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On his latest venture, Church in These Streets, Jeezy is a preacher, the wise, older veteran of the Atlanta rap scene. The vibe of the music seems to suggest he wants to bring the dank and spacey stuff that Young Thug and Future work with into his playground, but grounded in his declarative, raspy voice. | On his latest venture, Church in These Streets, Jeezy is a preacher, the wise, older veteran of the Atlanta rap scene. The vibe of the music seems to suggest he wants to bring the dank and spacey stuff that Young Thug and Future work with into his playground, but grounded in his declarative, raspy voice. | Jeezy: Church in These Streets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21164-church-in-these-streets/ | Church in These Streets | Jeezy does not traffic in nuance. He dropped the ‘Young’ out of his name when he realized he wasn't young. The hooks to his biggest songs are so blunt they skirt deadpan humor—"my president is black, my Lambo is blue" works in a shockingly efficient manner, a mission statement that unpacked a hell of a lot at the right time in history in just two lines. He’s envisioned himself (on album covers at least) as a mafia don, Malcolm X, a patriot draped in the flag. His trademark grimacing snowman logo is as identifiable as a corporate brand.
Fresh off the release of last year’s Seen It All: The Autobiography, he's releasing Church in These Streets, and they are both as literal as their album titles. In his latest venture, Jeezy is a preacher, the wise, older veteran of an Atlanta rap scene that is currently worlds away from his grim motivational seminars. Church in These Streets doesn’t completely deliver on its compelling premise—a "reborn" Jeezy, half-conscious but still the self-proclaimed "God in these streets." There are some moments that strike this note, especially the spoken-word interludes that broadly touch on social issues like privatized prisons, police brutality, and even the toll of drug dealing on the lives of the hustlers and the buyers (especially striking on a record with a song called "Hustlaz Holiday"). But they do just feel like moments, a snapshot of a project Jeezy is unable to make.
After a few years of toiling in major-label purgatory, Jeezy’s new persona (and it is a "persona," not a guiding aesthetic principle) is good for a few effective, if perhaps obvious, metaphors and symbols. The song titles, just like the album title, give it all away: "Lost Souls", "Holy Water", "God", "Forgive Me". He deserves credit for turning a new album around in just a year that’s influenced by his feelings and thoughts on the current political climate, but it feels workmanlike and too deliberate to hold weight. It is conspicuously light on guests, probably by design, but Jeezy’s voice can wear during sustained listens, and when Janelle Monáe shows up on the light, totally un-Jeezy-like single "Sweet Life", she’s anonymous.
The vibe of the music seems to suggest that Jeezy wants to bring the dank and spacey stuff that Young Thug and Future work with into his playground, but grounded in his declarative, raspy voice. It's minimal, exciting stuff, the kind of creative pivot he executed so well just a few years ago overseeing CTE. "Gold Bottles" has a weak hook but features typically baroque production from London on da Track. "God" works that same apocalyptic tone of so many 808 Mafia productions: It’s a good song until you realize it’s essentially a redux of Future’s "Sh!t" from a few years ago.
"Just Win" is another highlight, riding a mournful horn sample that recalls socially aware blaxploitation movies and their rich scores, specifically Willie Hutch and the soundtrack for The Mack. It also samples Les Brown, a motivational speaker, and the song's dynamic nails the highs and the lows of this record—it clearly wants to be a meaningful, contemplative record, but it mostly reduces his action-hero slogans to blander political ones. The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results. | 2015-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | November 20, 2015 | 6 | bcfbbb4f-3b69-476f-a4be-82a5220c8401 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
The Pearl Jam leader’s first solo album in over a decade is an amiable, tuneful set with appearances from Stevie Wonder, Ringo Starr, and Elton John. | The Pearl Jam leader’s first solo album in over a decade is an amiable, tuneful set with appearances from Stevie Wonder, Ringo Starr, and Elton John. | Eddie Vedder: Earthling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eddie-vedder-earthling/ | Earthling | To imagine the Eddie Vedder of 1993 one day sharing a mic with Elton John is like imagining the Billy Corgan of 1994 eventually writing for Marianne Faithfull: not an improbability, a reimagining. But there they are, Elton and his piano, on a rollicking little number on Vedder’s Earthling called “Picture,” his voice as crinkled as a damp leather wallet. Amiable, tuneful, and inessential, “Picture” exemplifies the spirit of the Pearl Jam frontperson’s first non-soundtrack solo album since 2011: a suite of crunchy rockers intermingling with chamber pop, recorded with the help of Stevie Wonder here and Ringo Starr there, a space for musicians who, as a pandemic raged, still wanted to bro down, virtually or otherwise. Imagine Live From Eddie’s House, not Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1.
Steeped in the mythos of bands as the last gangs in town, Vedder allows these superstar friends to garnish tracks instead of bullying them; this Neil Young and Pete Townshend devotee betrays not a hint of lèse-majesté. (Stevie and company come in at the end as if at a concert, he observed in a recent interview.) The backing band—Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, former Chili Pepper guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, and co-producer Andrew Watt on bass—don’t pestle the material. Listeners, presumably Vedder’s age and who keep their Pearl Jam CDs close, may find the petulant confidence of those guitars a reason to endure this dirty world; it’s as if the mutant disco jive “Dance of the Clairvoyants” from Pearl Jam’s last album, 2020’s Gigaton, were a bad dream after eating spoiled tuna salad. “Good and Evil” and “Rose of Jericho” will not repulse fans of bullshit-free churners like No Code’s “Lukin” or the eponymous 2006 album’s “Comatose.”
Earthling’s sturm und drang avoids potted gestures of dads-jamming-in-the-garage rebellion. A feminist in an aggro scene in which Courtney Love endured a lot of shit, Vedder has told women’s stories as early as “Alive.” The hard acoustic strummer “Fallout Today” gets into the mind of someone “drowned in her perceptions/reaching out in all directions/No escape.” It’s lovely to listen to “Invincible” open up to a multi-tracked Vedder wordlessly scraping at the ineffable like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan taught him long ago; I don’t suggest Vedder is at his level, but the effort to escape the strictures of language redresses the image of the Soundscan-era scold. But despite the clawing after transcendence, songs are fictions, momentary in the mind. “Can’t escape the timeline,” he concedes on the pillowy, Tom Petty-indebted “Long Way” as Heartbreaker Benmont Tench adds organ washes. Brother, take a number.
As the morose soothsayer ceded ground to the ukulele strummer of the last decade, Vedder has accepted with dignity his position as one-fifth of what was once—briefly—the world’s biggest band. He’s lither; he sings with a spring in his step, trusting the deepened range of his indignant burr. After several Pearl Jam albums of material pounded into meat sauce, the airier delights of Earthling’s end run let Vedder stretch—cautiously. Ringo offers the usual super-steady drum work on “Mrs. Mills,” an ode to British pianist Gladys Mills and elegy to Vedder’s own musician father, his sampled trumpet shimmering like a memory of Swinging London. “Try” boasts Stevie Wonder’s harmonica, his skirls a pair of stirrups driving Vedder and Klinghoffer’s rhythm work. “Good men don’t have to pretend!” Vedder shouts. He may even have cracked a smile.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Republic / Seattle Surf | February 11, 2022 | 6.7 | bcff3aaf-5222-4913-95d2-1783564a2b25 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
On the first proper Underworld record in half a decade, the duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith continue to place matters of the heart at the center of their best songs. | On the first proper Underworld record in half a decade, the duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith continue to place matters of the heart at the center of their best songs. | Underworld: Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21509-barbara-barbara-we-face-a-shining-future/ | Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future | Let’s talk about love—with Underworld, you kind of have to. Though still best known for shouting "lager, lager, lager" in their epochal 1996 hit "Born Slippy.NUXX," the long-running dance duo, consisting of singer-lyricist-multi-instrumentalist Karl Hyde and producer Rick Smith, have quietly but persistently placed matters of the heart at the center of their best songs. Their breakthrough single "Cowgirl" pledged "I wanna give you everything," robotically chanting the final word like a mantra for emphasis. "Jumbo," the buoyant highlight of 1999’s Beaucoup Fish, took a (literally) sweeter approach, with singer Karl Hyde purring "I need sugar" when "I get thoughts about you." And despite the involvement of a series of guest producers whose work never quite gelled, UW’s last studio album Barking was held together by a chain of out-and-out love songs, from its singles "Scribble" to its tremulous closing ballad "Louisiana" ("When you touch me, planets in sweet collision"). Regardless of their reputation for turning late-night urban-hedonism anthems into festival-filling crowdpleasers, Underworld remain romantics at heart.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future—perhaps because Smith and Hyde’s own creative romance needed rekindling. Though their post-Barking period saw them collaborate with director Danny Boyle on both his stage adaptation of Frankenstein and the opening ceremony he helmed for London’s 2012 Olympics, recent years have seen them go largely their separate ways: Hyde recorded a solo album and two well-reviewed projects with Brian Eno, while Smith reteamed with Boyle to score the Trainspotting auteur’s Trance on his own. All told, Barbara is their first proper album in over half a decade.
Opening track and lead single "I Exhale," then, establishes the pair's reunion as a party-in-progress. The two-note synth-bass riff and stomping glitter-rock rhythm provide Hyde with a solid foundation for a madcap spoken-word romp whose introductory lines—"Life / It’s a touch / Everything is golden / Open"—set a tone as upbeat as the album’s utopian title. The second song, "If Rah," features Hyde's absurd proclamation that "the origin of numbers is a questionable hypothesis." Not many acts could recover from an opening gambit that ridiculous, but Smith (working here as throughout the record with co-producer High Contrast) constructs a groove relentless enough to contextualize that non sequitur as just another outburst from a fellow reveler, dimly heard over the din of the speakers.
The celebratory vibe takes a somber but sensual turn with "Low Burn." A pulsing throwback to the soundscapes of early albums dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest in the Infants, its lyrics are a cyclic incantation—"time / first time / blush / be bold / be beautiful / free"—that call to mind landmark moments of initial liberation, whether on the dancefloor or in the bedroom. The song makes a strong enough impression that the pair of comparatively slight downtempo tracks that follow it, the acoustic guitar interlude "Santiago Cuatro" and "Motorhome" (a gentle plea to "keep away from the dark side" marked by a "Baba O’Riley"esque synthesized highland reel in the background) can be forgiven as a necessary comedown.
They also provide a breather before closing tracks "Ova Nova" and "Nylon Strung," the strongest one-two punch in the band’s catalog since "Dirty Epic" faded into "Cowgirl" on dubnobasswithmyheadman 22 years ago. Strikingly, "Ova Nova" is the first time on Barbara that Hyde sings more than a single sentence at a time, and beautifully at that. Smith gives his high lilting tenor a digital shimmer, making the refrain of "change your mind" sound less about decision-making than actual transformation. But the emergence of bonafide back-up vocals—provided by Esme Smith and Tyler Hyde, the duo’s daughters—set "Ova" off not just from the blunt singing of the rest of the album, but from the band’s entire oeuvre.
Fittingly for an album that looks to the future in its very title, Barbara saves the best for last. The rhapsodic "Nylon Strung" starts with a hint of urban decay, with Hyde’s voice echoing "Sliding between the dust of a scorched earth." But the sadness doesn’t last in the face of what’s to come. The voices of Karl and Tyler Hyde and Esme Smith weave around the lines "Open me up / I want to hold you, laughing," over and over and over, with Smith’s classical soprano soaring high above. The repetition, long the most frequently employed tool in Underworld’s lyrical arsenal, is powerfully moving: Each iteration of the line brings you closer to the absolute vulnerability inherent in loving another person, whether a parent or a partner, a lover or a daughter or a son. The effect is stunning, the kind of music that makes you sob happysad tears in your car in the Sunday afternoon sunlight as you think about the people you wish were riding with you. Underworld’s never had trouble getting listeners to their feet. This gorgeously love-drunk finale makes Barbara a record that can bring them to their knees. | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | March 15, 2016 | 8.1 | bd02e380-4ff7-403e-9c28-39634fc66138 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | null |
The Georgia rapper’s debut for Shady Records is a gritty showcase for his creativity and versatility, even if it only works in fits and starts. | The Georgia rapper’s debut for Shady Records is a gritty showcase for his creativity and versatility, even if it only works in fits and starts. | Grip: I Died for This?! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grip-i-died-for-this/ | I Died for This?! | Grip understands the strains of independent artistry. The Georgia-born rapper spent the back half of the 2010s using a ruthlessly technical and narrative-heavy style to bring his rugged Decatur upbringing to life. But, while breakout projects like 2017’s Porch and 2019’s Snubnose gained critical acclaim, he was working as a cab driver just to make ends meet. His misfortunes grew as steadily as his profile: his first chance at a nationwide tour in 2020 was thwarted by the pandemic and labels, who had begun steadily blowing up his line, were suddenly getting cold feet. In his eyes, Grip had given the game everything but his life and received very little in return.
This past year, the windfall of Grip’s success pushed him closer to stardom. He appeared on Eminem’s radar, who quickly signed him to Shady Records, and got to work crafting a proper studio debut. Even after signing with an artist whose videos he’d watched repeatedly as a child, the push-and-pull of the artist-consumer relationship he’d experienced during his early days was still on his mind. That relationship is the base of his label debut I Died For This!?—an attempt to parse through the pain and suffering that comes with performing pain and suffering. It’s a solid concept worth exploring, especially in the context of rap, and its best moments flesh out the Grip story while forcing the listener to confront their role in consuming it as #content. As a whole, though, the album’s stylistic shifts are too unwieldy to maintain the idea the whole way through.
Grip’s versatility has been his calling card from the start. Give him any type of beat—soulful, sample-driven, trunk-rattling—and he’ll catch a flow and bar out over it. His shorter projects, like his 2020 EP Proboscedia, tend to spotlight his ability to flex without a roadmap and rap for the pure sport of it. His longer, more conceptual projects lean further toward the more personal, their focus demanding a sterner sense of direction. I Died For This!? is easily Grip’s most ambitious undertaking, and when the vision comes together, the stakes feel lethally high.
On mid-album highlight “A Soldier’s Story?” Grip recounts his rise through the rap game through the eyes of an active-duty soldier. He sifts through producers Beat Butcha and Willy Will Yanez’s psychedelic guitars and drums to pen his journey from having nervous breakdowns while waiting to receive the Eminem phone call that would change his life. Memories like these and the ones powering tracks like “And the Eulogy Read!?” and “At What Cost?” feel prickly but accessible, like heirlooms locked in the closet that need to be opened carefully. Grip isn’t the first rapper whose passions have ate at his well-being, but the sense of anxiety rippling through I Died For This!? is palpable.
Executive producer and longtime collaborator Tu! helps Grip organize the intersecting lanes of his mind. The beats—whether they’re boom-bap (“Hands Up!”), trap (“Momma Told Me”), or something more sedate (“Patterns?”)—all pulse with darkness and uncertainty, coloring the hectic atmosphere of Grip’s raps. The piano stabs and organs in the middle of the cacophony of “Momma Told Me” repaint Dekalb County with a gothic texture. Conversely, the jazzy ambiance producer Latrell James brings to “At What Cost” amplifies Grip’s wrestling with his ambition to keep rapping.
Seams only begin to show when the album starts biting off more than it can chew. At 17 tracks, the album’s length does no favors for its sequencing. The tonal whiplash that comes with following a raucous song like “Glenwood Freestyle!” with the very intimate “Cost” is done for emphasis but also saps the emotional power from both songs. Most of the tracks with sung melodies, including the back half of “And The Eulogy Read!?” and the entirety of “JDDTTINT!?” are pretty but serve little utility within the album’s otherwise airtight framework. The album leaves its own atmosphere to come up for air too often, which ultimately distracts from the story at its center.
But when Grip and company lock in, I Died For This!? is urgent and thrilling. It’s bold to turn your major-label debut, an introduction to a whole new fanbase, into something akin to a meta rap version of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. But his versatility and hunger helps Grip fit right into the label that signed Griselda and Westside Boogie. His energy has clearly reinvigorated his label boss, who turns in his least cringey verse in years on “Walkthrough!” “I like to be motivated by the artists we sign and I want to feel pushed by their creativity as well,” Eminem recently told Complex. For now, Grip fits the bill.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Shady | September 7, 2021 | 6.8 | bd08b6a2-2ed3-4863-b862-b87578306c24 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Co-produced by UK dance mainstay Switch, this comeback album largely ignores all the qualities that made the Queen of Funk a legend in the first place. | Co-produced by UK dance mainstay Switch, this comeback album largely ignores all the qualities that made the Queen of Funk a legend in the first place. | Chaka Khan: Hello Happiness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chaka-khan-hello-happiness/ | Hello Happiness | On August 31, 2018, a magenta-haired, fan-carrying Chaka Khan stepped onto the stage of Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple to honor her friend and mentor Aretha Franklin. I’ve watched the video of her performance a good 20 times, mainly because of how remarkable Chaka Khan’s transformation is, how powerful she grows. She begins with “Good evening” before correcting herself and saying, “Good afternoon”; the music comes in, and her voice—famously elastic and raw—slips out, warbly and tentative. She glances a few times at the back of her fan, where the lyrics to the hymn she is singing, “Going Up Yonder,” are conspicuously pasted. There’s a good 30 seconds, the first time you see the video, where you begin to silently pray to yourself, Please don’t let this be a disaster. Several bishops sit behind her, nodding respectfully.
Then the choir starts to sway and a smile breaks out on her face. She paces the stage, a bit dazed, but in full control. Around the 2:30 mark, you can tell that Chaka Khan’s got the hang of it—she just had to warm up. The choir swells like a tidal wave and the band is locked in. Going into the third chorus, it finally happens: The Chaka Khan cry is unleashed. Pained and piercing, she summons it from somewhere deep in her stomach. It’s the same cry that punctuated the last choruses of “Ain’t Nobody” and “Through the Fire.” The respectful bishops stand up instantly, the choir sings at the top of its lungs, and Chaka Khan has risen. The performance, complete with an encore, lasts over nine minutes. She smiles as she surrenders the mic at the end, as if to remind us: She might not remember all the words or hit all the notes, but, at 65 years old, she remains the undisputed Queen of Funk.
Hello Happiness, Chaka Khan’s first album of new music in 12 years, unfortunately frames her as a novelty past her prime. Released as the first project on Diary Records, the vanity imprint of Switch—better known as an original member of Major Lazer and the man half-responsible for “Bubble Butt”—it’s an album shockingly devoid of the expert musicianship that has defined Chaka Khan’s career. Instead of emphasizing the live instrumentation, hair-raising harmonies, and goosebump-inducing modulations of Funk This, the 2007 album anchored by longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis that maximized her talents, Hello Happiness is a messy, overproduced, anonymous set of hotel-lobby beats that makes woeful use of one of the greatest voices of all time.
For whatever reason, Switch and co-producer and label co-founder Sarah Ruba Taylor have coated Chaka Khan’s voice in a claustrophobic stew of reverb and chopped it to the point that she sounds like a sample, making songs like “Don’t Cha Know” resemble Fatboy Slim remixes from 1998. Putting effects on Chaka Khan’s pipes is like screwing training wheels on a Harley Davidson. Gone are her dizzying range, nimble jazz scats, and, really, any sense of emotion. When she does sing uninhibited and with the backing of some actual music, like on the sultry and groaning “Too Hot,” she sounds marvelous. But she’s rarely given the chance.
Single “Hello Happiness,” featuring deconstructed disco violins and a thumping bassline from Sam Wilkes, could conceivably make for a good time on the dancefloor. But Switch and Ruba Taylor’s mind-numbing, budget-Jamiroquai instrumental is shockingly bland; if anything, the production here, as on the rest of Hello Happiness, makes it feel like Switch and Ruba Taylor—in drastic comparison to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s careful work on Funk This—have never before listened to a single Chaka Khan song. Of course, Chaka Khan isn’t free from blame—she’s spoken of how inspired she was meeting Switch and Ruba Taylor in the studio, and she has co-writes or production credits on every song. But no matter who's at fault, having Chaka Khan and Switch together on wax feels like washing down a $40 ribeye with a Four Loko.
There’s a moment when Hello Happiness works. On the sensual and affirming closing track, “Ladylike,” Chaka Khan finally breaks free of vocal effects, and, accompanied by feel-good guitar by funk legend Ricky Rouse and backup vocals from her daughter Indira, the contours of her voice, worked like cracked leather, are allowed to emerge. But that’s about it.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Chaka Khan is clearly in a better place than she was a few years ago: The album has been touted as marking a new chapter in her life, following a dark moment when she returned to rehab in the aftermath of the death of her close friend and collaborator Prince. If Chaka Khan’s found the happiness she’s so doggedly searched for—and deserved—over the course of a life plagued with difficulty, then we should celebrate that, despite the album’s soul-starved production. As she sings on the title track, “Love is what I’m here for/So don’t give me no bad news.”
Still, that happiness doesn’t feel truly genuine across the album. In Chaka Khan’s life and music, happiness has always been accompanied by bad news. It’s what’s made her who she is. There’s a reason she chose to sing “Going Up Yonder” at Aretha’s funeral and sang it the way she did. “I can take the pain/The heartaches they bring,” the song goes. “The comfort in knowing/I’ll soon be gone.” Now that sounds like Chaka Khan. And when she sang those words on that church stage in Detroit, the smile she unleashed—one of relief, and knowing, and strength—said it all. | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | A Diary / Island | February 20, 2019 | 5.9 | bd171e95-6503-44a0-afac-7495b92e7c2b | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
On their new album Suck My Shirt, Atlanta punks the Coathangers manage to have it all. It's well-recorded, well-written, and teeming with both force and emotional depth. | On their new album Suck My Shirt, Atlanta punks the Coathangers manage to have it all. It's well-recorded, well-written, and teeming with both force and emotional depth. | The Coathangers: Suck My Shirt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19119-the-coathangers-suck-my-shirt/ | Suck My Shirt | The Coathangers' debut album had a song called "Shut the Fuck Up", and the elements were few: a tom-heavy thwack, brief guitar stabs, and a basic keyboard melody. The lyrics, like so many others by the Atlanta punks, are aggressive: "You said I broke your heart and you’ll never love again/ Let’s tell the truth you only like the way I give head." Then, the full band screams along the chorus: "Well grow up, and then shut the fuck up!" Seven years later, on Suck My Shirt, they've got a song on the album called, simply, "Shut Up". The message here is more grown up—the narrator is fed up after years of being lied to, whined at, and blamed. And this time around, the band are firing on all cylinders—the drums sound more full, the guitars more complex, and the vocals are sung rather than growled or screamed. "Shut up," they sing repeatedly at the chorus, more out of frustration than vindictiveness.
No longer peddling the candy-coated vigor of "Stop Stomp Stompin'" or the intense, Nina Hagen-esque vocal delivery of "Johnny", Suck My Shirt shows a band continuing to grow and refine their sound. Have they become more tame as they've become a tighter band? Hell no. Their instruments still bite and their vocals still growl. But this time, the subject matter feels weightier. Several songs have the band addressing the harsh realities of love and relationships ("I know it's hard to love me," bellows Stephanie Luke on "Love Em and Leave Em"), all while delivering some of the best performances in their discography.
Four tracks that recently appeared on Suicide Squeeze singles, reworked for the album, are all performed with urgency and power. "Smother" is a persistent burner with an infectious chorus about needing space. "Adderall", one of the best-constructed songs of the album with its subtle harmonies and calm-before-the-storm chorus, is about deception. You can detect a hint of sorrow in Luke's vocals on "Derek's Song", a requiem for their fallen friend Derek Shepherd, but it's offset by the track's opening power chords. Then there's "Merry Go Round", one of the album's undeniable highlights, and describing the "he tricks her, she tricks him" plot isn't nearly as interesting as the earworm chorus: "I'll have some fun on the merry go round,/ I'll get real high on the merry go round...".
The only snag along the way has to do with the length of their songs. Album opener "Follow Me" has a melody that's immediate and lyrics that're both aggressive and playful, but it's a song that goes for a largely unvarying four minutes. Before they even find the second minute, they're repeating the lengthy-on-its-own first verse again. Why? It's a punk song with momentum, but it's stretched too thin. Other songs start slow—"Love Em and Leave Em", for example, which opens with a trudge. But that track is also an example of one of the Coathangers' greatest strengths: They've become adept proprietors of "the drop." Right as the chorus hits, there's a pause, and then they launch into a breakneck chorus. It's even more satisfying one track later, on "Zombie", because it's completely unexpected. The track comes to a full stop. Then a wall of frenzied guitars, fingers shoved to the bottom of the fretboard, an atmosphere that's sudden and dire.
There's plenty of ire on Suck My Shirt, but the album's real stunner is "Drive", which isn't angry at all. Their warm, gentle power pop guitars close the album, and the narrator sings with a sense of longing. She's waiting for someone special to come home; it's been too long. "But you," she sings, pausing—maybe the pause is there so the verse can fit in the confines of the song's structure, but it's just as likely that the truth at hand is too painful for the full sentence to come out at once. "You drive away from me." She says she'll stop waiting around for him, but as the chorus hits and she sings "so long, my love," it feels bittersweet. It's a relatable sentiment in a beautiful song. Somehow, on an album called Suck My Shirt, the Coathangers manage to have it all. It's well-recorded, well-written, and teeming with both force and emotional depth. | 2014-03-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-03-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Suicide Squeeze | March 19, 2014 | 7.2 | bd1a86f3-5e0e-4108-a8ce-d07e32e6f86b | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The debut release from queer multimedia artist Bully Fae, on Matmos' Vague Terrain label, mixes rapping, stand-up comedy, spoken-word, and more into a hilarious and fascinating whole. | The debut release from queer multimedia artist Bully Fae, on Matmos' Vague Terrain label, mixes rapping, stand-up comedy, spoken-word, and more into a hilarious and fascinating whole. | Bully Fae: Defy a Thing to Be | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22583-defy-a-thing-to-be/ | Defy a Thing to Be | It’s been a few years since Matmos’ label Vague Terrain released a piece of new music, and for the most part Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have called the organization a “vanity label” to release their own work and play around. In 2002, they even used Vague Terrain as a pseudonym to record the soundtrack for a fetish-heavy pornographic film. “Every so often we hear something completely gobsmacking and feel that we MUST share it with the world,” the pair wrote on their website to suddenly announce the revival of their label.
The project that so shocked them is the debut album of Bully Fae, a queer Los-Angeles based multimedia artist. Defy a Thing to Be is the artist’s first formal release, but they (Fae prefers not to be gendered) have been sharing performance pieces and fragments of the album, which mixes rapping, stand-up comedy, abstracted spoken word, and goofy (but highly effective) dancing into a hilarious and fascinating whole.
Fae’s work has been described as the middle of a “Bermuda Triangle” that includes three artistic forebears: Nicki Minaj, the video artist Ryan Trecartin, and the poet Ariana Reines. Meaning, the work they make is colorful, fueled by amphetamines and raunchy, but highly theoretical, and very interested in the body and identity. Defy a Thing to Be is a short, acerbic, and often very funny album that only spans 22 minutes over 9 tracks. It lives in this intersection of experimental dance music and hip hop, one that recalls the work of artists like Yves Tumor, Nguzunguzu (and the Night Slugs/Fade to Mind crew at large), Lotic, and queer rappers like Le1f. Although, unlike any of these artists, Fae’s work is much more invested—often to its own detriment—in heady and restricted kinds of experimentation.
The lyrics attempt to explore a broad and almost overwhelming number of subjects. The writing can be very serious and probing: “Hack up the program hosting us/Addicted to systems.../You could say I’m addicted/But how do we define addiction,” but also grotesquely humorous: “Bossy but a bottom at best I wish.” On the level of Fae’s writing alone, there is a sly and investigative quality that can’t be imitated. Yet, their voice will definitely be polarizing for many listeners. It can be piercing or cartoonish, and it is often garbled by digital effects, but there is no avoiding the fact that a needling voice can be a bad messenger for such dense thinking. Even if unintended, Fae’s sometimes erratic flow can make the expression of their ideas clunky and forced.
Often, the album’s saving grace is clever, subtle, and fluid production across the nine tracks. Fae’s beats are often vaporous, foreboding, and almost dystopian, cloaking their voice with a razor’s edge that makes up for any vocal shortcomings. Take for example songs like “Elevator Pitch (lasséz-fairy forecast),” where Fae attempts to critically frame this corporate experience with a queer sensibility. Lines like, “Picture us online/All accounts entwined” or “Like a verb man can I heard your a word man” don’t sound disjointed or so random, because Fae is able to create a sonic space that is dimly lit and uncomfortable and unpredictable. In the music video for the song, it becomes profoundly weird, which depicts Fae cavorting around an empty office in a shabby suit.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Defy a Thing to Be is that it just seems better suited for the stage or for visual consumption. Part of Fae’s theory of performance is based upon a kind of focused randomness that can be lost with the album form. Watching videos of Fae perform show that their ideas simultaneously focus and loosen in the context of actual performance. The critical aspect of Fae’s work seems to go missing when experienced only in your headphones.
Similar to the artist working in the NON collective, Fae works to implicate an audience, but it requires a dance floor and willing group to generate this ideal experience. Fae almost proves Peggy Phelan's idea that performance can only exist in the present, and that documentation and records of it are profoundly different. As an act of artistic subversion, Defy a Thing to Be hits the mark with its level of thinking, but misses a key element of physicality that would make it something special. | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Vague Terrain | November 29, 2016 | 6.5 | bd1b7c84-4489-400a-9d2b-6e961171af81 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The enigmatic Swedish rapper strips back his hypnotic music until it’s nothing but AutoTuned crooning and chanted slogans. | The enigmatic Swedish rapper strips back his hypnotic music until it’s nothing but AutoTuned crooning and chanted slogans. | Bladee: Exeter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bladee-exeter/ | Exeter | Though his Auto-Tuned vocals have remained a constant, each Bladee project tends to sound like a new era. The enigmatic Swedish rapper and Drain Gang leader has moved through the airy lo-fi sound of his first mixtape, 2014’s Gluee, to the the icy industrial of his 2016 debut album, Eversince, and the futuristic pop of Drain Gang’s most recent group project, 2019’s Trash Island. Along the way, his music has become sunnier and more melodic, while his songwriting, which has veered at times into the deeply depressive, has grown increasingly pared down and positive.
EXETER is Bladee’s third studio album and the first time he’s worked significantly with Gud, the Sad Boys producer and close Yung Lean collaborator. Bladee has always had range—even on his first album, aggressive songs like “Rip” lived alongside ballads like “Skin”—but, here, he pushes even further towards blissful pop and strips down his lyrics to their most minimal extreme.
The album’s intro, “MIRROR (HYMN),” serves as a blueprint for his approach. Over twinkling ascending notes, he repeats three phrases—“Mirror in the way,” “Follow all the way,” and “Window in the way”—in a circular pattern before adding something more concrete: “Ego in the way/I go all the way/I’m not in the way.” On “MERRY-GO-ROUND,” he examines the cycles of life, striking a satisfying balance between simple writing and catchy melody. But his less-is-more approach starts to feel hollow on “EVERY MOMENT SPECIAL,” a song with even simpler lyrics that consist of just two repeated phrases (“Every moment’s special, you make every moment special” and “Only one wish, baby, it has to be perfect”).
Where the 18-minute project starts to feel shapeless, guest spots on “WONDERLAND” and “LOVESTORY” from Ecco2K, Bladee’s sweet-voiced Drain Gang compatriot, help anchor it. But it’s Gud’s production that glues the album together. Listening to the crinkly distortion effects on “RAIN3OW STAR (LOVE IS ALL)” with headphones on sounds like dialing out of the Matrix. More than ever before, Bladee uses his voice like another instrument and pays attention to blank space, allowing Gud’s sparkling melodies and muffled percussion to breathe. They meet perfectly on “DNA RAIN,” a glitchy, angelic song that’s a reminder of Bladee’s influence on the clipped vocal stylings of current internet darlings 100 gecs and the legion of artists that have already sprung up in their wake.
Bladee’s music has always been about building alternate universes, and the one he creates with Gud on EXETER sounds like a warped version of Mario’s journey to save Princess Peach—but without a neat and predictable conclusion. Instead, he seems to be removing himself as much as possible and inviting listeners to grapple with their own interpretations. “I’m not special,” he emphasizes over and over on “OPEN SYMBOLS (PLAY) BE IN YOUR MIND.” For those that haven’t yet bought into Bladee, EXETER probably won’t be the turning point and, even among die-hard fans, it’s minimalism has already proven to be controversial. But it’s the sort of album that rewards you the closer you lean into it. | 2020-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Year0001 | April 16, 2020 | 7.2 | bd1dd90c-51fa-4a9e-b9b4-e7a295a5717a | Ben Dandridge-Lemco | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-dandridge-lemco/ | |
Mixing speech and singing, the New York-based sound poet and experimental musician meditates on meaning, context, and impermanence. | Mixing speech and singing, the New York-based sound poet and experimental musician meditates on meaning, context, and impermanence. | Asha Sheshadri: Interior Monologues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asha-sheshadri-interior-monologues/ | Interior Monologues | In his 1978 essay Sound Poetry: A Survey, poet Steve McCaffery traces three distinct eras of the field. He notes the first “paleotechnic” period as defined by chant structures—think nursery and jump-rope rhymes. Later came the Dadaists and Futurists, whose desire to split words from semantic meaning allowed for a focus on their acoustic properties. Then the tape recorder arrived, allowing practitioners to work beyond the human body’s limitations. Sound poetry, he asserts, is about feeling the insufficiency of language and, as a result, finding new possibilities of expression. A concluding declaration is at the heart of his text: “[Sound poetry] is, above all, a practice of freedom.”
Asha Sheshadri’s music displays a rigorous consideration for the way that technological practices can rupture language to create something original. She’s strikingly different from many of her sound-art peers, the kind who’ve spent the past decade using spoken text in diaristic modes or as a way to approximate ASMR videos (a phenomenon that has often ignored its sonic precedents in sound poetry, radio plays, and acousmatic music). On her 2020 epic “Patty Live June,” she uses field recordings, shapeshifting electronics, and text recitations to explore the psychology of Stockholm syndrome. Across Misfired Empathy, her collaboration with brainy prankster Jack Callahan, any speech we hear is regularly mangled to create conflicting emotions. She pushes her practice further with Interior Monologues, a solo album that features her most compelling use of singing as a phonological, textual, and conceptual launchpad.
In previous works, any singing Sheshadri employed had a largely textural impact. Under the Isolde Touch moniker, reverberating vocals recall artists like Julianna Barwick. In Open Corner, her duo with Christian Mirande, fleeting melodic moments are just one element in a robust sound collage. Throughout Interior Monologues’ 29 minutes, she sings Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me” with a tender casualness—the sort of vocalizing that only barely breaches the talking/singing threshold, and has the semblance of someone puttering around at home. Her edited, overlapping, and non-chronological mishmash of verses creates a technology-produced simultaneous poem, and the effect is evocative. It’s easy to identify the loping melodies of Mitchell’s lines “Oh, didn’t it feel good?” and “When I get that crazy feelin’” as deeply lovestruck. But as Sheshadri repeats Mitchell’s words, a palpable sense of anxiety comes to the surface; found sounds and stuttering samples reinforce the impression that this is an illusory moment frozen in time. One spoken line sums up the mood: “Three hours of total disbelief.”
This focus on the temporary is highlighted by the album cover’s lightly edited images of Charles Ray’s Two horses (2019). The piece exemplifies what the sculptor once said about the medium: “A sculpture physically ages as it slips into time. Authorship, context, and content fade away long before sculptural stone turns into sand.” It’s no coincidence that the Court and Spark highlight is the song Sheshadri wields here: Its lyrics reference “I’m a Rambler, I’m a Gambler,” a traditional American folk song that has been interpreted by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. When the second half of Interior Monologues tightens the focus on this pairing of recited text and song (and even includes moments when the former turns into singing), Sheshadri embraces the inevitability of contextual dissolution. Musings on Two horses and the impermanence of one’s cultural footprint are revisited with slight variances, and they have the effect of gradually repurposing what Mitchell’s words mean. The refrain of “Help Me” (“We love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom”) is initially a sobering reality check about a doomed romance, but near Interior Monologues’ end, the “freedom” Sheshadri sings of feels related to something else entirely: the impossibility of fully understanding art in their original contexts. Find joy, she seems to suggest, in how unavoidable ignorance always births something new.
Sheshadri’s music is clearly indebted to sound poetry forebears like Henri Chopin, Marran Gosov, Larry Wendt, and text-sound composer Åke Hodell. But her music has a propulsive energy that embodies the entirety of sound poetry’s progressive spirit and complex history, one that McCaffery found challenging to discuss because of its competing but related concerns—“attempts to recover lost traditions” and “attempts to effect a radical break with all continuities.” The most striking result is that Interior Monologues then points to the beauty of all art as a prismatic culmination of exchanges across different generations and cultures. In theory and practice, Sheshadri’s music reminds us that everyone can and does participate in this never-ending dialogue. | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hold | March 30, 2022 | 7.5 | bd1e3918-ae11-47d9-8d3b-b4486c3d1d56 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters singer-songwriter ends the year with yet another quality release-- this time, a record of lovely instrumentals and covers of tracks from tribute and benefit albums. | The Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters singer-songwriter ends the year with yet another quality release-- this time, a record of lovely instrumentals and covers of tracks from tribute and benefit albums. | Mark Kozelek: The Finally LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12492-the-finally-lp/ | The Finally LP | As the exec and main signee of Caldo Verde Records, Mark Kozelek can release pretty much whatever he wants. This year alone has seen a full-length by his band Sun Kil Moon, which was packaged with a bonus disc of alternate takes; an LP of live and alternate takes that accompanied the U.S. publication of his book of lyrics; a live EP that came free with purchase at his online store; and finally a covers album. Rather than flood the market or dilute the quality of his output, these releases suggest Kozelek tinkers with his own and others' compositions continuously. In this regard, he's certainly no stranger to the covers album: His first solo release was 2000's Rock 'N' Roll Singer, which included songs by AC/DC and John Denver, and he has since released full-lengths fully devoted to AC/DC and Modest Mouse. But The Finally LP is something a bit different even for him: a record of lovely instrumentals and covers of tracks from tribute and benefit albums.
Finally may be LP length but it lacks an album's cohesiveness. There's no big statement here, at least not like there was with April, his second album with Sun Kil Moon. However, the looseness of the tracklist allows him to indulge some punishing metal riffs and howling emo madman vocals. Yeah, right. Kozelek is the king of somber and of course gives these covers his signature reading: slow, melancholy, full of stoic vocals and steady, shimmery guitar. This solemn take doesn't work against the LP, but in its favor. The Finally LP is Kozelek's own tribute of sorts, a nod to his array of idols and influences.
The title comes from a song by folk singer Kath Bloom, who has experienced a resurgence of sorts in the past two years. Kozelek covered the song for Loving Takes Its Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom, out next year on her Australian label, Chapter Music. He gives it a tension that wasn't present in the original: Bloom's version was as much a valedictory as the title suggests, but for Kozelek, there are no promises in catharsis and no conclusion in the song. Such dourness, while not unexpected, has always threatened to become Kozelek's default mode, but here his curiously pessimistic interpretation sounds raw and wounded, as if he hasn't yet shaken off the darkness of whatever is finally coming to and end. His ruminative reading of "New Partner", from the 2006 comp I Am a Cold Rock, I Am Dull Grass: A Tribute to Will Oldham, develops that theme and storyline, creating an intriguing diptych about loss and renewal.
This is an album of transitions. The segue from "Finally" into "New Partner" gives both songs more impact than they might have otherwise, as does "Bedtime Lullaby" into "Celebrated Summer". "Lullaby" was recorded for an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba!, and this song, along with dancing Nathaniel and a beatboxing lesson from Biz Markie, would argue that it might just be the greatest show ever. If some listeners claim that Kozelek puts them to sleep, he has responded with a song specifically designed to put listeners to sleep. Written by the show's Jarond Gibbs, it makes for a sweet lullaby and leads in nicely to Kozelek's cover of Hüsker Dü's "Celebrated Summer", which he slows down to great effect, playing up wistful memories of youth like an adult's lullaby.
He's less successful with his cover of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns", off the charity comp Musicians for Minneapolis: 57 Songs for the I-35 Bridge Disaster Relief Fund. Kozelek grafts an effective descending acoustic riff onto the chorus and adds a slight lilt to the melody, but it's still "Send in the Clowns". Low's "Lazy" fares better, as Kozelek's voice cracks just enough to convey a strong sense of yearning. His delivery lends added gravity to "My Friend Bob", by Dom Leone (not Pitchfork's Dominique Leone, but the late songwriter for Ed's Redeeming Qualities), although his cover of AC/DC's "If You Want Blood", recorded for Lisbon radio, isn't appreciably different from the version that appeared on What's Next to the Moon. There's a hodgepodge quality to The Finally LP, but like his recent EPs, bonus discs, and live collections, it proves another essential non-essential. | 2008-12-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-12-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde | December 9, 2008 | 7.3 | bd29e4ea-a499-40f9-9840-a26bb8fbe0ab | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The South African gqom trio explores the joy and disorder of sensory overload on its vibrant second album. | The South African gqom trio explores the joy and disorder of sensory overload on its vibrant second album. | Phelimuncasi: Ama Gogela | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phelimuncasi-ama-gogela/ | Ama Gogela | Phelimuncasi want to jolt their audience into a mad, uninhibited state of dance. The South African trio of Makan Nana, Khera, and Malathon makes harsh and propulsive gqom, a vigorous strain of house music that sprung from Durban townships in the early 2010s. On their restless and vibrant second album, Ama Gogela—named after a menacing South African bee—Phelimuncasi enlist a glossary of local producers to shape their scorching, urgent club cuts. Uninterested in subtlety or the slow burn of build-ups, they prefer sensory overload: clattering, repetitive polyrhythms and snarled call-and-response vocals.
Gqom is inherently democratic. Its exact origin point is unknown, and the genre has generated a kind of DIY lore: Some guy futzing with production software in his bedroom birthed a more rugged and intense variant of kwaito—the cleaner, mainstream style of South African house. It is more likely that a handful of nascent producers conducted this experiment simultaneously, tapping into the collective unconscious of Durban and its surrounding communities. Produced largely on FruityLoops, early gqom tracks were unmixed and unmastered, passed around in massive WhatsApp group chats and offered as free downloads on websites dedicated to the genre. Though the songs were often too low quality for radio airplay, local taxis would blast the latest hits from their consoles to attract people pouring out of nightclubs.
Conservatives targeted the genre, who condemned its artists for encouraging delinquent behavior and drug use. Certain tracks were banned from South African radio, while local venues endured a rash of police raids. Phelimuncasi allude to this brand of artistic oppression frequently on Ama Gogela. On the creeping, drone-spurred “Maka Nana,” featuring South African rapper Bhejane, the MCs cite an approaching police van and subsequent arrests. “We just having fun,” they sing, volleying lines back and forth in isiZulu over DJ Scoturn’s crispy hi-hats. “This is dark entertainment.” Rather than buff out blemishes with gleaming pop melodies, Phelimuncasi embrace the grit with a barrage of guttural bass and hissing percussion.
Phelimuncasi’s work is often self-referential, documenting the club scene in their local Mlaszi township—the drinks and dance moves but also the disorder. In this way they shape their own narrative, one of defiance and camaraderie. Like so many schools of censored art—punk, Dada, drill—Phelimuncasi’s work points to an entire community pushing back. They are strengthened by the collective; their music, with its snapping, incessant beats, provokes a physical response, designed to be heard in public. On “Kdala Ngiwa Ngivuka,” Malathon admits to being “hardened” by history but strives to rejoice in spite of adversity. “Please stop hating,” he sings in his low, round register as robotic chirps echo in the background. “Just listen to my good music and dance like you don’t have a future.”
Phelimuncasi have described their music as “irresistible” and “painful,” and their best songs incite a ceaseless, fanatical response on par with The Red Shoes. Maximalist opener “I Don’t Feel My Legs” perfects this frenzy; rubbery bass notes propel the track as Makan Nana and Khera’s voices tangle like crossed telephone lines. Sirens caterwaul in the distance and a simmering beat buzzes like the mechanized stab of a tattoo needle. Its density and insistent rhythm feels all-encompassing, with the momentum of a densely-packed, chanting crowd. The Net Gala-produced “Ngiphupha Izinto” is another offbeat banger, bursting with plasticky drum trills and a springy synth pattern that sounds like wingdings transposed into musical notation. The song perpetuates the group’s self-made mythology, as they envision crowds around the globe flailing to their music. Listening to Ama Gogela, far from the heaving dancefloor, you can almost see it for yourself. | 2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Nyege Nyege Tapes | May 16, 2022 | 7.6 | bd34dd7b-6c51-4f80-8bf2-6f572962f0e2 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Now reissued in expanded editions, the first official Sub Pop release—and its full-length follow-up—deserve more than historical footnote status. | Now reissued in expanded editions, the first official Sub Pop release—and its full-length follow-up—deserve more than historical footnote status. | Green River: Dry As a Bone/Rehab Doll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/green-river-dry-as-a-bonerehab-doll/ | Dry As a Bone/Rehab Doll | Green River are known best for having broken up. Any retelling of the history of the Seattle music boom in the 1990s worth its wack slacks will explain how the 1988 demise of Green River begat Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone, which begat Pearl Jam, which ultimately begat platinum records and global pandemonium and the upending of underground culture. But before all that begatting, there were some records; after 30-plus years of exhaustive hindsight and recontextualization, Green River’s songs have aged better than many of their better-known contemporaries. Taken as a whole, they remind us that history is not always as neat as the way we remember it.
The band’s second EP, 1986’s Dry As a Bone, is the faster, scrappier, punkier, and more lo-fi one. While Green River’s 1988 full-length debut and swan song, Rehab Doll, isn’t exactly polished, it has the distinctly late-1980s big-drums feel of something someone tried to polish before the band imploded—at least in part over disagreements about how much it should be polished. Still, the two records bear more similarities than differences, an implicit point of Sub Pop’s expanded reissues of both. Four songs (“One More Stitch,” “Hangin’ Tree,” “Together We’ll Never,” “10000 Things”) appear on both editions in multiple forms and in varying degrees of shagginess. This isn’t a novel concept—Sub Pop reissued the records as a single title in 1990. Together, Dry As a Bone and Rehab Doll deserve a richer legacy than that of a walking prologue.
At all of five songs in its original incarnation (and bulked up to 16 here), Dry As a Bone will mainly be immortalized for being the first proper release on Sub Pop, albeit about a year after the EP was finished. Recorded by producer Jack Endino, whose imprimatur became nearly as integral to the scene’s mythology as flannel itself, it’s a mischievous, unassuming dogearring of the Stooges playbook—the embodiment of what the word “grunge” might sound like before it lost all meaning. These songs remain a natural showcase for Mark Arm’s inimitable yawp. Far from filler or mere fan service, the added tracks show a band clawing at its restraints as it learns how to play together in real time, particularly on “Hangin’ Tree,” “Bleeding Sheep,” and the six-and-a-half-minute “Bazaar.”
Rehab Doll was intended to be the great leap forward, but the band was finished before the album even came out. “Mark wanted to keep the band more down to earth, and the other guys wanted it to become something bigger,” drummer Alex Vincent told author Mark Yarm (no relation) for the definitive Seattle rock oral history, Everybody Loves Our Town. The reissue stands, then, as a fascinating document of an impassable crossroads. After initially recording with Endino, the band instead hired producer Bruce Calder to smooth the edges. Most of the songs are included in both forms here, and toggling between the two amounts to a clinic in what gets lost—and more crucially, what doesn’t. Though not intentional, the original album feels cast as the villain, an outmoded example of slickness or careerism versus the Important Authenticity of the Endino recordings.
But to believe that is to buy into the idea that ’80s metal in all its grandeur and thwomp was inherently bad (it was not) or that Duff McKagan wasn’t in the Fastbacks (he was). This David-versus-Goliath conflict has always been at the core of the Seattle story, but Rehab Doll reminds us that the truth was messy; before these bands were saddled with carrying the torch for authenticity, they made big, dumb, fun rock. The things that work best about the songs work in either iteration—a hook is a hook. The riffs that guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament helped write later may be more famous, but few do their job better than the ones driving “Hangin’ Tree” or Dry As a Bone’s frantic opener, “This Town.”
The combination of humor and gloom helped set the scene’s mood as much as any Big Muffed guitar sound. There is an earworm catchiness to even the most nihilistic romps, like “Smilin’ and Dyin’” (“Misery loves company, baby/That’s why I love you”) and, most indelibly, Arm’s defiant refrain during Rehab Doll’s “Swallow My Pride.” “This ain’t the summer of love!” he wails, lifting several lines from Blue Öyster Cult to presage the wagon-circling to come as bands and labels and media outlets would very soon saturate the city, thinking it some sort of countercultural utopia.
Little else ages the songs. The distinct whelp of Arm’s vocals sounds just like it does on the Mudhoney album that came out last year. Untethered from their historical baggage and period-specific sheen, these Green River songs just feel like good, loud, heavy, snotty rock tunes, the way grunge intended. | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 28, 2019 | 7.8 | bd37971b-7030-4d3a-a5c0-dddef35f4c6f | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
Your humble reviewer is not hugely invested in the state or the fate of hip-hop. A lot of folks are ... | Your humble reviewer is not hugely invested in the state or the fate of hip-hop. A lot of folks are ... | Aesop Rock: Labor Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/65-labor-days/ | Labor Days | Your humble reviewer is not hugely invested in the state or the fate of hip-hop. A lot of folks are, though, sometimes to an unfortunate extent-- hip-hop spends almost as much time drawing lines and fighting over its own image as the punk and hardcore zines do, albeit more entertainingly. One of the results of this is that a whole lot of hip-hop records are basically about hip-hop: the mainstream stuff (aka "real" hip-hop) offers up further meta-explorations of a few MC-persona archetypes, while the undie stuff (aka "real" hip-hop) dedicates itself to the Ancient Skillz of crate-digging, battle rhyming, and either picking on the mainstream or spitting abstract jumbles of wordplay. The former is how we get stuff like P. Diddy saying, "I don't write rhymes, I write checks"; the latter is how we get stuff like the Anti-Pop Consortium, who sound godlike in ten second snippets but prove mind-numbingly tedious by fifteen.
Aesop Rock is one of those MCs who have stumbled upon a blindingly intelligent solution to this state of affairs: he's ignored all of that baggage and made a record that's mostly about something. That something is work. Labor-- effort in its broadest sense-- is a topic he treats sometimes pedantically but often more thought-provokingly than not only the bulk of hip-hop, but the bulk of any genre. It helps that Labor Days is as terrific a record as anyone could ask for, really, and you should buy it, and here's why.
First: Aesop Rock is a terrific MC. His flow is rapid but clear; his interjections, double-time verses and sing-song bits are arranged with near-symphonic skill. He's also calm and confident, avoiding both the egomaniacal swagger of a lot of mainstream and the egomaniacal jerkiness of a lot of underground, while nicking their finer points as well. Better than that: Aesop Rock's flow is brilliant, a combination of mindbending wordplay ("Who am I?" he asks, then answers: "Jabberwocky Superfly!"), in-rhymed poetics ("You won't be laughing when the buzzards drag your brother's flags to rags"), and surgically sharp, eye-rolling dismissals of anyone he disapproves of: "If you had one more eye you'd be a cyclops," runs one, "which may explain your missing the premise." Aesop Rock says more astoundingly intelligent things per minute than the entire combined rosters of a lot of other labels.
Second: Blockhead, who produces much of this record, does an equally terrific job. Labor Days is bound for constant comparisons to Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein, the other Def Jux Edgy Intelligent NYC MCs with Stark Progressive Beats record to crop up on 2001's year-end lists. And while the comparisons are valid ones, lyrically and often sonically, Labor Days differs by trading in The Cold Vein's minimalist grind for an equally minimal but remarkably lush, cinematic spread of subtly weaving beats and sinuous, somber, minor-key instrumental arrangements that sound as if someone has been doing his crate-digging in the klezmer, bouzouki, and koto piles of the "World Classical" section.
"Daylight," the record's initial standout, works from a long, plush melodic loop with a wood flute sighing over it (there are a lot of woody flutes on this record-- enough to make you wonder if Blockhead wouldn't have done a better job than RZA on the Ghost Dog soundtrack). Meanwhile, "Save Yourself," the record's real standout, consists of a slow-motion lope constructed from staccato bass blips, an east-Mediterranean guitar pluck, and wispy female cooing. "Battery" stretches the limits of hip-hop pastoralism with a bass-and-cello figure and more of those fluttering coos with Ace intoning, "Brother sun, sister moon, mother beautiful," and, "I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids."
If most hip-hop chases a futuristic, brightly lit city vitality, Labor Days is laid out peacefully on a rainy plain somewhere. And if The Cold Vein sounds like the grind of inscrutable machinery, Labor Days waits a couple hundred years for those machines to be covered with moss and vines. When it all comes together, on "9-5ers Anthem"-- a track which pairs a sprightly bassline with handbells (handbells!) with Ace in top form, spitting out brilliant parallel metaphors for quotidian employment-- it seems so all-consumingly right: hip-hop bouncing confidently along, actually saying something about something, and saying it well and smartly.
Aesop Rock does have a message here, which you'd expect to be a bad thing but isn't, really, insofar as the message is a pretty reasonable one. Ace's message is that life can be hard but that's all the more reason to shut your mouth and work on something that makes you happy. Essentially. Labor Days gets cartoonish only once, on "No Regrets," which is still a decent and sensitive track but which we won't really get into here because on the other hand, it's the inherent pragmatism of Ace's theme that allows for his wonderfully apologetic complaints about 9-5 employment. Not to mention all those glorious eye-rolling disses: "Keep me posted," he says, "as to when you grasp something mature to sit and soak about, Mister, and I'll consider picking up your record."
That last line's from "Save Yourself," which collects Ace's comments on the How We Do Hip-Hop question-- he's undie, of course, here with his sonically progressive Def Jux release, so clearly he's going to drop some invective on this Important Issue. His take, though? Forget it: "Maybe you ought to try saving something other than hip-hop," insightful advice no matter what genre you insert at the end. "Pistons pump perfect," he says, then, "what you're holding ain't really broken." And for the duration of Labor Days, it's pretty clear that in the hands of someone with something to use it for, it's not, not at all. | 2002-01-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-01-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | January 22, 2002 | 8.7 | bd39cbbf-f51d-4018-b57f-bcaa89a6aaff | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
It's no real surprise that Alice in Chains are still around-- there's always money in the reunion rounds-- but it is a surprise that the band's latest album actually sounds like they're trying to move forward. The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is more inventive than it needs to be, and less self-congratulatory than past efforts. | It's no real surprise that Alice in Chains are still around-- there's always money in the reunion rounds-- but it is a surprise that the band's latest album actually sounds like they're trying to move forward. The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is more inventive than it needs to be, and less self-congratulatory than past efforts. | Alice in Chains: The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18086-alice-in-chains-the-devil-put-dinosaurs-here/ | The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here | Alice in Chains were one of the most successful grunge acts of the 1990s, but they were also one of the most derided. They started life as a glam-derived metal band, for which they were dismissed by the same people who embraced Seattle’s other big glam-derived metal band, Mother Love Bone. Layne Staley’s drug metaphors and horror-show vocals made hits out of “Man in the Box” and “Would?” but he could often sound self-satisfied regarding his addictions, which ultimately made it difficult for them to tour. If Alice in Chains staked its popularity on the still-vital Dirt in 1992, they maintained it with an MTV Unplugged album. As a band, they never possessed the metal chops of Soundgarden, or the arena-punk populism of Pearl Jam, or the self-torturing sound of Nirvana. As an influence on subsequent bands, they are arguably responsible for mook-metal acts like Puddle of Mudd, codifying self-absorption as a viable rock'n'roll stance.
Even after Staley’s OD in 2002, it’s no real surprise that Alice in Chains are still around-- there’s always cash in nostalgia-- but it is a surprise that the band's latest album actually sounds like they're trying to move forward rather than rest on their dubious laurels. Despite its very 1990s red jewel case and its trollable title, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is actually a solid mainstream rock album: more inventive than it needs to be, and less self-congratulatory in its intense introspection. That’s due to new vocalist William DuVall, who approximates Staley's blared sneer but actually has more expressive range. And mostly it’s due to Jerry Cantrell, the guitar player, chief songwriter, and arguably the brains behind the band for 20 years now.
In 2009, this new line-up made the tortured-but-determined Black Gives Way to Blue, which lacked the desperation of a typical comeback record. In retrospect, that album sounds like a warm-up for Dinosaurs, which sounds more confident and concentrated than its predecessor. The hooks sounds more insistent, the guitars grind harder, and the songwriting sounds almost extroverted at times. The title track is one of Alice in Chains’ most politicized songs to date, a God’s-eye-view of religious extremism in America and a quick glimpse back at the spiritual doubts that infected “Man in the Box”. “The devil put dinosaurs here,” DuVall sings as the guitars quake and rumble, as though the bottom were falling out of the song. “No problem with faith, just fear.”
That song is six-and-a-half minutes long. It doesn’t need to be. Chop it in half and you could double its impact. But the same could be said of just about any track on Dinosaurs, which typically lumber past the five-minute mark. The result is an album that feels much longer than its bloated 70 minutes, that often buries its best moments, that exhausts its most intriguing ideas either by stretching them out or simply repeating them. On the other hand, Dinosaurs actually does have some intriguing ideas to exhaust, mostly about how you play mainstream rock in 2013. Rather than foreground crunching guitars, “Pretty Done” and “Voices” build their riffs piecemeal out of bent and tortured notes that fit together in jigsaw fashion. The technique approximates melody but conveys mood precisely. That’s what makes first single “Stone” so effective: You’re a full minute or so in before you realize just how smart and menacing its central guitar riff is, or how it slyly establishes an atmosphere of subtle aggression.
