is process-minded but accessible, too, with a habit of remaining understated as it transports the listener to sometimes-dramatic interior landscapes.
Though she’s put out a handful of EPs, Grafts feels like a continuation of Coverdale’s 2014 cassette A 480. The five tracks on A 480 were built from a limited library of vocal samples, which were processed and looped into modal compositions—cool, melodic, and structurally simple, but occasionally plunging into extended contemplative passages. Even at its most immersive, that release seemed notable for its boundaries: each track discrete, possessing its own architecture. While nodding back to A 480’s icy samples, the three sections that make up Grafts take a more fluid shape, bleeding into one another to form an arc.
The keyboard phrase that opens the release establishes a sober calm, warmed by a border of machine fuzz. It gently stutters as it loops, a base for the wandering free associations of a harpsichord-like sound. Gradually, the piece thickens; the keyboards establish a more insistent pace as other melodic elements wander in and out. Among these are futuristic glitches and shimmers that aren’t far off from the sounds favored by musicians who use computer music to think through digital realities. But Coverdale approaches such elements with an assimilative touch. There’s no novelty in her application of technology, and in particular no sense of detachment about her compositions, however chilled their aesthetics.
Indeed, Grafts’ second phase has an aching quality, a rippling sample holding ground while faraway piano chords produce a sort of celestial drama. Coverdale’s music is sometimes described as ambient or drone, but this narrative dynamism suggests otherwise; her sound feels indebted more to an older generation of minimalist composers. Still, the final and longest phase is restful, lingering unhurried on a mellifluous passage. Opening up rather than illustrating as it cycles, it ambivalently taps into internal space.
Coverdale has worked as an organist at a handful of churches, including a recent stint at St. John Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Montreal. Her electronics contain shades of the devotional. Some passages—particularly in the first two parts of Grafts—nod to the sweeping tendencies of church music, while others hold space for a more atemporal and vaguely new age-y meditation. With Grafts, Coverdale seems to propose a decidedly agnostic vision of what devotional electronics could mean in our contemporary moment, folding a natural awareness of technology’s forms into music that feels insistently about being present. | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Boomkat Editions | May 3, 2017 | 7.7 | ba65447c-fef0-4c94-9be0-c4eb7e378d8c | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
On their fourth LP, the Hamilton, Ontario garage punks step up with a more ambitious and accessible sound without sanding down their raw edges. | On their fourth LP, the Hamilton, Ontario garage punks step up with a more ambitious and accessible sound without sanding down their raw edges. | TV Freaks: People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tv-freaks-people/ | People | People, the fourth album by TV Freaks, is dedicated to This Ain’t Hollywood, a recently shuttered venue in the band’s hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Named after the 1982 album by local first-wave punk legends the Forgotten Rebels, This Ain’t Hollywood was everything you could want in a scuzzy rock’n’roll dive: Seventies B movies showing on a bank of old TV sets behind the bar, piss-stenched bathrooms covered in Sharpie and band stickers, and a psychedelic Johnny Cash painting gazing upon the room like some all-seeing eye. Since forming in 2010, TV Freaks have effectively served as This Aint’s unofficial house band, brandishing a manic style of Stooges-spiked hardcore that embodied both the gritty edge and welcoming, misfit-clubhouse vibe of the space. But while the sight of venues closing has become all too common in the COVID era, the writing was on the wall for This Ain’t Hollywood long before the pandemic hit. The building was initially put up for sale in 2018, a circumstance that speaks to another invisible force affecting urban music scenes: the market-driven transformation of once grungy corners into prime real estate.
People is TV Freaks’ first proper album in five years, and while it was made well before This Ain’t Hollywood announced its closure this past spring, it’s a fitting—and necessary—progression for a band that can’t go home again. On the surface, People doesn’t appear to be a concerted effort to break overground; it was recorded live off the floor by frontman Dave O’Connor at a home studio in a single weekend. (Like 2015’s Bad Luck Charms, it was mastered by Aussie DIY demigod Mikey Young, of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control). But while the opening “Destined for Stardom” seems to mock the very idea of swinging for the fences, the song’s sudden transformation from a staccato stomp to a dance-punk sprint suggests that if TV Freaks aren’t about to conform, they’re at least willing to contort.
Growing up within garage punk is often a fool’s errand that requires bands to adopt the very qualities—sing-along melodies, classic-rock conventions, modern production touches—that are antithetical to the genre’s primal essence. But on People, TV Freaks pull off the uncommon trick of making themselves more accessible without sounding any less irascible. In the past, O’Connor often had to bark himself hoarse in order to be heard above guitarist TJ Charlton’s in-the-red riffs, Vivenne Bell Bright’s pugilistic basslines, and drummer Nathan Burger’s double-timed gallop, but the repressed flamboyance and trembling distress in his voice belied his imposing aggression. He has explored those qualities more freely in the new-wave goth-soul serenades of his solo alias, Sweet Dave, but on People, TV Freaks take full advantage of his violent-to-vulnerable range.
You can hear the band broaden its horizons even in a two-minute blitz like “Souvenir,” where O’Connor alternates between stoned ’60s-garage melodies and bugged-out, David Byrne-like convulsions. But the results are all the more impressive when he uses his voice to invest the band’s righteous racket with a greater emotional depth and heightened sense of drama. Where “Space” begins as an unsubtle homage to Spacemen 3’s psych-punk rave-up “Revolution,” the song is ultimately less a call for war than a cry for help, capping its panicked chorus with a warning—“This is my last resort”—that, intentional Papa Roach quote or not, sounds like an ominous dispatch from a point of no return. The references are even more overt on “Heart of Gold”—not a cover of the Neil Young classic, but fueled by a similar quest for purity in a world where everything’s “just a different shade of beige.” As its bass-throttled, post-punky urgency gives way to an extended blur of overlapping melodies, the song is elevated from trashy to transcendent.
None of this is to suggest that TV Freaks have lost their absurdist sense of humor; it just manifests itself in more abstract, meta fashion. Coming from another band, the opening line of “Saturday Night”—“You want to party on a Saturday night/It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be alright”—might seem like the height of rock cliche. But when O’Connor adopts his finest goth monotone atop a churning “She’s Lost Control” rhythm, you’re thrust into some bizarro-world parallel universe where Joy Division are playing weekend keggers. The tension between TV Freaks’ irreverent and insolent sides hits its fever pitch on “Capital Eye,” a motorik Neu!-wave ripper that reaffirms O’Connor’s eternal outsider status as he declares, “I can’t/Stare at/Anything/Beautiful too long.” But he delivers those words via the album’s most infectious shout-it-out-loud hook—and even as Chartlon launches into a spastic solo, O’Connor continues to repeat the mantra as if locked in a trance. Maybe he’s just marvelling at his band’s newly realized potential: When faced with the rare garage-rock album that’s as tense and tuneful as People, it’s easy to be mesmerized.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Schizophrenic | November 19, 2020 | 7.8 | ba656790-2d8e-420f-855e-a0493a7f1d17 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The alt-pop trio’s stripped-down EP plays almost like a series of demos, abandoning anything that gets in the way of singer Kelly Zutrau’s hushed melodies. | The alt-pop trio’s stripped-down EP plays almost like a series of demos, abandoning anything that gets in the way of singer Kelly Zutrau’s hushed melodies. | Wet: Pink Room EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wet-pink-room-ep/ | Pink Room EP | One moment Kelly Zutrau’s standing tall, shoulders back and chin high, and the next she’s supine on the floor, unsure if she’ll ever stand again. The 34-year-old lead singer of the alt-pop trio Wet writes hopeful songs about heartbreak and loneliness, positioning despair as an enduring yet fleeting precursor to purpose. “I’m always interested in multiple feelings at once,” Zutrau said in a recent interview. “Not just a happy song, but happy and sad and guilty—those can all be true.” On their new EP, Pink Room, Wet forgo their trusted brand of synth-pop and make their most stripped-down songs yet, often leaving Zutrau alone with a guitar while she searches for reclamation. “I know these things, they come and go,” she repeats on “There’s a Light.” It sounds like she’s singing a hymn, a lilting brightness that inflects even her saddest lines.
Optimism-tinged anguish is a familiar theme for Wet. Their first two albums, 2016’s Don’t You and 2018’s Still Run, were breakup records that bluntly described the process of letting go of someone without succumbing to helplessness. Both bounced between dispassionate R&B and flat synth-pop, the music more theoretically interesting than emotionally affecting. For the first few years of their career, the band’s most compelling songs were remixes. Producers like Branchez and Jim-E Stack flipped the trio’s downtempo work into danceable pop, a welcome revelation for a group struggling to nail a cogent identity. On last year’s Letter Blue, their first project since exiting their deal with Columbia, Wet worked with producer Buddy Ross and Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear to shake up their once safe sound. The album’s best song is “Larabar,” a stunning piano ballad that sounds like it’s being played through a faulty tape deck. The song proved that the group had great work in them, or at least the ability to make something simple feel seismic.
Like “Larabar,” Pink Room abandons anything that gets in the way of Zutrau’s hushed melodies. The lo-fi EP plays like a series of demos—one song, “Blades of Grass,” actually is a Letter Blue demo—with thin acoustic guitars, subtle synth pads, and the occasional swell of strings the only support for Zutrau’s vocals. There’s a breezy, almost lullaby-like quality to her delivery and rhythms that leads to some moving moments. “Tell Me Why” evokes the sensation of a found recording as Zutrau sings of carving out independence in a failing relationship. On “Turn the Lights Down Low,” she uses a delicate falsetto to describe fears of being alone and the power to be gained by acknowledging them: “Maybe I could be tall/Maybe I could go gently/For the rest of this road/I’ll ride half empty.” Here, the bare-bones production and gentle melodies suits Zutrau’s writing, a synthesis the EP fails to sustain.
