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Inspired by a love of fantasy and cartoons, the rapper’s debut full-length is simultaneously playful and sincere, confident and anxious. | Inspired by a love of fantasy and cartoons, the rapper’s debut full-length is simultaneously playful and sincere, confident and anxious. | tobi lou: Live on Ice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tobi-lou-live-on-ice/ | Live on Ice | Animation offers the freedom to escape the self, to explore one’s contours from the outside. Last year, across three EPs—tobi lou and the Moon, tobi lou and the Loop, and tobi lou and the Juice—the Chicago-raised, LA-based rapper tobi lou strove to inhabit an animated universe. Each release featured a cartoon version of lou on its cover. He wrote songs inspired by the fantasy series Adventure Time and Sailor Moon. Even the glittery plastic stars lou often wears at the corners of his eyes seem like remnants of a cartoon alter-ego transferred into the real world.
On his debut album Live on Ice, lou’s suspended reality manifests in songs about feeling caught in the middle: between youth and maturity, playfulness and sincerity, confidence and anxiety. He works from a toolkit of synthetic, ringing tones whose constancy counters the album’s unwieldy length. But across 21 tracks tinged with the diaristic influence of SoundCloud rap, his wavering sometimes devolves into ambivalence. When the occasional string swell or slow guitar strum emerges, the combination suggests pause music, the kind a video game avatar idles to while the player is away.
But the ambient instrumentation can work when paired with lou’s stream-of-consciousness flows. On “I Was Sad Last Night I’m OK Now,” he repeats the titular lyric and asks: “You ever been so hungry you just lay down?/You ain’t even eat, you just went to sleep, just so you could dream about some takeout?” Times may be lean now, but lou’s twinkling synths and conversational delivery are a simple lesson in feeling better tomorrow. There are several such moments when he allows listeners to see past the fantasy and into his real world. On “That Old Nu-Nu,” he confides, “I’m told that my mother hates rappers,” before addressing his mother directly: “Mama, I hope this isn’t too rapper-ish.” It’s a playful moment with an aura of real significance: He just wants to make his mom proud.
Most of the time, though, lou sounds far more unsure of his abilities. On opener “100 Degrees,” he wonders: “I don’t know if it’s really me talking or if it’s just a ventriloquist.” Later, on “Berlin/Westside,” he promises, “I’m still me, just rearranged.” In spite of his self-awareness, Live on Ice frequently lingers on the wrong side of the line between tongue-in-cheek and cheesy. “Humpty Dumpty” aims for OutKast’s quirky panache and lands on bad egg puns; “Like My Mom” strikes an uncomfortable balance between adoring and overzealous. Narrating a romantic rejection, lou sings: “She tried to call me ugly, but she just sounded dumb/’Cause goddamn, I look good like my mom.” The album is weakest when he fails to laugh at himself.
“Orange Reprise” splits the difference between sincerity and corniness. When the track begins, lou is struggling to ward off sadness, rapping about feeling “insubstantial” and changed for the worse (“Why’d I stop rockin’ flannels?”). Framed as a tribute to Frank Ocean’s genre-defying power, “Orange Reprise” has grand aspirations. But then comes a slide whistle solo, and an outro that sounds like a Wii theme music version of “Pure Imagination,” from the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory soundtrack. When tobi lou manages to make the two styles coalesce, they complement each other well. When he can’t, the fantasy seems out of reach. | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | August 8, 2019 | 6.5 | bf31b583-5c61-47fc-a0cf-71c766419b36 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
The TDE rapper’s sixth album is a daring feat that finds the sweet spot between comfort and anguish. It’s the rawest and most adventurous music of his career. | The TDE rapper’s sixth album is a daring feat that finds the sweet spot between comfort and anguish. It’s the rawest and most adventurous music of his career. | Schoolboy Q: Blue Lips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/schoolboy-q-blue-lips/ | Blue Lips | Schoolboy Q spends “Cooties,” the eighth track on his sixth studio album, Blue Lips, marveling at the dimensions of the box he’s put himself in. “I know the feeling of being trapped from all the things that you built,” he yelps before ping-ponging between the spoils and troubles of the last 13 years. He’s working through trauma while dealing with haters; relishing the “house on the hill” where his daughters play soccer and he puffs ganja in the vestibule, but also worrying about school shootings and memories of betrayal. These are the nightmares of the outside world for Black folks folding into the creature comforts afforded by his rap stardom, and the paranoia and pride fight for space in the staggered elegance of Q’s delivery over scuzzy bass and drum slaps. As a whole, Blue Lips viciously prods at this sweet spot between comfort and anguish.
If 2019’s CrasH Talk was the kickback where Q leisurely took stock of his position in life, then Blue Lips is a thumping raucous night out with the homies chased with a shot of existential dread. The album’s title refers to the phenomenon of being shocked into speechlessness, and over a decade into his journey, he remains shocked at all the fans, accolades, and prestige he’s racked up. But instead of the occasionally maudlin poolside reflection of CrasH Talk, Blue Lips fully embraces the dissonance of pairing the morose with the manic. Q sounds like he needs to get all his ideas out in case he won’t have the chance to do it again. Every side of the California rapper—the former Hoover Street Crip, the iced-out spitter, the horny golf-playing father of two—is given room to stretch and ruminate and stomp his way across the rawest and most adventurous music of his career.
More than any other Top Dawg Entertainment artist, Q has thrived on hairpin musical turns. 2014’s Oxymoron and 2016’s Blank Face LP, in particular, are constantly molting, revealing a delicate ear for sequencing that brings variety while helping the experience stick to the ribs. He may not reach the conceptual heights of a Kendrick, but he doesn’t need to. He’s supremely gifted at balancing party jams and grizzled storytelling tracks with cinematic flair. Blue Lips keeps that structure while being bolder and weirder. Songs like the Rico Nasty-featuring “Pop” end abruptly and smash cut into the next without warning; songs that have smoother mass-appeal tendencies grind up against unvarnished soul loops and trippy drum ’n bass freakouts. The slinking “Movie” is ceded entirely to LA rapper AzChike, who turns it into a creaking Cali street rap funhouse. Intro track “Funny Guy,” with its trilling flutes and technicolor guitars and choir, sounds more like an Avalanches B-side than anything a disciple of Kurupt or Suga Free might touch, yet here Q is, crooning about money bags, sex, and kicking rowdy fans out of venues. There’s a bracing, madcap quality to Blue Lips, proof that he still knows how to surprise listeners by folding off-kilter influences into head-nodders and rocket fuel.
Q spends the album shooting out sparks on the sides of the rails without ever letting the train tip over. Centerpiece “oHio” has its own three-act structure that flirts with the epic scale of prog. A grainy funk beat wafts in for the first third, as Q hints at near-death experiences before cutting to flexes about his AmEx and getting head in Paris. Just as quickly, he’s slinging jokes (“Nigga, your bitch got a negative ass!”) on a fast-paced synth beat that skirts into lounge-jazz territory where he and Freddie Gibbs trade barbs about the pitfalls of fame and marriage over a piano and saxophone waltz. All of this happens in the span of five minutes. The rush of styles, tones, and themes would overwhelm a lesser artist and render the whole song a broken, soupy mess. But Q holds court, grinning his way through the peaks and valleys.
The sheer amount of modes Q is capable of switching between remains astounding. But Blue Lips never feels gaudy or overly concerned with elegance. None of it sounds made for the golf course or for soirées at the beach house. These are aggressive, revealing, and occasionally messy songs about the intersection of success and the underlying hurt from a sordid past it’s often used to conceal. For every kick-in-the-door anthem like the cop-blasting “Pig Feet,” or the giddy look-at-me-now-ness of “Foux,” Q will spend a track like “Germany ‘86”—named for where and when he was born—reminiscing on his father abandoning his family and the street life he inherited as a result.
Ever the blunt lyricist, Q’s writing has become more curt across the board, making every flex about jewelry land with as much impact as probes into his self-confidence. A song like “Blueslides” is a microcosm of Q’s writing at its most economical, bending light wordplay about depression and desperation around wilting piano and trumpets. Its second verse features several bars chastizing listeners for turning their backs on Kanye West, crudely chalking up his last half-decade of controversy to a growing indifference toward mental health advocacy. Though it’s an oversimplification of many complicated issues (and plenty of ignorance and bigotry), the hurt behind the admission is real. In context, the bars highlight one of the album’s, and Q’s, greatest concerns: the struggles of having everything in the world and still not being able to outrun your problems.
Near the beginning of “Movie,” there’s a brief vocal sample taken from Ralph Bakshi’s 1975 cult classic Coonskin, and that film’s imperfect candy-colored bacchanalia might be the closest analogue for Blue Lips’s brand of chaos. Bakshi’s goal was to bring the pains, pleasures, and racism of 1970s inner cities to life in lurid detail. While Q’s ambitions aren’t that lofty, the album’s frenetic pacing and writing fit the mold all the same. A world’s worth of regret and fun is squeezed into just under an hour, and aside from a few hiccups—Devin Malik’s opening verse on the otherwise exhilarating “Back n Love” is a particularly harsh speed bump—hardly a second is wasted. It doesn’t just push Q past the crossroads he was at pre-pandemic, it reaffirms him as one of mainstream rap’s most engaging and daring stylists. Few MCs, on his label or elsewhere, are capable of firing in so many different directions and hitting this many targets at once without sounding out of their depth, but Q corrals the ups and downs of his lavish lifestyle into a deliriously entertaining joyride. | 2024-03-04T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-04T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment / Interscope | March 4, 2024 | 8.3 | bf377faa-65fe-4e6c-a95d-ac4b4928bb29 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Widowspeak take bits and pieces of rock, folk, and country history to make a pop Americana sound that feels antique. Whereas their first two records were dark and haunted, All Yours is all lightly shaken maracas, dreamy acoustic melodies, and getting so stoned the world feels like velvet. | Widowspeak take bits and pieces of rock, folk, and country history to make a pop Americana sound that feels antique. Whereas their first two records were dark and haunted, All Yours is all lightly shaken maracas, dreamy acoustic melodies, and getting so stoned the world feels like velvet. | Widowspeak: All Yours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20986-all-yours/ | All Yours | Widowspeak unabashedly and openly take bits and pieces of rock, folk, and country history to make a pop Americana sound that feels antique. The band’s last full-length, Almanac, showcased a lively, psychedelic strain of '70s rock'n'roll, and their following EP, The Swamps, was a bluesy, banjo-plucked ode to the Southeast. But Widowspeak's third record, All Yours, seems to strip away the group's hyper-referential past sound to something more sparse. All Yours is committed to a sunbaked, blissed-out pop rock sensibility that is noticeably lighter than their previous work. There’s no big concept here or specific inspiration behind it other than making something that sounds pretty and easy to listen to. And where there first two records were dark and haunted, filled with Morricone-style guitars, All Yours is all lightly shaken maracas, dreamy acoustic melodies, and getting so stoned the world feels like velvet.
Which isn’t to say this record is all feel-good music to string daisy chains together. Singer Molly Hamilton has said that for All Yours the band wanted to focus for the first time more on "writing songs about what we’re thinking," and you can hear that in the lyrics. From blaming the stars on "Cosmically Aligned", to being too young on "Girls", to not being able to read the lines in a palm well enough to know on "My Baby’s Gonna Carry On", the band runs vaguely through all the reasons why love can go to the wayside. The rollicking "Dead Love (So Still)" is a Fleetwood Mac wannabe, its jangly guitar almost masking the record’s most devastating inquiry. "Dead love, you’re so still," Hamilton sings. "Are you just sleeping in?"
There’s a sort of rolling movement to every track on All Yours, partly owed to Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’ steady and unfussy guitar work but mostly to their songwriting, which lays heavy on fleeing scenes. It's a road trip album, less for the heartbroken crowd and more for the heartbreakers (and every runaway and hitchhiker ditching a promise.) "You know that I’m always worried that I can never pay my debt," Earl Thomas sings for the first time on "Borrowed World". "Always feel like I’m running and they haven’t caught me yet."
Though it’s clear the band is refining their songwriting and getting more personal in the process, the record feels wilted instrumentally compared to their previous releases. All Yours has its gorgeous moments, but when you hear the band’s older tracks like Almanac’s "The Dark Age" or The Swamps' "Smoke and Mirrors", you have to wonder where that fiery spark went. Seems like Widowspeak is ghosting from something more than just an unpaid debt or an old flame, and it might be a step backward instead of forward for the duo. | 2015-09-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | September 7, 2015 | 6.8 | bf3910de-0e14-4208-a5c8-2df9ed32d688 | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
On his latest album, the singer-songwriter documents the tumultuous months of late spring and early summer 2020, occupying a sweet spot at the intersection of folk, punk, country, and Americana. | On his latest album, the singer-songwriter documents the tumultuous months of late spring and early summer 2020, occupying a sweet spot at the intersection of folk, punk, country, and Americana. | Austin Lucas: Alive in the Hot Zone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/austin-lucas-alive-in-the-hot-zone/ | Alive in the Hot Zone | Every artist unlucky enough to release an album in 2020 has faced an unenviable choice about whether or not to address a certain elephant in the room, whether or not they consider themselves to be a “political” outfit. They can either try to ignore the horrors of the current administration and chance coming off as out-of-touch or ignorant, or choose to tackle the Trump era head-on, and risk feeling dated after the next geopolitical shift (remember all those Rock Against Bush compilations? Me neither, and I was their target audience). For heartland folk-punk singer-songwriter Austin Lucas, though, it was never even a question. He even went a step further by choosing to document a specific section of a specific year—namely, the late spring and early summer months of 2020, when the initial burst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising spurred by the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor captivated the nation.
It was a move that felt entirely in character for Lucas, whose sound occupies a sweet spot at the intersection of folk, punk, country, and Americana. The Bloomington, Indiana-born artist has long sported a “This machine kills zombies” sticker on his guitar in a clear reference to Woody Guthrie’s warning to fascists, and is open about his own anti-fascist politics, as well as his background in the DIY punk scene. The punk delegation has historically tended to excel at this particular task ever since the Reagan era ushered in a generation of vital hardcore (Anti-Flag’s rollicking, venomous 20/20 Vision is an excellent contemporary example), and Lucas released an anti-fascist anthem of his own with “Already Dead,” the first single off his new album, Alive in the Hot Zone.
It has a poppy, anthemic feel that belies its sobering lyrical content. In just over three minutes, Lucas storyboards out the frustrating trajectory of slowly losing a loved one to the lure of fascist rhetoric, opening with the weary entreaty “Let’s talk, though we have nothing to say.” There are shades of Bruce Springsteen’s hangdog working-class malaise (as well as his stadium-filling sensibilities) tucked amidst the peppy chords, and Lucas nails the exasperated futility of a familiar conversation that was never going to go anywhere anyway.
“Already Dead” is one of ten songs that offer direct commentary from the troubadour’s perch in Mainz, Germany (where he unexpectedly found himself weathering the pandemic after a trip abroad turned into an extended lockdown). While most of the album keeps to an even keel, the dystopian “American Pyre” comes barreling in with a woozy surf-rock vibe, and the twangy, nostalgic “Shaking” was made for playing in a busted-up van on a trip through big sky country. In other tracks, he slows it down, as on “The Truth Is Supposed to Hurt,” a poignant slice of Rust Belt gothic Americana, or the sweet, lonesome dirge of “Anyone.” Lucas’ voice reaches unexpected heights on the delicate album closer “Holy Sparrow,” showcasing the upper reaches of an elastic vocal range that serves him well throughout but shines extra bright when he pushes it outside of his grittier comfort zone. (There must be something special about sparrows, because country icon Dolly Parton has been known to exhibit the same tendency).
Though it was made in the midst of a deadly pandemic while its creator was stranded far from home and worrying about the fascist creep at home, Alive in the Hot Zone is more than just a diary of the plague year. It’s an emotional plea for empathy from someone who’s weathered more than a few runs of bad luck and heartbreak himself, as well as a call for political action. Lucas has been in this particular game for over two decades, and has used that time wisely in honing his sound and carving out a unique niche. Americana, punk, and folk all attract their fair share of misfits, but there’s no one quite like him.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Cornelius Chapel | November 11, 2020 | 7.3 | bf489746-5f7a-480f-b9f5-fb756a51dadd | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
A new reissue shines a light on the Nigerian session player, who brought his Afro-rock heat and slick funk to British experiments with West African music in the ’70s. | A new reissue shines a light on the Nigerian session player, who brought his Afro-rock heat and slick funk to British experiments with West African music in the ’70s. | Remi Kabaka: Son of Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remi-kabaka-son-of-africa/ | Son of Africa | Musician Remi Kabaka, a Ghanaian-born Nigerian, first landed in London in the early 1960s, flourishing in the expat community’s Soho club scene and performing at joints like Club Afrique, where African bands rubbed shoulders with London’s writers, artists, and record collectors. Kabaka’s reputation as a percussionist and keyboard player brought him into hip circles; by the summer of 1969, he was flanking the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park for a elongated performance of “Sympathy for the Devil,” with an estimated crowd of as many as half a million.
At the time, veterans of Britain’s ’60s abduction of American blues and rock‘n’roll were seeking something new, something raw, which they found in West African sounds like Kabaka’s. He accepted session work with Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and Paul McCartney and Wings on the song “Bluebird” (Kabaka recorded his part in London, despite McCartney’s sojourn to Lagos to create most of Band on the Run). It was all enough to convince Island Records—perhaps seeking a fresh international voice to emulate the success it had with Bob Marley—to invest in a Kabaka solo record. As things turned out, Son of Africa, released in 1976, struggled to infiltrate a Britain infatuated with reggae and dub. But newly reissued by BBE, it remains a killer blend of Afro-rock, funk, psych, and soul, one that showcases this noted session man was ready to step out and lead a band.
For the recording, Kabaka called upon friends like Winwood; the Wailers’ Junior Kerr on guitar; bassist Jerome Rimson, who would go on to work with Van Morrison; and future Can collaborator Rebop Kwaku Baah on congas, among others. Yet from its first track, Son of Africa leaves no doubt about who the title refers to (though it possibly twins as an allusion to a prominent British abolitionist group of the 18th century). The song that bears Kabaka’s name is steeped in the sound of 1970s Nigeria, with chants of “Kabaka” and “kachunga,” which means creative and happy, punctuated by dynamic horns and funky guitars. “Wake up, do it, the new Afrobeat,” Kabaka sings ardently, his drumming crisp and propulsive. “Wake up, shake it, the funky, funky beat.” When things are this fun, lyrics are often best kept simple.
Son of Africa features the polished production values that many Afro-rock records recorded in the UK had at the time. Even popular West African artists like the Funkees and Joni Haastrup were entering British studios during this period and coming out with something a little more slick—a little more palatable for Western ears, perhaps—than some of the raw, fiery recordings they’d forged in their homeland. “Aqueba Masaaba” has disco-era guitars, pristine keys, and a rubbery bass. This sleeker style might not be how Lagos loyalists prefer things, but it’s impossible to deny that Kabaka’s funk workouts generate significant heat. Just feel the pop and snap of “Meteorite,” a sophisticated, high-end funk jam with brass solos, natty drum rolls, and cool harmonies.
The album is enamored with the angel-dusted sounds of ’70s American psych-funk too, tripping the strobe light fantastic on tunes like “Sure Thing.” The spirits of Bootsy Collins and Sly Stone circle the carefree, cosmic slop of “Future of a 1000 Years,” and it’s easy to picture Kabaka going into the booth to record the vocals to “New Reggae Funk” after listening to Curtis Mayfield’s There’s No Place Like America Today on repeat.
Son of Africa, of course, didn’t make Kabaka famous. He released a couple more solo albums under the name Aderemi Kabaka and continued to rack up sessions and touring credits with the likes of Paul Simon. These days, his London-based son, Remi Kabaka Jr., who provided the voice of Russel Hobbs in Gorillaz, also carries on his name and legacy. And now, this reissue has arrived to ensure his father’s position as an early innovator in blending Anglo-American and West African sounds is set in stone. | 2023-04-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BBE Music | April 27, 2023 | 7.4 | bf4e71a9-92b3-44ea-a252-5b070fd67cdd | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Amid the humble Florida rapper’s croons and raps about life and pain, there’s a unique voice that’s starting to emerge. | Amid the humble Florida rapper’s croons and raps about life and pain, there’s a unique voice that’s starting to emerge. | Lil Poppa: Blessed, I Guess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-poppa-blessed-i-guess/ | Blessed, I Guess | Lil Poppa probably wouldn’t mind if he didn’t get any more popular. From his music, you can tell that the Jacksonville rapper isn’t too interested in photo-ops with Johnny Dang or shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus. Those are just distractions. Mainly, you’re left with images of Poppa sitting alone in his room, fanning away smoke while praying that he can make his grandmother proud and hoping that the pain goes away. The glossy, fast-paced lifestyle of a rap superstar isn’t very appealing to Poppa. Rapping is more of a passion that became a job—there’s no doubt that he loves it, but at the same time, it’s what he has to do to make sure that his siblings and cousins get everything they want.
Over the 41-minute runtime of Blessed, I Guess, Poppa’s constantly second-guessing himself and asking: Am I doing enough? There’s no amount of drugs, money, or sex that can bring back his lost ones, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to ease his hurt. Poppa buries himself in work to make others happy; personal happiness feels all too distant for him. It’s only when his little brother tells him to “stop being humble” he realizes that with how much he’s spent on his siblings, he could’ve treated himself to something too.
Of the various schools “pain song”—NBA Youngboy’s blunt revenge letters, Rod Wave’s bluesy tales of struggle, and Rylo Rodriguez/NoCap’s punchline-heavy poetry—Poppa’s style most closely resembles Polo G’s clear-headed, meditative storytelling. It’s best on display with the twangy guitar of “It’s Alright Again” and somber “Chosen One, Pt. 2,” where every line might as well be followed with a dejected shrug. “My dawg hit my phone and said he losing hope/I say just stick to the plan, he say he losing focus/I be feeling the same way, like, will they ever notice,” he laments. It’s a style that incidentally courts rap traditionalists because of its emphasis on pensive songwriting and straightforward structures.
Admittedly, Poppa isn’t a fan of sitting down and writing out songs, which would make those same traditionalists suck their teeth. He prefers to record in short bursts as lines come to him, which gives his music a flip switch that allows it to go from a slow-rolled measure of talking straight into a head-turning outburst like “Mask On.” “When you write stuff, the whole song is liable to have the same flow,” he explained in an interview last year. “When you punching stuff in, freestyling, you got a chance to play with it… Be creative with it.”
The greatest successes on Blessed, I Guess come when Poppa sets up a hidden camera to find new angles. For a brief moment as the album reaches its climax, he’s no longer “Lil Poppa,” he’s “Ms. Barbara Grandson” and he’s narrating his own biography, flickering between backstabbing friends and the comforting ringtone he’s had since his childhood. The album’s wheels start to spin occasionally: Nearly every song is built on short loops of moody keys trying to become the backbone of a hit. But when those keys are combined with more interesting elements, like the soaring guitar solo of “Boys to Men,” it gives Poppa the chance to stretch his legs and show he can be explosive without losing any of the depth of his slower songs.
When he pushes out the words “I’m blessed,” on the title track, it sounds like he’s struggling to hold his chin up before sighing, “I guess.” It’s said with the enthusiasm of someone who just spent five minutes trying to blow a balloon up before watching it deflate and fly away in the wind. Poppa never finds the answer to his question: Am I doing enough?; He’s aware that no one can help him navigate the nuances of loss, envy, and responsibility, but he never turns hopeless, even when life’s discouraging.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rule #1 / Interscope | May 19, 2021 | 7.3 | bf65e16d-7ac6-44b0-a40b-b12be2c613e2 | Brandon Callender | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-callender/ | |
On her debut solo album under her own name, the Screaming Females frontperson reintroduces herself, placing the focus on her remarkable singing voice. | On her debut solo album under her own name, the Screaming Females frontperson reintroduces herself, placing the focus on her remarkable singing voice. | Marissa Paternoster: Peace Meter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marissa-paternoster-peace-meter/ | Peace Meter | Over the past 15 years, Marissa Paternoster has made a name for herself as the driving force behind New Jersey rock band Screaming Females and, occasionally, under the solo moniker Noun. The 35-year-old musician is as nimble as she is reckless when wielding her faithful G&L guitar, and her playing has ranged from heralded classic-rock riffs to the type of punk-indebted shredding that elicits blisters. This unbridled talent, however, isn’t the focus of Peace Meter. On her debut solo album under her own name, Paternoster bolsters the other core instrument that’s often left in the shadows: her voice.
When faced with a canceled tour at the start of the pandemic, Paternoster holed up in her grandmother’s house by herself and sent the skeleton of a song to Thou guitarist Andy Gibbs in hopes of fleshing out new ideas. That digital swap morphed into a regular long-distance collaboration and, over the span of several months, included two other musicians: Snakeskin’s Shanna Polley on backup vocals and Lung’s Kate Wakefield on cello. For much of her career, Paternoster’s trademark has been a guttural trill that verges on a warning sign, like a rattlesnake’s hiss before pouncing on its prey, that fits in whiplash punk songs and jittery pop-punk tracks alike. On Peace Meter, however, she softens her voice and the force at which she sings. Long vibratos billow and puff up, and the more she elongates them, the softer they become.
Album opener “White Dove” introduces this evolution in a little over four minutes. While a steady kick drum pounds in the distance, Paternoster sings about a white dove’s feathers soaking in blood and lets the vowels wobble as they leave her mouth. With each repetition of the refrain, she rounds out the edges of her vibrato until it becomes a soothing, meditative loop. Elsewhere, she uses minimalist 1980s synth pop as the groundwork for wistful vocal harmonies about a fractured relationship (“I Lost You”) and draws out her choir-like melody with riffs that descend like molasses (“Sore”). While there are flashes of her usual rock-adjacent songwriting, like on the snappy indie-rock single “Black Hole,” Paternoster often opts to replace her guitar solos with mellow vocal coos.
If Peace Meter at large serves as a reintroduction, then “Balance Beam” plays like Paternoster’s breathtaking entry into the gala ballroom. Subdued and elegant, the stripped-down ballad layers fingerpicked acoustic guitar with haunting cello and delicate vocal harmonies. Her vocal delivery recalls Grouper, and her pitch is lush and soft while bright enough to cut through the foggy drone. The song positions her voice as a meditative instrument, more suited for echoing through posh theaters than riling up fans in sweat-drenched venues. It’s the surprising pillar of a collection defined by its beautiful vocal performances and relaxed pace. The emotional effect rings just as loud as her heavier work, and it proves that Paternoster is far more than her six strings.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | December 7, 2021 | 7.1 | bf69398f-ee10-4d06-9bcb-1888e01bf62d | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
null | Whatever you like to call the Black Lips' particular branch of guitar rock-- garage, revival, their own "flower punk" tag-- it's an easier sell whenever the band in question is painted the fastest, craziest, or most depraved in the land. But it's long past time we put the band's reputation and ridiculous press aside and look at them for who they are; they're neither buffoons nor savants, and they deserve to be judged on their music, which was plenty maniacal without taking any outside factors into consideration. Now on the verge of a potential breakthrough-- maybe because of it, who | Black Lips: 200 Million Thousand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12702-200-million-thousand/ | 200 Million Thousand | Whatever you like to call the Black Lips' particular branch of guitar rock-- garage, revival, their own "flower punk" tag-- it's an easier sell whenever the band in question is painted the fastest, craziest, or most depraved in the land. But it's long past time we put the band's reputation and ridiculous press aside and look at them for who they are; they're neither buffoons nor savants, and they deserve to be judged on their music, which was plenty maniacal without taking any outside factors into consideration. Now on the verge of a potential breakthrough-- maybe because of it, who knows-- on 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.
Indeed, the cleaner sound and summery pop of Good Bad Not Evil has been ditched here for a psychedelic haze. From opening track "Take My Heart" onward, vocals are more obscured by echo, guitars play queasy, atonal leads, and the rhythm section pokes and ambles around the beat. Some tracks are subtly weird-- like the simmering breakdown of "Drugs", where the band's voices get not so much quieter as they do smaller-- and there's more full-on psychedelia on"Big Black Baby Jesus of Today", a Southern swamp shuffle drenched in toothache-inducing guitar bends and unhinged vocals. Closer "I Saw God" takes an already near-inscrutable ode to a minor drug epiphany and manipulates it with tape-masking and censoring "bleep" noises, before its full-band climax goes off less like a tidal wave of sound and more like someone falling over a drum riser. If there's beauty in imperfections, some of these songs are shrines.
No one's going to mistake this record for anyone but Black Lips, but they are stretching out as band here, pulling back their own tics in favor of things like style and tone. Vocal duties are spread more democratically among the band, and more styles are dabbled with, though they haven't moved the needle too far on the college radio dial. There's faux-innocent greaser-pop like "Drugs", some Byrdsian jangle added to the sobriety pledge of "Starting Over" ("while I'm still lucid... my wounds won't stop oozing"), and "Trapped in a Basement", a weirdly theatrical number that combines country twang with woozy keyboard tones. But before you say there are no surprises on the record, there's also a rap song: "The Drop I Hold" is a definite departure, though maybe not one as drastic as it first seems. The scratchy orchestral loop underneath that would be more appropriate for an early Wu-tang record, but Cole Alexander rap-sings its lyrics, sings its hook, wails like a ghost in the background in the same way they hit the high notes in "Trapped in a Basement", and even imitates a turntable scratch with childlike exuberance. It's as if he's singing along to a favorite song that existed already.
You could say the same about many of this band's best songs, and that's no criticism. They're obvious about their influences, but thankfully never fussy or precious about them. The results still hold something palpably reckless and earnest, refracting tradition through their own filthy lens. Black Lips haven't lost their lack for songcraft-- "Short Fuse" is so sleekly and effortlessly catchy that any disparate sound they graft onto it (paisley 60s pop, hammy piano hammering, an ancient B-movie whoosh) sticks by force of inertia. But whether or not Black Lips have changed their M.O. much, 200 Million Thousand is less consistent than any of their previous albums, with more winding paths than real peaks. | 2009-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Vice | February 23, 2009 | 7.3 | bf69d145-82e8-480c-a704-b75e2ad5b2f7 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Building atop a wobbly foundation of post-punk totems, the Glaswegian sextet make complicated songs sound fun. | Building atop a wobbly foundation of post-punk totems, the Glaswegian sextet make complicated songs sound fun. | Kaputt: Carnage Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaputt-carnage-hall/ | Carnage Hall | Of all the ways to say something is fucked, “kaputt” might be the cheeriest and most playful. There’s an almost cartoonish quality to the word, conjuring images of blown gaskets and billowing smoke. Yet it’s a silly-sounding word that cuts straight to the heart of capitalism’s great folly: It’s a system whose survival depends on selling you useless, instantly obsolete junk over and over again. So it’s fitting that, on their debut album, the Glaswegian sextet who call themselves Kaputt proffer a style of post-punk that is both highly combustible and patently absurd.
Carnage Hall is built atop a wobbly foundation of familiar post-punk totems: the wiry energy of early B-52’s, the bass-string-snapping rhythmic contortions of Minutemen, the melody-resistant rants and cheerleader chants of Brix-era Fall, and the sort of saxy violence that coursed through feisty freaks from X-Ray Spex to Love Is All. But in sharp contrast to your typical Mark E. Smith-modeled sing-spieler, Kaputt lead singer Cal Donnelly isn’t especially cranky—his elastic voice sounds both permanently gobsmacked and full of bravado, like someone who’s gotten clocked in a bar fight and, amazed to be still standing, marvels at the imaginary stars swirling around them. The first words we hear him sing on album opener “Rats” are, “It’s so much/Darker now,” but while a sudden breakdown at the 28-second mark braces you for a hit of chaotic skronk, the track instantly reanimates itself as an upbeat, brass-powered thrust that invites you to dance your worries away.
As “Rats” illustrates, Kaputt excel at making complicated songs sound fun. Even Carnage Hall’s most tightly wound rave-ups, like the D. Boon-worthy “Very Satisfied” and the call-and-response sprint “Parsonage Square,” pack surprise structural shifts and outta-nowhere hooks, with percussionist Emma Smith’s restless clatter providing the destabilizing counterpoint to bassist Tobias Carmichael and drummer Rikki Will’s vacuum-sealed rhythms. Donnelly’s wordplay cuts through the clamor with lyrics that are as bleakly satirical as they are brutally efficient. On “Feed My Son,” he takes on patriarchy and gluttony in a single couplet, singing, “I need to feed my son/Need him to grow big, big and strong,” before adding an ominous twist: “I need to eat to my son, he’s grown to twice the size of a normal one!”
Donnelly’s innate theatricality is most effective on Carnage Hall’s more manic tracks, where he can pinball off of guitarist Simone Wilson and saxophonist Chrissy Barnacle’s punk-rock pep-rally harmonies. His unwavering bug-eyed intensity feels out of place when the band eases off the accelerator for slow-burn struts like “Hi! I’m the Wasp” or more light-hearted fare like “You Are Buried With My Nose.” But the band successfully ventures beyond the typical dance-punk parameters on Carnage Hall’s two-part centerpiece, “Drinking Problems Continue.” It is, in many senses, the album’s most despairing song, an unflinching portrait of escape from industrial-town misery via alcoholism. (“Metal smell roll off hill, burn my nostrils further,” Connelly sings, before sardonically adding, “I love this place like no other.”) But it’s also the album’s most joyous moment, with a boisterous Afropop groove that gives way to an ecstatic group chorus—a readymade self-help anthem for when all your hopes and dreams go kaputt. | 2019-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Upset the Rhythm | October 7, 2019 | 7.1 | bf6ad7b7-5b18-4796-9067-e2a95b4439d3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their first self-produced record and first in 24 years without drummer Janet Weiss, Sleater-Kinney find pleasant comfort and not much else with down-the-middle rock tunes. | On their first self-produced record and first in 24 years without drummer Janet Weiss, Sleater-Kinney find pleasant comfort and not much else with down-the-middle rock tunes. | Sleater-Kinney: Path of Wellness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleater-kinney-path-of-wellness/ | Path of Wellness | A shift began in 2019 with The Center Won’t Hold, the closest Sleater-Kinney has ever come to making a pop album. Produced by Annie Clark, the record was a scattered and confusing anomaly. It bounded awkwardly between new wave and art-pop, sounding at times more like Sleater-Kinney covering a handful of St. Vincent songs. Shortly before its release, drummer Janet Weiss left the band; founding members Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker toured the album without her. The power of Sleater-Kinney was, for the first time in their 27-year career, slightly dimmed.
Path of Wellness is the first Sleater-Kinney record without Weiss since 1996, and their first self-produced record ever. It is a course correction, a tricky and frustrating rock record full of well-executed and arranged songs. It’s pleasant enough to listen to with a friend, heavy enough to put on after an argument. But it’s missing something. In the band’s attempt to swing the pendulum back, they’ve lost their spark and urgency, the very stuff that makes Sleater-Kinney one of the most impactful rock bands of all time.
The album sounds best when Tucker and Brownstein allow themselves to let loose, be funny, and have fun. The scorching “Tomorrow’s Grave” has a sublime guitar solo as well as some characteristically witchy lyrics about being “the drought,” and “the barren land,” à la Dig Me Out’s “Jenny.” On the moody “Method,” Brownstein sings like she’s looking out the window at the rain as bluesy guitars unfurl around her. “Worry With You” captures the cheeky overconfidence of having three beers and then hopping on your bike. These songs aren’t exactly outliers, but they are some of the only ones that feel playful, where Brownstein and Tucker seem to be directly engaging with you.
Path of Wellness has the same aura as almost all previous Sleater-Kinney records. It’s tight as hell; Tucker’s wailing mezzo-soprano is as brutal and uncompromising as ever. The lyrics can be a bit corny and overdone, but this should come as no surprise to anyone who has heard “God Is a Number” or “The Ballad of a Ladyman.” The problem here is more of a spiritual one. Earlier Sleater-Kinney albums took the feminized undertaking of “shut up and smile” and turned it on its ear. A record like 1997’s Dig Me Out explored being present with your anger as a woman in a world where men constantly expect you to be submissive and sweet. It was also about heartbreak: about breaking up with your girlfriend and then having her sing backup vocals on the song you wrote about her. In 1999, The Hot Rock compared love to being riddled with tumors, turning the malaise that comes with realizing you’re growing up into intensely beautiful, brooding music. The best song on 2005’s The Woods is literally about jumping off a bridge; it leaves you feeling like someone ran a steamroller over your chest.
On the Path of Wellness, there is very little of that visceral way of exploring pain. Relatedly, there is also a complete lack of irony that is so crucial to the band’s ethos. A track like “Complex Female Characters” is so self-serious and humorless that it’s almost cloying. “You’re too much of a woman now/You’re not enough of a woman now,” sings Brownstein. The song’s feminism feels surface level, a critique of gender stereotypes in art plucked from an op-ed column in a campus newspaper. It strives to get close to the biting feminist and anticapitalist critique of “Modern Girl,” but it’s missing the shit-eating grin you envision Brownstein wearing when she sang about a donut with the hole of the entire world. Instead, it leaves you feeling weirdly empty.
As producers, Tucker and Brownstein are minimalists, which works for a band whose best songs are often the least cluttered. Path of Wellness is chilled out, almost effortless. It’s not such a bad thing to feel like you don’t have to work hard for what you’re listening to—but Sleater-Kinney used to put you in a headlock and hold you there. Their songs can make you feel crazy, give you whiplash, make you clench your jaw, kick a brick wall, eat a pill off the ground and then spit it up in someone’s face. There is none of that bleary-eyed rage on Path of Wellness. Moreover, very little happens at all. This music doesn’t prompt the kind of introspection that leads to personal breakthroughs; it doesn’t leave the world feeling more vivid, more exhilarating than it did before. Sleater-Kinney has made heart-stopping, philosophically challenging rock music. Path of Wellness takes a more pacifist stance, content to let life happen around it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | June 15, 2021 | 6.8 | bf6daf7f-ec53-4847-b724-b5f7a3efaf1f | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Nashville institution Chris Stapleton followed his 2015 breakthrough with two new albums this year. They showcase his omnivorous approach to country music in all its dignified melancholy. | Nashville institution Chris Stapleton followed his 2015 breakthrough with two new albums this year. They showcase his omnivorous approach to country music in all its dignified melancholy. | Chris Stapleton: From a Room: Volume 1 / Volume 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-stapleton-from-a-room-volume-1-volume-2/ | From a Room: Volume 1 / Volume 2 | Chris Stapleton toiled for nearly 15 years to become an overnight sensation. After moving to Nashville in the early 2000s, he played in a bluegrass band and co-founded a Southern rock group whose only claim to fame was opening for Zac Brown, all while writing songs for artists like Luke Bryan, Darius Rucker, Blake Shelton, and Lee Ann Womack, among others. He tried his hand at a solo career, releasing a single in 2013 that went nowhere. In 2015, with a new breed of singer-songwriters challenging Nashville’s most ingrained conventions, Stapleton finally released a full album under his own name, Traveller. Revealing a vivid and economical songwriter as well as a soulful and sensitive singer, the album enjoyed only modest sales right up until the night of the Country Music Awards, when he performed with Justin Timberlake and took home the award for Album of the Year, beating out more established acts like Jason Aldean and Little Big Town. He woke up the next morning to a No. 1 album.
In Nashville, a place where traditionalists are treated as the avant-garde, Stapleton quickly eclipsed many of the artists who had previously sung his songs. His success, however, isn’t based on how he envisions the future of country music, but rather how he uses the past. His sentiments and characters are familiar, occasionally giving way to generalities but usually bringing the dignified melancholy of old-school country right up to the present. Musically, he understands that “country” is an inclusive label, one that uses the bristly twang of 1970s outlaw as its foundation but also covers the excitable R&B from Memphis and the Shoals as well as the blues-based Southern rock of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Two years after Traveller turned him into a Nashville institution, From a Room Volume 1 sounded like a non-follow-up when it came out in May: a way to release new music without having to make a big statement or one-up his debut. The tracklist was short, nine songs clocking in at just over 30 minutes. The packaging was minimal, a cardboard sleeve for the CD and a retro insert for the LP. The nondescript title carried a concealed pun, as all the songs were recorded in Room A at the historic RCA Studio in Nashville. Lending that indefinite article even more weight was the fact that the studio had been threatened with demolition while Stapleton was recording Traveller there. Someone thought condos would be a better use of that real estate.
Vol. 1 works as a tribute to that studio, but Stapleton is as interested in personal history as he is in music history. He resurrected songs he’d written years before, some of which had been hits for other people, some of which had been overlooked completely. It sounded more like a minor reclamation project or an abbreviated career retrospective than an actual album, but with the release of From A Room Volume 2, the first collection comes more sharply into focus. Together, they reveal the full scope of his abilities, not only monetizing his vast catalog (he’s written approximately 1,000 songs) but filling in his biography for the uninitiated.
As a songwriter, Stapleton rarely strays from country’s evergreen topics: breaking hearts, breaking the law, breaking the bank. But he tackles them with a graceful economy of language and fine gradients of emotion. Take “Either Way,” off Vol. 1, originally recorded by Lee Ann Womack on her 2008 album Call Me Crazy. Stapleton, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, describes the romantic inertia between lovers who only talk “when the monthly bills are due.” He sings quietly on the verses, as though lost in thought, but his voice rises to a near-shout on the chorus: “We can just go on like this/Say the word, we’ll call it quits.” There’s not a happy ending. In fact, there’s not an ending at all. The last verse makes clear that nothing will change between them.
Stapleton works well with resignation and regret, to the extent that even his raucous weed anthem “Them Stems,” off Vol. 1, offers a chicken/egg conundrum: Is the narrator’s life a shambles because he smokes too much pot, or does he smoke too much pot because his life’s a shambles? The people inhabiting these verses tend to live at the extremes, although the songs fare best when those extremes are familiar and relatable. The doomed inmate on Vol. 1 closer “Death Row” is less a character than an archetype, making it a peculiarly inconsequential contribution to country’s prison song genre. And the multiple generations of farmers on Vol. 2’s “Scarecrow in the Garden” are far less compelling and distinct than the pragmatic alcoholics on “Nobody’s Lonely Tonight,” a Vol. 2 standout. “What’s love but just some illusion we believe,” Stapleton sings, his tone both disgusted and resigned. “What’s love but just some confusion we don’t need.”
He doesn’t mean it, of course. Vol. 2 leavens its heavier moments with songs that celebrate the simple joys of love and marriage and family, without lapsing into sentimentality. “Millionaire,” a cover of a song by fellow writer Kevin Welch, is about how love is worth more than money. “A Simple Song,” penned by Stapleton’s father-in-law, lists off a family’s escalating woes, which include bad health, poverty, and unemployment, until Stapleton admits, “But I love my life/Man, it’s something to see/It’s the kids and the dogs and you and me.” The idea of finding happiness in the face of hardship is not new in country music, and that’s the whole point. What has made him so successful is how Stapleton invests these ideas with gravity and gratitude. | 2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | null | December 11, 2017 | 7.6 | bf6edb34-e8e6-4479-afc7-a3f267c27a4f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
A product of their city's thriving DIY punk and hardcore scenes, the Tampa, Fla. band features members of Neon Blud, Cult Ritual, and the Dry County. Their ambitious second album is an outsized, emotionally rich pop record that practically begs for your attention. | A product of their city's thriving DIY punk and hardcore scenes, the Tampa, Fla. band features members of Neon Blud, Cult Ritual, and the Dry County. Their ambitious second album is an outsized, emotionally rich pop record that practically begs for your attention. | Merchandise: Children of Desire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16918-children-of-desire/ | Children of Desire | It's not surprising that digging up concrete information on Tampa, Fla.'s Merchandise is a little harder than it should be. As a product of the city's thriving DIY punk and hardcore scene, the three-piece (anchored by multi-instrumentalists David Vassalotti and Carson Cox, who also contributes vocals, along with Patrick Brady on bass) is used to flying under the radar, contributing to other Tampa-based outfits like Neon Blud, Cult Ritual, and the Dry County, respectively. But with Children of Desire, Merchandise's second proper LP to date, lying low no longer seems like much of an option: Though most assuredly not a punk record, Children of Desire is anything but understated; instead, it's an outsized, emotionally rich pop album that practically begs for your attention. "I still participate in punk and hardcore but for traditional reasons," Cox told music blog Yellow Green Red in October. "My roots are strong and have kept me playing whenever I really hated playing shows because of pointless social gossip or whatever. I'm taking the chance that there are people like me outside of punk by playing whatever I like. Genres are not for us."
Merchandise's conflicted feelings about genre are understandable: One of the most interesting things about Children of Desire is, despite being crafted from familiar parts, how damn hard it is to peg. A cursory blog search will tell you that Merchandise play an amalgamation of post-punk or shoegaze or noise pop or pretty much any confluence of notable indie offshoots that gained momentum during the 1980s, and while you certainly wouldn't be faulted for making similar connections, something about such broad distinctions doesn't do the band justice. Trying to figure out where Children of Desire fits is not only a fruitless endeavor, it marginalizes the ambition that acts as the record's most visible engine.
On their 2010 debut, (Strange Songs) In the Dark, things were a bit easier to sort. Working as a miserablist pop album shrouded in corroded production, it's a record that tries to filter the fog of strife and regret that pepper so many songs about love and youth. But for the players that make up Merchandise, these ideas were rendered in ways that were uncommonly restrained. "Learn how to sleep without any company," Cox dourly croons on "What Was Left Behind", "Oh, you're still a young man." Though the approach still feels-- at least from a production standpoint-- punk-influenced, there's no denying that something more romantically resonant was bubbling underneath. On Children of Desire, a great deal of that suspected brightness has broken through the surface, revealing a borderline anthemic sound that's a leap and a revelation. The hot, swirling guitar feedback that overwhelmed (Strange Songs) In the Dark is no longer front-and-center; here, it's a natural by-product of the wide-eyed magic Merchandise have begun to conjure.
"The music started, I realized it was all a lie/ The guitars were running out/ Last year's punk," sings Cox, sounding newly unencumbered on the telling "Become What You Are", a staggering piece of music and one of two songs on Children of Desire that push the 10-minute mark. It's almost proportioned for an arena, glowing and aching in nearly equal measure. Noisy, decadent, and richly characterized by titanic passes of stinging guitar, it sounds both urgent and somehow elegantly dazed. It's the kind of song you don't want to end (it almost doesn't), briefly breaking down from either exhaustion or bliss (or both) only to ratchet itself back up with a tornado-like intensity that ends up spinning the entire thing right off its own axis. The same kind of energy is more concisely registered on "Time", the murderous first single that subscribes to an almost Tears For Fears-like bigness, cut with an undercurrent of Smiths-ian longing, all drenched in swaths of sugar-spun reverb. Thanks to its pop-friendly structure, you wouldn't be hard-pressed to conjure up a dozen other equally flattering reference points, but Children of Desire ultimately succeeds thanks to its ability to still sound singular.
One of the smartest moves Merchandise make on Children of Desire is bringing Cox's vocals to the forefront. There's a delicateness in his voice that, by all accounts, should be crushed whole under the weight of how gigantic these songs can be, but there's also a sturdiness in his baritone that brings a surprising but necessary balance. Cox's phrasing makes it clear that Morrissey has had some sort of an influence on his approach here, like on the driving, industrial-bent cut "In Nightmare Room", which he manages to make sound more like "I Know It's Over" than whatever Jesus and Mary Chain track you're trying to put your finger on. The fact that he doesn't actually sound much of anything like Morrissey is also an important insight, as Merchandise are able channel influences with some sort of vague kineticism rather than flat-out ape them at nearly ever turn, avoiding the easy missteps that a less intuitive band would make pretty quickly otherwise.
There's little denying that Children of Desire is an ambitious effort. Take "Satellite", which sounds as if it's practically lifting "The Suburbs" wholesale and repurposing it as a barroom piano ballad. But watch it then blossom into a radiating, communally drunken waltz. Things like that shouldn't work, but when they do, Children of Desire's risk-taking reads as crucial, not foolhardy. So it's a bit of a downer that the closing, 11-minute "Roser Park" doesn't quite live up to some of the same high-wire tricks that preceded it. You can't help but feel a bit of the air go out of the room, though it's hard not to be a little greedy after being so consistently thrilled. "Roser Park"-- with its beatific organs and mechanically sharp rhythm section-- would be a gem on most any other like-minded LP. Here, it's merely a reminder that, for Merchandise, the bright lights are most definitely on. | 2012-07-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-07-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Katorga Works | July 12, 2012 | 7.8 | bf70a8c6-945e-4384-a99f-a45e5d2bb77d | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
This epic compilation produced by the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner serves as both a fine showcase of the Dead's iconic songs and a who's who of current indie rock. | This epic compilation produced by the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner serves as both a fine showcase of the Dead's iconic songs and a who's who of current indie rock. | Various Artists: Day of the Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21771-day-of-the-dead/ | Day of the Dead | In the summer of 1987, MTV sent a bewildered VJ crew to report live from the long-rolling party taking place outside of Grateful Dead shows, this particular one manifesting at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. Besides broadcasting the news of a massive tailgate onto nationwide cable systems, the station pumped the band’s “comeback” hit “Touch of Grey” a few times an hour. While the 22-year-old sextet was already capable of selling out Giants Stadium, MTV’s “Day of the Dead” report fully transubstantiated the Grateful Dead and the Deadheads from an underground phenomenon into a legitimate part of mainstream American culture, as much an '80s phenomenon as a '60s band. Until Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, the Grateful Dead would grow more popular each year, the Day of the Dead extending to nearly a decade. The director of the band’s ticket office and others would point to the MTV special as the tipping point towards the gate crashes and mini-riots of the '90s.
It was this popularity, too, that codified the deep uncoolness of the Grateful Dead during the same years, at least among a certain taste-making elite. Being anti-Dead had been part of the uniform for years (see the Teen Idles’ “Deadhead,” from Dischord’s very first 7” in 1980). That attitude, too, went mainstream a decade or so later, via Kurt Cobain’s homemade “Kill the Grateful Dead” shirt. The Grateful Dead boogied, perhaps occasionally achieved choogle; some of their fans were definitely on serious drugs, egregiously friendly, and stood out in crowds. They were easy picking for punks and the DEA alike.
This year’s Day of the Dead is a new 5xCD , five-and-a-half-hour compilation produced by the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner as a benefit for the Red Hot organization. With a cast of dozens drawn from a cross-section of indie-ish musical worlds, the set, like its MTV predecessor, signals another milestone in the San Francisco band’s profound influence on American music, closing old circles and opening new ones. In the same way that no single Grateful Dead show (or song performance, or even era) could ever be definitive, the 59 tracks of Day of the Dead represent (merely!) a major entry in the ever-deepening catalog of Grateful Dead covers, interpretations, and reinventions. Already containing universes, the Dead’s songbook is what makes the set enjoyable as a whole, transcending the performers and their translations. Perhaps even more than those of Bob Dylan (no stranger to covering the Dead), the songs of Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter welcome musicians of all stripes—loud and quiet, singers and instrumentalists, big-eared non-virtuosos and players alike.
With an artist list that connects Mumford & Sons (who blanch the Satanic urgency right out of “Friend of the Devil”) to So Percussion (who carry “Terrapin Station (Suite)” to thrilling new realms), the set ranges eclectically in both style and level of inventiveness. Most anyone with any kind of appreciation for the Grateful Dead will find probably at least an hour or three of music to dig and really groove with; Dead freaks might also find a good deal to snicker at.
