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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album by the Cramps, true believers who recast rockabilly in their own outrageously camp image. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the debut album by the Cramps, true believers who recast rockabilly in their own outrageously camp image. | The Cramps: Songs the Lord Taught Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cramps-songs-the-lord-taught-us/ | Songs the Lord Taught Us | Even the Cramps’ covers were original. In August 1980, in a performance filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the documentary Urgh! A Music War, they played “Tear It Up,” a cover and a classic from their recent debut, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The first “Tear It Up” is a twangy staple of Memphis rockabilly, recorded by Johnny Burnette and his Rock’n Roll Trio in 1956. The Cramps’ version comes from a different planet: It’s loud, fast, raw, so distorted as to be almost psychedelic. There’s no bass, but it feels like there is.
Six-and-a-half feet tall in heels, Lux Interior looms over the crowd, twitching and thrashing. He doesn’t sing so much as shriek, leaning on the original lyric—“C’mon little baby, let’s tear the dancefloor up”—until it becomes “let’s tear this damn place up.” Poison Ivy Rorschach stands stage left, mirthless, possibly chewing gum, and bends the central guitar riff through the song’s moods: fast to start, slower, fast again, then slower still as Lux sucks the head of the microphone into his mouth, gasping rhythmically and sliding his hands over his latexed crotch.
Normal people can’t do this; couldn’t make it look hot; are too chickenshit to try. If you can, well, welcome to the Cramps: They made sexy music for people who didn’t buy mainstream sex appeal, peering back at ’50s rockabilly and R&B through a big, dirty punk magnifying glass. Even Ivy’s name for the band has a sneer to it, a whiff of “female trouble,” sexual frustration, and constraint. She and Lux were obsessed with early rock’n’roll and all the contemporaneous artifacts of lowbrow culture: B-movie sexpoloitation flicks, serial killers, pin-up girls, the type of comic books that represent a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. The things they left to the imagination—werewolves, UFOs, man-sized insects—were more fantastic still. And like John Waters or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Cramps attracted a cult following. Their work, Lux once said, was “a rallying point for certain kinds of people to come together and for certain kinds of people to stay out.” Songs the Lord Taught Us is the point of no return: the foundational document of psychobilly, a loud, theatrical, noticeably unpolished album with the tongue-in-cheek sense of the macabre that became the band’s signature.
There were always four members of the Cramps, but Lux and Ivy’s bond made everything possible. The couple met in California, where a young Erick Purkhiser claimed he’d picked up Kristy Wallace hitchhiking. They hit on a shared love of the New York Dolls, moved in together, and started collecting records, combing junk stores for ’50s doo-wop, R&B, and the sped-up, country-fried sound of white Southern rockabilly bands. “I’ve just always liked obscure things, strange names—and once I found rockabilly I just couldn’t listen to anything else,” Lux told NME. To Lux and Ivy, early rock’n’roll held mystic power. It was visceral, erotic, almost transcendental. “Rockabilly should have inspired something to happen that was so great, so passionate, so sexual that it should have taken us to another place,” argued Lux. That it had instead faded out, been rendered obsolete by the likes of Pink Floyd and the Eagles, seemed unjustifiable.
Lux could sing deep and smooth, garnering comparisons to the similarly shirtless Iggy Pop, but he studied the judders and hiccups of ’50s singers like Carl Perkins, who wrote “Blue Suede Shoes,” and Charlie Feathers, who wrote “Can’t Hardly Stand It,” another song the Cramps would claim for their own. On Songs the Lord Taught Us, he’s wired and fried, hoodling and howling his way through come-ons that sound like threats. “I use your eyeballs for dials on my TV set,” he smirks on the opener, one of the album’s actual originals. Ivy, a self-taught guitarist, modeled her playing on rockabilly icons Link Wray and Duane Eddy, but her tastes ran deeper. “What I think of as the really raunchy rockabilly most people didn’t hear,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times. “It was underground music. The real wild stuff was either obscene or messy-sounding. I mean it’s beautiful, but I don’t see how anyone could have heard it unless they were in the town where that record came out or where that nut lived. The real filth, that’s what we listen to.”
For Lux and Ivy, rock’n’roll peaked at the moment when the word itself connoted sex, vulgarity, and moral panic. They wanted the Cramps’ blend of rockabilly, garage rock, and blues to inspire the same, and they hit on “psychobilly,” the word Johnny Cash used to describe a crazy-looking mismatched Cadillac on 1976’s “One Piece at a Time.” It was intended as a slogan, not the genre tag it became; as Ivy would point out, “There’s nothing new about combining horror with rockabilly.” Much like the Cramps, early rock’n’rollers gobbled up the babes-and-monsters aesthetic, and for every famous song, like Link Wray’s “The Shadow Knows” or Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash,” there were dozens more obscure: Terry Teene’s bone-chilling rendition of “Curse of the Hearse” (B-side: “Pussy Galore”), or Ronnie Cook’s flesh-eating fantasy “The Goo Goo Muck”—better known for a Cramps cover that swaps out the words “looking for a head” in favor of “looking for some head.” Not that the sexual possibilities were a big leap, exactly. “I think that all rockabilly was psychobilly anyway,” surmised Ivy.
The salacious content and crude production of their favorite music convinced Lux and Ivy they could play it, too. The couple were living in Lux’s home state of Ohio when they read about CBGB in a rock magazine and figured they’d found their calling. They moved to New York and started rehearsing cover songs, classics and deep cuts, in the basement of a record store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where Lux recruited his coworker Bryan Gregory as second guitarist. Gregory had never played in a band before, but his gaunt, skull-like visage ensured he looked the part. “Lux sent me an autographed photo of the Cramps—just the three of them—before there actually even was a band,” remembered record producer Miriam Linna, who briefly served as their drummer before she was replaced by Nick Knox of Cleveland protopunks electric eels.
The Cramps arrived later to the scene than the more famous Ramones and Talking Heads, and New York’s rock cognoscenti viewed them with skepticism more appropriate to a weirdo novelty act with a hillbilly fetish. The band happily returned the favor: In their opinion, rockabilly was misunderstood and under-appreciated, and so, by extension, were they. In any case, after a few years of gigging, they still couldn’t seem to land a record deal. One of the few people to take an interest was power-pop icon Alex Chilton, recently of Big Star, who invited the band to his hometown of Memphis to record. Chilton was more familiar with the Cramps’ tastes and, crucially, less interested in influencing them. When the band returned from its first UK tour with an album deal backed by Police manager Miles Copeland’s Illegal Records, they enlisted Chilton as producer and headed to the studio of Memphis’ legendary Sun Records.
The album sessions were difficult. “We didn’t get any respect by the studio. They’d look at us like we weren’t a serious recording act,” Ivy complained. “The mixing was a problem too ’cos we couldn’t get any engineers that could stand to listen to this music. They’d sit there and say ‘How can you listen to this distortion all day?’ And any time Alex wanted to put his hands on the board to move the faders, it was ‘How dare you?’” In defense of Sun’s engineers, Chilton often appeared intoxicated, demanding multiple retakes and agonizing over the mixes for months after. Meanwhile, Bryan Gregory was growing increasingly dissatisfied with his bandmates and struggling with a heroin addiction; he’d soon vanish from their California tour. In the end, the Cramps were unhappy with some of Chilton’s track selections, and Ivy pronounced the final mixes “too muddy,” though even she had to admit that “it definitely had a creepy atmosphere, and that has a certain kind of appeal to it.” The night before the album was set to be mastered, Chilton called up and suggested they re-record the whole thing; Lux and Ivy turned him down.
The Cramps’ music was familiar, elemental: Nick’s pounding toms, Bryan’s bleating rhythm guitar, Ivy’s prickly rockabilly attack, Lux’s impassioned moan. Their references were clear on purpose, a breadcrumb trail for fellow record fanatics to follow: “The Mad Daddy” (a tribute to Lux’s childhood hero, madcap Cleveland radio jockey Pete “Mad Daddy” Myers) was reminscent of their cover of “Surfin’ Bird,” the unhinged garage-rock classic by the Trashmen, who nicked it from doo-wop quartet the Rivingtons, whom the Cramps also covered. Even the band’s new compositions often adapted a lyric or a saxophone part from a film or a classic 45 record—sometimes three or four at a time. Yet to critics, Songs the Lord Taught Us sounded like nothing else. “It unleashes a noise so loud, so uncontrolled, so jittering and shivering with the nightmares of a thousand-and-one restless nights, that one may be moved to run in panic, switch on the lights, and cower in the nearest closet,” wrote Robot A. Hull for Creem. “These guys play all this trash so deadpan you feel like an anthropologist who’s found an otherworldly culture that’s been developing rock & roll along parallel musical lines but utterly divergent social ones,” quipped Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone.
There are more covers on Songs: Jimmy Stewart’s “Rock on the Moon,” Dwight Pullen’s “Sunglasses After Dark,” the Sonics’ “Strychnine,” Little Willie John’s “Fever,” and a generous quote of Dale Hawkins’ “Tornado” on “What’s Behind the Mask?”—but the other best parts of the Cramps were made-up. “I was a teenage werewolf/Braces on my fangs,” shudders Lux in the opening lines of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” reveling in the tawdry, self-evidently ridiculous premise of a 1957 B-movie horror film. Ivy’s surfy melody is sharp enough to sting; Gregory’s second guitar buzzes like a downed wire. The whole band kicks up at the bridge, growling and Link-Wray-rumbling through a distorted blues that’s almost loud enough to conceal the howls. As in the movie, the lupine affliction is a simple metaphor for puberty, but the message arrives with real outsider pathos—which Lux, then in his mid-30s, still plays up for maximum outrageousness: “All my teachers thought/It was growing pain, oh no no/Somebody stop this pain!”
On the frantic highlight “Zombie Dance,” Lux’s arch, clipped vocal sounds a little like David Byrne (the latter co-wrote “Psycho Killer,” the former wrote John Wayne Gacy directly). A song called “Zombie Dance” feels like a gag, same as the “Monster Mash,” and it is, except zombies can’t dance: “They do the swim face-down/Down at the zombie pool!” But Cramps songs are hardly ever just jokes, and these stiff-bodied buzzkills aren’t just a send-up of humorless New York hipsters either. Consider another pun, the one that sounds oddly like a moral judgement: “The kind of life they choose/Ain’t life at all.” It’s language more often used to condemn drug fiends or sexual deviants; here in Zombieland, the Cramps flip it on its head. The zombie dance is the whole wide straight world, the uptight moralizers who don’t know how to let loose, the tragedy of a life lived like you’re already undead.
With the Cramps, it’s less about the shock value than the thrill of discovery, less about the pruriency of the interests than the joy of pursuing them. It’s all there in “Garbageman,” the album’s rudest and sludgiest song and maybe its best. With the sly, bluesy innuendo of Muddy Waters’ “Garbage Man,” a shout-out to “Louie Louie,” and a gnarly sounding toilet flush, the Cramps simultaneously declare allegiance to rock’n’roll and lay out a manifesto for mutant music. “Do you want the real thing or are you just talkin’?” Lux jeers. Against two grinding guitars and Nick Knox’s relentless pounding, his breathless, fourth-wall-breaking verse captures the heart of its own appeal:
Yeah, it’s just what you need
When you’re down in the dumps
One half hillbilly
And one half punk
Eight long legs and one big mouth
The hottest thing from the North
To come out of the South
Do you understand?
Do you understand? Garbage is the best stuff we’ve got. “To us it isn’t garbage,” Lux would insist. “To us it’s the center of what life’s all about.” By now, the Cramps’ take on vintage rock’n’roll is vintage in its own right, but it’s still electrifying, still outré, still underground. It’s the reason their legacy lives in both directions: backwards with the shine they brought to obscure ’50s artists collected on fan compilations like Songs the Cramps Taught Us, and forwards in the prolific career of Bryan Gregory’s eventual replacement Kid Congo Powers and the many psychobilly-styled bands in the U.S., Britain, and all around the world, particularly Mexico and Latin America. Their influence feels present, too, in other power duos whose music only touches on psychobilly yet still hits the same notes: the Raveonettes’ rainy, reverb-slicked bubblegum; the White Stripes’ professionally refurbished, bass-less electric blues; Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s wild-eyed swamp kitsch.
The most important thing about the Cramps: They didn’t play the sideshow. When Songs the Lord Taught Us is campy, exaggerated, and lewd, it’s in the spirit of carnival, the realm of real freaks. It’s a perfect album for Halloween, but it’s true all year: You can gather up the detritus of this rotten culture and invert it, turn it into something that’s both endlessly familiar and terrifyingly new.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | IRS | October 25, 2020 | 8.7 | babf78e8-5e5d-49c3-a405-39c277f35929 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Moody synth-poppers from Philly, whose contributors include members of Xiu Xiu and Prurient, make an impressive full-length debut. | Moody synth-poppers from Philly, whose contributors include members of Xiu Xiu and Prurient, make an impressive full-length debut. | Cold Cave: Love Comes Close | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13383-love-comes-close/ | Love Comes Close | If vampires are as cool as I'm told they are right now, Cold Cave would've cleaned up at the Teen Choice Awards this year. Consider: Dark, synth-splashed pop songs with enough of an industrial bent to validate any flashbacks you might be having of watching Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie stalk the club for fresh meat in The Hunger. And though pack leader Wesley Eisold (also known for his work in the hardcore outfit Give Up the Ghost) does have the spooky Peter Murphy vocal thing down pat, Cold Cave sound more realized than the one-off pleasure project they look like on paper. By enlisting noise goblin Ian Dominick Fernow (Prurient) and Xiu Xiu-graduate Caralee McElroy to pitch in, their full-length debut*, Love Comes Close*, manages to stand out as a successful collaborative effort with a clear sense of purpose.
Synth-pop, post punk, new wave, atmospheric industrial-- all these references, which came and went and were fashionable again a half-decade ago, somehow manage to feel fresh here. It's probably because the songs on Love Comes Close are consistently catchy and well constructed-- once you have that down, genre concerns become secondary. Still, these are some awfully icy landscapes, and Cold Cave do have a way with mood. Take, for instance, opener "Cebe and Me", which exhibits a pulsing, Ambien-addled dry cold that threatens to wear thin if over-exercised. But this track turns out to be an entry-level teaser, as album highlight "Love Comes Close" chimes in right on time, an inspired, bittersweet New Order-style dance-pop track that's as morose as it is curiously uplifting, constantly refreshing itself on that earworm of a guitar hook. From here on out, Love evens out, outfitting those creepy, dead-eyed synthetics in more pop-friendly garb.
The presence of Fernow is apparent and welcome, seasoning the Human League pop pulse with big, bright slices of Throbbing Gristle abrasion on cuts like "Heaven Was Full" and "Cebe and Me". Cold Cave have the chops to be a depraved batch of noise warriors with a Blade Runner fetish, but I'm guessing that those crystalline new wave hooks they're capable of were just too juicy to ignore. There's an overwhelmingly disaffected quality to this music, but in the sense that even the darkest parts have been treated with Cheer® Dark Colorguard®. So maybe it's McElroy's vocal contributions that are to credit, sweetening dance-ready tracks like "Life Magazine" and the splendid "The Trees Grew Emotions and Died" (both of which sound much like two very reined-in Crystal Castles singles).
But Eisold proves to be the noble, well-versed synth-Svengali of the whole operation, his devilish baritone channeling the vocal reticence of Ian Curtis one moment and the yearning of the National's Matt Berninger the next. True, he sometimes allows the lyrical content to wade a bit too far into chic discontentment for some ("A synthetic world without end," interjects McElroy on the Eastern Euro disco joint "Youth and Lust", "sheds a tear of plastic deception"), but Love Comes Close is all about that world anyway and makes no apologies, so you might as well just roll with it. Besides, most of the pretenses presented here can't overshadow the sexy fun of a little black lipstick on the collar. Twilight fans, let's cut the shit: throw on a little Cold Cave and get down to business already. | 2009-08-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-08-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Heartworm | August 26, 2009 | 7.6 | bac7c14a-d8cc-4de2-8e63-e1e7c2e88e0b | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Multimedia artist and turntablist Philip Jeck creates loops from worn vinyl, locating passages in old records that others don't hear; with Sand, his eighth album, he manages to do his work in large part from edits of live performances. | Multimedia artist and turntablist Philip Jeck creates loops from worn vinyl, locating passages in old records that others don't hear; with Sand, his eighth album, he manages to do his work in large part from edits of live performances. | Philip Jeck: Sand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12052-sand/ | Sand | One way to learn about a culture is to retrieve and study what it throws away. The multimedia artist and turntablist Philip Jeck, then, is an excavator. He finds worn vinyl records, tinkers with their surfaces, then plays them on any number of old, sturdy turntables, allowing their layers and loops to build and fall while he folds in bits of keyboard or other effects. Jeck hears things in those old records that others don't hear-- a short, banal passage might be fed through a pedal just so to create a startling new sound, or a saccharine bit of Disneyfied strings might bubble up from a dark cloud of overpowering surface noise. He takes old, discarded junk and sends it back to us like a reflection.
Sand is Jeck's eighth solo album and, like many of its predecessors, it's constructed in large part from edits of live performances. He dedicates it to his late mother, and there's a famous quote inside from Emily Dickinson about death, so it's about mortality on some level. I also hear Sand as a political record, because of the combination of the album's title (a possible allusion to the Middle East) and the prominent use of the patriotically charged "fanfare" motif in three tracks. "Fanfares", "Fanfares Forward", and "Fanfares Over" are the glue that holds the record together. An element in each is Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man", which Copland composed in 1942 as part of series that commissioned new works to uplift a nation at war. "Fanfares" takes a short segment of the original, a whoosh of string and horns all warbly and tumbling over itself, adds bits of delay and noise, and gradually folds the various elements into a constantly shifting drone of overlapping loops.
It's a powerful track because it triggers so many feelings simultaneously. On one level, the sterling pomp of the "fanfare" is the institution you want desperately to believe in. It's Cub Scouts learning how to fold the flag, the winner's circle at the Olympics, a moon landing-- music designed to make the heart swell. But Jeck, through the use of surface noise, processing, and editing, dips the sentiment into the acid bath of reality. Sometimes, the passages he samples are assembled to sound like "Taps". Indeed, you can feel something ending when you listen to "Fanfares", a way of life crumbling, some sort of dream slipping away. It's easy to be swept along by the mournful horns, but the constant sense that something is wrong pervades. "Fanfares Forward" shoves the whole burning city of the earlier track underwater, slowing things down and drowning it in an aquatic space with the high-end rolled off. And the closing "Fanfares Over" begins with a broken, dubbed-out calliope, returns to the main theme, and then explodes the whole thing in a perpetual flange filter that feels like strafing jet fighters. These are terrifically complex and layered pieces that are among Jeck's best.
Unlike parts of Stoke and 7, there's never a moment here where you are unsure that you are listening to turntables. Beyond the "fanfare" pieces, Jeck finds passages of twinkling, almost sentimental beauty lifted from records of orchestral works ("Chime Again") and infuses them with poignancy through layering and repetition. He also takes bits of indeterminate sound and stretches them into thin, eerie drones that almost sound like a field recording ("Shining"). You could say that these other tracks find Jeck in his classic mode. On a purely sonic level, however, Sand isn't his most appealing album. It's packed with mid-range information and sometimes comes over as blaring, which might suit the material but can be a little tiring to listen to. Still, in terms of its composition and the power of the music, Jeck continues to function at a high level, and he seems to have stepped up his game in terms of emotional complexity. Throughout Sand you can hear opposing forces-- grandeur and loss, beauty and ugliness, clarity and ambiguity-- bumping against each other, and the tension makes for some seriously rich listening. | 2008-08-06T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-08-06T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | August 6, 2008 | 7.8 | bad2eba7-2316-45b5-b097-3fec039ddc4f | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Another competent effort from the former twee band, now practitioners of Coldplay-like dramatic ballads. | Another competent effort from the former twee band, now practitioners of Coldplay-like dramatic ballads. | Snow Patrol: Eyes Open | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9018-eyes-open/ | Eyes Open | Earlier this month, Snow Patrol debuted at the top of the UK album chart with their fourth full-length, Eyes Open. Glasgow's finest Zippo-rockers held the top spot as if consoling a lover, fending off Pearl Jam before givin' it away to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Led by singer/guitarist Gary Lightbody, Snow Patrol first went major with 2004's Final Straw, which led to the huge UK top five single "Run" and a slot opening for Ireland's most overrated Nobel Peace Prize nominee (and friends). The quintet had come a long way from their roughshod early recordings for indie label Jeepster-- and more importantly, they were better.
If Eyes Open lacks the vivacity of its breakthrough predecessor, it remains an assured example of a band still paying more than lip service to the notion of rock music as a vital pop form. On an album of sparks and explosions, Lightbody signals his world-stopping ambitions: "For once I want to be the car crash/ And not just another traffic jam." Lyrically, Lightbody continues to be transfixed by the personal. His specialty is the Wile E. Coyote phase of new love-- the stomach-fluttering poignancy of stepping off that happy cliff and trying not to look down-- and he details it with the emotional acuity of his hero, Lou Barlow. This time Snow Patrol's bustling power-pop sounds almost as close to the 1990s radio fodder of the Gin Blossoms as to Sebadoh's antisocial din, but strings, finely layered guitars, and even a choir help the band achieve its chosen mood: "We need to feel breathless with love," Lightbody prescribes in falsetto.
Opener "You're All I Have" sets the chugging pace with simple, subtle lyrics and oohing background vocals. There's a pleasingly self-deluded sophistry in a chorus like, "I have no fear/ Because you are all that I have." The more muscular second track, "Hands Open", begs for feedback-painted forgiveness-- "It's hard to argue when you won't stop making sense"-- with an equally radio-friendly hook. In a subdued moment you'll either love or hate, Lightbody namedrops your 50-state overlord, Sufjan Stevens. Call me insufficiently elitist, but I find power in the idea of tens of thousands of young listeners discovering a wider musical world thanks to one tightly packed pop song. (And frankly, anyone bugged by this should have found new ways to feel superior by now.)
At its aching best, Eyes Open takes the style of Final Straw to its shiny, populist conclusion-- not that it will completely free the band of comparisons to similarly anthemic mediocrities like Keane. Massive ballad "Chasing Cars" is a bland follow-up to "Run", with uncharacteristic platitudes rather than the original's bare drama; "Set the Fire to the Third Bar" features Martha Wainwright's elfin vocals but gets overwhelmed by its own deadly seriousness. Still, the skywalking heartburst of "Beginning to Get to Me" and music-box melancholy of "You Could Be Happy" at least atone somewhat. If it's hard to imagine the name "Suff-yawn" being sung in arenas, try imagining a band that once called itself Polar Bear somehow playing there. | 2006-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | May 22, 2006 | 6.6 | bad3cbf0-6e44-4dd0-8ab0-72fe6ee5c869 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On the first album of a four-part series, the Venezuelan-born, Barcelona-based artist offers her most accessible music to date, channeling her signature sounds into sharply focused avant-pop. | On the first album of a four-part series, the Venezuelan-born, Barcelona-based artist offers her most accessible music to date, channeling her signature sounds into sharply focused avant-pop. | Arca: KiCk i | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arca-kick-i/ | KiCk i | In the overlapping spheres of pop and electronic music—spaces long populated by queer artists moving beyond narrow preconceptions of gender identity—Arca has become one of the most visible figures exploring what it means to transition in public. On KiCk i, the first in a proposed series of four albums, she navigates the spaces in between worlds, languages, genres, and genders. Where her previous releases often felt rooted in melancholy and discomfort, emotions that spilled forth as operatic vocals on 2017’s Arca, KiCk i radiates with self-possessed joy. It contains her most accessible music to date, scooping up her glitchy, slippery textures and chiseling them into hard definition. It’s pop, it’s avant-garde. It’s both and it’s neither.
Opening track “Nonbinary” presents Alejandra Ghersi at her most direct and pop-primed. She’s fierce, self-possessed, in it for the thrill: “I don’t give a fuck what you think/You don’t know me—you might owe me,” she purrs, tasting every syllable. Over clanging pipework and videogame machine guns, she acts out the perverse thrill of doing whatever you want and knowing that someone hates you for it: “What a treat it is to be nonbinary, ma chérie, tee-hee-hee—bitch!”
With each track, Arca applies a different costume—a different skin, even—moving through effervescent electro pop on “Time,” which could be the beginning of a Robyn ballad, and into experimental club rhythms, steamy torch songs, and her own ragged, industrial take on the reggaetón that she encountered as a kid in Caracas. On “KLK,” she and co-producer Cardopusher add extra ballast to a pounding reggaetón production with the growl of the furruco bass drum, a Venezuelan folk instrument that Ghersi learned at school. Elsewhere, the electronic sounds feel familiar enough from the abstract universe of Arca—noises that have no real-world index, but make you think of stuff like latex and metal, volcanic rocks and collapsing buildings—but each element has been sharpened and accentuated.
More than on previous records, Arca bends her voice into multiple shapes and characters. The operatic mode we’ve heard from her before returns on the romantic closer, “No Queda Nada,” and “Calor,” a shuddering love song for her partner: “Eres el dueño de todo mi ser” (“You’re the owner of my whole being”). On “Mequetrefe,” the bashed-up skeleton of a reggaetón rhythm offers an unstable base for her processed voice, which crumbles into metal shards as she imagines herself as a head-turning woman on the hunt for her man: “Ella no toma taxi/Que la vean/Que la vean en las calles” (“She doesn’t take a taxi/Let them see her/Let them see her on the streets”). “Rip the Slit” is also fueled by a combination of shredded reggaetón and treated vocals, this time pitched up to helium-femme proportions.
In addition to Arca’s voices, three guest singers appear, while SOPHIE lends production and voice on “La Chíqui.” Shygirl casts a cold glance over “Watch,” dismissing the night’s options in a world-weary Londoner’s monotone: “No feelings, no exclusive.” It doesn’t take much to flip Rosalía’s flamenco tones into something approaching sheer glossolalia, and on “KLK” the bare-bones lyrics are simply a way to generate sound through the Catalan singer’s quivering soprano as she repeats short, scrappy phrases: “Qué es lo que tú crees?” (“What do you think it is?”) and “Bendecida, bendecida” (“Blessed, blessed”).
Lacking much of a hook (save for a loop of the Dominican slang phrase “Que lo que”), “KLK” feels more like a studio experiment than a pop song, despite the A-list guest singer. Perhaps that’s the point. Björk appears, singing in Spanish, on “Afterwards,” underscoring the extent to which KiCk i is inspired by the Icelandic musician’s ’90s albums, from the sound—cutting-edge club music combined with pop-facing vocals—to the cyborg cover art, which would surely get the nod from Homogenic art director Alexander McQueen. What Björk once brought to the table, though, was songwriting—image-rich, personal, laden with memorable hooks and emotional landscapes. “Afterwards” has a touch of that (the lyrics, lines from a poem by Spanish modernist Antonio Machado, are about a dream where “golden bees” make honey “inside my heart”) but the duet slips away like sand between their fingers, never settling on a distinct melody; the song feels restless and unresolved.
The lack of proper songs, for want of a better term, is a mystery. There have never been so many lyrics on an Arca album before, yet, “Nonbinary” aside, they’re mainly used as textural elements rather than vehicles for ideas or stories. This is a shame, as Arca is known for the sharpness and wit she wields in two languages—another duality unpacked on KiCk i, as she flips between English and Spanish. In a recent interview, she made the point that language is prone to “glitches,” misunderstandings that arise when people disagree on the meaning of a given word. “You can have two people arguing about identity politics and gender,” she said, “screaming at each other with both of their faces red, thinking that they’re right.” But the inevitable “glitch” is to be welcomed as a kind of productive dissonance, she added, “because it favors a life that is more unexpected, vibrant and full of possibility. Who doesn’t want that?”
Arca’s music has always incorporated various kinds of glitches, conceptual as much as technological, making electronic ruptures and spasms into her signature sound. Perhaps the same suspicion that meaning is never fixed or certain helps to explain Ghersi’s treatment of voices throughout, as they flicker like radio static, failing to communicate. That will be disappointing for those who were expecting a star-studded pop-crossover album on a par with her guests’ best work. Still, compared to the rest of Arca’s catalogue—including the forbidding twists and turns of @@@@@, the hour-long mixtape from earlier this year—KiCk i marks not only a giant leap towards a bigger audience, but one taken on her own terms.
As she put it in another interview, KiCk i can also be heard as a rallying cry, inviting listeners “to recognize the fact that there’s an alien inside of each of us.” She sets her own inner alien free on the album cover and in other recent images, where she appears almost naked, strapped into prosthetic claws and stilts, or six-breasted, attached to inscrutable devices—a being of her own creation, beyond traditional binaries, part human and part machine. Using the camera and her body to reinvent herself for our (and her) pleasure, Arca joins a long line of musical chameleons. The emancipatory promise of Arca’s project—a world beyond binaries, categories, and convention itself—remains thrilling, even when her tottering steps don’t quite reach that wished-for horizon.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Correction: A previous version of this review implied that Björk wrote the lyrics to “Afterwards.” It is been updated to reflect the lyrics were written by the poet Antonio Machado. | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | XL | June 30, 2020 | 7.5 | bad89650-1ce2-4e6e-a8d9-495572d76377 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The Soundcloud rapper’s latest album offers a natural point of entry to his gripping aesthetic, distilling his virtuosity in a series of distinct, yet successful cuts. | The Soundcloud rapper’s latest album offers a natural point of entry to his gripping aesthetic, distilling his virtuosity in a series of distinct, yet successful cuts. | WiFiGawd: Chain of Command | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wifigawd-chain-of-command/ | Chain of Command | WifiGawd uses digital portals to manifest in different regions, tripping through time and space like a rap game Bill & Ted. Raised in Washington D.C.’s Rasta community on profound amounts of reggae and classic New York hip-hop, Wifi doesn’t discriminate musically. Instead, he funnels familiar elements from all of rap’s historically powerhouse regions into his own psychedelic world. In this way, WifiGawd represents a vision of post-region rap that never really happened. In an era of algorithmic gatekeepers, he feels like a maverick.
To the uninitiated, the scope of WifiGawd’s body of work might seem daunting. He’s been recording prolifically since the mid-2010s, building a phenomenal collection of hectic tapes that rumble and surge like they were forged during hypnotic all-nighters in the studio. Because he moves so seamlessly between styles, it’s tough to single out any WifiGawd song as representative of his ethos. His new album Chain of Command offers a natural point of entry, distilling what makes Wifi such a gripping virtuoso in 11 distinct but successful cuts. The fact that it’s his first album to be pressed on vinyl solidifies the feeling that this is the deepest version of WifiGawd to date.
Though in the past he has often favored operating with a single producer per project, here Wifi assembles a crack team of collaborators. The result is one of the strongest batch of beats boasted by an underground rap record in recent memory. Wifi favors dense soundscapes and chaotic collages, all presented in a lo-fi, decayed manner. The intro of Chain of Command, co-produced by Wifi and Maryland’s AMAL, is built around what sounds like the iconic riff from the Isley Brothers’ version of “Summer Breeze,” with splashes of piano keys and orchestral stabs filling out the sound. Appearing later in the album, the Tyris White-produced “365” features buzzing synths and sampled strings; it feels like a classic West Coast beat that’s been left out to bake under a blood-orange sun.
WifiGawd might have a highly tuned ear for beats, but his real gift is synthesizing his performance to the music. Finding comfort deep in the mix, his voice can sound dank and translucent, like you’re spacing out at the end of a party and he’s speaking to you from the opposite corner of the room. But while he might seem content loitering in the background of his own songs, Wifi is one of the most innovative rappers to come out of the Soundcloud generation. There is the bugged-out “4 My Skaters,” where he forms part of the percussion by rapping with a steady pulse, managing to find time to talk about his life-long crush on Nia Long and explain the benefits of Covid-19 lockdowns to a criminal. On “Fuck The Law,” he transforms into a spectral presence, floating gently above a cheesy sax line.
A confirmed disciple of Kid Cudi, Wifi is versatile with his melodies. On the beautiful and stirring “Kawasaki,” he switches from swagger rapping to bled-dry singing, making the transition feel seamless. Then there’s the romantic and strangely affecting “Slide Thru,” where a laidback WifiGawd sounds like he’s cruising towards a sunset in a convertible sports car, the ringing of a cell phone highlighting the urge he has to speak to his sweetheart.
The topics are familiar, but WifiGawd’s frequently cracked writing is solidly funny. On two-minute flexing classic “God of War,” he depicts a neighborhood tear-up by threatening to turn the block into a warzone and send his enemies to Lucifer—“Shout out to the cell/If you try to cross ‘em I’mma send yo’ ass to Hell”—before bigging up his propensity for making merry: “I’m the big dog/Step into the party everybody blast off.” It’s simple stuff, but presented with compelling confidence, sardonic charm, and zero cliché.
The only disappointment here is that there’s no track where WifiGawd opens his chest and spits full throttle like we know he can. A song like this would be have completed his quest to show every side of himself, and reasserted the feeling that Chain of Command is the jewel in the baseball cap. That omission notwithstanding, the collection of songs here weave together like rich fabric, forming an expert piece of underground rap. He gives you a glimpse of his indelible presence before jetting off into the next otherworldly realm. | 2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | POW | February 24, 2022 | 7.7 | badde430-c11b-474e-8890-321c228a48e3 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Todd Rundgren’s new album seeks to represent him in a holistic light. It’s a genre-spanning collection that finds him pairing with artists new and old—Robyn, Trent Reznor, and Daryl Hall among them. | Todd Rundgren’s new album seeks to represent him in a holistic light. It’s a genre-spanning collection that finds him pairing with artists new and old—Robyn, Trent Reznor, and Daryl Hall among them. | Todd Rundgren: White Knight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23123-white-knight/ | White Knight | Who are Todd Rundgren’s peers? While his fellow artists from the classic rock era have long solidified and embraced their legacy, Rundgren remains elusive. As a producer, he assisted the evolving sounds of the 1970s’ most innovative acts (New York Dolls, Patti Smith, XTC), but he was equally involved in its more commercial moments (Meat Loaf, Hall and Oates, Grand Funk Railroad). As a songwriter, he gave us some of the era’s most earnest love songs and its most confounding piss-takes—several defining albums and many obscure left-turns. In recent years, Rundgren has remained gloriously all over the place. He’ll follow familiar routes, like making a trad-blues covers album or performing a canonical record on tour. But he’ll also run in stranger directions, like dabbling in EDM, acid house, and remixes—all while working at a pace that makes Neil Young look refined by comparison.
Rundgren’s latest album seeks to represent him in a more holistic, reflective light. White Knight is a genre-spanning collection that finds him pairing up with artists new and old to highlight his myriad gifts and to demonstrate the reach of his influence. But even if White Knight makes for Rundgren’s most marketable album in ages, it’s characterized by the cozy, homemade sound that’s defined all his work since 2004’s Liars. This is not the music of an artist attempting to prove himself to a new audience or to reacquaint himself with old fans. Instead, it’s the sound of one of music’s most restless listeners inviting others into the world he built—playing off them like instruments at his disposal.
The album’s greatest moments are often its simplest. Robyn provides lead vocals on “That Could Have Been Me,” and their connection is immediately apparent. Together, they focus on well-worn territory—lonely nights, broken hearts, empty beds—and embellish them with a sadness that feels distinctly their own. Fellow Philadelphian Daryl Hall shows up on “Chance for Us,” and the two pal around over an infectious disco beat, leading to a saxophone solo that feels both inevitable and triumphant. Other tracks put the spotlight on Rundgren’s songwriting. The chugging, Cheap Trickisms of “Let’s Do This” elicit a warm rush of familiarity, while “Fiction” breezes along with stuttering sci-fi synths. Like any of Rundgren’s best-loved work, *White Knight *is full of pop gems beneath its conceptual framework.
The album’s relaxed charm makes it an easy, endearing listen, but some of its collaborations don’t transcend their novelty. While it’s easy to see what Trent Reznor loves about Rundgren’s music, their track “Deaf Ears” feels disappointingly flat. Reznor and Atticus Ross’ trademark drones fail to spark Rundgren’s imagination, inspiring lyrics that do little more than verbalize the dystopian atmosphere of the music (“We enact The Hunger Games/It’s raining ashes”). The Donald Fagen-assisted “Tin Foil Hat” is a well-meaning protest song, but its surface-level jabs feel like punching down from two of the ’70s’ sharpest songwriters. “He’s writing checks to his accusers/With those tiny little hands,” Fagen sings, and even he sounds exhausted by the futility of these kinds of jokes.
Of course, Rundgren is nothing if not self-aware, and throughout White Knight, he’s quick to laugh at himself. In the faux-Prince funk of “Buy My T,” Rundgren admits to the increasing negligibility of album sales, hawking his own merchandise to stay afloat on tour. Even funnier is “Look at Me,” a mid-album interlude that finds Rundgren barking rhymes with a hypeman who introduces him as “M.C. T.O.D.D.” “I’m a spectacle of myself,” Rundgren shouts to a roaring crowd, “I’m electrical as all hell.” It sounds like his critique of aging artists trying to keep up with the times—demanding their audience view them with the same reverence they did back in the day. Or maybe it’s totally sincere, a testament to his individuality in an industry that demands artists choose a lane and stay in it. Either way, it’s classic Rundgren: weird, charming, and dotted with his favorite kind of jokes—the kind that only he’s in on. | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cleopatra | May 10, 2017 | 6.6 | bae7a9e4-ce66-471a-806b-d3c48bb0d46e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The debut full-length from the celebrated filmmaker collages genres with abstract ambition, but it often lands with unnerving headiness. | The debut full-length from the celebrated filmmaker collages genres with abstract ambition, but it often lands with unnerving headiness. | Terence Etc.: V O R T E X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terrence-etc-vortex/ | V O R T E X | Terence Nance is genre non-compliant. The writer, artist, filmmaker, and musician from Dallas, Texas is most celebrated for his Sundance-premiered film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and the HBO television series Random Acts of Flyness, stream-of-consciousness tragicomedies that subvert and satirize contemporary Black American narratives. On his debut full-length album V O R T E X, mirror-eyed soul and R&B experiments abound, embracing the “consistency of change” to achieve catharsis.
The album showcases over 10 years of epic compositional structuring with the help of co-writers and producers, including Nance’s brother Djore, Solomon Dorsey, Nick Hakim, and Nelson Bandela. Over 11 tracks, indie folk, pop, hip-hop, orchestral, and musical theater elements fluctuate against an undercurrent of funk, soul, and R&B. Nance, who performs as Terence, Etc., successfully plugs listeners into a circulatory system of textured stories about relationships, but the record is often intentionally cerebral and unnerving—at times only understood by its creator.
The third track, “In Contemplation of Clair’s Scent,” is where Terence, Etc. feels most harmonious. The ballad skips into focus across hot pavement, a mise-en-scène composed of brass horns, drumline percussion, and a winding electric guitar, blending 1970s Latin jazz and Afrobeats in celebration of Black femininity. After a glorious eruption of samba, the track’s pulse slows in reflection. Nance modulates his vocals, singing, rapping, manipulating his pitch, and sprinkling in Auto-Tune in reflection of his multiplicity. “She brighter than the darkest dawn/So I found the spot where my body born/Found the spot that I suckled on,” he intones, meditating on his relationship to the feminine. Before long, this heady energy shifts into a groove, and then harpist Brandee Younger swaddles us into a heartbreak lullaby.
Terence’s precise vocal performance acts as a lighthouse, guiding tracks with somber themes and oracular production. Emmy Award-winning actor Reg E. Cathey offers a gravelly spoken interlude to preface the metallic, pattering rain driving the elegy “Stay.” This reflection on the emasculation of unrequited love is a bitter concession, as Nance weeps: “The past too long/And the future’s/Already gone/With no children.” The string arrangement on this track anxiously punctuates each acerbic cry, flowing into the indie meltaway track “Infinince or Infinity?” Synths, strings, and horns glide until a glitch of bright horns and electric guitar reveals Nance’s shadow side in the lyrics: “Inconvenient I know it sounds glum/I’m easier to dream about than I am to love.”
The latter half of this album follows the liquid mechanic laws of its namesake. A vortex describes fluid rotating around a center of gravity, its particles slowly decreasing in size, causing the angular movement to speed up and expel matter. Musically, that means the melodrama runs stale after “Sanity Envy,” and it’s hard to stay with Terence, Etc. in what follows. The themes are relatable, but his inner monologue is abstract, the strings are dizzying, and the scream-singing is discordant. The experience revels in abstraction, echoing the “whole war inside of [his] head” described in “I Miss Things I Never Had.”
Beauty lies in the eye of the V O R T E X: its stunning production buoys the spirit of its sobering lyrical contents. Terence Etc. thinks in highly detailed cinematic terms, building complex worlds from experiential and hopeful collisions. His full-length musical debut is a cleansing mechanism, casting the weight of sparse emotions and memories to the sea, forever in flux and in motion. Even as it intends to strike a balance, the concentrated, maximalist components require a sense of patience and submission. Art aficionados will stay along for the ride, but casual listeners may be stranded, overstimulated, and at Nance’s mercy. | 2022-08-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Brainfeeder | August 24, 2022 | 7 | bae7ff9e-5b5a-4070-adf8-eca02544b839 | Tatiana Lee Rodriguez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tatiana-lee rodriguez/ | |
Will Oldham’s first collection of new songs as Bonnie “Prince” Billy in several years focuses on simple pleasures and persistence. | Will Oldham’s first collection of new songs as Bonnie “Prince” Billy in several years focuses on simple pleasures and persistence. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: I Made a Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonnie-prince-billy-i-made-a-place/ | I Made a Place | On January 13, 2018, an emergency alert lit up phones throughout Hawaii, warning of a ballistic missile approaching the island. “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER,” it read. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Among the recipients were Will and Elsa Hansen Oldham, who had recently arrived at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park as artists-in-residence and who were suddenly preparing to spend their last moments together. Calmly, the couple ate some THC-infused blueberries that they had been gifted by a friend—why let them go to waste?—and Will began writing a whimsical new song to calm his nerves. “When life is tough and very scary,” it went, “My wife and I/We chomp a blueberry.” By the end of the song he distilled its message to just three words: “We’ll be fine.”
And so they were. About forty minutes after the alert was sent, it was revoked; a result of human error. Life went on. When the Oldhams returned home to Louisville, Kentucky, Oldham painted his entire body blue and shot a video for “Blueberry Jam,” a song whose giggly absurdity in the face of death turned out to be the only rational response. It was not the only thing he wrote during his time in Hawaii, but for the time being it was all he felt comfortable sharing. A full album was coming together—his first official collection of new Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs since 2011’s Wolfroy Goes to Town—but he had mixed feelings. With a deep hatred toward streaming services and the internet’s infinite content scroll, he described his reluctance toward releasing new original music like a parent leaving a teenager at a party. It felt irresponsible.
Now that he’s released it, I Made a Place gives insight into his trepidation. It’s careful, contemplative music. But that doesn’t mean it’s unguarded. While peers and collaborators like Bill Callahan and Phil Elverum have evolved toward songwriting that lays bare their most primal worries and beliefs, Oldham has only burrowed deeper into life’s mysteries. His work remains defined by its complexity, as many of these 13 songs take the form of advice delivered like riddles. “Put your body on and get a new memory box,” goes the chorus of its opening song. “I got the eye of the squid/It ain’t not there, it’s just hid,” is another. Early in his career, Oldham’s merging of traditional folk music with his willfully obscure persona felt like the epitome of indie dedication: his invite-only universe away from the status quo. In 2019 it feels arguably even more anachronistic.
The band he assembled for these songs helps bring him down to earth. The always-riveting duo of singer-songwriter Joan Shelley and guitarist Nathan Salsburg offer a soothing counterpoint, like concerned friends during a bad trip. Take “You Know the One,” an autumnal highlight, where he sings about devotion to “the one” that could be either spiritual or romantic (“Complete transfiguration is what the one is bound to bring”). Shelley’s soft, resolute harmonies and Salsburg’s trilling riffs expose the warmth in these words—what true connection feels like. The darker, second half of the record is buoyed by Jacob Duncan’s clarinet and saxophone, making it pleasantly difficult to tell where one song ends and the next begins.
The lived-in sound of the record belies how different some of this music is for Oldham. “Look Backward On Your Future, Look Forward To Your Past” is a song unlike anything in his deep catalog, a morality tale that seems to take inspiration from both John Prine and William Faulkner. You don’t expect a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end from Oldham’s songwriting (even the song title, repeated throughout the record, seems to fight against this formality). But with his lively solo acoustic delivery, he makes it feel as natural as a country standard. Often his writing is best at its simplest. “Dream Awhile,” which shares a melody with “Triumph of Will” from his 2013 self-titled release, prescribes combating stress with a good night’s sleep, a jar of cookies, and a loved one to spoon. It is the most settled Oldham’s work has ever sounded.
So while “Blueberry Jam” doesn’t actually appear on the record, its themes of simple pleasures and persistence echo through the music. In the last few years, Oldham became a father, and he has noted how these songs were the first that his daughter heard. His message of hope to the next generation rings clearest in “Building a Fire,” a psalm-like ballad that closes the record. His best work in this style includes some of his barest love songs—say, “I Gave You” or “I Called You Back”—but this one follows a stranger path through the darkness. “Yesterday was a lark/And today is a bear,” he sings. “Tomorrow is an octopus/You can look for me there.” It’s a funny send-off to one of Oldham’s most complicated albums, but it’s also poignant in its way. If you’re left confused or disoriented, that’s exactly Oldham’s point. Welcome, he seems to say, we’ve been waiting for you.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City / Palace | November 15, 2019 | 7.1 | bae94a99-ca22-4b9d-9e48-fbfd83540f3e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Blending misty ambience with introspective folk songwriting, the Los Angeles artist’s full-length debut is less about specifics than the way it all smears together. | Blending misty ambience with introspective folk songwriting, the Los Angeles artist’s full-length debut is less about specifics than the way it all smears together. | Skullcrusher: Quiet the Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skullcrusher-quiet-the-room/ | Quiet the Room | With just two EPs and a couple standalone singles, Helen Ballentine, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who records as Skullcrusher, has honed in on a sound that’s both familiar and bracingly distinctive. The market for vulnerable, downtempo acoustic music is a crowded one, but with her focus on the ambient side of folk—songs as haunted whispers, emphasizing texture over structure—Ballentine has carved out her own dusky niche. Shades of Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Phil Elverum, and Phoebe Bridgers exist not within some anxiety of influence, but as benevolent force ghosts: a comfortable and comforting presence on the periphery. Ballentine is engaged with this constellation of forebears, but she’s only ever beholden to her own vision.
Quiet the Room, her debut full-length, is the clearest look yet at that vision, interspersing hushed, resonant sonics with a few genuinely staggering moments of songwriting. Ballentine’s strengths are most apparent in the feel of this album, which is consistently rich and gauzy. Even the clearest acoustic guitar licks are somehow buried beneath a persistent field of sustain and mild distortion. On “Whistle of the Dead,” one of a few instrumental tracks, garbled recordings of a toddler’s voice share the air with chirping crickets and slow, filtered piano. Around the midway point of “Window Somewhere,” Ballentine ditches language altogether, turning prolonged “oohs” and “aahs” into another element of a spare, misty backdrop.
The production on “Lullaby in February” takes cues from windblown Grouper albums like Grid of Points and Shade, and its lyrics allude to a similar kind of blustery remove; in the wintery, light-suffused world Ballentine conjures, one is always “looking,” always “picturing.” She is keenly attuned to the quiet magic of perception—she’s concerned not just with the thing experienced, but with the act of experiencing. “Late at night I hear a name I don’t recognize/I’m in my bed but it feels weird/Where is my body?” she sings on “Pass Through Me,” capturing the feeling of temporal dissociation, a kind of sensory lag. Right around the album’s midpoint, a song called “Could it be the way I look at everything?” explores the question of subjective experience atop skeletal fingerpicked guitar. Though Ballentine’s lyrics often cast the world as distant or out of joint, that pervading sense of disconnection is ultimately less about specifics and more about the way it all smears together: the ghostly afterimages you’re left with in the quiet, the impressions that linger when the world feels out of focus.
The best moments on Quiet the Room—the propulsive folk bounce of “Whatever Fits Together,” the exhilarating final minute of “It’s Like a Secret”—are also the most engaging. It’s when the music retreats into airy, diffuse corners that it can start to feel untethered. “Sticker,” although pretty, scans as syrupy and indulgent, its sense of stasis unearned. The same goes for “Building a Swing,” which taps into a vein of puddly ambience and never quite finds its shape. In these wispy, drawn-out lulls, I found myself craving more substance: On the excellent “Song for Nick Drake,” released early last year, Ballentine knew exactly what she wanted to say; here, she’s content to keep things more abstract. In that sense, the fact that Quiet the Room feels like a weighty mission statement turns out to be a double edged sword. It’s one thing to announce yourself; where do you go once you’ve arrived? | 2022-10-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | October 20, 2022 | 7.2 | bafd6542-0d71-41e8-98d7-ce047d040957 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
The shoegaze band’s third album is another portrait of addiction and recovery, but this time there’s no suggestion of a victory lap. The lyrics may wallow, but the music soars. | The shoegaze band’s third album is another portrait of addiction and recovery, but this time there’s no suggestion of a victory lap. The lyrics may wallow, but the music soars. | DIIV: Deceiver | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diiv-deceiver/ | Deceiver | Just a year after DIIV released its sophomore album, Is The Is Are, frontman Zachary Cole Smith conceded it was predicated on a lie. That record purported to be a portrait of addiction and recovery, a tidy narrative culminating in “a light at the end of the tunnel,” but recovery is never as easy as merely willing it, and in truth Smith says he hadn’t committed to sobriety, let alone mastered it. In hindsight, the album’s messaging “really trivializes what people go through,” Smith apologized in a 2017 interview. “Getting sober and staying sober is fucking hard.” He spent much of that year in inpatient treatment, living in rehab facilities and a sober living house, coming to terms with the reality that the light at the end of the tunnel was more distant than he admitted.
In a sense, then, DIIV’s third album Deceiver is a do-over, an atonement for a record that, while a triumph on a technical and artistic level, didn’t get the truth right. Like its predecessor, Deceiver is a portrait of addiction and recovery, but this time it’s not quite as tidy, and there’s no suggestion of a victory lap. It plays like the last record’s darker shadow. As with every DIIV album, it sounds timestamped from the year that punk broke, but the mood is heavier, louder, queasier. The guitars jangle less and brood more.
The band workshopped many of these songs on the road with Deafheaven, which may account for some of the newfound muscle, but mostly the bluster feels like a natural extension of Smith’s remorseful lyrics. Over knots of Sonic Youth guitars on “Skin Game,” he offers a more unflinching account of self-destruction than anything on Is The Is Are: “Sunken ceiling and a sideways grin/We lived to use and we used to live.” On “Between Tides” he channels Elliott Smith’s falsetto sigh as he sings of living with shame: “Apologize to all I see/For everything I used to be.”
Deceiver is trimmer than its predecessor—a relatively compact 10 songs spread over 44 minutes—yet it feels bigger. The luscious shoegaze overtones of the record’s early tracks gradually give way to the creeping unease of Unwound’s autumnal masterpiece Leaves Turn Inside You as Smith's focus turns from the damage he’s done to himself toward the relationships destroyed during “the years I lived in vain, chasing the pain with pain.” In its second half, the record burns hotter and blacker as it stretches toward its seven-minute closer “Acheron,” the dirge that most bears Deafhaven’s influence.
That track doesn't quite go full metal, but the lyrics get close: “Hate the god I don’t believe in,” Smith seethes. “Heaven’s just a part of hell.” It should be too much, but isn’t. Smith spends the entire album flirting with self-hatred, dwelling on lies, guilt, and burned bridges. And yet Deceiver never succumbs to miserabilism—even at their dingiest, these songs radiate with a beatific serenity. The lyrics wallow, but the music soars. For a record about regret, Deceiver is an unbridled pleasure.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | October 8, 2019 | 7.7 | bafe27a7-27b3-4623-a5c3-95f657d28502 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The dusty twang of M. Ward’s guitar and his whispered singing paint a picture of souls in transition, hinting at the reasons people choose to leave their country for another. | The dusty twang of M. Ward’s guitar and his whispered singing paint a picture of souls in transition, hinting at the reasons people choose to leave their country for another. | M. Ward: Migration Stories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-ward-migration-stories/ | Migration Stories | Under the Donald J. Trump administration, singing about migration is an explicitly political act. But M. Ward is constitutionally predisposed towards mystery and understatement, so his Migration Stories sidesteps protests and outrages. The album, Ward’s 10th as a solo artist, unfurls at a deliberate pace, luxuriating in a dreamworld conjured out of memories, shared stories, and flights of fancy.
Though 21st-century headlines may have been Ward’s initial inspiration for Migration Stories, he declines to write about current controversies. Instead, they’re a context for Ward’s grander design, which is focused on the emotional and spiritual motivations for migration. Some of his intent stems from his own family history, specifically his grandfather’s journey from Mexico to the United States at the dawn of the 20th century. Ward doesn’t tackle this story directly. He instead evokes that era through a dreamy cover of “Along the Santa Fe Trail,” a tune written for the 1940 western film Santa Fe Trail, which he initially encountered in a version by the singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely.
Ward moves “Along the Santa Fe Trail” away from its origins and toward the spacy, untethered roots-rock that’s been his calling card for the better part of two decades. He traveled to Montreal to work with producer Craig Silvey—the first time he’s cut an album with a co-producer—at Arcade Fire’s studio, recording with band members Richard Reed Parry and Tim Kingsbury. All the new collaborators don’t radically reshape Ward’s music so much as expand its parameters. The difference between the new and old is made clear by the handful of tracks Ward recorded and produced on his own. “Chamber Music,” along with the instrumentals “Stevens’ Snowman” and “Rio Drone,” are delicate and contained, where the rest of the record seems to spread out across a starry sky.