Pink Room falters with repetitiveness. Across the project, the guitars employ the same sleepy strumming patterns and Zutrau recycles cadences and images. “Tell Me Why” and “There’s a Light” open with nearly identical chords; the slight deviations in texture and tone read as variants of the same idea. What really prevents the EP from hitting the heights that “Larabar” promised, though, is the pedantic arrangements. These songs rarely surprise or enliven, seldom reaching a climax or expanding upon their initial concept. When Zutrau says that she wants to “stand up tall, but I am laying down empty as a hall,” you can almost feel her trying to break free of the project’s self-imposed constraints, only to hit her head on the ceiling. | 2022-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Friends Of / Secretly Canadian | July 15, 2022 | 6 | ba65a6ed-6910-45fe-8daf-7ce339901fdd | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
On her debut album, Fletcher aims to champion vulnerability in queer love. Instead, she delivers generic, one-dimensional pop anthems that never fully articulate her experience of love and heartbreak. | On her debut album, Fletcher aims to champion vulnerability in queer love. Instead, she delivers generic, one-dimensional pop anthems that never fully articulate her experience of love and heartbreak. | FLETCHER: Girl of My Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fletcher-girl-of-my-dreams/ | Girl of My Dreams | Cari Fletcher first heard Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” as her mom drove her to middle school. “That was the moment I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I like girls,’” she told GLAAD about 15 years later. She took online quizzes with titles like “Am I gay?” and googled—a lot. Fletcher eventually came out as queer, and sought to center that experience in her twinkling, fizzy pop. Her songs are dense with unfiltered disclosures. In 2020, she released a seven-song EP called The S(ex) Tapes about the demolition of a relationship; her ex-girlfriend shot the music videos. A year later, Fletcher returned to Katy Perry with “girls girls girls,” a one-off single built around a glossy interpolation of the “I Kissed a Girl” chorus. The song underwhelms: It’s stuffed with clichés about hanging onto the moment and a girl who “looks like a masterpiece.” But just before she launches into the chorus, Fletcher coos, “Go tell your mom it’s not a phase.” It’s a fleeting pulse of affirmation, a wink to queer women who’ve had their identities dismissed.
There’s an easy appeal to an artist who dangles this many confessions; intimacy is a shortcut to affection. Fletcher focuses so much of her music on asserting how vulnerable she is, but every attempt to express that vulnerability comes off as vague and nonspecific. On Girl of My Dreams, her full-length debut, she once again hides behind concerted confessions. The record traces a breakup and the resulting path to a Lizzo-ified concept of self-love. The titular “girl of my dreams” turns out to be Fletcher herself. She hurls the phrase “I love you, bitch” at herself in the mirror. Elsewhere, she assigns clunky labels to her emotions without interrogating or even fully articulating them. “Existential crisis mode,” she wails over flitting drums on “Conversations,” grasping at linguistic shortcuts to carry the weight of her internal monologue. “Get myself in situations/Different people, different places,” she sing-shouts on “Serial Heartbreaker,” a Paramore-indebted track built on catchy, twitching synths.
There are shards of intriguing ideas buried in the album’s plodding acoustics and garish rock-pop confections, but Fletcher fails to excavate them. “Birthday Girl” strains to carry the conceit about sharing a birthday with an ex. “Becky’s So Hot,” a single engineered for virality and shock value with a video starring Bella Thorne, becomes a flimsy caricature about lusting after an ex’s new girlfriend: “She flame emoji, wow,” Fletcher yowls over a melodramatic guitar.
She litters the album with awkward traces of Internet-speak, shouting “fuck you to the bad vibes” on “For Cari” and describing herself as “singing the sad girl songs” on the title track. Fletcher alternates between trite similes—green eyes the color of a forest, feelings that surge like a tidal wave, heartbreak that hits like a missile—and gushing admissions about how hot, tormented, or devious her love interest is. Even the propulsive thump of “Sting,” the best song on the album, sags when tenderness curdles into melodrama: Fletcher turns from prodding at the pain of a failed relationship to wailing about diamond rings. The New Jersey-raised artist is a songwriter who feels deeply, who is so intent on conveying the intensity of her emotions that she skips over any sense of stakes. The women at the center of these songs are flat, blank spaces: The only concrete image she provides is a Taylor Swift shirt crumpled on an ex’s floor.
Fletcher makes songs so queer women can see themselves in her, slotting our aches and anxieties into her skittering pop. On “Her Body Is Bible,” she sings about the sanctity of a desire so clear it empties you out. Pop has braided the sacred and the profane for so long that it barely registers as subversive, but when Fletcher hurls “amens” over a climbing beat, or when she flounders to describe what she’s feeling and all she can come up with is heaven, she shakes you into paying attention. Every so often, there’s a comfort in her generalizations. But to find it, you'll have to wade through the treacly platitudes, frenzied drum patterns, and wince-inducing lyrics. Only then will Girl of My Dreams deliver something close to salient. | 2022-09-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Capitol | September 23, 2022 | 5.9 | ba6eef57-9d68-460c-bcf8-799495d21eac | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
From a lineage that includes Edith Piaf and PJ Harvey-- and with celeb fans like Brian Eno and Nick Cave-- this goth-pop singer makes her debut. | From a lineage that includes Edith Piaf and PJ Harvey-- and with celeb fans like Brian Eno and Nick Cave-- this goth-pop singer makes her debut. | Anna Calvi: Anna Calvi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15153-anna-calvi/ | Anna Calvi | Anna Calvi recently listed classical composer Claude Debussy, filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, and Flamenco music as influences on her self-titled debut album. While none of these signifiers seem to directly shape her music, Calvi's record feels like it has much in common with cinema and literature. She uses sonic textures to evoke feelings-- from spaghetti-western guitars to her lung-busting take on gothic melodrama. Musically she's indebted to a lineage of female songwriters from Edith Piaf and Patti Smith to PJ Harvey.
The latter comparison is bolstered by the appearance of longtime Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis on production duties. His rangy, atmospheric handling of the music is one of the record's standout qualities. While the sound is suitably bombastic, Ellis also takes care to open up enough emptiness in the mix to allow Calvi's twisting guitar to snake with menace. On the strongest moments, such as "No More Words", Calvi pushes herself into darker territory, as Ellis allows cavernous space to open up, her voice and guitar sounding as if they are being played into a black hole. It's also one of the softest songs on the record, crafting a coiled feeling when Calvi's voice quietens to a whisper, hanging like a thread but never snapping. The restraint has an edge to it that feels provocative.
Still there are moments where Calvi ratchets up the drama too readily, and sometimes hams it up-- see "I'll Be Your Man", which comes across as campy. More often than not, however, Calvi gets the balance right: "Suzanne and I" feels grand as it lurches from bare guitars underpinned by pounding drums into a skeletal breakdown. The delicacy of its second half-- ghostly, yearning singing and spacey fingerpicking-- makes for a bigger payoff when the drums kick back in and her guitar doubles the vocal lines, giving the ending a truly anthemic quality.
On much of the record Calvi explores the pained romanticism of goth with references to the devil, darkness, and unrequited love. These passing allusions are reduced into something elemental on "Desire", with its impassioned wail against loneliness, as Calvi sings, "You don't have to be lost"; it's a rare moment of togetherness and empathy on an album where Calvi can sometimes seem cold. She dresses up in the same outer strength as Piaf often did, but without the same sense of underlying vulnerability.
Calvi's outstanding vocal tone and arrangements carry the emotional punches, while her lyrics can occasionally take a backseat role. She never allows herself to sound truly exposed, and this adds to a sense that, for all its perceived boldness and big climaxes, the record never seems unhinged or fragile. It can sometimes feel more like a series of controlled demolitions than something from the gut. But once you accept these shortcomings and give yourself over to Calvi's wall of theater, there are plenty of excellent moments to lose yourself in. | 2011-03-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-03-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | March 1, 2011 | 7.8 | ba6f5fc3-efcb-4519-a7b9-b53cb51e7f8b | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
The latest offering from A$AP Mob is really just an A$AP Rocky showcase, but per the title of the tape, he sounds more comfortable than ever, as do his compatriots. It’s natural and confident. | The latest offering from A$AP Mob is really just an A$AP Rocky showcase, but per the title of the tape, he sounds more comfortable than ever, as do his compatriots. It’s natural and confident. | A$AP Mob: Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends- | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22599-cozy-tapes-vol-1-friends-/ | Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends- | A$AP Mob’s proper debut album begins with a two-and-a-half-minute skit that takes place in a New York bodega. Pushing lead single “Yamborghini High” over seven minutes, it’s the kind of move that could easily be frustrating. Instead, it’s pretty funny: It’s a group of men trying to out-cozy each other, arguing about who has the most comfortable outfit. A$AP Rocky arrives with tall tales of a ridiculous getup that he boasts was inspired by global warming. It feels natural, which is a welcomed evolution for Rocky, aka That Pretty Motherfucker, who has for the longest time been far more concerned with designer credibility than wearability. The skit is a signal for what’s to come—an infectious sense of camaraderie and a marked return to A$AP’s core sound and strengths.
In practice, Cozy Tapes is an A$AP Rocky album, as he appears on all but three songs. (For comparison, Ferg is on only two tracks, and Ant is at second-most with just four features.) Whether intentionally or not, the rest of the Mob readily acknowledge that it’s Rocky’s show. In one skit, they’re convinced to go somewhere only after verifying Rocky won’t join them. In another (there are a lot of skits here), someone’s pursuing a woman, and his greatest attribute is his association with Rocky and the perks that come with it. Taking the record for what it is, Cozy Tapes is Rocky’s most cohesive project since his debut.