In other words, Alice in Chains would rather sneak up on you than attack you with blunt force. That serves a fairly boilerplate anthem like “Scalpel” especially well as it builds quickly from an acoustic intro to an extroverted chorus that in concert likely prompts a few raised lighters. On the other hand, Dinosaurs loses some of its stomp toward the end, with the by-the-numbers “Phantom Limb” and the plodding “Hung on a Hook” sounding more like what you’d expect from Alice in Chains 20 years after their heyday. So it’s as insistent as Dirt, but it’s also not as superfluous as, for example, Soundgarden’s recent reunion record. Instead, Dinosaurs is a testament to how 90s alt-rock angst can translate meaningfully to middle age. | 2013-06-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin / Capitol | June 4, 2013 | 5.9 | bd4b1ba2-7e8f-4c5b-a88b-d46f605da56a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The riffs come hard, fuzzy, and fast on the Bristol punks’ deeply passionate second album—and the platitudes follow close behind. | The riffs come hard, fuzzy, and fast on the Bristol punks’ deeply passionate second album—and the platitudes follow close behind. | Idles: Joy as an Act of Resistance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/idles-joy-as-an-act-of-resistance/ | Joy as an Act of Resistance | IDLES’ new album concerns the tragedies of illness and loss, the addict’s vacillation between sobriety and vice, and the discomfort of rational people at the current state of the world. Joe Talbot, the band’s sardonic, growling singer, lost his disabled mother, cleaned up his substance abuse, and watched the xenophobic Brexit go down—all while his Bristol-based post-punk quintet blew up in his home country. While they mined grief and addiction on their heralded 2017 debut, Brutalism, its follow-up seeks to further focus their notorious, explosive, tongue-in-cheek energy. Now the name of the game is to see past the pain: Joy as an Act of Resistance.
The music on this record is unrefined in the same way that sugarcane is unrefined—any further processing would strip it of its vitality. In the few short months IDLES have spent touring stateside, they’ve gone from cult New York bar act to headlining midsize venues from Brooklyn to Peoria. Without a doubt, they’re playing the hits people who can muster the energy for a circle pit want to hear: Grief is OK, masculinity is toxic, racism sucks. (An actual cover makes its way into the mix, of Solomon Burke’s 1961 soul standard “Cry to Me.”) The riffs come hard, fuzzy, and fast. And the platitudes follow close behind.
Talbot delivers lyrics like “I am my father’s son/His shadow weighs a ton” with the passion of a desperate man, borrowing wisdom from very well-worn aphorisms. The lines come from opener “Colossus,” which twists the solitary act of Catholic confession into something collective: After the narrator atones for his personal sins, the song closes with a gang-shout chant, and the entire room is absolved. But what’s so revolutionary about bringing the mosh pit to the pulpit? In the face of the explicitly earthly problems IDLES are so eager to address, it feels like a cop-out.
And it isn’t the only moment on the album when Talbot retreats from more difficult conversations. The singularly heartbreaking experience of having a stillborn child permeates Joy. “There are so many people out there who probably think they are weird or different because they have lost their child,” he told NME. “Because there is a point of loneliness where you think you are the only person in the world grieving at that point.” It’s the kind of insight that, if harnessed in Talbot’s songs, could have made grieving listeners feel less alone. Yet IDLES never quite get there. Instead, they paraphrase a six-word story famously, but probably apocryphally, attributed to Hemingway: “Baby shoes for sale: never worn,” Talbot repeats on the turgid singalong “June.”
Across Joy as an Act of Resistance, IDLES struggle to balance the weight of human history with the absurdity of making music at what feels like the twilight of humanity. On “I’m Scum,” one of several overt political polemics. The line “I put homophobes in coffins” (with Talbot’s hint of a Bristol accent) is laughable enough to pass, while “This snowflake is an avalanche” belongs scrawled on the protest sign of a recently radicalized 13-year-old. When the songs—and the political convictions behind them—are inextricably tied to personal experiences, it’s a shame to paper over that vulnerability with something so broad.
When an artist reaches their wit’s end, the struggle to return from that point can fuel some of their most resonant work. IDLES share a certain strain of desperation with Modern Life Is War, the crossover hardcore act whose 2005 album Witness was a masterpiece of bottoming out. But what made that record so compelling as a portrait of a broken man was specificity that approached poetry, with the band finding solace by wallowing in the caverns of misfortune and describing every stalagmite that blocked their path. While IDLES don’t sound dishonest on Joy as an Act of Resistance, both the urgency and the vagueness of this record create the impression that a declaration of “joy” might be a little premature. | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 5, 2018 | 6.8 | bd5110f2-beed-4987-a35a-73a748aa2d3f | Dale W Eisinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dale-w eisinger/ | |
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 examine the young South Carolina rapper’s profoundly influential moment in the spotlight. | 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 examine the young South Carolina rapper’s profoundly influential moment in the spotlight. | Speaker Knockerz: Married to the Money II #MTTM2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speaker-knockerz-married-to-the-money-2-mttm2/ | Married to the Money II #MTTM2 | Derek McAllister Jr. was 16 and broke, living in Columbia, South Carolina, and, like any teenager, needed money in his pocket. He wanted a job at the fast-food chicken joint Zaxbys but when they didn’t call him back, he turned to his computer. Using a beat making program called FruityLoops, which he had been fooling around on since he was 13 after he watched a clip of the self-promotion wiz and teenage dance-rap icon Soulja Boy doing the same, he put beats for sale on a website called SoundClick and marketed them aggressively on social media.
Around 2010 or 2011, McAllister sold his first beat to a Miami rapper for $50, which he used to purchase his trusty pair of affordable speakers. He scored early major placements on Meek Mill’s Dreamchasers, for “Tony Montana,” and French Montana’s Coke Boys 3, for “Dope Got Me Rich.” Through his production, you could hear the heavy influence of Atlanta’s rap scene: his piano melodies, soft enough for a jack-in-the-box, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Travis Porter deep cut; his doomsday-ready 808s and ticking hi-hats were indebted to Lex Luger. His beats sounded like the ones on Future’s Pluto if they came from a cracked version of FruityLoops on a personal computer in a 16-year-old’s South Carolina bedroom.
Over the next year, McAllister uploaded 250 beats on his SoundClick page and sold them all. With this newfound spending money, he bought what would instantly become his prized possession: A brand new black-on-black Camaro. Later on, the car would be referenced in his songs again and again, and featured in his music videos with dramatic slow-motion shots that made it seem like the Batmobile.
Rapping came along almost as a promotional tactic. “The whole purpose of me rapping is that I knew I could make a good song,” he said in a grainy interview from 2013 that looks and sounds like it was shot on a flip phone. “I knew how to promote myself, so that would bring more people to buy beats from me.” In spring 2012, he began to upload melodic singles on YouTube under the name Speaker Knockerz. “All I Know,” the best of his early tracks, laid a robotic, lifeless melody—with a generous amount of Auto-Tune—over a bright piano line. This clash defined his music, especially the two essential mixtapes released in 2013.
Married to the Money and Finesse Father sound like much of popular rap throughout the South and Midwest in the early 2010s, because they’re not trying to be anything more. The twinkling production, the catchy coos delivered with a deadpan demeanor, and the attention to detail elevated the pair of mixtapes to melodramatic mini sagas. Sometimes the songs were just shit to throw ass to in the club (see: “Freak Hoe”). But usually, they were bitter anti-love pop ballads and street fiction. But his heartbreak, loneliness, and paranoia came at a strange remove, like the fantasies of a teenager who’d learned about these emotions from the music videos he religiously watched on the internet.
He studied the music around him like he was going to be tested on it. (There’s a clip on his YouTube where he’s dancing along to Future’s “Same Damn Time,” and stops to make a comment. “Why do rappers brag about selling mid?” he asks. “That’s the dumbest shit ever. I would brag about selling loud.”) Particularly the cold style of Chicago’s emerging drill rap scene: Whether it was the stoic melody Durk began to experiment with, or how Keef could warble about numbing his trauma with drugs and alcohol, and it was still sung along to by fans as if it was a joyous Top 40 radio record. Similarly, Speaker Knockerz could rattle off villainous, neurotic sentiments on “How Could You,” or pen the hopeless three-part crime epic “Rico Story” trilogy, and overlap the grim mood with sun-splashed production that felt like it was made for teenagers wearing skinny jeans to dance to, which is exactly what happened.
Instead of breaking out in the South, Speaker Knockerz’s music came alive further north, in Chicago. Spiritually, his blend of Future-style Auto-Tune on steroids and drill’s brutal frame of mind aligned his tracks with the fast-emerging Chicago bop scene which, around this same time, spawned local hits like Breezy Montana’s “Ball Out,” Shawty Doo’s Speaker Knockerz-produced “Its Foreign,” and anything made by Sicko Mobb. In 2013, Chicago’s Kemo, an essential local tastemaker known as the King of Bop, uploaded a video of himself dancing fluidly to Married to the Money’s “Annoying.” Kemo’s endorsement helped Speaker Knockerz become a staple of the scene. Eventually, Toni Romiti—then a popular personality on the short-form video platform Vine—heard the singles around Chicago and used them to backdrop her six-second clips. Speaker Knockerz went modestly viral.
At the end of 2013, Speaker Knockerz put out his definitive single, “Lonely.” It’s his style perfected, crooning with the cold-blooded stoicism of the Terminator, “Started out with nothing, I was hungry/Now I got a couple niggas bitches on me/Fuck nigga, I don’t wanna be your homie/I had to make a couple bands by my lonely,” over rapid-fire hi-hats and a bleeding-heart piano. This time, the track went so viral on Vine that Drake sang along to it. Speaker Knockerz followed up “Lonely” with the similarly dynamic “Erica Kane,” which, along with the “Rico Story” trilogy, represents the pinnacle of his writing. “Erica Kane” would be the last song he released while he was alive. In March 2014, at 19 years old, Speaker Knockerz was found by police and his father in his garage holding his chest, dead from an apparent heart attack. At his side was his black-on-black Camaro.
Speaker Knockerz may have made pop-inflected rap music, but when he was alive he was no pop star. He only did a handful of interviews, there was little written about him, and despite interest from Atlantic and Universal Republic, he never signed to a label. His recognition veered more regionally specific, in cities like Chicago, New York, and Milwaukee. He also came along at a time when rap blogs were beginning to fade; media coverage tended to favor the mix of typically label-backed stars who would grace XXL’s Freshman covers. Even after his death, his family was relatively tight-lipped aside from a single profile on the music website Wondering Sound. While it’s unclear how Married to the Money II, a posthumous album released almost six months after he passed and headlined by both “Lonely” and “Erica Kane,” was completed, it’s fair to assume that it included heavy involvement from his family, most specifically his father, Derek McAllister Sr.
Initially, the younger McAllister was raised in the Bronx by his mother and father, who was a music producer himself. When McAllister Jr. was 5, his father was sent to prison on drug-related charges; in that time, his mother moved him and his younger brother to South Carolina. At 13, when Speaker Knockerz first began to mess around on FruityLoops, he played his amateur instrumentals over the phone for his father and asked for advice and criticism. After McAllister Sr.’s release, he worked closely with his son, bringing him to a studio and assisting with the more routine aspects of his burgeoning career.
Despite the likely involvement of close relatives, Married to the Money II is flawed like most posthumous rap albums. Its construction is comparable to Pop Smoke’s 2020 album Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, by how it aimed to take a regional star who was on the verge of mainstream fame before a sudden loss and build on their legacy while also remaining an introduction point for possible new fans. It ends up sounding confused, focused on too many lofty goals at once.
Unlike those two foundational mixtapes, II is not as tightly edited and runs too long. Speaker Knockerz’s decisions usually felt fun and chaotic, as if made on a whim, but here the choices come out of necessity, especially the heavy emphasis on collaborations, which were sparse on earlier projects. It’s easy to tell that quite a few of these songs were unfinished: Kevin Flum sounds like the most cliché fast-spitting white rapper on “U Mad Bro”; childhood friend Capo Cheeze’s use of Auto-Tune on “Smoke It” and “Double Count” might make you think JAY-Z was right that one time; the “Scared Money” hook by Toni Romiti, the Vine star who helped to boost Speaker Knockerz’s early popularity, is unfathomably bad.
Despite the glaring issues, II is the launchpad into Speaker Knockerz’s catalog it was intended to be. Particularly notable is his production, which continued to maximize the popular rap music trends of the era: automated-sounding hand claps and finger-snaps, booming drums, and electronic keyboard melodies, hallmarks of the unconventional ATL era between ringtone rap and the arrival of pivotal mixtapes like Rich Gang’s Tha Tour Pt. 1 and Migos’ Rich Nigga Timeline. Of course, “Lonely” and “Erica Kane” are the peaks, but “Tattoos,” where he laid heart-pounding drums over pop synthesizers, and “Don’t Know,” which is the perfect canvas for his AutoTune-heavy wails, belong in that conversation as well. With production this bubbly and harmonic, it’s likely that if Speaker Knockerz got the chance to finish his verses and hooks himself—rather than rely on cheap mercenaries—II would have been his opus.
In tune with the lyrical structure of his previous mixtapes, the writing—whether jolly or somber—is as straightforward as a nursery rhyme. “The phone, the phone is ringing/I’m ’bout to talk dis dumb nigga out all of his ching-ching/All dis finnessin’ now I got all of this bling-bling/Nigga… I’m fuckin an’ smokin’ and drinking,” he sings on “We Know.” The basic words are uplifted by vocals that blend disorienting Auto-Tuned croons with the uncanny energy of an A.I. that has just learned how to feel for the first time. Likewise, if you can overlook the lackluster guest verse on “On Me,” you’ll find one of the most vibrant and melodic verses of Speaker Knockerz’s brief career: “She wanna ride in my black car, because I’ma star,” he lilts, as if the offer of a ride in his Camaro was the equivalent of getting down on one knee.
As time goes on, Speaker Knockerz’s story only becomes harder to tell. The regional scenes where he thrived are no longer the same and the social media platform where his music boomed is now a distant memory. It’s getting harder to find the original Vines and clips that made him an early viral star; if we were to wake up one day and his YouTube page were taken down, much of what we know about him would be gone. It’s a reminder of how temporary anything that lives almost solely on the internet is, of the fragility of a legacy that exists entirely on platforms Big Tech could snuff out tomorrow.
Regardless, like so much memorable pop music, Married to the Money II feels like a time capsule (next to a Speaker Knockerz CD there would probably be snapbacks, True Religion jeans, graphic tees from his favorite store Urban Outfitters, and clothing with unnecessary zippers). But similar to his kindred spirits Future and Chief Keef, the moment while important is also a backdrop to the ageless stories that just happened to take place during this time. More traditional pop-rap records are forever stuck in the early 2010s moment (see: “Rack City” or “Black and Yellow”); a single like “Lonely” has emotional weight that feels timeless. Speaker Knockerz sounds like an entity of his own, no matter how heavily inspired he was by everything popular to a teenager, in the early 2010s, stuck in their bedroom on the internet.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Talibandz Entertainment | April 18, 2021 | 7.2 | bd54f1f3-c9db-4951-a6a1-b1b0eb7aefb0 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/60799be4141a0559ae0d69ea/1:1/w_1600,h_1600,c_limit/Speaker%20Knockerz:%20Married%20to%20the%20Money%20II%20#MTTM2.jpeg |
Where Culture was an event, its follow-up feels more like an occurrence, the quality of its songs handicapped by an album that plays like a long and formless grab bag. | Where Culture was an event, its follow-up feels more like an occurrence, the quality of its songs handicapped by an album that plays like a long and formless grab bag. | Migos: Culture II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/migos-culture-ii/ | Culture II | Calling your album Culture is a move so ballsy it feels like trolling if you can’t back it up. And last year, the Migos did: Culture was the resilient Atlanta trio’s best album, but it also felt like a moment, arriving right at the crest of a monster wave of hard-fought acclaim. A lot of that had to do with “Bad and Boujee,” the group’s first No. 1 single, but what made Culture exceptional was more than just chart positioning. Suave and streamlined, it was proof that the Migos were capable of more than they’d been given credit for circa “Versace”—a real album’s album that elevated the group’s style without sacrificing what made people love them to begin with. They’d officially infiltrated the mainstream without going pop; instead, pop had gone Migos. All of it just felt right.
The Migos’ best quality is their ability to present truly virtuosic rapping in ways that are commercially viable, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that Offset, Takeoff, and Quavo’s talents have diminished since Culture’s release. But if Culture marked the very peak of the Migos’ triumphal arc, buoyed by a swell of goodwill, Culture II is simply… here, arriving in the wake of a handful of solid but inessential singles that hardly compare to the zeitgeist-dominating force that was “Bad and Boujee” or “T-Shirt.” It’s hard to say what Culture II adds to our appreciation of Migos in ways that don’t feel redundant: Yes, the trio is still incredibly successful, still ridiculously wealthy, and hey, one of them’s engaged to Cardi B! Where Culture was an event, its sequel feels more like an occurrence, the quality of its songs handicapped by the artlessness of its presentation.
The first thing to note about Culture II for anyone who may have made non-Migos-related plans for their leisure time is that it is long—dauntingly so. Its 24 tracks range across one hour and 45 minutes of digital space. Maybe the Migos just had that many ideas they simply could not deign to edit down. But it seems more likely to be another attempt to game the current Billboard and RIAA rules, in which 1,500 individual song streams count towards one full album sale (thus, the more songs on an album, the higher and faster it charts). It’s a familiar play from Migos’ label, whose “Quality Control” moniker feels fairly ironic here; last month, they released the 30-track Control the Streets Vol. 1 compilation, 22 of which featured Migos or some combination of its individual members. And currently pinned to the top of Migos’ Spotify page under “Artist’s Pick” is not Culture II, the album, but a 72-track playlist that repeats the album’s tracklist three times in a row. It’s not like this kind of craven opportunism is a recent development in the music industry, but it feels pretty dark all the same.
All this power-grabbing does a significant disservice to the songs here, most of which are good to great. In fact, there are two strong projects to be culled from Culture II’s sprawl: an album-quality selection of slick, playful nudges in experimental but chart-friendly directions on one side, and a mixtape’s worth of expensive updates to the O.G. Migos sound on the other. The lonesome sax solos wafting through “Too Playa” pair elegantly with the muted horns on Kanye co-production “BBO (Bad Bitches Only)” and the loungy “Made Men,” on which Takeoff’s adlibs feel like the intimate asides of a ’70s soul singer. On “Stir Fry,” the trio step outside their comfort zone with a Pharrell beat originally intended for T.I. circa 2008. “On the nose” doesn’t begin to describe “Narcos,” with its Latin guitar, “arriba!” ad-libs, and the best-worst drug lord accent attempt since “Tony Montana”—but if that’s not exactly what you come to a Migos song for, then Offset’s standing ovation-worthy second verse is. “I ain’t really with the razzle-dazzle/Knock him off and then I throw him off the boat paddle/Go to Tijuana, put the kilo on the saddle,” he raps with stunning precision, a reminder of why it’s worth it to trek through nearly two hours of material.
This isn’t to say that the “mixtape half” of Culture II is underwhelming, exactly; there’s a lot that works here, from the cosmic Ren Faire chords of “Supastars” (though it’s a weird choice for the album’s third single) to the haunted “Crown the Kings,” whose waterlogged vocal samples evoke a trapped-out Kate Bush. But the farther you journey into the album’s increasingly sleepy second half, the harder it is for these songs to hold your attention for much longer than a verse and a couple hooks. Even the song structures themselves start to feel formulaic: each of the album’s first nine songs opens with a Quavo hook leading into a Quavo verse, to the point where it’s often a full two minutes in before we hear anything beyond ad-libs from his compadres. “Too Much Jewelry” finally breaks free from the repetitive template: a Zaytoven-produced Gucci Mane homage and a showcase for Takeoff, who regularly steals the spotlight on Culture II even when relegated to a song’s final verse. The youngest Migo’s turn on the sultry bounce of “Gang Gang” is the album’s biggest surprise, his gravelly baritone holding down the melodic duties usually relegated to Quavo with unexpected grace.
It’s still a joy to hear the Migos rap, which is why it’s especially depressing that Culture II ultimately feels like a drag—a formless grab bag compiled without much care. Perhaps this is a hopelessly old-fashioned way of thinking; after all, there’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a playlist of our own, trimming and rearranging the album’s 24 tracks exactly to our satisfaction. And frankly, given the choice between pleasing critics with concise, thoughtful works like Culture or appeasing every fractured sector of one’s fanbase while boosting sales numbers—well, it’s not exactly a tough call. Maybe the culture is already too deep into its “album as outlet mall” moment—an endless, unedited data dump ready to be whatever we want it to be. But culture and art do not always share the same priorities. | 2018-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown / Capitol | January 30, 2018 | 6.4 | bd56853e-e438-42e8-91cc-aba0c0d8dcce | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Amsterdam DJ Young Marco Sterk mixes Buchla experiments with Nintendo-derived dance in his ambitious new mix. | Amsterdam DJ Young Marco Sterk mixes Buchla experiments with Nintendo-derived dance in his ambitious new mix. | Young Marco: Selectors 002 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22811-selectors-002/ | Selectors 002 | In just a few years, Amsterdam’s Dekmantel label has grown from throwing dance parties for 200 of their closest friends into a powerhouse label and a stellar annual festival. They recently leapt continents to throw their first festival in São Paulo and last year, they spun off another mini-festival, Dekmantel Selectors, staged on a coastal resort in Croatia. As the name suggests, the latter festival emphasizes DJs with an ear bent towards the obscure and unheard. For those who didn’t snap up tickets, as accompaniment, the label released compilations of such curious tunes from their favorite DJs. The first release in the series featured Motor City Drum Ensemble’s Danilo Plessow balancing transporter-beam house, loft disco rarities, and raucous gospel-funk.
For the second entry in the series, Amsterdam’s Young Marco takes a decidedly different path. Marco’s mix hunts for tracks from outcasts and outliers, suggesting a bizarro world of not-dance dance music. Across 10 tracks, he finds Buchla experiments and a track made entirely from the old Nintendo game Mario Paint, cringeworthy Eighties Dutch rap, and a dewy jazz-funk delicacy from the lone legendary name on the comp, Larry Heard.
Along the way, Marco pays plenty of cheeky tributes to his Dutch roots. In the wake of Sugarhill Gang’s chart success in the Netherlands, Jolyon Grevelt earned the humble title of being the first Dutch rapper, making a record as Danny Boy at the age of 13 in 1980. So leave it to Marco to find an even weirder B-side from the lad with which to open Selectors 002. Its rubber band-lite funk gets intercut every few minutes by cat meows, wikki-wikki scratches, vocoder chants, and what Jared Leto’s Joker sneezing might sound like run through an Echoplex. Yet somehow, it all adds up into something that just escapes being an unlistenable oddity.
While EBM became a worldwide force thanks to the likes of Front 242 and Ministry, Sterk finds late ’80’s Dutch examples that are peculiar mutations of that relentless electronic sound. Gerrit Hoekema’s “Televisiewereld” sounds as whimsical as Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib,” with its circuitry curling up at the edges of the track. The Force Dimension’s 1989 track “200 FA” trades the genre’s distorted drum programming for what could be ethnographic tribal chants.
To Marco’s ear, there’s a connection to be made between the extremely rare and expensive Buchla Music Easel and a video game console. He digs up a 1981 track from Philly group Ghostwriters (an early duo featuring analog synth legend Charles Cohen) that deploys the Buchla on the joyous bubbling of “Swizzle” and then, a few tracks later, slots in Ray Tracing’s “Mariopaint,” an anthemic bit of digital tiddlywinks from the mid-‘90s. That entry comes from Irdial Disc’s peculiar ’95 comp that had as its only piece of gear the Nintendo Super Famicom, running the Mario Paint music sequencer as its only bit of software. Neither selection would scream “peak hour,” but in Marco’s hands, his gifts as a “selector” become clear. Like a packet of Sea-Monkeys, Marco knows just when to sprinkle in seemingly un-danceable tracks so as to make them wiggle to life in just the right setting. | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | February 17, 2017 | 7.9 | bd57889e-8142-4c7f-8052-4cab03ab4e2a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
After penning hits for Selena Gomez and Hailee Steinfeld, Julia Michaels brings her chart-topping songwriter chops to her solo career. The songs are refreshingly unique but their impact is varied. | After penning hits for Selena Gomez and Hailee Steinfeld, Julia Michaels brings her chart-topping songwriter chops to her solo career. The songs are refreshingly unique but their impact is varied. | Julia Michaels: Nervous System EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-michaels-nervous-system-ep/ | Nervous System | Last April marked the first time since 1984 that no women landed a solo single in Billboard’s Top 10. Most of the divas of just a few years ago have faded or cultivated distribution channels outside radio airplay. When women crack the upper reaches of the charts nowadays, it’s almost always via second (or no) billing on a star producer’s track: Zedd and Alessia Cara’s “Stay,” Kygo and Selena Gomez’s “It Ain’t Me,” DJ Khaled, Bryson Tiller, and Rihanna’s “Wild Thoughts.” The improbable exception? Songwriter-turned-singer Julia Michaels, whose “Issues” bubbled almost all the way up to the Top 10 in a sea of dudes.
Michaels wasn’t exactly a newcomer, having written several pop tracks like Hailee Steinfeld’s self-love-via-”self-love” anthem “Love Myself” and most of Selena Gomez’s recent work, like the teasing “Hands to Myself” and crushed-out Talking Heads flip “Bad Liar.” What’s remarkable about this isn’t that Julia Michaels has successfully crossed over from behind-the-scenes songwriting; artists have managed this since Motown and probably before, and Michaels had all the support majors can buy. What’s remarkable in 2017 is that she did it without a decades-long label tenure like Sia, a high-profile vocal feature like Halsey (unless you count an uncredited Cash Cash spot, which you shouldn’t), or a pile of gimmicks like Meghan Trainor, whose early singles were practically storyboards for future thinkpieces. And what’s especially remarkable is that the singles Michaels released have bucked all the radio trends except the ones she started. They’re sparse in sound, confessional in story, and barely removed from their acoustic beginnings. They are, for lack of a better term, singer-songwritery.
This isn’t uncommon. Almost every pop writer, from Bonnie McKee to Stefani Germanotta, begins as a traditional acoustic artist, the kind who 20 years ago might have played Lilith Fair. Michaels is no exception; her influences include the unquestionably legit likes of Laura Marling and Fiona Apple, and pop-rock tracks like “Next to You” could easily have fit in on the soundtracks to “Dawson’s Creek” or even “Buffy.” But today, while male singer-songwriters have no problem charting (or, in Ed Sheeran’s case, being four-fifths of the charts in the UK) female singer-songwriters struggle, and adapt. What might have been released as an acoustic ballad 20 years ago is more likely today to be absorbed into an EDM topline—think David Guetta ft. Michelle Branch.
Michaels’ early career whiplashed between both poles. On the one hand, an album of sedate piano ballads she likened to a bunch of Australian singer-songwriters (”Issues” was particularly well-received Down Under, where she’s now touring). On the other, the “Austin & Ally” theme and a breathtakingly cynical cut-rate ”Tik Tok” for “The Hills.” But when launching a solo career, like launching a brand, lack of cohesiveness is death. So on Nervous System, Michaels’ first EP with Republic, she blends the two with promising results.
Besides “Issues,” produced by former Dr. Luke protege Benny Blanco, Nervous System is largely the work of Michaels’ core collaborators: co-writer Justin Tranter and producers Mattman & Robin (Carly Rae Jepsen, Tove Lo). Michaels’ influences are in there if you listen—in particular, the pizzicato strings of “Issues” and jaunty dysfunction of “Just Do It” suggest someone who’s spent a good year or two with Regina Spektor’s Begin to Hope. Likewise, “Don’t Wanna Think”—her take on Rihanna’s “Higher” with furiously played piano and self-referential lyrics—is songwriter’s songwriting: an acoustic portfolio piece. But most of Nervous System is far less polished, both as songwriting and as pop songs: production restrained where it might have been blown out, hooks delivered in low-key sotto voce, and lyrics first-thought-best-thought with words spilling out of the confines of their choruses and snapping at the ends of their verses. At best, the effect is disarmingly plainspoken when her asides and quirks are left in rather than sanded off. At worst, it leans a bit too much into the accept-me-at-my-worst confessional that’s become (fairly or not) singer-songwriter cliche: tell rather than show. Parts of “Issues” and “Worst in Me” might as well be SongMeanings explanations of “Fast As You Can.”
A current of bleakness has run through pop radio for some time now, and Michaels shares her part; singles like her “Surrender,” Gomez’s “Good For You” and Norwegian newcomer Astrid S.’s “Hurt So Good” are shot through with despair, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. But while those singles certainly achieve the desired effect, Tranter and Michaels are best when goofing around—like on the deeply dumb, kinda fun “Pink.” “There’s no innuendos, it’s exactly what you think,” Michaels whispers after a series of innuendos, with the deadpan mock-seriousness of someone who’s explained “Love Myself” to the press one too many times. The punchline? A chorus of scuzzy, breathy electro, but played more as goofy than seductive.
”Uh Huh” takes a standard campfire-strum of a pop ballad and dents up all the edges: verses strewn with dissonant plinks at the too-high end of the piano, voice contorted into a vocoder glissando, a chorus full of gleeful yelps, and about four lines’ worth of lyrics packed into where the hook would go. It’s perhaps the most shambolic song released to pop radio in 2017, and sounds nothing like its company—but its form perfectly matches its crushed-out, breathless subject matter. It doesn’t play like a hit at all, but neither did “Issues.” The songwriters who have succeeded tend not to be those who’ve tried to replicate the hyper-polished, machine-slick pop material of their clients but those who revel in unapologetic, relatable messiness, whether it be Sia’s cultivated camera-shyness and deeply uncool yet lucrative Clarissa Pinkola Estes flavor of self-help or Kesha’s scrappy party-runoff aesthetic—glitter, trash-bags, and human teeth—that kept devotees around well after the last drops left her bottle of Jack. Michaels, with her modest persona and writing style she likens to therapy, best fits this company, a promising sign for the future. | 2017-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | August 4, 2017 | 6.6 | bd5f2bbc-dcee-4f7a-ba13-207c9f757e3e | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The London-based ensemble taps Hot Chip to flesh out the dimensions of its cosmopolitan blend of West African funk and electronic bass music. | The London-based ensemble taps Hot Chip to flesh out the dimensions of its cosmopolitan blend of West African funk and electronic bass music. | Ibibio Sound Machine: Electricity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ibibio-sound-machine-electricity/ | Electricity | One of the oldest drums that we know much about is the West African djembe. It was used for celebration and communication, and its voice carried beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. A large goblet carved from a single piece of wood with a goatskin roped over the head, it produced three distinct sounds in swinging patterns: a low bass, a mid-range tone, and a high, accented slap. The way it anticipated the essential elements of electronic dance and pop music—kick, snare, hat—is as plain as the djembe’s thousand-year westward journey is staggering to contemplate.
The indomitable Ibibio Sound Machine are driven by an instinct for music as humanity’s means of talking to itself across vast times and spaces. A large international ensemble based in London, they blend West African funk and electronic bass music with cosmopolitan aplomb. Their songs can be light and teasing or clashing and commanding, but they always seek the ur-rhythm moving across the ages, finding it all over the place: in the bright, buoyant guitars and horns of the highlife music that became a Nigerian pop sensation in the 1960s; in the blazing Afrobeat heralded by Fela Kuti in the ’70s; in the global disco and R&B divas of the ’80s and their leftfield electro and no-wave foils; in the drum’n’bass of the ’90s and the indie house of the new millennium.
Though Ibibio Sound Machine seem to compress the distances between traditional and modern sounds, each of their four albums has generally been more electronic than the last, a drift that sharply peaks on Electricity. Not only is it their first record working substantially with outside producers, it bears the highly recognizable stamp of Hot Chip, who they brought on board after bonding over Francis Bebey and Giorgio Moroder. Though the album closes with a euphoric synth-pop tribute to the water drumming of Cameroon’s Baka people on “Freedom,” it opens with a Teflon thump and an icicle arpeggio on “Protection From Evil,” accurately announcing itself as Ibibio Sound Machine going all in on sleek, danceable electronic pop.
The holographic filter sweeps and webs of synth might suppress the warm, jazzy qualities of the band’s prior records, but they also heighten the impervious finesse and ferocity of Eno Williams. Her torrents of words deftly flip between English—“big, big grammar,” as she wryly has it on the title track, where a spacious groove seems heated and cooled by its own subterranean power source—and the Ibibio language of southern Nigeria, where she’s from. On “Protection From Evil,” she peppers drops ripped from Vitalic’s French touch heyday with percussive staccato syllables, giving full range to her unique gift for sharpening language to a piercing point.
Such restive, stimulating beginnings give way to a dazzling middle run that begins with “Afo Ken Doko Mien,” a warm bath of rippling song with perfectly chorused vocal samples. It continues through the single “All That You Want,” where Williams manages to wrest control of the Hot Chippiest music imaginable (you know it: a chubby bass bouncing on a candied funk trampoline) through sheer vocal force. And “Wanna See Your Face Again,” the absolute standout, is not the only time Electricity evokes the steely deep-house elegance of Tracey Thorn, Ibibio Sound Machine’s Merge Records labelmate. The contemporary energies thrumming along the music’s surface highlight the deep connections the record effortlessly draws—a series of starbursts connecting William Onyeabor to Gloria Estefan to Loose Joints to Grace Jones to a beat that picked up before recorded history begins, somewhere in West Africa, and never stopped. | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Merge | March 25, 2022 | 7.8 | bd66d090-2012-4c81-9317-b599d8582473 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Revisiting his Bobby Digital character in the soundtrack to a forthcoming graphic novel, the typically freewheeling Wu-Tang rapper-producer sounds frustratingly restrained. | Revisiting his Bobby Digital character in the soundtrack to a forthcoming graphic novel, the typically freewheeling Wu-Tang rapper-producer sounds frustratingly restrained. | RZA: RZA Presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rza-rza-presents-bobby-digital-and-the-pit-of-snakes/ | RZA Presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes | As a rapper, RZA has always been most effective as an uncontrollable ambassador from a place few humans would dare venture. His voice is the first you hear on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the command to “BRING THE MOTHERFUCKING RUCKUS” seemingly a message sent straight from hell; when he barrels onto Ghostface’s “Stroke of Death” (“SMACK THE JAIL BAILS BONDSMAN, STRENGTH OF 18 BRONZEMEN”), you’re left wondering whether terrestrial prisons could even hold him. From behind the boards, the Staten Island icon’s production work can be patient, even subtle. But on the mic he’s usually an unrepentant maximalist. This isn’t limited to group efforts or guest spots: His solo debut, 1998’s Bobby Digital in Stereo, imagined RZA as the titular antihero, riding around in a bulletproof “Digimobile” with guns of cartoon dimensions, nothing but an id to control them.
That character is the subject of the Abbot’s latest project, RZA Presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes, the eight-song soundtrack to a forthcoming graphic novel. But while the title conjures some of the most delightfully harebrained moments of RZA’s catalog, on record he sounds frustratingly restrained: The songs’ over-considered structures leave just enough room for raps that too often stick dutifully to the expected plot beats. Where the best RZA songs messily enjamb his lust, wisdom, and hubris into one another, overlapping them in a way that makes a mockery of familiar syntax, here those elements are meted out so sparingly that they’re almost uniformly dull. That hesitancy, combined with some of his blandest indie-rock dabbling, makes for a record that’s less than the sum of its already spare parts. As RZA raps of Bobby Digital in Pit of Snakes’ first verse, in what could just as easily be a reflection on his own work: “This is just a fraction of his abilities.”
That opening song, “Under the Sun,” features some of the record’s strongest writing—the second verse builds momentum almost entirely through its phonetics; we know it’s growing more urgent when we hear Bobby “attack the shack with a pack of black German Shepherds”—but also typifies the ways the songs undercut their own momentum. The two verses are separated by nearly a minute and a half of mawkish guest vocals nearly indistinguishable from the ones that derail “Trouble Shooting” and “Cowards.” “We see the world grow, change, and decay,” Cody Nierstedt sings on “Under the Sun”; the line’s literality is an insult to a track that casually notes a cyborg’s penchant for slap-boxing kangaroos.
It’s not difficult to imagine a more compellingly fleshed-out version of Pit of Snakes, where the tension hinted at here between the rugged natural world and our safe digital cocoons is explored in more provocative ways. On “Something Going On,” RZA poses a question—“Would you rather have a smartphone, or a smart child?”—that would, in another context, be the beginning of an argument that grew far more absurd; here it is deployed like the punchline to a rote stand-up bit. Each of Bobby Digital’s minor emotional crises is cataloged with a heavy, deliberate hand (“The sky may fall and worlds may shake/Our bond of friendships, I’ll never break”). RZA has often, at least in the 21st century, been criticized as overindulgent, someone who needs to be reined in and edited. Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes is just the opposite: a minor record that would be far more engaging if it better embodied its author’s eccentricity. | 2022-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 36 Chambers, LLC / MNRK Music Group | July 26, 2022 | 5.2 | bd66f126-4f4e-4fa5-ab1c-489736d1b294 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The ambient power trio condenses a hard drive’s worth of marathon jam sessions into a succinct hour of cosmic minimalism and wooly post-rock. | The ambient power trio condenses a hard drive’s worth of marathon jam sessions into a succinct hour of cosmic minimalism and wooly post-rock. | Cowboy Sadness: Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cowboy-sadness-selected-jambient-works-vol-1/ | Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 | Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 opens with the slow grace of a sunrise. A low drone shimmers into view, joined moments later by the reedy hum of a Farfisa. Synth chords billow, tinged with rich delay, pushing glittering harmonics to the edges of the stereo field. After four delicate minutes, the elements dissipate like clouds and you realize that vast expanse of tone has captured your attention without overtly commanding it. Over the next nine songs, the trio of David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Peter Silberman (The Antlers), and Nicholas Principe (Port St. Willow) repeat and refine that slow-blooming approach, composing enormous, enveloping ambient panoramas that take up the entire screen.
The journey to Selected Jambient Works began in 2011, when a mutual friend introduced Moore to fellow Brooklyn musicians Silberman and Principe. All three trafficked in similar territory, occupying various overlapping points of the ambient, drone, and pop Venn diagram. They began to develop a shared musical vocabulary, recording marathon jam sessions on a handheld recorder. By 2017, all three had decamped to upstate New York, trading their cramped outer-borough neighborhoods for the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. With Principe at the helm, the trio took the 20-plus hours of recordings they’d made between 2017 and 2021 and whittled them into a succinct 58 minutes of cosmic minimalism and wooly post-rock.
These songs are huge, to be sure—Principe and Silberman’s synthesizers stretch into infinity and Moore’s transistor organs shudder like tuning forks in a silo—but the spaciousness comes from the deft restraint each musician exhibits. The band makes ample use of reverb and echo but never relies on them as a crutch to create its expansive sound. “Billings, MT” builds into a velvety groove with Principe's brushed drums galloping next to Moore’s cyclical Rhodes figure, a gauzy hum wafting in the background. Two thirds of the way through, Silberman introduces a sparse baritone guitar line, suddenly giving the track new depth. “Ten Paces” has a similar blueprint, with Silberman’s spare guitar and Moore’s Rhodes drifting through a foggy synth chord, dancing around Principe’s steady but unpredictable drum hits.
Cowboy Sadness’ songs can initially feel airy and languid; their unhurried tempos and hazy atmosphere have a calm, almost heavy-lidded vibe. Yet lurking beneath the bucolic air is a slightly ominous quality, a shadow that doesn’t move with the sun. Synthetic strings slowly cocoon around the distorted melody at the center of “Full Mammoth” but allow spiky textures to peek out from the silken webbing. An anxious tremolo runs through “Starcharger,” speeding as the song presses on, gathering up blistering noise like a blade running over gravel. The band describes Selected Jambient Works as “the sound of the desert,” and the press materials mention patches of succulents, towering plateaus, and red-orange sunlight—all suitable reference points for the sweeping music found on the record. What makes Selected Jambient Works so remarkable, however, isn’t its ability to conjure images of the endless West, but rather the existential melancholy it conveys. The musicians of Cowboy Sadness understand that to grasp enormity, you must first acknowledge the smallest details; the farther you can see, they seem to suggest, the smaller you’ll feel. | 2024-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | People Teeth | January 26, 2024 | 7.6 | bd703acc-a4c1-4097-9a1f-d79b8154e153 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
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 Cake’s second album, a wry, earnest, and oft-misunderstood outlier of ’90s alt-rock. | 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 Cake’s second album, a wry, earnest, and oft-misunderstood outlier of ’90s alt-rock. | Cake: Fashion Nugget | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cake-fashion-nugget/ | Fashion Nugget | In the fall of 1996, as Cake’s offbeat single “The Distance” climbed the charts and became the most-requested song on alternative radio stations nationwide, frontman John McCrea compared his band’s ascent to being at the top of a toboggan run. “There’s an out-of-control feeling,” McCrea told a reporter for his local paper, “but there’s also a typical feeling. Because the toboggan ride is a set course that many people have gone down, you feel like you’re part of this grand rock cliche.” Had you never heard the band Cake, or laid eyes upon its white-bread mouthpiece, you might imagine these words coasting on a curl of cigarette smoke, the speaker obscured by dirty hair and sunglasses. But with his goatee and penchant for casual hats—trucker, bucket—this was not McCrea.
Amid the heavy-hitting, guitar-forward noise of the mid-1990s, which McCrea frequently referred to as, “that Viking alternative rock,” Cake were pragmatists, constructing wry but earnest pop music in the machismo era of post-grunge and nu metal. They could find artistry in a strip mall, or rush hour congestion on the I-5. Surely, they were being ironic.
Cake formed in the early ’90s under unremarkable circumstances, in an unremarkable place. McCrea, a few years older than his bandmates, had tried his hand at the L.A. songwriter circuit. But his eccentricities did not package well within prevailing butt-rock. So he returned to his home of Sacramento, and like any shrewd musician, poached players from other groups in town. Guitarist Greg Brown, bassist Victor Damiani, and drummer Todd Roper were regulars on the Sacramento bar-band scene. Trumpeter Vincent DiFiore was playing in a local jazz outfit.
Like all of their subsequent records, Cake self-produced their 1994 debut, Motorcade of Generosity. The album was “lo-fi” by necessity. Its songs were warm and close, and listening to it can feel like trailing notes down a stairwell into some subterranean tavern, where a cantina band plays over clinking pints. For all of its quotations from honky tonk and ranchera music, not to mention the slow-scorching “Jolene,” it was the snide “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle” that primed Cake for college radio takeover. Its lyrics skewered rich rockers who were more interested in merch than the actual music. The song quickly became a fan favorite, perhaps because it allowed listeners to feel superior to their peers. It also cursed McCrea as the detached commentator—or worse, a self-righteous ass. In the opening verses of “Rock ‘n’ roll Lifestyle,” he sings:
Well your CD collection
Looks shiny and costly
How much did you pay for your bad Moto Guzzi
And how much did you spend
On your black leather jacket
Is it you or your parents in this income tax bracket?
Now tickets to concerts
And drinking at clubs
Sometimes for music that you haven’t even heard of
And how much did you pay for your rock’n’roll T-shirt
That proves you were there, that you heard of them first?
Over a decade after the song’s release, McCrea sat down with Terry Gross to discuss its legacy. He explained that he wasn’t interested in roasting posers so much as examining “the mercurially changing fashions of music.” He was mesmerized by the pop culture waste cycle, and how “music just got discarded every few months; consumed, discarded, consumed, discarded.” “Just thinking about all of these leather jackets that were no longer in style, that were just rotting in a landfill,” McCrea continued. “I like the idea of things being out of style, believe it or not, especially from an environmental perspective.” A closer assessment of the band’s catalog—tracks like “No Phone” and “Stickshifts and Safetybelts”—reveal McCrea’s fascination with the obsolete. But Cake has rarely been afforded the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they were just tossed off as unfashionable.
Maybe it’s because they were pointedly out of style. McCrea often referred to their work as “music product,” and was transparent about the band’s calculated approach to songwriting. Even their album covers stank of branding—the simple, high-contrast designs recalled the advertising boom of the ’50s and ’60s. “We are in a service occupation,” McCrea told The San Francisco Examiner, three months after releasing Cake’s second album, Fashion Nugget. “Our job is not glamorous. We supply the soundtrack for your drive to work.” Brown admitted a dirtier secret: “What I would really like to accomplish is making a living—having dental and health insurance would be nice.” Nothing could be more radical in the mid-’90s, when conservative politicians were holding congressional hearings to determine the effects of violent rock lyrics on adolescents. Yet the band’s approach to music-making was economical, not cynical. Cake cut their teeth in local bars, where performers are at best cause for dancing, at worst something to shout over. Implementing different genres was not only the result of eclectic tastes, it was a bid for survival. A wider net yields a more plentiful catch.
Fashion Nugget is like an oversized diner menu. There is something for most people: mariachi, jazz, tango, funk, country—none of which were cool at the time. Nor was stewing disparate genres in the same pot. It was as though Cake could see into the post-genre future, the inevitable outcome of the internet and our heightened access to everything. Among its 14 songs are three covers, the tango standard “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps,” made famous by Doris Day, Willie Nelson’s “Sad Songs and Waltzes,” and of course, their widely misinterpreted take on Gloria Gaynor’s disco juggernaut “I Will Survive.” After the mild success of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle,” Cake spent most of the ’90s asserting their sincerity. “I Will Survive” was not a joke, but an honest tribute.
McCrea must have known that his voice, blunt as a rolling pin, was responsible for such misconceptions. His only real “crime” was sounding so ordinary. Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” was an anthem of Black female empowerment, later adopted by the gay liberation movement amid the AIDS crisis. Cake’s version, coasting on palm-muted guitar and Damiani’s dexterous bassline, doesn’t so much wither as shrink. When Gross interviewed McCrea in 2005, she hedged: “When you sing it…it’s like a white guy who’s been hurt and he’s taken it.” McCrea admitted that his point of view made the song much angrier (“I should have changed my fucking lock”). In reality, McCrea’s character seemed pathetic—a man who masks his pain with pent-up fury. Even the music video depicts him as a woeful figure of piddling authority: a meter maid exacting revenge on the neighborhood.
McCrea’s drawl was more like a shield that protected the deadpan poet. How bold to kick off a record with these lines: “We know of an ancient radiation/That haunts dismembered constellations.” How perceptive to recognize the pure musicality of a name like “Daria.” On the mid-tempo “Italian Leather Sofa,” McCrea takes aim at a couple above his station: “They laugh, they make money,” he sings, before reducing them to their shining possessions: “He’s got a gold watch/She’s got a silk dress and healthy breasts/That bounce on his Italian leather sofa.” McCrea is a fine and streamlined lyricist, the kind that can pen an insult capable of attracting its target.
As Cake’s principal songwriter, McCrea often explored the fragile male ego. On the country ballad “She’ll Come Back to Me,” McCrea waits for the return of his estranged lover, ignoring mounting evidence that she is gone for good. On “Friend Is a Four Letter Word,” he piles his plate with self-delusion: “When I go fishing for the words/I am wishing you would say to me/I’m really only praying/That the words you’ll soon be saying/Might betray the way you feel about me.” There is a degree of inadequacy plaguing McCrea’s characters, particularly on “Open Book” and the brief, freakish “Race Car Ya-Yas.” The former describes a woman as a complex tome, stuck with a man who doesn’t “know which page to turn to.” The latter compares inane fuzzy dice to testicles strung “proudly” from rearview mirrors. McCrea swiftly reduces masculinity to something plush and pointless—a testament to his efficiency as a writer. The way he softens the word “fuzzy,” with an extended “ffff” over Brown’s needling guitar, is a small morsel of his wit.
Because Cake dealt in the aesthetics of normalcy, because they were decidedly uncool, they were frequently miscategorized or dismissed as sarcastic. Despite their success (Fashion Nugget would eventually go platinum), concertgoers and booking agents did not know what to do with them. They were put on bills with Korn, the Meters, Deftones, and Al Green. They inexplicably drew screaming teenage crowds, the kind prone to bra-flashing. Cake were compared to Beck and Weezer and the inferior Cracker. But aside from McCrea’s conversational delivery and his status as a “self-aware, medium-funky white guy,” as journalist Rob Harvilla recently put it, there wasn’t anything that sounded quite like Cake at the end of the century. What other band honored the trumpet like a lead guitar, or so effortlessly incorporated the vibraslap?
Only one Cake cut, 1998’s “Never There,” has managed to slip into the Billboard Hot 100. And yet their quintessential song is, undeniably, Fashion Nugget’s lead single “The Distance.” It was the rare track written by Brown, though McCrea insisted on arranging it. But following its breakout success, McCrea seemed to treat “The Distance” as an outlier in their catalog. “White males demand a certain amount of that power-Viking feel,” he told Billboard, trying to explain the single’s appeal. “People respond to that, because deep down inside, we all want to be inside a tall truck and roll over people’s heads.” It seemed like a dig at Brown, who, along with Damiani, left Cake before tracking began on the next album. There was word of inner-band conflict, of hours-long lobbying over whether or not to use reverb on one segment of a bridge. In the summer of ’97, Cake cut short a tour after McCrea collapsed due to “nervous exhaustion.” As the everyman of alternative rock, he was liable to suffer like your average guy.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2022-11-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capricorn | November 6, 2022 | 7.8 | bd7c78cf-8a93-44e9-91f1-782d94dbdb87 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Felix Walworth’s third album of skewed indie pop is solitary but inviting, setting songs about the pitfalls of intimacy against the most accessible sonics of their career. | Felix Walworth’s third album of skewed indie pop is solitary but inviting, setting songs about the pitfalls of intimacy against the most accessible sonics of their career. | Told Slant: Point the Flashlight and Walk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/told-slant-point-the-flashlight-and-walk/ | Point the Flashlight and Walk | The last time Felix Walworth released an album as Told Slant, they had company. Walworth was a founding member of the Epoch, an indie-pop musical collective that imploded toward the end of 2016; in the wake of that dissolution, Walworth made Point the Flashlight and Walk, the third Told Slant album, almost entirely alone. Compared to 2012’s Still Water and 2016’s Going By, which took inspiration from the screamed laments of early Modest Mouse, Point the Flashlight and Walk is brighter and more polished—a pop album, by Told Slant’s standards—but its themes are even heavier than usual. Its 12 songs are like a series of anecdotes, if not outright character studies, interrogating loneliness and unrequited emotions, offering a sense of communities lost and a person unsure how to define themselves again. The contrasting sound and subject matter make Point the Flashlight and Walk Told Slant’s most accessible record, but also their most intense.
Walworth is one of many queer people to find solace in Bruce Springsteen, and on Point the Flashlight and Walk, they took direct influence from 1982’s Nebraska, the rock icon’s most desolate and solitary album. The songs here are largely about characters who depend on and are devoted to each other, even if it means destruction for everyone involved. Many of the album’s themes are corollaries; the pointlessness of perfunctory relationships, the benefits of solitude, the dread of being stuck in that solitude. On “Flashlight On,” neither party can meet the others’ needs: “I would turn into you and you would turn into me/two empty things exchanging emptiness.” The narrator of “No Backpack” recognizes a similar destructive codependency, but opts to trudge on anyway: “I don’t want to run from you/When there’s no one you’re afraid to lose/You lose.” Walworth’s refrains often involve similar repetitions of terms, resembling intrusive thoughts more than conventional choruses.
In tweaking their own formula, Walworth also finds clever new tricks. “Moon and Sea” comes a little too close to early Death Cab for Cutie, but for a listener raised on that sort of bookish indie pop, the song’s uncanny familiarity dovetails neatly with its observations about refusing to leave the comforts of home. “From the Roofbeams” spins an elaborate aural metaphor based on phasing, a concept in audio engineering and music theory involving overlapping patterns that fall out of sync with each other. “Talking out of phase with you,” Walworth sings, followed by an incantation of “I can” that falls out of phase with itself, eventually becoming “Can I,” then “Can I stop loving you?”
That sense of playfulness—albeit in the service of serious topics—is new for Told Slant, and a part of the reason why Point the Flashlight and Walk can seem joyful despite its darkness. For an album about codependency and instability, this is sonically the most stable of any Told Slant release. It’s still raw, occasionally out of tune and time, but Walworth is a more confident singer, and the mix sparkles in a way that Told Slant didn’t before. “Bullfrog Choirs” is an outright pop song, its synths and pianos resembling AOR classics like “Solsbury Hill.” But Walworth and mix engineer KT Pipal stop short of full-on ’80s worship, never losing the project’s signature intimacy. Compared to the first two albums, which might as well have been recorded in the white voids of their cover art, these sounds have depth and dimensionality. If the previous records felt like eavesdropping on something private, Point the Flashlight and Walk sees you and invites you in.
Told Slant’s music, from the beginning, expressed a yearning for that kind of connection. On “Tsunami,” from Going By, Walworth hoped for anyone to “Tuck my hair behind my ears and say/Isn’t this silly, and aren’t you beautiful?” Various Epoch members grant Walworth’s wish on the recording, repeating the refrain back to them one by one. But intimacy doesn't solve underlying problems in oneself or a relationship. As Walworth put it in a Talkhouse post about Point the Flashlight and Walk, referencing Springsteen: “What happens after Mary takes that long walk? What if nothing changes, and it’s our own fault?” The album's characters are equally alienated together or apart, in stasis or movement. Nothing changes, but they walk on.
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. | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Double Double Whammy | November 19, 2020 | 7.7 | bd808984-f46f-4e64-a60b-ec6db3b24bd5 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
On her Thrill Jockey debut, the solo guitarist creates truly borderless music, fusing the diverse global traditions she favors without drawing too much attention to the act of juxtaposition. | On her Thrill Jockey debut, the solo guitarist creates truly borderless music, fusing the diverse global traditions she favors without drawing too much attention to the act of juxtaposition. | Marisa Anderson: Cloud Corner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marisa-anderson-cloud-corner/ | Cloud Corner | In the fall of 2015, a fan’s criticism caught the guitarist Marisa Anderson by surprise. She had just finished her set in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, a quintessential seaside town on Spain’s northeastern coast, when a British expatriate confronted her with a question: Why don’t you play any happy songs? She told him happiness wasn’t her job and walked away. But his provocation stuck: Could she write a solo guitar instrumental so buoyant, no one would mistake it for sad? Absolutely. Late on Cloud Corner, Anderson’s terrific Thrill Jockey debut, she practically jaunts through a stunning four-minute track named for the city where she accepted the challenge. With a miniature melody that rises, falls, and repeats in slightly irregular patterns, the song recalls waves lapping onto the shore beneath the fading springtime sun. Using just six amplified strings, Anderson conjures the wide-eyed wonder of a tourist seeing sights they never knew could exist.
Anderson has written plenty of songs that don’t scan as sullen; 2013’s frenetic “Galax” comes to mind, as does 2016’s resplendent “Into the Light.” But on Cloud Corner, “Sant Feliu de Guíxols” is the exception that at least suggests a rule: One of the best emotional mediums in the field of solo guitar, Anderson is a master of lovely melancholy. Written in memory of a favorite hiking trail that was incinerated by fires that swept around her hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2017, “Angel’s Rest” lets a sentimental phrase fade into the distance again and again, as if Anderson is setting every memory anyone ever made there free to drift away in smoke. “Lament” stems from the war in Syria and the ongoing refugee crisis it has created. Anderson elicits scratched notes from her slide guitar; they quiver and moan, the sound of a cry someone is trying to suppress. And “Sanctuary” is a tender lullaby meant for adults. With its graceful, glowing chords, the tune feels warm and inviting—but whenever it begins to lift, the weight of reality pulls it toward the ground again. In providing shelter, Anderson acknowledges the danger that waits outside.
One exultant song, Anderson’s uncanny ability to articulate emotions wordlessly, and her new-found enthusiasm for keyboards and Spanish guitars notwithstanding, the real feat of Cloud Corner is how well Anderson has learned to fuse the musical traditions she favors without drawing attention to the juxtaposition itself. “Surfacing,” for instance, begins with a subdued and ominous riff that seems to slink at the edges of the microphone. Anderson slowly answers her guitar with a twilit keyboard line, reflecting the quiet ascendance of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. The contrasting sounds move in tandem, seesawing between bluesy melancholy and classical transcendence, or between heaven and earth.
For “Slow Ascent,” Anderson plays a stately series of patient chords with her guitar and a Wurlitzer, evoking the stately minimalism of latter-day Earth. She surrounds those slow tones, though, with flurries of brief, tinny notes borrowed from the Tuareg tradition of northwest Africa. The idea continues one of Anderson’s most consistent compositional approaches, in which she subdivides one slow riff with a string of smaller melodies, played quickly and quietly between its notes. (You can hear her do it on opener “Pulse,” a preamble that serves as a concise summary of what Anderson accomplished before Cloud Corner.) But during “Slow Ascent” and elsewhere on the album, she ties this technique to sources of inspiration outside of her country and blues bedrock. Anderson’s music now seems borderless.
All of these threads—the extra instruments, the commingled influences, the artificial binary between happy and sad—intertwine in the title track, one of the most beautiful and transfixing solo guitar recordings in years. Anderson starts with a flickering electric riff that seems to weave nervously through space, moving like a taxi through late-afternoon traffic. She soon chases it with a complementary acoustic guitar, in a brisk counterpoint that wraps a soft surface around the harder, heavier line. The song simultaneously recalls the “continuous music” of pianist Lubomyr Melnyk (and his descendant, the guitarist James Blackshaw) and the incisive Delta blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins. What’s more, the sound seems to linger between a smile and a frown, suggesting that life could forever go either way. It’s Anderson’s best response to that critic in Spain, a wordless admission that her songs are, above all else, honest. | 2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey | June 19, 2018 | 7.8 | bd81c01a-d48f-4c6d-b88b-42229e08f77f | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On this collaborative LP, Mica Levi (Micachu & the Shapes) pairs with the cellist Oliver Coates (a contributor to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool) for one of 2016’s more enjoyable experimental albums. | On this collaborative LP, Mica Levi (Micachu & the Shapes) pairs with the cellist Oliver Coates (a contributor to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool) for one of 2016’s more enjoyable experimental albums. | Mica Levi / Oliver Coates: Remain Calm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22638-remain-calm/ | Remain Calm | Though her soundtrack for Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 feature Under the Skin was more prominently received, Mica Levi’s tape Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill felt like her landmark release that year. The hour-long mix, with colorful, droning chapters bleeding seamlessly into one another, broke from the brash pop of her band Micachu & the Shapes, offering instead an elastic take on avant-garde composition. Loose and weird, it stomped and crackled all over the place, brimming with an impulsive sense of personality.