Much of this picturesque quality stems from the subtle contributions of Parry and Kingsbury or, in the case of the album opener “Migration of Souls,” the spectral supporting vocals of the Lost Brothers. Harmonies float through the songs, intertwining with gossamer slides of synthesizers, the arrangements accentuating the dusty twang of Ward’s guitar and his whispered singing. Often, these sounds are felt as much as heard, adding depth and dimension to a collection of songs that suggest a faded nocturnal transmission from a mid-century radio station deep in the Southwest. Unlike 2016’s More Rain, the tempo never quite quickens (“Unreal City” is the only song with a propulsive pulse, but even that is muted) and the volume never rises. Nor is there a sense of levity—a quality that surfaced on 2018’s What a Wonderful Industry, Ward’s otherwise barbed letter to the music business. Migration Stories simply drifts along at its own lazy pace, letting its pretty textures become the connective tissue.
Sometimes, Ward’s words break through the haze. Images of families and lovers striving to reconnect, either in this world or the next, float to the surface, as do visions of traveling shows, David Bowie’s Major Tom, and displaced wanderers searching for a home they’ve seen only in dreams. All these passages paint a picture of souls in transition, literally and spiritually, hinting at the reasons people choose to leave their country for another. Ward’s decision to not directly confront the immigration horrors of modern times isn’t cowardly; it’s entirely in character. As a singer and songwriter, he specializes in miniatures and suggestions, taking indirect routes to simple truths.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | April 13, 2020 | 7.2 | bafea2b6-9702-488f-8273-7326462c1ee9 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Gathering newfound lyrical confidence, the Halifax slack-rockers trade the sparseness of their early material for gentle guitar chords and gleaming Mellotron harmonies. | Gathering newfound lyrical confidence, the Halifax slack-rockers trade the sparseness of their early material for gentle guitar chords and gleaming Mellotron harmonies. | Nap Eyes: Snapshot of a Beginner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nap-eyes-snapshot-of-a-beginner/ | Snapshot of a Beginner | Nigel Chapman spends a lot of time singing about his own inability to take action. Whether seated on the couch at a party or pacing the desolate streets of his hometown, the Nap Eyes frontman habitually falls back on restless indecision, spinning stories about his own passivity in the face of existential concerns. The best Nap Eyes songs offer a subtle shift to the active tense amid this anxious, wine-drunk detachment, with sparse, lo-fi arrangements that split the difference between the Velvet Underground and their many ’90s alt-rock descendants (Pavement, Sebadoh, Yo La Tengo). On Snapshot of a Beginner, their fourth studio album, Nap Eyes build on these moments of solipsistic brilliance, pairing a newfound lyrical confidence with sharper, more intentional arrangements that lend the project fresh weight.
In the process, Nap Eyes take risks that would have once seemed at odds with their reputation for starry-eyed introversion. “Mark Zuckerberg,” a humble ode to the awkward tech overlord, bypasses the armchair critique of social media to cast the Facebook founder as a kind of folkloric legend: “Is Mark Zuckerberg a ghost? Maybe, maybe/Where are his hands? And why don’t you ever see them in public?” Chapman’s voice bears a startling resemblance to Soft Bulletin-era Wayne Coyne, while the band trades the sparseness of their early material for gentle guitar chords and gleaming Mellotron harmonies.
Chapman’s songwriting, long the driving force of the project, finds new footing in the album’s emphasis on arrangement. “Primordial Soup” introduces a synthesizer into the mix as Chapman rehashes a familiar subtext of Darwinian evolution: If the entire universe is the result of a “billion simple molecules” combined in precisely the right way, where does that leave God? As clean guitar loops and synth pads give way to thundering distortion, Chapman inches closer toward a definitive answer. “Might feel frustrated but does it mean anything?/Might feel lonely but what’s the meaning?” he shouts. It’s a sentiment familiar to anyone who’s struggled to capture an emotion in words, yet one that’s representative of Chapman’s approach to songwriting, which finds an implicit universalism in these moments of clumsy ineptitude.
Where earlier albums achieved this feeling through lyrics alone, Snapshot of a Beginner incorporates songwriting into a wider vision, one that feels truer to the band’s intentions. “Fool Thinking Ways” pulls the steady acoustic strum of earlier songs like “Boats Appear” into a hushed meditation that waxes and wanes with Chapman’s spirit, rising with the excitement of a breakthrough before deflating at the recognition of his own subconscious habits. “And that’s when it happened to me/That the change in my thinking set me free,” he sings, guitars soaring higher to match his mood.
Like much of the album, the track feels like a concerted response to the occasional aimlessness of Nap Eyes’ previous material, even as they try—and mostly succeed in—maintaining the same lightness. “But now I think again/Because I’m sick of making my process the subject of my songs,” Chapman sings on album closer “Though I Wish I Could.” Yet for every moment of heady introspection, there’s an equal and opposite song about Zuckerberg or The Legend of Zelda, punctuating an album otherwise dominated by Chapman’s inner monologue with moments of genuine charm. It’s a testament to his songwriting versatility and a new benchmark for Nap Eyes at their most ambitious. | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 1, 2020 | 7.5 | bb062a27-199e-44b7-9e17-1fbcf5c1605a | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
Although Yndi Halda use every post-rock cliché imaginable on their long-awaited sophomore LP, they use them sparingly, along with more daring instrumentation and their first use of lyrics. | Although Yndi Halda use every post-rock cliché imaginable on their long-awaited sophomore LP, they use them sparingly, along with more daring instrumentation and their first use of lyrics. | Yndi Halda: Under Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21613-under-summer/ | Under Summer | Post-rock bands aren't bound by the same rules that rock bands are. Take Yndi Halda, from Brighton, England. They completely ignored that old rock aphorism that "you have your whole life to make your first album and six months to make the second." Nearly a decade after their debut, Enjoy Eternal Bliss, the band are finally releasing their second LP. But post-rock bands do have their own set of boxes to check off albeit ones that are slightly more specific. Twinkling guitar and bass harmonics? Present! Songs that sprawl uniformly over ten minutes? Absolutely! Moments of quiet that build toward overwrought crescendos? Just look at the wavelengths of these songs on SoundCloud!
Although these traits are all present on Under Summer, they are used sparingly, alongside new aspirations of a band who are clearly challenging themselves and the very conventions of post-rock. Like its predecessor, Under Summer contains only four songs, each more than 10 minutes in length with distinct movements. The elegiac violin that created a niche for the band with the first album is still here too. But the biggest difference is the appearance of vocals, and not just the choral la-la placeholders of Enjoy Eternal Bliss. The lyrics here are mostly outdoorsy and naturalistic, with moments of powerful simplicity.
But there are also occasional dropped articles—"We sneak out at night, in time with owl cry"—and crammed syllables. This occasional awkwardness is the only aspect of Under Summer that feels tentative. A heartfelt line like, "It's something I know, not just something I believe," on Under Summer's final track, "This Very Flight," should sting with spiritual conviction, especially alongside the orchestral intensity of the moment, but the line is delivered demurely like they don't trust the importance of what they're saying.
Yndi Halda's growth shouldn't simply be measured by the fact that they're singing now, though. Enjoy Eternal Bliss felt like a band studying the post-rock playbook, and its consciously mournful songs felt forced. Here they take more risks, like taking a sharp turn at what would have logically been a swelling crescendo on "Helena," the album's sole instrumental number, and deciding to pull into a Fender Rhodes piano groove. Or using what sounds like a banjo and slide guitar. How very un-post-rock! And the last four minutes of the album are gently strummed major chords on an acoustic guitar accompanied by elementary—but nevertheless inspired—piano. With a more adventurous spirit and less rigid adherence to rules than its precursor, this album seems more concerned with expressing feelings than manufacturing them. | 2016-03-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Burnt Toast Vinyl / Big Scary Monsters | March 4, 2016 | 6 | bb0b2bcc-2b19-47be-bef9-4f03887dd82f | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the avant-garde saxophonist offers two hours of uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed and sharpened to an atomically fine point. | Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the avant-garde saxophonist offers two hours of uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed and sharpened to an atomically fine point. | Roscoe Mitchell: Bells for the South Side | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roscoe-mitchell-bells-for-the-south-side/ | Bells for the South Side | “Music is 50% sound and 50% silence,” said Roscoe Mitchell in a 2005 interview. On his new double album Bells for the South Side, this may be an understatement. The record opens with a pause, a lingering moment of space which is then patiently ornamented by figures that seem to emerge from and dissolve back into the void. Mitchell stretches his improviser, composer, and conductor chops throughout, leading 12 musicians through two hours of heady dissonance, zig-zagging structures, and austere avant-jazz. But even at their most rip-roaring, you can feel the silence looming in the background. It’s always there.
Bells was recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the pioneering avant-garde collective of which Mitchell was an early member. This might suggest a tidy career retrospective, a cheery lifetime achievement award ceremony for one of the few left standing of a generation of iconoclasts. Yes, it’s true the museum was hosting an exhibition that celebrates and reinterprets Mitchell and his peers’ legacy. And yes, the ensembles on Bells pulled old percussion rigs used by Mitchell’s most famous group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, out from cold storage. And yes, there’s a lovely performance of the AEOC’s “Odwalla,” from 1973. But Bells feels utterly contemporary, the work of a master, aged but energized, still pushing forward into the unknown.
If you’ve never heard of Mitchell, the AACM or the AEOC, well, Bells may not be the best place to start. It’s not for lack of quality, it’s just that Mitchell has been running circles around many of his contemporaries for half a century, building a unique musical language that’s as rewarding for devotees as it is impenetrable for noobs. His career began in the wake of the early free jazz trailblazers like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane, taking the raw possibilities of ’60s fire music in bold new directions. With the doors blown open and the rule book ripped up, there was the question of where to go next with all this freedom. Mitchell and co. answered it with a rich, exploratory body of work that combined jazz idioms, cutting edge experimentalism, global instrumentation, graphic scores and, in the case of AEOC, lots of face paint. Five decades later and Bells is a sink-or-swim kind of work, two hours of an uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed, honed, and sharpened to an atomically fine point.
Difficult though it may be, it is also great. The pieces explore the various corners of Mitchell’s work, and the scope of his vision is impressive. Opener “Spatial Aspects of the Sound” could be mistaken for one of Morton Feldman’s earlier pieces in its soft, murmuring dissonance, while “Panoply” rides waves of rippling free jazz. “Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand” has the type of somber bowed strings that Ligeti would admire, but they’re soon swapped out for an extended section of tumbling, swinging drums. Fluttering, miasmic drones (maybe a bass sax, or perhaps electronics, it’s hard to say) steal the show on the title track, answering an opening of peeling reeds with creepy, oscillating groans. The clean, linear horn lines on top are like arrows shot over a battlefield. Busy but unadorned, most of the players sit back as the percussion quietly explodes all around you, half chorus-of-church-bells, half gamelan-ensemble-falling-down-a-carpeted-stairwell.
Without dedicated players, this approach would fall flat on its face, but Mitchell’s devotees are fully up to the task. The performances are uniformly excellent—listen to the way the ensemble builds up the middle of “The Last Chord,” thwacking drums like exclamation marks in a wheezing, darting exhortation before exhaling into a tumbling groove that then drops into a perfectly timed sax solo. It’s the kind of liftoff-and-divebomb that countless improvisers dream of pulling off.
But Bells is only tangentially related to the average skronk session. Rather, it explores the raw qualities of sound, its material essence more than its symbolic, storytelling qualities. Though a mournful, expressive mood pervades, Mitchell seems fascinated to the point of obsession with the revelatory aspects of the unexpected. Over the years he’s opted for a difficult, occasionally ugly palette. His aim, however, hardly feels confrontational or antagonistic. Rather, these 11 pieces, like all of Mitchell’s work, are genuinely experimental, wringing affecting work from unexpected combinations, structures, harmonies. When the group wraps up with the smoky, catchy melodies of “Odwalla,” it’s not nearly as contrasting as you might think. Sure, it’s a gimme of a closer, but it serves to underscore Mitchell’s fundamentally expansive approach. No matter how far out he goes, it’s all part of the same musical whole. | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | July 11, 2017 | 7.3 | bb0ca5b7-738a-4144-97d2-c875fd4b9379 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
On the 20th anniversary of their initial dissolution, the alt-rock OGs release an album produced by Muse-man Rich Costey and featuring TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek and Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan, among others. | On the 20th anniversary of their initial dissolution, the alt-rock OGs release an album produced by Muse-man Rich Costey and featuring TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek and Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan, among others. | Jane’s Addiction: The Great Escape Artist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15910-janes-addiction/ | The Great Escape Artist | The year 1991 was a significant one in Jane's Addiction lore, marking both the launch of the L.A. art-rockers' Lollapalooza travelling-circus experiment and the announcement of the band's dissolution. Now, on the 20th anniversary of those events, both brands are still making headlines, despite enduring extended periods of inactivity, aborted restarts, and organizational restructuring. And it's perhaps no coincidence that both Jane's Addiction and Lollapalooza have evolved in exactly the same way: What were once unpredictable, chaotic forces have inevitably mutated into well-oiled, monolithic entities bearing little of the charm and character of their original incarnations. This circumstance is not lost on frontman/Lolla visionary Perry Farrell who, on Jane's Addiction's new album, proudly declares, "We've become a big business/ A galaxy merger!"
Even if that line is intended to be a metaphor for a blossoming romantic relationship, the fact that Farrell's singing of love in the language of commerce effectively sums up the proficient but perfunctory nature of The Great Escape Artist, Jane's Addiction's fifth official album, their second comeback record (following 2003's Strays), and the first release since the short-lived reintroduction of founding bassist Eric Avery into the fold for a 2009 tour. No doubt, their various attempts to keep Jane's alive over the past decade have taught Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, and drummer Stephen Perkins that replacing Avery requires more than just finding a talented bass player. In many respects, Avery defined the band's sonic identity and mystique; think of any Jane's classic, and often the first thing that pops into your head is one of those ominous, propulsive basslines. So while the middling Strays tried to plug session vet Chris Chaney into the dynamic, for The Great Escape Artist, the band makes a more concerted effort at revitalization, recruiting everyone from TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek to Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan to Morocco's Master Musicians of Joujouka-- a trifecta of collaborators who respectively play to Jane's Addiction's affinities for heady atmosphere, raunchy hard rock, and tribal-percussion jams.
At the outset, The Great Escape Artist lives up to that on-paper potential: Farrell's freak-scene re-indoctrination "Underground" and Avery-directed invective "End to the Lies" (featuring the Joujouka crew) open the album with a pair of promisingly authoritative metallic grinds that sound like they were grafted from the slow-motion mid-section of Ritual de lo Habitual's "Stop", but with Sitek's chrome-plated textures adding a post-apocalyptic ambience that greatly complements Navarro's eerie six-string squeals. But there's a palpable dip in intensity from there on in, as The Great Escape Artist gets mired in the not-quite-rock/not-quite-ballad purgatory that defines so much post-grunge alt-radio.
As slickly produced as Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual were, you always got the sense that Jane's Addiction were a band of four interconnected personalities contributing distinct, individual parts to the majestic whole. But even compared to the nu-metalloid sheen of Strays, The Great Escape Artist's intricate, heavily lacquered production-- courtesy of Muse-man Rich Costey-- has the effect of making Jane's Addiction sound like an anonymous assemblage of oversaturated recording tracks. More so than Avery's commanding presence, what's really missing here is Jane's Addiction's sense of playfulness, absurdity, and rhythmic verve. Beyond hard-charging closer "Words Right Out of My Mouth", powerhouse drummer Perkins is given scant opportunity to flex his percussive muscle and is instead relegated to playing the mild-mannered time-keeper on melodramatic turns like "Twisted Tales" and "Splash a Little Water on It", while Sitek's bass contributions are barely perceptible underneath the glossy sheen. And for a frontman who's always been happy to flaunt his own ridiculousness, Farrell is surprisingly humorless here, the quirky character studies and brash swagger of old replaced by straight-faced pleading and vague second-person admonishments. Sure, the line, "You were the foreskin/ I was the real head," reads as hilarious but, coming from a Jew, probably isn't meant as a term of endearment.
There is, however, one song here-- "Broken People"-- that cuts through The Great Escape Artist's sleek surface and provides a glimpse of the charismatic, affective band that Jane's once were and still could be. (Surprisingly, it's one of McKagan's three co-writes.) And, as per the standard set by "I Would For You", "Jane Says", and "Then She Did...", "Broken People" is a melancholic reverie dedicated to a tragic female protagonist, though instead calling upon his usual cast of junkies and eccentrics, Farrell updates the archetype to paint a sympathetic portrait of a sex-vid-shilling celebutante. Despite the sensationalistic subject matter, Jane's treat it with an understated elegance, thanks to Navarro's beautifully restrained guitar line, a sensitive but not mawkish vocal from Farrell, and-- rare for this album-- a concise, unfussy arrangement; even the amped-up, fist-pump treatment applied to the third verse can't sully the song's graceful sway. In a world where truly nothing is shocking, Jane's Addiction have understandably lost the will and desire to be as outrageous and confrontational as they once were. But as "Broken People" attests, the most effective way for a big business to surprise you is through a simple, humble act of charity. | 2011-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | October 17, 2011 | 5 | bb122bef-4ed0-43da-8270-2d3eb8ab1dac | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
null | Ten years ago it would have been ridiculous to use the word "formula" when talking about the music of Osaka's Boredoms. In 1999, they were riding a wave of creativity the likes of which most bands can only dream about. In the year prior they'd released both *Super Roots 7*, which on better days sounds like the final word on the visceral power of rock'n'roll repetition, and *Super Ae*, on which they revealed themselves as masters of playful trance-inducing psychedelia with spiritual underpinnings. And they were about to put out *Vision Creation Newsun*, boasting a gentler but no less immediate | Boredoms: Super Roots 10 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12715-super-roots-10/ | Super Roots 10 | Ten years ago it would have been ridiculous to use the word "formula" when talking about the music of Osaka's Boredoms. In 1999, they were riding a wave of creativity the likes of which most bands can only dream about. In the year prior they'd released both Super Roots 7, which on better days sounds like the final word on the visceral power of rock'n'roll repetition, and Super Ae, on which they revealed themselves as masters of playful trance-inducing psychedelia with spiritual underpinnings. And they were about to put out Vision Creation Newsun, boasting a gentler but no less immediate vision that seemed, especially after Yamantaka Eye's Rebore Vol. 0 re-working a bit later, to suggest that the musical possibilities in the decade to follow would be endless. All of this came after 10 previous years of painful noise, bad punk, hilarious song titles, pointless screams, and occasionally unmatched rock power. You couldn't pin this band down.
But in the decade since Vision Creation Newsun, Boredoms have interrupted long periods of quiet with absurdly grand gestures (the 77 Boadrum and 88 Boadrum events) and a couple of records that referenced or expanded upon past glories but never came close to matching them. Seadrum/House of Sun, from 2005, had two 20-minute-plus tracks that were not nearly as beautiful as the advance word made them sound, even if they managed to summon inspiring amounts of energy. (We heard talk of Eye leading his percussion-toting followers to the edge of the sea to record, conjuring images of the greatest drum-circle jams since the twilight of the Pleistocene.) And then 2007's Super Roots 9 was a 40-minute monster for drummers and pitch-shifted choir that took one thing the Boredoms did well-- gradual builds to ecstatic climaxes-- and let it play out forever. Tracks going on for far too long filled with ideas that were beaten into the ground 10 times over has always been part of the band's M.O. But when releases are so rare, they don't serve the same prankster function that they once did. Now it kind of sounds more like the Boredoms doing that one thing the Boredoms do. Again.
Which, if you happen to freaking love that one thing, isn't so terrible. A new Boredoms release is still an event, even if you no longer feel the need to rush out and tell all your friends about it. Super Roots 10 snuck up on people when it appeared for sale on a website in Japan earlier this year (by which time it was already sold out-- I'm reviewing this from downloaded mp3s). It is, with one huge exception I'll get to in a second, just the Boredoms being their post-VCN drum-happy, DayGlo-streaked, build-up-and-breakdown selves. After a short intro of bassy static, we hear a track called "Ant 10", which exists in a nine and a half-minute original mix and is then spun off into four different remixes that mostly flow one into the next. So it turns out to be essentially another 40+-minute track. The main features of the original version are layered tribal drums, an analog synth out of early-70s Tangerine Dream running scales, and Eye, sounding as joyful as ever, singing/shouting /chanting "Ah-u!" and "Hey!!!" and layering his voice in all sorts of fun ways. Toward the end there's some tape manipulation and huge cymbal-rushes, and then everything breaks down to silence, leading into "Estero 10", a remix by Japanese producer Altz.
The Altz remixes (another of his called "Mineral Dub Break" closes) and a remix by someone called DJ Finger Hat (my guess is it's Eye, which would be pseudonym number 1,328) offer an expected range of theme and variations-- drums get a bit housey, voices are extended into drones, Yoshimi's voice is added and layered to sound a little like an interlude from Einstein on the Beach, a guitar pattern is chopped into tiny pieces and sequenced. Even though it's now become so familiar and-- hate to say it-- formulaic, this stuff still has the capacity to thrill.
The huge exception to the Boredoms-by-numbers feel is the almost 11-minute mix of "Ant 10" by Lindstrøm. The Norwegian producer essentially takes his space disco approach and toughens it up considerably to meet the forward-leaning aggression of Boredoms. Heavy drums find their way to a 4/4 beat augmented by all manner of percussion fills, a Moog sounds for a moment like it's playing the intro to the title theme from Grease, a rubbery funk bassline for the ages folds in, and "Superstition"-style Clavinet starts bouncing around. There are a million things going on, but it still grooves. Long-time Pitchfork contributor Dominique Leone, who reviewed the last couple of Boredoms releases here and released material last year on Lindstrøm's Feedelity imprint, even drops by, adding some "Bow bow bow" vocals at the precise moment they're needed. Even if Lindstrøm's remix is 90% Lindstrøm's and 10% Boredoms, the change-up is hugely welcome. It's like all of a sudden Boredoms find themselves in the middle of a crazy party, where someone left the front door open and you've no idea who is going to wander in next. Time was when all Boredoms get-togethers felt that way. | 2009-02-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-02-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Avex Trax | February 27, 2009 | 7.6 | bb12a17a-dbc7-4bcb-8df5-21bcbc491797 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The veteran band takes a victory lap on its latest record, which walks the same path as 2007's relatively polished Let's Stay Friends. | The veteran band takes a victory lap on its latest record, which walks the same path as 2007's relatively polished Let's Stay Friends. | Les Savy Fav: Root For Ruin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14537-root-for-ruin/ | Root For Ruin | In their more than dozen years of existence, Les Savy Fav have gained a reputation as an exhilaratingly wild live act. While the band is known for working up a sweat-drenched crowd chaos, though, their career trajectory has been one of a band focused on truly honing their hard-charging craft. LSF's last full-length, 2007's Let's Stay Friends, represented the full realization of their sound, with exacting, catchy-as-hell songs that possessed the neck-snapping kinetic energy that was found in rougher form on previous records. A polished "crossover" effort, yeah, but also fun and rollicking in all the right places.
Root For Ruin, the band's fifth proper LP, re-asserts that sound rather than expanding upon or altering it. There's not many surprising moments on this record; if anything, it feels like the first Les Savy Fav album that sounds more comfortable in its own clothes than twitching to tear apart its own skin. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: LSF still excel at constructing miniature explosions of songs, even if they sound a bit tidier now.
Guitarists Seth Jabour and Andrew Reuland prove to be aces in the hole for this record, continuing to prove their worth as two of modern indie rock's smarter, more bruising axe-wielders. They layer colorful lines over each other like it's a competition, bringing the hook-laden pain on the smashing, bashing opener "Appetites" and "Lips n' Stuff". Elsewhere, they create nervewracking warning calls on "Excess Energies" that dovetail in and out of Tim Harrington's metronomic shouts. On the whole, there are still very few bands that do this arty, shitkicking stuff as well as Les Savy Fav do.
And yet Root For Ruin feels slightly sluggish, more so than any of the band's previous records. The distinct lack of new ideas plays a small part in this letdown-- "Dear Crutches"' dripping guitar line sounds a little too close to "The Sweat Descends", a standout on 2004's kickass singles collection Inches-- but mostly it's the presence of a few lukewarm cuts that make the record one of LSF's more minor efforts. "Sleepless in Silverlake" and "Let's Get Out of Here", notably, bring the album to a near-flatlining halt. The latter is a midtempo would-be rager that never takes off the ground, while the former is the life-in-Los-Angeles snoozer that you hoped Tim Harrington would never write. The slow jams aren't the only duds here, as the speed-addled "Calm Down"'s monochromatic chorus squarely locates the song on the wrong side of the "post-hardcore" tag.
Dull tempos, disengaging moments, recycled ideas-- all egregious offenses, yes. Luckily, Les Savy Fav have earned a decade's worth of goodwill to cushion a just-OK album or two landing in their discography, which makes Root For Ruin a well-deserved victory lap, if nothing else. The lone pair of surprising songs on Root For Ruin, the dissonant howler "Poltergeist" and menacing closer "Clear Spirits", serve as a gentle nudge as well that this band surely has some creative juice left in them. Let's hope they utilize it well in the future, because Les Savy Fav simply being Les Savy Fav can't retain its charm forever. | 2010-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss | August 12, 2010 | 7.2 | bb23ced3-16ce-449c-8b4a-6ca9d80dc044 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Rather than lean into the gimmick of a “bedroom” record, Cloud Nothings’ quarantine album disguises relatively amateur equipment behind clean melodies and power-pop nostalgia. | Rather than lean into the gimmick of a “bedroom” record, Cloud Nothings’ quarantine album disguises relatively amateur equipment behind clean melodies and power-pop nostalgia. | Cloud Nothings: The Black Hole Understands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cloud-nothings-the-black-hole-understands/ | The Black Hole Understands | It might not be obvious from the dense, towering compositions of his recent discography, but Dylan Baldi is something of an ascetic. The Cloud Nothings frontman’s updates during lockdown suggested he was shopping around an ambient emo record and embracing the hypnotic drone of modular synths. The only music he and Cloud Nothings drummer Jayson Gerycz released together in the past three months was a minimal “free-form jazz” improvisation that featured only a saxophone and drums. But an avant-garde side project is one thing; aiming to reproduce Cloud Nothings’ searing riffs and gnarled screams in solitude is more daunting. That might explain the relatively low-key rollout of their new record, The Black Hole Understands, recorded remotely in quarantine and primarily featuring Baldi and Gercyz. Rather than attempt to replicate the harsher sound they’ve developed since 2012’s Attack on Memory, they spit-shine limited resources until they gleam like a long-lost Creation Records release. Despite being recorded in an era of unthinkable instability, it is the most assuredly melodic Cloud Nothings has sounded in years.
Perhaps owing to the limits of his home studio setup, which by his telling consists only of GarageBand, Baldi eschews the abrasive shouts and syncopated, MacKaye-indebted barking that were his go-to on 2018’s Last Building Burning. Instead, he delicately traverses vocal triplets, overdubs bright counter-harmonies, and leaps into ELO-worthy falsettos with ease. The softer approach befits the band’s humbler sound. On “An Average World,” Baldi ends a pre-chorus bridge by resolving the harmonies introduced earlier in the verse, his voice ticking up to match his guitar. In another universe, it’s easy to imagine Cloud Nothings building momentum with layered, angular chords, Baldi capping off each line with an increasingly unhinged shout. But here they choose harmony instead of dissonance, creating tension not by pushing the limits of studio mics and faders, but through the sense of anxiety that, because everything is recorded so closely and with such light processing, any slight vocal crack could throw the song off course.
The Black Hole Understands is in many ways a revisitation of the band’s earliest days, when Cloud Nothings was Baldi recording alone in his parents’ Ohio basement. These songs share a similar pop sensibility and self-contained structure as his early recordings, bolstered by a decade’s worth of experience and Gerycz’s note-perfect percussion. There’s the simmering, quiet-loud dynamic of “The Sound of Everyone,” which arrives at a restrained crescendo as Baldi reassuringly sings “life won’t always be this way” over crisp drum fills and low bass. “A Silent Reaction” borrows the fuzzed-out sincerity of Teenage Fanclub, clean chords building to a wistful refrain delivered in Baldi’s surprisingly strong higher register. The album betrays a deep nostalgia for power pop, whether on the twinkling reverb of “Memory of Regret” or the cooing backing vocals that accent “The Mess Is Permanent.”
Despite similarly modest origins, The Black Hole Understands is more patient than the blown-out revelry of Cloud Nothings’ early bedroom recordings. Rather than lean into the gimmick of a “bedroom” record, they disguise their relatively amateur equipment behind clean melodies and reliable song structures. Thanks in large part to Gerycz’s obsessive home mixing, otherwise novel elements of the recording process—Baldi relied solely on the built-in guitar amps on GarageBand, for example—are hardly recognizable. The limits of composing songs via email manifest most clearly on the wordless “Tall Gray Structure,” where dense and stormy riffs give way to a prolonged, mostly straightforward jam session. It’s serviceable if formulaic, fading into the background like a television score. But for the most part, Black Hole stands defiantly against the decade Cloud Nothings spent working with an impressive roster of producers, honing their sound in such hallowed spaces as Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio. Absent pushback from a watchful producer, the band’s intuitive knack for melody shines through.
What could otherwise be a throwaway experiment is bolstered further by the strength of Baldi’s songwriting. While certain lines land with a wink—“This ain’t the ending I had wanted,” he sings on “Story That I Live”—his cheerily-delivered defeatism is comforting in its timelessness. “What is the purpose of anything more?” he asks with a slight shrug on “An Average World,” a question that feels directed towards quarter-life crises in general, more than the one unfolding at this particular moment. Hearing Baldi sing about comfortingly quotidian issues—emotional disconnection or frustration with life—is a source of welcome familiarity. “Ordinary people/Living out their lives,” he sings brightly on “Right on the Edge.” Backed by gleaming harmonies, Cloud Nothings make the dulled ennui of everyday life sound like an escapist fantasy.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | July 9, 2020 | 7.5 | bb2b629d-4cf7-4871-936a-194f596d9486 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The São Paulo producer pushes Brazilian funk to horrorcore extremes, colliding Lil Uzi Vert and Halloween samples into a dizzying metallic symphony. | The São Paulo producer pushes Brazilian funk to horrorcore extremes, colliding Lil Uzi Vert and Halloween samples into a dizzying metallic symphony. | DJ K: PANICO NO SUBMUNDO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-k-panico-no-submundo/ | PANICO NO SUBMUNDO | Maybe the only thing higher than the bass-driven volume of baile funk is the rate at which it has evolved as a musical form. Since its origins in Brazil in the 1980s as a local mutation of electro, Miami bass, and freestyle, baile funk has grown into a global phenomenon with a dizzying spectrum of subgenres and regional variations. Mainstream Brazilian stars like Anitta have spread the sound of funk internationally through pop reinventions, while underground producers and emcees like MC Bin Laden and DJ Ramon Sucesso have found new audiences thanks to viral clips on social media. Despite the best efforts of vulturous foreigners such as Diplo and Drake, baile funk has mostly managed to resist widespread appropriation, likely because its producers so often challenge the limits of sound itself.
Some of the more cutting-edge visions of baile funk hail from São Paulo: Consider “funk paulista” or “funk ostentação” (literally ostentatious funk), which is known for its lyrical emphasis on bombastic material flexes. Also originating in São Paulo is DJ K, one of the breakout stars of Baile do Helipa, the street party that takes place in the city’s biggest favela. His new album PANICO NO SUBMUNDO—which translates to Panic in the Underworld—pushes the edges of baile funk to horrorcore extremes with a style he dubs “bruxaria,” or witchcraft.
These songs reside in the shadowy edges of the warehouse where bodies writhe into Guernica-like tableaus, finding twisted ecstasy in the unpredictable terror of a bad trip. For all the pleasures of raving and booty-shaking, there’s a sense of lawlessness to baile funk, a scene that’s been strictly policed and criminalized, largely along racial lines. Along with Bruxaria Sound, the collective of adventurous DJs and bodacious MCs he enlists as his co-conspirators, DJ K deliberately taps into the paranoid feeling that the party could go wrong and get shut down at any moment, thwarting every expectation with impish glee.
At times, PANICO NO SUBMUNDO sounds like a decade’s worth of dance music scenes crammed into a blender: The pounding beats are somewhere between South African gqom, Jersey club, European hardstyle, and the kind of distorted, sped-up “phonk” music you hear in Russian street drifting compilations. On “Isso Não é um Teste,” an alarm sound known as “tuin” signals the oncoming storm before a buzzsaw synthesizer hacks away at your eardrums. The “tuin” sound is an allusion to lança perfume, the drug of choice in funk scenes, and DJ K’s invocation of it recalls both apocalypse and hallucination. This is a relentless metallic symphony of DJ drops, chirping ringtones, menacing laughs, laser blasts, harsh bleeps, and whistles, the busy soundtrack of a chemically enhanced baile in the favelas synthesized into a single song. If the world was ending and Armageddon was imminent, the São Paulo producer would probably record the air raid sirens before locking himself in a bunker and raving for the rest of eternity.
DJ K taught himself to produce with Fruity Loops software, and his bold and cartoonish synth lines often sound like a hyper-charged blend of ringtone rap and acid house. A dirge-like violin wails on “Beat Distorce Mente,” before he blasts it into oblivion with lasers and static. Samples from popular songs whizz by at lightning speed, like on “Erva Venenos,” before your brain can even process where you recognize them from. “Montagem Eletrônica” opens with an Arabic chant that he soon chops up into a Cherrelle flip, while on “Sequência Terrorista do Heliópolis,” he fuses the Halloween theme song with a hardstyle-like thwomp. Witchy laughs and banshee wails taunt the listener throughout, as on provocative tracks like “Puta de Silicone.”
In spite of the chaos, there’s something almost startlingly minimalist about some of DJ K’s productions, which are at times little more than a drumbeat, a demented synthesizer, and chanting. The beat switches like Optimus Prime transforming from one mechanical state to another, but just as often, it grinds to a halt, leaving a voice to hang in uncanny silence. Against the intense peaks of ear-shattering sound, even a second of quiet seems like an eerily deep void of space. Every vocal is coated in reverb and echo, leaving behind blurry traces of auditory floaters for a dub-like effect of stimulating physical sensation. In one sense, baile funk MCs are very similar to classic hip-hop MCs: party conductors riding a rhythm and pushing the mixmaster to cut faster. But DJ K breaks their voices into distorted loops, turning vocalists like MC AG on “Ela Quer Pop Pirulito” into human percussion.
As a compilation, PANICO NO SUBMUNDO offers a thrilling introduction to a scene largely dominated by individual singles and SoundCloud loosies, but it doesn’t sacrifice any of its scenic specificity or middle-finger experimentality. This isn’t a Baile Funk 101 playlist curated by outsiders; it’s a transmission straight from the favelas. PANICO NO SUBMUNDO gleefully blows up any convention in its path, as DJ K engineers an audacious cyberpunk sound from the rubble that’s left behind. | 2023-07-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nyege Nyege Tapes | July 27, 2023 | 7.9 | bb2b8f54-dbee-4274-87de-84ffc4d38271 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
On the Chicago rapper’s second album of the year, she once again displays her uncanny talent to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal. | On the Chicago rapper’s second album of the year, she once again displays her uncanny talent to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal. | CupcakKe: Eden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cupcakke-eden/ | Eden | CupcakKe refers to her vagina as “Garfield” for a good 10-percent of her latest album. Over the course of the 33-minute long Eden, the rapper born Elizabeth Harris also compares her genitalia to: a keyboard, honey, a barbell, a dryer, a car parallel parking, straws, a furnace, Ring Pops, soup, a purse filled with loose change, Dial soap, and a satin cushion. She writes with a weird, wonderful specificity. In CupcakKe’s world, bodies don’t just defy social conventions; they defy physics.
This has classified the 21-year-old Chicagoan as a “raunchy” rapper—a term that never seems to be leveled at male hip-hop artists—slinging dildos on videos that get taken off YouTube for graphic content, calling her steadily growing fanbase “Slurpers.” She’s capable of more, though, and on her second album in 10 months, she’s determined to prove it. “Most people already skipped this song because it ain’t about sex and killing,” she rapped on her last album, Ephorize. The songs on this month’s Eden are still slathered in sex. The majority of the album is spent asserting her sheer competence, as she tries on different trends and flavors of modern hip-hop and still sounds uniquely, ecstatically like herself.
CupcakKe’s raps have velocity. Each track on Eden propels into the next, and her flow stays tight, whether she’s cooing or shouting. It is a masterclass in control. That’s what has always been delightful and, in its own way, empowering about CupcakKe’s work. She takes no shit when she raps about her sexuality, and for someone who’s spoken openly about her history of sexual violence and abuse, it becomes all the more radical. “That’s funny when abusers ain’t locked away/They in the crib giving more beats than Dr. Dre,” she raps on “Cereal and Water.” Moments later on the song, she spits the words, “Fucking rapists,” and it sounds like a declaration of war. CupcakKe’s music transforms the site of trauma into a place for ridiculous, fearless, uninhibited acts. Her work is a rallying cry for sexual assault survivors. That doesn’t stop it from being fun and totally insane.
CupcakKe occupies her own outrageous space in the rap world, and she easily could have stayed there. On Eden, though, she sieves herself through different strains of modern hip-hop: Latin trap (“Prenup”), a synth-pop adjacent heartbreak ballad (“Dangled”), tingling reggaeton (“Garfield”). These tracks are still uniquely CupcakKe—punctuated with moans and hi-hats, sprinkled with giggle-inducing flexes (“Bitch I’m so cold gotta rock me a thermal and sweater right under the coat,” or “Wrist ice be so creamy/So we naming this shit Edy’s”). Sometimes this feels self-conscious, a way to conspicuously show off her talent. But it’s hard to fault her for that when she’s twirling rhymes around hi-hats, or when she’s silencing critics with a line like, “What trends have you set?”
There seems to be a CupcakKe lens of looking at the world—danceable and glistening with who-knows-what, full of elaborately wrangled metaphors and puns. When she uses that lens to call out men who post pictures of her on Insta (“Post Malone can’t even post my shit”) or proclaim how great she is, it’s slick and funny. But that lens is equally effective, if a little jarring, when she employs it to examine more serious topics. On Eden, these range from an odd but earnest and sweet song about autism to stark statements about racism. Her flexibility is astounding. CupcakKe can go from a condemnation of police brutality in one minute to a line about a dick the size of Ariana Grande’s ponytail in the next. That ability to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal, distinguishes CupcakKe from any other rapper. There’s a pulsing power in the center of her songs. It’s the sound of a woman in charge. | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 15, 2018 | 7.9 | bb2dea9c-0f93-4d03-99e7-31508e2af361 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Whether the result of taking an unusually long time off between records or not, on WHY?'s fourth album, Yoni Wolf has sunk even further into himself, but not to discover some sort of deeper truth about the human condition. Mumps, etc. is an often unlistenably solipsistic, lazy album from a band that was often excellent. | Whether the result of taking an unusually long time off between records or not, on WHY?'s fourth album, Yoni Wolf has sunk even further into himself, but not to discover some sort of deeper truth about the human condition. Mumps, etc. is an often unlistenably solipsistic, lazy album from a band that was often excellent. | WHY?: Mumps, etc. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17136-mumps-etc/ | Mumps, etc. | The realization that a great band has made a terrible record marks the point of pivot where you stop thinking about what's happening as a listener and turn into something like a forensics expert asking, "what happened?" The best case scenario is that an outside pathogen is to blame, a failed genre experiment, an ill-fitting producer, drugs. These are the things cult classics and critical reclamation projects are made of. The inside jobs are far more painful to endure-- records such as Travis Morrison's Travistan, Weezer's Make Believe, the Smashing Pumpkins' MACHINA/The Machines of God and the Streets' The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living that clearly couldn't have been made by anyone but their creators, but where the same qualities responsible for such individual and affecting works of art have completely turned on their owners. Mumps, etc. is of the latter variety, an often unlistenable album from WHY?, a group whose music is often excellent.
It might sound counterintuitive to claim that restraint would've worked to WHY?'s benefit here. A large part of the appeal of records like Alopecia and Eskimo Snow was that they let Yoni Wolf run rampant lyrically and emotionally, all while his band exploded the boundaries that would have kept them in either indie rock, hip-hop, or even "indie rap." No matter what Wolf was going on about-- masturbation, his bowel movements, any number of ex-girlfriends-- his extremism was tethered by relatable emotions and strong hooks. Whether it was the result of taking an unusually long time off between records or not, Wolf has sunk even further into himself, but not to discover some sort of deeper truth about the human condition. Instead, a sizable portion of Mumps, etc. turns out to be a longform rumination on what it means to be Yoni Wolf, Lead Singer of WHY?.
Doesn't matter if it's The Wall or from the perspective of a guy who admits, "I make decent cash, I'm a minor star," as Wolf does on "Sod in the Seed"; the "lot of the touring musician" album has a great track record of establishing the frightening point when an artist feels entitled to a listener's empathy despite having their most distorted sense of self. Yet it's not unthinkable for Wolf to find pathos in this scenario, since at WHY?'s level of success, "how can I keep this up?" is more a crisis of relatable age and economic concerns rather than that of a poor lil' rich boy in a gilded cage. But it's nearly impossible to find Wolf's situation interesting because I'm not sure he thinks it is either.
He repeatedly references the end of his "rap career" as something of a given and bemoans its terrible mundanity-- "I can't sleep in rental cars or airlines/ Yo, and so I keep the deck of cards for downtime." Either that, or he gets lost in impenetrable metaphor as a means of distracting from that mundanity. During the sickly mariachi lurch of "White English", Wolf engages in impressive verbal gymnastics in order to avoid saying what he actually means, and it's summed up by its diffident hook: "Lost in translation." Same for "Thirst", which introduces potentially loaded metaphors about black cowboys and discarded porn-stuffed G4 motherboards without delving far enough into their symbolism; when Wolf pleads, "He will always thirst like that/ He will thirst like that always," it fails to register. He might thirst like that, but how the hell are we supposed to know what "that" means?
But when really getting to the bottom of why Mumps, etc. often sounds like it wasn't subject to outside QC, it isn't so much about Wolf's lyrical inscrutability but rather that long stretches of the record are just really fucking hard to listen to. Musically, it's perfectly fine and a logical dovetailing of Alopecia's sharp hybrid of hip-hop and indie rock with Eskimo Snow's forays into post-rock and folk, if maybe sidling a little too close to the sort of Danger Mouse-style pop-hop it knows it can't be.
And that's because Wolf has completely lost a grip on judging his own vocals. They've always been an acquired taste for sure, and on Alopecia and Eskimo Snow, Wolf showed a canny command of his various modes of monotone, staggered rapping, heartsick crooning that packed unorthodox pop smarts. As Wolf attempts a more perfect union of those various modes, he ends up with a hybrid that somehow manages to bring all of his most grating qualities to the fore, to the point where the actual words of a line like "when I got better from the mumps, yes-- my swollen nut and neck shrunk" are the least objectionable thing about it.
Combatively nasal, all jagged edges and botched notes, Wolf makes an irreversible, disheartening slide into Borscht Belt jokes about his advancing age ("I'm in decline/ But women like be jockin' still/ 'Cause I rhyme with skill and talk so chill and youthful"), retreating hairline ("Girls used to fawn over my locks-to-kill/ Now the girls are gone and I'm on Minoxidil") or inescapable whiteness ("Rockin' soccer socks and sandals like, 'yeah, bro.'") . Technically catchy but irritating all the same, "Jonathan's Hope" and "Strawberries" are the inexplicable singles, and as Wolf sings brutal rhymes such as, "Slow pitching like a Vatican priest to be pope-- what? Dope," or, "Your mom she sits while her hair is in curlers/ Smokes weed and listens to that Garrison Keillor/ That's how I'll live when I quit my rap career," there isn't so much of a melody as a curdling effect taking place in Wolf's mouth, like he's having an allergic reaction to his own lyrics. There too are remnants of Anticon.'s willfully arrhythmic approach to hip-hop on "Jonathan's Hope" and "Paper Hearts", the latter of which might be the most unpleasant song of 2012. A noxious merger of topic, content, and delivery, Wolf cruelly describes a failed romantic encounter in flagrante: "She's cute with little titties and a sense of humor/ But to tell you the truth sir, I pity the poor fool-- her," and, "During sex I might put us in some joke positions/ But it's scary always how we end up in mission...airy like the daring men who fight to submission," aren't even the half of it. While there's no such thing as TMI in WHY? songs, it's nigh inconceivable to imagine someone listening to this for enjoyment.
At the very least, Mumps, etc. creates a new wrinkle in discussing what "career suicide" can really mean. It's usually attributed to albums so off the grid that fans will inevitably refuse to follow, yet those always strike me as a cry for help, a need to trigger a reaction. But I don't think that's the case here. Mumps, etc. does have its moments that remind you how WHY? have always been a trial by fire that demands and often rewards intense loyalty that can't be shaken easily. On the contrary, Mumps, etc. sounds like WHY? reading their own eulogy. Sure, Wolf claims, "I'll hold my own death as a card in the deck/ To be played when there are no other cards left," on the closing song, but "Exegesis" ended Alopecia making the same exact threats, so make your own "cry Wolf" joke if you must. It's just that so much of Mumps, etc. thinks of itself in the future tense, having already given up the fight. Even beyond Wolf's decidedly pessimistic take on his current occupation, most of the songs on Mumps, etc. just seem to opt out of delivering hooks when they could or should and meekly tap out before three minutes.
But to really get to the heart of Mumps, etc.'s despondence, you have to look at "Distance", paradoxically the most musically accomplished and lyrically affecting song here. The sighing strings are a bit manipulative when Wolf says, "I gotta keep my distance to withstand the silence of you missing when you're not there to listen to this nonsense," yet it's a real moment of resonance, and you're just left to wonder why such a typically candid lyricist took so long to get to the point. The structure of "Distance" would lead you to believe "men and women might yet quote his modicum of the truth/ But never will they get right close to Jonathan Avram Wolf" is the money quote, but it already happened. Because while Mumps, etc. expresses that Wolf is too in touch with his emotions to not potentially have great art left in him, it's just that I'm not sure even he believes WHY? is the best place for him to work it out anymore. | 2012-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Anticon / City Slang | October 9, 2012 | 2.8 | bb336e6a-3947-45c9-956d-ef90cec76ada | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Experimental pianist Nathan Phillips flits seamlessly between wobbly electronic pop, soaring post-rock grandeur, and ambient minimalism. | Experimental pianist Nathan Phillips flits seamlessly between wobbly electronic pop, soaring post-rock grandeur, and ambient minimalism. | Big Bend: Radish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-bend-radish/ | Radish | Many working musicians struggle to balance service jobs and artistic pursuits. Nathan Phillips, an experimental pianist and composer from Ohio who records as Big Bend, found an unusual harmony between the two. Phillips wrote the vocal melodies for his airily gorgeous new album, Radish, by listening to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt while mopping floors at a cafe after hours. “When customers weren’t around, Phillips tried out the lines, experimenting with singing outside familiar meters,” his Bandcamp page reads. Indeed, little of the music Phillips makes falls within the constraints of “familiar meters,” or familiar anything.
Drawn from improvised sessions with small groups of musicians, Radish flits seamlessly between wobbly electronic pop (“Long Time”), soaring post-rock grandeur (“Can’t Get Around”), and stretches of top-shelf ambient minimalism (“12'-15'”). Big Bend’s previous album, Hunched, was strictly instrumental. Here, Phillips’ bright, flowing voice (which has been compared to Sting’s) shares space with contributions from celebrated experimentalists Laraaji, on zither, and Susan Alcorn, on pedal steel. He also knows when to step away from the mic: “Four,” one of two instrumental songs, is a cosmic communion between half-stepping piano and Laraaji’s fluttering zither.
Phillips built these songs by detaching his vocals from the Arvo Pärt pieces and creating new music around them, but the resulting album is not some austere deconstructivist exercise. It is intimate, warm, emotionally inviting. It is even a family affair: Phillips’ mother, also a singer, lends her vibrato to “Swinging Low,” where operatic vocal swells make an intriguing contrast to rustling electronic pitter-patter. “Before” is a less successful experiment, allowing harsh, stuttering beats to bump up uncomfortably against Big Bend’s atmospheric proclivities.
Phillips is an inventive songwriter, and his ear for sonic and compositional detail is remarkable. Consider the way the bass enters mid-syllable in “Floating,” bringing sudden rhythmic clarity to the track’s start-stop percussive patterns, or how the whirring feedback that anchors “12'-15'” follows its own melodic logic, curiously apart from other pieces of the puzzle. “Can’t Get Around,” the clear centerpiece, is a brooding stunner that brings to mind the work of These New Puritans, Port St. Willow, or Talk Talk. The song’s climactic weight hinges on Phillips’ shifting piano chords, which unfold with the patience and grace of a Spirit of Eden outtake.
As a lyricist, Phillips is interested in aging, survival, and “spiritual phases,” as he puts it, though not overt religiosity. He repurposes a Bee Gees refrain on “Before” (“staying alive, staying alive”) and decides he’s “finally sold on the idea of getting old” in “Floating.” “Can’t Get Around” suggests a spiritual crisis and an accompanying sense of entrapment. But much of this album remains pleasantly mysterious, from the hazy cover image to the title. (The last track, “Floating,” does mention a radish, but still—why?) That’s not necessarily a gripe: Curious, open-ended, and slyly resistant to categorization, Radish is the best kind of mystery. | 2019-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | June 29, 2019 | 7.3 | bb341abd-842f-407f-9fca-9a3caf07ec82 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
On their fourth collaborative album, rapper-producers Oh No and the Alchemist are dueling dragons—even when the beats could stand to bring a little more heat. | On their fourth collaborative album, rapper-producers Oh No and the Alchemist are dueling dragons—even when the beats could stand to bring a little more heat. | The Alchemist / Oh No / Gangrene: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gangrene-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose/ | Heads I Win, Tails You Lose | Gangrene are here to crack brains like they were blown speakers. So says Oh No near the top of his fourth collaborative album with the Alchemist, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. The Oh No–produced highlight “Oxnard Water Torture” slides in on a bed of drums, cymbals, and haunted-house organs, a hazy backdrop he runs into the gutter. “This ain’t your Moët, this Olde English,” he says with a Joker-like snarl, his verse all harsh dissonance and razor edges. Alchemist follows up with more nimble flows and surreal writing: He’s the android with a sniper scope, hopping out the reclining Recaro seat at pinball velocity. Back together for the first time since 2015’s You Disgust Me, this dueling-stoner-dragons approach is a perfect distillation of the mud-caked shit talk the duo inaugurated with 2009’s “Acts of Violence.” Heads I Win oozes with menace when it taps into this frequency, but nearly as often, it loses some of that grime, coming off a touch too clean for its own good.
Prolific doesn’t begin to do justice to this pair’s respective catalogs—last year, they dropped nearly a dozen projects combined. As Alchemist has parlayed his indie-rap mini empire into placements on Travis Scott and Drake albums, Oh No has churned out wonky psychedelia with underground stalwarts like Elzhi and Tha God Fahim. Gangrene remains the space for them to get their hands dirty, trading sludge balls with the laidback giddiness of a true-school weed cipher. Everybody needs an outlet for low-stakes fun, and at its best, Heads I Win plays their still-developing contrasts against each other well. On “Cloud Surfing” and “Just Doing Art,” Alchemist’s fixation on surreal elegance—all Lamborghini races and smearing enemies’ blood on canvases—slots decently with Oh No’s blunt threats and metaphors (“Y’all ain’t solid, just some snakes sittin’ low-low/They will find you on the side of the wall like plate sticker logos”). They still sound like they enjoy rapping about rapping together, even when they’re worlds apart.
But when I press play on a Gangrene song, I expect not just grimy beats, but grimy beats that sound tailor-made for the duo. Several tracks on Heads I Win are missing the distinct Gangrene rawness, and it’s not a welcome change. Sometimes they’re a little too silly, like the Saturday morning orchestra sample at the center of “Dinosaur Jr.” or the chintzy interpolation of the Inspector Gadget theme song on “Watch Out.” Others sound like leftovers from non-Gangrene Alchemist projects: “The Gates of Hell” has the same kind of maudlin loop heard on his This Thing of Ours projects; “Just Doing Art” and closer “Muffler Lung” sound like they were pulled from the Bo Jackson and Haram folders, respectively. That isn’t to say these beats are bad, just that they don’t fit the project’s ethos. Stacked next to “Espionage” and “Magic Dust,” which do scratch that itch, they illustrate how Alc’s prodigious output is beginning to blend together.
Aside from “Watch Out,” Oh No largely sidesteps this problem. In front of the mic and behind the boards, the Oxnard, California, native routinely supplies Heads I Win its filthiest moments. On opener “Congratulations, You Lose,” his slinky keyboards and farting synth line inspire him to use his enemies’ beards as Swiffer mops. Here and over the skipping drumline and sour horns of “You Should Join the Army,” he sounds vicious and hungry. Even when the beats get a bit homogenous, Alchemist and Oh No’s verbal chemistry is still airtight. Hearing them flex just for fun while playing vocal double-dutch over peppy drums on “Royal Hand” is as engrossing as early career highlights like “Gutter Water” and “Flame Throwers.” It’s one of the few times on this album when the vintage Gangrene sound feels forward-thinking, too. | 2024-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ALC | April 30, 2024 | 6.7 | bb3ec2b6-b94f-4765-bd85-4f20e0d252d8 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Brooklyn rapper follows in the footsteps of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Tjay, crafting sweetly melodic songs about pain and young love. | The Brooklyn rapper follows in the footsteps of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Tjay, crafting sweetly melodic songs about pain and young love. | J.I the Prince of NY: Welcome to GStarr Vol. 1 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ji-the-prince-of-ny-welcome-to-gstarr-vol-1-ep/ | Welcome to GStarr Vol. 1 | Justin Rivera was 14 years old when he appeared on the second season of Lifetime’s 2016 music competition series The Rap Game as J.I. the Prince of New York. The Brooklyn rapper didn’t win; his fast rapping style—easily traceable back to Eminem—was clearly dated. He continued to put out music, though he wouldn’t emerge in the city’s rap scene until he adopted the sweet-sounding melodic style New York rappers are currently using to tell street tales about pain and young love.