Where the Dead’s critical revival on the fringes of the early 21st century freak-folk scare hinged on the band’s weirdness (LSD, musique concrète, countercultural activity, untethered improvisation), Day of the Dead’s reclamation feels comparably restrained. Though the contributions nod at various Day-Glo threads, the core of the project is made from the softer colors and textures that have defined indie rock in recent years. At the center is a National-anchored house band that come off as conservative literalists compared to the Dead themselves—pleasant, but not usually taking the music anywhere especially new. Instead, they treat the songs as new standards (which they are), pairing them with vocalists. Just as the Dead’s hardcore '60s experimentation dissolved to messy stadium-sized calypso thunder, Day of the Dead is more dancing bears than skull-and-lightning Steal Your Faces. But fun prevails and sunshine abounds, and the set manages to capture a wide range of available Grateful Deads, channeled via Senegalese jazz groovers Orchestra Baobab, noise sculptor Tim Hecker, and many more.
Among the few to really nail the Dead’s communal and conversational bounce, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks take a reassuring and natural turn through a *Europe ’72-*style “China Cat Sunflower->I Know You Rider,” Robert Hunter’s Joycean psychedelia finding its perfect match in Malkmus’ quizzical tongue-twisting. Other bands apply their own filters, highlighting bands the Grateful Dead maybe even wished they were. Representing the kinder, gentler side of the nu-Dead revival, Real Estate cleanses “Here Comes Sunshine” of its hippie jazz pretensions and buffs it into the AM gold the Dead themselves couldn’t quite conjure for 1973’s Wake of the Flood. On the far left of the dial, Oneida drummer Kid Millions conducts a hyper-condensed realization of “drums/space” that draws a direct line from the Dead’s infamous second-set jam session to present day Brooklyn. Joined by So Percussion for “drums” (who shimmer like Mickey Hart’s most melodic dreams), Oneida tumble episodically from drone to synth swirl to stoned guitar chatter, covering a familiar through-line with an un-Deady focus. It is the centerpiece of one of several Day of the Dead sequences that approximate the Dead’s ever-variable song-suites.
In this way and others, the Dessner brothers find different ways to interpret the Dead, in micro and macro, letting artists stand in for the band’s various sides. During the set’s approximated jam sequences on the second and third discs (Lighting and Sunshine, respectively), the Dead’s weirdness shines through, including a father/son space-dub jam-out by Terry and Gyan Riley on a near total reconstruction of Bob Weir’s “Estimated Prophet” (yes, that Terry Riley). The band’s jam flagship “Dark Star” gets several treatments, including a happening studio improv labeled “Nightfall of Diamonds” and a full pass by the Flaming Lips, where the Oklahoma psychedelicists translate the song’s theme into a krautrockin’ bassline and build a jam that doesn’t so much go anywhere as build a safe space for Dead freakdom in whatever galaxy the Lips are occupying these days.
More than nearly any other act that might be considered for a massive multi-disc tribute, Grateful Dead songs retain a three-dimensional historical presence. Even the most casual fans know that each Dead tune comes available in a range of versions from a variety of periods in the band’s history, at varying tempos and with different collections of musicians and gear and drug habits. Day of the Dead serves a variety of purposes, and at its best engenders genuinely fresh perspectives combined with excellent performances. Like many a Dead show, it doesn’t always hit the mark, but unexpected magic emerges often enough to make the whole operation worthwhile: over here, a spooked Lee Ranaldo/Lisa Harrigan duet on “Mountains of the Moon”; over there, Bela Fleck’s banjofied “Help on the Way/Slipknot” drawing the connections between Garcia’s mid-’70s prog period and his own banjo roots.
Some of the most exhilarating moments come during songs the Dead themselves didn’t give much attention to, like “Rosemary“—nitrous-washed on 1969’s Aoxomoxoa and barely played live—which finds a freaky-folky new setting with Mina Tindle (and Friends) uncovering the song as a melodic precursor to Garcia and Hunter’s more accomplished later work. Providing more subtle renovations, Will Oldham (who previously recorded a gorgeous “Brokedown Palace” for a 2004 tour single) rightly earns three slots on the collection. On “If I Had the World to Give,” played by the Dead in 1978 and dropped, he pulls the rare trick of creating a performance perhaps more definitive than the Dead’s own, stripping the song down to only piano and erasing the '78 Dead’s two-drummer pomp. He doesn’t quite manage the same feat on “Rubin and Cherise” (a solo Garcia staple, played a few times by the Dead in 1991), but finds his own Bonnie turn on the song, yo-yoing from Garcia’s preferred melody but standing astride and moving freely inside Robert Hunter’s magic-touched world in a way that many of the other singers here don’t manage.
What is most surprising, maybe, is that—on a tribute to a fundamentally guitar-driven band—the guitar and its inevitable solos are deemphasized. There are guitar moments, of course, like William Tyler’s Garcia-gone-countrypolitan curlicues that dot Hiss Golden Messenger’s “Brown Eyed Women” and a hypnotic 10-minute “Wharf Rat” fronted and jammed by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, though on the latter the guitars themselves are gently blurred into a Nationalist haze. On a live Wilco version of “St. Stephen” featuring the Dead’s Bob Weir, Nels Cline’s unceasing lead torrents stand out, perhaps the closest anyone on the collection comes to Jerry Garcia’s own approach. But it is over the past decade and change, as well, that Garcia has become fully accepted into the alternative pantheon, an audible pillar of American guitar alongside John Fahey, Television, Sonic Youth, and others, and Day of the Dead is a ripple in an already busy pond. A new all-star set Dead tribute could be assembled every year or two and the range of interpretations might never be exhausted, such as on Songs to Fill the Air, an exquisite folk-leaning tribute CD-R issued as part of WFMU's annual fundraising marathon this spring.
In some regards, the only question is how long the current revival can possibly last. With five-and-a-half-hours here that range from art-song rewrites (Anohni and yMusic’s “Black Peter”) to fantasias about what it might’ve sounded like had the Dead said “yes” to Bob Dylan’s request to join them permanently in 1989 (War on Drugs’ “Touch of Grey”), it would seem we may’ve reached peak Dead, if history hadn’t already concluded such a thing to be impossible. But to top it, some of the surviving bandmembers will tour baseball stadiums this summer under the Dead & Co. logo, minus Phil Lesh and accompanied by John Mayer. While they might not be producing new material (other than a jam or three), Dead & Bro, combined with the Dead’s current fashionability, could likewise constitute something large enough for another generation of musicians to define themselves against—at least until they discover Live/Dead and/or LSD. In the mean time, extending the Deadhead tape trading network of the '80s (where live versions of “Touch of Grey” were a hit a half-decade before Arista Records or MTV got their hands on it), the Dead’s songs will continue to flow by their own folkways. | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | 4AD | May 19, 2016 | 8.1 | bf711cc5-3e56-4cf4-ad26-ff35fbd0a446 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
Mozart’s Sister is the alt-pop project of Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant, formerly of Shapes and Sizes. Her debut LP is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness. | Mozart’s Sister is the alt-pop project of Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant, formerly of Shapes and Sizes. Her debut LP is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness. | Mozart’s Sister: Being | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19699-mozarts-sister-being/ | Being | It seems like it's hard to go a day in 2014 without running into a new purveyor of alt-pop and her new hyperkinetic vision of an alternate-universe top 40 chart. For such a crowded and seemingly welcoming genre, though, the sound itself is hard to get right, but when it is, it’s exhilarating, like the music itself has been subject to a Rube Goldberg machine for beatmaking, with no part too ridiculous to use. The risk is ending up with “pop music for people who don’t like pop music”: too restrained to really sink its hooks in, yet not quite intricate or patient enough for a slower approach, and usually carrying airs of preciousness. It's a trap that ensnares many, from the biggest of pop stars to the most DIY of bedroom producers—but when artists manage to avoid it, the results can be thrilling.
For now, Mozart’s Sister—the project of Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant, formerly of Shapes and Sizes—have sidestepped these pitfalls. Naming herself after the hypothetical auteur from A Room of One’s Own (as she puts it, the B-list to Mozart’s A-lister), Thompson-Hannant taught herself to produce with a demo version of Ableton and worked her way up the equipment ladder. She’s an apt student of tech and vocal tricks, swooping from sotto voce to a diva-like belt at a single hook’s notice. In these ways, she has peers: Grimes—a friend of Thompson-Hannant’s—is an obvious reference point, as is Chairlift's Caroline Polachek on her album from this year as Ramona Lisa, Arcadia, as well as tUnE-yArDs in her less frenetic moments.
But Mozart’s Sister’s riffs and hooks suggest Thompson-Hannant is looking equally toward peers on the other side of the divide. She has this balance in mind from the first track, “Good Thing Bad Thing”: “Give me the body, but don’t sacrifice brains/And give me the brains, but don’t sacrifice the love pains.” As with AlunaGeorge’s Body Music (the paradox of alt-pop albums like this, by the way, is that they’re usually self-consciously the work of auteurs, yet very difficult to talk about without naming peers), it’s a simplified metaphor, but gets at the idea well enough.
Later, Thompson-Hannant drops another line that describes her approach: “Holding hands with the good and the bad simultaneously.” “I think I was trying to make sunny songs, but they didn’t come out that way,” Thompson-Hannant told the *Montreal Gazette. “*Demented is what I’m going for.” While her best tracks aren’t quite demented, it’s fascinating to hear them attempt that ideal regardless. “Faif” resembles a R&B crossover track from 10 years ago wiped out with a chalk eraser until only the fuzzed-over verse and prechorus remain; the lithe melisma and tinny beat of “Enjoy” suggests Thompson-Hannant played Kelela and chiptunes on separate speakers and recreated what she heard. “Chained Together” is like a lowing goose trapped in a chirpy pop song, lending an extra disturbing bit of codependency to the title, while “Do It to Myself (run run)” crafts a subtle hook from skewed backing vocals, synth cowbell and something resembling the cave groans from a Commander Keen game. The main vocal line’s so low in the mix and muttered that it takes a while for the a narrative of domestic abuse, which starts with “Daddy’s got a gun” and gets darker as it goes, to sink in. As with and possibly more so than many similar albums, Being rewards time over immediacy.
But it’s seldom a good sign when an artist admits in interviews that their album’s “unfocused,” and Being suffers as such. Sometimes, a single sonic element grates, such as the unwieldy shrieks of “Good Thing Bad Thing.” Elsewhere, Thompson-Hannant almost seems reluctant to fully commit to the pop song she’s written; the hook on “My House Is Wild” is about half as big as its a cappella frame calls for, and “Lone Wolf” is pleasant enough but has neither an outsider’s stalk nor the gleeful predation of, say, Shakira’s take on the theme.
“Salty Tear” and “Don’t Leave It to Me” are older tracks–the latter appearing on last year’s Hello EP–and accordingly scan as rough drafts included on the record regardless; the latter, in particular, finds its central element, a chantlike “Fear, fear, fear!/ Sex, sex, sex!”, reprised on “A Move” as “Death-love-life-want.” (Perhaps both tracks could've stood to be revised entirely, as the abstract Freudian stuff is one incantation away from a flop-prone Natalia Kills song.) That said, the other three-quarters of “A Move” are stunning, with a drifting croon, a little like mid-career Lisa Germano, so muted it stops entirely toward the middle; parts of “Enjoy” and “Do It to Myself” plumb the quieter end of the dynamic range to the same hypnotic effect. Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness. | 2014-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Asthmatic Kitty | August 7, 2014 | 6.4 | bf727936-8b17-40bd-9889-b429f81a58fc | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
DJ Katapila is a Ghanaian DJ who has become known for his marathon sets. His own production borrows as much from early Chicago house and Detroit techno as from Ga dance music, and boasts a remarkable sense of humor. | DJ Katapila is a Ghanaian DJ who has become known for his marathon sets. His own production borrows as much from early Chicago house and Detroit techno as from Ga dance music, and boasts a remarkable sense of humor. | DJ Katapila: Trotro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21711-trotro/ | Trotro | Trotros are to Accra what the subway is to New York, in that neither city would function without them. On Trotro, DJ Katapila pays homage to Accra, and on its title track, he tips his hat to its infamous minibus system. From the song’s outset, a cartoonish voice exclaims, “Makola, UTC, Kaneshie!,” imitating the mates (drivers’ assistants) who lean out the side of the trotros calling out their destinations. That same kind of humor and depiction of daily life runs through much of DJ Katapila’s music, which is a mix of neo/traditional Ga dance music, and old-school house and techno.
DJ Katapila, aka Ishmael Abbey, grew up in the ’70s in the coastal district of Jamestown in Accra, a historically Ga area. The now-40-something became known for his marathon DJ sets, to the point where his tirelessness earned him the nickname “Katapila,” after Caterpillar construction equipment. Yet it wasn’t until several years ago that he started actually producing, and in 2009, he self-released his debut album, Trotro. Since then, a number of his tracks have circulated on bootleg tapes, which is also how Awesome Tapes From Africa found his music and ended up partnering with him to issue this rerelease.
The album was never actually pressed to cassette, yet it still sounds as if it were playing back through a thin layer of dust. This rawness comes in part from Katapila’s own production, in part from the spirit of early Chicago house and Detroit techno, and in part from Ga music. The album is grounded as much by the four-on-the-floor thump of Chicago house as it is by the programmed son clave patterns that are common to so many genres of music across the Black Atlantic, including kpanlogo. Kpanlogo is a type of neotraditional Ga dance music that combines older sounds like gome drumming and street processional music with elements of highlife and ’60s-era rock (i.e., the Twist). It also happens to be a precursor to azonto, whose inflections can be heard throughout Trotro. For instance, on “Sakawa,” the rhythm comes through in the snare, on “Trotro” through the handclaps, and on “Cocoawra” and “Lalokat,” very clearly in the cowbell.
Besides house and azonto though, DJ Katapila also often references other kinds of contemporary, black club music, while still largely staying within the sphere of Accra life. “Nkran Dokunu” refers to Accra kenkey, a corn-based staple food of Ghana. The track bounces along at around 140 BPM and feels almost like a slower, crunchier shangaan electro. Midway through it, as a toy Casio-like figure plinks along over a galloping snare, two cartoon-voiced characters chant in Ga, “Accra kenkey is delicious! We’re eating it!”
By contrast, “Ice-Inc” is a lot darker in mood. It’s a direct line to old-school Detroit techno, complete with 808-sounding electrofunk cowbell, and the time-warped, intergalactic quality of a Kraftwerk song. It may not scream “Accra” like some of the other songs on the album. But as a part of Trotro as a whole, it speaks to the multitude of musical and cultural influences that have been exported and imported to the city over time. That, and the propensity to approach the otherwise unremarkable with a remarkable sense of humor. | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Awesome Tapes From Africa | March 14, 2016 | 7.7 | bf758d2f-9ea9-4b4a-ac83-439d2d0ed082 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | |
Over synth-heavy beats by the co-founder of Philadelphia's Working on Dying collective, the Chicago rapper writes intensely diaristic songs delivered with numb detachment. | Over synth-heavy beats by the co-founder of Philadelphia's Working on Dying collective, the Chicago rapper writes intensely diaristic songs delivered with numb detachment. | Lucki / F1lthy: WAKE UP LUCKI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucki-f1lthy-wake-up-lucki/ | WAKE UP LUCKI | Over the last decade, Chicago rap has been characterized by two predominant strands in the popular imagination: drill, with its hard edges and bleeding heart, and the candy-colored stylings of more backpacker-friendly artists like Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Mick Jenkins. If Keef and Durk are like the Thug and Gucci of Chicago, the scene revolving around Chance resembles more the “New Atlanta” of iLoveMakonnen, Awful Records, and Earthgang. But Lucki, who received one of his first major co-signs from Chance in 2014, has taken neither of those routes; he’s closer in spirit to Playboi Carti, a singular artist who has paved a lane of his own. Fittingly, one of Lucki’s chief beatmakers, and the sole producer of his new album WAKE UP LUCKI, is F1LTHY, founder of Philadelphia production collective Working on Dying and the sonic accelerationist behind many of the brain-melting beats of Carti’s Whole Lotta Red.
While both Lucki and Working on Dying straddle the line between mainstream rap and the most abrasive edges of SoundCloud, on WAKE UP LUCKY, they maintain a measured distance from the limelight. Lucki’s partnership with a certified hitmaker yields a diaristic sketchbook that feels almost invasive to view; his inward focus recalls the seasonal depression of Bladee, one of the first acts F1LTHY produced for, more than anything from his Chicago peers.
Lucki’s sadness and Working on Dying’s futuristic, synth-focused beats have their clear progenitors. Raider Klan and SpaceGhostPurrp are to 2010s rap what the Velvet Underground were to underground rock: To adapt the old adage, it seems that everyone who downloaded a zip file of Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 in 2011 got themselves a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and started making beats. But while so many artists latched onto Raider Klan’s hauntology—the ghostly horrorcore samples, lo-fi recording styles, and ’90s nostalgia—Working on Dying gravitated toward the psychedelic haze, that feeling of taking a tab of acid late at night when you’ve already been awake watching television for 36 hours. There are shades of electronic music in their sound, which sometimes recalls Drain Gang or the beats AraabMuzik was making in his Dipset Trance Party era, but it’s more like hearing a rave through drywall while you slip into a coma than being in the middle of the throng. Working on Dying’s production also frequently recalls another kind of underground music popular on SoundCloud in the 2010s: the endless deluge of Nintendo novelty remixes that layered Danny Brown or Death Grips over the Wii Shop Channel music or Legend of Zelda soundtrack cuts—adorable and even cutesy sounds juxtaposed against jagged and emotional bars.
F1LTHY’s distinctive tread bass sound is dependably thick and pounding across WAKE UP LUCKI, but the synths on top are unpredictably kaleidoscopic: “BUSY DAY” brings in crystalline bells, while “OUTRO” sounds like an off-kilter church organ. Individual synthesizer notes bleed and blur together into a continuous stream of off-kilter sound, like on “WHERE I BE,” where the higher pitches of a keyboard turn eerie and flute-like. In the background of “SPARKS VISION,” pitch-shifted vocal flips turn the human tongue into ribbons of tone, the most EDM-like touch on the album.
While Chance’s early brand of hallucinogenic gospel eventually calcified into wife-guy music that sounds profoundly out of touch with the current moment, Lucki’s own emergent style, which the title of his first mixtape dubbed “alternative trap,” has remained fluid and evolving, imbuing his psychedelic worldview with shades of darkness. Despite F1LTHY’s clout and the similarities Lucki might share on the surface with Carti or Uzi, WAKE UP LUCKI strikes a hermetic tone, a party for two without a feature to be found. Lucki’s career has been marked by addiction, missed opportunities, and isolation, which you can resoundly feel in his flow: While the beats might be brightly shaded, Lucki himself frequently sounds dejected and distressed, with a mind numbed to pain and half-fried thoughts that trail off. His voice is a steady waveform, with dry and raspy intonation that remains at a consistent volume, expressing his affective detachment. When Lucki talks about drugs, he sometimes describes bliss and euphoria, but just as often there are bad trips and bad vibes, hangovers and depressive hazes and dry mouth. While substances are frequently an escape, Lucki also readily admits that they’re inseparable from and woven into his other issues, and a contributing factor to the decline of interpersonal relationships.
There’s no room for cleverness or intense wordplay in Lucki’s blurred reality; it’s the peeled-back frankness of Lucki’s bars that makes them so wounding, like the unadorned confession of “CRYOUT”: “She let me cheat if I’m in it to win/Talkin’ to God, repentin’ again.” Lucki usually raps in an inside voice, not quite mumbling or crooning, but at times disaffected and even dissociative—he sounds more comfortable with hands in pockets, shades drawn, standing in the corner than raging on stage. F1LTHY’s now iconic production tag — “Wake up, F1LTHY”—is befitting of an artist who frequently sounds like he’s trying to escape consciousness. WAKE UP LUCKI is the portrait of an artist who has pulled away from the scene he came up in, the major-label artists who might platform him, and many of the closest people in his life; sometimes, he suggests, it takes isolation to hear your own voice.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire | January 10, 2022 | 7.5 | bf88c534-762e-47b2-99fa-cd55a1437676 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Pairing a world’s worth of traditional instruments with widescreen gestures, the legendary duo explore the myth of a Greek god in an unknown tongue. | Pairing a world’s worth of traditional instruments with widescreen gestures, the legendary duo explore the myth of a Greek god in an unknown tongue. | Dead Can Dance: Dionysus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dead-can-dance-dionysus/ | Dionysus | Is music now too small for the long-running duo of Dead Can Dance? Are we really meant to enjoy their grandiose statements via tinny white earbuds rather than earth-quaking sound systems? And how will their forthcoming tour fare its medium-sized concert halls, rather than the Roman amphitheaters such enormous music deserves? At least Dionysus—the band’s ninth album and first since 2012—is the rare record that took two years of research and recording to make and actually sounds like it needed every one of those 730 days. Its epic proportions suggest a work chipped out of marble.
Since forming in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981, Dead Can Dance have shown the kind of towering ambition that has given them purchase in goth-rock circles and among filmmakers looking for windswept gravitas. By 1993, their reputation was so strong they could put out Into the Labyrinth, an album of classical legend and global folk, and sell half-a-million copies. Even by Dead Can Dance’s own outsized standards, though, Dionysus is an album of radical ambition, a work of scholarly pursuit and musical depth that explores European folk traditions, the boundaries of language, and Latin American bird calls. A two-act record representing “different facets of the Dionysus myth and his cult,” it is divided across seven tracks, each meant to share a new phase of the god’s saga. During the first piece alone, “Sea Borne,” Brendan Perry turns his hand to instruments including the shrill zourna, the haunting gadulka, and the creeping sustain of the bowed psaltery; he eventually employs everything from the gong to the gaida (a bagpipe from Southeastern Europe) to weave together this rich sound.
Perry and singer Lisa Gerrard have long been uninhibited in the search for musical inspiration, borrowing everything from Gregorian chant to Middle Eastern progressions. But whereas their last album, 2012’s Anastasis, was at least tethered by Perry’s cavernous rock vocal to some sense of pop, Dionysus has no such space. During Act 1, scattered voices provide texture rather than melodic leads, while the vocals on Act 2 tracks “The Mountain” and “Psychopomp,” where Perry and Gerrard duet, are rendered in an invented tongue that she once called “the language of the Heart.” The effect is one of primal emotion unencumbered by the baggage of words, so feeling eclipses thought.
For a band blessed with one of the most exquisite singers in rock, rivaled in dramatic range and enigmatic tone only by the likes of Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, this might feel like a waste. But Dionysus compensates with its widescreen sound, a towering musical synthesis that is unafraid to pair the Brazilian berimbau with the Russian balalaika on “Dance of the Bacchantes” or the Bulgarian gadulka with Aztec flutes on “Liberator of Minds.” Likewise, the sampled voices form a patchwork quilt of global influence, ranging from a North African souq to an Andean ritual, all supported by field recordings of a Swiss goatherd and Mexican bird calls. “World music” is a rightly pilloried term that broadly ghettoizes non-Western musicians. But Dionysus aims to reclaim it, defying simple geographical origin in search of a pan-national synthesis that has its roots everywhere and its home nowhere.
You could live off these magnificent textures alone, though Dionysus webs them around rousing melodies. The tempestuous string line on “Sea Borne” plays against a pattering zither, like blustery wind against a storm’s first tentative drops of rain. The gorgeous vocal interplay on “The Mountain” hinges on eternally rousing harmonies that linger somewhere between benevolence and threat; the sound wordlessly scores the fear of god. Best of all, though, is “The Invocation,” where a heartbreaking choral lament meets a strutting beat from the Iranian daf and the Turkish davul drums, emphasizing the “Dance” of Dead Can Dance.
Moments like these lift Dionysus way above the dusty academic exercise that a two-act reflection on the cult of a Greek god could be. That the album addresses such lofty concepts is admirable. That it does so in a work of visceral, accessible music that rewards surface listening and prolonged exploration is doubly so. This is music of grandeur and grand humanity. | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | PIAS | November 5, 2018 | 7.3 | bf94e54a-2e55-4310-a981-728d2a4ec199 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Assembled from years of recordings made on the road, the Armenian British producer’s debut LP for Four Tet’s Text label flips traditional instruments and captured moments into dancefloor thrills. | Assembled from years of recordings made on the road, the Armenian British producer’s debut LP for Four Tet’s Text label flips traditional instruments and captured moments into dancefloor thrills. | Hagop Tchaparian: Bolts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hagop-tchaparian-bolts/ | Bolts | Hitting play on Hagop Tchaparian’s debut feels like opening an old journal. The first thing you notice is its texture—every synthesizer sounds as if it’s fraying at the ends, each field recording seemingly covered in dirt, a marker of the miles traveled to reach your ears. Bolts was assembled from stray recordings Hagop Tchaparian collected over 15 years, from street musicians and wedding videos to small towns where his father’s family took refuge after being exiled from Musa Dagh, an ethnically Armenian region in present-day Turkey. Though it’s the first full-length album from the British-Armenian producer, it demonstrates the confidence of his vision, tackling the dancefloor with an invigorating, lived-in energy.
Tchaparian’s path to dance music has been unusual: His most notable musical output prior to this came from his time as guitarist in the short-lived British pop-punk band Symposium in the ’90s. Since then, he’s been orbiting London’s club scene, recording the occasional remix in between tour managing for acts like Hot Chip and Four Tet. It’s the latter who brings Tchaparian’s debut to us via his Text label, and whose own cerebral approach to electronica offers a lens with which to understand Tchaparian’s music. Bolts can be deceiving at times—its highs are breathless house assaults, yet Tchaparian’s debut is a largely restrained experience, one that’s less concerned with dominating a festival crowd than with enveloping the listener in its rich, grainy world.
Bolts is filled with instruments from Tchaparian’s Armenian heritage, and he folds them into his tracks with the instincts of a seasoned pro. When “GL” roars to life with its flailing zurna, it fits so naturally that you might not even notice the ruptured bass note tearing through the middle of the track. After swelling like this for a good minute and a half, the whole thing finally caves in with a decimating techno thump, as stampeding dhol drums careen into a crushing finale. The transition from that into the relatively calmer synths of “Escape” is like the moment you step out of the club drenched in sweat, only to be greeted with your own foggy breath in the cold night air.
That headier, more measured space is where most of Bolts makes its home. As the deep groove of “Raining” slowly kicks in, Tchaparian shrouds the track in wobbly, Stott-ian distortion, slowly gaining momentum as the synthesizers seem to fold back on themselves in reverse. Often, Tchaparian sounds like he’s just having fun seeing what he can weave out of his personal bank of recordings. “Ldz” begins with the sound of fireworks booming over a whistling crowd before Tchaparian chops it up and spins it into its own miniature groove. Compared to more attention-grabbing tracks like “GL,” or the garagey sci-fi stomper “Round,” he regularly opts to let his tracks simply simmer, even if the results don’t always gel into something fully fleshed out. “Flame,” the album’s longest song, plays like a volcano threatening to erupt without ever fully doing so; it wanders through different zones, coasting between tranquil ambience and tense passages of escalating hand drums, occasionally arriving at a steady house groove before dissipating into a cloud of floating synthesizers. As the track ends on a recording of what sounds like a scribbling pencil, you can sense Tchaparian sketching out his own concepts in real time too, seeing what sticks without worrying if it’s completely developed.
If there’s one moment where all of Tchaparian’s ideas come together to form a magnificent whole, it’s on “Right to Riot.” Tchaparian launches out the gate with his tumbling dhol drums, raising the intensity one notch after another until that shrieking zurna returns once more to signal a pummeling, crowd-annihilating drop. As he charges through the track, you can practically feel his urgency as he pushes his samples deeper and deeper into the red, twisting them up and unleashing them with a determined, violent ferocity. At his best, Tchaparian welcomes us inside these scattered moments from throughout his life, transforming them into personal and collective catharsis. | 2022-10-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Text | October 26, 2022 | 7.6 | bf991559-fa2b-44b1-bb68-23b9c8bc1003 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Clouds Taste Metallic, newly reissued in a 3xCD set, is the last album where the Flaming Lips just sounded like some oddballs from Oklahoma. It stands as the peak moment in a fantastic four-album run that began with 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. | Clouds Taste Metallic, newly reissued in a 3xCD set, is the last album where the Flaming Lips just sounded like some oddballs from Oklahoma. It stands as the peak moment in a fantastic four-album run that began with 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. | The Flaming Lips: Heady Nuggs: 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21279-heady-nuggs-20-years-after-clouds-taste-metallic/ | Heady Nuggs: 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic | By 1995, the post-Nevermind dream that any eccentric rock outfit could follow Nirvana’s path from indie outsiders to chart-toppling insurrectionaries was officially dead. The '90s mainstream would not be transformed in the image of the '80s underground after all, and, as it turned out, Sonic Youth weren’t festival-headliner material. By mid-decade, many artists pegged as the next Nirvana had either deliberately swerved from the spotlight or swung for the fences and whiffed, thus ensuring that no used-CD store was ever lacking for multiple copies of Exit the Dragon and Let Your Dim Light Shine.
For a moment there, the Flaming Lips seemed destined to join the also-rans. Released in the fall of 1995, Clouds Taste Metallic was the band’s seventh album, but the first to arrive with any commercial expectations. After a decade on the fringes, the Lips struck paydirt with 1993's Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, whose fluke hit single—"She Don’t Use Jelly"—drove album sales into the low six figures and earned the triple crown of '90s TV appearances. Understandably trying to capitalize on this momentum, the Lips loaded Clouds with more cheery and catchy songs about girls doing strange things with foodstuffs. But album sales floundered and, by the fall of 1996, reclusive guitarist Ronald Jones—whose swirling screech was so crucial to the two aforementioned records—had left the band, reportedly out of frustration with drummer Steven Drozd’s worsening heroin addiction.
Clouds Taste Metallic is the last album where the Flaming Lips just sounded like some oddballs from Oklahoma, before Wayne Coyne, Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins refashioned themselves as studio scientists and transformed into the blood-splattered, laser-shooting, Miley-collaborating freak show that’s topped festival bills since the dawn of the millennium. But the record stands as the peak moment in a fantastic four-album run that began with 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. It's a sturdy wood-paneled shrine to the band’s teenage rec-room touchstones, channeling the shortwave frequencies of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the fuzz-toned boogie of The Slide**r, the rustic splendor of After the Gold Rush, the thundering thrust of Houses of the Holy, and a Revolver-like balance of kid-friendly frivolity and strobe-lit freakery. Clouds' sad-eyed opener, "The Abandoned Hospital Ship", charts the Flaming Lips’ early '90s evolution in miniature: A creaky Coyne serenade (click-tracked by a wheezing film projector) gives way to a volcanic sludge-rock eruption, but the maelstrom is eventually smoothed over by merry church-bell chimes and swooning choral harmonies. It’s the musical manifestation of what would later become a common Lips lyrical motif—even in the midst of chaos, everything’s going to be okay.
Here, the Lips use distortion to exhilarate rather than annihilate: "Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles" may rumble like a rocket launching out of your floor, but its perma-grin melody invites you along for the ride. Coyne and Jones’ guitar noise is infused with character and humor, like the spasmodic riffs that personify a patently absurd song like "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" or the buzzing surges that power "Lightning Strikes the Postman". And there’s also something reassuringly earthbound about their sound—amid the high-octane blast of "Kim’s Watermelon Gun", Jones drops in countrified fills like he’s plucking an electric banjo, while the cuteness of "Christmas at the Zoo" is kept in check by a George Harrison-style refrain that emulates the weepy tone of a pedal steel.
But if Clouds Taste Metallic pushes Coyne’s lyrical whimsy into overdrive, it also provides the first inklings of the more emotionally charged songwriting that would flourish on 1999’s orchestro-rock opus The Soft Bulletin. Rather than merely invoke outer-space imagery for trippy effect, stargazing songs like "Placebo Headwound" and "When You Smile" find Coyne simultaneously awed and humbled by his infinitesimal place in the cosmos. And the alternately rousing and defeatist "Evil Will Prevail" resonated all the more deeply in the aftermath of the April 1995 domestic-terrorist bombing in their native Oklahoma.
The songs that fill out this expanded three-disc 20th-anniversary edition—part of the band’s Heady Nuggs reissue series—likewise capture the Lips at their most down-to-earth, evincing an intimate charm that’s since been vanquished from the band’s increasingly futurist, high-concept music. Even though, post-Transmissions, the Lips were an MTV-approved major-label rock band touring with the likes of Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, and Candlebox, they were more spiritually in tune with the lo-fi pop and skewed, tape-manipulated psychedelia bubbling up from the American indie underground in the early '90s.
The wonderful 1994 EP Due to High Expectations… The Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles for Your Balloons (included here in its entirety) is anchored by an early, slightly scruffier version of future Clouds closer "Bad Days", but mostly imagines a parallel '90s where the Lips were signed to Drag City instead of Warner Bros. Woofer-blowing sing-alongs ("Jets Pt. 2") collide with honky-tonked Alan Vega revamps ("Ice Drummer"), shout-outs to a then-unknown Bill Callahan (via the live in-store performance of Smog’s "Chosen One") and impromptu Christmas carols ("Little Drummer Boy"). The Needles EP is supplemented here by corrosive covers of Bowie ("Life on Mars?"), Bolan ("Ballrooms of Mars"), Sinatra ("It Was a Very Good Year") and other ephemera, but collectively the bonus material reinforces the lo-fi maxim that a great song can withstand the most unforgiving production.
No song makes that case more persuasively than "Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear", a piano ballad that sounds like it was recorded into a dictaphone that is nonetheless one of the prettiest, most poignant songs in the Lips canon. It also serves as a reminder of a time when Flaming Lips songs required two-minute preambles from Coyne to explain their meaning (in this case, a half-true story about his stoned brother’s paranoid freak-out at a grocery store, and his imagined superhuman ability to telepathically summon insects to attack meddlesome cops). But where the post-Bulletin Lips thrived by translating serious songs into circus-sized spectacle, back in the mid-’90s, Coyne had a special gift for making the most outlandish concepts seem logical and oddly relatable.
Heady Nuggs’ third disc—a bootleg-quality document of a May 1996 show in Seattle—is hardly lacking for expository banter, though the real novelty is hearing the Lips rip through a set untethered to the ceremony and choreography that defines their shows today. It’s a grainy-but-radiant snapshot of the mid-'90s Lips live experience, and the performances—particularly the awesomely interstellar version of In a Priest Driven Ambulance’s "Take Meta Mars"—capture this version of the band at the peak of their brain-scrambling powers. (You may not be able to see the twinkling pinwheel Christmas lights that smothered their stages at the time, but you can more or less hear them.)
But a telling moment emerges from the epic distention of "Psychiatric Explorations" that closes the set proper. After stretching what was originally a three-minute song past the nine-minute mark (and seriously straining Coyne’s voice in the process), the Lips sputter out, and within months, their entire guitar-powered aesthetic would follow suit. Ronald Jones was gone just a few months later, and before year’s end, the band had turned into something else entirely. Compared to what followed, the Flaming Lips that made Clouds Taste Metallic were just a rock'n'roll band. But this reissue reminds us of what a uniquely wondrous and marvelous rock'n'roll band they were. | 2015-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | November 24, 2015 | 9.1 | bfa50a0b-e722-461d-ae04-37c69293a251 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The short but well-developed debut from the Polish singer features close collaborations with the trip-hop luminary as they conjure a hushed, alluring atmosphere. | The short but well-developed debut from the Polish singer features close collaborations with the trip-hop luminary as they conjure a hushed, alluring atmosphere. | Marta Złakowska / Tricky: When It’s Going Wrong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marta-tricky-when-its-going-wrong/ | When It’s Going Wrong | In 2017, on the opening night of his European tour, the British trip-hop veteran Tricky quickly needed someone to fill in on vocals. A promoter suggested Marta Złakowska, who was then working at a bar in Krakow. Marta, a well-trained jazz singer, was a quick study and joined Tricky first on that tour, then on recordings with his label False Idols. With this partnership, Marta joined a decades-long line of storied trip-hop producer-vocal pairings—most famously, in Tricky’s case, Maxinquaye with Martina Topley-Bird. Comparisons between the two singers abounded and seemed near-inevitable: their similar origin stories, their smoke-curl voices. But Marta is an even more low-key presence, almost ephemeral. On her arrestingly spare debut album, she’s found a sound to match.
When It’s Going Wrong does a lot with very little. The nine-track album lasts barely over 19 minutes—a downright astonishing runtime, given how developed and complete it sounds. Tricky’s arrangements, inventive and fast-shifting as ever, account for part of this, but the credit also lies in Marta’s gift for beckoning you into the mood. The album follows a fairly direct line from Tricky and Marta’s 2020 project Fall to Pieces, and the two records’ lead tracks—here “Intro,” then “Thinking Of”—are remarkably alike, sharing a stark arrangement of a few low synth notes repeating pendulum-like. But on “Intro,” Tricky slows and pares back the production even more, the riff reduced to two notes from three. Marta’s vocal is fast and insistent alongside it, pushing against the arrangement until that arrangement abruptly goes silent.
This is the album’s feel: all tension, little climax, and little need for it. “When It’s Going Wrong” is a study in almost agonizing restraint, with instrumentation that sounds more like insinuation and lyrics that leave most things unsaid. When Marta sings “Call me when it’s going wrong,” murmuring over a creeping, unchanging tempo, it sounds like an omen—maybe even a threat. In these sub-two-minute tracks, Tricky’s production somehow finds room to shift and intensify the mood—a string interlude on “Nowhere,” a few sudden moments of drum-and-bass on “Today”—and also to fall quiet all of a sudden, as if someone’s changed their mind. On “Swimming Away,” the album’s slinkiest and most uptempo track, Marta and Tricky trade spoken-word lines over what sounds like the faintest possible disco. It, too, grows hushed in its final moments.
When It’s Going Wrong is less emotionally raw than Fall to Pieces. Instead, almost every lyric imagines moving without progressing: pushing through water, sinking into quicksand, going nowhere. Perhaps this theme is what drew Marta to the first of two covers on the album: “Today,” a downtempo version of a Jefferson Airplane cut that’s part glowing love song, part confused revelation. Marta pulls the track away from its folk-rock sunshine into a dimmer place. Simply by replacing the choral backing vocals with Tricky’s husky whisper, the original song’s singalong becomes something more like a private confession.
The second cover closes the album: “Czarno Czarny,” a Polish folk song. Suddenly a brighter tone is set: a major key, a bell line chiming in unison with the melody, a runtime that’s among the longest on the album. The simplicity brings to mind something Tricky said, talking up his collaborator: “Marta doesn’t care about being famous, she just wants to sing.” It’s exactly how she works: casually conjuring a seductive vibe, then just as nonchalantly letting the tension fade. | 2023-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | False Idols | April 11, 2023 | 7 | bfa6bef7-8154-496c-b230-dd7e703cdd7c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
On his first album for Warp, the South London musician mixes grunge guitars with drum’n’bass breaks and claustrophobic atmospheres, seeking uneasy catharsis. | On his first album for Warp, the South London musician mixes grunge guitars with drum’n’bass breaks and claustrophobic atmospheres, seeking uneasy catharsis. | Wu-Lu: LOGGERHEAD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wu-lu-loggerhead/ | LOGGERHEAD | On his 2021 single “South,” Wu-Lu (aka Miles Romans-Hopcraft) burst through a blocked emotional dam and into the spotlight. Raging against being priced out of his South London community, the Brixton artist mounted a forceful grunge-rap blitz—a surprising but welcome shift for a musician whose earlier releases—lush downtempo under the influence of Los Angeles beat music—would have struggled to send a ripple through a mosh pit, much less open one up. The song’s bruised emotions mapped a restless mind in flux, hinting at Wu-Lu’s ascendance as a genre-breaking force.
With the arrival of LOGGERHEAD, Wu-Lu’s Warp debut, it’s clear that Romans-Hopcraft isn’t interested in being the punk prophet of the anti-gentrification movement. Instead, he channels his energy inward, harnessing the turmoil at the heart of “South” to drive out his demons. Suffused in cut-up breakbeats, glowering basslines, and claustrophobic atmospheres, it’s the sound of your brilliant but quiet friend learning to say it with their whole chest for the first time, even if they’re still practicing in front of a mirror.
LOGGERHEAD’s most compelling moments are when Romans-Hopcraft allows his fury to surface. “South” remains the gold standard; no lyrical moment delivers as staggering a gut punch, or as visceral an image of urban decay, as its opening couplet (“I used to live in South London/There isn’t much of it left”); no vocal outburst cuts as deeply as the blood-curdling scream that forms the song’s chorus. Penultimate cut “Times,” a grungy thrasher featuring a monstrous drum performance from generational talent Morgan Simpson, of black midi, comes closest to giving “South” a photo-finish challenger. Simpson’s explosive power behind the kit imbues everything, including Romans-Hopcraft’s drawling vocal delivery and searing guitar hook, with an awe-inspiring swagger that makes the record’s longest song fly by like it’s the shortest. “These are tuff times for my mind and its design,” he sings, his voice confidently dragging behind the surging beat. Feeling the pressure but in no rush to respond, Wu-Lu bends but doesn’t break.
But it takes him quite some time to build up the necessary anger to push the record toward catharsis. Despite their forceful drums, the first four songs are hazy and emotionally evasive, hamstrung by uneven and cluttered mixes that push Romans-Hopcraft’s voice way down in the murk, and light on insight. Clichés like “Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true,” on plodding, perfunctory opener “Take Stage” only add to the risk of the audience nodding off before the curtain fully rises. The sullen, aimless drum’n’bass of “Facts” is the weakest of this opening stretch, and the most startling example of sonic mismatch. Elsewhere, Romans-Hopcraft proves his talent as a versatile and commanding vocalist, but his mumbled delivery here, buried beneath jittery drums and distracting electronic flourishes, makes you wonder if he feels anything about “watching TV, seeing my ideas jacked.”
Thankfully, once the album gathers the necessary steam, LOGGERHEAD’s world-weary portraits of survival take on a sharper focus. The hypnotic, largely acoustic “Calo Paste” is intense without being volatile: Romans-Hopcraft and guest vocalist Léa Sen circle around Mica Levi and Raven Bush’s gorgeous, minimal string arrangement with the chanted refrain, “I don’t want to see your mental health go to waste,” their multi-tracked voices washing ashore together in a disarming flood of tenderness. “Slightly” wraps self-doubt (“I don’t feel the same/And I’m weak when I pray”) in a deceptively lithe trip-hop groove; the harrowing “Blame” (“Eyes shot red/Couldn’t see my best friend/Soul was dead”) is a delirious yet strangely tender take on noise-rap.
In the introduction to closer “Broken Homes,” Romans-Hopcraft recites a short poem with straight-to-camera seriousness, lamenting the impossibility of “reasonable thought” when “anxious frames of guilt” constrain “everyday reality.” Live, the song’s wiry groove emerges from an extended feedback jam, but here, he’s cloaked in nothing but a gently swelling string drone. After spending an album with his guard up, there’s something distinctly human, even sweet, about his vulnerability. Then a seething post-punk groove whips up clouds of dust, and he tears into a free-associative meditation on doubt and resilience. Even as the music rages around him, it’s clear that he’s finally lowered his shield. | 2022-07-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | July 11, 2022 | 7.3 | bfb80d0d-9458-420c-aed8-20c188c0b8a9 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Soaring Swedish indie rockers Makthaverskan deliver anthems of heartache that anyone could love on their third album. | Soaring Swedish indie rockers Makthaverskan deliver anthems of heartache that anyone could love on their third album. | Makthaverskan: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makthaverskan-iii/ | III | Makthaverskan make music for the margins. Formed by a group of schoolmates from Gothenburg, Sweden, the dream punk band rejects the ultra-slick production and cloying cuteness that dominates their native country’s famed pop machine. Instead, they lean on the angsty melodrama of ’90s Swedish rock group Broder Daniel, who were in turn influenced by the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s feedback-soaked pop. But despite some major aesthetic differences, Makthaverskan do share a crucial belief with artists like the Scandinavian hitmaker Max Martin, who once said that “a great pop song should be felt when you hear it.”
Chasing that deceptively simple goal, Makthaverskan vocalist Maja Milner pens her lyrics quickly, in an effort to preserve the urgency of an experience. Her wistful confessionals and biting “fuck you”s create tension with the more uplifting guitar melodies that swirl around her. If the group’s ferocious last album, 2013’s II, was akin to ripped flesh, then III finds the band picking at the scabs of cauterized wounds. Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery,” as Milner sings on the lyrically-fatalistic and sonically radiant single, “Eden.” But on tracks like “To Say It as It Is” and “Days Turn Into Years,” Milner and her bandmates—bassist Irma Krook, guitarist Hugo Randulv, and drummer Andreas “Palle” Wettmark—dip into slow-burning dramas, revealing a new type of bareness along the way.
Milner’s quest for love is blocked at seemingly every turn on III. “You don’t even see it in my eyes/You are all that I want,” she sings on opener “Vienna,” her voice swelling with yearning before revealing a harsh reality: “But now you’re dead/You’re gone!” On the album’s low-key highlight “Leda,” Milner struggles with a lover who ignores her (and everything else), but chooses not to take it personally. And on the Roy Orbison indebted “In My Dreams,” love is only possible as a fantasy. Yet in typical Makthaverskan fashion, all the crashing hi-hats, fuzz pedals, and soaring hooks make heartbreak sound triumphant. These are songs of survival, not misery.
Perhaps because Milner spends so much of III in the grips of factors beyond her control, her reclamation on the wildly carnal “Witness” feels like a gigantic triumph. First released as a single two years ago, the song is a radical departure for Makthaverskan, a hardcore call to the pit. While the band indulge in a self-described Iron Maiden moment, Milner relishes a foe’s eventual downfall, her voice a dramatic, determined foil to the band’s pummeling onslaught.
Penultimate track “Comfort,” meanwhile, is an ominous post-punk number that feels like a follow-up to II’s “No Mercy,” which became a rallying cry of sorts due to its empowered chorus: “Fuck you for fucking me when I was 17.” Here, Milner guides someone else through a shared trauma as best she can: “His mistakes took our youth/… To ease the pain what can I say, it will never go away.” Returning to the idea that a song’s emotional pulse should be immediate, the song’s haunting guitar riff communicates as much pain as the anguished chorus. Every note is felt. | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | October 23, 2017 | 7.6 | bfb975a9-859c-4539-969d-24debf6f1273 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The Texas rapper’s second album shows a great talent struggling to find her place while focusing on what she does best: aggressive, take-no-prisoner bars. | The Texas rapper’s second album shows a great talent struggling to find her place while focusing on what she does best: aggressive, take-no-prisoner bars. | Big Jade: Pressure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-jade-pressure/ | Pressure | Black women’s bodies have always been an easy target in mainstream hip-hop. Our physicality is continually used as a tool to extract pleasure or inflict pain, and it’s so ubiquitous that for a listener, the effect barely registers. The past few years, though, have signaled other (i.e., more feminist) possibilities. In the age of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s rise to superstardom—which is, of course, indebted to predecessors like Trina, Lil’ Kim, and Nicki Minaj—the sexual pleasure of women promoted by women is, almost unbelievably, commercially viable. At the same time, the commodification of rap music steered by women—in an environment still dominated by men—has made the lines between agency and objectification or sex positivity and sexual exploitation murky, to say the least.
Beaumont, Texas native Big Jade’s second album Pressure finds itself caught in the maelstrom of this identity crisis. Powerful men in the industry still openly ascribe to sexist norms, which complicates the strides made by women in recent years. Two months before the album dropped, Jade revealed in a radio interview that she refused to sign a deal with Migos rapper Offset (also Cardi B’s on-again, off-again partner) because of a stipulation to “get [her] body done.” Meanwhile, BeatKing, the first person to take a chance on Jade and the producer of seven out of 10 tracks on her album, specializes in club-ready, sex-charged bops that tell women exactly what to do with their bodies. In the music video for a collaboration with Ludacris released earlier this year, BeatKing plays a doctor administering butt injections.
So where does this leave Big Jade? It’s a question Pressure struggles to answer. Jade’s signature hard-hitting and crazy-fast raps, best showcased in her at-home freestyle videos, are abundant and flawlessly delivered on the project but often seem at odds with the Houston Club God’s languorous and predictable production. Even when she’s explicitly making pussy poppin’ rap, she sounds less than enthused. The result is an album that displays a great talent struggling to find her place.
This isn’t to say that she has to choose between being sexy or hard. That kind of binary thinking only reinforces stereotypes. Jade’s debut album Bsbbj (spearheaded by BeatKing) was full of raunchy tracks with fun and sexually fluid takes on pussy-rap (“I hate a bitch that’s fake gay/Bitch, this ain’t no playdate,” she spits on “Period Pooh”). Similarly, on Pressure, “Dem Girlz”—a rare instance in which an early-aughts flip (in this case, David Banner’s “Like a Pimp”) avoids coming off as lazy and uninspired—recalls the playfulness of Jade’s earlier project; it’s ready-made for warm weather debauchery. But the rest of the album indicates a desire to move away from twerk anthems. She can still tear the club up, but lyrically, she seems to be reaching more for a “Dreams and Nightmares” effect than a “Back That Azz Up” one.
The bulk of Pressure reflects what Jade does best: aggressive, take-no-prisoner bars that assert her ability to whoop your ass on the track and in person. Her breathless raps on “Jade Wins” and unhurried, almost casual threats on “Pressed” reveal her impressive range and vocal control over beats that play to her strengths. Elsewhere, bland production constricts Jade’s raps rather than propping them up. It’s too easy to tune out what she’s saying on “No Hook,” especially after the beat switches. “Up Now” is simply boring, and the slow trudge of “Respectfully” is uncomfortable and could’ve used an extra Jade verse instead of BeatKing’s standard strip club bars.
Big Jade may only be 5’2, but her freestyles have shown that she lives up to her chosen moniker. While Pressure doesn’t match the bar set by her one-offs, it affirms that she is bigger than formulaic club beats. That said, a real summer might finally be upon us, and I’ve never wanted more than to drunkenly throw it back. I’d happily do it to Big Jade, but I’d rather not just move to her music. I want to listen to her, and it’s clear she still has a lot to say.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | June 11, 2021 | 6.5 | bfbb2312-6774-494b-9821-ca504d6584f9 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
Drawing from two long-out-of-print compilations from the mid 1980s, this abridged reissue documents experiments in fusion—mixing post-punk, electronic, and fourth world—that sound both as strange and as relevant as ever. | Drawing from two long-out-of-print compilations from the mid 1980s, this abridged reissue documents experiments in fusion—mixing post-punk, electronic, and fourth world—that sound both as strange and as relevant as ever. | Various Artists: Terra Incognita | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-terra-incognita/ | Terra Incognita | The best compilation titles are as evocative as they are explanatory: Valium Orgasms, Someone Got Their Head Kicked In!, The Philosophy of Sound and Machine. When Spaniards Ani Zinc and Javier G. Marin released two compilations entitled Terra Incognita (“unknown territories”) on their Auxilio de Cientos label in 1985 and 1986, the name was both succinct and suggestive. Few eras of music remain as muddy and confounding as the early-to-mid ’80s, when the lines between post-punk, industrial, no wave, new wave, fourth world, and other styles became nearly impossible to parse.
While recent comps may have explored this period in greater detail (some of the better ones include The Minimal Wave Tapes and Oz Waves), Terra Incognita I and II are two of the earliest. They have languished out of print for over three decades, with both volumes trading online for ludicrous amounts. On this affordable, single-volume edition, the British reissue label Emotional Rescue cherry-picks tracks that have eluded compilers over the years. Today, Terra Incognita remains wondrously arcane, with thrilling new sounds from around the globe—France, Belgium, Spain, America, Africa—lurking around every corner.