On this new collaboration with cellist and producer Oliver Coates, who also performed on the Under the Skin OST, Levi loops back to that unstructured sound. (Accordingly, Remain Calm has origins in a live collaboration for NTS Radio, also in 2014.) But she builds it up, too, by decluttering and introducing a more orchestral sensibility. With her songwriting for Micachu & the Shapes or her soundtracks, one gets the sense that Levi is sinking herself into a style, a set of constraints, conditions reflected in those projects’ concision. Here, as with Feeling Romantic, the field is wide open, and the results are imaginative and multi-textured.
In form, these 13 tracks, most under three minutes long, resemble sketches. This is not at all to the release’s detriment—rather, it recalls the stylistic play and emotional frankness of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo—and this unfinished quality is a crucial method of delivery. The minimal “Schoolhouse,” which lasts 43 seconds, sees Coates’ bright picked strings weighted by a teasing beat. “I’ll Keep Going” is more lush, even mournful, the titular refrain repeated in a smeary drone over piano and deep, sustained cello notes. Coates’ instrumentation is lovely but understated, folding effortlessly into the clattering productions such that prim classical connotations feel like afterthoughts. Even when the cello is brought to the fore—on “County H,” for example, which consists of just strings and a barely-tonal radio-transmitter-like sound—it’s repetitive, textural, and melodically restrained, again bringing Russell to mind.
More traditional strains of contemporary experimental music can at times be weighed down by their own history. And while Levi and Coates are clearly products of certain traditions, their influences are widespread. Tracks like the fragmentary “Xhill Stepping” or “New Wren Kitch,” which has the feel of an unraveling Actress B-side, nod to UK hip-hop and garage; scrawls of noise and vocal modulations bridge into brainy, gallery-bound sound work. The unfussy way Levi and Coates negotiate these references keeps this album from sounding like self-conscious pastiche. All the while, Remain Calm (like most of the projects Levi has been attached to) maintains a loping pace, easy and cool even as instrumental flourishes nervously flutter.
The breadth of Levi’s career offers an exciting framework for a new generation of musicians looking to uproot themselves and move—as might be most intuitive in our contemporary cultural economy—in several directions at once. We sense less a linear evolution in her sound and more a continual, varied expansion, driven by collaborations like this that are rooted in improvisation, as well as more rigid, genre-driven assignments. (Coates, too, negotiates between projects this way: He played with the London Contemporary Orchestra on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, for one, but this year also released Upstepping, a solo LP of oddball deep house.) Remain Calm is particularly refreshing for its relative approachability, no doubt the product of sly pop and dance sensibilities that are lodged somewhere in there alongside the open-ended phrases and sonic atmospherics. Even as its mood slides from pensive to morose to quietly exuberant, this remains throughout one of the more enjoyable experimental releases this year. | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Slipdisc | December 3, 2016 | 7.7 | bd849e05-471e-47dc-9220-d7897c444a23 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
On his major label debut, the once-scrappy Boston rapper Cousin Stizz flaunts his wealth as well as his ear for distinctive, minimalist production. | On his major label debut, the once-scrappy Boston rapper Cousin Stizz flaunts his wealth as well as his ear for distinctive, minimalist production. | Cousin Stizz: One Night Only | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cousin-stizz-one-night-only/ | One Night Only | Bostonians aren’t exactly known for their friendliness. Still, Dorchester native Cousin Stizz is especially standoffish. The rapper’s breakout single, 2015’s “No Bells,” was a study in understated, menacing territorialism. “Who you know from out here? Your name ‘aint ringing no bells, boy,” Stizz huffs on the song, over piano notes that reverberate through the air like, well, bells. In an era of busy, up-tempo trap beats, Auto-Tuned hooks, and vulnerability as currency, “No Bells” stood out. The song is skeletal and unapologetically cold—the sonic equivalent of a “keep out” sign. It announced Stizz as one of the few young rappers aiming not for club anthems but rather for the realism of life at street level.
Two years, two mixtapes, and a major label deal later, Stizz is now looking far beyond his Fields Corner block. On One Night Only, his debut release for RCA, the rapper assumes the stance of a self-assured star—stunting on his peers, taunting his naysayers, and calling in favors from the likes of Offset and G-Eazy. Production-wise, One Night Only is Stizz’ strongest project yet, though that’s not only due to the contributions of name-brand producers. While Wondagurl, VInylZ, and Dun Deal all land beats on the album, it’s the five tracks produced by frequent Stizz collaborator Tee-WaTT that give the project a real sense of cohesion. Using “No Bells” as a blueprint, the relatively unknown Virginia producer constructs lean instrumentals that are airy yet disorienting—a perfect pairing for Stizz’ stone-faced verses and catchy, half-sung hooks.
The results of this chemistry are often dazzling. Opener “Switch Places” is built around decaying tones that ping pong back and forth in the mix; the song sounds the way that staring out of a taxi after too many drinks feels. Evoking Drake, “Doubted Me” wraps Stizz’ wounded flexing in a glitchy neon glow. “Paid” grafts a trunk-rattling beat onto an icy vaporwave melody built from Game Boy violins and crystalline synths. And on “Headlock,” Stizz makes Offset meet him on his home turf: a wobbly, seasick beat, courtesy of VinylZ. “These days I run it like Ricky, I'm Ross,” Stizz boasts on the track, adding rhetorically, “What does it take, turn yourself to a boss?”
Stizz also toys with some new sounds on One Night Only, though he occasionally ventures a bit too far outside of his comfort zone. Both the marimba-heavy “Neimans Barneys” and the lurching “Jo Bros” borrow from the Migos playbook, brute-forcing catchiness through repetition; the latter even employs a Nextel chirp as a prominent sonic motif. Other stylistic experiments are less compelling. Mid-album cuts like the bouncy “No Ice” and “Paper Calling” (reminiscent of Future) feel a bit flat and drag on the record’s momentum. Worse yet is “Pullup,” wherein Stizz fails to land a funky sex jam, laying bare the limits of his charisma.
Cousin Stizz might lack range, though when his delivery clicks with the production, as it does on most of these songs, it’s hard to argue with the results. On One Night Only, he manages to carve out a distinctive lane in trap, offering up a slower, more hypnotic take on the Atlanta sound. Stizz himself, however, remains a bit of a cypher. While his early work felt insular, it also lacked a concrete sense of place or perspective. Now that he’s graduated from rapping about trying to acquire money to rapping about actually spending it, what once read as plainspoken relatability is starting to feel a bit generic: on most of these tracks, Stizz is just another rapper cataloging his access to women, cars, and designer clothing. But he makes it sound great, even if he continues to keep the listener at arm’s length. | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA | July 20, 2017 | 6.9 | bd97e22d-68e6-4373-aab2-dc3ca6a5792d | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The Boredoms offshoot's seventh full-length arrived last year in Japan on Boredoms’ own Shock City imprint and which is only now seeing wide release through Thrill Jockey; it's the group's strongest effort in some time, taking a number of heady, out-rock ideas and cueing them up into a fairly approachable mixtape. | The Boredoms offshoot's seventh full-length arrived last year in Japan on Boredoms’ own Shock City imprint and which is only now seeing wide release through Thrill Jockey; it's the group's strongest effort in some time, taking a number of heady, out-rock ideas and cueing them up into a fairly approachable mixtape. | OOIOO: Gamel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19541-ooioo-gamel/ | Gamel | When OOIOO started in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much evidence to suggest that the band would be any longer lived than the numerous other satellite projects rattling through deep space orbit alongside Japanese noise-rock giants, Boredoms. OOIOO (say it oh-oh-eye-oh-oh) has endured, though, and nearly twenty years and six albums later, the all-female quartet—lead by Flaming Lips LP namesake and Boredoms percussionist Yoshimi—have established their own voice, audience, and influence, long since transcending their origins as ancillary Bore-product. Gamel—which arrived last year in Japan on Boredoms’ own Shock City imprint and which is only now seeing wide release through Thrill Jockey—is OOIOO’s seventh full-length and also the group’s strongest effort in some time. Like the group's best work, it takes a number of heady out-rock ideas and lines them up into a fairly easy to digest mixtape.
Given their shared DNA, Boredoms and OOIOO mirror one another in a number of ways, particularly in their zeal for primitivist rhythms, psychedelic tones, and trippy fluorescent color schemes. But while the former has gradually evolved into a sort of high concept drum circle—with performances that often involve a seven-necked guitar and dozens of percussionists—the latter has consistently kept things small. For the past decade, Boredoms' sheer mass has forced the project to focus on a single schtick, but OOIOO has been free to float from sound to sound, with songs that sometimes evoke fusion-era Miles Davis, Konono No. 1, and the European prog-rock band Gong within the same five minutes.
Still, the best OOIOO records have always benefited from a central theme—be it kraut rock-style repetition (Feather Float) or tribal psychedelia (Armonico Hewa)—to ground the band’s ever-mutating sensibility. This time around, the glue comes via two metallophone players, who expand OOIOO’s riffing with melodies drawn from Javanese gamelan music.
The instruments—which are played by hammering mallets against brass rods tuned to microtonal scales—preserve Gamel’s percussive and propulsive core, but also produce strange harmonies and overtones that imbue the music with a heady psychedelic sheen. If you’re an anime fan, some of Gamel’s sounds might inadvertently trigger memories of Japanese collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score for the film Akira. That music used a similar mix of sounds—synthesizers, alternate tunings, traditional instruments—and perfectly complemented that film's strange and quasi-psychedelic sci-fi style. Gamel is a little more organic and much more ebullient, but just as otherworldly and futuristic.
Prior OOIOO albums were, evidently, recorded by the band and then extensively tweaked and edited by Yoshimi in studio post-production, but Gamel was mostly recorded live. As a result, the music isn’t quite as crowded. Yoshimi has laid off the effects—echo, reverb, and synthesizer glop—and there are fewer hard turns and zig-zags in the compositions. For the first time, OOIOO actually sounds like a real, living breathing band.
One of the best things about OOIOO records is that they provide a way to experience a number of fairly culty musical ideas—prog rock, psychedelic music, and so on—from a point of remove. The band's nonsense chants and jagged melodies provide all of the weirdness without necessarily conjuring the established imagery and associations, be they good or bad. It's easier to listen with fresh ears and hear these strange sounds as something playful, unfamiliar, and approachable, qualities that Gamel definitely possesses. | 2014-07-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-07-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Thrill Jockey | July 1, 2014 | 7.2 | bd991607-5061-4b22-a3db-3c335d5ca9d8 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
A genre-spanning collection of cryptic transmissions, interludes, and asides, the Manchester duo’s second album gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays. | A genre-spanning collection of cryptic transmissions, interludes, and asides, the Manchester duo’s second album gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays. | Space Afrika: Honest Labour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/space-afrika-honest-labour/ | Honest Labour | What do you do with an ambient album about love? That’s the challenge of Space Afrika’s Honest Labour. Space Afrika are a duo of musicians—Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid—who both hail from Manchester, though the latter is based in Berlin. The music that they make varies from album to album, but what is consistent is their ability to place the listener in a state of reckoning with themselves. Space Afrika’s 2020 mixtape hybtwibt? contended with the minutiae of racial oppression, fusing snippets of daily life, protests, and popular songs with distorted melodies. It’s the type of work that invites neither easy listening nor easy answers, even though it’s often beautiful. Their previous album, 2018’s Somewhere Decent to Live, is even more elliptical. One sound or one sample will be swirled again and again, until it’s impossible to discern if it’s still there. It makes you reevaluate your senses, and after a listen, it’s easy to want to start touching the walls to reorient yourself. Honest Labour, named after the patriarch of Joshua Inyang’s Nigerian family tree, is somehow more deeply rooted and maddeningly abstract then these previous releases. A genre-spanning collection of extraordinarily detailed interludes, asides, and transmissions, the record gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays.
Though the music may sound minimal on a first listen, Space Afrika fill up the songs with samples and heavy instrumentation, overwhelming with disjointed parts. They tempt fracture, embrace distortion, and emphasize delay, all in service of creating sound that feels close to the beginning of Wings of Desire; you feel as if you are Bruno Ganz hovering from apartment to apartment, subway to subway, divining the thoughts of the denizens of each building you pass. Two early standouts exemplify this tendency. In “Preparing the Perfect Response,” over warbling, resonating strings, a woman speaks about her life and the struggles that she’s gone through in order to begin to appreciate herself. The closeness you feel to her comes from the detail in the sample, and the way you can hear her pound her chest when she declares that she loves herself. As the background oscillates behind her, she stays resolute. In “Indigo Grit,” over a backdrop of abstracted electric piano, clipping bass, and thunder samples, you hear their collaborator, who goes by the name of guest, singing mordant lines about “hidden things.” Two-thirds of the way through, this singing is replaced with a dialogue on the meaning of love: A man asks a woman whether love just means “to like someone a lot”; she says no, there’s a huge difference between the two. When he asks her to clarify, she hesitates, and the song abruptly ends. The effect of this is crushing. After moving you through an impeccably created atmosphere full of yearning, they place you right at the edge of expression, pushing you deep into the places that you hesitate to go, and then they cut the cord.
As the album progresses, concrete statements become more legible, and it becomes possible to delineate specific genres. Space Afrika provide their version of hip-hop with “B£E,” which begins with a clattering drum echo. Even as they work in an identifiable style, they curve the song by bringing in momentary waves of static and dropping the beat out entirely. And once the beat returns and strings swell, it gets even deeper. Blackhaine, a Manchester rapper, gives an impression of what he sees, the loneliness that surrounds him, and a final tag of pride: “Man are trynna get rich at the top of the map.” It’s an expression of love to a city and culture that nurtured them, delivered in a way that earns every scintilla of sentimentality. The first half of “Girl Scout Cookies” is drifting ambient pop that floats on Bianca Scout’s voice, which is somehow as light and sharp as Elizabeth Fraser’s, and a disappearing synthesized glissando. After a sample of a feud appears for an instant, a transfixing This Heat-like guitar riff repeats as Scout sings cryptically about how she’s “run out of chances,” ending the song by repeating the words, “For the last time.” Not only does the song function as a bifurcated embrace of two disparate styles, it feels like a depiction of the slow understanding that one’s idealized love is slowly ebbing away beneath the day-to-day destruction of reality; it’s dream pop with an industrial underbelly.
The tightly controlled mix of voices and textures on Honest Labour feels cinematic primarily because it pursues human feeling. Kodwo Eshun said the Detroit techno duo Drexciya “exacerbated the dehumanization” of electronics in order to create “impalpable hallucinations that get on your nerves.” After repeatedly listening to Honest Labour, I think the electronics of Inyang and Reid do the exact opposite. What they do on this album is create a wholly humanistic synthetic world focused on figuring out exactly what we mean when we talk about loving one another. Honest Labour is a taxing, emotionally exhausting experience precisely because it replicates the messiness of human existence, in all its flaws, insensitivities, and oppressions. The titular last track repeats the melody of “Indigo Grit,” yet this time the keys are clear, a wavering cello plays along, and celestial electronics pulsate in and out. As the cello plays, the other instruments slowly fade out, and you are left listening to this lone player, struck by their devotion to their work. And then it’s over.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dais | September 9, 2021 | 8 | bd9ad603-663f-48dc-9756-db30be051d07 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
L.A. MC/producer Jonwayne's formal Stones Throw debut Rap Album One is a dense affair. While the rapping on Rap Album One can feel bogged down in thought, the production benefits from the almost mathematical approach. | L.A. MC/producer Jonwayne's formal Stones Throw debut Rap Album One is a dense affair. While the rapping on Rap Album One can feel bogged down in thought, the production benefits from the almost mathematical approach. | Jonwayne: Rap Album One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18715-jonwayne-rap-album-one/ | Rap Album One | There are many ways of loving hip-hop, but there's one in particular that most fans go through at some point that involves thinking really hard. Listen the right way, and the music turns into this fantastic puzzle, or maybe an equation that works out just so: Hook the beat up, convert it into hip-hop form, write a rhyme, etc. There's a specific kind of hip-hop that tends to fit this mindset best, in which the lyrics are geared in equal parts toward head and record scratching, the beats put you in a zone, and the only possible reaction is turn to your (perhaps equally stoned) friend and say "that's dope."
That style is one that the Los Angeles-based label Stones Throw excels in, and MC/producer Jonwayne is more or less the label's archetypal practitioner. Coming from an electronic background inspired by hanging out as a teenager in L.A.'s beat underground during the rise of artists like Flying Lotus and the Gaslamp Killer, Jonwayne has spent the last couple years staking out a claim as an MC with his series of Cassette mixtapes. His vibe is that of the friendly slacker dude who seems to always be hanging around in high school parking lots or dorm common rooms, eager to talk your ear off about some obscure psychedelia band or Wu-Tang deep cuts. With his proper debut, Rap Album One, he's upfront about what he's offering, cutting a Silent Bob or Dude-like figure in press photos and using a picture of a saltine cracker (wink, wink) as his album cover.
Pretty much everything about Jonwayne's approach to rap can be summed up in his lines from "You Can Love Me When I'm Dead", in which he explains, "this is rap shit, recite banter with high standards/ cold-blooded art like a salamander on fine canvas." His lyrics are clever and exactingly written, full of dense internal rhymes, and carefully thought-out punchlines. Although he offers some biography, particularly on "The Come Up Pt. 1 and Pt. 2", mostly he sticks to lyrical-bread-and-butter stuff that can't really be begrudged.
But while Wayne may be a rapper who seems primarily interested in technique, he's not a very technically interesting rapper. Almost all of his verses are delivered in a monotone, and he rarely varies his flow to sound any way other than steady and studiously composed. He raps slowly and deliberately, often taking a pause between bars, in a way that makes lines land like stoner proclamations or Deep Thoughts. Lyrics like "Shoes in the closet/ My stomach's got too many knots to justify tying laces and looking sharp" seem profound but end up revealing themselves as aimless upon closer inspection. On the song "Yung Grammar", the sort-of funny idea of screwing down a hook about grammar skills is immediately undermined by the revelation that there's basically nothing that sounds more boring screwed than a list of the parts of speech.
Elsewhere, though, it's these types of experiments that yield the album's best results. Much of "You Can Love Me When I'm Dead" is simply a piano riff that leans heavily on the instrument's rarely used low end and a drum machine with the phrase "every time I grab the mic I rock it just like that" being scratched in different ways. It sounds cool, and it's easy to zone out to, a trip to the traditionalist rap fan's subconscious. On "Zeroh's Song", by far the album's best and most interesting cut, rapping is more or less abandoned as snatches of sung phrases flit in and out of the track. Wayne blurts out the screwed-down phrase "they went back to moon!", and counts in a sinister voice over meandering synthesizer plinks. It's totally weird and fun, connecting the dots between Animal Collective, DJ Screw and Chance the Rapper, the moment when the album feels the least deliberate and the most playful.
The upside to Wayne's exacting approach throughout is that the production sounds fantastic, a clear indication of where his roots lie as an artist. His sound is minimal, in many cases relying on just piano and subdued drum pattern—live he uses just a sampler and a mic—which works to vivid effect. "Sandals", for instance, relies almost entirely on hi-hats, a perfectly calm match for Wayne's low-key style. While the rapping on Rap Album One can feel bogged down in thought, the production benefits from the almost mathematical approach (things get literally mathematical on the vinyl version, which, at 45 RPM, is designed to sound screwed down when played at a normal 33 ⅓ RPM). The album may be hard to connect to on anything other than a cerebral level, but sometimes that's the best way to connect. | 2013-11-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-11-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | November 12, 2013 | 6 | bd9bb87d-f4c8-44b7-a95a-f1e55f228620 | Kyle Kramer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kyle-kramer/ | null |
Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) reintroduces us to the indomitable Vivien Goldman—music journalist, reggae scholar, NYU’s “Professor of Punk”—whose recordings helped build post-punk at its magic hour. | Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) reintroduces us to the indomitable Vivien Goldman—music journalist, reggae scholar, NYU’s “Professor of Punk”—whose recordings helped build post-punk at its magic hour. | Vivien Goldman: Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21895-resolutionary-songs-1979-1982/ | Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) | In the beginning there was Patti, and she created light and it was good. Luckily, Vivien Goldman was around to ask her some questions. In November 1976, Goldman—music journalist, reggae scholar, a woman who is now known as New York University's “Professor of Punk”—went deep with Patti for the London music weekly Sounds. They chopped it up over Albert Ayler, astrology, and *Radio Ethiopia’*s feminine energy; Patti quoted Rimbaud's dying words and proclaimed that the Queen of Sheba was “like, the heaviest woman in rock‘n’roll.” A month later, Goldman visited a squat that reeked of cats and had panels missing from the floors, in order to report on an exhilarating new band called the Slits (who would become her friends and collaborators). In the piece, Goldman details her first meeting with the Slits’ firecracker teen screamer, Ari Up—elaborate black makeup slashed around her eyes, the word ‘SLIT’ painted on her cheek—at a gig attended by Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten (another future comrade in art). “Are you Vivien Goldman?” Ari asked, with “what appeared to be dismay.” Of course she was. “I don’t know…” Ari continued, “I thought you’d be much—younger…” She was 22.
How could one resist the pull of a current so strong? How could a person be in the purview of all this and not fully participate? How do you stand to the side? These are questions that Goldman does not have to answer or ask, because she did, of course, play. In her formative years, there were no demarcations between musician and critic. As readily as Goldman critiqued and grilled bands like the Slits, the Raincoats, and Public Image Ltd.—all kindred spirits moved in their own ways by reggae, dub, punk, and pop—she also recorded with them. Punk’s most sacred promise is, after all, that it can be yours—a hard light to un-see. When punk and reggae famously collided in ‘70s Ladbroke Grove, Goldman ultimately gravitated towards the latter. She is 62 now, and remains a creator, a translator, a formidable beacon of ideas.
Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) is one of several compilations released this season to reintroduce some of the women who helped architect post-punk at its magic hour, among them the expansive, two-disc Sharon Signs to Cherry Red and thrilling Subnormal Girls Volume 1. Resolutionary pairs Goldman’s visionary Dirty Washing EP from 1981 with two feminist art-rock songs she wrote and sung in the Flying Lizards, and three by her cosmopolitan, proto-world music duo Chantage. On Resolutionary, you'll find production by John Lydon and percussion from Robert Wyatt, a forefather and fixture of the Rough Trade scene then (Geoff Travis was once Goldman’s roommate). Goldman covers Bob Marley’s “Do It Twice” and she collaborates with British punks and musicians from Jamaica and Zaire. Her pop sense is sharp, her lyrics are witty, her voice a full soprano mixed high and clear. Among *Resolutionary’*s fragmented soundscapes, Goldman sounds as though she’s sung on a theater stage.
Goldman formed Chantage with Eve Blouin, a native of Guinea, while they shared a flat in Paris in the early ‘80s. The soukous guitar lines on these recordings came from Zairean player Jerry Malekani, and Chantage also worked with a violinist named Jancsi Hosszu, a man they first spotted playing at a Hungarian restaurant, who’d never been in a studio before. They found yet another collaborator by going out to All Saints Road and asking, “Who’s the best steelpan player in the area?” (They arrived at a fellow named Bubbles.) The shuffling drama of Chantage’s “It's Only Money” makes it sound like a snippet from a musical—or perhaps if broke, destitute squatters wrote a lost scene from La bohème. It alludes to the desperate predicaments one can get into in order to survive as an artist, and it underscores the unusual relationship artists had with money in that era, a time when squatting communities were alive throughout Europe. “Tu M’Fais Rire” is a rich, chic, strikingly harmonized a capella sung in French, the anti-punk lyric twirling and translating to: “Today people are embarrassed to say they love each other/It's a frightening feeling/But for us, it is bliss.”
Goldman’s deep love of reggae comes out most deliberately on the wondrously bold Chantage recording of “Same Thing Twice,” a slightly renamed version of the 1971 Wailers song “Do It Twice” (Goldman wrote a book on Bob Marley in 2006). It’s more sensitive than your usual rude boy joint, with an infectious lovers-rock sway. Chantage radically recast “Same Thing Twice” and its extremely sensual come-on from a female perspective: “Baby you're so nice,” they harmonize with sheer glee, “I’d like to do the same thing twice!” It’s hot, mellow disposition is heartening and happy, alive with pure joy—their singing seems to melt, and it just makes you smile. The upbeat swing of the horns could be from Return of Django. Chantage push this optimism towards the sun.
Before Chantage, Goldman was a member of avant-garde new wavers the Flying Lizards, who became known for their absurdist cover of the Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want)” and wacky, conceptual performances—you can watch them playing toy instruments on Top of the Pops, a noble undertaking. Goldman’s two songs, “The Window” and “Her Story,” both appeared on their debut LP in 1979—they are unabashedly feminist, which was rare. “The Window” tells the nightmarish, vivid story of a guy who’s throwing things at the glass, while Goldman hopes that her door’s locked tight: “I don’t want to let him in.../I wish he wasn’t twice my size/Sometimes you fight for the world/Sometimes you fight for yourself.” The groovy “Her Story,” meanwhile, is about the tyranny of history, which feels apt here.
But it’s really the cult Dirty Washing 12” EP—“Launderette,” “Private Armies,” and “P.A. Dub”—that makes this reissue so utterly indispensable. (For years, I honestly thought it was all she’d ever recorded, and with just two secret songs, Goldman seemed like a post-punk hero in her own right.) In ’81, Dirty Washing came out on Viv’s own label, Window Records, distributed by Rough Trade. While in New York, Goldman walked into the tiny record shop at 99 MacDougal Street and handed over a copy, so the collection got a pressing on the legendary 99 Records. Dirty Washing is a woman building a world. I listen to Dirty Washing to feel less alone.
On Dirty Washing, Goldman orchestrated the ultimate post-punk posse cuts. She asked her friend, George Oban, bassist in the local reggae band Aswad, to jam with her, bringing the resulting tape to fellow reggae connoisseur, John Lydon. When Public Image Ltd. were recording Flowers of Romance, they let Goldman use their downtime in the studio; Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd. played guitar. A wild ensemble of characters floats into the mix, texturing these bohemian songs: spacious percussion from Wyatt, the Raincoats’ classically trained violinist and noted feminist Vicky Aspinall, toy piano maestro Steve Beresford of Flying Lizards, another drummer called Shooz. The now-legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood mixed them all in a couple hours (Goldman was a fan of his LP Starship Africa). Goldman was well-positioned to assemble something epic like this. As Sherwood once put it: “Viv was mates with everybody. She was very friendly, and she decided to make a couple of tunes.”
“Launderette” is a funny and filmic song about a romance sparked among hypnotic washing machines: “I wanted 10 pence for the dryer/Yes, that was how we met/My laundry bag was broken/My clothes were soaking wet/I felt I needed hugging.” And so it goes; her new suitor comes around her flat and stays for weeks and will not leave, and after she “learns to say no”—to take control of her domestic space—she can't even escape him while she’s washing her socks. “Your hair’s all over the bath,” Goldman playfully adds. “You always were untidy.” The wandering, irresistible bass line tells the story, too. You know it’s going to happen again. She does not sound mad.
“Private Armies” is a cut-and-paste collage, a cloud that billows with a communal energy. It is one of the best documents of this era. Its ambient psychedelia is a swirl of reverb and echo, full of booms and crashes and flutters. The drum beat is stoned-sounding, and the bass is cinder-block heavy. Mixed with the raw echo of a sawed violin, the tough clatter is ominous, and the blown-out dub reprise is even heavier. That version later appeared on the 1981 debut from New Age Steppers, the collaboration of Ari Up, Sherwood, and the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart. Near the end, Goldman is sort of rapping.
With so many ideas zipping in and out, it's a small miracle that “Private Armies” remains so engrossingly tuneful. In direct terms, “Private Armies” speaks of Goldman's friends Vernon and Norman, who sat in their car and watched a bunch of skinheads “beat shit out of a person on the pavement/blood everywhere.” Goldman shouts the refrain: “If you can't get a hard-on/Get a gun!” Three and a half decades ago, “Private Armies” evoked the distinct and frustrating absurdity that any person could own a weapon of war, that masculinity should be equated with violence. (See also: Anohni’s “Violent Men,” released this year.) As Lee “Scratch” Perry once said, dub is where you can “hide from the fuckers.” Such places become scarcer everyday.
The roles of the musician and the critic can often seem opposed. One recalls the Lester Bangs character in Almost Famous advising the budding rock scribe, “You CANNOT make friends with the rock stars,” but—plot twist—Bangs played in bands, too. Goldman brought a reportorial instinct into her music, which is clear from the six-minute audio interview that comes at the end of this reissue, wherein Goldman incisively discusses “Private Armies.” (“Living where we are now,” she says, “people don’t need guns.”) “Private Armies” remains searingly relevant, and so does Goldman. Her uncommon path is inspiring; it is a reminder that there is no path but your own. | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Rock | Staubgold | July 11, 2016 | 8.5 | bda0cdb6-e43c-48c0-8c56-8b3a7a21fefd | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
At a time when so many young, emerging New York City rappers are eagerly presenting themselves as a sum of their classic New York rap influences, Ratking have generated attention by trying to represent something different. Ratking's palette is restless, chaotic, and cluttered, and So It Goes sounds like it exists in its own world. | At a time when so many young, emerging New York City rappers are eagerly presenting themselves as a sum of their classic New York rap influences, Ratking have generated attention by trying to represent something different. Ratking's palette is restless, chaotic, and cluttered, and So It Goes sounds like it exists in its own world. | Ratking: So It Goes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19201-ratking-so-it-goes/ | So It Goes | At a time when so many young, emerging New York City rappers are eagerly presenting themselves as a sum of their classic New York rap influences, Ratking have generated attention by trying to represent something different. Bursting onto the scene with rabble-rousing gusto and a reputation for wild live shows, teenage MCs Wiki and Hak (of the Upper West Side and Harlem, respectively) and Harlem-based producer Sporting Life aim to revitalize the reckless spirit of classic New York rap.
From the title of their full-length debut So It Goes—a Kurt Vonnegut reference that doubles as commentary on whether hip-hop is dead—to the album's nearly-exclusive focus on New York as a muse, it's impossible to misinterpret Ratking's stance on the constant conversation that runs through hip-hop culture. “This ain't 90s revival/ It's earlier, it's tribal revival,” Wiki raps on “Protein”, a disorienting song with an insistent MIDI tone driving the beat, a lengthy instrumental break in the middle, some understated singing, and a lot of disembodied yelling. Above all, Ratking's palette is restless, chaotic, and cluttered, and accordingly So It Goes sounds like it exists in its own world.
It's an album tied inescapably to its urban setting, with snippets of voices and the dings of closing subway doors drifting around under the clanging instrumentation. Sporting Life's instrumentation crackles with energetic drum-machine patterns and digital washes of noise, but the sound of So It Goes is never too harsh, with soulful backing vocals and meandering horns that offer an underlying warmth, particularly on the languorous highlight “Snow Beach”. The contributions of engineer and Jay-Z associate Young Guru (again, the New York lineage here is solid) are valuable, too: while previous Ratking recordings occasionally sounded claustrophobic because of the chaos' collision with the dense jumble of lyrics, So It Goes sounds spacious and clear.
The increase in clarity includes Wiki and Hak's rapping. Wiki first attracted attention as an MC due to his dense, rapid-fire delivery, and both rappers have a gift for freewheeling, tangled flows. However, their presence is satisfying on a basic level, too, breaking from the anti-expressiveness that often comes with such lyrical recitations. Hak often gives his rhymes a physical depth, creating a percussive effect through heavy alliteration, while the more ebullient Wiki yells and repeats short phrases like the singer of a hardcore band. These phrases echo and ring out like proclamations: “The earth is fucked, the city is gone!”, “The city implodes with the prettiest prose!” “20 degrees outside! We're toasted in the tunnel!” Much of So It Goes isn't as concerned with following traditional rap structures as it is with creating rich panoramas.
There isn't anything here that's trying for pop accessibility (unless you count King Krule's singing on the excellent downer anthem “So Sick Stories”), and So It Goes drags a little toward the end, especially with regards to the title track's new-agey ramblings, so the constant noise and loose structure can feel oppressive. Where Ratking dives deepest, then—the police harassment protest song “Remove Ya” and “Snow Beach”, which addresses NYU's gradual takeover of New York's downtown and paints a rich lyrical portrait—the payoff is greatest, proving that Wiki and Hak are perceptive observers. There's a pulsing, lived-in energy to So It Goes that captures what New York feels like and pushes at the boundaries of lyrically-driven rap. Beyond conversations about their city or genre, Ratking's greatest success is confidently offering a sound that feels untethered from expectations and bristles with the exhilarating energy of trying something new. | 2014-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | XL | April 16, 2014 | 7.5 | bdab90fb-4274-454b-b706-d05a730fae68 | Kyle Kramer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kyle-kramer/ | null |
On the fourth tape in his Bin Reaper series, the Michigan breakout looks to level up with slicker beats and bigger cosigns. Fortunately, he’s still rapping about NBA stars and SpongeBob. | On the fourth tape in his Bin Reaper series, the Michigan breakout looks to level up with slicker beats and bigger cosigns. Fortunately, he’s still rapping about NBA stars and SpongeBob. | BabyTron: Bin Reaper 3: New Testament | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babytron-bin-reaper-3-new-testament/ | Bin Reaper 3: New Testament | A few years ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking that BabyTron and his Detroit-area trio ShittyBoyz were an elaborate spoof. With mixtape titles like Dookie Brothers 2 and an entourage regularly referred to as the Dog Shit Militia, Tron and his collaborators veered dangerously close to branding themselves as a parody-rap outfit. But riding an upswell of listenership, Tron seems newly keen on the big-time and, on his new tape Bin Reaper 3: New Testament, it’s clear he’s ready to be taken—if not seriously—at least serious-ish.
BabyTron first appeared on the Detroit scene in 2019 with ShittyBoyz compatriots StanWill and TrDee. Alongside scam-rapper Teejayx6, they ushered in a wave of deadpan, reference-heavy flows about embossing debit cards and ripping off the elderly. But where Teejayx6 favored narratives and occasionally detailed instructions, BabyTron and the ShittyBoyz preferred sample-heavy beats and mile-a-minute non-sequiturs about basketball, cartoons, and money-making. In the years since, BabyTron, the clear break-away talent, has released over a dozen projects either solo or with his group and garnered a cult following. Enter Bin Reaper 3: New Testament, a natural title for the fourth entry in his Bin Reaper series, following last October’s Bin Reaper 3: Old Testament.
If the serialized title and relative promptness of New Testament’s arrival suggests an album of castoffs, BabyTron does his best to prove those presumptions wrong. The more commercial beat selection, high-profile features (including Lil Yachty, Babyface Ray, the ever-present ShittyBoyz, and a high-energy turn from Rico Nasty), and BabyTron’s own giddy confidence all suggest a premeditated stab at crossover stardom. Fortunately he’s still rapping about NBA stars, SpongeBob, video games, and (for some reason) Shameless, but it’s accompanied by a newfound sheen and his biggest cosigns yet.
The South Park-referencing “Mr. Hanky,” for instance, features a harder beat than BabyTron has ever attempted, filled with sinister piano and sampled vocals. Overtop, he delivers droll schoolyard taunts by way of the car dealership: “This life shit up and down, kinda like a seesaw/Aston Martin with the horses, pull off in a yeehaw/Threw your album in the dumpster, that shit sounded weak sauce.” Gone are the days of ShittyBoyz’s dinky production: Producer Bye Kyle! brings an air of professionalism to the beats, which are often darker and more aggressive than BabyTron’s past instrumentals.
Frequently on New Testament, BabyTron sounds invigorated, continuing to deliver some of the best one-two punch(lines) in rap. On “RIP Hutch,” also featuring Remble and Rico Nasty, he raps, “Got it off the hustle, off the muscle, I ain’t buy fame/Feelin’ like Sub-Zero, masked up in these ice chains.” BabyTron has always flexed, but fresh off his inclusion in XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class and an uptick in streams on both his newer material and extensive back catalog (particularly 2019’s “Jesus Shuttlesworth”), his big-upping and trash-talking carry new weight. This is the first BabyTron album where a line like, “Shit, I’m getting 30 for a verse, I got the gift of gab” is even halfway believable.
New Testament’s primary issue is its runtime. At 26 tracks, and with this much gimmick, there’s bound to be some skips. BabyTron doesn’t stray from his dry, wry flow very often, instead leaning on mid-song beat switch-ups for most of New Testament’s dynamic changes. His uncanny deadpan is versatile enough to handle jarring instrumental shifts, but often fails to engage on slower cuts, as on the mid-tempo, jazz-inflected “Beetleborgs,” featuring Cordae. It’s a snoozer, and Tron doesn’t seem capable of altering his affect enough to make a mellow song sing.
At its best, though, Bin Reaper 3: New Testament marries BabyTron’s idiosyncratic regional style with newly focused ambition. On “Next Level 2,” when asked “Tron, what make you different?’” he replies, “‘Without I, you can’t even spell commitment. Do you get it?” BabyTron may rap some silly stuff, but at 22, he’s discovered the central truth to leveling up as an offbeat act: You gotta commit to the bit. | 2023-01-20T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-20T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | The Hip Hop Lab / Empire | January 20, 2023 | 7.2 | bdbc589d-18f1-43ff-9242-8dd3536ac054 | P.J. McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/p.j.-mccormick/ | |
E-40 sounds like a resigned elder statesman on his fourth album with cousin B-Legit, and that’s a surprise coming from someone who used to be superhuman. | E-40 sounds like a resigned elder statesman on his fourth album with cousin B-Legit, and that’s a surprise coming from someone who used to be superhuman. | E-40 / B-Legit: Connected and Respected | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/e-40-b-legit-connected-and-respected/ | Connected and Respected | According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great wept not because there were no more worlds to conquer, but because he’d yet to become the master of a single one. Were the Macedonian warrior-king alive today, he and E-40 could discuss the finer points of boundless ambition, perhaps over a bottle of Earl Stevens Mangoscato. At 50 years old—E-50, if you will—the Vallejo rapper, label owner, beverage impresario, and Wingstop franchisee has released Connected and Respected, his fourth collaboration with his cousin B-Legit. Counting his LPs with the Click and Too $hort, Connected and Respected is E-40’s 30th album. There are no more worlds left for him to conquer.
E-40 wasn’t the first Bay Area rapper (that was probably Motorcycle Mike) and he wasn’t its first homegrown star (that was Too $hort), but the slang maven with the quicksilver voice is its arch-stylist. At his peak, E-40’s verses ebbed and flowed like Napa River tides and had the carefree, unencumbered sway of a Hillside sideshow. He was a thrilling listen: a line’s meter and syllables had little bearing on those of the next, so every verse had a breathless, acrobatic quality. But thirty years of rapping has dulled his powers. Either the ravages of age or an understandable ebbing of interest has turned his voice, once volcanic, into something more viscous. He remains a gifted rapper and a witty lyricist, but he’s human—and, for E-40, that wasn’t always the case.
Fortunately, he and B-Legit (whose own Tryin’ to Get a Buck and The Hemp Museum are critically underappreciated) have a chemistry forged by time and consanguinity. Historically, B-Legit, with his deep, plainspoken lilt, has played the straight man to E-40’s antic, vibrating energy. E-40 was the gun that shot a BANG! flag; B-Legit was the jet-black truncheon in a dark alleyway. On Connected and Respected, that calculus has been altered. They now share an age-appropriate world-weariness, and the lightheartedness that marked classics like their (and Mac Shawn’s) “Sideways” and the Click’s “Hurricane” is largely absent. When their hard-bitten bad cop-bad cop routine works, it works well. The wizened, slightly dyspeptic storytelling of “Life Lessons,” “Up Against It,” “Barbershop,” and Click reunion cut “Blame It” would have been out of character 20 years ago but, with both rappers nearing or at their fifties, their transition into elder statesmen feels right.
What feels wrong, though, is the limited range of Connected and Respected. Despite its array of respected Bay Area producers—most notably P-Lo, Traxamillion, and the Mekanix—there’s an off-putting uniformity to the album, which is stuck in a gray zone that’s either post-Mobb Music or post-Mustard, depending on your historical perspective. This seems less the fault of the producers than it does E-40 and B-Legit. When they’re engaged, the album’s washed-out palette plays as menace rather than exhaustion. There’s a revealing contrast to be found in the work of SOB X RBE: A similarly restricted sound feels more exciting in the hands of the hellions from Vallejo’s Country Club Crest, probably because they’re young and rap like their shoes are on fire.
The cousins’ most dramatic deviation from that monochromatic tone is the album’s capper, “So High.” It might be a cynical play for song-of-the-summer status, but that’s ultimately immaterial. The sample of Howard Johnson’s pleading 1982 electro-boogie jam “So Fine” is pitch-perfect for our aging protagonists. It’s a bolt of fresh, pure orange light on an album that, after 19 songs and 57 minutes, can become cloudy and overbearing. It’s nostalgic without being cloying, fun without being overly self-aware, and the logical—and enjoyable—extension of two careers spent interpolating and reinterpreting funk and soul. It’s not a new world for E-40 to conquer, but a sunkissed coast worth revisiting. | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Heavy on the Grind | April 14, 2018 | 6.7 | bdc7c689-4385-4965-ac21-918fe848c2a1 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
One of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade makes their well-deserved, Rick Rubin-assisted major-label bow. | One of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade makes their well-deserved, Rick Rubin-assisted major-label bow. | The Avett Brothers: I and Love and You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13478-i-and-love-and-you/ | I and Love and You | Do the Avett Brothers ever wake up feeling cranky? Mean-spirited? Less than generous? Their songs all communicate an unfailingly chummy earnestness that stems from candid introspection and unbidden love for their fellow man, and perhaps more than their brotherly harmonies or their rambunctious take on string-band Americana, that sincerity is their chief appeal. Of late, however, the Avetts' self-reckoning has grown so overbearing that it borders on obsession and threatens to limit their musical range. I and Love and You, their sixth studio album, doesn't break from their monolithic solemnity, but actually intensifies it: The hook on "Ten Thousand Words" goes, "Ain't it like most people, I'm no different, we love to talk on things we don't know about." On "The Perfect Space", they sing in sharp harmony: "I want to have friends who love me for the man I become, not the man that I was." There's a similar potential yearbook quote in every song-- every verse, just about-- and after a while, you may begin to wish they'd get angry about something, or, god forbid, crack an ironic joke.
I and Love and You is a crucial album for the band. One of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade, they spent years self-releasing albums and self-promoting shows to gradually growing audiences, eventually signing to North Carolina indie label Ramseur before moving up to Sony/BMG/Columbia Records. For their major-label debut, the trio (which includes brothers Scott and Seth and unrelated bass player Bob Crawford) worked with producer Rick Rubin, whose involvement gives the album added critical and commercial cache. With a large and loyal fanbase, they could be as big as Dave Matthews and bring string-band rootsiness to the mainstream. Or not. One thing is for sure: After I and Love and You, they can no longer go back to being the Avett Brothers they once were.
As a major-label debut, the album plays to one set of their strengths while ignoring others. The Avetts continue to emphasize bold melodic lines, emphatic performances, and lyrics whose self-criticism is so magnanimous it becomes a form of self-praise. "And It Spread" moves from gentle to raucous the way more pedestrian bands do quiet-loud, and "January Wedding" is so delicate it nearly blows away in its own breeziness. These songs draw less from the celebratory energy of Mignonette and Emotionalism-- rambling albums whose spirited imperfections made them all the more endearing-- and more from the recent Gleam EPs, which showcased a calmer, more polite acoustic craftsmanship. That trend may predate Rubin's involvement, but here it sounds like a product of the Beard's approach to Americana, which is unerringly clean, sparse, and tasteful.
Every instrument sounds perfectly placed, and that's a shame because the Avetts got more mileage out of their rough edges than most bands this decade. Buffing away their rough edges and rowdy quirks, Rubin establishes a mood of intense pensiveness even on the first song, when they announce they're getting no sleep till Brooklyn. The title track builds carefully as the brothers ask the borough to welcome them, carefully adding an instrument or two with each verse until the song reaches its destination-- a big, cathartic finale. Most of the songs that follow employ a similar technique: opening with a soft acoustic intro, then inserting other sounds to underline the sentiments. It's effective until it becomes predictable, but later in the album, "Laundry Room" plays around with that formula, following a winding path from a gentle near-ballad (marred only by the lyric "I am a breathing time machine") as it transforms into a swirling bluegrass jam that's one of the album's finest moments.
There are surprisingly durable hooks on the stand-out "Tin Man" and the upbeat "Slight Figure of Speech", which, back to back, make the second half much livelier and more tenacious than the first. Rubin allows the Avetts to expand their sound and indulge these pop urges, but not always to great effect. With its jaunty piano theme and insistent screaming, "Kick Drum Heart" tries for Wilco but achieves Guster. Generally, there's a refinement to I and Love and You that seems slightly out of step for a group that has built an audience on performances and recordings that sound rawly spontaneous and heartfelt; breathlessly conveying their positive message has always been more crucial than deciding where to put the banjo or how prominent to make the strings. These songs, on the other hand, are more purposeful, more written, more professional. It's not that there's no room for such studio nuance in the Avetts' music, but it gives I and Love and You a quotidian sheen, making their signature sincerity seem sappy and much less special. | 2009-10-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-10-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / American | October 2, 2009 | 5.8 | bdc90df2-7ffa-4ccd-8a1e-1634e3aa1940 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Producer Fatima Al Qadiri adapts the “evil extreme femme alter ego” of Shaneera for her new EP on the Hyperdub label, which is packed with melody, drama, and joy. | Producer Fatima Al Qadiri adapts the “evil extreme femme alter ego” of Shaneera for her new EP on the Hyperdub label, which is packed with melody, drama, and joy. | Fatima Al Qadiri: Shaneera EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fatima-al-qadiri-shaneera-ep/ | Shaneera EP | Although she may borrow from the tools of modern club music—rattling drum machines, wipe-clean synths, and corporeal sub-bass—the output of Fatima Al Qadiri is about as far from the stereotype of dance-floor workouts as it is possible to go. Her records come wrapped in elaborate conceptual frameworks that may envisage a journey into an “imagined China” (2014’s Asiatisch), explore the idea of war as refracted through video games (2012’s Desert Strike EP) or celebrate the right to protest (2016’s Brute), putting her in a lineage of electronic music producers from Matthew Herbert to Kode9 and Jeff Mills who use the infinite sonic possibilities of electronic music production to question the universe around them.
Shaneera, Al Qadiri’s new EP for Kode9’s Hyperdub label, is another fabulous example of her thematic explorations, and it’s packed with enough backstory to give Ken Burns food for thought. “Shaneera,” the press release explains, “is the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word, shanee’a ( شنيعة ), literally meaning ‘outrageous, nefarious, hideous, major, and foul.’” When used as queer slang in Al Qadiri’s native Kuwait, however, the word “Shaneera” takes on a positive tone, referring to a gender-defying persona and the notion of being an evil queen.
With that, you might expect an EP that is inaccessible or academic, more food for the mind than zip for the body. But underneath Shaneera’s steely sonic casing lies an EP packed with melody and joy. Al Qadiri appears on the EP’s cover made up as Shaneera—who she calls her “evil extreme femme alter ego”—clad in the kind of cake-thick makeup that was popular in mid-2000s Kuwait, the picture setting the scene for a love letter to evil and benevolent queens that bursts with dramatic energy. In this quest, she is joined by Lama3an, an Kuwaiti/Iraqi architect who moonlights as an artist and fashion designer; Chaltham, aka longtime collaborator Khalid al Gharaballi; singer Naygow; and Bobo Secret, noted for his “uncanny ability at projecting an evil femme queen voice.” It’s that kind of record: “evil as fuck,” in Al Qadiri’s own words. But it’s also theatrical, intense, and frequently funny, marked by Secret’s vampish, regal projections.
It’s a hugely original piece of work. Over the EP’s five tracks, Al Qadiri explores new sonic territory by marrying the Khaleeji music of the Arab Gulf to the granite-hard, grime and trap-infused production listeners will recognize from her solo work or adventures with Future Brown. Al Qadiri is a brilliant producer with the knack of squeezing the maximum effect out of individual sounds. Her synths shine like polished silver and penetrate with the force of a diamond-tipped drill; her drums are sculpted girders, dropped into the mix with the sonic precision of latter-period Kraftwerk, and her work here imbues Shaneera with a furious intensity that amplifies the EP’s drama.
Al Qadiri is also very melodically gifted and it is this that connects Shaneera to her career high-point Asiatisch. The melodies on the two may be very different—the Arabesque swirls on Shaneera versus the sinogrime elegance of Asiatisch—but both releases are home to some of Al Qadiri’s most powerful hooks. “Galby,” the best song on Shaneera, features a heart-rending vocal line from Naygow, while the EP’s title track makes an unlikely pop gem out of stately keyboard sweeps and the three syllables of the song’s title stretched into a bizarre yet affecting earworm. There may be something sinister in the heady, minor-tone melodies that dominate Shaneera, but this is set off by the bombastic timbre of lead vocalist Bobo Secret, whose voice suggests the melodramatic menace of a Disney villain.
The other big difference from the sedate tones of Asiatisch is that Shaneera simply bangs. The five songs here are all dance tracks, which charge along at the kind of frantic pace you could imagine inflaming both basement club and family wedding, while the percussion is a brilliantly frenetic mix of Western drum machine tone and Khaleeji rhythm. “Spiral” is particularly thrilling, with jittery synth lines that twist off into the mix meeting a pointillist layer of percussive touches to send the pulse racing.
The lyrical themes on Shaneera —which are sung in Kuwaiti and Egyptian Arabic, with one Iraqi proverb—sound equally exhilarating. Al Qadiri hasn’t provided an English translation, explaining that the meaning would be lost in translation, but we are told that the lyrics are “suggestive, imploring, shady and loving, some original and some re-recorded material from Grindr chats, online drag, and femme comedy skits.” In “Alkahaf,” Bobo Secret repeats the line “Aheenik ibjamaly,” which means “I offend you with my beauty,” a phrase apparently used by many non-binary individuals against hegemonic haters.
Shaneera doesn’t so much break boundaries down as invite them in, loosen their ties and take them out dancing. Electronic music can be experimental, danceable, thought-provoking, and fun. But to combine all of these attributes in a record that also breaks new sonic ground is a remarkable achievement. | 2017-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 13, 2017 | 7.6 | bdca1d44-e7b9-40b4-b773-ea0dbc464ebd | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
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 My Chemical Romance’s second album, an operatic pop-rock behemoth that became an icon for outcasts. | 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 My Chemical Romance’s second album, an operatic pop-rock behemoth that became an icon for outcasts. | My Chemical Romance: Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-chemical-romance-three-cheers-for-sweet-revenge/ | Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge | Donna and Donald Way lived in a particularly bleak apartment in the gloomy little township of Belleville, a New Jersey suburb often mentioned in news stories about crime rings and mob trials. Donna, a hairdresser, had a penchant for horror films and eerie decor—at one point she filled an entire room with Victorian dolls. It was here, in a wood-paneled basement unit filled with gothic kitsch like petrified bats and lifelike human skulls, that their son Gerard spent most of his childhood. He posted up in a bedroom with only one window the size of a cinder block, fomenting the outcast mentality that would later manifest in My Chemical Romance.
Northern New Jersey would soon become home to a thriving hardcore and emo scene in the early 2000s, one that would eventually propel Gerard’s band to global recognition. But as children, the suburbs could be restrictive: “Our parents were kind of scared to let us out of the house,” Gerard’s younger brother, Mikey, said later. “It was mostly me and Gerard.” The Way brothers chose to make the best of their cramped environs. They were into horror movies and comic books, and made up characters and stories together to compensate for the loneliness. For Gerard, comics became more than a hobby; after becoming an amateur artist in his own right, selling his first comic book at age 15, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
After graduating, Gerard nearly landed a TV pilot on Cartoon Network for a show about a Scandanavian monkey that could magically make breakfast out of thin air. But in 2001, when he saw the Twin Towers collapse during his morning commute, he found himself pulled away from his previous passion. Disillusioned and traumatized, he gave up his career, finding the world of TV executives insufficiently radical, too profit-driven and slow for the intensity of the post-9/11 era. Seeing local hardcore heroes Thursday perform at a small club flipped a switch: “I wanted to make a bigger impact,” he said later. After roping in his brother and local music nerd Ray Toro, who had the frazzled look and finger-picking acumen of a snobbish Guitar Center tech, My Chemical Romance was born a week later.
Today, My Chemical Romance are ubiquitous—a meme, a cult, an aesthetic. Though the term “emo” has long stuck to the band, their mix of vaudevillian pomp and four-on-the-floor punk progressions was more indicative of a new direction for the sub-genre. But they remained relevant long after the sound they championed died out commercially in the late 2000s. Rather than the pinch of nostalgia or embarrassment that often accompanies revisiting the histrionic lyrics of that era, My Chemical Romance subverted shame by embracing their gothic attire, wearing it like a base layer from which they could build unexpectedly melodic pop. When they announced their reunion earlier this year, fans embraced them not like a ratty relic of childhood, but like a long-lost heirloom that had finally been returned.
Perhaps their lasting appeal is because the band never wanted to strictly write about passing teenage anxieties. Their early songs were a direct response to the attacks of September 11. “Skylines and Turnstiles,” the first song Gerard wrote, teemed with heightened existential dread: “After seeing what we saw/Can we still reclaim our innocence?” The “Attic Demos,” recorded in 2001 in the attic of their then-drummer, barely made it past the North New Jersey punk scene—the production was tinny and compressed, Gerard’s voice was strained and out of tune. But the demo conveyed an earnest commitment to storytelling and a glimmer of ambition, enough to convince local punk stalwart Frank Iero to join as a rhythm guitarist: “There was just something about it where you could already imagine what it would sound like,” he said.
My Chemical Romance released their official debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, in July 2002. The record, produced by Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly and released on local punk mainstay Eyeball Records, had the hallmarks of the hardcore scene that surrounded them: guitars ripped through verses; clean vocals slipped into shredded screams. But My Chemical Romance stood out for its dedication to fantasy, writing the album loosely told from the perspective of a vampiric protagonist who must avenge his lover’s death. Their bombastic live shows, so violent and destructive they often led to broken glass, landed them a manager and, before long, a record deal with the Warner Bros. offshoot Reprise. Before the end of 2003, they’d outgrow the small Passaic clubs they used to frequent. By 2004, thanks to an optimistic album review in The Guardian, they’d be playing headlining shows across the UK, scoring a series of glowing write-ups in Kerrang! and NME before they even began recording their major-label debut.
The deal with Reprise gave the band access to their pick of producers. Their first choice, rock oracle Butch Vig, was busy, so they landed on Howard Benson, who had once worked with Motörhead but, more recently, had taken on the dregs of nu-metal with groups like Crazy Town and Hoobastank. Benson and My Chemical Romance were a strange pair. When he first arrived at the studio, wearing his usual uniform of sweatpants and a hockey jersey, the band allegedly mistook him for a pizza delivery guy. Everyone referred to him as “a sports coach” who would largely communicate in basketball metaphors. But Benson challenged the band to work on song structure and melody, pushing back against extra guitar solos and abrupt endings—saying things like, “‘What does this have to do with the rest of the song? You’re confusing the shit out of me,’” as Gerard later recalled. “That’s the point,” the band would yell in return.
But Benson’s coaching pushed the album, what we now know as Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, to its emotive peaks. While recording “The Ghost of You,” a seething song about loss, Benson convinced the band to include a final chorus to end the song. (“We all hated having that chorus in that song,” Toro later said.) My Chemical Romance came from a world in which nothing trumped the brute force of a scream like Rickly’s or an overdriven guitar-heavy outro; the original ending had both. But Benson’s formulaic approach helped anchor the pensive ballad: With that final chorus—a defiant, unabashedly self-serious crescendo— the band displayed a glimmer of the massive arena rock they’d go on to write for 2006’s The Black Parade. “The Ghost of You” shot to top the UK Rock and Metal Singles chart.
On its face, Three Cheers was a lofty concept record about star-crossed lovers who die in a gunfight, who must then “bring the devil the souls of 1,000 evil men” in order to be reunited in the afterlife. But it’s a conceit loosely held. Instead of a vigilante shootout, Three Cheers ripples to life with “Helena,” a guilt-laden tribute to the Ways’ grandmother, Elena, who died while the band was away on tour. The track begins with a restrained, reverberating guitar and Gerard’s voice at nearly a whisper. Then, almost like a jump scare at a haunted house, the band comes in at full volume: a legion of distortion, led by a full-throated yelp from Gerard.
While the songs on Three Cheers are certainly allegories for ennui and narcissism, they are often equally escapist explorations into storytelling and world-building. We meet our protagonist outright in “Give ’Em Hell, Kid,” as he journeys up from New Orleans pumped full of stimulants and ready to exact his revenge. By the third track, “To The End,” he’s inside a mansion to murder a wedding party, dropping small details—homosexual undertones, allusions to William Faulkner—like little breadcrumbs. The narrative also helps to unite an otherwise disparate record; by the time the Morricone whistles kick in on “Hang ’Em High,” they seem fitting in service of the story. The band, and Benson, carefully balanced these large gestures to literary tropes with hooks and choruses that are more in line with a typical rock song. Still, like the band members cooped up in Jersey basements a decade prior, the fans who needed it found an escape, a record that didn’t just lament a sleepy one-horse town, but transported them out of it entirely.