In New York, the pop stars who get to be the iPhone wallpapers for teenagers across the boroughs don’t sound like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, but like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Tjay. On “Need Me,” J.I.’s summer 2019 breakout song, he follows in the footsteps of the Bronx-born crooners—it’s a bright-but-macho love song over a sample of Mya and JAY-Z’s “Best of Me (Part 2).” By the time his December mixtape arrived, J.I. had officially become the baby-faced foil to Brooklyn’s drill movement—compared to the no-frills coldness of drill, J.I.’s easy listening melodies make him sound like he could have once been on the cover of Tiger Beat.
But J.I. desperately wants to be more than a Brooklyn rapper. “I’m tryna be global,” the 18-year-old said in a recent interview. “Global” is a vague goal, and you have to assume he’s thinking of Drake, who has conquered popular music by bouncing through trends big and small, from a Memphis dance rap track with BlocBoy JB to a dancehall rhythm with Popcaan to Brooklyn drill with Fivio Foreign to afropop with WizKid. But there’s only one Drake. Most rap albums, mixtapes, and EPs lose their soul when ripped away from their local roots.
J.I.’s new six-song EP, Welcome to GStarr Vol. 1., suffers when he’s pushed too far from his distinct New York sound. On “Spanglish,” the teenager connects with Puerto Rican rapper Myke Towers for an underwhelming reggaetón duet. It’s not a bad song, but why should we listen to half-assed trend-hopping when Ozuna or Bad Bunny are one click away?
Nevertheless, J.I. finds a groove on the EP. “Beautiful Girl” is cheesy, but charming enough to soundtrack New York teenagers falling in and out of love for the next six months, and “20K (Intro)” is a standard rapper-singer ballad. But “Love in the Club” catches the perfect balance between the crossover anthems J.I. aspires to make and the melodic New York love songs that have made him a rising local star. The track has a danceable rhythm that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Burna Boy record, yet still has the anything-can-happen-spirit of a night out in the city with the Brooklyn rapper. Because even if J.I. hasn’t realized it yet, becoming the soundtrack to New York is just as impressive as going global.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G*Starr Ent. / Geffen | July 23, 2020 | 6 | bb3f467f-4636-4eac-9fc6-eca3f70c096c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The dance-pop quartet pays tribute to a canon of airhead classics on a fleet-footed record that prioritizes sheer pleasure and fun above all else. | The dance-pop quartet pays tribute to a canon of airhead classics on a fleet-footed record that prioritizes sheer pleasure and fun above all else. | Confidence Man: Tilt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/confidence-man-tilt/ | Tilt | Confidence Man are fighting valiantly for the rights of bimbos and himbos everywhere. While plenty of bands beg to be taken seriously, the Melbourne-via-Brisbane four-piece makes deadpan, gleefully stupid dance music that’s unashamedly derivative and, most of the time, conceptually meaningless. Their second album, Tilt, commits so hard to meaninglessness and stupidity, in fact, that it manages to function as both good comedy and often superlative dance pop. The aim of these songs, according to vocalist Grace Stephenson, was “partnering this soft, feminine energy with also this hot, feminine energy.” The result is an album whose closest points of comparison are airhead classics like Spice World: The Movie or Paris Hilton’s Paris—a blast of raw energy so potent that it’s hard not to surrender.
Confidence Man first tried this formula on 2018’s Confident Music for Confident People, a collection of largely prosaic dance pop whose mildly fun concept—Stephenson and fellow vocalist Aidan Moore talk-singing in half-hearted American accents about being hot, being in a band, and going to cool parties—was driven into the ground several times over. The lyrics were strangely dense, as if Stephenson and Moore were looking so hard for punchlines that they ended up overcooking the joke; the production felt undercooked, recalling the thinness of early aughts electroclash and dance punk without any of the anarchic edge. Although Tilt follows roughly the same format, it’s better in every way. The main reason is that these songs don’t feel like they were tossed off in the 15 minutes before a show. Producers Sam Hales and Lewis Stephenson do an admirable job of paying homage to 1990s and 2000s dance pop: They conjure a simmering, spine-tingling tech-house build on “Woman,” pay tribute to “Groove Is in the Heart” on “What I Like,” and incorporate textures of dub, UK garage, and Balearic house in unshowy but ingratiating ways. There’s nothing here for purists, but many of these tracks scratch the same itch as Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia or Lady Gaga’s Chromatica, picking elements from the past 30-odd years of dance music history to create a sophisticated and varied synthesis.
Rather than attempt to write jokey lyrics, as they did on Confident Music, Stephenson and Moore are more content just to vibe out, with far more engaging results. The lyrics of Ace of Base-ish highlight “Push It Up,” spoken by Stephenson, typify the outlook: “I do the same thing every day around the world/I do it everywhere ’cause I’m that kind of girl.” They don’t really mean anything, but you feel hot and silly saying them, which is Confidence Man’s modus operandi. Although Stephenson takes most of the vocal duties on Tilt, Moore rarely fades into the background, probably because he takes the persona to even more loony heights than his bandmate, delivering lines like “We’re alive, we’re all animals with beautiful hair” with spine-chilling sleaze.
Tilt makes occasional allusions to the often feminist bent of classic house and disco, but these too are comically shallow: “I’m a woman of many words/But words do not define me,” Stephenson intones on “Woman.” This song, like “Angry Girl” and the enjoyably misandrist “Toy Boy,” seems to have something to say, but the rhetoric falls apart under even minor scrutiny—which feels intentional. Confidence Man find humor in reducing political sentiment to a pulp of vaguely empowering buzzwords.
As Confident Music proved, songs like these are only enjoyable when the production is up to scratch, and Tilt is not without its clunkers. The monotonous “Break It Bought It” is a house slog so desultory that not even RuPaul would touch it, and Stephenson’s endless refrain of “You break it, you bought it” begins to feel bludgeoning very quickly. These duds, however, prove just how sublime the highs are. The best song, “Holiday,” captures the ecstatic raver aesthetic of Sydney dance heroes Pnau and their 2007 hit “Embrace.” The entire appeal of Tilt is captured in these four-and-a-half minutes, prioritizing sheer pleasure and fun over all else. It’s a simple song, but it has a jolting, electric power that taps into the hedonistic feeling of all the best EDM. It confirms one thing about Confidence Man: It takes a lot of smarts to sound this dumb. | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Heavenly / PIAS / I Oh You | April 20, 2022 | 7 | bb40c92f-f2b0-41cb-84df-b8a6ee8bb235 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
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 genre-defining debut from 1981 featuring the acerbic Dan Treacy and his clever, fragile, timeless songs. | 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 genre-defining debut from 1981 featuring the acerbic Dan Treacy and his clever, fragile, timeless songs. | Television Personalities: …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/television-personalities-and-dont-the-kids-just-love-it/ | ...And Don’t the Kids Just Love It | For decades, the Angry Young Men shone a dingy light on British culture. Bottling working-class desperation, these playwrights and novelists originally addressed a 1950s society mired in social immobility and repressed angst. Their themes anchored the films of Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and later Mike Leigh, and found global appeal in the music of the Who. For all its rip-it-up-and-start-again bluster, punk expressed a similar disillusionment: The Sex Pistols and their ilk just gave the angry young man a spikier hairdo and held his jacket together with safety pins.
Dan Treacy, the leader and sole constant member of Television Personalities, wrote about the same frustrated youths as his parents’ generation. He littered his songs with references to film and theater, including archetypical mid-century plays like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. He prodded borders between life, songwriting, and the culture at large, cheekily quoting both Jonathan Richman and “We Will Rock You” on an album that delves into his harrowing battle with drugs. Yet back in his teen years, class-conscious British realism was his model and lyrical inspiration. Take Television Personalities’ 1978 debut single “14th Floor,” whose narrator is trapped in a council estate tower because the lift is broken. Catchy hooks and schoolboy wit are in abundant supply—so are poverty, dysfunctional homes, and psychic pain.
Born in 1960, Treacy grew up blue collar in the increasingly posh area of Chelsea, London. His father did roadwork and his mother ran a laundrette. Through her shop, and around the hip thoroughfare of King’s Road, young Treacy met Bob Marley, Malcolm McLaren, and Jimmy Page, interning as an adolescent at Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records—his mom, who washed the clothes of the community’s ascendant bohemians, got him the gig. Kitchen-sink drama, swingin’ London: In his early music, Treacy flits between the two, dosing social realism with psychedelic distortion, jangly guitar, and rudimentary vocal accompaniments. Television Personalities were hardly the only punk-adjacent group taking notes from the ’60s. But they were also suspicious of the punk revolution, and with their paisley shirts and twee waistcoats, they were the rare band to wear this opinion on their sleeves.
The group’s second single, written when Treacy was still a teen, follows his speaker as he wanders around his childhood neighborhood, feeling different from everyone around him:
Walking Down King’s Road
I see so many faces,
They come from many places
They come down for the day
They walk around together
And try and look trendy
I think it’s a shame
That they all look the same
After the chorus drops—“Here they come/The part-time punks”—Treacy derides clueless conformists who buy albums at Rough Trade Records “because they heard John Peel play it.” Treacy also sent a copy of a copy of his self-pressed EP to Peel, who spun “Part Time Punks” on his popular radio show. By 1980, Television Personalities signed to Rough Trade, the label that grew out of the influential store they had disparaged. A classic countercultural gambit worked: have the guts to hate the status quo, and it might just love you back.
During January 1981, Treacy, accompanied by bassist Ed Ball and drummer Mark Sheppard, released the first Television Personalities album …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, a feat of three-piece economy, chockablock with relentless hooks and poignant lyrics. In just 37 minutes, the record paved the way from post-punk to indie rock, hauling passé sounds from the ’60s into uncharted, lo-fi terrain. Their sound, cleverness, fragility, and frankness snowballed through music, rolling into the work of Morrissey, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, Nirvana, and Pavement. Alan McGee claimed Television Personalities changed his life, leading him to start his groundbreaking label Creation Records. Other bands even began to dress like Television Personalities; a whole rock movement named itself after paisley patterns. Their first album isn’t as starry-eyed as its equally clairvoyant, stoned follow-up, 1982’s Mummy Your Not Watching Me, but the debut cheerfully prophesied a brighter path out of post-punk gloom, one attuned to feelings and human foibles. It’s Treacy’s narrative masterpiece, his most potent rock record, and the last time he cast his burgeoning personal struggles in the rosy light of youth.
…And Don’t the Kids Just Love It is shot through with the simultaneous joys of discovery and simplicity, unmistakable evidence of the kid genius behind it. Almost every track is a clinic in verse-chorus-verse tension. Treacy’s guitar lines can be brilliantly tentative; each bum note in the solo that ends “The Glittering Prizes” is like a nervous tic in an articulate monologue. Backing vocals hang idiosyncratically in front of the mix on “A Family Affair,” obscuring the rueful chorus behind heavy light. Treacy often came up with song names before writing the music and lyrics, favoring playful refrains that present as a strange jumble of reverence and mockery. Referential titles such as “Look Back in Anger” and “A Picture of Dorian Gray” feel like pretty words the grown-ups say, which the narrator wants to try out for himself. On the moving “Jackanory Stories,” Treacy pokes fun at the titular British children’s series while twisting some ordinary writing advice: “Just like life there’s a good beginning but there is no middle/So you may as well skip to the end.”
Beneath it all, desperation and rage are palpable. The Clash famously sang about using fury. Television Personalities, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to depict it. Opener “This Angry Silence” cycles through a hollering father, a drunk mother, a brother with an eating disorder, a sister who’s always at the pub (she happens to be a bartender), and finally our speaker, a “silly” poet who’s been snubbed by the girl he loves. On “A Family Affair,” Treacy surveys the horror of other peoples’ flats: “Mrs. Davies cries/The welfare have taken her children today/Jenny’s so upset/She just received the results of her test/It proved positive.” The walls subsequently crumble between songwriter and song. Turning his pen back on himself, Treacy’s lines seem anachronistically lifted from emo: “I telephoned God today/But all I got was the answering machine/Please help me.”
The LP shifts from the claustrophobia of unhappy families to the despair of living among equally miserable friends. Adulthood’s beginning is carved into the record’s grooves like graffiti on a bar top—Treacy completed …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It when he was 20, an age when home is untenable, but all the friends you might move in with are still shaky themselves. “World of Pauline Lewis” and the proto-Smiths “La Grande Illusion,” propelled by Ball’s popping bassline, are portraits of doomed, depressed young people, witnessed by a narrator whose guileless attempts at intimacy are futile. On the final track, “Look Back in Anger,” the turbulent family narrative from the disc’s beginning passes down to the next generation. Our hero looks back at a failed relationship with exasperation and regret: This cycle of disappointment, Treacy suggests, keeps rolling on in its quintessentially English way.
Throughout, the words seem to tumble out of his exultant, perhaps slightly embellished cockney accent. Punk, after all, liberated bands from needing to sing like Americans in order to hit it big. Treacy’s darker-hued opus, 1984’s The Painted Word, takes shots at Margaret Thatcher and her jingoistic Falklands War. But on his debut, Treacy’s bleak regard for the English domestic front is tempered by a kaleidoscopic nostalgia: He wants to unearth the country’s myths, embrace its pastoralism, and even curate the gems of its cultural history for a generation that was pretending to make a clean break with the recent past. “Geoffrey Ingram” might be the album’s most infectious pop tune, but it’s also a veritable sandwich cake of UK cultural references. The song is named for a character in A Taste of Honey, yet its central conceit of a flawless schoolboy “who always gets home as it starts to rain” echoes the Kinks’ 1967 classic “David Watts,” as filtered through the Jam, who covered it on their obstinately melodic, masterly 1978 collection All Mod Cons. Treacy drops postmodern breadcrumbs, leading listeners through the lineage of artists who inspired him.
A similar mischievousness motors the record’s quietest and most devastating composition, “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” A decade before the song came out, its subject, Pink Floyd’s narcotics-addled first singer, notoriously disappeared from public life. Treacy knows where to find him: Cambridge. He likely heard some rumors back on King’s Road, but the point is not the story’s eerie accuracy. The young artist means to transcribe modern legend, weaving threads of psychedelia, rural English fantasy, and the innocence of fandom. A child’s voice responds to the song’s teenaged speaker, who describes Barrett’s “little house,” his “little pet dog” and “a little pet mouse.” During their visits, he and the rock star “have Sunday tea, sausages and beans.” Treacy goes on: “He was very famous once upon a time/And no one knows even if he’s alive.” The child cries: “We do!”
Addiction and depression led Treacy to struggle in his career, but he also chose to be noncommercial. A persistent sense of irreverence got him kicked off of a high-profile 1984 tour with David Gilmour; he read Syd Barrett’s home address to the crowd. His music grew prickly, atmospheric and sorrowful, and he steadily replaced his skillfully rendered characters with brazen first-person dispatches from his emotional life. Instead of duking it out in the major-label trenches, he started a couple independent labels of his own, Whaam! and later Dreamworld, a DIY business decision that would prove nearly as important to the future of indie rock as Treacy’s own compositions. The music, though, continued to be fruitful—after The Painted Word, 1990’s pop-friendly Privilege and 1992’s double album Closer to God scattered the aesthetic seeds of his early work, letting them germinate in far-flung ground.
Treacy was submerged in his habits, too. Heroin became central to his existence, and later in the ’90s he disappeared like Syd Barett, provoking similar speculation that he might be dead. He went to prison for theft several times and lived on the streets or crashed with friends for long periods. In 2011, just when Television Personalities were ramping up again, he nearly died from a blood clot, and his health issues have mounted since. According to biographer Benjamin Berton, the 62-year-old singer currently stays in a care home, where he has limited mobility, impaired vision, and some memory loss.
Making sense of such tragedy is foolish—as the angry young men showed, narratives may depict, inspire, and politically activate, but they won’t reverse life’s cruelty and ruthlessness. Yet Treacy left several generations of admirers who discovered his work’s many gifts and repackaged them for times to come, piping up like kids whenever someone asks if they know anything about that storied London group Television Personalities: “We do!” | 2023-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | March 19, 2023 | 9.5 | bb4cf5b8-a0db-4a43-bf78-8bf02ba91bd1 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The Polish ambient musician channels deep-seated melodic instincts on her exploratory and enchantingly enigmatic new album. | The Polish ambient musician channels deep-seated melodic instincts on her exploratory and enchantingly enigmatic new album. | Martyna Basta: Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martyna-basta-slowly-forgetting-barely-remembering/ | Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering | Martyna Basta was trained as a classical guitarist. On YouTube, you can find videos of the Polish musician as a preteen, tackling her repertoire with uncommon skill and an expressive sensibility unusual for a player so young. But like many musicians torn between the pursuit of excellence and desire for creative freedom, she eventually quit her studies and turned her back on the instrument. “In music school, everything had to be perfect,” she has said. “There was no room for any margin of error or any room for experimentation.” Instead, she turned to photography and field recording, learning to embrace the world as it presented itself to her.
Over the last four years the Kraków musician has released a growing body of work that pushes back against conventional modes of beauty, flipping over the block of marble to see what lies squirming underneath: quivering microtonal dissonance, arrhythmic scraping, breathy sighs and guttural whispers. While Basta has tackled a range of formats—meditative standalone tracks, filmic longform works, audio “postcards” collaging together field recordings from friends and confidants—all of them feel charged by a profound sense of unknowing. Her music exists in a stygian netherzone: It is rarely clear where her sounds come from or where a given piece is going.
Basta’s new album, Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering, employs similar moods as its predecessor, 2021’s Making Eye Contact With Solitude: The volume is hushed, the approach oblique, the candle watts practically nil. She favors bristling tritones and spiky harmonics over more consonant harmonies and timbres; when she sings, she limits herself to staccato, monosyllabic coos. Omnipresent rustling and gurgling suggest ceaseless and vaguely ominous natural processes, as though she had recorded atop a melting glacier. But she also pushes into more conventional spaces on this album, at times seeming as though she is finding her way back to melodic instincts that she forced herself to unlearn when she gave up the guitar.
That journey plays out almost in real time in the nine-minute “Podszepnik I,” the album’s second track. It opens with a lattice of moans and murmurs, touch-tone signals, insectoid scuttling, and pitch-shifted whispers. Halfway through, however, a plucked zither pattern assumes vivid focus, like wind chimes ringing out in the night, offering a scale—dissonant and strangely tuned, but a scale nonetheless—for the rest of the elements to arrange themselves around.
Even at their most melodic, these are not straightforward songs. The Los Angeles ambient musician claire rousay makes an appearance on “It Could Be as It Was Forever,” her ASMR purr run through heavy Auto-Tune; in the song’s climax, her deceptively dulcet major-key intervals give way to a bracing explosion of dissonance, squeezing the equivalent of free jazz out of pitch-correction software and glancing bow strikes. And in “Back and Forth,” where flickering constellations of zither gradually give way to a gentle guitar melody, the background swarms with whispers and grunts. The sense of intimacy is unsettling; one might read these sounds as evidence of eros, but I hear them—particularly when combined with faint splashing noises that might be rowing oars—as signs of great exertion. It’s as though Basta were moving under a heavy load, pushing forward with great determination.
That implication of strained effort makes “Podszepnik II” all the more remarkable. Here, on the album’s eight-and-a-half-minute closer and highlight, all the intimations of disturbance melt away, leaving nothing but a simple guitar figure played on the low strings. It is a repetitive melody, reaching out and then folding back in upon itself, but every so often it stretches for a higher note, as though it were trying to express an emotion that words cannot. In its inky tone, it is almost goth, but without any hint of pastiche or posing. Basta’s voice swirls around the melody in gradually thickening layers of wordless mourning, the result sounding like a lament for an unfathomable loss. In its simplicity, coming at the end of this tangled, contorted album, her song also sounds like a celebration of freedom. | 2023-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warm Winters Ltd. | May 4, 2023 | 7.8 | bb5bae91-1a5c-4ac6-ab16-1db6612e5846 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Birmingham techno producer puts a fresh spin on his pummeling club tracks; the album is equally suited for dancefloor abandon and spiritual searching. | Inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Birmingham techno producer puts a fresh spin on his pummeling club tracks; the album is equally suited for dancefloor abandon and spiritual searching. | Surgeon: Luminosity Device | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/surgeon-luminosity-device/ | Luminosity Device | Beginning in the mid 1990s, Anthony Child—as the DJ and electronic musician Surgeon—pioneered a strand of techno as brutalist as the concrete architecture of his native Birmingham, turning out hammering, remorseless rhythms that drew their power from the grease and grit of industrial music. Much of modern techno—from the Berghain sound to the noise-laced experiments of Prurient and Broken English Club—owes something to Surgeon’s influence. But Child himself remains idiosyncratic, averse to pigeonholes. A few years ago, for instance, you might have found him strafing arenas full of Lady Gaga superfans with coruscating modular electronics, joined by Gaga’s DJ Lady Starlight.
In that clip from the Lady Gaga concert, Child is sporting a Coil T-shirt; just like John Balance and Peter Christopherson’s industrial project, there’s the sense that Child isn’t interested in noise as mere provocation, but as a path to enlightenment. Over the last few years, we’ve seen him venture outside the confines of Surgeon’s turf to explore such themes by embracing new methodologies. The two-volume Electronic Recordings From Maui Jungle, released under his own name on Editions Mego, offered meditative excursions in modular synthesis, melding sweltering rainforest field recordings with the bubbling tones of a Buchla Music Easel. Meanwhile, a new duo project, the Transcendence Orchestra, employed monastic drones as a route to “exploring the effect of tone and improvisation on consciousness.” Luminosity Device feels like Child’s attempt to reconcile these extracurricular experiments in the esoteric with the corpus of Surgeon itself. The album is inspired in part by the Bardo Thodol—better known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an ancient guide to the afterlife beloved of psychedelic explorers—and boasts track titles alluding to that ancient text’s ruminations on death and rebirth.
Despite this backstory, and despite a cover photograph where a blurry, triple-exposed Child wears the opaque gaze of a cult leader, once you get past the liquid new age of the opening “Seven Peaceful Deities,” the contents within are unmistakably Surgeon. “The Primary Clear Light” and “Earth-Sinking-Into-Water” offer up rugged, pummeling techno characterized by its pared-back simplicity and surging, runaway-train energy. Still, there is the sense that Luminosity Device has nudged Child’s sound onto a slightly different track. “The Vibratory Waves of External Unity” and “Master of All Visible Shapes” balance machine-music rigidity with an unmistakably lysergic quality—rhythms shot through with squirming undulations, burbling synths flaring and dissolving around the edges.
Luminosity Device is notable not only for its slamming dancefloor qualities: In its sequencing, it also suggests a sense of passage—from tranquil repose to dark momentum to frenzied reckoning, and finally an arrival at some kind of enlightenment. There’s a stunning moment some five minutes into “The Etheric Body” where the furious kicks suddenly fall away to reveal a lattice of pin-prick synths, and a voice describes the process of shrugging off one’s physical form and becoming spirit. That sets the scene for the climactic “The Source,” which uses mantra-like repetitions and mangled acid sounds to drill down through layers of consciousness—a sort of DIY trepanation conducted using synthesizer and drum machine.
It’s possible to listen to Luminosity Device and hear just the grit and none of the grace. But that this album feels as suited to dancefloor abandon as it does for periods of meditation or contemplation is telling; for Child, perhaps, the two aren’t so different—both offer a way of ceding control, of losing yourself in something greater. | 2018-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dynamic Tension | May 23, 2018 | 7 | bb665daa-ba84-4e5c-b238-43f0139ed5a9 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
Why Khaliq, a young upstart from St. Paul, is turning out some of the Twin Cities’ most forward-thinking rap music, and he does so by circling way back. His new seven-song EP takes the visual and musical signifiers of late-'90s and early-'00s conscious rap and injects into them welcome doses of immediacy and personal detail, and at least a half-dozen new flows. | Why Khaliq, a young upstart from St. Paul, is turning out some of the Twin Cities’ most forward-thinking rap music, and he does so by circling way back. His new seven-song EP takes the visual and musical signifiers of late-'90s and early-'00s conscious rap and injects into them welcome doses of immediacy and personal detail, and at least a half-dozen new flows. | Why Khaliq: Under the Perspective Tree EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21581-under-the-perspective-tree-ep/ | Under the Perspective Tree EP | The rap scene in Minneapolis and St. Paul has splintered in curious ways. From the late '90s through the end of the Bush years, the Twin Cities were known nationally for the Rhymesayers roster above all else. Atmosphere, Brother Ali, and Eyedea typified the Cities' dominant styles: self-deprecating, socially conscious, abstract. This music was sometimes cordoned off as "backpack rap," but as early as Lucy Ford it had morphed into something weirder. In any event, this aesthetic mostly trickled down to the local scenes and the promoters who curated it.
But as two of the three aforementioned acts moved into middle age (and after Eyedea tragically died in 2010), it left a stylistic vacuum that artists from all corners rushed to fill. Some of the new decade's most exciting work has been tailored for the live setting: Grrrl Party springs to mind, as does wag music, a glitchy, stuttering type of party rap that indulges all its best and weirdest impulses. The Stand4rd earned national attention with ghost-infested R&B; Mike the Martyr is bringing back Starburys from the discount bin at Foot Locker; Finding Novyon is rapping about beloved cartoon characters. And Why Khaliq, a young upstart from St. Paul, is turning out some of the Cities' most forward-thinking music, and he's doing it by circling way, way back.
Under the Perspective Tree, his new seven-song EP, takes the visual and musical signifiers of late-'90s and early-'00s conscious rap and injects into them welcome doses of immediacy and personal detail, and at least a half-dozen new flows. Start with the cover. A black man has been hanged from a tree, from which also dangles red lingerie over scattered Hennessy bottles, piles of cash, and gold chains. Slave hymnals bookend the opening song itself. But it hones in immediately: It's 3 a.m., I'm in my baby mama's mama's house. And that's what Khaliq does time and time again over the course of the record—zoom in when you expect the sweeping argument.
Producer Lelan Foley can be largely credited for how loose and improvisational Perspective Tree feels*.* The EP leans heavily on jazz piano and pavement-hard drum programming, arranged in such a way that each part of a song feels as if it shifts into the next of its own accord. On “Knew the Half,” Foley brings in the type of rolling hi-hats that are more often found in contemporary trap music, but lays them under one of the tape's warmest melodies to hypnotic effect.
Khaliq is a precise rapper and a personal, colorful writer. To stay on “Knew the Half”: he drags your focus in and out of the drum pattern, letting his syllables fall consistently but switching where he places the emphasis in each bar. Later in that song, and in a handful of others (“For You,” “Nonchalant Interlude”), Khaliq deploys a captivating singing voice, which breaks up the sound and structure of the project. Why Khaliq is the type of rapper superbly suited for his time: one who understands how to use the past to move forward. It would be a shock if the next year or so doesn't afford him a chance to latch on to the present. | 2016-02-16T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-16T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 16, 2016 | 7.8 | bb671250-0f3d-410c-8e6e-d84f04aeb52a | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The Bay Area band’s two singer-guitarists have been friends since they were teens. On a debut album shot through with grief and tenderness, that intimacy fuels an almost telepathic interplay. | The Bay Area band’s two singer-guitarists have been friends since they were teens. On a debut album shot through with grief and tenderness, that intimacy fuels an almost telepathic interplay. | Sour Widows: Revival of a Friend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sour-widows-revival-of-a-friend/ | Revival of a Friend | Catharsis does not always come quickly in a Sour Widows song, but when it does, it hits like a lightning strike. On early singles and EPs, musicians Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson intermingled their voices and guitar melodies while dreamy soundscapes sprawled into extended vamps, holding tight to both tension and tenderness. The Bay Area band has honed its process on its debut full-length, Revival of a Friend—an album filled with patient, gracious songs that unfold with careful momentum and deep emotion.
Revival of a Friend is shaped by grief: Both Sinaiko and Thomson faced significant loss in the years since starting the band, and those experiences are embedded in their songwriting. The dynamic “I-90” pays tribute to a partner Sinaiko lost to an accidental overdose, filtering sweet, quotidian memories through the retrospective lens of sorrow. “Initiation,” too, is a song of mourning, written after the 2021 death of Thomson’s mother; its imagery is striking, combining the sacred and visceral in lyrics that sing of “Heaven spilling at the steppe/Stardust in the cup of my hand.”
Many of these songs depict a narrator reaching out for connection, grasping for something just beyond their grasp: “Fuck everything I did/To feel good for a moment,” goes the opening of “Cherish,” which eventually comes around to a pleading note: “Will you love me through this?” But beneath the desperation and severed connections lies the sound of musicians who are deeply attuned to each other. Sinaiko and Thomson are longtime friends who first met as teenagers and have written songs together ever since. You can hear their intimacy in the way they play and sing together—guitar melodies that snake and vine around each other; vocal harmonies where each voice complements the other with richness and depth. Drummer Max Edelman joined the band after Sinaiko and Thomson’s very first show as a duo, and his playing—along with bassist Timmy Stabler—ranges from delicate to thunderous, forming a deft backbone for the songs’ ebbs and flows.
Several songs shift seamlessly into instrumental interludes—like the spacey, slowcore-indebted “Revival,” which follows opener “Big Dogs,” or the gently rolling “Gold Thread,” which extends and explores musical themes introduced in “Initiation.” These blood-pressure-lowering respites make the album’s moments of breakthrough hit even harder. “Witness,” also written in the wake of Thomson’s mother’s death, has a roller coaster’s momentum: When a tight rhythm and strummed chords in the verse give way to a more elastic beat and gracefully ambling guitar lines, it feels like a fist unclenching. Later, a similar musical build erupts into full-on release; the whole band is propelled powerfully forward by the heaviness of loss, a “feeling” that “would kill you,” as Sinaiko and Thomson shout. When the song downshifts and sways into its final moments, the effect is dizzying.
The closing track, also an elegy, likewise spends its final minutes in poignant slow burn. Thomson has said the song is about learning and re-learning that, in grief, there is no one right way to feel, and there’s no way out but through. After Thomson sings the song’s final lines, the band continues to play for a few minutes more, gaining intensity then slowly receding, as if working through these changing and overwhelming emotions together, in real time. | 2024-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | July 2, 2024 | 7.6 | bb7eb2b8-8962-4ae3-9a04-f1a7636e771f | Marissa Lorusso | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/ | |
The Asheville songwriter’s newly reissued debut divulges her restless thoughts through folksy garage-pop that’s both vulnerable and fierce. | The Asheville songwriter’s newly reissued debut divulges her restless thoughts through folksy garage-pop that’s both vulnerable and fierce. | Indigo De Souza: I Love My Mom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/indigo-de-souza-i-love-my-mom/ | I Love My Mom | Asheville, North Carolina singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza first picked up the guitar as a child at the suggestion of her mother, who was seeking relief for De Souza’s intense shyness. By 11, she’d begun writing original songs. For De Souza, a self-described outcast, loneliness isn’t just a go-to songwriting topic—it’s the reason she began making music in the first place, and its presence is unshakeable. In 2018, she assembled a band at a friend’s house to record I Love My Mom, a collection of the best songs she’d written over the previous few years. A new reissue from Saddle Creek re-introduces De Souza as an undeniable force, divulging her restless thoughts through folksy garage-pop. Originally intended for only a small circle of people to hear, I Love My Mom is imperfect, unabashed, and endearing.
Now in her mid-20s, De Souza explores alienation in much the same way that Phil Elverum, one of her inspirations, has explored the facets of death: How do you keep going when misery seems inevitable? I Love My Mom doesn’t attempt to find the answer, but to navigate each phase of solitude as it arrives. The album’s centerpiece, the jaunty “Take Off Ur Pants,” assesses her perceived shortcomings relative to the rest of the population: “When am I gonna go back to school like everybody else does?/When am I gonna start being cool like everybody else is?” She describes mental and emotional woes both in quotidien metaphors about dirty dishes and in dramatic, nihilistic terms: “I need to be kicked, maybe fucked, maybe told I’m in the way,” she repeats on opener “How I Get Myself Killed.” Her voice flits between breathy murmurs and emphatic wallops; at times, her vibrato resembles that of fellow Asheville resident Angel Olsen.
I Love My Mom isn’t explicitly a breakup album; its subjects are too ambiguous to fall into the “relationship” category. De Souza’s songs pinpoint the unrequited crushes, the empty hookups, the unsung situationships—seemingly minor entanglements that might not evoke the full agony of heartbreak, but when compounded, become steady omens of romantic futility. Instead of languishing there, she offers subdued reminders of love in other forms: “I don’t need anyone to love me/I love my mom more than any of you fools,” she sings on “Ghost.” The titular phrase feels like a small yet significant victory.
At times, De Souza sounds like she’s on track to reaching the closest thing to inner peace, or at least a kind of passive resignation. “I’m not the girl you thought I was, but I am close,” she sings on “Good Heart.” Moments like these are fleeting, instantly sobered by either others’ rejection or her own dissatisfaction. But weirdos, outcasts, and introverts are good at spending time alone. De Souza channels this message on “Ghost,” where her gentle deflation of a partner’s ego leads up to one of the album’s biggest kiss-offs: “I like sleeping in your bed/But honey, I’ve got my own at home.” It’s a subtle and gentle reassurance of the solitary worlds we create for ourselves.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 24, 2021 | 7.2 | bb7ff070-9f51-4c6f-9b50-54b5ef5e356e | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Three Lobed Recordings' second vinyl box set features full-length splits between Bardo Pond and Yo La Tengo, Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler, Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger, Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn, and Thurston Moore and John Moloney and Chris Corsano, Alan Bishop, and Bill Orcutt. Despite the title, the ultimate takeaway of Parallelogram might be the tension among all these acts, not their similarities. | Three Lobed Recordings' second vinyl box set features full-length splits between Bardo Pond and Yo La Tengo, Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler, Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger, Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn, and Thurston Moore and John Moloney and Chris Corsano, Alan Bishop, and Bill Orcutt. Despite the title, the ultimate takeaway of Parallelogram might be the tension among all these acts, not their similarities. | Various Artists: Parallelogram | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20588-parallelogram/ | Parallelogram | Three Lobed Recordings operates from the brightly lit basement of a one-floor midcentury home in a quiet subdivision of modest ranches outside of Greensboro, the third largest city in North Carolina. When the label issued its first vinyl box set in conjunction with its 10th anniversary in 2011, Cory Rayborn—Three Lobed’s owner, a lawyer by day—joked of the operation’s at-home modesty by way of a sales pitch. “In this case,” he wrote of his staff, “‘we’ means one human and three feline assistants.”
Since the release of that collection, the excellent Not the Spaces You Know, but Between Them, Three Lobed has continued unabated with its curatorial quest through the weird annals of experimental American folk, drone, and rock. The pace has been methodical, with four or so albums a year, but the execution masterful. In that span, Three Lobed has served as a syndicate for some of the world’s best, relatively young solo guitarists—Chuck Johnson, William Tyler, Sir Richard Bishop, and Tom Carter. There’s been shambling, snarling folk-rock from Wooden Wand, impish permutations of folk and metal from Horseback. Three Lobed issued one of the decade’s most transfixing drone records—On Jones Beach, a bagpipe-anchored collaboration between members of the Necks and Sonic Youth—in 2012, followed by two essential collections from Bardo Pond, the free Philadelphia spirits that prompted Rayborn to launch Three Lobed in the first place. For an imprint so smitten with noisy records, Three Lobed’s actual signal-to-noise ratio remains nearly perfect.
Still, four years and all those accomplishments later, Three Lobed’s operations remain minimal, with Rayborn and his cats working away in the basement after-hours. The small scale seems by now a point of pride, a way to show that the persistent dedication of one person can help shape an entire scene. Indeed, such modesty and minimalism offer significant returns for the roster of Parallelogram, Three Lobed’s second vinyl set and a collection of 10 acts so strong it would feel like a fever dream for most any avant imprint. Bardo Pond splits a full-length with Yo La Tengo, Six Organs of Admittance one with William Tyler. Transatlantic and trans-generational kindred spirits Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger face off, while Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn back one another up on sides of their own. And for the five-record set’s white-hot point of dissonance and bedlam, Thurston Moore and John Moloney duel as the duo Caught on Tape while Chris Corsano, Alan Bishop and Bill Orcutt crash, clatter and grind as a trio. Parallelogram presents a constellation of explorers, separately ferrying the same enthusiasm and openness that have animated Three Lobed’s very catalog.
Almost every act here has experience with a much larger label. In Sonic Youth, of course, Thurston Moore made major waves by moving to a major label a quarter-century ago, while Michael Chapman issued Rainmaker on Harvest Records during the company’s first year, the same year they issued Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. Four have deals on Matador, two on Merge, one on Drag City and so on. Some of these bands may sell more records in a week of touring than Rayborn sells of all his releases combined in a year.
But these five splits are available only in an edition of about 950 LPs. Through the label, they’re offered only as a buy-them-all bundle, though stores and the bands themselves will be able to sell individual titles. Coupled with those low numbers and a relatively high barrier to entry, Three Lobed’s low-key status and individual-driven aesthetic seem to have made each act comfortable, or free and clear to try something different out of their typical spotlight. As William Tyler, who continues his recent streak of austere wonder with his two contributions here, put it in an early interview about Parallelogram, “I pretty much say yes to anything Cory suggests. He is a number one ace dude, like a Yogi Berra-type figure in the subterranean rock scene.” Everyone on Parallelogram seems to respond to that same why-not directive.
Yo La Tengo, for instance, shows a piece of their collectively complex musical mind rarely seen in a recording studio; their “Electric Eye” is a fierce 20-minute improvisation, with stalled signals, scraping guitars, and muffled, murmured vocals fighting against a militantly loping rhythm. Its counterpart is Bardo Pond’s “Screen for a Catch (Fur Bearing Eyes)”, a sidelong beauty that seems to funnel almost every strength of their catalogue into one arcing collage. They move from bleary-eyed stoner drift to howling-guitar psychedelia, from seraphic harmonies to acoustic-slide tangents, closing with a high-and-mighty jam that fades into the middle distance. It’s like a patchwork homage to a label that exists only because they do.
And just two months after releasing the biggest album of his career, Kurt Vile pounds the piano keys through Randy Newman’s “Pretty Boy”, a song that’s a bar fight waiting to happen. You can almost picture Vile, a tumbler of brown liquor in his hand, singing it this way at a bar after a show, offering it as send-up to casual new fans who might have quaked his perpetual mellow. And when he digs into heartland country for a cover of John Prine’s gleefully apologetic “Way Back Then”, he sounds carefree, temporarily leaving behind his cool for a moment as an earnest balladeer.
Steve Gunn adds guitar to that cover, and Vile returns the favor for Gunn’s faithful and steely-eyed cover of Nico’s “60/40.” More intriguing, though, is “Spring Garden”, a 10-minute fantasy featuring Gunn, Vile and harpist Mary Lattimore on piano. In the last few years, Gunn has morphed from a guitarist issuing long-form, dexterous instrumentals through Three Lobed to a proper singer-songwriter and bandleader. But just a few months ahead of his own big Matador debut, Gunn attempts to reconcile both past and present with this extended beauty. The trio delights in seemingly infinite refractions of a riff without distracting from Gunn’s soft-focus hook.
As the title suggests, Rayborn intended these pairings to highlight interesting, perhaps overlooked similarities between sets of artists he treasures. And that approach works. Hearing Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler on the same LP, for example, you notice how well both manage density, or the lack thereof, as a discrete aspect of dynamics. Tyler’s stunning “Southern Living” begins as a bucolic duet for acoustic guitar and sighing slide. But he slowly lets the notes hang until the space can handle no more sound, until it all blurs into a messy web he then must pull apart. Likewise, in the gorgeously distorted “Lsha”, Chasny piles layers into the mix—his ghostly vocals and rapid fretwork, broken keyboards and whirring synthesizers—until it merges into one signal. He then drifts from the din, arriving at chords so soft and pretty they sound like bedside whispers.
But the ultimate takeaway of Parallelogram might be the tension among all these acts, not their similarities. Compare the guitar elegance of Tyler or Chapman, especially on the latter’s stunning “Stockport Monday (Homage Tom Rush)”, to the six-string aggression of Moore. Here, he takes a familiar riff—in this case, the pinging theme of his “Ono Soul”—and twists, turns and tackles it in every way he can. Feedback and static, squeals and divebombs: Moore searches for new ways to destroy his own melody. Usually so solemn, Hiss Golden Messenger seems to bask in the springtime sun during a delicate, groove-heavy take on J.J. Cale’s blushing “Wish I Had Not Said That”. He adds a lightness of soul at which the original only hinted. Corsano, Bishop, and Orcutt, on the other hand, torture Jack Bruce’s soft-rock flop “Politician”, turning its creepy come-on into an off-putting, oft-hilarious fuck-you. The cumulative effect of all these lines—parallel, perpendicular, divergent—is one of sheer wonder.
There was a time not to long ago—when it became clear that most every act, no matter how large or small, could release their own records online—that people questioned what role, if any, labels might play in music’s future. Why would someone need an imprint if they could simply convince friends and fans to share a file or link? In many cases, that has come to fruition, allowing for the emergence of trends that might have been bypassed by the old, slow system. But labels aren’t just big businesses. They are, as in the case of Three Lobed, people with a long-standing dedication to a sound they want to push into the world. And their involvement in those scenes can help connect dots or create ideas, turning strange potential scenarios into five-record box sets that create new contexts for familiar acts. More than curation or tastemaking or filtering, the usual quasi-canards invoked for label survival, their real source of staying power might be their ability to invest in, understand, and help evolve a niche. For the last 15 years, that’s what Three Lobed has done. Parallelogram is a trove of evidence, fit for a label too big for a suburban basement. | 2015-11-16T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-16T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Three Lobed | November 16, 2015 | 8.4 | bb82814e-fe93-4c93-b369-859b499609a1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Damn the Torpedos is the peak of Tom Petty’s songwriting with the Heartbreakers. Slick, big, and immutably classic, the album is a front-to-back feat of production and songwriting. | Damn the Torpedos is the peak of Tom Petty’s songwriting with the Heartbreakers. Slick, big, and immutably classic, the album is a front-to-back feat of production and songwriting. | Tom Petty / The Heartbreakers: Damn the Torpedoes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-and-the-heartbreakers-damn-the-torpedoes/ | Damn the Torpedoes | Before he was the American bard of the wandering, willful, and stoned, Tom Petty was an ornery Southerner who migrated from a Florida college town to scrape together a record deal in the rotten heart of the Southern California record business. Four years after signing with Shelter Records, and in the midst of recording the third Heartbreakers album for the label, it all went bad.
When MCA bought Shelter’s fledgling parent company ABC in 1979, Petty tried to opt out of his contract—in which he’d naively ceded all publishing royalties—and MCA and Shelter sued him in L.A. Superior Court. Refusing to be “bought and sold like a piece of meat,” Petty threatened to shelve his band’s new album, and MCA counter-threatened to confiscate the band’s session tapes—legally, their property. Petty then privately told a studio assistant to hide each day’s reels in a secret location without his knowledge. Petty’s final blow was filing for bankruptcy, which opened his current contracts to renegotiation and signaled that he wasn’t about to flinch. Remarkably, MCA and Shelter caved. MCA kept Petty on contract, but it was now far more lucrative with significant creative latitude. They also returned to him all publishing rights and gave him his own boutique label, Backstreet. It was a rare victory in a cutthroat business: a musician called a major label’s bluff and forced them to fold. The album the Heartbreakers released that October, a day before Petty’s 29th birthday and four months after his Chapter 11 filing, was appropriately titled Damn the Torpedoes.
”We didn’t sit around and talk about making an album about that experience,” Petty told Rolling Stone in 1980, “but we knew we were. They get you pinned in a corner, and the last thing you can do to keep your sanity is write songs.” Especially for someone who specialized in songs about losers trying to get by, Torpedoes was a positively triumphant moment. Thanks in large part to the studio wizardry of producer Jimmy Iovine and engineer Shelly Yakus, “Refugee,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “Here Comes My Girl” sounded massive on FM radio. After two studio albums, after “Breakdown” barely cracked the Top 40 and “American Girl” didn’t even chart, after four years in the industry mines and a few months of court battles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had finally conquered the pop world.
Torpedoes sat at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart for seven weeks—kept from the top spot by Pink Floyd’s The Wall—and would eventually sell nearly three million copies. The band’s stardom was actually validated through MCA’s own blinkered corporate logic. Having learned no lessons from testing Petty’s will, the label determined that the Heartbreakers now qualified for its unscrupulous “Superstar Pricing,” an increase from $8.98 to $9.98 already applied to big sellers like Steely Dan’s Gaucho and the Xanadu soundtrack from ELO and Olivia Newton-John. Yet again, Petty threatened to withhold the LP—arguing that his label was trying to price-gouge his fans—or title it Eight Ninety-Eight. MCA decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Petty won again, and named the followup Hard Promises.
The Heartbreakers—guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch, and bassist Ron Blair—split the difference between a lot of styles: They weren’t massive UK art-rock or the arena-sized metal of AC/DC and Van Halen. They were an L.A. band, but without the slick, expensive sound of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. They fit somewhere between spiky new wave, the blue-collar rock of Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, and the emergent crop of critically-beloved, acerbic UK traditionalists Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, and Joe Jackson. In the previous few years, the Heartbreakers had opened for everyone from Blondie to Bob Seger, the Kinks, Al Kooper, Rush, even the jazz-rock ensemble Tom Scott and the L.A. Express—but had never headlined their own tour. Their second album You’re Gonna Get It! had gone gold, but Petty was tired of being a support act. He wanted the third album to be different, and definitely bigger.
Enter Jimmy Iovine.
Four years earlier at 21, he’d stumbled into engineering Born to Run and studied Bruce Springsteen’s studio perfectionism during some long sessions at New York City’s Record Plant. Springsteen’s insistence on perfecting Max Weinberg’s drum sound on the album—three weeks’ worth of insistent tracking and re-tracking—even forced Iovine to quit on one occasion. A few years later, Iovine signed on to produce Patti Smith’s third album Easter while he was engineering Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. Knowing that Smith’s long-delayed third LP had no lead single, he coaxed Springsteen into giving Smith a skeletal tune he’d shelved—just a chorus, really—called “Because the Night.” Smith finished the song, and her scenery-chewing romantic mini-opera was easily her biggest hit. It sounded great, too, thanks in large part to veteran engineer Shelly Yakus, whom Iovine loved. The Heartbreakers loved “Because the Night”—I mean, everyone loved it—and Lynch was particularly fond of Yakus’ drum sound on the record. Shelter brokered an introduction between Petty and Iovine, and when Petty played him the demos of “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” Iovine was instantly sold. “It’s the first and last time I’ve ever said to anyone that they don’t need any more songs,” Iovine later recalled. “I’ve never said that to anyone since.” According to Petty, after he played the songs, Iovine looked around the room and exclaimed: “We’re all going to be millionaires!” Iovine signed on to produce Torpedoes and showed up in Van Nuys’ Sound City studio with Yakus as his engineer.
The first single released from Torpedoes, the roller-rink R&B of “Don’t Do Me Like That,” was the band’s highest-charting yet, reaching the Billboard top 10 and saturating rock radio playlists through 1980. The song dated back to demos from Petty’s first band, Mudcrutch, and packed significantly more Gainesville choogle than anything else on Torpedoes, or either of the first two records, for that matter. Petty was planning on giving it to the J. Geils Band, which made perfect sense—their 1981 hit “Centerfold” would borrow its bounce—until Iovine insisted that the Heartbreakers re-record it. It’s a unique single in the band’s discography, as close to the proto-MTV new wave as the Heartbreakers would get. Tench’s piano plinks and tangy organ licks play tag with Campbell’s chicken-scratch riffs and Lynch’s tumbling fills, while Petty spits admonitions in a sprechgesang that owed as much to Stax R&B lifer Rufus Thomas as any contemporaneous rock frontman.
The Heartbreakers were more used to gigging as a group than playing separate studio parts, and Iovine and Yakus put the quinet through its paces during the tumultuous Torpedoes sessions, which Petty was regularly leaving to meet with MCA’s lawyers a half-hour south on the 405 in Century City. Iovine’s meticulous studio M.O. chafed against the Heartbreakers’ lackadaisical approach. “We would sit back and get stoned and discuss it for a while, and then jam for a while,” Campbell remembered. After several days of Iovine’s and Yakus’ obsession over the album’s drum sound, particularly during the recording of “Refugee,” which, according to the band, took between 100 and 200 takes, Lynch and Campbell reached their breaking points. Iovine nagged Lynch to break free from his style of playing to the point that he actually quit the band (and was coaxed back by Petty). Pushed to the edge by the constant bickering, Campbell disappeared for a bit as well. Yakus’ preoccupation with Lynch’s drum sound led him to tune his heads much looser, resulting in a muffled tone similar to what he achieved on Easter. It might have driven Lynch nuts, but it sounded great on record and radio. Entire music recording messageboard threads are devoted to trying to match the gear, mic positions, and tunings that Yakus perfected on Torpedoes.
Released in January 1980 as Torpedoes’ second single, “Refugee” was the best-recorded and hardest-sounding song the Heartbreakers had yet released. For an album recorded in L.A., “Refugee” sounds incredibly New York—more alleyway than highway, which the band recognized in the song’s music video. It was certainly anthemic, but in place of “Because the Night”’s Orbisonian romanticism was a searing, metallic sound, no less menacing for its exquisite mix; a blend of Tench’s keyboard stabs with Campbell’s blues-derived minor riff (which he’d taught himself from listening to late-’60s John Mayall albums). Petty did not boast Smith’s or Springsteen’s poetic inclinations but offered a variation on a spoken/sung verse. The shift from his laconic, stonerish Southern drawl on the verses to the in-the-red adenoidal yawp on the chorus is still thrilling, and peaks at the last word of the middle-eight, when he shreds his vocal cords before Campbell’s solo: “One of those things you gotta feel to be truuuuuue!”
Like most rock lyrics, “Refugee” is best read as a composite of ideas and characters. It’s certainly, at some level, Petty’s translation of his unsettled state as the creative ward of a corporation during the song’s composition. Yet he maps this frustration onto his favorite theme: a wayward soul looking for a home. A couple years after the titular character of “American Girl” sought “a little more to life, somewhere else,” here was another girl, or maybe the same one, rootless and worse for wear. Indeed, the clearest predecessor to “Refugee” from a narrative standpoint isn’t “Because the Night” or anything from Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town, but Steely Dan’s gloomily empathetic 1974 ode to a troubled transient making her way through L.A.’s Chandleresque underbelly, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”
If “Refugee” was the perfect outcome of the Heartbreakers-Iovine mind-meld, then “Here Comes My Girl” added some twists to the band’s jangle-pop arsenal. Ever the traditionalist, Petty was a fan of ’50s throwback and CBGBs mainstay Mink DeVille, and on the verses of “Girl,” he tweaks the speak-sing into the dejected persona of a hard-luck nobody, a worn-down iteration of DeVille’s streetcorner hustler archetype. Petty’s voice morphs into a rasp on the pre-chorus, before coming to full bloom on the chorus, when the streetwise greaser lapses into a romantic stupor at the mere sight of his beloved. Petty’s dead-on imitation of Roger McGuinn’s gentle tenor is backed by Tench drizzling piano notes on one edge of the song and holding a sustained, dreamlike organ chord on another. Petty’s career is defined by his mastery of effortlessly pretty medium-tempo grooves, and the “Girl” chorus stands out among them: It’s both the most genuinely sweet and unexpectedly psychedelic moment in Petty’s extensive canon of hooks.
Speaking of choruses, is there a single six-word phrase more humbly aligned with rock’s zero-to-hero mythos than, “Even the losers get lucky sometimes”? Not released as a single but later included on the band’s over-10-million-selling Greatest Hits package, “Even the Losers” shows Petty in his American Elvis Costello mode, equal parts snarl and self-deprecation, and features a killer Chuck Berry-derived solo from Campbell, who’d come into his own as a sideman while Petty developed his songwriting chops. His fiery solos on Eddie Cochran-style deep-cut rave-ups “Century City” (Petty’s snide take on the corporate L.A. enclave where he battled his label) and “What Are You Doin’ in My Life?” showed his old school chops, while his slide work on album-closing ballad “Louisiana Rain” displayed his capacity to channel Beggars Banquet-era Keith Richards.