No matter the year or the context, “Criola,” the collaboration between the Congolese/Belgian duo of Denis Mpunga and Paul K, would be a standout: It is a startling mash-up of Mpunga’s heavenly warble and a rockslide of drum machines, explosive hand percussion, and effervescent marimba lines. The heady mixture was basically a one-off (though the Music From Memory label recently unearthed extra tracks from this session). Its only real antecedent from that decade came from French composer Hector Zazou and his Congolese collaborator Bony Bikaye, who in 1983 teamed with French electronic duo Cy 1 to make an audacious amalgam of African rhythms, drum machine, and experimental electronics on Noir Et Blanc. Zazou and Bikaye contribute “Komba” to this set, and the duo again sounds like little else from that era: Melding Bikaye’s earthy vocals to a weightless synth backdrop, they create a woozy sort of lullaby. Zazou also appears in another enchanting collaboration on “Stranger in the New Light,” which finds him working with the Congolese singer Ray Lema and a mysterious figure named Nodland, their ethereal voices casting spells over dribbling hand drum and crepuscular keys.
Other acts featured on the comp are even more obscure, but while these artists may not have wielded much influence at the time, these mutant noises feel particularly resonant today. Right now, somewhere in Bushwick, some band is probably seeking to emulate Mal’s whiplash synth-punk or the Belgian husband-wife duo Bene Gesserit’s drunken machine din and howling, whispering gibberish. While they might have only made one cassette in 1984, the Poe-referencing entity called La Caida de la Casa Usher suggests what Arca might sound like if he had come up as an early-’80s punk, with Spanish-language vocals snarling over drum machines that flay like a whip.
It doesn’t all anticipate the future, or even hold up very well. The flanged, lo-fi guitars of Image Pour Image and the muffled funk-punk weirdness of Instead Of sound pretty much like any other stumbling rock-not-rock act, no matter what peculiar production choices they made. But nothing here is as strange as American outsider Danny Alias and his answer record to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Alias’ first single, “Civil Defense,” caught the ear of no less than Chicago house legend Ron Hardy, who created an edit of the tune. Here, “Big Brother - The Answer” mimic’s Anderson’s vocodered delivery, intoning cryptic phrases (“Hello, this is the clinic/Are you queer?”; “Big Brother said/You’re not the first/But you’re not the last”) as synths and woodwind lurch in the background. By turns paranoid, vicious, gorgeous, perverse, and silly, it hints at even stranger musical terrain that still remains unexplored. | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Emotional Rescue | August 21, 2017 | 7.2 | bfbb6fa4-aeb4-4e4a-ba95-b123df67ea2c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On her full-length debut, the R&B singer expands her musicality and lyrical confidence. The album is ambitious in its scope even as it treads the oft-wandered territories. | On her full-length debut, the R&B singer expands her musicality and lyrical confidence. The album is ambitious in its scope even as it treads the oft-wandered territories. | UMI: Forest in the City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/umi-forest-in-the-city/ | Forest in the City | Tierra Umi Wilson has been preparing for her close-up. Her 2021 EP Introspection Reimagined was, at first glance, a premature step by a new artist—a revisitation of her 2020 EP Introspection, where she was accompanied by a live band. A re-do felt like unnecessary filler in a still nascent career, but UMI wanted her listeners to experience the stages of her artistic maturation in practice—to see the constant shifts in real time. On her debut album, Forest in the City, her expanded musicality and lyrical confidence make it clear what comes to fruition when an artist’s development is central to their position as an entertainer. Her influences—Erykah Badu, Brandy, SZA—are obvious without falling into mimicry, and her growth is both exciting and compelling.
Spanning 15 songs, the album is ambitious in its scope even as it treads the oft-wandered territories of self-discovery, stifling lethargy, and complicated relationship dynamics. On the standout tracks, slivers of truth meld into fictional songwriting just enough for listeners to catch her reflection. “I wanna be happy with my own path/I wanna be good to the friends that I have” she sings on “sorry,” her syncopated oohs and ahhs holding the lyrics in a soft frame. “I wanna be a stoner with my own pad/I wanna be cool with my motherfuckin’ dad.” The vibe is chill while still being very real, an atmosphere that permeates the record. “too late” grapples with the circumstances of revealing too much too soon in a relationship, while “moonlit room” deals with the complicated longing that comes after separation. On the latter’s chorus UMI delivers her lines with rapid-fire control and clarity, projecting ambivalence while still feeling sentimental.
Similar to her 2020 EP, UMI wrote all of the songs on Forest in the City. While producers Logiksmind and Psymun appear both here and on her last project, she takes a stronger hold of the reins and pushes her sound in a more dynamic direction. On “wish that i could” she experiments with heavier bass and an electronic twist to her voice that’s been stretched to achieve a danceable but still steady lilt. And there’s plenty of summer jam potential on “what would you do,” a song for those pleasantly buzzed club nights. As she deliberates taking a lover home or simply chilling alone, her vibe is cocky and assured, a departure from the earnest ballads of her earlier work. In this space, she’s nonchalant about the dating game, observing its monotonous routine and predicting the eventual outcome—meeting, hanging out, someone leaving, someone staying, and repeat.
Halfway through the album, the length starts to feel like a weight; some tracks feel padded on without a discernible purpose. Singles like “whatever u like” and “birds eye view” are pleasant but forgettable—her layered harmonizing on each shows the ease with which UMI can coast over a beat, but we also hear her pen at its most uninspired. “everything will be alright” has UMI starting off in Japanese before switching to English, signaling the ways she effortlessly moves from one to the other, and masking the labor it takes to express yourself with equal insight and power in multiple languages. But the track feels obligatory and tailor-made to punctuate fleeting captions about living your best life.
Even so, she pulls us right back into her orbit with “lost and found” which builds off all the facets that shape her art: intimacy, reflections, minimal production. UMI has a subtle, slow-building voice, one that can fool you into thinking you can play it in the background while you go about your day. But then you hear a revealing lyric and catch a sweeping note that commandeers your attention. On Forest in the City, UMI makes the case that we are all our own forests moving through cycles of growth and decay. She has been learning about herself while sinking into her music, and this new chapter shows an artist who will not be rushed—who’s ready to be seen because she’s done the heavy lifting. | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Keep Cool / RCA | May 31, 2022 | 6.7 | bfbba50b-781b-4817-b460-d7689d93d684 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
Aimée Argote's band Des Ark oscillates between thrashing noise rock and hushed folk. Everything Dies is her most unified project, and for all the turmoil it confronts, it creates a sense of safety. Nearly every song extends a hand to the abused, the subjugated, or the otherwise marginalized and reassures them they’ll be all right. | Aimée Argote's band Des Ark oscillates between thrashing noise rock and hushed folk. Everything Dies is her most unified project, and for all the turmoil it confronts, it creates a sense of safety. Nearly every song extends a hand to the abused, the subjugated, or the otherwise marginalized and reassures them they’ll be all right. | Various Artists: Everything Dies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21009-everything-dies/ | Everything Dies | Des Ark's Aimée Argote can shred with the best of them when the mood strikes, though on Everything Dies, it doesn't. For most of the last decade, Argote's band has existed as a Jekyll/Hyde operation, oscillating between thrashing noise rock and hushed folk. Depending on her lineup, a Des Ark show might find her making a mockery of ear plugs, contorting her body into impossible positions to force the cruelest sounds from her instrument, or playing for a crowd seated on the floor, inviting them to squeeze in closer in order to hear her over her unplugged guitar.
Argote makes either extreme feel like her natural state on stage, though capturing both on the same record has proved more of a challenge. 2011's Don't Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker positioned scorching punk uncomfortably against pretty but sometimes overworked songs that lost some of the intensity of Argote's solo performances. On Everything Dies, she avoids that whiplash. Though it was recorded in bits and pieces at six studios in five states over a span of several years, with a range of collaborators including Swans' Thor Harris, Engine Down's Jonathan Fuller, and Saddle Creek journeyman Andy LeMaster, it coheres like the product of a single session.
No track benefits more from this unified approach than "Ties". Argote has been kicking that song around since at least 2007, when it first appeared under the misleadingly silly title "Covert Conspiracy of Spanish Speaking Cats" on a solo session Argote recorded for the Durham station WXDU. On its Everything Dies' update, she's accompanied by imposing guitars and drums that give the song thrust, underscoring Argote's violent imagery without drowning out the dread in her voice. It's the most devastating song she's ever written, a chilling documentation of the tolls of loving an addict—the promises they might break, the things they might steal, and the bruises they might leave. "Here it is," she sings, "The bathtub where you'll find the love of your life, choking up his own blood." The words seem to fight her as they leave her mouth.
Not all of Everything Dies is so bleak—it couldn't be. "French Fries Are Magical" plays like a prolonged hug, as does the album's most unabashedly pretty number, "Street Woods". And the one song on the record that does live up to its irreverent title, "Don Taco & His Hot Sauce Toss", is downright gleeful, a communal rejoice that falls somewhere between the Polyphonic Spree's rainbow sing-alongs and the radiant pop of Feist's The Reminder.
As on Don't Rock the Boat, there are moments on Everything Dies where you can't help but wonder how a songwriter this good has existed so far below the radar of so many listeners. In a recent interview with After Ellen, Argote shed some light on why that might be, explaining that she prefers to play queer-friendly venues and safe spaces removed from the threats and harassment that women face at traditional venues. "I don't really feel like I need to cultivate a male audience," she explained. "My songs are written for women and they're written for queer people; those are the people I've been closest to in my life, who I obviously want to share my music with … Really what I would like to do is create spaces that are safe for everybody and since I identify as queer I think it helps."
Those comments sparked some distracting backlash from male commenters somehow upset that a woman might want to target her music at her own community, but they reveal a lot about these songs. For all the turmoil it confronts, Everything Dies really does create that sense of safety. Nearly every song extends a hand to the abused, the subjugated, or the otherwise marginalized and reassures them they'll be all right. "I'll bandage up your arms, your legs, and leave you where the wounded lay," she offers a lover on "Coney Island Street Meat". Argote cycles through nearly every emotion imaginable in these songs, but the one that drives her the most is concern. | 2015-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Graveface | September 24, 2015 | 7.5 | bfbf4bd5-5a50-4e4d-b57f-bfb854ada34d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Reissued on vinyl some 40 years after its initial release, Don Cherry’s sprawling, free, ecstatic masterwork defined what came to be known as “world” music. | Reissued on vinyl some 40 years after its initial release, Don Cherry’s sprawling, free, ecstatic masterwork defined what came to be known as “world” music. | Don Cherry: Brown Rice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/don-cherry-brown-rice/ | Brown Rice | After the seismic 23 months (1959-1961) in which the Ornette Coleman Quartet flipped the jazz world on its ear, Coleman, drummer Ed Blackwell, bassist Charlie Haden, and trumpeter Don Cherry scattered to the winds. In the decades that followed, Coleman jammed with everyone from the London Symphony Orchestra to his ten-year old son Denardo to the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Ed Blackwell drummed for Eric Dolphy and Yoko Ono while Haden wed Spanish Civil War folk songs to jazz. And Don Cherry set about traversing the globe in search of what he deemed “organic music.”
Today, you can find the word “organic” in any Kroger or corner bodega, but in the early ‘70s it was as alien as yoga, world music, and a macrobiotic diet, all concepts that would inform Cherry’s approach to music for the rest of his life. Uprooted from Oklahoma to the Watts ghetto in California when the oil boom destroyed the family land, Cherry was attuned to societal ills from an early age. And while his work was rooted in jazz improvisation, Cherry sought a level playing field in his work that could unite Indian classical, African township jive, Indonesian gamelan, Arabic folk, electric Miles, early minimalism, orchestral music, skronky noise, and more, sometimes all at once. Cherry’s childlike vision of inclusiveness pioneered what would soon be known as “world music.” But rather than a sippable café soundtrack, Cherry’s music was sprawling, free, ecstatic, and devout.
Most of his ‘70s albums came in the form of concert recordings that captured him in the heat of the moment, but 1975’s Brown Rice is a thrilling exception. Cut across two studios in New York, the four compositions here present the most focused vision of Cherry’s muse, resembling his wife Moki Cherry’s carefully assembled tapestries rather than the paint splatters of live performance. Featuring Haden on bass, old Coleman drummer Billy Higgins, fiery saxophonist Frank Lowe, and Moki on tambura, with glints of vocals and electronics, the album is searing and psychedelic, pulsing and deeply hypnotic. Abstract, visceral, and deeply personal (the cover photo shows Cherry at Watts Towers), Brown Rice anticipates the boundary-free future of music. But it wasn’t always easy to hear; never reissued on CD in the US, this vinyl reissue comes some 40 years after its original release.
In the opening minute of “Brown Rice,” Cherry’s world-embracing vision is made clear. An ode to a time in Cherry’s life when he subsisted only on brown rice “to remind myself there were starving people in the world” (though Julian Cope suggests it might be about heroin instead), it speaks to the two extremes of Cherry, that of the spiritual seeker and the junkie jazz musician. Two electric keyboards chime in tandem, emulating either Chinese classical music or gamelan, while Haden’s wah-wah bass interlocks with electric bongos and forms a groove. Vocalist Verna Gillis purrs an inviting and skin-prickling “ooh.” As it all starts to percolate and cook, Lowe’s bluesy outbursts lance the tapestry and Cherry calmly utters the titular phrase and other ingredients like “miiiiso,” his intonation making that bulk grain sound at once wholly sensuous and slightly sinister.
“Malkauns” references one of the oldest raga forms in Indian classical music. Moki Cherry’s tambura acts as a resting breath beneath the expansive composition, slow and deep, as Haden takes an extended solo that’s contemplative, poignant, and unhurried. When Cherry and Higgins enter nearly five minutes in, the piece moves from calm to urgent, casting off the strictures of Eastern and Western musical forms and cresting towards a sumptuous peak.
“Chenrezig” is the closest Brown Rice ever gets to sounding like straight jazz, though purists might disagree. Nearly as long as “Malkauns” and with a gaze similarly affixed towards infinity, it’s named for the most revered of all Bodhisattvas (the Dalai Lama is considered to be his reincarnation). After opening chimes and Cherry’s growled incantation set the ritual in motion, his trumpet flutters around Lowe’s melodic, vibrato-heavy solo, leading towards a tranquil center some 8 minutes in. The piece then turns ferocious; ecstatic blues chords from pianist Ricky Cherry urge the song forward and Lowe plows ahead with a shrieking, stratospheric solo, Don Cherry joining him with high-register runs and vocal ululations.
Closer “Degi-Degi” suggests a liminal space between German kosmische, Afrobeat, jazz fusion, and electric funk, powered by Haden’s incessant bass and Cherry’s high-arcing solos and whispers about “the goddess of music.” Relentless and incandescent, it rebuffs the notion that spiritual music must be placid. Much like Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane did in the ‘60s, Cherry suggests—as Alice Coltrane did in the same era—that true spiritual awakening stems not always from a state of peace but from tumult and upheaval. In its balance of noise and bliss, beauty and chaos, Brown Rice is true world music. | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Verve / UMe | May 25, 2019 | 9.2 | bfc2733e-4fc7-4c9b-bf88-e8158ab6e6e9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Ithaca, N.Y. rapper/producer Sammus writes at the intersection of race, womanhood, sexuality, and nerdiness. Pieces in Space is her strongest work to date. | The Ithaca, N.Y. rapper/producer Sammus writes at the intersection of race, womanhood, sexuality, and nerdiness. Pieces in Space is her strongest work to date. | Sammus: Pieces in Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22711-sammus-pieces-in-space/ | Pieces in Space | When something gets tagged as nerdcore rap, the implications are clear: this is for the Star Wars diehards, the sub-Redditors worried about the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s continuity with canon, or as Alex Trebek once put it on “Jeopardy!,” “losers.” It’s less MF Doom coolly retconning a comic supervillain into an enigmatic rap persona, and more Childish Gambino’s “Freaks and Geeks.” Nerdcore rap evokes the awkward and gangly, completely at odds with traditional rap bravado but still unknowingly, clumsily pantomiming its gestures nonetheless. To a point, it has long been insinuated that nerdcore rap is mostly just a safe space for introverted white males to write artlessly hypertechnical verses of Guardians of the Galaxy fan fiction and the like.
Enter Sammus, a Cornell PhD student and rapper/producer named for the Metroid heroine, making what she calls “black girl nerd rap.” Her strongest work to date is Pieces in Space, a weird and confessional collection of songs about being weird and confessional. Sammus’ music represents an under-reached subset of geek fandom: it’s made for black feminists trying to quietly coexist in the gaming and comic subcultures. But as the recent GamerGate scandal proved, this can be a culture of sexism and anti-progressivism, and it exists within a larger world that already belittles and diminishes black women specifically. Sammus’ writing converges at the intersection of race, womanhood, sexuality, and nerdiness, doing so with a subtlety lost on most in the subgenre, who rap like they’re mashing every button on a controller at once to do a combo. She’s just as influenced by hardcore nerdcore trailblazer Mega Ran as she is Kanye West. Sammus is a passionate idealist and craft-first poet, penning the kind of wordy marvels that rap annotator types fawn over; she is self-described as “living in the land of keystrokes and passwords/Cheat codes, amiibos, and actors.”
On the surface, the reference points for Pieces in Space are obvious and in keeping with the subgenre’s framework, dealing primarily with characters in the geek lexicon: MMOs, Nintendo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Sega with mentions of Loki, Luke Cage, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lakitu, and Majin Buu. But a closer reading reveals understated and sharp critiques about the ways we relate in the digital age, and how they often rob us of true connection. In the margins, these themes continuously arise: Talking to Siri when no one will listen, sharing a Netflix account with an ex you never talk to, being attacked by anonymous lynch mobs of trolls and fire-starters in comment sections. It documents life online as a black female gamer, and in turn reveals how the internet is dehumanizing us.
On “Comments Disabled,” a tightly-coiled chronicle about the pervasively toxic and antagonistic internet culture that now extends all the way to the White House, Sammus dismantles trolls. “I’m thinking you should invest in collecting a best friend,” she raps, “Who won’t let you press send/To someone you just met/Through Twitter or Sirius XM.” On “Perfect Dark,” she examines the lack of women of color in comics, games, and anime, sending a simple message: black girls want to have heroes, too. Alongside Jean Grae (a skilled lyricist who herself is named after a comic hero), “1080p” finds Sammus writing about the hardships of balancing grad school, an indie rap career, and interpersonal relationships when trying to communicate emotions through phone and computer screens, an idea fittingly conveyed by the concept of seeing things in higher resolution.
What unfolds in Pieces in Space is a tale of personal identity and perspective that provides interesting insights on micro and macro scales. Sammus paints a complete and complex self-portrait while exposing truths about the subculture she wades through, and the greater world at large. She’s a ferocious and thoughtful MC whose flows call to mind the solving of a Rubik’s Cube, especially on songs like “Headliner” and “Genius.” Her hooks can leave something to be desired; they’re usually too long-winded and chewy to be earworms, sticking out like sore thumbs. But at any given moment, she’s liable to rattle off a bar like “Gotta spit so sick that you drain Big Pharma/Get your skin so thick you don’t get stigmata” on “Cubicle.” She’s as likely to rap about phosphates and integers as she is to name-check Serena Williams or Emmitt Till. Her delivery is piercing, her perspective refreshing. She ends up becoming the role model she once set out to find. | 2016-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Don Giovanni | December 20, 2016 | 7.2 | bfcb26b8-78d0-42f0-b25b-c1ac5d582f4d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Drew McDowall spent time in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his potency as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. Collapse is his debut full-length under his own name, and on it he taps into a deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe. | Drew McDowall spent time in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his potency as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. Collapse is his debut full-length under his own name, and on it he taps into a deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe. | Drew McDowall: Collapse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21077-collapse/ | Collapse | Like anyone involved in the intricate network of bands that sprang from Throbbing Gristle, Drew McDowall has contributed to a number of projects over the past few decades. He’s most notable for his tenure in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his craft as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. One thing he’s never done, though, is release a solo album—that is, until now. Collapse is McDowall’s debut full-length under his own name, arriving 37 years after the first recorded appearance by the Poems, the Scottish punk band he formed with his then wife, and future Strawberry Switchblade member, Rose McDowall.
It’s been a long journey from teen punk to avant-industrial vet, but on Collapse, McDowall sounds anything but spent. The album’s five tracks—instrumental, save for a smatter of vocal samples—tap into the same deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe that fueled Coil, only with a fuller and more focused sense of dread. Nowhere is that as evident as on "The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws (Parts 1-3)", the 20-minute triptych that anchors Collapse with an arcane gravitas straight out of McDowall’s greatest achievement with Coil, 1999’s Astral Disaster. But where Astral Disaster folds ambience and emptiness into its spellbinding substance, "Chimeric Mesh" wields those elements like hammers. The result is cinematic, insectoid, and foreboding, even as it morphs gently from movement to movement in a fugue of skittering static and fractured blocks of noise.
Another through line of McDowall’s work over the years is psychedelia, inasmuch as it intersects with the finer pulverization of industrial. "Hypnotic Congress" takes a while to settle into its mesmeric groove, but when it does, its rhythmic cascade of echoing pulses, looped chants, and submarine blips segues into a mind-dissolving wash. There’s a ceremonially circularity to "Through Is Out" and "Each Surface of Night", each of which phases into a sequence of krautrock-like pings and oscillations by song’s end—McDowall has admitted to being warped at the age of 12 by an impulse purchase of The Faust Tapes—that tensely countermands their eerily organic, almost folk-like undertones. But the most starkly psychedelic stretch of Collapse is "Convulse", a staccato salvo of hollowed-out power electronics whose chilling sampled voice—"I convulsed," intones a woman, clinically—comes across like a radical dub reworking of Joy Division’s "She’s Lost Control", told from the perspective of the song’s subject, and played at the bottom of the ocean.
In recent years, McDowall has collaborated with numerous artists, including Tres Warren of Psychic Ills in the blissful drone project Compound Eye. On Collapse, McDowall is joined by Nicky Mao (of Effi Briest and Hiro Kone), who contributes violin, unspecified samples, and splices to the album’s beckoning mix of recursion and unease. In any case, those contributions are seamless; as a whole, the collection comes across as a unified meditation that channels an atmosphere of doom, morbid curiosity, and the perplexing pluralism of modernity. It’s also frequently beautiful, even if that beauty is undermined by a vagueness that might have been more sharply defined by wider dynamics. As a solo statement, though, Collapse is a winner—a field recording of the psyche of an extreme-music journeyman who’s finally started to settle in and harness his own dark voice. | 2015-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Dais Records | September 30, 2015 | 6.8 | bfd189b8-33c5-4ee3-95dd-b9c07fcd640d | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The genre-bending New York synth-funk septet create a glorious mess on their full-length debut. | The genre-bending New York synth-funk septet create a glorious mess on their full-length debut. | Ava Luna: Ice Level | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16419-ice-level/ | Ice Level | On the first couple passes, Ava Luna's Ice Level seems an almost impenetrable mess, charting a dizzying course between the itchy art-funk of the Dismemberment Plan, Tim-and-Aaliyah's future-perfect R&B, Dirty Projectors' forays into slip-sliding harmonics, and a generous helping of funky old soul. But even after you've traced out the many roots of the New York "nervous soul" septet's gnarly genre-bending, you'll find there's simply no telling where they'll take it from one minute to the next. With his band restlessly undulating around him, Ava Luna frontman Carlos Hernandez coos about calculus, coming off a little like The Soulman Who Fell to Earth. Still sounds like a bit of a mess, doesn't it? Sure is; and a glorious one at that.
Hernandez, son of a soul DJ with a background in noise-punk (among other things, he produced the Stateside version of Fucked Up's "Year of the Pig" 7"), belongs to the post-Prince school of falsetto-forward vocalists. Which is not to say he's a particularly studious singer; as much as or more than the man from Minneapolis himself, I'm reminded of the clear-eyed, chameleonic croon of Multiply-era Jamie Lidell, particularly when, like Lidell, Hernandez's love for the music comes across closer to full-absorption rather than simple idolatry. He's got quite a foil in Becca Kauffman, who takes a couple of striking Aaliyah-inspired solo turns here; with both Babygirl's all-knowing tone and her incredible reserve, she slips neatly into these clattering beats, where Hernandez wobbles around them. Kauffman, Felicia Douglass, and Anna Sian can often be found joined in zig-zagging, out-from-nowhere harmony, more than a little reminiscent of the vocal derring-do Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman brought to the Dirty Projectors' still-spectacular Rise Above and Bitte Orca. But with so much going on in, under, and around them, Ava Luna never allow themselves the time to fix on any one element; not only do they they sound like a lot of things, they manage to sound like most of them all at once, an impressively deft balancing act atop an ever-shifting platform.
Beneath the vocals, Ice Level's fidgety future-funk seems forever on the verge of flying off the rails, accruing-- then discarding-- an endless stream of whirrs and gurgles. Ice Level's made up of little moments, its unapologetically wriggly, cacophonous caterwaul providing one tiny thrill after another. With all that racket swooping in from all angles, the initial impression is that of utter chaos, one some listeners may never be able to quite settle into. But cock your ear to Ice Level a few times, and it begins to develop its own sort of machine logic, all these bursts of noise propping up Hernandez and co.'s abstracted come-ons and spaced-out soul-searching. Locating the songs themselves amidst these impossible shapes isn't always the easiest, but Ava Luna manage to wrangle the careening elements into a series of sweet spots well-suited to their attention-deficient dalliances with dance music, past and future. Note the ease with which "Ice Level" glides from late-1990s pop radio to sweltering strings of Isaac Hayes, or the way the skittish Destiny's Child nod "Wrenning Day" always seems a second away from spinning itself out. Songs bend, dip, double-back; that "whoa, what was that?" feeling you'll get listening to Ice Level? It persists, no matter how much time you've spent puzzling it all out.
Restlessness aside, I suspect most folks'll find their trouble with Ava Luna is located in the back of Hernandez's throat. Though his love for R&B's slippery side is readily apparent from the first time he opens his mouth, there are moments when he bends so far into a note, it comes off as slightly parodic, a little closer to Beck's winking Prince homage "Debra" than the man himself. These moments are fleeting, though, and they're smartly counterbalanced by the liquid-cool trio of Douglass, Kauffman, and Sian. And, with so much else going on, it's a feeling that, like almost everything else about Ice Level, seems fleeting. Ice Level's willingness to take so much on at once can be more than a bit discombobulating-- you throw this much at the wall, not all of it's going to stick-- but there's a real sense that if they could settle things down just a touch, there'd be a little more for the listener to grab onto from one spin to the next. But, while Ice Level's an awful lot to process, it's the finest sort of overload; listen closely enough, and you can almost hear your circuits being rewired. | 2012-03-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-03-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Infinite Best | March 22, 2012 | 7.3 | bfd50973-91d8-494d-ac43-63c00af56c02 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The latest EP from the versatile young singer is a harmless taste of pop-inflected R&B, a style in which Khalid sounds largely unremarkable. | The latest EP from the versatile young singer is a harmless taste of pop-inflected R&B, a style in which Khalid sounds largely unremarkable. | Khalid: Suncity EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khalid-suncity-ep/ | Suncity EP | No one hears a Khalid song and is like, “Yo, turn that shit off!” It’s harmless, nobody is mad at it. It’s like switching between radio stations in a car, passing over one for playing a song I hear too often, and another for commercials, before finally settling on a song that makes me shrug—it’ll do. Since arriving on the scene with “Location,” Khalid’s music has always felt like settling. The El Paso, Texas singer has talent: he can jump from genre to genre, his voice is strong, and he even has some charm. But where’s the fun in music made to appease everyone, music that only incites feelings of “I guess so?” Khalid’s new Sun City EP doesn’t escape that feeling. It’s pop-inflected R&B that is so extra-medium, finding reasons to care is difficult.
Khalid prides himself on versatility, a stylistic range that is showcased throughout the EP—no two tracks are the same. But that versatility also weighs down Khalid exposing how he’s not exceptional at one single thing but just pretty good at a bunch. On “Saturday Nights,” a guitar ballad that sounds like the ending credits on a CW teen drama, Khalid’s juvenile lovestruck songwriting comes to surface: “All the things that I know, that your parents don’t.” The song follows in the path of another Charlie Handsome acoustic guitar production, Post Malone’s “Go Flex” but with none of the edge. Khalid’s most successful branching-out moment is when he becomes the latest artist to jump on the money-printing reggaeton bandwagon for a bouncy track with Empress Of and background vocals from Spanish singer Rosalía. Khalid sounds at home having another vocalist to bounce off of and not having to carry the future hit on his own.
But Sun City is lighthearted to a fault. Khalid wants to be taken seriously on the R&B end but drops “Salem’s Interlude” which has to be the first R&B voicemail interlude to not be petty and hurtful. It transitions into “Motion,” a light and glimmery smooth jam that features Khalid without any vigor whatsoever. His voice is sharp and the melody is clean but it only makes me want to press pause and spin a Miguel cut, something with momentum. Khalid is a pop star, he’s capable on the R&B end, it’s just not where he’s most comfortable. “Vertigo” is proof that when Khalid slides into the pop alleyway—the song is reminiscent of the strange pop era when Coldplay ruled the world—his broken-hearted vocals fit perfectly into this world: “But I love you in the moment/I was happy, I was not/I’ve been learning, I’ve been growing/But the worst is yet to come.”
For as popular as Khalid is, he’s still trying to figure it out. The purpose of Sun City doesn’t seem to be a cohesive project but a vehicle to throw seven different sounds into the world and see what sticks. Khalid comes out of the project, mostly the same, still the least controversial pop star we have right now—which, in this moment, we need more of. Khalid is going to stumble into hits, as he should, and when it comes on the radio I’ll probably have little reaction just the usual shrug and a sway. | 2018-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | October 19, 2018 | 6.2 | bfd90935-ab32-48e5-bd5f-c7162df711b6 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
An expanded new mix of an overlooked, misunderstood 1975 electronic “biomusic” opus—featuring mysterious contributions from Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Phil Lesh, and others—finally gives the record its due. | An expanded new mix of an overlooked, misunderstood 1975 electronic “biomusic” opus—featuring mysterious contributions from Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Phil Lesh, and others—finally gives the record its due. | Ned Lagin: Seastones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ned-lagin-seastones/ | Seastones | While there were bushels of pioneering electronic composers active in the mid 1970s, few modular synth players performed their compositions to full arenas and put out nationally distributed quadrophonic LPs. When Seastones, Ned Lagin’s sole album of “biomusic,” was released in 1975, it received enough FM radio play to edge into the outer boroughs of Billboard’s charts despite its pressing in SQ quad, one of three quad competitors that would die in brutal mid-’70s format wars. Though the mix promised stereo compatibility, most turntables rendered a murky presentation of Seastones’ already obtuse music. A 1990 CD realization, meanwhile, accidentally deleted the track breaks. But a crystalline new mix, available only through Lagin’s website, presents a vastly expanded and rearranged two-CD iteration of Seastones, gorgeously reanimating one of the most misunderstood and literally misheard projects in the rock/experimental family tree.
Between 1970 and 1975, Lagin and Seastones arrived at what Brian Eno and others would later call “generative music.” Running modular-synth signals through chains of effects and gates—often involving other musicians as filters—the M.I.T.-trained biologist created what he called “moment forms,” not intended to be listened to in any fixed order. Broken down for the first time into 83 unnamed individual tracks, ready for shuffling at the highest possible fidelity (or cherry-picking one’s favorites) the new Seastones is an ever-changing carousel of surprising sound sculptures, tangible and visceral, often exquisitely delicate—and nearly all unsuited for anything other than total foreground listening, linear only if a listener is willing to commit to a stroll through Lagin’s creations. While some moment forms seem to anticipate Eno’s own experiments with atmospheric music, they disappear into Seastones’ constant reminders about the beauty, power, and sometimes discomfort of pure sound.
Though the original Seastones would find an audience among experimental-music heads and noise connoisseurs, it would likewise remain in the record-collecting memory due to its other feature: an all-star lineup, albeit one with a major caveat. It features significant participation by the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart; Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick; the ever-game David Crosby; and others. As the Dead’s in-house modular-synth genius, Lagin performed with the Dead live—check out 9/11/74—and in the studio, and these appearances would cement him as a glowing avant-garde node within the Dead’s music when the band got hip again around the turn of the 21st century. Throughout 1974, Lagin and Lesh would perform unannounced through the Dead’s mammoth Wall of Sound speaker array, making music that was often a combination of minimalist, rumbling, and disconcerting, sometimes moving from harsh and expressive noise to sublime space jazz.
Yet, with a few notable exceptions, these marquee names are virtually unrecognizable except as their most distilled musical personalities, their egos subsumed into the larger creation. On the original, not even Lagin’s name was on the front cover, with Lesh receiving a large-font second billing on the LP sticker itself, though not here. Originally issued on Garcia and Ron Rakow’s independent label Round Records, Lagin’s music would confound generations of Deadheads, though it would also inspire at least one Ph.D thesis chapter and the detailed chronology NedBase.
Perhaps best listened to in the dark on headphones, or sitting directly between properly cranked speakers, Seastones offers a variety of synaesthetic vistas: cybernetic pebbles skipping across a digital pond and over the event horizon (“Track 79”); interdimensional pipe-organ swells (“Track 57”); modular synth beats only a knob-tweak (and bass drop) away from a modern dance floor (“Track 05”); conversations in impenetrable tongues (“Track 06”); cackling insect reveries (“Track 80”); an all-too-brief three-minute movement of Yayoi Kusama-like dots (“Track 70”); bursts of fine-grained static (the 17-second “Track 17”); the rush of ocean in a seashell (“Track 54”); and much more. Very occasionally, recognizable human voices emerge, like the unmistakable quizzical smokiness of Grace Slick, delivering Joycean wordplay (“Track 20”). The double album’s pick hit, as it were, is “Track 66”: Jerry Garcia intoning half-sung poetry (in variations on the original LP’s back cover), a performance as psychedelic as it is tender, his voice merging seamlessly into Lagin’s electronic tapestry.
The culmination of a half-decade of work at M.I.T., Brandeis, and in the wilds of Marin County, the new edition of Seastones is Ned Lagin’s opus, a vast and beautiful musical universe. Ranging from seven seconds to 10 minutes, the 83 non-linear segments of Lagin’s “open form mobile composition” are microcosmic windows into his world. In expansive liner notes peppered by quotes from ecologist-activists like Rachel Carson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lagin patches the long-tail forces of natural history to the moment-form technical specs of his sound-making tools—including modular synths by E-mu and Buchla, a pair of Arps (2500 and Odyssey), and an Interdata 7/16 processor that Lagin programmed directly in machine code and assembly language.
All of it comes glowing with the optimism of the age, combining 20th-century modernism with the San Francisco psychedelic renaissance. The latter was then reaching its apex, rock’n’roll’s pre-punk aspirations still pointing towards the society-changing visions of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog as much as the avant-garde atmospheres of Seastones, with its musical ecologies and systems harmonies. It was all destined to go awry. Lagin would walk away from the Dead world only months after the album was released, resurfacing last year with his first new public work since the ’70s in the form of new photographs, art, writing, and an eclectic, beguiling album called Cat Dreams, less like the atonality of Seastones and perhaps more like what Jerry Garcia might have done had he pushed more rigorously into the age of MIDI.
A quiet and almost secret coda to an age of unimaginable creative ambition, Seastones remains an island of sound removed from the classic-rock archipelago, hewn by waves and now separated by time. “Seas tones,” as Lagin sometimes spells it, the moment forms collected along the shore. The music remains fully mysterious, but no longer impenetrable. Cleaned up, with nearly a half-century more of electronic pioneers behind it, the 21st century Seastones is more knowable than ever—sensations to link the ear and brain on an even more faraway beach. | 2018-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Round | July 4, 2018 | 8 | bfde631f-eabf-487d-99b1-a2cf8be5626a | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
Over the past few years, Roberto Carlos Lange has gone from making softly warped, pastoral music with Spanish lyrics and Latin influences to more urbane pop with bi-lingual lyrics. A sultry, dreamy temperament always remains, and Invisible Life is Helado Negro's clearest record yet. | Over the past few years, Roberto Carlos Lange has gone from making softly warped, pastoral music with Spanish lyrics and Latin influences to more urbane pop with bi-lingual lyrics. A sultry, dreamy temperament always remains, and Invisible Life is Helado Negro's clearest record yet. | Helado Negro: Invisible Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17690-helado-negro-invisible-life/ | Invisible Life | It's tempting to claim that the Helado Negro of 2009's Awe Owe is unrecognizable in the Helado Negro of Invisible Life. The former was a softly warped, pastoral record with Spanish lyrics and prominent Latin guitar; the latter is a more urbane electronic pop record with lyrics in English and Spanish. But in every style Roberto Carlos Lange develops, a sultry, dreamy temperament remains apparent, from the shimmying cadences and simmered arrangements to his just-woken-up voice. Invisible Life is the clearest and most dynamic Helado Negro record to date.
His transition from acoustic to electronic took place on 2011's Canta Lechuza, which was lively but sometimes drifted through embryonic learning passages. Helado Negro generally deals in smart sounds rather than memorable songs (outside of maybe "El Oeste") but that changes with Invisible Life. Lange has committed to his MPC game and tightened it up, knotting his signature atmospheres into immersive, highly musical beats scrawled with unstable sub-rhythms. The glass-brick chords and deeply pumping bass of "Dance Ghost" are solidly constructed but hairline-cracked by jittery, stereo-panned clicks, and Lange's shivery falsetto halfway through lifts the whole arrangement up a level, breaking it free from its foundations. There are many patient, considered payoffs, as when, late in "Arboles", a staccato synth begins skipping atop the leisurely Latin rhythm.
A nostalgic feel lightly creeps in to Invisible Life, from the cartoonish snake rattles and bird whistles shot through the bass arpeggios of "Lentamente" to the gear-shifting 8-bit theme of "Catastrophe". Other songs are rooted in Caribbean music or techno. But Lange's most compelling moments come when he circumvents cultural references, exhuming mysterious but vibrant sound-worlds from the ocean floor of his imagination. He's never before ventured anything as formally distinctive and effectively delightful as "U Heard", which feels densely compacted even as its varied timbres peel off in every direction-- rubbery plucks bouncing around a low octave, bubble-like blips rising and sinking, and percussion threshing straight ahead.
A couple tracks don't measure up to this standard of invention. The rather thin "Relatives", for instance, plops Helado's pal Jon Philpot (Bear in Heaven) atop a rocksteady template of knobby bass and skating backbeats and then calls it a day. There are other guests lurking around, including Devendra Banhart supposedly playing guitar on "Arboles", which isn't prominent. Helado Negro actually seems to have begun as a more collaborative project. Lange has previously worked with Julianna Barwick and Guillermo Scott Herren. But there's always been something solitary about it, and the most subtly bewitching tracks on Invisible Life feel like the internal weather of a mind billowing and clearing. His once noticeable traces of tentativeness around electronic tools have disappeared. At the time, Canta Lechuza seemed like Lange dabbling in electronic music, but in the retroactive light of Invisible Life, it sounds more like him finding his voice. | 2013-03-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-03-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | March 14, 2013 | 7.4 | bfe937e1-c871-4b47-8a8f-7bcddea8d0b6 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Mouse on Mars have yet to repeat themselves. Radical Connector boasts the longest gestation of any Mouse on Mars album since the duo formed over a decade ago, and the departure on this record is dramatic enough that it's easy to imagine at least two other transistional LPs between it and 2001's landmark Idiology. Here, the duo shake their progressive IDM constructs for alien club bangers. | Mouse on Mars have yet to repeat themselves. Radical Connector boasts the longest gestation of any Mouse on Mars album since the duo formed over a decade ago, and the departure on this record is dramatic enough that it's easy to imagine at least two other transistional LPs between it and 2001's landmark Idiology. Here, the duo shake their progressive IDM constructs for alien club bangers. | Mouse on Mars: Radical Connector | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5467-radical-connector/ | Radical Connector | As music makers in an electronic sphere, the nature and practice of repetition is something Mouse on Mars have had to confront. While they've often kept a finger on the club music button through remixes and various associations with the dance community, the Mouse on Mars method has always involved finding ways to knock the loops out of joint and upset the sort of internalized expectations that come from a lifetime of music listening. The element of surprise is crucial to their aesthetic, even though the change-ups are often subtle, which means serious attention to detail is a must. If they've taken longer to record and release albums than their contemporaries, it's because of this need to micromanage. Mouse on Mars on record are fussy and exacting.
Their full-length portfolio shows a similar inability to leave well enough alone. Mouse on Mars aren't in the business of repeating themselves, and even now, eight albums deep, it's difficult to describe one Mouse on Mars full-length by comparing it to another. Certain qualities overlap and there is a distinctive "sound," but each album picks a handful of ideas and explores them to varying depths. The next one then picks up somewhere else and goes.
2001's Idiology was unique because ideas were so numerous. Each track seemed to point to a possible new direction, and it seemed as if the next album could be anything from a screamo noisefest to an electro prog opera. You'd think we would have learned by now; it turns out that the threads running through the long-awaited new album Radical Connector are not found anywhere on Idiology. This is Mouse on Mars' most conventional album, with vocals on every track (by drummer Dodo Nkishi and Sonig fellow traveler Niobe), and it's also their most predictable in structure. Each song builds an internally consistent songworld and is content with its boundaries. If you're a fan of Mouse on Mars' more experimental side (hand up here behind the keyboard) it helps to approach Radical Connector on its own terms.
Though it is indeed pop, Radical Connector has an unusual sound. Nkishi and Niobe have strong voices even untreated, but their vocals are vocoded, chopped, and phased to seem as unnatural as possible while generally avoiding robotic cliches. Several tracks with Nkishi on lead feature an intentionally thick and sludgy low end, with the bass and drums merging into a lunging, leering, lumbering beast. And though heightened danceability has been a key selling point of this record, most tracks are a half-step slow.
"Wipe That Sound", for example, is nimble on its face with excellent "oo-way oo-way" disco background vox, a command to "kick the can" (do they play that in Germany?), and a gurgling acid bassline, but there's no way the plodding tempo is going to fill a dancefloor. Same goes for "Mine Is in Yours", probably the purest song on the album, with a simple chord structure whose catchiness becomes apparent when the electronics lay out and a ringing electric guitar takes over-- unique and excellent, but not dance music by any stretch.
The best rhythms are left for Niobe. On two of her four tracks, she assumes the role of a distant and aloof diva, intoning cryptic lyrics ("When the boats go round/ Turn on back to a spiral") behind several layers of processing. "Send Me Shivers" fits the tech-house template, with a steady chug of a rhythm hypnotic and groovy enough to earn its 6 minutes. The rhythmic accents are pure Mouse on Mars playfulness, however, with two stabs every other bar sounding like pistons from a Dr. Seuss machine.
"Evoke an Object" is comparatively sleek and sexy, with a metallic sheen and a persistent glow of distortion, and though the beat goes on for almost 9 minutes and threatens to go into full-bore house several times, it always maintains a hint of off balance herky-jerkiness. "Spaceship" is an altogether different animal, a prelude of political lyrics ("The inexact inquiry/ Profitable madness/ Society/ The abstract variety") over chaotic drum hits and wind-up noises that slowly gather like a storm before erupting into deeply goofy and great funk hinging on a rapid cut-up of the song's title. Niobe proves to be as sure a fit with Mouse on Mars' current sound as Laetitia Sadier was in the late 90s.
Though reference points like Daft Punk and Prince have rightly been thrown around, Radical Connector is in fact a strange album that doesn't sound like much else. Subversion is still here, but this time it comes in the form of texture, most of which is purely electronic in origin. There is something fundamentally ugly about the sound of Radical Connector, despite its song-oriented tendencies, but it's a quality present for contrast and complexity, and not as a statement on its own. The tension resulting from opposing forces continues to fuel for Mouse on Mars' fire, even when they're experimenting in the realm of pop. | 2004-08-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-08-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | August 24, 2004 | 8.1 | bfef78d1-98dd-43d1-ae72-b6d66ce3b726 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On their fourth album, the restless Toronto trio change lanes again, this time to minimal, claustrophobic electronic music that sounds like the end of the world. | On their fourth album, the restless Toronto trio change lanes again, this time to minimal, claustrophobic electronic music that sounds like the end of the world. | Odonis Odonis: No Pop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/odonis-odonis-no-pop/ | No Pop | On their previous album, Post Plague, Toronto’s Odonis Odonis warned us of the grave threats that technological dependency poses to the human condition. Now, a year later, they provide a despairing update: The robots have won. Where they were once a surf-damaged noise-punk trio, with No Pop, Odonis Odonis complete their incremental transformation into a bionic replicant version of their former selves. Their souls are trapped in the machine, screaming to get out. The last vestiges of their humanity have been choked out by wires, their internal CPUs threatening to violently short-circuit without warning.
Post Plague saw the group embracing the mechanized grind and aggression of EBM without sacrificing their primordial, paint-peeling dissonance. The album was so spot-on in its 1980s Mute Records evocations that they could drop a howl-for-howl cover of Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant” in their setlists last year without missing a beat. But while No Pop shares its predecessor’s compact, 10-track structure, the new album feels less like a series of discrete strobe-lit shocks than a single, amorphous, ultraviolet-lit piece. This is industrial punk shot through the smelting plant, mercurial machine music that solidifies and decomposes at regular intervals. And even though it eases up on Post Plague’s anvil-crushing pummel, it’s a more viscerally tense listen. The first lyric we hear on the record is “We have to talk”—a phrase that’s never followed by good news. It’s especially worrisome coming from singer Dean Tzenos, who sings with the unnerving numbness of a movie villain savoring the taste of his own blood after getting hit in the face. The steam-pipe synths and stalking beat that accompany those words on “Check My Profile” only amplify the sense of doom; once the queasy, contorted throb of “Nasty Boy” gets overwhelmed by piercing synth oscillations, Odonis Odonis effectively resemble a biohazard lab entering meltdown mode.
As they’ve moved beyond the lockstep thrash of some industrial music, Odonis Odonis have become ever more adept at doing more with less. “One” creates a suffocating sense of dread using just a circular bass-frequency pattern and synth squiggles that feel like spiders crawling up your neck. “By the Second,” meanwhile, is psychedelia stripped of its splendor, its chiming keyboard melody engulfed by icy textures like sunlight swallowed up by black clouds. Tzenos ominously repeats the words “Every second counts,” followed by a pained exhalation of “Ahhhhhs” that sound like a lost soul trying to remember what bliss feels like. Both tracks are best appreciated in the context of the album’s sequence, where they counter-balance the pulse-pounding peaks found elsewhere, like the Liars-on-Wax Trax thrust of “Eraser” (not a Nine Inch Nails cover) or “Vision,” a nerve-wracking jolt of diseased techno that retrofits Suicide for the supper-club.
It’s fortuitous that No Pop arrived the same month as Blade Runner: 2049—like the world of Ridley Scott’s epic sequel, this album is an immersive, disorienting display of technological precision and toxic atmosphere. You could say its mood is apocalyptic, but the images it conjures are less scorched-earth ruin, more classic claustrophobia. Congratulations: You avoided getting wiped out in World War III. Now you get to spend the rest of your life trapped in a subterranean shelter with flickering fluorescent lights that will slowly drive you crazy. | 2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Felte / Telephone Explosion | November 1, 2017 | 8.1 | bfef7c67-5288-43c8-8370-d267575c2108 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The latest album from the chameleonic hardcore band is filled with pithy one-liners and gigantic hooks. Mired in anxiety, this music builds intimacy from commiseration. | The latest album from the chameleonic hardcore band is filled with pithy one-liners and gigantic hooks. Mired in anxiety, this music builds intimacy from commiseration. | Drug Church: Hygiene | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drug-church-hygiene/ | Hygiene | Flipping through the lyrics of Hygiene can feel like reading a book of Oscar Wilde epigrams if Oscar Wilde had been barely scraping by as a punk musician. Every song on chameleonic hardcore band Drug Church’s fourth album offers at least one pithy phrase to sum up the often cynical worldview of frontman Patrick Kindlon. “There’s so few reasons to prostrate yourself at the feet of all these fools,” he sings on album opener and de facto mission statement, “Fun’s Over.” If you’re looking for a mantra to break out of the endless doomscrolling cycle, try shouting along to this one from “Million Miles of Fun”: “News flash/I need news less.” And when Kindlon reaches the bittersweet climax of “Athlete on Bench,” he shares his most instructive aphorism yet: “I’m living between shrinking margins.”
Those “shrinking margins” have squeezed every musician working in the streaming era. On Hygiene, Drug Church invite us behind the curtain to see how they’re making it work. “I’m in the workforce of music,” Kindlon told Stereogum in January. “To that end, if there’s a material goal on my part, it’s to have a career. And if there’s an artistic goal on my part, it’s to experience the ups and downs of that career with some grace.” The lyrics on Hygiene explore these valleys, offering a self-aware look at a rock band whose livelihoods are shaped by the vagaries of late capitalism. “Fun’s Over” suggests there’s a dumb luck component to the band’s success, while “Detective Lieutenant” spins an extended metaphor to ask whether good art can be separated from a problematic artist: “If I do a double murder, what this song did for you doesn’t change an iota,” may not ring true for every listener, but it does invite some self-examination.
Kindlon’s vocal performance on Hygiene is the most deliberately tuneful he’s ever given, in either Drug Church or his longer-running band, Self Defense Family. He’s always been a capable singer, but he’s now learned that the best way to make a lyric stick is to pair it with a gigantic, undeniable hook. Even when he digs into his grittier register to charge a line with extra urgency, he manages to pull out a deceptively sweet melody, too. He’s evolved in lockstep with the rest of the band. Guitarists Nick Cogan and Cory Galusha bounce between nervy post-hardcore and sunny pop-punk with ease, hitting every way station between the two. Bassist Pat Wynne and drummer Chris Villeneuve are agile enough to keep up, buoying the band through wild tempo shifts and taking center stage when necessary, as on the rhythmically driven pit-starter “World Impact.”
Drug Church’s music has always felt like an extension of their wider community, and nods to peers and influences dot Hygiene’s landscape. Hearing how those reference points interact is still a thrilling part of listening to the band. For each passage that evinces the raw emotional impact of Touché Amoré or the brawny intensity of Sick of It All, there’s one that recalls the punk-poet erudition of the Hold Steady. A line in “Tiresome” references an album by the cult UK band Leatherface, and it sits comfortably next to riffs that feel inspired by the metal-infused pop-punk of Propagandhi.
Drug Church’s balance of brightness and heaviness also recalls Turnstile, a band whose ascent since the release of 2021’s breakthrough Glow On looks like a tempting blueprint. While the two bands do share an unusual gift for creating deep intimacy between band and audience, they forge that closeness in contrasting ways. Turnstile turn their inborn empathy into a feel-good party that everyone is invited to. Hygiene is mired in modern, adult anxieties—the financial pressures of making a living doing what you love, the tough questions that lead to a coherent political view, the complicated friendships that require reexamination. It’s an intimacy built on commiseration rather than communal joy: Drug Church want you to know that they’re in the muck, too, trying to figure it out. | 2022-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pure Noise | March 15, 2022 | 7.4 | bff40fa3-c1f8-461c-b8eb-6980206b755e | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The perennially reissued debut from the prog rock giants doesn’t offer much memorable bonus material, but the album itself remains a towering pillar of musicianship, wonder, and menace. | The perennially reissued debut from the prog rock giants doesn’t offer much memorable bonus material, but the album itself remains a towering pillar of musicianship, wonder, and menace. | King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (50th Anniversary) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-crimson-in-the-court-of-the-crimson-king-50th-anniversary/ | In the Court of the Crimson King (50th Anniversary) | It’s all there in the Schizoid Man’s face. Barry Godber’s cover art—a man mid-scream, nostrils flared, gaze fixed on a horror we can’t see—teases a manic, transformative head trip. In the Court of the Crimson King marks a vast fault line in the geology of rock music, refining a nascent genre into a pinnacle of the progressive rock form. The Moody Blues’ symphonic grandeur, Brian Wilson’s expansive production, the psychedelic experiments of Pink Floyd and the Beatles—these are some of prog’s essential building blocks. But with their first record, King Crimson shaped those pieces into a monument, wielding a sorcery unduplicated in the five decades since.