Beyond being the face of the group, Rocky proves that he remains, by far, the most talented rapper in the Mob—including Ferg. Each track on Cozy Tapes finds him successfully using a new flow: “Crazy Brazy” is an impressive display of agility; “Money Man” is all measured and melodic repetition; and “London Town” is his best, with bars that spill over and build on themselves. It’s the first time since LIVE.LOVE.A$AP where Rocky’s pure rapping ability is the focal point. He’s long been lauded as an expert stylist and curator, but that too often has been a distraction from his skill. Though the highs of LONG.LIVE.A$AP are very high (“Goldie,” “Long Live A$AP,” “1Train”), the entire album is bogged down by an obsession with high-profile collaborators and manufactured swagger, like an oversized Rick Owens outfit. Rocky, for his part, never rapped about much more than material goods, but that aspiration felt important when he was doing so over beats that he could command and felt specific to him—not overpriced ones that would go to the highest bidder. Cozy Tapes has a very modest roster of producers, which allows him to set the tone and vibe. None of these songs would stand out on their own (à la “Wild for the Night”) if not for Rocky and the Mob’s efforts on top of them.
No matter how much Rocky excels, Cozy Tapes is still billed as an A$AP Mob album. As such, it is eons beyond Lord$ Never Worry, their debut mixtape, which is nothing more than a bloated victory lap that feels laughable four years later. On Lord$, there was a concerted effort to showcase the lesser known members of the collective, hoping to turn them from secret weapons into superstars. The tape succeeded in shining a light on Ferg, but no one else has popped off as intended. Instead of trying to showcase individuals, Cozy Tapes has a great cohesion, with Ant, Nast, and Twelvyy playing bit roles. The exception is “Nasty’s World,” a track very much set up to be Nast’s “Method Man.” He’s a capable rapper, but that’s not enough, especially when younger rappers (like Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, and MadeinTYO—all showcased here) are succeeding and amassing followings with more experimental styles. Further, Nast sounds better on the subsequent track, “Money Man,” where he apes Rocky’s flow.
Cozy Tapes’ emphasis on Rocky brings into question why it was ever turned into a group effort. Even the guests—most notably Tyler, the Creator, Wiz Khalifa, Skepta, and BJ the Chicago Kid—highlight Rocky, rather than upstage him. The most obvious answer is that the album is a tribute to the late Mob co-founder A$AP Yams, who would have wanted to see all of his friends excel. Yams was the architect of the A$AP sound, which has always been defined more by coolness than sonic markers: When Rocky made the big-budget shift from LIVE.LOVE to LONG.LIVE, a forward-thinking attitude remained consistent. Yams posthumously executive produced Rocky’s AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, but that record felt more like what Yams would’ve wanted Rocky to make (that is, follow his heart) than what he, himself, would produce (a detritus-free swag rap album). Despite admirable verses, Cozy Tapes proves that A$AP Mob does not need to be Wu-Tang or Odd Future to succeed as a collective. It’s acceptable to have a star and a backup, with a few talented MCs to round things out and play straightman to the others’ flashy ways.
Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends- is a very good hip-hop record even if it arrives at a time where the A$AP Mob are not at the center of the hip-hop zeitgeist. Rocky consistently entertains without delivering any one-liners, and the album is sequenced to mask some of the lesser members’ weaknesses. Cozy Tapes stays true to its name. The Mob grew immensely and then lost its spiritual guide, just as it needed someone to give them direction. In Yams’ memory, they turned inward looked at what they did best. It may not be the most ostentatious effort. But it is comfortable. | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | November 7, 2016 | 7.1 | ba766903-b974-4c63-a4d0-ea7919267842 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Chicago folk legend is honored by Conor Oberst, Bon Iver, Drive-By Truckers, Lambchop, and more. | Chicago folk legend is honored by Conor Oberst, Bon Iver, Drive-By Truckers, Lambchop, and more. | Various Artists: Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14337-broken-hearts-dirty-windows-songs-of-john-prine/ | Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine | A veteran of the Chicago folk scene of the late 1960s and early 70s, John Prine ought to be more difficult to cover. He writes for his own voice, an instrument with a uniquely warm wryness and a limited range, which means his melodies are homey and modest, as if he's making them up on the spot. More crucially, his songs-- crammed with stray details and wonderfully skewed insights-- are strongly tied to his part huckster, part good ol' boy personality. Prine's a songwriter's songwriter, which means that the very traits that ought to make him hard to cover only make covering him an attractive notion. Many have pulled it off, too: George Strait, 10,000 Maniacs, Fairport Convention, and Johnny Cash.
Even so, an album of Prine covers is a dodgy proposition. It's bound to be erratic; tribute albums are by nature inconsistent, and the particulars of Prine's songwriting make it likely that just as many people will stagger as will step lively. By focusing on several insightful interpretations and by spotlighting some of Prine's lesser-known tracks, however, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows actually has some surprisingly high highs and some lows that are as forgivable as they are inevitable. No one covers "Sam Stone", thankfully, nor "Hello in There", "Paradise", or his biggest single, "Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard". Of course, someone's going to tackle "Angel From Montgomery", an aching, oft-covered tune that is one of Prine's most popular. Old Crow Medicine Show make it sound pretty rote, with singer Ketch Secor even mimicking Prine's distinctive cadence. They sound a bit overwhelmed.
For the most part, these are fan choices, revealing the less-explored depths of the tributee's catalog and reveling in the often contradictory aspects of his songwriting. Few of the artists, however, can actually capture that hardened ambiguity, that sense of laughing while crying. Recasting one of Prine's more boisterous songs as a quiet solo folk rumination, Josh Ritter savors the details of "Mexican Home", singing "Take the fan from the window/ Prop the door back with a broom" like he wished he'd written that line. But he sounds overserious, which makes the composition seem a bit stuff. Likewise, Sara Watkins has a perfectly lovely voice for the melody of "The Late John Garfield Blues", but she misses the song's gruff self-deprecation. Even though Prine wrote it in his mid-twenties, it's a song for and by a middle-age man.
But others strike a finer balance. Abandoning the ethereal folk of Bon Iver, Justin Vernon invests "Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)" with an earthy gravity, packing in a novel's worth of detail in just four minutes. On "Spanish Pipedream", the Avett Brothers have a blast realizing that hippie escapism is both futile and fun, and it's been years since Conor Oberst has sounded as volatile and energetic as he does on "Wedding Day in Funeralville". The Drive-By Truckers' turn "Daddy's Little Pumpkin" into a bluesy stomp, and Mike Cooley sings it like he wrote it for Jerry Lee Lewis' lascivious leer. But the best moment may be Lambchop's "Six O'Clock News", a lesser-known track from Prine's 1971 debut. Singing in a clipped cadence, Kurt Wagner finds the ideal balance for the whimsical ("'God bless this kitchen,' said the knick-knack shelf") and the grisly ("the whole town saw Jimmy on the six o'clock news/ His brains were on the sidewalk and blood was on his shoes"). It's a dark song, barely leavened by its glimpses of humor, but that's Prine's secret: heartache demands humor, and vice versa. | 2010-06-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-06-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Oh Boy | June 10, 2010 | 6.8 | ba774204-874e-4a2f-bb50-91bede2918da | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Featuring guest spots from Twin Shadow and members of Yeasayer and Nomo, Mars finds Brooklyn-based, Sudanese-born multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Gallab working with Sudanese pop, Krautrock, 70s funk, free jazz, and global indie. | Featuring guest spots from Twin Shadow and members of Yeasayer and Nomo, Mars finds Brooklyn-based, Sudanese-born multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Gallab working with Sudanese pop, Krautrock, 70s funk, free jazz, and global indie. | Sinkane: Mars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17218-mars/ | Mars | Biography can be overstated when evaluating an artist's work, but Ahmed Gallab's story is key to understanding his music. The Sudanese son of two college professors, he moved to the United States with his family at the age of five to escape the country's fomenting political violence of the late 1980s. The family moved around a bit, and Gallab eventually settled in Columbus, Ohio, when he was 18, where he fell in with the city's hardcore punk music community. He later found work as a session musician of some demand, drumming and serving as a multi-instrumentalist for Yeasayer, Caribou, Of Montreal, Born Ruffians, and Eleanor Friedberger. Eventually, as these things often go, he made his way to Brooklyn, where Sinkane started taking shape as his primary creative outlet.
Mars is Gallab's second full-length as Sinkane, and it sounds like the work of a nomadic professors' kid with equally strong ties to a DIY scene as well as his east African roots, whose creativity flourished on the road with indie vets and in the self-styled cosmopolitan home of 21st-century indie music. Mars is both refined and easygoing, if not a bit aloof at times. It works in multiple musical registers simultaneously and smartly-- the syncopated rhythms and breezy guitar figures of Sudanese pop, krautrock, early-70s funk, free jazz, Fader-friendly global indie-- while maintaining a clear authorial voice (largely coming from Gallab's playing multiple instruments on each song).
There's a loose concept at play on the record: Mars is Gallab's metaphor for a musical space in which anyone can exist, regardless of background. Though the temptation to refer to the rich tradition of Afro-futurism arises when a guy born in Sudan references interstellar reaches, the connection to Sun Ra, Parliament, or André 3000 is tentative at best. The record's politics are as abstract as the cover photo, and the album's mood thermostat doesn't move much from the "chill" position. There aren't a whole lot of lyrical specifics, but an abundance of references to the red planet seems less meant to signify escape (as in the Reverend A.W. Nix's pioneering "White Flyer to Heaven" sermon), or a sign of plain weirdness (as in Lil' Wayne's use): For Gallab, it's more along the lines of a summertime rooftop party, where your affable host greets you without rising from his deck chair.