Torpedoes’ hits can overshadow the fact that the album—far from the singles-and-filler approach of so many contemporaries and predecessors—is end-to-end great. Beatles acolytes that they were, Petty and Campbell urged Iovine to keep random bits of studio noise in the tracklisting, including a trippy drum loop that segued into Campbell’s wife yelling, “It’s just the normal noises in here!” which Petty grabbed from the four-track demos Campbell cut in his living room. Torpedoes-era Heartbreakers deserve to be in the conversation with the critically-adored post-Beatles studio-rats generally referred to as “power pop”: Todd Rundgren, the Raspberries, Badfinger, Dwight Twilley, the Flamin’ Groovies, and Cheap Trick. Consider the breadth and confidence of the band who gave the world the album track “You Tell Me,” which opens as slick, urbane L.A. pop (which Sheryl Crow would later unconsciously plagiarize for “My Favorite Mistake”) before segueing into the kind of nerdy, nasal hook-fest that lesser-known power-pop contemporaries like Shoes and 20/20 would’ve killed for. Or the nod to the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby” that opens “Shadow of a Doubt,” a breezy Americana romp that, with hindsight, predicts peak Wilco by a couple decades.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers made music that still befuddles critics: they were too chill to be punk, and too famous to be underdogs. Petty was too unassuming a superstar to be Springsteen, and though he was equally gnomic and cantankerous, he was far too lyrically judicious to be Dylan. They were a singles band who made great albums and a “heartland” band from L.A. via Gainesville. In the year that Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks took top honors in the Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, Torpedoes finished eighth, which the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau chalked up to votes from conservative daily paper rock critics, and though he was happy Petty beat Supertramp and the Eagles, he snorted, “If Tom Petty ends up defining rock and roll heaven, then Johnny Rotten will have died in vain.” Of course, Petty himself knew more than anyone that the very idea of a “rock and roll heaven” is ridiculous. There are players and songs, producers and albums, labels and gigs, fans and critics, and his job was not to aim toward redemption or salvation, but to keep a little bit of pride, get lucky sometimes, and always move forward, full speed ahead. | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Backstreet / MCA | October 10, 2017 | 9.2 | bb9a6b76-49b0-468f-8c1d-eccd48107e84 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
Teaming with the playful producer Tobacco, Aesop Rock has a joyous playdate with his overlooked senses of humor and storytelling. | Teaming with the playful producer Tobacco, Aesop Rock has a joyous playdate with his overlooked senses of humor and storytelling. | Malibu Ken: Malibu Ken | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/malibu-ken-malibu-ken/ | Malibu Ken | Aesop Rock has always been funny, though listeners could be forgiven for not noticing. Anybody who raps this often about cats doesn’t lack for self-awareness. But between the claustrophobic production, the miserablist worldview, his imposing delivery, and the sheer density of his wordplay, his music scans as dead-serious even when it drips with pitch-black humor. He’s funny, sure, but he’s a lot of other things first.
If he just needed the right producer to highlight that wit, he’s found a choice one in Tobacco, of the Pittsburgh synth-psych outfit Black Moth Super Rainbow. Aesop Rock and that band toured together over a decade ago, and Aesop guested on the producer’s nutty “Dirt” in 2008. Now they’ve released a full-length together as Malibu Ken, a madcap project that unmoors Aesop from expectations of high-mindedness. Tobacco previously produced the bass-addled “Silicon Valley” theme song, and, like that jingle, his Malibu Ken tracks radiate demented whimsy. For all its erratic shifts and kinks, his miswired electro-funk is purely pleasurable, a rarity in Aesop’s catalog.
Fueled by Tobacco’s sugar-jolt beats, Aesop lets the zingers fly. On “Tuesday,” he goes full stand-up, detailing his unkempt lifestyle and sad apartment: “I can’t even keep a cactus alive when I’m present/When I’m gone, it’s a groundbreaking botanical epic/From desolate to Little Shop of Horrors in a second/It’s weird knowing life thrives more when you exit.” Even more vivid is his description of his own skin and flesh, which he paints in the grotesque detail of a “Ren & Stimpy” still: “The pizza face is pepperoni, carbuncle, and caper/I’m bunions and contusions, bumps, lumps, and bruises/Discoloring and other things I can’t reach with the loofah.”
Elsewhere, Aesop writes about violent events with the prosaic specificity of Sun Kil Moon. On “Churro,” he recalls a webcam broadcast of an eagle snacking on a cat like the song’s sweet namesake. Despite his personal fondness for felines, he doubles down on the bleakness here. He imagines that some poor bastard cued up that very cam to cheer himself up after his cat ran away, only “to watch his little fluffy torn to pieces by the very nature he had sought to ease him through his deep depression.”
Similarly grim, “Acid King” is dense with 1980s details, from Mary Lou Retton to “Excitebike.” Aesop recounts the 1984 saga of Ricky Kasso, a 17-year-old metalhead who murdered his friend while high on LSD, claiming Satan appeared to him as a crow and made him do it. Tobacco matches him with the period-piece synths of a 1980s action show, as Aesop fixates on all the unknown details of the incident, which fueled a fervor over the dangers of heavy metal.
Even when his subjects are less clear, there’s still so much imagination and purpose in Aesop’s language that he sounds like he’s telling a story. The guy mints new “cellar doors” with nearly every verse, combinations of viscerally satisfying syllables that keep exact meaning out of reach. “Under the boardwalk, half eighth and a half-ate corn dog/Face halfway to P-40 Warhawk, graze in the gore with the whores and the warthogs,” he raps on “Dog Years,” as if setting the stage for a tale as fulfilling as “Acid King.” Instead, he unfurls a parade of ecstatic imagery.
With its 34-minute runtime, its cartoon cover art, and the pervading levity of Tobacco’s beats, Malibu Ken may seem at first like a minor work. But there’s nothing diminutive about a record this sharply written. It’s a side project every bit as substantial as Aesop Rock’s proper albums. That it also happens to be more fun than most of them is a bonus. | 2019-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | January 17, 2019 | 7.7 | bb9c9c4c-7f81-4e97-b94c-88433ba96622 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Noah Lennox finds solace in solitude on his sixth solo album as Panda Bear, stripping the instrumentation down to just a handful of sounds to create an unusually unified listen. | Noah Lennox finds solace in solitude on his sixth solo album as Panda Bear, stripping the instrumentation down to just a handful of sounds to create an unusually unified listen. | Panda Bear: Buoys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/panda-bear-buoys/ | Buoys | When working with Animal Collective, the exuberant Noah Lennox surrenders to the spirit of collaboration. But when he’s working solo as Panda Bear, his music honors the state of aloneness. That word describes how his music as Panda Bear is created (typically written, played, and sung by Lennox), performed (Panda Bear shows usually feature Lennox by himself, standing before a mixing board and microphone, with a guitar around his neck), and experienced. You have to think twice before putting on a Panda Bear record when hanging out with friends—the music is just too interior, and Lennox’s work has always been best suited for headphones and solo contemplation.
The new Panda Bear album, Buoys, suggests that aloneness can be represented in a number of different ways. The last three Panda Bear full-lengths—2007’s Person Pitch, 2011’s Tomboy, and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper—were light and airy. Their queasy weightlessness brought to mind dreams, memories, and imagination, sometimes shaded with fear and darkness, and the billowy reverb created an illusion of an enclosure filled with activity, even if it was being observed from afar. Lennox’s voice suggested physical spaces—cathedrals, for the grandest of songs, perhaps a bathroom for ones that felt more closed-in. It seemed to exist somewhere in the physical world.
Buoys takes a different approach, stripping the instrumentation almost to nothing and forgoing the overt warmth of the lingering note. In these songs, which have a stark, brittle quality that feels very “digital,” there’s barely anything moving. The primary instrument on Buoys is acoustic guitar, which is not a new thing for Lennox. In the middle of the last decade, Lennox used acoustic guitars on records like Sung Tongs and Young Prayer like an extension of his body, creating a drone effect that sounded more like breathing. But the acoustic guitar on Buoys doesn’t sound played, exactly—it’s more a device for sending ripples of chords across the stereo field at regular intervals, or else short, declarative chops of rhythm. It sounds disembodied. Just a handful of sounds make up the production for the album (along with guitar, there are assorted gurgles and laser sounds, a few drum breaks, some deep bass throbs, and not much else), which makes for an unusually unified listen.
From the opening “Dolphin,” Lennox resides in new territory. He has never sung like this before—his voice is a true close-mic’d croon and it even has a bit of vibrato. As he soars over a lightly strummed acoustic guitar and a percussion arrangement that subs a drop of water for a snare, the sense of effort is palpable, the laying of each piece in its place. That sense of exertion extends to Lennox’s voice as he tests a chest-heavy bass register, stretches single syllables for a couple of bars at a time, and offers careful articulation of each consonant where reverb-enabled smearing was once the norm.
The songs here unfold at an even, mid-tempo pace. Some, like “Cranked,” are disarming in their sparseness. “Token” is the rare song that opens up on the chorus, with Lennox folding his voice into harmony as he sings of longing and need. “Inner Monologue,” which is, along with “Dolphin,” one of the record’s big highlights, conveys a tense, nervous atmosphere. In the background, you can hear what sounds like someone sobbing, and the droning synth line that snakes through the track makes it feel ominous, even charged with violence. But the drama makes it an outlier. Most of the songs move forward step-by-step and unfold almost mathematically.
Throughout the record, Lennox offers the simple affirmations and pledges of loyalty (“I would always be there when you need it” on “Dolphin,” “Guy on the ropes (yes you can)/Don’t give up hopes (start again)” on “Cranked”), a motif common in his music. But these homilies are more complicated in this setting. He describes wanting to be a good person and remaining hopeful, and inside the perfect-from-now-on desire is the suggestion that what’s happening at the present may not be so wonderful. That’s where a certain amount of the sadness in Lennox’s music comes from—what’s happening now might be too much to talk about, so let’s talk about what might one day come.
Buoys is a sad and wistful album, though in a non-specific way. Part of it is the inner pep-talk of lyrics that imagines a future that may never come. There’s an ache in being stuck between who you want to be and who you actually are. And part of it is the sound, which feels closed off from the world, but in a carefully considered and ultimately beguiling way. This sort of privacy can seem alienating, cordoned-off, suffocating, solipsistic. But those who connect with it hear something else, something deeply comforting: It’s the sound of one person considering his place in the world, beamed to a person who, in turn, considers their own. | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | February 12, 2019 | 7.6 | bba38960-575e-4c06-8258-5c107f8362e9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Newly reissued with a more polished sound, the ATL rapper’s third mixtape finds the promising SahBabii on shaky ground trying to discover his voice. | Newly reissued with a more polished sound, the ATL rapper’s third mixtape finds the promising SahBabii on shaky ground trying to discover his voice. | SahBabii: S.A.N.D.A.S | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sahbabii-sandas/ | S.A.N.D.A.S | In early 2017, SahBabii’s “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” became a sleeper hit, continuing a trend of light-hearted youngsters infiltrating the Atlanta trap scene with impishly playful romps. The Chicago transplant has identified his sound as “melodic trap” and likened it to racing a Mario Kart beach track on Wii. He is a surrealist who finds delight in the bizarre, emphasizing melody over meaning and concentrating on the little vocal flourishes and ad-libs to flesh out songs. The kaleidoscopic quality to his music beams in vibrant colorways.
Few seemed to follow “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” back to the 2016 mixtape that produced it called S.A.N.D.A.S., or Suck a Nigga Dick Ah Something, a beta test for a polished product just about ready to go to market. The song was one of several tracks that proved a relative compositional acumen, but it was “Pull Up” that stuck with audiences, and with good reason; it synthesizes some of the most interesting things happening in Atlanta in recent months with relative ease. Soon the song had remixes from T-Pain, Fetty Wap, and Wiz Khalifa. A label bidding war ensued, and Warner won the rights to the upstart, who feels built for the streaming era, playlists, and virality.
The newly remastered S.A.N.D.A.S. is an attempt to capitalize on Sah’s healthy buzz. It’s a bit like slapping a fresh coat of paint on a used car and pushing it back onto the showroom floor, but it can serve as a suitable crash course in his spasms and bird calls for the uninitiated. Aside from the title track, the project is largely the same, just with a noticeable improvement in sound quality. The only new additions are the recently released “Marsupial Superstars” with his brother T3 and the long-teased “Geronimo,” both of which put into action all of his strengths, twitching in and out of phrases and moving in little leaps and bounds. The charm is the seamlessness: the seemingly endless propulsion and how fluidly everything happens.
Since stepping into the spotlight, Sah has acknowledged Young Thug as his forbear, whose influence cannot be ignored. Sah is less dynamic, significantly less captivating in action, and the recently released “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” remix featuring Thug only magnified the gap between the two. He’s nowhere near as unpredictable as Thug and he smooths out some of his predecessor’s kinkier flows. Sah’s style is steadier and less gnarly, but more certainty doesn’t mean there’s more purpose. Actions and words are both often aimlessly assembled here, even when you know what’s coming next.
The tape has a very loosely recurring jungle theme, particularly on “King of the Jungle,” “Purple Ape,” and “Titanoboa,” where he compares himself to animals without explanation. The components of his songs are mostly the same—the phrase “animal planet,” armed robberies, hundred round drums, lots and lots of fellatio—and after a few listens a compositional formula emerges: triplet flows constructed on repetitive melodic phrases. But then there are songs like “Chit Chat,” which transcend their basic moving parts to form something nearly supernal.
At his sharpest, he can string together haymakers (“That Glock get to burning like gonorrhea/That chopper sound off, onomatopoeia”) and flat-out outlandish non sequiturs (“Recording that hoe with no kissing scene/How you suck dick but don't eat string beans”) that anchor his more delicate tunes. There’s a fun scheme where he rattles off references to various Steves (Irwin, Urkel, Harvey, Jobs, the family from the Disney Channel show “Even Stevens”) in quick succession. But at his most derivative, he exposes the things separating him from the stars he emulates. “Bullshit” sounds like a low-budget rework of a Future and Zaytoven collaboration. “Cracks & Crevices” is a half-mumbled, half-crooned ditty that relies heavily on the laziest Young Thug tropes. Even “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” marries midgrade Thug vocal turns with dead-eyed 21 Savage gun talk.
It can be difficult to reconcile the SahBabii appearing in interviews—the one who turned the number of the beast into a symbol for the most basic element of life, worries about the ozone layer, decries capitalism, and wants to design video games—with the one who appears on S.A.N.D.A.S., simply because his melodic musings don’t seem to share the same thoughtfulness. That isn’t because his SoundCloud persona isn’t as philosophical, or because these topics don’t make their way into his music—no 20 year old should have to rap about global warming; it’s that his music doesn’t provide the same window into his personality. So far, he’s spent more time projecting images of his sires than growing into his own. Re-releasing S.A.N.D.A.S. is a lateral move reiterating his defining truth thus far: he has yet to find his voice. | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | June 13, 2017 | 6.6 | bba4a807-40a6-40d0-b692-8805caf688b7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The tireless psych rocker’s latest is simultaneously sleek and sludgy. It’s not quite his cleanest-sounding album, nor his heaviest, but it stands close to the top of both categories. | The tireless psych rocker’s latest is simultaneously sleek and sludgy. It’s not quite his cleanest-sounding album, nor his heaviest, but it stands close to the top of both categories. | Ty Segall: Harmonizer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-segall-harmonizer/ | Harmonizer | Harmonizer arrives after the longest stretch that Ty Segall has ever gone between albums of original material under his own name: just over two years, or 20 Ty Segall years. Before now, his longest gap preceded 2016’s Emotional Mugger (about 17 months), followed by 2019’s First Taste (about 13). Each of those albums also happened to be among his most bizarre: the former a choppy, devious conceptual escape, the latter a bouzouki- and koto-based experiment that arose from guitar fatigue. For Segall, working within the confines of garage and psych rock makes hairpin lefts a necessity; there’s only so much room in there for a guy who moves as much as he does. “I don’t think I can write songs on the guitar right now because I think I’m tapped out—I’ve hit my maximum guitar style,” he said around the release of First Taste. And when you’ve been as consistently good for as long as he has, it’s a cruel irony that it becomes harder to make something that really stands out. Returning from a relatively long silence with a confounding gesture is one way to try.
Harmonizer, however, makes sense immediately, regreeting his audience not with a cheeky bow or something in Pig Latin, but with a stoic and confident “hello again.” Co-produced and mixed by Cooper Crain and released by surprise last week, it maintains a simultaneously sleek and sludgy quality across its 35 minutes, like a cornstarch slurry gluing the whole thing together. Glistening, squelching synth voices and guitar effects fill up the mix, while Segall exaggerates his best fake British accent with ecstatic doom, sounding like an executioner riding out a sugar rush. It’s not quite his cleanest-sounding album (Freedom’s Goblin, probably) nor his heaviest (maybe Slaughterhouse, or anything that he’s made with Fuzz), but it stands closer to the top of both categories than any other.
The album distinguishes itself from the Segall catalog with extra-punctuated parts that slam into the ears, a calculated continuity enhanced by tracks that transition seamlessly, and a bunch of laser sounds. In fact, it would score a laser show nicely, and its unabating propulsion would fit equally well in a hockey arena, a HIIT class, or a high-speed chase. While it’s all too catchy and generally non-confrontational to be considered self-subversion, it does feel something like Segall tearing off his Stooges shirt to reveal a King Crimson one underneath it.
Harmonizer’s two best songs, “Whisper” and the title track, are its proof of concept, standouts that make the others sound even better and that deserve to become regulars at his blistering live shows. But the album’s songwriting doesn’t quite rise to the level of its overdrive energy, running out of gas towards the end and sputtering out with two tracks that mimic the established motions more than they thrive in them: The lead guitar buzzes through a fuzzbox, the lyrics describe sensory thrills, but the sense of all-consuming obsession over this new world fades. Some front-loading is forgivable, though: Segall is likely already obsessing over his next album, and by the time you reach the end of Harmonizer, it might be done.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 14, 2021 | 7.3 | bba83828-578f-4aab-b182-5a90d6df223e | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Quiet folk duo Luluc gained attention after last year’s covers collection Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake; the National's Aaron Dessner produces their sophomore effort and Sub Pop debut. | Quiet folk duo Luluc gained attention after last year’s covers collection Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake; the National's Aaron Dessner produces their sophomore effort and Sub Pop debut. | Luluc: Passerby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19505-luluc-passerby/ | Passerby | On the title track to Luluc’s second album—and their Sub Pop debut—Zoë Randell laments what she calls “the passerby life.” The song recounts several friends who have come and gone, some human and some not: a bearded guy named Mike Brown, an old man she knew as Mr. Finnegan, “a young dying baby lamb” that she fed by hand, “a tiny Christmas Island bird” with a broken wing. They’re lovely images and poignant remembrances, especially sung in Randell’s robustly ruminative voice and set to Steve Hassett’s gentle acoustic strums. As befits a duo that moved around the world to soft-start their career, the song dispels any romanticized notions of connection and memory: Everyone is a passerby in your life, and you’re merely a passerby in theirs.
And then Luluc ruin it. Randell ends the song with a blah couplet—“And as you go, know I love you so”—that brings the song to a rousing conclusion, completely undercutting the tough-minded verses. What begins as a world-wear reverie finishes as a Nicholas Sparks epilogue, as Luluc choose to state the obvious in the most obvious way possible. It’s not that those lines are wholly unnecessary, but that they carelessly cordon off the song’s emotions to deliver pat catharsis. Similarly, Passerby toggles awkwardly between the evocatively melancholy and the chintzily sentimental, rendering the carefully composed and performed music as little more than pretty.
This stumble will be all the more disappointing for anyone who heard the Brooklyn-via-Australia duo play on last year’s Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake. It was an ill-conceived public tribute to a deeply private artist, yet Luluc’s versions of “Things Behind the Sun” and “Fly” were highlights that showcased both the dignified yearning of Drake’s lyrics and the easy chemistry between Randell and Hassett. They were something of an anomaly for those live performances, as at the time they had only one album, self-released back in 2008, to their name. On the strength of that tiny catalog and Randell’s big voice, Luluc signed to Sub Pop, where they join the Head & the Heart and Mirel Wagner on the folksier side of the roster.
Perhaps more crucially, Luluc gained the ear of the National’s Aaron Dessner, who agreed to produce Passerby at his studio in Brooklyn's Ditmas Park area. His contributions are low-key and mostly unobtrusive. To reinforce the theme of departure and travel, he emphasizes the spry rhythmic guitar strums on opener “Small Window” and peppers “Early Night” with low-key industrial noise. Only “Tangled Heart” builds to anything that might be considered a big moment, with its texturing of horns greeting the Randell’s romantic regrets. Still, even Dessner can’t nudge Luluc out of their comfort zone: Every song trudges by at the same midtempo, conjuring the same atmosphere of glum reminiscence with no relief or variation.
As rich as Randell’s voice may be, this collection portrays her as a sharply limited artist, with only one mode and a few interpretive tricks up her sleeve. Occasionally she goes purposefully flat like Nico, other times she rounds her vowels luxuriantly, but there’s no tension, no conflict, no story to connect those moments into something larger. The result is a strictly passerby album: one that is heard and then quickly forgotten. | 2014-07-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-07-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | July 23, 2014 | 4.9 | bbb1ffe1-b978-4a6a-9bfb-489c83de3131 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The latest from the prolific psych-folk duo comes courtesy of Woods' Woodsist imprint, and the higher profile coincides with some of their more memorable tunes. | The latest from the prolific psych-folk duo comes courtesy of Woods' Woodsist imprint, and the higher profile coincides with some of their more memorable tunes. | MV & EE: Root/Void | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22449-rootvoid/ | Root/Void | Perhaps the most surprising thing about Root/Void—an album unfathomably deep in the discography of Vermont-based psych duo Matt “MV” Valentine and Erika “EE” Elder—is that they hadn’t already released a song titled “Yr My Jam.” The title is a tidy encapsulation of MV & EE’s most defining features: the intimate bond that makes their music together feel wholly natural, and the lengthy, meandering improvisations that constitute their records. The song in question is, fittingly, a nine-minute encapsulation of their best tendencies, wrapping their brain-dead, out-of-key vocals around Valentine’s searing guitar solos. “Your love is so wide it could have been a canyon,” they shout in unison, “Flies so high, I’m surprised they didn’t ban ya.”
Released on the Woodsist label, as opposed to Valentine’s in-house Child of Microtones imprint, and arriving on the heels of two excellent solo albums from Valentine, Root/Void might seem like the perfect opportunity for the duo to clean up their sound and aim at a larger audience. But the very joy of MV+EE’s spacey, homemade music has always been that they seem largely incapable of breaking through. Together, they have invented their own language and have demonstrated no interest in varying or expanding it for newcomers. Still, Root/Void does have its fair share of high points, many of which would serve as fitting introductions. Inasmuch as MV+EE could ever pen a pop song, “Much Obliged” is the album’s hit. In three minutes, it features an actually-catchy chorus and a sunny melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on a latter day Dinosaur Jr. record.
If “Much Obliged” represents the album’s most amiable tendencies, then “I’m Still In Love With You Love > Void” is its finest experiment. A slow, synthy jam, it’s akin to the sound of “On the Beach” blasting from a rattling van, driving slowly down a beach road at sunset. Its 11 minutes glide by effortlessly and close the album with a deep sense of atmosphere that lingers like thick humidity. Of course, not every moment on the album is quite a revelation. The staggeringly titled “No $ (Shit Space - It’s All About the Coin ¢ / Corn),” for example, also happens to resembles a Neil Young song; unfortunately that song is “Cough Up the Bucks.” The two jams that center on the repeated mantra “Love is everyone,” meanwhile, could have likely been condensed to greater their impact (and to lessen the potential for listeners to ponder what that phrase means).
The balance between psychedelic nonsense and genuine beauty has always been an underlying tension in the group’s music, and at this point in their career, the idea of turning off potential listeners isn’t likely to weigh too heavily on their blissed-out minds. More than maybe any MV & EE release, Root/Void is propelled by a sense of cosmic satisfaction that makes even its weaker moments feel like a necessary part of its story. In its relative concision, it also feels like the duo’s most mature album, a thoughtful, hazy meditation on love. Nearly two decades into their career, MV & EE have firmly drawn the borders of their music, but it’s never been more exciting to hear them explore the strange, beautiful terrain in between.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly identified Valentine’s in-house label as Ecstatic Peace when it is Child of Microtones. | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Woodsist | October 10, 2016 | 7.3 | bbb86788-52d2-402d-bb2a-798ecb8ba9c2 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The co-founder of Oakland’s Club Chai merges samples of Turkish and Middle Eastern music with club beats on an EP that casts a skeptical eye on club culture’s promise of personal liberation. | The co-founder of Oakland’s Club Chai merges samples of Turkish and Middle Eastern music with club beats on an EP that casts a skeptical eye on club culture’s promise of personal liberation. | 8ULENTINA: Bodyguard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8ulentina-bodyguard/ | Bodyguard | In 1980, following a decade of political upheaval and violence, Turkey’s General Kenan Evren staged a coup. When the conservative regime shuttered trans brothels and banned performances by trans artists, Turkish transgender singer Bülent Ersoy began her sexual reassignment process, publicly revealing her new body at a national trade show. Subject to intense discrimination, Ersoy attempted suicide before fleeing to Germany, where she was able to rebuild her career in a place where her choices were accepted and understood.
This history of fascistic bodily control looms over the work of the Bay Area DJ, producer, and multidisciplinary artist 8ULENTINA, named after Ersoy. Along with Lara Sarkissian, aka FOOZOOL, 8ULENTINA co-founded Oakland’s Club Chai, a collective that cultivates safe spaces for trans and women-identifying individuals working at the intersection of electronic music and disaporic traditions. On Bodyguard, 8ULENTINA raises existential quandaries familiar to anyone whose personal boundaries have been violated. “How do bodies protect each other? How do we deal with that mutual responsibility and trust?” they ask in a text accompanying the album. As on their previous EP, last year’s Eucalyptus, 8ULENTINA refracts percussion and melodies sampled from Turkish and Middle Eastern music through angular club rhythms. They chop and loop excerpts of traditional instrumentation and hand drums alongside kicks and snares at techno BPMs.
Bodyguard’s five tracks are meant to be conversant with each other, with vocal samples formatted as a quasi-poem on the EP’s Bandcamp page. Making sense of these somewhat inscrutable bits of text feels a bit like eavesdropping on a hushed exchange in a corner of the dancefloor. On the opening track, a barely audible voice mumbles, “No, I was fast,” accompanied by an urgent stringed riff based on the makam (a system of scales utilized in Turkish and Middle Eastern music). It would seem to be a response to a question posed in the closer, featuring the Lebanese-Australian producer DJ Plead, punctuated by entrancing woodwind and hand-drum samples: “Were you tough?” Elsewhere, on “No One Could Get By You,” someone murmurs “I’ve never felt this safe before” in a hushed tone that belies the churning acid drone beneath. It’s a fleeting moment of relief before horror-film violin stabs introduce the next track, “Doesn’t Always Work.” “I spend a lot of time trying not to react to things that other people do,” someone says—de-escalation as a survival tactic.
Post-#MeToo, the policing of bodies, especially in a nightlife setting, can be complicated. Bouncers decide who enters the club based on appearance, and even when nightclubs establish codes of conduct, it can be unclear how to enforce them. 8ULENTINA is clearly committed to fostering conversations about these issues in their artful manipulation of samples. No solid answers to their questions emerge by the end of Bodyguard’s 15 minutes. But the push-and-pull between prickly and intimate makes for a mesmerizing EP that provokes with every listen. | 2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | TT Label | March 26, 2019 | 7.3 | bbbd8ddb-e91d-4f21-9fe9-3dd315d64325 | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | |
On their second release, the Disappears alums turn mercurial, whipping their habitual post-rock into more impressionistic, unpredictable forms. | On their second release, the Disappears alums turn mercurial, whipping their habitual post-rock into more impressionistic, unpredictable forms. | FACS: Lifelike | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/facs-lifelike/ | Lifelike | Disappears were a perfectly named band. Over the course of five studio albums, the Chicago quartet took the standard indie-rock starter kit—Velvets-schooled guitar noise, motorik propulsion, hectoring post-punk sing-speak—and gradually melted it down until all traces of the band’s initial identity had been obliterated. Post-rock has become synonymous with large orchestral ensembles and sweeping crescendos, but the term was originally meant to describe artists that used traditional rock instrumentation to make music that steadfastly did not rock in any traditional sense. And on their 2015 album Irreal, Disappears’ swan song, they honored that original definition, forsaking their signature fuzz-covered thrust for skin-piercing guitar pricks, stalking post-industrial rhythms, and pure gothic dread.
In hindsight, it’s tempting to label Irreal as the first album by FACS, the post-Disappears outfit formed by singer/guitarist Brian Case (who initially moved to bass), guitarist Jonathan van Herik, and drummer Noah Leger. The group’s 2018 debut, Negative Houses, effectively picked up right where their previous band left off, with an increasingly atmospheric spin on post-hardcore that suggested Slint given a King Tubby remix. But even in its slowest, most methodical moments, Negative Houses bristled with a punk-fueled intensity, its predatory lurches giving way to frenetic, white-knuckled climaxes.
Following the departure of van Herik and the addition of former We Ragazzi drummer Alianna Kalaba on bass (allowing Case to return to guitar), FACS turn both more mercurial and minimalist on their second release, Lifelike. The new record feels less like a collection of proper songs than a series of evolutionary steps as the band unmoors itself from its taut rhythmic foundation to drift further out into the chop, and not always with a set destination in mind. It’s the sort of record where each successive track seems to embellish ideas introduced by its immediate predecessor: After the murky opener “Another Country” establishes the album’s burbling, seasick feel, “In Time” adds the impressionistic smears of guitar squall that become Case’s go-to trick over the remainder of the record. It’s easy to see why he’s so enamored with it: Like an aluminum sheet bending and wobbling in your hands, the sound is metallic and monochromatic, but produces radiant flashes of light at the right angle.
Though the ominous air is as thick as ever, and Case’s curt, cryptic phrasing is all the more brutally blunt (“Nothing left to save/Burn it down/Get out”), Lifelike is an oddly restrained record—perpetually roiling and churning, but with precious few moments of cathartic release. The band wades through the sludgy riddims of “Anti-Body” like the Jesus Lizard on muscle relaxants, dialing down the temperature just when it feels like the song is about boil over; “Loom State,” meanwhile, summons the thundering ritualistic clamor of Drum’s Not Dead-era Liars, albeit without the wild abandon. But if Lifelike’s individual songs can’t always muster the strength to deliver a dramatic payoff, the album itself does. With the closing “Total History,” FACS distill all the preceding experiments in Dub Like Jehu discord and apocalyptic fridge-magnet poetry into an exhilarating eight-minute epic, making good on Lifelike’s exploratory promise and razing the path for their next step into the unknown. | 2019-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | April 3, 2019 | 6.8 | bbbe7824-1228-4f3e-be3c-fb9db6a9823e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
A little Gary Glitter, a little Kid Rock, even a little Smash Mouth—the third album from these former California party kids holds nothing back. | A little Gary Glitter, a little Kid Rock, even a little Smash Mouth—the third album from these former California party kids holds nothing back. | FIDLAR: Almost Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fidlar-almost-free/ | Almost Free | FIDLAR’s last album, 2015’s Too, began with frontman Zac Carper screaming that he’d never sell out—well, unless the price was right. Like all of his jokes, there was more than a hint of truth to the quip. But if there’s a central takeaway from the testy Los Angeles skate-punk band’s third album, Almost Free, it’s that they wouldn’t know how to sell out if they tried. Recorded with producer-to-the-stars Ricky Reed and mixed and mastered by a team of industry pros touting Rihanna and Imagine Dragons credits, Almost Free plays like a bid for the same crossover alternative audience that Portugal. The Man found. Yet while FIDLAR may have the chops and attitude to play to the masses, they may never have the restraint.
Almost Free shares some of the showy sprawl of Portugal. The Man’s commercial breakthrough, Woodstock. Where that record drew from an unwaveringly safe pool of modernized soul and psychedelia, though, FIDLAR’s left-field influences are either hopelessly uncool or smirkingly out of step in 2019. “Scam Likely” teases the Clash then ambushes with Big Audio Dynamite. “Alcohol” plays like one of the Vines’ tamper tantrums. “Called You Twice” flirts with a guitar riff perilously close to the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” while “Flake” has echoes of a certain Gary Glitter jock jam. And then they go full fucking Smash Mouth for “By Myself,” a surf-funk shimmy that only a wedding DJ could love.
On paper, most of that sounds unbearable, but it largely isn’t. FIDLAR trade in some of the gaudiest radio sounds of the last three decades, but they present them with the enthusiasm of a puppy that’s dug a greasy hambone out of the trash, too gleeful to admonish. Almost Free may be obnoxious, but it’s never cynical. FIDLAR are as devoted to old Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations as the Ramones were to Phil Spector’s girl groups.
Still, sometimes it’s all too much. The raucous opener “Get Off My Rock” begins as a spot-on Beastie Boys homage, then heaps one overkill accompaniment on top of the next: pissy harmonica, Kid Rock’s cowboy rage, Cage the Elephant slide guitars, a rooster call, 40oz to Freedom dog barks. Even more grating is “Too Real,” which goes a step further by adding some shrill politics to the mix. For much of the album, Carper plays the angry 99-percenter, but here he sets his sights on P.C. culture and white guilt, too. “You’ve gone so far to the left you ended up on the right,” he seethes. “Was that too fucking real?” he prods after tossing out each jab from a grab-bag of grievances so full his attacks become meaningless. It’s never clear where the satire ends and the truth begins.
Carper’s sour worldview probably hinders FIDLAR’s crossover potential as much as the group’s contrarian indulgence, but, for better or worse, it seems to stoke his band. Carper’s new sobriety has admittedly divorced him from the party lifestyle that was once their animating spirit, so he’s still struggling to figure out a new place. “Why does getting sober make you feel like a loner?” he stews on “By Myself.” Perhaps that sense of alienation explains why FIDLAR is so eager to try on so many different hats during Almost Free. They’ve made a record that captures the tumult of feeling displaced, without abandoning the hyped-up spirit that made them such a spectacle during their party-animal days. | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | January 31, 2019 | 6.5 | bbcd2b02-8637-45cd-9dd0-c14e3cc609d7 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Emo barrel-scrapers make Rites of Spring seem two decades old. Oh, wait. | Emo barrel-scrapers make Rites of Spring seem two decades old. Oh, wait. | Panic! at the Disco: A Fever You Can't Sweat Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6586-a-fever-you-cant-sweat-out/ | A Fever You Can't Sweat Out | Ten years ago, who would've guessed that emo would usurp punk as the genre du jour for angst-ridden teens. By the late 1990s, most fans of the genre's second wave were abandoning it. Many of the best bands had split up, while the handful that were left were moving toward a more straightforward pop rock sound. But just as it appeared over, the scene suddenly exploded, giving birth to an entire new generation of slick, generic, mall-store neo-emo. It's like the bartender yelled last call, the house lights came on, and then at the last minute, he decided to keep the club open all night serving Cokes. So now, 20 years after Rites of Spring's only full-length album was released, we've arrived at Panic! at the Disco's A Fever You Can't Sweat Out.
Where does one begin to describe this steaming pile of garbage? You've already seen the ridiculous name, so let's try a few of song titles on for size. Track two is called "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage", and it's followed by "London Beckoned Songs About Money Written By Machines". If those don't quite do it for you, check out "I Write Sins Not Tragedies", or my personal favorite, "Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off".
But of course, the asinine song titles and the moronic band name have nothing on the actual songs. The usual guitar, bass, and drums are augmented by drum machine beats and synths that would be more at home blaring over the P.A. at your local gym than in anything one might consider enjoyable music. The production, handled by Matt Squire, a guy who is certainly no stranger to radio-friendly emo, is slick and polished. Vocalist Brendon Urie's impassioned, warbling vocals are so strained it's as if he might just burst into tears at any moment. This poor guy's heart must get broken on a daily basis or something. And if it wasn't bad enough, someone convinced him to add some fancy effects on a track or two that make it sound like someone is lightly karate chopping him across the throat while he sings.
The lyrics are just the sort of vague teen heartache you'd expect. In "Camisado", Urie croons, "You're a regular decorated emergency/ The bruises and contusions will remind you what you did when you wake," sliding up to a falsetto while keyboards shimmer behind him. In "Time to Dance", which utilizes some sort of poorly realized gun-as-a-camera metaphor, he belts out, "When I say shotgun, you say wedding/ Shotgun/ Wedding", and "Give me envy/ Give me malice/ Give me attention/ Give me a break." Yeah, you and me both, kid.
It's sad that this is what emo has become. The genre's always had some irritating characteristics, but this newest batch of heartbroken heartthrobs has managed to build their careers solely out of those characteristics. The whining, the emotionally exposed lyrics, and the passionate choruses are there, but there's no sincerity, creativity, or originality. | 2005-11-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2005-11-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Fueled by Ramen / Decaydance | November 28, 2005 | 1.5 | bbce510f-9286-4aad-8df8-30ddbe284c32 | Cory D. Byrom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cory-d. byrom/ | null |
The 21-year-old Norwegian producer’s debut EP is driven by whimsy and promises a fresh spin on the Pelican Fly sound. | The 21-year-old Norwegian producer’s debut EP is driven by whimsy and promises a fresh spin on the Pelican Fly sound. | Marius: Existence Problem EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marius-existence-problem-ep/ | Existence Problem EP | One of the unlikeliest developments in the decade’s commingling of underground electronic music and mainstream pop has been Cashmere Cat’s leap from making twinkling, daisy-chain trap to working with singers like Ariana Grande and the Weeknd. Here was that rarest of unicorns: an artist on the fringes—a Norwegian former turntablist hiccupping his way through a mutant take on of Scandinavian skweee, to be precise—who catapulted himself into the Hot 100 by trading the maximalist ethos of EDM for an aesthetic about as tough as kittens and cotton candy.
It was the Brussels label Pelican Fly that originally put Cashmere Cat’s music out into the world, and after he jumped ship for LuckyMe and then Interscope, the Belgian label soldiered on with similar, if slightly less distinctive, sounds: variations on trap, R&B, and Jersey and Baltimore club punctuated by the usual 808 skitter, trance zap, and helium spritz. Norway’s Marius is the label’s latest discovery. He makes fizzy instrumental hip-hop that’s clearly indebted to fellow Norwegians Cashmere Cat and Lido, another Pelican Fly signee. And though its four songs cumulatively clock in at under 12 minutes, his debut EP for the label suggests a fresh, promising spin on the Pelican Fly sound.
Like Cashmere Cat, the 21-year-old producer’s music is driven by whimsy: He’s fond of plinky, harp-like strumming and kazoo buzz; he likes his chords wistful and his keyboards wheezy, with long attacks suggestive of a backmasked sample. Voices drip and synths detune in mid-flight—an aesthetic influenced by wind tunnels and the Doppler effect. While his melodies have their heads in the clouds, though, his beats stay grounded with a mixture of overdriven machine hits and sampled rock drumming. “Give In” has the staggering, brawny cadence of hip-hop grooves pounded out on the MPC; “LAME” balances distorted 808 blasts with nimble hi-hats so vivid you can practically make out the Zildjian logo leaping off the cymbal. Nothing spells out his use of contrast like the guitars that compete for attention in “LAME”: One’s a winsome, clean-toned kin to Cocteau Twins or the Durutti Column, and the other’s the kind of gnarly, gut-punching prog riff, compressed to within an inch of its life, that Daft Punk have made their stock-in-trade. It’s a fun, surprising combo.
Until earlier this year, Marius went by the name Melf, and listening to the first couple of singles he put out under that alias, “Crzy” and “Guilty,” suggest how quickly he’s developing. Where “Crzy” was a fairly run-of-the-mill pop-trap tune, and “Guilty” was a little too beholden to SOPHIE’s Flubberized funk, the new material finds him coming closer to carving out his own sound. He still has some kinks to work out. The soulful falsetto hook that dominates “Existence Problem” feels like a step backward into the R&B-collage aesthetic that has been bass music’s default for years now. And as much personality as his sounds have, that’s not always enough to sustain them. “Existence Problem” treads water for the final minute of its 3:22 running time, although the longer “LAME” manages to keep you guessing until the very end, thanks to its agile dodging and feinting, building up to a big climax and then pulling the rug out. And while “Master Dope (Interlude)” is probably the EP’s least original cut—two minutes of hip-hop breaks suffused in dissonant keys and shortwave static, it’s clearly indebted to producers like DJ Shadow and the RZA—its thick, viscous frequencies are among the record’s most visceral pleasures. | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pelican Fly | September 18, 2017 | 7.1 | bbd36cfd-6e1e-4a22-b763-d8f9f8b9ab54 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Ibiza-based producer’s first full-length in over four years, originally intended as the score for a Japanese documentary, nudges down the thermostat on the island escapism of his earlier work. | The Ibiza-based producer’s first full-length in over four years, originally intended as the score for a Japanese documentary, nudges down the thermostat on the island escapism of his earlier work. | Mark Barrott: Jōhatsu (蒸発) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-barrott-jhatsu/ | Jōhatsu (蒸発) | Mark Barrott’s awe and gratitude at living in an real-life island paradise has informed most of the music he’s made since moving to Ibiza in 2012. The snaky flutes, burbling sequencers, and hand drums that populate his Sketches From an Island series err just on the right side of kitsch, not to mention album covers that resemble illustrated postcards. What keeps him from becoming electronic music’s Jimmy Buffett or Jack Johnson is the genuine sense of wonder his music conjures. There’s no happy-go-lucky humor about how a toke and a margarita are the answer to life’s problems, and no weighty moral lesson to be learned, either. He lives on a balmy Balearic island, it’s beautiful, this is how it is.
As soon as the first piano chord falls on “森林浴 (Shinrin-yoko),” the second track on his new album 蒸発 (Jōhatsu), we’re in for a different kind of Barrott album, one that nudges down the thermostat a few degrees from the Sketches From an Island albums or his early, pseudonymous releases on his International Feel label. What’s striking about the transition so soon after the familiar synths and sequencers of opener “京都 (Kyoto)” is the loss of an anchor. The reassuring pulse disappears and confronts the listener with a pregnant silence. All sorts of thoughts and associations rush in to fill the space, not least the image of Barrott thinking: maybe about which note to play next, or simply about the shortness and transience of life.
Tracks like “Shinrin-yoko,” the field-recordings-and-piano reverie “9月のある金曜日 (One Friday in September),” and the sublime closing drone “神隠し (Kamikakushi)” just feel like they come from a deeper place than “Kyoto” and the album’s other more rhythmic cuts. Maybe it’s because Barrott’s sequencers maintain such urgent momentum that the music never really has time to slow down and collect its thoughts. Maybe it’s just leftover associations with acoustic-leaning ambient albums like Harold Budd’s Perhaps, Grouper’s Ruins, or Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12, whose sustained piano chords seem to empty into the vastness of the universe. Or maybe it’s the nature of the piano itself, an instrument that lends itself well to depressive slumping, as opposed to instruments like guitars and drums that force you to remain upright.
Jōhatsu was originally commissioned as the score for a film about the titular Japanese phenomenon in which people seemingly disappear from their lives without a trace, often to escape obligations such as debts and dead-end jobs. While the as-yet-unreleased documentary faces funding issues, the soundtrack represents Barrott’s first full-length solo album in over four years. Its origin as film music helps explain pieces like “すべての幽霊を殺す (Kill All Ghosts),” which switches halfway through from a plangent keyboard miniature into a mess of prog-rock synths. But it’s less interesting to imagine this album’s melancholy moments as simply mourning the plight of the jōhatsu than to take the broad view: This is Barrott’s most emotionally gripping album yet, with ample space between the piano chords to locate your own existential quandaries. | 2023-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Reflections | April 25, 2023 | 7.2 | bbd47eec-5fc5-4878-9f8a-9f1790a5ba1b | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Before Trish Keenan's passing in 2011 she teamed with James Cargill on this largely instrumental soundtrack. The album picks up on the similarly fractured thread found on their 2011 Focus Group collaboration Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age. | Before Trish Keenan's passing in 2011 she teamed with James Cargill on this largely instrumental soundtrack. The album picks up on the similarly fractured thread found on their 2011 Focus Group collaboration Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age. | Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17492-berberian-sound-studio-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Berberian Sound Studio: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | Broadcast's output was remarkably meticulous. In their 16 years together as a group, through various lineup changes that saw them ultimately shaved down to the duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill, they released just four full-length studio albums. There was certainly a decent amount of other work that sprung up in the gaps between those records, but often a protracted silence would settle on the band. It wasn't hard to imagine a permutation of the Broadcast lineup locked away in a studio during those times, agonizing over pink noise settings, crafting a set of lyrics that sat just right with Keenan's detached delivery, mulling over sleeve design with longtime cohort Julian House of the Focus Group. As the world outside sped up they seemed to slow down, getting a little more lost in their own sound with every passing year.
Their final work together before Keenan's sad passing in 2011, the manic cut-and-paste Focus Group collaboration Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, spewed Broadcast out into a disorienting space, deliberately clipping their pop wings. Their live shows from that era further emphasized the feeling, with Keenan and Cargill performing in near darkness, facing one another while hunched over tables laden with equipment, barely even acknowledging the presence of the audience. The sense of retreat from those shows was overpowering, even if it was the natural product of the insular existence the pair seemed to fall into over the course of their career. In the beginning they had easily traceable peers-- labelmates Stereolab, fellow Birmingham bands Plone and Pram-- but by the time of Witch Cults they were mostly out on their own. Even the "hauntology" sub-genre felt too parochial for a band that had such potentially limitless scope within its grasp.
It feels appropriate that one of Keenan and Cargill's final works together is a largely instrumental soundtrack to filmmaker Peter Strickland’s 2012 feature Berberian Sound Studio. The film follows a British man who travels to Italy in the 1970s to work on the sound design of a schlocky giallo movie, only to be driven to the point of self-destruction by his own creations. Broadcast are a natural fit for such a project, their working methods clearly mirroring the obsessive, isolationist approach of Strickland's central character. Their music often has a filmy élan to it, bearing traces of composers such as Krzysztof Komeda's work for Roman Polanski and Luboš Fišer's score for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It's not clear who did what here-- Keenan and Cargill began working on this project together, with the latter completing the score after Keenan's passing-- but it picks up on the similarly fractured thread sewn throughout Witch Cults, with 39 tracks included, many of them barely making it over the one-minute mark.
That Broadcast were still working deeply in the abstract suggests they were keen to further explore the ideas embedded in that last record. According to Cargill, we may find that out at some point in the future. For now, all we have is this, an album that arches away from Witch Cults in subtle ways, dialling down the self-consciously quirky material that periodically surfaced on that record and bringing a conspicuous feeling of terror closer to the surface. Berberian Sound Studio is all bone-chilling screams, deep red blood spilling across decaying celluloid, knives being raised pointedly in the air. It's the work of people enamored by the common devices of horror, who want to see how pliable that material is so they can find their own entry point into it.
This isn't an album easily broken down into tracks, but the influence of Herk Harvey's sinister organ grind from the classic Carnival of Souls surfaces sporadically ("Beautiful Hair", "Treatise") as do great bursts of menacing analog synth reminiscent of Fabio Frizzi's score for Zombie Flesh Eaters ("Mark of the Devil", "Found Scalded, Found Drowned"). Elsewhere, pieces of dialog from the film are regularly worked in, often through creepily whispered female voices reminiscent of a similar trick deployed on Goblin's Suspiria soundtrack ("Monica's Burial", "Anima di Cristo"). Occasionally there are even Broadcastian touches-- the keyboard refrain on "The North Downs Dimension" is noticeably similar to the one deployed on "You and Me in Time" from Tender Buttons. But mostly this is an attempt at subtlety emulating the work of others, of generating chills from an eerie sparseness (the quite beautiful "Teresa, Lark of Ascension") or from dense, compact forms (the strident "The Equestrian Vortex").
What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria’s Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up"). It's undoubtedly derived from that high level of fastidiousness Keenan and Cargill always applied to their work together, but it also demonstrates what big-picture thinkers they were, able to forge unseen connections between disparate, barely heard musicians. It's what gives an album like this, drawn from so many sources, a recognizable identity of its own, and it's what gave their ever-evolving career a solid grounding in a world that was recognizably theirs. | 2013-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | January 3, 2013 | 7.4 | bbdf4d34-e721-44eb-8f97-186697a7a18c | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Stockholm trio Peter Bjorn and John branch out on their latest LP, exploring everything from lo-fi 1980s electronics and shoegaze guitars to slacker beats and icy dreamscapes. The result is their most focused and fully realized album yet, and one of the better pop albums we've heard this year. | Stockholm trio Peter Bjorn and John branch out on their latest LP, exploring everything from lo-fi 1980s electronics and shoegaze guitars to slacker beats and icy dreamscapes. The result is their most focused and fully realized album yet, and one of the better pop albums we've heard this year. | Peter Bjorn and John: Writer's Block | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9518-writers-block/ | Writer's Block | So, the title's just a pun. Peter Morén, Bjorn Yttling, and John Erikkson all wrote songs for their third album, Writer's Block, but where last year's heartbroken Falling Out drew inspiration mainly from 1960s pop, the Stockholm-based trio's latest LP finds them aspiring to new levels of sonic diversity, exploring everything from lo-fi 80s electronics and shoegaze guitars to slacker beats and icy dreamscapes. It's a lot of new ground for a band to have covered in a year's time; fortunately, PB&J (uh, yeah, we know) managed to harness their melodic expertise and cultivate their textural craftsmanship at precisely the same time. The result is their most focused and fully realized effort yet-- an album that adds an imperial hugeness to the teen noir and garage-y psychedelia of their past efforts-- and one of the better pop records we've heard this year.
Aided by Yttling's solid production (he's also worked with the Concretes and Shout Out Louds), Writer's Block's sonic textures demand attention first: odd synths, overdriven bass, dreamy harmonies, rolling drums, pink streaks of guitar noise, or a foot tapping in soft focus. But ultimately, the album is just as notable for the way it captures both the electric first moments of a deep relationship and the bleary aftermath of post-breakup malaise. The infectious, lazily whistled hook and playful bongo drums of first single "Young Folks" are immediately inviting, but the song's second layer-- the coy chemistry between Morén and ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman-- adds depth, as the song's two hopeful strangers discover each other by chance: "All we care about is talking/ Talking only me and you."
As an album, Writer's Block shares these new lovers' singular focus. "Paris 2004" is a classical guitar-tinged traveler's ballad in the manner of John Cale's near-perfect "Andalucia", exchanging Cale's studied ambiguity for sentimental bedazzlement; Erikkson's "Start to Melt" flickers with amazed adoration; and Morén's "Objects of My Affection" combines the dramatic flair of an uncharacteristically upbeat Morrissey with the nasal vocals and ringing acoustic guitars of a post-Loveless "Like a Rolling Stone".
The album's narrators cast an equally attentive eye on love's jagged downside. Amid the simplistic percussion and glassy Flaming Lips chorus of "Amsterdam", Yttling mopes over his loneliness during a lover's vacation, before Erikkson's starry-eyed "Up Against the Wall" pictures a relationship at the precipice. "It's almost that I wish we hadn't met at all," sings Erikkson against a crystalline rhythm that could pack a John Hughes prom.
Written by the full trio, "The Chills" pays quiet homage to the New Zealand indie group of the same name, and steeps its bitterness in caustic one-liners ("Your tongue is sharp/ But I miss the taste of it"). And at last, Yttling's big-screen "Roll the Credits" pictures an escape, but as usual on Writer's Block, the romance fills the frame: "It's between me and her now/ Can't separate at all/ Let's put the cards back in the sleeve." Only droning closer "Poor Cow" kills the mood, like the George Harrison sitar song contrarians might revisit when the rest of the album grows overly familiar.
For Peter Bjorn & John-- as with their Pitchfork-approved compatriots-- love is all. As such, a certain amount of actual writer's block should have been expected; after all, what Writer's Block seeks to portray is, in the end, ineffable. "And the question is: Was I more alive then than I am now?" Morén wonders on "Objects of My Affection", rejoindering, "I happily have to disagree/ I laugh more often now/ I cry more often now/ I am more me." If lyric poetry is, as Czech novelist Milan Kundera recently wrote, "the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and the desire to make it heard," surely the pop song is the highest incarnation of all-consuming love and its fundamental need to be shared. Writer's Block, indeed. | 2006-10-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 / Wichita | October 18, 2006 | 8.5 | bbe02763-7ba8-46bc-82c8-a5b83127571a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
In a follow-up EP to last year’s The Mountain Will Fall, Shadow bucks expectations and finds inspiration in unlikely collabs with Nas and Danny Brown. | In a follow-up EP to last year’s The Mountain Will Fall, Shadow bucks expectations and finds inspiration in unlikely collabs with Nas and Danny Brown. | DJ Shadow: The Mountain Has Fallen EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-shadow-the-mountain-has-fallen-ep/ | The Mountain Has Fallen EP | Early in his career, back when he was still a college-radio striver a couple years away from inspiring Mixmag to coin the term “trip-hop,” DJ Shadow made his way doing what hip-hop producers usually did: creating beats for rappers. He built up a promising résumé, from his self-released 1991 mixtape Hip Hop Reconstruction from the Ground Up (featuring a drums-of-the-apocalypse remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em”) to his time making G-funk-deconstructing classics with neo-Panther and Bay Area MC Paris, in 1992, to his run on Solesides, starting in 1993, crafting beats for Blackalicious and Lateef the Truth Speaker. But once Endtroducing..… blew up in 1996, Shadow’s aptitude for abstract instrumental beats took center stage. And with rare exceptions—Kool G Rap and Mike D taking turns confronting “Drums of Death” on UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction; a hyphy detour on The Outsider (which, say what you will, gave us a great E-40 track); the Posdnuos/Kweli backpacker summit on The Less You Know, the Better’s “Stay the Course”—his music was pegged, usually unfairly, as hip-hop for people who didn’t like rap.
If the fact that the Run the Jewels collab “Nobody Speak” became far and away the biggest crowd-pleaser on last year’s The Mountain Will Fall doesn’t put the Timbs to that theory, the leading twofer on follow-up EP The Mountain Has Fallen probably should. There’s no ’90s-vet rapper’s-rapper quite like Nas, and few MCs this decade who’ve reached EDM and indie audiences on their own honest terms as successfully as Danny Brown, so bringing them in for collaborations reads like a canny move on the surface. But Shadow’s history of fuck-what-you-think iconoclasm puts these collaborative highlights in a more musical context that pushes past simple optics.
For instance: What do you even expect from “Shadow produces Nas” when both artists have been repeatedly burdened with the expectation of returning to their debut forms? Nas has been keeping quiet since his fine 2012 comeback, Life Is Good, save a few stray singles that keep up his future-focused elder-statesman vibe. So hearing him amped and inspired is always welcome, even when it’s a little thematically scattershot. “Systematic” seems lyrically torn between fuck-the-system calls to “occupy all streets” and hood-mogul dreams of tech ventures—a tension that gave it a self-aware spot on the “Silicon Valley” soundtrack while nodding to Nas’ investments with his own QueensBridge Venture Partners. At least you have a jittery, propulsive electro-G-funk beat to ponder late capitalism to; it’s almost like a direct nod to Nas’ predecessors in Queens’ Juice Crew, considering it hits a lot of the same dirty, low-end synth squawks as Masta Ace’s “Born to Roll.”
