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The Detroit singer-songwriter’s second album is sparser, lonelier, and more patient, allowing the candor of her lyrics to shine through. | The Detroit singer-songwriter’s second album is sparser, lonelier, and more patient, allowing the candor of her lyrics to shine through. | Anna Burch: If You’re Dreaming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-burch-if-youre-dreaming/ | If You’re Dreaming | From the outset of If You’re Dreaming, Anna Burch sounds deliberate. The steady pace of opening track “Can’t Sleep” is a confident introduction to a new sound: one sparser, lonelier, and more patient than the jittery folk-pop songs of her 2018 solo debut, Quit the Curse. On her second album, Burch is more confident, even as her subject matter becomes more introspective. The wordless, uplifting chorus of “Can’t Sleep,” a song about insomnia, stretches out like a long road ahead. It’s a strong new direction for the Detroit singer-songwriter, though it doesn’t always maintain the same momentum.
Where Burch’s debut often layered her vocals with scratchy guitar riffs to evoke 1960s girl-group harmonies, If You’re Dreaming mellows out the sound. Burch takes a more stripped-back approach, soaking her voice in echo. The image of her sitting beneath a spotlight, alone on stage—as in the Scorsese-inspired video for “Tell Me What’s True”—lingers in the mind’s eye. Over that song’s doleful electric piano, Burch leans into the foreground so that you can’t miss the candor of her lyrics: “When I used to hate myself/I saw things so clearly.” Likewise, the sense of social anxiety she evokes on the bluesy, mournful “Go It Alone” is heightened by how starkly her voice seems to stand on the fringes of the party.
Just as spending a lot of time in your own company gives small interactions a feeling of outsize significance, the record’s pared-back palette allows the tiniest variations to feel startling and fresh. When the woodwind flutters on the interlude “Keep It Warm,” or when a second vocal track enters on “Every Feeling,” it hits like a stiff breeze. A subtle swell of saxophone lifts “Not So Bad,” a dreamy soft-rock tune about admitting you enjoy someone’s company; it might easily have tipped over into schmaltz, but Burch masterfully keeps the mood light-hearted and restrained.
That deliberate simplicity doesn’t make for a consistently invigorating listen. The second half sinks into a slower pace after “Keep It Warm,” while Burch’s lyrics shift from dwelling on anxiety towards an acceptance of her lonely, quiet state. An extra interlude, the fuzzy “Picture Show,” only slows the momentum further. “Here With You,” the album closer, is serene and slight, and nowhere near as satisfying as the richer, angstier first half.
But what resonates most is the clarity of Burch’s emotional world. The lyrics of her debut were tantalisingly guarded, offsetting the drama of her melodies with wry one-liners. That humor still lives in If You’re Dreaming—it’s there in the nonchalant shrug of the title “Not So Bad” and in her resigned cry of “I’m so tired” on the sunny “Party’s Over”—but like the overall tone of the record, it’s softer. In Burch’s minimalist musical landscape, each lyric she pushes to the foreground becomes loaded with meaning. It’s as though she’s smiling knowingly as she sings, while also feeling every word.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 7, 2020 | 7.2 | c148c9e0-8fdf-4d94-89bd-58aeeb28b93b | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The UK band’s enormous third album is pristine and emotionally extravagant, the platonic ideal for contemporary big-tent rock music. | The UK band’s enormous third album is pristine and emotionally extravagant, the platonic ideal for contemporary big-tent rock music. | Wolf Alice: Blue Weekend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolf-alice-blue-weekend/ | Blue Weekend | Not everyone has the energy, confidence, or money to be among the crowd at Glastonbury or Primavera, playing Tetris with the festival schedule, shuttling between three different stages trying to catch the best 10 minutes of every set. Wolf Alice’s extravagantly emotive third LP, Blue Weekend, is a safe substitute for the experience, not just for 2021 but for virtually any year between 2017’s Visions of a Life and now. Blue Weekend is fluent in both alt-rock and the domain of pop artists that are most likely to headline alt-rock festivals. They’re the platonic ideal for big-tent rock music in 2021: lead singer Ellie Rowsell gives 20-somethings the megaphone of a superhuman, working through vices, crises of confidence, and a pervasive misogyny that success has only worsened, upending UK lad-rock supremacy while staying firmly within its lineage.
Blue Weekend makes ample use of the big Wolf Alice jukebox. When the negative space is flooded with reverb, Wolf Alice flaunt the glitziest production values ever heard on a shoegaze album; turn the reverb down and they’re a more guitar-centered version of big-budget bedroom-pop. “Safe From Heartbreak (if i never fall in love)” is Wolf Alice’s entry into indie-adjacent, twang-free country-pop; strip away the floodlit harmonies that make Rowsell sound like a one-woman Staves and the 12-string overdubs and it’s an Elliott Smith song.
But if there’s any overarching pop culture trend defining Wolf Alice’s existence, it’s how they repackage existing IP to reflect modern sensibilities. This is where Wolf Alice’s impact feels most distinct: Rowsell eyerolls her way through “Last Man on Earth,” which variously recalls Bowie, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd as she mocks the mythos of male genius that animates classic rock boosterism. “Smile” barely conceals its disdain for critical condescension as the band works through a funk-metal groove that could serve as the theme song for a gender-flipped reboot of Entourage.
In the context of popular alternative rock, Blue Weekend is inspiring, maybe even life-changing for anyone who hears “Smile” alongside bands like Royal Blood or Catfish and the Bottlemen. But Blue Weekend can seem a bit circumspect compared to their Dirty Hit labelmates. The 1975 or Rina Sawayama’s eclecticism is far messier and riskier and no matter where it takes them, they never leave any doubt whose song it is. Three albums in, Wolf Alice still lack a quintessence that immediately establishes a song as Wolf Alice rather than bending to its influences first. Rowsell can sell the feeling of being inelegantly wasted on “Play the Greatest Hits” (“I leave the present empty/But I make it gift wrapped”), but similar to Visions of a Life’s “Yuk Foo,” its foray into a noise can feel a bit tokenized.
On “Delicious Things,” Rowsell dips into a husky lower register to outline a debauched stay in Los Angeles. It all turns on one brilliant final line where Rowsell calls her mom to check in, taking “Delicious Things” out of the realm of musical tourism and into a sad and very human drama; as she takes ownership of her capitulation to the illicit charms of various party favors and wolfish bullshit artists, “Delicious Things” proves the endurance of basic Hollywood fantasies for people who should probably know better.
For all of its obvious ambitions towards creating a “cinematic” scope—quoting Macbeth on opener “The Beach,” ending with “The Beach II,” and fitting a loose breakup narrative in between—Wolf Alice work more on an episodic level, each track creating a specific mood easily separable from the whole. That’s not really a figure of speech—with no way to road test these songs, the band played them against muted YouTube clips to see if they got the vibe right. Blue Weekend always nails the vibe, they nail everything, but often in a way that sounds micromanaged. It’s easy to scapegoat the fussy production of Markus Dravs, which leaves Rowsell like so many of our gifted and versatile actors vying to stuff themselves in a CGI bodysuit for Marvel. But if Blue Weekend sounds too big to fail, he’s doing his job. This is the guy bands call to get that extra boost from “Mercury Prize nominee” to “Grammy winner”: The Suburbs, Viva La Vida, those first two Mumford & Sons albums, Florence and the Machines’ How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, all of which sound like GarageBand scratch tracks compared to Blue Weekend.
There’s one exception tucked away towards the end, enough to question the album’s entire approach. “No Hard Feelings” mostly consists of Rowsell’s voice backed by bass guitar and almost nothing else—none of the triple-tracked vocals, no guitarmonies, no bleats of synthesizer or Sistine Chapel reverb. Not that it lacks for drama: Rowsell spends the second verse heartbroken in a bathtub, listening to Amy Winehouse, trying to siphon the pain in her music as her own. A few lines later, she realizes “there’s only so much sulking the heart can entertain,” and “No Hard Feelings” emerges as an unusually mature and forward-thinking breakup song.