With few exceptions, Gallab makes sure Mars' invitees are clearly identified. The album opens with the squawking funk of "Runnin'", on which his thin falsetto and encouraging words directly channel Blaxploitation-era Curtis Mayfield. "Love Sick" is about as blatant a reappropriation of "Spoon"'s vampiric funk riff as I've ever heard, and "Jeeper Creeper" vamps for five minutes around the core idea of Yeasayer's "2080" (it helps that the band's bassist plays on the song). "Making Time", which rides a new age synth pad that could have been drawn from All Hour Cymbals into the pocket of a deep Afro-funk groove, is the album's most successful synthesis. He plays all instruments on the song, save for a "Dirty Diana"-style guitar solo, courtesy of Twin Shadow's George Lewis, Jr. Yet instead of flaunting it, Gallab buries it in the mix, allowing it to serve as more of a textural element than a spotlit celebrity showcase. This is perhaps the clearest example of Gallabs gifts: using his friends smartly, playing down virtuosity, lest it detract from the overall vibe. | 2012-10-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-10-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | October 23, 2012 | 7 | ba7e502b-4e8e-4849-98ca-a36416497b54 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Despite trending toward pop in recent years, the globetrotting producer turns to European and African rappers to help him find new inspiration—or at least try. | Despite trending toward pop in recent years, the globetrotting producer turns to European and African rappers to help him find new inspiration—or at least try. | Diplo: Europa EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diplo-europa-ep/ | Europa EP | Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: On Diplo’s latest release, the mega-producer and self-anointed ubiquitous random white dude collaborates with a globe-spanning array of artists, offering his own approach on a variety of sounds that have yet to take commercial hold stateside. Yes, Europa—his fourth proper EP this decade—represents familiar territory for the 40-year-old musical omnivore; it’s an approach he famously showcased in 2004 on the Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 mixtape with M.I.A. Now, 15 years since that boombox-blasting collage of worldly rhythms, flashy pop samples, and teases of M.I.A.’s then-unreleased Arular, the remainder of Diplo’s career has itself shaped Volume 2—a crossroads of savvy tastes and production that pushes those interests toward the mainstream. No, Diplo didn’t invent cultural appropriation, but it’s hard to think of a modern white producer who’s more successfully monetized non-white sounds. He’s at it again.
That legacy notwithstanding, Europa—a 16-minute trifle featuring collaborations with on-the-rise British rapper Octavian, French spitter Niska, Algeria’s Soolking, and others—still feels like a sudden left turn. For Diplo, trend-spotting has always been a form of aesthetic survival, a way to maintain just the right amount of market ubiquity in an industry where it’s become increasingly difficult to achieve and keep big-deal visibility. It’s how he boogie-boarded his way from the low tide of bloghouse and firmly into the crass cash-cow sounds of EDM.
In recent years, he’s safely slipped through the door of EDM’s crumbling facade to take a more generalist role as pop’s behind-the-scenes whiz-kidult, with contributions to albums by Poppy, Bad Bunny, and MHD, as well as work with frequent friend MØ, Ellie Goulding, Swae Lee, and French Montana. But his last culturally impactful moment, via contributions to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, was nearly three years ago. His career is arguably in another transitional phase, similar to the fallow period that predated 2013’s rough-and-tumble Revolution, a release that firmly established him as one of EDM’s most famous bass-faces.
Through this lens, Europa ostensibly represents a seasoned DJ hitting the stacks to dig for some new sound that’ll liven up a set. But on these six tracks, the thrill of discovering something fresh and vibrant is nowhere to be found. This is becoming a trend for work issued under Diplo’s own name. Despite appearances from off-kilter, on-trend rappers like Lil Xan and Trippie Redd, last year’s California effectively buffed the jagged textures and unpolished surfaces of “SoundCloud rap” into something too smooth. Diplo’s work with Sia and on-the-rise pop guy Labrinth as LSD, collected on last year’s Mountains, likewise lacked any sonic eccentricities that would suggest a robust personality.
“New Shapes,” Europa’s Octavian-laced lead track, is the biggest whiff of this bunch, failing to capitalize on the rapper’s fascinating, hybridized approach of tough-talking grime motifs and queasy melodies. Paired with an ethereal synth and lightly carbonated drum patterns, Octavian comes across as exceedingly polite, even deferent. The remainder of Europa fares a little better, at least: Soolking flutters prettily and flows atop the piping trap of “Oh Maria,” while the always just-pleasing-enough “dolphin” sound that famously rippled across Justin Bieber’s “Where Are Ü Now” punctuates the rubbery Niska collaboration, “Boom Bye Bye.”
These are musical tricks and moods that Diplo can practically conjure in his sleep, which isn’t a good thing. After a half-decade churning out sour, aggressive EDM-fest staples that constantly walked the line between hedonistically pleasing and just plain grating, Diplo is on an anti-streak that mirrors the musical miserabilia currently clogging the pop charts, peddling a drab sound that fails to stand out. The flatlining pop on Europa makes one yearn for the ruder, bolder sounds of Diplo’s past—a time in which his ubiquitousness, regardless of how you felt about it, was reliant on something other than the ability to simply fade into pop’s increasingly congruous background. | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mad Decent | February 28, 2019 | 4.2 | ba7f6473-b9a7-4164-81d7-a3e0b37ac2d5 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The pop star’s fourth LP is a transitional record mistakenly labeled as a statement album. Her impressionistic tale of lost love and aimless youth is electrifying but inconsistent. | The pop star’s fourth LP is a transitional record mistakenly labeled as a statement album. Her impressionistic tale of lost love and aimless youth is electrifying but inconsistent. | Camila Cabello: C,XOXO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camila-cabello-c-xoxo/ | C,XOXO | Much of the excitement in mainstream pop these days falls left of center. Chappell Roan took us all to theater camp; Charli XCX painted the club green with Brat. It’s only too easy to view Camila Cabello’s recent reboot as the work of a music establishment clumsily shifting gears to follow in their wake. The outsized response sparked by C,XOXO’s lead single “I Luv It” was split between excitement over a radical new musical direction and eye-rolling over what initially seemed like one of the most cynical pop rebrands in recent memory (at least until we figure out what is going on with Katy Perry).
It’s too bad, because if there was ever an artist more primed for casting off an old self and giving into some effortless partying, Cabello would be the woman. Until now, her music has been incredibly dutiful, whether owing to the demands of a career in Fifth Harmony or the loving reverence for her musical heritage that shaped her three prior solo albums. Though it bears her signature, C,XOXO is a transitional record mistakenly labeled as a statement album. It’s a bridge away from girl-group polish and Latin-inflected pop and toward a more dreamy and reckless club sound. It is not a full pivot to hyperpop, as “I Luv It” suggested, but more like a stab at the wistful, complex, dancefloor introversion practiced by the likes of Lorde, Kelela, Troye Sivan, Frank Ocean, and Rosalía. It’s an evolution that squares nicely with Cabello’s stated ambition to be thought of not simply as a performer but as a writer, the author of a more complex and explicitly adult narrative than she’s told before.
C,XOXO is a broadly sketched tale of returning home to Miami and gaining perspective on broken love and aimless youth. It’s heavy on vibes, evoking the 305 primarily through features, some voice memos, and a toothless Spring Breakers aesthetic that’s notably neither trashy nor violent. Yet the musical landscape that Cabello’s producers El Guincho and Jasper Harris conjure is incredibly vivid, wielding warm synths and babbling samples as slinky launch pads for scorching riffs on Afrobeat and reggaeton. Halfway through the fantastic “Dade County Dreaming”—which doubles as a likely swan song for City Girls—JT’s ass-shaking chant is gradually subsumed by an absolutely tidal piano churn as their swagger gives way to a dreamy instrumental vastness. It’s as if Cabello is accessing a new mental horizon in real time.
What horizon is that? If the production has personality to spare, the same cannot always be said of the persona Cabello adopts here. This Camila often feels clumsy, half-drawn, at odds with the assuredness of the music. Even as she professes on “Chanel No. 5” to being “a cute girl with a sick mind,” much of the record bears little evidence of perverse or spontaneous thought. Cabello’s lyrics can be so associative they’re nonsensical. Daisy-chained signifiers like “Cigarette, candy necklace on my hips, butterfly that’s on my wrist” add up to little beyond PG-13 edginess.
C,XOXO does powerfully evoke the kind of album Cabello aspires to: A MOTOMAMI, Blonde, or Something to Give Each Other, the kind of record that reveals itself through collage, expertly weaving in loose strands that telegraph the artist’s taste and sensibility. Apart from a few wonderfully insane moments like the Gucci Mane sample on “I Luv It” or the downcast Pitbull rework of “B.O.A.T.,” Cabello’s choices more often feel either random or convenient. When she gives an unexpected shout-out to Haruki Murakami on “Chanel No. 5,” it feels like posturing. It doesn’t help that it’s made to slot into such a basic, and vaguely orientalist, rhyme scheme: “Fold for me like origami/Magic and real like Murakami/Red chipped nails, I’m wabi-sabi.”
Her features are a mixed bag in the same way. Her sultry, steely-eyed vocals on “Dade County Dreaming” make for a cool compliment to JT and Yung Miami’s staccato flows; her voice maps sweetly onto PinkPantheress’ effervescent production on the too-short “pink xoxo.” But there’s little chemistry with Playboi Carti, who’s left muttering to himself on the frenetic, overblown “I Luv It,” and Cabello’s coyness is mismatched against Lil Nas X’s full-throated horniness on “He Knows.” That her Drake duet, “Hot Uptown,” arrives on the back of his bruising defeat to Kendrick Lamar is a miracle of bad timing, because it’s excellent: a should-be hit that plays brilliantly to their respective strengths as a songwriter and a fuckboy.