Meanwhile, Danny Brown sets up his own conflict on “Horror Show,” playing both to and against the type he spent much of Atrocity Exhibition staring down like an enemy: the manic maniac in rock-star threads spending stacks on “a bag of drugs looking like trail mix.” The first verse’s Porsche-flooring coke hubris links up to the second’s undertone of doomed self-loathing via a bouncy sing-song chorus somewhere between shaming himself and threatening everyone else: “Welcome to my horror show/Horrible, how I will do all of you.” Danny’s at his broadest here, but when his broadest sounds a lot like the Weezy ’07-via-Alice Cooper ’73 monster that made his last three albums throat-clenchers, all that’s left to do is head-nod. And even if the lumbering galoot of a beat that Shadow builds for him is horrorshow more in the Dark Carnival sense, rather than A Clockwork Orange, it’s the perfect excuse for him to stomp around with some of the most no-bullshit battering-ram drums and basslines he’s ever done.
That said, there’s not much of the beat-chopping restlessness that’s laced his best tracks, neither on the rap cuts nor the two instrumentals that round things out. “Good News” is a weird little slice of ’70s-prog kick/snare/synth noodling that alternately sounds like a slick cut-up and a drunken attempt to push a malfunctioning Moog up a flight of aluminum stairs. (You almost expect Hannibal Buress to improvise a silly talkbox song over it.) There’s a bit more nuance in the closing “Corridors,” an instrumental featuring string arrangements by Academy Award-winning composer Steven Price; it’s largely in keeping with the beat-scene excursions of The Mountain Will Fall and picks up the post-dubstep rhythmic intricacy that Burial left off his last single. But once the orchestral bits start overwhelming the intricate bass-music locomotion Shadow’s built to a crest, its cinematic flourishes turn a strong composition into a score in search of a super-powered fight scene—impressive, but emotionally distant. The three good songs on this EP could be streamlined into The Mountain Will Fall’s overall structure well enough, but the two rap collabs are the clear highlights. It’s fine hearing Shadow continue to work in new modes, but sometimes it’s better to hear him finding interesting new angles in his old ones. | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mass Appeal | July 13, 2017 | 6.5 | bbeabe0c-72ad-4c09-be24-c8b6afd2b3b5 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
In an album of studio recordings informed by her partly improvised live hardware sets, the UK-based techno musician balances dance-floor functionalism with wild idiosyncrasy. | In an album of studio recordings informed by her partly improvised live hardware sets, the UK-based techno musician balances dance-floor functionalism with wild idiosyncrasy. | Karen Gwyer: Rembo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/karen-gwyer-rembo/ | Rembo | In the four years since the release of her debut album, the dreamy and pleasingly homespun Needs Continuum, Karen Gwyer has honed her hardware setup into a formidable dancefloor weapon. It’s perhaps no coincidence that former Ann Arbor, Michigan, resident now finds herself attached to London-based imprint Don’t Be Afraid, where her labelmates include DJ Bone, one of Detroit’s finest—and perhaps most underrated—techno DJs of the last 20 years. His recent album for Don’t Be Afraid, which appeared under the new alias Differ-Ent, showed off a more adventurous and eclectic attitude intended to satisfy the label’s desire for “the weirdest possible music,” as he put it. On Rembo, an eight-track powerhouse of deep, dense, and hugely danceable techno, Gwyer proves herself just as adept at taking Detroit’s weighty history in freaky directions.
Where Needs Continuum sprang from a period of confinement, recorded in the UK (where Gwyer has lived for many years) while pregnant with her first child, Rembo is the product of many late nights honing her attack for a live audience, and it follows several EPs charting a journey deeper into body-music territory. Framing this album, Gwyer has spoken of her frustration that her live set might be treated as “a warm up act for DJs”, arguing that she’s just as capable of setting moods, responding to crowds, and creating spontaneous moments with her partly improvised hardware sessions. Accordingly, almost every track on Rembo sounds as if it’s been worked out under hot lights and thick smoke.
While she proves herself increasingly adept at stoking the energy on the floor, Gwyer isn’t afraid to leave an idea hanging in the air for an extra eight or 16 bars, gently nudging her captive listeners into trance mode. On “Why Don’t You Make Your Bed?,” she holds a moment between her fingertips for most of six minutes, spreading slow-motion synths like butter over a gritty, lo-fi rhythm. “Why Does Your Father Look So Nervous?” is the album’s central pearl, a shifty dancefloor moment that’s quintessentially Gwyer: chunky, primitive-sounding bass and drums lifted by a mid-range flightiness that’s part Reichian minimalism, part krautrock mysticism. A looming chord suddenly breaks through to raise the pressure, and out of nowhere we’re deep, deep inside—it’s a shiver-inducing moment, informed by an intuitive knowledge of the minute personal ecstasies of the dancefloor.
Split across two slabs of vinyl, the eight tracks are nearly all primed for DJ use, and, typically for Gwyer, the titles are a cryptic delight, pairing tracks into a call-and-response structure. “Why Don’t You Make Your Bed?” sets up “It’s Not Worth the Bother”; “Did You Hear the Owls Last Night?” is followed by “Yes, But I Didn’t Know They Were Owls.” Not that there seems to be a hidden narrative propelling the action; Gwyer is probably just having a laugh at techno’s expense, bringing a sense of humor sometimes missing from an often self-serious genre. That cheekiness also comes through on “It’s Not Worth the Bother,” a drumless synth folly that recalls the baroque busyness of early electronic pioneers like Wendy Carlos—best of luck to any DJ bold enough to take it on. Ultimately, though, Rembo is an album that prizes function as much as idiosyncrasy; much like Differ-Ent’s It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, the yearning for experimentation is always kept in check by an intuitive appreciation for what dancers desire. It’s a talent to be cherished. | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Don't Be Afraid | June 26, 2017 | 7.4 | bbed9329-1cd0-4590-bd75-8ce68e80f6b0 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | null |
Oakland “stoner violence” trio Connoisseur’s entire debut LP is about the pleasures and politics of smoking weed. The band attempts to be dually comical and menacing, falling short in both capacities. | Oakland “stoner violence” trio Connoisseur’s entire debut LP is about the pleasures and politics of smoking weed. The band attempts to be dually comical and menacing, falling short in both capacities. | Connoisseur: Over the Edge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23075-over-the-edge/ | Over the Edge | Whenever a band focuses all of its attention on one subject, it’s bound to get old no matter how engaging that subject might be. With that, the appeal of Connoisseur’s debut LP depends entirely on your personal tolerance for the band’s, um, chronic monomania. Then again, by its own admission, the Oakland “stoner violence” trio is trying to be provocative: “If you are straight edge,” says guitarist Daniel Hague, aka Daniel “Machinegun” Grenade, in a press release, “this record will hopefully make you question your life choices. If you smoke pot, this record will make you feel sexy and intelligent.”
If only that were true, and if only the band could muster half as much wit via their music as Hague does in that single quip. All indications show they could; clearly, this is a band with a sense of humor. In 2015, their side-splitting video for “Pot Hole” depicted frontman Carlos Saldana sparking up with a pair of door-to-door religious pamphleteers. And Saldana keeps tongue firmly in cheek in the band’s live show, where his hyperactivity and self-deprecation make for a strong, distinct presence that recalls D.R.I.’s Kurt Brecht in his prime. But without the benefit of being able to see Saldana’s facial expressions as he jumps around and windmills his arms, Connoisseur’s schtick loses a critical dimension. On Over the Edge, the band attempts to be dually comical and menacing. The album falls short in both capacities.
Things start out promisingly enough when Saldana shouts, “You didn’t want your kids to be like us/We don’t want our kids to be like you” on opening number “The Stoning.” By the next line, though, Saldana’s train of thought gets a bit convoluted: “So now weed is mainstream/And profits are so fucking high/Fancy shops and fancy rigs/We don’t want your money in our scene/Get out.” Okay—it’s understandable that Saldana and company would resent marijuana chic and the gentrification that comes with it. (And hats off to Saldana if he got someone thinking about this issue for the first time.) But would these guys prefer someone face criminal charges and prison time just to maintain their sense of outlaw cool?
Worse, when Saldana closes the song out with “You can take your weed/You can fuck yourself,” it reeks of the same punk elitism that undermines come-as-you-are outsider scenes from within. On “I’d Rather Be Smoking Weed,” Saldana calls for a sense of solidarity, singing “No more divisions/Tearing each other down,” but his arms are only open for fellow potheads. Unsurprisingly, the music is most charming when it’s clear that Saldana is just clowning the audience, like when he sings, “Hit this/Or I’ll kick your ass/This weed/It’s so magical/So green/Put it in yer butt/Wait, don’t/I’m just kidding.”
On “Weeding Out the Weak”—a kind of boxing contest between smokers—Saldana cleverly makes himself the target of his own joke by losing the contest. Indeed, there’s a lot to like about how this band seems to wink at you between lines, as if screaming “if you take us too seriously, the joke’s on you.” Much of the time, though, Saldana shrieks and grunts as if he’s deadly serious, which makes it easy to miss the joke. And all too often, Connoisseur’s wit is eclipsed by what sounds like a sincere desire to brag about how much weed they burn through.
In an age where Weedeater’s Dixie Dave pulls stunts like cough-medicine and cheese tastings, there really are few cards left to play from the drugs-are-cool deck. And if a group as sonically engaging as Cypress Hill can reduce itself to self-parody after just a couple of albums, Connoisseur need to play-up the things that set them apart. Namely: the way they break out of the paint-by-numbers stoner metal mold by mixing fast and slow tempos with ease. However brief and ratty Connoisseur’s songs get, it’s noteworthy that Hague, Saldana, and returning drummer Lyle Sprague are actually emulating musically ambitious groups like Earth Crisis and Spazz. Their mix of sludge, powerviolence, and d-beat hardcore is flexible and seamless enough to accommodate “Hey! Ho!” Ramones-style chants (“All Day, Every Day”) and even clean guitars (“Boulevard of Broken Bongs”). With some tweaking, they could marry the music and the humor together for a particularly potent strain of stoner metal. | 2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Tankcrimes | April 15, 2017 | 6.4 | bbf4394d-b8dc-4c7d-9460-2146650e153f | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
There's an infectious sense of discovery in Black Dice's latest album as the Brooklyn band finds ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun. | There's an infectious sense of discovery in Black Dice's latest album as the Brooklyn band finds ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun. | Black Dice: Mr. Impossible | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16499-mr-impossible/ | Mr. Impossible | Brooklyn sonic alchemists Black Dice are one of those bands that started off seeming like they could go anywhere. Early singles and EPs focused on scream-laden hardcore and mixed noisy electronics with traditional guitars and drums. By the time of their proper full-length debut, 2002's Beaches & Canyons, they had become psychedelic explorers who smashed gentle drones against noise and turned it into something both violent and graceful. In the years since that masterpiece, they've cut a stumbling but consistent path through bad vibes electronics, mixing dark humor, broken beats, and generally disorienting drugginess to create a sound that they pretty much own. And though recent records like Repo, Load Blown, and Broken Ear Record have a fair amount of variety, you'd never mistake them for anything early on in the group's history.
Since Black Dice are no longer as interested in formal innovation, the best way to evaluate their new music is to just think of it in terms of tunes. Are the riffs good? Do the melodies take some nice turns? Do they use the right textures to suit the track's overall thrust? On Mr. Impossible, the answer to all three of these questions is yes. At nine songs in 46 minutes, Mr. Impossible feels like a collection of instrumentals that has a clear if seriously bent relationship to pop music.
Black Dice's sound is resolutely urban, conjuring images of percussion pulled from junkyards, strange music leaking from a broken speaker in a bodega, the bass-heavy thud of a mobile subwoofer that happens to have an automobile wrapped around it. Regardless of how this music was created and which actual instruments were used, if any, Mr. Impossible feels organic in its own rusted-out way, wholly of this polluted earth. Black Dice get funky here, too, offering up something like a lo-fi, low-technique variation on the rubbery, densely textured grooves of Miles Davis' On the Corner.
Since Black Dice's M.O. has always been at least partly about chemical-laden anxiety, it's easy to forget that they can be pretty funny, and Mr. Impossible in particular is filled with playful silliness. The "lead" voice on "Outer Body Drifter" basically sounds like a couple of fun-loving dudes trying to get a party started, but their voices have been ripped from their throats and packed together into a single gooey, wholly unintelligible ball. The absurdity of these sorta-chants over the stomping, buzzy beats sounds both darkly fucked up and also hilarious. "Pigs" is a static-soaked, very distantly countrified tune with a 4/4 thump and snarling vocal that sounds like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top with a bloody mouthful of broken teeth. The eight-minute "Carnitas" is the most free-floating thing here, a rush of awkwardly tumbling drum hits, sax blurts, and watery vocals that flows and careens and seems constantly on the move. "The Jacker" is downright jazzy, with a beat that actually swings and a bouncy little distorto-rhythm and a snaking wah-wah'd lead melody. Even with all the unease, there's real joy in this stuff, an infectious sense of discovery as Black Dice find ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun.
In other places, though, Mr. Impossible is a little more abstract and experimental and also a bit less interesting. "Spy vs. Spy", which has squelchy synths and a vocal loop consisting of a single chipped syllable, is Black Dice by numbers, the kind of thing that seems to come almost too easily to them; listening to it, it's hard not to feel a bit wistful for when they seemed to re-write the rules every time. Still, on the evidence of Mr. Impossible, they still sound like no one else and they're still thinking hard about music and texture. When you're craving something trashy and tripped-out in this very particular way, they still deliver the properly damaged goods. | 2012-04-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ribbon Music | April 13, 2012 | 7.7 | bbf65f54-17b8-44d6-8224-b9860ae3ace2 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After more than 20 albums in the past two decades, the idiosyncratic Chicago rock band takes a final bow. As always, their songs are welcome and familiar, yet a surprise every time. | After more than 20 albums in the past two decades, the idiosyncratic Chicago rock band takes a final bow. As always, their songs are welcome and familiar, yet a surprise every time. | Joan of Arc: Tim Melina Theo Bobby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joan-of-arc-tim-melina-theo-bobby/ | Tim Melina Theo Bobby | Tim Melina Theo Bobby, the last album by Joan of Arc, plays as if Tim Kinsella, Melina Ausikaitis, Theo Katsaounis, and Bobby Burg sat down to compile their greatest hits, remembered they aren’t the kind of band that writes hits, and decided to try out a little bit of everything. There’s an effective literalism to this approach: If you’ve ever liked a Joan of Arc song, then you’ll almost certainly like some of these. And if you didn’t, then track 1 sounds exactly like American Football—talk about an instant crowd pleaser.
This is how a lot of people first come to Joan of Arc, of course: Via the most memed house in Champaign-Urbana, tracing the ways Tim Kinsella and his younger brother Mike’s musical careers have crisscrossed since Cap’n Jazz, the inventive and influential emo band they founded as teenagers. Joan of Arc’s anxious deadpan meandering and virtuoso weirdness can be a more acquired taste, and there’s a lot to acquire—they’ve released 20-some albums in the past 20 years. No two are especially alike, except for the constant presence of Tim Kinsella and a spirit of diffident, digressive unpredictability. And now it’s over.
As an album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is maybe even less concerned than usual with coherence, which tends to create the atmosphere of a singles collection. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s about time and boundaries, the things that separate concepts like then and now or you and me. Musically, this can sound like a walk through Joan of Arc’s tangly, overgrown garden: the sawtoothed strums of “Karma Repair Kit” (“I got a lot of good to do/To possibly come out even”), the moodier reflecting pool of “Creature and Being,” the wet-noodle synth of “Land Surveyor.” Over the motorik groove of “Cover Letter,” Kinsella reviews his résumé, How to With John Wilson-style, reflecting on the many, many other jobs he’s performed in service to music: “I prepared various coffee drinks/And I waited tables stoned…/Afternoon shift selling businessmen porn in order to keep the shelves stocked with underground and foreign art films/And I wrote songs.” The hustle sounds like a drag; the song doesn’t, which is where the pathos comes in.
But Joan of Arc have always been a band of multiple simultaneous perspectives—never more than now, when Kinsella and Ausikaitis divide lead vocal duties. As a medium for undermining literal meaning, Ausikaitis is unrivaled; her lyrics can be funny, visceral, or morbid but always mysterious and absurd. “Another role where the movie ends, nice/It’s a natural conclusion that people can buy,” she sings at the top of “Feedback 3/4” (sounds just like the name says). I picture her reading film scripts, reaching for galaxy-brained director questions like But what is ending, actually? and So if this is ending, then what is life? Her riddles make for really good songs, like standout “Something Kind,” where a creeping, knotted guitar melody escalates to a noisy window-smasher as Ausikaitis describes a series of increasingly vivid and then sexually graphic scenes that refuse to resolve into secure meanings.
Tim Melina Theo Bobby is hardly the end of these four people making music: There’s Aitis Band, Ausikaitis’ group with Katsaounis and Burg, and Good Fuck, Kinsella’s duo with Jenny Pulse. But after all these years, Joan of Arc means something in itself: welcome and familiar but still a surprise every time, like the pickles of indie-rock comfort foods. We feel a pang when we lose something like that. Does it mean anything? Isn’t it supposed to? What it means, Joan of Arc will remind you—gently, quietly, at the very end of “Creature and Being”—is that it’s up to you: “We create/Retroactively/Our own causes/To rationalize beliefs.” Okay, then: Joan of Arc forever.
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. | 2020-12-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Joyful Noise | December 31, 2020 | 7.4 | bbf84b1e-f6c4-4dab-8fd2-6dedf5f977ab | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
On their sixth album, the Los Angeles rockers attempt to reach across the political spectrum, but their noble intentions clash with cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. | On their sixth album, the Los Angeles rockers attempt to reach across the political spectrum, but their noble intentions clash with cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. | Dawes: Passwords | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dawes-passwords/ | Passwords | After the 2016 election, a subset of Americans became fixated on finding common ground with their fellow citizens on the opposite end of the political spectrum. On their sixth album, Los Angeles rockers Dawes follow suit: Passwords explores various means of reconciliation, with political adversaries and romantic partners alike. And its intentions are noble. Yet the album’s sentiments are often bogged down by cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. At times, the music feels conspicuously out of character for a band that has historically made tactful, if occasionally bland, rock’n’roll.
It’s laudable that Dawes are writing songs that attempt to push the national conversation forward. On “Crack the Case,” the strongest track on Passwords, frontman Taylor Goldsmith delivers a salient, perhaps naive statement of intent: “I wanna sit with my enemies/And say, ‘We should’ve done this sooner,’” before a sweet lap steel transports that bipartisan summit to a pig roast in Middle America. Later, on “Telescope,” he returns to the detail-oriented storytelling that characterized the band’s earlier work: His character Ricky, a conspiracy nut living in a trailer outside Albany, could be the ultimate embodiment of MAGA. The song is an empathetic narrative of disenfranchisement and a reminder that, as Goldsmith puts it in one admittedly on-the-nose lyric, “It’s really hard to hate anyone/When you know what they’ve lived through.”
Yet Goldsmith’s portrait of Ricky, like many of the album’s most focused narratives, gets lost in slogging arrangements; only four out of ten tracks clock in at under five minutes. “My Greatest Invention” aims for the syrupy sweetness of Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” but lacks that song’s forward momentum. Album closer “Time Flies Either Way” talks up the importance of finding love (Goldsmith happens to be engaged to Mandy Moore) when everything else is going to shit but foregrounds a dull, static guitar figure that makes it easy to miss the song’s emotional climax. Occasionally, these lifeless arrangements are resuscitated by flashes of sharp musicianship: The flamenco-tinged guitar on “Stay Down” glimmers with a honeyed sheen. Frenzied, Eddie Palmieri-style piano dances through the end of “Feed the Fire.”
The elephant in the room is the utterly incongruous “Living in the Future,” an inclusion that is all the more confounding for its selection as album opener and lead single. A beefy guitar riff leads to a series of cryptic doomsday pronouncements; the chorus treads alarmingly close to the humorless, testosterone-drenched arena rock made infamous by Creed and Nickelback. It’s a perplexing statement, particularly for these devout students of soft-rock luminaries like Jackson Browne (who have also served as a smart backing band for Conor Oberst and Brandon Flowers). Although it preaches the merits of comprehending what motivates our peers, moments like “Living in the Future” suggest that Dawes have yet to get a handle on their own objectives. | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | HUB | June 29, 2018 | 5.6 | bbfe5e00-cfae-45d1-887b-9878ffc32b79 | Max Savage Levenson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-savage levenson/ | |
Soundtracked by euphoric bubblegum synth, the PC Music star takes a deep dive into two-dimensionality. | Soundtracked by euphoric bubblegum synth, the PC Music star takes a deep dive into two-dimensionality. | Hannah Diamond: Perfect Picture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hannah-diamond-perfect-picture/ | Perfect Picture | In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries named “selfie” its word of the year. Not coincidentally, that’s also when hyperpop star and digital photographer Hannah Diamond debuted with the London label PC Music. Working alongside producer and label mastermind A. G. Cook, Diamond created high-concept electronic pop, as well as her own hyper-stylized, highly Photoshopped portraits. But a photo—even a bespoke self-portrait in sparkling high definition—can only tell you so much about a person. Perfect Picture, Diamond’s second and final album for the label, which will cease to release new music come January, is an earnest quest to capture her essence as a person and an artist—and a winking commentary on the construction of reality and the path to self-acceptance.
Early in Diamond’s career, her chirpy, processed vocals and hyper-feminine, seemingly plastic persona led some observers to doubt her mere existence. Her 2019 debut, Reflections, didn’t do much to change that Vocaloid-like posture, and its arrival was overshadowed by the fact that most of its songs had already been released. Perfect Picture, produced by David Gamson (Kesha, Charli XCX), has a much warmer palette than its predecessor. What was once a crystalline shell of mourning for insecurities and broken online relationships has matured into a dial-up dream of early-aughts stardom made real in 2023. HD is past sounding high definition: Perfect Picture embraces a blurrier resolution where pitch-shifted vocals glitch in and out of static and punchy, arpeggiated synths leap into massive choruses. Even the relatively downtempo cuts (“Flashback,” “Unbreakable”) carry a fresh buoyancy.
As Diamond steers away from the icy, sad-girl trappings of her earlier work, she morphs into a more upbeat, motivational pop star, something like Hilary Duff’s ’00s teenie-bop classic “What Dreams Are Made Of” by way of Eurodance hitmaker DJ Sammy and mid-tempo Britney deep cuts. If the connection between these oft-maligned pop gems isn’t readily obvious, their influence on Perfect Picture’s digitally mediated yet heartfelt emotional landscape is. “Want You to Know” is tinged with Eurodance, while the modulated backing vocals of Spears’ 2008 song “Unusual You” can be heard all over the record.
Lyrically, Perfect Picture covers a lot of the same ground as Reflections with renewed optimism. Many songs are ostensibly about Diamond’s own experiences—references to pixels, touchscreens, and photo-editing tools abound. Almost all the songs are knowingly self-referential, and the meta humor that’s a PC Music signature serves to highlight the genuine emotion behind them. Diamond is still contemplating her flaws, targeting imposter syndrome in “Poster Girl” and “Lip Sync” and uncertain relationships in cuts like “Impossible” and “Divisible by Two.” Instead of wallowing, she draws newfound strength from the cracks in her self-image. “When I focus on what’s perfect/I never notice the imperfections in moments that make life so worth it,” she admits on “Poster Girl.” Time and again, Diamond reiterates that artifice doesn’t negate sincerity, just as her role in constructing it doesn’t vacate her agency.
With Gamson and her co-writers (including Cook, though his presence is less felt this time around), Diamond cushions gentle self-empowerment earworms in fuzzy synthesizers and decks them in pink ribbons and bows. Notable among the credits, besides several songs written with SOPHIE collaborator Cecile Believe, is the early standout “Want You to Know,” an old Kesha demo that Diamond has airbrushed in her own image. On the surface, she’s asking a potential partner to see her for who she truly is, but the message is aimed inward too, one of the record’s many mantras of self-worth.
Perfect Picture hits its sweet spot with the mid-album trio of “Flashback,” “No FX,” and “Lip Sync.” “Flashback” tenderly reflects on a bygone relationship, lowering the emotional temperature a notch, before the sugary love song “No FX” picks it back up again to become the album’s shimmering centerpiece. “I’ve never been so at ease/With you, I feel like myself completely,” Diamond sings. Vocoders puncture her words but leave the “completely” crystal clear, just in case you thought she was still consumed by self-doubt. On “Lip Sync,” Diamond wonders if one day she’ll “be the real thing.” It’s a funny question to ask—one that echoes some of her earliest critics. But that doesn’t seem to bother her: For Diamond, the image of the girl lip syncing in the mirror is just another reflection of the pop star’s existential duality. | 2023-10-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PC Music | October 9, 2023 | 7.8 | bc13bf2c-22d2-4b7a-9949-537b7e641b57 | Peyton Toups | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-toups/ | |
Ty Segall and Tim Presley lock into a psychedelic hive mind again for an exciting, wildly varied album made to be combed through and prodded. | Ty Segall and Tim Presley lock into a psychedelic hive mind again for an exciting, wildly varied album made to be combed through and prodded. | Ty Segall / White Fence: Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-segall-white-fence-joy/ | Joy | It seemed preordained that the two giants of West Coast rock’n’roll would work together at some point. In 2012, Ty Segall and Tim Presley were both in the middle of a hot streak. Segall was putting out new music at a clip, oscillating between the low-key garage rock of Goodbye Bread and the obliterating punk wildness of Slaughterhouse. As White Fence, Presley was overflowing with psychedelic pop ideas, putting out over six dozen songs between 2010 and 2013. Segall approached Presley at a show, as one does, and they decided to make a split album. But when they got in the studio together, the plan quickly changed and their shred-heavy jam sessions became stoner opus Hair—a high point in each man’s long discography.
Even with both men playing on every song, in certain places Hair still sounded like a split. The fuzzed-out and glammy Marc Bolan worship of Segall’s “Crybaby” is obviously the work of the guy who made a tribute album called Ty Rex, and the Presley-penned “(I Can’t) Get Around You” sounds like a White Fence song with a boilerplate Segall guitar solo. As a team, however, they were instantly soluble. Especially on “Scissor People” and “Time,” their voices glommed together in unison as their guitars—occasionally gentle but also mega-burly—intertwined. More than a vanity team-up, this was the work of two people who wrote in a shared sunbaked, psychedelic language.
Six years and so many records later, they’ve locked into their hive mind once again. Every song on the second Ty and White Fence album Joy is a co-write, and there’s never a moment where one guy overpowers the other. There’s an introduction to “Please Don’t Leave This Town” that shares similarities to several of Presley’s more reserved moments, but it’s balanced by a vocal harmony and guitar solo that carry Segall’s distinct influence. When they start singing, an abstract narrative takes form—something murky about being made of dough and being asked to leave town forever.
Their patchwork psychedelic lyrics are a staple of the album, and so is their tendency to ride the peaks and valleys of songs—letting withdrawn and reserved moments linger before sending them off with a big climactic release. After establishing 48 seconds of calm with a quiet and stripped-back pairing of electric and acoustic guitars on their interstitial song “Room Connector,” they ramp up the energy for a dramatic, loud, fast-strummed flourish that sets the stage for one of the album’s punchiest tracks, “Body Behavior.” It happens again when the minimal percussion of “She Is Gold” gives way to a big scuzzy Blue Cheer groove.
Joy is undeniably more ambitious than Hair. Every track brings a new energy or explores a different vibe. They transition from speed punk (“Prettiest Dog”) into upbeat power pop (“Do Your Hair”). Songs pack both ethereal harmonies and the high-speed clatter of electric guitars (“Good Boy”). There’s not much in the way of screaming—not compared to some of Segall’s most intense work, that’s for sure—but these two spend the entire album swinging wildly between subdued songwriting and all-beef guitars. Their mysterious instincts lead them to repeatedly sing the words “rock is dead”—accompanied by some electric guitar noodling, of course—before offering 30 seconds of squawking noise and titling that song “Rock Flute.” Later, on the song featuring the growls of Segall’s actual dog Fanny, they reference Bryan Ferry’s right-wing politics. That could be a lighthearted throwaway moment, but then Segall and Presley call the listener’s own political complacency into question.
If their tone shifts and coded lyrics make Joy sound chaotic or elusive, a few earnest moments give the album focus and clarity. Sometimes, in the fever dream heap, you hear them offering affirmations of self-love: “I want to believe in me,” they sing in unison on “A Nod.” On “My Friend,” Segall and Presley weave a gorgeous acoustic ballad with a simple message—that they’re there for the person they love. But Segall and Presley didn’t set out to offer tidy narratives or an easily defined aesthetic. Joy is an album to be combed through and prodded. It’s a testament to their shorthand with each other, which somehow ties all the fraying, crusty, silken, wiener dog, kitty cat threads so seamlessly together. | 2018-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 20, 2018 | 7.8 | bc191cac-5653-4489-9060-ad72a34389a9 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
The London producer loosens the reins for a guest-heavy, party-starting album that doesn’t feel pressured to do or say too much | The London producer loosens the reins for a guest-heavy, party-starting album that doesn’t feel pressured to do or say too much | Mura Masa: demon time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mura-masa-demon-time/ | demon time | Move over Calvin Harris, it’s Alex Crossan’s shot at a breezy, good vibes record with high-flying collaborators paging in from around the globe. Whereas the precocious British producer’s 2017 debut as Mura Masa was a tropical-sounding homage to the London underground, and his 2020 follow-up was a collection of scruffy guitar anthems that proclaimed his generation’s disaffectedness, his third album, demon time, skips out on a big concept. Dejected during lockdown, the 26-year-old Crossan made some contemplative, inward-looking songs that he wasn’t quite happy with. Then a 2000s UK garage hit steered him toward revelation: “I started remembering what it felt like to be excited about music where the essence of it is just [having] a good time, that doesn’t have to say something remarkable about the human condition.”
So drink up and let loose. Guests like the Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng, Japanese rapper Tohji, and reggaeton princess Isabella Lovestory convene for an album that strives to be flirty and feral; as Crossan explains in an interview, “I wanted to soundtrack the weird 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. time when you’re up to no good.” Contributing to the irreverence, titles are written in textspeak; pre-touchscreen cell phones bleep at the beginning of songs, like you just got a “heyyy” from your homegirl.“Go demon! Go demon!” newcomer BAYLI chants over dribbling, 2000s pop-rap production on the title track, as if she’s egging her friends to get a little nasty at the block party. It’s proof of how delightful the project is when it really commits to unseriousness. “I know I’ve been a really bad girl/I’m just trying to birth a King like Coretta,” BAYLI raps with a smirk.
demon time’s main offerings are fizzy, lowkey numbers about romantic misalignment. PinkPantheress, Shygirl, and Lil Uzi Vert trade off duties on “bbycakes,” a pastel-hued song with steel drums and a subtle drill beat, inspired by the 3 of a Kind smash that shook Crossan out of his creative slump. It’s cute, if a bit inert—and the same goes for the minimal reggaeton track “tonto,” featuring Isabella Lovestory. The silky UK garage of “e-motions” fares much better, with Erika de Casier accusing a love interest of carelessness over digital harp and funky turntable scratches. “I crossed the ocean/You wouldn’t even jump puddles for me,” she sings—and while there’s turbulence in the lyrics, the track sails along oh-so smoothly.
demon time hits a low at “2gether,” a too-moody guitar anthem about love troubles that includes chiptuned vocal snippets and a wobbly, unnecessary EDM breakdown. It’s like having your mood killed at the club by the presence of Mr. Polo Shirt. The songs surrounding it are not as heavy-handed, but still tonally off: “slomo”’s future bass production and Auto-Tuned murmuring makes it two steps away from a Jane Remover song. “up all week” sounds like a pump-up anthem for the gay club—but instead of Cakes da Killa or Azealia Banks, there’s slowthai delivering social critique. “Brain like mush, always staring at screens/They’re selling us dreams/Mouse with some cheese,” he shouts, a dial tone sounding as if signaling a conversational dead-end.
Mura Masa is best when he sticks to the script and cranks up the heat. Pa Salieu and Skillibeng are a great pairing on the squeaky, horned-up collaboration “blessing me,” but by far the standout on the album is the house and R&B-inflected “hollaback bitch,” on which Shygirl refuses to be at someone else’s beck and call. “Backyard bully in bed/Don’t give a fuck about giving no head/Take what comes ‘til a rudeboy dead,” she raps cooly—and surprisingly, the lyrics weren’t written by the master of smut herself but the more PC-presenting Crossan. After the snap of a whip, a saxophone melody wafts in as if you’ve opened the window to a live band and a courtyard of people swaying their hips. The song swelters like the last days of summer, glorious enough to shake the next young producer out of creative torpor. | 2022-09-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anchor Point / Interscope | September 20, 2022 | 6.8 | bc1f7e91-ae9c-4466-bb04-7fda7dbc6ddc | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
In 1969, Elvis Presley went to Las Vegas to reboot his career. With a half-century of hindsight, the performances feel both bittersweet and anticlimactic. | In 1969, Elvis Presley went to Las Vegas to reboot his career. With a half-century of hindsight, the performances feel both bittersweet and anticlimactic. | Elvis Presley: Live 1969 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elvis-presley-live-1969/ | Live 1969 | In the summer of 1972, Elvis Presley released “Burning Love,” a soaring number written by Dennis Linde. Despite the song’s frisky sensibility, the supposed King of Rock and Roll sounds exhausted as he strains to hit the notes. The song was his last Top 10 single in the United States. Nearly five years to the day from its release, Presley was expiring alone on a bathroom floor.
But before “Burning Love” lit up the charts for the King one last time, Presley re-launched his music career with 29 shows at the Las Vegas International Hotel in the swelter of August 1969. Recordings of 11 consecutive performances from the tail end of that run are stitched together in a new 50th anniversary box set, Live 1969. With Woodstock, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Doors, and David Bowie also receiving the golden-anniversary treatment this year, the 11-disc Presley collection only adds to the nostalgic bloat. But it also offers a peculiar opportunity to put one of pop music’s all-time megastars under the microscope.
As Presley explains every night, the Vegas appearances were his first live shows in nearly nine years, having occupied the previous decade with his film career and Army draft obligation. Throughout the run, he was backed by a massive ensemble that included his core five-piece band, a full orchestra, and two groups of backup vocalists: the Imperials and the Sweet Inspirations. In a brief August 1969 essay about the spectacle, rock critic Ellen Willis described Presley as “a grown man in black bell-bottoms, tunic, and neckerchief, devoid of pout and baby fat, skinny, sexy, totally alert, nervous, but smiling easily.” He was ready to reign again, and 2,000 people a night were ready to receive him.
Listening to all 13 hours of Live 1969 is ridiculous thing to do, but the time investment exposes the collection’s biggest shortcoming. The most magical live recordings highlight moment-to-moment chemistry between a band’s players, with each new arrangement shaped by circumstances of space and time—not to mention the sobriety and moods of the personnel and their audiences. Spontaneity can unspool hidden nuances in a deep cut or inject fresh energy into an old favorite. But the strategic nature of a nothing-but-hits Vegas show leaves little room for any of the non-Presley performers to show off their own impressive chops. Still, the band consistently rallies for the then-unreleased “Suspicious Minds,” which Willis reported as a late-set highlight.
The kinds of delights that stand out on most bootlegs are buried on Live 1969. They’re there: the haunting operatic filigrees a backup singer adds to each edition of “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” an especially hard-boogieing dinner-show iteration of “Suspicious Minds,” the way the drummer pummels the floor toms on every “Mystery Train/Tiger Man” medley, some fine honky-tonk piano in a midnight kickoff of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Though he’d issued plenty of hit records by 1969, Presley sticks to near-identical set lists of guaranteed crowd-pleasers, plus a nightly nod to the Beatles with a medley of “Yesterday” and the coda from “Hey Jude.” Listening to every performance in order feels like a game of Spot the Difference for dedicated Elvis obsessives.
While his band may have been seasoned professionals, Presley’s moods range from lovable scamp to frazzled kook, making for a colorful display of the singer’s profoundly weird character. One need not go far to get an idea of Presley’s eccentricities, but it’s still surprising to hear them fall from his curled lips. Like most busy performers, he repeats his yarns from one show to the next. He marvels at the Showroom’s “li’l funky angels” and “weirdo dolls on the walls” and makes liberal use of the phrase “woolly booger” to describe everything from his bandmates to actual boogers. All the while, Presley snorts and sniffles an alarming amount of phlegm, peppering in urgent hisses of “Back! Back!” and “Whassat?” amid clicking noises and requests for “wawa.”
Some of Presley’s ad-libbed asides, however, can be laugh-out-loud funny. Noting Las Vegas’ desert conditions, Presley remarks that he’s so parched it feels like “Bob Dylan slep’ in ya mouth”; at another show, he informs the audience of “a little bitty dead lizard” sharing his stage. He distributes innumerable cartoonish wet smacks to ecstatic women demanding kisses. He tweaks the memorable refrain of “Heartbreak Hotel” into an even more memorable, “I get so horny I could die.” Whether these outbursts are a result of drugs or just Presley’s natural state is indiscernible.
Aside from the extemporaneous musings, Live 1969’s sprawl offers little new insight about Presley’s life, mind, or music. According to the fine print in the liner notes, most of this material has already been issued piecemeal in some form already, some as recently as 2013. Presley’s Vegas residency was designed to propel his career into a new era, but the show-by-show repetition of the Live 1969 recordings stalls their momentum. Presley had no way of knowing that his comeback would fail within a decade; with a half-century of hindsight, listening to Live 1969 feels both bittersweet and anticlimactic.
Despite their length, the interchangeable sets of Live 1969 merely skim the surface of Presley’s odd inner life and taxing career, the twin engines that would hurtle him toward disaster. In 2019, Presley has been dead for 42 years—the same number he spent alive—and his shadow still looms over the world’s models of pop stardom. What remains to learn from Elvis? What’s left to parse in the ten thousandth recording of “Don’t Be Cruel,” in his career-long marriage of lust and loneliness, in the way he pontificates on li’l funky angels and woolly boogers? In a way, consuming Live 1969 in its entirety feels like a hint of what it might’ve been like to be Elvis Presley: intemperate, self-indulgent, and more than a little surreal.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA / Legacy | August 12, 2019 | 6.1 | bc2080a3-7558-4688-b7fd-d81f2d465837 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
In their latest joint release, Kanye producer Sinjin Hawke and Jlin collaborator Zora Jones combine human voices and digital processing to manifest a seamless fusion of flesh and code. | In their latest joint release, Kanye producer Sinjin Hawke and Jlin collaborator Zora Jones combine human voices and digital processing to manifest a seamless fusion of flesh and code. | Sinjin Hawke / Zora Jones: Vicious Circles EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sinjin-hawke-zora-jones-vicious-circles-ep/ | Vicious Circles EP | In Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, the transhuman takes many forms, but it often begins as light: a glowing presence detected deep inside one’s own person or a shimmering apparition that comes twitching across the sky. Something similar happens in the work of Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones, which combines human voices and digital processing in a seamless fusion of flesh and code. In the silvery edges of their sound, you can feel something manifesting itself—a shape-shifting entity, a cybernetic skin wrapped around a molten core.
Hawke and Jones have been pursuing their mercurial instincts for a few years now, across a number of different configurations—solo, as a duo, and in various one-off collaborations (Jones with Jlin, Murlo, and La Zowi; Hawke with DJ Rashad, Just Blaze, and Mike Q). Jones’ edits of artists like Sasha Go Hard and E-40 catch drops of inspiration from regional rap styles and distill them into her own brittle and glistening brand of club music, while Hawke’s production work for Kanye has helped his trademark choral leads to bubble up into the mainstream.
This is the duo’s first long-form collaboration outside Fractal Fantasy, the audiovisual project that doubles as a research unit into sound, image, and technology. The fruits of that labor were on view in a striking performance at Barcelona’s Sónar festival this summer in which their avatars, projected on a screen over their heads, rippled like CGI phosphorescence. Jones’ gestures, captured by a video camera, allowed her to manipulate synth leads as though playing an invisible theremin. There is no visual component to Vicious Circles beyond its blue-lit, sweat-slicked cover image, but the music is imbued with a similarly spectral energy, as though she and Hawke were plucking vibrations out of thin air.
While many electronic producers fetishize bass, it’s the treble register that preoccupies Hawke and Jones. Vicious Circles swims in high-end riffs that move like beads of quicksilver: digitized flutes, chirping roto-toms, streaky lightning-bolt synths. The eponymous opener balances plunging sub-bass with percussion that flashes—and disorients—like strobe lights; built on a technique long present in Hawke and Jones’ work, the melody suggests a cyborg castrato. “Lurk 101” is folded around a blippy son clave pattern that gets spun into increasingly convoluted permutations. In “God,” a Bulgarian choir sample is chopped to ribbons over shuddering drums and synth blasts, but what sounds almost bombastic at first quickly flips into a surprisingly slinky, dancehall-inflected rhythm. Hawke and Jones are maximalists who delight in pulling the rug out from beneath the monoliths they build.
They like their tracks short—nothing here runs much longer than three minutes—and they have a mischievous way of teasing listeners’ expectations, building tension by stacking crescendo upon crescendo and then switching course without ever offering anything like a release. The resulting constructions feel a bit like one of Escher’s staircases, constantly ascending, constantly building toward a climax that never comes. The technique can occasionally be frustrating. The two-and-a-half-minute “Baby Boy Sosa,” in which rave stabs and processed voices are smeared in gelatinous textures over staccato trap drums, refuses to fully take shape; there’s a glimmer of something bigger there, but it remains obscured behind the streaks and curlicues.
But this disinclination to indulge any instinctive craving for resolution sets up the closing “And You Were One” to sound even bigger and more triumphant than it already is. Here, at last, they pull out all the stops, bringing all their tricks—the chimes, the zigzagging synth leads, the hiccuping robots—to bear on a song you could almost imagine playing on pop radio. “Would you feel better?” chirps an Auto-Tuned voice, and that small gesture toward intimacy works wonders. The strangeness of their approach takes an almost feel-good form; the cold, clinical light that suffuses the EP softens into a warm, rosy glow. Despite the hard angles and unfamiliar textures that are at the forefront of all their work, Hawke and Jones seem to say, there’s nothing to fear in these artificial worlds: The alien was inside us all along. | 2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | August 8, 2018 | 7.7 | bc2191e9-125b-4ca9-adb7-1af989d0ab5b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Sam Smith remains a bit of a pop paradox, a trailblazing figure who often settles into well-trodden songwriting. | Sam Smith remains a bit of a pop paradox, a trailblazing figure who often settles into well-trodden songwriting. | Sam Smith: Gloria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-smith-gloria/ | Gloria | It’s awards season, so I’d like to nominate Sam Smith for 2022’s Best Celebrity Cameo in a Magazine Profile. The publication was New York Magazine; the subject was Joel Kim Booster, the writer and star of last year’s tender-hearted Pride and Prejudice flip Fire Island. Booster and his friends are returning home from a Silver Lake gay bar when he ducks into the bathroom and emerges to announce, “Sam Smith is coming.” Smith is introduced to the reader as “the first gay person to think they were the first gay person to win an Oscar during an acceptance speech,” and upon their arrival, they tell the party about their plans to visit Anne Boleyn’s grave at the Tower of London as a little birthday treat. This unexpected appearance in Booster’s world also articulates Smith’s strange blend of genuine trailblazing and cultural conservatism. They’re a proud, unapologetic non-binary pop star and an old soul with a taste for the maudlin. Who else would “stick up for the girls of English history” while partying with queer Hollywood royalty?
You can hear both the freedom and the fustiness on Gloria, an album that feels assertive and diverse when held up against a career that’s hewed so closely to pop’s middle of the road. Smith has described Gloria as being defined by “emotional, sexual, and spiritual liberation,” and if you’ve followed Smith for the last decade, you understand this kind of unrepentant self-love has been hard-won. The histrionic powerhouse who once begged a one-night stand to stick around has transformed into a playful lover and a student of queer history, sampling RuPaul, Divine, Paris Is Burning, and soundbites from early Pride parades. But these authentic expressions of self share space with a closing track that’s basically Ed Sheeran’s “Same Love,” and that’s the puzzle of their career: Smith’s taste level and writing haven’t kept pace with their comfort in their own skin.
Gloria does offer plenty of the one fundamental pleasure you can expect on any Sam Smith album: the thrill of a gifted vocalist exploring and subverting their material on a phrase-by-phrase basis. Here it’s the confidence of Smith’s delivery that place the album into a slightly higher echelon within their catalog. Sometimes it’s a chorus or a verse that knocks you back on your heels: the graceful, fluid runs closing out the subdued “No God,” or the viscous and husky pre-chorus on single “Gimme.” In other spots, you’re given the same jolt you might feel hearing a singer like Adele turn her talents to lovers’ rock or chanson: “Who knew they could do that?” Gloria flips between hyperpop, country, dancehall, disco, 2-step, and intimate, Kehlani-esque R&B, though the range covered by the material ends up more notable than any sparkling example of genre tourism.
Smith weaves the disparate threads tying Gloria together with surprising versatility, though it’s the songs in the latter categories—the ones suitable for a lounge or a club—that are strongest. “Lose You” is a pulsing, urgent spin on a Smith breakup anthem, channeling their desperation into dancefloor euphoria. The molasses-thick “Six Shots” elevates a standard alcohol metaphor with languid, mood-lit sensuality. Best of all is “I’m Not Here to Make Friends,” a whirlwind of grown-up lust that evokes George Michael—a clear predecessor—circa “Fastlove” and “Outside.” It also suggests that between this song and the sinewy 2018 single “Promises,” the collaborator who best understands Smith’s talents might be vanilla club-pop king Calvin Harris.
The question of collaboration is an interesting one for Smith, because Gloria’s saggy moments largely involve other voices. The barrier-smashing single “Unholy”—the first song by openly non-binary and trans artists to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100—flips a critical cliché by sounding worse in an album-length context, its transgressive glee scanning as shallow and theatrical up against more grounded, mature material. Smith clearly feels a kinship with Canadian singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez, but her two features on Gloria—the aforementioned “Gimme” and the drab, mid-tempo “Perfect”—are anodyne at best and grating at worst. Ending the album with the Sheeran duet “Who We Love” feels like a step back after Smith’s most nuanced dispatches from a queer life to date. The album’s interludes and line-to-line writing suggest a perspective more nuanced than trite scenes like “Holding hands in the street/No need to be discreet,” and yet that’s the final note sounded on Gloria.
It’s remarkable we’ve reached this point at all: an artist whose writing has long tended toward the bland and impersonal has grown into a vision and identity that can be compromised by mediocre features. Wanting to hear more from Smith and Smith alone is one of their strongest arguments yet for true stardom. We’re now familiar with Sam Smith as an emotionally generous diva who likes to dance, loves out loud, and can’t resist a gratuitous string section or a gospel choir. It’s a coherent identity, and it leaves the Gloria listener with mixed emotions. Recent hit single aside, Smith has somehow never felt further from pop’s molten core. It’s still a pleasure to watch a singer who once consigned themselves to lovesick, gender-neutral ballads spread their wings. | 2023-01-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | January 27, 2023 | 6.2 | bc274746-2c9c-42cb-ad81-edbae06802c3 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Drakeo’s fifth full-length release in eight months is brooding and entertaining. The lesser cuts can’t help but bleed together, but there’s just enough new variations to keep things fresh. | Drakeo’s fifth full-length release in eight months is brooding and entertaining. The lesser cuts can’t help but bleed together, but there’s just enough new variations to keep things fresh. | Drakeo the Ruler: Ain’t That the Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drakeo-the-ruler-aint-that-the-truth/ | Ain’t That the Truth | The past five years of Drakeo the Ruler’s life are a compressed tale of pain and triumph. On his 2017 breakout Cold Devil, he emerged as an emissary of Los Angeles rap’s new wave, blanketing the city with his menacing croak and choppy flow. He spent the 10 months before that album’s release embroiled in a firearms case that put him behind bars and was a free man that November. Yet by March 2018, he was facing a separate life sentence for racist conspiracy charges filed against him and his Stinc Team affiliates. As the case dragged on for nearly three years, Drakeo continued to record and drop new music from jail while his status as an L.A. folk hero grew.
Drakeo beat the case and has been out of jail since November 2020, and he’s wasted no time capitalizing on his growing profile. Songs with fellow Los Angeles up-and-comer Blxst, current Bay Area queen Saweetie, and professional wave rider Drake materialized quickly. He’s also dropped five new full-lengths between then and now, an uncharacteristically prolific streak on the heels of his and producer JoogSZN’s excellent prison-recorded project Thank You For Using GTL. For all the good energy his freedom has brought him, Drakeo’s latest, Ain’t That the Truth, is the first of his post-prison albums to yield diminishing returns. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it—Drakeo is as brooding and entertaining as ever, for the most part—but also little to distinguish it from the other four albums he’s released in the past eight months.
Lyrically, he’s in the same headspace as he was on this February’s The Truth Hurts: Balancing his newer, more lavish lifestyle with the grislier one he’s always known. Opener “Just Dance” includes bars about disarming a perp while eating steak and lobster and drive-bys conducted in Rolls Royce sedans. On “Way Before the Fame,” he reminisces about where the L.A. district attorney claims he hid his guns before listing off his recent jewelry purchases. Obscure slang (calling a gun clip a “stiffer”) and menacing threats delivered in his trademark raspy deadpan (“Oh, that’s your friend? You don’t care, start a GoFundMe”) are Drakeo’s stock-in-trade, and there are just enough new variations to keep things from sounding rehashed.
Whenever a song leans too far toward the familiar, like “Flu Flam a Op” nearly does, Drakeo’s voice slinks through the synths and drums to find the perfect pocket to talk about a “silly op” who “wrestle shots like Vince McMahon.” Others, like “Boogieman” and penultimate track “She’s a Roller,” are vintage Drakeo to a fault, serviceable but hardly unique. Ain’t That the Truth is a 17-track, nearly hour-long release in a line of similarly lengthy recent releases, and the lesser cuts can’t help but bleed together in a sea of faceless ops and whispered chest-thumping.
A handful of guests attempt to keep the momentum steady. Drakeo’s brother and frequent collaborator Ralfy the Plug appears on five tracks, though none match the madcap menace of their recent collaborative project A Cold Day in Hell. Kentucky upstart EST Gee shines on “Tricky Ball Play,” barreling through producer Fizzle’s twinkling piano keys. California and Michigan connect again on standout “Should I Kill Him,” Drakeo and Detroit rapper Peezy feeding on each other’s paranoia as they bob and weave through producer Al B Smoov’s guitar licks. These songs crackle with personality and flair, and the album could’ve used more like them.
Drakeo the Ruler, a newly free man with more eyes on him than ever before, has earned the right to drop as much music as he wants. But, as he makes up for time lost in jail, he’s oversaturating the market and unwittingly diluting the appeal of his laid-back swagger. Ain’t That the Truth is a workmanlike album that will surely satisfy Stinc Team lifers, but Drakeo’s style isn’t conducive to the maximal release schedule of artists like Griselda or even his L.A. contemporary 03 Greedo. Sometimes, there’s value in slowing down and basking in your own image.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stinc Team | July 23, 2021 | 6.7 | bc303cc6-67ff-4e1f-bbff-895c35349476 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Lexxi worked on Elysia Crampton's excellent July release Demon City. Where Demon City stretched to encompass both past and future, the producer's debut EP* *takes place in a single wide-eyed moment. | Lexxi worked on Elysia Crampton's excellent July release Demon City. Where Demon City stretched to encompass both past and future, the producer's debut EP* *takes place in a single wide-eyed moment. | Lexxi: 5TARB01 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22234-5tarb01/ | 5TARB01 | London-based producer Lexxi’s “Red Eyez” served as the closer on Elysia Crampton’s excellent July release Demon City. Crisp and determined, the track did the tough work of providing resolution to Crampton’s thematically and sonically sprawling album, setting the listener in a dark-but-hopeful present. A version of “Red Eyez” reappears on Lexxi’s debut EP 5STARBOI—this time, weighted down by the introduction of blown-out bass—linking the two projects; Crampton herself tweeted that Demon City “is really just an advertisement for Lexxi’s *5TARBO1 *EP, a poem and captivating accomplishment in its own right.”
The succinctness of “Red Eyez” carries throughout the five tracks that comprise 5STARBOI. Where their collaborations on Demon City embraced collage, Lexxi’s solo material is notably direct. “Pared-down” might be an overstatement, as his compositions are still generously adorned, hissing and crackling at the seams, but if Demon City stretched to encompass both past and future, *5TARBOI *takes place in a single wide-eyed moment.
The EP opens with an anarchic deluge of synth noise, which swiftly gives way to the sort of icy, winding phrase Lexxi is particularly skilled at making. His melodies, which are generally quite simple and will reiterate for the length of a track, bring to mind a less-elastic Arca. Bookended by squalls of texture and undergirded by stuttering grime-inflected beats, this music is certainly aggressive (angry, even) but by no means relentless. On “$ever0” (whose title references severo, a style pioneered by Lexxi, Crampton, and their friends: “an accumulation or accretion, an ongoing process of becoming-with,” as Crampton recently described it to Resident Advisor), a creeping rhythm is met with ambient tones and metallic echoes—pacing that’s far from the club. It brings to mind a somewhat-more-contemporary version of the sort of affected London sound in Zomby and Burial’s saddest tracks; similarly, this is music that is very much marked by urban space.