On the most successful manifestation of the album’s concept, the jaunty “You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison,” the band strikes a memorable balance between drama and black humor, dropping the listener in on the arrest of the protagonist and then documenting his ensuing panic attacks behind bars. His concerns vacillate between the laughably mundane (“They all cheat at cards and the checkers are lost”) and the deadly (“My cellmate’s a killer”). But it’s the delivery of the penultimate line of the verse—“They make me do push-ups in drag”—that reverberates after the song ends. It’s a half-laugh, half-sob delivered with flair and a wink. The scattered references to queerness and gender-play—Gerard might sing a verse from the perspective of a girlish ex-lover—add a counterweight to the record’s overarching violence and masculinity, a self-referential nod to a frontman who would later publicly admit to struggles with gender identity. In a scene that was quickly turning to gendered hatred and dreams of femicide, these small rebellions against the rigidity of masculinity felt like the loosening of a pressure valve.
But the song that would become an anthem for fans and the hoards of copycat bands that grew in the album’s wake was lead single, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” The song is a comparatively straightforward outsider anthem, with choppy chords, gnarled vocals, and lyrics that state pent-up, vindictive frustration outright. As far as narcissistic depression goes, the chorus is admittedly on-the-nose: “I’m not OK/You wear me out.” With its sensitive, almost sophomoric outlook (“Forget about the dirty looks/The photographs your boyfriend took”), the song could have been self-parody, an encapsulation of emo’s self-pitying melodramatics. Yet, perhaps because the band took themselves and their message as deadly serious, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” remains a classic—an unfiltered stream of pure catharsis, destined to be screamed at karaoke bars for the foreseeable future. From the gasping desperation of Gerard’s vocal performance, recorded alone in a dark attic, to the song’s pop structure, it approached the desolation in its lyrics with almost triumphant glee. Unabashedly melodic and unafraid to whimper and shout in the same verse, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” captures the most exciting way to be at the end of your rope.
In the end, sentiment won out over concept. A year into the tour for the Three Cheers, Gerard began to sing a different tune about the meaning of the record: “Really, it's about two boys living in New Jersey who lost their grandma, and how their brothers in the band helped them get through it." And the beauty in Three Cheers lies in that mutability: It took the quotidian drama of suburban kids and blew it up into a life-or-death soap opera. Instead of digging its heels further into the pressures of adolescence, the album attempted to transcend them; in a world of Judy Blumes, it read like Stephen King.
My Chemical Romance thrived because they came to the realization that emotional outcasts deserved something to cheer for, even if their victories were imaginary. Teenage emotions aren’t cut and dried and high school has no set heroes and villains. In building a world that reflected imperfections and guilt, exhilaration and depression, My Chemical Romance never patronized their audience; their characters, like the band members themselves, embraced the in-between. Perhaps that is why, when The Daily Mail accused My Chemical Romance of creating a suicidal cult, teens cloaked in the colors of a funeral procession shot back with a surprisingly affirmative response: “MCR SAVED OUR LIVES.” | 2019-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | December 8, 2019 | 8.2 | bdcda81c-0d8d-4e77-8b7c-ab978b24f9e3 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Singer Rosita Bonita and producer Prinz George prove R&B can still be crazy, sexy, cool on a mixtape that favors the uptempo ’90s grooves of Timbaland, New Edition, and especially TLC. | Singer Rosita Bonita and producer Prinz George prove R&B can still be crazy, sexy, cool on a mixtape that favors the uptempo ’90s grooves of Timbaland, New Edition, and especially TLC. | S4U: Heart 2 Say | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/s4u-heart-2-say/ | Heart 2 Say | You’ve got to hand it to S4U. Plenty of modern artists have found 1990s R&B a tempting narcotic, but it takes supreme self-confidence to try on Aaliyah’s baggy pants and Montell Jordan’s snakeskin jackets. While fellow revivalists Jessie Ware, Wet, and Jacquees have drawn from the era’s urbane, romantic sounds, the London duo favors its more uptempo grooves. The small body of work cut by singer Rosita Bonita and producer Prinz George—2016 EP Brazil, plus a handful of loosies—has offered a smart, streetwise hybrid of Babygirl’s and Timbaland’s cyborg sensibilities, New Edition’s new jack swingin’ pop-soul credibility, and, in particular, TLC’s slamming rhythms and swaggering flippancy.
For strong evidence of the latter connection, observe how the smooth programmed horn section of the 2016 single “Twice” summons the spirit of TLC’s evergreen “Creep,” or how Brazil’s “Sket” plays like an East London-set remake of “No Scrubs.” With T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli as their spiritual guides, S4U add a thick layer of hazy atmospherics and spiky drum machines to their sonic purée, reinventing these old-fashioned grooves for the future while keeping things distinctly of the British capital. And they’ve done so with a certain low-budget aesthetic, keeping all production in-house and releasing a set of self-directed videos that play like the most visually popping Sweded versions of old Adidas commercials ever. As that great prophet DJay, from Hustle & Flow, once said: “It’s not enough for a man to climb Mount Everest. You know, he gotta do that shit with the least amount of tools.”
Heart 2 Say, the pair’s first attempt at a full-length release, is pitched as a mixtape—and it feels like one in the most modern sense of the term. Though made up entirely of original music, there’s a brevity to the tape as a whole. A dozen or so rising local artists wander in and out of each track, adding slam poetry recitals and heavily accented rap verses to the mix. Songs like “Refrain” sound less structured than previous singles, with Bonita’s voice deployed as textured tones to wrap around the glittering keys and tough drum machines. The singer tests herself on “Untitled,” playing around with a more barbed trap vocal style than she’s previously adopted, while “Alone” is an unlikely rave-inspired number tacked on to the back end of Heart 2 Say, probably because the pair didn’t know what else to do with it.
No experiment here is entirely unsuccessful, though the tape’s best moments unsurprisingly come in its most fully formed songs. Take “No Ego,” a track about hitting the darkest, dankest of dancefloors and letting your body get entwined with another: The synths are murky and shadowy, the climate so thick, it sounds like the music is being teased out in a tiny underground club running two smoke machines on full blast.
“Trust” is underpinned by a shuffling, garage-style drum loop that reasserts S4U’s affinity for the genre following last year’s Artful Dodger-esque single “Too Much.” The best song, though, is “Heart,” an R&B jam that manages to feel both suave and slightly wonky. Prinz George deploys thick drums and rocky, drip-drip synth riffs that are reminiscent of Timbaland while sounding more vital than almost everything Tim has done in years. Up top, Bonita’s vocals rasp like T-Boz meets Brandy, further crystallizing her connection to the legends of her youth.
Over 38 minutes, the melodies blend beautifully, making Heart 2 Say a groomed, funky listen, if not the definitive statement of the first phase of S4U’s recording career. But hey, try compiling the best work they’ve done without even releasing a proper album: Take “Twice” and “Sket” and “Too Much,” then add “No Ego,” “Heart,” and more. You’ll end up with a London street classic that showcases an act that simultaneously celebrates and defies contemporary R&B norms while proving that the genre can still be crazy, sexy, cool. | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Different | July 16, 2018 | 7.3 | bdd926f2-029e-477a-b7cd-f07f9a4d3e68 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On their fifth album, the Chicago rock band Disappears have traded in the pop streak of 2013's Era for a world of stark and brutal rhythm. Instead of melodies, the instruments trace shrapnel in the wind. | On their fifth album, the Chicago rock band Disappears have traded in the pop streak of 2013's Era for a world of stark and brutal rhythm. Instead of melodies, the instruments trace shrapnel in the wind. | Disappears: Irreal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20065-irreal/ | Irreal | Disappears left plenty of space in the cracks on their last album, 2013's Era, and at points it was a surprisingly inviting kind of emptiness. That album's title track even gripped something like a hook: "Is rapture your only fear/ Or do you think about it at all?" asks singer Brian Case at the chorus. Sure, he's musing on the end of days, but at least he's singing right to us. No such luck with the Chicago band's fifth album, Irreal. Disappears have traded in their last pop streak for a world of stark and brutal rhythm.
Instead of questions, answers, and hypotheses, the lyrics on Irreal assume the shape of isolated fragments. Instead of melodies, the instruments trace shrapnel in the wind. "I want to remember/ Make me," Case demands on "Interpretation" as a roiling drum pattern whips past him. He repeats the words in a steely monotone, only breaking his flat timbre when he throws the occasional "oi!" away from the mike. Somewhere behind him, guitars that don't sound like guitars play chords that don't sound like chords. "Anything could happen," he smirks, and it's more of a threat than a promise.
Irreal is a deliberately exhausting listen. The band dares you to see how far you can stomp behind them without a melodic phrase or a lyrical narrative to grab hold of. But unlike Swans, who paved much of this terrain, Disappears sound more resigned than spiteful. They're eager to pummel themselves, but not because it offers any catharsis.
"Another thought/ Another memory," Case drones later in the record. "Living in a loop of different lives." His accompaniment is pitchy, nervous, and streaked with noise. The drums racket from the right channel to the left. This is cabin fever at its most intricate, a cage of beautiful repeating patterns that holds no chance of escape.
On the album's title track, the guitars seem to bicker with each other, cutting squalls of feedback with sharp, demented arpeggios. Even the name sounds like a trap, a portmanteau of "unreal" and "irregular," maybe, a word that's just familiar enough to hint at meaning while still coming up void. When Case pronounces it, it sounds like "I will." I wonder if there's supposed to be a pun on "IRL", too.
The song "Halcyon Days" probably hides a joke about aging behind its title. It's certainly no calm before the storm. That may be Irreal's whole punchline: You count your years in suffocating routines and repeated patterns. You build memories somewhere between the filler. What do you get from it, except a library of respites to look back on in the tedium? What good are the best days of your life if you can only access them in retrospect?
The album's last song coughs up the first melodic bass line in the whole piece, a mournful, descending figure. "Am I alone now?" Case wonders as the record spirals to a close. The band named that song "Navigating the Void". If Irreal is a map, don't expect to stop walking in tight, lonely circles. | 2015-01-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-01-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Kranky | January 19, 2015 | 7 | bdda284e-916f-4012-8898-7c4d2178fb27 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The Brooklyn rapper follows up his 1995 debut with an ornate sequel that indulges nostalgia on its own terms. | The Brooklyn rapper follows up his 1995 debut with an ornate sequel that indulges nostalgia on its own terms. | AZ: Doe or Die II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/az-doe-or-die-ii/ | Doe or Die II | Doe or Die, the 1995 debut by Brooklyn rapper AZ, suffers critically for its flawless execution. A coming-of-age treatise and a doctorate-level technical exercise, it’s Illmatic’s cosmopolitan sibling and Cuban Linx’s sober cousin, bridging their ideas and surpassing their acrobatics. Where its closest peers—ruggedly hard-won classics like Word...Life and operatic genre favorites like 4,5,6—commit more fully to autobiography or ambiance, Doe or Die explores weighty themes but doesn’t leave quite as much to chew on. Its modesty is unique among rap masterworks: AZ is all polish and rolled consonants, his rhyme patterns nested like Russian dolls so as to belie their complexity.
The album’s subtle magnificence extends to its exposition. On Doe or Die, life is fragile and death nonsensical, the born-alone-die-alone ethic making for a stark intimacy. Basking in a penthouse sunset, the kingpin narrator of “Sugar Hill” seeks distraction from memories of his criminal past; the chilly prisoner’s lament “Your World Don’t Stop” lands closer to Hard Rain Falling than “One Love.” The record is paced like a brooding HBO drama, long cigar-room dialogues punctuated by flashes of brutal violence.
Although 23-year-old AZ established himself as one of New York’s premier album artists, the industry had other ideas. When singles acts like Ma$e and Fat Joe ascended to cultural stardom, AZ was relegated to pinch-hitter status, emulating Bad Boy Records’ interpolation-heavy homages while signed to a succession of flailing major labels. Despite a productive mid-2000s indie run, his catalog remained overshadowed by the specter of his debut and his association with Nas. The promise of Doe or Die’s titular sequel made headlines when it was announced in 2009, the pressure of replicating his magnum opus all but dissipating over a 12-year delay.
Doe or Die II is a better record for it. The best sequels offer fresh lenses through which to consider their predecessors, and AZ’s discography has a rare narrative trajectory. Where Doe or Die’s narrator did the dirty work of pushing hostages’ heads through plane propellers, its follow-ups find an older man idly enjoying the spoils of wealth, plotting political maneuvers, and reminiscing over the bad old days. On “The Wheel,” AZ layers his couplets with concentric rhyme schemes: “When your features is as fresh as your sneakers, you age well/From the reaper era of reefer-puffers that make bail.” The ornateness might be grating from a lesser vocalist, but alliteration leavens the delivery. Even if his lifestyle bars found their logical conclusion in the mouths of Roc Marciano and Westside Gunn, AZ’s preternatural finesse still confers a sense of ceremony.
Doe or Die’s aesthetic triumph lay in how vividly it evoked the sound of mid-’90s New York: crackling snares, melodic arrangements from Pete Rock and D.R. Period’s salad days, Black and Hispanic guys parrying one another with Italian-American slang. (There are entire theses to be written on “We was already molded in people minds as mulignanes/Now we more fucked, stuck with a mayor named Giuliani.”) But even New York doesn’t sound like New York anymore, which frees AZ to indulge nostalgia on his own terms. Pete Rock and Buckwild return, joined by Alchemist, Bink, KayGee, and Rockwilder, a roster approximating a 20th Century Masters revue. Their collective vision of the AZ Type Beat—befitting of late nights and amber-hued spirits—makes for a cohesive sound that’s not indebted to any particular scene or era. For “Time to Answer,” Heatmakerz revisit the frosty chipmunk soul of 2005’s impregnable “Never Change”; when Baby Paul flips the Bobby Caldwell instrumental on “Keep It Real,” you marvel that AZ never rapped over it before.
Lil Wayne, T-Pain, and Conway all drop in to pay their respects in what is surely a first for a 49-year-old rapper’s self-released victory lap. Lest it turn into a survey course, a few genuine fireworks are scattered amongst the mood music. AZ mirrors the saxophone’s eighth notes on “Never Enough,” whereas Rick Ross plows right through them; their methods are discordant, but stylistically, they could not be better matched. On Buckwild’s show-stopper “Blow That Shit,” Dave East jaunts from marble-mouthed chorus to a synesthetic tour of emerald rings and cranberry leather. It’s the best case yet for Dave East, the hip-hop star—all it took was a quick immersion among AZ’s resplendent set pieces.
For half his life, AZ has been measured against Nas’s bloated profile, but AZ may emerge the better for it. The King’s Disease series finds Nas mired in joyless legacy building, each breath a hectoring appeal to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame voters. Doe or Die II is businesslike to a fault—more than anything, it would benefit from a dose of AZ’s mid-2000s exuberance—but for AZ, the proof has always been in the product. The unvarnished rhymes and staticky drum loop on “Found My Niche” sound like an early demo; listening to the bare vocal, it’s hard not to reflect on what was and what might have been. But when you can flow like that, who wants to look at your résumé?
One of Doe or Die’s more engrossing feats is its elegant fusion of memoir and fiction, the way AZ appends bittersweet reminiscences with aspirational visions of a 1990s caporegime. The sequel is uncannily self-contained by comparison, its discourse more immediate, its cast of characters winnowed. Yet if any of Doe or Die’s audacious promise—that intricately foretold ascension from basements and back alleys to yachts and private jets—remains unrealized, its Delphic narrator is only a little worse for wear. In a game of neoclassicists and revivalists, satirists and true believers, AZ remains a man apart.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quiet Money | September 13, 2021 | 7.3 | bde05b59-378d-4659-8e38-c7dab57265dc | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The self-appointed (and much-derided) new King of R&B attempts to live up to his own hype with a slick and ambitious new LP. | The self-appointed (and much-derided) new King of R&B attempts to live up to his own hype with a slick and ambitious new LP. | Jacquees: King of R&B | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacquees-king-of-randb/ | King of R&B | When Atlanta singer Jacquees crowned himself the King of R&B last year, his self-coronation was met almost entirely with jeers and dismissals. Despite his vague caveat (“for this generation”) and its clear intentions (for Jacquees to psyche himself up), haters, talking heads, and all the once and never Kings gathered en masse to dogpile the poor guy. It was only The-Dream, a singer-songwriter who can stake his own claim to the throne, that came at the comments with any sense: “That’s how you gotta talk, man,” he told Beats 1. “I did the same thing before I wrote ‘Single Ladies.’ ... Everybody took that as me being asinine at the time. They didn’t know like ... No, he’s trying to psych himself out to do some great shit.”
Jacquees makes a similar clarification on “King,” the opener to his sophomore album, which he dedicates to all the kings that came before: “Every day, a star is born/And if we talkin’ kings, there’s more than one/You should clap for ‘em,” he sings, reworking the hook from JAY-Z’s “A Star is Born” to reframe himself as just the latest in a long line of R&B royals. King of R&B, an hour-long, 18-track practice of the genre’s techniques, is Jacquees’ job application. He doesn’t write any songs as great as “Single Ladies,” but his ambitions are crystal-clear.
Of the R&B singers under 30 that Jacquees could feasibly call his competition, he is the most well-rounded. He might not have the massive crossover appeal of Bryson Tiller, or the experimental range of Daniel Caesar; his music isn’t as rap-infused as the alternative R&B of 6lack, and he’s nowhere near the songwriter the Internet’s Syd is, but he is as fundamentally sound as any of his peers: he understands R&B songs at their basic components and he is easily the most gifted singer of the bunch. In his clash with one such contemporary, Tory Lanez, on the album cut “Risk It All,” Jacquees steamrolls the Canadian mimic with bigger melodies and bolder come-ons. Throughout, he tries on Trigga-era temptations, Usher-sized confessions, and nearly everything in between.
He is still more reliant on mood than actual scene-setting, but his songs are broadening in scope. His debut album, 4275, was all about the anticipation of sex—trying to connect with someone after coming home from a long tour, yearning for a lover during a late night at the studio, the final moments just before sealing the deal. There was a song called “House or Hotel” that focused primarily on sneaking around with women in relationships. Titillation was all he could muster.
The new album fills out these vignettes, not just rolling around in the sheets (“Round II”) but also navigating the interpersonal exchanges that come with it. On the apologetic “Cross the Line,” he finds himself renegotiating boundaries after getting caught cheating. “Warning” proposes an entirely new construct for him, one where he is not in control: flipping the “one that got away” trope on its head. Past Kings of R&B have always negotiated a fine line between raunchy pleasure-seeker and hopeless romantic, and Jacquees is learning how to balance that emotional equation. From the sleek, body roll enticements of “Come Get It” to the starry-eyed Summer Walker duet “Superstar,” these are carefully crafted totems from an admirer of the form.
In a bit of irony, Jacquees sounds most comfortable on King of R&B among melodic rappers. He sucks Young Thug and Gunna into his orbit on “Verify,” their raps serving as accents for his croons. The strobing, synth-led “What They Gone Do With Me” sponges up some of Future’s bravado. Alongside Lil Baby, on closer “Your Peace,” he turns the throwback bounce of hip-hop soul into a middle ground. On “New New,” he filters down Thug and Travis Scott-ish vocal takes into a serenade, basically purifying a rap song into an R&B one.
Even straddling the hip-hop world, he never loses the smoothness R&B requires. At a time when so many pride themselves on being genre-benders, he remains a formalist. There may be room to debate who the King of R&B is or what that even means, but with King of R&B, Jacquees formally accepts his place within a storied lineage. | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Cash Money | November 15, 2019 | 7 | bde3cc12-9b88-469a-b398-1affefc0258e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Let Me Hang You is the result of long-shelved sessions from the 1990s, during which Burroughs recited some favorite riffs from Naked Lunch. The album conjures only a portion of the book’s wild power. | Let Me Hang You is the result of long-shelved sessions from the 1990s, during which Burroughs recited some favorite riffs from Naked Lunch. The album conjures only a portion of the book’s wild power. | William S. Burroughs: Let Me Hang You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22113-let-me-hang-you/ | Let Me Hang You | The penultimate section of William S. Burroughs’ most notorious book carries the heading “Atrophied Preface,” and it’s there that the author drops a useful—if belated—hint for the reader: “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point.” That line provides a shot of literary self-esteem for anyone who’s experienced trouble following the experimental text in sequential fashion up until this juncture.
Given how slippery the 1959 book is with chronology and setting—and how quickly it moves between riotously debauched sexual libertinage (and violence), vaguely sketched political conspiracies, descriptions of alien-bug climaxes, and comparatively sober theories regarding various aspects of drug dependence—most readers will have already cottoned onto the fact that Naked Lunch privileges an aggregate feel over any traditional sense of novelistic progression. In his late-50s correspondence, Burroughs even went back and forth on the question of whether Naked Lunch was a novel at all. It’s always nice to have some authorial permission to skip around in a piece of writing as avant-garde as this one, the better to attack it from multiple angles and see what happens at the level of comprehension.
Now that the author of Naked Lunch is gone, this officially approved liberty-taking comes in handy for Hal Willner—a skilled producer who worked with the writer on LPs made during Burroughs’ lifetime—as well as for a group of musicians that stretches across eras. Let Me Hang You is the delayed result of some recording sessions from the 1990s, during which Burroughs was reportedly asked to isolate and recite a number of his favorite riffs from Naked Lunch. These performances received a bit of musical accompaniment at the time, courtesy of guitarist Bill Frisell, violinist Eyvind Kang, and pianist Wayne Horvitz, before the overall project was buried by record label executives. Some time after Burroughs’s death, Willner exhumed the tracks, and asked a new generation of musicians to help him refurbish the album—among them the Canadian punk auteur King Khan as well as the singer (and author of the “Negrogothic” manifesto) M. Lamar.
The casting is right. And even the irregular nature of the album’s path to market would seem to be in the spirit of its anarchic source material. That said, for significant stretches, Let Me Hang You only manages to conjure a portion of Naked Lunch’s wild power. In part this is due to Burroughs’ editorial decisions regarding excerpted texts, which seem focused on the book’s perviest jags. Even within certain of these more infamous “routines” from the author’s repertoire, his readings here excise key lines from Naked Lunch that originally lent the book’s scenes a distinction beyond their noted luridness.
The album’s title track is a refrain from the portion of Naked Lunch devoted to group orgasm-via-hanging. In the book, the transgressive erotics are part of a story within the story—specifically, a porno being projected at something like a society ball. At the end of the book-section titled “A.J.’s Annual Party,” the actors who portrayed this brutal ménage à trois on-camera step out from behind the screen, at film’s end, and take a bow while sporting ropes around their necks. Part of the charge of this passage in Naked Lunch comes from this slapstick juggling of modes, as well as the depiction of what an elite audience in the novel’s fictional land of Interzone will happily consume.
On Let Me Hang You, though, the routine is merely presented as a distinctly naughty sex scene that was written and read by the author himself, and then paired with an often-quiet but suitably discordant avant-rock arrangement. The stripping away of context seems primed to privilege the nastiest parts, though at the expense of the author’s social and political cynicism. (Not to mention his humor.) Instead of promoting the feel of Burroughs’ early approach to satire, this latter-day performance feels more akin to that of a grade-schooler walking around the playground at recess, eager to show you something unexpected and unsettling.
This juvenile fixation extends to other tracks here, like “Islam Incorporated,” which also snips out some of Burroughs’s funniest gags (as set down in the Naked Lunch section “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone”) in order to focus on the gross-out clauses. (The most savage jokes in this part of the book are actually trained on the American bourgeoisie.) Burroughs’ interpretations here seem clearly inferior to his first recorded excerpts from Naked Lunch, on the 1965 spoken-word album Call Me Burroughs.
Just as the aesthetic range of Burroughs’ writing tends to be scaled back in these vocal takes, most of the arrangements stake out a single style and then stick with it for the duration of a given reading. Gravely thrumming bass tones hold sway during “Lief the Unlucky,” 60s-style rock-boogie drives “Clem Snide the Private Asshole,” while countrified twang is created for “The Queen Bee.” The performances always sound crisply played, but for the most part, they don’t measure up to the moment-to-moment inspiration of Willner-produced tracks on the 1990 Burroughs album Dead City Radio, which placed the author alongside John Cale, Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Just because it’s possible to “cut into” Naked Lunch at any point doesn’t mean all readings will be equally robust. Though there are, happily, two arrangements here that do full justice to the book’s surreal stream of textures. During the lengthy “Disciplinary Procedures,” ambient noise dominates at first, before some staccato strings are added. A groove is gradually lathered up, and the swinging finale suggests big-band bombast. And on “Gentle Reader,” M. Lamar’s countertenor voice manages to be both spooky and lyrical—the perfect accompaniment to a spiritual, incantatory Naked Lunch lick in which the narrator announces his intention to set loose his “word hoard.” It’s Burroughs’ best vocal performance on this album, too, as he slides from his trademark aristocratic whine to more overtly threatening cadences. Along with attractive miniatures like “The Exterminator” and “Quick,” these major tracks from Let Me Hang You offer some stray, valuable new connections with the best of the Burroughs style. | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ernest Jenning / Khannibalism | July 29, 2016 | 5.8 | bde66dec-839f-43ab-b45f-7951f4ab9601 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The masked psychedelic band Goat claim their project stems from a long-running collective of townspeople in their small Swedish village: People have been playing under the name Goat in various incarnations for decades, but this nine-song, steady-burning World Music is the first proper release. | The masked psychedelic band Goat claim their project stems from a long-running collective of townspeople in their small Swedish village: People have been playing under the name Goat in various incarnations for decades, but this nine-song, steady-burning World Music is the first proper release. | GOAT: World Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17332-world-music/ | World Music | As the series of interviews they've given in recent months suggests, the Swedish band Goat is hilarious: In September, before their performance at Britain's Supersonic, the Quietus published its second talk with the ever-vague group. When writer Joe Clay asked who might headline the festival of that unnamed member's dreams, they answered, "If Holger Czukay and Geezer Butler had a son, it would be him. Just him playing bass for a couple of days." The Goathead described the band's live performances as "the harvesting of souls," and its lifestyle as "invocations, prayers, and total rejoice!"
Beneath that jester veneer, though, there's a much more serious idealism at work here. As key member Christian Johansson told The Quietus in an earlier interview, Goat stems from a loose and long-running collective of townspeople in Korpilombolo, a village with a population of a few hundred in the northwest hook of Sweden. Though people in the town have been playing under that name in various incarnations for several decades, the nine-song, steady-burning World Music is the unit's first proper release. That alleged tradition, it seems, is mostly an excuse for being a true band or collective rather than a collection of personalities, vying for the attention of micro-celebrity at a time when that's easy enough to find. To wit, they wear masks on stage and discuss the details of membership-- who has been in the band, who will be in the band, who is currently in the band-- in incredibly ambiguous terms. "In northern Sweden-- it is hard to explain in English-- it is about not drawing attention to yourself. The important thing is what you do, not who does it," explained Johansson. "This is why we never have tried to make ourselves heard before now." The songs matter more than the sources.
That approach of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts largely defines World Music, a psychedelic rock record that strangely never seems hyperbolic. It's fun and often dizzying, employing a kaleidoscope of unexpected tones and far-flung influences. But it doesn't feel forced. Over insistent rhythms that suggest Spacemen 3 and, at least in spirit, the conjuring drones of Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young, Goat weave an ecumenical history of rock'n'roll. They intercept signals from Led Zeppelin and Funkadelic, Jefferson Starship and Fela Kuti, the Congos and the Rolling Stones, bending them into a resiliently consistent album. Sure, opener "Diarabi" finishes with a brief drum solo, but that span flows naturally from the song's steady ascent of tangled guitars and distant keyboards; it feels less like a solo than the end of the song. "Let it Bleed" is a mildly funky number with powerfully strutting (and anonymous) female vocals, suggesting ESG in its sass and sizzle. But even its syncopation seems somehow reserved, taking care not to come too hard or too heavy. With its fuzz-tone bass, wah-wah love, and chanted vocals, "Goatman" is the record's traditionally heaviest track, keying on a guitar solo that sounds as though played with barbed wire. Still, Goat seem to be holding back, tempering sizzle and drive with a proper modicum of listlessness. This might sound tepid to some; to me, at least, it's an invitation for immersion.
Like their fellow Swedes in Dungen, Goat have succeeded in not only borrowing the sounds of yore but reinvigorating them, creating a record that doesn't mimic the past wholesale so much as re-contextualize its components. But for all of Dungen's musical bustle and urgency, Goat seems preternaturally at ease with this stuff, soaking insistent beats with lysergic tones and high-flying hooks. If their creation myth is dubious (and it seems to be), its ethos-- this music is an extension of traditions, so there's no need to rush it or demand that it make them famous-- might not be. The short and infinitely catchy "Run to Your Mama" could be a single, but it isn't polished or produced enough to be meant that way. "Goatlord" coasts over a tide of pump organ and casually strummed acoustic guitar, existing in a Velvets haze until an electric guitar solo-- nasty and snarling, like Comets on Fire falling back to earth-- finally intersects it. When the drift returns, the electric guitar sticks with it, following it toward the exit. It's a fitting illustration of the band's philosophical insistence that all of this is world music-- ancient and modern, accessible and mutable.
I wonder if, in a matter of months, the world were to learn that the story of Goat was one of complete hokum, would it matter? That is, if their tales of Korpilombolo and voodoo and ancestors passing down a tradition of inclusive and now-electrified ritual music were false, does it matter? Probably: Despite the detail droves that the internet and itinerant social media allow, a sense of mystery still begets a sense of wonder. Perhaps you and your friends could begin your own Goat, live a myth of your own making?
But at least at this moment, Goat afford listeners the opportunity to press pause on self-obsessed information cycles, to push past the noise of minutiae, check into their wonderfully vague story, and check out with a wonderful record. Indeed, if certain components of Goat's lore prove to be just that, they have, with World Music, created a vivid manifestation of the ideals they've espoused. "We've been taught since we were small to have an understanding of not only western bands, but of music from other parts of the world," Johansson told The Quietus, a sentiment echoed when the band told another interviewer that its influences include birdsongs and food. "The title World Music was chosen because we believe we play 'world music,' and that's what we think everyone plays." For all its psychedelic tendencies and marketing trappings, Goat's World Music feels as assured and unfussy as folk music. | 2012-10-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Stranded Rekords / Rocket Recordings | October 26, 2012 | 8.1 | bde8756d-6e79-4f19-aa91-672823878871 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The group’s new mini-album is their most consistent and focused, but by drawing their sound down to its essence, they dampen the anything-goes spirit that made them so appealing. | The group’s new mini-album is their most consistent and focused, but by drawing their sound down to its essence, they dampen the anything-goes spirit that made them so appealing. | Modern Nature: Annual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/modern-nature-annual/ | Annual | In the 16 months since the release of Modern Nature’s debut EP Nature in March 2019, the group led by guitarist Jack Cooper has explored krautrock, paganesque British folk, sideways In Rainbows jams, spiritual jazz, tape loops, meditation music, and the kind of minimalist indie rock Cooper forged with James Hoare in their group Ultimate Painting. Modern Nature’s new mini-album, Annual, is their most consistent and focused release to date, but by drawing their sound down to its essence, they dampen the anything-goes spirit that made them so appealing. As a result, Annual feels polished and smartly constructed, but limited in its scope—a high-definition planetarium that makes you wish for the night sky.
Annual purports to be a calendar cycle of songs, beginning at the end of the year and moving through the seasons, culminating in the return of winter. Instead, this 20-minute suite feels more like a bleak February set off by a weekend-long warm spell. The overall mood is dark, gray, and cloudy, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Where last year’s full-length How to Live felt like an exurb meeting between Neu! and Fairport Convention, Annual is more at home in the territory of Songs: Ohia, Low, Ryley Walker, or the Sufjan Stevens of Seven Swans: American artists working in the dim light of midwestern winters.
This is a mode that suits Cooper well. With Will Young focused on BEAK> and momentarily out of the picture, Modern Nature have scaled down to little more than stand-up bass and shuffling drums that follow the lead of Cooper’s guitar, which curls like a flag in low wind. Like Talk Talk, a heavy influence here, this iteration of Modern Nature uses shadow and suggestion, their small size somehow standing in for the immensity of the object upon which they’re focused. Sunwatchers’ Jeff Tobias, whose sax whirled across How to Live, mostly reduces himself to textural work, laying down a high-pile carpet that serves as the foundation for many of these songs. In Ultimate Painting, Cooper perfected his sense of negative space, carving his way through the group’s albums with deceptively complex guitar lines. Here, he’s backed by a band capable of matching him step for step.
But it’s hard not to miss the risk-taking of Modern Nature’s previous releases. “Harvest,” whose lead vocal is sung by Itasca, is stroked along by swells of guitar, and just when the song seems ready to strike deeper into the darkness, it sputters out on Cooper’s brief, throat-clearing solo and a couple of leashed bars from Tobias. “Halo” glances in the direction of a long, low-stress jam à la Alice Coltrane, but ultimately decides it’s not worth the trip; a stretch that seems like the prelude to a pleasurable workout turns out to be nothing more than a yawn.
Despite its misfires, the ambitious scale of Annual’s song suite is another step forward for a young group evolving at an unnaturally fast rate. The band’s all-gates-open conceit has clearly sparked something in Cooper, who is already at work on a follow-up, and who seems more aware than ever of just how malleable a song and a band can be. All the more reason to wish he’d hammered harder.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Bella Union | June 17, 2020 | 6.5 | bdf75f60-933b-496b-ba97-596fad75338f | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
On her debut album, the Kenyan composer folds field recordings, ambient textures, and layered vocalizations into a gripping meditation on illness and healing. | On her debut album, the Kenyan composer folds field recordings, ambient textures, and layered vocalizations into a gripping meditation on illness and healing. | Nyokabi Kariũki: FEELING BODY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nyokabi-kariuki-feeling-body/ | Feeling Body | In “feeling body,” the twelve-minute title track of Nyokabi Kariũki’s debut album, the composer’s voice wavers as she asks a vulnerable question: “If you’re not hopeful for your body, then who is?” Amid a wash of violin pricks, whispers, and everyday ambience, the young Kenyan composer thinks aloud about illness and the strain of unfulfilled recovery. Like the millions of others who have felt haunted by the same specter of corporeal disquiet, she has no answer.
Kariũki developed FEELING BODY from her experiences with the extended, amorphous symptoms of long COVID, along with the compounding ills of the virus and a society that badly wants to disappear the sick. With last year’s peace places: kenyan memories EP, she built compositions around field recordings she’d taken in her home country, searching for her own sense of place and self as she spent time living in New York and Maryland. On FEELING BODY, Kariũki plucks more hyper-localized sounds from domestic life. She shares a visceral tour through the psychological journey of recovery without reaching any definitive solutions, mapping the aches of illness and isolation with careful intensity.
Especially in its title track, FEELING BODY can be an uncomfortable listen, in part due to Kariũki’s precise attention to the mix. Between tense, quiet passages, vocalizations sneak up like distant calls for aid, and oozing electronic sounds evoke the squeezing pressure of headaches and stuffed sinuses. A faucet’s drip is a steady, rhythmless presence, like a cold reminder of a hospital sink. Tangled with background noises of household puttering, instrumental knots snake around Kariũki’s vulnerable musings about reconciling her mind and body, wrestling with hopelessness, and grieving. “feeling body” pierces so deeply that Kariũki said that she was unable to return to some of its elements after she first recorded them, a way of shielding herself “from having to relive saying these things.”
Kariũki surveys other aspects of healing as the album progresses. She grapples with the strictures of the body and memory with the micro-opera “folds,” exploring how her moods changed throughout seasonal cycles and virus-imposed stagnation. In “fire head,” a mechanical voice repeats, “They stopped asking, ‘Are you okay?’” Its tone is flat, not unfriendly. But as Kariũki crests an ominous instrumental tide, she erupts in a piercing high; electronic thuds land wet, crunching blows, and the voice continues: “...when they knew the answer wouldn’t change.” It is a crushing realization: Not only may there not be a “better,” but cherished personal connections are more fragile than we’d like them to be.
From the anguish of “fire head,” Kariũki shifts to “quiet face,” where a bittersweet melody dominates. “Hope is for the weekend/Scrollin’ Reddit ’til I’m sleepin’,” she sings. It’s the ghost of a sweet pop hook blown away by a listless sigh, with the chasm of evaporated potential emphasized in the homophone of “weekend”/“weakened.” “Subira” has a similar gossamer eeriness, with Kariũki singing in a near-whisper over flitting violin and airy vocalizations.
“Nazama,” however, resolves the album’s tension with an exhale at the end of the record. It feels like a baptism, and in the record’s liner notes, Kariũki connects FEELING BODY’s watery flow to both the Biblical River Jordan and homeopathic traditions of Kenya’s Kikuyu people. “I’m getting better at facing the ocean,” Kariũki sings over a heavenly, wordless chorus. Instead of a sharp prickle, sounds of water murmur alongside her long, quivering notes; a baleful air returns, but Kariũki’s sense of calm triumphs over the swells. A solution to Kariũki’s ailments may still be intangible, but “Nazama” suggests an answer in surrendering to a flow state.
As COVID-19 has kept shapeshifting, so too has the concept of the “pandemic album.” There are those made in immediate reaction to its circumstances, like the solo efforts written in newly liberated swaths of time and the work assembled over sturdy WiFi connections. But fewer projects have reckoned with the pandemic’s elliptical tail: the rippling effects of its years-long destabilization, the lingering cloud of long-term illness, and the gaps between those still living in the pandemic and those who’ve left it behind them. FEELING BODY occupies this uncharted terrain, probing at visceral feelings of physical and psychological discomfort. Operating without meaningful answers about what may lie ahead, Kariũki nonetheless extends a reassuring hand into the void. | 2023-03-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cmntx | March 6, 2023 | 7.7 | be012243-9a54-4a1e-8e1a-3414e1161468 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
L.A. production duo continues to do no wrong, including this wide-eyed, creative reshuffling of the piles of au courant music. | L.A. production duo continues to do no wrong, including this wide-eyed, creative reshuffling of the piles of au courant music. | Nguzunguzu: The Perfect Lullaby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15395-the-perfect-lullaby/ | The Perfect Lullaby | If you want an example of the wide-ranging nature of dance music in 2011, look no further than Nguzunguzu, the Los Angeles production and DJ team of Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda. The duo, which got some attention hosting the popular (and now-dormant) Wildness party series at the L.A. club Silver Platter, incorporates most every strain of domestic and global music into its beats-- from Chicago juke and footwork to UK bass, mambo, reggaeton, and cumbia. But they also celebrate the familiar: For all the exotic sounds in an Nguzunguzu track, there are usually elements of chart hip-hop and R&B offsetting them.
Nguzunguzu have two EPs to their name-- Mirage and a self-titled one, both from 2010-- but the best introduction to their sound is The Perfect Lullaby, an album-length mixtape made for the online art magazine DIS. (It's available for a free download here.) On this, Pineda and Maroof (it's worth mentioning that the latter recently served as M.I.A.'s tour DJ) build a bouncy, dreamy mix that takes specific inspiration from the Angolan dance genres of Kizomba and Zouk. These styles are generally slow and seductive and have a grimy, percussive undercurrent, and Nguzunguzu match that with the similarly sultry vocals of artists like Brandy and The-Dream. The combination is pretty ingenious.
A big part of the reason the mix works so well is simple execution-- Nguzunguzu blend these far-flung sounds together in a way that just feels natural. They often leave source material intact (vocals are rarely tweaked or mutated, as they are in some recent indie-leaning R&B), so it's less about intricate remixing than careful beat matching. For example, early in the set (it's not divided into individual tracks), they put R. Kelly's verse from Ja Rule's "Wonderful" over a Zouk instrumental by DJ P&P Productions that flips the context of the source but maintains something essential about it, too. The same goes for Amerie's classic "1 Thing", set here to a grimy beat by France's DJ Lo, placing the original's high-energy clamor on a humid slow boil.
In a recent interview with DJ /rupture on his WFMU show, Mudd Up!, Maroof talked about a Nguzunguzu track combining a Wiley instrumental with the Nicki Minaj remix of Drake's "Best I Ever Had", saying, "She kind of raps like a grime MC on it... I want her to be a grime MC, so I just kind of put the two together." A simple statement, but it gets at what the group does so well-- sort of a wide-eyed, creative reshuffling of au courant music. So even with the R&B bent of this mix, the group seems more in line with folks like DJ /rupture and even M.I.A. than the crop of urban-pop revisionists that has sprung up recently. But for Nguzunguzu, it's not about politics-- these two are just trying to build the global discotheque of their dreams. | 2011-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | self-released | May 5, 2011 | 8.1 | be035b69-880c-48bd-a1a1-4413a0340bf1 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The North Carolina noisemakers Earthly mix the psych noise of early Animal Collective and Black Dice with the audio collages of the Books, Matmos, and Prefuse 73. Their joyful album Days doesn't make you feel like a kid so much as it reminds you how great it can be to act like one. | The North Carolina noisemakers Earthly mix the psych noise of early Animal Collective and Black Dice with the audio collages of the Books, Matmos, and Prefuse 73. Their joyful album Days doesn't make you feel like a kid so much as it reminds you how great it can be to act like one. | Earthly: Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20738-days/ | Days | Sometimes you can tell a lot from the smallest details of a project. The suffix "ly" in the name "Earthly", for instance, nods subtly to how this pair of North Carolina noisemakers create music not necessarily of Earth but cobble together fragments from their terrestrial experience into a rough resemblance. The album title may account for the sheer amount of time ex-college roommates Edaan Brook and Brint Hansen have spent together, working through school, hanging out at home, writing songs, or just getting to know each other. You can hear that time in Days—the lifeblood of its tracks is an endless collection of samples that would've taken years to assemble, let alone arrange into music—and sense that close friendship, too. Look at the cover: two strange, colorful faces stare blankly, content to simply be in the same place.
But maybe that's all a bit too serious for music like this, because if nothing else, Days wants to have fun. Earthly finger paints with found sound, plays tag with sequencers, jumps rope with drum machines, seesaws with FX pedals, and pigs out on bubblegum melody. You can imagine sing-songy opener "RGB" as the theme for a CGI "Rugrats" reboot, or "Ice Cream"'s carnival bounce as a Cartoon Network interlude. One particularly exuberant track is straight-up called "Games", and though it wastes no time dropping PlayStation samples into its iridescent chords, the music plays like an anthem for indoor kids who discovered their kindred spirits at noise shows and dance parties. Days doesn't make you feel like a kid so much as it reminds you how great it can be to act like one.
Surrealist as they are, Brook and Hansen frequently dip into the uncanny valley, and it's where their best ideas are found. Not unlike Oneohtrix Point Never or Holly Herndon, vocals are chopped and pitched into tuneful glossolalia, occasionally allowed to speak in daffy non sequiturs. And it's often impossible to discern exactly what other sounds Earthly recorded, dismantled, and pieced back together for any given track. Was that a pan flute fluttering in the background of "Honison Climber"? Did they sample a soda commercial for "RGB"? You may want to pick apart the layers, but it's better to soak in the frenzy; all those moving parts would be nonsense on their own, but together amount to a baffling electronic spectacle.
It's unlikely you'll hear another album like Days this year, but it's not without predecessors. The influence of early aughts psych noise courses through the music, as if it's a love child conceived during the first Black Dice and Animal Collective tour. But the offspring has grown independently, learning to speak its own language with new slang and more deliberate syntax. The sound resembles fellow audio collagists in places—Javelin's playful No Mas, early Prefuse 73, Matmos, and the Books are all here. But throughout the record, Brook and Hansen discover new ways to surprise and thrill, making unexpected turns with each consecutive track. Even low-slung drifts and beatless shimmers aren't off limits in their topsy-turvy digital funhouse. Maybe "balanced noise album" is an oxymoron, but so is "adult playground." Indeed, Days is both. | 2015-07-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Noumenal Loom | July 24, 2015 | 7.8 | be066f7e-9369-4a4f-9d79-5bf030f33525 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
California musician Christopher Adams fuses shoegaze, house music, breakbeats, and hip-hop into an ever-morphing sound world as complex and irreducible as grief. | California musician Christopher Adams fuses shoegaze, house music, breakbeats, and hip-hop into an ever-morphing sound world as complex and irreducible as grief. | PENDANT: Harp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pendant-harp/ | Harp | Dance music has long been used as a refuge—from breakups and soul-sucking day jobs, from homophobia, racism, and war. But Christopher Adams, the California-based musician and producer behind PENDANT, wasn’t seeking an escape from reality so much as an opportunity to confront the reality he’d been avoiding. His second LP, Harp, grapples with the grief and pain Adams locked away for years following his father’s death in 2010, channeling invigorating hardcore, eccentric rap, and weirdo rave alongside flashes of R&B and new wave. What makes all these sounds work together is Adams’ confident performances and complex sound worlds—icy yet inviting, ambitious yet grounded. “Follow me down, this is the caustic pop music sound,” he raps in a Beastie Boys-esque snarl on “Thorn.”
For much of Adams’ youth, his father struggled with alcoholism, ultimately passing away when Adams was 18. Adams—barely a legal adult—signed the papers to remove life support, and though he went on to release music with acts like DIY post-hardcore band Calculator and noisy punk outfit Never Young, it took over a decade for him to come to terms with the experience through his art. “My dad’s death was messy and confusing and it’s always been really hard to talk about,” he writes in a statement accompanying the album. “I wanted to make this record about pain, how ugly it can be, and how grateful I am to it for connecting me with myself and the people around me.”
Adams began work on the album in early 2020, writing and producing by himself with only a laptop. After several years making guitar music, he was drawn to different sounds: the ones that boom from clubs and warehouses, which then lay vacant at the onset of the pandemic. Harp is marked by thunderous dance beats, in-your-face rap, and fragments of spoken word—a jarring departure from Adams’ past work. Fusing his shoegaze, punk, and hardcore background with jungle, house, and hip-hop, the album cycles through a mad scientist’s library of musical styles, from UK garage breakbeats (“LED Head Rush”) to celestial synths (“Altered Destinies”) to abrasive electronic textures (“Contract”). Thankfully, the off-the-wall ideas largely pan out, and as an experienced shoegazer who’s previously worked with producers like Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Jack Shirley (Deafheaven), Adams is accustomed to balancing layers within his music.
Against these harsh yet beautiful backdrops, Harp explores the interconnectedness of life, dreams, memories, and death—and how pain and love color all of this. Adams’ previous full-length as PENDANT, Through a Coil, was rather abstract, couching brief moments of vulnerability within metaphysical imagery that was often difficult to parse, alongside Creation Records-esque melodies that occasionally felt half-baked. With Harp, Adams demonstrates his ability to write a sticky hook or sustain attention without one, whether it’s the seductive dream pop of “Blue Mare” or the acid-doused club track “Rights for an Angel.” The melodies wield his relatively limited vocal range to near perfection, displaying his knack for soulfulness and rowdiness alike.
While the vaporous vocals, brash rhythms, and ever-morphing styles can lead Harp to feel larger than life, Adams’ words come across raw and direct. “Pain’s my bitch I fucking feel it,” he raps on the seething, hardcore-infused “Contract.” When he squawks “This is the sound of my head bleeding out” on “Thorn,” or delicately coos “I forgive you for everything I lived through/While so much is unclear to me” on “Secret in the Dusk,” the catharsis is apparent. He doesn’t claim to be cured—he frequently references his lasting anger and hurt—and although this music is born from a brutal experience of grief, it also reflects the euphoric power of love. “LED Head Rush” glows with the memory of a loved one who’s no longer around, and the anxious narrator of “Latex Heart” finds affirmation during a breakdown in the warm presence of someone they trust. It’s no coincidence that both of these moments on the album take place late at night, the traditional hours for dance music. As darkness gives way to light, Harp reminds us that opening oneself to love can be just as humbling as death. | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Saddle Creek | April 20, 2022 | 7.4 | be0874d8-a64c-4ba4-933e-258ebec84228 | Lizzie Manno | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lizzie-manno/ | |
An elaborate new box set explores the evolution of Justin Vernon’s early band through pivotal live sets, avant-Americana studio experiments, and a formative solo album. | An elaborate new box set explores the evolution of Justin Vernon’s early band through pivotal live sets, avant-Americana studio experiments, and a formative solo album. | DeYarmond Edison: Epoch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deyarmond-edison-epoch/ | Epoch | Epoch begins with a dilemma. To explain why the avant-Americana quartet DeYarmond Edison is worth remembering, the box set would have to start with the recordings they made closer to the end of their mayfly lifespan. But to tell the whole story, it would have to start with Mount Vernon, their precociously professional teen band, whose songs, as the accompanying book gently concedes, may grate on the adult sensibilities at which this handsome shelf-buster is aimed. That they appear at the beginning anyway shows just how hard Epoch comes down on the side of storytelling. It’s a work of music journalism as much as a portfolio of songs, excavating how Justin Vernon, Joe Westerlund, and brothers Brad and Phil Cook grew up together in Wisconsin, rampantly evolved in North Carolina, and split off asymmetrically, with three of them earning modest acclaim as Megafaun and one earning Grammy awards and Taylor Swift guest spots as Bon Iver.
The box is divided into six chronological parts, beginning with All of Us Free, an LP that captures DeYarmond Edison taking shape in the late 1990s and early ’00s. The second LP, Silent Signs, reproduces their second album, which they recorded just before leaving Eau Claire. That Was Then consists of four CDs documenting the performances in which they dynamited their newly refined sound, and these discs form the messy, brilliant heart of the box and the band. The LP Epoch, Etc. is the sound of them breaking apart under the stress, and hazeltons is Vernon breaking out on his own. The set concludes with the LP Where We Belong, with an A-side of recrimination and a B-side of reconciliation.
Epoch was executive produced by Grayson Haver Currin, a Pitchfork contributor who also wrote the 114-page accompaniment, Time to Know. When DeYarmond Edison moved from the Chippewa Valley to the Southern capital of Raleigh in 2005, Haver Currin became a friend and fan, and the project is such a close study of their bond that it becomes a monument for friendship writ large—how it fits people together, changes them until they fit no more, and then, with patience, rejoins them at new seams.
DeYarmond Edison lasted only a year in Raleigh, but this is where they pushed their trusty roots rock to its limits and beyond—in public. Their sound took as its provenance all the Black and Southern and mountain music recorded by Alan Lomax, the electronic webs and tape delays of Steve Reich, the drone-country collage of Richard Buckner, the pastoral graces of Bill Frisell, the free energies of jazz, the cellular structure of procedural music, and the microtones of bowed cymbals, all of it spinning the chrysalis from which Bon Iver would later emerge.
Vernon, a guitarist and singer, and Westerlund, a drummer, started playing together in middle school, but Epoch picks up in 1998, when they fused with bassist Brad Cook and pianist Phil Cook as Mount Vernon. It’s every high schooler’s right to be annoying, and Mount Vernon exercised it fully. Their Saddle Creek-style indie folk was lethally earnest, its high-minded ideals untested, their cultural boundaries unquestioned. They were rule-followers, un-punk, with a “terrifying Protestant work ethic,” as one member put it. In short, they seemed the people least likely to rip it up and start again. Singer Sara Jensen is appealing on “We Can Look Up,” but Vernon is still figuring out whether he wants to be Adam Duritz or Lead Belly. The ska horns don’t help. Mercifully, high school graduation put a stop to this.
Soon enough, the Cooks reunited with a Westerlund, Dan—Joe was studying experimental music and jazz with Milford Graves at Bennington—in another band led by Vernon. But they were all a little wary, and they were all changing. The dreadlocks, dashikis, and Tibetan flags had fallen away, and a gentle, tasteful, moody Americana style was emerging. Vernon’s writing turned inward, his meanings shrouded in melancholy weather reports from real places that already lay half in childhood dreams. By 2004, when they released their debut album as DeYarmond Edison, Vernon was ripening into his husky voice. On the first LP here, you can hear their expanding horizons in a trumpeting electronic bauble from one of Vernon’s solo projects and “The Orient,” a mystic mountain of organ chords that ends disc 1.
The second disc reproduces Silent Signs, the album DeYarmond Edison made before leaving Eau Claire at the peak of their local fame. Now Dan was off to college, and Joe tagged back in. “Lift,” 97 seconds of gorgeously suspended gongs, horns, and soft feedback, tunes the listener’s antenna to the experimentation stirring in the sturdy songs to come. On the title track, the horns hang in graceful swags, the harmonica an almost strident drone. Vernon attenuates simple chord progressions into shards and curls, his songs unrolling in many pensive stages. Other highlights include the surprisingly good Tom Waits impression “Time to Know,” the salty-sweet Stevie Nicks homage “Dead Anchor,” and the whispering banjo-and-vibraphone mirage “Ragstock.”
The book’s appraisal of the music is washed in friendship, but it also has the sharp-eyed insights that only friendship allows. The young Vernon is portrayed as being driven by jealous rivalry with area bands like Amateur Love, which was gaining steam in Eau Claire. Even worse, the Cook brothers were members. Vernon made them choose. The compromise, which probably made sense in their mid-twenties, was that they would go all in on DeYarmond Edison, but it would be a collaborative vessel for their new interests, and they would relocate to Raleigh, a city they knew as an alt-country hotbed in the ’90s, with a Southern halo thanks to “Wagon Wheel.”
After making the move in 2005, they lined up a semi-monthly residency at Bickett Gallery on the strengths of their polite folk albums. They ripped this music to pieces in front of a startled, up-for-it audience, as we hear on That Was Then. The first two CDs are culled from the Bickett shows on March 1 and April 22, 2006, where each member took charge of one set. Vernon tasked his bandmates with singing leads instead of their customary harmonies. Westerlund brought in jazz tunes and experimental practices from Bennington. Brad Cook gave a crash course in 20th-century electronic composition. And Phil Cook led a deep dive into early, unamplified American music: Delta blues, spirituals, string and jug bands.
By then, Cook had immersed himself in UNC-Chapel Hill’s folk archives and met some “real honest-to-goodness folk musicians,” as he announced at the Mabel Tainter Theater, a bejeweled 19th-century concert hall where they played a triumphant home-state show between those two Bickett dates. Filling the second two CDs of That Was Then, the concert mixes songs from their records with restrained versions of their discoveries at Bickett. It delivers an ideal version of “Silent Signs,” stretched and spectral like Sam Amidon, and the beautiful “Red Shoes,” which has the cloudy mixture of doubt and regret that marks Vernon’s best songs, and the darkly spun charmer “Song for a Lover (of Long Ago),” where the enigmatic repetition of the word “ring” is both a matured take on the circular prosody of “Bones” and a holographic step toward Bon Iver.
In contrast to the concert-hall coughs on the Mabel Tainter discs, the chatter at Bickett sounds like an audience who’d come to hear these new guys from up north play Southern music but had walked into something else entirely, something haunting and electrifying. This band raggedly drawled the Piedmont blues of Blind Boy Fuller and belted out Muddy Waters, played a convincing Latin clave in “Afro Blue,” and improvised at the edge of chaos and in pacific depths (the exquisite “Abel + Cain”). They built ambient keyboard aquariums, roughed up a Richard Brautigan poem, bridged Sun Records traveling rhythms and Sun City Girls drones, and indulged in bursts of rustic thrashcore.
They also chanted and clapped their way through “Old Dollar Mamie,” a song that Alan Lomax recorded Benny Will Richardson singing in a Mississippi prison, and then dissolved it into electroacoustic drones. The brilliance of the Bickett shows lies in their stark, well-considered leaps, in their courage to play like riverbank idlers one moment and loft dwellers the next. Yet they could leap too far. They were suburban Northerners laying hands on rural Southern songs in an art gallery, and while the line between specifically Black music and common folk property is often blurry, there are times when they are inarguably emulating Black Southern voices, however reverently and carefully sourced. The book spends several paragraphs facing this head-on, but it’s still uncomfortable to hear.
The Bickett sets also include the spiritual “A Satisfied Mind,” the result of Brad Cook suggesting that Vernon try a falsetto, which the book frames as ground zero for Bon Iver. This new vocal style—and an increasingly spare, sculptural, multi-tracked style of construction—takes shape on hazeltons, a solo album Vernon released in an edition of 100 copies in 2006. Its title track features the “Holocene” chord progression with different vocals and less production; more exciting are “game night,” where guitar harmonics slip through drums like schools of fish, and “Song for a Lover (of Long Ago),” with field recordings and vocal processing, tricks he’d learned from his bandmates. But he was also pulling away, already collaborating with a future Volcano Choir bandmate on “Hannah, My Ophelia.”
The Bickett residency seemed to unsettle the fault lines DeYarmond Edison had been riding, especially when they started trying to figure out what to do next. A telling anecdote in the book finds Westerlund and the Cooks rapt by a noisy, unhinged Akron/Family show while Vernon sits in the back, wishing he could hear the nuances and structures of the songs. He was writing but not sharing much with the band. They were hurt, but when they heard the wholly private world he was creating, they understood. Lost in the studio, DeYarmond Edison dissolved mid-session, leaving 1,000 copies of a reissued Silent Signs to rot in a barn in Durham. Vernon returned to Wisconsin to make For Emma, Forever Ago, and the others went on without him as Megafaun. “We were like three framers and a contractor,” as Phil Cook put it. “Then the contractor left. And then we just built a bunch of fucking houses.”
Still, the final DeYarmond Edison recordings, collected on the Epoch, Etc. disc, were some of their best, with new versions that balanced graceful songwriting and experimental taste. Instead of building on this promise, though, the box set concludes with Where We Belong, which tracks a decade of cautious rapprochement. The first side features some lonely, heartbroken, Lomax-y things that Vernon made alone after the band split and the collaborative work that his former bandmates had taken as a betrayal. “Lazy Suicide,” which became Megafaun’s signature song, is pretty clearly aimed at Vernon. But the second side finds the four old friends taking one another on tour and joining for Sounds of the South, a major Americana collaboration with Sharon Van Etten, Fight the Big Bull, and others in 2010, captured here at the Sydney Opera House—the professionalization of the performance-as-archivism that they first tried at Bickett.