Cabello is so eager to go searching for new sounds you occasionally wonder if she ought to be crediting other artists for the raw material she’s working with. Even though she’s decidedly Lana-endorsed, “June Gloom” cribs a little too much from the singer’s laconic flow for comfort; ditto Amaarae on “He Knows,” which fits a little too neatly into her sweaty, eclectic vision of Afrobeat. It still feels almost psychedelic how in-your-face the Charli XCX rip is on “I Luv It,” especially in light of the album’s title.
Cabello has the juice to be her own artist and is more than capable as a writer, but the risks she takes are inherently safe when they’ve all been taken before. Her best songs on C,XOXO capture an acute emotional drift with a compelling honesty. “B.O.A.T.” is gorgeous, a song that pines for the final word in a breakup that she’ll never get to utter. Cabello tracks her roiling emotions in real time as her voice leaps from Auto-Tuned lament to piercing anger, while a subtle sample of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room” needles its way through, half-mocking, half-longing. It’s sad, sophisticated, and utterly singular—a proof of concept in a room full of prototypes. | 2024-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | June 28, 2024 | 6.9 | ba84886c-1053-4b3f-bc44-86030fafc255 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
After a stretch of dark, searching records, the former Hüsker Dü and Sugar leader uses the familiar power trio configuration to find a little peace. | After a stretch of dark, searching records, the former Hüsker Dü and Sugar leader uses the familiar power trio configuration to find a little peace. | Bob Mould: Sunshine Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-mould-sunshine-rock/ | Sunshine Rock | Bob Mould gives away the game with the title of Sunshine Rock, his 13th solo album: After several years in darkness, he’s ready for the light. Darkness is a comfortable place for Mould, who has spent his career picking at scabs and exorcising demons. But he had extra reasons for gloom earlier this decade, when his parents died in quick succession. On the subsequent Beauty & Ruin and Patch the Sky, Mould turned inward, meditating on mortality and loss. “I went through a dark period,” he admitted in a 2016 interview with Fact circa Patch the Sky. “I felt very isolated. I took six months away from the excitement of life to sit and contemplate the meaning of the rest of my life, and here it is.”
Sunshine Rock isn’t a ruminative album. Instead, it’s the place where Mould expresses his design for the rest of his life. For creative and personal reasons, Mould distanced himself from the past after Patch the Sky, decamping from San Francisco to Berlin, where he chose to rebuild his life with an eye toward optimism. He made a conscious decision to try happiness, the resolution at the core of Sunshine Rock in both attitude and sound. Using the great ball of fire in the sky as his lyrical lodestar, Mould has written an album that pulsates with positivity, even during occasional moments of melancholy.
Though bursting with primary colors, Sunshine Rock doesn’t qualify as a pure pop album, even when Mould excavates the fuzz-drenched “Send Me a Postcard,” a continental hit of organ-laced effervescence in the late ’60s for the psychedelic Dutch quartet Shocking Blue. Such tinny AM-pop artifacts may provide Mould with some measure of inspiration, but he’s not attempting to craft bubblegum hooks or even revive the candied rush of Sugar, the 1990s alt-rock outfit that represents his last flirtation with an actual modern rock hit. Instead, Mould works with familiar elements, shaping them so they seem brighter than they did in the recent past.
He returns with the peerless rhythm section of Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy, which has supported him since his 2012 Merge debut, Silver Age. (This is also the live rhythm section of that label’s long-standing flagship band, Superchunk.) A few quieter moments pepper the explosions of noise, and even the roaring guitars are occasionally dressed with keyboards or strings, accents that help the record sparkle. Still, despite these accoutrements, Sunshine Rock is recognizably the work of a power trio, the format that has been Mould’s strength since the days of Hüsker Dü.
On Hüsker Dü’s final album, 1987’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories, Mould admonished his audience: “These are your important years/You’d better make them last,” a sentiment sung with youthful conviction. On Sunshine Rock, Mould asks, “What do we cherish in the final years?,” lacing the question with quiet urgency. Some of what he cherishes is evident through his lyrics, rife with romantic images of afternoons in the park, missed connections, and small victories.
But what really resonates is the music itself, or how Mould continually finds new variations on a formula he’s mined for nearly 40 years. For a while, Mould rejected this volcanic blend of melody, passion, and volume, but over the last decade, he’s reckoned with his past both through book and song, accepting his flaws and strengths. As he’s facing 60, he’s at peace with who he is, but he still writes and plays with the vigor of somebody restless inside. That tension between conception and execution makes all the good energy of Sunshine Rock feel hard-earned and genuine; scars and all, it’s the sound of somebody who has weathered battles and worked to survive. | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 6, 2019 | 7.6 | ba89c4f7-d8b6-4f14-9dd4-d29130b2c0fd | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The alt-country songwriter’s sixth album sits at the eye of the storm, matching a softer, more measured sound with a wryly humorous look at existential turmoil. | The alt-country songwriter’s sixth album sits at the eye of the storm, matching a softer, more measured sound with a wryly humorous look at existential turmoil. | Lydia Loveless: Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lydia-loveless-nothings-gonna-stand-in-my-way-again/ | Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again | Is Lydia Loveless, who made their name writing infectious country-rock songs with a death wish—songs about setting an ex’s lawn on fire and getting shot down in a lovers’ spat—mellowing out? “I’m getting older and my jets are starting to cool,” they sing amid squalls of reverb on Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again, their sixth full-length album. But then, with something between a wink and a sigh, they add, “If I ever get sober it’s really over for you fools.” It is part confession, part boast, part wish, delivered in a croon that holds their vocal power in reserve. Loveless’ earlier albums made deft use of sudden reversals: a flash of vulnerability followed by a sucker punch. Here and throughout their latest and best album, they spend more time in the ambiguous middle.
Some of Loveless’ most aggressive music over the past several years has arrived in deceptively shiny packages. On songs like “Heaven” and “Wringer” from their previous two albums, they threw their voice like a hand grenade, thundering lines like “Paradise is only for the weak, man” over twinkling synths and hi-hat pulses. The pessimism roiling beneath these songs transformed their brightness into a deadly coldness: less disco lights than the glint of a scalpel. Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again paints with a softer palette. Loveless largely sings not from the aftermath but in medias res. In “Toothache,” they feel a low-grade disaster coming on and beg their lover to just “pry it loose,” as a chorus of sugary whoo-hoo-hoos hints at the relief that might follow. The middle of a slowly unfolding crisis can also be eerily calm. “I’ve been looking for a way out,” they confess on the standout “Ghost,” which starts off as one of the most resigned-sounding revenge songs in recent memory, before inverting resignation into relief: “Think that I’ll find it now that I’m stuck in time.”
It can be hard to tell the difference between such eye-of-the-hurricane calm and total psychic shutdown. On “Runaway,” over a woozy Mellotron pad, Loveless alternates between cataloging death-drive urges and sketching fragments of scene: “Dissociating down at Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar.” Only a cascading Wurlitzer line, accompanied by a shift into Loveless’ supernaturally resonant upper register, cuts through the murk. There is a stubborn will to transcendence in these songs: a desire to leave the dissociative slough of the eternal middle. But the will-they-won’t-they friction between self-destruction and self-preservation generates its own kind of pleasure. “I want the rush of knowing that I did the right thing for once,” Loveless declares on the power-pop confection “Do the Right Thing,” a song about resolving not to make a confession of love. In “Poor Boy,” a call and response between competing desires—“I wanna get in his head/Don’t wanna fuck with his head”—gathers a giddy energy that carries the song out over waves of pitch-bent synths.
“Sex and Money,” maybe Loveless’s best song yet, inhabits a different sort of middle. It is an anthem of desperate ambition, set to a rim-knocking groove, that captures the accumulating frustrations of a mid-list rock’n’roll act. But if it is an anthem, it is a self-defeating one, lingering on the simultaneous ridiculousness and necessity of the hustle it chronicles. “I know I’m not saving the world, but I gotta live in it,” Loveless drawls, “so I might as well splurge on 200 cotton T-shirts with my face on the front.” In the almost painfully catchy chorus that follows, Loveless pulls off a genuine magic trick: They make the bare act of survival, irradiated with the vital but embarrassing desire for something more, feel like enough, at least for now. | 2023-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Bloodshot | September 22, 2023 | 7.8 | ba8f64ec-1508-4576-8da9-3ba164ad19bf | Mitch Therieau | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mitch-therieau/ | |
The southern rapper’s latest project captures him the same way he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable. | The southern rapper’s latest project captures him the same way he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable. | Big K.R.I.T.: K.R.I.T. IZ HERE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-krit-krit-iz-here/ | K.R.I.T. IZ HERE | Big K.R.I.T. has never had much interest in beef or drama, but early on his new record, he drops what could be interpreted as a jab at one of the famous headliners he’s shared shows with over the years. “You on the radio,” he raps, “They came to see me ’cause I did it without a hit.” It’s a brag, of course, but it’s a bit of a self-own, too. Even after nearly a decade on the industry’s radar, K.R.I.T. still doesn’t have anything even close to a hit, and it’s increasingly hard to imagine he ever will. He’s still working at more or less the same ceiling he was nearly a decade ago when his 2010 breakout mixtape K.R.I.T Wuz Here made him a critical favorite and a potential next-big-thing that never quite was.