The band summoned that collective force—a hybrid of menacing rock, classical sophistication, pastoral psychedelia, and free-jazz mania—quickly, almost instinctively, guided by what guitarist Robert Fripp has called “the presence of the Good Fairy.” The original Crimson lineup emerged from the ashes of short-lived psych-pop act Giles, Giles and Fripp in January 1969, with guitarist Fripp and drummer Michael Giles linking up with bassist-singer Greg Lake (future frontman of prog juggernaut Emerson, Lake & Palmer), keyboardist-woodwind player Ian McDonald, and lyricist Peter Sinfield. The quintet assembled in a cramped rehearsal space in London’s Hammersmith district, working on songs for three months before their proper live debut at the city’s Speakeasy club. By that summer, they’d even made a fan of Jimi Hendrix, who showed up for their gig at the Revolution Club and, as Fripp has frequently recalled, exclaimed, “This is the best group in the world!”
Within months, the band had developed into a formidable live act—even supporting the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park in July. But they were struggling in the studio, failing to make progress during two sessions with Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke. In a move equal parts brave and absurd (given Clarke’s high profile at the time), they decided to end that collaboration and helm their own material: They reconvened at London’s Wessex studio, armed with a handful of songs worthy of Hendrix’s standing ovation.
Like Godber’s cover image, much of their music was designed to provoke and scare. “It’s meant to be frightening,” an unidentified band member notes during the in-studio chatter of “Wind Session,” a newly mixed bonus track on Crimson King’s lavish 50th Anniversary reissue. In that previously issued leftover, the musicians workshop the discordant sci-fi woodwind noises that kick-start “21st Century Schizoid Man,” clustering exhalations into what sounds like TV static and future dial-up modems. After much gentlemanly discussion, they arrive at suitably “diabolical sounds.”
What follows “Schizoid Man”’s airy intro is even more jolting: seven minutes of nuclear proto-metal riffs, stuttering jazz-rock drum fills, wailing alto saxophone, and Lake’s distorted shriek—capped off with the paranoid prophecies of Sinfield, who used images of burning politicians and starving children to survey the destruction of the Vietnam War.
While King Crimson later evolved through a series of lineups under Fripp’s mysterious guidance, they achieved a rare level of creative intimacy on their debut. The four musicians composed “Schizoid Man” as a unit, practically breathing down each other’s necks in their rehearsal spot: They reacted to each other’s riffs and arrangements in real time, weaving old ideas (McDonald’s strutting sax section, lifted from a tune he wrote during his days in the Army jazz band, “Three Score and Four”) into new ones (Lake’s heavy main riff, countered by McDonald’s chromatic, ascending lick).
The final version of that song, which Kanye West famously sampled for his 2010 single “Power,” would be enough to cement King Crimson’s legend. And the 50th Anniversary edition offers a revelatory alternate version, building from a recently discovered backing track recorded in June 1969 during the aborted Clarke session at Morgan Studios. It’s a mutant of old and new, mingling 50-year-old parts (Giles’ violently demented kit-bashing, Lake’s finished vocal from the official LP) with a pair of modern-day overdubs (current members Mel Collins and Jakko Jakszyk doubling placeholder sax and guitar solos, respectively, with stereo-panned lines).
King Crimson have reissued In the Court of the Crimson King so many times, the album’s Discogs entry boasts more listings than a phone book. And considering most fans shelled out for the 40th Anniversary set one decade ago, this 3-CD/Blu-Ray is a tough sell for anyone who can’t name all of the band’s three present-day drummers. If blindfolded, most fans would have trouble distinguishing between Steven Wilson’s new stereo mix and the original they know by heart. And since the vaults have been mostly cleared over the years, the package’s real value boils down to a handful of unreleased gems. The centerpiece is a mostly a capella rendition of the morose ballad “Epitaph,” underscoring the wide dynamic range of Lake’s voice. Building from a fragile croon to a crackling, full-throated roar, it’s one of prog’s canonical performances.
Other bonus tracks are revealing but lack replay value—like the instrumental, bare-bones version of closing epic “The Court of the Crimson King.” (Listening to this track without the wordless vocal theme or the Grand Canyon-sized mellotron is physically painful, though intriguing as an in-progress footnote.) There’s also a faster alternate take of “Moonchild,” the album’s experimental descent into psychedelic texture and free improvisation—the sorta thing you’ll savor a couple times out of collector’s guilt but probably forget about within a week.
The original LP itself is enough, and always will be: Its fingerprint is so distinct that even imitators—including the entire prog-metal movement—can’t even accidentally sound like it. “You must have gathered it’s good,” the Who’s Pete Townshend wrote in a half-page advertisement promoting Crimson King. “But in some ways too good too soon if that’s possible.”
He was right in a practical sense: King Crimson’s jarring upward velocity could only carry them so far. The band crumbled after their first U.S. tour, leaving Fripp to rebuild as their de-facto maestro—restructuring the line-up again and again in search of “Good Fairy” dust. They found it, of course: Many of their subsequent records (the percussive pummel of 1973’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, the interlocking guitars and new wave sheen of 1981’s Discipline) glimpsed galaxies of new ideas as Fripp endlessly re-tooled his vision. But all roads branch out from the mighty Court.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | DGM | November 11, 2019 | 10 | bff48177-eaa6-435b-83f4-d043ebd72396 | Ryan Reed | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-reed/ | |
Old adages and young women agree that things grow better with age, but a legion of late-90s rock bands stand ... | Old adages and young women agree that things grow better with age, but a legion of late-90s rock bands stand ... | Brand New: Deja Entendu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1090-deja-entendu/ | Deja Entendu | Old adages and young women agree that things grow better with age, but a legion of late-90s rock bands stand as evidence to the contrary. Supergroups like Jets to Brazil and The Promise Ring rose to prominence as some of the last worthwhile pop bands of the decade, only to become the first great disappointments of the new millennium. One heard whispers of a confused direction, and perhaps even (in TPR's case) a confused sexual orientation. Either way, The Promise Ring went out with a sigh, and the odds of another good Jets to Brazil album are about as good as that dodo on the cover of Four-Cornered Night coming to life in your living room and shitting all over Electric Pink.
Enter Brand New, whose first album was the effective sum of Saves the Day and Dashboard Confessional. You guessed it: LIES. LIES stands for L.ong I.sland E.mo with S.creams-- think Taking Back Sunday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, and any other group of emo-dandies that prance delicately through candylands of Orange Rhyming Dictionaries, New Nathan Detroits and Bells, Bells, Bells. But S.O.S! Very Emergency! Brand New's new album for Razor and Tie, Deja Entendu, is produced by Stephen Haigler, engineer of the Pixies' Trompe le Monde. This and the album's postmodern cover art hint at something more substantial than 2001's Your Favorite Weapon.
While it was surely a treat for ninth and tenth-graders chomping at the bit for "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad", Brand New's debut did little for anyone with an interest in instrumentation or variety; it also had a bad case of self-consciousness, with singer Jesse Lacey spending more time thinking up crazy song titles than anyone in the band (himself included) spent on actual songcraft. But Deja Entendu, while a football field short of groundbreaking, has an air of substance and maturity that, at its peaks, makes me forget a little of how Jade Tree once jaded me.
Deja Entendu comes complete with its own share of ridiculous track names-- a few of which are funny if you can fit your tongue next to that lollipop in your cheek. The opener, "Tautou", isn't the album's strongest, but it's significant in that it introduces the band's new sound with just over a minute of minimalist guitar arpeggio and sombre vocals. Things pick up quickly with "Sic Transit Gloria...", as Lacey's layered whispering over the bass-driven verse breaks violently into an overdriven chorus. In come harmonic shrieks and screams which fall in bassy stair-steps back to the verse. This song rocks but it makes me wonder: Why would a band like this tour with Dashboard Confessional? To score chicks?
"Okay, I Believe You But My Tommygun Don't" gives Brand New's formula away, but as the song progresses there are flashes of wit and maturity, even humor. Lacey scoffs at the narcissistic pretentiousness of the emo scene with lines like, "These are the words you wish you wrote down/ This is the way you wish your voice sounds/ Handsome and smart/ My tongue's the only muscle on my body that works harder than my heart." As long as it stubbornly refuses to roll over and die, emo should at least develop this sense of humor. It could have come off a backpacker hip-hop record if it weren't pulled off with such searing sarcasm.
"The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows" is trite enough for radio play, which is frustrating as it opens promisingly. Unfortunately, though, LIES overcome the band and the song mutates into an aberrant hybrid of Jimmy Eat World and The Used. This burn is thankfully extinguished in favor of a Smiths-y ballad, "The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot". "Jaws Theme Swimming" is cool and controlled enough to be crafty, but "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" is flat-out indulgent. Fortunately, for the subsequent 3:25 seconds, "Guernica" will make you forgive and forget. It's a brilliant lament about the horrors of cancer that manages both desperation and confidence. Still, at the end of the day, we're left with just an EP's worth of decent songs and a spark of interest where formerly there might've been a laugh of disgust. Stephen Haigler may have aided Brand New in discovering a more mature approach to recording, but as far as breaking new ground, the album's title says it all. | 2003-10-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2003-10-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Razor & Tie | October 28, 2003 | 6.9 | bff669c7-9a3c-46b1-b560-b9f5cd8c14cc | Pitchfork | null |
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Following last year's split with Grimes, the Montreal musician releases an LP, a sprawling collection that explores extremes of spirituality in a digital world. | Following last year's split with Grimes, the Montreal musician releases an LP, a sprawling collection that explores extremes of spirituality in a digital world. | d’Eon: LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16683-lp/ | LP | In his brief career to date d'Eon has marked himself as a curious prospect. He is part of an exciting new scene of mostly electronic musicians in Montreal; including Purity Ring and Grimes (with whom he released a split EP last year). Like those two artists, d'Eon's approach has an esoteric bent to it, and on his new full-length, simply titled LP, he investigates two extremes of spirituality: He explores ideas of tradition and religion, pitting them against a modern self trapped at the top of a Facebook profile or communicating via iPhone.
For the most part, the questions LP poses are the ones you might ask yourself everyday when turning on your computer, but they also seem to be issues that haven't been explored that much in music. James Ferraro pushed some of the same buttons on last year's Far Side Virtual, but Ferraro's approach felt a bit more ironic, or tongue-in-cheek. d'Eon's struggle with the online world and spiritual identity seems to come from a place of real soul-searching.
The near-10-minute closing track, "Al-Qiyamah", is a high point, and the most successful illustration of d'Eon's concept. He frames the track with a question right away: "If we're stuck in here, what happens on Judgement Day?" It's a dramatic sentiment but one equally applicable on a small scale, too: At what point does "real life" intersect with online life? The track is held together by some of the best production on the record: Swirling, iridescent synths keep pushing with forward motion before a breakbeat consumes the song at its halfway point. That beat eventually degrades, sounding almost like a chip tune by the time it rubs against a new age synth line at the end. Fittingly, it ends with the static of a phone signal interrupting a speaker frequency.
Elsewhere, the density of LP does the record no favors-- it clocks in at a mighty one hour and 13 minutes-- and you almost wonder if there's some sort of meta point being made about saturation on the internet. Musically, LP isn't strong enough to sustain this weight, and the length makes what should be an interesting concept seem at times rambling and forced. Songs like "Transparency Pt. II" drag things down especially-- scanning like a babbling Tumblr entry and tapping into a Kevin Barnesian level of unearned excess. As such, LP's a little frustrating. There are some challenging and interesting ideas at its core along with spots of very good production, but ultimately the lack of self-editing makes the sprawl too difficult to truly access. | 2012-06-06T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2012-06-06T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hippos in Tanks | June 6, 2012 | 6.4 | bff8a15d-eefd-4991-901f-0395d504616f | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
The refined sophomore album from Majid Jordan—best known for featuring on Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home”—finds the Toronto duo coasting on an atmospheric pop-R&B sound that is uniquely their own. | The refined sophomore album from Majid Jordan—best known for featuring on Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home”—finds the Toronto duo coasting on an atmospheric pop-R&B sound that is uniquely their own. | Majid Jordan: The Space Between | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/majid-jordan-the-space-between/ | The Space Between | On the title track of Majid Jordan’s The Space Between, singer Majid Al Maskati invites the object of his affection—or the listener, or both—to live in the moment with him. The directive comes at the end of a blissful album that aims to make each song its own event. The Toronto duo has existed in a perpetual state of evolution since rocketing into the spotlight, four years ago, with a feature on Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” Their 2014 debut EP, A Place Like This, settled on moody R&B, while their self-titled debut album from last year attempted a balancing act between sullen and bright. Here, on their sophomore LP, Majid Jordan arrive at a sweet spot: their own in-between, a dance-flavored romance uniquely theirs. They’ve created a set that understands the beauty of the journey, no matter the destination.
Jordan Ullman’s retro-futuristic productions are built on a foundation of 1980s synth-pop energy and dreamy contemporary effects. It shines consistently throughout The Space Between, and perhaps most so when he does things like remix their proper opening song for an outro. Majid’s vocals take on different auras that change based on the backdrops they’re placed against. On the sexy ballad “You,” the duo soften the music to expose Majid’s tenderness; on “Asleep,” the layers and pulsating beat give his voice edge. The pair have a symbiotic relationship that highlights their gifts while offering both the benefit of versatility.
An audio rip of “Gave Your Love Away” has been floating around the internet since June when it was previewed at a Louis Vuitton fashion show (and again on an episode of OVO Radio). But the official version is an early standout on the album, and it was worth the wait. Jordan’s deep basslines and Majid’s atmospheric voice are readymade for dropping the top and heading out on the open road of the prior “Intro.” The same intoxicating groove carries over into “OG Heartthrob”—a fine blend of R&B romance with addictive pop sensibility. This trio of tracks may be one of the year's best opening sequences: the transitions are impeccable, offering a seamless sense of place and mood.
Aesthetically, The Space Between shifts away from the darker tints of their previous album, painting in upbeat, sunset tones. Lead single “Phases,” for example, could have easily taken a more melancholic turn: “All of these people and all of their names/All of this love and all this disdain,” Majid sings over swelling piano stabs before a skittering drum spins his introspection into a rink-ready bounce. Even the lovesick “What You Do to Me” is garnished with otherworldly synths that translate the kind of love that makes you “feel like [you’re] magic” into actual magic.
The album’s only features come courtesy of their OVO labelmates PARTYNEXTDOOR and dvsn. Together, the three acts create a spectrum of current R&B aesthetics: PARTY’s proclivity for rap influences in contrast to Majid’s smoothness, while the latter’s voice lacks some of the emotion of Daniel Daley’s. But Majid Jordan’s position in, yes, the space between makes sense: they are the only ones going for larger-than-life, bonafide pop music. They shirk profanity and the overly obscene in favor of a sound that seeks to defy age and time. It's radio-ready by default, but Majid Jordan don’t sound particularly concerned about whether or not it works so much as creating a neon-lit jam session where everyone is welcome.
The Space Between is Majid Jordan’s most refined full-length. The writing is simple but effective; the productions are intricate but subtly propulsive. There is plenty that can stand alone here, but the album is best consumed all the way through, present and unhurried. It offers a place of solace in the discomfort of change, a means to an unknown end. It remains to be seen whether Majid Jordan have peaked, but they’ve certainly found solid ground to coast on. This music feels as good as it sounds. And its spirit, rather than its lyrics, encourages you to keep moving, to get in the car and just go—even if it is on a road to nowhere. | 2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound / Warner Bros. | November 1, 2017 | 7.4 | c007936a-0c84-4b20-8d64-18399e48f4c1 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
The French musician’s solo album is full of blissed-out vocoder ballads that would have slotted effortlessly onto his duo Air’s Moon Safari. | The French musician’s solo album is full of blissed-out vocoder ballads that would have slotted effortlessly onto his duo Air’s Moon Safari. | Nicolas Godin: Concrete and Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicolas-godin-concrete-and-glass/ | Concrete and Glass | The two fundamental principles of any Air or Air-related project are 1) that it will display a total disdain for modern music’s rhythmic rough-and-tumble and 2) that it will sound a lot like Air. Concrete and Glass, the second solo album from Air co-founder Nicolas Godin, sees no reason to buck this trend. The record is designed as a hymn to the world of architecture and it sounds utterly, decadently Air, full of blissed-out vocoder ballads that would have slotted effortlessly onto the band’s 1998 debut, Moon Safari.
That might sound like a decidedly retrogressive move in 2020. But unlike, say, the Ramones (another band who always sounded perfectly like themselves), Air’s sound is a malleable beast, employing orchestral ambience, 1970s funk, and Serge Gainsbourg baroque soundtracking in one elegant stride. Besides, nostalgia is a tricky subject with Air: Their appeal was always retro-futuristic, a slightly corny vision of the future that sounded as anachronistic when they emerged alongside Britpop and French house as it does now.
The charm of Concrete and Glass rests not so much on the album’s architectural concept—it would be no great surprise to find that every Air song is about architecture—as in the ornate songwriting, luxuriant synth-and-string production, and moments of alchemical magic that Godin charms out of his guest vocalists. Air have a history in bringing out the best in their guests—think Beth Hirsch’s wonderfully wistful vocal turns on Moon Safari—and Russian artist Kate NV and soul singer Kadhja Bonet excel on Concrete and Glass.
NV delivers gilded heartbreak on “Back to Your Heart,” which sits somewhere between the Carpenters’ daytime melancholia and the fuzzy futurism that 10cc nailed on “I’m Not in Love,” while Bonet employs a strangely forceful, spooked psychedelia on “We Forgot Love,” her voice casting a spell over Godin’s undulating synths. These two songs are topped and tailed by two of Godin’s best vocodered performances, “Concrete and Glass” and “What Makes Me Think About You”: The pair’s velvety textures, lush melancholy, and gentle warmth send listeners drifting back to Moon Safari’s scatter-cushion reign.
The record’s other guest vocalists fare nowhere near as well. Cola Boyy’s nasal soul twang and Alexis Taylor’s little-choirboy-lost chirp fit awkwardly with Godin’s silky musical bed, while Australian pop provocateur Kirin J Callinan is wretched on “Time on My Hands,” his anemic vocal limping along atop clichéd lyrics and moldy guitar lines. These three songs have a nastily infectious quality that seems to seep into “The Border” and “Turn Right Turn Left,” two decent pieces of sumptuous, if lightweight, pop that suffer by proximity to this terrible trio.
Thankfully, closing number “Cité Radieuse” breaks the hex. It’s the one moment on Concrete and Glass where Godin shifts out of his comfort zone; the song’s neo-classical synth lines ripple in subtly shifting patterns that suggest Steve Reich and Valium, as Godin makes an admirable attempt of interpreting what he describes as the “Tetris-like form” of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation building in Marseilles.
It’s an intriguing choice to end on. While Le Corbusier’s work was bold and divisive, Concrete and Glass has a comforting familiarity that is more cozy brick cottage than towering skyline. Concrete and Glass won’t shock, sparkle, or challenge cultural norms, but it’s a (mostly) lovely place to inhabit.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Because | January 27, 2020 | 6.7 | c01c1401-3cb9-4c0c-89ca-6a73a7752fb6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The teen rapper’s dreamy yet dark mixtape leans into gruff flows and gun-toting punchlines with a wink. | The teen rapper’s dreamy yet dark mixtape leans into gruff flows and gun-toting punchlines with a wink. | Ka$hdami: epiphany | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kadollarhdami-epiphany/ | epiphany | Ka$hdami is attempting to do what only a few have done before: breakthrough on a major scale while rapping over plugg beats. The production style originally shaped by MexikoDro, StoopidXool, and the rest of a crew called Beat Pluggz is like Atlanta trap beats merged with Screw music and Zelda OST melodies. It was the foundation of many promising rappers on SoundCloud in the mid-2010s, including UnoTheActivist, Thouxanbanfauni, Yung Bans, and, most famously, Playboi Carti. But a wave of “type beats” producers oversaturated the sound with half-assed imitations. Soon enough, it felt like everyone with a SoundCloud account had adopted the form, and by the time Carti put out his heavily anticipated 2017 debut mixtape, he’d left it behind. Plugg music was then unfairly written off as underground and played out until recently when a new wave of rappers and producers who never stopped loving it emerged.
But Ka$hdami is also strongly influenced by his home base in the DMV. Since the 16-year-old’s voice became deeper about a year ago, he no longer sounds like he should be waving a wand on the Disney Channel. With his latest mixtape epiphany, he leans into the gruff flows and gun-toting punchlines delivered with a wink by regional staples like Xanman, Q Da Fool, Lil Dude, and Goonew. On “Look N the Mirror!”—Ka$hdami’s breakout single and the heart of the record—he aggressively raps, “I ain’t the same lil’ nigga from the block/It’s a one way, nigga, come down, get shot/Boy, you had the drop for a motherfuckin’ year/Without your niggas, you gon’ disappear,” over a lush plugg beat. Typically, in the DMV, lyrics this brash would be delivered over a brooding instrumental that sounds like a producer tossed tense hi-hats and blaring 808s over the A Nightmare on Elm Street theme. But Ka$hdami’s tracks don’t resemble that at all—they’re sweet and, despite the violence, come off as the innocent imaginations of a teenager who fell in love with his local street rap scene on the internet.
The best songs on epiphany bring to mind taking a wholesome skip through the park. “Figures” even starts out with birds chirping before the ethereal beat kicks in. Ka$hdami’s rhymes aren’t quite an afterthought, but they’re more about his rough yet sort of melodic delivery. Unlike his DMV-based inspirations, his punchlines aren’t that colorful or memorable, but they don’t have to be—plugg music was always more about fantasy. On “Trust Issues,” a beat that feels like cannonballing off a cliff into a warm body of water, the way he glides over the track is enough to overlook writing that is basically filler. If anything, the song is held back by miserable-sounding features—this happens again and again on the project. The only purpose of these guest verses is to stretch his songs beyond the two-minute mark. It’s unnecessary—making short songs is fine! “Look N the Mirror!” (at 1:25) and “Dior” (1:58) are his best tracks to date.
A handful of instrumentals on epiphany feel similar to that original wave of bland “type beats” that diluted the sound. “Up!” and “See Ya!” have all too familiar melodies that seem as if they’ve been used better before. The easiest way to avoid this is to go straight to the source as he does on “Receipts,” which is co-produced by StoopidXool, one of the innovators of the sound. It’s light and dreamy, and Ka$hdami’s punchy flow gives the track a darker edge. It’s a clash that not only defines his tape but the best plugg music as well.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Kashwayz | June 9, 2021 | 6.8 | c01d2983-e471-49d0-b754-6b1f60428467 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Radiohead drummer goes acoustic guitar-strumming singer-songwriter, putting his sticks down to pen Nick Drakesian songs about family. | Radiohead drummer goes acoustic guitar-strumming singer-songwriter, putting his sticks down to pen Nick Drakesian songs about family. | Philip Selway: Familial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14602-familial/ | Familial | Whatever your opinion on the relative merits of Philip Selway's transmogrification into an acoustic guitar-strumming singer-songwriter, it's tough to find an angle that doesn't at least give the guy points for bravery. Firstly, he's spent 25 years in the ruthlessly self-correcting Radiohead, a band who tend not to go more than three records without ritually wringing themselves inside out and emerging from the studio, eyes bulging and ears ringing, with some newly invented sonic paradigm. Secondly, said band also includes Thom Yorke, whose own noted songwriting abilities and singing voice have by now gifted him with an unreasonably long shadow. Thirdly, Selway's a frigging drummer. In an arena rock band. And when was the last time any drummer in any rock band (much less arguably the world's biggest) put his drumsticks down to write some Nick Drakesian songs about family?
Make no mistake: This is a risk. A risk of exposure, credibility, mystique, whatever you want to call it, and Selway deserves credit for putting his newly elongated name on the line. The good(ish) news is that Familial is hardly an embarrassment. It's a modest, mannered record that prizes directness, simplicity and bittersweet sentiment above all, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The highlights, such as they are, are front-loaded. With its delicately hooky chorus, lead single "By Some Miracle" is probably the most immediate thing here. Elsewhere, a cleverly syncopated vocal loop in "Beyond Reason" evokes some of Radiohead's sonic trickery, while "All Eyes on You" offers up an oddly naked account of Yorke's stage fright: "So frail and small/ So scared you're terrified by all/ The eyes on you."
The bad news is that Selway's material, tasteful and expertly played as it is, never fully transcends the novelty of who it's coming from. That two of the three highlights contain Radiohead callbacks should tell you something about the rest of the record. Even though Selway acquits himself as a capable an [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| d likable enough frontman, a lot of the material, especially on the second side, is ultimately just too bare, too slow, and too earnest to connect. For every one line that hits, there are two that shouldn't have made it out of first revisions. On "A Simple Life", the crowds pour out "on a cold, cold night." On "Patron Saint", Selway's played for a fool by "a web of lies and compromise." Such overtly earnest lyrics aren't helped by the unwavering politeness in his delivery, which, in being pretty-sounding but not much else, create a clear path for the clichés to land with a dull thud.
Selway's famous for his restraint as a drummer, so it's not a stretch to suspect that his response to being the frontman for the first time has been to crank up his natural predilection toward politeness. Unfortunately, in this instance, it feels like a counter-productive strategy. Fans of shivery folk music with subtle plateaus will surely find things to like, but the rest of you might find yourselves wishing the "black dog" in Selway's basement had a bit more bite. At least he let it outside. | 2010-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | August 27, 2010 | 4.9 | c0219cb2-b5c0-4333-8b31-3ff9f98bb4f5 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
After their most recent and extremely spotty album Future This, the Big Pink try and reconnect with the bombastic electro-rock sound that made them popular while casting around for a viable future. | After their most recent and extremely spotty album Future This, the Big Pink try and reconnect with the bombastic electro-rock sound that made them popular while casting around for a viable future. | The Big Pink: Empire Underground EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21443-empire-underground-ep/ | Empire Underground EP | Two events have defined the British electro-rock band the Big Pink since their last, extremely spotty album, Future This. Firstly, founding member Milo Cordell left to focus on running Merok Records. Secondly, the band's frontman, Robbie Furze brought his wife Mary Charteris into the fold, on vocals and keyboards. At the center of their new EP, titled Empire Underground, is this notion of both separation and union, an idea of reconnecting with the aesthetic that made them popular while casting around for a viable future.
Try, if you can, to close your eyes and picture the environment in which the Big Pink released their first, and still best, record A Brief History of Love, in 2009. Bloggers are losing their grip on the meritocracy of independent music, the general aesthetic is shifting from fluorescent party attire to nouveau goth black and basic athletic wear. On the strength of two meteoric singles, "Velvet" and the boisterous, anthemic peak of "Dominos," the Big Pink are able to bridge two eras of British music pretty much seamlessly: the boyish swagger of Britpop and the more electronic music that was going to become prevalent. It seems like they have been chasing that eureka moment ever since to diminishing returns.
Which brings us to "Hightimes" the lead single off of Empire Underground, which opens with the same ethereal coos and ultra-fuzzy guitar riffs that became the Big Pink's signature at their prime. And the message couched behind the layers of distortion couldn't be more clear: "It's about high time/ Better than the last time" wails Furze as Charteris' pleasantly smooth vocals sail beneath his. Big booming drums and rubbery basslines roll across the song, almost but never quite succumbing to a sheen of static. It's obvious that the Big Pink were aware that their future depended on getting in touch with the sound that made them, and while not exactly reaching the heights of something like "Dominos," it's a welcome reintroduction to a band that had somewhat lost their way.
If Richard Ashcroft were to front the Kills, "Decoy" would be the result, a throwback of another kind. While perfectly enjoyable (the track's most notable aspect is its mid-career-Oasis-style chorus), it's mostly a precursor to "Beautiful Criminal," the only track that hints at a new direction. It could be placed coherently on a Selena Gomez or Demi Lovato record, and I mean that with the utmost respect: Breaching the hull of mainstream pop, where some of the most interesting musical innovations are being made, is a coveted skill. It boasts an instantly catchy hook, a memorable chorus and a world-weary quality that cuts through any traces of saccharine. The band have already announced a third album in the works, and if they continue in this vein, it could definitely help push them beyond a niche that can no longer seem to support them. | 2016-03-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-03-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | B3SCI | March 9, 2016 | 6.5 | c0280962-7375-4126-ab92-2f72b1087546 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The country icon’s latest is a loose concept album about the American road, a scattershot travelogue that houses some of her best-ever songwriting. | The country icon’s latest is a loose concept album about the American road, a scattershot travelogue that houses some of her best-ever songwriting. | Miranda Lambert: Palomino | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miranda-lambert-palomino/ | Palomino | When Miranda Lambert announced her upcoming Las Vegas residency, she was following in the footsteps of kindred artists who evolved from icons into brands: think Cher, Shania Twain, Whitney Houston’s hologram. It’s not off-script for a woman who, 20-plus years into her career, is approaching the status of another genre-transcending icon-turned-industry, Dolly Parton, whose CV Lambert’s has often mirrored: songwriter, performer, celebrity-coupledom survivor, chart-topping duet partner, all-star vocal trio co-leader, inclusive club jam dabbler. Lambert’s breadth is on full display on Palomino, a loose concept album about the American road, completed during two years spent largely off-tour. It’s a scattershot travelogue, idealized and hopeful, bright with giddy pleasures, welled tears, and some of her best-ever songwriting.
In many ways Palomino springs directly from The Marfa Tapes, Lambert’s winning 2021 writers round with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, full of deeply-felt storytelling and boozy punchlines. Palomino reimagines some of Marfa’s highlights and re-engages Randall, a former Emmylou Harris sideman, as co-producer and co-writer alongside Lambert’s longtime MVPs, Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby. Unlike the dusky Nebraska sound and campfire harmonies of The Marfa Tapes, Palomino is not tonally coherent. But neither was 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, Lambert’s most ambitious display to date, and that record’s unleashed spirit returns on Palomino, demonstrating the tensile strength of Lambert’s craft in all sorts of settings.
It peels out with “Actin’ Up,” a modern Music Row rhyme showcase channeling Elvis’ Sun sessions with the spirit of an Eminem freestyle, stuttering consonants and spitting random signifiers: Billy Bob’s Texas, Tiger Woods, “Mony Mony.” After some road-trip scene-setting (“Scenes”), Lambert settles in for the ride with some Marfa Tapes remakes. “In His Arms” was already near-perfect in its fireside-demo iteration; here its acoustic guitar frame gets wrapped in a lovelorn country-western dreamscape, with watercolor-washes of electric guitar and steel. Benefiting more from a fuller arrangement is “Geraldene,” a feisty dress-down that echoes the scenario and title of Parton’s love-triangle signature, albeit with more of a “Fist City” attitude: “You're trailer park pretty,” Lambert sings, “but you’re never gonna be Jolene.”
“Music City Queen,” a funky strut about a riverboat with another nod to country’s high priestess, features prominent guest vocals by the B-52’s, a Southern band whose camp sensibility always felt Parton-esque. “Tina never quite had a Hollywood body/But she makes a damn good look-alike Dolly,” sasses Lambert, Schneider answering “woo, Dolly!” in his best “Rock Lobster” bray. It’s an inspired gesture on a goofy song that, like much of the album—see “Country Money”’s Southern-rock swag and the honky-tonk take on Mick Jagger’s juke-jointed 1993 solo track “Wandering Spirit”—hums with the joy of master musicians screwing around, reveling in process and each other’s company. It feels more about having fun than about song-crafting for the ages.
But Lambert does that too. There’s a wide-screen version of “Waxahachie,” the aching Marfa Tapes gem, and the deceptively easy-rolling “Tourist,” which is as much an existential meditation on that mindset as an embrace of it, another example of the introspection that’s distinguished Lambert’s country since 2014’s “Bathroom Sink.” “That’s What Makes the Jukebox Play,” a co-write with Dick and Hemby, joins the long tradition of country songs about country songs, a wistful slow dance sketching a barroom full of hurt with resonant couplets (“When you live like neon/There’s a song you can lean on.”) And the single “If I Was a Cowboy,” a co-write with country-pop virologist Jesse Frasure, manages the hat-trick of both timelessness and timely activism. Slipping into genre myth like tailor-made chaps, Lambert delivers a stealth anthem of inclusivity so supple you might miss it, even with the flip of Waylon & Willie on the bridge, when she issues the gentle challenge: “So mamas, if your daughters grow up to be cowboys, so what?” It’s not out of character from an artist who built her brand tweaking gender stereotypes and demonstrating LGBTQ+ solidarity without sounding like a PSA.
Palomino closes with “Carousel,” a paean to reinvention about a trapeze artist concluding her life in the spotlight. “Every show must end/Every circus leaves town,” Lambert sings, pivoting from third person to first person to reveal that the song’s subject is in fact telling her own story, the carousel a metaphor for both the stage and the cycle of time. It’s a resonant reflection for anyone who saw their old way of life end in the pandemic, temporarily or permanently. “I bet you it’s the last song I’ll ever sing when it is time,” the songwriter told Rolling Stone. As a lovely coda to a set that celebrates the thrill of unfettered motion and the reflective craft that still propels her, it’s not a bad choice. | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Vanner / RCA Records Nashville | April 29, 2022 | 7.6 | c028e5b2-9475-4e77-996d-8779342f26bb | Will Hermes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-hermes/ | |
Luz Elena Mendoza follows her full-length Mujeres with an EP of introspective folk songs that understand just how visceral introspection can be. | Luz Elena Mendoza follows her full-length Mujeres with an EP of introspective folk songs that understand just how visceral introspection can be. | Y La Bamba: Entre Los Dos EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/y-la-bamba-entre-los-dos-ep/ | Entre Los Dos EP | Earlier this year, Y La Bamba (aka Luz Elena Mendoza) released the full-length LP Mujeres, examining her intersecting identities against the backdrop of the poisonous American political landscape. The album was Mendoza’s first in the role of producer, and she continues to lead her band in new directions on *Entre Los Dos —both in sound and message. As the title implies, this is a record concerning the intimate space between two people. Though still grounded by lo-fi percussion and surf-rock inspired guitar, the arrangements veer in more experimental directions, matching Mendoza’s inward turn.
Her acrobatic voice fills each track, often evoking Angel Olsen when it trembles. The pared-down piano ballad “Octavio,” the only song sung in English, emerges in the middle without warning. More frequently, though, it transforms into something closer to a yell, as on the title track and on “Rios Sueltos” and “Las Platicas.” The record rumbles along at nearly the same pace and tone as Mendoza’s contemporary Molly Burch, but it never loses sight of where it’s headed.
The title track of Entre Los Dos begins with a threat, calmly delivered: “Y me saltaré de mi ventana” (“And I will jump out of my window”). The EP is filled with similar sentiments, with Mendoza fighting to understand her place within her relationships and coming up against the brink of her composure. Later on the title track, she admits that she doesn’t think she can be what her lover needs, then repeats the phrase “No creo que puedo” (“I don’t think I can”) three times, her voice inflected with mounting desperation. It’s an arresting moment, her desire to make things work colliding with her dawning understanding that they probably won’t.
The tracks collide and overlap in ways that mirror Mendoza’s lyrics: The end of “Entre Los Dos” dissolves into piercing bird calls and wind chimes, which carry over into the following track “Rios Sueltos,” bolstered by an ominous drone. Similarly, the delicate piano that backs her warble on “Octavio” falls out of tune as the song ends and turns into an unsettling, frantic twinkling—countered immediately by the enthusiastic guitar riffs that follow on “Soñadora.” On “Los Gritos,” she announces: “Mi piel es mi lengua, mi lengua es mi piel, los huesos son hechos, son hechos de pura sal” (“My skin is my tongue, my tongue is my skin/The bones are made, are made of pure salt”), and the music tremors with the same physicality. Entre Los Dos is an introspective folk record, yes, but it’s one that understands just how visceral introspection can be.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Tender Loving Empire | September 25, 2019 | 7.7 | c02d88db-5e41-43da-a6a2-f3d36023e7f3 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
A new project from Boy Scouts songwriter Taylor Vick expands her homespun sound into spectral, immersive dream pop. | A new project from Boy Scouts songwriter Taylor Vick expands her homespun sound into spectral, immersive dream pop. | Art Moore: Art Moore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/art-moore-art-moore/ | Art Moore | Taylor Vick makes feeling like shit seem worthwhile. Recording under the name Boy Scouts, the Oakland native paints vivid scenes of annihilating, enlivening pain, her songs dramatizing the belief that big feelings are better than no feelings. On the first album by Art Moore—her new collaborative project with Los Angeles-based musicians Sam Durkes and Trevor Brooks—she sings about sleepless nights, unyielding heartache, and memories so haunting that they infect every moment of her waking life. Like her past work, the record straddles the line between succumbing to present-day suffering and smothering herself in the pleasures of the past, but Durkes and Brooks’ swooning, blissed-out production offers a new landing place: It’s Vick’s dreamiest and most immersive album, an impressive addition to her prolific catalog.
As Boy Scouts, Vick spent the latter half of the 2010s uploading a surfeit of full-length projects and EPs to Bandcamp. Her guitar-backed indie pop hit its stride on her two most recent albums, Free Company and Wayfinder: spunky, sapient records that showed off her perceptive songwriting and subtly dense arrangements. When she linked up with Durkes and Brookes in 2020, the trio entered the studio hoping to make a few tracks to pitch to various film and TV projects. Soon they realized they were onto something bigger. Though the pandemic cut their studio time short, they continued working remotely. Durkes and Brooks began adding synths and programmed drums to Vick’s guitars and stacked vocal melodies, morphing her once homespun sound into sensuous, spectral dream pop.
The interplay between Vick’s singer-songwriter roots and Durkes and Brookes’ synth-laden production evokes the sumptuousness of 2010s bands like Beach House and Wild Nothing. But Art Moore still sticks to Boy Scouts’ rawer indie rock sweet spot; the first four songs—“Muscle Memory,” “Sixish,” “Snowy,” and “Bell”—are built from guitars and dusty studio drums, and Vick’s listless singing sounds like it could be lifted from any number of Boy Scouts tracks. The album’s second half, however, introduces more electronic elements, and Vick experiments with new cadences and harmonies. On “Rewind,” a plodding guitar pluck blends into hi-fi synths and ambient whirring as Vick slides into her upper register, cooing softly as the song descends into distortion. “Something Holy,” another late album highlight, is a stirring electro ballad embellished with beeps, a tinkly bell synth, and processed ad-libs. It also includes some of her sharpest writing: “Well, you told a lie/That something holy could never die.”
In her lyrics, Vick explores the complexities of heartbreak, the mutilating power of memory, and the disorienting fugue state between dream and sleep—themes that she renders with an understated, sophisticated touch. It’s not always clear when she’s writing literally or figuratively, like on “Habit,” when she recalls how her ex used to water their garden, or how she sleeps with the lights on to avoid love-longing dreams. To Vick, dreams are not heartwarming intuition chambers but essential venues for escape, the only space for her to recreate the world as she sees fit. On “A Different Life,” she sings that, in her dreams, her life seems “full of meaning.” She’s alive in these subconscious moments, and the music becomes an attempt to prolong them and make them real.
Vick has described Art Moore as a more abstract project than Boy Scouts: “I love writing my personal shit,” she said in a recent interview, “but I was at this point in my life where I wanted a break.” She describes these songs as “short stories” that may or may not be about her own experience—the line isn’t always clear, even to her. Autobiographical or not, the narratives feel just as personal as any Boy Scouts record, and maybe even more so. While Free Company and Wayfinder were rife with wry one-liners and observations to offset the otherwise emotionally knotty writing, Art Moore is a bruising and remorseful record that aches without reservation. | 2022-08-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | August 10, 2022 | 7.5 | c03b0714-b24b-41dd-bdc1-c8cb352c65e5 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
On this re-release of her 2014 cassette, the Austin-based songwriter Caroline Sallee offers homespun solo recordings that draw on C86, bossa nova, and soothing folk music. | On this re-release of her 2014 cassette, the Austin-based songwriter Caroline Sallee offers homespun solo recordings that draw on C86, bossa nova, and soothing folk music. | Caroline Says: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-says-50000000-elvis-fans-cant-be-wrong/ | 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong | The first lyrical image on the debut album from Austin-based songwriter Caroline Sallee, aka Caroline Says, is a name written on a window. In Sallee’s song, her lover left the mark months earlier, before she took a Greyhound around the West Coast—a trip that would inspire her to return to her family home in Alabama and create an album in her parents’ basement. But when we meet Sallee here, the name has faded away, as she attempts to wipe herself clean of this person’s impact through the passing of time.
There is a lot that is familiar on her new Caroline Says record, which is called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Hair is left on a pillow; the streetlights glow at night. And then there’s the project’s name and album title, lifted from the pop music lexicon, borrowing from a Lou Reed song and an unofficial Elvis Presley album respectively. Death and solitude and heartbreak are sung about with the same reverence, to the point that they become virtually interchangeable, all factors leading to a similar state of melancholy. The result is a road trip album that knows the catharsis of looking out the window as the scenery changes. It’s firm in its belief that running away and running towards aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s even resolute in its genre hopping, as if turning of the dial to hear whatever station is coming in clearly.
Getting a proper release after a tape-only run in 2014, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong returns as a precursor to a proper studio follow-up expected next year. But working on her own doesn’t hold her back. “Winter Is Cold” is fleshed out with hissing harmonies that mimic the wind rushing by a speeding vehicle. “Funeral Potatoes” replaces a twinkling piano line and Brian Wilson-sounding backing vocals with the static of the radio waves fading away over miles. And the record’s best and most Lou Reed-sounding song, “Lost Feeling,” winds down with an extended fade out until all that remains is an atmospheric whooshing. Homespun recording, for Caroline Says, is an asset that adds to the sensations of days passing and cities flickering by.
Clocking in at under 30 minutes, Sallee packs numerous songwriting and recording styles into the collection. The gentle bossa nova of “My Fiance’s Pets” passes by like a satellite, while “I Think I’m Alone Now” uses higher fidelity to support her most straightforward melody. “Gravy Dayz” drifts closer to C86 than anything else, and “Ghost Pokes” glistens as sunny California garage pop. There’s an ease to Sallee’s gear switching, even if it is the soothing folk music that binds the album together and winds up being its most memorable element. “I never know what I’m doing,” she claims on “My Fiance’s Pets”; the line doesn’t speak as well for her art as it does for her relationships.
But the heartbreak that Sallee reflects on and flees throughout 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong is never completely outpaced in the miles she travels. When the album closes, the name that faded away from her window on the album’s opening lines lingers. “Even when you weren’t there, I never cut you out,” she sings on “Lost Feeling,” her ghosts never quite disappearing from the rearview mirror. If the journey can’t put the past to rest, maybe an album can. | 2017-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Western Vinyl | August 7, 2017 | 7.2 | c045a1f4-7145-408d-9c75-4c316965fbc6 | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | null |
At the time of their endearing-but-muddy self-titled debut, “San Francisco’s Grateful Dead” were already local legends, but no one quite knew what to do with them on record. | At the time of their endearing-but-muddy self-titled debut, “San Francisco’s Grateful Dead” were already local legends, but no one quite knew what to do with them on record. | Grateful Dead: The Grateful Dead: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22733-the-grateful-dead-50th-anniversary-deluxe-edition/ | The Grateful Dead: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition | Before they were the Grateful Dead, they were “San Francisco’s Grateful Dead.” At least that’s how they were to be billed on the title of their debut album: a scuzzy, organ-drenched oddity, more representative of the era it came from than the band it introduced. Leading up to the record’s release in 1967, the Grateful Dead had fortified their reputation as an uncontainable force, a live act who had to be seen to be believed. They were a band inextricably linked to their locale (Haight and Ashbury, San Francisco) and the scene it had hatched (namely Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, for which the Dead served as the house band). In a spirited but nascent Vancouver show attached to this 50th anniversary reissue, mostly comprised of embryonic attempts at original songs (“Cream Puff War,” “Cardboard Cowboy”) and jumpy renditions of soon-to-be standards (“I Know You Rider,” “New Minglewood Blues”), the audience greets the band with silence. Bob Weir responds dryly, “I see our fame has preceded us.” He’s not entirely kidding. At the time, no one was quite sure what to do with the Grateful Dead. It was a question the band would face multiple times throughout their career and one that was immediately apparent when they recorded their debut album: How do the Grateful Dead present themselves, stripped of the context that defines them?
While the band would never find a definitive answer to that question (although they came a hell of a lot closer on their next self-titled release, a staggering live album from 1971), their debut record found the Dead choosing the path of least resistance. Signed to Warner Brothers with a “jazz rate” deal—meaning they were paid by song length, not number of tracks—the band conceded to nearly every label expectation, transforming themselves into something like a traditional garage rock band. In thirty-five minutes, they speed through the album’s nine songs with an anxious energy, resulting in an endearing-but-muddy listen—something Phil Lesh would describe as “sound and fury buried in a cavern.” Maybe it was the nerves of a group of young freaks trying to sell themselves for the first time, or maybe it was the massive amount of Ritalin they were all on, but the Grateful Dead sound more energetic here than they ever would. Which is to say, if the Dead’s characteristic brand of sprawling experimentalism isn’t your bag, then this might be the album for you.
On the flip side, it also means that this is not a particularly essential album in the Dead’s catalogue. Jerry had not yet developed his trademark brand of soloing—or if he had, he was keeping it to himself; it’s almost comical hearing the songs fade right as his solos are about to pick up. In lieu of Jerry’s defining sound, Pigpen’s organ mostly steals the show: just listen it bobbing chaotically throughout “Sittin’ on Top of the World” like an LP playing at the wrong speed. The album’s finest moments are a slow, summery “Morning Dew” and a thrilling take on “Viola Lee Blues” where you can allegedly hear someone in the studio urge the producer, “Let them play!” just as the track fades. It’s no coincidence that these highlights arrive when the band settle down and play the way they want to.
While the Dead would never sound quite like this again—their following studio albums would be more confrontational and experimental, and then looser and statelier—they would also shift their attitude as musicians. On The Grateful Dead, they were not only submissive to producer Dave Hassinger, who had previously worked with the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and maybe wanted to turn the Grateful Dead into a tripped-out combination of the two, but also to their label, who had the nerve to request a single out of them. The Dead responded with “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” the album’s buzzy opening number and one of only two original songs on the record. It’s telling that even when the Dead were trying to sound commercial, this is how it came out. “The Golden Road” is a warped and woozy pop song, almost novel in its unwieldiness. They try to harmonize during the chorus but it comes out sounding more like a gang of strangers doing vocal warm-ups with earplugs in. Of course, the Grateful Dead would eventually write an honest-to-god hit single—they’d also record tighter albums and find their own permanent place in rock history. But, as with all things the Grateful Dead would do, it would be on their own terms and in their own time. “Let them play,” indeed. | 2017-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino | January 19, 2017 | 6.9 | c04b12c2-08f7-4e36-9061-c4115e638dc7 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
On their latest album, Peaking Lights’ dreamy mix of dub, new wave, and disco is emboldened by Indra Dunis’ simple, repetitive verses. | On their latest album, Peaking Lights’ dreamy mix of dub, new wave, and disco is emboldened by Indra Dunis’ simple, repetitive verses. | Peaking Lights: The Fifth State of Consciousness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peaking-lights-the-fifth-state-of-consciousness/ | The Fifth State of Consciousness | Indra Dunis begins Peaking Lights’ fifth album in a kind of zombie state. “I’m wondering/Where my mind has gone to now,” she breathes slowly on opener “Dreaming Outside.” “Here I am just wandering.” Surrounded by her partner Aaron Coyes’ loping beat, Dunis’ voice floats passively, synth waves bobbing her up and down. Her soak-up-the-world tone persists throughout The Fifth State of Consciousness in songs about staring at the sun, walking alone at night, and “sitting watching time go by.”
Dunis’ meditative aura naturally fits Peaking Lights’ dreamy mix of dub, new wave, and disco. As Coyes layers loops with growing textures, simple tunes morph into enveloping swirls. In that process, familiar sounds are shaped into a unique signature. On their previous album, 2014’s Cosmic Logic, that signature blurred, submerged under styles that drifted toward the generic. But The Fifth State of Consciousness corrects that course, echoing many influences but sounding definitively like Peaking Lights.
A lot of that correction is due to Dunis, whose simple, repetitive verse emboldens the duo’s musical cycles and gives the album a consistent mood. Often she sounds like a friendly hypnotist, calmly coaxing you to open your senses and invite the world in. “Hear the ring/Jangling/Let it sing /And envelop you,” she sings on the reggae-inflected “Coyote Ghost Melodies.” During the angelic “A Phoenix and a Fish,” she extols the rewards of observation (“Everywhere I look I see beauty”); she even celebrates the therapeutic power of smell on the rippling “Sweetness Isn’t Far Away.” On the album’s most beatific tune, “Put Down Your Guns,” her outlook is clear: “Let love come in/And put down your guns/Look at everyone /Love conquers all.”
Such sentiments could sound saccharine were Peaking Lights’ music not infused with many colors. Trace the intersecting loops on any track and you’ll see that a lot happens inside Dunis and Coyes’ bubbling mixes. Two of the best examples are the album’s catchiest tracks, the insistent “Everytime I See the Light” and the retro-tinted “Love Can Move Mountains.” Both establish solid beats and pulsing basslines that never waver, yet the music continually swells. It’s why Peaking Lights’ take on dub is often called psychedelic: its effects hit subconsciously, like a high that kicks in while you were thinking about something else.
The Fifth State of Consciousness isn’t just one big happy trip. As on their best record to date, 2012’s Lucifer, Peaking Lights’ songs get a little darker as this album progresses. Emotionally, “Love Can Move Mountains” is a mixed bag: Dunis tries to listen to and connect with others, but admits that “I’m lost inside/And it’s hard to know/If I can hear your sound.” On “Eclipse of the Heart,” the darkness threatens to take over: “Don’t let the shadow/Cover who you are,” she sings over descending bass and cloudy synths.
Light always wins on Peaking Lights albums, though, and this time the victory comes in a sugar-sweet closer. “Wild Paradise” is so bright and giddy you might think the duo’s drug of choice is laughing gas. “Electric sunset/Fluorescent candy clouds/Sunlight makes the moon come alive,” Dunis hums as glistening tones rise around her like bubbles. At times like this, when the duo seems to breathe helium, they’ve earned the right to indulge. Whatever plane The Fifth State of Consciousness represents, Peaking Lights make it sound like gold at the end of a rainbow. | 2017-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Two Flowers | June 20, 2017 | 7.6 | c04cab0b-6de3-49cc-809a-ee567c6acec6 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Like her former band Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier’s new solo album draws on sounds ranging from French yé-yé to krautrock, though its tone is earthier. It features a duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. | Like her former band Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier’s new solo album draws on sounds ranging from French yé-yé to krautrock, though its tone is earthier. It features a duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. | Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble: Find Me Finding You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22972-laetitia-sadier-source-ensemble-find-me-finding-you/ | Find Me Finding You | In an interview surrounding her 2014 album Something Shines, former Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier laughingly said that, since the days of her old group, she’s been “cultivating the same piece of land, [but] maybe I grow different vegetables.” The pithy comment stands as a fairly perfect summation of the 48-year-old’s career. Since arriving on the European indie scene back in 1991 with the first Stereolab EP, Super 45, Sadier’s vocal and lyrical approach has remained consistent: She applies her crystalline alto to lyrics that explore philosophy and political inequality through a Marxist lens. In Stereolab and as a solo artist, Sadier’s musical tastes have tended to skew nostalgic, mixing influences of 1960s pop from the U.S. and Brazil, easy listening, and German kosmische.