Brad Cook has gone on to become a prodigious producer, Phil Cook an invaluable steward of local gospel music, Westerlund a well-circulated drummer and solo artist. So what does their old band amount to in the end? As one doubter puts it in the book, “Other than DeYarmond Edison being a failure, I don’t know how important any of this is.” But if there is something indulgent about the project, there is also something deeply fascinating about its attempt to face every inch of the past, laying bare how people change and change yet always end up as what they always were. | 2023-08-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 21, 2023 | 7.7 | be0e8786-b2f8-480d-98eb-7da1e393f6d4 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Though the band is now squarely in its pop era, the nostalgia that laced its early records has morphed into a timely, fatalistic vision of the future and national decay. | Though the band is now squarely in its pop era, the nostalgia that laced its early records has morphed into a timely, fatalistic vision of the future and national decay. | Deerhunter: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhunter-why-hasnt-everything-already-disappeared/ | Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? | By 2015, Bradford Cox had grown weary of the nostalgia that suffused Deerhunter’s early records. “When I was young, foggy nostalgia was such a part of my shtick. That pink haze of nostalgia and boyhood,” he said in an interview before the release of the band’s seventh LP, Fading Frontier. “Now I just wanna be around adults... I’m not as interested in the pink fog of nostalgia.” On the band’s eighth album, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, that feeling has perceptibly intensified.
Nostalgia, after all, fuels some of the United States’ most dangerous reactionary thinking, calling back to a perfectly homogeneous and heterosexual national image that never really existed. While Fading Frontier spoke to a dilapidated American mythos—Cox sang of “amber waves of grain” that were “turning gray”—Disappeared reckons viscerally with late capitalism’s fallout. These songs contend with the emotional and physical ramifications of life in a country that’s reiterating itself to death, one franchise reboot or startup reinvention at a time.
Co-produced by Cate Le Bon, with whom Cox shared a residency at last spring’s Marfa Myths, Disappeared rewires many of Deerhunter’s aural hallmarks. The band has often sounded either gently sprawling, as on Fading Frontier and Halcyon Digest, or aggressive and claustrophobic, as on Monomania. Here, they manage to hit both moods at once. Opener “Death in Midsummer” attends to the memories of departed friends with chimes of harpsichord and drums that sound recorded inside a refrigerator; both hit with blunt force, pulling the song inward. Beneath them, though, a piano rings out as if into wide open space, and Cox sings like he’s trying to be heard from the other side of a gymnasium. A sickly, simple guitar solo reinforces the illusion that the song takes place in both an arena and a coffin. The vertigo of the combination makes an ideal vessel for the lyrics. “They were in hills/They were in factories/They are in graves now,” Cox sings, identifying emblematic blue-collar jobs as passageways to death instead of freedom.
A spiritual sequel to Fading Frontier, Disappeared seizes on its predecessor’s cheery melodicism. Deerhunter are in their pop era now, even as their lyrics remain unflinchingly bleak. “What happens to people?/They quit holding on/What happens to people?/Their dreams turn to dark,” Cox muses against a sweet, upturned piano riff at one point. One of the album’s most bubblegum offerings, “Element,” pairs piano with a swirl of strings, amplifying the melodrama of the syrupy hook. The piano leads the vocal melody, stringing Cox’s voice along like a dancing marionette, even as he sings of “cancer words/Laid out in lines” and a “curtain call for all those lives.”
Cox maintains a forced grin for most of the album, but his pantomimed cheer never sounds phonier than on “Détournement,” where he sing-speaks through a vocal filter that dramatically lowers his pitch. Laurie Anderson has employed a similar effect for decades to produce what she calls “a voice of authority”—a mannered, reasonable man’s voice that remains distressingly calm, even in the event of a plane crash. In his own authoritative voice, Cox calls upon an air travel metaphor, too, greeting various countries around the globe with postcard phrases. He interjects fatalistic non-sequiturs: “Your struggles won’t be long/And there will be no sorrow on the other side.” He concludes with “Hello eternal return/Eternal détournement,” citing an avant-garde technique used in culture jamming: a playful reframing of cultural detritus, like advertising, intended to puncture capitalism’s sheen.
Repetition induces decay; just ask William Basinski, whose series of Disintegration Loops repeats a musical phrase on fragile tapes until holes start to obliterate the sound. The final track here, “Nocturne,” applies a similar effect to the vocals. The gaps in Cox’s voice jar the ear, while a music box riff plays uninterrupted behind him. Nothing happens to the machines, even as the walls close in and the environment seems to teeter on the verge of collapse. It’s only the body that suffers, stutters, and begins to vanish. | 2019-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | January 17, 2019 | 8 | be12677e-fe7d-4d50-9a4d-9e0cfecd912b | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Despite its technical mastery, the English producer’s debut full-length struggles to deliver on the emotional revelation it promises. | Despite its technical mastery, the English producer’s debut full-length struggles to deliver on the emotional revelation it promises. | I. JORDAN: I AM JORDAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/i-jordan-i-am-jordan/ | I AM JORDAN | When I. JORDAN spoke to Pitchfork in 2020, they weren’t getting their hopes up about the future. Their lofty ambition was to live in Berlin—“like every other DJ”—but they doubted they’d ever be successful enough to make that viable. They were, of course, being modest. By then, Jordan had already released a string of EPs that gushed with energy and emotion, blending UK rave styles with trance and the sunny thump of French house. Crucially, there was a personal element, too. 2020’s For You was a dedication to their younger self, an out-of-place queer teenager in the working-class northern English town of Doncaster. Four years later, Jordan has blown past those early doubts. Since 2021, they’ve found a home for their music on Ninja Tune, the prestigious and long-running London powerhouse. They’re now a fixture on the international club and festival circuit; Mixmag listed them as one of the 25 DJs who defined 2023. All the while, Jordan has kept their personal story front and center, chronicling their gender transition on social media and offering a real, humble, and empowering presence to their fans.
Sometime in the midst of this meteoric rise, Jordan’s music lost some of its magic. Early EPs like DNT STP MY LV, For You, and Watch Out! are beautiful, ecstatic, and overflowing with feeling in a way that makes you want to do more than dance—cry, maybe, or stage dive. But since around the time of their 2022 collab with Fred Again.., their tunes have felt glossy and flat, drained of intensity. I AM JORDAN, their debut full-length, is, in concept, a bravely personal record, celebrating Jordan’s self-realization, queer community, and working-class roots. Musically, though, it is strangely hollow, full of tracks that are technically well-executed but emotionally unmoving. In spite of its high tempos, rave clichés (police sirens, canned spinbacks, a Shephard tone), and rowdy hints of donk and hard house, it only occasionally achieves liftoff.
The album’s best track is “People Want Nice Things,” an ethereal banger that chronicles Jordan’s transition in a clever and subtle way: To track how their voice dropped when they started taking T, they recorded themself saying the title phrase once every month for 10 months, then used those recordings as the song’s central vocal sample. But the rest of the album feels less distinctive and artistically assured than Jordan’s early records. The first single, “Real Hot n Naughty,” is a collaboration with the actor and dancer Felix Mufti. Jordan says they aimed to create “a real queer northern dance anthem” with this one, which feels like a big promise for a bit of shiny organ house with jokey Scouse raps on top.
Other tracks feel more like genre templates than works of impassioned creativity. Take “Round n Round,” an effective speed-garage ripper, but one devoid of any twists or flourishes to make it exciting, surprising, or uniquely Jordan’s. This one debuted on Jordan’s socials in a tutorial titled “How to finesse your wobs in Ableton.” Heard in that context, you might have assumed it was a bare-bones demo made expressly for that purpose.
It’s telling that the wob tutorial is more memorable than the song in it. You wonder how I Am Jordan would hit without any supporting content—that is, no prior knowledge of Jordan’s personal story, no socials packed with professionally edited videos and pictures. It’s admirable when music explores delicate aspects of the human experience, especially in the often wordless and utilitarian world of club music. Ideally, though, the music itself would do that, without too much help from outside. Jordan has our attention because they are an artist with something valuable to say, musically and personally—but you might not know that from I Am Jordan. | 2024-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | May 17, 2024 | 6.6 | be12bf4b-fba9-4e11-81a9-90855bbe0cbb | Will Lynch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-lynch/ | |
The alt-R&B duo’s second album remains preoccupied with breakups, but these stories of separation and loss are rendered so dispassionately, it’s hard to feel invested in their outcomes. | The alt-R&B duo’s second album remains preoccupied with breakups, but these stories of separation and loss are rendered so dispassionately, it’s hard to feel invested in their outcomes. | Wet: Still Run | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wet-still-run/ | Still Run | What’s popular music without its staple, the breakup album? Alt-R&B outfit Wet, the duo of Brooklynites Kelly Zutrau and Joe Valle, are great champions of the form: Still Run is their second album and also their second contribution to the tradition. Following 2016’s Don’t You, a collection of languid songs about heartbreak, this record is the product of an arduous internal rift that culminated in 2017 with the departure of founding member Marty Sulkow. Loosely interpreted, most of the songs on Still Run are as applicable to Sulkow’s split as they are to actual romance, making it something of a double-layered breakup album. Unfortunately, the record does little justice to the drama that surrounds any sort of separation, whether creative or romantic.
There are plenty of things that should be working in Wet’s favor here, not least of which is the cast of collaborators they’ve assembled. Ubiquitous pop producer-at-large Rostam Batmanglij helms two of the 10 songs; Andrew Sarlo, who last year produced Big Thief’s stunning sophomore record, handles another four. R&B crooner Starchild & the New Romantic lends his voice to the title track, and Lykke Li also makes an appearance. As Zutrau tells it, Still Run contains some of the group’s most accomplished work to date, and, to their credit, they have made moves towards overcoming one of Don’t You’s major shortcomings: its struggle to break out of a downtempo daze. But despite its starpower and self-generated hype, Still Run ends up being something about as adventurous—and nourishing—as a plate of buttered noodles.
Lyrically, more often than not, these songs are frustratingly uncreative. Though the record centers on conflict, Zutrau, in her role as narrator, may as well be a friend of a friend of the person who actually lived through it: She recounts these stories of separation, grief, and recovery with such scant detail or apparent emotion that it’s hard to feel invested in their outcomes. Throughout, she readily turns to canned metaphor. In “There’s a Reason,” some instability (the actual tenor remains elusive) is described as a rhythm “just out of time.” Several tracks later Zutrau pleads, “life without you” is “like a note sung out of tune.” Behind her hackneyed words, a steady stream of unfussy piano chords and tidy percussion do little to elevate the listening experience.
There are a few moments when the ear perks up. At the beginning of “This Woman Loves You,” one of Rostam’s wards, he pushes Zutrau’s voice through a hazy filter and pairs it with wily country-inflected slide guitar; the effect contains hints of the same genre-smashing quirkiness that made the producer’s work with Haim so delightful. Unfortunately, the track still ends up being one of Still Run’s worst offenders. It lauds the flag and quotes “America the Beautiful” (“This woman loves you/From sea to shining sea”), likening romantic love to love of country—an effort that seems woefully miscalculated at a time when Wet’s base probably feels minimally patriotic.
Another bright spot appears in “Love Is Not Enough.” This final song, if a bit plodding, is at least intriguing. Its opening piano melody gives off haunted music-box vibes, and Zutrau’s voice, multi-tracked and so thin as to be almost translucent, approximates the sound of a gang of ghosts playing Ring Around the Rosie. For the first time on the record, strings are used to some emotional end, rather than as pure decoration, as they shudder in time with Zutrau’s fraught realization about love’s impermanence. The song leaves you to wonder why those that preceded it couldn’t have drawn more from its playbook. Regrettably, just as love is not enough to sustain a union, these few compelling moments are not enough to carry an album’s worth of fluff. | 2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | July 17, 2018 | 5.2 | be15050b-4796-4989-999e-87b6791bcabc | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Biokinetics was the first album released on Berlin's Chain Reaction and 16 years later, Type has reissued Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig's landmark experimental techno album. | Biokinetics was the first album released on Berlin's Chain Reaction and 16 years later, Type has reissued Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig's landmark experimental techno album. | Porter Ricks: Biokinetics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16288-biokinetics/ | Biokinetics | If you bought Porter Ricks' Biokinetics on CD in the 1990s and the disc is still intact, consider yourself lucky: The original edition is currently trading for $65 and up on Discogs. The price has something to do with the album's place in history: Biokinetics, a touchstone of experimental techno, was the first album released on Berlin's widely worshipped Chain Reaction label. But scarcity is a bigger factor: Biokinetics, like all of Chain Reaction's CDs from that era, came packaged in an aluminum tin that tended to crack the CD it was supposed to be protecting. (As a comment on Discogs notes, "Another Chain Reaction release, another metal box that eats up CDs.")
Fortunately, 16 years later, John Twells' Massachusetts-based Type label has stepped up with a reissue of the landmark album, not just on CD (this time in a standard jewel case) but also, for the first time, on 2xLP and digital download. It's a welcome reissue, and long overdue. It comes as certain ideas from techno's fertile, experimental, mid-1990s period are being picked up by a range of underground musicians. Many of these ideas have permeated so deeply into the culture that it's hard to remember a time without them, but we wouldn't have Burial, to name just one of the duo's distant descendants, without Porter Ricks' seafloor crackle and mottled-granite color scale.
Porter Ricks were the duo of Thomas Köner, a sound artist and ambient composer, and Andy Mellwig, a techno producer who also recorded as Continuous Mode and, with former Monolake member and future Ableton founder Gerhard Behles, as Async Sense. Released in 1996, Biokinetics was Porter Ricks' debut album, gathering tracks from three vinyl EPs released that year along with three songs exclusive to the album. It had been years since I last listened to it, and the Type reissue surprised me first by reminding me how diverse the album is. "Chain Reaction" has long since become shorthand for a certain fusion of buoyant dub, hazy ambience, and coiled techno, but on Biokinetics, none of these has quite settled into place; it's a dynamic, unpredictable mixture of pulse and hiss.
The opening "Port Gentil", a precursor to the template Wolfgang Voigt would adopt under his Gas alias, pairs soft, monochromatic tones with a muted 4/4 pulse. On the surface, it couldn't be simpler, but as it pulls you in, you become aware of shifting contours and unusual dimensions, the interplay of light and shadow; it sounds like a string section tuning up atop a freight train trundling through a deep canyon.
"Nautical Dub" hews closer to textbook techno, with muscular bass pushing relentlessly forward, but it's hardly conventional. There are no sharp edges, for one thing: Percussive accents have been buffed to a dull gleam, and the upper register of the track, normally reserved for crisp, cutting hi-hats, is diffused into a fine-gauge spray that sweeps back and forth like a lawn sprinkler. Only "Port of Call" assumes dancefloor techno's chiseled boom-tick profile, but this time it's the low end that's fizzed to near nothingness. A few years later, Pole would famously construct an entire aesthetic around the vagaries of a broken Waldorf filter, but Biokinetics was first: Everything sounds broken here, all frayed cables and dusty contacts, and every gesture toward techno clarity feels like a trade-off made at the expense of another element that's left to crumble.
Dub techno has since become one of electronic music's most mannered styles, but here, Porter Ricks' tracks feel not so much like compositions, much less stylistic exercises, than answers to very specific, fairly arcane questions-- what happens when we route this LFO through that filter? How many divisions can we parse between the downbeats? How can chaos be turned into rhythm, and how far can a repetition be stretched before it's rendered senseless? Where is the boundary between tone and white noise?
On "Biokinetics 1", a heaving, wheezing synthesizer struggles to stick to a regular pulse as it's fed through disorienting delay and looped back upon itself, stumbling and confused. As an experiment in stretching a groove to the breaking point, it's as exhilarating as anything in the history of techno. "Port of Nuba" and "Nautical Nuba" submit drum machines to a similar warping process, resulting in rhythms that gallop like teams of horses. Here, you can hear the origin of Thomas Brinkmann's tumbling cadences of a year or two later, as he used a double-armed turntable to draw elliptical rhythms out of the grooves of records by Wolfgang Voigt and Richie Hawtin. And while we're talking about precedents, the leaden dirge of "Biokinetics 2" lays the groundwork for the bleak, trudging techno of Andy Stott and his Modern Love labelmates.
That Biokinetics is an album about currents is reflected in its seafaring titles, such as "Nautical Dub", "Nautical Zone", "Port of Call", etc., and also in the way that the record's energies feed back into itself. What Porter Ricks learned from dub was less about particular rhythms or stylistic tropes than about the path that a sound travels as it wends its way through the mixing desk, and how it comes out transformed on the other side. Dub's hall-of-mirrors approach to versioning, meanwhile, informs the way that many tracks here are variations upon one another: "Port Gentil" and "Nautical Zone" bookend the album with nearly identical chords, while "Nautical Nuba" and "Port of Nuba" recycle the same drum patterns, using filters and delays to achieve very different results. Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.
Like Detroit's Drexciya, Porter Ricks (who took their name from a character from Flipper, the 1960s film and television series) used aquatic metaphors to get at larger ideas, both musical and otherwise. Ocean currents, electrical currents, sound waves, feedback; dub, techno, minimalism, noise; exchange as a fluid back-and-forth but also, as Drexciya pointed out, as a loaded dynamic, fraught, unequal-- they all swirl together, rippling in time and veering out of sync, as though pulled by complicated gravitational forces. Biokinetics is above all a music of tides, suggesting rhythm as both celestial stroke and as a vibration deep in the body, bubbling at the molecular level. | 2012-02-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Type | February 14, 2012 | 8.5 | be17117a-c13c-4cfd-9c49-90a9258d1f9d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On the quick follow-up to last year’s A Bit of Previous, the Glasgow indie-pop band’s on-the-fly energy and head-in-the-clouds musings collide in memorable and surprising ways. | On the quick follow-up to last year’s A Bit of Previous, the Glasgow indie-pop band’s on-the-fly energy and head-in-the-clouds musings collide in memorable and surprising ways. | Belle and Sebastian: Late Developers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-late-developers/ | Late Developers | Belle and Sebastian may always be remembered for their unlikely ascent in the 1990s: the makeshift band of Glasgow musicians who became international word-of-mouth sensations and helped define the sound of the era’s sensitive indie pop. But what they accomplished in the decade-plus after their dual 1996 breakthroughs, Tigermilk and its quick follow-up If You’re Feeling Sinister, was pretty unusual too. They transformed into a festival-ready ensemble who reached new and gaudier heights, all without the pressures (or perks) of mainstream fame. Last year’s A Bit of Previous, their first proper studio album in seven years, was another improbable triumph, reinvigorating familiar themes of spirituality, sexuality, and existential crisis with an easygoing humility born of experience: Belle and Sebastian were so much older then, they’re younger than that now.
Well, surprise—again. Late Developers, announced less than a week before its release, underlines Belle and Sebastian’s uncanny ability to keep coming out on top. Before the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, the band was planning to record in Los Angeles with Shawn Everett, the six-time Grammy-winning producer and engineer who has worked with the War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves. Instead, they shelved their intended L.A. songs, rearranging their Glasgow rehearsal space to write and track what became A Bit of Previous and, now, Late Developers. Like the last record, Late Developers carries the anything-goes effortlessness of sessions where, as Stuart Murdoch told an interviewer last year, “You might wake up with a tune in your head and think about the words on the way in, and it wasn’t until you got to the studio that you would nail it down with chords.” Perhaps it’s not heresy to also say: Like If You’re Feeling Sinister, this is a near-simultaneous follow-up that’s somehow even better than its acclaimed predecessor.
The characters from their first two records—who stood out for, say, being into S&M and Bible studies or making life-sized models of the Velvet Underground—inhabited a shared universe. Likewise, Late Developers extends the full-circle gesture of A Bit of Previous. Musically, the new album runs the gamut from sepia-toned folk-rock that might’ve fit on 1998’s The Boy With the Arab Strap to neon synth pop that’s as insidiously earworm-y as this band has ever sounded. As with A Bit of Previous, the emphasis is on the nuances of a large group playing together. Their nonchalant camaraderie is the password to a secret club where anyone can belong. Lyrically too, the bookish outcasts who once ruled the school are now shredding their old letters and questioning their former selfish obsessions. There are, blessedly, no specific references to present-day technology or breaking-news headlines, but clearly they’re living in the now.
Late Developers’ contemporary vision is illuminated, though, by the “then.” Where A Bit of Previous single “Young and Stupid” bounced around the trapdoor of nostalgia with all the deceptive sunniness of mid-2000s Belle and Sebastian, here the A.A. Milne-referencing “When We Were Very Young” is a moodier, piano-driven number that might hit early fans a bit close to home. Murdoch’s narrator, a despondent commuter who can’t muster two shits about his prior creative passions, yearns eloquently for contentment in routine—in “football scores” and “my daily worship of the sublime”—but sorry, too bad: “We’ve got kids and dystopia,” sings the frontman, who recently turned 54. A different kind of time warp occurs on “When the Cynics Stare Back From the Wall,” a previously unreleased song written circa 1994. Ambling chamber pop with guest vocals by Tracyanne Campbell, of much-missed Glasgow band Camera Obscura, it has the feel of a lost classic: a B-side or soundtrack selection that you somehow slept on for 25 years. But its stubborn insistence on sincerity, rendered by middle-aged adults who know all too well about pandemics and political collapse, feels earned where it might once have seemed naive.
As on A Bit of Previous, Belle and Sebastian share songwriting credit throughout Late Developers, and Murdoch isn’t the only longstanding member who captures the album’s spirit of communal urgency and disquieted déjà vu. Violinist and co-lead singer Sarah Martin, who’s been in the group since before If You’re Feeling Sinister, seizes the vintage-B&S sunshine of “Give a Little Time” to make her paradoxically persuasive case for leaving the past in the past. As bass rumbles over the sprightly synth-disco of “Do You Follow,” a call-and-response affair that recalls 2004’s non-album espionage-funk gem “Your Cover’s Blown,” Martin gets in the sharpest jabs: Murdoch, asking what must be a universal question, sings, “Is it me or just the world that’s changing?” Martin, sounding unimpressed, shoots back, “My money’s on you.”
At a lean 11 songs and 43 minutes, Late Developers is packed with moments when the band’s on-the-fly energy and head-in-the-clouds musings collide in memorable ways. Opener “Juliet Naked” bristles with stark electric guitar, all the better to ponder Murdoch’s richly allusive visions of “quicksand on the battlefield,” “prayers and pills,” and the “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” songwriting duo. On the revved-up indie dance of “When You’re Not With Me,” Martin offers to “stop the clock/and make a moment between tick and tock”—a particularly evocative way to revisit yet another longtime pet concern. The closing title track, with horns and gospel-powered backing vocals, is so jaunty and verdant that more than a few in Belle and Sebastian’s demographic may be reminded of the Encanto end credits. But it’s also a cathartic unburdening. Building on the last album’s vulnerable “Do It for Your Country,” where Murdoch compared himself to a “lobster in a pot/a songbird in a gilded nightmare,” he sings here, “Who said that I had the wisdom, had the answer?/Wasn’t me.”
Proving Murdoch’s endearing openness to fallibility is Late Developers’ first single, “I Don’t Know What You See in Me,” crafted uncharacteristically with an outside co-writer, Peter Ferguson aka Wuh Oh. Eerily digestible synth pop with essences of palm-muted guitar and a maniacally catchy refrain, it feels like a late-career attempt to indoctrinate new members of the cult. What risked being a garish embarrassment should end up as a fresh hit for the band’s encore runs. Belle and Sebastian have always been focused on connection, and on Late Developers, they’re unpretentious about sharing that bond and generous in reinforcing it. | 2023-01-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 13, 2023 | 7.6 | be1b1fc3-4796-4260-88f0-e8c6b61293ef | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Brooklyn songwriter Zannie Owens’ debut is a loose concept album about a lost alien—and an opaque inquiry into the shifting nature of reality. | Brooklyn songwriter Zannie Owens’ debut is a loose concept album about a lost alien—and an opaque inquiry into the shifting nature of reality. | Zannie: How Do I Get That Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zannie-how-do-i-get-that-star/ | How Do I Get That Star | Zannie Owens opens their full-length solo debut, How Do I Get That Star, with a Major Tom moment. In “mechanical bull,” the Brooklyn-based songwriter makes a sudden loss of contact with reality feel more sublime than worrisome, like getting mesmerized by the sun’s glow without the retinal damage. “I fumble with the airlock and then capitulate,” they sing calmly, shrugging off a terrifying experience with a lofty question: “Is there such a thing as real or fake?/I press my cheek to the stuff dark matter generates.” Zannie folds into the stardust and space debris, acting as a vessel for an otherworldly odyssey.
How Do I Get That Star is a concept album based on the story of a lost alien finding its way home. The narrative threads loosely through the album, which often feels like whimsical sci-fi expressed through free association and dream logic. Zannie cites the legacy of the Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft and the midcentury poet Jack Spicer, who envisioned poets as conduits for some other lifeform, like ghosts or aliens. Sometimes Zannie’s own convoluted language and spacey observations read as though the details got lost in transmission. But like their muses, they seek a kind of authenticity in the unknowable—a way to break the loop of earthly reality—and they find it in quirky synth-pop tunes with the color and whimsy of a Fisher-Price toy.
Whether or not it’s clear what’s going on in the narrative, How Do I Get That Star is often melodically charming and vocally captivating. Owens’ melodies are decadent and playful as costume jewelry: On the highlight “for a while,” their silvery vocals contrast pleasantly with a bouncing polka beat and soulful pedal steel. Their vocal delivery, which can vary from sing-songy to a breathy flutter, is matched with peculiar percussive zaps, warped guitars, or a thin trap beat.
While the sound of the record is inviting, its layered conceptual subtleties itch to be solved. On “holy ghosted,” Zannie pines for another person’s electricity; on “poison plant,” they fret over the type of energy they bring into the room (“I just want to purify the air just like a tall tree/But I feel like a poison plant sucking life from my apartment”). “Am I just a sound?” they ask on “song of rose pain.” At times their lyrics unfold like scientific parables. On the woozy, baroque closer “Doppler,” Zannie calls out someone whose personality seems to change based on other people’s perceptions, comparing their behavior to the phenomenon observed in wave frequencies. “You were always trying to cheat time,” they sing in a pearlescent falsetto. It could be a simple change of heart or the transits of a corrupt time traveler. And yet, whether they’re channeling a lost Martian or untangling their own complex thoughts about connection and human existence, Zannie’s sweetly synthetic pop melodies make the big ideas feel deceptively close to earth. | 2022-08-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | August 24, 2022 | 7.2 | be3199f6-d215-4009-bf0b-e2ba83c9f687 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On his newest mixtape, the young Atlanta rapper succeeds at sounding like a vague, one-note NBA YoungBoy and very little else. | On his newest mixtape, the young Atlanta rapper succeeds at sounding like a vague, one-note NBA YoungBoy and very little else. | Anti da Menace: Legendary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anti-da-menace-legendary/ | Legendary | If you ever wondered what YoungBoy would sound like without the emotional complexity, well I got it, it’s Anti da Menace. Raised on the West Side of Atlanta, the red-hot teenager caught a breakout moment earlier this year with the threat-fueled single “Murder Bitch,” which shaves down YoungBoy’s sound to a growling delivery and anger. But YoungBoy is so much more than that, he’s rarely ever just angry, there’s sadness, pain, and regret bubbling under the surface even when he’s not explicitly saying that. Those layers weren’t always instantly identifiable, but through years of YoungBoy laying out his story and developing his vocal tics on countless mixtapes did it all come together.
Anti da Menace’s newest mixtape, Legendary, skips a couple of steps. Like a YoungBoy album, the sound ranges from tender melodic ballads to brash, drill-inflected diss tracks, yet the emotion is unearned. Of the more vulnerable tracks, which are the type of songs where we’ve learned more about YoungBoy than any interview, Anti da Menace isn’t actually that vulnerable. “Flamethrower” has the elements of what sounds like he’s pouring his heart out—strained vocals, a weepy piano-driven beat, vague words of advice from his mom—but he doesn’t actually say anything to back up the mood. It’s completely relying on our pre-existing knowledge that this is what more downbeat Southern pain rap songs sound like, without doing any of the work. “Forgive Me” is similarly impersonal, there’s not much that makes the song about Anti da Menace, the vagueness is an assumption that we already know his story which makes the lines ring hollow.
He’s a lot better off making songs like “Murder Bitch” even if they are a bit one-note. Similar to how Florida rapper Cochise cordoned off a small bit of Playboi Carti by running off with his helium-voiced flow, Anti da Menace does a pretty good imitation of YoungBoy’s menacing side. On “Blood Boy,” arguably the album’s best song, Anti Da Menace’s snarling delivery is so intense that he could probably rip his t-shirt with his bare hands a la Hulk Hogan. The lyrics where he tries to paint the most violent images possible have no weight to them other than shock, but the energy covers it up well enough. Then over a slightly groovier version of SleazyWorld Go’s “Sleazy Flow” on “Switchblade,” he shows some skill by channeling his anger through a gravelly melody instead of snapping. Meanwhile, “223” goes in the opposite direction: The moment a funky bassline becomes more pronounced in the thrashing beat, his growls are cranked up so much that the relatively clean mix can’t stop his vocals from cracking. It’s the weirdest moment on an album that could have used a lot more weird moments.
Even when Anti da Menace occasionally breaks free from the YoungBoy mold, there’s still not much that sounds specific to him. “Enemies” has the acoustic guitar-led frame of a NoCap track, but he’s not lyrical enough to carry that. “Outta Bounds” starts out like a King Von–style crime short, and despite the two-minute runtime, he runs out of story about halfway through. His most promising moment is “Red Rum,” which has shades of Lil Durk with the way he blends the ruthless spirit of drill with Southern pain melodies. And while it’s a bit of a tired sound, at least the focus is more on his relentlessness and not on what he’s saying. Because, hey, not having much to say is fine, the problem comes up when he’s working within styles of rap that basically require that. Leave the balladry to YoungBoy and he’ll be alright. | 2022-09-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 952 da Label / Artist Partner Group | September 28, 2022 | 5.5 | be3495f7-8200-4bf1-9143-8b7caefd0cc4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Afghan Whigs leader's debut solo album balances guitar-slashing catharsis with candelabra-lit elegance, taking inspired tangents from his signature nocturnal sensibility without departing from it entirely. | The Afghan Whigs leader's debut solo album balances guitar-slashing catharsis with candelabra-lit elegance, taking inspired tangents from his signature nocturnal sensibility without departing from it entirely. | Greg Dulli: Random Desire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greg-dulli-random-desire/ | Random Desire | Greg Dulli closes his first official solo album with a richly atmospheric, slowly unfurling ballad called “Slow Pan”—a fitting move for an artist who approaches rock’n’roll with the methodical gaze of a cinematographer. Over the past 30 years, the ensembles Dulli has fronted have assumed different names—first, the Afghan Whigs, then The Twilight Singers, and then back to the Whigs— but his widescreen sensibility has never wavered. Usually, the term “cinematic” is reserved for instrumental music suggesting grandeur and gravitas, but Dulli prefers to drop you into the thick of the action. His records are like romantic thrillers with all the exposition and character development stripped out, leaving only moments of heated conflict and disarming confessions.
Random Desire further affirms Dulli’s vision, even in the absence of his trusty bands behind him. With the Afghan Whigs once again on hiatus—following bassist/co-founder John Curley’s return to school and the 2017 death of guitarist Dave Rosser from colon cancer—Dulli conceived Random Desire as a one-man operation, but ended up pulling in various longtime associates in for guest spots. The branding and methodology have changed, but the intent and effect are ultimately the same. Like pretty much every record Dulli has made since the Whigs left Sub Pop in the early ‘90s, Random Desire deftly mediates between guitar-slashing catharsis and candelabra-lit elegance. It is filled with the nocturnal ambiance, climactic crescendos, and savvy musical references we have come to expect from a Greg Dulli product. The instant you hear the tensely tapped piano pulses of “Sempre” and “The Tide,” you know it’s only a matter of time before the songs erupt into Joshua Tree-toppling surges, with Dulli engaging the most ravaged register of his voice like a guitarist kicking on an effects pedal.
Random Desire also abounds with nods to Dulli’s omnivorous musical taste. He was once the only ‘90s indie-rocker to drop Lauryn Hill covers covers in his sets; now he’s practically adopting a triplet flow on the shuffling slow jam “Scorpio.” The Nick Cave-esque “A Ghost” invokes enough New Orleans voodoo vibes to yield Dulli’s very own “Red Right Hand.” The album’s most devastating song requires no such theater: "Marry Me," a mournful acoustic ballad, is a mea culpa from a non-committal cad who never worked up the courage to say those words to the one who just walked out on him.
As much as it draws from Dulli’s dog-eared little black book, Random Desire features its share of inspired tangents, when he forgoes the elaborate full-band effect to embrace the mad-scientist possibilities of his solo set-up. The trip-hoppy lament “Lockless” features the album’s most pronounced use of electronics, and a brass fanfare that jolts the song back to life after Dulli powers down into a slow-motion slur. But the album’s biggest surprise is less musical than spiritual. On the bass-driven gospel sprint “Pantomima,” Dulli’s flair for heart-racing hysterics is reoriented around a feeling you rarely encounter in his discography: joy. “Desolation, come and get it!,” he beckons ironically, sounding more like a carnival barker than a prophet of doom. He seems to relish the irony: after 30 years, he needed to make a Greg Dulli record in order to sound a little less like Greg Dulli.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Royal Cream / BMG | February 21, 2020 | 7.3 | be356da5-2213-4fc4-8f51-61cd67cf36ed | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Australian pop-punk musician’s second album is a welcome and wide-open look at mid-twenties inertia and queer romance. | The Australian pop-punk musician’s second album is a welcome and wide-open look at mid-twenties inertia and queer romance. | Alex Lahey: The Best of Luck Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-lahey-the-best-of-luck-club/ | The Best of Luck Club | When Alex Lahey released a charming debut album, I Love You Like a Brother, in October 2017, gay marriage wasn’t yet legal in her home country of Australia. Its follow-up, The Best of Luck Club, is a welcome and wide-open look into the artist’s personal life, packed with songs about mid-twenties inertia and queer romance that flow as naturally as an embellished story from the boozed-up patron on the next bar stool. She might start the night as a stranger, but by closing time, she’s got your number and you’re calling her “bud.”
Flashes of this same chumminess shone throughout her debut, but Lahey avoids redundancies by tinkering with her sound. Working with pop-savvy co-producer Catherine Marks, she’s sanded down some of the debut’s rough edges, casting a Tegan and Sara glow on sincere love songs and refined slacker-rock anthems. On “Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself,” Lahey brings in a blaring saxophone solo against a cautiously encouraging message to a friend who’s grabbed the bull by the horns and seems at risk of being thrown off. The spiteful riffs and quick chord progression of “Misery Guts” recall Hole’s “Celebrity Skin,” and the whimsical piano melody of “Isabella” underlines a cheeky ode to what sounds like a vibrator.
When Lahey sang, “We can’t marry even if we want to” on I Love You Like a Brother ballad “There’s No Money,” it was a brief, resigned personal acknowledgment tucked into an album whose descriptions of life and love were otherwise largely non-confrontational. Australia has since equalized marriage, and coincidentally or not, The Best of Luck Club joins the likes of Troye Sivan in celebrating details of specifically queer romance. “You deserve to know the way I feel/When I watch you use your thighs to turn the steering wheel,” Lahey sings on the doting “Black RMs,” a line that will feel uniquely familiar to any girl who’s road-tripped with a crush. It wasn’t that long ago that alt-rock’s most visible queer women were regularly tagged as being sad, serious, emotional—not that they didn’t have reason to be. A generation on, Lahey’s breezy love songs are brightened by everyday descriptions of a life lived openly.
Outright statement, as opposed to suggestion, has always been at the heart of Lahey’s songwriting. The best of The Best of Luck Club marks a new level of maturity, compressing a multitude of emotions within a single song. “Misery Guts” reacts to a painful breakup with equal parts vulnerability and volatility: “I need a minute to relax, so pretty please get off my back, I’m breathing with my hands on my knees!” The stunning “I Don’t Get Invited to Parties Anymore” explores the fragility and frivolity of the early-to-mid-twenties transition, with its minefield of financial anxieties and steadily worsening hangovers. Lahey soaks the verses and chorus in raucous, power-pop riffs, downshifting at the bridge to sing in a clear-as-glass voice: “I’ve lost track, it’s caught me by surprise/Can I go back and not be left behind?” Layers of self-harmonies alternate lyrics—“Everything was better with no jobs or obligations”—and collaborator Lachlan McGeehan takes a heavy hand to the cymbals until the whole thing crashes together like drunk twenty-somethings on a Twister mat.
Lahey may be stuck in the thick of it now, but her ability to see as though she’s already beyond, to address life’s essential contradictions with thoughtfulness and humor, makes her an insightful storyteller. Like a message from a wise friend, The Best of Luck Club is worth revisiting whenever you’re in need of a little perspective. | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | May 17, 2019 | 7.8 | be43798d-b6b9-439f-9b7d-aa35bdcda242 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
With flutes and instrumental flair, the New Zealand singer-songwriter adds restless drama to her steadfast, plainspoken reflections on pain and personal growth. | With flutes and instrumental flair, the New Zealand singer-songwriter adds restless drama to her steadfast, plainspoken reflections on pain and personal growth. | Sarah Mary Chadwick: Messages to God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-mary-chadwick-messages-to-god/ | Messages to God | Here’s the annoying thing about creating anything: You have to reckon with a time lag. Pure feeling can never survive the time required to decide to register it, and then jot it down. So you have to invent the thought anew, render it writerly, symbolic, neat. New Zealand musician Sarah Mary Chadwick, whose work has always privileged immediacy and primacy, brings pause and contemplation to her eighth studio album, Messages to God. In a quavering contralto thick with indeterminacy, she mirrors the experience of trying to clamber out of the darkness, but never knowing when it will end, or whether the light at the end of the tunnel exists at all.
Her previous three albums, released between 2019 and 2021, found solid footing (and a bleak sense of humor) in abjection, referencing heavy drinking, self-harm, her own suicide attempt. Lines tended to end in an anti-climax or a joke, alongside a streak of cruelty. “Tried to end it all, I’d not tried lately/August 11, 2019/And I didn’t call my mum/’Cause I hate that bitch,” she sung on 2021’s “Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby.” The effect was one of emotional overstimulation rather than purgation.
Messages to God documents Chadwick’s attempt to find help and health, a process that’s boring and often irritating, like a slow, dull scratch. During the effort to move forward, she often falls back into her past, landing on heartbreak and hopeless nostalgia loops. But there are flashes of scattered beauty, lightning bolts of pure joy. “Well I’m here/I’m glad I’m still alive,” she sings like a secret on “I Felt Things in New Zealand,” a pause from her carousing vocal performance. At times Chadwick herself becomes a reliable and loving guide. On “Drinkin’ on a Tuesday,” a rollicking, boozy anthem, she proffers some genuinely great advice: “You gotta have a song to sing that will bring you to its knees with its beauty/And you gotta have a joke to tell that’ll help you make friends drinking on a Tuesday.”
In her previous triptych of albums, musical gestures were largely deprioritized in favor of Chadwick’s dramatic vocal delivery. Melodies were few and far between, as well as tonally inconsistent. She played her piano like a teenager throwing a tantrum during a school recital, bashing out a few chords here and there, keeping the composition as spare as possible, yet still furiously alive. She used her limited technical ability in service of her emotionally excessive performance. Here, pop melodies serve as a foil to Chadwick’s grave messages. A grand piano line, reminiscent of Aphrodite Child’s “Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall,” meets bluegrass slide guitar on “Don’t Tell Me I’m a Good Friend”; a psychedelic swirl of flutes surrounds her voice on “Only Bad Memories Last.” These flitting, willfully frivolous additions bring further drama and tension to Chadwick’s songcraft. The depression and abjection that once characterized her songs made them purgatorial, motiveless. Now, Chadwick floods them with wild and frenzied motive-seeking, performing the quest for lightness and reason with equal ferality.
Messages to God departs from her previous ultra-stalwart, self-immolating approach, as Chadwick makes a concerted effort to find beauty in the mundane, allowing herself to experience the drag of the time lag in order to do so. “I’m just trying to move my life/Away from strife and into love,” she sings on “Someone Else’s Baby,” operose and hesitant. Learning to get out of your own way requires understanding why you were acting as a roadblock in the first place. On Messages to God, Chadwick attempts to use that intense self-inquiry to move forward, knowing it’s a journey she must undertake for herself. Her most musically and emotionally dynamic work to date, Messages to God may not inch her much further toward heaven, though it makes a great leap towards Chadwick’s goal here on Earth: to perfectly transcribe the wretched, muddy, disgusting, beautiful mind. | 2023-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Kill Rock Stars | September 19, 2023 | 7.5 | be4d546d-0d88-45c6-b46b-079b20163856 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The London electronic musician’s painterly, atmospheric production style yields deftly layered headphone music adorned with occasional dancefloor flourishes. | The London electronic musician’s painterly, atmospheric production style yields deftly layered headphone music adorned with occasional dancefloor flourishes. | Rival Consoles: Now Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rival-consoles-now-is/ | Now Is | Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, has always searched for new ways to approach his synthesizers, whether translating sketches into scores on Articulation or daisy-chaining effects pedals to create the busy textures of Howl. The London producer’s restless tone-seeking and expressive ambience easily meld with other mediums. Recently, his music has provided the ominous underpinnings of a contemporary dance production, the pulsating cues for a soccer documentary, and the droning accompaniment to supermodel Bella Hadid having a dress sprayed directly onto her body. With Now Is, West has crafted a soundtrack to his own pandemic-induced lockdown. Appropriately, it’s sometimes tedious and occasionally revelatory, oscillating between comforting recollections of the past and tentative inklings of the future.
An inward-looking suite of tracks made in solitude isn’t exactly new territory for West, whose painterly, atmospheric production style yields deftly layered headphone music, in spite of some propulsive dancefloor flourishes. And the decidedly contemplative bent of Now Is is nothing less than routine among the growing canon of records predominantly created in lockdown; West’s former labelmate Nils Frahm recently stretched the “stuck-in-quar” mood into three painstakingly pensive hours. Many of the tracks on Now Is were conceived as miniature scores to film clips or as deliberate counterpoints to the sinister tone of 2021’s Overflow, but they’re still beholden to West’s usual palette of stuttering synths, sparse rhythms, and reverberating flourishes. While songs like “Echoes” and “World Turns” refine the sound of previous Rival Consoles albums, West is most compelling when he’s consciously subtracting familiar elements or introducing new variables.
West says that while recording Now Is, he tried to be “confident enough to bring very subtle details to the front and let them just be.” Classical music served as one of his primary muses, though he’s more interested in channeling the delicate interplay and timbre of orchestral sound than replicating the dense structure of symphonic bombast. “Running” and “Vision of Self” embrace the tenets of minimalism, featuring short synth motifs that resemble string arrangements, repeating and slowly shifting as embellishments are introduced. Hearing these songs gradually transform and reveal themselves requires patience, but neither track feels like it’s building to some inevitable crescendo—here, the journey is the point.
Now Is occasionally gets bogged down in tunes that sap the album’s deliberate momentum, such as the cold, percussive “Frontiers.” Written as an ode to dramatic Icelandic scenery, it’s a track that you might expect to mirror the sweeping landscapes of a nature documentary, but it settles for the fade-into-the-background energy of generic video-game music (probably an ice level). Just before its conclusion, Now Is enters another lull as West leans into the acutely listless tendencies of ambient music (“The Fade”) and toys with nu-jazz stylings (“A Warning”).
The warped melody of a muted piano offers resolution at the album’s close. The instrument is rarely the centerpiece of West’s music, which makes its use here all the more striking. The gentle hiss of the looped piano on “Quiet Home” lends a sense of physical space and grounded reality, contrasted with West’s typical array of electronic noise suspended in reverb. In interviews, West insists that he rebelled against the notion of writing a predictably mournful pandemic-era record, but the album’s sparse, willfully earthbound final minutes betray the melancholy at its core. Thankfully, Now Is doesn’t devote too much time to wallowing. West is far more interested in the musical possibilities that a stretch of enforced downtime can eventually reveal. | 2022-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | October 18, 2022 | 6.7 | be4d7ffd-62fd-402c-9fdb-fb3c1bc435d0 | Zach Long | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-long/ | |
The Afrobeats star balances the formula to unite home and abroad with big pop songs that can compete across cultures and an underlying theme that embraces his roots. | The Afrobeats star balances the formula to unite home and abroad with big pop songs that can compete across cultures and an underlying theme that embraces his roots. | Wizkid: Made In Lagos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wizkid-made-in-lagos/ | Made In Lagos | It’s been 10 years since WizKid first debuted in Lagos, becoming synonymous with all that is good in Afrobeats. Four years ago, Drake’s “One Dance” introduced the Nigerian pop star internationally, broadening his audience and spotlighting a genre on the verge of becoming a global powerhouse. The 30-year-old singer has picked up the skills to dualize his music, making art with one foot planted firmly at home while the other seeks success in new markets. From making dance records designed to conquer Lagos, he’s expanded into other territories, by leaning heavily on Caribbean influences. It hasn’t been an easy task, and in the time since WizKid gained international recognition, his crossover credentials have been in question back in Africa.
His stateside debut, Sounds From the Other Side, struggled to make a dent commercially. His contract with Sony demands that he continues to play for a global audience, making music that would not work connect locally back home. To work around contractual restrictions, he’s paired with producers and DJs, appearing on their records as an invested guest, to start records in the Nigerian market. More complex still is the ever-changing scene in Lagos, where a new guard of musicians including Omah Lay, Fireboy, and Joeboy are expanding the borders of genre and redefining the local sound. WizKid’s legacy is secure, but in 2020, he’s a king under threat of deposition.
Made in Lagos dispels those doubts over 14 tracks. Here, he’s finally balanced the formula to unite home and abroad with big pop songs that can compete across cultures and an underlying theme that embraces his roots. The project is dedicated to Lagos, Nigeria’s bubbling creative hub, historically the beating heart of Africa’s art community. It’s home for WizKid, the place where he was born, raised, and first accepted. It isn’t his first love letter to his hometown: His previous ode to the city’s popular Ojuelegba neighborhood brought Drake into his life and launched his crossover campaign. He continues to embrace his people in art and in action: As young Nigerians around the world participated in the recent #EndSARS protests against police brutality, WizKid delayed his album release and joined in, marching alongside fans in London and becoming a vocal advocate on social media.
Made in Lagos is narrow in its sonic approach, but for good reason. Where previous projects were outsized cocktails of club bangers and experimental pursuits, WizKid’s measured take on his fourth album betrays refined maturity. His sounds are familiar, his delivery sure. And the sincerity bleeds through the songwriting. “Inna inna inna, I know say dey go pray on my downfall/I’m still a winner winner,” he asserts early on, as horns travel through the winding melodies of “Reckless.” Wizkid’s delivery of patois and pidgin English interpolating with lush saxophone instantly set this apart. He has refined his approach, finding comfort in exploring the intersection of two sound cultures: Lagos exuberance meets Jamaican rhythms.
For a project dedicated to the Nigerian city and its country, the core of Made in Lagos highlights the cultural exchange between Africa and the Caribbean. For many generations, the music of Lagos has enjoyed a healthy Island influence. From reggae to dancehall, to soca, local creatives in Lagos chop and mix music along a wide spectrum of Island sound cultures. Lagos might have birthed WizKid, but Kingston provides the inspiration.
True cross-cultural explosion happens within the bounce and deep drumming of “Mighty Wine.” You are instantly transported into a late night in a small club in Victoria Island, bodies gyrating from joy. Damian Marley’s gratitude and introspective verse elevate “Blessed” into an anthem fit for those windy sunsets driving through the incessant honking cars of Lagos Island. On the ground, Lagos might be a city of struggle and shadows, but its very heart is aspirational, and to survive its horrors is to be blessed. WizKid captures the feeling of escapism on the hook: “Say tonight man no go stress o/Say tonight, me and my guys we go jam gbedu.”
Other collaborators elevate their records, playing on their strengths in a diverse fashion. H.E.R. redirects flowing positivity into romance on fan-favorite, “Smile.” The mid-tempo reggae production attracted local criticism for its cultural detachment and simplicity when it was released in July. A poignant music video might have softened that stance, but within the full project, its familiarity feels like home. Ella Mai’s openness makes for the perfect duet, bringing a slow burn to the R&B standout “Piece of Me.” “Meet me for lobby o, I know nobody can satisfy ya,” WizKid brags. Alternative Nigerian vocalist Tay Iwar’s sunny infusion of tropical fun over lush instrumentals on “True Love” provides a highlight, while rising singer Tems continues her steady ascension with a sultry performance on “Essence.” Despite a pedestrian chorus, Burna Boy still rings in the party on “Ginger” amid rolling drums and exaggerated promises to a lover. Skepta relives his “Bad Energy” success on “Longtime,” and even though the new collaboration drags uncomfortably, a little déjà vu can be excused.
Made in Lagos doesn’t pretend to dig deeper than escapism and a bit of symbolism. Love and gratitude drive the affair forward, with rich approaches to its mid-tempo production. With 10 years of African success under his belt, WizKid’s play for increased global reach is transforming his artistry. The beauty and novelty within Made in Lagos is a consequence of that metamorphosis. For African artists pushing for crossover success, a full Afrobeats takeover of the Hot 100 remains the Holy Grail. WizKid’s latest is a fine addition to make that a reality.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Starboy / Sony Music International / RCA | November 7, 2020 | 7.7 | be4ddf95-5a72-47ea-8f67-f52ca0800e81 | Joey Akan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joey-akan/ | |
For his latest solo record, Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach recruits a free-ranging band and jams out a loose, soul-inspired record that feels like longtime friends playing ego-free in basements. | For his latest solo record, Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach recruits a free-ranging band and jams out a loose, soul-inspired record that feels like longtime friends playing ego-free in basements. | The Arcs: Yours, Dreamily | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21064-yours-dreamily/ | Yours, Dreamily | While he's best known as one half of the Black Keys, Dan Auerbach's built himself quite a resume of extracurricular actives in the past few years, largely behind the boards. He's produced for artists including Ray LaMontagne and New Orleans piano legend Dr. John, and helped give Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence its sweeping, cinematic sheen.With his latest side-project the Arcs, the guitarist and vocalist steps back into the spotlight, recruiting Truth and Soul Records founder Leon Michels, Black Keys touring bassist Richard Swift, Menahan Street Band member Homer Steinweiss, Amy Winehouse collaborator Nick Movshon, and guitarist Kenny Vaughan.
Instead of coming across as a "Dan Auerbach & Co." record though, Yours, Dreamily strikes a more collaborative balance, with all members receiving songwriting credits and an overall feeling of longtime friends jamming ego-free in basements (never mind the fact one of those practice spaces was New York's Electric Lady Studios). In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Auerbach said they were inspired by "old soul records, Captain Beefheart, and newer hip-hop".
Much like Auerbach and Patrick Carney's well-meaning but poorly-executed rap-rock experiment BlakRoc, the album was recorded quickly in two weeks, though fans of the Akron, Ohio's last stadium rock duo standing will find plenty to enjoy here. Rollicking opener "Outta My Mind" could easily be a lost Black Keys Attack & Release B-side and the Arcs incorporate a love of psychedelia and the Stax Records catalog more successfully than the group's last outing. There's a lot of influences coming together here, but they work sonically, from the clop of horses and bird chirps on the country-tinged "Everything You Do (You Do for You)" to the orgiastic shrieks and frenzied saxophone on "Come & Go".
While nobody's claiming to be innovating wildly here, the biggest flaw of Yours, Dreamily lies in its ham-fisted and occasionally rote lyrics ("Pistol Made of Bones" is the biggest offender). With the exception of the horn-heavy, Junior Kimbrough-referencing "Velvet Ditch", which Auerbach says was inspired by a motorcycle trip he took from Nashville to Clarksdale, Miss., too many of the songs here come off like failed attempts to write a Muscle Shoals version of "Bad Blood". It's not the first time he's sung about ill-fated romance (his acrimonious split with wife Stephanie Gonis in 2013 made tabloid and music blog headlines alike)—see also his 2009 solo album Keep It Hid—but over the course of 14 tracks, it grows slightly repetitive.
Thankfully, his wearied tales get a welcome assist from Brooklyn-based all-female mariachi band Flor de Toloache, who provide ghostly backup vocals and a much-needed sense of perspective on slow-burning highlights "Put a Flower in Your Pocket" and quasi-ballad "Chains of Love" (disappointingly not an Erasure cover). On tender lead single "Stay in My Corner" (inspired by the May 2015 boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao), he pleads his allegiance to a lover claiming "I will fight for you" but it sounds like it's himself he's trying to convince. Like that fight, the Arcs will draw audiences (they've already been booked as a musical guest on an upcoming episode of "Late Show With Stephen Colbert" and are sure to be a lock for the festival circuit) and Yours, Dreamily draws spirited performances from its players, but works best as a one-off event. | 2015-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | September 21, 2015 | 6.8 | be525949-af33-4a11-a903-f6147bb7f817 | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | null |
The Berlin-based DJ’s new album relies on rototom drums and the interplay of diverse guests to build exhilarating, dynamic soundscapes. | The Berlin-based DJ’s new album relies on rototom drums and the interplay of diverse guests to build exhilarating, dynamic soundscapes. | Ziúr: Eyeroll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ziur-eyeroll/ | Eyeroll | In the early stages of writing Eyeroll, Berlin-based DJ and producer Ziúr started calling it her “jazz album.” “I mean it’s not really,” she admitted in one interview, “but I guess it’s my kind of jazz.” There is a marked difference between this body of work and her older records, which are icy expanses of fractured electronica; 2021’s Antifate, for example, is spare and heady, blanketed in a digital frost. On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests.
Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort. Among them are Egyptian poet, singer, and composer Abdullah Miniawy; Manchester-based rapper Iceboy Violet; and New York DJ and multimedia artist Juliana Huxtable. Each has a distinct, angular presence. On the crackling “If the City Burns I Will Not Run,” Miniway reads a poem in Arabic that depicts a charred and war-torn land—a hostile place, but no less of a home. As Berlin-based composer James Ginzburg modulates a drone that hits glass harp frequencies, Miniway’s cadence ripples just above a whisper, and Ziúr meshes his soft trills with dappled rhythms on rototoms—tunable drums that change pitch as they rotate around a threaded metal ring.
The instrument is fundamental to Eyeroll; Ziúr recorded the album mostly at night, and sought out percussion that wouldn’t make too much noise. The rototoms, which she tapped and scraped in dizzying patterns, became the foundation of each track, evolving and resurfacing throughout the record. On “Move On,” Ziúr thumps out a clubby dance beat, goading Iceboy Violet’s pillow-muffled rap. On the title track, the skins sound like they’re being pelted by rubber balls, mimicking a frenetic free jazz drum solo.
Songs like “Malikan,” “Move On,” and “Nontrivial Differential” make a strong case for jazz as a descriptor. Each cut features skewed and splintered trumpet, played in frantic blasts by Miniawy. On “Malikan,” sparse percussion and bass that warps like a sagging floorboard become off-kilter accents to Miniawy’s horn and ululating howls. His playing is cleaner on the skeletal “Nontrivial Differential,” leaving space for the vocal acrobatics of Welsh experimentalist Elvin Brandhi. The largely improvisational singer has exceptional vocal control; she can plunge to smokey, lounge crooner lows, snap to shrill yelps, and summon hellfire like Diamanda Galás.
Brandhi’s verses are among the most exhilarating on Eyeroll. On the title track, she clicks, shouts, and screeches, straining her throat into a dry moan that sounds like her uvula is being stretched out with surgical clamps. Ziúr’s sole lyrical contribution, “I roll the shittiest cigarettes, ” becomes a darkly funny admission in Brandhi’s mouth—a mundane detail contorted into a fiendish mantra. Ziúr allows room for Brandhi to flail, but sculpts some of her most interesting sounds to bristle against her voice. On the spectacular “Cut Cut Quote,” the producer ekes out noises that recall crisp, creaking leather. As Brandhi whips into a frenzy, barking out harsh consonants and foaming at the mouth, Ziúr ramps up her rototoms and discharges barbed lines of synthesizer. In the hands of a sensitive and dynamic composer like Ziúr, her collaborators are emboldened by the racket. | 2023-08-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hakuna Kulala | August 2, 2023 | 7.7 | be54122a-5a79-400c-9895-033b5cf93348 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Chicago guitarist Brett Sova records for Ty Segall's God? imprint under a name inspired by a classic Jimi Hendrix LP. He blends massive, shredding guitar solos with muffled, unsteady psychedelic music, and the best tracks on his second LP Early Surf brim with potential. | Chicago guitarist Brett Sova records for Ty Segall's God? imprint under a name inspired by a classic Jimi Hendrix LP. He blends massive, shredding guitar solos with muffled, unsteady psychedelic music, and the best tracks on his second LP Early Surf brim with potential. | Axis: Sova: Early Surf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20169-early-surf/ | Early Surf | If there's one thing you need to know about Chicago's Brett Sova, it's that he shreds. He records under the name Axis: Sova, which stands as a solo project in the studio but morphs into a full band on the road, and in either formation the most interesting element is easily his guitar. When there is percussion on Early Surf (his second LP, and his first for Ty Segall's God? Records imprint), it's minimal, synthetic, and purely functional. He's only two full-lengths in, but he's already established a reputation for buzzing, unsteady, occasionally muffled psych music spiked with a few giant guitar solos for good measure. He's established a formula—"avant garde yet burly"—that he delivers once again with Early Surf.
The trouble with this sort of psychedelia is that it sometimes veers toward abstraction and facelessness. That's definitely a concern here, as Sova's somewhat of an elusive figure in his music. He's the guitar-wielding figure on the album's cover, his features blotted out by blinding light, singing poems that address uncertainty and unclear identities. His distorted and effects-laden vocals cut off words, and he occasionally comes across as dour and reserved, but his oblique storytelling (with references, for example, to the overpowering nature of artificial light and television) and amorphous guitar leads hint at a larger aesthetic unity. On "Ask Me About My Smell", in which a woman named Heather does, indeed, ask him about his smell, he steps away from his heavier persona and lets a sense of humor shine through.
Early Surf's best moments brim with potential. "Fractal Ancestry" shows a guitarist and songwriter unafraid to explore different approaches: Over seven minutes, Sova's guitar melody operates within a loose structure, but things always seem to be in a state of flux. His solos guide the song down alternate routes as he continually shifts the balance from the right speaker to the left, peppered throughout with sci-fi sound effects. Again, his approach mirrors his lyrics: "Open the door, let it close behind you. What do you see now? It's just another door." At his best, Sova seems like the type of guy who could endlessly swing open new doors to unexpected places.