That’s not to minimize what he has accomplished. Unlike Donnis or Charles Hamilton and the blog-rap era’s other flash-in-the-pans, K.R.I.T. was able to parlay his talent into a sustainable recording career. Has a following, and longevity isn’t anything to scoff at. And yet there’s a sense that he’s underperformed. After 10 full-lengths, K.R.I.T. is beginning to look like rap’s answer to Ty Segall: consistently good, rarely stop-the-presses great. Even when his projects impress on first listen, they can’t help but bleed together in the big picture.
And so K.R.I.T.’s latest project K.R.I.T. Iz Here captures K.R.I.T. the same as he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable. The album is ostensibly a sequel to his 2010 breakout project, and the title’s nod to the past only underscores how little his core sound has changed since then. He’s still making music seeped in UGK worship, all soulful Southern country grooves, subwoofer-Shiatsuing bass, and Pimp C snarl. There’s literally a song called “Learned From Texas,” about all the moves he learned from DJ Screw and UGK, as if anybody who’s listened to more than 10 minutes of K.R.I.T.’s music could have possibly overlooked Houston’s influence on him.
But unlike 2017’s 4Eva Is a Mighty Long Time, where K.R.I.T. barely even bothered acknowledging current trends, on K.R.I.T. Iz Here he tries branching out a bit, too. “I Been Waitin,” with its posh, nervy production, borrows liberally from Travis Scott’s art-house trap. Opener “K.R.I.T. Here” taps the jazzy joy of Chance the Rapper and Donnie Trumpet. The Rico Love feature “Obvious” rides the same wave of wistful Caribbean music as Drake’s “Controlla,” while the strip-club fantasia “Blue Flame Ballet” mirrors the freak-soul of Childish Gambino’s “Awaken, My Love!” There are shades of Migos in the triplet flows of the clubby trap cut “I Made,” and elements of Frank Ocean in the wistful closing stretch twofer of “High Beams” and “Life in the Sun.”
All those songs are perfectly fine, because K.R.I.T. is almost incapable of making a song that’s anything less than perfectly fine. And yet maybe K.R.I.T. Iz Here might have been better off if K.R.I.T. had availed himself of a few swings and misses. On “Addiction,” a shameless and otherwise only so-so knockoff of Kanye West and Lil Pump’s “I Love It,” K.R.I.T. is joined by Lil Wayne, who drops one of those unexpectedly great verses that, even this far past his peak, he still delivers regularly enough that we should almost start expecting them. It’s funny and surprising, blasé yet vital. Wayne’s career, in many ways, has been the antithesis of K.R.I.T.’s. He’s hit higher heights than K.R.I.T. by a mile, yet he’s also face planted in ways it’s impossible to imagine K.R.I.T. would ever allow himself. Neither rapper’s approach is intrinsically right or wrong. But one sure is a lot more exciting. | 2019-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Multi Alumni / BMG | July 17, 2019 | 6.8 | ba98c210-b310-4e2a-bd86-bfdfd55d0563 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Texas band Dead to a Dying World's second album is a hybrid of doom, black metal, and crust punk, buttressed by baroque classical flourishes and focused on the state of the world and its rather grim prospects. Its six extended pieces commingle melodrama and momentum, horror and hope, pulling the listener along like a tight-wire suspense flick. | The Texas band Dead to a Dying World's second album is a hybrid of doom, black metal, and crust punk, buttressed by baroque classical flourishes and focused on the state of the world and its rather grim prospects. Its six extended pieces commingle melodrama and momentum, horror and hope, pulling the listener along like a tight-wire suspense flick. | Dead to a Dying World: Litany | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20834-litany/ | Litany | For a moment, you think that the onslaught is over, that after eight minutes of dramatic strings and overdriven guitars, punishing drums and punished vocals, the big Texas metal band Dead to a Dying World will at last offer a respite. After all, they’ve already detailed environmental degradation, screaming lines about nature’s revolt and grand-finale floods as rhythm and riff crack and lash against one another. But when Dead to a Dying World at last pull back during "Beneath the Loam", one of four quarter-hour marvels on their second album, Litany, it is only to regroup and instantly return with twice the speed and twice the fury. "Brittle embers flicker inside," screams Heidi Moore, pushing her voice so hard above the sudden black metal melee that she takes full stops between every word. "Where blasting suns once raged." It’s a shocking and gripping moment, a jolt applied with unapologetic force and impeccable timing amid what was already a mighty furor.
That sort of escalation is exactly what Dead to a Dying World do so well throughout Litany, a vivid hybrid of doom, black metal, and crust punk, buttressed by baroque classical flourishes. Dead to a Dying World’s 2011 debut pursued a similar mix, with doom lunges and black metal surges woven together with string sections and riffs that expanded or contracted based upon the context. The idea, though, often outstripped the execution, so that the transitions between those parts felt threadbare and rushed, the rookie mistakes of an audacious new seven-piece ensemble. Four years later, however, Dead to a Dying World show no such signs of folly. These six deliberate pieces commingle melodrama and momentum, horror and hope, pulling the listener along like some tight-wire suspense flick.
To an extent, that’s what it is: Litany deals with the state of the world and its rather grim prospects, delivered in moribund language that suggests we are, as a species, poised at the precipice of our end. The music animates that message, with sweeping arrangements and chiming guitars, washes of distortion and marches of drums shaping a battle between anxiety about our future and hope for it, between infinite pessimism and purposeful optimism. Though the tools are different, Dead to a Dying World suggest the same frisson as the Arcade Fire in their salad days and the same emotional ambiguity as Explosions in the Sky. There is no single style to Litany, just as there are no easy answers about the worries Dead to a Dying World address.
For an album that lasts for more than an hour, though, it is at least an easy, alluring listen, largely because so much effort and thought seem to have gone into building it. During 17-minute opener "The Hunt Eternal", for instance, Dead to a Dying World volley between invigorating, aggressive black metal passages and stately, alluring doom. They drift into a pensive and patient midsection, where the spectral voice of Sabbath Assembly’s Jamie Myers-Waits hangs like foreboding fog. When at last they reach the end, they funnel all of it together, with the harshness pushing against the heaviness and buoyed from below by viola. Each moment feels bigger and more powerful than the last, so that these epics never overstay their welcome and linger into tedium. The song establishes the rubric for the rest of Litany, a seesaw of dynamics built around a world of apocalyptic images and faint whispers of renewal.
Just before the album’s final minute, Dead to a Dying World collapse, exhaustedly, from Litany's blitz, the beat marching along in halftime. His voice fighting above surviving sheets of guitar, Mike Yeager fights to pose one final question: "Do we choose to follow, or can we break away?" At times, Litany may feel overwrought, too emotionally loaded and compositionally ostentatious for its own good. But here, at the end, you understand that Dead to a Dying World aren’t being maudlin just for kicks, that they’re not howling about "a bloodless pillar" and "ochre hands" and intoning lines about the end of days without cause.
No, these are real-world worries, written in the extreme patois of heavy metal and cast with the mild panic of environmentalists, climate scientists, and even civil rights activists. Litany reminds me of Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption, in which he wonders if emergency can force humanity into grand action, or the glaciologist Jason Box, who proclaimed that we might be, as he infamously put it, "f’d." Dead to a Dying World’s roots in punk and metal afford these concerns urgency, while their sophisticated sounds lend it magnetism. When Litany ends, not only do I want to hear it again but I also want to follow its lead, to make some change for the better on behalf of the music—to, as Yeager puts it, "break away." Litany paints frightening if not altogether-unfamiliar scenes and asks pressing questions of both them and us, bound to music meant to mirror the complexity and precariousness of the world at large. | 2015-09-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Gilead Media | September 2, 2015 | 8.2 | ba9af764-98ed-48d5-a82d-bc47657962d8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The second album from the Toronto indie pop band is nothing but thoroughly accomplished songs. Alvvays have sharpened their focus without losing sight of themselves. | The second album from the Toronto indie pop band is nothing but thoroughly accomplished songs. Alvvays have sharpened their focus without losing sight of themselves. | Alvvays: Antisocialites | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alvvays-antisocialites/ | Antisocialites | Oh Archie, what have you done? It’s been three years since Alvvays’ self-titled album, a most auspicious indie-pop debut that doubled as a dog-eared short-story collection. Its breakout track was “Archie, Marry Me,” the rare proposal that could rhyme “matrimony” with “alimony” and still sweep people off their feet, but acerbic wit and heart-tugging melody could be found all through the succinct nine-song set. You pronounced their name “always” because you expected them to last.
Alvvays themselves have hardly been gone at all. The Toronto band spent most of the past few years playing bigger and bigger stages, including Glastonbury in 2015 and Coachella in 2016, not long after lead singer Molly Rankin joined the Jesus and Mary Chain onstage at a festival in Australia. They’ve also been road-testing new material. The band’s second album, Antisocialites, conspicuously lacks an “Archie,” whether musically or romantically, but it’s another batch of thoroughly accomplished songs. Alvvays have sharpened their focus without losing sight of themselves.
Rankin, who grew up on the East Coast of Nova Scotia as part of a famous family of Celtic folk musicians, certainly wasn’t brought up on the NME cassette compilation that became synonymous with winsome, ’60s-dappled guitar pop. She and Alvvays guitarist Alec O’Hanley bonded over Scotland’s C86-descended power-pop heroes Teenage Fanclub, but both understandably seem to bristle at being pigeonholed. In one recent interview, they noted how acclaim for Alvvays’ debut sometimes treated it as almost a guilty pleasure. “I just really like to write pop songs and I don’t really care what genre that is,” Rankin said in another.