Find Me Finding You, the first album she’s released as Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble, also relies on these familiar musical elements. French drummer Emmanuel Mario and Brazilian bassist Xavi Munoz, both of whom played on Sadier’s previous solo albums, are present throughout, as is David Thayer, the filmmaker and musician who co-ran the group Little Tornados with Sadier. Opener “Undying Love for Humanity” burbles with intertwining guitar lines, stuttering keyboard signatures, and bouncing vocal harmonies—it recalls French yé-yé 45s and the knotty exotica of the Free Design. The rest of the album is dotted lightly with krautrock droning, Latin percussion, and chiming twee.
“Undying Love” is ultimately an outlier, though, playing with those elements that Sadier is most associated with before the album moves towards earthy tones and a temperate atmosphere. Find Me maintains a consistent mood better than any other album Sadier has released on her own or with the now-defunct side-project Monade. There are minor pulse-quickening moments, like the psych pop interludes within “Psychology Active (Finding You),” but everything else sticks to a calm mid-tempo like a resting heart-rate.
Still, there’s a wealth of variation to enjoy here. “The Woman With the Invisible Necklace” somehow connects flamenco rhythms with a post-punk swing akin to the Marine Girls. Closer “Sacred Project” shows off the keyboard collection of Ensemble member Phil F MU, with the rumble of Taurus 3 bass pedals warmly humming below a tinny modular melody and assorted synth squeaks. “Reflectors” builds confidently around a pulsing marimba and a rich bass tone before temporarily falling hushed, as guitar and flute waft around Sadier’s commentary. “Wars cannot overcome our troubles,” she sings, “Status, prestige, prominence, don’t mean a thing at this time.” Though Find Me was written before the Brexit vote and the U.S. political disaster, Sadier’s sharp eye for the slowly rolling tides of geopolitics gives these songs added resonance.
Sadier’s lyrical pattern continues on Find Me, as her lines revolve around tyrants, indoctrination, and states of conflict. This is what makes “Love Captive” stand out. A duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, it’s a ballad for slow dances, but it finds both singers shunning the idea of romantic love, wondering why we “make promises of eternity/When really a heart needs to run open and free.” Instead, they advocate for a broader definition: “We are made to love/Not to fall in love.” The song comes early in the album, but it provides a small lyrical breather that feels necessary to the whole. In the past, Stereolab’s 2001 Sound-Dust tracks “Nothing to Do With Me” and “Les Bons Bons Des Raisons” functioned similarly. Amid Find Me’s otherwise downcast worldview, “Love Captive” lets in some light. | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | March 21, 2017 | 6.8 | c0524140-577f-4248-ad79-b2964a5307c9 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | null |
With help from HEALTH's Jupiter Keyes, Denver producer Travis Egedy refines the blasted-electro approach of 2009's Dark Rift. | With help from HEALTH's Jupiter Keyes, Denver producer Travis Egedy refines the blasted-electro approach of 2009's Dark Rift. | Pictureplane: Thee Physical | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15635-thee-physical/ | Thee Physical | The hands-across-the-void cover art that accompanies the proper sophomore effort from blasted-electro producer and Denver scene magnate Travis Egedy's Pictureplane project, Thee Physical, brings to mind a few things: fictional Spinal Tap album Smell the Glove, the "kid who found the severed hand" statue in "Arrested Development", and Magic Eye artwork with all the eye-straining already in place. In reality, the image ties into the album's loose themes of human touch and technological eroticism. This dorm-room theorizing also shows up in selected song titles: "Trancegender", "Post Physical", "Body Mod".
Listeners who approach Thee Physical probably aren't showing up for Egedy's flimsy personal-political philosophizing, though. They're here for his frayed, ear-bleeding take on 1990s diva-house and electro-- disembodied leather hands be damned. Pictureplane's 2009 label debut, Dark Rift, was a statement of purpose, packed with both thrilling moments ("Goth Star") and drifting provocation (nine-minute closer "True Ruin"). On Thee Physical, the approach is considerably more refined, with HEALTH's Jupiter Keyes helping lend a new, immediate sonic appeal. Keyes knows a thing or two about tempering industrial-tinged aggression with sugared sensuality (see last year's HEALTH single "USA Girls"), and on Thee Physical that balance is more present than it's ever been in his main gig.
Further contributing to the album's accessibility is Egedy's move from staticky speaker-pounders toward honest-to-god pop songs. Early album offerings "Real Is a Feeling" and "Post Physical" ably showcase his steps toward electro approachability; other songs feature Egedy engaging as an in-the-flesh sideman to the snippets of throaty vocal samples strewn throughout. This man-machine relationship was prominent on Dark Rift, too; Thee Physical does it better. What's more, Egedy's inherently thin voice sounds stronger in its surroundings here.
And yet, for all the improvements, there are times when Egedy's handmade beats seem slightly out of rhythm with everything else that's going on around them (an issue that's especially apparent on "Black Nails"). And when the album's most vibrant hook shows up, on "Trancegender", it's quickly buried in favor of the murky atmospherics that jam up the album's second half. Thee Physical wants to mosh in the punk club as much as it wants to throw on some lip gloss and hit the town, and it's frustratingly enticing to imagine how the record would have turned out if Egedy had leaned on the gas towards the latter option. | 2011-07-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-07-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lovepump United | July 18, 2011 | 7 | c05d685d-b0ac-4d7c-895d-6dd9b2406c13 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
After finding an audience on TikTok, the Ohio producer extends their hypercute, ASMR-inspired sound into an album that floats between states of relaxation and overstimulation. | After finding an audience on TikTok, the Ohio producer extends their hypercute, ASMR-inspired sound into an album that floats between states of relaxation and overstimulation. | Galen Tipton: brain scratch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galen-tipton-brain-scratch/ | brain scratch | Listening to Galen Tipton can feel like watching a mad scientist at work. Over a number of different projects, the Ohio producer has tossed ideas at the wall with a zany abandon: Last year they released an album specifically meant to be played directly out of your phone speakers and into your mouth, while projects like digifae and recovery girl have dealt in varying strains of whimsical, speaker-busting hyperpop. Though their other monikers have allowed Tipton to push and prod at song-based production, their solo work is where their tinkerer’s sensibility goes to its wildest places. Each mixture sounds like it could combust into a big, multicolored cloud at any moment.
Recently, Tipton’s bleeding-edge laptop jams have found an audience on TikTok, particularly as they’ve narrowed in on a new style they refer to as “brain scratch.” Taking cues from ASMR, Tipton coats the listener’s ears in microscopic electronic particles that sparkle like slime suffused with iridescent beads, their largely improvised chords and melodies acting secondarily to the constant rush of squelching synthesis underneath. A hypercute take on avant-garde synth music, Tipton’s pieces are an appropriately bite-sized accompaniment to videos pining after the sweet taste of frosted bouncy balls. After introducing this mode in raw blocks of tickling noise on last year’s nymph tones EP, brain scratch arrives as Tipton’s full-length investigation into the sound, using a more structured approach to see just how far the putty will stretch.
No matter how dissonant the music gets, one of Tipton’s most consistently delightful tricks is spinning unwieldy chaos into sumptuous shapes. The ribbiting voice that opens “brain scratch 01: the scavengers hymnal” is constantly ballooning out into notes that won’t quite stay in key, yet Tipton is able to create their own skewed tonal logic. “brain scratch 07: grove of the green knight (beta scale)” balances the almost dubsteppy bass throbbing through its core with a featherlight piano melody, cultivating a strange sense of calm on a track that should be anything but. brain scratch constantly floats in this state between relaxation and stimulation, its heightened sensory overload delivered with a cozy warmth.
Though much of brain scratch follows the cadence of a rainstick trickling in eight directions at once, occasionally Tipton offers something almost approaching a song. The standout “brain scratch 09: playground myths” swells from its fizzy intro into a racing parade of drums complete with a flailing brass section, hitting a sugary stride reminiscent of ’90s Shibuya-kei. But for the most part, the focus rests on Tipton’s dense instrumental textures and bright, childlike imagery. “brain scratch 16: thawing flowers” bursts to life with flutes that flutter softly as if settling atop bright green lily pads, while “brain scratch 4.5: bootlegged elixirs” plays like the soundtrack to a bubble bath slowly flooding an entire house.
After the heavy digital processing of the first three songs, the shorter interludes “brain scratch 15.5: burnt out candles” and “brain scratch 2.5: folk songs for the creepy crawlies” each introduce an earthy, tactile feel—the former with a warm, chalky layer of surface noise, the latter with a gentle mix of pirouetting percussion and cooing kazoos. Though these tracks would be dizzying by any other artist’s metrics, the effect they provide here is a grounding one. Tipton brings enough peaks, valleys, and glimmers of melody to hint at the musical possibilities of this sound, but brain scratch is still an overflowing teacup of a record: music made for a swooning, adventurous date with your headphones. | 2023-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | May 26, 2023 | 7.2 | c05e8fa0-1fc2-40f6-8efd-e69f4d0a2fd2 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
This collection of post-Cerulean material-- previously available only as a limited tour CD-- is Will Wiesenfeld's latest attempt to crush the competing sides of his personality into song. | This collection of post-Cerulean material-- previously available only as a limited tour CD-- is Will Wiesenfeld's latest attempt to crush the competing sides of his personality into song. | Baths: Pop Music / False B-Sides | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15837-pop-music-false-b-sides/ | Pop Music / False B-Sides | When Will Wiesenfeld recorded a Daytrotter session under his Baths moniker earlier this year, he chose to include three piano ballads in his four-song set. There's a certain logic at work there, considering the emotionally charged material on his debut full-length, Cerulean, from last year, but it's still not a move that most beat-obsessed bedroom producers would have the balls to try out. Wiesenfeld's post-Cerulean career has partially been shaped by a series of left turns, whether it's through his desire to work in piano balladry and on his more passive Geotic project, or in his affable banter with audiences during his live shows. During the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, he seemed to spend most of his non-stage time wandering among the crowds with his shirt off. Wiesenfeld clearly doesn't care to be bracketed, either personally or professionally, and Pop Music / False B-Sides is his latest attempt to crush all those competing sides of his personality into song.
What's most impressive about Baths is how that all-embracing approach never devolves into sloppiness or identity loss. Wiesenfeld is always careful to string recognizable, Baths-like traits through his sound so that the listener never comes completely unshackled from his world. Sometimes it's through those stringy beats that he's so adept at constructing ("Seaside Town"); at others it's when he drenches a song in bathos via a few twists of his immaculate falsetto ("Iniuria Palace"). Frequently both of those elements are deployed, such as on the standout "Pop Song". This isn't supposed to be a proper follow-up to Cerulean-- it's a collection of tracks Wiesenfeld has worked on since that album was released, originally made available to fans who attended a tour from earlier this year-- which illustrates the strength in depth he has at his fingertips when something as appealingly frail as "Pop Song" is buried here.
If this is an indication of where Wiesenfeld is heading, it feels like a spot somewhere between Geotic and Baths, with a greater emphasis on traditional instrumentation. Strangely, it's often reminiscent of work by artists who have walked backwards into the electronic world and assimilated some of its elements after wringing all the inspiration out of the guitar-bass-drums format. "Somerset", for instance, skews close to the kind of dolorous studio experimentation Blur were tooling around with on 13, all tied to a looping, post-rock bassline that could have been uprooted from Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die. That material points to Baths' future, although there are still a few ties to the Cerulean comfort zone (on the jumpy "Seaside Town" and the fuzzed-out "Damnation") that make Pop Music / False B-Sides feel like a passing of the baton from old to new.
That could be how this album is viewed in the Baths' discography in future years, depending on where Wiesenfeld heads next, which is another testament to his sequencing skills. There are no huge stylistic leaps here, just a subtle testing ground laid out so new ideas can be unwrapped and worked into the sound. It's clear that Wiesenfeld has progressed as a lyricist too, with tracks like "Nordic Laurel" and "Iniuria Palace" easily among the best song-oriented works he's produced. There are occasional misfires, particularly when Wiesenfeld channels his inner Robert Smith on "Tatami", but in the context of this release he can be cut a little more slack than if this were Baths' actual second album. For most of this record, he's still wrapped up in those sci-fi lullabies that made his name, while also gently prodding his surprisingly malleable aesthetic into welcome new territories. | 2011-09-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anticon | September 20, 2011 | 7.4 | c0637c71-7910-4278-857b-8bdc20e5a94a | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
On her second album, the Nashville spitfire flits easily between country, bluegrass, and rock. | On her second album, the Nashville spitfire flits easily between country, bluegrass, and rock. | Lillie Mae: Other Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lillie-mae-other-girls/ | Other Girls | On her second album, Nashville spitfire Lillie Mae keeps tabs on everyone who’s spurned her, and her tightly wound voice convinces you to join in. She can calibrate her disappointment to multiple settings: damning and plaintive on “You’ve Got Other Girls For That,” deliciously scorning on “At Least Three In This Room.” She can sound coolly independent and wounded at once, evoking Dolly Parton in one breath and Ariana Grande in the next. She’s played the fiddle since she was three, touring with her family band to fairs and RV parks, and by now she can turn the country on or off as needed.
Mae’s Jack White-produced 2017 album Forever and Then Some had a hard-rocking veneer, but Other Girls (still under White’s label Third Man Records, this time produced by Dave Cobb) invites more natural light into the mix. She plays acoustic guitar and fiddle throughout, but keeps her voice front and center, floating effortlessly between bluegrass, country, and rock. She plays tag with the guitars or spars with a fiddle, singing with but not over them. At the end of “Didn’t I,” she vaults into exalted trills and yeah yeah yeahs over finger-picked guitars that seem to be goading her to go even wilder.
Like some fellow retro-minded musicians Molly Tuttle and Courtney Marie Andrews, Mae is unafraid of swampy instrumentation. Sometimes the tug of tradition can pull a little too hard. The word “dames,” when it pops up on “At Least Three,” is tough not to cringe at. But the awkward moments are outnumbered by the Dorothy Parker bullseyes: “I ain’t your only, maybe the only one who think that’s so,” she sings on “You’ve Got Other Girls For That.” It would be funny if it weren’t so forlorn and self-aware, a self-defeating joke at her own expense.
To record Other Girls, Mae paused touring for the first time in her adult memory. She told Rolling Stone, “This has been the slowest year of my life,” and the effects of this slowdown can be heard everywhere in this album. Regrets and disappointments linger in the music the way they do in life, casting long shadows. On her last album, she was at her finest when near-breathless, but here she soars in the pauses. At the end of “Crisp and Cold,” she lets the line “Don’t be scared, be more” float into silence with no symmetrical Nashville instinct to rhyme or tie it up.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Third Man | August 16, 2019 | 7.5 | c064d6d7-2cb2-4022-9fcc-412ddc52a022 | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
On his second solo album, Austrian producer and Flying Lotus associate Oliver Johnson puts his own eclectic spin on FlyLo’s brand of over-caffeinated astral jazz and hiccuping robo-breaks. | On his second solo album, Austrian producer and Flying Lotus associate Oliver Johnson puts his own eclectic spin on FlyLo’s brand of over-caffeinated astral jazz and hiccuping robo-breaks. | Dorian Concept: The Nature of Imitation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dorian-concept-the-nature-of-imitation/ | The Nature of Imitation | In dance music, four years can feel like an eternity. Take Flying Lotus, who has been unusually quiet since the release of 2014’s You’re Dead!, but whose influence continues to grow. In the interim, his collaborators on that album, Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington have won a Pulitzer, jammed yacht rock with Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, and become the driving force in modern jazz, respectively. Low End Theory—the party that got FlyLo his start—is finally shutting down, even as his Brainfeeder label keeps forging into strange new terrain, from dizzying footwork to hazy lo-fi house.
It has also been four years since we last heard from Austrian producer Oliver Johnson. Once a touring member of FlyLo’s group (and a contributor to his album Cosmogramma), he released an album called Joined Ends as Dorian Concept in 2014. The record unveiled a sparkling, melodic side of Johnson’s sound, which put a dreamy spin on IDM. Now, he’s popped up again, on Brainfeeder. And his 180-degree turn on The Nature of Imitation suggests that he has stepped in to fill the void left by his former employer, offering an array of over-caffeinated astral jazz and hiccuping robo-breaks.
The fanfare that opens the album, in the intro to “Promises,” does bring to mind the mix of orchestral fanfare and free-jazz blasts on You’re Dead!, though Johnson pivots from there, toggling between Lonnie Liston Smith-style spiritual drift and fusion. Careening from blissed-out to wonky and back, he crafts a sonic zigzag that carries through the rest of the album. Standout single “J Buyers” similarly toys with expectations, building itself up like a festival-ready EDM track, all tingly ascents and dramatic bass anticipating a big payoff. But Johnson seeks effervescence rather than the gaudiness of the drop, abruptly detouring to milder sounds. A buzz disrupts that placidity, as though a power cable has come unplugged, before the composition bursts into full bloom. Chirping voices and an effortlessly catchy melody eventually flutter into earshot, then out. Dorian Concept’s playful mixing brings to mind the convulsive pleasures of a late-’90s Aphex Twin cut.
This hyper, protean aesthetic means that unabashedly beautiful moments like the piano-focused “A Mother’s Lament” mingle with “E13,” which chirps and beeps like a sentient video arcade. “No Time Not Mine” imagines what a FlyLo/D’Angelo collab might sound like—at least in its first half, before the track spirals out into something busier and more frantic.
Flying Lotus’ “Putty Boy Strut” seems to inform “Pedestrians,” but Johnson adds his own swagger to it, as always. It’s a peculiar track—funky yet mechanical, like Johnson is feeding Cameo and Shalamar records into an algorithm. In its squelching synths and vocoded voices, Dorian Concept creates something that ’70s and ’80s electro-funk auteurs like Kraftwerk, George Clinton, and Roger Troutman hinted at: computer music that uncannily imitates the funk, rather than just faking it. | 2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | August 7, 2018 | 7.2 | c06959de-e2b2-4ee9-a7cd-652c2cfedb21 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Producer Daniel Pineda, who is one half of Nguzunguzu, has transformed club dancefloors into zones of unmitigated free expression. | Producer Daniel Pineda, who is one half of Nguzunguzu, has transformed club dancefloors into zones of unmitigated free expression. | NA: Cellar EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21611-cellar-ep/ | Cellar EP | Working with a large cohort of friends and collaborators spread across the globe (he’s one-half of Nguzunguzu), producer Daniel Pineda has transformed club dancefloors into zones of unmitigated free expression. In some ways, his second solo release as NA feels more like a busy construction site than a collection of dance music: It’s 21 minutes of unrelentingly hot, noisy, messy electronic thumps. Thematically, each of Cellar’s five songs is supposed to represent a different dark and claustrophobic room in a large dungeon, complete with its own set of problems and pleasures. The extended architectural metaphor at the heart of Cellar is a fitting description for an artist whose career has been defined by spatial dimensions as much as sonic ones.
The music’s physical tenor is steamy and crowded—it’s like a top down shot of a dance floor, with poor souls trying to claw their way out of the mass of bodies. On "Brass Claims," Pineda adds aggressive horns to his wild array of percussive sounds. The middle chunk of the EP: "Menace" and "Definite Sentence" attempt to scale back the tone and lighten the mood, lowering the frenetic BPM, but the rhythmic zig-zags accomplish little more than creating an anxious block of music. There are a handful of lighter moments in "Definite Sentence" where it sounds like Pineda is sampling a dog’s squeaky toy. And the closer, "NA in a Mood," is surprisingly open and airy. It’s a long fade out that nears ambient music in the relaxation it can somehow pull out of the metallic and mordant sounds Pineda trades in.
At its best, the EP’s pure visceral nature is a stark reminder of the body’s central place in dance music. At its worst, it’s a numbing and grating experience that would never be able to extend past its short runtime. The EP’s attempt at pacing is never smooth but closer to flagellating, and if it did not end at least a little bit gently, the vice-grip it clamps on to your ears would start to feel oppressive. On the whole, though, Cellar is a focused curation of the simple and harsh sounds that were the strongest parts of Pineda’s work in Future Brown and Nguzunguzu. | 2016-02-29T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-29T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fade to Mind | February 29, 2016 | 7.5 | c069b9f9-19b0-4feb-9063-0230334a8fe1 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On their third album, Tyvek's delivering a unifying garage-rock anthem for Detroit's punks, nerds, and audiophiles fighting for something to do on a Saturday night. | On their third album, Tyvek's delivering a unifying garage-rock anthem for Detroit's punks, nerds, and audiophiles fighting for something to do on a Saturday night. | Tyvek: On Triple Beams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17411-on-triple-beams/ | On Triple Beams | Tyvek are a Detroit band, which is definitely a point of pride for them. In interviews, they talk about the city not just as a place where they derive inspiration or play shows, but as a place where the community is obligated to fill a vital role. "I feel like in other cities there might be more of a separation from the different crews or different scenes, whereas in Detroit people are supporting each other just by default so they have something to do on a Saturday night," frontman Kevin Boyer said. "It's definitely a survivor kind of city." In the past, something like "survivalism" made itself apparent in the band's near-hardcore aggression, especially on their 2010 album Nothing Fits. That's still present for On Triple Beams, but in a key moment, they soften somewhat to deliver a unifying anthem for Detroit's punks, nerds, and audiophiles fighting for something to do on Saturday night.
That anthem is "Wayne County Roads", which takes its name from the greater Detroit area. The song's title is chanted in response to the line, "Can you explain to me just how we get home?" It's a song not about the sort of "white flight" city desertion from the history books, but about recent, specific young people ditching the city for other places. "Friends that I hold so dear, it's sad to report/ Not hardly one soul around to defend the fort." It's a depressing notion, but the title is chanted as a sort of rallying cry-- there are fewer soldiers around, but that's all the more reason to fucking do something.
Appropriately, the song comes right after a track called "City of a Dream", which discusses the recent efforts to "rebuild" Detroit. Boyer's view of the current situation is cynical, though he sings it over a cheerful progression: "City of a dream, but it's just a lie/ You can write about it in the Sunday Times." But aside from the standard bitterness seemingly directed at politicians and the media, there are glimpses at real life in the city, like working at Temple Bar or the movie theater. If the allusions to the big picture make On Triple Beams feel contemporary or significant, it's the descriptions of "Midwest Basements" and the MOCAD namedrop that make it feel special.
And since it's Tyvek we're talking about here, most of the tracks emanate urgency in nearly every respect. The guitars are buzzy and loud, the rhythms are quick, the drums crash, the lyrics are densely packed into a short span of time, and Boyer spits them out with punk rock confidence. His words are often eloquent, but sometimes, shit's just too frustrating for poetry. On "Little Richard", he sings about not being able to afford rent or heat, which eventually leads to, "Click clack click clack click clack FUCK/ We've got a live one, we've got a live one!" It's a simple, understandable descent into nonsensical anger.
More often than not, tackling current events on a punk record can end with corny and terrible results. But Boyer and Tyvek succeed because they don't set out to make a condescending, chastising political record. Yes, they allude to the current state of Detroit, but they also reference what sound like personal details from their own lives: friends moving out of town, sleeping in Midwestern basements, getting drunk, forcing the band into the van by 3pm, working tomorrow with Steve, etc. It's not a romantic view of Detroit at all, but idealism has never been Tyvek's thing. Do they offer a great reason to come to town and support the local scene? Hell no. But that's not what they're trying to do. With their urgent, sometimes aggressive, sometimes anthemic delivery, they show us Detroit from their vantage point. | 2012-12-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-12-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | December 3, 2012 | 8 | c0716136-3512-4f99-b5cc-4dbccb98d0a6 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
On his expansive debut studio album, the once enigmatic rapper expands his fascination with trap and melody to feature-length with mixed results. | On his expansive debut studio album, the once enigmatic rapper expands his fascination with trap and melody to feature-length with mixed results. | Baby Keem: The Melodic Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baby-keem-the-melodic-blue/ | The Melodic Blue | Up until recently, Baby Keem chose to be an enigma. His voice on the mic is distinctive, a high-pitched whine well-suited to jokes and boasts, but Hykeem Carter, the man behind the persona, often receded from view. Personal details in his music and interviews were scarce, and Keem outright hid his face until he began promoting his 2018 project, The Sound of Bad Habit. Even after revealing himself, he remained tight-lipped, but that didn’t stop eagle-eyed fans from noticing his name in the songwriting and producer credits of Top Dawg Entertainment albums like the 2018 Disney collab Black Panther The Album and Jay Rock’s Redemption. Rumors swirled that Keem was actually Kendrick Lamar’s cousin and merely benefitted from rap nepotism, but as Keem’s popularity and mystique grew on the heels of his 2019 breakout project Die For My Bitch, he kept his distance and mostly let his boisterous music speak for itself.
Nepotism or not, the rollout (or, according to former TDE president Dave Free, the “well-executed plan”) for Keem’s debut studio album The Melodic Blue telegraphed a more personal, or at least less secretive, direction for him. He publicly embraced his relationship with Lamar, signing with Lamar and Dave Free’s pgLang collective and releasing the tag-team track “family ties.” The album’s trailer is soundtracked by “scapegoats,” a brief but somber reflection on family that hits a bit closer to home (“Flowers on my uncle’s tomb, thousands to my auntie’s, too/I’m used to taking backstreets, last week was nothing new”) before drawing the curtain back again. While The Melodic Blue is indeed flecked with more intimate writing than usual, it isn’t exactly a confessional. Instead, Keem uses the opportunity to expand his well-established fascination with trap and melody to feature-length—with mixed results.
On earlier projects, Keem showed a skill for hopping between rapping and singing, sometimes within the same song. Whether he was screaming “Baby Keem just humbled a model!” on “STATS” or cooing about his indifference toward anyone’s opinions on “Opinions,” it felt like a natural progression, the same artist coming with a different approach. Some of that synergy remains on The Melodic Blue, and the highs are exhilarating. His opening verse on “family ties” is easily among the best of his career. Keem triumphantly skips over horns and thudding 808s with a handful of flows and reminisces on childhood Popeyes trips while puffing out his chest (“It’s a red dot, don’t get on the wrong red-eye”). Both “pink panties” and “first order of business” see Keem switching effortlessly between melody and bars about paying for lace fronts and thanking his mother for her love and support. When he sticks to what initially made Two Phone Baby Keem a success, it’s easy to understand the initial hype.
The core of what made Keem so appealing when no one knew what he looked like exists in bits and pieces here, but The Melodic Blue falls apart when he starts experimenting. He aims for pop and R&B more often, sometimes landing on something fun and propulsive (“cocoa”) and other times sounding jarringly indistinct. The coos of “issues” and “16” sound like leftover reference tracks from Drake’s Certified Lover Boy sessions, while “range brothers” is a stab at Travis Scott-style bombast—complete with multiple beat switches and glossy mixing. The latter starts out decently but dissolves into a memeable mess by the time Keem and Lamar are trading quotes in funny accents like children at a family cookout.
Keem’s collaborations with Lamar are among the album’s most perplexing moments. The chemistry in their hot-potato exchange at the end of “family ties” is undeniable, offsetting Lamar’s earlier choice to employ a flow and vocal tone that sounds like Hulk Hogan on helium. Compare that to the end of “range brothers,” where both Keem and Lamar trade short, breathy exchanges and goofy adlibs over a thumping beat. (I can’t decide if “top o’ the mornin’” or “Rollie gang, Rollie gang, Rollie gang” is more ridiculous.) The duo is clearly having fun, with Lamar, in particular, relishing rapping within looser, concept-free parameters, but that energy can’t always save these show-stopping moments from looking incredibly silly. Neither is as inexplicable as Keem’s hard left turn into acoustic emo-rock on “MY EX,” but it’s hard to tell if they’re joking or not, which isn’t always a good thing.
It’s strange because Baby Keem has always had a strong sense of identity. Whether he’s claiming to be 50 Cent or clowning on his lover’s ex, it’s easy to tell when you’re listening to a Baby Keem song. Much of The Melodic Blue is devoted to trying on other artist’s sounds when it would have benefited from more of Keem refining what already worked about his. An album this theatrical and expansive suggests Keem is aiming for the next level. He doesn’t have to fully open his mind and heart to be a great artist, but he does need to retain his own voice.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | pgLang / Columbia | September 15, 2021 | 6.4 | c0793215-af0d-4ff8-bd47-60a6e53ed0f0 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On their third album, Amsterdam’s finest Turkish psych revivalists add synths and drum machines to spirited ’70s standards from the Anatolian funk canon. | On their third album, Amsterdam’s finest Turkish psych revivalists add synths and drum machines to spirited ’70s standards from the Anatolian funk canon. | Altin Gün: Yol | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/altin-gun-yol/ | Yol | Altin Gün’s third album arrives with the same mysterious allure as a weirdly shaped parcel found under the Christmas tree. Trapped in lockdown, Amsterdam’s finest Turkish psych revivalists started tinkering with drum machines and electronics, adding the spacey synth strut of early-’80s disco to their hallucinogenic rock/folk stew. The prospect sounds so charmingly idiosyncratic on paper that you almost dread to press play, for fear that reality will disappoint.
Remarkably, not only do the results live up to their billing, they also share errant strands of DNA with some surprising strains of contemporary pop. The moody interlocking synth lines of “Ordunun Dereleri” are only a whisker away from the Weeknd’s recent excursions into ’80s revivalism, and the handclap disco beat and wiggling bassline of “Maçka Yolları” is a wayward cousin to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. “Yüce Dağ Başında,” meanwhile, sits somewhere between Lindstrøm’s space disco and Gorillaz’ occasional excursions into reggae.
Damon Albarn’s cartoon troupe is a useful reference point for Yol (“road” in English). Much like Gorillaz, Altin Gün concoct their improbable musical fusions in the service of pop music’s joys, rather than eat-your-greens musical worth. Yol represents a fascinating musical laboratory for the way it alloys genres, as the band—founded by Dutch bassist Jasper Verhulst with members of Turkish, Dutch, and British descent—traces unusual routes through source material taken largely from the traditional Turkish songbook. But the results are never less than engaging, suggesting the Mentos-in-a-Coke-bottle school of experimentation rather than the relentless drudge of high school chemistry. If this year sees a livelier, more jubilant amalgam of disco breaks with saz than Yol’s “Hey Nari,” then 2021 will have been an outlandishly funky time indeed.
Allied to this liberal take on genre is Altin Gün’s enlightened view of instrumentation, with the band adding synth, congas, drum machines, and even the cosmic twang of the harp-like Suzuki Omnichord to the psychedelic guitar rock of their two previous albums. This approach might have been inspired by lockdown—the band was stuck at home for three months, swapping demos online—but Yol bubbles with life and adventure, free of the introspective torpor that the pandemic has inspired in some artists.
Altin Gün also have a wise ear for a tune. The songs on Yol are taken from often archaic sources: “Yekte” is a traditional song from the Anatolian city of Kayseri, while “Arda Boylar” comes from a region of the Balkans that once formed part of the Ottoman Empire. Every song works brilliantly in the neo-disco psych environment; the gorgeous despondency of the folk melodies blends with glittering pop production in a stream of gilded melancholy. It helps that Altin Gün are blessed with two extraordinarily gifted singers in Erdinç Ecevit and Merve Dasdemir, whose immaculate technique never comes at the expense of emotive power.
Tapping into these antique melodies gives Yol a curious sense of timelessness. The album sits somewhere between 19th century Ottoman Empire, ’60s Haight-Ashbury, the bubblegum boogie of ’80s New York, and the omnivorous pop universe of the present day. To pull off such a trick is clever indeed. But it is a mark of Altin Gün’s ingeniousness that Yol never feels forced. The album glides along like a particularly elegant swan, musical dexterity and audacious spirit paddling away frantically below the surface.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | March 4, 2021 | 7.6 | c07f0516-a41b-4b4d-afef-10fca91817b9 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Meshell Ndegeocello’s sprawling new record feels like a natural synthesis of the jazz, rock, dub, and soul sounds she’s explored throughout her career. | Meshell Ndegeocello’s sprawling new record feels like a natural synthesis of the jazz, rock, dub, and soul sounds she’s explored throughout her career. | Meshell Ndegeocello: The Omnichord Real Book | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meshell-ndegeocello-the-omnichord-real-book/ | The Omnichord Real Book | The Omnichord was developed in Japan in the 1980s as a musician’s electronic accompaniment, incorporating a drum machine with rhythm and tempo controls, a set number of playable chords, and a “futuristic” touch-sensitive synthesizer ribbon. And while it has famous fans—Brian Eno, Joni Mitchell, and Damon Albarn, to name a few—it has always been a niche instrument: It’s mostly made of plastic, it feels like a toy, and it now sounds as cheap as it looks. In the hands of an exacting and protean virtuoso like Meshell Ndegeocello, deep into a decades-long career, the Omnichord became a tool for self-discovery.
In 2020, with no shows to play or sessions to sit in on, she found herself scoring three television shows—BMF, Queen Sugar, and Our Kind of People—simultaneously. At the end of marathon days spent collaborating remotely from her home in Brooklyn with an untold number of artists and executives, she would retreat to her attic. Alone with her thoughts and a gifted Omnichord, she would write, free of expectation, free to find things she wasn’t necessarily even looking for.
The bones that emerged from the attic would eventually become the songs on her latest LP, The Omnichord Real Book. A sprawling, 18-track album dosed with free jazz percussion, bass-driven funk, a capella beats, and gentle acoustic fingerpicking, the record feels like a natural synthesis of the jazz, rock, dub, and soul sounds she’s explored throughout her career. Ndegeocello has always had a forward-facing view, experimenting with new styles from album to album and serving as a chameleonic session musician for a wide variety of artists (Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Gov’t Mule). The expansive Omnichord Real Book draws on that history of shape-shifting and turns it into something both recognizable and new.
It’s her first release for the storied Blue Note imprint (a label she “dreamed about as a child”) and feels like a genuine reset in a career that has had several to date. Ndegeocello spent much of the last decade saying goodbye to her parents; after her jazz saxophonist father died in 2016, her mother suffered from dementia for years before passing in 2021. “I have no one to blame anymore for my inner hurts,” she told the Guardian. “No one to please. No one to miss.”
The album’s title references The Real Book, a collection of “lead sheets” for jazz standards that’s been published in various editions since the 1970s; sifting through her father’s things after he died, she came across the first copy he ever gave her. The function of a Real Book is to give musicians the bare minimum of information they need to perform a tune—usually just the melody and the chord changes—and it’s up to the player to bring the song to life. And indeed, while the Omnichord’s tinny electronic tones are the first we hear on album opener “Georgia Ave,” very little survives the record’s final mix. Ndegeocello’s early sketches give way to a richly produced coterie of live instrumentation from the session vets in her band and a coterie of collaborators at the forefront of contemporary jazz.
The transformation is by design. Many of her collaborators—Jeff Parker (guitar), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Joel Ross (vibraphone), and Jason Moran (piano)—are masters of improvisation who add new dimensions to the worlds she’s lived in. Funky neo-soul grooves give way to sparse piano ballads, cosmic chords accompany jazzy horns, and twinkling desert blues guitar nestles into psychedelic soul basslines. She does most of the writing, yet can’t help but include other inspiration, like Samora Pinderhughes’ crushing piano ballad “Gatsby,” whose themes of self-reflection (“I been saying things I don’t believe/I been doing things that just ain’t me”) sound like they were written for her.
Through that lens, the sessions can be seen as a rumination on the illusion of control—of ourselves, of others, of the art that they make and release. It balances humility with ego, relinquishing control to artists with their own distinct voices, while offering a new set of standards into the jazz canon that has historically been anything but inclusive.
Ndegeocello’s solo albums—her early work, in particular—were often sexually and politically charged. She explored and asserted her own sexuality, and aggressively confronted the status quo and her place in it as a queer Black woman artist. The Omnichord Real Book is no less assertive, yet feels energized by grace and understanding. She processes shared trauma (“Towers”), communes with the spirits (“Vuma”), and embraces the dream of the unknown (“Georgia Ave.”) Having fought those battles many times over, Ndegeocello feels more concerned with the present, her assertions reflecting a new sense of self and the existential melancholy of a 54-year-old artist who finally feels comfortable enough to imagine the privilege of a dignified death.
This energy coalesces on “Virgo,” a nearly nine-minute Afrofuturist suite that serves as the album’s centerpiece. Her synth bass spends much of the first few minutes in conversation with Julius Rodriguez’s electronic organ as she sings of finding peace in pain; as the groove builds, she expands her gaze outward to the stars and deep space. When Brandee Younger’s harp comes floating into the mix, it’s as if they’ve cleared the earth’s atmosphere, free to roam the great expanse.
It’s often when we’re alone that we consider our connection to others. Alone in the attic with her Omnichord, Ndgeocello drew on the gifts from others that became the basis for her life as a musician: her father’s favorite records, her mother’s melancholy, the go-go music on which she cut her teeth performing in her youth, even the homogenous music industry that forced her to firmly establish her sense of self. And not unlike the lead sheets in the Real Book she first learned from, the songs she wrote remained incomplete until their communion: with her collaborators, with her audience. “The song is the spaceship,” she said in a recent documentary. “We just get in and see where it takes us.” | 2023-06-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Blue Note | June 22, 2023 | 7.8 | c07f9c15-d272-4c5a-a79f-ec60c22addeb | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On his sophomore album, the Swedish singer and guitarist takes the basic elements of an acoustic troubadour's craft and explores their possibilities, not only as ingredients of songs, but as sounds to be enjoyed in their own right. | On his sophomore album, the Swedish singer and guitarist takes the basic elements of an acoustic troubadour's craft and explores their possibilities, not only as ingredients of songs, but as sounds to be enjoyed in their own right. | José González: In Our Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10717-in-our-nature/ | In Our Nature | They say the true measure of a great song is whether it still sounds as good when you strip the accompaniment down to a solo acoustic guitar. They, of course, are full of shit. This year alone, a bunch of my favorite songs-- Chromatics' "In the City", let alone Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss"-- have been more about texture and rhythm than melody. José González might still be best known for his unplugged cover of the Knife's "Heartbeats", but with this Swedish singer-songwriter, lack of adornment means something different than just showing a song's bones.
In fact, for González's follow-up to debut album Veneer, I hesitate to use the term "singer-songwriter" at all. It used to bother me that the Gothenburg-based artist hadn't written any originals as compelling as his covers, which so far have included not just "Heartbeats" but also Kylie Minogue's "Hand on Your Heart" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". I'm so over it now. While sophomore full-length In Our Nature still only rarely nears the songwriting brilliance of González's fantastic cover selections (an unfair standard!), that's clearly not the game he's playing best.
On In Our Nature, González takes the basic elements of an acoustic troubadour's craft and explores their possibilities, not only as ingredients of songs, but as sounds to be enjoyed in their own right. A stray breath, the buzzing of guitar strings, a hand scraping across the frets: these are all shades in González's palette. The biggest embellishment you're likely to hear is a metronomic foot-tap, subtle hand percussion, or a backing vocal by Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagamo. Where the Knife's "haunted house" sound is informed by minimal techno, González's lo-fi acoustic guitar music could be dubbed "minimal folk."
Or "minimal folk-pop," if you prefer. Like British folkie John Martyn on 1973's Solid Air, González has a reassuringly airy voice and the intricate finger-picking of a leftfield jazz aficionado. Plus, there are plenty of hooks in his spare melodies and still sparer lyrics. Whether a political statement, a musing on sin, or a stark depiction of a troubled relationship, first video selection "Down the Line" is entrancing beyond its slightly distorted strums, droning treble strings, or clicking percussion. "It's all about compromising," González sighs into what he calls "the darkness."
The fire and brimstone from classic American folk (and its folk-rock inheritors) is often detectable behind González textures. For all its sleepy off-mic mumbling and uncluttered finger-picking, "Abram" reads as a shot against religion: "Even though you mean well (well, most of the time)/ You made a delusion and created lies in our minds." And from the first breaths of bloodstained opener "How Low", In Our Nature is haunted by the ugliness of war. With one of the more memorable, faster-paced guitar figures on the album, second video selection "Killing for Love" could be an indictment of blood lust, if not the lust in our hearts.
The preaching occasionally turns slightly pat. The title track trudges a bit, and its repetitions ("It's in our nature," or, "Put down your gun") don't make the dark theme more arresting. Closer "Cycling Trivialities" shows González at his most vulnerable, with a stream of plangent notes bubbling out from an unaccompanied guitar, and while the song's sense of futility-- capping off an album heavy with the stuff-- gets pretty powerful, an extended outro and the awkward title phrase itself find González in a rare moment of unwarranted excess.
Nevertheless, even the least striking tracks have their electrifying moments: Take "Time to Send Someone Away", which sets weary defiance over handclaps, or "Fold", which casts up a gentle plea against the better of its own hard-earned wisdom. Opening with a yawn, "The Nest" adds the bagpipe-like keyboard playing of Håkan Wirenstrand before ending in the hiss of amplified dead air.
Like its predecessor, In Our Nature is a collection of sparse acoustic recordings. But it's a more thoughtful and atmospheric work than either Veneer or last year's Stay in the Shade EP-- one that suggests González has enough talent to make good on the lofty Pink Moon comparisons. And for the first time, the cover-- an urgent acoustic rendition of Massive Attack's "Teardrop"-- isn't even the album's best track. | 2007-09-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute / Peacefrog | September 28, 2007 | 7.8 | c083ec6e-7ce1-4606-b9d5-2435a4098a07 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On his latest, syllable-twisting conspiracy theorist Ab-Soul becomes so information-obsessed that he loses sight of actual meaning. The songs are empty riddles, leading nowhere and saying nothing. | On his latest, syllable-twisting conspiracy theorist Ab-Soul becomes so information-obsessed that he loses sight of actual meaning. The songs are empty riddles, leading nowhere and saying nothing. | Ab-Soul: Do What Thou Wilt. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22708-do-what-thou-wilt/ | Do What Thou Wilt. | Occultist and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley once said “I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.” Parsing this opaque statement reveals it was just Crowley’s cryptic, verbose way of devaluing faith and championing skepticism; a fake-deep principle demeaning the moralist position, the “Gotta Hear Both Sides” of a pseudo-cerebral ideology.
It also reads like an Ab-Soul bar these days. It’s fitting that Crowley, once dubbed the Wickedest Man in the World and written off as a Satanist for his musings about the supernatural, has been a source of inspiration for TDE’s syllable-twisting, in-house conspiracy theorist, who is becoming so information-obsessed that he seems to be losing sight of actual meaning—perhaps a bit woozy from inhaling around all the tomes and scrolls and manuscripts he’s been dusting off. His songs have become so abstract that very little happens in them anymore; they’re all empty puzzles, mazes made of loosely parsed Greek myths, astrological information, and the unfinished script pages for National Treasure 3, meant to be mind-fucking but revealed to be mush when even gently interrogated. His new album, Do What Thou Wilt., named for the defining law of Crowley’s Thelemic philosophy, is the ultimate act of performative wokeness.
It wasn’t always this way: Ab-Soul has been a thoughtful writer in the past, making sense of fringe sciences and unorthodox philosophies with elastic rhyme schemes, gently massaging them to suit grand proclamations about society’s shortcomings or personal explorations for spirituality. His breakout, Control System, remains among the best Top Dawg releases, boasting one of the most heart-wrenching and personal rap songs of the past several years (“The Book of Soul”). But the rapper has strayed from the confessional and introspective brand of stargazing that once made him one of rap’s most interesting voices. In recent outings, Soul has emerged as rap’s preeminent quasi-intellectual, besting peers like Lupe Fiasco and Jay Electronica (who he disses on Kendrick’s behalf here) with dramatic logical leaps, upping the ante with nonsense bars.
Ab-Soul spends so much time mixing pagan and Christian texts on Do What Thou Wilt. that it’s unclear what exactly he believes, or worse, what he’s trying to persuade us to believe. These songs are mostly self-serving or pointless, and they all contain plenty of bad phonetic reaches and try-hard wordplay. There’s a song called “Huey Knew THEN.” (Get it?!) It interpolates the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme and he raps “I’m hornier than the brass section of the band, you understand?” This is what would happen if you gave Shia LaBeouf some DMT, a 12th Planet documentary, and a World Religions textbook.
The production comes courtesy of longtime collaborators like Sounwave, Tae Beast, Willie B, and Skhye Hutch, names familiar to TDE canon like Rahki and the Antydote, and notable outside producers like WondaGurl and A$AP P on the Boards. It’s mostly dark and ominous, with sloping traditionalist breaks that slink just behind the downbeat. When it’s good, dense, or atmospheric like on “Braille” on “Now You Know,” it can settle Soul into a comfortable rhythm or obscure some of his worse lines; but when it’s bland (“Womanogamy”) or overwrought (“God’s a Girl?”), things become twice as grating, and often unlistenable.
Do What Thou Wilt. has been billed both as a love story and a “woman-appreciation album.” It’s also supposedly an exploration of Crowley’s wicked objectives and Soul’s goal of being the most righteous man, among other stray themes. These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest. The overly-busy “God’s a Girl?” boasts the lines “You got me crying with a hard dick (amen)” and “come have sex with Jesus” in the first 35 seconds. “Wifey vs. WiFi / / / P.M.S.” can’t decided if it’s a song about how digital communication interferes with intimacy or an extended prison metaphor. “Womanogamy” is a half-baked manifesto about liking girls that like girls that are in love with him; “RAW (backwards)” is a construction of lazy word games (“Man, I got so many flows them shits come with ceilings”); “YMF” or Young Mind Fuck, is lined with the most boring paradox of all-time: if Ab-Soul calls himself a liar, does that make him a liar, or is a liar calling himself a liar a lie? A better question: Who cares?
Among the worst songs is “Threatening Nature,” a single that proved to be a microcosm of the entire project. It’s an undercooked concept with even flimsier raps that would get laughed out of a smoke circle of college freshmen: “With all disrespect, I think the American flag was designed by fags,” he says, a line that would probably be repugnantly offensive if it weren't so ridiculous. On “Evil Genius” Soul raps, “I studied theology, ancient philosophy, astronomy, astrology/The current state of the economy/Washington D.C., fossils and dinosaurs/The origin of our species.” Perhaps he should’ve spent a bit more time studying music. | 2016-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | December 22, 2016 | 4.4 | c084f4d2-ccf8-43e6-bcca-0c08c44e9b54 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
[Editor's Note: Rob Mitchum is an admitted former fan of emo-punk act Rainer Maria, a fact that has brought ... | [Editor's Note: Rob Mitchum is an admitted former fan of emo-punk act Rainer Maria, a fact that has brought ... | Rainer Maria: Long Knives Drawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6671-long-knives-drawn/ | Long Knives Drawn | [Editor's Note: Rob Mitchum is an admitted former fan of emo-punk act Rainer Maria, a fact that has brought him great ridicule from the rest of the staunchly anti-emo Pitchfork staff. Confronted with the dilemma posed by reviewing their latest album, and torn over whether to reveal his weakness for the band, or to verbalize the unqualified hate of the staff's collective opinion, Rob underwent what is medically known as a "psychic rift." The tragic results are presented below.]
You know, if there's one band I've never liked, it's Rainer Maria. Epitomizing everything wrong with the Midwestern emo movement of the late 90s, Rainer combined their diary-excerpt lyrics, dampened-punk sound, and pretentious aesthetic to create suffocating levels of melodrama that backpack drones of the Great Plains ate up like Doritos. With singer Caithlin de Marrais wailing out her vocals like a nailgun to my head, and Kyle Fischer's off-tune counterpoints not helping matters, the poet-named trio was always near the top of my enemies list.
So it probably comes as no surprise that I find Long Knives Drawn to be not very good, not very good at all.
Long Knives Drawn continues a direction Rainer first explored on 2001's A Better Version of Me, a failed experiment in shoegazer rock that replaced the usual cold monotone singing with impassioned capital-V Vocals. The result: Decisive proof that separating the stretched-out chord storms and detached microphone work of shoegazing is like the fatal severance of Siamese twins. Somehow, as weak as the band was before A Better Version, this approach made them even worse.
Which means it's at least a small relief that Long Knives Drawn starts out sounding more like the slightly more palatable early material, with the first three songs building to fiery peaks that are all too quickly abandoned. The lyrics quickly assume the fetal position, however, with lines ("you need contact daily, or conscience is failing") worthy of similarly over-serious mopester Pedro the Lion.
I could rag on the script all day, but the failings of Long Knives Drawn go beyond mere solipsism. De Marrais' constant fretting about wilting love is kept company by Fischer's run-of-the-mill fretwork, rarely contributing more than a overdriven fuzztone after the admittedly arm-swinging "Ears Ring". Stripped of the band's old jittery tendencies, much of the music just floats on by beneath de Marrais' histrionics, while a sat-on organ in (yipes) "The Awful Truth of Loving" does little to expand their dried up sound.
Without instrumental distractions, those wince-inducing words just keep ringing, ringing, ringing in my head. Consider the clincher on "The Imperatives", where the breathtakingly awful crowning statement is "I was thinking we could go and live in a monastery."
I went into Long Knives Drawn with, well, long knives drawn, but the album's complete inessentiality appears to even trump my considerable bias. Admittedly, the record does have a few more listenable moments than I was initially prepared to give it credit for, but as a whole, the album is such a continued watering-down of their old sound that I find it hard to believe it would even appeal to the Rainer Maria faithful. Chalk up another victory for the Pitchfork status quo.
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You know, I've got to be square with you. I used to like Rainer Maria. Having been a Midwestern teenager in the late 90s, square in the midst of my Melodramatic Period, Rainer's sense of tragic romanticism and ever-so-slightly math-punk sound was exactly what I was looking for in the late high-school/early college years. Powered by the wonderfully wrong harmonies of singers Caithlin de Marrais and Kyle Fischer, the trio hit their stride early with their debut's opener "Tinfoil" and Look Now Look Again, their second and best record.
So you understand how I'd disappointed that Long Knives Drawn is not very good, not very good at all.
Though I'm not too surprised, really, after the trajectory suggested by their 2001 release A Better Version of Me, a highly flawed effort that found the band smoothing out the time-sig skips and clashing duets for an unsatisfying Loveless-lite sound. Largely missing Fischer's distinctive vocal interactions, while reflecting his increased complacency with sitting on single (albeit noisy) chords for indeterminable amounts of time, A Better Version wasn't so much deserving of scorn as it was yawningly bland.
Long Knives Drawn at least hints at a rebound, starting off at an energetic clip with three songs which, at times, show hints of the band's old spark. "Ears Ring" even contains an abrasive riff and pessimistic chorus worthy of Pedro the Lion ("you need contact daily, or conscience is failing"), though without David Bazan's morose delivery, it doesn't come off quite so meaningful.
It's all a log roll downhill from there, though, as it becomes increasingly clear that Fischer isn't going to step to the mic, and the music isn't going to regain much of its previous unpredictability and kick. Rainer Maria doesn't even seem up to conjuring up much of a storm any more, "The Double Life" and "The Imperatives" being surprisingly tame, dampered affairs too lacking in boister to attract attention, and "Situation Relation" forgettably occupying the band's now-customary solemn, finger-picked closing track slot.
But ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in. Rainer sympathizer as I might be, I just can't forgive lines like "I think that we should go and live in a monastery" serving as the vocal hook without popping a Rolaid.