But nothing less than a masterpiece was to be expected of Wolf Alice’s third album. That’s just how it goes for a certain kind of artful and ambitious British rock band, even if they hadn’t respectively earned a Grammy nomination and the Mercury Prize with their first two. Look, I don’t make the rules, the British press do, and their handiwork has already placed Blue Weekend on a critical echelon occupied by the likes of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and To Pimp a Butterfly. You can’t blame anyone for going overboard at a time when Wolf Alice are ever so close to returning to their natural habitat playing to great lawns across the globe, yet the only thing that seems to prevent them coming off like the biggest band in the world on Blue Weekend is that they also want to be every band in the world.
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. | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit / RCA | June 17, 2021 | 7.2 | c14920fc-63c5-4b4e-a000-d06bc703226e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Matty Healy, the enfant terrible of pop-rock, pushes his band all-in with a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs ever. | Matty Healy, the enfant terrible of pop-rock, pushes his band all-in with a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs ever. | The 1975: Notes on a Conditional Form | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-1975-notes-on-a-conditional-form/ | Notes on a Conditional Form | The 1975 are distracted. They are drifting in and out of a podcast while reading the news; putting on a movie and spending half of it scrolling through their phones; living through a pandemic while worrying about the death of our planet—all while finding time to post inane memes on Twitter. Like few working bands, the Manchester quartet has made an art out of multitasking. Their albums are big, hyperactive statements that embrace the mechanics of our fragmented minds: half-evolved and half-destroyed, cyborgs acting out base desires. They never tire of sharp juxtapositions—airtight pop songs and meandering interludes, noisy tantrums and orchestral motifs, computerized mayhem and naked confession—because their very essence lies in the whiplash.
If Matty Healy, their 31-year-old frontman and outspoken avatar, had his way, the band’s fourth album, Notes on a Conditional Form, would have arrived mere months after 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. The goal was to satisfy his own need for constant stimulus: “I watch something on Netflix,” he explained at the time, “and it’s like, ‘That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Next?’” It was an exciting proposition considering the myriad breakthroughs of Brief Inquiry: its heartfelt reflections on addiction and recovery, its attempts at generational statements and pop perfection. It was the sound of a band with uncontainable ambition on a creative roll. Like U2 after Achtung Baby or Radiohead after Kid A, they wanted to keep going.
But, well, life happened. They got distracted. Following a series of delays, Notes arrives a full year after its proposed release date and makes no effort to hide its complicated genesis. Written mostly on tour and recorded across 16 different studios, it is the band’s longest and most uncentered album; their funniest and most earnest. It features numerous guest appearances (Phoebe Bridgers, FKA twigs, Jamaican reggae DJ Cutty Ranks) and an EP’s worth of tracks with no vocals at all. Just to get to the second actual song, you have to make it through two symphonic pieces—one of which is almost five minutes long and features a sobering speech from climate activist Greta Thunberg—and the early single “People,” a throat-shredding alt-rock manifesto that suggests we might already be doomed.
The album’s remaining 70 minutes are more introspective but no less sprawling: From radiant, thumping dancehall to the barest folk songs Healy has ever sung, Notes ups the ante on every challenge the 1975 have posed since debuting as a polarizing emo band in the early 2010s. It is neither their Zooropa nor their Amnesiac; at times, it doesn’t quite know what it is. But once again, they mostly pull it off. The band’s secret weapon remains drummer and producer George Daniel, who has grown increasingly adept at matching Healy’s every whim as a songwriter. It’s easy to take for granted by now that, no matter what style the 1975 attempt, it will at least sound great. A slapstick country-emo travelogue? Go for it. A shoegaze snippet with Auto-Tuned ad-libs? Why not. A lush, futuristic Americana story-song? Fetch the pedal steel.
From a production standpoint, Notes is their most intricate and impressive work. It seems they have learned the success of a song like “Love It If We Made It” wasn’t just due to Healy’s grand, unifying lyrics: It was the pounding drums, the anxious string arrangement, the sheer momentum that made it not only read like an anthem torn from the headlines but also feel like one. The music on Notes is a narrative unto itself, a spiral into a haywire, alienated mind. “Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)” spills late-night heartbreak to a pitched-up Temptations sample; the exquisite “Frail State of Mind” ascends from glitchy two-step as Healy sings about a loosening sense of security. “Go outside? Seems unlikely,” he sings in its opening lyrics, and, from that transmission, the record only grows more isolated and uncertain.
This sense of solitude unifies the vast changes in production, and even pop turns like “What Should I Say” feel more geared for dimly lit bedrooms than mass gatherings. Healy’s writing takes us to settings that match: alone at the computer, at parties he is desperate to leave, on dates full of boredom and resentment, amid conversations he can’t escape. A verse in the acoustic song “Playing on My Mind” goes as follows:
I met one of your friends
And it was dead nice, he was fine
But he said, “Things that interest me exist outside of space and time”
Now I know I should have left it but, who says that?
What a sigh
Earlier in his career, Healy might have been the one babbling on. Nowadays, he seems more interested in observing from the sidelines, lending a familiar, unglamorous intimacy to his portraits of relationships. The couple in “The Birthday Party” bicker about each other’s bathroom habits, while the Britpop rom-com “Me & You Together Song” finds its starring characters smiling through an underwhelming Christmas outing: “It was shit but we were happy.” The most purely romantic moment arrives in the closing “Guys,” where Healy reflects on his friendship with his bandmates, who he’s known since high school. “You’re the love of my life,” he sings sweetly. On an album that spins from societal collapse through personal catastrophe, it is a small, uncomplicated gesture: an unlikely ode to consistency from a songwriter who has spent his career at war with this very notion.
For all its sonic experiments, Notes is filled with these quiet, self-affirming moments. If the 1975’s early work felt like pop music compulsively interrupted with provocations and footnotes, then Notes takes an inverse approach: It is a long, messy experiment that just so happens to peak with some of their sharpest songs. I imagine them piecing the whole thing together like a family moving to a new home, knee-deep in the clutter, where they might come upon a wholesome duet between Healy and his father (“Don’t Worry”), a six-minute extension of the band’s flirtations with UK garage (“Having No Head”), or a self-referential cry into the void about fame (“Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied”). It can feel indulgent. Yes, they have expressed some of these thoughts more succinctly in the past; and yes, the tracklist could be condensed so that you don’t have to clear your schedule to get through it. But when everything clicks, their work has never sounded so patient, so personal.
Take, for example, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know),” a late-album highlight and their highest-charting single to date in the UK. Evolving from a slow-building intro into a mechanical chug, it is the record’s closest thing to a typical 1975 song—a glittery ’80s arrangement, a ridiculous saxophone solo, a charmingly sleazy hook. All the while, Healy sings about communing with the camgirl of his dreams. In each verse, he makes his way toward the laptop; in the chorus, he is seduced into a kind of digital heaven. “I need to get back,” he sings with bravado. “I’ve gotta see the girl on a screen.” Is it love? Will it last? Does it matter? Of course not. He’s doomed, as usual. And yet, backed by a band who can transform into whatever symphony blossoms in his head, a group who have settled into a personality so distinctly their own that a hundred genre exercises couldn’t strip it away, Healy seems focused, present in the moment. It sounds a little like devotion. | 2020-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit / Interscope | May 22, 2020 | 8 | c14a6569-983e-47eb-8c5a-bdd370549746 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On their second record, the Orlando duo create a world of cozy, minimalist pop. | On their second record, the Orlando duo create a world of cozy, minimalist pop. | SALES: forever & ever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sales-forever-and-ever/ | forever & ever | In SALES’ world, everything has its place. Unlike the messy shelves of a discounted goods rack or the garish neon stickers on clearance markdowns that the moniker suggests, the Orlando duo make shipshape indie pop with a sleek packaging. Since forming in 2013, singer/guitarist Lauren Morgan and producer/guitarist Jordan Shih have taken their time sharing music as an independent and self-managed entity, releasing a steady stream of singles and EPs before dropping their self-titled debut in 2016. Before SALES, the band’s every element was coordinated: the color-block collage artwork, the tight-knit trip-hop production, Morgan’s insouciant singing style. The aesthetic-heavy product gained them a following online, all without the help of a label or promoter. Now, as the duo return with their sophomore album, forever & ever, SALES’ mellow perfectionism is beginning to loosen, allowing their songwriting to capture a wider emotional range.