What differentiates this set of tracks from such UK forebears, and draws it even closer to associates like Chino Amobi, Lotic, and Crampton, is its nuanced emotional tenor. *5TARBOI *feels balefully of-the-moment, acutely aware of its surroundings. At its heart, it’s a statement of youth, a coming-of-age record, even. And, tinged with sadness, this coming-of-age can be as much a mourning as it is a celebration. Any moody restraint sustained elsewhere on the release is cast aside on closer “Up Top,” an anthem with both crushing and delicate elements. Its melancholic climax winds across octaves, while an errant synth screeches uncomfortably close to atonal territory; the track finishes on an unresolved note. Lexxi captures a feeling of cathartic dissolution, a moment when coming into being means coming undone. | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Endless Xclusive | August 17, 2016 | 8 | bc3810ac-96fe-4210-94a8-2acabf07b6f4 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The sharp wit of veteran songwriter Stephin Merritt thrives in brevity across a collection of short songs that range from 12 seconds to an epic two-and-a-half minutes. | The sharp wit of veteran songwriter Stephin Merritt thrives in brevity across a collection of short songs that range from 12 seconds to an epic two-and-a-half minutes. | The Magnetic Fields: Quickies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-magnetic-fields-quickies/ | Quickies | At the end of an onstage interview three years ago, I asked Stephin Merritt about the Magnetic Fields’ song “The Book of Love” becoming a staple at weddings, including my own. After some characteristic quips, he turned suddenly serious, recalling how for all of the many marriages at which he’d been asked to perform the song, he’d recently been pressed into delivering the tune at the funeral of his longtime friend. He almost couldn’t get through it, he said, and has associated the song with that somber occasion ever since.
Merritt knows how context can deepen music’s meaning. “The Book of Love” benefits from appearing alongside 68 other witty yet tender tracks on the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 landmark album, 69 Love Songs. For more than three decades as a songwriter, Merritt has relished in presenting projects within discrete frameworks, whether group names (The 6ths, The Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes) or album concepts (the first person, the Jesus and Mary Chain, “folk”). This process seemingly culminated with another massive collection, 2017’s quasi-autobiographical 50 Song Memoir. After so much history, the brevity-oriented Quickies is a welcome reset.
These are short songs, from 12 seconds to an epic two-and-a-half minutes, sparsely arranged. Merritt was inspired by the ultra-short fiction of author Lydia Davis, as well as working on his own 2014 Scrabble poetry book, and, as he cheekily implied in an interview with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, “record label preferences.” But short, even radically short songs are already the norm for the Magnetic Fields. Low-key production is also in character. And at 28 songs running 48 minutes, this album is not especially quick or lightweight. This is, blessedly, not the indie-pop laureate version of Twitter, let alone TikTok, let alone Quibi. It’s another Magnetic Fields album, and a fine one, freed from the baggage of a grandiose concept.
Because it’s a Magnetic Fields album, Quickies delights in subversion. Its first single, “The Day the Politicians Died,” is a macabre, one-hand-piano sort of party anthem, sung by the Magnetic Fields’ manager and longtime member Claudia Gonson, who deadpans, “We’ve got a taste for blood/So let’s eat all the priests.” On “My Stupid Boyfriend,” a duet between Merritt and another longtime member, Shirley Simms, sung over a whimsical instrument called a banjolele, a laundry list of gender-swapping complaints about their respective partners culminates in a darkly comedic death wish. In the barely-a-jingle “Death Pact (Let’s Make A)” or the autoharp-backed “Love Gone Wrong,” an almost goth-country dirge in which Merritt’s booming baritone recounts gruesome real-life examples of, um, strange love, Quickies finds humor in bleak morbidity.
Not all of the laughter on Quickies depends on maiming or death. The sole reference to the album title, the 45-second romp “Bathroom Quickie,” sung by Simms over accordion and celeste, juxtaposes Tin Pan Alley wordcraft and toilet-adjacent fucking. “Let’s Get Drunk Again (And Get Divorced),” which Merritt has said was inspired by his distaste for the Las Vegas wedding scene in the 1977 Martin Scorcese film New York, New York, is even more fun, and flips the classic Magnetic Fields wedding-dance format on its giddy head. Some songs, like synth-pop bad-boy embrace “(I Want to Join a) Biker Gang,” could easily have fit on 69 Love Songs.
The Magnetic Fields resonate so deeply for a devoted group of fans, though, because Merritt also manages to subvert his own detached artifice. Quickies, too, cuts to moments of real (“real”?) feeling. “She Says Hello,” another chiming, concise duet, presents an unexpectedly touching, slice-of-life anecdote about a tearful, intoxicated woman’s greeting. “Come, Life, Shaker Life!” is Merritt’s reworking of a Shaker hymn, joined by both Gonson and Simms, and on an album that’s gleefully filthy, its banjo-flecked prayer for purity is oddly stirring, like accidentally clicking over to Sufjan Stevens in the middle of listening to a CupcakKe playlist.
As with other Magnetic Fields projects, some deeper cuts succeed more than others. Still, any lows aren’t particularly low, though I could live without the cutesy rhymes on “Evil Rhythm” (“hypno-tithm,” “commun-ithm”) or the trippy first-person zombie-ant fungus tale “Song of the Ant.” The vinyl release, packaged as five 7-inch records, sounds exhausting, but it makes sense for diehard fans. And Quickies is the type of album that’s packed with little details for the particularly devoted, while also brimming with enough of the Magnetic Fields’ familiar charms to welcome those who haven’t yet found an entry point into Merritt’s increasingly vast discography.
Merritt typically writes his songs alone in a bar, but see him in person and there’s a palpable sense of community. To promote Quickies, the Magnetic Fields were scheduled to play residencies at smaller venues in seven cities. “Kraftwerk in a Blackout,” with its top-shelf Merritt pop-cultural references (not just Kraftwerk, but Star Trek, too), and inescapable melancholy, might have ranked among the Magnetic Fields’ best songs whatever crisis happened to be in the headlines—certainly, if there had been a blackout. As the song fades, Simms repeats, “Will we ever dance again?” The tour, of course, has been postponed. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but life is short, and, sooner or later, all things must end. From weddings to funerals. In this or any time, there’s something to be said for less context.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 19, 2020 | 7.3 | bc3bbe86-165f-42aa-ae34-d7ed543f0cd5 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
His first two records were lousy, but Rick Ross has found his niche by presiding over a luxurious rap fantasy out of step with the current moment. | His first two records were lousy, but Rick Ross has found his niche by presiding over a luxurious rap fantasy out of step with the current moment. | Rick Ross: Teflon Don | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14482-teflon-don/ | Teflon Don | If you came up as a rap fan in the 1990s, it's hard to come to grips with the fact that the Illmatic/Doggystyle/Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) ideal has become outmoded. Rappers rarely start with a fully-formed classic right off the bat. And sometimes, a guy who was underrated, underappreciated, or even considered a joke earlier in their career actually generates so much momentum that they eventually become undeniable.
Still, even the most patient and forgiving listener would've had trouble imagining that Rick Ross would ever be taken seriously. His first two Def Jam albums sold well, but his bumbling performances on the mic did little to combat the view of him as merely Jay-Z's get-rich-quick scheme, someone to piggyback on the commercial momentum of dudes from the South rapping about hustling. And when 50 Cent "outed" him as a former corrections officer, it could've been a career-killing PR disaster. But instead of filling his 2009 album Deeper Than Rap with a compendium of explanations and mea culpas, Ross did the exact opposite, exaggerating the most outrageous and ostentatious aspects of his music and persona to summer-blockbuster proportions. He threw the burden of believability out so fast that you could just sit back and cheer as shit blew up.
Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don. If this album initially lacks the wallop of Deeper Than Rap, it's only because there's no longer the shock value in realizing that Rick Ross is making one of the better rap records of the year. But Teflon Don also lacks the concessions to sensitive thuggery that bogged down Deeper, and it's also remarkably lean at just 11 tracks. Ross defiantly announces on opener "I'm Not A Star", "If I die today remember me like John Lennon/ Buried in Louis I'm talkin' all brown linen/ Make all of my bitches tattoo my logo on they titty/ Put a statue of a nigga in the middle of the city," and things really don't get any more modest from there.
Ross' greatest gift is the ability to conjure a fully-formed Planet Boss, a refuge from the dwindling fortunes of gansta rap and the general economic downturn, where rappers can and do film videos with as many speedboats as possible. It's obviously a place where A-list rappers are in their comfort zone to do whatever the hell they want. Here, Jay-Z can refute possible ties to the Illuminati, Kanye is at his most aw-shucks disarming since 2007, and the third iteration of "Maybach Music" features none other than Erykah Badu on the hook. The only times Teflon stumbles is when interlopers can't figure the lay of the land. Diddy would've catered more to the spirit of this record if he went in character as Sergio Roma instead of hyping up the overamped, ill-fitting rock moves of "No. 1", and while Drake proved every bit as capable of having rappers meet him on his own terms, his redux of "The Resistance" on "Aston Martin Music" is the awkward sound of two worlds colliding.
While Teflon Don is fun to talk about conceptually, it would be a shame if Ross' growth as an artist went overlooked. Just because Ross and his producers rarely work in nuance doesn't mean they're not craftsmen. It's fitting that his franchise is called "Maybach Music": J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, No I.D., and Kanye West create beats that really do sound like they're fantastically out of reach to anyone but the financial elite, and you can hear every dollar that went into the record. There are still plenty of villainous synth vamps that cater to Ross' halting, self-satisfied delivery. But the real fun is hearing Teflon at its most indulgent. Just listen to how the Disney strings modulate to a new key to herald the arrival of Ross on "Maybach Music III", the way a Bobby Seale speech adds high drama on "Tears of Joy", or how "Live Fast, Die Young" takes a Kid Dynamite sample back from "Nuthin' But a G Thang" for six minutes of bottle-popping. Even the drum rolls on "MC Hammer" suspiciously conjure an ATM dispensing cash.
Ross won't ever be confused for a Scribble Jam participant, but compare his incongruously meek rapping on 2006 single "Push It" to anything on Teflon Don, and you hear someone who's come into his own. Lyrics that might look clumsy on paper turn into grand pronouncements through pure self-belief. And like a great action hero, Ross never lets cleverness get in the way of saying something memorable. Understandably, money is about the only tie Planet Boss has to reality, and nearly every interaction can be broken down as a financial transaction. He uses luxury autos as a pricing scale for his donations to Haiti, his fatalism is manifested in having his jewelry go uninsured, he reps Emmett Till and Rolexes in the span of two lines, and the only way he can express his grief over his dead father is by turning down "All the Money in the World".
So, yeah-- the tide's pretty much turned for Ross, but if Deeper Than Rap didn't change your mind, I'm not sure Teflon Don will either. At this point, you can find a piece bemoaning the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam'ron, or Gucci Mane becoming critical favorites and fill in Ross' name, since it's a common theme that hip-hop heads would rather miss out on new royalty than admit they might've been wrong about a rapper. And yet, those who are stuck on New York in the late 90s as might actually be most likely to appreciate Teflon Don. It's every bit the throwback, embracing an aura of dominance in a landscape where vulnerability has become a rapper's greatest asset. But more importantly, Ross has proven to be among the last of dying breed. His studio albums feel like events that demand the ears and opinions of rap fans. | 2010-08-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-08-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Maybach | August 3, 2010 | 8 | bc3fede1-4bbd-498a-9f1b-62e77621fc41 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Dirty Projectors bassist and co-vocalist strikes out on her own with a five-song EP of slow, droning, R&B-influenced folk. | Dirty Projectors bassist and co-vocalist strikes out on her own with a five-song EP of slow, droning, R&B-influenced folk. | Deradoorian: Mind Raft | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12995-mind-raft/ | Mind Raft | For the sake of transparency, let me start by saying that I'm reviewing Angel Deradoorian's debut EP, Mind Raft, because Angel Deradoorian is the bassist and co-vocalist in Dirty Projectors. I'm guessing she takes this as a mixed blessing: On the one hand, it's probably a little disheartening to consider that the bulk of her audience are DP fans curious about what else the band members might be up to. On the other hand, she's probably fine with the attention, considering that a near-heartbreaking number of albums just as passionate and lovingly crafted as Mind Raft go totally ignored because of time and space limitations.
Deradoorian's sound is almost the opposite of the Projectors'-- slow, droning, R&B-influenced folk splattered with blue notes and big drums. (Her own flippant but apt description of Mind Raft is "An EP with five gothed-out psych tracks for you to do drugs to, or something." Or something. Listening to the Projectors' convulsive, pointillistic music, it doesn't take a feat of empathy to imagine she needs a breather.) Though the instrumentals are heavy, it's her voice that anchors-- a waxy, seductive instrument that, along with Amber Coffman's, has come to define the Dirty Projectors' sound as much as Dave Longstreth's convulsive squawk. And here, she gets even more room to flaunt its range and character: The sheepish demurrals of indie with the muscle and flutter of genuine R&B; the near-operatic countermelodies of "Weed Jam" unfurling into steamy murmurs on "High Road"; the backing vocals on "Moon" that sound like dissonant Bosnian folk. The lyrics are, to my sensibilities, slight, but that's basically irrelevant-- her voice is often so intoxicating that stepping back from my stoked and thoughtless lizard brain to parse her English feels like a waste of concentration (not to mention insulting to her voice). But the songs wander and churn when it feels like they could develop, and ultimately, it's a record that I'll never mind having on but probably rarely reach for. (Oddly, for all the EP's quiet eclecticism, it's the relatively straightforward blues dirge "Holding Pattern" that I find stickiest.)
Isn't there some cute aphorism about how napkin sketches by innately talented artists are more fascinating than the dedicated brushwork of someone who, on some inaccessible and deep spiritual level, will just never get it? If not, imagine that there is, because I'm going to need for you consider it now. Mind Raft, for its probably good intentions, sounds like sketches from a young musician with obvious talent who hasn't exerted herself just yet. I realize I'm doing some rhetorical hand-wringing here: For all I know, these five songs required a huge amount of effort and will be the closest Deradoorian gets to the godhead-- but I just don't think that's the case. She's 22, very capable, and her stylistic blend is more interesting and unusual than that of plenty of her peers. If you need a hand reconciling the numerical score with that bit of clinical gloss, I'll just say that if I had to review Dave Longstreth's first solo album, 2002's The Graceful Fallen Mango, I don't know that I could confidently say it's all that much better than Deradoorian's is. To the future. | 2009-05-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-05-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Lovepump United | May 8, 2009 | 5.8 | bc40a411-93f6-4c1d-88d4-483cc552f09e | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Hip-hop supergroup comprising Brooklyn's Sean Price, Detroit's Guilty Simpson, and Black Milk finally releases its long-gestating debut. | Hip-hop supergroup comprising Brooklyn's Sean Price, Detroit's Guilty Simpson, and Black Milk finally releases its long-gestating debut. | Random Axe: Random Axe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15526-random-axe/ | Random Axe | Random Axe, a hip-hop supergroup teaming Brooklyn's Sean Price with Detroit's Guilty Simpson and Black Milk, was announced in 2008. When Pitchfork spoke to Milk two years ago, he said Random Axe's debut album was 80% complete, which means either a) the group left a number of old tunes on the cutting floor and started nearly from scratch or b) it really took them 24 months to hash out one-fifth of an album. Random Axe is officially here, but it doesn't sound like the kind of product sprung from years of work.
The group addresses its mission statement early on, as Price rhymes, "No love-letter rhymes and raps about chicks/ Just whole lot of druggin' and thuggin', that's it." Single-mindedness aside, all three rappers are very good at what they do here. Simpson, with his no-frills wordplay, makes for an exceptional supporting player, and even sounds inspired on "Never Back Down". Milk brings his skill as a producer over to his rapping, applying a percussive flow. As for Price, he's already well-noted for a wickedly dark sense of humor, using tricky internal rhyme patterns to levy his hilarious threats.
Milk makes all the album's beats, which range from fair to excellent. He chops and flips samples with a studious flair, while drums, no matter how dirty and muffled, all thump like kicks to the chest. The visceral "The Hex" is interrupted by live drum fills, while an eerie twinkle floats over the staccato drums of "The Karate Kid". But a producer's job is more than making beats and recording vocals. It's also about drawing the best performances from all of the album's participants, and Random Axe feels carelessly phoned in at times.
Most of the songs on Random Axe follow an uncomplicated template: Spit 16 bars and get the fuck out of the way. The only track that deviates from this formula is "Everybody Nobody Somebody", where each rapper takes a word from the song's title and uses it as the root of their verse on the song, with limp results. In fact, the most surprising lyrical moments on the album come when Price, notorious for his thug persona, says both that he's happily married and no longer smokes weed. The members of another rap supergroup, Slaughterhouse, sound like four solo rappers on the same song-- clearly failing to grasp the concept of the word "group"-- but at least they make a concentrated effort to out-rap each other. On Random Axe, the verses are reliably good, but the tedium of clock punching replaces the spirit of competition.
The quality improves in every category when the album's two biggest guest stars join the proceedings. Over the high-pitched West Coast gangsta-rap synths of "Jahphy Joe", Random Axe is joined by recent Fool's Gold signee Danny Brown, whose pill-popping lunacy is infectious. The album's shining moment, "Chewbacca", is heightened by the appearance of New York rap phenomenon Roc Marciano, whose economical rhyming shakes both Simpson and Price into focus with their own verses, while Milk's beat manages to render a glittery synth sample into a threatening clarion call. It makes you wonder what would have happened if all of Random Axe carried this same sense of urgency. For one, the album probably wouldn't have taken Milk, Price, and Simpson nearly three years to complete. But more importantly, it might have ended up being the classic fans were waiting so long for. | 2011-07-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Duckdown | July 26, 2011 | 6.6 | bc4616f9-140c-40e0-91ca-5bdce6410933 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
The Berlin-based musician reconceives ambient music as an urgent, deeply embodied project interrogating the experiences of black Africans in the West. | The Berlin-based musician reconceives ambient music as an urgent, deeply embodied project interrogating the experiences of black Africans in the West. | Lamin Fofana: Black Metamorphosis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lamin-fofana-black-metamorphosis/ | Black Metamorphosis | The first album in a proposed trilogy, Black Metamorphosis is rooted in Lamin Fofana’s experience as a black African in Berlin. The music is a wash of tone, infused with both grace and unease, at once elegiac and ambivalent. It is intended as the answer to a question Fofana posed in a recent interview: “What happens when African people… find ourselves in the West, in America or Europe? We are often in the margins, in the outskirts, or in the in-between spaces, where things are always in flux, nothing is permanent, and we are forced to improvise, come up with new ways to relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the surrounding world.”
If Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports proposed ambient music as the ideal soundtrack for global citizens passing through the stateless non-places that serve as the hubs of modern air travel—still a relatively novel concept in 1978, when the album was released—Fofana suggests a different interpretation of ambient, one that is deeply embodied. Music for Airports lent tranquility to places that monotony had rendered meaningless. But Fofana’s album reinvests interstitial spaces with meaning by re-centering the experience of migrants, for whom freedom of movement is often an unimaginable luxury.
The album takes its title from the Jamaican post-colonial theorist Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, an unpublished, 900-page manuscript, written in the 1970s, that challenged Western constructions of race and subjectivity. Fofana grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone; in the 1990s, he fled the country’s civil war with his family before eventually relocating to the United States and, in 2016, Berlin. This is not the first time Fofana has addressed the experience of displacement in his work. In 2015, the Another World EP used churning dub techno and oceanic sound effects to address the plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean; the lead track, “Lampedusa,” was named after the Italian island, a contested transit point for refugees entering Europe, where hundreds of migrants have perished in shipwrecks over the past decade. Fofana’s 2018 album Brancusi Sculpting Beyoncé borrowed its title from a song on Mike Ladd’s Negrophilia, drawing links between the Modernist avant-garde’s appropriation of African art and contemporary fetishism of black popular culture.
Black Metamorphosis’ underlying themes of displacement and alienation are not always obvious in the music, although a video by the Franco-Congolese artist Nicolas Premiere teases out an implicit Afro-diasporic thread. “Dawn” is a gentle swirl of hand drums and rosy synthesizer pads whose detuned chords faintly recall Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. “Cosmic Injuries” stretches a layer of hiss over deep exhalations of bass; the held tones and birdsong of “Sono” and “Enchantment” are contemplative and perhaps nostalgic, conjuring a distant sense of place. The album turns darker in its back half, as the shape of the music dissolves into ominous rumbling and low drones.
Fofana makes the album’s theme explicit on the opening track, “I’m Your Question,” burying an almost inaudible voice beneath a swirl of viscous tones. The snippet of speech is intended as the answer to a question that people of color in Europe and North America are frequently confronted with: Where are you from, and why are you here? “I am here because you were there,” is Fofana’s answer. It’s a formulation as elegant as it is cryptic, neatly demolishing the logic of margin and center, colonizer and colonized. That the words are so hard to make out is intentional, Fofana says. To blur the answer is a way of underscoring the imbalance of power implicit in the question; it is a defense of the fundamental right to be private, unknowable.
In its opacity, Black Metamorphosis does something similar. For all its expressiveness, it guards its secrets. I sometimes find myself wishing that the album was more direct, less veiled. But perhaps that desire is itself an expression of privilege, a stubborn refusal to allow Fofana to reclaim ambient music for his own purposes, in his own way. Eno declared that ambient music should be as ignorable as it is interesting. But ignoring—ignorance—comes from a position of power. Fofana’s Black Metamorphosis asks instead: Who gets to zone out—and at what cost? | 2019-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | SCI-FI & FANTASY | November 23, 2019 | 7.2 | bc462fbf-cbcf-474f-ba77-53015b095089 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Baltimore/Philadelphia duo builds on the harmonious folk-pop of its debut with proggy synths, maze-like arrangements, and a newfound sense of mischief. | The Baltimore/Philadelphia duo builds on the harmonious folk-pop of its debut with proggy synths, maze-like arrangements, and a newfound sense of mischief. | @ : Are You There God? It’s Me, @ EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/at-are-you-there-god-its-me-at-ep/ | Are You There God? It’s Me, @ EP | There’s a scene in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., the recent film adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1970 novel for middle schoolers, where four girls try an exercise that’s rumored to help breasts grow faster. In the privacy of one girl’s frilly bedroom, they thrust their elbows back and forth aggressively, like doing the backstroke with chicken wings, while chanting, “We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” That slice of adolescent desperation is ludicrous and awkward, both to viewers and the girls themselves. While Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak are more than twice the age of those protagonists, the two musicians—known together as the duo @—revel in a similar mix of strange and endearing growing pains on the cheekily titled Are You There God? It’s Me, @, which contrasts the harmonious folk-pop of their debut album, Mind Palace Music, with an endless scrapbook of glitchy psychedelia. Across five new songs, that mixture produces a colorful spread that occasionally clashes.
During the lockdown phases of the pandemic, Rose and Filipczak made their music from a distance, and they continued that approach on Are You There God? It’s Me, @, passing drafts back and forth between Philadelphia and Baltimore. However, they did change their production methods in order to challenge their writing. Software instrumentation and processed vocals push the humanness of @’s warm, acoustic sound in a more robotic, but equally stirring, direction. Songs like “Processional” and “Webcrawler” turn the duo’s hypnotic voices into trance-like screensavers over proggy keys, mutating rhythms, and hyperpop production touches. Sometimes, though, their enthusiasm gets the better of them; beholding the searing classic-rock guitar solo and coordinated rah rahs of “Webcrawler” are a little like watching a preteen trying on ill-advised outfits.
Rose has always had a striking voice that’s pure and direct, both in @ and and her solo project Brittle Brian, and her soothing tones inject some welcome naturalism back into the fold. On the title track, she sings choral harmonies about struggling to touch a loved one who’s hiding, looping her vocals into fractured rounds. Filipczak begins weaving his own voice into the a cappella mix until, at the halfway mark, the audio abruptly stutters and the song snaps into a totally different shape. The band goes full twee—complete with flute, rock-steady drumming, and a thin, bouncy bassline—in a move that’s daring in its simplicity. Bookended with proggier songs, the title track feels doubly refreshing, making @’s knack for ’70s-indebted harmonies and warm hooks all the more obvious.
Although Are You There God? It’s Me, @ feels like the musical equivalent of an adolescent growth spurt, the duo still finds enlightenment in screeching synths and data scraping. @ perfect the awkward-to-confident transformation on “Soul Hole.” The song pulses with a quantized beat of spliced drums, looped choir, and droning electronica. Right when it begins to nag, the music bursts euphorically open. Where some people look to religion for answers, @ turn to a different all-seeing arbiter of truth: search engines. “I’m going to the soul hole and I’m never coming back,” sings Rose, staring the internet dead on. It’s a fitting closer for the EP in its brief, vibrant arc: @ may be in a state of unexpected change, but like any good coming-of-age story, the record has you rooting for them. | 2024-01-17T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-17T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | January 17, 2024 | 6.9 | bc474b41-d6b0-449e-8c45-de01da2eec1c | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Jonny Nash draws on the otherworldly sounds of the Baschet brothers’ experimental instruments to sculpt a gently haphazard ambient mirage. | Jonny Nash draws on the otherworldly sounds of the Baschet brothers’ experimental instruments to sculpt a gently haphazard ambient mirage. | Jonny Nash: Make a Wilderness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonny-nash-make-a-wilderness/ | Make a Wilderness | “The world is supposedly a big place, but that’s not so when you travel with a guitar,” François Baschet observed. In the years following World War II, eager to circumnavigate the globe with his instrument, the French musician came up with a solution: an inflatable guitar with a balloon for a body and a foldable wooden neck. That humble invention was the origin of what Baschet and his older brother, Bernard, an engineer, would make their life’s work: sonorous objects that blurred the line between sculpture and musical instrument. The otherworldly sounds generated by the Baschet brothers’ sound structures, as they called their devices—like the Cristal Baschet, an array of glass rods played with wet fingers—have inspired musicians from Tom Waits to Jean-Michel Jarre. Now, the instruments form the basis of Make a Wilderness, the first solo album in two years from the ambient musician Jonny Nash.
It’s easy to see why Nash would be attracted to the Baschet brothers’ objects, with their rich, resonant timbres, which suggest electronic sounds produced using non-electronic means. Whether solo, in collaboration with Suzanne Kraft, or as a member of Gaussian Curve, Nash tends to pursue the ineffable in his music. An early EP, Phantom Actors, invoked his ambient forebears—Jon Hassell, Mark Isham, Wally Badarou—in tones and textures evocative of tropical sunsets, ripe peaches, a lover’s sigh. His music has only become more diffuse from there, the edges between synthesizer, piano, and standup bass steadily softening, as though worn away by erosion.
Make a Wilderness is his most ethereal effort yet: a modest set of instrumental sketches that feel cloaked in mystery. The glassy timbres and microtonal harmonies of the Baschet brothers’ objects lend to the desert-mirage air, though it’s impossible to discern how any of these songs were made, or even whether they were composed at all. Their movements are as gently haphazard as the clanking of wind chimes. Studies in stillness, they suggest a winter breeze whistling through a scrapyard, or the creak and murmur of a boat harbor at night.
There are no melodies to speak of, though the album’s ephemeral meanderings are not at the expense of more consonant pleasures. A minute and a half into “Shell,” a rich, reassuring piano chord rings out, and it is repeated throughout the course of the piece, regular as a beacon in heavy fog. Nash’s minimalist tendencies suggest that he has taken to heart the late Mark Hollis’ advice: “Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note. And don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.” Nash’s touch is distinguished by its patience: He layers his tones with exceptional finesse, taking care not to waste a single sound. Each note feels earned.
Much of the album, in fact, draws its inspiration from the quietest, most secretive corners of Hollis’ and his group Talk Talk’s discographies. That’s particularly true of “Shell,” with its ruminative piano, and “Language Collapsed,” the 10-minute centerpiece of the B-side, where vibraphone paints broad strokes across a blurry backdrop in which flickers of brass and woodwinds flash out from the darkness and disappear just as swiftly. Those ephemeral appearances mark Make a Wilderness’ defining characteristic: Gorgeous while it plays, it’s almost impossible to remember once the needle has hit the run-out groove. But that transience only makes Nash’s mood music that much more alluring. Make a Wilderness makes good on François Baschet’s youthful desire to find a sound that travels well. It’s not just portable; it dissolves into thin air. | 2019-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Music From Memory | March 19, 2019 | 7.4 | bc4a23ba-bc05-4787-a58a-903b16ce84c1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
As Irish black metal aesthetes Altar of Plagues reached their career peak, it was clear that frontman James Kelly had other interests. The first full-length to emerge out of his bass-focused solo project WIFE draws from the same barren palette as his past work, but it attempts to approach that darkness through uplifting synth swells and dead-eyed vocalizations rather than screeches and squalls. | As Irish black metal aesthetes Altar of Plagues reached their career peak, it was clear that frontman James Kelly had other interests. The first full-length to emerge out of his bass-focused solo project WIFE draws from the same barren palette as his past work, but it attempts to approach that darkness through uplifting synth swells and dead-eyed vocalizations rather than screeches and squalls. | WIFE: What's Between | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19448-wife-whats-between/ | What's Between | As Irish black metal aesthetes Altar of Plagues reached their career peak, it was clear that frontman James Kelly had other interests. After 2013's electronic-focused Teethed Glory and Injury, he called an end to that band's aggression and physical brutality in favor of the morose atmospherics of his bass-focused solo project WIFE; the first full-length to emerge out of Kelly's fractured electronic inclinations, What's Between, draws from the same barren palette as his past work, but it attempts to approach that darkness through uplifting synth swells and dead-eyed vocalizations rather than screeches and squalls.
At his most focused, Kelly's work recalls the beat-driven bleakness of Ross Tones' Throwing Snow (whose Left_Blank label released WIFE's first missive, 2012's Stoic EP) or his new Tri Angle labelmates. In particular, "Dans Ce" batters Kelly's saccharine vocal with abrasive percussion scrapes and pointillist synth parts, warping his pop predilections into something less easy to apprehend. Because Kelly is given to flighty genre exercises, though, What's Between often feels fragmented and mangled; the leftfield house banger "Living Joy" sidles right next to the creeping Burial-isms of "A Nature Shards", and the brooding vocals and distant clinks that finish off the moody closer "Further Not Better" couldn't be further away from the sunny-eyed emoting of the record's opening salvo "Like Chrome."
That sonic inconsistency can work in Kelly's favor—check the nearly-nauseating transition from the skulking ooze of "Tongue" and the vacant, reconstructed R&B of "Heart Is A Far Light"—but his lack of focus robs What's Between of a definite collective identity. Gone are Altar of Plagues' high-minded ideas and 18-minute movements, and in their place are disfigured attempts at inky beat-pop. Kelly is, as ever, able to conjure disaffection and gloom from his expansive instrumentation, but he hasn't quite figured out how to turn digital desolation into something that matches the emotional and narrative force of his influences. What's Between provides some compelling glimpses at Kelly's cimmerian headspace, but knowing that he possesses the ability and the vision to flesh out his own ideas, it's hard not to be left wanting more. | 2014-06-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Tri Angle | June 11, 2014 | 6 | bc4ae038-d0b9-417e-8203-08653de413a5 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
Pavement’s swan song finally gets the full reissue treatment, with various demos, alternate versions, and a new track sequence. It remains a fascinatingly ambivalent note to finish on for one of the most influential indie rock bands of their era. | Pavement’s swan song finally gets the full reissue treatment, with various demos, alternate versions, and a new track sequence. It remains a fascinatingly ambivalent note to finish on for one of the most influential indie rock bands of their era. | Pavement: Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pavement-terror-twilight-farewell-horizontal/ | Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal | As they prepared to record their fifth and final LP, Terror Twilight, Pavement was a band pulled in different directions. Having scattered to various parts of the country following a long tour to promote 1997’s Brighten the Corners, the members spent the better part of the following year hardly interacting at all. It was an understandable reassertion of boundaries after the unnaturally close quarters of the promotional cycle, but also an indication of diverging interests and priorities. The scrappy young noise merchants of Slay Tracks and Slanted and Enchanted were now in their early 30s. The band had been on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough that it was never entirely clear they actually wanted. Approaching the 10-year mark, they reconvened in frontman Stephen Malkmus’ adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon in July 1998 to see what more they had to say.
Rock groups are frequently a redoubt of passive-aggressive behavior, none more so than Pavement. Long the unchallenged creative force behind the band, Malkmus was not only one of the finest songwriters of his generation but a visionary guitarist—the best instrumentalist in the group by far. No one in Pavement disputes this then or now, and it was commonplace during recording sessions for Malkmus to play many of the others’ parts in the interest of time, or efficiently realizing his frazzled perfectionism. After months of not playing together during which time certain other members had not picked up their instruments at all, Malkmus decided he wanted to make a “band record” that would feature plenty of live tracking, improvisational embellishment, and relatively few overdubs. This was the brief when the group showed up at Jackpot! Studios and were handed demos of the frontman’s thorny compositions, which were increasingly veering into the complex terrain of English folk acts like Fairport Convention and the zany prog of Frank Zappa. Unsurprisingly, the band struggled.
Malkmus was unhappy, but it’s difficult to understand what he expected. In the liner notes for the new and expanded edition, Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal, multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich recalls: “Stephen was very frustrated because we had tried to play a handful of songs that were in their larval form and we hadn’t advanced them at all. And he was kind of irritated, seemingly with all of us. And he went up to the microphone and he’s like, ‘Here. I wrote one so easy that all of you should be able to play it.’” Several illuminating Malkmus demos are included on Matador’s sprawling 45-song reissue of the album, but only one track survives from the Portland misadventure, a highly tentative run-through of “You Are a Light” that certainly sounds like a struggle. Sessions were abandoned and rescheduled for New York a period of weeks later. In the interim, Nigel Godrich entered the picture.
Fresh off recording Radiohead’s OK Computer and Beck’s Mutations, Godrich had established himself as a generational talent, deservedly feted for alchemizing a contemporary sound drawn from the canonical psychedelic and garage records of the ’60s and ’70s. He loved Pavement—Wowee Zowee in particular—and let it be known through channels that he would be eager to record the group. For a floundering band in search of a confidence boost and a path forward, Godrich was an intriguing proposition. Sotto voce negotiations ensued between Malkmus and the band’s UK label Domino, and then, just like that, Nigel Godrich was producing Pavement. It was a boom or bust proposition that would ultimately prove to be a little of both.
Terror Twilight’s second attempt at actualization began at Sonic Youth’s Lower East Side studio/practice space Echo Canyon, rented out to the band at friends’ rates. The manageable budget was the main attraction but within a couple days it became apparent that the studio’s sundry idiosyncrasies were a bridge too far for Godrich. Acceptable headphone mixes were nearly impossible to achieve and the faders were upside down. Godrich wanted to make a Pavement album, but unaccustomed to both the setting and the band’s musical fault lines he implored them to upgrade the circumstances.
For their own purposes, the Echo Canyon recordings on the reissue are fascinating, simultaneously ratifying Godrich’s concerns and providing a glimpse of what Terror Twilight might have evolved into under more pacific circumstances. Early, more anarchic takes of “Ann Don’t Cry” and “Cream of Gold” benefit from first-thought-best-thought momentum, but suffer from cavernous sonics. The winsome, eventual outtake “The Porpoise and the Hand Grenade” swings along agreeably in the band’s accustomed three-legged-race groove. Whatever caused the misfire in Portland seems to have worked itself out.
Godrich prevailed upon Pavement to relocate to a studio he found more legible, eventually landing on the pricey RPM near Washington Square Park. Now they were on the clock, spending money beyond their budget on a half-formed record, festering with internal contretemps, and hoping the third time proved a charm. At RPM, the tension between a top-level producer accustomed to the benefit of a lengthy gestational process and an indie-band on a shoestring began to inform the deeply anxious and bizarre character of the finished Terror Twilight. Pavement had five or six days to complete the majority of the LP. In the liner notes bassist Mark Ibold paints a befuddled picture: “All I remember is that whenever we were in the studio together, almost every studio experience we’ve ever had, I am just nervous, and I don’t like it.”
Uneasily, but perhaps inevitably, much of Terror Twilight became the Malkmus and Godrich show, with the producer and frontman huddled together in an attempt at achieving a shared vision. In Pavement’s initial incarnation, co-founder and guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg had been second among equals to Malkmus. Now, an evolving trendline that found him estranged further and further from the group’s creative locus reached its peak. For the first time, he would not contribute a single composition to a Pavement record, although the reissue includes a few Kannberg songs recorded later, two of which would eventually serve as B-sides. In a curious essay featuring many, many exclamation points which Kannberg penned for the reissue he characterizes his frustration as short-lived: “Although I was kind of pissed initially, not getting to record a couple songs, it mattered more to move forward. I did record a couple songs later… and doing those all by myself helped me realize I could move past Pavement and do my own music one day!”
Estimates vary as to how much of Terror Twilight was finished in the New York frenzy—Nastanovich suggests somewhere between 50% and 80%—so while the sessions had been productive, much work remained. That work took place a few weeks later at RAK studios in London, a storied (and once again pricey) setting where they encountered Chrissie Hynde and Suede’s Bernard Butler recording in RAK’s other two rooms. There they tracked vocals, added various overdubs, and completed the LP’s final mix. Not every member made the trip overseas, and for at least some of them Terror Twilight became a bit of a mystery. Having been unable to solve his parts in New York, Steve West was replaced on drums by Dominic Murcott of the High Llamas on new recordings of the majestic ballad “Major Leagues” and the ribald novelty “Carrot Rope.” Nastanovich claims to have never heard the finished “Major Leagues” until receiving an advance CD some months later.
As the lengthy process of rendering Terror Twilight finally approached its conclusion, one last point of contention remained. Godrich had long envisioned a running order which would foreground the LPs more digressive, challenging material, beginning with the bonkers freakout “Platform Blues” (tellingly known in a previous incarnation as “Ground Beefheart”) and the menacing bad-trip vibes of “The Hexx,” essentially creating a 10-minute barrier of entry for anyone tuning in with the hopes of hearing the next “Shady Lane” or “Gold Soundz.” It was a bold plan, and one which speaks again to the conflicted nature of the project. Pavement had hired a hot producer and spent over $100,000, or $85,000 more than they’d paid to record the enduring classic Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain five years previous. Now, with his plan to split the album into a “weird” A-side and a more approachable, hook-oriented B-side, Godrich's well-intentioned gambit threatened to torpedo whatever commercial prospects the album possessed. The band was concerned.
Eventually, a compromise was reached with Kannberg leading the way on a revised running order that toggles between the outré and the confectionary—beginning with the Beatles-esque majesty of “Spit on a Stranger” before segueing into the banjo-driven, stoner-Beat poetry of “Folk Jam” and then returning to the austere and moving balladry of “You Are a Light.” This has been Terror Twilight as we’ve known it for 22 years: a strange admixture of the catchiest and most unsettling music of Pavement’s career, culminating appropriately enough with the lovely and ludicrous “Carrot Rope,” the indie-rock sequel to “My Ding-A-Ling” that nobody but Stephen Malkmus recognized we needed.
The vinyl edition of the new reissue restores Godrich’s original running order, and it certainly makes for a different experience: One side Hawkwind and one side E.L.O. The counterfactual sequencing of old LPs has become a trope of the reissue industry and makes for a diverting thought exercise, but this rearrangement does not amount to an improvement. As much as Malkmus and Godrich had become a creative quorum of two on the Terror Twilight sessions, it may have been Spiral Stairs who was, in that moment, seeing the appeal of the fractious group most clearly of all. “I was always to try to make the best Pavement record possible,” he writes in his essay. And so he did.
Save for periodic reunion shows, Terror Twilight signaled the end. The band toured the LP relentlessly and live versions on the reissue find the band in fine form on rip-throughs of everything from the group-oldie “Frontwards” to CCR’s “Sinister Purpose.” But Malkmus was done with Pavement as a dynamic creative force. As Steve West says in the liner notes: “I think Stephen got to that point where he wanted to move on to a different bunch of people and be able to play with people who were much more confident musicians. I think he did the right thing for him creatively and more power to him. And I know it was a hard thing for him to do. Maybe he could have been more like huggy-huggy about it, but he was really honest about it, and I respect him for that. It was the right time to exit because this album is still creative and different.”
Too creative and different as it turned out to make Pavement the American Radiohead. Alternately diffident and insinuating, Terror Twilight was reviewed with genial confusion and peaked at No. 95 on the Billboard Charts, far from the breakthrough which would have justified the budget. Kannberg compares the record to the Replacements’ polarizing, desultory final LP All Shook Down, when Paul Westerberg consolidated his agency while functionally breaking up his band. That comparison holds true as far as it goes, though musically, it’s closer to Combat Rock, the final Clash album which found Joe Strummer and Mick Jones gloriously and fatally marooned between their most experimental and star-making impulses. It remains a fascinatingly ambivalent note to finish on for one of the most influential indie rock bands of their era, and this reissue, while not necessarily better than the original 1999 release, provides enough context to understand its odd bathos in a new way. It was the album that brought Pavement full circle: dressed for success, but never quite sure if they wanted the job. | 2022-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | April 9, 2022 | 7.5 | bc4ced51-f85c-43d9-92cd-74b6b8e4bed2 | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
Mixing technical death metal and thundering jazz fusion, the Florida band Cynic's 1993 debut, Focus, still sounds like future music, and their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess. But did they really need to make a third record? | Mixing technical death metal and thundering jazz fusion, the Florida band Cynic's 1993 debut, Focus, still sounds like future music, and their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess. But did they really need to make a third record? | Cynic: Kindly Bent to Free Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18859-cynic-kindly-bent-to-free-us/ | Kindly Bent to Free Us | Did Cynic really have to make a third album? In 2006, the Florida progressive metal paragons returned to the stage after a decade away from both recording and performing (plus a short stint under another name). The first phase of Cynic’s existence had been short but crucial; in only five years, they evolved from an atavistic thrash band to a frame-breaking alloy of technical death metal and thundering jazz fusion, crystallized on their wonderfully vexing 1993 debut, Focus. Two decades later, Focus still sounds like future music, an impossibly complex rush of disparate parts and unseen twists that maintains its momentum in spite of its bewildering mechanics. It’s righteous and affirming, too, and not just for its instrumental heroics; with his voice floating in a web of electronics and his head in a cloud of self-made mysticism, Paul Masvidal extolled the infinity of the mind and the sovereignty of the individual.
Their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess, though the aging members Cynic had tempered the ambitious parts. The metal, jazz, and math seemed partly pulled apart, strands that no longer held one another so closely. It was a worthy successor and proof that their legacy could live beyond one 15-year-old benchmark. It was also a chance for graceful closure. Instead, Cynic have made Kindly Bent to Free Us, a debacle that scraps not only that exit opportunity but also a chunk of what made them interesting at all.
As if to prevent the perception that they, after a quarter century, simply became just another band aiming to issue a new record every several years, Cynic drastically shift their approach for Kindly Bent to Free Us. In fact, on album three, they leave approximately half of their sound behind. Though Kindly Bent to Free Us does get dense and loud, with the occasional viscous march and tempestuous drum burst, they slough off much of their metal persona for eight tepid tracks. These pieces bend toward post-rock (mawkish closer “Endlessly Bountiful”) and prog (the swiveling “Moon Heart Sun Head”). Brighter production and fewer moving parts dovetail to give Masvidal’s computerized vocals a broader spotlight, too. At their best, that choice offers a pop-like gleam. At worst, it shapes the songs into the unintentional comedy album of the year. Lyrics lifted from the cereal Rice Krispies float above ceremoniously solemn guitars. The plea “Oh mercy, radiate your grace on me” lingers as the grand, laughable conclusion of a particularly knotty span. And that’s just before Masvidal, singing with a choir composed only of himself, informs us repeatedly that “There will be holy fallout.” His tone is clear, clean, and garish. Without the frisson afforded by their more aggressive portion, Cynic’s music becomes a string of unfortified punchlines.
The mere deletion of Cynic’s metal side isn’t itself a satisfactory condition for the failure of Kindly Bent to Free Us; some of these hooks are among the most radiant moments in the band’s catalogue, and some of the instrumental interplay ranks among their most fascinating. It’s not pedestrian, either. These guitar solos remain knots of notes that seem to start and stop time. Cynic also relishes in the daunting task of dividing melodies across every instrument, as they do at the start of the interesting “Gitanjali.”
But the omitted ingredients make Cynic too predictable—not only for the rote order in which things happen here but also for the things that never have the chance to happen. Focus might be impossibly complex, but at least on a structural level, these new songs seem flatly simple, as though the trio plugged parts into an algorithm and played to the resulting script. They favor short, vaguely threatening intros followed by full-band bursts, as that’s how three of the first four songs begin. By the time opener “True Hallucination Speak” reaches its second chorus, its routine movement between quiet and loud, full tempo and no tempo has already become a bore. “Moon Heart Sun Head” seesaws between marching, drum-led verses and lulling, bass-heavy impasses. Even a hyperkinetic solo and a lengthy sample of philosopher Alan Watts reading from his The Nature of Consciousness can’t excite that back and forth. If you get the feeling that you know what’s coming next while listening to Kindly Bent to Free Us, your premonition is most likely correct. In losing a chunk of their identity, Cynic also lost their ability to do the entirely unexpected. They once launched the listener into a sense of wonder and kept them there for minutes on end. Not here.
In the past several years, the bands of peoples’ dreams have reunited. Some have cashed in with high-profile gigs but (at least to date) recorded little else, while others have dazzled with new material that made you mourn their initial hiatus once again. Still others have embarrassed themselves with endless cash grabs and new recordings that amounted to debacles, and a few have made new material that sounds more or less like what they left behind. Cynic is a most peculiar case, though: They got back together to play the old stuff and ended up enjoying the experience so much that they wrote a copacetic follow-up to the only album they’d ever made. And now, after the reunion buzz has had time to dissipate, they’ve embarrassed themselves with a record that fails because it divides their legacy in half. Kindly Bent to Free Us works as a sort of retroactive insult: It resurrects many of the misgivings people have always had about Cynic—the overindulgent vocals, for instance, or the ponderous new-age musings—and runs wild with them. In fact, when I listened back to Focus after hearing Kindly Bent to Free Us, those traits felt like strangely fresh faults, where they’d once been part of Cynic’s unlikely sui generis appeal. It’s a shame that the present now haunts this band’s peerless past. | 2014-03-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-03-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Jazz / Metal | Season of Mist | March 10, 2014 | 4 | bc57b830-8a97-4de2-bfa6-69fc6fb742ad | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On her debut full-length, the Hanoi conceptualist sings of youthful heartache over glitched-out, sub-rattling beats. | On her debut full-length, the Hanoi conceptualist sings of youthful heartache over glitched-out, sub-rattling beats. | Aprxel: Tapetumlucidum<3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aprxel-tapetumlucidum/ | Tapetumlucidum<3 | Aprxel (pronounced “april”) might be your favorite drainer’s favorite drainer. On her debut full-length tapetumlucidum<3, the Hanoi singer-songwriter’s voice bleeds into distorted, collage-like productions by Pilgrim Raid (aka Long Trần). Both are members of Mona Evie, a collective of young artists flourishing in the city’s underground music scene. The album is also a showcase of fellow Hanoian conceptualists, like noise wrangler Tran Uy Duc and sound artist Lý Trang, who produced Aprxel’s first EP AM, PM. While the sample-based, deep-fried maximalism of peers like Jane Remover and Rắn Cạp Đuôi often approaches hyperactivity, Trần’s productions saunter through glitched-out cyberspace as Aprxel’s smoky voice floats above the din. Amid the overstimulation and memey undertones of the current landscape, tapetumlucidum<3 is refreshingly heartfelt and grounded.
While post-TikTok attention spans have encouraged many bedroom artists to shorten the runtime of their tracks, Aprxel sings over instrumentals that meander and unravel into oblivion. “va’ng9999” begins with a dreamy interpolation of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing” that gradually gets chopped and screwed, eventually surrendering to a wall of fuzz laid down by Lưu Thanh Duy of shoegaze outfit Nam Thế Giới. The noisy four-on-the-floor of “two” takes a left turn into swingy 2-step garage, while on “planet hollywood,” Aprxel sings over JPEGMAFIA-type beats that disintegrate into spiraling sax lines. When a minimalist dembow riddim edges its way in, you have to check whether you’re still listening to the same song.
These experiments can be hit-or-miss, but the record’s more straightforward plugg’n’b middle section is a smooth synthesis of Raid’s low-bitrate SoundCloud beats and the midnight melancholy of Aprxel’s harmonies. “cbd” blends grim Memphis stylings with limpid synths, fusing a loop from Gimsim Family’s “Fear No Evil” with saccharine Vietnamese pop balladry. And while she’s rapped for Mona Evie before, Aprxel’s staccato bars on “inanna” feel more self-assured, cutting through Jersey-club bed squeaks.
Between the harsh noise of “terrorizers” and the angelic strings of “escape 2 farewell,” only Aprxel’s vocal performance holds Raid’s concoctions together. At times, her voice battles a flood of samples that threaten to drown her out. “cbd” is discordant, akin to Kelela’s infamous detuned 808 on “Closure.” But on “never can say goodbye,” Aprxel’s voice pierces through with startling clarity; on the following track, she puts a little Björk in it, the strings swelling to a poignant peak. Her voice fractures into shard-like vocables in the final section of “escape 2 farewell,” flitting alongside an extended sample of a demo by Kyoto glitch artist sora. Alone in a digital cacophony, Aprxel sings to ease the pain, hoping someone out there is listening. With a knack for adapting to the musical chaos that characterizes her hometown, Aprxel’s voice carries beyond the city; it’s only a matter of time before it’s heard. | 2024-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Mona | January 8, 2024 | 7 | bc5a51a1-d1c1-4ddd-a67f-b2f802c5c62b | James Gui | https://pitchfork.com/staff/james-gui/ | |
The multi-hyphenate singer-songwriter’s second album, densely packed but light as a feather, explores life and the many leaps of faith required to truly live it. | The multi-hyphenate singer-songwriter’s second album, densely packed but light as a feather, explores life and the many leaps of faith required to truly live it. | Sampha: Lahai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sampha-lahai/ | Lahai | Richard Bach’s popular 1970 allegorical novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull tells the story of a seagull cast out from his flock for daring to challenge their worldview by flying beyond the clouds. Along his solitary journey, he finds ways to channel his sense of isolation into self-actualization; he eventually ascends to another realm, one where ostracized gulls like himself soar across the sky in peace and serenity.
“Jonathan L. Seagull,” a standout track on singer, songwriter, and producer Sampha’s second album, the meditative Lahai, ponders the forces that keep us tethered to the reality of life on Earth. “Seasons grow and seasons die/How high can a bird ever fly?” he sings, as if to literally uplift the listener. The production becomes airy and buoyant as Sampha alternates between his usual rich tenor and a breathy, piercing falsetto.
There has always been something transcendent, almost spiritual about Sampha’s music, like listening to someone invent their own type of prayer. He name-checks our avian protagonist once more on “Spirit 2.0”, Lahai’s lead single and its crown jewel, where honey-toned synths and skittering drumbeats craft an ambiance halfway between Erykah Badu’s R&B mysticism and the pop experimentation of mid-career Björk. “Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull/Try catch the clouds as I free fall,” he sings, until realizing that he is ripe for salvation: “Love gonna catch you/Spirit gonna catch you, yeah.” In comparison to the rest of the album, the production on “Spirit 2.0” is sparser, more intentional in its empty space, mirroring the resignation that comes before having to take a leap of faith.
Transcendental seabirds aside, it’s no wonder that Sampha relates to these themes of alienation, individuality, and transformation. His 2017 debut album, Process—which won him the Mercury Prize and made him an R&B powerhouse after years of collaborating with superstars like Kanye West, Drake, and Solange—was written and recorded in the wake of losing both his parents to cancer. On the other side of the type of world-shattering grief encapsulated in Process songs like “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” lies an emotional expansion, a psychological release when those heavy emotions finally give way to something new; Lahai celebrates that transition.
Another major factor between Process and Lahai is the birth of Sampha’s daughter in the spring of 2020. The newfound optimism deftly woven into this record clearly comes from an artist who has recently and suddenly shifted their perspective on life and love. “Can’t Go Back” is built upon a hypnotic loop of Sampha singing the song’s title, punctuating driving breakbeats that push the track into quasi-IDM territory. Amid the pulsing beat, Sampha is aware that his daughter is “heaven-sent,” and that whatever the circumstance, he now has no choice but to move forward, never looking behind him.
While both Sampha’s lyrical style and vocal prowess are exceptional, it’s really as a producer where he is able to express the full breadth of his talent. Lahai is jam-packed with ideas: whether it’s the way he continuously layers his vocals to create texture through harmony, or how he’s able to slightly bend pianos and guitars around complicated beats until they sound warped, warm, and welcoming; every track has dozens of little nooks and crannies itching to be explored. If anything, if the record has a fault, it’s that sometimes the non-stop restlessness can distract from the subtler aspects of the songwriting, but generally, Sampha is able to deploy the intricacies of his production style to great effect.
Thematically dense, but never heavy, Lahai is peppered with references to flying, the sky, and lightness: the album art features Sampha against a background of a blue sky dotted with clouds, staring at the camera as if looking down from the heavens; in the video for “Only”, the second single and probably the most pop-influenced moment on the record, Sampha grabs a handful of air before it transforms into a songbird in his fist. On “Suspended”, he floats joyously through his life as a new father, as he croons “I am lifted by her love/I am lifted from above.” If Process was the act of wading through the muck of healing, Lahai is the cleansing shower that comes when it’s finally time to wash all the dirt off, shedding layer after layer until all that’s left is air. | 2023-10-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Young | October 30, 2023 | 7 | bc5ae8ba-bf38-4ec5-9d07-5eae395b1d89 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
With his band SQÜRL, the legendary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch makes drone-oriented music that’s more about texture than motion. Their latest EP is uniquely physical. | With his band SQÜRL, the legendary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch makes drone-oriented music that’s more about texture than motion. Their latest EP is uniquely physical. | Sqürl: EP #260 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squrl-ep-260/ | EP #260 | Jim Jarmusch’s films are often about patience and deliberation, as if rushing through anything would be sinful. Think of Johnny Depp’s zombified journey in Jarmusch’s surreal Western Dead Man, Bill Murray’s gradual road trip through his romantic history in Broken Flowers, or Adam Driver’s contemplative bus driving in Paterson. Whatever story he’s telling, Jarmusch likes to give his characters—and his audience—ample time to think about it.