Unfortunately, a few of the songs just don't have legs. The two-minute track "Secret Hand" seems to be building to something enormous before it just sort of fizzles out. It happens again on the album's title track: Sova named his band after a classic Jimi Hendrix LP, and for a brief moment at the start of the song, it seems like he's going to do his namesake proud by springboarding off his earworm and heading into the stratosphere. Instead, he just stays the repetitive course, only changing his approach in the song's final seconds. Sova's undeniably the sort of guy you want to hear go long—the lengthier jams are undeniably the best. When he's not going on an epic journey, however, he winds up spinning in place. | 2015-02-17T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-02-17T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City / God? | February 17, 2015 | 6.6 | be576c94-a8c0-4dc4-9205-39ddbd0ece62 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2003 debut by the North Carolina rap trio, a ridiculously hard throwback album that plugged hip-hop’s golden era into the internet age. | 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 2003 debut by the North Carolina rap trio, a ridiculously hard throwback album that plugged hip-hop’s golden era into the internet age. | Little Brother: The Listening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-brother-the-listening/ | The Listening | Phonte, Rapper Big Pooh, and 9th Wonder have always been ’90s rap babies at heart. The two rappers and producer, respectively, grew up idolizing rap acts from the genre’s Golden Age: A Tribe Called Quest and their Native Tongues cohorts, EPMD, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, and Hieroglyphics. “We considered them our big brothers,” Phonte told the Star-News during press for The Listening in 2004. “So we were like their little brothers,” Pooh replied. This was the philosophy the trio brought with them to North Carolina Central University in Durham in 1998.
Phonte and 9th Wonder were both born and raised in small North Carolina towns; Pooh grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and was drawn to North Carolina by a deacon at his church who suggested he attend NC-Central because it was an HBCU. Phonte and 9th first met while moving into their dorm rooms: 9th was carrying a copy of The Source. “At that time, if you saw somebody with a Source mag, it was like a Jedi meeting another Jedi,” Phonte explained in 2019. Pooh came into the fold when he and Phonte met during freestyle sessions in the room of their RA, Joe Drama. That room would become an incubator for the collective known as the Justus League: eight rappers (Phonte, Pooh, Chaundon, Cesar Comanche, Median, L.E.G.A.C.Y., Edgar Allen Floe, and Sean Boog), five producers (9th, Big Dho, Khrysis, Eccentric, and Son of Yorel), a DJ (DJ Flash), and a “Minister of Opinion” (Mike Burvick). They would crack jokes and kick rhymes and indulge in each other’s wide-ranging musical tastes, from the Roots to Led Zeppelin. Bonds formed as Joe Drama’s room became the Dagobah to over a dozen Jedi-in-training.
Their arrangement was casual, little more than friends having fun recording music, until a fateful night in 2001. Phonte and Median were scheduled to rap over a 9th beat called “Speed” but, at the last minute, Median didn’t show up. Pooh was there, though, so he and Phonte joined forces instead to create what would become the first Little Brother song. 9th’s beat is steady and soulful, perfect for uneasy morning commutes across the Raleigh Beltline. Phonte’s writing is vivid and impressionistic, conjuring his position as a slave to a dead-end job (“I’m sharecropping in this paper chase”) that keeps him from seeing his infant son for days at a time. Pooh counters with bars that bluntly lay out where his mind is at during trips through the arteries of North Carolina highways: “I let my life shine in between these paper’s lines/I write rhymes to incite minds/Spending time on this pipeline, 85 North.” They offer two different perspectives on this pink-slip paranoia or, as Phonte puts it, “I was the chisel, Pooh was the sledgehammer.” “Speed” highlights the relatable yin and yang of Phonte and Pooh—direct descendants of Tribe’s Q-Tip and Phife Dawg or EPMD’s Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith—over 9th’s expert manipulation of Bobby Womack and Mobb Deep samples. In an effort to bring the Triangle of North Carolina to the world, Little Brother was officially born.
The Justus League were geeked about their sound, which honored the East Coast-bred boom-bap of hip-hop’s past, but mainstream rap, particularly in the South, had begun to move on. The highest-charting Southern rappers between 2001 and 2003—artists like Nelly and Ludacris—favored booming bass and synth-based rhythms over samples and drum breaks. Crunk music was on the verge of going mainstream: Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz released their landmark song “Get Low” as a single on February 19, 2003, only six days before The Listening landed in stores. Within three years, the rise of snap music in the Bankhead area of West Atlanta would set the stage for the ringtone rap explosion led by artists like Soulja Boy and Dem Franchize Boyz in the mid-2000s. The South had produced plenty of lyrically minded emcees (Geto Boys, UGK, 8Ball & MJG) but barring notable exceptions like OutKast’s behemoth of a double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below released that September, the emphasis is on dances and beats over rhymes. Little Brother was moving in the exact opposite direction, hoping to create music with the thoughtfulness and soul of rappers like Scarface and Aquemini-era OutKast. Waning interest in this brand of rap didn’t deter Little Brother or the Justus League from putting their own twist on André 3000’s declaration that the South had something to say.
But outside of occasional spins on college radio, Little Brother’s reach was minimal. They put together The Listening on the cheap with $2,000, a computer, and some dinky microphones, equipment “you could have found in the back storage room of any middle school or YMCA,” friend and collaborator Joe Scudda tweeted in 2021. As college students working out of dorm rooms and off-campus apartments, they didn’t have anyone to pull strings in the music industry, but they managed to cultivate an early audience through local shows and burgeoning hip-hop message board communities like Okayplayer.
Founded by Questlove of the Roots on the same day the band released their fourth studio album Things Fall Apart in 1999, Okayplayer would position itself as a space for fans to interact directly with artists years before Myspace, Facebook, or Twitter existed. The site’s message boards were a battlefield of recommendations, jokes, and heated exchanges between artists and a small army of rap purists hungry for something outside the realm of Air Force 1s and oversized white tees. Four early Little Brother songs were posted to the website thejawn.com and then reposted to Okayplayer. Once those songs surfaced on the boards, Little Brother quickly found an audience who reaffirmed their confidence and made them into one of the earliest examples of blog rap stars.
The Listening’s 18 songs are tied together by a fictional FM station called WJLR Justus League Radio—“the future of hip-hop music”—that plays from the morning commute through the graveyard shift. Different League members make cameos as hosts, hotline callers, and themselves, creating a Real Hip-Hop utopia where the lyrics hit as hard as the beats. The radio station concept was already tried and true by the early 2000s thanks to the likes of De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, and Wu-Tang Clan, and WJLR served the same basic function of transplanting rappers into their own version of ubiquitous broadcasts. But Little Brother’s love for the past dovetailed with their desire to change the present. They called the album The Listening in direct response to audiences’ shrinking attention spans and perceived lack of appreciation for the finer details of a full-length LP: reading the album credits, memorizing songs, generally marinating in the art. The concept prods at the music industry with the same backhanded humor as the WRMS station from 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead: music nerds airing our grievances through characters and conviction.
The title track, which closes out the project, is the most explicit call-out. The first two verses trade stories of kids only caring about beats blasting out of cars and school days spent listening to Black Star and Big Daddy Kane albums. To drive home the point that “niggas ain’t listening,” the third verse is filled with nonsense bars about “Fly Motorola diploma style ice niggas,” “Gold Bond Armor-All fatigues,” and Jetsons references designed to rattle anyone only half paying attention. The whole thing is soundtracked by 9th’s breezy beat, which is punctuated by a blatant sample of the horns from “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” the Pete Rock & CL Smooth standard that sampled them from “Today” by Tom Scott and the California Dreamers. Tongues are darting through cheeks so hard, they’re practically bursting from their ears and touching the pop filters on the mic.
It’s bold and more than a little pretentious to cast yourself as classicist saviors of an entire genre on your debut album, but Little Brother’s understanding of modern radio and their sense of humor cuts the bitterness back to playful snark. For all the self-righteousness, Little Brother’s priorities were simple: hard beats and dope rhymes took precedence over everything else. 9th’s—who produced every song on The Listening except for “The Get-Up,” which was made by Eccentric—production style was nostalgic but forward-thinking, laying pounding drums over sample fragments with enough finesse and energy to not feel sterile. Early highlights “For You” and “Whatever You Say” use vocal chops and drums in tandem to create a new swing for Phonte and Pooh to skip across. The duo recorded “For You” as a literal mic check, but the sheer joy of hearing Phonte and Pooh try to outrap each other with poetic grace (“Microsoft niggas say Word and page up”) and blunt scene-setting (“We fire off like it’s New Year’s Eve”) is infectious. The trio’s love for the genre and its history is palpable—the hook for “Groupie Pt. 2” interpolates lines from Rob Base’s classic “It Takes Two” and “So Fabulous” is a rap nerd checklist for the ages—but the quality of the songs amplifies their passion more often than the references spell it out.
It also helps that The Listening is more than just a sermon for Backpackers Anonymous. Little Brother was content to stand in opposition to the more materialistic music dominating the airwaves, particularly in the South, but they weren’t opposed to the music and culture itself. They were smart enough to realize their own place as everymen within rap’s framework and play to those strengths as often as they embraced their Real Hip-Hop ethos. “Everybody can relate to a Little Brother song. Whether you crunk all day, or you a thug all day, or if you go plant flowers all day,” Pooh once said during a radio interview. The two verses on “Whatever You Say” juxtapose the duo’s failed attempts at picking up dates—Phonte manages to impress a love interest even though his verse didn’t rhyme. On “Away From Me,” a late album highlight, Pooh and Phonte pen thoughtful verses to family members, Pooh to his estranged older brother (“I bailed out in your time of need/But you fucked me over in your time of greed”) and Phonte to his young son (“Hearing your laugh is like music to my ears but the song ended”). The stately beats on both songs magnify the uncomfortable aspects of each story, but Phonte and Pooh’s sincerity and interplay balance everything out.
For all their emotional maturity and old-school hip-hop values, Little Brother leave plenty of reminders that this project was created by an idealistic group of music nerds. Only a fanlike appreciation for the inner workings of a studio session could produce a song as pointed and funny as “Make Me Hot,” where Phonte plays a talentless rapper harassing 9th for beats. Phonte’s verse on “The Yo-Yo” is all fire and brimstone over coffeehouse rappers in “sandals and capris” holding their Blackness over his head while only dating white women. Nearly a third of The Listening’s tracklist is made up of songs about the duo’s imperfect attempts at courting, sleeping with, and reconnecting with women. Their penchant for speaking their truths kept them down to Earth, giving the disses to corny rappers on “Make Me Hot” and the soulful shout-outs to true fans on “The Way You Do It” more impact.
There’s a lot of lyrics to parse, but WJLR’s omnipresence keeps things smooth and irreverent. The transitions between songs are seamless and drive home the comforting atmosphere of a 24-hour radio station. The conceptual reach occasionally exceeds its grasp—some of the skits and ideas drag—but ultimately Little Brother display a remarkable sense of satire and thematic control.
Shortly after the album was finished, a representative from ABB Records felt the potential and reached out to the trio off the strength of their Okayplayer fanbase. After signing with ABB in 2002, The Listening was officially released on February 25, 2003 to widespread acclaim. The Source labeled it “one of the most sonically cohesive hip-hop albums since The Blueprint.” The project didn’t chart, but it made waves on the internet and moved 34,000 units by 2005, a respectable number for an indie debut. Before they knew it, Little Brother had co-signs from DJ Premier, a profile on the MTV News show You Hear It First, and music with Questlove and Pete Rock. Engineer Young Guru was so impressed with 9th’s production work, he connected him with JAY-Z, who was interested in having 9th produce the song “Threat” for his 2003 farewell album The Black Album.
From apartment recordings to touring and making music with their idols, Little Brother came out the gate swinging. But it would be years before they were fully compensated for their work. Eighteen years later, in 2021, Phonte and Pooh revealed that ABB head Ben Nickelberry Jr. had been stiffing them on royalties since at least 2004. After a passionate fan campaign, the duo received the masters to the album and re-released The Listening—complete with instrumentals and bonus tracks—via Bandcamp and the new label Imagine Nation Music.
I’ve always been curious how an album like The Listening can be so tethered to the time it was created but still feel timeless. But I think it comes down to an ethos, one that Little Brother has maintained since dropping The Listening and The Minstrel Show; since 9th Wonder’s departure in 2007; since their breakup in 2010; throughout Phonte and Pooh’s respective solo careers and their reunion in 2018: no matter what kind of Southern hip-hop was trending or what the general public expected from them, Little Brother and the Justus League never second-guessed their vision.
Finding a small audience on the internet primed Little Brother to go for the jugular with their parody TV network UBN on their Atlantic debut, 2005’s The Minstrel Show. There would be no 5th & Fashion without WJLR call-ins; none of the note-perfect elder R&B satire of Percy Miracles without the sweaty charm of fake producer Roy Lee. Phonte’s unironic expansion into adult contemporary R&B with the Dutch producer Nicolay as the group The Foreign Exchange doesn’t happen without Little Brother’s relationship to the Okayplayer message boards. Pooh’s journey as an A&R and manager might not have begun if label negotiations hadn’t gone south. Without this album, 9th Wonder would’ve never produced for JAY-Z and Destiny’s Child.
All roads lead back to The Listening. Little Brother felt something was missing from the rap ecosystem and returned those minerals to the soil, influencing artists from Kendrick Lamar and Drake to Oddisee and Tanya Morgan. Seeing Doja Cat nerding out while rapping Phonte’s verse from “Speed” on Instagram Live this past December was a gratifying reminder that things go in cycles. Few ideas are new these days, but Little Brother formed a refreshing present from the bones of hip-hop’s past.
Buy: Rough Trade
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2022-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | ABB | January 30, 2022 | 8.5 | be59a365-23d6-42fa-b636-8d8a75d9e5d6 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On their third album, the New Orleans duo master their omnivorous style, which ranges from hectic noise rock to jangling ambience to arena riffage—sometimes within the span of a single song. | On their third album, the New Orleans duo master their omnivorous style, which ranges from hectic noise rock to jangling ambience to arena riffage—sometimes within the span of a single song. | Caddywhompus: Odd Hours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23200-odd-hours/ | Odd Hours | In a culture that praises overnight fame and craves an endless stream of hits, the difficult, awkward path known as The Long Road to Success always loses travelers. Why bother with unpaid gigs, cramped tour vans, sleeping on floors, and saving up for studio time when you can easily polish a song at home and let the internet sort out your fate? There’s no shame in the latter route, but there’s something ineffably sweeter about witnessing a beloved underdog mature and pick up steam in real time. Just ask the rabid fans of Caddywhompus, a band that, nine years into their career, has released their most important album.
Caddywhompus is the New Orleans-based duo of singer/guitarist Chris Rehm and drummer Sean Hart, friends who have known each other since kindergarten in Houston, Texas, and have played music together since middle school. They’ll cite early inspirations like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Radiohead as soon as they’ll describe formative experiences with A Minor Forest, Don Caballero, and Explosions in the Sky. Grouper, the Caretaker, Vashti Bunyan, Roy Orbison, and Liz Phair sit side by side on their mixtapes. And the music Rehm and Hart write as Caddywhompus reflects their omnivorous musical appetites.
As far back as their 2010 debut LP, Remainder, the pair have mulched the contents of their iPods into a chirping, spazzy noise-rock that’s equally unhinged and pop literate. Rehm’s voice falls into the strange timbre of twerpish falsettos that rattle the bones—like Avey Tare’s yawps tamed by, say, Thom Yorke impersonating Ezra Koenig. The duo’s inclusive sound took on a new wrinkle with 2011’s The Weight EP, when they allowed themselves breathing room between bouts of erratic shredding. Three years later, the impressive Feathering a Nest diverged more frequently from angular riffs and punk tempos into post-rock’s shimmering vistas.
The third Caddywhompus album, Odd Hours, is the refined culmination of its predecessors; this stylistic tour de force rarely rests at the countless pit stops spread across its 40 minutes. Opener “Decent” kicks off with a whirlwind of proggy emo and pop punk. “Salmon Run” at first recalls OK Computer with its boomy drum kit and spacey guitar, before switching straight into fuzzy power chords and sing-along melodies à la Deerhoof. “Appetite” pulls a bait-and-switch, too, with a jittery bounce, like ’90s-era Modest Mouse, and a massive, galloping riff that could have shown up on Battles’ Mirrored. All this breakneck jamming and juggling can overwhelm, but the atmospheric instrumental “Ferment” and the straightforward “In Ways” offer palate cleansers amid the delirium.
It’s hard not to play connect-the-dots with Odd Hours, but the album is more accomplished than a well-curated grab bag of influences. Because Caddywhompus pulls from everywhere all at once, the flurry of their motions blurs into something unique unto itself. In just over a minute, “Waiting Room” moves from heavy riffing to a lazy waltz to 4/4 power-pop and back again—each transition seamless and unfussy as can be. Yet for all of the band’s remarkable skill and presence, little about them is ostentatious or gratuitous. Behind every hairpin turn and difficult time signature is a gush of effusive candor. Odd Hours is too emotional to be math-rock, too energetic to be post-rock, too structured to be art-rock—there’s no neat categorization for a record this ambidextrous.
On each half of Odd Hours, two varied, complete movements rise and fall with casual precision, the lockstep performance of bandmates with almost a decade’s practice behind them. The whole thing couldn’t exist without the duo’s years upon years spent playing flophouses, unlit basements, local block parties, and cold, uncrowded garages, with breaks to record each road-worn song in whichever buddy’s “studio” is cheap and available. It couldn’t exist without the slow work of cultivating a dedicated audience, fans that share their first experience with the band like a badge of honor. It couldn’t exist without the perseverance of two lifelong friends, who would still be playing these songs whether or not anyone bothered to listen. | 2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Inflated | April 24, 2017 | 7.8 | be65f54b-12d1-4369-8b2a-9d9cd78b821c | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
The latest from the Buffalo rapper is a lean, mean project cut in just two days, eschewing his usual attention to detail for a more ramshackle approach. | The latest from the Buffalo rapper is a lean, mean project cut in just two days, eschewing his usual attention to detail for a more ramshackle approach. | Westside Gunn: Peace “Fly” God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-peace-fly-god/ | Peace “Fly” God | Westside Gunn wants you to consider his music high-end art, as worthy of reverence as the pieces that fill his own seven-figure-valued collection, or the Caravaggio repurposed for one of his album covers. Appropriately, Gunn’s take on slimy-grimy New York boom-bap can feel opulent and luxurious. His best albums are rich and immersive; his street raps are adorned with pristine instrumentation, and he makes frequent references to luxury fashion brands, expensive vehicles, and the artists that appeal to his proclivities.
Peace “Fly” God is a change-up. The project was cut in an intense two-day studio session following the Buffalo rapper’s return from Paris Fashion Week, where he attended the late Virgil Abloh’s Off-White exhibition. The resulting music eschews Gunn’s usual attention to detail for a ferocious burst of off-the-cuff creativity. There are few hooks or overarching themes. Affiliates Estee Nack and Stove God Cooks end up doing much of the heavy lifting on the mic—both are decent foils, but they’re not exactly at the level of Gunn’s Griselda brethren Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher. The tracklist feels hastily assembled as it simply arranges songs by producer. Even the album title uses curious punctuation—“Fly” God as opposed to Flygod–as if scribbled by a clueless engineer on the masters. Yet for all these eccentricities, the ramshackle approach creates a compelling alternative to his more methodically assembled music. Peace “Fly” God will go down as a minor Gunn release, but it provides a welcome detour from the prolific artist’s usual methodology.
Due to his aesthetic consistency, Gunn is sometimes unfairly accused of making the same song over and over again. Peace “Fly” God alters the formula by shedding the beats down to rough soul samples and very little else. So you get a song like “Ritz Barlton,” produced by Don Carrera, who helms the entire first half of the 10-song tape. The warped piano and horns sound like they were mined from an old jazz record that was left out to bake in the afternoon sun. The eight-minute runtime of “Jesus Crack” pushes a beat that leans almost entirely on a repetitive vocal sample to its limits. So stretched is Estee Nack’s elongated verse that he needs a couple of breathers. There is a neat trick at the end of Gunn’s section, however, when he describes playing Grand Puba of 1990s rap group Brand Nubian in his Tesla jeep and a section of their song “Slow Down” comes in, bringing some relief to the otherwise unchanging arrangement.
The best beats unsurprisingly come during the three-track streak of Madlib productions. In keeping with the minimalist nature of the project’s arrangements, this is the Beat Konducta at his leanest and meanest, lining up a string-drenched sample on “Derrick Boleman,” the only hint of percussion coming from a bassline on the original recording. On “Horses on Sunset,” Cooks matches Madlib’s downbeat orchestration with a sad and striking lament: “They said they shot him six times/I said you should have shot him seven, then he could have died/Holy.” The lonely piano chords of “Open Praise” are beautiful, making Gunn sound like a forsaken hero walking down a dark, rain-streaked street.
Gunn makes himself scarce throughout Peace “Fly” God—it’s a good five minutes into the tape before we hear his voice—but when he does materialize, the soon-to-be 40-year-old’s high-intensity howl is as gripping as ever as he raps about all his favorite things. There is the exceptional “Big Ass Bracelet,” where he drops enough brand names to make 2000s Jay-Z sound modest: Hermès furniture, Adidas x Gucci’s collaboration range, MF Doom’s Nike Dunk High shoes. Gunn’s trick, though, is not allowing his expensive taste to alienate listeners. On “Ritz Barlton” he describes a sexual encounter at a halfway house that made him feel like he had a suite in a luxury hotel. And though there are fewer pusherman raps than usual, Gunn is still comfortable in that lane. On “Derrick Boleman,” he describes the smell of cocaine filling his loft while Cooks lays out his 44 bricks in honor of former NBA All-Star Derrick Coleman’s number. Gunn may have presence in the art and fashion worlds these days, but Peace “Fly” God still invites us to believe in his on-record persona: a hustler with fantasies of living life like a modern day Gatsby. | 2022-07-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | July 14, 2022 | 7.2 | be6756b0-018d-47fa-84af-552ac6fb9807 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The California-based producer, instrumental to the rise of emo-rap, offers a solid showcase of his talent that maps a constellation of strange and unforgettable artists. | The California-based producer, instrumental to the rise of emo-rap, offers a solid showcase of his talent that maps a constellation of strange and unforgettable artists. | Nedarb: AMITY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nedarb-amity/ | AMITY | To start with, the Saetia sweatshirt. On the cover of Amity, Nedarb Nagrom is wearing the mythic proto-screamo band’s merch, and their logo is dead center. Someone on their Instagram account posted a screenshot of his cover, saying, “I wonder if he has ever heard of us.” It’s a reasonable ask of a young producer about a band 20 years defunct that rarely played shows to more than 50 people. But for Nedarb, it’s no surprise.
Like Saetia, he’s a foundational act in a style that only had a name after he helped create it: late-2010s emo-rap. But Amity isn’t even an emo-rap album. Emotionally and sonically, it’s all over the place, cohesive insofar that it maps a constellation of strange and unforgettable artists. In fact, Saetia’s lead singer now produces tough Philly techno, and that same spirit is present here, too: guest after guest—and there are a lot of them—these are the new DIY lifers.
“Home on Time,” featuring Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, is a fitting opener. Over the past five years, he and Nedarb have worked together in the inventive collectives THRAXXHOUSE, GOTHBOICLIQUE, and their latest, Misery Club, but this is actually the first song with just the two of them. It’s like they finally got a moment to catch their breath. The song is patient in sound—a hollow, dribbling synth—and its sweet, sad message: “I don’t mean to rush her, but I need to go… I never get home on time.”
A few years ago, Nedarb lived in Pasadena with Lil Peep, GBC member Horse Head, and the singer Brennan Savage. His one-time podcast, “Ned’s Place,” occasionally took place in their house, and it now serves as a bittersweet archive of the mundane roundtables that formed when the guys weren’t making music. In 2014, it was Horse Head’s “Numb,” on which Nedarb sampled the Canadian emo band Silverstein, that arguably first cracked open emo-rap. Today, Horse Head and Brennan Savage do the heavy lifting in that style on the five songs that begin Amity, singing about love and angels in the night.
Then on track six, things go sideways. The producer tag, “Yo Ned, turn that light down a little bit,” which once seemed almost defeatist, starts to land decidedly freaky. The first rapper on “Triflin’,” Lil House Phone, is a longtime collaborator, but the left-of-hyphy sound here ushers in a different kind of debauchery. The Atlanta rapper Father sneaks in the very not-sad, “Shawty get crushed and ate up like Lays,” and the album becomes a kaleidoscope of styles.
Each new guest appearance contributes another distinct vocal texture. Bootychaaain and La Goony Chonga, from Gwallah Gang, both show up, and a drawling Black Kray, one of the first artists to use a Nedarb beat, is as unknowable as ever on “Babygangsoldiers.” Newcomer Big Baby Scumbag shouts about Boosie, and Little Pain, the saddest of rappers, compares himself to Casper. Zubin’s vibrato makes an essential appearance, and so does KirbLaGoop’s alarming squeak. Somehow, Alice Glass fits into this, with an ear-piercing wail on “Eat Me Alive Interlude.” Girl Pusher, the ferocious L.A. dance band, remix that “Interlude” for Amity’s final track, with Nedarb fully handing over the reins.
Even the most commercially successful producer albums have validated eccentrics with a few spots in the lineup. On Amity, the oddballs make up the whole team, with Nedarb their bullheaded coach. For many of these artists, he was one of the first people to spot something different in them, and here he relentlessly pushes them for more, adeptly shifting styles and tempos to suit. The effect is of simultaneous humility and confidence. Recently, Nedarb tweeted that he was now charging $5,000 for a beat. Someone pointed out that that’s Atlanta veteran Zaytoven’s rate, and Nedarb simply replied, “And?” | 2019-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Baby Gang | January 14, 2019 | 7.3 | be678f94-c205-4d17-8c1f-83500fa58dba | Duncan Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/duncan-cooper/ | |
Nashville-based singer Natalie Prass has created an album of relationships troubled by misunderstandings, of earnest lovers caught in the claws of the unmerciful. Matthew E. White's Spacebomb band lends her songs a string-and-horn-heavy instrumentation, giving her smoldering perspective on passionate romance some pomp and circumstance. | Nashville-based singer Natalie Prass has created an album of relationships troubled by misunderstandings, of earnest lovers caught in the claws of the unmerciful. Matthew E. White's Spacebomb band lends her songs a string-and-horn-heavy instrumentation, giving her smoldering perspective on passionate romance some pomp and circumstance. | Natalie Prass: Natalie Prass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20088-natalie-prass/ | Natalie Prass | Natalie Prass is not history ripped from a black-and-white photo, but a real, living person. She crafts slow-burning soul music indebted to singers like Dolly Parton, Dusty Springfield, and Jenny Lewis (with whom she toured as a backing vocalist), and she makes her home in Nashville, where she settled after stints in Cleveland, Virginia Beach, and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. (She dropped out after only a year because she thought the city was too big.) In Richmond, Va., she found her people at Spacebomb Records, the label run by retro revivalist and high school friend Matthew E. White. He and producer Trey Pollard hooked her up with the Spacebomb house band, and helped craft her debut album, Natalie Prass, around luxuriant string-and-horn-heavy instrumentation to give her smoldering perspective on passionate romance some pomp and circumstance.
When the album opens, Prass is telling us she doesn’t feel much, which would sound more like a joke if her voice didn't sound so somber. Natalie Prass is an album of relationships troubled by misunderstandings, of earnest lovers caught in the claws of the unmerciful. She sounds lighter than air as she sings lyrics devastating in their economy, addressing someone who "plucked me from the vine" on "Bird of Prey" and later telling someone else (or the same person?) "I just want to know you violently" on "Violently". The latter reminds me of Sharon Van Etten’s "Your Love Is Killing Me"—the songs even share a similar lyric about having their legs broken so they won’t walk to someone all wrong for them. (Yikes!)
But Prass sounds positively uplifted as the band swells over her lovesick harmonies, forgoing any tortured abnegation. There’s idealism in her voice that’s tempered by heartbreak without falling prey to cynicism—like the bitterness has been skimmed off the top, leaving an evergreen sweetness. In an interview with Grantland, Prass said the record was completed in early 2012. "Violently" dates as far back as 2009, when she was still in college. What’s remarkable is how the songwriting coheres into one vision, even as Prass herself must’ve changed over the years. Recently, Run the Jewels participated in Rookie’s "Ask a Grown Man" video series, where they doled out advice on life and love to teenage girls. During one question, Killer Mike said that love should feel good—that it shouldn’t hurt. Fine advice for hormonal romantics just starting out, but anyone with an ounce of life experience knows it doesn’t work that way.
Natalie Prass is officially the work of nearly three-dozen musicians, most of whom played horns or strings for Spacebomb’s house band. (Prass has called the record "a community.") The arrangements were handled by White and Pollard, and they’re crucial. Without those horns and strings, the repeated refrain of "our love is a long goodbye" toward the end of "My Baby Don’t Understand Me" wouldn’t percolate to a rolling boil before exploding in that final, devastating delivery. Still, it would be unwise to think that any old singer-songwriter would work with this band behind them. What makes Natalie Prass is her confident delivery amidst so many unconfident feelings—the way she nimbly skips over the verses on "Bird of Prey", or walks along the groove on "Why Don’t You Believe in Me". She sounds comfortable and in charge, wielding her massive band like a wizard’s scepter.
Prass is most impressive working within the biggest instrumentation, where her emotional precision acts as a counterweight for all the textural grandiosity. The songs where the drums don’t do the driving, like "Christy" or "It Is You", raise the question of what the album would sound like were she a more bombastic singer, capable of blowing out speakers. Prass herself seems aware of her limitations. "I don’t think I’m the most talented musician or the best singer, but I work really, really hard," she told Pitchfork. "And sometimes these random things happen, and it makes you keep going." As mantras go, "I’m not the best but I work really hard" isn’t the type to get turned into a Tumblr macro, but the result makes Natalie Prass a warm, intimate debut album that leaves space for darker contemplation—those stray thoughts that light you up at the end of the night. | 2015-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Spacebomb | January 26, 2015 | 8.3 | be68aa84-f569-4a6c-a97b-963b8f04fc2d | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
The Breeders’ new album features their iconic Last Splash lineup. It is smoothly confident with many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz. | The Breeders’ new album features their iconic Last Splash lineup. It is smoothly confident with many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz. | The Breeders: All Nerve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-breeders-all-nerve/ | All Nerve | The “comeback album” can arrive with a suite of expectations attached many of which tend to boil down to one question: Will the artist revive their signature sound, the one most likely to trigger a dopamine rush of recaptured youth in the listener?
All Nerve, the new album from alt-pop icons the Breeders comes packaged with a particularly weighty version of that narrative. It’s the band’s fifth full-length and first since 2008’s Mountain Battles, but perhaps more importantly, it’s the first album in 25 years to feature—in addition to Kim Deal on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, and her sister Kelley on guitar—bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim MacPherson. This iteration was last found on Last Splash, the band’s 1993 album that reeled off one of the alt-pop era’s most deliriously off-kilter singles with the groovy, gummy “Cannonball” and contained a ton of other chestnuts—the gorgeous extinguished-soul ballad “Do You Love Me Now?,” the sweat-drenched summer ode “Saints,” the cheeky religion rebuke “Divine Hammer.” Last Splash was a hooky jab at the self-importance that sometimes threatened to overtake alt-rock in its earliest days, a middle finger caked in funnel-cake sugar.
It’s a lot to live up to, and many bands would crumble under the pressure—or at least try too hard to recapture past glories. But the Breeders avoid this trap: While its title is a double entendre that implies both courage and open-wound neuroses, All Nerve is smoothly confident. The four Breeders have individually and together slashed idiosyncratic paths through pop; on All Nerve, they collectively dig into that ideal, with each member playing to their strengths—the Deal sisters trading off harmonies and licks while Kim yelps abstract poetics, Wiggs holding down the low end so the sisters can leap ever higher, MacPherson keeping the beat urgent even when the BPM lets up a bit.
This approach results in many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz. The title track describes a longing that’s curdled from its own heat, with whispered-secret harmonies revealing the primal need only hinted at by Kim’s plaintive verses. The chorus’ happy-fun-ball explosion is the inevitable result of that paradoxical angst, with Deal’s “I won’t stop!” acting as the spark that lights her bandmates’ dynamite stick. The chugging centerpiece “Spacewoman” is starlit yet weary, its analog-synth flutters whooshing through Kim’s descriptions of spotlight-borne alienation (“When you look up/At your big light show/Do you ever wanna turn around and go/Hitting every green light on the long way home”) to create a waking-dream effect. And “MetaGoth” is a grand showcase for Wiggs’ ice-queen vocal—the music outlines a trip too close to the edge of the abyss before shards of feedback rise up to blot out the riffs.
Those looking for Last Splash Pt. 2 might be disappointed by All Nerve. It’s not as instantly grabbable as its quarter-century-old predecessor, both in terms of its alt-pop banger quotient and the moods it sustains. After “Spacewoman,” the album nearly falls into itself—the open-road murder ballad “Walking With a Killer” and the stagger-swaying “Howl at the Summit” are almost too vibe-oriented, making the implosive opening of “Archangel’s Thunderbird” all the more urgent. More often than not, All Nerve is a satisfying listen because it lets the Breeders dig into their reasons for being drawn back into each other’s orbit—including the left-of-center hooks, the withering poetics, and the shared prickliness toward meeting outside expectations. | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | March 2, 2018 | 7.1 | be6d7d86-8a4e-48c3-9e13-091b7b246d55 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
On the final installment of their Trifecta series, the Detroit rap trio delivers quotable after quotable. It’s cocksure and playful, like a high school lunchroom cipher. | On the final installment of their Trifecta series, the Detroit rap trio delivers quotable after quotable. It’s cocksure and playful, like a high school lunchroom cipher. | ShittyBoyz: Trifecta 3: the Finale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shittyboyz-trifecta-3-the-finale/ | Trifecta 3: the Finale | At this point, ShittyBoyz are a well-oiled sports car with LEDs on the chassis and Supreme stickers embossed on the spoiler. Since they first gained traction through their single “No Hook 3” in 2018, emcees BabyTron, StanWill, and TrDee have honed their sly take on Michigan street rap into a reliable formula. Over a high-octane blend of dance, hyphy, and hardcore rap that couldn’t come from anywhere but the Motor City, they shoot off rounds of impish insults and flexes. (If their songs were any more Detroit, every album would come with a bottle of Everfresh.) It’s an approach that’s catapulted BabyTron into mainstream rap conversations, but StanWill and TrDee haven’t slowed down either, thanks to a prolific run of solo albums and wacky videos. Independently, they are already among Detroit’s most consistent rappers, but on their latest album, Trifecta 3: the Finale, they continue stunting as a unit, digging further into their world of deadpan zaniness.
ShittyBoyz records largely stick to an established blueprint, mostly because each member of the trio has more freedom to experiment on their solo projects. BabyTron’s last album, 6, featured some of his most thoughtful and slowest-paced songs yet. Though StanWill and TrDee don’t deviate much from their go-to themes, the beats they gravitate toward feature strange, beguiling samples, even by their standards (On this year’s Early Mornings, Late Nights, TrDee’s baritone enchantingly clashes against the bright twinkling sample). In that sense, every ShittyBoyz album is like an Avengers team-up: They’re not here to complicate or challenge the lore, but they’re also not going to phone it in. Instead, they hit every trick and alley-oop with just enough nonchalance to elicit oohs and aahs from the crowd.
And by now, that three-man weave is so effortless, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. On each of Trifecta 3’s 20 songs, they pull quotable after quotable out of the ether. Whether it’s hyperspecific sport references (“Flyin’ in a ’Hawk, I feel just like Dejounte Murray” from “Perfect 3”) or borderline dad jokes (“You not plugged in like a loose charger” from “Ball Players”), the bars range from quotidian profundities to genuine gut busters. BabyTron remains the star, a product of his unmatched charisma and cutting barbs (the way he sneers “You’re a pedophile” after TrDee’s R. Kelly joke on “Sh!tty Pack” almost made me fall out of my chair.) But all three of them sound best when they play off of each other in coordinated lyrical attacks. On the early album highlight “Tronald & Stanley,” Tron and Stan trade off after every bar, their references to DD Osama and scam-proof credit cards landing with the cocksure energy of a high school lunchroom cipher. “Game 7” pushes this dynamic to the extreme, with all three rappers sharing space in the same verse. They’re like different strands on a DNA triple helix, complementing each other’s themes and rhyme schemes in a brotherly bond.
Trifecta 3’s stable of producers, which includes the usual suspects, like EnrgyBeats, byekyle, Danny G, and RJ Lamont, keeps things just as lively and familiar. Some of the beats, like “Boomshakalacka” and “Triumphs & Trophies,” are powered by the fanfare of horns, warbling 808s, and mid-song beat changes, which the trio raps over seamlessly. Others default to the retrofitted freestyle dance music (“Fun & Games”) and the future-goth aesthetic (“50 Boyz,” “Forever Litt”) present in many Michigan street rap songs, with slinky pianos and thudding percussion as if they were outsourced from the video game Castlevania. There are no misfires on the beat front, but the lack of exploration is more apparent here than it is in the raps. They don’t possess the ridiculous fun of past standouts, like the theme song medley on “Video Games” from Trifecta 2, or the tongue-in-cheek flip of Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand” that powers “Payday” on the first Trifecta. This record is no less energetic, but it is more straitlaced in comparison to its wilder siblings.
That’s the glaring issue with the otherwise solid Trifecta 3: The bars and the beats never operate on the same manic level. It’s all fluid, funny, and engaging, but there’s no song that grabs your skull and shakes it for loose change, no standout bar or memorable beat switch that will light social media on fire. ShittyBoyz do meet their standard for street rap mayhem, and you can’t knock these songs for jogging in place, especially when their whole thing is about appearing relaxed and rich enough to buy an NBA franchise with scam money. But if this is the clear end of a chapter in their discography, it’s hard not to wonder where else their madcap antics can go from here. | 2023-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The Hip Hop Lab / Empire | October 2, 2023 | 7.1 | be747e0b-58d1-413c-818a-c39ebee8a73a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Though less consciously ambitious than their previous two albums, the California power pop band’s latest is a pure refinement of their sound and feel. | Though less consciously ambitious than their previous two albums, the California power pop band’s latest is a pure refinement of their sound and feel. | Joyce Manor: 40 oz. to Fresno | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joyce-manor-40-oz-to-fresno/ | 40 oz. to Fresno | Surviving as a punk band is tough. Even the most beloved bands are subject to a special kind of mundane burnout where, quite understandably, they figure getting together to make an album and tour just isn’t worth navigating the time off from work. After 14 years and six albums together, Joyce Manor have so far escaped that fate. On “You’re Not Famous Anymore,” a track from their new record 40 oz. to Fresno, frontman Barry Johnson seems to address someone who didn’t. “You’re working in a grocery store,” frontman Barry Johnson points out. “No meet and greet, no UK tour, now you’re not famous anymore.”
There may be a hint of gloating there. Joyce Manor are decidedly still indie famous, as far as indie punk bands go; they recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of their debut album with two nights at the sizable Hollywood Palladium. They’ve achieved a cult longevity unlike some of the bands they once shared bills with. The reward is lower stakes, releasing their music to a plateau of long-time fans rather than expecting too many new ones. As a result, 40 oz. to Fresno is less consciously ambitious than the band’s last two albums. While 2016’s Cody embraced glossy ’90s alt-rock, and 2018’s Million Dollars To Kill Me let them jump ship into ’80s power-pop, 40 oz. to Fresno’s readiest comparison point is simply Joyce Manor itself. They’ve figured out the outer limits of Joyce Manor; now it’s about perfecting what’s within them.
That gives them the freedom to focus less on the big picture and zero in on the songs. “Dance With Me” and “Don’t Try” feature two of their catchiest choruses ever; the former jangly and Pixies-esque, and the latter a driving outburst of pop-punk. Meanwhile, lead single “Gotta Let It Go” tries something they haven’t really done before: sounding absolutely enormous. Its weighty production works beautifully to prop up the fired-up-but-nowhere-to-go vibe of the song. The album is over before you really know it’s begun, and it isn’t cohesive or groundbreaking enough for that to feel as satisfying as on previous albums. But the songs are studiously, almost mathematically propellant, creating a rush of exhilaration that feels equally earned.
Johnson’s witty and sardonic songwriting is mostly the same as ever. He plays the role of someone who would be romantic if he wasn’t so misanthropic—or the other way around. The narrator is always reaching for connection, then waving it away like a stubborn kid. “It’s not a confession if I was just messing,” he asserts on “Gotta Let It Go.” On “NBTSA,” he wants to confess a secret, then a line later spits: “I don’t know why I want you to know.” Many of the experiences he narrates are lit with the glow of reckless youth—falling in love in a park, fucking in the back seat of a car. But there’s also a new streak to the subject matter that betrays the fact Johnson is in his mid-30s now. There’s the disillusionment of “You’re Not Famous Anymore,” while a similar world-weariness shows up in “Gotta Let It Go”—the thing that must be let go of alternates between a relationship and the narrator’s own youth.
But there’s a little bit of lopsided optimism in “Dance With Me.” Johnson addresses the rag-tag crowd that Joyce Manor make music for—“You’ve never been an addict, you’ve just got a little habit that you couldn’t cope without”—culminating in a kind of fuck-it theme song. Towards the end of it, he asks: “Could it be that the room’s empty and I’m just tearing out my heart for the sound guy?” The possibility of fading into obscurity is on his mind. But 40 oz. to Fresno doesn’t seem to be an attempt to counteract that, as much as to get the most out of Joyce Manor as a vehicle while people are still listening. This is the Joyce Manor album for Joyce Manor fans—a loving, uncynical refinement of the band’s best. | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | June 9, 2022 | 7.3 | be76456a-14a5-4536-a85f-2c9c3d974e3d | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
The sophomore album from the electronic pop duo offers a biting, withering take on pop music, full of crisp humor while still finding real moments of tenderness. | The sophomore album from the electronic pop duo offers a biting, withering take on pop music, full of crisp humor while still finding real moments of tenderness. | Sylvan Esso: What Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23081-what-now/ | What Now | The Durham, N.C. electropop duo Sylvan Esso debuted in 2013 with a single called “Hey Mami”—a humid snapshot of catcallers that hooted right along with them. Amelia Meath’s hiccupping trill, as light and sugary as corner shop wine, flew over producer Nick Sanborn’s languid, slightly arrhythmic beats—a surprising product from members of the Appalachian roots trio Mountain Man (Meath) and the freak-folk jammers Megafaun (Sanborn). It took a few spins to suss out its satire and parody; when the track appeared on their self-titled debut the following year, it paired well with far sillier bouts of humor, down to a song that remixed the playground chant of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” into a displaced screed about technology (“H.S.K.T.”)
On What Now, Sylvan Esso’s second album, their driest quip waits patiently in the wings. “Radio,” a scathing survey of pop music songwriting, flings such acid as “Don’t you look good sucking American dick?” over their most broadly palatable synth hook yet, the sort of sound Katy Perry strove for on her similarly dyspeptic “Chained to the Rhythm.” Meath and Sanborn aren’t any less Technicolor or any more subtle here in drawling their disdain for FM radio-friendly songs that must be “three-point-three-oh” minutes—so you can picture their smirks when a glance at iTunes reveals that this track also runs almost exactly at 3:30.
Crisp humor is a time-honored constant in folk storytelling—Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan knew their way around a bitchy barb. On What Now, much like on Sylvan Esso’s debut, folk exists only in the narrative sense; Meath studies everyday scenes through a loupe, pausing between the punchlines to relay stark, occasionally morbid scenes of intimacy. However, there’s a thick sepia filter now with bigger set pieces propping up a more wide-lens anxiety. While Sylvan Esso offered peppy dioramas of untended coffee mugs and postcoital bruises, its successor scrutinizes more familiar pop imagery with a self-aware twist. Meath coos about birds chirping in the trees, but their songs are as clanging and mechanical as car alarms (“Signal”); dancers whirl to mask their desperation, sweat drenching their sequins (“Kick Jump Twist”).
Sanborn’s production is so boisterous, he hardly relaxes inside his beats. They bounce along with eccentric found sounds and Moog tics, occasionally evoking the sense of an errant tab opened somewhere on a browser. At moments, it seems like a defense of their oft-maligned genre, a fun rebuke of the stereotype that pop music is shallow. Their acerbic pop is both a product of the FM-friendly formula and a wry subversion of it.
When Meath and Sanborn ease into a slower lane, they find a sweetness that isn’t entirely likable. There is a bitterness to their Southern bless-your-heart feel, swaddling sharp observations in mannered dance-pop. The most haunting track on the album, “Die Young,” hones in on a burgeoning affair: Meath sings with soft curiosity about how she’s finally prepared to yoke her life to another’s. The lyrics themselves are a bit too histrionic to induce sympathy—“I was gonna die young/Now I gotta wait for you, honey”—but there’s no trace of irony; she is fully sincere to the melodrama over new love atop a pleasingly tinny house-lite pulse from Sanborn. (Reportedly, Meath and Sanborn have done the research, falling for each other after recording the debut.) It’s a moment that almost seems to answer the album’s title: the path forward may be calmer yet ever-curious, with plenty of amusement still to be found within. | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Loma Vista | April 26, 2017 | 7.2 | be7f1206-ad5b-4427-80b3-756e97b078f0 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Uniting musicians from Kinshasa, Montreal, and Seattle, Pierre Kwenders’ second album, produced by Shabazz Palaces’ Tendai Maraire, is a wildly inventive, globe-spanning triumph. | Uniting musicians from Kinshasa, Montreal, and Seattle, Pierre Kwenders’ second album, produced by Shabazz Palaces’ Tendai Maraire, is a wildly inventive, globe-spanning triumph. | Pierre Kwenders: MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pierre-kwenders-makanda-at-the-end-of-space-the-beginning-of-time/ | MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time | The distance between Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Montreal, Quebec: 6,386 miles. Between Montreal and Seattle: 2,287 miles. Together that’s over a quarter of the planet that’s circumscribed by Pierre Kwenders’ second album. With roots in several nations, lyrics in four languages, a firm grasp of African musical tradition, and a sumptuous vision of the future, MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time is one of the most wide-ranging musical expressions of 2017. Yet the wonder is not in how panoramic it sounds but in how comfortably it encompasses its span.
Kwenders’ music begins as an update of Congolese rumba, aka rumba Lingala, an Africanized variation of Cuban son that arose in DRC and its neighbor, Republic of the Congo, in the 1940s. Of course, son is a Cubanized variation of old Central African rhythms that were transported westward across the Atlantic hundreds of years earlier, during the Spanish slave trade. The ethnomusicology behind this stuff is fascinating, revealing bloodlines that trace the very DNA of rhythm. But the music of MAKANDA hits with more of-the-moment urgency than a family tree can impart.
Kwenders was born in Kinshasa and moved with his family to Montreal when he was a teenager. His first taste of performance came in the city’s Congolese-Catholic choir, followed by years of youthful exploration alongside intrepid Quebecois hip-hop, electronic, and Afropop producers. He released his first EP, Whisky & Tea, in 2013, and his first album, Le Dernier Empereur Bantou—“The Last Bantu Emperor,” a reference to the Bantu Empire that flourished in Central Africa for centuries before colonization—the following year. Even then he was subsuming distance and crunching genres to establish a kind of musical ubiquity.
Around that time, another restlessly inventive member of the African diaspora, Tendai Maraire of Shabazz Palaces, was drawn into Kwenders’ orbit, and the two began sharing tracks and ideas about Africa’s growing clout in global popular culture. Kwenders suggested that Maraire, born in Seattle of Zimbabwean parents and raised on a diet of hip-hop and mbira, the traditional African thumb piano, produce a song or two for his next record; Maraire wanted to helm production for the entire project. In 2016 Kwenders visited Seattle for three recording sessions in Maraire’s studio, working with a cast of local talent, some of African heritage, like trumpeter Owuor Arunga and guitarist Hussein “H-Bomb” Kalonji; some Shabazz-related, like Ishmael Butler, Cat Harris-White, and Darrius Willrich; some from Seattle’s deep pool of working musicians, like upright bassist Evan Flory-Barnes and composer/violinist Andrew Joslyn.
So many players and so much backstory somehow add up to a remarkably cohesive, distinctive sound. Credit Kwenders for the inspiration and Maraire for helping refine it: MAKANDA is built of layers of electronic and hand percussion, humming synths, wah-wah guitar (Kalonji is on almost every track), and Kwenders’ amicable, unhurried vocals, sung-rapped in Lingala, Tshiluba, English, and French, the official language of both DRC and Montreal. Per translation, Kwenders sings mostly of love and its capacity to transcend, liberate, empower. His poetic eye seems fixed on whatever feeling, setting, or celebration is coming next.
Maraire’s production rounds the edges of almost every sound here, and he employs copious reverb as a sort of sonic area rug that pulls the disparate components together. This is luscious, liquid music, a billowing stream that fills the contours of mental space. There’s dissonance, too: “Woods of Solitude” contains drony, metallic feedback of the sort you might hear from Konono No. 1. That chiming mbira and bristling MPC beat on “Makanda” are a familiar, Shabazz-like foil for Butler’s elegant flow, and “Welele” bumps on percolating hand percussion and slinky funk guitar.
Among songs that flow one into the next, the centerpiece of the album comes midway, with “Rendezvous” and “Sexus Plexus Nexus.” The first is a meditation on a groove, building incrementally over hand shakers and Kalonji’s highlife-esque guitar. Kwenders sings about unfettered freedom, namechecking Paris, Kinshasa, and Moonshine, his monthly dance party in Montreal. Trumpet and saxophone saunter into the scene, vocal melodies overlap, and a curious, flutey synth floats through. It’s a gorgeous musical moment, and a generous one, extended over five-and-a-half minutes.
“Rendezvous” curves right into “Sexus,” the album’s lead single and one of the year’s standout jams. All the album’s musical elements come together with Kwenders’ most hook-forward writing to build a song that comprises an entire worldview. Even as it references Henry Miller, “Sexus” is a communion of pan-African and North American soul music, interwoven with strings and sax and reverbed vocals, reaching across continents and decades and also ideal for roller skating to next Saturday night. That’s the marvel of MAKANDA: Kwenders’ version of globalization feels perfectly at home everywhere, all the time. | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bonsound | September 11, 2017 | 7.9 | be817998-5ccd-40bc-b2de-7a3a7890e1ee | Jonathan Zwickel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-zwickel/ | |
New Zealand singer/songwriter Nadia Reid's debut album dissects a relationship whose end illuminates new layers of failure and hidden motives with each re-examination. Reid's outlook on love may be hopeless, but her blunt words are cocooned by the warmth and unusual hookiness of the varied arrangements. | New Zealand singer/songwriter Nadia Reid's debut album dissects a relationship whose end illuminates new layers of failure and hidden motives with each re-examination. Reid's outlook on love may be hopeless, but her blunt words are cocooned by the warmth and unusual hookiness of the varied arrangements. | Nadia Reid: Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21297-listen-to-formation-look-for-the-signs/ | Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs | New Zealand songwriter Nadia Reid's debut album begins with the kind of Zen-like certainty that only comes after taking stock. "When I hit the ground in all my glory/ I will know where I have come from," she sings on "Runway", its opening track. Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs finds the 24-year-old Aucklander dissecting a relationship whose end illuminates new layers of failure and hidden motives with each re-examination. Reid's outlook on love may be hopeless, but her blunt words are cocooned by the warmth and unusual hookiness of the varied arrangements.
Listen is a soothing, folky Americana album that recalls the work of Laura Marling, Gillian Welch, Hope Sandoval, and Nina Nastasia. Reid isn't reinventing anything, in other words, though Listen is itself more inventive than many records of its ilk. Its main mode is a kind of glowering hush made up of gentle acoustic guitar, glints of pedal steel from Sam Taylor, and Richie Pickard's glacial double bass, very occasionally chased by Joe McCallum's spindly drums. The band changes the pace with waltzing rhythms that evoke rural dance halls ("Just to Feel Alive"), or pare back the already-ghostly instrumentation to let Reid's nimble voice come to the fore ("Ruby").
There are a few electric moments that evoke the leap Sharon Van Etten took between Because I Was in Love and Tramp. The stormy weather of "Reaching Through" is broken up with sparkling, ascendent layers of Reid's voice and strings; the bowed guitars and clanking metallic chords of "Seasons Change" bring to mind the National. The gorgeous "Call the Days" marries the poppier sensibility of Reid's heavy songs with the grave palette of her more candlelit numbers. Throughout, she shapes her words into characterful, sticky hooks, which feels rare for this genre of music.
Not to underestimate the experiences behind Reid's lyrics, but the loss of faith that unravels throughout the record comes off a little grave, reminiscent of those fogged post-heartbreak moments where it's impossible to believe you'll ever be happy again—the kind you look back on and laugh. And some of these songs are seven years old, written in her teens, which may explain why love is a "fiery black disease" and delusion, marriage is a convenience, and she can't even believe other people's happiness. "Bittersweet I am when it comes to young love," Reid sings on "Ruby", exposing her occasional tendency for Folk Yoda-style inversions.
But there are also beautiful, revealing turns of phrase: on "Reaching Through" Reid admits, "If I am bound for something, honey won't you know, that I always take the shortest fucking road." "Seasons Change" sneaks a crushing truth into the lifespan of a relationship: "It's good to love a heart who surely understands/ The coming of the day/ The beauty of the land/ The act of being sorry/ The breaking of a man." "Call the Days" feels like the resolution to all the heartache and anger, Reid declaring, "I threw out my winter coat/ I cut the sleeves off all I'd known." Although by no means the finished article, Reid's acute understanding of where she's been sets her up nicely for what happens next. | 2015-12-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-12-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Scissor Tail | December 8, 2015 | 7.2 | be83bc40-be55-471b-82ca-1789508c06d5 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Meredith Monk's influence as a singer and composer extends through Björk, Joanna Newsom and beyond. On Behalf of Nature is a plea for ecological awareness with no lectures, just beauty and empathy. | Meredith Monk's influence as a singer and composer extends through Björk, Joanna Newsom and beyond. On Behalf of Nature is a plea for ecological awareness with no lectures, just beauty and empathy. | Meredith Monk: On Behalf of Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22620-on-behalf-of-nature/ | On Behalf of Nature | Over her half-century career as a composer and singer, Meredith Monk has refreshed the language of vocal music. She has cultivated steely modes of expression in her top register, and gravely dramatic timbres in the low end. In between those extremes, she possesses a library of stunning, diverse effects that come across as intensely physical. On a recording, Monk’s voice doesn’t enter the listener’s consciousness from some disembodied ether. The music sails directly from the discrete figure at its center.
The pressed-lip vibrations, throat clicks and beaming yowls of childhood play are celebrated in her singing. And these tricks are also put to use for emotionally varied ends. A tender lullaby might veer into a cathartic silliness. A pulse-driven group chant can collapse into solemn observance. Patterns are present, though mostly for the purpose of being challenged by an unlikely development.
Occasionally she uses short English phrases to anchor a theme. More often, the vocal production is wordless—though it is no less communicative for that fact. The influence of this style is felt both inside and outside the academy. When listening to Björk, Joanna Newsom, or Kate Soper, you’re dealing with a tradition that stretches back through Monk, who has studied classical and folk forms and found luminous ways to channel them.
On Behalf of Nature is titled after one of Monk’s recent, wordless stage shows: a meditation on ecological themes, including climate change. Despite that impassioned editorial focus, her resulting suite of songs and motifs avoids coming across like a lecture. And because she always revises the music from a dramatic piece before creating an album, Nature sounds purposeful and complete throughout its hourlong running time. Aside from her vocal troupe, the instrumental forces include ace percussionist John Hollenbeck, harpist Laura Sherman, and the reed-instrument player Bohdan Hilash. (One current singer in Monk’s group, Allison Sniffin, also doubles on piano, violin and French horn.)
With a spare introductory theme voiced on a Burmese piccolo, opening track “Dark/Light 1” evokes a pre-dawn zone of austere beauty. Later, a brooding bass clarinet is stalked calmly by a vibraphone tones. Then Monk’s voice enters, creating a sense of shamanistic ritual. Her notes could be talismans against danger, or the first melody after a cataclysmic event. Gradually, her sound gives way to that of a male voice, for a short stretch, before the the full vocal ensemble enters with gleaming new harmonies. In moving from a vulnerable, solo state to a zone of greater security and community, the music etches its broad narrative.
Throughout Nature, the composer’s graceful use of diverse sonic phenomena amounts to a plea for biodiversity. This argument works via metaphor, instead of through the language of the stump speech. Rich rounds of vocal writing suggest organic growth processes, on “Fractal Activity.” The murmurs of “Environs 1” sound like the byproduct of a busy hive. Then there are the serene glances at beauty, as in the clarinet, vibraphone and French horn feature “Eon.” And you can understand why Monk rejects the “minimalist” label during a movement like “Duet with Shifting Ground”—where blocks of seemingly stable harmony are interrupted by prickly parts for violin and percussion.
Surprises keep coming, without ruining the charming underlying vibe. Strange string lines sneak up on the vocalists, during the otherwise imperturbable “Evolution.” Unexpected rhythmic stresses make “Pavement Steps” into an unlikely dance number. Occasionally, Monk’s hooks seem to be present merely so that they can be upended. But thanks to the palindrome-like “arch form” of the piece, all these feints and stylistic burrows eventually feel unified, when early motifs reappear in slightly adapted form, toward the close of the piece.
At 74, Monk’s voice doesn’t have quite the otherworldly pliability captured on vintage recordings like Do You Be. Yet she is utterly commanding during this album’s centerpiece, “Water/Sky Rant.” Here, Monk inhabits the role of a woman petitioning the heavens for a downpour. Harp arpeggios support the initial entreaties; an optimistic clarinet tries to help make the sale. Then, a shift in the harmony shows us that the sky is still parched. Monk’s voice momentarily sounds defeated, tinny. Then she unleashes a show-stopping “rant,” full of the desperate, throaty extended-techniques that this singer has been pioneering ever since Julius Eastman was a member of her vocal ensemble.