Written, recorded, and mixed between their two bedroom studios, forever & ever spends as much time exploring dream pop airiness and electronic minimalism as it does romanticizing its guitar parts. A song like “You Look Well” centers around a simple guitar melody and Shih’s thudding electric drums, creating a heavy fog over the course of the song as the melody lodges itself in your brain. Much of that haze comes from Morgan, who sings in a nonchalant manner that favors the plump yet hushed enunciation of Beach House’s Victoria Legrand. On standout single “Off and On,” her voice skates across the bare and looping guitar lines, transforming what could be misread as an homage to the xx into a more personal song. The duo’s dexterous guitar-work prioritizes sparse melodies and every song sounds comfortably bare, steeping in its own cozy, minimalist pop space.
The skill with which SALES employ their drum machine (cheekily referred to as their “third, uncredited member”) gives the conventionally robotic instrument the illusion of being ambulatory. During “Talk a Lot,” short hi-hat taps and staccato bass-drum kicks take on the life of a jazz drummer while Shih and Morgan harmonize guitars. It sounds like there’s room to improvise, but every note and its delivery feels purposefully chosen to give the album its crisp, clean sound.
The album pulls focus toward the blasé emotion in Morgan’s voice. She overcomes day-to-day problems, sanding them down until they lose their edge, but her words are too breathy to completely decipher. So as the album opens with one of those reflections (“You work in the mornings/A boring 9-to-5/And you’re spent”), SALES make it clear that this time around they’re zoned in on a larger feeling, not a smaller moment. By setting abstract emotions against a perpetually chill backdrop , SALES create a world of lo-fi pop on forever & ever that’s perfectly pristine yet easy to get lost in all the same. | 2018-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | SALES Universe | August 16, 2018 | 7 | c14d6abc-3c02-4ec7-b6f4-aee762e9f74e | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The latest record from the UK electronic musician is built primarily on the guitar synthesizer, setting a tone that feels gently euphoric, whimsical, and bittersweet. | The latest record from the UK electronic musician is built primarily on the guitar synthesizer, setting a tone that feels gently euphoric, whimsical, and bittersweet. | Memotone: How Was Your Life? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/memotone-how-was-your-life/ | How Was Your Life? | Bristol’s Will Yates makes music inspired by folk rituals and ley lines—music of landscape and weather, of legend and myth. Recording under the aliases Half Nelson, O.G. Jigg, and, mainly, Memotone, he has made records based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the 19th-century Scottish poet James Hogg; he has written for chamber ensembles and soundtracked a short film about his father’s first fishing rod. It is electronic music, but it runs counter to the genre’s futurist thrust. In the tradition of Boards of Canada, he uses obsolete technology to capture both bucolic calm and elegiac nostalgia, and it’s not always clear where the catgut ends and the circuitry begins. Woodwinds are frequently refracted through eerie digital processing, conjuring the parallel fifths of Jon Hassell’s horn lines. Memotone’s hyperreal medievalism feels suited for post-apocalyptic ceremonies. It’s the kind of thing you imagine the troubadours of Station Eleven getting up to—powering salvaged synths and cassette decks with jury-rigged solar batteries, and capturing fading echoes of 20th-century recorded history (jazz, minimalism, exotica, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) before the last tape can crumble to dust.
On How Was Your Life?, Yates turns his attention to a more recent artifact: a Roland GR 33 guitar synthesizer from the 2000s. The secondhand purchase afforded him a newfound freedom, unlocking a range of tones that mimicked instruments outside his skill set: double bass, fretless bass, even tabla. He fashioned the album out of extended studio improvisations, abandoning his frequently conceptual way of working. In recent years, much of Yates’ music has been heavy on murky, dissonant frequencies, as though he were rooting around for something in a peat bog. But How Was Your Life? is marked by a newfound clarity, buoyed by the silvery tendrils of guitar; it is his lightest and most unburdened record in some time, imbued with an almost Balearic spirit of ease.
The opening “Paradise Drips” lays out the record’s palette. Feedback shrieks like a seagull; digital mallets establish a bright rhythm that drips like the eaves after a summer storm; a guitar melody with heavy glissando invokes the Durutti Column’s liquid fretwork. Structurally, it just sort of drifts, more moodpiece than song: The guitar bobs and weaves over steady, lackadaisical conga slaps, and guitar figures slip sideways and unravel into dissonance. “Open World” is similarly freeform, led by an ersatz stand-up bass solo and pitch-bent flute synths that wander blithely through a glowing field of layered pads. Its movements are pleasantly aimless, vacillating between melody and meandering, happy to linger on the idyllic vistas of Memotone’s uncanny valley.
Yate’s characteristic Hassell-like harmonies occasionally wear out their welcome. They’re so reliably eerie, they feel a little bit like an emotional cheat code, as well as faintly cloying. Fortunately, there are enough ideas in play that any such momentary distaste quickly dissipates. “Forest Zone” rides a loping water-droplet rhythm and understated funk bass. “Carved by the Moon” is a gorgeous soundtrack miniature for strings that reveals remarkably sophisticated chord progressions and voicings. “Canteen Sandwich,” on the other hand, is a kind of bell-tone techno, like Jeff Mills gone gamelan, while the pensive clarinets and pulsing mallets of “Lonehead” evoke Talk Talk covering Steve Reich.
What’s most convincing about How Was Your Life? is neither the technological tricks nor the record-collector references, but rather its understated emotional register. The precise mood is as impossible to pin down as a spring breeze, but it is by turn gently euphoric, whimsical, and bittersweet. The album’s title suggests a deathbed glance back, and, given Yates’ ecological interests and the perilous state of the planet, perhaps that’s just what it is: a fond sunset appraisal of a beautiful place out in the country, before the skies darken one last time. | 2023-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Impatience | May 17, 2023 | 6.9 | c15415dd-a77d-48ae-8345-e78f603821d7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The hip-hop collective’s sixth album refocuses on melody and economy, resulting in the group’s most focused and impressive record yet. | The hip-hop collective’s sixth album refocuses on melody and economy, resulting in the group’s most focused and impressive record yet. | BROCKHAMPTON: ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-roadrunner-new-light-new-machine/ | ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE | Something changed for Brockhampton with “Sugar.” The unobtrusive and charming 2019 ballad was the group’s most successful single by many metrics—their lone entry on Billboard’s Hot 100 (No. 66), it was certified platinum by the RIAA and the band’s first song to get an official remix, featuring Dua Lipa, no less. “Sugar” is also their most traditional song, structured to give the showcased members a fitting role. Guest Ryan Beatty sings the inviting chorus; Dom McLennon and Matt Champion rap solid verses; Bearface handles a pre-chorus and the outro; and leader Kevin Abstract sings the bridge. No one is rapping about One Direction, there aren’t loud, conspicuous production gimmicks, and it’s finished in a tidy 205 seconds. In the best of ways, it could be anyone’s song.
Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, the boisterous yet sensitive hip-hop collective’s sixth album, keeps this focus on melody and economy, resulting in their most impressive record. This is Brockhampton at their most efficient, paring back the instrumentals and woebegone attempts at self-examination. Previously, Brockhampton songs were long and incoherent, which made their albums long and incoherent. A signature Brockhampton beat was built with a unique, often wacky, loop: “Boogie” has a whooping siren; “Gold” has an arpeggio; “Boy Bye” has what I can best describe as pizzicato MIDI violin.
The beats are subtler on Roadrunner, with the flourishes dialed down and the emphasis placed on mood: wistful bliss on “Chain On” and “When I Ball,” impassioned swagger on “Bankroll.” Without the vestigial honks and boops cluttering the foreground, the music is sturdy and even sumptuous, as with the suite of “Bankroll,” “The Light,” and “Windows,” all co-produced by Abstract, Romil Hemnani, and Jabari Manwa. On these three songs, the strongest run of the album, you feel the rappers’ brash confidence, no matter if they’re spitting bluster or opening up. It’s enthralling.
Since their inception, Brockhampton have prioritized unchecked creativity and unfiltered self-expression over discipline or structure. It’s why their songs have too many verses, their albums have too many failed experiments, and it’s how you get something like Iridescence’s “Honey,” which feels like a collection of rough drafts sewn together. Roadrunner pressurizes this scattered energy. Only one song—the well-earned posse cut “Windows,” with a thumping Houston-style beat—features a glut of verses, while the others emphasize members’ specific talents, as when Merlyn Wood plays hype man on “Buzzcut.”
The group also continues to blur its line between hip-hop and pop. The rap beats are polished enough to complement the boy-band cuts, which maintain a metronomic quality. The pop song “I’ll Take You On,” in particular, is a triumph, balancing a quietly skittering backbeat with lovesick harmonies. For all of their focus on colorful individuality, they sound best when they finally cohere into a synchronized unit.
Their newfound discipline extends to their signature confessionals. In the past, a Brockhampton song felt like an opportunity to excavate and explicate every possible trauma, but on Roadrunner, their lives peek through in compelling fragments. On the opening “Buzzcut,” Kevin Abstract threads his colorful rapping with evocative mini-scenes: “Thank God you let me crash on your couch,” “My whole family cursed.” He does the same on “The Light,” rapping stray lines like, “I was broke and desperate, leaning on my best friends.” We don’t need much more.
The darkness shows up most strongly on “The Light,” where operatic wildcard Joba describes his father’s suicide and its tormenting aftermath. Joba’s story is not linear, placing the listener into his maelstrom: “At a loss, aimless,” “Hope it was painless,” “I know you cared,” “Heard my mother squealing,” “I miss you.” His vocals are tactfully fuzzed in the mix, not burying Joba’s words so much as submerging him in the music. It’s maybe the most poignant moment Brockhampton have ever recorded.
Elsewhere, they sound liberated. Matt Champion is their best rapper, and he shines here. His lines might not mean a ton, but they’re wonderful to mimic, like when he raps “Nightmares, it’s fright-filled the moment Freddy tuck you in” on “Windows” or the way he punctuates, “This a jam for you whims and you woes/For the people in the back standin’ on they tippy toes,” on “Don’t Shoot Up the Party.” Everyone sounds like the best versions of themselves—focused, committed, inspired. The joy of being a collective bleeds into every bar and hook. For a change, it’s a Brockhampton album that isn’t telling you what to think or feel; it just sounds good.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Question Everything / RCA | April 14, 2021 | 7.4 | c15a7180-cc4e-4d39-acc9-ac599fcbedbf | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
North Carolina singer-songwriter Justin Morris writes with a sense of offhand intimacy, shading familiar Appalachian guitar textures with memory and ambiguity. | North Carolina singer-songwriter Justin Morris writes with a sense of offhand intimacy, shading familiar Appalachian guitar textures with memory and ambiguity. | Sluice: Radial Gate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sluice-radial-gate/ | Radial Gate | Sometimes it seems like Justin Morris wishes he were an eagle. Planes and birds of prey soar above Radial Gate, the Durham, North Carolina folk musician’s second album as Sluice. From the ground, Morris sings of dirt paths sooted with millworkers’ boots and creeks deep enough to drown in. “I am a cartoon Callahan,” he sings on “Fourth of July,” describing a beer-soaked riverside setting like that of Smog’s “Drinking at the Dam.” Though the premise of Radial Gate might threaten Bill Callahan pastiche, Morris is more like Callahan’s tenderhearted, New Sincerist cousin. He’s a Callahan without the temperance of a wise and wizened disposition, without the sourness; a Callahan who would sing about watching his friends’ girlfriends get ready for a party and conclude, “It’s a precious thing,” as Morris does on the album’s closer.
Morris comes by this eagle-eyed sense of wonder not out of naivety, but as a preservationist. He inscribes serene and untroubled memories into the bucolic details of Durham’s forests, skies, and bodies of water, before gently gesturing toward industrial violence. “That damn chainsaw’s still trying to rip us out,” he sings with a soft lilt on “Mill.” Radial Gate isn’t as saccharinely single-noted as Morris’ honeyed voice and major-key Appalachian guitar melodies suggest. Each song is flooded with ambiguity. Natural beauty is underpinned by a cruel dramatic irony; Morris acquaints you with each tree, knowing that they—alongside the unsullied memories of his childhood—will be chainsawed down.
There’s a constant feeling of spontaneity in Morris’ voice, which sounds like the meeting point between Peter Broderick’s cajoling timbre and Jason Molina’s cool unnerve. He occupies multiple states and time frames at once; he is both an eagle and a dormouse on the ground, simultaneously 9 and 25. Sometimes the switch is as fast as a jump cut. “What’s that, is that a bald eagle? No, that’s a crow,” he sings between soft peals of pedal steel on “Fourth of July.” With pacing that is often surprising, listening to Radial Gate feels like watching a watercolorist paint a landscape in real time. “And it feels…it feels,” Morris sings with masterfully performed reluctance on “Centurion.”
Contrary to the project’s namesakes—which suggest a systematic control of (water)flow—the songs on Radial Gate leak out like a small flood, unfurling without a hook or central focus. At times Morris’ songwriting can feel piecemeal, as when he hurries between scenes of people, weddings, and travel on “New Leicester” (with its aforementioned “beautiful girlfriends” tableau). Morris is a curious, sometimes revelatory songwriter, but his revelations need more refinement to really land. On “Acts 9:3” he takes “a surprise shit” in the woods and is “struck by the beauty and the comedy of attempting to exist,” an attempt at cosmic pithiness that reads more like AI-generated Neutral Milk Hotel. Still, Radial Gate feels like a re-education in sincerity, a lesson in the perception of beauty. Justin Morris is no Bill Callahan, but that’s something to be thankful for. A pair of open eyes above a simple open heart is also capable of opening the floodgates. | 2023-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ruination | March 15, 2023 | 7.2 | c15bf9db-0821-4d8d-be11-e22b9e7fe391 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Six years after their breakout album, the Brooklyn chiptune veterans turn inward and re-assess their hedonism. | Six years after their breakout album, the Brooklyn chiptune veterans turn inward and re-assess their hedonism. | Anamanaguchi: [USA] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anamanaguchi-usa/ | [USA] | Six years ago, Brooklyn chiptune band Anamanaguchi—beloved for their blend of guitars and low-bit video game sounds—crowdfunded $277,399 in support of their second album, Endless Fantasy. Newly flush with cash, they set to work sending pizza to space. Footage of the lonely cosmic slice eventually made its way into a music video, but it’s hard not to roll your eyes at the whole scenario: Four men in their mid-20s convince their extremely logged-on fans to give them a quarter of a million and proceed to blow it on a dollar slice in the name of art. Yet, goofy as the space pizza was, the stunt netted Anamanaguchi a level of press coverage they’d never seen before. It landed them a slot on Fallon, a landmark moment for chiptune devotees. The album itself was a riotous genre masterpiece full of cutesy cat sounds, Weezer-esque turbo-punk, and square-wave synth-pop.