Jarmusch’s group SQÜRL takes a similar approach to music, which makes sense since the band came together (initially under the name Bad Rabbit) for the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s sedate assassin film The Limits of Control. SQÜRL’s songs are usually static and drone-leaning, more about texture than motion. Some don’t even have a beat, and the ones that do are less about timekeeping than added emphasis. Once your mind tunes into the group’s dense sound, rhythm becomes just another catalyst for meditation.
Though their music seems ripe for a longform release, thus far SQÜRL has only issued EPs. EP #260 is their fourth such mini-album, and it is perhaps their shortest original work yet, considering that two of its five tracks are remixes by other artists. The trio nearly make up for that brevity during the opening “Solstice,” a mini-symphony of guitar feedback that’s so full of overtones it would be easy to put on repeat and get mentally lost for days. The song’s heavy whirr shares the spooky ambience of Sonic Youth’s farther-out experiments. But there’s something uniquely physical about listening to SQÜRL’s ringing hum, as if the band has inserted a tuning fork inside your rib cage.
That miles-deep density is maintained throughout the other two original songs on EP #260, with Carter Logan’s lumbering drums added for all of “The Dark Rift” and part of “Equinox.” In the past, his playing has given SQÜRL’s songs the dusty march of late-era Earth, but here he plays faster and sharper, steering toward more classic metal. That shift works for the most part, but the magnetism of EP #260 comes from the mammoth guitar sounds erected by Jarmusch and Shane Stoneback.
Those sounds shrink a bit in the hands of EP #260’s remixers. Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre adds an electronic beat and whispery female vocals to “Equinox,” morphing it into sultry but generic techno under the new name “Gates of Ishtar.” Föllakzoid fare better with their take on “The Dark Rift,” keeping the original’s shadowy mystery intact, but their throbbing pulse doesn’t entrance like Logan’s calmer drumming. Both remixes are far from failures, but they feel trivial compared to SQÜRL’s distinctive sonic signature. Jarmusch’s group are onto something for sure, and the main flaw in their work so far is that there’s not more of it. | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | July 19, 2017 | 6.8 | bc667320-6718-4282-88f1-145a4d781576 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The hardcore band’s sixth album is short, fast, and misanthropically funny, full of scuzz-punk tantrums about the indignities of modern life. | The hardcore band’s sixth album is short, fast, and misanthropically funny, full of scuzz-punk tantrums about the indignities of modern life. | Pissed Jeans: Half Divorced | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pissed-jeans-half-divorced/ | Half Divorced | There was a time when every mundane indignity of adult life had a corresponding Seinfeld episode. Now those indignities inspire grimly funny Pissed Jeans songs. Demoralized about our dehumanizing healthcare industry? There’s a Pissed Jeans song for that. Depressed about going bald in early adulthood? There’s a Pissed Jeans song ranting about that. Fantasizing about your blowhard project manager’s death? These freaks have a song for you, too.
Two decades into their career, the Pennsylvania-bred punks are the poets laureate of pathetic men flailing against their own obsolescence. (That’s a compliment—to portray a character is not to concern yourself with the character’s likability.) On Half Divorced, their first album in seven years, Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").
Let other bands address the political and structural causes of late-capitalist decline; with his guttural howl, vocalist Matt Korvette has always been better at sweating the small stuff. He’s in fine form on “Helicopter Parent,” yowling about the micromanaging tendencies of bougie parents (“Why ya breathing down the back of their neck!?”) over a sludge-metal riff that oozes like overflowing sewage. It may be the funniest song about parenting since Randy Newman’s “Love Story (You and Me).” The band further indulges its comedic side on “Everywhere Is Bad,” an amusingly specific travelogue of ills. The playful call-and-response segment—enumerating different cities and the reasons they suck (“Philadelphia/Trashy streets/San Francisco/There’s no more freaks!”)—evokes the humor-infused punk of the Dead Milkmen more than any hardcore reference points.
If Half Divorced has a claim at being Pissed Jeans’ funniest album, it’s not their most musically stimulating. “Helicopter Parent” and “Junktime,” a half-spoken yarn about toxic waste fallout, are exceptions—sludgy, slow-burning eruptions that showcase the band’s talent for tension and release, goaded by Korvette’s throat-scraping anti-charisma. The rest of the record plays it relatively straight, with quick and dirty hardcore outbursts like “Killing All the Wrong People” and “Alive With Hate” that summon plenty of bludgeoning energy but little in the way of memorable riffs or refrains.
The last two tracks evoke a kind of aggro pop-punk: a cover of “Monsters” by undersung Florida punks Pink Lincolns and an uncharacteristically anthemic original, “Moving On.” The latter sounds like it could be a straightforward divorce song until you read the lyrics and realize it’s about a guy swearing off selling his used underwear online. Maybe that’s the album’s unifying theme—trying to cling to your dignity in the world that capitalism has wrought.
Pissed Jeans are fortysomethings now, with day jobs and families of their own. Presumably, any glamour associated with playing in a moderately successful punk band has long since evaporated; they’re still doing it because they still mean it. On “Cling to a Poisoned Dream,” Korvette satirizes the self-delusions of the creative class, people sabotaging their mental and financial health in hopes of making it big. “I know you never got yours/Maybe one day I’ll get mine,” he shouts over pummeling power chords. “Yeah, I’m still clinging to this poisoned dream.” It’s quintessential Pissed Jeans: acerbic and untempered, mocking the masochism it takes to keep a punk band going in 2024, even as they do exactly that. | 2024-03-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 6, 2024 | 7.3 | bc67bd6f-a166-485c-a1fb-871c9d35f1a7 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
David Rawlings finds news ways of inhabiting old folk music alongside his longtime musical partner Gillian Welch. There’s a crisp intimacy to his new solo effort, but also a self-awareness. | David Rawlings finds news ways of inhabiting old folk music alongside his longtime musical partner Gillian Welch. There’s a crisp intimacy to his new solo effort, but also a self-awareness. | David Rawlings: Poor David’s Almanack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-rawlings-poor-davids-almanack/ | Poor David’s Almanack | Poor David’s Almanack is David Rawlings’ third album or his eighth, depending on how you count. In the last 10 years, he’s made two records as the Dave Rawlings Machine, a loose reference to the old Woody Guthrie slogan, but he’s made five more with his musical partner Gillian Welch under her name. They both play on each other’s record, they both inform the direction each other’s music takes, but they maintain separate musical identities. Yet, their combined catalog comprises perhaps the most ambitious and most peculiar corpus in roots music today, one that digs deep into the past to find neglected song forms and defiantly old-timey notions: new ways of old singing, of just inhabiting the music.
His latest is credited to just David Rawlings, but it features Welch and members of the Machine. He remains the most prominent personality on the album, and he’s a fine singer with a slightly nasal twang, a way of bleating his vowels that belies his New England origins. Listen to Rawlings dive into the chorus of “Lindsey Button,” drawing out each syllable: “A long time ago.” There’s a full decade in each word. He’s an even better guitar player, with a graceful picking style and a full bag of tricks. When he bends his notes on “Airplane,” he adds an earthbound dissonance to its airborne chorus. In his songwriting, Rawlings favors the repetition of the blues and the wily phrasing of folk. He rewrites the old tune “Cumberland Gap,” popularized by Guthrie and Lonnie Donegan, into a third-person tale of lost love and hard times.
Rawlings, Welch, and the backing players use the same instruments available to any roots musician, but very little roots music sounds quite like this. That’s partly due to Rawlings’ production. He’s lent his touch to albums by Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, and Dawes, and has a notoriously discriminating ear, to the extent that he and Welch are only just now releasing vinyl editions of their albums after 15 years of unsatisfactory test pressings. There’s a crisp intimacy to the record, but also a self-awareness. He and especially Welch were long dogged by criticisms of “inauthenticity,” which might have more to do with her L.A. origins, but they’ve managed to outlast them. Still, there is useful playacting to their music, as though they understand that any 21st century folk singer necessarily has some distance on their subject.
Folk music has traditionally spoken to its present moment, addressing contemporaneous events and circumstances: murders and mining disasters, economic downturns and income inequality. So you might listen to Poor David’s Almanack and wish Rawlings had more to say about 2017. “Yup” is about a woman too strong-willed for the devil to keep in Hell; “Good God a Woman” is about Adam pestering his Creator to hurry up with Eve. They might hint toward contemporary feminist attitudes, but that’s a stretch—and perhaps Rawlings intends it to be a stretch. “Money Is the Meat in the Coconut,” with its carnivalesque tone and tale of monkeys getting married, sounds like an old political cartoon set to music, its inspiring calamity long forgotten even as the monkeys keep stealing kisses.
Despite his obvious debts to Guthrie and Bob Dylan, Rawlings is no protest singer. His truest subject is not really the past—or, not merely the past. Rather, it’s the joy to be found in old songs, in old instruments, in old sounds, in old perspectives. Nearly every tune on Poor David’s Almanack has roots in something or someone specific. “Come on Over My House” is surely meant to echo Robert Johnson’s invitation in “Come on in My Kitchen,” recorded 80 years ago. Rawlings scrambles the scenario, speaking in the voice of a poor man in love with a woman above his station and repeating the refrain, “But I surely love you, surely love you!” Lusty but not leering, the song has a freewheeling pace, a bright and excitable tone grounded as much in the vocal harmonies as in the lyrics themselves. And that’s key to what distinguishes Rawlings from so many of his contemporaries: He manages to convey the same exuberance and spirit in his own music that he hears in his favorite old tunes. | 2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Acony | September 6, 2017 | 8 | bc722aac-a3e2-4c38-a765-d7a5c780f197 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
A year after the soul singer’s death, the label that gave him a third chance collects his stray tracks, shaping a showcase for his incredible versatility. | A year after the soul singer’s death, the label that gave him a third chance collects his stray tracks, shaping a showcase for his incredible versatility. | Charles Bradley: Black Velvet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charles-bradley-black-velvet/ | Black Velvet | Charles Bradley lucked into the kind of third act that few people could ever imagine. His early years were filled with neglect and poverty, buoyed by his discovery of James Brown when he was 14. As an adult, he drifted back and forth across North America, working odd jobs and singing on the side. In 2002, Bradley finally happened to be in the right place at the right time—in New York City, just as Daptone’s retro-soul empire began to rise. Bradley heard about Daptone’s success with Sharon Jones, another singer specializing in soul from another era. He was in his mid-50s and moonlighting as a James Brown impersonator named “Black Velvet,” one of many monikers he used in service of his JB tribute. Bradley introduce himself to Daptone co-founder Gabriel Roth, who heard something within that gravelly rasp. He signed Bradley to Daptone, linked him with producer and guitarist Tom Brenneck, and released the single “Take It As It Come,” launching a partnership that lasted until Bradley’s death from stomach and liver cancer in September 2017.
Black Velvet rounds up the stray tracks Bradley made during his last decade, apart from his three studio albums for Daptone. Despite his illness, diagnosed just months after the release of 2016’s Changes, Brenneck didn’t abandon the idea of creating new music with Bradley. He wrote and recorded “Black Velvet” with his Menahan Street Band, the group that backed Bradley since his 2011 debut, No Time for Dreaming. But Bradley couldn’t muster the energy to sing it, so the instrumental plays here as a mid-album elegy: soft, slow, and sweet, a song in search of a singer.
The presence of the unsung “Black Velvet” suggests Bradley didn’t leave much in the vaults. Black Velvet runs a scant 10 tracks, just three of which are newly unearthed and completely finished: “Can’t Fight the Feeling,” “Fly Little Girl,” and “I Feel a Change,” each dating from a different phase of his brief career. Otherwise, the compilation gathers songs stranded on singles or released as bonus tracks; a deluxe edition contains “Stripped Down Mixes” of songs from Bradley’s first two albums, spare variations on the original recordings designed to showcase his voice. This may lessen the feeling of discovery for longtime Bradley watchers, but Bradley’s music was always about maintaining tradition, not discovery.
To that end, Black Velvet is a fitting tribute to the late singer, perhaps capturing the breadth of his appeal better than any of his actual albums. Black Velvet isn’t as cohesive or tight as 2013’s Victim of Love or the emotionally charged Changes. But its sampler nature showcases how Bradley could ease himself into any style of the classic soul era. The closest nod to Brown comes through the guttural growls of a deeply funky cover of Nirvana’s “Stay Away,” but the arrangement pulsates to fuzzy guitar more reminiscent of the paisley-bedecked Temptations than the Godfather Of Soul. Bradley leans closer to Otis Redding here, especially on a slightly stiff reading of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” Brenneck and the Menahan Street Band shake things up by adopting any number of sounds from the golden age of AM radio.
Black Velvet plays a little like a compilation of obscure vintage 45s. But listen closely, and the illusion dissipates. The production is a little too tidy, reliant on affectionate signifiers of classic soul that don’t necessarily allow the music to breathe. Paradoxically, the songwriting is loose. Bradley eschews lyrical precision for free-flowing imagery, as on “(I Hope You Find) The Good Life,” where he interpolates Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” The melodies can follow similarly elliptical routes. Such slips didn’t happen on stage, where Bradley could rely on the tricks he honed through years of hard work.
But that can be said of every one of his records: They’re crafted artifacts that never quite captured his live charisma. Still, his weathered, yearning voice provided a focal point for Brenneck’s retro fantasias and helped freshen them. If anything, this farewell helps preserve the singer’s charms by illustrating how his revivalism wasn’t pure. He could adapt to whatever Brenneck gave him, making music that sounds tantalizingly out of time—a quality that will not fade as the years roll on without him. | 2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Dunham / Daptone | November 17, 2018 | 6.6 | bc80f784-3110-42a8-bd26-0bb2f748a200 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel reassemble the works of Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer into a playful fusion of electroacoustic music and electronic pop. | M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel reassemble the works of Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer into a playful fusion of electroacoustic music and electronic pop. | Matmos: *Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matmos-regards-uklony-dla-boguslaw-schaefferandnbsp/ | Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer | The two men of Matmos are living rebukes to the idea that conceptual art is somehow scary and inaccessible. When they decide to make a track out of the sounds of a breast implant or a cow uterus, they’re challenging themselves not just to use those noises, but to make them sound funky and fun. In a recent interview with Norwegian artist Lasse Marhaug, M.C. Schmidt—one half of the duo alongside his musical and romantic partner Drew Daniel—described being one of 10 people at an electroacoustic festival a few years ago; the problem, he believed, was that the venue had only invited “academic composers” to the festival, rather than putting up flyers and getting the word out to the public. “I feel like multi-channel electroacoustic music can and should be a populist/popular art form,” said Schmidt. “Just, for example, enjoyed by anyone who smokes marijuana.”
Their new album Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer integrates electroacoustic music and populist art in a very literal way. While most of the record is stylistically in line with the duo’s M.O. of mapping sounds from unconventional sources onto a rhythmic grid taken from electronic pop, all the sounds here are sourced from a sample pack the duo created from the electroacoustic works Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer made at the influential Polish Radio Experimental Studio in the 1960s and 1970s. The couple didn’t know Schaeffer’s music before Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute commissioned the sample pack, and it’s hard to blame them: Though popular in Poland, especially in the 1990s, Schaeffer is little known abroad. Recordings and performances of his pieces aren’t always easy to come by, but anyone who saw the awesome recent touring print of David Lynch’s Inland Empire will have heard his work.
The 11 pieces incorporated into the sample pack provided just about everything the duo could need for the album’s eight tracks. Choral samples take on the role that fake angel-choir presets generally play in electronic music, casting eerie chords to create a sense of grandeur and foreboding. It seems unbelievable that a ridiculously funky bit of frat-rock organ on “Cobra Wages Shuffle / Off! Schable w gurę!” could’ve come from Schaeffer, but nope, it’s from Schaeffer’s “E.S. Jazz.” (The titles are bilingual, and three are delightful anagrams for Schaeffer’s name.) A forest of bells criss-crosses the landscape of opener “Resemblage / Parasamblaż”—not the fairy-tale kind but gruff clanks that emphasize the fact of bells as percussion instruments. Then there are the honks. Matmos adores honks, and Schaeffer provides them with no shortage thereof.
In other words, it all sounds very much like a Matmos album, from the hyper-swung house beats to the way they introduce their tracks by spilling out their constituent pieces and then gradually assembling them into a coherent groove. The duo’s most novel stylistic gambit on Regards, excluding the album’s concept itself, is the splitting of the record into two distinct sides: five shorter and more rhythmic tracks on the first, three longer and more ambient cuts on the second—a sequencing that might make more sense on vinyl than an uninterrupted format like CD or streaming. The beat-free cuts are highlights of the duo’s recent catalog, especially the closing “Anti-Antiphon (Absolute Decomposition) / Anty-Antyfona (Dekonstrukcja na całego),” which slices the center out of their sound and leaves a gaping, ghostly, ominous void.
But, for the most part, the music here doesn’t push Matmos’ sound into unfamiliar territory so much as recreate it with new materials. While the sources of their sounds often impart the most elemental, essential bits of themselves—the wetness of the washing machine on Ultimate Care II, the sickly squish of the surgical procedures on A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure—we don’t get much of that on Regards. What we’re left with is a great-sounding Matmos album constructed from bits of Schaeffer’s work. You probably won’t come away knowing much more about either the duo or the composer than you did before, but if it gets stoners curious enough to hit up their local electroacoustic festival, it’s a win all around. | 2022-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | May 28, 2022 | 7.2 | bc894d73-ce4b-456b-a0e7-1b723e549d81 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
A too-cautious sequel to the Louisville rapper’s breakthrough mixtape dangles fascinating production experiments but winds up returning to the script. | A too-cautious sequel to the Louisville rapper’s breakthrough mixtape dangles fascinating production experiments but winds up returning to the script. | EST Gee: El Toro 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/est-gee-el-toro-2/ | El Toro 2 | When El Toro came out in 2019, EST Gee never ran out of spellbinding ways to describe his reality as a candy man and opp exterminator. The gravel in his voice emphasized the intensity of his survive-or-die narratives and paired sensationally with the production of ForeveRolling. It was then that Gee and his right-hand producer established a brand of music that would later allow them to transition from respected members of the underground hip-hop scene in Louisville to Billboard chart mainstays. Now having proved himself across the board, Gee’s development should be fully on display in the title’s second edition.
Except El Toro 2 is a tug of war between EST Gee’s usual formula—bars about flipping bricks and making his chopper sing—and fresher style experiments that emphasize a more melodic dispatch and an infusion of R&B and soul samples. As expected, EST Gee flaunts his unfiltered storytelling, lurid wordplay, and Midwestern-to-Southern flow. But El Toro 2’s groovier production palette sets it apart. On “Tuscan Perfume,” he abandons his usual jagged rapping to murmur about thugging through the pain over a hazy, pitched-up flip of Mary J. Blige’s “You Remind Me.” On the stunt-hard paean “Another Moment With Gotti”—which features the CMG head honcho and flips Willie Hutch’s 1974 interlude “Overture of Foxy Brown”—each bar cuts through the ethereal backdrop with precision. The pulse of “Back to a Time” is so saucy that any Kentucky native is bound to hit the John Wall dance.
EST Gee is constantly aiming for his sweet spot somewhere between trap and soul. But there are times when this formula falls flat. “Nobody Else” features posthumous contributions from Playa’s fallen member Static Major, though it fails to make Gee’s romantic tales and Static’s once in-demand vibratos a cohesive rap&b product. Elsewhere, Gee is mostly focused on his memories of family trauma, cheating death, and being unable to stray away from illicit activity. These are well-worn topics for him, and while he does his best to keep them interesting, the off-kilter flows don’t always work. On “Bad Guy” and “Toast,” his uneasy attempts at singing grind against the detonating production. The records feel like rough demos dusted off to beef up the tracklist and they prolong the problem with last year’s MAD, where he was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
El Toro 2 finds EST Gee stuck between the old and new versions of himself. When he takes more risks and diversifies his method and sound, it’s good. When he leans on the shield and raps in the same way that he did on the first edition of El Toro in 2019, it’s not. The rapping overall is pretty pristine. And the beat selections are A1. But does El Toro 2 signify a momentous change in Gee’s career? Not quite. He dabbles with the idea of taking things up a notch but sounds like he’s still trying to figure out what else he should do and how exactly he should do it. | 2023-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | CMG / Interscope | August 24, 2023 | 5.8 | bc8a68ec-3897-40d4-8ef9-d2419d4222fb | Kemet High | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kemet-high/ | |
In his first solo project since the group’s dissolution, the former Daft Punk member swaps his customary synths for a full orchestra—but some old habits die hard. | In his first solo project since the group’s dissolution, the former Daft Punk member swaps his customary synths for a full orchestra—but some old habits die hard. | Thomas Bangalter: Mythologies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thomas-bangalter-mythologies/ | Mythologies | Even before Daft Punk announced their retirement in 2021, fresh updates from the duo were often old news: the release of bonus tracks, archival concert footage, album reissues. It was a welcome surprise, then, when Thomas Bangalter announced the release of Mythologies, his first full-length solo project in 20 years. It was even more surprising that the release was not an electronic record, but an orchestral score originally composed for Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet of the same name. This sharp left turn offers a look at Bangalter’s work beyond the dancefloor—and stripped of the helmet he was apparently all too ready to shed.
Mythologies embodies classical tradition, both musically and culturally, in 23 movements that draw inspiration from mythical tales and figures. Take “Le Minotaure”: The myth of the Minotaur concerns a half-man, half-bull monster created by a god’s vengeful curse. The creature is kept isolated in the center of the labyrinth until the hero Theseus slaughters it on a quest. Bangalter’s piece begins with low strings and grumbling brass, stopping and starting in bursts, anguished and suspenseful. Heavy timpani and syncopated rhythms give way to a lamenting violin solo that sounds like a reinterpretation of the central character of the myth: not a fearsome monster, but a lonely creature crying out into the darkness.
At first glance, these sprawling symphonic compositions bear little resemblance to Bangalter’s more recognizable club anthems and dance epics. But both mediums rely on balance, voicing, and form; both de-emphasize words, focusing instead on sound and atmosphere. Mythologies allows Bangalter to seek a different kind of satisfaction. As he said in an interview with The New York Times, “To write a chord or a melody and have the performers—human beings—play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”
While Bangalter might have wanted to distance himself from computers, lingering sensibilities from electronic music still seep into his compositions. Pieces like “Aphrodite,” “Zeus,” and “Circonvolutions” sound as though they are built on the loops of his past: a repeated arpeggio, a sequenced melody, the same articulation asserted over and over again. Though such repetition may suit a choreographer’s work, the technique grows wearisome across the album. With an entire orchestra at his disposal, the reliance on these mechanistic structures feels like a wasted opportunity to fully explore the expressive potential of the symphonic medium.
Mythologies can be captivating. The devastating “Icare” stretches upward bit by bit and tumbles through the sky like its story’s subject. “Danae,” the tale of a prophecy fulfilled, begins and ends with the same delicate dissonance of fluttering strings, a cyclical choice that imparts a sense of inevitability. A somber chorale theme appears in several pieces, nodding to the fundamentals of classical music and Bangalter’s appreciation of their storytelling potential. This melodic recurrence allows for moments of solace and reflection within the often dour source material, starkly at odds with his former duo’s habitually upbeat demeanor. Mythologies sounds like the work of an artist stepping out of his comfort zone in search of personal creative fulfillment. It might be equally rewarding for the listener if only any of these pieces were as memorable as Daft Punk’s songs. | 2023-04-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erato / Warner Classics | April 11, 2023 | 6.9 | bc8fde04-987f-43bb-bc72-6f476b8aa7f7 | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
The Sacramento duo’s 2002 debut album might be the platonic ideal of math rock, but its real joy lies in the way it seems to escape the bounds of logic altogether. | The Sacramento duo’s 2002 debut album might be the platonic ideal of math rock, but its real joy lies in the way it seems to escape the bounds of logic altogether. | Hella: Hold Your Horse Is (Deluxe Reissue) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hella-hold-your-horse-is-deluxe-reissue/ | Hold Your Horse Is (Deluxe Reissue) | Has there ever been a genre name that sounded more eager to be shoved into a locker than math rock? Even the bands who spearheaded the sound—Polvo, Don Caballero, Ruins—distanced themselves from the term, rejecting the cold, dispassionate calculations that it conjures. Though legions of groups have wheeled out odd meters and looping pedals as if they were performing parlor tricks, those that transcended simple gimmickry tapped into something rawer and deeper. The bands that made the sound exciting in the first place are those who forced you to stop counting time altogether.
Sacramento’s Hella miraculously pulled this off by taking their calculus to its most extreme endpoint. They may have been the nerdiest band of them all: When they formed, guitarist Spencer Seim was in another group dedicated to playing Nintendo covers, while Zach Hill had dropped out of high school to play drums for as much as seven hours a day. Technical complexity was essential to their experimental style of noise rock, but it wasn’t the goal; Hella’s music followed a stream-of-consciousness logic, apparently spontaneous in spite of its intense choreography. The product of two California boys taking cues from Zeppelin, Zappa, and Hendrix, their music refracted vintage rock lore through a skater outcast mindset, all brewed in the cauldron of ’90s DIY. Together they created something that sounded like the platonic ideal of what math rock could be, while nevertheless existing in a brain-rewiring universe all its own.
The band came about by accident. Their high school quartet Legs On Earth fell apart after their lead vocalist fell into heroin addiction, and Seim and Hill realized they weren’t going to be able to find any other musicians to play the kind of music they were envisioning. Slowly the two of them oriented their songs to be played by just a guitarist and drummer. Seim would double-tap his basslines while Hill searched for what he called “invisible pockets”—intervals he could reorganize his rhythms around to create new patterns that wouldn’t make sense in a normal meter. Their debut, Hold Your Horse Is, was a deliriously adventurous hybrid of punk and prog that thrashed with playful violence. Though later dalliances with OutKast-style double albums and expanded lineups demonstrated the band’s restlessness, Hold Your Horse Is remains the most thrilling snapshot of Hill and Seim’s frantic, far-out chemistry.
Kill Rock Stars has remastered and reissued the album to celebrate its 21st birthday, with the band’s original three-track label demo included as an extra 7"—a charmingly scrappy snapshot of an ambitious young duo working out its sound in the garage. The album has lost none of its power: When the Game Boy menu music of “The D. Elkan” first slams into “Biblical Violence,” Hill’s snares come crashing down like hail shattering through a sunroof. As Seim nimbly sprinkles triplets up and down the fretboard, Hill tosses grindcore blast beats and jazzy cymbals together as if they were always meant to be complementary flavors. In these songs, the guitarist’s and drummer’s roles are reversed, with Seim’s spidery riffs acting as a grounding agent for Hill to batter his instrument to kingdom come. The timbres of the drumming are as dazzling as the speed—utilizing custom-fitted pieces of trash and metal appliances in addition to his worn-out gear, Hill’s sound is coarse and rich, each snare hit colliding with such scalding power that listening to it for too long can start to make you sweat.
Hill sought to create a visual experience with his playing, both in his use of everyday objects and in the sheer neighbor-waking force of his attack (he broke so many drumsticks during sets that he once planned to build a bed frame out of the splinters). Hold Your Horse Is is surprisingly textured for an album that mostly consists of just two instruments, and the new remaster fills out the bassier end nicely. One doesn’t nod along to the beats so much as chase after them, and at a certain point all you can do is surrender to the endless churn. Still, as dense as the duo’s compositions are, they flow naturally. In “Republic of Rough and Ready,” Seim and Hill approach their riffs as if they were taking turns loosening a rope, then snapping it tight again; “Better Get a Broom!” seems to wobble in and out of time, like a spinning plate about to topple over.
Though it’s hard to ignore Hill as the star of the show, Seim deserves equal credit for his inventively odd tunings and twisty playing. Take “1-800-Ghost-Dance,” whose midsection descends into a dizzying whirlpool of notes swirling and sloshing against one another, or the stern central riff of “Republic of Rough and Ready,” which blows wide open in the bridge as he taps out a melody that rains down like fighter jets careening through the sky. The tracks on Hold Your Horse Is work precisely because they’re actually songs, complete with arcs and recurring themes and, above all, feeling. As precise as Hella could be, the driving principle of these tracks is the messy, human intensity behind them—a frenzied conviction that seemed to find the kinship between the chaos of John Zorn, the electricity of Melt-Banana, and the bugged-out lunacy of their beloved Primus.
Hella’s legacy is so singular, it’s all the more remarkable that Hill went on to have a second life as the percussive muscle behind Death Grips. In both bands, Hill has communicated a very specific language—one speaking directly to a generation slowly becoming more plugged into the mainframe—of tension and release. Though some may have accused Hella of being too intellectualized, or impossible to headbang to, watching live videos from those early shows paints a different picture: scrawny kids giddily vibrating in place, shaking their bodies as best they can to indecipherable beats. In eschewing conventional time signatures, Seim and Hill tapped into an unfolding tesseract of rhythm, as if imparting to listeners that the best way to move is to just let their own internal pulse take over, and let that incalculable energy guide the way. | 2023-08-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | 5 Rue Christine | August 31, 2023 | 8.3 | bc915c1d-dde8-4c8e-af57-c1a921ac33ce | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Farben (German for 'colors') is a poetic moniker for a Berlin's Jan Jelinek, because he claims to be influenced ... | Farben (German for 'colors') is a poetic moniker for a Berlin's Jan Jelinek, because he claims to be influenced ... | Farben: Textstar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2993-textstar/ | Textstar | Farben (German for 'colors') is a poetic moniker for a Berlin's Jan Jelinek, because he claims to be influenced more by painting than music. It's not hard to imagine Jelinek's music as the aural equivalent of a Rothko canvas-- clear geometric structure made soft and ambiguous through warm tone, blurred hue, and an exacting sense of detail. As Jelinek has made albums under his own name and as Gramm (derived from 'kilogram'), he's continued to release EPs under the name Farben, and the good folks at Klang Elektronik have been kind enough to collect some of highlights as Textstar.
This nine-track CD draws material from the EPs Farben Featuring the Dramatics, Beutone, Raw Macro, and Farben Says: Don't Fight Phrases. An expanded vinyl set called Starbox contains all the original EPs, complete with a total of six tracks not on the CD. Yet, despite this being a collection of material from previous releases, Jelinek's sonic style is so distinct and consistent that Textstar feels like a singular work.
The borders are porous, but generally speaking, Jelinek uses Farben to represent his most upbeat, danceable music, the stuff that would fit nicely under the heading 'microhouse.' Most of the tracks here have a house foundation, usually a sub-bass kick drum deep enough to blow the speakers in Luke Skyywalker's Jeep paired with a high-hat cast from a tiny scrape of static. The tracks have a structure much closer to pop music than Jelinek's later work, with variations that seem analogous to the verse/chorus/bridge/chorus template, and short melodic phrases that could be best described as riffs. Tying it all together is a supremely dubby production philosophy, where each sound is endlessly tweaked and filtered until it serves the overall design of the track.
Despite the consistently bare-bones approach of the sound, Jelinek always keeps things interesting. He has an uncanny ability to make a handful of sounds do an enormous about of work. Rhythmic, textural and melodic elements are handled by an array of squelches, clicks, and washes, all anchored by wall-rattling bass. The instruments are juggled into compositions that seem constantly in motion. Unlike an artist such as SND, Jelinek's songs are loose, wet, rubbery and unpredictable, unfolding according to some odd internal logic.
Take "Beautone." After an intro comprised of a slightly awkward rhythm tapped on a virtual woodblock, a commanding house beat takes over. The bass is a squelchy 303 that seems to be running in unpredictable circles around the programming, and the chords just might be the ghosts of some Hammond organ Jelinek pulled off one of his jazz records. A couple of minutes in, a sample of an easy-listening wash of strings and flute punctuates the chorus, providing the track with a disorienting and humorous twist that nonetheless seems like it was designed to fit into this precise spot.
Another dizzying but funky track is "Live at the Sahara Tahoe, 1973" (titled after the Isaac Hayes live LP). Several elements each seem to be keyed into their own separate, but complimentary rhythms: a churning synth loop and sampled cymbal lag slightly behind the crisp beat; an electro-inspired breakdown of faint laser-gun sounds repeats for two bars and never returns; a gorgeous orchestral sample, heavily processed and seemingly beamed in from another dimension, forms the track's emotional core.
By contrast, "Farben Says: So Much Love" is Jelinek at his sleekest and most elegant. The deep, sensual bass hammers home an elastic riff of pure technofunk, and the microscopic high-hat is like the smallest possible unit of what can be considered a sound. Between these sonic poles is an ever-shifting pool of warm chords, off-beat, jazz-inspired rhythm accents executed on glitchy percussion, and a sexy, whispered female voice saying something about getting a haircut.
Textstar is a sonic feast if you want to dissect the myriad timbres and underlying structure, but you'll probably just want to turn off your mind and dance. And that's alright. Either way, it's clear that Jelinek is one of the most inventive producers working in this field today. This compilation is a must-own. | 2002-06-24T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2002-06-24T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Klang Elektronik | June 24, 2002 | 9.5 | bc924169-8dfb-45f4-84c4-1130957a010b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After more than a decade away, guitarist John Frusciante returns for the band’s first album in six years, a restrained and familiar effort to recapture an old spark in a new era. | After more than a decade away, guitarist John Frusciante returns for the band’s first album in six years, a restrained and familiar effort to recapture an old spark in a new era. | Red Hot Chili Peppers: Unlimited Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/red-hot-chili-peppers-unlimited-love/ | Unlimited Love | From their multi-platinum peaks to their sad, desperate lows, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have always aspired toward a humble goal: to make you feel like you’re in the practice space with them, zoning out and goofing around, watching three exceptionally talented musicians and their extremely jacked singer spitballing ideas and keeping each other entertained. It’s an intimate bond that has fostered an intense connection among their fans. But it’s also opened them up for harsh scrutiny. When a relationship is built on these simple pleasures—jammin’ and rappin’ and slappin’ the bass, cramming your lyrics with cartoonish sex talk and rock history allusions, calling your reunion album Unlimited Love and really meaning it—it’s easy to feel you’ve outgrown it.
If audiences have sometimes felt that way, imagine how John Frusciante must feel. He first joined the Chili Peppers in the late 1980s, a teenage virtuoso helping shape his favorite group’s horned-up funk-rock into something more melodic. He quit in 1992 while touring their commercial breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Magik, then returned in 1998 as the mystical, fragile heart of their most fruitful period. Even if you don’t like the band, you can at least acknowledge that his inventive solos, layered vocal harmonies, and wide-ranging influences have always been attempts to make the music more artful and ambitious (or, at the very least, more like the Cure).
Unlimited Love—the Chili Peppers’ first album in six years and first with Frusciante in 16—recaptures their natural camaraderie. At once live-sounding and restrained, it’s Frusciante’s first record with the band where none of the songs sound remotely like anything on mainstream radio, which maybe speaks more to the times than the group’s efforts. The last time Frusciante recorded with them, on 2006’s double album Stadium Arcadium, their riffy, pile-driving anthems felt at home alongside hits by fellow, enduring Gen X peers like Foo Fighters and Green Day. On Unlimited Love, which arrives nearly 40 years into the band’s career and makes no concessions to any prevailing trends of popular music in 2022, the Chili Peppers sound like no one but themselves.
In fact, they sound a lot like themselves. After testing the waters with replacement guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who debuted on 2011’s I’m With You, and new collaborator Danger Mouse, who produced 2016’s The Getaway, the goal here is to act like no time has passed, settling back into their old magic and maybe finding some winners to slot between the hits in their live set. Grungy first single “Black Summer” and glittery funk throwback “She’s a Lover” should do the trick, but even mid-tempo cuts like “Bastards of Light” find satisfying payoffs from the moody, patient songcraft they attempted during their tentative past decade in the wilderness. As for the lyrics, there’s a song that seems to be about traffic in Los Angeles; another about how good the music was in the ’70s. There are some veiled references to aging and grief and climate change. There’s a chorus that promises (threatens?) that Anthony Kiedis’ “aquatic mouth dance is waiting for you”; there’s another where he argues how cool it would be if the great apes could roam free.
It’s nothing new, but that’s kind of the point. Every decision seems to be pulled from a dog-eared manual of how this band operates at its best. To their credit, everything still plays to their strengths, from Rick Rubin’s stark production to the overcrowded tracklist, like all their best albums—long and rangey, stacked with crowd singalongs near the beginning and woolier, destined-to-be fan favorites at the end. Along the way, you’ll hear all the trademarks of those old chestnuts: intricate, popping bass from Flea, climactic snare thwacks from Chad Smith, and some rhymes from Kiedis that I’ll do everyone a favor by not quoting out of context. (If I must: “Please, love, can I have a taste?/I just wanna lick your face.”)
As for Frusciante’s contributions, it’s a pleasure hearing him play rock guitar again, after a decade mostly occupied by left-field electronic experiments. I have sometimes gotten the sense he views his role in the band like a logic problem—a challenge to expand their limited vista without completely overhauling it, once going so far as to filter all his solos through a modular synth rig—and his innovations here are humble but rewarding. I look forward to reading the Guitar World interview that explains how he recreated Adrian Belew’s distant-seagull slide sound from “Matte Kudasai” in “Not the One,” or how he landed on the beautiful, jazzy register for his vocal harmonies in the muted chorus of “Aquatic Mouth Dance.” He has cited early psychedelic bands like the Move as an influence, and the dry, chunky crush of his solos in “The Great Apes” and “The Heavy Wing” hits with fresh inspiration.
In the latter song, one of the best here, Frusciante elbows Kiedis out of the way to sing the chorus himself—a move he last attempted on “Dosed,” a tender highlight from 2002’s By the Way. That album arrived during the peak of Frusciante’s creative powers in the band, after he brushed off the dust from his comeback and took fuller control of their sound. Like last time, some 20 years ago, there’s apparently a lot more where this came from: The band claims they’ve already got enough material for a follow-up, and the worst moments on Unlimited Love have the feeling of jams sculpted into songs as quickly as possible, while everyone’s still giddy and no one has the chance to raise concerns like, “Haven’t we written this before?” or “Should we try a take where Anthony doesn’t sing like a pirate?”
Granted, this impulsive nonchalance has always been part of the Chili Peppers’ appeal. The other day at the bar I found myself defending their music to some friends. I gestured vaguely toward the hooks, the confidence, the sadness below the surface, the grain of Frusciante’s playing. It was difficult. Growing up as a classic rock kid in the late ’90s, their songs just so happened to be the ones that caught my attention on MTV, at public pools, in CD players in my friends’ basements. I was mostly drawn to the mood—the feeling that these fun, dangerous, frequently shirtless dudes from California were letting me hang with them for 70-minute intervals.
Blocking out its sentimental appeal, the music on Unlimited Love is tested by familiar pressures of late-era releases from successful rock bands: balancing the risk of self-parody with the need to live up to people’s nostalgia, knowing they’ve already written the music they’ll be remembered for but still wanting to keep the ride going. Like a lot of these types of albums, Unlimited Love is competent and comforting—its creators rarely try to grab your attention but never totally embarrass themselves either. (Well, maybe a little during the rap verses in “Poster Child.”) If you’re not on board, then there’s little reason to hop on now. But if you are, or ever have been, then one day you might find yourself like me, looking into some inquisitive, unsympathetic eyes, trying to articulate what you recommend about this ridiculous, once-radical band. Unlimited Love won’t be the first thing that springs to mind—but that doesn’t mean you won’t be glad it exists. | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | March 31, 2022 | 6.2 | bc968518-0d25-48e8-982f-d764d29a133c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Amid newfound success, the soulful Los Angeles singer voices the anxieties of growing up and meeting creative expectations during turbulent times. | Amid newfound success, the soulful Los Angeles singer voices the anxieties of growing up and meeting creative expectations during turbulent times. | Brent Faiyaz : Lost EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brent-faiyaz-lost-ep/ | Lost EP | A year has passed since the tender 23-year-old songwriter and soul singer Brent Faiyaz released his breakthrough album, Sonder Son, a pensive and dreamy glimpse at his DMV-to-LA odyssey. During that span, he’s earned a Grammy nomination and the praise of Drake and Tyler, the Creator. But the title and tone of his follow-up, the six-song EP Lost, suggests that the singer who recently lamented his classroom troubles and anxieties about moving to Los Angeles in song still feels misdirected. Sharing a name with his label and crew, Lost ably embodies the isolation and anxiety of these tunes, with hookups and friends alike passing in and out of Faiyaz’s life. He seeks solace in self-reliance or companionship—any way out of feeling alone, really.
Lost is more vulnerable and succinct than Sonder Son, a charming introduction that probed his upbringing. It starts on “Why’z It So Hard” with an unflinching reflection on race and injustice. Over complicated crisscrossing harmonies and a beat that seems to droop beneath its own sadness, he reflects on being marginalized and degraded as a young black man: “Why they wanna see me dead?/I ain’t even grown yet/Baby, you got too much to offer/That’s prolly why they want you in a coffin.” He’s speaking to power dynamics that hover like a guillotine and how black brilliance is treated as a threat to white hegemony. During “Came Right Back,” his soft voice stretches over scintillating guitars and uneasy piano chords covered in static. The deconstructed ballad soon disappears into a conversation where Faiyaz ponders the burdens of promise. Lost is a wunderkind’s search for catharsis, a quest to find his voice while battling demons of self-doubt.
Faiyaz contemplates his relationships with loyalty and faith; he’s continually questioning or checking the intentions of others and himself, having recognized that social media has made the prospect of privacy during a rise toward fame almost impossible. With this in mind, the EP’s centerpiece, “Trust,” is its thorniest moment. Layered vocals and resentful ad libs haunt the track with grief and contention. “You told me I could trust you/And I could really use it,” he sings. He is disoriented, his voice splintering in multiple directions, a tree damaged by lightning. Instead of picking up the pieces himself, he searches again for comfort in a companion. “But I just wanna feel love,” he calls out, confessing he’s vulnerable with or without a connection.
Although he largely trades in the tender Spanish guitar licks of his past work for luxuriating synths and terse hi-hats here, Faiyaz continues to use skits and sound effects to give these songs context. The cries of sirens and the crackle of rain make the hardships of “Why’z It So Hard” clear. While he chats with his friends about his artistic progress amid the hum of passing cars during “Came Right Back,” we hear that, although the world around him brims with adversity, he’s proud of his trajectory and confident in his abilities. Rather than veil himself in anonymity to foster a sense of mystery, like the vintage version of the Weeknd, Faiyaz instead cozies up to transparency and vulnerability. He’s advocating not only for himself but others who may feel lost. As he poignantly reminds us during the unexpected spectral coda of “Poundz,” his voice powered by sudden conviction, “You can’t lose your faith/You can be what you want when you get older.” | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Lost Kids | November 6, 2018 | 6.6 | bc96b24e-612e-4b7c-bf46-54388701a8f0 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Reissued by Temporal Drift, this recording of the mysterious Japanese psych-rock band’s loud, legendary 1993 set at Club Citta’ is the best they’ve ever sounded. | Reissued by Temporal Drift, this recording of the mysterious Japanese psych-rock band’s loud, legendary 1993 set at Club Citta’ is the best they’ve ever sounded. | Les Rallizes Dénudés: CITTA’ ’93 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/les-rallizes-denudes-citta-93/ | CITTA’ ’93 | For decades, Les Rallizes Dénudés’ legacy has been plagued by myth and misdirection. The Kyoto-based psych-rock ensemble, founded in 1967 by guitarist and vocalist Takashi Mizutani, never recorded a studio album. Instead, their trance-inducing jams, blanketing the atmosphere in thick haze, spread through the Japanese underground (and eventually to Western shores) via rampant bootlegging of their live shows. Most of the recordings were of such poor quality that it’s difficult to hear anything but walls of harsh noise. Mizutani—so reclusive that even his bandmates had trouble keeping contact with him—avoided giving interviews or making any public appearances, leaving space for rumors and fantastical tales, like that of member Moriaki Wakabayashi participating in the hijacking of a commercial flight and subsequently getting exiled to North Korea.
Mizutani wasn’t a fan of any of this: the lack of control from all the bootlegging, low quality of the recordings, and accompanying artwork that didn’t suit his vision. The first officially sanctioned Les Rallizes Dénudés releases—a trio of live shows released by the label Rivista in 1991—were the only ones with his blessing. So Mizutani got in contact with former bassist Makoto Kubota, who left the band in the mid-’70s, to inform him of his interest in properly remastering and releasing the endlessly pirated live shows, starting with recordings from the fabled Tokyo venue OZ where they first made a name for themselves. Then Kubota didn’t hear from Mizutani for the next three decades. They finally got back in touch in 2019, but communication dropped again. Kubota feared something had gone wrong. Later that year, his suspicion was confirmed when he received word that Mizutani had suddenly passed away.
Kubota was determined to see his late friend’s wish come to fruition. He got to work retooling the OZ shows and the Rivista albums in preparation for reissues on Temporal Drift. While those releases were still in the pipeline, something unexpected was uncovered—a recording of the band’s performance from Club Citta’ in 1993. The concert, which was their second public appearance during a brief comeback in the ’90s, had been circulated as a bootleg for many years and was notorious for being one of the band’s most intense shows. Three speakers blew out; the front doors swung open and attendees rushed out to escape the noise. The newly found audio beggared belief—it was chronicled on state-of-the-art ADAT magnetic tape, recorded without Mizutani’s knowledge. The audio therein would be, without a doubt, the best LRD would ever sound, and Kubota would spend hundreds of hours over several months slaving over it.
Nearly as soon as the Citta’ set starts, the total sensory assault begins. “The Night, Assassin's Night” begins with a thumping drum pattern, which quickly gets washed away by a cascade of feedback from Mizutani’s amp. It’s a stylish way to kick things off, and also a happy accident; rhythm guitarist Katsuhiko Ishii recounts that Mizutani’s instrument wasn’t plugged in, unleashing a rush of noise. Unperturbed, Mizutani stuck the landing and launched straight into a solo, all while drummer Kodo Noma continued to play without missing a beat. It’s a powerful illustration of Les Rallizes Dénudés’ unflappable cool.
LRD’s sets were always unpredictable. The group rarely played a song the same way twice, and at Club Citta’ they go all out; staples of their catalog appear here as some of their best renditions. On the fan favorite “White Awakening,” they slowly work up to a frenetic pace before Mizutani suddenly detonates into a fuzzed-out solo. (Compare it to the slow and contemplative version on The OZ Tapes, which may as well be a totally different song.) The unprecedented fidelity helps to illuminate dimensions of Mizutani’s musicianship never heard before. On the bootleg recording, a tidal wave of static washes over the mix when he slams down his pedal, drowning out the finer textures; here, his nimble shredding is on full display. LRD’s traditional set closer “The Last One” benefits most from the deluxe treatment, its sludgy riffs ramping up and descending to fill a transcendent 40 minutes—the longest the band has ever jammed on one song.
Kubota would take particular care to preserve the electric live energy of the event, augmenting the digital audio with sounds from multiple sources—a process he likens to “restoring an ancient Buddhist statue.” You can hear these techniques clearly on the bluesy “Deeper Than the Night”; crowd ambience can be heard between the steady shuffling groove and tortured screams from Mizutani’s guitar, spliced in from various cassette recordings made inside the club. The echo was also meticulously adjusted on Mizutani’s vocals to approximate how they reverberated around the venue, his wails hanging on the air like cries from a vengeful specter. It’s the closest any LRD release feels to being in the room with them.
Rather than spoiling the mystery of Les Rallizes Dénudés, CITTA’ ‘93 is a revelatory document that shows their vibrant color. Makoto Kubota and Temporal Drift have gone above and beyond in addressing Mizutani’s frustrations, reuniting the music with the context it’s always been lacking. Now the picture is fuller; you can more clearly hear the ways in which Les Rallizes Dénudés resembled their peers—taking cues from the acid rock of Flower Travellin’ Band and the freewheeling spirit of Taj Mahal Travellers—while setting themselves apart in explosively loud style. If there’s this much to appreciate below the surface of just one legendary recording, imagine what more can still be discovered. | 2023-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporal Drift | September 14, 2023 | 8.2 | bc987900-2f77-4e98-b4a7-b887811d5e89 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
With a crew of equally radical peers in tow, the Atlanta band’s new album is a dissonant but hopeful statement about dreaming up a better world. | With a crew of equally radical peers in tow, the Atlanta band’s new album is a dissonant but hopeful statement about dreaming up a better world. | Algiers: Shook | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/algiers-shook/ | Shook | Algiers’ politics are not subtle: For starters, they draw their name from a place once at the heart of the anti-colonial struggle. The Atlanta band’s lyrics are staunchly anti-capitalist, fueled by the righteous anger of people who know exactly how we got here and who’s to blame. Moreover, frontperson Franklin James Fisher is hyper-aware of his place as a Black frontman in a white industry—and of how the band’s values inform the way they’re perceived. While their debut was tight and focused, the group has sometimes buckled under the weight of their own bombast, hunched like Atlas as they carry a burden so great it threatens to crush them. But Shook, while characteristically dark and deadly serious, feels different. It’s a record built around community, evidence that when the struggle is shared with like-minded peers, it feels lighter. So does the music.
The group draws from an eclectic palette (gospel, blues, rap, jazz, R&B, metal, spoken word), creating a chaotic patchwork underpinned by industrial drums and synths. As influences, they cite producers DJ Premier and DJ Screw; first-wave New York punks Dead Boys; East Berlin post-punks Dïat; Memphis MC Lukah; and the rappers of Buffalo, NY crew Griselda. It’s intentionally disparate, but you can see where the dots connect: The way Premier and Screw used wildly different ways to manipulate previously recorded material; both the New York and German bands’ sneering tone, which drips with sarcasm; and the outsider ethos of rappers spiritually connected to New York City, even if they’re physically distant from it. It’s difficult to pinpoint, but these ostensibly paradoxical legacies intertwine all throughout Shook.
The characters that populate the album help narrow the scope of their rage, zooming in on individual perspectives and experiences. When the rapper-producer Backxwash raps, “The news said I was looney/Till poof, happens to you” on “Bite Back,” she does so in a world that seeks to criminalize her existence, in a verse that leans heavily on the infamous manhunt of former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner. When Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha barks, “What it be, God?/No rehab for my jihad” on “Irreversible Damage,” he does so from the heart of his band’s radical ethos.
Yet no figure has as much influence on the overarching message of the LP as Big Rube, the spoken word poet best known for his Dungeon Family affiliation and his narration on classic OutKast records. The rumbling bass tones of Rube’s voice, which are peppered throughout the album, instantly lend Shook a strong sense of place, declaring from jump that this record is a product of Atlanta. And there’s a gentleness to his speech, its weathered texture hinting at hardships endured. He serves as the record’s—and in some ways, the city’s—conscience, the wise old uncle willing to give you the unvarnished truth.
The themes on Shook are often bleak. But wherever there is struggle, there is also joy. The skit “Comment #2” features the activist An Do, who speaks about how marginalized communities struggle to be seen outside of the context of their oppression. When your experience of pleasure is erased, and your identity reduced to your most tragic moments, your status as “other” is solidified. Still, there’s not much handholding here—listening to Shook, it can be difficult to find moments of levity amid the suffering and rage. Instead, its brief buoyancy is camouflaged: Consider the battered optimism of the instrumental breakdown on “Irreversible Damage” (“That’s what hope sounds like in 2022 when everything’s falling apart,” Fisher said in a statement upon the song’s release), or the “brown skin shining against the sun” in LaToya Kent’s poetic performance on “Born.”
That said, the group sounds most natural at their darkest—the reverbed growl of guitars, the synths colored with dirt and grime. They benefit from Matt Tong’s virtuosic drumming, which feels looser and more alive than any drum machine. While much of their early work stuck closely to standard pop song structures, they seem less restricted by convention than ever, building on the sound collages found on their tour mixtapes and one-off projects, like “Can the Sub Bass Speak?” (a reference to the foundational Gayatri Spivak essay). The Mark Cisneros collaboration “Out of Style Tragedy,” which starts with Fisher’s spoken word over a Sun Ra refrain, layers sample after sample until it unravels into dissonant noise. The link to Shook World, the mixtape that collaborator King Vision Ultra crafted from the album’s stems, is clear. Though Shook World’s raw, freewheeling structure often veers into the chaotic, ironically, the individual pieces that comprise Shook come into focus once deconstructed from their final form. Fisher’s words never ring clearer than when they’re cutting through the cacophony.
An Algiers record often requires some heavy lifting in order for the listener to fully engage. Usually, it’s easier to fit the pieces together if you’re familiar with the political references, or if you’ve already been living under colonialism’s yolk. But Shook feels more urgent, more arresting, with performances that draw you into their world. In part, it’s because the band has become a conduit for the community they’ve built, their work elevated by their own mutual admiration society. If we are indeed the company we keep, the Algiers coalition is strong, talented, and not about to go down quietly. | 2023-02-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 27, 2023 | 7.7 | bca11222-5ed5-4160-b1a1-b13769cc2490 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On his third album, Sam Hall performs lo-fi keyboard-trap doused in the same ecstasy produced by fleeting interactions with your middle-school crush. | On his third album, Sam Hall performs lo-fi keyboard-trap doused in the same ecstasy produced by fleeting interactions with your middle-school crush. | Ghost Orchard: Bunny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghost-orchard-bunny/ | Bunny | As its Gen Z affiliates funnel into the mainstream, the definition of “bedroom pop” is murkier than it used to be. But in 2014, before Cuco penned a celebration of his modest Honda, before Gus Dapperton sold Urban Outfitters-exclusive vinyl, and before Clairo sighed at the shallow demands of being a “pretty girl,” New York City-based label Orchid Tapes had a more intimate vision in mind. They presented their blueprint on a compilation released that year, Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes, featuring early cuts from low-key songwriters like (pre-Sandy) Alex G, Yohuna, and the multiple aliases of Sam Ray. Sam Hall, a more recent addition to the Orchid Tapes roster, performs lo-fi keyboard-trap as Ghost Orchard; he created his third album, Bunny, by himself at his Michigan home.