I went into Long Knives Drawn hoping for a comeback to justify my unpopular soft spot for Rainer Maria, but I've come away with all my fears about their route confirmed, wondering if my previous fanship was just one of those cheeky mistakes of youth. Whatever the reason for my apathy, it's a sentiment concisely summed up by the band itself: "Once there was something, and now there's just a piece of atmosphere." Chalk up another victory for the Pitchfork status quo.
---|--- | 2003-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | February 19, 2003 | 4.4 | c085e650-ac77-4229-acf8-d6768fa718bc | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Times are tough for rap supervillains, it seems—even Rick Ross's nemesis 50 Cent is declaring bankruptcy. The surprisingly strong Black Dollar, Ross' first new project in a year, feels slightly recalibrated to reflect the new hard times. | Times are tough for rap supervillains, it seems—even Rick Ross's nemesis 50 Cent is declaring bankruptcy. The surprisingly strong Black Dollar, Ross' first new project in a year, feels slightly recalibrated to reflect the new hard times. | Rick Ross: Black Dollar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21025-black-dollar/ | Black Dollar | Rick Ross's unlikely ascendance from one-note joke to kingpin was dazzling to watch, but all commercial rap empires end, and the sun seems to be setting on the once-untouchable Maybach Music Group. 2014's Mastermind debuted at #1, but the hot air balloon of confidence that powered his best records felt deflated. Leading up to its release, he got more press for his loathsomely tone-deaf justifications of "U.O.E.N.O"'s rape lyric, which cost him his sponsorship with Reebok, than he was for radio hits. Besides "Sanctified", an album cut featuring Big Sean and Kanye West, little of Mastermind has lingered in the public consciousness. As for *Hood Billionaire—*the second album Ross released that year—did you recall that existed?
Times are tough for rap supervillains, it seems: even Rick Ross's nemesis 50 Cent is declaring bankruptcy. And Black Dollar, Ross' first new project in a year, feels slightly recalibrated to reflect the new hard times. A "grounded" Rick Ross would be unthinkable, but he has scaled back, mostly on the production, which leaves behind the booming, slow-moving productions of Lex Luger and his many imitators. "Foreclosed on my past life," he bellows on the opening track "Foreclosures", an early highlight and the most compelling music he's made since his Rich Forever peak.
The song offers the welcome surprise of hearing Ross treat money as something that eats away at relationships and breeds distrust, instead of green rectangles he enjoys tossing out of helicopters. There are not-so-veiled references to contract issues with his own artists: "That paper get funny when publishing's involved/ Mechanicals never matter, 'cause that was your dog." Rapping about music-industry arcana like "mechanicals" and publishing is not a surefire recipe for excitement, but Ross' sonorous voice still breeds drama. His delivery is so convincing that the man who once air-lifted his mansion from Miami to Boca Raton sounds halfway-believable as a financial advisor: "I never met an artist who fully recouped/ These the deals the deal dealers wanna deal to you!" he raps through gritted teeth.
That voice of his, and the way he makes it leap and tremble with joy, can momentarily make you believe anything. At his best, Rick Ross isn't just a fantasy-fulfillment rapper, or a maximalist hitmaker: He's a performer, in the purest sense of that word. On "We Gon Make It", his voice climbs in excitement, and the gusto, the control, and thunderous conviction of his performance recalls the promos cut by the greatest WWF wrestlers. There is a trace of Dusty Rhodes in how he savors pauses, pounces on ripe-sounding words, sometimes at the expense of intelligibility. On "Turn Ya Back", he spits every repetition of the word "back" like it's a mouthful of poison. "Money and the Powder" repurposes the chanted chorus from Scarface's classic "Money and the Power", and by the time Ross is done with it, the phrase has melted into simply "money and the POWWW!"
This energy has always been the electrifying current enlivening even his silliest lyrics—on "Bill Gates", he reiterates his dearly held dream of a world with "Wing Stops on every corner." It is what allows him to somehow to diss "Freeway" Rick Ross—the very real gangster whose identity Ross co-opted—and 50 Cent in the same bar on "Geechi Liberace". There are dull, rote spots on Black Dollar—"Money Dance" retreats into a soft-focus world of bowties, marble floors, and cocktail-jazz pianos that is about as exciting as eavesdropping on senior executives. And the reduced ambitions also mean that there are no calling-card songs here, no tarmac-sized beats or immediate chanted hooks. It's clear that Ross is regrouping. But the project serves as a reminder: This a good energy to have around, still. | 2015-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | September 11, 2015 | 7.1 | c08734d2-0363-43c1-b3cf-90e30aaa5a20 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Melbourne band Jaala has a rushing, halting feel to their debut album, reflecting the complex rhythms of life. When the band's guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cosima Jaala screams, it's not with rage, but with rollercoaster joy. | The Melbourne band Jaala has a rushing, halting feel to their debut album, reflecting the complex rhythms of life. When the band's guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cosima Jaala screams, it's not with rage, but with rollercoaster joy. | Jaala: Hard Hold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21300-hard-hold/ | Hard Hold | The debut album by Melbourne four-piece Jaala constantly shifts between time signatures, but it's not a virtuoso showcase. The band's guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cosima Jaala has said that she would struggle to identify any tempo—with the exception of 4/4, which, in her words, can "go fuck a dead donkey." Instead, the record's rushing, halting feel is her attempt to reflect life's complex rhythms. It's complemented by an unusual but brilliant pop palette that splutters with the chaotic energy of a Jackson Pollock.
The interplay between guitarists Jaala and Nic Lam, bassist Loretta Wilde, and drummer Maria Moles recalls Thrill Jockey's '90s Chicago set, splashy as Tortoise and richly mellow as the Sea and Cake. "Lowlands" ambles around a crooked bass line; "Order" has a splayed ska-punk lilt that evokes Clash ballads. Jaala sings with a jazzy, muscular intonation and a chalky squeak in her throat that recalls a punkier Amy Winehouse or Jeff Buckley, and also owes a debt to the skittish incantations of Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins. When she screams, as she often does, it's not with rage, but roller coaster joy. Considering how rampant the pace is—and Jaala's predilection for "brain-melting shit"—Hard Hold is often remarkably soothing, yet always surprising.
Jaala's lyrics are just as playful as her delivery, full of twists and wonderful imagery. They often deal with the ties that bind humans—love, obsession, violence—and she's just as interested in stretching the bonds of language. On "Hard Hold", she wrings the endless potential of a single syllable. "It's hard, a heart to a heart/ Too hard to unfold this hold with you," she sings, as if massaging out her own heartbreak, working agility back into her ticker's knotted muscle. "If sharing is a bowl of soup, then you drunk it dry," she tells her ex before she proclaims her newly discovered strength, a moment heralded by the song's buoyant lope bursting into a frenzied thrash.
Swaying between downbeat and more anxious passages, "Salt Shaker" captures Jaala's relief and guilt at leaving her humdrum seaside hometown. She licks salt off her hand to remind herself of the waves, and observes: "Those happy-holy-heinous houses/ They spread out and out for mileses." She's a distinct voice, and a versatile one, too: "Ticket" is a serrated tirade against an ex who used her, full of ugly screams and jagged riffs. But then comes closer "Hymn", a tender devotional where the band's edges soften to glimmer like sea ripples reflected on a cave wall.
H**ard Hold is a clever record that rarely foregrounds that fact—perhaps because it was recorded in a week, it hangs onto a scampering, impromptu quality that only adds to its appeal. While they sound nothing alike, Jaala's debut has a similar sense of fluid, approachable experimentation to a record like Bitte Orca: the kind of bright weirdness that seems to illuminate a whole new set of colors. | 2015-11-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Wondercore Island | November 20, 2015 | 7.8 | c09172b6-d36d-4d36-87d7-870fce46c7a1 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Though not as politically riling as his notorious Jerusalem, Steve Earle's latest album tries hard to be, with songs about sexing Condi Rice, and others that draw parallels between American and Iraqi soldiers. | Though not as politically riling as his notorious Jerusalem, Steve Earle's latest album tries hard to be, with songs about sexing Condi Rice, and others that draw parallels between American and Iraqi soldiers. | Steve Earle: The Revolution Starts... Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2650-the-revolution-starts-now/ | The Revolution Starts... Now | Hey, Steve, when does the revolution start? The title of Steve Earle's 12th album, silly as it is, could be seen as a nudge against Earle's previous release, the controversy magnet Jerusalem. His highest-profile record in ages, if not his highest-selling, it contained the O'Reilly-baiting "John Walker's Blues", an explication of the American Taliban's motives that was vilified for having the audacity to humanize the enemy, which Fox pundits and Nashville DJs saw as matter-of-factly treasonous.
There's little on The Revolution Starts... Now that's likely to ruffle as many feathers as that song-- i.e., nothing quite so revolutionary-- although two early tracks try their damnedest. "Rich Man's War" draws similarities between an American soldier named Jimmy and an Iraqi insurgent named Ali, both of whom Earle describes as "just another poor boy off to fight a rich man's war." Anyone with an American flag license plate holder is going to find parallels like these at least disagreeable and at most offensive (although Earle may have a better chance of reaching swing listeners than many dissenting acts). Like "John Walker's Blues"," the song works hard to make both Jimmy and Ali seem sympathetic, and while the effort is laudable, the result is less than compelling.
Faring far worse, both politically and artistically, is "Warrior", a spoken-word song full of purple-prose lyrics along the lines of, "Your faithful retainer stands resolute/ To serve his liege lord without recompense/ Perchance to fall and perish namelessly." Rather than being merely unrevolutionary, it sounds more like an embarrassment. It doesn't help that the song is sandwiched by a forgettable trucker anthem ("Home to Houston") and a story-song ("The Gringo's Tale") that takes forever to set up and then falls apart with a disappointing anticlimax that sounds as calculated as a stump speech.
Ironic considering its title, The Revolution Starts... Now is halfway over before it picks up with the one-two punch of "Condi Condi" and "F the CC". The latter rocks the album's catchiest shout-out and is stage-ready for an audience pumping fists and singing along with, "Fuck the FCC/ Fuck the CIA/ Fuck the FBI/ Living in the motherfuckin' USA." As it finally breaks down into a Ramones-style spellalong, the song becomes the most righteously defiant track on the entire album.
Earle sings "Condi Condi", a tongue-in-cheek-and-in-other-places ode to our current national security adviser, with Daily Show-esque straight-faced aplomb, and it should have fans lowering their pumping fists to cover their mouths as they chuckle over lines like, "Skank for me, Condi." While neither is as outright hilarious as Eric Idle's "FCC Song", both songs are a much-needed laugh amid all this election-year seriousness, and like a tent pole, they prop up an otherwise sagging album.
"Comin' Around", a duet with Emmylou Harris, and "I Thought You Should Know" rein in the politics in favor of more personal matters. While the songs may seem out of place on an album bearing this title, Earle lets them remind his listeners-- as if they need reminding-- that life continues during wartime, more or less the same as before. Heartache and happiness, dread and disappointment aren't exclusive to political anxiety, and these songs make the album sound less like a manifesto than a document of a year spent watching the dead-heat elections and going about your business.
Good as some of these songs are-- and the entire album is better than Nicholson Baker's similarly anti-war novel Checkpoint-- they're not quite enough to foment a revolution, and Earle closes the album with a lengthy reprise of the title track, which creates a bookend effect without actually building to anything specific. He's always been a deeply political musician, a radical in a genre whose stock-in-trade these days seems to be tradition. His ideology informs just about all of his albums to some degree, but politics as an overt subject may not be his forte, as The Revolution attests. | 2004-08-30T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-08-30T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Artemis | August 30, 2004 | 6.8 | c092837c-5178-457f-8883-7ecdb5943c6a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Channel Tres barely avoided the EDM world. And thank god for that. He turns in a debut EP of dark and deep hip-house with tons of promise. | Channel Tres barely avoided the EDM world. And thank god for that. He turns in a debut EP of dark and deep hip-house with tons of promise. | Channel Tres: Channel Tres EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/channel-tres-channel-tres-ep/ | Channel Tres EP | There’s an alternate timeline in which Channel Tres ended up an EDM DJ, resigned to the HARD Fest circuit until his soul officially bottomed out. Instead—in a case of what could be called divine intervention if you believe that Moodymann is God—he discovered house music. It was an awakening for Channel, now 26, who spent his post-college years songwriting, DJing, and generally just trying to make a living. And though he’d lived most of his life in Los Angeles, having grown up between Compton and Lynwood, something about the basement soul of Chicago and Detroit spoke to him: “That shit just woke me the fuck up,” he said earlier this year.
Enter “Controller,” the lead single from Channel Tres’ self-titled debut EP on Godmode (the label that brought you Yaeji’s pair of 2017 EPs, which similarly made the case for modern hip-house). Over loose, tumbling drums, Channel speaks as though he can’t be bothered to raise his voice much above a whisper, which makes his demands all the more powerful: “Your body is a game, fuck the lames, fuck the fame—I am your controller,” he decrees. His commands extend beyond the listener to the producer, Godmode co-founder Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor): “Throw some sub in that bitch!” Styling himself as the omnipotent narrator of the dancefloor, Channel evokes an icier take on the near-religious devotion of Midwest house anthems where vocalists played the role of deities. But with his ice-cold spoken-word baritone—too cool to care, too commanding to be ignored—his inspirations skew more towards the composed sleaze of Moodymann’s “Freaki Mutha F cker” or the casual control of Mike Dunn’s “So Let It Be House.” These are artists who know that “less is more” only applies when you’re the coolest motherfucker in the room. Which they are.
If “Controller” feels warmed by mid-afternoon L.A. sunshine, the rest of the 5-track EP slinks into dusk. “Jet Black” is lit by the sunglasses-at-night glow of neon and street lights, its pulse reminiscent of the kind of Afrofuturist electronics where utopia and dystopia aren’t as opposed as they might seem. While spoken word of “Controller” ventures further into straight-up rap, Channel’s tone never veers from a self-assured deadpan. “Glide,” with its deeper-than-deep bassline and restless little snare hits, takes things even further into Motor City techno, Channel’s voice echoing across the cavernous space. But as lush background vocals and ambient synths creep in, it begins to resemble the work of guys like Theo Parrish or Mr. Fingers, Midwest pioneers who played man and machine against one another, making tracks where mechanical repetition coexists with improvisation, drift, soul.
Channel’s own unique perspective feels especially clutch on “Topdown,” where mahogany synths and a driving techno beat create the perfect pocket for his almost-raps: “Rolling with the top down/With my n****s, and your bitch.” He seems to be exploring familiar Midwestern territory, until halfway through, ’90s G-funk synths come wailing into the picture—an inspired halfway point between the Midwest and the West coast. It’s a lane ripe with promise, and one that begs for further exploration—hell, before there was N.W.A., there was the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, the electro group in which Dr. Dre performed turntable surgery in a sequined jumpsuit. With Channel Tres’ vision already this clear on his debut, the dancefloor is in good hands. | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Godmode | August 4, 2018 | 7.9 | c09b0d2e-1f14-4971-a40c-3dbfb9bf8f4b | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
In 1968, the Brazilian pop singer began a Tropicália revolution against a newly installed military government. It's a vibrant, cheeky, agitprop album that purred and glided past the martial censors. | In 1968, the Brazilian pop singer began a Tropicália revolution against a newly installed military government. It's a vibrant, cheeky, agitprop album that purred and glided past the martial censors. | Caetano Veloso: Caetano Veloso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22255-caetano-veloso/ | Caetano Veloso | In the history books, it was on March 31st, 1964 that a military coup ousted Brazilian President João Goulart. The U.S.-backed junta overtook all branches of government, ending nearly a century of newfound democracy for the one-time adjunct of the Portuguese empire and subjecting the country to two decades of increasingly repressive military rule. In Caetano Veloso’s 2003 memoir Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution in Brazil, he is adamant that the date is a lie: The coup actually took place on April Fool’s Day. Four years into the new regime, then-twentysomething Brazilian pop singer Veloso recorded his first solo album.
But the first voice you hear on his 1968 self-titled release isn’t that of Veloso, but of Portuguese knight Pêro Vaz de Caminha, credited with discovering Brazil in the year 1500. He wrote a letter to Manuel I, King of Portugal raving about the fertile Brazilian land and how “all that is planted grows and flourishes,” convincing the king that the presumed island was worthy of colonization. Carta de Pero Vaz Caminha is considered the first literary text to emanate from Brazil but it gets parodied in a high nasally voice by Veloso’s drummer Dirceu. Little did the percussionist know that the tapes were running. And when the arranger of the session mimics the “exotic” sounds of the Brazilian rainforest, it points back to that time when Brazil was virgin land, before the empire arrived at her shores.
Caetano Veloso’s debut album remains one of the most revolutionary albums released into the worldwide tumult of the 1960s. The opening salvo of Tropicália, it announced the arrival of the greatest Brazilian talent since João Gilberto and launched a fifty-year career that’s not only changed Brazilian music but American music as well, from Talking Heads to Beck to No Wave legend Arto Lindsay and Animal Collective.
To non-Portuguese speakers, Caetano Veloso might not sound anywhere near as transformative as the other albums of that year: Electric Ladyland, The White Album, White Light/White Heat, Anthem of the Sun, A Saucerful of Secrets, to name just a few. Couched in lush orchestral strings suggestive of the generation prior instead of the psychedelic production effects of the moment, it’s a sound thoughtfully strummed on an acoustic guitar. It has few of the tricks and technology of the aforementioned, but at its heart, it’s a revolt, a message delivered at a purr rather than a howl, elegantly gliding past military censors.
At the time, the album struck a balance between the polemics of communism on the Left and the crushing military might on the Right, sloughing off the nationalism and patriotism on either side while embracing a love of country in the shadow of the American Empire. And at the center of it all was Veloso and his supple, silken voice, a Bing Crosby croon delivered with a glint in his eye and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries surreptitiously tucked into his back pocket.
The seeds of Tropicália’s revolution were planted the year prior when Veloso submitted “Alegria, Alegria” (“Joy, Joy”) to the TV Record Festival. Featuring a burst of fuzz guitar and electric organ it became Veloso’s first anthem, his self-described “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” It’s also his Breathless, his “Chicken Noodle Soup,” at once a critique and embrace of 20th-century pop culture. Veloso drinks Coca-Cola, quotes Sartre, name-drops Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale, all while slyly quoting fellow Brazilian pop star Chico Buarque’s “A Banda” and shrugging his shoulders at the end with the line: “Why not?” It set the themes for the movement to come in Tropicália: courting mass media, distancing themselves from the Left and silently protesting the powers that be. As Veloso later told the New York Times: “It was against the dictatorship without saying anything about it.”
The success of “Alegria, Alegria” emboldened Veloso as he worked on a new album. During lunch at a friend’s house one day, he sang some of the new songs, including one that still didn’t have a title. Brazilian film producer and screenwriter Luiz Carlos Barreto suggested the name of a recent piece from visual artist Hélio Oiticica, an installation that required the viewer to follow a path through sand, lined with tropical plants, until they ended at a television set. “Until I could find a better title the song would be called ‘Tropicália,’” Veloso wrote. “I never did find a better one.”
“Tropicália” opens with Dirceu’s recitation about Brazil as a “tropical paradise,” shouted amid a clatter of jungle drums, tympani, shakers, agogô bells, and the piercingly high frequency of flutes imitating bird song, before the orchestra strikes up and Veloso ambles in like a giant surveying all of Brazil:
*Over my head the airplanes
**Under my feet the trucks and trains
**And pointing out the highland plains is my nose
**I organize the movement, too
*I lead the carnival.
As expansive, outsized, and hallucinatory as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” as insouciant and word-drunk as Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Tropicália” is allegory and absorption of all the contradictions of Brazil: its baião rhythms against suave orchestral surges, its colonial opening against the overstuffed modernist lines of Veloso. In the chorus, Veloso praises the sophisticated and urbane song form of bossa nova yet rhymes it with “mud huts.” Throughout the dense lines, Veloso swings from jungle to city, from swimming pools to sea, referring to fellow Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) singers like Elis Regina, Roberto Carlos, and—at the last refrain—to Buarque’s “A Banda” again. Though this time, Veloso adds a twist, rhyming it with the lady in the Tutti Frutti hat, Carmen Miranda.
By that point in the ’60s, Miranda was perceived as kitsch, the Brazil of old, even though early in her singing career, the “Brazilian Bombshell” was her country’s first full-fledged pop star and one of the highest paid entertainers in Hollywood. But Veloso was sincere in his embrace of Miranda, and in teasing out the last syllable of her name, he also nods to Dadaism, melding colorful camp and the avant-garde in just a handful of syllables.
“One characteristic of Tropicália... was precisely the broadening and diversification of the market, achieved through a dismantling of the order of things, with a disregard for distinctions of class or level of education.” So Veloso wrote in Tropical Truth, adding that one goal of their movement was “to sort out the tension between Brazil the Parallel Universe and Brazil the country peripheral to the American Empire.” It was a fine line to straddle, embracing both their own heritage and American pop culture. It meant admiring the colorful cartoonishness of the Kool-Aid Man but neither buying nor drinking the Kool-Aid, all while not falling for the consumerism being offered up religiously since the junta took power.
The American poet Elizabeth Bishop traveled to Brazil in the early ’50s. A two-week voyage turned into an 18-year stay in the country, where her aristocratic spouse, Lota de Macedo Soares, fed her access to the upper echelons of Rio society. Bishop found herself with a bird’s-eye view of the coup d’etat that would soon grip the country. She marveled at its efficiency and the support it appeared to engender, writing that these displays of anti-communism were becoming “victory marches [with] more than one million people marching in the rain.” From her perspective, it was simple: “...all in about 48 hours, it was all over...The suspension of rights, dismissing lots of Congress, etc... had to be done—sinister as it may sound.” But for the Brazilians who weren’t in positions of power and prominence, those in the favelas or those in the working classes who would not stand to profit handsomely, something far more sinister loomed.
In the United States, a group of economists began to impose a debilitating economic plan around the world through means of torture and suppression. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine traces this nefarious economic shock therapy from Iraq in the 2000s back to Indonesia in 1965. But its earliest iterations took place in South America. In 1962, Brazil had elected João Goulart, who Klein writes was “committed to land redistribution, higher salaries and a daring plan to force foreign multinationals to reinvest a percentage of their profits back into the Brazilian economy rather than spiriting them out of the country and distributing them to shareholders in New York and London.” It was a dynamic attempt to close the gap between the rich and poor in the country.
But less than two years later, the U.S.-backed junta ousted the president and—with an economic policy scripted in the White House—instilled a plan “not merely to reverse João Goulart’s pro-poor programs but to crack Brazil wide open to foreign investment.” In just a few short years, most of Brazil’s wealth was in the hands of a few multinational corporations and the income gap widened, never to be narrowed again. That inequality remains today, exemplified by the Olympic Games in Rio. The political corruption and abject poverty lie just beyond the colorful walls erected to keep the favelas out of sight on our television screens.
And as the people took to the streets to protest the economic hardships befalling them, it was these same corporations behind the violent repression that soon followed. In Brasil: Nunca Mais, a book that detailed the dictatorship’s torture record from 1964 until democracy was restored in the 1980s, the extralegal forces that brutalized unions, student groups, and other dissidents were funded “by contributions from various multinational corporations, including Ford and General Motors.”
These nefarious forces at work were neither observed by the ’60s counterculture in the United States (then protesting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War) nor for most of the Brazilians themselves. As Veloso noted of the time, “Almost all of us were unaware of those nuances back then, and even if we had been, it would have changed nothing; we saw the coup simply as a decision to halt the redress of the horrible social inequalities in Brazil.”
But even if the young Veloso wasn’t consciously aware of the corporations sucking his country dry, his lyrics suggest an awareness of something terribly amiss. It’s a line that runs through the work of all who gathered under the banner of Tropicália: fellow Bahian Gilberto Gil; the psychedelic wunderkind trio Os Mutantes; bossa nova singers Gal Costa and Nara Leão; the wry, live wire Tom Zé; Rogério Duprat, the producer who studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. While Tropicália earned the ire of the Left by not writing overtly political songs, in tapping into the collective disquiet of the time, their songs became all the more resonant.
Mocking his corporate overlords and their thirst for profit, Veloso made a tangy MPB album perfect for public consumption his first time out, his artful pop becoming Pop Art becoming agitprop. “Paisagem Útil” (“Useful Landscape”) scans as a string-laced bossa nova that toys with the title of Tom Jobim’s “Inútil Paisagem" (“Useless Landscape”). It’s an ode to Brazil where Veloso offers up a love of Rio's city lights and speeding cars, his lovers kissing under the glow of an Esso sign, a romantic scene set in a simulacrum of nature under the auspices of that multinational oil company. The speedy “Superbacana” is a frevo as penned by Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The titular hero “Supercool” battles Uncle Scrooge and his battalion of cowboy minions and uses advertising lingo for shiny new products like “super-peanut” and “biotonic spinach” and—amid the dizzying blur of slogans—“economic advances.”
Translate the title of the jaunty “Soy Loco Por Ti, America” and it reads as “I Am Crazy for You, America.” And at the time, the Tropicálistas were eagerly absorbing as much music as possible from their neighbors to the north. “We were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix,” Veloso said of their influences at the time. “We wanted to participate in the worldwide language both to strengthen ourselves as a people and to affirm our originality.” They fervently spun albums from the likes of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, and more, but rather than simply mimic the trends to the north, they made these influences bear out the music of their half of the hemisphere. So on “Soy Loco,” Caetano isn’t being cheeky about loving America, it’s just that he means South America. The song playfully dances between a Colombian cumbia and a Cuban mambo, sung in Portuguese and Spanish, with Veloso hoping for a united South America rather than the North American Empire. The lyrics toy with the notion of naming, be it the name of America or the girl he plans to bring to the beach (Marti), but then Veloso pivots and he sings of a nameless country.
Fun enough beach fare, until Veloso signifies a dead man whose name can’t be said. He continues to land on this figure: “The name of the dead man/Before the permanent night spreads through Latin America/The name of the man/Is the people.” Less than a year prior, on the other side of the Brazilian border in Bolivia, Che Guevara was captured and killed by CIA-assisted forces. It would be decades before Veloso would admit that Che Guevara was the dead man at the center of the song, but with his death, the prospects of a united Latin and South America were imperiled. And in the years ahead, Brazil remained under the heel of the American Empire.
As Tropicália grew in popularity around the country, Veloso began to see more attention from the authorities. A performance with Os Mutantes for Festival Internacional de Canção in September of 1968 became a riotous confrontation with the audience. Soon after, another show featuring Veloso, Gil, and Os Mutantes was staged under another piece of art from Hélio Oiticica. Only this one featured a man recently shot dead by the police with the slogan “seja marginal, seja heroi” (be a criminal, be a hero) written on it.
By the end of the year, both Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested by the military police and detained two months in solitary confinement without being charged with a crime. After being allowed to play a farewell concert, they were then exiled from Brazil for the next four years. Living in London and then in Bahia upon his return in 1972, Veloso continued to record albums that were by turns exquisite, experimental, and introspective.
Veloso recalled an interrogation from an army sergeant during his imprisonment: “The sergeant was revealing that we tropicalistas were the most serious enemies of the regime. But in that little room of the army police, I did not have the strength to feel proud: I was merely afraid.” None of that fear can be heard here. Instead, bravado and bold assurance run through every number. At the center of it all is Veloso, with his swagger and full belief in the power of his songs to dance around the tanks and petroleum companies, to triumph over both the CIA and Uncle Scrooge. Amid the album’s blinding color and tropical fronds that would make Carmen Miranda proud, Veloso made a stand against the dictatorship without saying anything about it. | 2016-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Philips | September 11, 2016 | 9.4 | c0b768c4-c231-41b3-b64f-41e158314825 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On their 11th album, Rivers Cuomo and co. aim for a hook-filled tribute to California guitar pop but the production gloss suffocates any personality these songs could have had. | On their 11th album, Rivers Cuomo and co. aim for a hook-filled tribute to California guitar pop but the production gloss suffocates any personality these songs could have had. | Weezer: Pacific Daydream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weezer-pacific-daydream/ | Pacific Daydream | Long ago, Rivers Cuomo basically split Weezer into two different bands. One of them puts out experimental albums (Pinkerton, Maladroit, The Red Album, etc.), and the other puts out commercially-minded records (The Green Album, Make Believe, etc). At times (The Blue Album, Everything Will Be Alright in the End), Weezer straddle the fence. There’s a bit of mad genius to this approach. Not only does Cuomo—something of a creative contrarian who’s been ultra-reactive to fan response in the past—get to buck expectations when he wants to, but he also gets to appease both sides of the aisle.
If you like hooky Weezer, about half of the albums should appeal to you, while the same applies if you’re partial to the more out-there Weezer. Pacific Daydream is the band’s first offering to fall far short for both camps—not because it’s one of the most extreme examples of Cuomo going for a radio-friendly sound (though it is that), but because he betrays the band’s mission in the process. This is all the more disappointing when you consider that even when Cuomo churns out dance-pop fluff such as “Feels Like Summer,” it’s still abundantly clear that he hasn’t lost his gift for coming up with earworm hooks.
“Weekend Woman” offers a clear example of just how these songs go wrong. Weezer have used glockenspiels for texture in the past (Pinkerton’s “Pink Triangle,” last year’s “California Kids,” etc.), but here they follow ’80s-era Cheap Trick into the void between powder-puff rock and adult contempo, and the percussion instrument is front and center. This could have turned out to be another example of Cuomo taking gutsy risks, but "Weekend Woman" sounds less "spacious" and more "empty." Other than the one eccentricity in the arrangement, there's little to distinguish this song from hundreds of pop songs you've forgotten about. In fact, the album is almost completely devoid of the chunking guitar riffs that sit at the core of Weezer’s soul. And on “QB Blitz,” they even manage to take the “power” out of “power ballad.”
Lyrically, Cuomo’s continued fixation on nostalgia and dime-store rock mythology further chokes what little the music may have had to offer. He tries to pass himself off as the dreamy-eyed kid you invariably find shredding at Guitar Center by including references to Mexican-made Fender guitars and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but the observations are pat, delivered without detail or conviction. And while there are moments on Pacific Daydream when Weezer take half-hearted stabs at the harmony vocals that Brian Wilson so famously seared into our musical DNA, the strangely wan “Beach Boys” isn’t one of them. Had producer Butch Walker (Avril Lavigne, P!nk, Panic! at the Disco, and Weezer’s own 2009 album Raditude) nurtured the song’s quirks, “Beach Boys” could have actually explored its hinted fusion of Latin music and reggae. The airy lead hook in the chorus even contains suggests yacht rock, a style that could do worse than to have Cuomo give it a go.
To be fair, Pacific Daydream does show us new sides of the band—splashes of Spanish guitar, clavinet—while Cuomo and fellow guitarist Brian Bell’s acoustic handiwork threads the music with a delicate touch we rarely get from Weezer. Nevertheless, toothless melodies coupled with an excess of production gloss suffocate any personality these songs could have had. When Cuomo and company do more than pay superficial lip service to the Beach Boys, it comes off as crass—even dishonest—coming from behind the music’s thick, gleaming surface.
Looking back, it’s no surprise that Cuomo’s distinct combination of fuzzy guitar riffs, sunny hooks, unabashed awkwardness, and roiling internal conflict struck such a profound nerve. But for the second album in a row, Cuomo anchors the music more specifically to California. Sure, that’s worked for scores of artists in the past, but a crucial part of Weezer’s appeal was that you could believe they came out of any garage on any tree-lined cul-de-sac in any suburban zip code in the U.S. Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere. | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crush / Atlantic | October 26, 2017 | 4.3 | c0b80ebc-3d74-4911-9148-04edc5bc05be | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
Broken Social Scene guitarist Andrew Whiteman's latest is at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be. | Broken Social Scene guitarist Andrew Whiteman's latest is at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be. | Apostle of Hustle: National Anthem of Nowhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9858-national-anthem-of-nowhere/ | National Anthem of Nowhere | Andrew Whiteman, Broken Social Scene guitarist and Apostle of Hustle bandleader, is not an apostle, he's a hustler of hospital-cornered quilt of breezy, bouncy pop, with all of his more famous band's overlapping propulsion, but little of its chaotic bliss.
Where Folkloric Feel opted for cobwebby murk, National Anthem of Nowhere dovetails in bright, tidy corners. It's at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be. Tight, molded percussion and luxuriantly fluffed basslines make clean passes through delicately reverbed sheets of guitar and lathed synths. Affable vocals remake the music's nighttime throb as afternoon flirtation. The first record found Whiteman hung up on Cuban music, but National Anthem of Nowhere seems less discriminating in which genre particles it assimilates. The accumulation doesn't change the music's vanilla flavor, but it makes it bolder: The languorous "NoNoNo" threads throttled hand percussion through smoldering gypsy folk; the icily cragged "Jimmy Scott Is the Answer" is a mild-mannered indie rock approximation of classic soul; the post-rocky squalls of "Fast Pony for Victor Jara" are shot through with juicy tropicalia. On "Haul Away", Whiteman even manages to merge two of indie rock's favorite exotic templates-- the Western movie twang and the sea chantey.
Whiteman is aptly named-- there's a stiffness to his swing that, despite the house beat pulsing through "My Sword Hand's Anger" and the svelte disco bass on "The Naked & Alone", makes it better for headphones than dancing. This is an audiophile's record that encourages appreciative observation more than participatory engagement. Whiteman's vocals are strikingly similar to Jason Collett's; they have the same grainy, ingenuous croon, but the music deftly assembled around it makes Apostle a different thing that BSS (less rock) or Collett's solo project (less rustic). Galumphing percussion and angelic synths flesh out the fluidly hitching indie rock of "Cheap like Sebastian", and the vivid yet carefully time guitar fireworks of the title track are capped with a breath-arresting horn finale. By the time the piano filigrees of "A Rent Boy Goes Down" leaned into a mean, distorted cha-cha-cha, I was charmed enough to berth on Whiteman's international cruise ship, even though it really felt more like reading a Let's Go! guide than traveling. | 2007-02-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-02-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | February 5, 2007 | 7 | c0b897ae-b308-4b19-ac45-17f5785a4746 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Most of the songs on Juan Wauters' second album of sweet, unvarnished folk-rock are arranged for acoustic guitar, electric bass and other things that can be rehearsed in the living room without bothering the neighbors. Simplicity here isn’t a matter of technical limitation but of philosophical stance: For Wauters, music stopped evolving when the Beatles decided mysticism was more complicated than puppy love. | Most of the songs on Juan Wauters' second album of sweet, unvarnished folk-rock are arranged for acoustic guitar, electric bass and other things that can be rehearsed in the living room without bothering the neighbors. Simplicity here isn’t a matter of technical limitation but of philosophical stance: For Wauters, music stopped evolving when the Beatles decided mysticism was more complicated than puppy love. | Juan Wauters: Who Me? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20477-who-me/ | Who Me? | Juan Wauters’ sweet, unvarnished folk-rock comes from a forgotten New York, between the suburbanization and white flight of the 1950s and the impoverished 1970s, when it was enough for Simon & Garfunkel to visit the Central Park Zoo on the A-side of the single and the Queensboro Bridge on the B-side, when people’s hearts were alight with hope for a new baseball club called the Mets.
His second album, Who Me?, features 13 songs, all of which are less than three minutes long and several of which are less than two, played on about as many chords. Most of them are arranged for acoustic guitar, electric bass, and other things that can be rehearsed in the living room without bothering the neighbors. Simplicity here isn’t a matter of technical limitation but of philosophical stance: For Wauters, music stopped evolving when the Beatles decided mysticism was more complicated than puppy love.
Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek. I first encountered him as the singer of the Beets, a bratty, separatist band whose songs were anchored by declarations so simple they sounded like Zen aphorism. (My favorite of these is still probably "If you’re cold, get a coat," though I also get great comfort from "There’s only one horse and twenty riders/ Only one of them will get to ride it," which I take to be a metaphor for the narrow odds of success.) Whatever certainty he had has winnowed. "I grew up thinking I’d be a hero," he sings on "El Show de Los Muertos". "I grew up thinking I wouldn’t be them/ But what am I doing/ Here alone lost and wondering/ How many times do I have to die to be only me?"
Doubt is universal, but Wauters always seemed like someone able to enjoy himself in spite of it, someone who brandished his cardboard sword and charged the castle laughing. That’s him on the cover of Who Me?, standing on the hood of a car with the Manhattan skyline in the background, dwarfing the buildings but shying away from the camera. Later, he said he looked uncomfortable because they had to stop traffic in order to take the shot. Being in the way isn’t really his way.
I like Wauters; I want him to win in part because I don’t think he cares much about winning. His songs are a stay against the passage of time: Kid to adult, openness to inevitable close. Music that takes on smallness as a cause—the third, self-titled Velvet Underground album, Daniel Johnston, half the history of indie pop—usually carries within it some hard intimation of purpose, a candle flame, a secret message that tells the people who bother to stick with it that they are in fact on the true and noble path. Call it the secret toughness of wimps. Every time I see the title of this album I reflexively think, yes, you*!* | 2015-05-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-05-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | May 11, 2015 | 6 | c0c253bd-9fac-4d4b-a790-ac383bd0c03e | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Using her customary palette of field recordings, captured conversations, and instrumental contributions from friends, the Texas composer lays bare her darkest thoughts about friendship and solitude. | Using her customary palette of field recordings, captured conversations, and instrumental contributions from friends, the Texas composer lays bare her darkest thoughts about friendship and solitude. | claire rousay: sometimes i feel like i have no friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-sometimes-i-feel-like-i-have-no-friends/ | sometimes i feel like i have no friends | “What if?” can be a trapdoor to hell. Waiting on the other side of that interrogative lurk paranoid delusions and pipe dreams, both potent mood oscillators. In sometimes i feel like i have no friends, San Antonio composer Claire Rousay explores the subject of friendship through a spiralling self-examination packed with dangerous hypotheticals. “Why does anyone want to be around me?” Rousay wonders in the mission statement of the 28-minute piece. “How do I have friends? Do I deserve it?” The ambient soundscape, like all of Rousay’s work, is assembled from field recordings, inventive percussion, and captured conversations. Here, Rousay seeks the marrow of friendship, and in turn presents the mechanics of the mind: its tendency to wander, scrutinize its host, and occasionally soothe.
In the opening measures, wind chimes flutter and tree branches sway and crack. sometimes i feel like i have no friends plays like footage of a blustery seaside, although it’s possible that these sounds—recorded in San Antonio, Chicago, and Rotterdam (the only coastal locale)—may have nothing to do with the sea. Rousay doesn’t map out the origin of each field recording, possibly because she knows that the mind is quick to construct a scene for each. What passes for surf might be a freeway overpass, or trash blowing around an empty parking lot. The tableaus morph with each listen; is that really a wind chime, or is it a bicycle bell? What’s interesting is that such disparate sources can produce such tranquil audio. Rousay, who once told The New York Times, “I basically record my whole life,” is intrigued by the multiple sonic properties of everyday things. Listeners can get lost in the limitless vistas she conjures, only to learn that they come from the sound of a seltzer can.
The images of windy beaches and blown leaves drift in and out as a halo of piano, played by Emily Harper Scott, quiets the mind. But when Rousay’s voice chirps in at the three-minute mark, it feels like a guided meditation gone wrong. “How many friends do you have?” she asks. “Do you ever say something bad about someone you would call a best friend?” (You may find yourself answering these questions silently and inadvertently.) “What if word got out that I’d said something bad about a best friend? Would they forgive me?” Each “what if” grates on the nerves, prodding you out of hypnosis. Rousay spirals further down, taking us with her: “What would happen if everyone turned their back on me one day? Am I ready for that? To be completely alone?”
Early in her monologue, Rousay sneaks in a growling drone. It grows louder and inflames the sense of unease stoked by her interrogation. But Rousay is an excellent manipulator of mood and atmosphere, and she is quick to rescue her listeners from self-obsessed despair. The remaining minutes are filled with barroom chatter, a car radio, and snatches of conversation between Rousay and her friends. The topics are light and banal: an 80-year-old Vietnamese tailor who is “obsessed” with Anthony Bourdain; a student who turned in improperly formatted homework. Rousay drowns out her anxieties in the mundane chitchat, which eventually disappears in a rain of wood and metallic percussion. Scott’s piano returns, and a swell of violin (courtesy of Rousay’s real-life best friend Mari Maurice, aka More Eaze) restores a sense of calm. In this serene passage, the questioning voice has been silenced.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | null | January 11, 2022 | 7.1 | c0cadd97-9557-4969-a1a8-ff5aca327a81 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
In a live recording from a site-specific 2016 performance at Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House, the Japanese polymath and the German minimalist balance piercing tones with emotional warmth. | In a live recording from a site-specific 2016 performance at Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House, the Japanese polymath and the German minimalist balance piercing tones with emotional warmth. | Alva Noto / Ryuichi Sakamoto: Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alva-noto-ryuichi-sakamoto-glass/ | Glass | A third of the way into his 2017 comeback album, async—Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first solo album in eight years and his first since recovering from throat cancer—a rustling noise arises on “Walker.” It’s a hushed, uncanny piece, full of faraway electric drones mixed with a much closer and more personal sound, of leaves crunching underfoot. It’s a sound that Sakamoto recorded while strolling the grounds of the 20th-century American architect Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House before a duo performance with Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) back in September 2016. Noto and Sakamoto’s musical dialogue stretches back to the beginning of the 21st century, when the duo began trading the files that ultimately became 2002’s Vrioon. They most recently collaborated on the soundtrack to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Their work there made the frozen wilderness of the film feel all the more bitter, and Glass, the live recording of that 2016 performance, pushes deeper into chilly abstraction.
After decades of making groundbreaking synth-pop as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra and working with artists such as Brian Wilson, Iggy Pop, and David Sylvian on his own solo albums, Sakamoto pivoted away from pop music. But collaborating with one of the most austere electronic producers of the clicks ‘n’ cuts generation marked a return of sorts. He has said that making experimental music led him back to the music of his youth, working under the influence of artists like Nam June Paik and the Fluxus movement.
There’s a resonant center to Noto and Sakamoto’s work together in which stark timbres and abstract electronics ultimately turn heart-stirring. That sense slowly arises on Glass, a site-specific performance that utilizes Johnson’s building as an instrument itself. The music’s drifting forms scan as ambient, but rather than imbue a sense of calm, Glass evokes an intensifying sense of unease it evolves. Glass bowls are rubbed with a mallet and digitally processed; ghostly tones from Sakamoto’s Sequential Circuits synthesizer waft about in space; and crotales (small tuned disks) are struck so that their high frequencies seem to hover like flying saucers. When Noto and Sakamoto introduce an even higher sound it evokes a physical sensation akin to freezing rain suddenly turning to ice, brittle and crystalline.
Nearing the 20-minute mark, a breathy, voice-like drone flares up. Watch the video of the performance, and the source of this mysterious, haunting howl turns out to be so innocuous, it would be easy to miss. Sakamoto approaches one of the panes of the house’s outer wall and, with a small mallet in hand, contemplatively traces arcs across the glass, eliciting otherworldly shivers. Abstract as most of the sounds on Glass are, and as unstructured as the improvisation is, there’s something considered at its heart. The tones, though still sharp as glass shards, are infused with a warmth that slowly permeates the final moments of the piece. It shows off Sakamoto’s late-era mastery in working with more experimental artists: Drawing on the cerebral, piercing tonalities of Alva Noto, he adds just enough earthy heat to keep the piece from freezing over. | 2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Noton | February 16, 2018 | 7.5 | c0d6a47b-a314-452d-b58f-e06f43e3759c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his new album, the sad-boy pioneer regresses into empty flexing, content to remain stagnant while the rap world passes him by. | On his new album, the sad-boy pioneer regresses into empty flexing, content to remain stagnant while the rap world passes him by. | Yung Lean: Starz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-lean-starz/ | Starz | Yung Lean moaned so Lil Xan could mumble. With his sad-boy aesthetic, the Swedish cloud-rap pioneer set the stage for all the polarizing, Very Online baby-faced white rappers to follow in his wake. (“I thought it was funny, a 16-year-old kid rapping about coke,” he said recently.) But Yung Lean’s music has rarely served as anything more than a bridge for other rappers to advance across. “Yeah, I’m only 23 but there’s like, like, ten of me,” he raps on his new album Starz, not just a flex of his pedigree but an unwitting critique of how easy his stuff is to replicate. Lean deserves a lot of credit for being ahead of his time, but to paraphrase Drake, it isn’t about who does it first, it’s about who does it right, and on Starz, his methods seem outmoded and nondescript.
The sounds Lean helped popularize are better off in the more capable hands of his Drain Gang collaborators, especially Bladee and Ecco2k, who push the music well beyond his limits on recent projects. Many other rappers have taken bits of the Sad Boys style and scurried off in so many different directions it’s hard to do a head count, but several of them did something more worthwhile with it. Lean, for his part, has remained largely static. Even as he’s become more comfortable with himself, there’s still an emptiness to his music that makes it seem uninhabited. Starz feels like an abandoned promotional website for a tentpole blockbuster: A snapshot of a bygone little kingdom unto itself, standing still, oblivious to the world that has passed it by.
On 2017’s Stranger, Lean polished his songcraft a bit, and he stopped turning sadness into a meme and started reckoning with it. “Red Bottom Sky” showed his pop chops, and “Yellowman” teased the offbeat experimental musician he could potentially grow into. Sadly, the songs on Starz don’t really move in either direction. He’s still largely plagued by the same issues that hampered him in 2013: His boasting isn’t just inauthentic, it’s boring, and glimpses of real, genuine emotion are far too rare. On Starz, it’s easy to imagine most of the songs being better if someone else were performing, or if no one was performing at all.
The music’s punch and pathos come from producer and frequent collaborator whitearmor. His icy electronics make Lean’s one-dimensional performances seem stereoscopic. The erupting synths on “Violence” nearly blot out the stains of Lean’s expressionless rapping: “Put the money in motion, I pull strings, Geppetto,” he says, sounding more like the puppet that has yet to become a real boy. The crystalline arpeggios on “Acid at 7/11” aren’t enough to salvage the amelodic chants or the song’s fleeting moment of introspection (“I sold my soul when I was very young/I’m so gone”). Lean has talked before about the titular harrowing incident in Canada, seeing a man crack his skull open at the convenience store while he was high on LSD, describing it as the worst drug experience of his life, but that isn’t the song he wrote. Too many of his songs operate in this way—as approximations of episodes that never quite articulate the feeling.
The rapping on Starz, if it can even be called that, is utterly devoid of character. Lean regresses into bad habits, disappearing into empty flexing. “Pikachu” is the most explicit “Young Thug did it better” moment, and on songs like “Hellraiser” and “Iceheart,” Lean’s mentions of brands feel like product placement. There are flashes of evocative writing buried deep. “My dreams are in heaven, I won’t sell you them/Yeah, I lost a friend but we will meet again,” he raps on “Low.” He has a painterly way with melancholic imagery when he bothers: “Blood writings on the moon paint the sky/Living is whatever, I know what it feels to die,” he raps on “Sunset Sunrise.” But most of the time, he doesn’t bother, and whole stretches of the tape pass by without evoking a single identifiable emotion.
Yung Lean is most tolerable on Starz when his songs play into the surrealism. On the yappy “Dogboy” and the crooned “Boylife in EU,” his oddball personality jumps out. The closer, “Put Me in the Spell” is closer to the Fray than any rap song, and while his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself. | 2020-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Year0001 | May 21, 2020 | 5.5 | c0d96204-dcde-4d1a-b217-0a791e9b33f4 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
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 Sean “Diddy” Combs’ 2010 side project: a dark and stormy concept album about one man’s transit through love. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Sean “Diddy” Combs’ 2010 side project: a dark and stormy concept album about one man’s transit through love. | Diddy - Dirty Money : Last Train to Paris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diddy-dirty-money-last-train-to-paris/ | Last Train to Paris | The act of adopting a new nickname has become an astrological event for the artist-producer born Sean Combs. He got the name Puffy from a childhood friend who said a young Combs would huff and puff when he was mad; of course, this was before the Puff Daddy moniker became synonymous with happy new-money raps and wealth. Then came his first major rebrand: In 2001, he changed his alias to P. Diddy fresh after a breakup with Jennifer Lopez and a very public trial where he was acquitted on gun charges. Four years later, he was just Diddy, having dropped the “P” because, as he said, it was getting between him and his fans.
This year, as part of his latest reinvention, Combs has co-opted the world’s most complicated emotion and turned it into a lifestyle built around positive affirmations and unity. He now calls himself Love, a word that is everything to him: a sensation, a hashtag, a vibe, and the name of his nebulous club. But the Diddy of 2010 had a much more cynical view of love. His fifth studio album, Last Train to Paris, released that December, tells the story of a romance doomed by distance. Combs is the jilted protagonist who envisions love as a vast, deceptive, often unattainable warmth. At a time when hip-hop was still easing out of 50 Cent’s clutches, an electro-rap concept record about feelings was a legitimately bold move. Combs described Paris very abstractly as “train music,” equating trains with sensuality, movement, and the rhythms of the heart. His interviews, accordingly, blurred the lines between commerce and genuine introspection on the subject. “I’ve always fucked love up,” he told the Guardian in 2010, adding that love was something he felt he could never “achieve and conquer.” He was 40, a multimillionaire bachelor, confessing to journalists that he was lonely.
Though he’d rapped about his personal life before, Combs positioned Last Train to Paris as more than an album: It was an all-new sound, energy, and vibration through which he could revolutionize pop. He’d been a fan of acts like the British dance trio Loose Ends (featuring two men, one woman) and figured he needed a woman’s perspective to actualize his vision, so he commissioned Dawn Richard from his successful girl group Danity Kane and fellow singer-songwriter Kalenna Harper to join him under the name Diddy-Dirty Money. The resulting album took three years to complete, and when it landed, it wasn’t as clairvoyant as Combs initially planned. By then, David Guetta-fronted Eurodance (Akon’s “Sexy Bitch,” etcetera) was crashing parties and spilling over Solo cups, and hip-hop was changing. So Far Gone and 808 & Heartbreaks had both arrived well before Paris, flipping the tone of mainstream rap from tough to emo. What Combs did was more intentional: he took these intersecting trends and packaged them into a savvy collaborative effort. With Paris, he made a convenient, prophetic statement, embracing his love scars just as a new generation of rappers began pouring their resentments about relationships onto songs.
Grief is a familiar, tragic part of the Diddy brand. The No. 1 hit that launched him into solo stardom, “I’ll Be Missing You,” was an elegy for his friend and protégé, The Notorious B.I.G. Combs released his debut solo album, 1997’s No Way Out, while battling depression in a world without Biggie, whose death set up an entirely new challenge for Combs. The budding pop superstar known as Puff Daddy had spent the decade building an empire in his own image, comprised of a record label (Bad Boy Entertainment), a clothing brand (Sean John), fragrances, a hit reality TV franchise (MTV’s Making the Band), and a luxury vodka (Cîroc). All the while, the world saw him not as an artist foremost but as a rapping executive with a capable squad of ghostwriters. As 50 Cent once taunted in an interview, “An artist would be someone who actually wrote something on a record.”
It wasn’t that the classification bothered Combs—he understood the instinct to view him primarily as an entrepreneur. But going from a mogul sidekick to the main character meant his artistry had to grow in real-time. “When I became an artist, I wasn’t really prepared,” he told Spin in a 2010 interview. “I knew it was something I wanted to do, but I wasn’t trying to do it at that level yet. I feel like I’m in my most artistic phase right now.” Biggie’s death evidently launched Combs into a space where besides rapping, producing, and dancing in videos, he had to become both the star and curator of his solo albums, which to him required more foresight and reinvention. Even so, he’s never really an island on his projects. Paris is organized behind a higher concept, but like his previous work, it still functions as a compilation where Diddy is the greatest showman.