But no fantasy is endless. In 2014, as the band announced that their next album would be titled [USA], the country’s reality began to visibly splinter. That same year, the reactionary ideology behind Gamergate sent shockwaves through the gaming community and laid out a blueprint for the online culture wars. Amid all of this, Anamanaguchi began to look inward, troubled by the “indulgent” daydreaming of their 75-minute double album. “When people ask why it was so sugar-coated before, it’s because things were more sugar-coated,” guitarist Ary Warnaar recently said. “I wasn’t losing friends that were dying when I was younger. I am now.”
Five years in the making, [USA] addresses these “unavoidable realities” for the first time. Neither Warnaar nor co-leader Peter Berkman, who share songwriting duties, sing on the album. Instead, they recruit a handful of female vocalists—former tourmate and virtual Japanese Vocaloid pop star Hatsune Miku among them—to lend their voices on certain tracks. Still, with the exception of Grimes collaborator HANA’s star turn on the blown-out synth-pop anthem “On My Own,” the vocal features are inessential. It falls to Berkman and Warnaar to compose intentional arrangements that demonstrate just how Anamanaguchi’s perspective has shifted.
Endless Fantasy was predicated on a slapdash marriage of power-pop and vintage video game palettes, and while the premise remains, [USA] feels more purposeful and less hedonistic. The previous album’s neon-soaked aesthetic is replaced by a more refined synthesis of those same musical influences, capable of capturing anxiety as well as joy. No longer simply mining the nostalgia archives for inspirational SoundFonts, Anamanaguchi are now interrogating what it means to be the most prominent representatives of chiptune, a niche genre predicated on recontextualizing the escapist magic of an entirely separate artistic medium.
Like some of the most celebrated games in recent memory, [USA] uses breaks in the fourth wall to subvert expectations. For every anthemic breakdown, there’s a jab of melancholia, a taste of the real world. The jagged synthesizer cliffs of “Tear,” the album’s emotional centerpiece, fall away at the beginning of “We Die,” replaced by a cascade of non sequiturs: flashes of acoustic guitar, synthesized vocal fragments, muted handclaps. “Speak to You [Memory Messengers]” is an innocuous interlude until it abruptly cuts off with the digital equivalent of a guitar cable jiggling in its socket. The video for another highlight, “Air On Line,” opens with a 3-D rendering of the space pizza from 2013, before the camera pans out to reveal an entire field of space debris floating in Earth’s orbit. The message is clear: It doesn’t matter how sheltered you want to be. You can’t hide forever.
Nowhere is this more direct than on the opening title track, where dreamy NES peals are interrupted by a murky, vocoded chorus reciting the well-worn patriotic chant now more commonly associated with nationalist rallies: “U-S-A. U-S-A. U-S-A.” As the voices grow louder, the eight-bit plucks glitch and fade, leaving a harsh grind of textures against a barren, warped soundscape. When the chant returns later on “Tear,” this time voiced by a text-to-speech bot, it feels like a pointed reminder: In this life, ugliness and beauty will always exist in equal measure. But the band is quick to clarify that the title [USA] is not actually about the United States of America; it’s more of a shorthand for working through their own identities, “American” included. “It’s about being from somewhere and having like a label attached to you, your personal relationship to it, and your personal relationship with any assumption,” Warnaar has said. “We could’ve called the album [Chiptune], because it’s a genre that’s always attached to us from the beginning.”
They also could have also gone with [Gamer]—after all, it was in this decade that “gamer” really coalesced into an identity. It was gamers behind the targeted harassment campaigns of Gamergate, and it’s also gamers who recently gathered to protest the censorship of a professional esports athlete who spoke out in favor of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. Games, sports, fashion—none of the trifling leisures of modern life can feign political neutrality anymore. In the attempt to find themselves, Anamanaguchi have made their most emotionally grounded record, one that speaks to the fragmented state of their environment. [USA] may rarely achieve the melodically overstuffed giddiness of Endless Fantasy, but it reveals more humanity than first meets the eye.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Polyvinyl | November 6, 2019 | 7.5 | c16a0056-c6fc-4998-9e59-6884656d07e1 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Gregg Gillis continues to do what he does better than anyone on the planet: crafting a truly communal pop experience at a time when such things are rare. | Gregg Gillis continues to do what he does better than anyone on the planet: crafting a truly communal pop experience at a time when such things are rare. | Girl Talk: All Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14899-all-day/ | All Day | The simplest way to a successful and rewarding career: Find something you love doing, then get paid to do it. This is why people talk about Gregg Gillis with a tinge of envy; as Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal has said, Gillis has figured out exactly what he was put on this earth to do--transforming five decades of pop music into seamless, well-paced mixes, and then, live, turning those mixes into a sweaty, tribal celebration of pop music itself. But while 2008's Feed the Animals proved his staying power and solidified his aesthetic, there was a creeping worry that as long as Gillis stuck with this maximalist mashup thing, we'd be stuck having the same arguments for and against him over and over again. So, the question with his fifth album,All Day: In 2010, is a newly minted Girl Talk fan someone who just simply hasn't heard of him before? Or is Gillis capable of converting those still on the fence?
If there are still holdouts, the arguments against Girl Talk are getting slimmer.All Day is a reminder that, despite the number of party DJs and bedroom mashup artists, nobody does it better than Gillis; here he makes the strongest argument yet for himself as a master of his craft. Initially, Gillis comes off like he's baiting his detractors: his "legitimacy" as a DJ has been brought into question on account of having the cleanest hands of any cratedigger, but Gillis goes even more mainstream with his source material (we're talking John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, the Jackson 5...). Compared to All Day, Girl Talk's calling-card LPNight Ripper might as well be Endtroducing... And even those who've enjoyed his work will admit that it's a hell of a lot to take for extended periods of time, yet All Day clocks in at a titanic 71 minutes, almost 20 minutes longer than Animals.
Against those odds, Gillis turns these perceived weaknesses into strengths; as his most fussed-over and carefully plotted album, All Day paradoxically sounds like his most effortless. He's still operating within a "if it's not fun, why do it?" ethos, but fortunately, it doesn't have the same relentless pacing of his prior work, offering a couple of cooldown moments to collect yourself before spazzing out again (the most notable is the "Imagine"/ "One Day" comedown that closes out All Day). Which is crucial, since All Day is meant to be listened to as a whole. (Gillis admits that the seemingly arbitrary track breakdown is solely for ease of navigation.)
But if I need a five-minute fix, "Get It Get It" is the best illustration of how the roomier confines of these songs allow the samples to breathe, evolve, and take on a life of their own without wearing out their welcome. Scoff at the supposed "wackiness" of matching "Pretty Boy Swag" with "Windowlicker" and you'll miss what is arguably Gillis' most inspired musical arrangement. It's not great because of novelty, it's great because it totally makes sense-- it's almost eerie how perfectly Soulja Boy's halting cadences match Aphex Twin's fidgety programming, amplifying the implicit weirdness of the former and the skewed pop instincts of the latter. If M.I.A. realized that agit-pop is greatly enhanced with kickass guitar riffs, she might realize how perfectly tailored Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" is for her protégé Rye Rye. Later in the track, Gillis pairs up the hyper machismo of Pitbull's "Hotel Room Service" with Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" as a musical illustration of Girl Talk's general outlook, a unity borne of the search for hedonistic pleasure.