Of late, Monk has started receiving more invitations to write for orchestras and string quartets. In her liner notes to Nature, it is acknowledged that “the voices and instruments have equal weight” this time—a state of play that might startle those who think of her talent in narrower terms. Still, she’s always been more than one of the world’s great singers. Some of Monk’s best pieces, like the 1991 opera Atlas, have also boasted dazzling instrumental writing. Her vocal instrument remains the envy of singers fifty years her junior. But on Nature, the uniqueness of her compositional vision is just as impressive. | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | ECM New Series | November 28, 2016 | 8.1 | be8d9998-ca00-4946-b287-02c54975be47 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Bryndon Cook is a hired gun for Solange, Chairlift, and Blood Orange; his debut album is a slick, colorful foray into retro-futurist funk that’s fueled by his keen sense of style. | Bryndon Cook is a hired gun for Solange, Chairlift, and Blood Orange; his debut album is a slick, colorful foray into retro-futurist funk that’s fueled by his keen sense of style. | Starchild & the New Romantic: Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/starchild-and-the-new-romantic-language/ | Language | It often gets lost in the sauce, but the key to great style has very little to do with designers or fashion—style comes from synthesizing various influences to create an aesthetic unique to the individual. Bryndon Cook has always understood this. From his first gig as a wide-eyed college kid on the road with Solange to his work on Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, he’s fit right in with his contemporaries on the bleeding edge where style rises above the runway. And with Starchild & the New Romantic, we’re finally getting to see his own vision take center stage.
Cook—a graduate of SUNY Purchase’s renowned acting conservatory and a former intern at Pitchfork—looks most comfortable performing, and when he’s under the big lights, it shows. It’s why Dev Hynes asks him to dance in his videos and lay down tracks for his Blood Orange project, and why Solange and Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly trust him to bring their music to life on stage.
But while he’s been in high demand as a hired gun in the studio and on the road, it’s been a bigger challenge to refine his own voice. Cook has been releasing music as Starchild since at least 2012, but Language is his first LP. A slick, colorful foray into ’80s-influenced funk, it’s the most forceful expression of his identity on record to date, the reflection of an artist of immense talent and a strong command of musical history. Cook’s bona fides are not in question. His burden is to find himself among the genius he surrounds himself with, to communicate something original with the tools left to him by his forebears.
It’s a story as old as black music in the Americas: the blues bars injected with the energy that birthed rock and roll, the mining of old records for the samples and breaks that became hip-hop. Cook’s Language speaks to that history, both musically and spiritually. Much of Starchild’s outward expression—from the P-Funk-inspired name down to the MJ dance moves—feels like a nod to the greats. As a producer, he wields nimble guitar licks, bouncy brass, and bleating organs with equal aplomb, and appears to share Prince and Sheila E’s affection for the LinnDrum. It’s the aesthetic of someone who knows his history and aims to be included among his heroes.
On Starchild & the New Romantic’s 2016 EP Crucial, Cook departed from the synthed-out rap&B vibe of 2012’s Night Music EP, offering a glimpse of the universe he was building. Language feels even more grown, relating political struggles to his own hopes and dreams. “Hangin On” reads like a letter to the late Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader assassinated on his own driveway in front of his family. “Saw you in my sleep/Chased you ’til morning came/My mama said ‘Follow your dreams’/Well I guess you were my warning,” he sings, weighing hope against the reality of what happens to black people who stir the pot. The song’s video elicits specific images of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, itself created to bridge the generation gap between Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the young students who represented the future of the civil rights movement.
Much of Language is written with one person in mind, a relationship strained—and ultimately ended—by the distance that comes with the life of a touring artist. This narrative is evident if you’re looking for it, but taken as a whole the lyrics read as those of an author working out his own emotional vocabulary, a young lover learning how to love and put those feelings into words.
The project’s visuals carry a stylish retro-futurist vibe (old landline phones, ’80s street-style chic) that reflects Cook’s attempt to straddle multiple generations, connecting past and present with an eye towards the future. The title track distills the concept succinctly, with a bouncy guitar riff, soulful harmonies, and an electric wail on the bridge that Cook says he imagined as Morris Day doing “Uptown Funk.” He’s an equally skilled singer and MC—his closest rapping analogue is the smooth swagger of Theophilus London—as evidenced by the blistering bars of “Some People I Know”: “Been up in the gazebo, building up my machismo/Stick me out in the doghouse, couldn’t even speak to the people.”
For an artist so adept at incorporating his influences, it’s appropriate that the song on Language that makes Cook’s gifts most evident was actually written by someone else. “Mood” is ostensibly a cover of the Porches song, but it completely reimagines the composition with a smoldering bass-driven atmosphere that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Freetown Sound. It’s instructive to hear the two versions played back-to-back; Greta Kline’s bass gives the original some bounce, but in Cook’s hands, the sketch is fully fleshed out, injected with a funky, soulful energy that completely transforms the song.
It’s often through their dialogue with standards that the most distinguished artists are able to find themselves, filtering the things they love through their own unique perspective. The language Starchild uses to express his point of view is still evolving. But with each new entry into his catalog, streaks of brilliance shine through, illuminating a portrait of an artist who deserves a seat at the table. | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Ghostly International | February 26, 2018 | 7.2 | be90cf75-8fcd-4620-92ab-908980f44939 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The seventh album from one of America's few major-label metal acts feels like the unedited, overly long collection of a younger band trying to make its mark. | The seventh album from one of America's few major-label metal acts feels like the unedited, overly long collection of a younger band trying to make its mark. | Lamb of God: Resolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16198-resolution/ | Resolution | If you heard Resolution before knowing anything about the band who made it, you'd be forgiven for mistaking Lamb of God's latest as the high-production, major-label debut of an energetic, upstart crew. At 14 songs and 57 minutes, Resolution feels like the sort of unedited, exhaustively long collection a label might get behind to see if at least one of the songs lands with a wide audience.
Such signs are everywhere on Resolution: Each of the choruses in these rigid Pantera-cum-Slayer recasts are aggressively emphasized, with thickets of backing vocals and rhythms and structures that slow or shift so as to beg you to swallow the hook. Lyrically, Lamb of God certainly write like a young band of heshers out for an angry good time-- Metallica quotes, subverted clichés, and diary-entry misanthropy laced with high-school vocabulary words and winking glimpses of profanity, drugs, and religion. And though the band is not only at its best but its most comfortable with four-minute formulaic tracks-- burst open, barrel ahead, shift at the bridge, regain momentum, and implode at the exit-- they take care to show that, even if young, they're versatile, too, the sort of band that boasts the promise of a varied future. There's the convincingly sludgy opener, the ghostly acoustic moments that serve as intros and interludes, and the creepy spoken-word surge of a closer. And it's all captured with big, bright production by Josh Wilbur, a major-label stable member who has worked with everyone from Steve Earle and Faith Hill to Pink and Limp Bizkit.
But Resolution is Lamb of God's seventh album and their fourth for Epic Records, making them one of the few current American metal bands to sign with and stay on a major label. They've done well there, too, peaking with a chart position of No. 2 for their most recent record, 2009's Wrath, which earned two Grammy nominations and sold a few hundred thousand copies. Those past stats and the Virginia band's status as relative metal statesmen for the mainstream make Resolution that much more disappointing in context.
Despite the handful of hooks that do stick and those big "risks," like the acoustic blues strums at the start of single "Ghost Walking" or the belligerent boogie that opens the much better "Invictus", Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries. After a decade of becoming arguably the biggest American metal band that either didn't exist when George H. W. Bush was president or didn't come from a cartoon, you would hope that Lamb of God had earned the right to be adventurous, to try and stretch their legacy wider than that of a band subservient to its predecessors. Resolution simply sounds like a refinement of their past, with their unquestionable technical prowess (especially impressive is the occasional interplay between guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler and drummer Chris Adler) funneled again into songs that would lose any distinction in a mixtape of their peers.
On "Invictus", this record's most structurally and lyrically compelling track, Randy Blythe roars the album's least instant but most interesting hook: "You brand it a crisis/ I name it an honor/ To face what arises/ To remain unconquered." That ethos reappears throughout Resolution, an album that, despite all this talk of bravery, lacks the resolve to sound anything but normal and predictable. With so much history and more than a million album sold, you'd think sounding mistakably young would be a compliment. But on Resolution, it doesn't equal a band bursting forth with ideas or burning with ambition; it means that, apart from the number of records they've sold, Lamb of God still need to find a way to make an impression last longer than an album cycle. | 2012-01-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-01-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | Epic | January 24, 2012 | 3.9 | be98e852-db08-42bf-95c7-241a9f3ceffe | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Craig David’s debut, a UK garage hit parade which became a poisoned chalice for its creator. | 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 Craig David’s debut, a UK garage hit parade which became a poisoned chalice for its creator. | Craig David: Born To Do It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/craig-david-born-to-do-it/ | Born To Do It | It took 15 years to clear his name. Sweet boyish Craig, good as gold, bullied out of his dream. How had it come to this? A star birthed from UK garage yet regarded as a footnote within it. Born To Do It, a multi-platinum hit parade that codified the wider world’s perception of what UKG was all about, reduced to the fine nub of a joke. For as long as there was a stigma attached to the sound, there was a stigma attached to its pin-up.
UK garage originally incubated in South London pubs, as DJs pitched up slabs of American garage house for buzzy ravers looking to push the feeling on to Sunday afternoon. A cut like Mood II Swing’s “Closer (Swing to Mood Dub)” was dynamite, sauntering about with a jazzy flair, but anchored by tough and unyielding drums. In Todd Edwards, the scene had an early unifier, a squeaky-clean sample wizard from New Jersey who gave himself to God first, garage second. His “Saved My Life” was released in 1995 but stayed in rotation for years as UKG developed, a benchmark for how creative the format could become in due course. Edwards showed you didn’t necessarily have to be a renegade club kid to cut it in this new world.
British producers upped the ante, making the basslines chunkier and altering the straight-ahead flow of garage house, so that MCs crossing over from hardcore and jungle raves could find moments within DJ sets to command and conquer the dance. In 1997, Kelly G’s wailing remix of Tina Moore’s minor R&B hit “Never Gonna Let You Go” was a radio smash, breaking the door down for the popularization of 2-step. This variant took the lightly swung drums of UKG and made them outright skippy. Even if this initially caught the unaware flat-footed in an attempt to follow the groove, dominant female voices filled the space left open once the consistent pulse of a four-to-the-floor kick was subtracted. Homegrown singers like Shola Ama, Kele Le Roc, and Anita Kelsey gave listeners something alluring to latch onto, as well as balancing the rowdiness of geezers on the mic.
By 1999, UK garage had gone national. No matter if you repped speed or soul or skip, the mood of the moment was intoxicating. Whenever the sun was out—far from a given in the UK, so appearances are celebrated with gusto––UKG blasted out of cars, ricocheted across council terraces, and accompanied grill smoke on its twist upward to the sky. People got dressed up to go out dancing: no hats, no hoods, no trainers; all smiles, everything nice ’n’ ripe. Champagne replaced H2O in the bloodstream. Times were as good as could be.
As Great Britain blearily swept the kitchen on the first day of the new millennium, a song called “Re-Rewind” was boinging around the top of the charts. Its opening three seconds are an effective elevator pitch to everything attractive about garage: a woofer-vibrating rumble, head turning SFX (in this case, shattering glass), an Anglicized "selec-tah," then a snare which springs us forward into major-key chords—and, invariably, a cork being popped.
“Re-Rewind” was the first of seven UK top 10 hits in 2000 shared between Craig David and his producer Mark Hill, one-half of DJ duo Artful Dodger. April’s racy follow-up “Fill Me In,” billed this time as David’s solo debut, shot to No.1, making him the youngest artist in British chart history to open their account at the top. The great misremembering about Born To Do It is that the garage ends there. “Re-Rewind” and “Fill Me In” form the double helix of commercial UKG’s DNA, staples of every themed throwback party, brunch, cruise, and symphony ever since—but the rest of the album is barely a garage record at all. Though the lingo and affectations remain, its heart wasn’t in soundsystem culture: David longed to be an R&B star, and an American one at that.
A chance meeting between David and Hill had led to an invite in 1998 for the singer to make use of Hill’s rudimentary studio and develop material of his own. Outside of its singles, which received extra polish once management entered the fray, most of the songs on Born to Do It are demos from those sessions that never required a further mixdown. Very little of the album’s beats can lay claim to originality: the pizzicato string plucks, synth bass, and Darkchild-style harp ripples all derive from sample packs, dutifully assembled as if by manual. Hill knew how to mask deficiencies in his setup, including using the smack of a bouncing basketball from the BBC Sound Effect Library to give the bass on some songs extra weight. (“Re-Rewind”’s glass shatter was at least done live in the studio, for that authentic breaking-and-entering feel.)
The production might be standard fare in places, but that’s fine, because David is the star of this show, crooning his way to a world where he is the alpha shagger. Having grown up with the music of Terence Trent D’Arby and Michael Jackson, he understood how confidence could be distilled into a formula and bottled for mass consumption. All over Born To Do It are spirited imitations of silky-smooth loverman jams that made their way over the ocean in the late ’90s. A hat-tip to Usher’s “Nice & Slow” here, a little pre-chorus mention of “Gettin’ Jiggy With It” there, a few seconds of Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” spliced into “Time to Party”—and why not? His performance was brazen but no one told him to stop.
With "Booty Man," David interpolates the nursery rhyme “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” and Willy Wonka's “Candy Man,” then spells out the URL to his homepage as if he were advertising a web 1.0 furniture sale. As “7 Days” slides into its final calendar-counting chorus, a warbling syllable soup pours forth, almost certainly recorded with the singer’s eyes closed and one hand tracing the notes through the air. And on “Can’t Be Messin’ Around,” a counterpart to Hill’s own hit “Please Don’t Turn Me On,” David remains chivalrous as he declines the advances of would-be suitors. Maneuvering around the dancefloor with his girlfriend on his mind, David still manages to drop a pick-up atom bomb: “Girl I must admit/You’re looking real fit”—the kind of line Mike Skinner would later latch onto with boozy glee as the Streets, delivered here with the fedora-doffing manners of a gentleman.
Born To Do It is a binary-busting mesh of good and bad, corny to the point of inanity but with charisma to pull it off. At every turn, the Brit in him couldn’t help but leap out: an archetypal kind of chirpy student who cribs chat-up lines from lads mags and can do a wicked a cappella rendition of Soul II Soul’s “Back To Life” on cue; king of small and perhaps medium talk, but one who flounders when swimming out into deeper waters than that. Even while having a jacuzzi-and-wine tryst with the girl next door, he wonders if her parents “one day might approve?” People went wild.
By 2001, with his home territory licked, it was time to crack North America. “7 Days” was an especial success, its PG-rated lyrics and clammy Latin flair perfect for a market still fat on the material gains of hits like Montell Jordan’s “Get It On Tonite” and Santana’s “Maria Maria.” The press were unconvinced, but he left a mark: Cup your ear to Drake’s 2007 mixtape cut “Closer” and hear him shout summers spent “Racin’ through the back streets/On my Craig David shit/The Artful Dodger, Shola Ama.” David was even invited by the Bush administration to perform at a White House concert. Glass eternally half-full, he accepted, though it never panned out. “I don’t know why it didn’t happen,” he later reflected. “I was doing something, I guess, and he was having a war.”
While on this charm offensive, a dark cloud had rolled in over the sunny domain of UK garage. Rougher kids had entered the fray, typified by the sprawling collective So Solid Crew and associated bad-boy duo Oxide & Neutrino, bringing with them a genuine edge of danger. Committees—formal, mob-style sit-downs—had been set up as early as 1999 by older heads to settle disputes between rival promoters and feuding DJs. This time, their attempt to maintain stability failed. Paranoia took hold, shootings spiked, and the police rolled in heavy to stamp out the whole scene, treating UKG as a node of gangland activity.
On the face of it, the pop phenom in a cream rollneck had nothing to do with any of this. If So Solid Crew were treated by the press as a local answer to NWA, then Craig David was MC Hammer. In an astonishingly patronizing skim-read of urban culture, members of the Labour government started parroting the term “gold chain and no brain” as they demonized UKG, which by this point was metamorphosing into grime anyway. David, never ashamed of an upbringing split between his Jewish-Anglo mother on the weekdays and his Grenadian father on the weekend, was being reduced to a set of faux-street catchphrases.
The warning signs had been there: In late 2000, fading rockist rag Melody Maker published a cover declaring “UK Garage My Arse!”, calling for the sound to be outlawed and extending Born To Do It’s artwork to show a light-skinned black man who looked nothing like Craig David sitting on the toilet. The racial overtones weren’t exactly subtle. David led the field at the BRIT Awards in 2001, but he missed out on all six of his nominations, a failing greeted with barely suppressed mirth. Dane Bowers, one of commercial UKG’s other prominent faces, somehow managed to get changed into a T-shirt declaring “Craig Woz Robbed” in time for the afterparty.
In 2002, an absurdist comedy called Bo Selecta! debuted on British television, its title taken from the call-and-response of “Re-Rewind.” This was the killer blow. At the show’s center lay a masked, mishap-prone version of Craig David featuring a doodled-on goatee and a hammed-up Northern English brogue that would be equivalent to giving Jerry Seinfeld a Down South drawl. The caricature was nothing like its target, yet withering all the same. His manager would explode in vein-popping rage any time it was invoked as an excuse for swooning sales. No matter how hard he had fought to escape the orbit of the garage world that had launched him, Bo Selecta! pulled David right back.
David attempted to stare down the critics on the opener to his second album, 2002’s Slicker Than Your Average. He jettisoned any remnants of Hill’s 2-step signature, bragged about seven million records sold, and nabbed the standing-up gag from “The Real Slim Shady”—just two and a half years late. It was the outlier on an otherwise anodyne album, a gloop of Sting duets, club scenarios where the girls “bang like Dre instrumentals,” and, lessons unlearned, another nursery rhyme. Just one year after the U.S. release of Born To Do It, Slicker slunk in at No.32; the third LP was never released Stateside at all. The dream was over. To David’s credit, he at least managed to make his wilderness years memorable: He moved to Miami, got ripped, donned a watch whose face displayed only the word “NOW,” and spouted silly things in pursuit of profundity that kept him ticking over as a He Said What?! paragon of washed-up celeb.
In the mid-2010s, another satirical show trained its lens on UK garage. People Just Do Nothing was centered around Kurupt FM, a bunch of pirate-radio wannabes in the armpit of suburban London, clinging to a faded blueprint for success. This time the series’ creators were genuine UKG diehards who wanted to bring it back as much as send it up. The show’s parodies were so acute, it provoked many to confront a dormant question: So what if the culture around garage can be daft? This was a national heritage too pure to be smuggled away as a guilty pleasure; UK garage should make us proud to be British.
Come September 2015, a Kurupt FM-fronted radio takeover on BBC 1Xtra secured a major coup: Craig David would drop in for a live PA. In a clearly unrehearsed moment, you can barely hear “Fill Me In” above screams of joy as the show’s cast breaks character and mobs the returning prodigal son. David then glides into a freestyle over Jack Ü’s “Where Are Ü Now” with some typically wink-nudge lyrics—“Packin’ on muscle like bars of protein/Melodies for days, you know what I mean?”—but for once, people were laughing with him. The clip went supernova online. David had a simple message on social media: “This is what I live for.”
Suddenly, impossibly, unstoppably, everything was coming up Craig. A record deal was inked off the back of the impromptu performance. Diplo ceded the stage at Major Lazer’s arena show in London toward the end of the year, letting David supplant Bieber and steal the thunder during his megasmash. By 2016, David was selling out arenas for his own comeback tour. Following My Intuition gave him his first No. 1 album since Born To Do It. The smirk on people’s faces had been replaced with an unforced smile.
Watching Craig David at Glastonbury Festival 2017 was like witnessing a young Lionel Richie crossed with a high-rolling televangelist. Decked all in white, he sprinted across the stage with teenage vim, grinning wildly. After 20 minutes of armor-plated anthems, he announced he would give a little flava of his DJ origins—something no one was asking for. He wheeled out a stage riser with a laptop and a pair of decks, scatted over the Fugees, Eve, and House of Pain, and ended the set not with a hit, but with “16”: a recreation of that redemptive viral moment on the radio, freestyle and all, in case people had forgotten that he played the long game and won.
No matter how close he danced to the edge of awfulness, how hard he tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, how much he willed us to walk away, the audience was there for him again. The anticipation when he took to the stage was choking. The assembled lunchtime crowd was larger than that for Radiohead the previous night: the size of a small city, stretching up and over the horizon. He took a breath and got straight into it. There was a lot to fill in. | 2020-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wildstar / Atlantic | April 19, 2020 | 7.2 | bea27f08-d0c2-4bee-b128-5cd2031df0be | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
Working remotely in Los Angeles and Brisbane, these two ambient mainstays toe the line for an album that exists in a perpetual state of becoming something else. | Working remotely in Los Angeles and Brisbane, these two ambient mainstays toe the line for an album that exists in a perpetual state of becoming something else. | William Basinski / Lawrence English: Selva Oscura | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-basinski-lawrence-english-selva-oscura/ | Selva Oscura | In the ongoing experiment of defining ambient music, Australian composer Lawrence English and his Room40 label are the control group. In the music he releases and creates (start with The Peregrine, if you’re not familiar), he is an ambient classicist, rigorously grooming abstract pitches and timbres as they traverse vast spans of time via moments of deceptive stillness. If there were ever any doubts that English is a staunch defender of the form from bells and whistles (ambient people love bells and whistles, but you know what I mean), he dispelled them earlier this year in an essay for FACT. Part ambient-history precis, part ambient-future manifesto, it commemorated the 40th anniversary of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports—which is to say, the 40th birthday of what we consider ambient. If there were such a thing as the Ambient Preservation Society, English would be its president, and this would be his state of the union.
English frames the milestone as ambient entering middle age, an anthropomorphic device that falls apart if you apply it too broadly. (Is jazz geriatric?) Still, the analogy feels apt when considering English’s music within the state of the art. His latest release, a collaboration with William Basinski of The Disintegration Loops fame, has a 40-year-old feeling of competence and caution, of being lived in, of knowing what it is. Its title a reference to the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno, Selva Oscura is a reverent and ordinary tribute to ambient filmmaker Paul Clipson, a mutual friend who died this year. It is not new age or chill-out or IDM. It does not have beats, melodies, or any other bricolage to bind it to any other musical tradition. It does not feign acoustic instruments or choirs. It is ambient music, or it is nothing. Or, to infer from English’s account, it is ambient music, so it is nothing.
Of the pair, English, like a composer, has the steadier idiom and the more cerebral air. Basinski, ever melancholic, is more inclined to let the medium do the talking, in the rustle of the tape loops, the babble of found sounds, and the hush of shortwave radio static. The two 20-minute pieces here hew closer to English’s clean, burnished style than Basinski’s looser, danker one, with more smoothly layered hums than creepy decay. Working remotely in Los Angeles and Brisbane, the creators avoided jammy gestures, kneeling chastely before the form. Instead of moving through a landscape, the record evokes standing still for eons as a landscape moves around you. No rhythms, only ripples; no moments, only motion. High and low, thick and thin, drift and shine—these are the most concrete properties haloing the sound, which exists in a perpetual state of becoming something else.
In that FACT essay, English walks us through the golden age of ambient purity, the wanton diversifying of the 1990s, and the welter of the now. His conclusion, at its core, is plain: Ambient’s future lies in its past. To English, the commandments Eno brought down from the mountain, inscribed in tablets of cloud, are perpetually contemporary. After all, ambient’s defining claim is that it responds to any experience, space, and time. It lives in an eternally renewing present. You don’t have to join the APS, with its implicit mandate to keep circling and circling the airport instead of landing, to admire the clarity of English’s convictions, and he isn’t bothered by people making ambient into pop. He just wants to know what it really is and make sure it gets done. This is a kind of service, one that Selva Oscura fastidiously performs. Someone has to hold down the bedrock of a form so that others may elaborate, fussing about orthodoxy so we don’t have to. | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | October 16, 2018 | 6 | bea44373-9429-47aa-b674-896273c27800 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Mike Hadreas’ fourth record is pure decadence. It’s his most realized album yet, a tender and transcendental protest record of love and devotion. | Mike Hadreas’ fourth record is pure decadence. It’s his most realized album yet, a tender and transcendental protest record of love and devotion. | Perfume Genius: No Shape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23137-no-shape/ | No Shape | From ancient Lesbos to ’60s SoHo, drag balls to Paradise Garage, queer havens aren’t just shelters created in opposition to the wider world, but hives of imagination and creativity where alternate realities reign, even if they sometimes dissolve at dawn. Perfume Genius’ fourth album, No Shape, is one of them. On 2014’s Too Bright, Mike Hadreas laid down the law when he commanded, “No family is safe when I sashay,” on the iconic “Queen.” But this time, he’s scarcely interested in using his steely blue gaze to challenge bigots. Instead, he preserves it to revere Alan Wyffels, his long-term boyfriend and musical collaborator, and to elevate their love to a heavenly plane. He and Wyffels met as recovering addicts—on No Shape, hard-won stability is a sacrament.
If Hadreas’ theme is insular, the mood on No Shape’s first half is ecstatic. These songs swoop and chatter like flocks of mad starlings, light up like religious paintings, flounce like all the pink frills in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, make the cosmos explode inside your ribs. If that sounds like too much, that’s the point. No Shape rebukes tasteful minimalism and embraces beauty at its most transgressive, harking back to the aestheticism and decadence movements of the 19th century, as well as Kate Bush and Prince’s most lurid extroversions. This inflated yet elegant dynamic sustains Hadreas’ own private joy: “If you never see them coming/You never have to hide,” he sings on “Slip Away,” a song that sounds perpetually under siege in a majestic fantasy battle. A few lines later, he insists, “If we only got a moment/Give it to me now,” and holds up his end of the bargain by giving literally everything he’s got.
Even if it’s a feint, Hadreas’ confidence is brazen and contagious. He subverts religious devotion on “Just Like Love,” admiring a young queer in an outlandish outfit. They’re “christening the shape,” and “cultivating grace,” and they walk “just like love.” It’s the kind of song that makes rags feel like ball gowns, and should probably have been playing when Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus. A prowling bass adds lust to Hadreas’ admiration, his crooned vocal styling referencing the period in the 1920s when intimate, amplified male voices were vilified for challenging ideas about how real men should sing. Using that register to exalt another man’s appearance is even more radical, and Hadreas knows it as he instructs the object of his affection to stand tall in the face of opposition: “When it happens again/Baby, hold on and stare them down.”
On Too Bright, bodies were “cracked, peeling, riddled with disease,” rotting fruit, sources of shame and revulsion that recalled Francis Bacon’s contorted 1970s portraits. Here, they’re as divine as the same-sex lovers depicted in trailblazing fin de siècle artist Simeon Solomon’s paintings. Hadreas lets himself be beautiful on “Go Ahead,” where he shuts down gawking onlookers with a withering retort. “What you think?/I don’t remember asking,” he tuts. He humors them for a moment—“You can even say a little prayer for me/Baby, I’m already walking in the light”—before throwing in a musical punchline at their expense, too, a moment of ambient reflection dismissed by a tart, cartoonish chime that he deploys like a sprinkle of Himalayan salt. The final part of the song whirrs and glitters, propelling Hadreas towards the heavens as he urges once more, “Go ahead—go ahead and try,” knowing nothing can touch him.
Transcendence is key to No Shape, and at its most explicit on “Wreath,” which references Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” both in its lyrics and breathless spirit. Like “Slip Away,” it’s a race to outrun the inevitable—in this case, Hadreas’ own physical form and identity, the prejudice projected onto it and the Crohn's disease within it. “I’m gonna peel off every weight/Until my body gives way/And shuts up,” he swears. Post-Trump, the Jenny Holzer Truism, “THE IDEA OF TRANSCENDENCE IS USED TO OBSCURE OPPRESSION” has regathered its power, as if urging vigilance against fantastical ideas. But for marginalized artists, that escape offers a short reprieve from psychological and physical persecution. To demand that Hadreas and his kin exist only in opposition to the political abyss is its own form of constriction. No Shape is a transcendental protest record and the divide between its two halves makes patently clear the challenge of staying present, staying alive, and staying in love as a queer person in 2017. “How long must we live right/Before we don’t even have to try?” Hadreas cries on “Valley General,” a graceful, pulsing tribute to another lost soul.
Most of No Shape’s first half finds Hadreas holding a pose in the outside world, refusing to conform. But it's hard to convince yourself of your own power, and on album’s second half, he struggles to break free. The blossom falls from the trees, leaving a claustrophobic atmosphere that recalls Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America, David Bowie’s Low, and Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack From Twin Peaks. Each song creaks eerily, indicating a lingering but unseen presence: a ghost on the queasy “Every Night”; threatening voices that haunt Hadreas’ sleepless nights on frenzied violin freakout “Choir”; a lover on “Sides,” a gorgeous duet with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. Hadreas wanders through this ruined palace of a song, searching for his absent love: “Where do you go sometimes/Idle and empty-eyed?” The song shifts gears from searching to spectral, and Mering trills in response, “Don’t want to watch the world we made break/And it’s never too late to stay.”
Rather than an entreaty from one lover to another, it seems to be a duet between Hadreas’ dueling impulses—the one that wants to dissolve, and the one adjusting to the realization that this is what the long haul looks like, as close to contentment as it gets. It’s not possible to transform into air, but love and sex may offer the closest analog to that weightless freedom he dreams of. His voice is ecstatic and disembodied on “Die 4 You,” which uses erotic asphyxiation as a metaphor for total commitment, a mellow trip-hop beat evoking the supposedly blissful sensation of suffocation. “Run Me Through” is glimmering doom jazz, a twisted cabaret where Hadreas urges, “Wear me like a leather/Just for you,” lingering over each word of his intimate, unsettling proposition.
For all the overwhelming physical sensations on No Shape, nothing is as flooring as “Alan,” the album’s concluding devotional, which echoes the beautiful decay of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. “Thought I’d hide,” Hadreas mumbles in an unusually low voice. “Maybe leave something secret behind/Never thought I’d sing outside.” Love saved Hadreas from abjection and gave him his voice when the odds were stacked against his survival. “I’m here,” he marvels. “How weeeeeeiiiiiiiird.” He belts the word like he’s pouring it into the Grand Canyon, his astonished gratitude more than justifying No Shape’s audacious and spectacular high stakes. Being present and being loved is the best anyone can hope for. For some people, it’s so much more than they could ever have expected. What sounds like heaven to Hadreas may seem commonplace to others, but No Shape makes you understand how it looks from his rapturous vantage point. | 2017-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Matador | May 5, 2017 | 8.8 | beaa58be-11b4-4ced-a4bb-1cb7a9348f1c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Malcom Lacey’s long-running electro-acoustic project feels like a window into someone’s private world. | Malcom Lacey’s long-running electro-acoustic project feels like a window into someone’s private world. | Arrange: Blood Dust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arrange-blood-dust/ | Blood Dust | Malcom Lacey, a Florida native who now lives near Portland, has been quietly releasing albums as Arrange for ten years. “Quietly” defines both his approach to promotion and the enticing murmur of his music; “washes over you” would be the operative cliché. It’s tempting to call his fluid electro-acoustic pop confessional, but a better word might be confiding.
Arrange has always felt like a genuine window into the depths of someone’s private world—someone intense but sweet, someone with whom you feel safe. This is odd, as the music courses with danger: Lacey sings as if he’s voicing scarily vulnerable things with his eyes covered, then peeking out between his fingers to see if the world is still there. Every time it is, he gets a little stronger.
Lacey began the project when he was only 17, and it has the air of a long-term therapeutic exercise, or exorcism. Growth isn’t just his process, but his subject, which he pursues with tender, dogged persistence. Lacey’s latest, Blood Dust, stops short of housing an easy epiphany; that would be a very un-Arrange, as he always traffics in more alloyed emotions and muted climaxes. But it does feel like the end of an arc, a survival and a summation—if a characteristically modest one—of a decade.
As ever, Lacey’s lyrics are concerned with mental health and family relationships. Throughout the album, blood is wiped from faces, blood is stolen, blood is transmuted from water. Allusive images of generational trauma accrue, abstract but vivid: There is a mercurial lover, a looming father. The album closes, after the glistening folk tune “Never Is,” with answering-machine messages from Lacey’s grandmother. You might feel moved without knowing why—something to do with home and how it moves around.
On Blood Dust, 16 songs flow by in barely 45 minutes, but none of them feel incomplete or incidental. Their brevity only accentuates their intimacy, humility, and rich interior detail. Though virtual synths are present, there’s more live instrumentation—keyboards, piano, and especially guitar—than ever before. Arrange emerged from an era of early-’00s laptop loners like Elite Gymnastics, whose quietude was a shadow of sunny chillwave, but it still reminds me most of early Bright Eyes, especially in the low, choked tone of Lacey’s voice.
Lacey moves around in time to take the measure of his perspective at various ages, some of them predating Arrange, some plucked blindfolded from the distant future. The album begins with the knocking, drifting dream-pop of “The Lone Ranger,” where Lacey, now almost 27, remembers feeling “the same hate” at 21 that he did at 15. Much later, on “All the Trouble,” he wonders, “When I’m rotten at 83, do you think I’ll be the same boy? When I’m cold at 92, will you tell just who I am?”
Much of this language, not to mention the sound, is consistent with what he was doing back on Plantation. But it feels different, more mature and self-defined. Lacey’s music has modeled growth not in the incandescent spurts of much pop, but in the way it actually happens: by degrees so fine as to be almost invisible, with plenty of backsliding and false starts. Instead of someone heroically becoming someone else, it represents someone, even more heroically, learning to be who he is. | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | self-released | October 15, 2019 | 7.1 | bebb18b8-0c92-477b-ba2c-95d974a8538e | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
An intriguing release from the Broken Social Scene/Do Make Say Think member finds ordinary speech transformed into strange but affecting music. | An intriguing release from the Broken Social Scene/Do Make Say Think member finds ordinary speech transformed into strange but affecting music. | Charles Spearin: The Happiness Project | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13089-the-happiness-project/ | The Happiness Project | People throw the term "concept album" around indiscriminately, but the new solo record by Broken Social Scene/Do Make Say Think multi-instrumentalist Charles Spearin truly earns that distinction. Part spoken-word collection, part sociological experiment, The Happiness Project is the result of Spearin's interviews with his neighbors in downtown Toronto about the idea of happiness-- recorded responses that he then turned into music. What's fascinating about this collection is not only what the interviewees have to say-- Marisa thinks that being "a good people-person" is what's important, Vittoria likes school on Valentine's Day when they just get to make art instead of work-- but also the way that Spearin spins the cadence of their voices into tunes. Childish temper tantrum "Ondine" ("Not almond butter, Mama. I just want butter") turns an irritatingly high-pitched kid's whine into a sliding violin melody bolstered by a delicate harp-and-piano foundation. And "Mrs. Morris"'s proclamation that "happiness is love" is rendered as a be-bop saxophone ditty that matches the alto tones of her speaking voice with the sax's own cool, deep timbre.
The tunes on the collection appear as if by magic. You hear people talking, and then their speech is transformed into honeyed horn patter (as on "Anna") or galloping guitar arpeggios (as on "Marisa"). "Vittoria", for example, spins a young girl's lazy "like"s and "um"s into percussive, brass- and reed-inflected bachelor-pad music perfect for a late-1960s James Bond chase scene. But the most moving of the collection's eight tracks is "Vanessa", which grows from a spare, reedy dirge into a celebration of twinkling pianos, sweeping strings, and sunburst guitars that mimic the vocal cadence of a deaf woman as she recounts the story of her cochlear implant surgery and its subsequent effect on her hearing and her life. "People often asked me, over the years, 'What do you hear?'" she says at the beginning of the track matter-of-factly with no music in the background to illustrate the silence in her head. "I couldn't really answer because I didn't know what it was like to hear, so how could I compare?" But by the end of the track, as she talks about the implant being turned on after the mandatory four-week waiting period, the instruments come alive beneath her voice, just like the sound that bloomed for her for the first time. The piano line is poignant and giddy as it imitates the mellifluence of her voice. "All of a sudden I felt my body moving inside," she says, describing the feeling of her brain taking in aural information for the first time ever. The track then shrinks back to silence as Vanessa explains that her implant only has a limited battery, and so when it shuts off she actually experiences that lack of sound. "Now," she says, after the last lingering piano note has stopped resonating," I understand the term 'dead silence.'" "Vanessa" may be too fractured to be a pop song, but you'll be hard-pressed to find another recorded track this viscerally affecting.
The stories told on The Happiness Project are moving and ordinary and strange, and the way Spearin makes you hear the music of spoken language by translating speech patterns into notes is truly thrilling. But some of these tracks are better as stories than songs (namely, the noodly guitars of "Mr. Gowrie", which is a nostalgic tale from an immigrant far from his homeland where life was difficult but perhaps richer with family). And even the most moving tracks are still not quite songs. Spearin's experiment is fruitful, nonetheless, helping listeners hear the beauty of everyday speech and appreciate the happiness that comes from life's most commonplace moments. | 2009-06-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-06-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Jazz | Arts & Crafts | June 1, 2009 | 6.8 | bec0c71e-7a92-4992-88e7-7c370c8a7993 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Louvin Brothers' powerful 1959 album has been reissued, and the CD version comes with a disc of the duo's songs, selected by artists like Devendra Banhart, Beck, and Jim James. | The Louvin Brothers' powerful 1959 album has been reissued, and the CD version comes with a disc of the duo's songs, selected by artists like Devendra Banhart, Beck, and Jim James. | The Louvin Brothers: Satan Is Real / Handpicked Songs 1955-1962 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15972-satan-is-real-handpicked-songs-1955-1962/ | Satan Is Real / Handpicked Songs 1955-1962 | Even if you've never heard a single note from the Louvin Brothers, odds are good that you've at least seen the cover of their 1959 album, Satan Is Real. The discrepancy between that emphatic title and that plywood demon landed it on countless lists of worst or weirdest album covers, usually alongside Paddy Roberts' Songs for Gay Dogs and Orleans' Waking and Dreaming. Charlie and Ira Louvin devised the concept for the artwork themselves and set everything up in an old quarry, cutting Satan from Charlie's son's miniature train table and filling old tires with kerosene to simulate Hell. Then, as if on some Biblical cue, it began to rain, so their poses were hurried and awkward so their white suits wouldn't get drenched. Still, as silly as it may be, there's something curious about that image, especially that folk art figure looming in the background, bucktoothed and cross-eyed. It doesn't look professional or polished, which fits the music: The Louvin Brothers may have been signed to Capitol, but like so many other rural artists who never settled comfortably into either secular or gospel, they still sound both compellingly raw and incredibly sophisticated.
Satan Is Real is the duo's best-known record, not only for its cover but for songs like "The Christian Life" and "The Kneeling Drunkard's Plea", famously covered by the Byrds and Johnny Cash, respectively. Will Ferrell even incorporated the title track into his one-man show, You're Welcome, America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. The album represents a shift from secular to religious music after several years away, and yet the Louvin Brothers weren't necessarily trading one for the other. Like Johnny Cash or even Elvis Presley, they blended popular and church music to amplify the qualities of the other. "There's a Higher Power" snaps back and forth in a spirited call and response, but it's the shuffling snare that drive those exultant shouts of "Amen!" Similarly, the piano that pushes "The River of Jordan" along its freighted path belongs more to the barrelhouse than the revival tent.
The Louvin Brothers, despite being brothers and such naturalistic harmonizers, were spiritually and temperamentally mismatched, which may explain the equal emphasis they placed on darkness and light. Charlie adhered strictly to the message of these songs and was likely the guiding force behind Satan Is Real, but Ira was an angry drunk who routinely smashed mandolins on stage and showed up late to concerts. He was shot twice by a wife who claimed he beat her, and he allegedly tried to strangle Presley, whose big beat Ira saw as an affront to country music. Those extremes reflected in their music, at least until Charlie broke up the act and, in a grim irony, Ira was killed by a drunk driver in 1965.
Their entire catalog devises a seemingly contradictory mix of the holy and the worldly, the sacred and the profane. How could an act that revels in "The Christian Life" turn around and sing a dire murder ballad like "Knoxville Girl", whose grisly details still provoke winces even half a century after they sang it? To the Louvins' understanding, man's boundless capacity for sin matched his boundless capacity for salvation, so they weren't simply going to nudge you along the righteous path; they were going to run you off the highway to hell. "Satan Is Real" sets the tone and the churchly tableau, as the brothers harmonize on a hymnal chorus before Charlie interrupts with a monologue reminiscent of Hank Williams' Luke the Drifter homilies. "You can hear him in the songs that give praise to idols and sinful things of this world," he declares of the devil. "You can see him in the destruction of homes torn apart." It's a scare tactic, yet the brothers' precise vocals and Ira's always agile picking lends the song an urgency and gravity, as though they might be that deeply invested in their listeners' faith.
These songs may kill off dear mothers, struggling drunkards, debased sinners, and even innocent little babies, but Satan Is Real somehow conveys jubilation rather than penance, which is likely what inspired 60s country rockers like the Byrds and the Dillards and continues to bear on so many artists today. To that end, Light in the Attic is jointly issuing Handpicked Songs 1955-1962, a compilation of Louvin Brothers songs chosen by musicians representing several generations: Dolly Parton, Chris Hillman, and Kris Kristofferson, as well as Beck, Jim James, and M. Ward, among others. On CD, the sets are packaged together; on vinyl, they're available separately (there's also a vinyl-only reissue of their 1956 LP Tragic Songs of Life).
Sonically, vinyl is the better option, but musically, the 2xCD edition provides a better introduction to the Louvin Brothers. Perhaps because it's set so irremovably in the church, Satan Is Real may not be their most accessible album, which means Handpicked Songs makes for a livelier complement than outtakes or live performances and allows for a secular counterpart to the sacred music. It reaches beyond their hits to unearth some deeper catalog cuts like the spry "Low and Lonely" (chosen by Jim James) and the loping "Scared of the Blues" (chosen by Devendra Banhart), which reveal the scope of their songwriting, the agility of Ira's mandolin playing, and the exuberance of their keening harmonies. Especially for an album produced by committee, Handpicked argues persuasively for the Louvins' relevance long after rock'n'roll supposedly rendered their music obsolete. Even at a time when so many church-bred artists were exploring more worldly markets, the struggle between salvation and damnation has rarely sounded so lively or so gloriously conflicted. | 2011-11-29T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-11-29T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 29, 2011 | 8.5 | bec11ea0-147b-4f7c-956f-54f33dec5f1c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
null | It's been a while since anyone's heard from Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn. In fact, it's been nearly a decade since Everything But the Girl's 1999 *Temperamental*, after which the duo went on extended hiatus and, perhaps more accurately, singer Thorn went on extended maternity leave. Sure, there was an EBTG best-of, and Thorn (with her longtime partner Ben Watt) curated a *Back to Mine* comp. But no one had heard a freshly recorded peep from Thorn until she resurfaced singing with Tiefschwarz on their 2006 Fabric mix. Still, that's nothing compared to the wait to hear from Tracey | Tracey Thorn: Out of the Woods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10012-out-of-the-woods/ | Out of the Woods | It's been a while since anyone's heard from Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn. In fact, it's been nearly a decade since Everything But the Girl's 1999 Temperamental, after which the duo went on extended hiatus and, perhaps more accurately, singer Thorn went on extended maternity leave. Sure, there was an EBTG best-of, and Thorn (with her longtime partner Ben Watt) curated a Back to Mine comp. But no one had heard a freshly recorded peep from Thorn until she resurfaced singing with Tiefschwarz on their 2006 Fabric mix. Still, that's nothing compared to the wait to hear from Tracey Thorn, solo artist. No one's heard from Tracey Thorn, solo artist, since her barely-there 1982 debut A Distant Shore, after which she teamed with Watt to form Everything But the Girl and moved on to bigger, better, and altogether more fleshed-out things. But with Watt off gallivanting around the globe as an in-demand DJ and the kids apparently okay to go, Thorn has finally returned to the studio for another stab at flying solo.
Needless to say, much has changed since 1982, both in Thorn's life as well as in Thorn's music, with the biggest difference between then and now probably Everything But the Girl's unlikely flirtation and ultimate intersection with house music. The merger transformed the group from sophisti-pop cult act to clubland favorites, not only earning the duo its biggest success to date but ensuring its perennial spot on countless dance comps.
No surprise, then, that many of those dance elements have returned along with Thorn on Out of the Woods. But this is no club record; instead it nicely encapsulates Thorn's best quality-- the unlikely diva and cosmo chanteuse, wrapped up in one-- while doing its darndest to prove as unchallenging as possible. It's a disc better suited to a relaxing afternoon shopping for jeans than a sweaty night out.
In a sense Thorn was fortunate that few outside the rabidly faithful were clamoring for a comeback, as the greatest advantage of making an album no one expected is that you're able to make an album free from expectations. That's a benefit most veterans would kill for, and at least initially Thorn takes advantage of the clean slate. The opener "Here It Comes Again" is a gorgeously pastoral piece of chamber folk that does justice to Thorn's evocative lyrics. "The sun coming through the rain is more precious than God," she sings, and if you close your eyes and sit still for a bit, that image comes across perfectly clear through the mix of English countryside melancholy and heavenly beauty.
Sticking to such a subdued internalized mood would have taken some courage, especially for a comeback record, so maybe it's not as surprising as it is a little disappointing that Thorn chooses to play it safe, taking much of the rest of the record indoors for a series of mostly standard-issue dance tracks that range from good to fine to perfunctory but never quite achieve the tacit goal of most club music: euphoria.
The downtempo schoolyard taunt chronicle "A-Z" starts things out on a strong note, the pointed lyrics of "small town hell" compensating for Ewan Pearson's 1980s-meets-90s production (it's like Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" at half speed). The actually pretty excellent "It's All True" continues on the decidedly retro track, with self-consciously dated squiggling synth squiggles and percussion flourishes as timeless as they are anonymous. With "Get Around to It" the album gets a bit of second hand inspiration from Arthur Russell, whose track gets remade as a funky disco rave-up that features the Rapture's saxophonist Gabe Andruzzi squonking away.
But after that early (musical) peak, "Hands Up to the Ceiling" brings it back down again, or at last back inward, and Thorn's suddenly warm glimmer of heart and directly personal sentiment fulfills the promise of "Here It Comes Again", the mellow trip down memory lane name checking "Siouxsie Sioux and Edwyn, too," while incorporating the requisite references to rain coming down "on a cold grey town." It's like a UK indie "In My Room" (Beach Boys or Weezer, take your pick).
"Easy" marks the shift back to downtempo dance, all space swooshes and low squelches, but it's hard to imagine this is the music the (we assume) teenage Thorn of "Hands Up to the Ceiling" turns to when it's time to escape. It's solidly constructed, but at the same time the song's almost oppressively generic. The same could be said for "Falling Off a Log", whose spooky Omnichord chimes are all that sets it apart from what could be a slick, safe, boutique friendly remix. The throbbing "Grand Canyon" makes Thorn sound like a guest on her own album.
Thus the pretty "By Piccadilly Station I Sat Down and Wept" again interrupts to underscore what the rest of the album has already evinced. Here Thorn's at her best, and her barest, both musically and emotionally, allowing her voice to take precedent over the beats rather than serve as a mere supporting player. Were the rest of the album this consistently mellow, the concluding "Raise the Roof" might have had a greater effect, a glimmer of optimism that washes away the gloom. Instead it's just another upswing of the album's back-and-forth cover the bases pace.
The difference is that on this final track, you can practically hear Thorn smiling as she allows herself to cautiously warm up, leaving behind the restrictions of chill out music for something a little more fun and loose. In context it sounds like nothing so much as the kind of soundtrack fodder that plays as the credits roll. A chick flick, no less, after the personal touches of the screenplay have been market tested and twisted through numerous permutations until what's left is perfectly serviceable and never less than pleasant, but still suspiciously closer to product than what the writer might have originally intended. At this point in her career, Thorn shouldn't be courting the middle, and considering the best moments on Out of the Woods, she didn't have to, either. | 2007-03-21T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-21T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Astralwerks | March 21, 2007 | 5.6 | bed97118-9253-4928-a85b-49c3245250fa | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
With understated production and forceful vocal performances, the Los Angeles songwriter crafts a heartbroken road-trip record that feels like a breakthrough. | With understated production and forceful vocal performances, the Los Angeles songwriter crafts a heartbroken road-trip record that feels like a breakthrough. | Jess Williamson: Time Ain’t Accidental | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jess-williamson-time-aint-accidental/ | Time Ain’t Accidental | Time Ain’t Accidental is a road-trip record full of open space and vivid detail. Listening to its 11 radiant country songs, you’ll encounter a singalong to Townes Van Zandt, “cigarettes and cheap incense,” and a poolside rendezvous at a Marfa hotel. The scenery is placid, but Los Angeles-based songwriter Jess Williamson is restless, eyes always trained on the horizon. She’s the one in the driver’s seat, but she’s also the one asking Are we there yet? As the world hums along behind her, she’s in the foreground dancing like a pop star: the impatient, impulsive center of an agonizingly slow-moving universe.
It’s been three years since Williamson’s last album, 2020’s arid, windswept Sorceress, and you can hear, from the opening moments of Time Ain’t Accidental, how her approach has changed. Her breathy, cool-girl intonation has been replaced by a voice that’s clarion and rich with emotion. The native Texan twang she showed off on I Walked With You a Ways, her 2022 collaboration with Waxahatchee as Plains, is on full display. Williamson’s wayward sense of articulation allows for some unexpected rhymes; the more outré pairs—“Raymond Carver” and “pool bar,” “ate me raw” and “Shangri-La”—give her writing a sense of unpredictability that’s mirrored in the album’s unusual arrangements.
Produced by indie go-to Brad Cook, Time Ain’t Accidental doesn’t sound like many recent indie-country records. The warm woodwinds that served as gilding on Sorceress are this record’s foundation, along with the click of an iPhone drum machine. It’s an open, breezy record, often pared back to just saxophone, a nonchalant beat, and Williamson’s voice. It’s a surprisingly versatile palette, allowing for tense, heartbroken anger (“Something’s in the Way”) as well as blushing romantic reveries such as the title track and “Topanga Two Step.” Williamson, singing with a new strength and soulfulness, is a magnetic presence. On “A Few Seasons,” she wonders how she learned to “accommodate and get so small,” and the way she sings—forcefully, suffused with an earnest, beseeching quality—feels like a counter to that realization.
Time Ain’t Accidental is a breakup record, but its observations are far removed from the immediate heat of a breakup. Instead, Williamson vacillates between wry analysis and guileless curiosity. Some lines are steeped in bitter irony—“I was admired for my patience and my strength/I am well known for being so okay,” she sings on “A Few Seasons,” dredging up the platitudes friends offer after a split—while others treat everyday life with wide-eyed excitement. On “Hunter,” she writes about the perils of app-based dating and turns mundane swipes into an odyssey: “I want a mirror not a piece of glass/We went a hundred down the highway/I’ve been known to move a little fast/I’m a hunter for the real thing.” Love is a life-or-death matter in Williamson’s world, even if modern romance can feel bureaucratic and kind of bullshit.
Even though many of the characters are heartbroken or wracked with anxiety, Williamson navigates modern life using timeless tropes that lend Time Ain’t Accidental an immense, gratifying confidence. She sings lucidly about the agony of being in someone else’s gravitational pull, and for every new age-y pearl of insight (“Shatter the lamp/The light remains”), there’s another that sounds like it was gleaned from the depths of a dive bar jukebox. On the tense “Something’s in the Way,” a desolate ballad that swells into frantic ragtime, she slips easily into one of country’s most enduring archetypes, the dutiful woman holding out for a fickle lover: “A man like you knows how to make me wait.”
Heartbreak isn’t Williamson’s only mode. She has a way of turning quick flirtations and flashes of new romance into low-key love songs that sound casual but burn bright. On “Topanga Two Step,” a delicate pop song with transportive imagery and needling hooks, Williamson teases a mercurial love interest, daring him to make a move. The production is understated, but Williamson’s presence is like a hurricane: “Baby, god damn,” she exclaims, stretching the words out into a rich, euphoric hook. Coming from her, it sounds monumental—an expression of frustration and ecstasy in one. It may not be the “radical kind of love” that Williamson seeks throughout the record, but it’s enough fuel to keep her on the road. | 2023-06-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mexican Summer | June 14, 2023 | 8 | bee35a41-80db-4090-a130-efa289dbfb39 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Continuing the beat-oriented experiments of their 12” club tunes, the electronic duo Demdike Stare blend their doomy aesthetic with dancehall cadences for their most compelling full-length. | Continuing the beat-oriented experiments of their 12” club tunes, the electronic duo Demdike Stare blend their doomy aesthetic with dancehall cadences for their most compelling full-length. | Demdike Stare: Wonderland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22649-wonderland/ | Wonderland | For the first few years of their career, Demdike Stare narrowed in on their chosen aesthetic with unswerving focus. They took their name from a 17th-century witch; they favored titles like “Suspicious Drone” and “All Hallows Eve” and “Forest of Evil (Dusk).” Drawing from horror soundtracks, Italian library music, African percussion records, and industrial acts like Nurse With Wound, they boiled down the mixture until it resembled the sticky black substance scraped from the bottom of an iron cauldron. At the same time, the proportions of their music sprawled, and they turned to increasingly ambitious formats—triple CDs, quadruple LPs—to suit their meandering, multi-part ambient suites.
In 2013, the duo turned from their habitual style to indulge themselves with a pair of gut-punching club tunes. Called simply Testpressing #001, the record was named in homage to the white-label platters used to check for errors in the vinyl manufacturing process, but the title also spoke to the tracks’ exploratory purpose: What would happen if they applied their doomy aesthetic to classic jungle and techno? (Total dancefloor mayhem, as it turned out.) Pursuing a grab-bag approach and pairing radically different tracks on each successive 12”, they kept the Testpressing series going for six more installments—only Demdike Stare would approach even one-offs in serial fashion—and although the music varied widely, from UK garage to chopped-and-screwed breakbeat hardcore, the records all shared the same questing nature.
Their new album, Wonderland, keeps up those beat-oriented experiments. Nearly all of its tracks are built around muscular rhythms: hardcore breaks, lurching dancehall cadences, overdriven techno. And despite the omnipresent shadowy hues and sandblasted textures, no two tunes sound alike; the eight full-length tracks here (the ninth is a minute-long ambient sketch) could easily have served as the next four records in the Testpressing series. That’s not to say that Wonderland sounds disjointed. Quite to the contrary: As wonderfully immersive as their first couple of albums could be, the new one makes for a far more engaging listening experience, one that shakes you forcefully by the lapels at regular intervals.
Where the Testpressing records were noxious and smoggy, so thick with static you could barely breathe, the new album frequently takes inspiration from dancehall reggae’s use of empty space. “Animal Style” loops breakbeats into a snapping groove that feels like a reggae 45 spun at 33, and “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” goes so far as to sample “Now Thing,” a 1998 Sly & Lenky riddim that became the centerpiece of an eponymous Mo Wax compilation of dancehall instrumentals. (It’s clearly a sound close to their hearts: Earlier this year, Demdike Stare’s DDS label released Equiknoxx’s Bird Sound Power, an album by a group of Jamaican producers deeply inspired by the kind of digital dancehall that Now Thing spotlighted.)
There are moments of real beauty, like the flickering loop of tone that sends the final track, “Overstaying,” soaring toward its 808-driven climax. But the musicians aren’t afraid to get messy, either. In “Sourcer,” a ragged ragga-jungle anthem, dubbed-out synths bob like fat globules in soapy water; “Hardnoise” delivers exactly what the title promises, at least until a trim 808 pattern ushers its metal-shop squeals toward a comparatively dulcet ambient close.
Something that elevates *Wonderland *above reams of color-by-numbers “dark” techno is Demdike Stare’s judicious sense of dynamics; the duo also clearly have a wicked sense of humor. They’re fond of fake-out beats that hiccup, stumble, and flip into totally different time signatures, and the switchbacking changes of “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” suggest a preference for hands-on recording and white-knuckled mixdowns, as opposed to meticulous, on-screen composition. The end of the song dissolves into a monstrous bit of noise, followed by a sharp guffaw from one of the musicians; suddenly, we’re eavesdropping on the duo in their studio. “Amazing,” says the other, clearly pleased with the madness they’ve cooked up.
My favorite moment on the album might be the spoken-word snippet that closes out the woozy synth sketch “Fridge Challenge.” It’s just a loudspeaker announcement inside an airport terminal—“TAP Flight 3814 to Brasilia now boarding gate 28”—but the announcer’s voice is so full of character, her diction so alien, that within the context of the album, it takes on a weird, almost paranormal resonance. You can imagine the two musicians staring slack-jawed at each other as they pulled out their phones to record the sound, marveling at what they’d stumbled upon. To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling. | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | November 29, 2016 | 8.2 | beec4227-c8dc-4629-9c49-d8000a03ec4d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his first album in six years, the UK producer spins freeform modular-synth improvisations into shaggily hypnotic psychedelia. | On his first album in six years, the UK producer spins freeform modular-synth improvisations into shaggily hypnotic psychedelia. | Luke Abbott: Translate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luke-abbott-translate/ | Translate | If the Ramones had grown up on Tangerine Dream and modular synthesis rather than classic rock and bubblegum, they might have produced something like Translate, the first solo album in six years from Norfolk, England producer Luke Abbott. That’s not to say that Translate shares the Ramones’ brevity, aggression, or wit—quite the opposite, in fact; here, glorious long-windedness is the order of the day. But Abbott shares with the New York punks a singular devotion to a narrowly defined sound, and on Translate he offers 11 versions on the theme of slowly mutating synth lines.
Great sweeps of analog synth give Translate its shape, breaking across the spectrum like tentacles of somber-colored paint or waves on a chilly autumn sea. Abbott’s recent work in the jazz trio Szun Waves has bled into the new album, which he recorded as a series of improvised live performances. Spontaneity and freedom of spirit fuel the album’s 11 tracks, where sounds twist at turn at will, untethered from the functional four-bar grid of much modern electronic music. On “Flux” the synths constantly promise to resolve into elegant melody, only to deviate at the last moment, sending the song lurching off into another slightly queasy left turn. “Ames Window” sounds like mice scurrying round an electronic maze—a scuttling frenzy of semi-irregular movement that seems to make sense only when viewed from a distance.