As good artistry does, though, Paris wound up telegraphing a shift in the air of hip-hop. Lil Wayne performs slam poetry on two tracks, which should tell you everything you need to know about the album’s mood. “Before you get here, put yo’ panties in yo’ pocketbook/That’s what I told her/Over the Motorola,” he recites breezily to open “Shades.” Spoken word is certainly not not Weezy’s medium—he adds a necessary lightness to the whole affair. Diddy’s rhyme schemes, in comparison, are quaint as love letters scrawled on loose-leaf, like streams of consciousness that skip from vexed queries (“I don’t comprehend how you can’t love when it’s so easy to,” he says on “Yesterday”) to full diatribes (“You’s a motherfuckin’ bitch to me/You just let me bleed,” he vents on “Hate You Now”). His raps are distractingly simple across the album, leaving space for Richard and Harper to be the true stars. Their more indulgent textures add dimension to the songwriting and overshadow Combs by design. When Richard flits from whispering her lines to exerting force on “I Hate That You Love Me” (“Love is in, then it’s out,” she sings), she’s adding deeper tones than Diddy can, even when her lyrics are straightforward.
On songs where Combs is a shadow, his collaborators—in this case, a suite of 19 other producers and 17 artists ranging from Grace Jones to Rick Ross—step in to effectively mirror his ennui. Trey Songz and Usher sound like pure sugar on “Your Love” and “Looking for Love,” respectively. Justin Timberlake summons his FutureSex self on “Shades,” but it’s Bilal and James Fauntleroy who gel beautifully on the hook, posing a charming yet bitter, harmonized hypothetical: “What you gonna do/When I’m perfect for you?” Does the song need a committee of voices? Not really, but it seems the more misery, the better. Drake offers a typical lament on “Loving You No More,” with a verse that matches the album’s overall theme of selfish love.
Combs is the most impassioned when he’s deep into warbling zone, like on his self-produced (with Mario Winans) “Angels,” a hip-hop soul ballad that masterfully contrasts his agony with Ross’ glossy boasts, rolling synths, and a flawless resurrected Biggie verse (“Dying ain’t the shit, but it’s pleasant/Kinda quiet,” Big offers). Like West did with 808s, Diddy saw Auto-Tune as the perfect tool to capture and transmit his cold despair. And though T-Pain didn’t invent automatic pitch correction, he influenced the Paris sound so much that Combs initially asked his “permission” to use Auto-Tune. The album’s engineer Matt Testa said Combs later gave Pain a royalty point.
There is a vibrancy to the atmosphere of Paris that seems to refract its cynicism. The effect is cool and industrial, with whirs and buzzes paced at the speed of a treadmill sprint. Lasers shoot through the Danja-produced “Yeah Yeah You Would” like arrows, and a hyper drumline powers Swizz Beatz’s “Ass on the Floor.” On “I Hate That You Love Me,” Combs compares Rodney Jerkins’ deceptively happy chords to “the way love feels.” The environment feels dark and confined like the dankest EDM venue, with the vulnerable, heartstring-pulling ethos of 808s. Similarly, the songwriting can quickly go from clunkers to devastatingly concise bars: “Yesterday, I fell in love/Today feels like my funeral,” Chris Brown drones relatably on one of the latter tracks, “Yesterday,” a better club ballad than his other cameo, the pulsing “I Know,” featuring Wiz Khalifa. The album’s most glaring disaster is “Coming Home,” a dreary, well-intentioned song about triumph in mourning.
A sense of loss looms over Paris, a place where love is clearly for sale. The bluster of it all threatens to extract you from the experience. You can hear the album actively striving for innovation in the background—before Combs begins crying out on “Yeah Yeah You Would,” there’s Swizz Beatz, noting that what we’re about to witness is “a brand new sound.” It wasn’t exactly that. We’d already heard versions of these weeps by then, though not in this setting: a dark and stormy dance record about a fickle emotion. Over a decade later, with rap fluent in more love languages than ever, Paris appears even more forward-thinking. The album remains a relic of a transitional period in hip-hop when rappers began openly embracing the idea of wearing their bruised hearts and egos on their sleeves. They haven’t stopped bleeding since.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bad Boy / Interscope | July 25, 2021 | 7.6 | c0e18fe1-878c-4aef-96b4-95c9ea728192 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
Basinski's new album *A Shadow in Time *contains some of his strongest work since The Disintegration Loops introduced him to the world at large. | Basinski's new album *A Shadow in Time *contains some of his strongest work since The Disintegration Loops introduced him to the world at large. | William Basinski: A Shadow in Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22738-a-shadow-in-time/ | A Shadow in Time | In the fifteen years since William Basinski released the debut installment of his Disintegration Loops series he has been rapidly, and rightly, lionized. But for two decades prior to that, he was just another eccentric artist in New York, a tinkerer who built his own instruments, ran a venue and experimented insatiably with tape loops. He would tune in to the easy listening piped out by CBS and record snippets of it, creating a massive archive of schmaltz that, through the alchemy of sampling, could be transfigured into something infinitely more haunting. “I would set up loops, get them going, put on the tape recorder and let it go for the length of the cassette because if it was going, it captured this eternal moment,” he told The Quietus in 2012. That eternal-moment is quintessential Basinski; his work has been uniquely fixated on time and loss, his compositions heaving with longing, melancholy and a sense of impenetrable mystery.
At its best, Basinski’s music inspires the sort of rapturous testimony usually reserved for peak experiences, cult leaders and the dead. When it’s not working as well, it can feel not unlike so-called “ruin porn” or the photography of Edward Burtynsky: lovely aestheticizations of late-capitalist collapse that comfort more than they confront. Thankfully, his new album *A Shadow in Time *contains some of his strongest work since The Disintegration Loops introduced the world to the artist.
The two pieces on A Shadow in Time offer contrasting entry points into his work. The title track is a richly layered composition for the archaic Voyetra 8 synthesizer that was a year in the making and showcases Basinski at the height of his compositional powers. David Bowie tribute “For David Robert Jones,” on the other hand, is an off-the-cuff tape loop piece commissioned by L.A.’s Volume gallery in the weeks after the artist’s death. Built with re-purposed tape fragments that had been chewed up by a former roommate's cat (“this big, fat motherfucker,” he called it) “For David” exemplifies the entropic decay he’s most known for while adding specific, Bowie-riffing details.
As with all Basinski’s work, there’s a tantalizing juxtaposition between chance and intention (the Voyetra 8 wasn’t even guaranteed to turn on, and when it did, it “was already doing some weird shit so we used it and more”). But on “A Shadow in Time” this tension plays more of a supporting role than a lead. The piece opens with a slow-motion cascade of shimmering high harmonies and murky, shifting lower tones. In its austere beauty, it calls to mind Pauline Oliveros’ landmark Deep Listening, but with an added dash of dread. Clocking in at just shy of 23 minutes, “Shadow” spends its first half stretching towards infinity and its second collapsing on itself.
Around the seven minute mark (amazingly it only feels like three), the piece begins to hollow out. Gradually those glassy high notes drift away like the dust tail of a comet, and tape hiss overtakes the piece. The sense of deterioration is palpable, made more dramatic by distant synth moans and weird bursts of chirping noise that poke through just as “Shadow” drifts into silence. It’s the kind of ending that makes one feel less like a listener and more like a witness.
In the wake of the A-side’s descent, “For David Robert Jones” feels like a cool down for the audience and a victory lap for Basinski. An orchestral clip that could easily be a Disintegration Loops outtake opens, circling around itself and never quite resolving. We’re on more familiar footing here, and the emotional tenor of the the piece, though engaging, is less arrestingly in-your-face than “Shadow.” Six minutes in, a gnarled saxophone juts through rudely, throwing the chilled out transcendence pleasingly off balance. A nod to Bowie’s own saxophone honking on “Subterraneans,” it’s an amusingly punk bit of sabotage, but it fails to develop into something more. Over fourteen more minutes the tension dissipates and “For David” runs out of steam.
Discussing The Disintegration Loops in 2012, Basinski told the Quietus “Over the period of the hour, that melody just decayed right in front of my ears… and eyes… I remember thinking, 'This is not about you.’” While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void. | 2017-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | 2062 / Temporary Residence Ltd. | January 13, 2017 | 7.9 | c0e45ca3-1ef6-4ca1-a8d5-67b6e2acb519 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
On her first album of all-new solo material since 2012, the Vermont-based folk singer reflects on her life with measured reverence. | On her first album of all-new solo material since 2012, the Vermont-based folk singer reflects on her life with measured reverence. | Anaïs Mitchell: Anaïs Mitchell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anais-mitchell-anais-mitchell/ | Anaïs Mitchell | At the start of the pandemic, Anaïs Mitchell and her family relocated from Brooklyn to her grandparents’ former home on a Vermont farm. Combing through the physical evidence of her past led Mitchell, now 40, to craft Anaïs Mitchell, a collection of songs about youth, age, memory, and relationships that reflects on her life with measured reverence. Buoyed by pure vocal melodies and thoughtful lyrics, it’s warm-toned folk with a gentle, optimistic heart.
After spending over a decade immersed in Hadestown, the Broadway musical that spun out of her 2010 concept album based on a Grecian myth, Mitchell now focuses on telling her own story. Throughout, her thoughts are pulled in two directions: backward to her younger self and ahead to the magnificent, “one in a million” future. She approaches her childhood with care and concern on “Revenant” and “Little Big Girl,” while “Bright Star” and “On My Way (Felix Song)” chart ascension and ambition—though the latter is equally occupied with mourning the late songwriter and producer Edward “Felix” McTeigue. “You get one take,” Mitchell sings. Anaïs Mitchell feels appropriately daunted; aging is surreal and unstable, the road to success steep and intimidating. On the closing piano ballad “Watershed,” the climb is all but endless.
Minute vocal manipulations render Mitchell’s words more complex than they first appear. (Look to the first line of the opening song: “Over Brooklyn Bridge” soars vocally then falls nasally, quietly, into “in a taxi.”) She often closes her lines with defined consonants, setting off a phrase with the gravity of a gentle click. She has a deft touch with rhetorical elements, as on “Little Big Girl,” which teases out the tension between age and youth by repeating the words “you grow up” until the variations mount into decades.
At times Anaïs Mitchell suffers from a lack of variation: The “Backroads” intro echoes the opening of “Bright Star,” and the repetitive themes occasionally feel heavy-handed. But more often, Mitchell uses repetition thoughtfully, whether touching on the anxieties of growing older in “Now You Know” or engaging a prayer-like personal meditation in “Revenant.” She doesn’t rely on vocal fry or quavering to invoke pain or worry—the undulation of melody does the work for her, and spare moments of speak-singing make the mundane sacrosanct.
Because she so often focuses inward, certain external moments feel unfinished or unaddressed. In “Backroads,” a one-off comment about racist police rings odd in its singularity. The sexual violence implied in “Little Big Girl” (“Let him have his way instead of/Saying what you want” and “You grow up underneath the gaze/Of many grown men’s eyes”) lands more powerfully on a song occupied with girlhood, though it’s still jarring among far idler and more nostalgic concepts.
Even as she memorializes her past, Mitchell’s eyes are focused on the horizon. She sings of wanting to be “one of a kind,” “once in a lifetime,” and “the one you ride beside,” all at once. There are no great musical innovations here, but that’s not to say the songs aren’t affecting: Anaïs Mitchell is a compelling, earnest rumination on the desires and possibilities that arise when you start looking for significance in small moments. Sitting next to your love in a taxi, suspended high over the East River, is enough to make anything feel possible.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | BMG | January 28, 2022 | 7.2 | c0ed0c6d-7f5a-4e26-a4cd-6a0a8339bdde | Caitlin Wolper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caitlin-wolper/ | |
This very promising mixtape from the up-and-coming New York rapper is filled with booze-soaked, antisocial rants that are detailed and funny but also show a surprising vulnerability. Guests include Das Racist and kindred spirt Danny Brown. | This very promising mixtape from the up-and-coming New York rapper is filled with booze-soaked, antisocial rants that are detailed and funny but also show a surprising vulnerability. Guests include Das Racist and kindred spirt Danny Brown. | Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire: Lost in Translation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15864-lost-in-translation/ | Lost in Translation | Full disclosure: I am totally cognizant of how this review might be utterly pointless. A rapper named Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire has chosen that for his album cover. Your mind's already made up. That is, if it wasn't already after his searing, anti-everything calling card "Triple F"-- that's "fuck 'em" in triplicate-- or "Huzzah", eXquire's dangerously catchy single produced by horrorcore vet Necro, with a hook that packs boundless socio-pathology into five words: "drunk driving on a Wednesdayyyy." Such an assault of antisocial behavior would lead to you believe there's nothing pleasant or new about Lost in Translation. But it's a nice surprise how it reveals itself as a comprehensive and ultimately human, if not always humane, portrait of eXquire's consummate underground ruggedness.
eXquire's been getting a healthy share of buzz of late, in large part because of the most divisive aspect of Lost in Translation: this is a New York mixtape and one that's provincial as fuck. His cantankerous and bullish flow can be traced to all purveyors of unwashed hoodie rap, but he boasts of a "Vote for Pedro" tattoo representing the underdog and all of the alcohol being abused is within the budget of the listener. Casual fans will easily spot the interpolations of Jay-Z and Lil' Kim tracks from 1996 but bonus points if you spot the hat-tip to a 50 Cent freestyle on Hot 97. Likewise, it's not enough to have a boom-bap medley called "Pissin' Between Train Cars" stuck between "Cockmeat Sandwich" ("if you ain't seen Harold & Kumar, that means suck my diiiiick") and an indefensibly drawn-out blowjob skit-- he tells you where his stop is on the C Train from Euclid (Utica, if you're interested).
That some of these beats are ripped from Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein might be the best illustration of the realm in which eXquire functions. It's a world of post-Wu murk where even the gulliest sounding dudes escape into comic books and hip-hop CDs because girls just don't understand. Even if it all takes place within a couple of city blocks, eXquire makes it feel like a universe of experience where he comes of age as a microphone fiend ("I Should Be Sleepin'"), lays out some deeply nerdy storytelling raps ("Maltese Falcon Pt. 1 and Pt. 2"), and joyfully gets on some Anthony Bourdain shit as an ambassador to his local chicken spots ("Plus they got pizza, y'all can't fuck with this/ Got macaroni salad too, but I don't trust that shit").
But don't think that this is merely a celebration of New York… or really a celebration of much of anything. His focus on humility and grind doesn't separate eXquire from many other up and comers, but when I hear, say, Green Ova Undergrounds, their hustle raps seem to take place in some sort of vacuum, and it's unclear what they're pushing against other than themselves. Translation is similar in a lot of ways to Danny Brown's XXX mixtape in that eXquire's sharing some very uncomfortable and often unflattering aspects of his life in order to fully express just how real this is to him. You get the feeling Lost in Translation wasn't chosen as a title for the fact it's a cool phrase: Despite the occasional guest rap, it shares the movie's overwhelming loneliness and desperation. He's in command railing against hip-hop ass kissers-- dud skits named "Hip Hop Networking 101" and "YeahRight!.com" should make that obvious-- but when bills, guilt, and the impending sense he's fucked up his life get the better of him on "Nuthin' Even Matters (Regrets)", eXquire's surprisingly effective singing voice rings out like a distressing call from someone who might end it at any moment. Likewise, while the drowsy hooks on "Lovesponge" and "Build-A-Bitch" might initially signal the point where this 18-track tape should've packed it in, eXquire sounds more confused than misogynistic.
On "Huzzah", eXquire boasts, "publicist asked me what's my gimmick, I said 'going in,'" and it's based in truth: these aren't the kind of lyrics filled with punchlines and tricky wordplay, and his fairly unglamorous strengths lie in his ability to pick beats, flesh out concepts, and develop stories. There are plenty of easily identifiable precedents in his tone and cadence-- Method Man, 50 Cent, hell, even a hell of a lot of Dr. Dre-- whether topically or vocally, eXquire covers so much ground that I'm not sure I'd be able to spot an uncredited verse from him. Particularly on "The Last Huzzah!", he sounds a little indistinct compared to highly pronounced stylists like Danny Brown, Das Racist, and El-P.
The "Last Huzzah!" remix is easily one of the best posse cuts of the year, and besides hearing Brown continue his hot streak and Das Racist come through with the kind of quotable jaw-droppers that were few and far between on Relax, there's the sense that some kind of vanguard is being established. Along with Brown, Roc Marciano, and Action Bronson, in a different era, they're the type of song-savvy hardheads whose skills and sound might have landed them on a major label with no real idea of what to do with them. But the freedom they have allows them to honor and revive "New York rap" as an artistic framework rather than a matter of geography: Of course that designation was going to generate skepticism when the personality-free likes of Skyzoo, Maino, and Saigon were all too eager to claim the throne. But eXquire has less to do with "real MCing" than a relatable realness, so yeah, that cover really does make sense: eXquire is flaws and all, and it's tough to look away. | 2011-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Мишка | September 29, 2011 | 7.9 | c0fc8ace-05e0-49ac-bf6e-0a841a5c497e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Bronx rapper pulls you into his orbit with dark humor and trademark absurdity on his latest project, more focused than any of his previous work. | The Bronx rapper pulls you into his orbit with dark humor and trademark absurdity on his latest project, more focused than any of his previous work. | Rx Papi: 100 Miles and Walk’in | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rx-papi-100-miles-and-walkin/ | 100 Miles and Walk’in | Rx Papi doesn’t sugarcoat anything. In the past few weeks, a particularly bleak chunk of his song “Cousin Tito” has circled the internet: “So high, I don’t think I’m gonna get home/Might run off the road and kill myself,” he raps. “Sometimes I wake up, wanna kill myself/How would you felt if I killed myself?” The lines read extremely grim on paper, but when rapped in a cavernous deadpan somewhere between Lil B and Max B, they become dark comedy. No matter how far Rx Papi pulls you into his troubled thoughts, he weaves in his trademark absurdity, rapping in a loud bark that often evolves mid-song into a full-throated scream. The joy of listening to him is bearing witness to an artist at his freest, seemingly unpolluted by any kind of refinement or recalibration from the industry.
That energy seeps into his latest album 100 Miles & Walk’in, where he appears to demo flows, voices, and cadences in real-time, mirroring his anxious storytelling. The record is a mere blip in his catalog—he released eight projects in 2020—and yet Walk’in feels more focused than any of his previous works. Besides a lone feature from Detroit rapper Boldy James, Papi carries track after track (nearly all of them hookless) on his own, sometimes fancying himself a sort of Upstate M. Night Shyamalan. On “Dead Man’s Letter,” he recalls getting so high he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror, then going to his bathroom to find his own body bloody and beat up in the tub.
More often, Rx Papi’s songs are delirious mood boards, mixing moments of paranoia with humor. He’ll mumble about taking Percs to relax his muscles before flat-out screaming that his pockets are “fatter than Mrs. Puff” (“SouthSide Mike”). There’s the middle of “One Last Dance,” where he ties off a stanza about his love-hate relationship with Jordans by saying, “I don’t miss the shot, I’m Michael Jordan/Walked out and stabbed you, Michael Myers.”
Like a long-running sitcom, his music gets funnier the more you dig in, often self-referential and reliant on tropes. There’s Auntie, a character who pops up on almost every track. There are his 5.56 shells and his Glock that looks like Bernie Mac or Crunchy Black based on the day. Then there’s “Walk in This Bitch,” which confirms there’s a seemingly infinite number of ways to “walk in this bitch.” Across the album, Papi walks in this bitch like an improbably extensive cast of characters, including Mystikal, Freddy Krueger, Styles P, Steve-O, DJ Clue, Ox from Belly, Rico from Paid in Full, God, a dead man, and John Wayne. “I walk in this bitch like John Wayne/I don’t know shit about John Wayne,” he raps on “Rush Hour,” on which producer DiorDaze’s crater-deep low end threatens to blow out speakers.
In general, Papi picks quality beats from the SoundCloud trenches that are suitable for him to be as loud and angry as he desires. The best is JXHNSCXTT’s for “Terry,” which sounds like death; the strangest is St. Los’s for the Pet Shop Boys-sampling “East End Boys.” It’s a bunch of musical ideas that cohere mostly because Papi, like a large planet, sucks them—and you—into his orbit. Some of them should’ve stayed in his inbox—the flimsy opener “A Man Apart (Intervention)”—but when everything is clicking, it’s hard to turn away.
The catch of black comedy, of course, is you’re not sure you should be laughing, but with the way Rx Papi so convincingly pulls it off, he takes that choice away entirely.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | TheRealRx | March 1, 2021 | 7 | c0fd0ef3-6565-4703-8390-d836abb36c82 | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
The Spanish producer who made his name with buzzing, colorful, maximalist free-for-alls returns with his most resolutely electronic work yet. | The Spanish producer who made his name with buzzing, colorful, maximalist free-for-alls returns with his most resolutely electronic work yet. | El Guincho: Hiperasia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21603-hiperasia/ | Hiperasia | El Guincho has always been attracted to bright colors and garish patterns; his first two albums, Alegranza! and Pop Negro, were buzzing, maximalist free-for-alls in the tradition of Animal Collective and Tropicalía. So when the Spanish musician born Pablo Díaz-Reixa says that his latest album was inspired by a visit to Hiper Asia, a chain of sprawling dollar stores in Madrid that carry beads, baubles, doodads, tchotchkes, trinkets, bric-a-brac, and all manner of climate-warming, air-polluting, late-capitalist gimcrackery, you can guess what pricked his senses so. The rush of all that plastic, all those shiny surfaces; the accidental and tragic beauty of all that useless crap.
El Guincho was way off his album cycle at the time. His last album, Pop Negro, had come out in 2010. In the years since, he ended his contract with Young Turks, left Barcelona for his birthplace, the Canary Islands, to care for his mother, who was dying of lung cancer, and, following her death and a subsequent breakup with his girlfriend, moved to Madrid in search of a new direction. When the epiphany washed over him in those fluorescent-lit aisles, he scrapped the album he had been working on, which he has described as a set of bass-heavy tracks in the Night Slugs vein, and set about translating Hiper Asia's sensational surfeit into song.
The resulting album, the most resolutely electronic work he's done yet, buzzes like an ice-cream headache: His voice is slathered with Melodyne's pitch-correction software, and he sings in strange, sing-song cadences whose melody and rhythm seem less like songwriting than the byproduct of algorithmic processes. His beats bob between the lurching rhythms of the L.A. beat scene, the snap of dancehall and reggaetón, and the shuddering, double-time pulses of jungle and footwork, and his synths recall both Dâm-Funk's fat, augmented chords and Rustie's dynamics-squashing compressors. The way jagged samples are shoehorned into the mix is reminiscent, at times, of the Bomb Squad—or a tropical take on them, anyway, like an MPC that's sticky with mango and mojo. Touch down almost anywhere on the record, and you'll discover details that trigger a hair-raising rush of sensation—brittle 909 snare rolls, crystalline choirs, video-game melodies, and basslines that reach frequencies most indie-electronic fusions never knew existed.
Like its namesake, however, Hiperasia sprawls. The melodies that give early tracks like "Rotu Seco" and "Cómix" their sugary kick soon turn syrupy and heavy and undifferentiated; tracks just four minutes long can seem eternal. Spanish speakers will have an edge on other listeners, because the lyrics' wordplay and surrealistic vignettes extend the songs' staying power. Some feel like riddles outsiders aren't expected, or even intended, to crack: "Stena Drillmax," named after a brand of oil-drilling ship, juggles images of drones and chemtrails with a lover's lips. But scrape away all the glitter and there are moments of real pathos: "Sega" closes with the brutal couplet, "You thought your father loved you/ But it was all a joke."
The title song, a tribute to the retail emporium that gave the album its name and shape, asks, "How do you get so much heart into a cement box?" But the real key to the album's muchness might be "Abdi," in which Díax-Reixas reminisces about his teenage years, shoplifting from electronics stores and then sitting on a park bench with a friend, listening to hardcore on his Walkman. His voice is squished and metallic and tinny, like something coming out of an old FM radio. "That was a big deal for me," he sings. "I know it wasn't for everyone." In the dime store of his imagination, the shelves are stuffed so full, and stacked so high, that half the treasure is out of reach; only he can get to it. But even to the casual observer, it still sparkles brightly, and—in small doses, anyway—alluringly. | 2016-03-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-03-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Nacional | March 7, 2016 | 6.8 | c1009855-f70c-40e6-a92c-42f9b6ae0e96 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Ibeyi consists of 20-year-old French-Cuban duo Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, twins whose father was Cuban conguero and master percussionist Miguel "Angá" Díaz of Irakere and Buena Vista Social Club. The duo ground themselves firmly within these traditions, but they weave them together with jazz, soul, hip-hop, and downtempo/electronica. | Ibeyi consists of 20-year-old French-Cuban duo Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, twins whose father was Cuban conguero and master percussionist Miguel "Angá" Díaz of Irakere and Buena Vista Social Club. The duo ground themselves firmly within these traditions, but they weave them together with jazz, soul, hip-hop, and downtempo/electronica. | Ibeyi: Ibeyi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20270-ibeyi/ | Ibeyi | "Ibeyi" is the Yoruba term for the divine spirit that exists between twins. It is also the name of 20-year-old French-Cuban duo Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz. Currently based in Paris, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi grew up on both sides of the Atlantic. Their father was Cuban conguero and master percussionist Miguel "Angá" Díaz of Irakere and Buena Vista Social Club. Díaz passed away when Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi were only 11, and their older sister Yanira followed him seven years later. But the sisters have taken up their legacies via their own music and their family's shared beliefs in Regla de Ocha. Regla de Ocha, also known as Santería, is a widely practiced Afro-Cuban religion based on the worship of orishas, which have roots in West African Yoruba culture. Musically, Ibeyi ground themselves firmly within these traditions, but they weave them together with jazz, soul, hip-hop, and downtempo/electronica. The result is their deeply evocative self-titled debut.
In many ways, Ibeyi is an extended ritual—a consecration of life and love, both past and present. Fittingly, the album opens with a Yoruba prayer to Eleggua, the gatekeeper of crossroads and pathways, whose blessing alone allows ceremonies to proceed. The presence of Eleggua and other orishas saturates the album, thematically and musically. In "River", for example, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi pray to Oshun, the orisha of rivers and fertility. As the song begins, a bass-heavy drum beat churns through a slow-moving current of looped "ah"s, and Lisa-Kaindé intones, "Carry away my dead leaves/ Let me baptize my soul with the help of your waters/ Sink my pains and complaints/ Let the river take them—" she chokes up, "—river, drown them!" The track feels monumental; this is, after all, a call for rebirth. Yet, upon stripping away the vocals and reverb, it becomes apparent that the only other instruments involved are a MIDI controller (or two) and the occasional smattering of piano. And that's exactly what makes Ibeyi so remarkable. Instrumentally, their music is sparse. But it always feels full, with emotion and the kind of spirituality that is as deep as the people and circumstances that created it.
And so it makes sense that Ibeyi is teeming with ghosts. Most prominent among them, of course, is their father's. On "Think of You", the sisters sample Angá's drumming, which fades in and out, specter-like, during the refrains when his daughters list the things that remind them of him (laughter, walking on rhythm, etc.). On "Mama Says", he resurfaces in the frustrations Lisa-Kaindé expresses as she sees her mother struggle to find meaning in life after his death. And during the chant break, she and Naomi pray to Eleggua, who was their father's orisha.
Vocally, Lisa at times channels Nina Simone, and in her higher register, she can even recall Kate Bush circa "Wuthering Heights". Her ability to imbue deep emotion and otherworldliness into simple lyrics, meanwhile, is Björk-like. Naomi, in turn, explores the ways that Yoruba tradition and contemporary rhythms can meet. It's not quite what her father did on his last project, in which he fused Afro-Cuban music with jazz and hip-hop, but they both move from the same impulse. Naomi will sometimes play hip-hop beats on cajón, or add electronic booms and claps that thunder through a track like "Oya", in reference to the song's namesake—Oyá, the orisha of storms and cemeteries.
The texts and subtexts in Ibeyi keep unfolding, but it feels immediate and direct regardless of how much of that text the listener is familiar with. Part of that is the nature of the language: Ibeyi do not just sing about their father, or Yanira, or once-lovers, or the orishas; they sing to them. By and large, they sing in terms of "me," "you," and "we," and at times, the lines between those entities are blurred. Which means that we are automatically implicated, living with them, or at least standing very nearby.
If there is a critique to make, it's that the production can at times feel too smoothed over. Some of the rougher edges and raw(er) emotion that got the twins noticed in the first place get ironed out a bit. And one side effect is that a few of the album's final tracks sound somewhat similar in tonality, tempo, and their vibe. But Ibeyi still find subtle ways to create shape, as in the single piano key that pulses like a heart monitor in "Yanira", their song to their late sister, or the chilling dissonance in the twins' harmonies throughout.
By the end of the album, Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé come full circle to face themselves, ending as they began: with a prayer. This time, it is to their namesake, Ibeyi. It is a joyful moment. And it is also, as every debut album attempts to but doesn't always succeed in being, a declaration of self. | 2015-02-23T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-02-23T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | February 23, 2015 | 7.4 | c1048c8f-cd28-403d-a0a6-ff63bb5c1ec3 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
The South London experimental musician shifts from her usual leftfield electronics and avant-garde R&B to an album of blistering guitar noise. She has a few more tricks up her sleeve, too. | The South London experimental musician shifts from her usual leftfield electronics and avant-garde R&B to an album of blistering guitar noise. She has a few more tricks up her sleeve, too. | Klein: marked | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klein-marked/ | marked | More than once, the shapeshifting experimental musician Klein has joked with interviewers that her next move will be toward the mainstream—a hip-hop album, a drill album, signing to Roc Nation, moving to L.A. to become an Oscar-winning actress. And every time, she’ll return with a record that sounds like a church organ gaining sentience in a Category 3 hurricane, or something just as dubiously marketable. It’s a revealing setup, though, because the South London artist has consistently positioned herself as an outsider to the walled-off world of the avant-garde, more schooled in Hot 97 hits than the underground artists—Dean Blunt, Mica Levi—to whom she was initially compared.
Eight albums into Klein’s discography, that claim gets harder to back up. She’s performed at London’s Barbican and ICA, adapted her own stage musical into a film, and has Björk’s number saved in her contacts. And yet, as her brilliantly weird live performances attest, Klein still defies categorization. On marked she doubles down, restricting herself almost entirely to a palette of blistering guitar squall that you’d more likely associate with the anti-rock extremism of Wolf Eyes and Aaron Dilloway. Technically, she’s explored this sound before. “top shotta,” from 2022’s Cave in the Wind, could be a lost bootleg of an Einstürzende Neubauten soundcheck; “grit,” from 2020’s Frozen, sounds like a far-off cement mixer munching down on a Telecaster. But on marked, almost every minute is claimed by Klein’s guitar, distorted to oblivion and shuddering with feedback.
Overdriven riffs burn holes in the VU meter on “gully creepa,” opening a portal to a nightmarish loop that’s half dub soundsystem, half doom metal. Muddy drones are juxtaposed against trebly scrapings and blown-out drum machines on “Blow the Whistle”—a leap into heavy new territory for Klein, but one that will feel familiar to fans of JK Flesh and Dreamcrusher. It’s tempting to interpret the mood as one of anguished introspection. On “more than like” she goes swimming in an inky pool of piano, sinking into the sustained low notes, despondent. That’s followed by the extended circular drones of “enemy of the state,” where serrated chords are slowly mulched into one enormous slug of noise, à la Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra.
Klein’s signature flamboyant vocal runs are largely absent from the album; ditto the patched-in supporting voices that often populate her dreamy narratives. Exceptions come near the end on three a cappella fragments: the voice-note R&B of “frontin,” an off-the-cuff mini-duet with La Timpa titled “neek,” and the closing “exclusive.” Flipping the script on the entire album, “exclusive” is pure, unmistakable Klein—hyper-melismatic vocals, a pitch-shifted loop over ticking trap drums, a snotty rap (repurposed from “black famous,” on last year’s touched by an angel): “I just look around and what do I see/Another mini me,” she spits through crackling Auto-Tune, “Sweet girl big dreams/They call her fleabag.” The contrast with the previous 45 minutes is like pressing a bag of frozen peas against a bruise.
The lingering question is whether these diversions into burly guitar noise are remarkable in their own right, or interesting mainly because Klein is the author. There’s certainly something endearing about an artist feeling her way into a genre apparently by accident. “I’ve always made stuff without thinking of anyone else,” she said in 2021. “I’ve never had time to think about what I’m doing or what this means.” Whether or not you buy that claim, such confidence in the process, in the freedom of not knowing, is worth dwelling on at a time when so much experimental music—and culture, in general—is delivered with a thud of literalism, wearing all its subtext on its sleeves. | 2024-07-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Parkwuud Entertainment | July 31, 2024 | 7.1 | c107d2bc-f510-45a7-bb29-74cc6c086596 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
On its frequently excellent debut, this Glaswegian band-- like early Delgados or BMX Bandits before them-- reflects its city's love of rough-edged, unpolished indie rock. | On its frequently excellent debut, this Glaswegian band-- like early Delgados or BMX Bandits before them-- reflects its city's love of rough-edged, unpolished indie rock. | Frightened Rabbit: Sing the Greys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9715-sing-the-greys/ | Sing the Greys | Belle and Sebastian are from Glasgow, but fellow Glaswegians Frightened Rabbit are nothing like B&S. Instead, they display their city's love of another sound: rough-edged, unpolished indie rock. On their charismatic debut Sing the Greys, Frightened Rabbit keep the instrumentation simple-- drums, bass, guitar, and straightforward washes of keyboard and accordion. The arrangements, too, are linear and humble, often blending shaggy elements with rigid ones to create a sense of purposeful drift. Setting loose guitar jangle against a tight bass pulse, the excellent "Yawns" finds singer Scott (just Scott) wrapping his coarse moan around some stirring moments of relationship inertia ("She yawns because she's bored/ He yawns because he can't sleep any more"). "Go-Go Girls" starts off tightly coiled, with a hellacious circular bassline zipping through volleys of percussion, before cascading into a triumphant garage-pop shuffle.
Camera Obscura are from Glasgow, too, but Frightened Rabbit's not like them, either. Where Camera Obscura's roots plunge into the annals of music history from Lee Hazelwood to Dory Previn, Frightened Rabbit's rambunctious bursts of enthusiasm seem to refer to little beyond indie rock's ahistorical everymen-- dudes having a good time with music in whichever way they please. Indie rock loves apathy, and Frightened Rabbit pay lip service to that tradition on "The Greys". It's a catchy, ragged ode to numbness ("What's the blues when you've got the greys?") that's belied by its impassioned delivery: Frightened Rabbit don't go to great lengths to sell disaffection; this is fun, unpretentious music. Two of the members are brothers who pose for their press photos in Lucha Libre masks and only go by their first names, if that gives you some idea.
Mogwai are from Glasgow, too, but Frightened Rabbit's definitely not like Mogwai. Where Mogwai's music is all about creating a grand atmosphere that dwarfs the listener, with little emphasis on the band members' personalities, Frightened Rabbit's is all about homely charm. They take a stab at ambiance on three brief, pleasant interludes-- the fuzz wash and martial clatter of "The First Incident", the baggy harmonies of "The Second Incident", and the choppy keys of "The Final Incident"-- and at the epic, with the seven-minute-plus "Square 9". But for the most part, grandeur is not their thing-- the thumping drums, silvery guitars, and blurring vocals of "Music Now" all unfold in modest human scale. Naysayers will find an easy jibe in the lyric "Make your music/ Make it so loud and so trite," but for Frightened Rabbit, this is a rallying cry, a rejection of the stylish and self-serious, and a redemption of the trite through the embrace of its universality. | 2007-01-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Hits the Fan | January 4, 2007 | 7.5 | c1091973-770d-49e7-b60d-b957ed3c80da | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
After breaking to work as School of Language and the Week That Was, the brothers Brewis return for a new Field Music LP. | After breaking to work as School of Language and the Week That Was, the brothers Brewis return for a new Field Music LP. | Field Music: Measure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13917-measure/ | Measure | When Field Music announced in 2007 the group was going on hiatus, the band stressed that the break was not a break up. In the ensuing months, brothers David and Peter Brewis kept working-- the former as School of Language and the latter as the Week That Was-- each occasionally enlisting the services of the other. And now, a couple of years later, Field Music have indeed reunited (albeit minus keyboard/utility player Andrew Moore, reportedly training to be a chef). You've got to love a band that stays true to its word.
Field Music last left off with 2007's Tones of Town, a relatively manageable 11 songs over a modest 30 or so minutes. The pair now seems refreshed and reenergized for the third Field Music LP, Measure-- it runs a staggering 20 tracks spread out over 70 minutes. Factor in the formidable arrangements, which often make a single song sound like two or three or four crammed together, and before you even press play you know Measure won't be casual listening.
In that regard the brothers Brewis don't disappoint, either. Retaining an affinity for the fussier side of XTC, Field Music values careful precision over outright prodigious velocity, which keeps their music from tipping over into the proggy abyss. Further, it laces their songs with winningly fragmented melodies that don't always resolve or even repeat but still provide a vital point of entry to the band's rigorous compositions. That's the upside.
The downside is that Field Music have a tendency to come off so cerebral, their charms are sometimes buried beneath the non-stop musical flourishes. Constantly inventive/evolving electric and acoustic guitar filigrees, meticulous percussion, strings, finger-snaps, handclaps, and intricate harmonies that bounce from speaker to speaker: Measure is, if nothing else, a truly crafted record.
In fact, Measure crams so many complex twists and turns into each of its tracks that it starts out imposing and rarely lets up, making it a lot easier to give up than give in. That'd be a shame, since even though the band's constant motion can be exhausting, its pleasures aren't as far-flung as they first appear. "Them That Do Nothing", with its interlocking acoustic guitars, steady beat, and genial vibe, is a pop gem, and the surprisingly lithe "Let's Write a Book" sticks to a groove long enough to prove that the Brewises understand well when to keep things simple(r). "The Rest Is Noise" is proud pomp that gives way to a sinewy but satisfying denouement.
It helps that the Brewis brothers have such a sharp understanding of space and, despite the sprawl, pacing, which is why they can get away with music this busy without completely overwhelming the listener. At times Measure feels like a suite, each track a separate part of the same (long) song that settles naturally into dynamic peaks and valleys. Admittedly, once closer "It's About Time" winds down into traffic sounds and hushed piano, you're likely to feel as much relief as exultation that Field Music made it this far without toppling off their precarious high wire and making a mess of themselves. But music this simultaneously careful and out of control would never get made if failure weren't a real risk. | 2010-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | February 17, 2010 | 7.5 | c10a601c-564f-430d-9caf-0eece9a9610d | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
On these ruminative solo guitar pieces, the Berlin-based artist takes an idiosyncratic and emotionally expressive approach, making even the most ordinary gestures sound mutated and strange. | On these ruminative solo guitar pieces, the Berlin-based artist takes an idiosyncratic and emotionally expressive approach, making even the most ordinary gestures sound mutated and strange. | Jules Reidy: World in World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-reidy-world-in-world/ | World in World | Editor’s Note: This review is presented as it was originally published in 2022 and uses the artist’s prior name.
At the start of Julia Reidy’s new album, World in World, the Australia-born, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist and producer makes brief sweeps across their electric guitar strings, each note pinging against the next at uncanny angles, like alien electrons bouncing through the thermosphere. Just as the sound of an orchestra tuning reassures an audience of quality control, Reidy’s strums and plucks offer warranties of intrigue, a promise you’ve rarely heard a guitar sound quite like this. Pedals click on and off, their pops framing an incidental rhythm as their electronic purrs unspool and recede. Reidy repeats this ostensible warmup—prismatic notes, pedal pops, droning tones—until you barely notice you’ve slipped into the opening title track. Warped chords and distant vocals shape a meditative hymn, as if bent by funhouse mirrors; you may soon hum along, even if the sound is unfamiliar.
Reidy’s recent work, especially 2020’s spellbinding Vanish, used the guitar as a springboard for immersive and audacious art-pop universes, like Julia Holter facing dioramic canvases. But for these nine subtle and intimate pieces, they stick largely to pensive guitar ruminations, with electronics emphasizing certain phrases and Reidy’s spectral voice seeming to haunt others. World in World is a solo guitar album in the way that, say, William Tyler’s Behold the Spirit is a solo guitar album, Mary Lattimore’s Hundreds of Days is a solo harp album, or Nils Frahm’s Spaces is a solo keyboard album. The guitar is Reid’s entryway into wider explorations of sound on a path toward emotionally expressive idiosyncrasy.
For World in World, Reidy played a custom guitar built by innovative instrument designer and engineer Sukandar Kartadinata, whose prior projects have included a “data violin” and ways of better incorporating digital software in analogue instruments. Reidy’s request, though, was incredibly hands-on: an electric guitar with moveable frets and “fretlets,” to allow for a wide range of very exact tunings. Reidy wanted to play in just intonation, meaning that the ratio between the notes are whole numbers, rather than the irrational divisions of equal temperament, the reigning system in Western composition. For Reidy’s purposes, the justly tuned guitar reorients familiar picking-or-strumming patterns until you feel like you’re hearing them for the first time. Reidy capitalizes on this sense of newness, making blues and ballads sound novel.
Talk of just intonation can sometimes be proudly academic, the details of specific systems acting like theoretical moats. But Reidy operates more on intuition than ideologic devotion in tuning. “I try to treat it as a tool,” Reidy said in an email, “but I’m not precious about logic or precision.… I like establishing systems and then fucking with them.” You may hear the lugubrious syncopation of John Fahey in “World in World” or perhaps the Delta blues during the spectacular and spry “Loom.” These unusual and personal tunings, though, delightfully dodge easy interpretation. Reidy’s every move shimmers in peculiar ways, so even ordinary guitar gestures become mutated and strange.
These songs often communicate the sensation of being on an edge you’re trying to get off, or of trying to calm nerves by first acknowledging them. Reidy begins the standout “Walls and Clearings,” for instance, with ululations that invoke a more forthright Grouper. They circle around those moans with broken scales and long, lurid tones until it all coils into a wail, an attempt to push some unnamed pain. The song fades in waves of beautiful fluorescence, triumphant.
There are simple delights here, too, tracks that suggest a new avenue of approachability for just intonation. “Paradise in Unrecognisable Colors” is gorgeous, a piece of pastoral wonder that has the grounding effect of Vashti Bunyan’s folk songs or Harold Budd’s piano meditations. Harmonics chime through open space while warbling drones arc beneath them, occasionally rising to commingle; it feels like watching a rainbow emerge from a thunderstorm to crown some verdant expanse. “Ajar” is giddy with expectation, little tufts of bright notes spiraling over Reidy’s murmured vocals and gnarled chords. Again, it’s like finding promise at the edge of calamity.
During a 2016 conversation about influences and development, an interviewer asked Reidy about the pleasures and limitations of guitar strings. “Main limitations of the strings? They break,” Reidy quipped. It is galvanizing to hear Reidy, not yet 30, tackle solo guitar improvisation and just intonation together—two modes often wrongly criticized as stodgy or antiquated—with such play and gusto. Where just intonation has frequently been seen as the territory of scholars or outlier eccentrics, solo guitar has been dominated by white dudes. But Reidy made this accessible and eccentric gem at home in Berlin, a DIY expression of just intonation’s possibilities that puts them in league with a growing international crew of fellow young apostles like Kali Malone and Duane Pitre. On World in World, Reidy is offering the familiar thoughts of anxiety, despair, and twinkling hope in a singular dialect, all their own. | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Black Truffle | June 3, 2022 | 7.6 | c1156f4f-5d8e-470d-807f-ea1bd17c5819 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The first posthumous album from Mac Miller plays like a companion piece to Swimming. It’s an optimistic epilogue to the life of an aspirational artist. | The first posthumous album from Mac Miller plays like a companion piece to Swimming. It’s an optimistic epilogue to the life of an aspirational artist. | Mac Miller: Circles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mac-miller-circles/ | Circles | Mac Miller’s death from an accidental drug overdose sent ripples across the rap community he helped cultivate. He was a kind-hearted collaborator and invested heavily in others’ growth, but his musical arc was left unfinished. In August of 2018, he put out Swimming, an album that was like a quantum leap in self-discovery. Then, a month later, at 26, he was gone, unable to realize that potential. Now there’s Circles, a posthumously released Swimming companion piece that gives his years of work a bit of closure. It’s the culmination of a career spent improving, a fitting epilogue to an aspirational life.
Miller had worked closely on early versions of these songs with composer-producer Jon Brion, who was committed to finishing the album after Miller’s death. It’s unclear how deep Miller was into the process at the time of his passing, but this sounds like a completed work, or as complete as it can be. “This is a complicated process that has no right answer. No clear path,” his family wrote in a letter on his Instagram. “We simply know that it was important to Malcolm for the world to hear it.”
If Swimming wasn’t Miller’s best album, it was certainly the one where he came into his own as an artist. There are moments on 2015’s GO:OD AM where his rapping is sharpest, 2014’s Faces accommodated his most ambitious ideas, and 2016’s The Divine Feminine is his most diverse and complete project, a testament to the community of musicians he’d established around him. But Swimming hinted at an artist who’d finally cleared his mind and found his footing. Circles provides some resolution and helps finish Miller’s final thoughts.
Miller seemed to envision Circles as the completion of a loop. “My god, it go on and on/Just like a circle, I go back to where I’m from,” he rapped on Swimming closer “So It Goes.” That record was about being fine on the surface while struggling with anxiety; this one is about knowing there’s something to be done about it. Both records are about working through depression, how the bad days are long and the good days feel fleeting, but the tone is more optimistic here. The imagery of a cluttered mind is a near-constant in Miller’s final songs. On the plucked single “Good News,” he likens the recovery process to spring cleaning, which feels fitting for someone looking to hit the refresh button. “Sometimes I get lonely/Not when I’m alone/But it’s more when I’m standin’ in crowds that I’m feelin’ the most on my own,” he raps on “Surf,” a poignant realization for someone who spent his last years surrounded by throngs of fans. But it comes with an epiphany, a sort of thesis for the album: “And I know that somebody knows me/I know somewhere, there’s home/I’m startin’ to see that all I have to do is get up and go.”
Circles never really opens up into a full-fledged rap album, content to push back and forth between lo-fi beat music and singer-songwriter indie folk, working almost entirely with live arrangements. After doing his most-ever singing on Swimming, he crosses a threshold into doing almost no rapping on Circles. That was the entire idea: two albums bringing balance to each other. The few songs that do have raps in them display his love of the form and improvement as a writer. On “Hand Me Downs,” he raps about moving carelessly and stumbling through the same patterns. “Hands,” the only full rap song, works through negativity while displaying the subtly knotty lyricism he fell in love with as a teenager.
Miller was always trying to balance being the guy who started Facebook’s first Big L fan page with his love for the nakedness of 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He didn’t live long enough to get to really reconcile those sides of himself, but as halves of a complete work, Swimming and Circles come the closest. Together, they establish the rapper-producer as comfortable in his skin, no longer out to prove to naysayers he could bar out. These are mellow, relaxed songs in search of that exact state of being. “‘Fore I start to think about the future/First can I please get through a day/Without any complications,” he sings on “Complicated.” It’s more Plastic Ono Band than Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous—lots of guitars, some keys, light bass, the occasional synth line—but not beholden to any one sound.
The chill-out aesthetic won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with Mac Miller’s Space Migration Tour, which transformed the songs in his catalog with warm Internet-laced grooves from their days futzing with electronica and experimental jazz. He was a huge rap nerd but he also loved the prospect of playing with a live band. These songs feel like an attempt to smooth down his interests into something comprehensive, and Brion seems like the perfect person to usher them to completion. He serves as a co-producer on most songs, an additional producer on all the others, and his work makes the songs shapelier without compromising Miller’s vision for them.
When a young rapper dies too soon, fans start listening to their music much more closely, combing over their lyrics to find the writing on the wall. With Miller, you don’t have to dive too deeply. “God Speed” is rife with thoughts about going down a destructive path and on “Brand Name,” he wrote a disclaimer that proved tragically prescient: “To everyone who sell me drugs/Don’t mix it with that bullshit, I’m hopin’ not to join the 27 Club.” But Circles dispels any sense of fatalism in his music. He was still idealistic; in these songs, he is searching for a way to break the cycle, a way forward. It’s only appropriate that Mac Miller’s final musical act be one of self-reformation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner | January 17, 2020 | 7.4 | c11929e6-47c0-4f47-9426-9881265c6583 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On a set of originals for the hallowed Folkways label, the California singer-songwriter and his pal, a Bay Area preschool teacher, know when to honor the past and when to break from it. | On a set of originals for the hallowed Folkways label, the California singer-songwriter and his pal, a Bay Area preschool teacher, know when to honor the past and when to break from it. | Mr. Greg / Cass McCombs: Mr. Greg & Cass McCombs Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mr-greg-cass-mccombs-mr-greg-and-cass-mccombs-sing-and-play-new-folk-songs-for-children/ | Mr. Greg & Cass McCombs Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children | Mr. Greg and Cass McCombs’ Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children, released as part of Smithsonian Folkways’ ongoing 75th anniversary celebration, is an ambitious entry in the label’s rich history of children’s music. The lifelong friends have written a set of new songs that attempt to cover the entire Folkways kids’ curriculum in one go: civil rights, flora and fauna, language, conservation, self-image. In the liner notes, each song is accompanied by suggested lesson plans; these ideas usually involve listening to one or more records from Folkways’ sprawling (and never out of print) catalog. In turn, the catalog folds itself back into the record: There are spoken cameos from folk lifers Peggy Seeger and Michael Hurley, as well as samples of children’s recordings from Woody Guthrie and Ella Jenkins, who made her Folkways debut in 1957 and celebrated her 99th birthday this month.
With all those canonical references, this album could have easily ended up as a glorified syllabus. But McCombs and Mr. Greg (aka Greg Gardner, a preschool teacher in San Francisco whose students make frequent appearances here, along with his own kids and even the family cat) generally know when to honor the past and when to break from it. For every “A Builder’s Got a Hammer and Nails,” with its cheery light-industrial percussion and a melody cribbed from “The Wheels on the Bus,” there’s a “Roll Around Downtown,” a jaunty tribute to skateboarding backed by drum machine and a guitar that coughs up chalk dust. It sounds like McCombs building a Tinkertoy model of George Thorogood. On “The Sounds That the Letters Make,” McCombs opts for beatnik jazz, content to scratch some feedback against Ben Sigelman’s tense, crabbed cello. “We Build a Lot of Muscle When We Exercise” is surprisingly glum, with a title that’s practically longer than the song; at the last moment, keyboardist Sean Trott pulls the arrangement out of an indie-twee death spiral.
I admit: If I were a kid with computer privileges, that description might make me shut the laptop. Children’s music is the rare genre that’s not defined by formal characteristics or place of origin, but by its audience. Which means, in theory, that it can take pretty much any form: the chirpy, rhyme-free dada of the Pinkfong empire, the emotional-regulation ditties of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, or Pierce Freelon’s Grammy-nominated forays into psychedelic R&B and chamber soul. Still, its intended listeners are more or less captive to parental preferences. For a certain cohort of grown-ups, that means folk that’s lightly didactic, of antique provenance, and performed solo. (“A lot of those old Folkways records are like that: just a banjo and a vocal or something,” McCombs notes, approvingly, in the press material.)