Befitting the party-starting functionality of All Day, it doesn't ever go into the chin-stroking appeal of obvious precedent Plunderphonics, and the samples aren't given new contexts so much as new purposes. It's pretty much impossible for "Sunshine of Your Love" to sound new, but it's a blast to drop the flower-power lyrics and have Biggie's "Nasty Boy" bring out the lurid appeal of the riffs (lolz at Eric Clapton's soloing beginning with the line "then I whipped it out"). And of course, there's the Easter eggs, the knowing winks and the in-jokes-- an instantly recognizable clip from "One More Time" sneaks in for a split second, but Daft Punk lay low for a minute or two before resurfacing for "Digital Love". Or chopping up Big Boi's "Shutterbug" to stress the line "I'm double-fisting/ If you're empty you can grab a cup." Personally, I think the funniest moment is intentionally using the commonly misheard chorus of "1901" (it's not "falling," people!) as a punctuation to Ludacris saying "how low can you go?" And the instrumental from "Mr. Big Stuff" allows the listener to clown Wale's noxious "Pretty Girls" hook without saying a word.
Yes, the headslap moments aren't completely eliminated, just far less frequent ("Jane Says"/"Teach Me How to Dougie" sticks out the most), but even the perceived "mistakes" have a plan-- at first, the indelible drum sound from "Idioteque" sounds horribly beatmatched with the Isley Brothers' "Shout", but that's just the second-long windup before hurtling into a crazed strip-club banger. And while some might see the use of the piano coda from "Layla" backing B.o.B.'s "Haterz Everywhere" as sacrilege, the two achieve a bizarre, complex harmony with each other. As far as what the use of Fugazi's "Waiting Room" as the foundation for a "Rude Boy" mashup is supposed to "mean"? I'll allow that Gillis is fucking with us sometimes.
When Girl Talk broke through in 2006 with Night Ripper, the album was often credited for reflecting the new listening habits afforded by the Internet, where long-held grudges were dropped and pop, indie rock, classic AOR, and mainstream rap were on equal playing fields. If only that were true; it's easier than ever to wall yourself off from music you dismiss on principle alone, and if we're living in a time when Arcade Fire fans don't want to have their sincerity questioned when they ride for the cause of Waka Flocka Flame or Birdman ("Wake Up" bridges the gap here between "Hard in Da Paint" and "Money to Blow"), I must've missed it.
What All Day and Girl Talk himself are nostalgic for is not a specific sound or even a specific period of time, even though Gillis' sweet spot is alt-rock and pop-rap from the 90s. It's not "hey, remember 'Thunder Kiss '65'" or, "whoa, what happened to Skee-Lo," but rather nostalgia for a time when MTV and radio were the primary methods of conveyance. They weren't perfect, but there was a certain thrill to being something of a captive audience, of letting yourself go and being impressionable for just once, finding out that "Possum Kingdom" was pretty rad while waiting for a new Beck single, that both "Flava in Ya Ear" and "Liquid Swords" were great in their own way and that your parents liked some cool shit after all once you discovered the classic rock station. It's fitting that Gillis went old-school and "released" All Day so that everyone could have it at the same time: He wants nothing more than to recapture the thrill of a true communal pop experience. | 2010-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Illegal Art | November 29, 2010 | 8.3 | c16b3578-5bd1-46a9-8f8a-a08d500b8431 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On J. Cole’s refreshing and lively new album, the rapper relaxes his grip around the mic and thrives when he’s collaborating, not when he’s making deadly serious legacy raps. | On J. Cole’s refreshing and lively new album, the rapper relaxes his grip around the mic and thrives when he’s collaborating, not when he’s making deadly serious legacy raps. | J. Cole: The Off-Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-cole-the-off-season/ | The Off-Season | Since 2011’s Cole World: The Sideline Story, every J. Cole album has been completely obsessed with being the one that earns him his place on the podium next to his idols Biggie, Jay, and Nas. It was like he read a copy of How to Make a Classic Rap Album for Dummies and has been trying to replicate it ever since. It never quite happened, but it had nothing to do with his skill. He’s a clever lyricist who can make lines stick for both good and bad reasons, the type of a storyteller who could get you to pull up a chair and listen, and his beats may sound familiar but they have this warmth to them that can produce the rare Billboard hit that feels intimate.
It’s just that he’s so deadly serious that he can make rap sound like studying for the SATs. In a recent interview with Slam, he opened up about how he was once so tormented by aspirations to make long-lasting music that he wouldn’t even allow himself to complete watching a full season of television. Imagine not letting yourself binge-watch Bob’s Burgers or whatever because you’re too busy trying to make the next The Blueprint! Sounds terrible! Well, finally he’s come to the realization he needs to chill out. Refreshingly, his latest album The Off-Season isn’t so damn uptight.
The Off-Season is a much-needed break from the heavy-handed preachiness that made KOD and 4 Your Eyez Only such slogs to get through. He pulls back slightly from the narrative form of writing (sorry, to the “Wet Dreamz” heads but no virginity tales on this one) in favor of more punchlines and wordplay. This switch doesn’t suddenly turn him into a Flint rapper, but it does sound like he’s having fun for once.
That liveliness comes out on the album’s collaborations. On “My Life,” Fayetteville crooner Morray’s hook repurposes Pharoahe Monch lyrics through vocals that sound like he’s leading a church choir, 21 Savage’s guest appearance is filled with the warmest death threats, and the smoky beat is done by Cole with help from Jake One and Wu10. This gives him the freedom to pour most of his energy into his verse, which catches a nice balance between the sort of shallow but earnest introspection he’s known for and more trivial things that just sound cool: “Wanna be in the spot like where every bitch want me like Rihanna droppin’ new Fenty,” he raps. The same could be said for “Pride Is the Devil,” where, annoying-Cole-singing aside, his thoughtfulness is complemented by Lil Baby being much less thoughtful: “Got my feet up, I paid silly bands to have sex on the jet.”
But you can still subtly feel that weight on Cole’s shoulders. “Applying Pressure” feels tense, made worse by a lifeless self-produced boom-bap instrumental that sounds like the background music for a ’90s UPN sitcom and some bars that have become expected of the out of touch rap elite: “If you broke and clownin’ a millionaire, the joke is on you.” (Nas, would approve of this one.) Some choices feel incredibly forced as well. Most notably the intro where he squeezes some cliché flexing in between a half-assed Cam’ron monologue and the jarring tonal shift into Lil Jon chants. Likewise “Let Go My Hand” would probably fall similarly flat if it wasn’t so funny. In what is supposed to be a sincere moment, he reveals that he once got into a scuffle with Diddy and in the very same song, Diddy shows up to speak some sort of fake enlightened prayer. None of this works, because no one cares about this beef, especially Diddy, who instead uses his studio time to promote his rebrand into Tony Robbins.
In the build-up to this album, Cole put out a mini-documentary that asks the question: Why is it so hard to be great in rap as you get older? Cole, now 36, believes that he’s solved it, though his answer is actually meaningless motivational speak about hunger and putting in the work and other sayings that belong on a Nike T-shirt. But actually getting older in rap is difficult because life is not the same. Many hugely successful rappers have struggled through this phase, not because they became worse lyricists, but they were clinging to the old days instead of reflecting this change. It happened to Jay on The Blueprint 3, Nas back during his “Hip Hop is Dead” era, and Kanye sometime before or after The Life of Pablo. Lots of finger-wagging and résumé raps about their accomplishments and outside endeavors. By taking a step back on The Off-Season, Cole mostly avoids that, even if he still doesn’t have a spot in those conversations he dreams of.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dreamville / Interscope / Roc Nation | May 18, 2021 | 6.5 | c16f4bee-9365-4c50-a1f1-eed9a58f34c0 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Earl Sweatshirt used to make you sift through the mud to find the gold. On his latest album, the nuggets are gleaming right on the surface. | Earl Sweatshirt used to make you sift through the mud to find the gold. On his latest album, the nuggets are gleaming right on the surface. | Earl Sweatshirt: Sick! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-sick/ | Sick! | Since 2013, Earl Sweatshirt has been committed to drawing out his thoughts in the fewest words possible. Both his debut album, Doris, and 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside refined the verbose rhymes the California rapper made his name on while under Odd Future’s wing in the early 2010s. His love of words remained but he was searching for clarity, a quicker route to the sources of his anguish: his then-damaged relationship with his mother; the loss of his grandmother in 2013 and his father in 2017; and the constant negotiations of being young, Black, and in the limelight. His latest handful of projects—2018’s firestarter Some Rap Songs and 2019’s foreboding Feet of Clay—settled into language both blunt and poetic while burying themselves in soupy vocal mixes and tar-soaked beats. Their lyrics ventured into the deep waters of Earl’s mind and funneled back undiluted grief, trauma, and joy.