The musty ambience of Chad Van Gaalen’s production on their debut has turned bright and clear on Antisocialites, with O’Hanley co-producing alongside John Congleton, who’s overseen big-ticket indie albums from artists including Future Islands and St. Vincent. Alvvays can still kick up a piercing dream-pop din, but now it’s less muffled by reverb and digital distortion. The reference point here is less “Archie” than another Alvvays single, “Party Police,” with its mournful synths and weary entreaty, “You don’t have to leave, you could just stay here with me.” Apparently, this person has left, but Alvvays’ endearing songcraft is intact.
“Dreams Tonite,” a live staple since early last year, showcases this slight shift toward synth-y melancholy, but for all its insistent hooks, Rankin also analyzes a broken relationship from a wealth of vantage points, introduces the album’s title phrase, and indulges in lovelorn wordplay (“So morose for me, seeing ghosts of me, writing oaths for me”). Better yet, in a similar vein, is “Not My Baby,” an aching and ethereal song that bum-bums like the answer to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” These iterations of Alvvays could get booked for the Roadhouse on “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Antisocialites isn’t all downtempo and forlorn. “Your Type,” a song that has been around since before the debut album, is an uproarious garage-rock tune about a conspiracy theory-spouting art-museum ejectee who feels molecularly incompatible (“Let me state delicately/You’re an O and I’m AB”). Surf-tinged single “Plimsoll Punks” bops up against the barriers of scene and genre as Rankin, channeling the Television Personalities’ proto-C86 classic “Part Time Punks,” vividly skewers unspecified stick-in-the-muds (“You’re the seashell in my sandal that’s slicing up my heel”). Alvvays broaden their palette on these faster songs, too, evoking Stereolab in the motorik freakout of “Hey,” which is memorable for introducing a drunken alter ego known as “Molly Mayhem,” but more powerfully insists, “It feels like forever since you held me like I was a human being/And I am a human being.” We’re human, and we need to be loved.
It’s interesting to hear how Alvvays nod to their vaunted indie forebears while also stretching against the limitations of being too closely associated with the past. Lovelorn opener “In Undertow,” one of the best tracks here, features none other than Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake on backing vocals. “Lollipop (Ode to Jim)” nods toward her JAMC stagemate Jim Reid through Psychocandy-like screeches and a sunny ditty about an acid trip, as Rankin sharply implores, “Alter my state to get through this date.”
Another way to consider Alvvays’ preferred place in the music landscape is through their usual choices in covers. They’ve done Kirsty MacColl’s “He’s on the Beach,” also performed by the Lemonheads, solidifying a connection to both vivid lyrical narratives and fuzzed-out guitars. They’ve adapted a song by the C86-adjacent band the Primitives and taken a Deerhunter B-side “Nosebleed” and made it their own. Those aren’t the most varied of selections, but like Alvvays stagemates Big Thief and Courtney Barnett, they push toward a larger narrative. “Archie, Marry Me” looked at eternity through the lens of the mundane. Antisocialites’ finale “Forget About Life,” a gorgeously spare singalong that’s sure to highlight future live sets, only wants to find respite tonight, drinking cheap wine amid the condos. Archie was worried about mounting student loans and stagnant wages, but now there are more existential problems. Alvvays have grown, too. | 2017-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl / Transgressive | September 7, 2017 | 7.3 | ba9fef85-6b0d-43fb-9823-094887d7c198 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
On his debut for Third Man, the prolific Nebraska rocker tames his wild side but still lands some magnetic songs. | On his debut for Third Man, the prolific Nebraska rocker tames his wild side but still lands some magnetic songs. | David Nance: David Nance & Mowed Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-nance-david-nance-mowed-sound/ | David Nance & Mowed Sound | David Nance seems like a true rock’n’roll apostle. Tell him about a record you love—especially in his personally fertile triangle anchored by Neil Young, MC5, and Faust—and the mid-Nebraska native might reveal his secret codex of deeper cuts with glee. For a decade now, Nance’s own music has gushed from that same wellspring, a torrent of two dozen LPs, EPs, and singles that map his many enthusiasms. On 2016’s More Than Enough, he slipped from New Zealand pop bittersweetness to full-choogle vamps in half an hour; he started 2022’s wonderfully warped Pulverized and Slightly Peaced with a two-minute, anti-capitalist barnburner about sandwiches and ended with a curled Crazy Horse jam about the crumbling New Age. Nance has even taken to making barely rehearsed, full-length covers of touchstones: Beatles for Sale, Doug Sahm and Band, Lou Reed’s Berlin. If Midwest boredom can create a vacuum, Nance’s now overflows with the blessed zeal of a beatific lifer.
But David Nance & Mowed Sound—the self-titled debut of his newest configuration of familiar Omaha friends—suggests a limit to this vintage discipleship for the first time. This is Nance’s debut on Third Man, following appearances on Ba Da Bing! and Trouble in Mind that were occasionally so intoxicating they intimated the rise of some anachronistic latter-day rock star, gloriously unkempt and unbound. These 10 songs survey Nance’s usual range, with doffs of the beard to Canned Heat, the Kinks, Skip Spence, and Gram Parsons.
It also feels circumscribed and safe, though, as if Nance and a band capable of truly cutting loose tried to make their own modern classic rock LP by forsaking the weirdness and wildness that made them special. (This same band, Nance included, is much sharper on Bite Down, the forthcoming LP from Rosali Middleman.) Ever zoom in on a soft-focused picture that appeared magical from a distance, only to find its charm diminished as the supposed details never actually resolve? This record confirms Nance’s work has always been that way—better blown out or faded away, not up close and clean like they are here.
To be clear, there are absolute jams here, searing reminders of or mighty introductions to Nance’s antiquarian power. “Mock the Hours” barrels from the gates like an Allman-powered anthem, Kevin Donahue’s drums kicking the shit beneath Nance’s crosscut riff. Howling from rock’s under-funded fringes about outlasting long odds, Nance sounds like the leader of some mid-’90s alternative-rock band whose regional hit somehow broke big. It’s an inescapable tune, its sharp hook set into place by piano that pokes like fingers to the ribs. “Credit Line” turns a similar trick, its lithe little lick seemingly exported duty-free from some Mississippi roadside dive. It scores Nance’s lament perfectly. The compulsive mantra of “Cure Vs. Disease,” the winking fuck-you refrain of “Side Eyed Sam,” the rhythmic moan of “Cut It Off”: There is no doubt on Mowed Sound that Nance can write and lead a tune. Each song is a crosshatch of touchstones iconic, obscure, and everything in between—ZZ Top to Otha Turner, John Lee Hooker to Little Feat. Here is Nance’s record collection as potent distillate.
Longtime Nance accomplice James Schroeder recorded Mowed Sound in bursts that stretched nearly 18 months, meaning the band didn’t decamp to a lavish studio with hired hands on account of its well-heeled new label. It does, however, sometimes seem so, with performances that always stop short of escape velocity, as though afraid to exit some imagined radio land. The lick and groove of “Side Eyed Sam” sound predestined for infinite repetition and variation, but the band fades out after three minutes. The smoke dissipates just when you think you see the fire. “Credit Line,” likewise, frames a playground for the tangled guitars of Nance and Schroeder, but they squeeze in a few succinct duets before drifting away. This take is listed as “Variation #5,” and Nance roared on a mighty live version captured and released in late 2022. As with half the great songs on Mowed Sound, it’s hard not to hear what feels like a half-there take and think, “Please, go on.”
The eccentricity is, instead, crammed into corners this time—ride cymbals that land like little earthquakes during “No Taste Tart Enough,” for instance, or the brief and ecstatic tape piece, “Molly’s Loop.” Nance includes two country ballads here, partnering with Pearl Lovejoy-Boyd to conjure Parsons and Emmylou Harris on Grievous Angel for “Tumbleweed” and closing with the Southern exile torment of “In Orlando.” These are exquisite and aching songs, suggesting that Nance has found yet another avenue for exploration. But on Mowed Sound, these anomalies squander momentum and take up the space where this band could and should be opening up, taking these open-ended songs for extended escapades across Nebraska flatlands.
When the David Nance Group released a single on Third Man in 2019, it was tempting to picture Nance as a spiritual successor to The White Stripes and The War on Drugs. Those bands, after all, reached wide audiences with versions of rock that long ago went endangered, in part because they believed in the form so much. So, obviously, does Nance. But as good as it often is, Mowed Sound reinforces what, in retrospect, has been Nance’s conundrum all along: He remains the clerk across the record store counter, gushing about all the things he loves without being able to tell you the one he likes best, the one he would forever commit to calling his own. | 2024-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Third Man | February 10, 2024 | 6.7 | baa3b266-b054-483e-9090-8ca84083e120 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On her fifth full-length, Ou, experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty with a record whose title literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. Her inquisitive, abstract music draws emotional depth from daily banalities and plays with our basic concept of time. | On her fifth full-length, Ou, experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty with a record whose title literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. Her inquisitive, abstract music draws emotional depth from daily banalities and plays with our basic concept of time. | Lucrecia Dalt: Ou | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21420-ou/ | Ou | Experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty. It's what she does best, with curiosity and a self-effacing confidence; it's no coincidence that the title of her fifth record literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. It’s an album of options, expectations, and the lingering hope that occurs when there’s a possibility of something better. Dalt repurposed her studio as a makeshift theater to screen films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helke Sander, and other New German Cinema greats and Ou's cinematic feel is the direct result. "When I have input from outside, I start to see more surprises in what I’m making," she told Julia Holter in conversation for Electronic Beats. For her, movies act as personal creative partners, and the four-track LP and its subsections are a live unraveling of all the surprises that come from the process.