Hall, 21, wrote more than 300 songs for Bunny after moving in with his partner of only a few months. This is an album of goopy love songs, each doused in the same ecstasy produced by fleeting interactions with your middle-school crush. It’s naive and a little cheesy, but Hall’s rosy optimism feels fresh in a genre overrun by “sad boy” tropes. “Station,” one of the album’s brightest moments, is an amalgamation of acoustic strums, stuttering beats, and budding romance. Tracing the map from his hometown to Chicago, Hall details a new relationship in a world where his biggest obstacle is public transportation: “At the station/Ticket in my palms, I can feel my hands shaking… Take the 9 back just to feel your hands in mine.” It’s a sweet reminder of how vast the world feels at 18, though it reads like a page from a John Green novel.
Bunny’s title track is one of the few times Hall begins to consider that love might require some effort after all. “Maybe we’re moving too fast/But we’re having so much fun,” he sings. “Lord knows we both have our differences.” Still, his devotion permeates the song: “I’m in this,” he promises, sounding committed—at least for now.
These and other guitar-driven tracks (“Carousel,” “Balloon,” “First Time”) feel most natural for Hall, whose past projects spotlighted grainy, lilting riffs. Bunny uses more electronic instruments than he’s put to tape before, but his experimentation doesn’t always equate to originality: “Guess” sounds like a rejected Hot Chip song, while opener “Witness” could suit Joji’s warbly SoundCloud verses, and closer “Honeymoon” feels like a Xerox copy of Rex Orange County’s sunkissed R&B.
On paper, Bunny’s hip-hop-meets-six-string aesthetic could easily lump Ghost Orchard with the type of tacky pop-rap crooner dying to convince you that he’s a bad boy with a sensitive side. But Hall’s earnestness feels genuine. He still has some maturing to do: His simple lyrics about young love and summertime outings recall the salad days of school vacation. But Bunny is lighthearted, inoffensive, textbook bedroom pop, and it doesn’t try to be more. It’s nice to imagine that love and coming-of-age could be so painless. | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Orchid Tapes | August 23, 2019 | 6.7 | bca7a2fe-7d2f-4a19-ada6-a5e34c879de6 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Memphis rapper proves himself a conflicted thinker, with an outsider/insider perspective that merges the personal and the political. | Memphis rapper proves himself a conflicted thinker, with an outsider/insider perspective that merges the personal and the political. | Cities Aviv: Digital Lows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15563-digital-lows/ | Digital Lows | Cities Aviv begins "Fuckeverybodyhere" with a swaggering declaration: "I could say some chill shit, but fuck all that." Given the song's hazy production--Steely Dan's "Midnight Cruiser" hammered into jagged boom-bap-- the impulse to lapse into laconic stoner rap makes sense, but nothing plays out quite so predictably on Digital Lows.
And so, in a drunken RZA-like flow, the Memphis rapper narrates his heroic origin story ("Bluff City born with a mic in my palm, I came up out the womb spittin' in the rarest of form"), hilariously big-ups himself ("In this 8-bit world I'm Bowser"), and mockingly croons the song's shit-talk title. Even the usual hip-hop clichés are afforded specificity thanks to his expressive wit and precise determination not to use words in the same exact way as every other rapper. He describes the girls he's pulling in by joking, "as a youngin' jerkin' off I could never picture this," and refers to his haters as "voyeurs."
Dude's got personality. He's a conflicted, searching thinker, with an outsider/insider perspective that merges the personal and the political, and lashes-out against the street mentality that mocks his forward-thinking hip-hop. "Niggas say I dress white," he observes a little hurt, and retorts, "flow must be cocaine." He also makes a joke about "white bitches" whose "favorite band is Mr. Bungle," which is just really funny. A few years ago this would be derisively called "hipster rap," but that kind of categorical thinking has been pleasantly deconstructed by now.
Digital Lows also has a group of out-of-nowhere, brilliant producers (Muted Drone, RPLD GHOSTS, Danny Dee, and others) behind it, all of whom contribute imaginative but still traditionalist beats. "Black Box" gives Gil Scott-Heron's "Winter in America" a blunted beatmaker refix. "Die Young" loops the intro to Depeche Mode's "People Are People" and turns the new wave classic into a hybrid of Rammellzee's avant-rap and Southern fight-rap. Three 6 Mafia's subtle influence on this next-generation Memphis rapper always manifests itself in subtle, indirect ways like that. "A Beautiful Hell", "Doom x Gloom", and "sixsixsixes" invoke Three 6 shock rap at moments when Cities, usually thoughtful and witty, sounds at the end of his rope, far beyond "fuck it"-- so he lets loose with lines like, "we fuck broads on the cross and they gulp the semen."
For contrast, placed between "Doom x Gloom" and "sixsixsixes" is "Meet Me on Montrose (For Ex-Lovers Only)", a bittersweet love story based on a sample of "Oh Lori" by the Alessi Brothers, which is quite possibly the least "hard" song ever made. "Voyeurs" lobs goofy disses at fellow rappers ("In a city full of fake Rick Rosses/ I rock Cuban link chains with inverted crosses") and ends with a burst of digitized noise before giving way to hopeful album closer "Float On", a wizened freestyle over Blackbird Blackbird's cover of the Modest Mouse hit. Balance is important here, and the darkest moments of Digital Lows soon enough let up to highlight Cities Aviv's most winning quality: his mordant humanity. | 2011-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Fat Sandwich | June 23, 2011 | 7.5 | bcb0d92e-d5ac-4786-9790-48312a0cd64b | Brandon Soderberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-soderberg/ | null |
Under a gray sky of grief, the Detroit post-punks’ sixth album makes space for skulking grooves, shoegaze-y experimentation, and a Baja Blast that’s always half full. | Under a gray sky of grief, the Detroit post-punks’ sixth album makes space for skulking grooves, shoegaze-y experimentation, and a Baja Blast that’s always half full. | Protomartyr: Formal Growth in the Desert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/protomartyr-formal-growth-in-the-desert/ | Formal Growth in the Desert | The symbolic and literal centerpiece of Protomartyr’s new album Formal Growth in the Desert is “Graft Vs. Host,” a song about forcing yourself to experience happiness after a crushing loss. In Joe Casey’s typically circuitous and surreal lyrics, Detroit bars and locals transform into poetically abstracted iconography and overheard asides become barked choruses. Here, the way he writes about his late mother is quiet and direct. “She’d want me to try and find happiness in a cloudless sky,” he sings. Alex Leonard’s rumbling drums back Scott Davidson and Greg Ahee’s ominous simmer, but all the heft falls away for a few overwhelming melodic tones—bursts of light through the darkness. Casey doesn’t always sound particularly convinced, but Formal Growth feels like an earnest attempt to get there.
Ahee, the guitarist and album co-producer, has said that scoring short films informed the process of assembling these songs, and Casey’s bandmates assist him by summoning positivity even when that feels impossible. Take the start of side two, when after 11 years and six albums spent gradually evolving toward a big, sweeping indie-rock sound, Protomartyr charge in with the thrashing guitars and fuzz-caked bass solos of their punk foundation. Casey, in his trademark mumbled bark, muses about the estimated 3,800 tigers known to survive in the wild. At first this grim statistic darkens his view of humanity—there’s “far too many of you fools”—but soon the broad ruminations give way to “write what you know” riffing. As if compelled by the logo on his hat, Casey starts in about Detroit Tigers legend “Sweet Lou” Whitaker and turns the hometown chant “eat ’em up, Tigers” into a howled command. The tug-of-war between endangered wildlife and a baseball team (extinction and a beacon, desert and growth) is classic Protomartyr—an unrelenting tension anchored by a Detroit institution they know like the backs of their hands. It also rips.
A stray, ragged, and fast punk song will forever be catnip to the Protomartyr faithful. Similarly, all you’ve got to do to prove they’ve still got it is quote any of Casey’s eternally quotable lines, like his reference to one character’s “array of disappointing nephews.” Those are the highlights, but some of the album’s most rewarding moments are its most gradual and subtle. Bill Radcliffe plays pedal steel on several songs including “We Know the Rats”; it’s a deft ambient touch that softens Protomartyr’s jagged edges, inching closer to shoegaze than they’ve ever been.
Protomartyr albums historically reward patience—close, repeated listens on headphones with typewritten lyrics in hand—so it’s a tough hurdle that the least remarkable song here is right up front. Opener “Make Way” jumps back and forth between quiet and bombast, sputtering without generating any real buildup or cool-off. It’s a less than inspiring introduction to a record with several songs that are distinguished by strong pacing. The swaying, skulking rhythm of “Let’s Tip the Creator” doesn’t require a big climax or drop; it’s a space where the band could’ve easily lingered for another several verses. “Polacrilex Kid,” the best of the advance singles, is another testament to Leonard’s crucial steadiness, laying the groundwork for Ahee to gradually transition from mellow atmospherics to crunchy power chords to a nimble and anthemic chorus.
“Make Way”’s other drawback: It’s the least lyrically specific song on an album replete with unbelievable details. When he sings about deserving love and the dangers of solitude on “Rain Garden,” Casey delivers the album’s best vocal performance while his bandmates build to the magnitude of an orchestra. Meanwhile, he’s asking you to consider the symbolism of a half-full Baja Blast in a parking lot behind a Coney Island restaurant. Elsewhere, a tragedy about two lovers dying in a car—lost on the way to the titular fulfillment center—begins with the admission that these people are a plot device to make the song “more heartbreaking.” Such sharp, fourth wall-busting writing this deep into their discography isn’t a given. Formal Growth in the Desert is a remedy for spiritual depletion: a promise to stay open when there seems to be nothing left. | 2023-06-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 6, 2023 | 7.6 | bcb41ee2-84bf-4322-b753-015a08637d74 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
I've been considering ways to dole out an introduction to this review for nearly\n\ two weeks, each attempt ... | I've been considering ways to dole out an introduction to this review for nearly\n\ two weeks, each attempt ... | The Notwist: Neon Golden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5845-neon-golden/ | Neon Golden | I've been considering ways to dole out an introduction to this review for nearly two weeks, each attempt more futile than the last. I considered keeping a diary of listening (and actually went so far as to do it on a number of occasions), piecing together thoughts and hoping something cohesive would come of it. Re-reading my scribbles, I realized that it was like fitting the jumbled pieces of a puzzle together. Every entry referenced something wholly other than what had preceded it. Inevitably, part of it became personal; so I nixed it. Still, the task became a vital part of this, almost as if I had lived inside the sounds of Neon Golden, drifting in and out of song, mixing familiar with unknown, moving above and beneath the textures and never completely keeping time. In the end, it's apt that this resulted from a Notwist record. The last decade for them was full of shifting movements.
Beginning in Weilheim, Germany in the early 90s as a heavy metal outfit, Markus and Micha Acher, along with drummer Martin Messerschmid, released two albums filled with pounding drums and guitar solos (The Notwist and Nook) before almost abandoning it completely. However, with Nook, things had already started to change. Interests moved away from thudding power riffs and toward the direction of complex rhythms and structures. Even so, to listen to those albums now, most people would find it difficult to believe the same band made this new disc.
In the mid-90s, the Notwist finally got an American distributor with 12, on the now-defunct Zero Hour label. With that, they began to explore even more textures in their sound, enlisting Martin Gretschmann (aka Console) to help with production and add his special electronic touch. Resulting in a more poppy sound for the group (some might even call it indie rock), 12's beauty is startling from beginning to end.
With Martin Console now in tow as a full-time member, Shrink was a huge step into the world of electronic music and sounded almost completely unlike anything else made at the time. Mixing rock and pop with free jazz, old-timey folk, jagged minimalist beats and just about anything else you could toss in, I don't have any problems saying now that the record was ahead of its time. To top it off, the shame in it all is that very few took notice; Zero Hour went belly up (rendering 12 and Shrink virtually impossible to find in record shops these days), and the Notwist went back to Germany and sort of disappeared for a few years.
So it seemed. Console never really slowed down, releasing a ton of solo projects (one of which was 1999's Matador-released Rocket in the Pocket), remixing just about everyone, and doing the programming and production on possibly the best track from Björk's Vespertine, "Heirloom." The list of Notwist side projects became quite lengthy, too: Tied and Tickled Trio (sax player Johannes Enders' continuing project), Village of Savoonga, Potawatomi and Lali Puna, to name a few. So, after four years of what only seemed like hiding, the Acher brothers and the Martins (Console and Messerschmid) return with Neon Golden. Their website says it was worth the wait. And, well, it's true.
Neon Golden is replete with textured sounds, drifting (and occasionally driving) pulsations, and mesmerizing hypno-rhythms. It's been quite a while since the last time I actually felt I've been with a record like this. Sounds odd, but that's exactly the feeling I've received over the last two weeks. And when you've got that much time to spend with a record, it becomes an entity in and of itself. Most times with a record review, you get a few precursory listens and then by number five or six, you're spitting out a review. Not so here. With well over fifty listens to this disc, it's like a relationship has begun to spring forth out of the ether. I guess you could say Neon Golden and me have become well acquainted and it's already akin to hanging with an old friend. Given that amount of time, realizations occur. One of my first was that, in many ways, this record is about textures: electronic bleats, pulsing waves, the mixture of organic instruments with digital blips and loops, and most notably the serenity of Markus Acher's voice.
While Acher's singing has always been appealing to me, it wasn't until this album that I finally recognized something and, for you lyric analysts, it's probably not a good thing. I've found myself spending more time listening to Acher's voice than paying attention to what exactly he's singing about. In some ways, it's similar to Arto Lindsay. On albums like Mundo Civilizado-- when he's singing in Portuguese, it's unclear exactly what he's talking about. Yet his ability to mesmerize and captivate the listener with his singing can be simply haunting, and damn if his voice just doesn't ooze sex appeal. A very similar thing often occurs when I'm listening to Acher. The songs are sung in English. I know the words and I can sing along. Thing is, my attention becomes devoted to the way his phrases are formed, his ability to roll words off his tongue, the manner in which certain syllables, consonants and vowels are stressed, and the way familiar English words all at once become foreign. On "This Room," there's a moment at around the 1:30 mark where the driving percussion suddenly comes to a delirious halt and leaving only Acher's voice imbedded in a wave of electronic gurgles and throbbing beats. The track is rendered into two halves here, Acher's voice cut-up and pieced back together in a dizzying loop, bouncing off itself in nonsense half-syllables and creating a split-second feel of nausea-inducing vertigo.
Elsewhere, a track like "One Step Inside Doesn't Mean You'll Understand" is comprised of plucked strings atop a low saxophone moan while hisses and crackles burble just below the surface, waiting for the end of the song, and fading out with the hum of nothing but fuzz, as if the stylus was just caught in a locked groove. Prior to that fading hum, thin layers of sound begin to unfurl themselves, something that transpires on almost every track-- whether it be the distinguishing Notwist banjo, clanking percussion or the layer upon layer of electronics. Even on Neon Golden's most driving track, "Pilot," the band allows space for those resonating electronic hums to break through.
And then, another realization. The Notwist have an uncanny knack for allowing their compositions room to breathe, creating lush sonic textures. Dynamic numbers like "Pilot" or "Pick Up the Phone" come off as thoughtful and unhurried, songs transitioning into each other with languid movements. "Pick Up the Phone" is awash in spastic, pointy-headed beats and it sounds like the feel of crumpled and un-crumpled candy wrappers. With Markus Acher singing in what sometimes sound like barely hushed whispers, Neon Golden begins to take on an introspective beauty, almost as if everything (the musicians, the singer, the music) is lost in contemplative thought.
Nowhere is this pensiveness more present than in tracks like "Neon Golden" or "Off the Rails." The muted, tranquil beauty of an acoustic guitar and Markus Acher crooning "this is all I know" gently over electronic washes of sound in the latter make for lullaby material. "Neon Golden," on the other hand, begins as a gritty dirge, containing a deep saxophone groan, plucked acoustic guitar and banjo, and the mantra-like title chant. As it progresses, though, the song begins to be taken over by drops of scattered percussion, rhythmic drums, congas, and the murmuring buzz of Console's electronic manipulations. At first, my feelings for "Consequence" were ambivalent, but now I see that it's the perfect choice for a closing song. Markus Acher's lovely, plaintive moan of "Leave me hypnotized, love/ Leave me paralyzed, love," is the one time when the lyrics stand against the backdrop of the song, stark and revelatory. Neon Golden can do exactly what he's singing: it leaves you mesmerized, lost in meditative thought and captivated by the grainy, exquisite textures.
Neon Golden would be a staggering feat for any band, much less a band most people had long since forgotten about (or maybe never really knew). A decade into their career, the Notwist have created a masterpiece by pulling the same trick they pulled on Shrink: mixing things that might not seem to fit together into a beautiful, seamless whole. Again, the unfortunate thing is that anyone outside Europe is going to have a difficult time getting their hands on a copy. If you do find one, be prepared to pay, as City Slang stuff just ain't that cheap in the USA. So, why haven't labels like Mute or Communion or Darla jumped on getting this available for domestic distribution yet? A more obvious choice would even be Matador, who recently released one of Console's albums domestically. As of right now, the Notwist have released the record of the year. It's a shame that most people might not have a chance to hear it. | 2002-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | City Slang | February 6, 2002 | 9.2 | bcbd9ee6-dd15-4fe0-b974-9a2f552defbe | Pitchfork | null |
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Hey you. Yeah, you, holding a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with an Adaptation ticket stub for ... | Hey you. Yeah, you, holding a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with an Adaptation ticket stub for ... | Cursive: The Ugly Organ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1698-the-ugly-organ/ | The Ugly Organ | Hey you. Yeah, you, holding a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with an Adaptation ticket stub for a bookmark. You're obviously hip to the new sensation sweeping the nation: meta-fiction! Maurice the Meta-fiction Moose defines the genre as "post-modern art conscious of and reveling in its own limitations" and it's in full bloom everywhere from the bookstore to the Cineplex, with TV-show characters talking to the camera in-between. Hell, even record reviews do it-- I crafted a densely mirrored concept review around this latest release from Cursive, but it turned out to be too pretentious for prime-time (watch for it in my forthcoming collection of short stories about famous Omahaians).
One media form yet to be infiltrated by the gimmick of self-reference, however, is music, partly because it's more than a little difficult to do in a three-minute pop song, and partly because Jon Spencer ruined it for everybody. But Cursive frontman Kasher is willing to give it the old college try on The Ugly Organ, and somehow manages to do it with a minimum of pretension while simultaneously livening up the crusted emo messenger bag.
Cursive is no stranger to the concept album; their last full-length, Domestica, was a song-cycle dealing with the critical entropy of a dying marriage, and its warm reception seems to have motivated Kasher to stay in the storyteller role. The "plot" of The Ugly Organ, such as it is, revolves around loose themes of fallout remorse and hollow sexual meandering, the latter summed up in the double meaning of the album title. Appropriately, then, recurring organ figures occasionally torment Kasher's protagonist mid-song, while recent Cursive recruit Gretta Cohn's cello grants everything the epic quality it so desperately calls for.
The material fueled by this concept is pretty easy to spot, bearing woe-packed titles like "The Recluse", "Driftwood", or "Bloody Murderer", and aside from the occasional Diaryland line ("My ego's like my stomach/ It keeps shitting what I feed it"), it's a solid record for those without severe emo allergies. "The Recluse" is melancholy and full of ornate note flurries like early Joan of Arc, and the eerie "Driftwood" creeps along like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" beneath Cohn's bowed swooshes.
An entire LP of this slumped-shoulder soul-searching would get pretty tired, however; a fact that even Kasher seemed to realize as he browsed back over the sad-sack lyrics he'd penned. Enter the meta: a handful of songs wherein Kasher either ups the self-loathing ante by both expressing his sadness and further expressing his sadness about his sadness, or brilliantly anticipates the kneejerk reactions of the emo-phobic critical community (not here, of course, no, never!).
Opening the album with the couplet, "And now we proudly present/ Songs perverse and songs of lament," Kasher makes a habit of anticipating the snide commentary of his hatas and beating them to the punch. "Art Is Hard" assails his own band with the biting stab "cut it out/ Your self inflicted pain/ Is getting too routine/ The crowds are catching on/ To the self-inflicted song," and he styles "Butcher the Song" ambiguously enough to make vain critics betcha think he's talking about them, don't we, don't we: "I'm writing songs to entertain/ But these people, they just want pain."
Wisely, Kasher also attaches these masochistic episodes to the strongest songs of the album: "Red Handed Slight of Hand" being all raw anthem like Desaparecidos without the limited understanding of the geopolitical landscape, and "Art Is Hard" using Cohn to her fullest as the rest of the band emulates her fierce bowing while she rips out a buzzsaw melody like a Dick Dale cello composition. Even "Butcher the Song" which turns on a sour riff repeated ad nauseam, has a sort of, well, nauseating effect that emphasizes the self-sickened words.
With the strength of the meta-emo material, plus "The Recluse" and "Driftwood", occupying the first half of the album, it's easy to get caught up in The Ugly Organ's bold aims. Unfortunately, the album is too top-heavy to be seaworthy, the back end full of Fugazi knockoffs and half a song stretched out to ten minutes in a forced attempt at a showstopping finale ("Staying Alive"-- they'd be better off with a Bee Gees cover). The fact that Kasher, in a toe-dipping test of this meta stuff, already called himself out as a Mackaye acolyte on Cursive's last EP can't save the likes of "Sierra" and "Gentleman Caller" from my seen-it-all scorn. Bah.
Still, a solid side A is enough to make The Ugly Organ an emo album (gasp!) on Saddle Creek (yipes!) that I'm not ashamed to admit a conditional liking for. Should Kasher decide to continue along the concept album path, it would perhaps do him good to study himself some Pedro the Lion-- and he might want to steer clear of the meta from here on out-- I hear from New York that unironic is the new ironic. But for twenty minutes of The Ugly Organ, what he's got now is enough to make an idea that sounds, on paper, a million ways wrong and a shoo-in for Most Self-Indulgent Album of the Year work reasonably well. Here's hoping he draws someone less homely than Nicholas Cage for the film version. | 2003-04-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-04-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | April 3, 2003 | 7 | bcbe1a8f-d058-4c6b-956c-085531808e91 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Warp Records mainstays Plaid have staked out a well-defined territory over two decades: They make highly listenable melodic IDM, warm and playful. Their latest album doesn't rip up the blueprint. | Warp Records mainstays Plaid have staked out a well-defined territory over two decades: They make highly listenable melodic IDM, warm and playful. Their latest album doesn't rip up the blueprint. | Plaid: The Digging Remedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21967-the-digging-remedy/ | The Digging Remedy | As hard as it is to believe that Warp Records mainstays Plaid have been making experimental electronic music now for over twenty-five years, it’s even harder to believe that they’ve managed to do without markedly adjusting their basic formula for success. Plaid have staked out a well-defined musical territory for themselves by choosing on each new record to continually mine their existing plot of land rather than explore new terrain elsewhere. Their latest album, the appropriately named The Digging Remedy, reiterates that the Plaid game plan remains intact.
Luckily for Plaid, their game plan has usually been a pretty good one. Their music is a unique strain of listenable, hyper-melodic experimental electronic music that fits the frequently maligned tag “Intelligent Dance Music” all while sounding truly like no one else. They’ve also never made a truly bad album, which isn’t easy to say for a band who’ve been together that long, both in their current incarnation as Plaid and in the past life as the Black Dog with Ken Downie (anywhere from 10 to 15 records depending on how you’re counting). If nothing else, the Plaid blueprint is strong, unique and reliable.
The Plaid coming to us now on The Digging Remedy is in a sort of fourth stage: from the early Black Dog years running from ‘91-‘95; to the first Warp trifecta golden era of ‘95-02; to the experiments and soundtracks of ‘03-'12; and finally in 2014, they hit a wizened, back-to-basics phase. 2014’s Reachy Prints returned to the warm tones and friendly melodies that had worked so well for them over the previous twenty years. Now, two years later, The Digging Remedy picks up where its predecessor left off.
One tradition that The Digging Remedy also carries on is the somewhat odd placement of an album opener that is distinct (and often superior) from anything else on its accompanying record. 2001’s Double Figure opener “Eyen,” with it’s fade-in intro, circular acoustic guitar arpeggio and coo-ing choral vocals sounded beautiful and stands out from the rest of the album. The first two minutes of “Even Spring” from 2003’s Spokes, featuring Leila-collaborator Luca Santucci’s ghostly vocals, sounded even further away (before returning to “standard Plaid” mid-song). And Scintilli’s delightfully exquisite “missing” is perhaps the most unique track in their catalog, incorporating vocals not for lyricism but as a new instrument. On The Digging Remedy, lead track “Do Matter” lays down a tone of ominous, reflective menace that feels like a perfect development for the band: after years of playfulness and warmth, the idea of imagining a darkwave Plaid record that turns that warmth into nightmare feels like a potential home run.
Alas, that dream is not to be, as second track “Dilatone” drags the mood back to familiar territory. The jarring transition from “Do Matter” to “Dilatone,” a slight track that spins in tiny circles while going nowhere, represents one of The Digging Remedy’s biggest weak spots. Though the album reaches greater heights than its predecessor Reachy Prints with a number of excellent compositions (“Do Matter,” “Clock,” “Melifer,” “Yu Mountain,” “Saladore”), the sequencing of everything just feels a bit off, in a way that seems uncharacteristic. Too often, the momentum of a great track is followed by the slow thud of something both different and lesser. The deliberate build and pitter-patter Knight Rider paranoia of “Saladore”—the closest thing to “Do Matter”’s ghoulishness—is wonderful, but to have it wind down into the bass drum circus thump of “Reeling Birds” feels like bit of a let down.
The good news about The Digging Remedy is that it’s lovely and listenable for any longtime followers, or for anyone remotely interested in the kind of melodic IDM defined by this piece. However, it is neither an exciting deviation nor a refinement; as such, it’s really just more of an already-good thing, albeit packaged less delicately. Few artists can say that twenty-five years in they are still able to put out quality records. But here’s to hoping that next time around Plaid might consider stepping off their lawn to chase that darkwave dream. | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 13, 2016 | 6.5 | bcc7a6a2-d6ae-4a21-98d6-2a737005b3ff | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The California singer-songwriter’s first album is exquisitely rendered, a solemn display of restraint and loneliness. | The California singer-songwriter’s first album is exquisitely rendered, a solemn display of restraint and loneliness. | Anna St. Louis : If Only There Was a River | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-st-louis-if-only-there-was-a-river/ | If Only There Was a River | Before her debut album, Anna St. Louis flipped through the phases of folk-rock with methodical determination, trying to plot a path through the wilderness. She arrived, half a decade ago, in Los Angeles as a Midwest émigré and Philadelphia art-school graduate in search of a new setting and, turns out, a new medium. After learning the guitar, she issued two aptly titled collections—2015’s DEMOS and last year’s First Songs. The earliest set was plaintive and blunt, multi-tracked confessions of heartsickness broadcast above strummed chords—real starter-kit stuff. Two years later, though, the endearing First Songs suggested fingers feeling the walls of some unseen room in the dark. As St. Louis tried to stake out her own corner of the crowded folk-rock field, she tested arid country blues and parlor soul laments, spectral folk moans and smoldering electronic esoterica. You could name the references and hear the effort, a new songwriter diligently scouting the shape of the future songs she would sing.
At last, on the exquisitely rendered If Only There Was a River, St. Louis has started to do just that. She still writes about the sad shapes the heart can take and the loneliness that the expanses of the West can produce. And traces of restlessness pervade these 11 songs, from the Appalachia moan of the fiddle-chased “Hello” to the slightly sinister crackle of the electric “Wind.” But on a record that unfurls with the pastoral ease of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and the idiomatic flexibility of Buffy Saint-Marie’s best, she seems to have made definitive choices about the type of songs she sings and how she builds them with her band. Alongside a sympathetic crew that includes producer Kevin Morby and Pavo Pavo multi-instrumentalist Oliver Hill, St. Louis embraces a sense of elegant austerity here, so that these tunes never do too much at once. She writes, musically and lyrically, so that the emotions expressed and the genres explored are never simple or clear. Rather than continue the search and strive for more, St. Louis has settled on simply being.
The consistent restraint of If Only feels like a minor miracle. “Mean Love” begins with guitar and voice, the intimacy pulling the listener in as close as the song’s suspect subject. Suddenly, it expands, with keyboards, bass, and drums that say what St. Louis struggles to articulate—her patience is running thin. Wrapped around fingerstyle guitar and a distant, luminous drone, Hill’s violin becomes a wagging finger during the chorus of “Water,” demanding the truth from a lover. The hand-drum drift of “The Bells,” the amplifier creak of “Desert”: St. Louis has learned to say so much with so little, suggesting the kind of keen aesthetic awareness that some songwriters burn through years, producers, studios, and labels trying to develop.
Likewise, St. Louis can web prehensile ideas around the occasional breathtaking, concrete image, like a pair of headlights signaling from the other end of some dark desert strip. “The heat that we both felt/Faded out like a cigarette,” she sings wryly during “Understand,” a song that views a relationship’s future fate with elliptical indifference. “Hello” is the plea of a new city dweller looking for respite from drugs and dance halls. “How the painted floor fades/The blues turn to white, and the yellows turn grey,” she offers at the start of its second verse, the audible grin in her voice countering the exhaustion of the lyrics. Having mapped out the folk-rock landscape on First Songs, St. Louis thrives here in its liminal spaces.
She ends her debut with “If Only There Was a River,” her strangest song to date. Emulating a mandolin, her high, loping guitar sweeps into easy dialogue with Morby’s Wurlitzer. “If only,” he chants in a dreamy whisper, like a shaman conjuring St. Louis toward her own farewell. She answers, singing a wish list of personal fulfillment—a river to take her away, a town to call her home, a sense of self-worth to satisfy her needs—in a tone of pure, peerless longing. Just as the guitars, keyboards, and three-part harmonies start to crest, they disappear, vanishing at the horizon line like a dream you’ll try to remember but never will. It is a tease, an intriguing suggestion of possible next steps in the motion of one of this year’s most promising new singer-songwriters. | 2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Woodsist / Mare | October 30, 2018 | 7.5 | bcc8cd9e-9a5f-4122-8e97-d8526921b290 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
A sought-after roller-disco anthem from 1983 makes for a tantalizing hybrid of boogie, electro, and house, and lays the foundation for artists from Chromeo to Dâm-Funk. | A sought-after roller-disco anthem from 1983 makes for a tantalizing hybrid of boogie, electro, and house, and lays the foundation for artists from Chromeo to Dâm-Funk. | Vaughan Mason & Butch Dayo: Feel My Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vaughan-mason-and-butch-dayo-feel-my-love/ | Feel My Love | You’d be forgiven for wondering if Vaughan Mason owned stock in a ball-bearing factory. Back in 1979, a Wall Street Journal report that 300,00 pairs of roller skates were being sold each month caught Mason’s eye, and he soon set about making an anthem for the rinks. The result was Vaughan Mason and Crew’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll,” a knock-off of Chic’s “Good Times” that became an epochal slice of roller disco all by itself, fueling innumerable birthday parties and Saturday nights. Beyond the roller rink, “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” continues to boogie through pop culture: You can hear it in Daft Punk’s “Da Funk,” the Avalanches’ “Electricity,” and shouted out by Janet Jackson on “R&B Junkie.”
When Mason teamed up with vocalist Butch Dayo in 1983 to cut Feel My Love, a five song EP, he crafted another roller-disco number in “Rollalong Songs.” Full of rubbery bass, phased snares and handclaps, and a chant urging you to lace up your skates and grab a partner, it seemed like another sure shot for the rink. But that track couldn’t replicate the magic of his first hit. Within a year, the once-mighty disco imprint Salsoul Records would shutter, and the sound of boogie was soon overtaken by hip-hop and house. (Mason turned his attention to the latter under the name Raze.)
Mason had pretty much been a one-trick pony up until that point, good at assessing other artists’ hits and repurposing them (another single, “Jammin Big Guitar,” would lift parts of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”), but on Feel My Love he branches out and tests other sounds. Not always successfully: It was definitely a mistake to open the set with the torpid piano-and-synth ballad “Oh Love” rather than close with it. That said, he was astute enough to let master DJ Shep Pettibone mix “Party on the Corner,” filling the song with go-go bells, roto-toms, starburst synths, and a sinuous percussion breakdown. “You Can Do It” uses a similar template, making for a boogie track with cosmic-disco elements. Both songs were released as singles, but as cagey as Mason was in flipping a few ideas into a music career, he failed to recognize the true hit he actually had on his hands in the title track.
Feel My Love disappeared, but these days it is sought-after, thanks to the earworm of “Feel My Love” itself, which resonates from the old school well into our meme-able present (this reissue comes courtesy of British label Be With Records). You can trace the aesthetic and sonic template of Dâm-Funk and Chromeo back to this song. It’s strange and immediately endearing, its sleekness cut with some cheese, with bits of electro, modern soul, and house embedded in its boogie sound; it’s powered by simplistic drum programming yet still deeply funky, while Dayo’s overly earnest vocal performance lends an almost naive quality. With a bright, incessant synth line that squirts like a spooned grapefruit, “Feel My Love” has been a staple of block parties, low riders, and skate parties ever since, from the Bronx to SoCal. Simple and sharp, it’s proof of Mason’s knack for keeping wheels rolling. | 2019-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Be With | July 29, 2019 | 7.6 | bcc9e4a2-3699-40ab-ac52-cf2d58953fe4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
This Irish rapper's debut suggests great potential, even if he's limited for now by the obvious influence of N.E.R.D and Tyler, the Creator. | This Irish rapper's debut suggests great potential, even if he's limited for now by the obvious influence of N.E.R.D and Tyler, the Creator. | Rejjie Snow: Dear Annie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rejjie-snow-dear-annie/ | Dear Annie | Irish rapper Rejjie Snow is a polymath with a nomadic streak. A few years ago, his left-of-center pop appeal got him a deal with Elton John’s management company and a spot opening for Madonna on tour. He later signed with 300 Entertainment, home of Young Thug and Migos, and has since worked with Canadian dancefloor wizard Kaytranada, Chicago neo-soul mainstay Cam O’bi, French disco auteur Lewis OfMan, and Kendrick Lamar collaborator Rahki, churning out tracks in enough styles to suggest a one-man equivalent to the Odd Future collective. Through all his guises, though, Snow stays true to certain constants. He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences—channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk—that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.
Snow spends most of his 20-track debut LP, Dear Annie, obsessing over a lover he abandons in order to live in Paris. The otherworldly, Aminé-assisted single “Egyptian Luvr,” produced by Kaytranada, and “23” showcase his laid-back delivery, futurist leanings, and ability to write tracks that sound like they should be hits. They fit in well with “Pink Lemonade” and “Spaceships,” both straightforward clinics in N.E.R.D.’s aesthetic. “Must be your birthday, the earth keeps spinning your tune…/The evening stars fall for you/Bet that’s your birthplace/The sun reminds me of you,” he croons over the former track’s interstellar synths and sunny, melodic thump.
In the album’s second half, though, Snow takes a sharp turn from sweet nothings and effervescent dance tunes to smoldering angst and solitude. By “Room 27,” heartbreak has turned to despair, as he contemplates suicide against dissonant, dreamy wedding bells. (The number in the title is a reference to the so-called 27 Club.) “Still I’m chasing demons/Best believe I ain’t been eating/Best believe I see my shadow checking on me like I’m Jesus,” he raps. Spiraling, he continues rattling off bars: “I don’t even trust myself/Feel like I just don’t belong/Feel like fucking flying, wish you’d understand my fucking thoughts.” A few tracks later, on “Bye Polar,” he swings between brooding, sinister tones and strip club bounce, somewhat randomly proclaiming himself “black,” “weird,” and “proud” along the way. Then he dedicates the next song, the cheeky “Charlie Brown,” to bad behavior and bubblegum pop.
That’s a lot of moods for one album, but Rejjie’s commitment to candor and his collaborators’ ace production keep Dear Annie from jumping the rails. It is a solid introduction to an able singer and MC who, at his best, recalls Kendrick’s knack for voicing a variety of characters. That progressive approach is something hip-hop needs in order to sustain growth. Though it’s become more common in the last decade, it still takes heart to lean into vulnerability in rap—to make music this deeply personal in a genre teeming with self-proclaimed bad actors who pride themselves on being impenetrable and emotionally unavailable. Throughout Dear Annie, Rejjie Snow is phoning home to Drake, André 3000, Pharrell, and Chance the Rapper, all of whom have spent years blurring hip-hop’s sonic and emotional lines. The most exciting thing about this album is the prospect of learning more about what he’ll do with the sense of freedom he’s inherited from them once infatuation subsides. | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment / Honeymoon | February 20, 2018 | 5.5 | bcca961c-31da-4e29-bccd-6dcb03e4c50b | Karas Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/ | |
The Norwegian ambient musician Geir Jenssen plumbs the mind of a medieval queen on his beautiful, gripping new album. | The Norwegian ambient musician Geir Jenssen plumbs the mind of a medieval queen on his beautiful, gripping new album. | Biosphere: Departed Glories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22302-departed-glories/ | Departed Glories | The artist Jessica Ingram’s series of photographs “Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial” seems, at a glance, to simply portray beautiful or quotidian parts of the Southern landscape. But the postcard-ready images are backlit by an appalling fact: They were all the sites of racist murders. On his new Biosphere record, Departed Glories, the influential Norwegian ambient musician Geir Jenssen does something strikingly similar, poised at the emotional conflict between the world’s everlasting beauty and the evanescent atrocities that seem to linger around it long after actual events.
While he was temporarily living in Krakow, Poland, Jenssen started to notice the sites where Polish people had been executed during World War II—the horrors lurking behind an indifferent natural splendor. He began to research the area’s history and learned of a medieval queen who had hidden from invaders in these same forests, and he started to wonder what kind of music she might have thought of to comfort her in her fear. The outcome is an album made mostly from heavily treated samples of Eastern European and Russian folk music, and its forbidding, haunting beauty is a sensitive encomium to the queen hidden in the forest, to all those erased by war, and to the other ghosts of history that invisibly crowd the world.
Jenssen has explored this kind of site-specific territory before. On 2011’s excellent N-Plants, he drew inspiration from the futuristic gleam and looming danger of Japanese nuclear plants, in tracks where pneumatic basses and skating electronic beats gave the impression of mechanical architecture producing massive energy. (The album came out not long after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, though, uncannily, Jenssen says he finished it before.) Those flickers of minimal techno also crept in, albeit less prominently, on 1997’s Substrata, widely regarded an ambient classic. Though Departed Glories has elements of both of those works—the concrete context of N-Plants and the sparser, icier regions of Substrata—it eschews any beats, and exchanges a structure of geological movement for something more like classical composition.
The title track is indicative of how the record is more like chamber music than anything else. It’s just fashioned out of tectonic basses instead of cellos, midrange drones instead of violas, and atmospheric squeals instead of violins. Unlike a lot of ambient music, it doesn’t wantonly spread through stereo space; instead, Jenssen fashions scintillas of sonic information into long, flowing lines of script. He homes in on places where minute frequencies push the red, unleashing spectral harmonies and beating basses on the sublimely austere “Down on Ropes.” On “Aura in the Kitchen With the Candlesticks,” flecks of guitar share a delicate duet with eerie operatic voices. “In Good Case and Rest” demonstrates Jenssen's artfulness with counterpoint, as a scalloped bass and a shivering stripe of voices lock into a tense orbit, and on “Wyll and Purpose,” he develops a monastic theme with the rigor of a composer working out a sonata.
Departed Glories’ strongest individual tracks are uncompromisingly abstract, like “This Is the Matter,” where a series of steppes chiseled into the face of a dark drone somehow has the presence of a hymn. It illustrates Jenssen’s signature ability to latch onto the smallest bit of dark matter and suck us into its core. Less profound, on their own, are the tracks that let edge-of-intelligibility vocal collages in the manner of Julianna Barwick do most of the work. But they play a flattering role in the album as a whole, which is how it should be heard; they also give voice to the lost souls still trapped at the sites that inspired them.
Sometimes we seem to glimpse their deaths: “You Want to See It Too” is a work of breath-holding drama, seizing up and pulsing like a moment of terrible intuition yet slowed down so it lasts for minutes. And sometimes we glimpse their afterlives, as on the gorgeous “Invariable Cowhandler,” which feels like moving through a lit mist filled with silhouettes. We also glimpse the subtle, inquisitive talent that makes each Biosphere album an ambient event, almost twenty years after Substrata carved his name into the clouds. | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Smalltown Supersound | September 23, 2016 | 7.6 | bcd3b709-7026-4ba6-a84a-aa2ce729c3ea | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Self-released in 1978, this gorgeous set of ancient songs and instrumental abstractions predicted the shape of folk to come. | Self-released in 1978, this gorgeous set of ancient songs and instrumental abstractions predicted the shape of folk to come. | Dorothy Carter: Waillee Waillee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dorothy-carter-waillee-waillee/ | Waillee Waillee | Soon after she crossed into her sixties, and just six years before she died, in New Orleans, in 2003, Dorothy Carter became an unlikely star. Her life had been a whirlwind: Born in New York but raised in Boston, she was a childhood piano whiz who forsook professional life for a vagabond existence scattered among convents in Mexico, stints as a steamboat deckhand on the Mississippi, and communal living and music-making in Maine. But in the mid ’90s, while Carter was sleeping on floors in Berlin, what already sounds like a fable took a stranger-than-Chaucer twist. On a lark, she proposed an all-women ensemble playing the very old music of Europe in modern settings. The result, Mediæval Bæbes, was an unexpected sensation, their extravagant anachronism selling hundreds of thousands of records and becoming popular enough to become an easy potshot for rock critics. Still, no less an éminence grise than John Cale produced their third album, not long before Carter left a group that even now remains a winkingly witchy European novelty.
However unlikely the Mediæval Bæbes seemed, they were, for Carter, a logical outgrowth of the music she’d pursued for decades. After trading the piano for the harp, she immersed herself in Renaissance madrigals, French chanson, and European ballads and hymns that had made the trip across the Atlantic. When Carter encountered the struck-and-plucked psaltery in New York in the ’70s, her cross-century song stockpile finally clicked: “I felt something like a strange recognition,” Carter later wrote of the moment. “THIS was the instrument I wanted to play.”
Her enthusiasm for the psaltery and its zither kin, the dulcimer, would last a lifetime. The imaginative music she made with them has long been hidden away on 1978’s Waillee Waillee, a private-press gem coveted by crate diggers and Discogs hounds that has at long last been reissued, salvaged from nearly five decades of obscurity. It is the start of a loving and stepwise quest to get her prescient records—and her compelling story, in book form—into public view at last. A seamless hybrid of clarion folk arrangements and coruscant drones, Waillee Waillee functions as a signal flare for that effort, its strange permutations articulating the shapes that acoustic and new-age music would take together in the coming years. A beautiful, sad, and bemused record, Carter’s opus is a joy to behold, as alive and vital now as it was then.
Atavistic songs, some of which predated her by almost a millennium, anchored Carter’s work. The Frenchman Adam de la Halle had been dead for nearly 700 years when Carter recorded her jubilant instrumental take of his love song “Robin M’aime,” her sparkling strings radiating off big, hollow drums like glitter beneath a full moon. Her “Celtic Medley” on the psaltery weaves together traditional Irish and Scottish ballads and waltzes, leaving notes hanging so that the overtones fade like morning dew.
Wrestled from its racist minstrel history, opener “The Squirrel Is a Funny Thing” suggests a naturalist’s sketchbook, images of a possum, rabbit, and bushy tails radiant above her dulcimer’s bright notes. If you were told this was a demo for The Milk-Eyed Mender, and that Joanna Newsom had a mild cold when she recorded it, you would not balk. And for all her age-old inclinations, Carter’s “Waillee Waillee”—a Scottish number from the 18th century, covered as “The Water Is Wide” by Bob Dylan a few years before Carter cut this—could have been cast from the rim of Laurel Canyon. It feels like a folk-rock trance, gently tugging past toward present.
In fact, Carter was invested not just in history and conservation but also in the frontiers of sound around her. She was a mentor to a young Laraaji, and long before she made Waillee Waillee, she performed with the Central Maine Power Music Company of artist Robert Rutman, whose steel cellos made him something of a high-art forebear to industrial music. Rutman plays that droning beast and a few other of his sculptural contraptions on closer “Tree of Life,” where Carter intones a Jewish hymn in slow circles through his long tones. Its rapturous sweep recalls Bardo Pond and Growing, bands whose members were children, at most, at that point. And on her own “Summer Rhapsody,” Carter’s ecstatic hammered dulcimer lines sprint across the animalistic moans of Rutman’s bow chime. It suggests the sun rising high above yesterday’s snowstorm, the world becoming a blinding white, a wintry gamelan. The continuous piano music of Lubomyr Melnyk would eventually feel this way, as would the guitar majesty of James Blackshaw.
So often in the world of reissues, records are dubbed proto-something—proto-garage, proto-rap, proto-trance. But what is most striking about Waillee Waillee is the way it feels like the thing itself, not some wispy intimation of the freak-folk, New Weird America, or international underground oddities that would emerge over the next several decades. It is vivid and fully realized, finding the strands connecting simple songs about the woods and love to abstractions that aim for transcendence, then climbing them like a Jacob’s ladder toward wonder. It’s mostly surprising that it’s taken until 2023 for this sublime music to return to circulation, long after the days of Devendra Banhart’s Gnomonsong label, Espers’ communal haze, or Arthur Magazine’s reign of heady expertise, all of which began around the time of Carter’s death. Waillee Waillee got to many of the same elevated planes first, and it still moves just like a time machine. | 2023-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Palto Flats / Putojefe | December 23, 2023 | 8.5 | bcd89577-108d-49cc-8d5b-808d258bd8e6 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Vivian Girls are no more, and lead vocalist Cassie Ramone's stepped out with her first solo album, which features lo-fi, shambolic musings on slackerdom and matters of the heart. Ariel Pink contributes bass to most tracks on the album. | Vivian Girls are no more, and lead vocalist Cassie Ramone's stepped out with her first solo album, which features lo-fi, shambolic musings on slackerdom and matters of the heart. Ariel Pink contributes bass to most tracks on the album. | Cassie Ramone: The Time Has Come | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19768-cassie-ramone-the-time-has-come/ | The Time Has Come | Nonchalance can be brash. Across three albums in the late 2000s, Vivian Girls' mix of girl-group sweetness, punk brusqueness, and proto-grunge sludge won them an adoring cult, but it also left the Brooklyn-via-New Jersey band exposed to criticism from the not-so-silent majority this excluded. As her bandmates have gone on to other projects, Ramone (born Cassie Grzymkowski) has continued to evince a dedicated dispassion. Kickball Katy, the bass player, has stepped to the front over three increasingly confident albums with the melancholic, day-dreamy La Sera. Ali Koehler, the drummer, has also taken over the mic for the intrepid fuzz blasters of Upset. Founding Vivian Girls drummer Frankie Rose graduated into the richly colored synth-pop epitomized by 2012's outstanding Interstellar. Ramone, by contrast, avoided center stage, splitting lead vocal duties with Woods bassist Kevin Morby on a pair of casually scuffed LPs with the Babies.
The Time Has Come is Ramone's solo debut, thrusting her conversational voice and lyricism back to the spotlight, but in effect it's another intimate-yet-aloof sidestep. Rather than charge ahead with the gig-ready urgency of Vivian Girls or space out on details like Rose's Interstellar, she has turned in relatively stripped-down album of songs she recorded herself at apartments in New York and Los Angeles. What the time has come for, Ramone murmurs listlessly on the title track, brings to mind the eccentric emoting of Blur guitarist Graham Coxon's early solo output—that is, saying "I love you." Those aren't always words you want more than certain people to hear.
As with most of Ramone's work, there's an admirable lack of apparent affectation across the album, which should help make it welcome in all places predisposed to love—or even just like—her back. Reverb-soaked and shambolic, with the occasional tambourine or fluid guitar solo, the songs address dark days ("Song of Love"), troubled romance ("Hangin On"), and enduring affection ("I Send My Love to You"). Despite the low-key recording setup, flourishes here or there break up the potential monotony, as when the nocturnal acoustic gallop of "I Don't Really Wanna Go" goes off into psyched-out lava-lamp burbles. Even when Ramone tends toward the tender-hearted melodies of great '90s indie-pop duo the Softies on "Sensitive Soul", she stays deadpan enough to allay the twee-allergic.
Lo-fi bedroom pop prophet Ariel Pink guests on bass for almost every song, but his presence is understated. T**he Time Has Come's press materials cite '60s Greenwich Village enigma Karen Dalton, and though the title has been used many times, one notable instance is English folkie Anne Briggs' breakout 1971 album. The grassroots movement where Ramone's effort would fit best is '90s indie culture, right down to the handwritten look of the cover text and the doodles on the record's inner label.
Part of that culture, of course, was the idea of the slacker. Ramone flirts most directly with that image on "I'm a Freak", where she flatly insists that she's "a fucking loser," "a bad egg just ready to crack, hey-hey." At times, particularly on the dirge-like "Joe's Song", she comes across instead like someone who likes her perfectly good eggs a bit undercooked. This is the paradox in which Ramone finds herself: her allure is partly her insular don't-give-a-fuckness, but that can only get her so far. It's hard to say whether she would benefit from the more generous approach to do-it-yourself recording seen on Karen O's "Rapt" or even Out Hud member Molly Shnick's self-titled Jean on Jean album several years back; she's not them. This much is clear: The Time Has Come is two songs shorter and about the same number of minutes longer than the Vivian Girls' 2008 debut album, and yet it's ultimately a bit slight. The songs are still nonchalant, still brash, but the time for Ramone's next nonchalantly brash big statement may be still to come. | 2014-09-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Loglady | September 2, 2014 | 6.7 | bcdccd18-affb-487f-81b0-3a625892ccb0 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Released just days after Philippe Zdar’s accidental death, the duo’s fifth album marks a joyous return to the emotive, immaculately produced house music of their early years. | Released just days after Philippe Zdar’s accidental death, the duo’s fifth album marks a joyous return to the emotive, immaculately produced house music of their early years. | Cassius: Dreems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cassius-dreems/ | Dreems | In 1996, Philippe Zdar didn’t know what to do. Motorbass, his ascendant project with his friend and roommate Étienne de Crécy, had dissolved after Crécy packed his things and moved out of their apartment in the Montmartre district of Paris. That same year, they’d released their sole album, Pansoul, regarded today as one of the defining moments of the French house revolution. His downtime didn’t last long. Within months, Zdar linked back up with his old La Funk Mob partner Boom Bass, aka Hubert Blanc-Francard. Having bonded earlier in the decade through their shared love of hip-hop, Zdar and Boom Bass rebranded as Cassius and released their first album, 1999.
Motorbass paved the way, but ultimately it was Cassius who went the distance, bringing “French touch” to the masses alongside peers like Daft Punk. Twenty years (and one decade-long hiatus) after their debut, a new Cassius record has arrived with a heartbreaking asterisk: It will also be the duo’s final album of Zdar’s lifetime. Two days before it was to be released, the news broke that he had accidentally fallen through a window in Paris and died. He was 52 years old.
Thus Dreems is a bittersweet homecoming. With their sights locked back onto the dancefloor, Cassius sound reinvigorated. Arranging the record like a cinematic DJ mix, Zdar and Blanc-Francard pare back the kitchen-sink maximalism of their Balearic-tinged concept album Ibifornia. Instead, they adopt a more back-to-basics approach: kick, snare, hat, and bassline take priority.
“Summer” is a wistful opener, cut from the same emotional cloth as the Zdar-produced Phoenix masterpiece “Love Like a Sunset Pt. 1.” The downtempo cruiser “Vedra,” tailor-made for the late-night coastal drive, evaporates into a crispy vocal sample that sets the stage for the album’s first real banger, “Fame.” Throughout Dreems, Cassius make strides to remind us that they could always keep pace with the new breed of producers, many of whom were reared on their work.
“Calliope” is a bass-heavy belter that wouldn’t sound out of place during any peak-hour club set. Elsewhere, returning collaborator John Gourley (of Portugal. The Man) crops up on the ’80s pastiche “Nothing About You,” his otherwise bothersome timbre softened with immaculate double-tracking, while Beastie Boys’ Mike D lends manic energy to “Cause oui!” Cassius balance their guests with poise, manipulating their voices to feel as if they’ve been sampled off some long-forgotten record and rarely allowing the vocals to dominate the mix.
The notable exception is the title track, with its hypnotic dembow rhythm and heartfelt refrain. French singer Owlle is the most prominent guest vocalist on the album, with three separate features, and Cassius give her room for an impeccable performance. “Never before I had someone like you right by my side,” Owlle sighs on the chorus. She and Luke Jenner of the Rapture pair together in an unlikely complement on the hook, singing, “You make me want to dream,” their distinct voices made one within the blend.
The lyric feels like a fitting tribute to Zdar, a man who connected so many threads of dance, indie, and hip-hop to help realize masterpieces that changed countless lives. The day before the album’s release, that much was clear when the producer’s compatriots and admirers around the world openly mourned his death. Those who were close to him shared stories of not only his incredible studio wisdom, but also the love he held for his family and the empathy that he brought to his collaborators, all of whom could earnestly call him a friend. It is an immense tragedy that Zdar didn’t get to witness the release of this album with Boom Bass; the two had been steadfast creative partners ever since they were young studio rats trying to scrape together enough experience to make the music they heard in their heads. Cassius may come to a close, but in Dreems, they offer a worthy capstone for a well-lived life: a celebration of love, an uncynical outburst of the kind of joy that feels rarer to come by with each passing day. | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Love Supreme / Justice | June 25, 2019 | 7.8 | bcdf2665-47e6-4655-83c7-33e0374c6a4b | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ |
Subsets and Splits