Those thoughts haven’t gone away on Earl’s newest album, Sick!, but there’s more talk of acceptance, balance, and moving forward in the face of new challenges. “I came from out the thicket smiling,” he says on the opening “Old Friend,” like a man home from war. “Link up for some feasible methods to free yourself/Split it with my hand like cigarills.” Earl used to make you sift through the mud to find the gold. On Sick!, the nuggets are gleaming right on the surface. The raps are as thoughtful and tightly coiled as ever, but now he’s clearer and more confident, approaching his past and his future with hope.
Two of the album’s major influences—new fatherhood and the ongoing pandemic—represent Earl’s own pondering of the orbs of life and death. COVID looms over every song, with overt references to masks, vaccines, and isolation throughout, but the responsibility he feels for his son drives his response to this strange and perilous present. It’s what inspired him to scrap a more “optimistic” 19-track version of the project: “This has been another crash course in the fact that this shit ain’t about me no more,” he recently told Rolling Stone. Dread of COVID dovetails with the album’s broader understanding of truth as the remedy for whatever ails. “This game of telephone massive/I do what I have to with the fragments,” he says on “Tabula Rasa.” It’s urgent and calming all at once.
Regardless of the subject, it’s still a marvel to hear Earl rap. His writing has only grown more concise and his sharp wit and varied delivery conjure detailed images. “Titanic” is a truncated retelling of Earl’s return from Samoa in 2011 that flips references to the late MF DOOM and the biblical Book of Daniel into a tense collage of memories. The verse that closes out “Tabula Rasa” is a technical powerhouse; Earl stagger-steps through the crevices of Theravada and Rob Chambers’ creaky beat, elongating words and phrases for emphasis and creating his own carefully sewn pockets. He makes rewiring a song as it’s playing out—and keeping pace with world-class talents like billy woods and ELUCID of Armand Hammer—look easy.
Duality—nurturing new life while surrounded by death, reconciling old actions with new perspectives—powers the album’s every thought and action. The beats are split evenly between the lo-fi-adjacent work he’s favored for the past five years and the darker side of contemporary trap preferred by artists like Lucki (who Earl’s produced for in the past) and Young Nudy. Tempos and aesthetics change from song to song, sometimes from verse to verse. Alchemist’s more traditional-sounding sour horn loop on “Lye” melts into the synthetic horns and ticking 808s of Samiyam’s “Lobby (Int).” But it’s Detroit producer Black Noi$e who walks away with the MVP title, displaying enviable range over four beat placements—the kaleidoscopic snap of “2010,” the moody trap of “Vision” and “Titanic,” and the simmering guitar samples of “Fire in the Hole.” The whiplash of rap styles emphasizes Earl’s growing confidence in his craft, as does the decision to bring in legendary engineer Young Guru for a decidedly clean mixing job. Compared to Earl’s earlier work, Sick! is literally and figuratively crystal clear.
The title track ends with a quote from the 1979 documentary Music Is the Weapon, spoken by Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti: “As far as Africa is concerned, music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution. Music is the weapon.” Earl has used music as a weapon for reasons both intuitive and juvenile in the past, but on Sick!, he’s more capable and no longer holding back. Healed scars and lessons learned have pushed him to this point as much as love from his son and kindred spirits like New York rapper AKAI SOLO, who gets a shoutout on “Fire in the Hole,” and longtime friend Na-Kel Smith, who provides ad-libs on “Titanic.” They’re as vital to Earl’s revolutionary spirit as anything passed down from his parents or his surrogate brother, Tyler, the Creator. Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Tan Cressida / Warner | January 14, 2022 | 8.1 | c179890f-b058-4725-b269-74acb610e506 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Back from retirement again, the polarizing, meme-powered pop singer takes up “cowboy emo”: breakup songs with a cartoonish twang and schlocky Western aesthetics. | Back from retirement again, the polarizing, meme-powered pop singer takes up “cowboy emo”: breakup songs with a cartoonish twang and schlocky Western aesthetics. | Oliver Tree: Cowboy Tears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oliver-tree-cowboy-tears/ | Cowboy Tears | Oliver Tree swore he wouldn’t make another album, but here he is, howling away on Jimmy Kimmel Live, taking off his big blue cowboy hat to reveal a series of smaller cowboy hats. This is Tree’s schtick: inane gimmicks that overshadow his music and even his blatant pleas for streams. In recent months, he’s crowned himself the “Vape God” from a bathtub full of e-cigarettes and boasted of spending $20,000 on tinfoil twisted into the shape of an octopus. He promoted his new album’s first single, “Cowboys Don’t Cry,” by claiming his label wouldn’t release the track until 100,000 people pre-saved it. “I’m not good at goodbyes,” he wails at the top of the song—the same phrase he used back when he announced his “retirement.” It was a wink and a middle finger to fans who got the reference, a rebuke for anyone who took him at his word.
Cowboy Tears represents a new era for Tree’s sound and style, as he trades the synth throb of 2020’s Ugly Is Beautiful for a cartoonish twang and schlocky Western aesthetics. “Just an outlaw who only had one friend,” he proclaims on the opener. He calls this “cowboy emo” music, a mix that comes across more like an emoji mashup than a cohesive mesh of genres. There are twinges of acoustic folk (“Swing & A Miss,” “California”), but more often Tree borrows from 2010s pop-rock, with sludgy distortion and reverberating whines. “I was chasing the sound of a song I heard in a Taco Bell when I was five years old,” Tree, 28, said of the album. He comes closer to the shaggy sounds of Grouplove doing their best Pixies impression, or Cage the Elephant mimicking Modest Mouse. Travis Barker offers his requisite stamp on any TikToker-turned-artist’s album, and Tree’s nasally snarls tip into Machine Gun Kelly cosplay, especially on the Barker-produced “Cigarettes.”
Eager to convince his audience that absurdity is inherently nuanced, Tree defaults to disgust. On “Cigarettes,” he crams 20 cigs into his mouth at once. On “Playing With Fire,” he moans about “drool hanging down from my double chin.” “I’m a weirdo, I’m a freak,” he proclaims on “Freaks & Geeks,” with the sincerity of a Riverdale monologue. On “Suitcase Filled With Cash,” he narrates a pile of burning money by the side of the road, a supposed statement that’s more chirpy campfire singalong than anti-consumerist anthem. “Some people are so poor that all they have is money,” he wails. For all this gesturing at subversion, Tree stays within his comfort zone: Many other songs are breakup ballads with a side of country imagery and generic lyrics that leave the listener filling the blanks (“I miss the things we used to do,” he hollers on one; “Riding ’round this wagon wheel, if you catch my drift,” he croons on another).