The first step is removing herself from the vocal spotlight. Opener "OVER UNITY" sees her whisper one indecipherable line, chop it up, and feed it through vocal effects to intensify each word. That’s the album’s only lyric. Meanwhile, a soft beep ticks like a metronome. She uses that constant element to contrast alternative forms of timekeeping in the piece, like the sputtering synths in the background. Dalt bypasses realism to pursue sounds rarely experienced in reality, a point she underlines on "OVER UNITY" when she reshapes the piece into a traditional song structure midway, drawing out asymmetrical melodies and an unconventional bassline.
As fascinated as it is with time, Ou is too ravenous to explore any single perception in depth. "IOT" breaks into three parts: "Roto," an anxious pulse of downbeats that closes with bashful clarinet; "Quebrado," a collection of broken telephone beeps and pitched-down gasps mimicking church bells; and "Suelto," a loose percussive arrangement accented with keys. The way Dalt sees it, time is an object passing through various forms of sound. Why waste it standing still when you can see it through a dozen lenses?
She does this by replicating Shepard tones throughout the album. Like the swirling stripes of a barber’s pole, these tones—a play on pitch where a note appears to move upward or downward—is an auditory illusion that plays with perceived direction. They’re superpositioned sine waves separated by octaves, swelling like that stale hum of an airplane lifting off or the rising and falling notes of THX’s infamous sound effect. The only piece exempt from this sound is also Ou’s darkest, "FLOTO," where ominous saxophone and wobbling bass recall the soundtracks of low-budget alien invasion flicks.
Like Laurie Anderson and those before her, Lucrecia Dalt is concerned not with upholding traditions, but reorganizing them—just like the label releasing the record, Care of Editions, which pays listeners to download its albums. On "ELEANORE," she combines wind chimes, cold percussive slaps, and descending string sections to draw emotional depth from daily banalities the same way the album’s artwork—sunlight leaking through a window shade like visual sine waves —does. Consider it disembodied pop where Dalt, a civil engineer who specialized in geotechnics, patiently reworks theories until they become scalable to the average listener. As a result, Ou sounds like a test of specific temporal concepts that is best observed from a distance. If you listen too close, its concept thins, and you lose your grip on the very abstract ideas Dalt is exploring. | 2016-01-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Care of Editions | January 18, 2016 | 7.6 | baa8a559-5c5d-4893-b898-aa15133c0802 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
Matmos have drawn inspiration from many far-flung and mundane sources, and on Ultimate Care II they source every sound from the Whirlpool washing machine of the same name. | Matmos have drawn inspiration from many far-flung and mundane sources, and on Ultimate Care II they source every sound from the Whirlpool washing machine of the same name. | Matmos: Ultimate Care II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21017-ultimate-care-ii/ | Ultimate Care II | In his recent book The Other Paris, Luc Sante describes an annual ritual of the city's laundresses, who numbered close to 100,000 by the end of the 19th century: "Every lavoir would elect a queen and all the employees would parade, merrily borrowing the finest accoutrements that had been left with them for cleaning." Nobody outside of detergent commercials dances up to a washing machine. We sweat through clothes on Saturday night; we reluctantly clean them Sunday afternoon. But the ambient sounds at a laundromat, those wetly spiraling colors, the unconscious motions of loading and folding and wringing—are they so easy to divide away from clubbing? Not according to Matmos, whose new album Ultimate Care II was entirely generated by the Whirlpool washing machine of the same name. They hit the appliance, massaged it, processed it, and jolted it with samples of its own noise.
It's not such a strange instrument for Matmos. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, partners in all things, have wrung electronic music out of surgical tools, a cigarette burn, Björk reciting Wittgenstein, and quivering crayfish. Lots of it you can even dance to. Their practice became more abstract in recent years: Supreme Balloon only used synthesizers, while 2013's The Marriage of True Minds was determined by a series of parapsychological experiments. "High-concept" is the wrong phrase for something so tactile, but the new album does take inspiration, in classic Matmos style, from a deadpan joke: Ultimate Care II is the machine, and the machine is Ultimate Care II. (It could also be the name of a monthly rave circa 1989.) Daniel and Schmidt have always been fascinated by texture, and here they focus on it intently, exploring dozens of ways that water can fall, slosh, churn, or hiss. During calmer interludes, drones move past as if floating through an amniotic sac.
Like Manuel Göttsching's techno opening E2-E4, Matmos sequenced Ultimate Care II as a single 38-minute-long track, elaborating on itself over the length of a standard cycle. The first moments are relatively straightforward, considering that we're talking about an album recorded from a washing machine: Somebody turns the dial, and the chamber floods. Polyrhythmic drumming slowly intensifies, before subsiding into amphibian breathing noises. There's this coarse timbre that resembles a wildly overblown saxophone—fingers rubbing the chassis, sensuality experienced as agony. For long minutes rhythm fades away, leaving a reverie of computer signals inside the machine's brain, and then returns to deluge them, seizing up briefly with a muffled conk. What follows must be the first piece of music braiding together free jazz and the sewer level from "Sonic the Hedgehog 3."
Ultimate Care II ends in thrilling panic, a squall of rapid percussion moving over glitchy effects: drum-and-bass that's hard and wet, like the misted breakbeats on A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology. But the real un-climax comes just before that, when Matmos allow the rinse cycle to run through with only minimal filtering. It lasts for four minutes yet feels boundless. I thought of Virginia Woolf's The Waves: "The spray, leaping high, spattered the walls of a cave that had been dry before, and left pools inland, where some fish, stranded, lashed its tail as the wave drew back." Time seems to leak out everywhere, as if you looked away from Matmos' knotted loop to find, feet slickly adrift, that the machine had sprouted a river.
John Cage realized there was no such thing as silence when he visited an anechoic chamber insulated from the rest of Harvard and heard two sounds, one high and one low: the pulse of his nervous system and the circulation of his blood. "There is always something to see," he said later on, "something to hear." (It was probably actually tinnitus, but that makes the omnipresence of music even clearer.) I imagine Matmos glancing around their laundry room and deciding that any space could hold a dancefloor, or a DIY noise show—a basement is a basement, after all. Caressing obsolete technology, they've parodied labor's drudgeries as play. Ultimate Care II is a daydream of domesticity, a chore ignored. Call it the revolutions of everyday life. | 2016-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | February 18, 2016 | 7.8 | bab2480e-9d56-4ce2-bb51-ad7c537fd311 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | null |
On this charity compilation, the Swedish label best known as the home of rappers like Yung Lean and Bladee dives deeper into electronic music and the golden-hour euphoria of trance. | On this charity compilation, the Swedish label best known as the home of rappers like Yung Lean and Bladee dives deeper into electronic music and the golden-hour euphoria of trance. | Various Artists: Rift ONE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-rift-one/ | Rift ONE | Swedish label YEAR0001 originally made a name for itself with rap-adjacent acts like Sad Boys and Drain Gang, but as its presence has expanded, the experimental Swedish music hub has increasingly bent toward electronic music. The RIFT One compilation—the first in a series benefiting community bail funds, mutual aid groups, and racial-justice organizing—features contributions from the rappers who have become its brand names: Bladee, Thaiboy Digital, and Yung Lean (appearing under a pseudonym closer to his government name, jonatan leandoer96). But overall, RIFT One is more interested in the intricate loops and extended grooves of dance music—specifically, the rave culture of the turn of the millennium—than in hip-hop.
The compilation showcases a broad spectrum of overlapping and interconnected styles. The so-called “trance revival”—spearheaded by artists like Lorenzo Senni and Ejeca’s Trance Wax remix project—is in full effect on RIFT One, which features a few tracks that Diddy could conceivably get down to at Ibiza. Dutch producer Torus builds a glittering entrance to the YEAR0001 universe out of stuttering synths and haunted shards of human voice on opening cut “Circles,” while Chariot gets the first anthemic beat drops in with “Sky Wheel,” effortlessly channeling the work of ATB or Ferry Corsten. PC Music-affiliated songwriter Namasenda imagines a nihilistic rave fantasy on “I Could Die,” her pitch-shifted, effervescent voice floating above glistening loops and thunderous beats.
Despite the label’s collective interest in bygone subgenres, RIFT One is fairly forward-thinking, weaving Auto-Tuned vocals, ambient textures, and rap flows into the sounds of dance-pop’s past. Beijing-based MC Bloodz Boi contributes a lowkey trap ballad with “Mist,” flowing gently over aching strings and the sampled sound of breaking glass. The compilation also highlights a number of UK-based producers, including Palmistry, whose “Basho Dew” is a hissing little piece of haunted speed garage, and Mssingno, who collaborates with HXE on “MXE,” a gritty club track with shades of South Africa’s gqom sound. XL-signed Dark0 works with composer Graeme Norgate—the hand behind the iconic electronic scores for games like Donkey Kong Land, GoldenEye 007, and the TimeSplitters franchise—on “Scrapyard 1v2,” which recalls video games not just in its level-like title but its raging hardcore sound, the kind of thing to which you could conceivably play Doom 64.
Much of the music released by YEAR0001 has the feeling of a video game soundtrack, borrowing tropes and textures from various subgenres of electronic music and reconfiguring them. Quiltland’s “Still” has a gently repetitive, bubbling quality, a piece of music that could accompany your explorations of a computer-generated world just as easily as it could dictate the movements of your body in the club. In the same way that the work of Yung Lean or Bladee introduces recognizable elements of American rap music to a new environment, the RIFT One compilation is less rave revivalism than rave re-imagination. This is a blast from another dimension in which the mix never ended, fusing the musical optimism of another age with a colder spirit of experimentalism.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Year0001 | July 24, 2020 | 7.4 | bab7ccb5-29b9-4bfb-9bf2-e69a3d15fc11 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ |
Subsets and Splits