Thankfully, his genre infidelity wins out. The more avant arrangements stand like secret passageways to possible futures, while the strummy pop tunes—such as the chooglin’ opener “Little Wilma Wiggly Worm”—are as comfy as a library nook. Of the strummers, “Things That Go in the Recycling Bin” is the highlight. The two artists harmonize over a lurching country-folk backing, sorting the recyclables (“cardboard scraps, outdated maps”) from the compostables (“apple core, cold soup du jour”). Wilma shows up, eats the compost, worm poop becomes dirt. It’s a commendably blunt choice, as is the matter-of-fact depiction of an owl’s mealtime—from prey to pellet—on “I’m a Nocturnal Animal.”
In style and subject matter, Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children achieves the dual aims of folk music: to depict the world both as it is and as it could be. Incidentally, these are also the tasks of a parent. You spend years hammering together an impossible armor, trying to build something that can deflect any pain while admitting all joys. And you may never know how the work ends. In high folkie style, this album includes tributes to two bygone political figures: “Wave a Flag for Harvey Milk” and “Requiem for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The tension in these songs, between tenuous present and triumphant progress—what is and what might be, in other words—could snap you in half. But the folkies and the parents agree: You gotta keep it together for the kids. | 2023-08-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Smithsonian Folkways | August 17, 2023 | 7.3 | c11a1094-3a09-41ec-b791-d7b9fe459b3c | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
On her stunning debut, the tenor saxophonist and rising member of the London jazz scene meditates on her humble family heritage, the continuum of jazz history, and the power of collective action in our present moment. | On her stunning debut, the tenor saxophonist and rising member of the London jazz scene meditates on her humble family heritage, the continuum of jazz history, and the power of collective action in our present moment. | Nubya Garcia: Source | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nubya-garcia-source/ | Source | For new listeners and latecomers, there was no handier introduction to London’s vibrant, bustling jazz scene than Gilles Peterson’s 2018 compilation We Out Here. Curated by the scene’s own breakout star Shabaka Hutchings, the set showcased a new generation of artists melding jazz classicism to Afrobeat, neo-soul, electronic music, and ambient. And no one worked harder than tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, present on five of the comp’s nine pieces. Hailing from an immigrant family—her mother from Guyana, her father from Trinidad—she grew up in a musical family in the London borough of Camden, starting first on piano and violin before gravitating to a “broken as hell” old clarinet. She came up with other groups like Maisha and the septet Nérija, and she’s remained busy ever since, her presence felt on Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings and Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen is a Reptile as well as Moses Sumney’s grae. No matter where she appears, she brings an exploratory, energized spirit, always playing in service to the song, never overshadowing the music, only elevating the proceedings.
That spirit and openness translates readily to Garcia’s long-anticipated debut, Source. Recorded with producer Kwes, whose credits range from Solange and Bobby Womack to Nérija, the album pushes Nubya Garcia and her tight-knit group into new territory while also remaining firmly rooted in jazz. And while her previous EPs popped up and soon disappeared on smaller labels, she now finds herself label mates with another dynamic jazz figure, Esperanza Spalding. Switching from dub reggae to cumbia to classic balladry, Garcia meditates on her humble family heritage, the continuum of jazz history, and the power of collective action in our present moment.
“Pace” serves as an empathic mission statement. As she recently told Downbeat, it refers to the hectic lifestyle of a gigging Londoner, but “Pace” embodies a whole range of emotions. Propelled by keyboardist Joe Arman-Jones’ cascading chords, the group soars and then deftly lands back where they began. Garcia’s solo calmly navigates it all: fiery and supple, dizzying and lyrical. You can hear how she’s garnered comparisons to the greats: Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Gary Bartz.
Garcia never overpowers her bandmates, instead slotting into the contours her band provides, whether it’s the nimble soul jazz of “The Message Continues” or the Ethio-jazz flavor of “Inner Game.” On the meditative R&B of “Stand With Each Other,” augmented by Nérija trumpeter MS Maurice (aka Sheila Maurice-Grey) and a trio of vocalists, Garcia’s horn barely rises above a purr, and doesn’t need to: her tone entwines with the wordless humming to generate a low-key warmth and benevolence.
Source thrills most when it delves into non-traditional jazz rhythms from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, as on the traditional “La cumbia me está llamando,” recorded in Bogota. But it’s the sprawl of the title track that best captures Garcia’s creative arc the past few years. “Source”’s exploratory 12 minutes open with the echoing snares and firecracker hi-hats of drummer Sam Jones and skanking staccato chords from Arman-Jones, all earmarks of dub reggae. Airy vocal “ahhhs” slowly lead us into Garcia’s solo, which carefully scales up from dubbed-out vibrato lines to blowing full-on fire by the end. Arman-Jones’ toggles between electric and acoustic, subtly pulling the piece into cosmic jazz territory.
By the end, the piece has seemingly traveled miles, and in so doing traced Garcia’s own steadfast journey. She has called the album a story “about my heritage, my ancestry, exploring those places and those stories from my parents and my grandparents.” On Source, she weaves together so many threads so masterfully that she instantly establishes herself as a foundational voice in the larger, ongoing story of the London jazz scene. Her debut is a stunning introduction.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Concord Jazz | August 25, 2020 | 8.3 | c1283a0c-5833-4399-8fe6-9090378878be | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
This live album captures one night in the unlikely, alt-rock-superstar-laden tour behind Minutemen legend Mike Watt's first solo album, featuring Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and more. | This live album captures one night in the unlikely, alt-rock-superstar-laden tour behind Minutemen legend Mike Watt's first solo album, featuring Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and more. | Mike Watt: “ring spiel” tour ’95 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22565-ring-spiel-tour-95/ | “ring spiel” tour ’95 | “ring spiel” tour ’95 captures one night in a superstar tour that assembled in support of the legendary Mike Watt’s first solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? The former-Minutemen bass player turned fIREHOSE band leader gathered an insane and unlikely roster of alternative-rock superstars to not only support his album, but follow him on tour. Evan Dando, Kathleen Hanna, Ad-Rock and Mike D, Eddie Vedder, the Kirkwood brothers, Dave Pirner, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, J Mascis, Nels Cline, half of Sonic Youth, and Mark Lanegan— these are just a few of the names in the long, long credits list. The title of the live record, recorded at the Metro in Chicago on May 6, 1995, references Watt’s concept of Ball-Hog or Tugboat? as being a wrestling match, where each group of musicians “got in the ring” with Watt.
The touring band for “ring spiel” would end up being Grohl, Vedder, Pat Smear, and William Goldsmith, freshly ex-Sunny Day Real Estate and newly christened Foo Fighter. Opening were Hovercraft, the multi-media project helmed by Beth Liebling (whose husband happened to be Vedder) and the then-fledgling Foo Fighters. The tour was run according to Watt’s ‘we jam econo’ ethos from back in the Minutemen days; there were no fancy tour buses, no blacked-out windows; everyone was in a van, driving themselves to gigs, 31 shows in 42 days, the kind of thing that Watt could do in his sleep. The kids, although they were more famous, needed to keep up.
The tickets were sold as a Mike Watt show, and as the liner notes (written by Michael Azerrad) point out, promoters were under strict instructions to not use Grohl or Vedder to promote the tour. But the jig was up, not because of local promoters trying to sell tickets, but because of fan networks on the internet. The Nirvana, Pearl Jam and even Foo Fighters fan bases were already well-entrenched, and word travelled fast, via Usenet and BBS and listserv. Then MTV showed up to a gig and poked their nose around, and any pretense of subterfuge was gone. Vedder could wear a floppy hat and drum in back of Hovercraft’s video projections all he wanted to, but the remaining shows, all in theaters and clubs, far below Pearl Jam or Nirvana capacities, sold out quickly. This was undoubtedly bittersweet: on the one hand, getting Watt in front of a larger audience was surely part of the point of the parade of stars on the record; on the other, the star power's ability to hang back in the shadows was gone, the Halloween costume (in the case of Vedder, a wig) removed.
But the newfound attention didn’t distract the band from the task at hand: the show. “ring spiel” tour ’95 catches the band about halfway through the outing, and they’re tight and cohesive: for all of the econo ethic of the tour, it’s their hard-earned experience of the musicians that makes them tremendous. As a concert package, it was a great lineup: Hovercraft’s psychedelic shimmer as an amuse-bouche, followed by the explosive energy of the early Foo Fighters, and then the journeyman punk rock stylings of Mr. Watt and his group. The set, as represented here on the live album, was constructed from eight of the 17 songs on the record, along with well-chosen covers of songs by the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Madonna, Blue Oyster Cult, Daniel Johnston, and others.
The 16-song set veers around punk and country and country-punk, as well as flat-out pop (“Piss-Bottle Man,” improbably enough), and it’s tight and well-sequenced and varied in texture, just like a package-tour set needs to be. Watt had fIREHOSE fans and his credentials from his days in Minutemen were unquestionable, but you don’t assemble a roster of high-powered guests for your record to fade into oblivion. Hopefully, a kid who liked the Lemonheads or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or never got to see Nirvana would come check out the album or the tour, and become a fan of Mike Watt. Or so that was the thought.
The songs from Ball-Hog… absolutely hold their own against the rest of the material. “Forever...One Reporter’s Opinion” maintains the urgency of the Minutemen original, Pat Smear on lead vocals sounding like he wrote it himself. “Chinese Firedrill” pulls straight from the Flying Burrito heart of California folk rock with no irony. “E-Ticket Ride” has a jazz-like energy, with both Grohl and Goldsmith on drums, complementing each other seamlessly as though they’d been playing together forever.
“Against the ’70s” would end up being the most well-known song from the record, because it was a duet with the then-reclusive Eddie Vedder. Later in the set, Vedder has a solo turn where he breaks out what would become a new Pearl Jam song: “Habit” would see the light of day on 1996’s No Code. Stripped down to essentials and anchored by Watt’s fat, fluid notes, “Habit” feels like it belongs here as much as anything else in the set.
The encores are fun: “The Red and the Black” by Blue Oyster Cult, who were kissing cousins on the edge of punk, and an old Watt/Minutemen love, becomes a pneumatic drill when in the hands of these guys, with Grohl taking lead guitar. But the real esoteric number is the Madonna cover, a Ciccone Youth special interpretation of “Secret Garden” from Erotica, sung with love and camp by Pat Smear, powered only by Watt and Goldsmith, not that far away from the original arrangement.
At their best, live albums capture not just a concert performance, but also document the energy and the context around the music. “ring spiel” tour ’95 manages to accomplish all of the above; it’s a nice time capsule if you were there, and it’s a great document to have if you weren’t, commemorating early years of musicians who are now canonic. At one point, Watt admonishes what were undoubtedly a disproportionate amount of amateur crowd-surfers: “Do you like those people rolling all over your heads?” (The crowd responds with a unanimous “No.”) “Then why don’t we give it a rest. Have to have your old man come up here and act like a fucking cop, to tell you that shit,” Watt says, the disgust obvious in his voice. If nothing else, this tour is a tribute to his instincts as a band leader, and a scene elder. He might have had some trepidation on starting over after ending fIREHOSE, but this record proves that he never should have doubted his instincts onstage. | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Legacy | November 22, 2016 | 8 | c12a3f3e-e608-4203-ab1e-bdc6db912fd9 | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | null |
Daniel Lopatin returns with a nostalgic jam session full of proggy synth passages and ’90s alt-rock touches. It leaves a lot to admire but a little less to think about. | Daniel Lopatin returns with a nostalgic jam session full of proggy synth passages and ’90s alt-rock touches. It leaves a lot to admire but a little less to think about. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneohtrix-point-never-again/ | Again | Daniel Lopatin is hung up on the past: how it shapes us, and how we shape it in turn; how the songs on the radio of your parents’ minivan can frame your perception of the world, and how your recollections of the same songs can morph and distort over time. As Oneohtrix Point Never, Lopatin has reveled in this slippery process: “My impulse to create often comes from some kind of confusion I have around memories of music,” he recently told The Line of Best Fit, examining how the music he loved (and hated) as a child still informs his present-day self. “I always go to the endless wellspring of my false memories.”
But Lopatin’s attention has gradually shifted away from theories of nostalgia and taste toward what to make of his own unlikely career. In his evolution from an avant-garde sculptor of smartphone psychedelia into a full-fledged film composer, pop producer, and Superbowl musical director, he has sometimes seemed unsure of what to do with the project that first put him on the map over a decade ago. There have been awkward forays into vocal pop, premature career retrospectives, and an ever-accumulating pile of instruments and sounds threatening to crush his music under its weight. While Rifts and R Plus Seven painstakingly constructed worlds where each timbre vividly reinforced Lopatin’s haunting vision of a life spent online, his overstuffed recent albums are likelier to evoke bleary nights of passive doomscrolling.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, Again, is his least conceptual project yet. Though Lopatin has described the record as an interrogation of his younger self and the roads he might have taken, you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that from listening to it. He wheels out all his favorite tropes, stirring JUNO-60 arpeggios, choral pads, and MIDI instruments straight from the uncanny valley into a churning soup. The only real developments include a newfound interest in string-laden orchestration and an unexpected turn toward ’90s alt rock—if you’ve ever wondered what Lopatin’s impression of a Smashing Pumpkins ballad might sound like, you can rest easy now. These detours may hint at alternate OPN timelines, but more than anything, Again plays like Lopatin’s jam record: He’s laid out his tools, knows what he likes, and is content to noodle around the playground he’s built for himself. When he brings the requisite energy, it’s still a pleasure to witness him shred. But for all its surreal soundscapes, Again leaves surprisingly little to the imagination.
Compared to the darkly mesmerizing dread of records past, here Lopatin practically kicks off his shoes and settles in for a comfy night on the couch, flipping channels through one distorted display after another. Without a clear framework tying it all together, Lopatin’s logic itself becomes the album’s defining quality. Early highlight “Krumville” seamlessly blossoms from a peaceful guitar loop into static string plucks, and before long Lopatin is leading a strummed slowcore singalong with Xiu Xiu sighing wistfully at his side. Lopatin constantly searches for ways to build his mangled pieces up as grandiosely as possible (he has cited a Rate Your Music list called “Crescendocore” as an influence on the album, channeling his inner Godspeed on a bite-sized scale). “Nightmare Paint” goes through multiple disparate movements in the span of four minutes, phasing between mutant piano grooves, math-rock finger tapping, a proggy synth climax, and a manically accelerating coda. As dissonant as it can all get, Lopatin still finds fun ways to glue disparate shapes together without the whole thing collapsing.
In spite of Lopatin’s sheer technical prowess (“Memories of Music” strikes a particularly sweet spot with its barrage of squiggling keyboard solos and shimmering Cisco hold-music synths), it’s difficult to shake the pervasive sense of randomness writhing through Again. The idea that literally anything could happen in this music has the perverse effect of making Lopatin’s world feel smaller, in the same way that the limitless capabilities of CGI can be less evocative than creative, practical effects deployed with purpose. When he uses AI programs like Riffusion and Jukebox to conjure up melismatic vocal jitters on “The Body Trail” and “On an Axis,” there’s nothing profound in the nondescript mush. As the album’s nearly hour-long runtime drags on, songs like “Locrian Midwest,” “Gray Subviolet,” and the title track meander with a shrug. It’s exploratory music that often doesn’t actually seem to be going anywhere.
OPN albums used to evoke a world ensnared in an endless cycle of remembering itself. Throughout Again, Lopatin attempts to recreate some of those moments from earlier in his discography, but without their melodic poignancy or textural allure, those flashbacks sound less like hypnotic recursions through time and more like files simply being dragged from one folder to another. Even on the supposedly dramatic finale of “A Barely Lit Path,” it’s hard to get swept up in the track’s swirling laser-beam church organs when they ultimately scan as a retread of R Plus Seven’s “Boring Angel.” Lopatin shouldn’t have to reinvent himself with every album (even if he’s proven shockingly adept at doing so), but it’s beginning to feel like he cares less about making sense of his own amorphous memories than just lumping them all into a pile together. Listening to Again, it’s unclear what else Lopatin has to impart about the nature of nostalgia, other than, yes, it is a trap after all. | 2023-10-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | October 2, 2023 | 6.9 | c12aaa3e-e6f2-4306-b70f-4f2c34310dca | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
A handful of tracks recorded during the Indigo sessions suggest an artist more concerned with creating a vibe than conjuring sincere feeling. | A handful of tracks recorded during the Indigo sessions suggest an artist more concerned with creating a vibe than conjuring sincere feeling. | Wild Nothing: Laughing Gas EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-nothing-laughing-gas/ | Laughing Gas | This year marks a decade since Gemini, the self-recorded debut that catapulted Virginia Tech senior Jack Tatum into contemporary dream pop canon. As his project Wild Nothing took off, Tatum’s music drew as many comparisons to 4AD royalty like the Cocteau Twins as it did to contemporaries like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Over time, as Tatum gathered confidence, Wild Nothing’s sound became glossier, steering away from lo-fi guitars to embrace an exactingly produced vision of chillwave. With each subsequent release, the ethereal haze gradually cleared, putting Tatum’s wistful melodies and insubstantial lyricism in clearer view. By 2018’s Indigo, he seemed so focused on aesthetics that any potential for emotional connection withered. The new Laughing Gas EP—a handful of tracks recorded during the Indigo sessions—suggest an artist more concerned with creating a vibe than conjuring sincere feeling.
It’s Tatum’s habit to follow each full-length album with a shorter collection of songs: Gemini outtakes appeared on the Golden Haze EP, while 2013’s Nocturne was followed by the Empty Estate EP. Ideally, this pattern of alternating full albums and EPs of leftovers would offer insight into his creative process, or at least some memorable deep cuts. But Laughing Gas suffers from the same issues as its predecessor without introducing any new ideas. Even Tatum’s usually enjoyable melodies feel bloodless. The psychedelic chug of “Sleight of Hand” too closely approximates Tame Impala’s “Let It Happen.” Closer “The World Is a Hungry Place” would make a passably lively B-side; still, it sounds like something Tatum could’ve conjured in his sleep.
By far the strongest moment here is “Blue Wings,” first released as a standalone single more than a year ago. Driven by bass arpeggios that culminate in a massive, shimmering chorus, the song feels like it could’ve been demoed in the Nocturne days. And there’s the rub: However much Tatum might begrudge the fact, Wild Nothing is still synonymous with the warm nostalgia those early albums exuded. No amount of busy synth squiggles or dry drum loops can clear enough space to forge your own daydreams. The harder Tatum tries to snap back to reality, the further he lands from the mark.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | February 4, 2020 | 5.9 | c12e7bfe-8b11-466c-bd6b-a0771631b026 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
This is Angel Deradoorian's debut solo album, but she played bass and sang in Dave Longstreth's Dirty Projectors in the Bitte Orca years, and she's one third of Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, the most recent side project of Animal Collective's Dave Portner. Her debut album is full of unusual juxtapositions, but her voice is the thread that holds it all together, and once the album has finished, it's her voice you remember most. | This is Angel Deradoorian's debut solo album, but she played bass and sang in Dave Longstreth's Dirty Projectors in the Bitte Orca years, and she's one third of Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, the most recent side project of Animal Collective's Dave Portner. Her debut album is full of unusual juxtapositions, but her voice is the thread that holds it all together, and once the album has finished, it's her voice you remember most. | Deradoorian: The Expanding Flower Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20939-the-expanding-flower-planet/ | The Expanding Flower Planet | Angel Deradoorian's debut album is full of unusual juxtapositions: '60s psych and Georgian polyphony; classical minimalism and laser-show maximalism; dulcimer and church organ. But her voice is the thread that holds it all together, and once the album has finished, tied off with a ribbon of wailing trombone, it's her voice you remember most. Crystalline and unerring in pitch, it dominates the album, both solo and in multi-tracked close harmonies that radiate an eerie glow, like pyrite glinting through fog. It's not hard to imagine that an a capella version of this album would be captivating all on its own.
This is Deradoorian's debut solo album, but she has played a key role in a number of arty, ambitious indie rock projects: She played bass and sang in Dave Longstreth's Dirty Projectors in the Bitte Orca years, and she's one third of Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, the most recent side project of Animal Collective's Dave Portner. As a singer, she's also worked with Vampire Weekend, Charli XCX, Flying Lotus, U2, and Matmos, a list that suggests an unusually robust versatility. She began releasing her own music in 2009, with the Mind Raft EP, but the new album represents a quantum leap in complexity and ambition. The Expanding Flower Planet feels like an album full of trap doors, where a single, unexpected sound can deposit you into new worlds.
Playing the bulk of the music herself, with help from two drummers and a handful of backup vocalists, Deradoorian explores krautrock rhythms, microtonal tunings, and various Eastern scales, including those of her Armenian heritage. And she lets those scales dictate a melodic line that takes her far away from the hidebound formula of indie's usual four-bar chord changes. "A Beautiful Woman" begins as a garage-soul rave-up and then explodes into the eerie, cascading harmonies of the Black Sea region; "Your Creator" stacks ghostly chords to the heavens and trips up and down their intervals, a dizzying game of chutes and ladders.
The album's title comes from a Chinese mandala tapestry that hung in Deradoorian's studio, and, accordingly, she wrestles with big, metaphysical themes: elemental forces, catacombs and mosaics, hearts and eyes, clutching and binding, love and knowledge, and above all, oneness. The theme of self-actualization runs from the first song's daily affirmations ("Beautiful woman/ You're the one I wanna be") to the last song's healing mantra ("Love/ Grow/ Love… Grow grow grow grow grow"). But the focus is rarely narrative; the lyrics tend to operate like koans, spells, small tokens supercharged with symbolic power. The quest for knowledge drives it all. "How do you know?/ Who can tell the truth?" asks "DarkLord". In the title song she sings, "We all know much more than we really think we know," and in "Grow", that idea becomes a question:" How do we learn so we can all teach?"
And then there's "Komodo", probably the only song you'll hear this year that seems at least nominally to be about a Komodo dragon attack ("Komodo coming through/ Run for your lives/ Run for the hills/ Don't close your eyes"). It contains some of the album's most vivid lyrics, particularly in a cooing chorus whose dulcet tone contradicts its stark imagery ("Drone/ Between the grass/ The blades are rough/ Your metal skin/ Protects your hunt/ Death is in your clutch"). Despite this reptilian foray, though, the album's wide-angled macro perspective suggests that Deradoorian's true spirit animal is likelier to be a hawk or an eagle.
There is an aching sense of space in her music: with her soaring vocals leading the way, her arrangements begin to suggest patchworks of fields and freeways and mountains and beaches as seen from above. "I love the beauty of the state, but there's a whole other aspect of it that I struggle with," she told Self-Titled magazine of her attempt to come to grips with California's sprawl. As she wends her unpredictable way up and away, through strange intros and outros and across mantra-like choruses and far above bridges to nowhere, she offers a bird's-eye view of a landscape unlike any other, a place at once familiar, as though half-remembered from a dream, and spellbindingly alien. | 2015-08-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anticon | August 20, 2015 | 8 | c12f63ce-8d70-444b-b7a4-ec3c43bafdce | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
This short EP is the proper solo debut from XL Recordings boss Richard Russell. Like all of his work, though, Russell is in the background, more an orchestrator than a frontman. | This short EP is the proper solo debut from XL Recordings boss Richard Russell. Like all of his work, though, Russell is in the background, more an orchestrator than a frontman. | Everything Is Recorded: Close but Not Quite EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23319-close-but-not-quite-ep/ | Close but Not Quite EP | After 28 years in business, XL Recordings occupies an enviable place in the hierarchy of record labels. Nominally, it’s an independent, but it has the punching power of a major—able to devote time and attention to artists big and small. Over the last three decades, XL’s releases have dictated sizable shifts in style and taste in music across the world, be it with enigmas like Jai Paul or megastars like Vampire Weekend or M.I.A.. Behind all this was Richard Russell, who joined the company as an A&R scout shortly after XL started in 1989. At XL, he helped discover Adele and has produced records for Gil Scott-Heron. Undeniably, Russell is one of the music industry’s most powerful players, with a rolodex that few can probably match.
But before he got wrapped up in the business of running a label, Russell had a budding career as a rave DJ and producer. He was one-half of the group Kicks Like a Mule (with XL co-founder Nick Halkes) and had a minor radio hit called “The Bouncer.” These last few years, however, Russell has stepped away from the daily operations of running XL and returned to his passion of making his own music. Released under the moniker Everything Is Recorded, the compact five-song EP Close but Not Quite serves as Russell’s proper debut as a musician.
Though, Russell, like in almost all of his work, is in the background of this music—an orchestrator rather than a frontman. For four of the tracks, he’s recruited vocalists to sing over his productions, while the closing track is a short instrumental. The EP is barely over 16-minutes long, and each of its tracks touches on a different genre, encapsulating Motown soul, grime, garage, UK bass, and more. Given that, Close but Not Quite is more of a sampler—a tasting menu of what Russell could possibly do in a larger project.
This is immediately apparent in how far apart the EP’s best song, its title-track and anchor featuring Sampha, differs from everything else on it. The song is built around a sample of Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 song “The Makings of You,” which Russell showed Sampha in a studio session, noting their falsettos were quite similar. The production from Russell bears a light touch—just featherweight piano chords, soft drums, and handclaps, tied together by winsome flourishes of colorful strings. Sampha and Russell deliver a ghostly duet that’s both uplifting and filled with ennui, as the song discusses how it is impossible to find the words to describe how one feels at any one moment.
The following track, “Early This Morning,” is a kind of slow, old-school grime track with British rapper Giggs. It’s a quick sea change from “Close but Not Quite,” with its blasts of sulfurous horns and blown out percussion. This song, too, is carved around a vocal sample: Russell’s production for Gil Scott-Heron’s “Me and the Devil,” a guttural baritone that is anything but relaxing. It’s insistent and sometimes haunting, though Giggs’ rapping is too clumsy to mesh with Scott-Heron. (It’s only a little funny when Giggs raps, “Got the coldest lyrics up in the folder/And got the cognac mixing up with the cola,” shortly after Scott-Heron talks about opening up the door to the devil.)
In fact, after “Close but Not Quite,” the EP never returns to its soulful start—making those blissful opening minutes seem like a red herring. Following “Early This Morning” is “Washed Up on the Shore” with Warren Ellis and Nigerian-born songwriter Obongjayar, which is equally ominous—laying on the hellfire and brimstone vibe thick. “D’elusion” is a collaboration with newcomers Infinite and Mela Murder, as well as Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, and it’s a rather crowded hodgepodge of electro-driven R&B and UK bass. Reprieve arrives with “The Rhythm of Life and Death,” the closing instrumental collage, which mixes together churning static, pianos, and cold drums. By the time you reach the end of this short collection, you’ll be hard pressed to find a single cohesive vision. Rather, it presents many possible records that it could have been, never settling into one comfortable mood. | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | May 25, 2017 | 6.7 | c1391956-69a4-4b06-b637-d8345515f7e7 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On their seventh album, the Decemberists sound like a polite, modern folk rock band with only a touch of the usual antiquity. They seem wrapped up in themselves, wistful and mature, careful not to become caricatures while also trying to push their sound forward. | On their seventh album, the Decemberists sound like a polite, modern folk rock band with only a touch of the usual antiquity. They seem wrapped up in themselves, wistful and mature, careful not to become caricatures while also trying to push their sound forward. | The Decemberists: What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20083-what-a-terrible-world-what-a-beautiful-world/ | What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World | The Decemberists have always aimed their sights at bookish fans who wanted music to be significant, who were interested in legends and myths and theatre and thesauruses. Instead of feeling good in a Decemberists song, there was "a rush of ripe élan," and it wasn’t just seeing some girls over there, it was "15 lithesome maidens lay along in their bower." The vellum-bound folios of Colin Meloy’s songs are full of heightened verse that make them fun in the same way that Kate Bush singing about Heathcliff and Cathy, or Peter Gabriel’s cape from "Watcher of the Skies", or swirling wine around in a glass is fun. There’s so much joy, however affected, in Meloy’s language: It’s camp for fans of Hawthorne.
The Decemberists also have a habit of over-correcting. The tripartite song suite on 2006’s The Crane Wife was blown out of proportion into an exhausting prog opus on The Hazards of Love in 2009. Then they bounced back in an exercise in restraint with their previous album, the ambling and dusty The King Is Dead. It was a necessary addition to the band’s canon, and a concept album in so far as it was proof that they could just write a few songs without culling themes from Elizabethan texts or Japanese folk tales. On their seventh LP, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, they balance out and cruise down the middle of the road, sounding more like a polite, modern folk rock band with only a touch of antiquity here and there. It’s a charming but predictable album aimed at the faithful, but provides few if any new tracks that measure up to those in their back catalog.
Part of what made their first several albums so entertaining was both that unique counterpoint and, well, they were kinda fun. There was a joie de vivre in the way Meloy sang "joie de vivre" on his first album in his signature voice that turned every simple vowel into a triphthong. Lovesick soldiers, chimbly sweeps, lovers’ suicide, a mom whoring herself out for money to a ship of sailors: It was nothing if not entertaining.
Now the Decemberists seem wrapped up in themselves, wistful and mature, careful not to become caricatures while also trying to push their sound forward. The one new impulse they find here is meta songwriting. In some world it might be fun to hear a band sing about how they "had to change some" to keep those bookish fans and put in a cute line about selling out for Axe shampoo, but turns out it’s quite a bit more grating than the errant Victorian quirk. That’s how the album opens, "The Singer Addresses His Audience", with another kind of cuteness and it’s hardly any fun at all.
The self-reflexive angle comes up again on "Anti-Summersong", a reference to their "Summersong" from The Crane Wife. "I’m not going on just to sing another sing-a-long, suicide song," Meloy sings, a flippant but not entirely serious jibe at his past. The tune is orchestrated like a traditional Stephen Foster folk tune, with square fiddle lines, a little banjo, a plucked acoustic guitar, and a true Americana harmonica solo. It’s more of the same roots feel they put to work on The King Is Dead, but everything feels a little paler and undercooked. The band’s live-tracking and Meloy’s plea to just move on from his past attempt to break new ground, but outside of a few lite rafter shakers, so much of what may pass for tuneful songwriting here is mostly just pleasant and formless outlines of songs.
But they had to change, and Meloy doesn’t want to sing about lovers' suicide pacts anymore, so we get Meloy the dreamer, Meloy the ponderous, Meloy the contemplative. Some tracks are more autobiographical, like the literally effortless "Lake Song", recalling a snapshot of lakeside love when Meloy was 17 and "terminally fey." The only anchor to its saccharine lines ("You were full and sweet as honeydew") is an acoustic guitar strumming in a rhythm that was perfected by kids in college dorm rooms years ago. It’s followed immediately by "Till the Water's All Long Gone", a narrative-based tune that wanders around in 6/8 and is quite possibly about protecting the fountain of youth from a tribe of hill folk.
Those big sing-a-longs of the past now scan more power pop and less sea shanty. "Make You Better" might as well be the New Pornographers, especially with the use of Kelly Hogan and Rachel Flotard as back-up vocalists, who add beautiful harmonies at the climax. The band has never lacked the musical bona fides to write a great anthem. And here it’s not a macabre, smirking tale about military wives or some Spanish monarch, but a song about how prescribing love is by no means a way to fix our own problems. You start to see Meloy himself more than ever, and it’s at once refreshing and a little unsettling how much he still hides behind poeticism.
But the failure of this album, in addition to being overlong and under-ambitious, is the idea that maturity should beget lazy, hammock songs. Some songs were written as long as four years ago, just after The King Is Dead. There's pleasure in feeling time pass on the album, but it passes so slowly, and at some points, interminably. The pro forma folk-rock of the entire thing is a slog. Of course the marks of the Decemberists are still there: A nod to Tennyson ("Cavalry Captain"), a lazy obsession with style (for things are both ill- and misbegotten), a healthy vocabulary (prevaricate, sibylline, eidolon), and the cheeky and bawdy song about oral sex ("Philomena"). But gone is the wild-eyed, fearless, nerdy-ass band who once said "fuck it we’re gonna do a 10-minute song about a revenge-murder inside whale." To borrow a theme from the album, this is the part of the the Decemberists’ story where you skim to the next chapter. | 2015-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | January 19, 2015 | 5.6 | c13984eb-8786-4457-a370-5cc3ab512cf4 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
With the passing of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, Iggy returns to being a solo artist, issuing an LP he claims "comes dangerously near jazz." | With the passing of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, Iggy returns to being a solo artist, issuing an LP he claims "comes dangerously near jazz." | Iggy Pop: Préliminaires | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13084-preliminaires/ | Préliminaires | It's hard not to root for Iggy Pop. At the very least, his initial tenure with the Stooges earned him more than his share of bricks in the modern rock foundation. Beyond that, his very survival in the face of untold self-destruction merits a few slaps on the back, too, and his first two solo albums, recorded with the help of buddy and benefactor David Bowie, remain classics in their own right. Since then, however, there's hardly been an Iggy Pop record worth listening to more than once, if that, and sadly that includes the unlikely Stooges reunion record, The Weirdness. With the untimely passing of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, that reunion unfortunately becomes a one-off, and sends Iggy back to wandering the wilderness as a solo artist.
Of course, given his all-over-the-place career, there's no reason to believe Iggy wouldn't have made Préliminaires, the follow-up to The Weirdness and the first Iggy Pop solo disc since 2003's Skull Ring, anyway. Still, Préliminaires comes as a sharp left turn: Inspired by The Possibility of an Island by blithely provocative French novelist (and occasional filmmaker and musician) Michel Houellebecq, Préliminaires "comes dangerously near jazz," Pop claims in the press notes, clearly forgetting, like everyone else, that he recorded some of the shitty Avenue B with Medeski, Martin & Wood. But in truth Préliminaires is less jazz than Iggy Pop as Euro-pop, á la Leonard Cohen circa I'm Your Man, crooning over a bed of mostly mushy and melancholy electronics and beats.
Préliminaires was recorded largely with collaborator Hal Cragin, who may as well be Hal Wilner for all the satisfaction he takes in tossing Iggy in relatively unfamiliar waters. But Pop makes the most of his new environment to expand his palette and his palate in one fell swoop. Heck, the disc even begins with Iggy mumbling Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert's "Les Feuilles Mortes"-- in French!-- ceding the microphone for a swooning smooth sax solo, about the last thing anyone would have expected from him, but yet further proof that the singer is not the dum dum boy people have always made him out to be.
Recasting himself as a Gallic crooner isn't necessarily a smart move, granted, but it is audacious, and amidst the drifting ennui Iggy demonstrates his trademark nihilism does translate even distantly removed from his caveman roots. "It's nice to be dead/ It's nice to be underground/ Free of the ugly sounds of life," intones Pop on "Nice to Be Dead", one of the more memorable tracks on the album, and also one of the few that veers closer to rock than easy listening. The sentiment's a fine epigraph for a singer several lives beyond his allotted nine but clearly comfortable where's he landed late in his career. Plus, even if the music rarely rises to such rousing heights elsewhere, Iggy's lyrical passenger is still clearly riding through the city's backsides, taking notes.
Elsewhere Iggy contemplates death by the sea ("Spanish Coast"), covers Jobim ("How Insensitive"), slops out some existential blues ("He's Dead/She's Alive"), and goes faux disco with the blasé irony of "Party Time". "It's party time," he grumbles, "and I smell slime/ The stupid people/ Make me evil." It's a misanthropic sentiment worthy of the Stooges in their prime, but here Iggy sounds beaten, the lyrics revealing his innermost thoughts even as his body goes through the motions.
"Like Daniel, [The Possibility of an Island's] protagonist, I too have grown weary of a career as an entertainer, and I wish for a new life," revealed Iggy Pop in a statement perhaps not out of character for a highly physical (and likely perpetually sore) rock star in his sixties. Weary it (and he) does sound here, beaten, even bored, if not outright boring. But by being boring on purpose, Iggy ironically proves himself oddly more compelling than on his many past accidents. If it's not an album for the ages so much as for the aged, at least it's one you may want to hold on to a bit and give another shot when you get closer to where Iggy's at himself right now. | 2009-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | June 3, 2009 | 5.4 | c1404288-8625-4276-a515-e37b94fc4308 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing create a magical crux on the experimental singer-songwriter’s latest, a powerfully maternal and spiritually yearning collection of dark folk music. | Sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing create a magical crux on the experimental singer-songwriter’s latest, a powerfully maternal and spiritually yearning collection of dark folk music. | Larkin Grimm: Chasing an Illusion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/larkin-grimm-chasing-an-illusion/ | Chasing an Illusion | There’s plenty of darkness on Larkin Grimm’s Chasing an Illusion, but more than ever, she leans toward the light. On her first release since 2012’s Soul Retrieval, the experimental singer-songwriter deepens the drones and trances she’s toyed with over her decade-plus career. Grimm frees herself to more fully embrace her spiritual yearning, all while tempering the transcendental edges of her obsidian music with the acknowledgment that joy and tranquility, while worth pursuing, can be fleeting and complicated when sharing your reality with other flawed human beings.
Joined by a full cast of musicians that includes longtime David Bowie producer Tony Visconti on bass, Grimm softens the qualities that used to get her music filed squarely under freak-folk. There’s less surface quirk, fewer references to nature, and more lush and expansive instrumentation. Even her voice sounds different: more open, more relaxed. Instead of the sharp curls that embroidered albums like 2007’s The Last Tree or 2009’s Parplar, she issues long, breathy syllables, often multitracking her vocals and scattering her presence across the album’s field of sound. On the lovely, droning “Fear Transforms into Love (Journey in Turiyasangitananda),” she pronounces the word “physically” as Björk might, savoring every percussive consonant. Between ruptures of harpsichord, she sings as if from across a quarry, eager to be heard from a wide, damp distance.
Though much of Grimm’s back catalog comprises love songs—beautiful, terrifying love songs that explore the carnal aspects of human desire—Chasing an Illusion addresses a kind of love heard less often in pop music. She sings from her position as a mother, full of hope and fear for her child. “The hardest thing I’ve done in my life/Is just keeping you alive,” she sings on “Keeping You Alive.” “You throw your body into ocean waves/Expecting them to catch you like I would/I can’t always break your fall/Sometimes I can’t be there at all.” It’s a stirring note of apology as she laments her inability to be the whole world to the person she loves most. On “A Perfect World,” she imagines just that for her child, an accepting paradise “where you can be happy and free.” Again, the song feels ringed with apology: We’re not in that perfect world, and teaching a child to survive a violent one ranks among the more painful challenges of parenthood.
On multiple tracks, Grimm overlays her lyrical content onto tonally contradictory accompaniment. “I Don’t Believe,” written as a love song to abuse survivors, counts among the album’s most soothing tracks. Grimm repeats the title over and over like a mantra or a lullaby, lulling herself into a trance even as she’s wishing death upon both herself and her tormentor. Later, the album’s free-form closing title track sees Grimm howling the stanza, “My heart is empty/My soul is empty too/I feel dead inside/Don’t you?” Behind her, her band breaks into one of the most upbeat sequences on the whole album, like they’ve finally found their groove and started to cut loose. Grimm’s vocals turn wordless, and she lets collaborator Margaret Morris have the final spoken word: “And how do we go about forgiving?”
These paradoxical moments of sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing make up the crux of the magic Grimm weaves on Chasing an Illusion. Pain can be paralyzing, but it can also level the ground for something new to grow. Pain and the healing that follows it can turn us loose. In Grimm’s world, the most important thing a person can be is free. | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Northern Spy | June 21, 2017 | 7.1 | c140be38-e7bc-420d-947d-781f0d8d6da9 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
On his new EP, Danish electronic artist Loke Rahbek creates a landscape of yearning choral pads and dubby loneliness, nodding at themes of love and despair. | On his new EP, Danish electronic artist Loke Rahbek creates a landscape of yearning choral pads and dubby loneliness, nodding at themes of love and despair. | Croatian Amor: Finding People EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23217-finding-people-ep/ | Finding People EP | Though it has roots in confrontational noise, Loke Rahbek’s project Croatian Amor has spent the last four years with love on the brain. Releases like 2013’s *The World *function as a sort of ultra-romantic library music, nodding towards grand themes of tragic devotion, heartbreak, and sacrifice without committing to specifics. The action is always off screen, the music an inscrutable cypher. You sense it all comes together in Rahbek’s brain, the project soundtracking his own private film. But last year’s Love Means Taking Action pushed past the patina of lovely haziness and got into the nitty gritty details. Jarring cut up techniques, breathy vocal samples, and disquieting de-tunings fleshed out a haunted, dreary, and stressed worldview. Love is happening, but only over spotty internet connections or in dank rooms, with a murmuring backdrop of the news cycle, the surveillance state, and frayed economies.
Finding People, the new four-song EP on Rahbek’s own Posh Isolation label, goes even farther in this direction. The record is notably more digital, more computer-based, than its predecessors, and it glitches and stutters its way through a landscape of yearning choral pads, dubby loneliness, snatches of video game dialogue. If there’s a love story here, it’s again nested within a larger tale of worldwide despair. The collage of voices on “Sky Walkers” smears together into an ephemeral chorus whose collective utterings, whisperings, and monologues point to a larger meaning. “You’re gonna die… don’t shoot… help us… One life ends, another begins,” it goes, then the sound of panting and running. “You always have to wake up.”
If this sounds familiar, well, it is. Rahbek owes a clear debt to Burial on Finding People, though to his credit, it’s not a direct copy. His melodic sensibility twists into more nervous and aggressive contours, and the locales are more continent-hopping, more transient. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to imagine the grandiose loner-isms of “Keepers” or Khalil’s autotuned R&B crooning on the title track without “In McDonalds,” “Stolen Dog” or “Gutted.” It’s all there: the leaden mood, the self-aggrandizing first-person-shooter narratives, the rainy ambience of the city, fragments of memory swimming around in the background. It’s the sound of losing yourself in another world when the one you live in has too much sorrow to bear.
Each of these four pieces holds up well enough on their own merits, with “Keepers” and “Breathe Into Me” standing out in particular. The former washes over you with an assured drama, while the later ups the menace with a ghostly melody and churning bottom end. As a whole, though, Finding People is slight. The statement that Rahbek seems to be trying to make comes off more as a gesture. Any or all of these tracks would work fantastically on an album, sandwiched between more definitive songs, but taken as a group they coast through moodiness without ever landing on something more substantial. It’s the sound of an artist in transition, taking a few strident steps forward into new territory, then pulling back a few to more comfortable footing. There’s a vibe, but no story. If Love Means Taking Action showed us the scope of Rahbek’s vision, Finding People proves he’s not done searching. | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Posh Isolation | May 10, 2017 | 6.3 | c142c002-8eaa-44f8-8f53-0909eaf723d9 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
The massive lite-EDM duo the Chainsmokers portray themselves as hilariously repugnant caricatures, and on C**ollage, they paint a photorealist portrait of their manspread over the charts. | The massive lite-EDM duo the Chainsmokers portray themselves as hilariously repugnant caricatures, and on C**ollage, they paint a photorealist portrait of their manspread over the charts. | The Chainsmokers: Collage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22589-collage/ | Collage | Bret Easton Ellis recently said if he were to rewrite American Psycho for modern times, he’d change the setting from late-’80s New York to today’s Silicon Valley, and his psychotic anti-hero Patrick Bateman would haunt the offices of a startup. In this updated version, Bateman probably spends his weekends cruising through Northern California in his Tesla Roadster for getaways to Napa, and presumably makes regular trips to Burning Man. As he drives his sports car with wanton abandon, the speakers rumbling with bass, I like to imagine he’s listening to the lite-EDM duo the Chainsmokers. On some balmy day somewhere in the Valley, he has perhaps downloaded their latest release, Collage EP, onto his smartphone to enjoy at his leisure. And he is listening to them not only because everyone in the country is (they’ve dominated the Billboard chart this year with three songs in the top 10, each for multiple weeks on end), but because the DJs Drew Taggart and Alex Pall, on a fundamental level, would be his people: bros in the prime of life, and caricatures of society’s most reviled.
If charts are the most reliable reflection of who the most powerful artists in the country are, the Chainsmokers are without a doubt kings of the hill. Yet, unlike any of their peers, even in the world of festival-ready EDM, Pall and Taggart have lent their full-throated support to the tech-bro lifestyle and all its connotations. They speak in the garbled lingo of “iterating” and “disrupting” culture. They preview bits and pieces of songs on Snapchat, and use Hype Machine as a market research tool to hone in on an audience. They wonder aloud about the “return-on-investment” and “reach” their relationship with the press warrants. When networking with Calvin Harris, they say they “basically brain-raped him” with their inquiries and curiosity.
Yet, they don’t want you to forget they are red-blooded males. As Pall so lovably admits: “Even before success, pussy was number one.” Taggart famously beefed with Lady Gaga and Halsey on Twitter, unleashing a casual flurry of misogyny in his wake (later claiming he was hacked). On their website, a bio provided by them proudly reads the Chainsmokers are “17.34 combined inches” (the measurement of their penises measured from tip to tip). Taggart lists “Entourage”’s manic Ari Gold as an inspiration, but they also want to be seen as “curators,” “creators,” and “nerds.”
All of this is to say, they have painted themselves as hilariously repugnant and horribly fascinating all at once. Moral turpitude and coarse language withstanding, they are still massively popular, and they themselves are not on trial—the music they make is. With Collage, they paint a photorealist portrait of their manspread over the charts.
Collage conveniently collects the group’s biggest from the year, and each of these songs works on a finely tuned algorithm. The recipe for a Chainsmokers song is basically two parts airy hook, one part lilting female vocal, and a few dashes of saccharine melancholy and sugary synths. Aesthetically they are close cousins to Calvin Harris’ poptronica and Kygo’s soporific trop-house, but their song structure borrows from forebears like Deadmau5 and Avicii. They’ll still use drops, but they have softened the edge of that serotonin spike by highlighting choruses and melody in pastel color. It makes their music instantly familiar and malleable, and thus radio-friendly.
Take “Closer,” for example, their biggest song and a duet between Drew Taggart and the alt-pop singer Halsey. The song derives its power from a sleek and simple chord progression that mirrors the song’s chorus (“We ain’t never getting older”), and borrows heavily from the Fray’s mid-2000s soft-banger “Over My Head.” The chord progression reinforces the chorus, as if it were humming behind Taggart in unison. The song’s narrative is relatable and anthemic but intimate-sounding: A man meets an ex at a party, hooks up, but then remembers why he hated her in the first place. The millennial populism of the lyrics (“Stay and play that Blink-182 song/That we beat to death in Tucson, okay”) make the track feel manically personal. Add in a little bit of sneering class resentment and conspicuous consumption (“So, baby, pull me closer/In the backseat of your Rover/That I know you can’t afford”) and you’ve got a giant hit on your hands. It’s undeniable—powerfully catchy and easy to whistle, with a light veneer of sad-boy sweetness covering EDM’s biting aggression.
Elsewhere they are more faceless, feeding off of the energy that a series of female vocalists gives to their tracks. Alex Pall has said that his main function in the group is as A&R, booking guests for individual songs and tailoring each one to fit a different demographic. With Daya, they crudely masquerade as the xx in “Don’t Let Me Down,” and (in their parlance) put forward “LMFAO with better clothes” in “Inside Out” (featuring Charlee). In each case, they find a different route to the reptilian brain, stripping back the McMansion architecture of an EDM song and redecorating with items procured from Anthropologie.
Perhaps, what is most interesting about the Chainsmokers is the cynicism of their approach. Their music is essentially an accretion of trends, a packet of market research. EDM’s boom-and-bust cycle has come to an end, and they’ve weathered the drought, presenting themselves as part of a lovably hateable lifestyle brand that grips the nation’s young and powerful. One thing about cynics is they tend to survive, and Chainsmokers seem engineered above all for survival. | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Columbia / Disruptor | November 9, 2016 | 3.5 | c14448d1-1c43-4a1a-b6d3-e910c97b92e6 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Kevin Barnes and co. follow the excellent Satanic Panic in the Attic with a self-described "foray into 21st century A.D.D. electro cinematic avant-disco." | Kevin Barnes and co. follow the excellent Satanic Panic in the Attic with a self-described "foray into 21st century A.D.D. electro cinematic avant-disco." | Of Montreal: The Sunlandic Twins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5955-the-sunlandic-twins/ | The Sunlandic Twins | One drawback of being a great songwriter is that consistency is often mistaken for monotony. Witness: Of Montreal lead man Kevin Barnes, who has made his name on mirthful choruses that often sound suspiciously similar. But Barnes is anything but short on ideas, as Satanic Panic in the Attic, the band's 2004 chef d'ouvre, attests. Cumulative yet innovative, the album douses classically saccharine and vaguely psychedelic indie pop in gratuitous amounts of syrup. The key: Of Montreal handle the powerful flavors with soufflé-like gentleness.
By contrast, The Sunlandic Twins, the band's new album, is like a restaurant with multiple Michelin stars serving Sno-Cones. Missing Satanic Panic's multidimensionality, the album feels like the hollowed-out shell of something great. Barnes can sleepwalk through a book of staff paper and come away with a set of leakproof pop songs-- or, in this case, a "foray into 21st century A.D.D. electro cinematic avant-disco-- and that effortlessness lends Of Montreal's music a sort of indifference. The high-glucose diet that fueled the band's previous outings has landed them in a sugar coma. Blissfully adrift, The Sunlandic Twins lacks the essential reflexivity of Satanic Panic in the Attic's ethereally silly pop gems.
The Sunlandic Twins isn't without its share of coruscating hooks and major-key shenanigans. "Requiem for O.M.M." is powered by a galloping bass line, which draws back to let the succinct two-line chorus take center stage. Barnes' kaleidoscopic artwork (somebody give this man a larger format) complements the music, especially "I Was Never Young": both seem plucked from the overripe fantasy realms of "Sonic the Hedgehog". The song features a laid-back, strutting rhythm, onto which the instrumentation gradually builds until a trumpet fanfare calls in a tempo change. Abetted by handclaps and a bopping guitar line, the section recalls Satanic Panic's snaking, poperatic song structures.
Elsewhere, "Forecast Fascist Future" and "So Begins Our Alabee" are airy but satisfying, meeting their melody quota while managing to have some fun with synthesizers. But around its midway point, The Sunlandic Twins takes a strange turn. "So Begins Our Alabee" initiates the second act: a self-styled electro pop opera with a startling lack of, well, songs. This independent, self-contained experiment has no business intermingling with the respectable opening set. A few tracks outshine their surroundings by dint of simplicity. "Oslo in the Summertime" rescues a glistening chorus from the maw of wandering pianos, twittering drum machines, and synth glides sandwiching it. "October Is Eternal", meanwhile, is admirable only for its titular appositeness: The song milks a discordant piano dirge for nearly three minutes before fizzling out in an ululating vocal loop and cheap-o MIDI instruments.
Of Montreal have always been silly, but The Sunlandic Twins is plain daffy. "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" and "The Party's Crashing Us" are condescendingly aloof, piling on excessive amounts of sound: On the latter, a traffic jam of synths produces the oversaturated colors of a mangled paint palette. Particularly annoying among the record's contrivances is its frivolous use of drum machines, which skip and stutter when the songs call for simple beats.
Barnes is still an impeccable craftsman, but these songs won't make your brain spongy like Satanic Panic's "Lysergic Bliss". This time, it sounds like Barnes is the one whose brain is gummed up. Of Montreal have accomplished the rare feat of honing an unusually nuanced signature sound. But with such a skilled songwriter at the helm, they should be making great records, checking the conceptual dalliances at the door. | 2005-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 11, 2005 | 6.4 | c145445d-5267-4e9b-8058-7214f6211f0c | Pitchfork | null |
Subsets and Splits