There is something primal about Translate’s rather grubby kinetic repetition. To record the album, Abbott positioned speakers around Border Community label boss James Holden’s London studio in a configuration he compared to the standing slabs of Stonehenge. “Our Scene” is the perfect song for such a setup: Its driving rhythm, climbing walls of synth, and cycling melody trigger a response that feels buried deep in the mammalian brain, suggesting prehistoric humans dancing in circles after a hefty dose of local mushrooms.
In the right frame of mind Translate can be highly immersive, as undulating synth patterns and analog sounds choreograph our neural oscillations into a foxtrot of flux. But a sense of sameness soon sets in. Abbott described “Ames Window” as “an indulgent improvised modular synth track,” and that characterization could comfortably fit the majority of the work here; the most immediately apparent difference between most of these songs is their length. Even that distinction feels largely arbitrary: “Kagen Sound” could happily extend to nine minutes and “Ames Window” could easily reduce to three, with no real changes to the album’s vital signs.
The problem may be that the Norfolk producer is all alone on Translate. Szun Waves operate as a trio, each member bringing sounds for the others to bounce off. Translate is the work of a one-man band, and the same arpeggiated synth lines and drum-machine rhythms return again and again, with the admirable exception of “Feed Me Shapes,” which brings an unlikely blues guitar to the equation. The Ramones got away with their relentlessly reduced toolkit by writing brilliantly vital pop songs. But the melodies on Translate are rarely more than respectable.
As a soundtrack to the listener’s own personal trip into the eye of the almighty—or, more prosaically, a film—Translate might work brilliantly, with the music’s cumulative effect more important than its individual details. As a sit-down listening experience, the album frequently feels too repetitive to remain consistently engaging. Still, taken as a microdosed jolt of electronic psychedelia, a song or two at a time, Translate has the potential to lift you up, out, and beyond, to a better, stranger place. | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Border Community | December 2, 2020 | 6.7 | bef310e4-7275-43e8-8367-83f02484a9d7 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Quelle Chris examines how words, fear, and skin color are weaponized, and how one’s community can dictate their relationship to firearms. | Quelle Chris examines how words, fear, and skin color are weaponized, and how one’s community can dictate their relationship to firearms. | Quelle Chris: Guns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quelle-chris-guns/ | Guns | Near the end of Quelle Chris’ new album, Guns, singer/producer Bilal Salaam ticks off some of the recent mass shootings in United States history: Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where Nikolas Cruz gunned down 17; First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where Devin Patrick Kelley murdered 26; and the carnage at a country music festival in Las Vegas, where Stephen Paddock killed 58 concertgoers. Salaam’s voice is pitched down, modulated to a near robotic tone, conjuring pre-2000 Busta Rhymes when “there was only one year left.” In a flash, everything before Salaam’s verse—on an interlude called “Sunday Mass”—is briefly forgotten; all the lo-fi drum loops give way to the album’s most sobering moment.
Chris’ first solo album since 2017’s introspective Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often is full of dire implications, and employs the same mix of serious reflection and satire that made Everything’s Fine—his 2018 LP with rapper/producer Jean Grae—such a resonant piece of cultural criticism. Chris and Grae examined America’s dying spirit, pointing the finger at The White House and racist police officers as reasons for the country’s never-ending malaise. Chris’ new record continues that theme, probing the nuances of American gun culture and its clichés. With each mass shooting, legislators “pray for the fallen” but fail to impose stricter gun laws. They say things like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” to explain why shooters can buy rifles at the local Walmart.
On Guns, Chris doesn’t just explore gun usage, he examines how words, fear and skin color are weaponized, and how one’s community can dictate their relationship to firearms. He does this by putting himself in their shoes, and on “Spray and Pray” and “Mind Ya Bidness,” Chris becomes the tough-talking street dude with gun culture in his blood. On the former, he sounds like a West Indian from Crown Heights, Brooklyn; the latter, a Crip or Piru from South Central, Los Angeles. There’s a prevalent sadness to “Spray and Pray,” as if the protagonist is trapped in the lifestyle and death by a bullet is the only way out. “Been packin’ since a yute,” Chris grumbles through a faux-Caribbean accent, “studied gun slangin’ from ‘89 to new thousand two, prayed if I paid my dues I’d grow big to be just like you.” The “you” is up for interpretation here; given the scope of the song and album, he might be talking to a big brother or Big Brother. On “Mind Ya Bidness,” Chris pokes out his chest to rap from the perspective of a brash O.G. The beat—produced by Chris himself—is a direct ode to mid-’80s West Coast rap, with the kind of deep bass and dark synths on which Too Short would feel comfortable. Chris sounds just as natural here; across this album and others, he’s shown that he’s not only a skilled lyricist, but an expert producer who pulls from various regions and subgenres to craft a universal aesthetic untethered to a specific place or category.
Chris hits a stride toward the middle of Guns, when a short run of songs—“It’s The Law,” “Wild Minks,” “Box of Wheaties” and “PSA Drugfest 2003/Sleeveless Minks”—lock into a magnetic groove of idiosyncratic funk and Wu-Tang-inspired grit. Chris evokes the production style of early-’90s RZA with unconventional vocal samples, foggy drums and off-center piano chords. Chris’ tracks have the same cassette hiss, and coupled with standout features from lyricists Ugly Boy Modeling (“It’s The Law”), Mach-Hommy (“Wild Minks”) and Denmark Vessey (“Box of Wheaties”), the LP recalls old New York street rap while avoiding the familiar tropes that came along with that era. On “It’s The Law,” Chris chides tiki-torch alt-righters who use religion as a shield to spew animosity.
The artist turns his lens inward on the back half of Guns, resulting in some of his ferocious music yet. Critics have called his music “weird” and “goofy,” and Chris fires back at those descriptions on “Straight Shot” and “Obamacare.” “I’m okay,” Chris assures us at the beginning of “Straight Shot” before launching into this clapback: “Y’all ain’t gotta make my day, I’mma always make the shit I like.” “Obamacare,” by contrast, might be the hardest track of Chris’ career. Dark chimes, undulating bass and stomping drums set a thunderous backdrop as Chris declares “I was never weirdo, they just had to acclimate.” In the end, Guns isn’t just about the devastation we see with our eyes—the mass shootings and the obligatory prayers that follow. It’s also about the journey to reconcile internal havoc and re-emerge with a stronger sense of self. | 2019-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | April 1, 2019 | 7.7 | befaaeee-30b2-4d89-9769-8a257ee99508 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
The Hot Chip frontman's third solo record is his most straightforward and surprisingly personal effort, a collection of songs for just piano and voice. | The Hot Chip frontman's third solo record is his most straightforward and surprisingly personal effort, a collection of songs for just piano and voice. | Alexis Taylor: Piano | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21946-piano/ | Piano | On his third proper solo album, Alexis Taylor puts aside all semblance of pop affectations in favor of something totally sparse and infinitely more vulnerable: a record composed entirely of piano and voice. Recorded at Hackney Road Studios, the aptly-named Piano is not only the most straightforward thing the usually cheeky Hot Chip frontman has ever released, it’s also the most surprisingly personal. Taylor has always had a knack for embedding wistfulness and bittersweet melancholia into pristinely rendered pop songs. With Piano Taylor peels back any kind of artifice, offering a collection of songs that examine mortality, religion, and the creative impulse itself.
The album opens with “I’m Ready”—a song that correlates the creative process with a kind of expansive emotional openness. “Don’t you know I’m ready?” sings Taylor. “Don’t you know I’m healthy? Nowhere else I’d rather be/Nothing to protect me/No one to defend me.” The song, which is carried aloft by Taylor’s lovely but unfussy piano playing, speaks to vulnerability at the core of the record. The idea of emotional nakedness as reflected by this sort of stripped back, bare-bones performance style is certainly nothing new, but it’s a conceit that works nicely here, showcasing just how genuinely sweet Taylor’s voice actually is. This is particularly true on the record’s two standout covers—a take on Artie Glenn’s “Crying in the Chapel” (a song made famous by Elvis in 1965) and, even more odd and sublime, a gorgeous version of Crystal Gayle’s 1977 hit, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Stripped of its more obvious gospel tropes, the former plays like a love song to serenity, a paean for the peace that comes with surrendering to a higher power or some great love. With his quietly non-ironic dissection of the latter, Taylor gets to the sticky emotional core of Gayle’s song—i.e. the pain of being tossed aside for someone else—and delivers it with devastating ease: “Tell me you love me and don’t let me cry/Say anything but don’t say goodbye.”
Of the original songs on Piano, the most interesting of the lot are oblique examinations of spirituality, all rendered from the stance of the unbeliever. “In the Light of the Room” and “I Never Lock That Door” each unspool with the rhythms of an old country song or a hymn, the divinity at their centers less about any specific god but rather sourced from a sense of love, goodness, and wholeness that exists only in the abstract. (“There’s one place that’s always open/And you’ll find me if you’re hoping/to be mine for all of time/I never lock that door.”) In the liner notes for Piano Taylor admits that many of these songs are meant to “celebrate lives of friends now passed, as well as love for those closest to us, and music itself.” On the elegiac “So Much Further to Go” Taylor balances the urge to bring something new into the world against the crushing brevity of human experience, describing life itself as “a miracle that's hard to bear,” while on album-closing “Don’t Worry” he intones, “If I’m gone away, don’t worry/It is only forever” as if to remind us that life is short, but also sometimes unbearably and stupidly long.
It would be easy to dismiss Piano as a slight addition to Taylor’s discography, but that would be wrong. The quiet humanity in these songs is disarmingly simple at first, but these sentiments creep up on you, giving credence to the notion that it’s in these private moments of contemplation where the narratives of our lives are ultimately assembled. “In the light of the room/Through a window dappled/I was dreaming of you/And of all that’s happened,” Taylor sings on “In the Light of the Room.” It’s the kind of simple moment of observation that Piano is full of. Taylor is no stranger to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Piano takes that notion one step further— it’s as if Taylor is taking his heart out for everyone to see, then discreetly leaving it on your coffee table. | 2016-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Moshi Moshi | June 11, 2016 | 7.1 | bf0120f2-7a4c-49ad-b009-4c3920e2ac09 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Somersault is a huge leap for Beach Fossils and includes some of Dustin Payseur’s most nuanced songs to date, with features from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Cities Aviv. | Somersault is a huge leap for Beach Fossils and includes some of Dustin Payseur’s most nuanced songs to date, with features from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Cities Aviv. | Beach Fossils: Somersault | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23278-beach-fossils-somersault/ | Somersault | After it launched in 2008, it didn’t take long for Brooklyn label Captured Tracks to define its sound. Founder Mike Sniper had grown tired of the power-pop and punk albums he was reissuing on Radio Heartbeat Records, and he sold off most of his personal collection to fund Captured Tracks’ first two releases: the sophomore Dum Dum Girls EP and his own band Blank Dogs’ Seconds EP. By the end of its first full year in 2009, the label had more than 30 releases to its name, and within a few years, it had launched the careers of Wild Nothing, DIIV, Mac DeMarco, and Beach Fossils. There was a through-line within the Captured Tracks sound: fidelity was often low, the songwriting was pointedly nostalgic, and the overall aesthetic skewed atmospheric and dreamy. For several years, Captured Tracks held a moment in its hand. And then its bands had to grow up.
In 2017, the artists involved with the label’s rise are surviving on their own accord. DeMarco and DIIV have certainly fared best, with the former ascending from slacker icon to maturing troubadour, while DIIV’s leader Zachary Cole Smith hasn’t let personal demons stand in the way of creating a catalog of hypnotic guitar pop. Wild Nothing hasn’t quite recaptured the heights of debut LP Gemini, but that hasn’t slowed down the project’s offerings, either. And then there’s Beach Fossils, whose leader Dustin Payseur helped set the groundwork at Captured Tracks for his higher-profiled peers to takeoff, before remaining quiet for the last few years. On his third LP, the four-years-in-the-making Somersault, Payseur doesn’t shy from the fact that he’s reaching for something more both lyrically and musically. Somersault is an acrobatic leap for Beach Fossils.
Released on Payseur’s own Bayonet Records (which he co-founded with Secretly Label Group A&R rep Katie Garcia), the sleepy-eyed longing of the band’s breakthrough self-titled debut are a distant memory. In its stead are frequent surprises. The confident lead track and first single “This Year” recalls Real Estate’s jangle and infuses it with a driving rhythm section, and when the strings cue to punctuate its outro, Payseur’s vision sounds more ambitious than ever. The orchestration is a recurring feature on the record, accentuating the backing vocals of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell on “Tangerine” and turning the mid-tempo “Saint Ivy” into the most nuanced composition that Payseur has ever recorded. Its coda marries a weepy George Harrison-like guitar solo with string swells, as Beach Fossils traverse the chasm between its previous brand of dream pop and the retro AM radio vibes that Jonathan Rado, one of the record’s engineers, is known for producing.
“Wanna believe in America, but it’s somewhere I can’t find,” Payseur sings on “Saint Ivy,” which is as directly political as the record gets. But reality bubbles up subtly as Payseur casually mines his personal life and relationships for stories. There’s something real in how the country’s hardships are inescapable in 2017: Even when Payseur wants to focus on friendships or temporary escapism, he looks down at the concrete to see “A.C.A.B” (All Cops Are Bastards) in the song “Down the Line.” The encroaching claustrophobia of the world is reflected in the record’s more unusual moments, like a Cities Aviv-led spoken-word diversion on the introspective “Rise” or the rudderless harpsichord of “Closer Everywhere.”
Still, Payseur has written some of his best songs to date here. When Somersault reaches its unfettered climax, the five-minute-plus tension-releasing eruption of “Be Nothing,” it’s clear that the project has overcome its greatest burden. Like DeMarco and DIIV before it, Beach Fossils emerged from Captured Tracks haze and established its own identity on the other side. | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Bayonet | June 7, 2017 | 7.3 | bf0200e7-518f-4685-9dce-d3e22b16daac | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | null |
Will Toledo takes Car Seat Headrest out of the bedroom and into a 1000-seat theater near you on the band’s first major live album. | Will Toledo takes Car Seat Headrest out of the bedroom and into a 1000-seat theater near you on the band’s first major live album. | Car Seat Headrest: Commit Yourself Completely | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/car-seat-headrest-commit-yourself-completely/ | Commit Yourself Completely | Commit Yourself Completely is billed as a Car Seat Headrest live album, but it’s not all that conceptually different than Will Toledo’s studio releases. By collecting and reconfiguring previously available Car Seat Headrest songs, Commit Yourself Completely joins Teens of Style, a “Greatest Hits”-style sampler of his wildly prolific early years on Bandcamp, and last year’s Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), an upgraded recording of Toledo’s 2011 cult classic. Even Teens of Denial was subject to 2016’s most costly ex post facto tinkering this side of The Life of Pablo, and its outtakes were made available two years prior on How to Leave Town. But if Toledo has mostly used Matador’s reputation and reach to refurbish his catalog for a larger audience, Commit Yourself Completely aims to present Car Seat Headrest not as “Will Toledo,” but a mighty seven-piece filling a 1000-seat theater near you.
Commit Yourself Completely was culled from about 50 shows on their 2018 tour and makes no attempt to imply otherwise—each of its nine tracks mentions the venue in which it was recorded. After finishing off a chiseled “Fill in the Blank,” Toledo asks “How many of you guys are in college?” to a crowd in Columbus, Ohio. The reaction is accordingly raucous for the home of the fourth-largest university in the United States. It’s his segue to a performance of “Drugs With Friends” in Amiens, France, which was likely the smallest gig they played on that tour.
“I...feel like a lot of bands these days don’t have a particularly compelling live act,” Toledo said in a 2016 interview. But it’s also worth pointing out that most of the ’90s legends Car Seat Headrest are compared to were notorious for their non-committal stage presence, and Commit Yourself Completely has no qualms about a classic rawk heft that, say, Pavement or Guided By Voices could only embrace with irony or heroic beer consumption.
CSH have the makings of a durable live institution. Toledo’s catalog spans over a dozen albums with songs that push past 10 minutes or more, and he’s clearly not against toying with them, live and in the studio. But Commit Yourself Completely offers the exact setlist one might expect from an hourlong set at Coachella or opening for Interpol or Death Cab for Cutie: eight of its nine tracks are culled from Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy, and none would be considered a “deep cut.” There are no new verses, no extended solos, no unexpected covers or interpolations, no clues into what Toledo says he learned from studying James Brown and Swans’ Michael Gira as bandleaders. “Fill in the Blank” imagines Toledo in a muscle T rather than an oversized suit; “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” is strangely sluggish for what was intended to be a compilation of the tour’s most “fun” performances, and neither illuminates the studio original.
The only outlier is a cover of Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” that’s popped up on setlists since 2016, treated with the deference one would expect after Toledo yearns to have the guy’s voice earlier on “Bodys.” While Toledo wisely avoids trying to emulate Frank Ocean’s vocals, there is an authorial voice shared between these two—a modern way with confessional tropes, a fondness for clever diversions and meta-commentary, informed by social media’s seemingly divergent aims of oversharing and content curation. Considering how Twin Fantasy and Monomania were Toledo’s longform conceptual explorations of queer sexual awakening and unrequited love, it’s possible he’s been trying to write his own “Ivy” for years; it’s also not impossible to think of the influence Toledo might’ve had on Ocean, a guy who’s shown a clear affinity for indie rock oddballs. For all of Commit Yourself Completely's intentions to recast Car Seat Headrest as a live juggernaut, the only essential cut finds Toledo at his most familiar: a solo performer giving the listener unfiltered access to his creative process. | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 27, 2019 | 6.5 | bf08a5ea-473a-48f6-9a1f-8306c19fc859 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
In the early days of what would become grunge, Soundgarden had the catchiest songs, the sexiest frontman, and the most conventional approach to making music. Twenty-five years later, Sub Pop has reissued their 1987 debut EP, Screaming Life, along with its 1988 follow-up, the Fopp EP, this time with a Jack Endino remastering job and bonus track. | In the early days of what would become grunge, Soundgarden had the catchiest songs, the sexiest frontman, and the most conventional approach to making music. Twenty-five years later, Sub Pop has reissued their 1987 debut EP, Screaming Life, along with its 1988 follow-up, the Fopp EP, this time with a Jack Endino remastering job and bonus track. | Soundgarden: Screaming Life / Fopp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18756-soundgarden-screaming-life-fopp/ | Screaming Life / Fopp | When Soundgarden released Screaming Life, their 1987 debut EP, grunge was not a thing. There were a few other bands slinging the sludgy sound that would soon be known to the world at large as grunge, but those groups—chief among them Soundgarden’s Washington State neighbors Green River, Malfunkshun, and the Melvins—barely shared characteristics. (Nirvana and Alice in Chains, meanwhile, were just finding their feet at the time.) The most striking element that set Soundgarden apart was their commercial viability: Of their peers, Soundgarden had the catchiest songs, the sexiest frontman in Chris Cornell, and the most conventional approach to making music. Catchiness, sexiness, and conventionality were all things grunge would eventually, if briefly, pretend to refute. From the start, though, Soundgarden’s music envisioned—if not promised—a nation of arenas full of flannel.
Screaming Life is proof. Along with its 1988 follow-up, the Fopp EP, it’s being reissued by Sub Pop—only this time with a needed Jack Endino remastering job and one bonus track, the jokey throwaway jam “Sub Pop Rock City”, drawn from 1988’s Sub Pop 200 compilation. The latter is sheer filler, as is the six-minute dub version of Fopp’s title track and the passable, unremarkable cover of Green River’s seminal “Swallow My Pride”. That leaves eight songs out of 11 worth listening to on the reissue—some more than others. Revisionists tend to gauge Soundgarden solely in the context of grunge, but Screaming Life—and the two songs on Fopp worth listening to, “Fopp” and “Kingdom of Come”—have more in common with what was truly going on in alternative metal circa 1987 and 88: Jane’s Addiction, the Cult, and even Living Colour, each of whom sought to expand the tropes of metal by cross-pollinating it with other styles—not to mention weaving a shroud of alluring otherness in the face of bad-boys-next-door like Mötley Crüe or Poison. The fact that “Fopp” is a thickened cover of the Ohio Players’ 70s funk classic shows that, in a parallel universe, Soundgarden could just have easily turned into Faith No More.
But they didn’t. Soundgarden wound up drawing from a broad palette while avoiding the funk-metal trap that so many of their contemporaries succumbed to. Even their breakthrough albums—1991’s Badmotorfinger and 1994’s Superunknown—owe more to progressive rock and psychedelia, respectively, than to grunge. Some of that structural oddness and swirling murk can be heard on Screaming Life, albeit sporadically. If anything, Screaming Life comes on like gothic Led Zeppelin. “Hunted Down” is cavernous and “Immigrant Song”-like in its pseudo-mythic chug, while “Tears to Forget” echoes the metallic gallop of “Communication Breakdown”. Cornell’s voice veers from Robert Plant majesty—steeped, though, in deeper shadows—to a scalding screech that he’d soon ditch in favor of a more melodic wail. “Entering” starts out with a drumbeat that resembles, of all things, Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” before morphing into lesser groove-rock aerobics. Finally tapping into the Black Sabbath wellspring that came to be a grunge stereotype, Soundgarden turns “Nothing to Say” into a ringing, doom-laden drone. “Little Joe” is Screaming Life’s lone disposable track, another foray into stiff-necked quasi-funk that feels squishy and unformed, as do Cornell’s monotone histrionics.
He’d get better from there, as would all of Soundgarden. Not that you’d know it listening to “Kingdom of Come”—a would-be party anthem complete with douchey double entendre that wastes the talent of Kim Thayil, turning one of the most subtly inventive guitarists of his generation into a vending machine for riffs. It in no way predicts what the band was about to accomplish on its brooding, full-length debut for SST, 1988’s Ultramega OK, let alone during its stunning major-label years. Soundgarden would go on to become the most challenging of the mainstream grunge titans; 1996’s Down on the Upside is every inch as dense and harrowing as In Utero. But in 1987, Soundgarden had no way of knowing that rock as they knew it was about to radically change around them. Grunge has long been touted as the revolutionary insurrection that rendered hair-metal obsolete. But Screaming Life/Fopp is music that seemed to want to save hair-metal, not do away with it. And in that sense, it’s a halting, hesitant half-triumph. | 2013-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 20, 2013 | 6.7 | bf1022ff-3a08-4d44-b45d-997cd8867c62 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Laurie Anderson’s grand theatrical treatise, an avant-garde piece comprised of sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics. | 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 Laurie Anderson’s grand theatrical treatise, an avant-garde piece comprised of sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics. | Laurie Anderson: United States Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurie-anderson-united-states-live/ | United States Live | On January 25, 1983, Reagan delivered a rousing State of the Union to a country reeling from a recession. He bid for inspiration. “As surely as America’s pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century,” he said, “the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of opportunity, the frontier of high technology.” He had, he said, “a vision not only of what the world around us is today, but what we as a free people can make it be tomorrow.” Six weeks later, in the premiere of his blockbuster “Evil Empire Speech,” he told an audience of the newly-ascendant Christian Right, “Any objective observer must hold a positive view of American history.” It was, he said, “a history that has been the story of hopes fulfilled and dreams made into reality.” Much of the country loved his shiny hair and avuncular brand of authoritarianism. They believed what he said.
In-between these two speeches, on February 7th, 1983, the performance artist Laurie Anderson had an opening night of a new show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She spiked her hair with Vaseline and pulled on a suit like she was ready for business. The overall effect was somewhere between Albert Einstein and Grace Jones. She gathered her trusty violin—various states of violins, really, some with neon inside them and others strung with prerecorded cassette tape the bow could activate—and a vocoder and other mechanical wonders, many made by her own hands. She had thousands of slides and videos and a crew to run them. A small band of fixtures of the Downtown scene, including the Love of Life Orchestra’s Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem, was ready to accompany her. An audience primed by recent theatrical epics like Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach sat ready to be wowed. They believed in her. In the darkened auditorium, Anderson took the stage. She pointed to a map of America projected behind her. She asked: “Can you tell me where I am?” Then she turned to a mic plugged into a Harmonizer that dragged her voice way down into what she named her “voice of authority.” Her male voice said: “Do you want to go home?”
And so began Laurie Anderson’s own state of the union. The record of this eight-hour, two-night show—1984’s four-and-a-half-hour box set, United States Live—is a gesamtkunstwerk, a bold federation of hobbyist tinkering and scientific wizardry, sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics. With performance chops equal to the Gipper’s, Anderson untangled Reagan’s knot of tech and hope and power and wove together an alternative form of patriotism, one that centers disorientation and finds authenticity in imagination. Along the way, she created an American masterpiece.
“I grew up in the Bible Belt and spent a lot of my childhood listening to these stories, at Bible school,” Anderson once said. “Adults who mainly just did the most mundane things imaginable (mowing their lawns, throwing potluck parties). They all believed in these wild stories. And they would sit around and discuss them in the most matter-of-fact way.” Born in 1947 in the suburbs of Chicago, she angled for attention as one of eight kids and wore red blazers to talk about life in America on a European tour with Talented Teen USA. She studied biology for a year at Mills College, then ran away to New York to study art at Barnard College and then Columbia University. She taught for a while, often fabulating art history, and made work of her own: 1973’s Institutional Dream Series, in which she’d fall asleep in night courts and library bathrooms and then document the effect of public places on her dreams. For the following year’s Duets on Ice, she strapped on skates embedded into a block of ice and played along with her “self-playing violin” which held a speaker inside it, until the ice was a puddle.
She found success in the minimalist and conceptual art circles downtown, rubbing elbows with Philip Glass and Arthur Russell, and toured the country. But in the late 1970s, even the highest-profile performance art was still a low-paying gig. In the American artistic tradition, she decamped to Europe. “I was basically an expat,” she recently said. “[There were] more opportunities to work, particularly in Germany and Italy. Those were the places we went, and we’d be sitting around after a concert, usually in an art gallery…and people would go: How could you live in a country like the United States? How do you manage?”
One answer was to get famous. The NYC indie label 110 Records used an NEA grant to press up 5,000 7"s of a track Anderson had made with her friend and collaborator Roma Baran, in which she sang into a vocoder a song about the future. “O Superman” is a doo-wop-inspired robo-bummer, its peppy harmonizing more nuclear winter than the Beach Boys’ endless summer. With lyrics like, “So hold me Mom, in your long arms/Your petrochemical arms/Your military arms/Your electronic arms,” the track was a perfect foil of Reagan’s Father Knows Best strongman schtick.
To Anderson’s surprise, it became a hit, eventually making it to No. 2 on the UK charts after play by John Peel, and would go on to be sampled or covered by everyone from El-P to Booka Shade to Moses Sumney. On its strength, Warner Bros. offered her an eight-record deal. Venues offered stages. Anderson returned to New York and dug through the work she’d amassed over the previous decade. A few pieces, including “O Superman,” appeared on her first solo album, 1982’s Big Science. Hundreds more had circulated within her performances for years. The borders of United States Live were broad enough to welcome in all of them. How could she live in America? “It turned out to be an eight-hour answer,” she later laughed.
United States Live is operatic in scale but most of its 78 songs are three minutes or less. In some of them, Anderson shows off a bit of tech she’s fabricated: for “Small Voice,” a violin recorded onto a cassette is modulated via a speaker tucked inside her mouth. In “Reverb,” she turns her skull into a drum, amped by a microphone strung across a pair of Joe Cool sunglasses. As with much of the album, Anderson’s sight gags are missing, but the sounds stand on their own. She’s in charge, both carnival barker and star of the freak show. She’s Reagan promising ingenuity will save us, but she’s also Cassandra: In “New York Social Life,” she portrays a series of alienated hipsters with only their answering machines as shoulders to cry on. “Closed Circuits”, a love song to oil, stretches out and stays a little longer as the Voice of Authority longs for “long black streams of that dark electric light” pumping from the ground. The track ends with a brag and a threat: “We can change the dark into the light,” he purrs, “and vice versa.” The apocalypse is never far away, and it is manmade. In the terrifying “Finnish Farmers,” she recounts a confusion between grain and missile silos in a clipped, bureaucratic voice above a nauseating clatter worthy of Throbbing Gristle. And a harrowing, 11+ minute version of “O Superman” slowly melts down into wintry flute and birdsong.
Anderson keeps things moving, as if doomsday was just a bad dream in a road-trip hotel room. In hushed but confident tones, she offers travel stories with a postcard’s economy: going to France and wondering if the babies judge her fluency; going to China and watching another artist mistakenly tell locals that Americans regularly commute to Heaven. But she can’t outrun fate. In “The Language of the Future,” the Voice of Authority gets on a plane that almost crashes and meets a teenager who speaks in “a kind of high-tech lingo” he barely understands. It’s the “language of the on-again/off-again/future,” he realizes, “and it is digital.” In a moment that feels like, among other things, hope, the girl doesn’t even notice that he doesn’t understand.
United States Live charts this uncertain digital future with analog tools. Even the sole digital instrument, the Synclavier Sampler Ann DeMarinis uses to chop Anderson’s voice into soft pads of percussion, is used rather like a hand drum. Vocal samples ripple across “Blue Lagoon” as if the radioactive waves of “O Superman” have been washed clean by cool seas; an opera singer offers human reflections of them while Anderson and her band build a bed to dream in. Big Science highlight “Born, Never Asked” is an amniotic ooze of synth and strings that seems to ricochet off hand claps; live, it’s a freak-out so groovy you can understand why Spiritualized covered it over a decade later.
Even her most traditional pop songs follow strange rules. “Language Is a Virus from Outer Space,” for example, begins with a chance observation—“I saw this guy on the train, and he seemed to have gotten stuck in one of those abstract trances”—which swells into alienation: “I wanted you…and I was looking for you…but I couldn’t find you.” Paranoia strikes: “Are you talking to me,” someone asks her, “…or are you just practicing for one of those performances of yours?” She escapes into pure sound, her band rising and falling through drum rolls and sax squalls at a clip that feels out-of-sync but stays in the pocket. It’s difficult music that’s easy on the ears. Throughout, Anderson’s razor-sharp editing keeps the solos from overstaying their welcome. It also affords jokes about a Stonehenge made of wood called Woodhenge grins instead of groans.
United States Live peaks with a definitive version of “Big Science.” Arriving like a stranger into town with a song in her heart and a clippity-clop beat, Anderson sketches what she sees. Like Reagan, she’s a virtuoso with her voice, telling wild stories in matter-of-fact ways. She sees a society and its reflection. “And they all say: Hallelujah. Yodelayheehoo.” The thrill of technology. The thrall of faith. And the frontier spirit, civilizer and colonizer. For Anderson, America is awe-inspiring. It prompts wonder and dread in equal measure—which, perhaps, is the only equality to be found. Reagan’s awe was a weapon; for Anderson, it’s fuel.
You can hear the awe ignite BAM in 1983. You can hear it powering the kind of techno genderfuck that Prince harnessed in his Camille phase and which traveled over the waters to Fever Ray and SOPHIE and Planningtorock. You can hear it in Anderson’s resolve to simply, wryly, speak her mind, a practice revived today by Cassandra Jenkins and Dry Cleaning. You can hear it in the ambivalent epics of Owen Pallett and the sci-fi self-mythologizing of Janelle Monáe. Anderson’s American awe is world-building, an atlas and instruction manual, a book of fables and a songbook of new American standards. It’s a saga that begins with the patriarchy asking a female artist if she wants to go home and ends with her saying that she already knows the way. It’s an album almost five hours long that leaves you wanting more. And it offers an answer to how to live in America: feel the awe. And with it, make something of use.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-07-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warner | July 4, 2021 | 8.6 | bf18fb92-ee24-48a6-b3eb-62db8f05e519 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On the Philly-via-Allentown band's fourth LP, Pissed Jeans trust in the power of honesty in Matt Korvette's lyrics while dropping the musical defense mechanisms that may once have kept listeners at a distance. It's headbanging music that allows you to nod feverishly in agreement. | On the Philly-via-Allentown band's fourth LP, Pissed Jeans trust in the power of honesty in Matt Korvette's lyrics while dropping the musical defense mechanisms that may once have kept listeners at a distance. It's headbanging music that allows you to nod feverishly in agreement. | Pissed Jeans: Honeys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17581-honeys/ | Honeys | If you're into Pissed Jeans' music because you relate to it, well, Matt Korvette is sorry it's come to this. Call it Commiseration Rock: Over the past decade, the Philly-via-Allentown band has occupied a very specific niche, making violent, shout-along sludge punk about situations that find men at their wimpiest and most impotent. In Pissed Jeans' songs, men (typically Korvette himself) go bald, can no longer shop happily at Whole Foods, take solace in ice cream, are beleaguered at work, and baffled by women.
Those are very real concerns that nonetheless foster a dangerous perspective from which to create art: It's basically responsible for the rash of deplorable "manxiety" sitcoms, which take the defensive and view any deviance from a false ideal of "father knows best" society as a threat to God's natural order. Typically, you'd say there's a "delicate balance" to be struck with this kind of stuff. On Honeys, Pissed Jeans' fourth and best album, they wisely make no such distinction, trusting the power of honesty in Korvette's lyrics while dropping the musical defense mechanisms that kept listeners at a distance-- it's headbanging music that allows you to nod feverishly in agreement.
So, no more seven-minute dirges about car troubles, no spoken word odes to scrapbooking. That's not to say Pissed Jeans have gone soft on us. You'll get your fill of terror by the second track, as "Chain Worker" is three minutes of free-time, squalling feedback surrounding Korvette's screams about a tortured office drone drinking until he cries blood. Otherwise, it's 10 songs (and a brief interlude) that take after the delirious opener "Bathroom Laughter" in concision and purpose. Nearly everything could pass for "the single"-- edge-of-sanity tantrums that make for great singalongs because the chorus is either an exasperated yell or just the song title. Without sacrificing visceral force, Pissed Jeans allow themselves enough versatility to keep Honeys intense and interesting throughout, fashioning a loser's history of alt.rock that honors some of the most abrasive bands to get a deal post-Nevermind; the cruel swing of Jawbox ("You're Different (In Person)"), the Melvins' mammoth plod ("Male Gaze"), Nirvana themselves going very ape ("Vain in Costume"), and of course, plenty of the Jesus Lizard's warped machismo.
The spirit of the music alone positions them as top-flight AmRep revivalists, though the relatively clean production makes them sound a little less faithful than labelmates METZ. But this is a necessary decision, as Korvette is a frontman who is trying to communicate with the listener, not just be a part of the abrasive din. Honeys is the most concentrated and consistent display of what Korvette does best. He's reliably quotable largely because his deadpan literalism allows him to be funny without aspiring to cleverness, and lets the ridiculousness of his actions and those of others speak for themselves: a chemically processed, preservative-laden frozen meal calls itself "Healthy Choice," a stick figure family decal on a car proudly boasts one's humility, the friendly "ding" accompanying an incoming email reveals the death of a coworker, a lazy boyfriend who thinks his girl should appreciate the effort it takes for him to say "let's do it."
In the past, it was easy enough to applaud Pissed Jeans simply for being so overtly topical in a genre that rarely has much to say-- to think, "Oh, a doom metal song about getting a massage, good one." While it's clear what each song is specifically about on Honeys, whether that's online dating or cat allergies, they're all essentially dealing with the same thing in a larger sense; the guilt of recognizing the frivolity of your problems and the compounded guilt of recognizing how powerless you are over these stupid things.
"Cafeteria Food" is closest to the perfect Pissed Jeans song in terms of aligning those two threads. The hollowed-out thud of the kick drum and guitar mirrors how, on the wrong day, a walk down the hallway at work can feel like a death march. It contains the album's best one-liners; upon finding out a shithead project manager has died, Korvette feels "like I've won the Super Bowl," "like Jesus Christ, our savior," and in a line inspired by guitarist Brad Fry's viewing of Maury, "like I'm not the father." If it were just an *Office Space-*style revenge fantasy, I doubt it would hold up to many listens. There's something more devious at play; notice that Korvette doesn't screw his enemy's wife on his desk, he doesn't take a baseball bat to his fax machine, he doesn't tell him and his fantasy team to fuck off. This is a subtler, dark humor-- here's a guy whose hatred has rendered him so feeble, he's resorted to the futility of begging for divine intervention, resigned to the fact that he'll probably have to make small talk with the same guy in the lunchroom today, tomorrow, and the day after that: "Go ahead, you can use the microwave/ It's an excellent kitchen tool."
Honeys hits hard and it also stings as it fully explores how lives are driven by fear and the sad little power plays we make to clutch any bit of control. The last two songs are on seemingly different planes: On "Health Plan", Korvette refuses to take shit or (any helpful medical advice) from doctors, and later disappears into his DVD collection on "Teenage Adult". But they're both unflinching looks at how people frame their willingness to endanger their wellbeing as principles rather than serious denial. This is even more pronounced on the "relationship" songs; far from an Al Bundy homage, the laughs of "Romanticize Me" are uncomfortably triggered by the acknowledged, pathetic co-dependency where one person refuses to change, the other refuses to leave, and you sit at dinner with the couple wondering how they ever found each other attractive. "You're Different (In Person)" is similar in that it doesn't deconstruct social media so much as let it speak for its own devolutionary power; from the excitement of setting up that perfect profile to the realization that the internet allows shut-ins an even higher level of deceit, manipulation, and stunted emotions than "real life." When Korvette yells, "I thought this was meant to be fun!" he outlines the sad truth that most people aren't different in person.
The cartoonish brutality of the music is fun as hell, and since Korvette is most often mocking himself during Honeys, it doesn't come off as hectoring. This is extremely important on "Male Gaze". Most often, songs by men decrying misogyny try to speak on behalf of all men (or all women, really), and turn into condescension. It might help that "Male Gaze" takes the most caricatured, simian path musically, but Korvette simply acknowledges the unintended consequences of his actions ("It's when a smile becomes a stare/ And it starts to burn") and apologizes. He doesn't ask for or assume forgiveness, he doesn't place himself on a pedestal and he doesn't indict his entire gender so you might think more highly of him. Korvette artlessly mutters, "I know I'm no angel/ But I'm trying to kill it," admitting to progress in a way that's more powerful than feigning perfection.
Pissed Jeans can often be mistaken for a misanthropic band, especially since Hope for Men and King of Jeans came equipped with enough self-sabotage to keep their underdog status intact. But when I call it "Commiseration Rock", it's because Honeys focuses on dealing with other people to an extent that's extremely rare. Not "how to deal with people"-- Honeys is thankfully not a treatise, not a moral code, not a series of op-ed pieces trying to convert you to Korvette's point of view, and it acknowledges that the zero-sum games of "fuck the man" punk idealism don't work for most people who have real jobs and bills. It's just a kickass rock record that presents Korvette in a way most of us can relate to, a guy trying to blow off steam after another exhausting, barely successful attempt to not be an asshole one day at a time. | 2013-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 11, 2013 | 8.1 | bf2221b8-46c7-4e28-bb81-aaca458bf8cd | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The former hyperpop star’s new album is refreshingly warm and musical, characterized by an unvarnished left-field funkiness lacking in her online contemporaries. | The former hyperpop star’s new album is refreshingly warm and musical, characterized by an unvarnished left-field funkiness lacking in her online contemporaries. | quinn: quinn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quinn-quinn/ | quinn | quinn must have whiplash. She’s spent her short career madly oscillating between extremes—only a few months into the pandemic lockdown, she mushroomed from having a few thousand fans to being crowned hyperpop’s forever-queen. But after that sudden assault of unwanted expectations, she disappeared and deleted her old music on SoundCloud. Then, equally abruptly, she returned with a debut album, swiftly followed by a mixtape she said was made during the worst period of her life. Through it all, she’s remained holed up in her bedroom, creating at least nine projects across her many pseudonyms in the last two years.
It’s easy to forget she’s only 17—a high schooler. But after all that tumult, quinn may have finally broken free. “I’m in a new place/I’m in a new light/I’m where I’ve always wanted to be,” she sings on “pdwnth” from her new album quinn, her voice curling when she says “be” like honeysuckle bending toward the sun. She’s never sounded more serene. Gliding over soft bass guitar and electric piano, she sings blithely about being faded and dehydrated, about being the shit and knowing it: “Who is she?/Bitch, I’m me/The first prodigy you ever seen, seventeen.”
quinn is her least hyperactive and glossy project to date. It arrives at a peculiar moment, when the internet music scene she came from feels increasingly overrun with lookalikes deploying the same ultra-shiny synths, same Main Character song structures, same windswept emo mewls. Against that context of done-to-death hyperpop, quinn is refreshingly warm and musical, full of little confessions and self-reflections that don’t monopolize your attention. Instead of pop hooks or electronic explosions, there’s bright guitar and tight yet relaxed drums. It has an unvarnished left-field funkiness that’s hard to pinpoint, similar to but not quite like Toro y Moi’s dissipated grooves, Slauson Malone’s sound-mosaics, or Dean Blunt’s genre-flummoxing anarch-art. It almost feels outside of time, with ’70s echoes—jazz-fusion, a lumbering funk rhythm, soulful singing—rubbing against chopped-up sound shards and processed vocals.
quinn produced, wrote, and arranged everything here, an impulse clearly aligned with her desire to be beholden to no vision except her own. To that point, her releases don’t bend to coherent shapes; they feel more like a dramatic disgorging from a peripatetic teen too curious to keep it all in. Recall how her debut, drive-by lullabies, skittered between twee pop and ambient, glitch-rap and facemelting bass. Or peep this year’s i’m going insane, an unrestrained torrent of draft-dump aural adventures from serrated rap to spoken-word SoundCloud poems to ultra-dreamy sample flips. quinn has the same thrillingly unscripted energy as before but this time it’s more focused, like flipbooking through someone’s brain. Smooth rapping and rhythm loops crash into noise; an almost tear-eliciting apology to a friend dissolves into a baleful bass rampage where quinn talks about invading an unnamed man’s house and stealing his identity, without proffering any explanation or context for any of those actions.
This album is slightly tighter than her debut—16 songs in just 32 minutes—which makes it feel dizzying and disjointed at times, especially during the middle, when the creepypasta-core bass mystery “i see you” spirals into radiantly quaint indie and then a vaporous void of synth. “food 4 thot” is maybe the tape’s weirdest. It microwaves a sample of a man rambling about the fifth dimension over a synth that evokes an anthropomorphic trumpet slumped on a bench, blowing morosely into the dusk, its plaintive wails buried under the scuffle of evening traffic. The wide sweep of textures on display mirrors the breadth of emotions—there are moments of frustration, elation, and affection, although most prevalent is earnest self-confidence. “warm and fuzzy” spotlights quinn as she ponders why she doesn’t feel comfortable showing her music to others, which is common in internet music scenes, where artists often trade files on Discord. Reaching the conclusion that “all you can really do is know yourself,” quinn decides to have fun and not “give a fuck if it’s ass.” The song ends with a silly, sweet detuned synth—the sounds agree with her.
Listening to quinn, I can’t help but contrast its more self-assured tone with some of the artist’s earliest music, dominated as it was by brutal throbs of cold loneliness. It was a feeling many of us experienced during the early pandemic. Yet maybe because of quinn’s lack of an adult’s emotion-guarding filter, the melancholy felt so much more visceral in her young voice: “It must be nice to have something to live for," she cried plainly on “mbn,” one of her first hits, a touching song about having no friend group and feeling left out. “I just want something to live and strive for.”
Fast forward two and a half years, and it feels almost like she’s answering her past self on quinn when she hurls commanding lines like, “I’m exclusive, motherfucker” and “You ain’t never, in your life, heard some shit like this.” She’s still working through anxieties like impostor syndrome and sharpening her sound, further removing herself from the rapidly homogenizing center of hyperpop. But now there’s a sense of earned optimism, of a better future to be had. quinn has a plan, she promises us on the luxurious, top-down-breezy highlight “please don’t waste my time.” The road ahead is newly smooth; all the whiplash that came with her twisty rise is fading in the rearview. | 2022-07-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | DeadAir | July 25, 2022 | 7.9 | bf228473-b666-44db-83cc-19aed2628eb4 | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
On singer-songwriter Zachary Cale's fourth album, Blue Rider, you're forcefully reminded that acoustic solo music is only as simple as you make it. It's a misty, gorgeous collection, offering a space that feels wonderful to roam around in. | On singer-songwriter Zachary Cale's fourth album, Blue Rider, you're forcefully reminded that acoustic solo music is only as simple as you make it. It's a misty, gorgeous collection, offering a space that feels wonderful to roam around in. | Zachary Cale: Blue Rider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18807-blue-rider/ | Blue Rider | The first thing beckoning you towards Blue Rider is its atmosphere—spacious, cool, distant. Zachary Cale's mesmerizing finger-picking, drawing on open-string drone and country blues tunings, wanders restlessly around a clean, well-lit place of a mix, synths humming like 3am refrigerators and chiming guitars confusing your sense of middle distance. It is a misty, gorgeous record, a space that feels wonderful to roam around in.
The second is the delicacy and exquisite loneliness of Cale's guitar playing. He has said in interviews that he'd rather not be aligned with folk music—"To me, folk music is something sacred, something that people today don’t have any business singing," he told the blog Underneath This in March—but the virtues of his playing are folk virtues, especially the ability to serve as his own rhythm section. Every one of Blue Rider's songs appears to feature at least three guitarists simultaneously; it's all Cale, working live. You are forcefully reminded, listening the counter-layers of something like "Hold Fast" or "Wayward Son", that acoustic solo music is only as simple as you make it.
At the center of the crystalline tangle sits Cale, a singer-songwriter who's been hiding in plain sight for awhile*—Blue Rider* is his fourth album. He's less quizzically arch than Destroyer, less cryptically moody than Cass McCombs. But there is a similar inscrutable poetry in his music, and the impassive Blue Rider is his most beguiling collection. He has some of Bejar's vocal timbre and some of McCombs's tilted-dog's-head relationship to language: The way that McCombs asked, teasingly, "What does it mean to be a man?" repeatedly on "Big Wheel" is the way that Cale sings lines like "Lover, for you my heart beats strong." He speaks them haltingly, as if he is testing the words in his mouth as much as he is puzzling over their meanings.
Cale sings these lines through a half-closed mouth, his consonants blurring into the soft curves of the sound, which means that a wry line like "Well, the past is still the past, he can visit anytime/ Nothing's really changed except a few road signs" ("Hold Fast") might initially slide past you unnoticed. But Cale's imagery flashes sharp and dreamlike across his songs once you tune to it—"Shadows walk across a jagged sky," he sings on "Hangman's Letters", a dark, alarming image. On "Noise Of Welcome", he muses "What does it mean to die in my dreams?" It's a question with a day-tripper's ring to it, but Cale has built the perfect environment for languorous thoughts like this. Blue Rider is short—eight songs, 35 minutes—but it slows everything down around it while's playing, coaxing half-formed feelings out of their corners and giving them space to exist. | 2013-12-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-12-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Electric Ragtime | December 12, 2013 | 7.9 | bf22a6fc-d593-40ca-9256-65ca3f15fcd4 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Working with cello, digital processing, and field recordings, the New York composer creates a gripping ode to the dynamism of nature and the beauty of transformation. | Working with cello, digital processing, and field recordings, the New York composer creates a gripping ode to the dynamism of nature and the beauty of transformation. | MIZU: Forest Scenes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mizu-forest-scenes/ | Forest Scenes | On stage, experimental cellist MIZU handles her instrument more like a dance partner than a hunk of curved wood. She stands, knees slightly bent, twirling and swaying her cello by the neck, occasionally stretching out her foot to set off an effects pedal. “It’s almost like a ballet,” MIZU told New Sounds host John Schaefer last year, suggesting that her expressive maneuvering of the cello, and her ability to undulate alongside it, might be stifled if she sat and played in a more conventional manner. The classically trained musician can’t help but tweak tradition: While studying at Juilliard, MIZU was more intrigued by modernist composers Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt than wigged titans like Mozart and Bach. She ultimately grew frustrated “playing the same Beethoven sonata that 1,000 other cellists across the world play with equal facility,” as she recalled to Schaefer.
Meeting guitarist and composer Rachika Nayar in Brooklyn’s queer party scene cracked open new possibilities for MIZU after college. Nayar taught her how to warp her instrument with electronics. On her 2023 debut, Distant Intervals, MIZU tracked cello phrases in her closet before layering, looping, and manipulating them digitally. On her new LP Forest Scenes, MIZU inverts the technique, composing high, shining arches of cello around digital dissonance and field recordings that capture the chatter and roar of the woods. Teeming with texture—whispered phrases, dry foliage, dial-up distortion—the gripping 37-minute instrumental is an ode to transformation. Frequently gorgeous, at times unsettling, Forest Scenes is constantly in flux.
MIZU was initiating a process of gender transition while writing Forest Scenes, and elements of growth and change are ingrained within her pieces. On the slithering “Pavane,” tremulous strands of cello twist together like vines in a time-lapse video, while a convention of birds confabs in the trees. Though distinct, these elements seem to sprout from the same ecosystem, and each additional detail enriches the landscape, be it belching bowed strings, plucked melodies, or staccato breath darting around the perimeter.
On Distant Intervals, MIZU ornamented her neoclassical playing with electronic flourishes. But the jungle racket and harsh digital passages of Forest Scenes—which were recorded before MIZU even picked up a bow—are structurally and thematically vital to each song. On “Pump,” crisp twigs and leaves snap underfoot before yielding to MIZU’s insistent, almost nagging loops of cello. As the piece crescendos and tapers, the forest footsteps reemerge, their crunching turned to sloshing, as if entering a shallow brook. This slight detail suggests an entire journey.
MIZU’s range as a composer, producer, and player feels far more developed on her second album. She can make her strings bellow like a bass clarinet (“Rinse”) or tremble in a high-pitched vibrato (“Flutter”). Her handling of software feels more fearless as well; on “Enter,” she dispatches eerie snippets of croaking, sizzling, and spurts of percussion before introducing any melody. Commissioning drum samples from New York composer Concrete Husband, MIZU has also crafted her most jarring piece yet: “prphtbrd” sounds like tech breakdown incarnate. Picture an arcade full of malfunctioning Atari kiosks. MIZU’s placement of “prphtbrd” just before the poignant 11-minute closer “Realms of Possibility” might be a comment on the constant threat of collapse—and the beauty of resurrection. | 2024-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | April 1, 2024 | 7.7 | bf2897fb-5a74-4ae2-bac1-28bd45976f37 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The fullest solo album yet from the Big Thief guitarist is an earnest ode to getting lost. | The fullest solo album yet from the Big Thief guitarist is an earnest ode to getting lost. | Buck Meek: Haunted Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buck-meek-haunted-mountain/ | Haunted Mountain | “Cyclades” is the sort of song Buck Meek could spend the rest of his life writing. A rollicking country-rock rambler, it opens with a verse about Meek’s father crashing a motorcycle into an elk and ends with his parents magically surviving a head-on collision with a truck. There’s no connection between those stories, aside from being unbelievable—something even Meek mentions: “They said, ‘You made that all up’/When I retold their story recently.” The chorus provides no commentary other than, “There’s too many stories to remember.” Meek isn’t throwing up his hands in frustration, but expressing a sense of wonder at how many experiences make up a life. It’s easy to imagine him adding new stories and new verses to “Cyclades” as he gets older and gathers more experiences.
Meek, who is better known as the guitarist for Big Thief than as a solo artist, specializes in a philosophical strain of songwriting, one that is still personal but not necessarily confessional. His songs aren’t merely vessels for stories, but prompts for reminiscences, tools to stir up the dust in the darker corners of his mind. Haunted Mountain, his third solo album, is full of songs about getting lost and finding yourself, about the pleasure of disorientation and the new perspective reorientation can bring. He gets lost in memories, in daydreams. He gets lost on a mountain, in the eyes and kisses of a lover. Meek sings the title track like he’s lost his way and is happier for it: “Now that I live here on this haunted mountain/I know I’m never coming down.” He co-wrote the song with fellow Texan Jolie Holland, who was inspired by Mount Shasta in northern California, but really that haunted mountain could be anywhere in “this green land.”
Meek’s guitar is always closely attuned to vocals, whether his own or Adrianne Lenker’s. He rarely calls attention to himself, but he values texture and complementary rhythms over big riffs or lightning licks. In the past his songs have rambled, mostly foregoing verse-chorus-verse in favor of stream-of-consciousness. Perhaps due to Holland’s contributions, Haunted Mountain is his fullest and most structured album. He and his band amble through these songs with… well, not more purpose or focus, which are anathema to getting lost. But listen to the coda of “Didn’t Know You Then,” which stretches out before losing its way. There’s a joy in the aimlessness of that ending, in not knowing where the music is taking them.
Meek has described Haunted Mountain as a collection of love songs, about half of which he wrote about his relationship with the person who became his wife. He can be insightful in this mode, as on “Secret Side,” when he realizes he must let her grieve rather than comfort her. In its direct expression of a hard truth, the song sounds indebted to Big Thief’s recent tourmate, Lucinda Williams. Elsewhere, his sentiments are sweet yet overly scripted, which makes it hard to get truly lost in the music. “Paradise” sounds like it’s based on a bad pickup line: “Tell me about living in the afterlife,” he sings, because he sees “heaven in your eyes.” On “Didn’t Know You Then,” Meek maps out their relationship in kisses: “Our first kiss felt like home/With tears in our eyes/And now, one thousand kisses later/Each one feels like the first time.” It’s dreamy and romantic, but it doesn’t sound like an actual lived experience or even an unbelievable story. It sounds like something you’d hear in a love song. | 2023-08-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | 4AD | August 22, 2023 | 7.2 | bf2cd9dd-e819-4060-a7ec-951f0e400194 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
For the last decade, Glenn Jones has taken a craftsperson's approach to the guitar and the banjo, issuing a sterling but rarely surprising string of records that find him telling stories and sharing vulnerabilities sans bells or whistles, his voice or his band. Fleeting, his latest, feels familiar, comfortable, welcome. | For the last decade, Glenn Jones has taken a craftsperson's approach to the guitar and the banjo, issuing a sterling but rarely surprising string of records that find him telling stories and sharing vulnerabilities sans bells or whistles, his voice or his band. Fleeting, his latest, feels familiar, comfortable, welcome. | Glenn Jones: Fleeting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21777-fleeting/ | Fleeting | The network of exceptional solo acoustic guitarists that emerged during the last decade has proven to be a restless bunch. In recent years, William Tyler went full electric, even recruiting a full backing band. Steve Gunn has morphed into an accomplished singer-songwriter, now fronting an outfit that resides in the borderlands of cosmic country and psychedelic rock. Cian Nugent sings these days, as does James Blackshaw. Six Organs of Admittance turned toward folk-rock and, more recently, savagely electric systems music. This pattern isn't surprising or without precedent, of course—Fahey, Bull, Basho, and Kottke never sat still with six unamplified strings, either.
Not so with the guitarist, scholar, and erstwhile bandleader Glenn Jones: For the last decade, Jones, several decades older than the lot that's emerged in the new millennium, has taken a craftsperson's approach to the guitar and the banjo, issuing a sterling but rarely surprising string of records that find him telling stories and sharing vulnerabilities sans bells or whistles, his voice or his band. It's as though he cycled through enough zany ideas during his time in the wild group Cul de Sac for a lifetime. He is now the six-string analogue of The New Yankee Workshop's Norm Abram, more obsessed with making work that will last than work that will momentarily stun.
Every two or three years since his solo debut in 2004, Jones has issued another set of quiet reflections that, taken together, suggest stacks of letters mailed from an old friend—thoughts on what has hurt him and what has given him hope, where he's been and what he's learned. On 2013's My Garden State, written while he cared for his aging and ailing mother at home, listeners shared in his sweet sadness; on the new Fleeting, dedicated to his late mother, he reflects on her life and death, the wonder of a newborn baby, and shifts in the season and scenery. It all feels familiar, comfortable, welcome.
If technique is your thing, Fleeting, like all Jones records, is a master class. His tunings are counterintuitive and mesmerizing; his use of partial capos and muted strings is novel and intriguing. But to Jones' great credit, those only feel like tools for telling stories. “Mother's Day” is a bittersweet ode to memories and mortality. When Jones lets the high strings sparkle, he seems to smile at some fond recollection; elsewhere, he digs deep into low, moody chords, as if sighing at the fact that those moments are stuck forever in the past. The album's finale, “June to Soon, October All Over,” is brilliantly composed, with the harmonies between the strings shimmering like late-afternoon sunlight on a lake and the slowly building structure suggesting a slowly opening flower. Jones slides smoothly down the guitar's neck and picks every nuance from every chord, but this feels more like a confession than a demonstration.
Indeed, every song on Fleeting carries its own emotional resonance. Written for an infant, the banjo miniatures “Cléo Awake” and “Cléo Asleep” are tender lullabies, with friendly, staccato phrases that seem to mimic a child's guileless laughter. Taken together, they barely break the three-minute mark, but the brevity feels like an ellipsis, an affirmation of the child's infinite possibilities. The slow, staggering “In Durance Vile” is Jones at his most irascible. He nods toward the blues as he slides between half-muted chords, and he slinks in cycles of notes that seem suspended in the doldrums. For four minutes, Jones' quiet despair becomes your own, his worry your worry. Then, the banjo of “Cléo Awake” trickles in, and everything is right with and bright in the world again.
All told, Fleeting isn't as distinct or as instant as its predecessors, particularly Jones' 2011 masterpiece, The Wanting. But as Jones' collection builds, making astonishing albums seems to be less and less the point. Instead, Jones is chronicling the stories of his life and sharing them in an honest, open way, as if he's invited you to pull up a chair for a conversation by the fire. You get to know him not as a technician but as a person, perfectly content to get better at expressing himself with five or six strangely tuned strings. | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B / Rock | Thrill Jockey | April 1, 2016 | 7.2 | bf2ee31c-c642-4795-9014-4bbfa53298f4 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
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