Tree told an interviewer that his study of Pink Floyd inspired him to tackle the album’s range of weighty themes. According to Tree, these include “money, time, religion and addiction,” motifs that rarely manifest in the actual lyrics. There is a darkness underpinning Cowboy Tears: jarring asides about Tree’s longing for death and plans for his own burial. He never lingers long enough to elucidate whether they’re more than just a facet of a melancholy “emo” aesthetic. Even when he grasps at a compelling concept—like presenting “Cowboys Don’t Cry” as a challenge to traditional masculinity—he never fleshes out a narrative or truly articulates a stance. His character’s main trait is a lack of substance; the songs are almost an afterthought in the project of performing Oliver Tree. There’s only one real surprise on Cowboy Tears, a little pulse of self-awareness as he breaks through the fourth wall. “I’m a dumbass, but people love that,” he sings on “Freaks & Geeks,” sounding a little weary of the charade, a little sick of his own bullshit. But he couldn’t be Oliver Tree without it. | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | February 23, 2022 | 4.8 | c19d1b00-2910-4290-97b5-c44ddda96003 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The decade’s most tantalizing pop enigma officially releases a trove of unfinished material that was originally leaked online six years ago. | The decade’s most tantalizing pop enigma officially releases a trove of unfinished material that was originally leaked online six years ago. | Jai Paul: Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jai-paul-leak-04-13-bait-ones/ | Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) | This is not the debut album from Jai Paul. It’s a collection of largely incomplete drafts that was stolen and illegally posted online in April 2013. Ever since, the 16-song release has lived on via dusty MP3s and cobbled-together YouTube playlists as a testament to boundless, unrealized promise. All the while, the London singer and producer stayed almost completely silent, creating a vacuum for an insatiable internet to fill with conspiracies, desires, and frustrations. That is, until last weekend.
On June 1, along with two totally new songs, Paul put this work that was once ripped from his hands onto streaming services as well as his own website, alongside a heartfelt note to fans. “I’ve grown to appreciate that people have enjoyed that music and lived with it, and I accept that there is no way to put that shit back in the box,” the 30-year-old wrote. “Looking back, it’s sad to think about what could have been, but it is what it is and I had to let go.” Elsewhere in the statement, he candidly discussed the seismic breach of trust he felt following the initial leak as well as an unmoored feeling of being perpetually misunderstood. He wrote of a withdrawal, a breakdown, and a slow trek toward recovery, aided by therapy. The official release of the unofficial document Paul has decided to call Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones)—Bait Ones being a slangy working title for the project during the original sessions—brings with it a sense of closure, of finally wrangling some dominion over chaos.
An ability to control the uncontrollable is part of what made Jai Paul’s music so mesmerizing in the first place. On the couple of songs he properly released before the leak, “BTSTU (Edit)” and “jasmine (demo),” he bent pop music to his off-kilter will. Both tracks, which also appear on Bait Ones, are at once propulsive and elusive, like quicksand pumping out of a speaker cone, with Paul’s mumbling falsetto self-consciously buried in the mix (in the recent note, he mentioned, “It will always be a little painful for me to listen to myself.”) Here was a guy in his early 20s spiking his obsessions with J Dilla, Michael Jackson, and D’Angelo with uncanny pauses, flyby instrument breaks, and laser zaps—a meticulous introvert whose slippery sound was soon being sampled by Drake and Beyoncé.
When Paul arrived at the start of the decade, he found himself among a vanguard of innovative and ambitious musicians who were opening up a dialog with the major pop establishment. James Blake was stretching Destiny’s Child songs into alien new shapes; Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon was wailing on Kanye records; Rostam Batmanglij was toying with Auto-Tune in Vampire Weekend and Discovery; Frank Ocean was covering Coldplay with startling sincerity. Leading up to the 2013 leak, some of the feverish anticipation surrounding Paul’s official debut album involved the widespread notion that it was high time for him to fully claim his place alongside such peers—and that, if things fell into place, he could very well surpass them all. Then, everything fell apart.
But the sketchy tracks that now comprise Bait Ones endured for good reason. To be clear, there are some differences between the original leak and this new version: Both are 16 tracks long and run around 38 minutes, but Bait Ones does not include some of the goofily endearing snatches of dialog from “Gossip Girl,” Harry Potter movies, and Tomb Raider video games due to sample-clearance issues. The fidelity of Bait Ones is sharper and richer than the low-quality leaked version, though the tracks were not remixed. Instead, an engineer combed through Paul’s archive of high-quality files in order to find the closest matches to each leaked song, according to his label, XL.
Generally though, perhaps the most surprising thing about this peculiar re-release is how much hasn’t changed. Paul himself commented on the awkwardness of the endeavor in his statement. “It’s completely surreal to me that this music will now exist officially in this form, unfinished, and even sequenced by the people who leaked it!” he admitted, adding that, “Much of the tracking and production work was there, but it’s a shame about the scratch vocals and the overall mix.”
The titles of 11 of the 16 songs here are amended with a word that serves as a lowkey warning, and a reminder: “Unfinished.” This is a little ironic, considering how the excitement of Paul’s music was always tangled up in its undoneness; official early singles “BTSTU (Edit)” and “jasmine (demo)” both had parenthetical notes in their names, suggesting eternal works in progress. All of it hinted at a keen understanding of the forever-tweaking online realm years before Kanye deemed his morphing The Life of Pablo a “living, breathing, changing creative expression” in 2016. But now, Paul’s tendency to leave threads dangling seems less like soothsaying and more like a compulsion: We may never know exactly how unfinished a lot of these tracks are, because Jai Paul may never know, either.
Throughout Bait Ones, Paul sounds like he’s battling his own tentativeness, as he oscillates between indecision and bravado. Like his hero D’Angelo, who sang about his own notoriously measured creative pace on Voodoo’s “The Line,” Paul could be commiserating with impatient fans with lines here like, “This ain’t no quick ting, I won’t lie/It’s gonna take time.” On “Zion Wolf Theme,” he offers up a host of questions about his own fate without any definitive answers. “Can I make you fall in love with me?” he asks over a syncopated, sinister beat that would make prime-era Timbaland envious, perhaps addressing a potentially adoring public. Given the internet drama—and police investigation—surrounding the leak, along with Paul’s subsequent vanishing act, another couplet in the same song now feels tragically prescient: “In the company of thieves/Will I stay or will I leave?”
Elsewhere, though, there are moments where Paul sounds exuberant, like he’s vanquishing his anxious demons one gargantuan synth riff at a time. If “jasmine (demo)” is a slurry drunk dial of a love song, “Genevieve” is its effervescent counterpart. Paul woos back an ex with confidence over a peacocking production jam-packed with cowbell, sci-fi blips, and orgasmic moans (it’s also the only song on Bait Ones with a notable addition compared to the leaked version, in the form of a pleading, minute-long outro). “100,000” is similarly preening, with Paul proclaiming his dominance over any and all competition while copping to the hard work he put in to attain that dominance; in his note, he mentioned that he had been working on the Bait Ones material for six years leading up to the 2013 leak. His conflicted attitude—hesitant but resolute—is stated best on the hook to “BTSTU (demo),” his first-ever release and the last song here, where he deadpans, “I know I’ve been gone a long time/But I’m back and I want what is mine.”
There is just one full track on Bait Ones that does not come with some sort of parenthetical disclaimer in its title: According to this Jai Paul-sanctioned release, “Str8 Outta Mumbai” seems to be, maybe, dare I say—finished. Which makes sense, because it would be impossible to improve upon this. The mind reels when imagining the colossal impact this song could have made if it was given a proper release years ago—the charts it could have climbed, the brains it could have blown, the joy it could have spread. Propelled by samples of Ravi Shankar’s soundtrack for the 1979 Bollywood film Meera, “Str8 Outta Mumbai” is a miracle of cultural synthesis, in which a young British man of Indian descent gloriously expands what pop music can be. At the song’s apex, right when you expect a Prince-ly guitar solo to hit, a Hindi vocal sample erupts instead. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times across the last six years, and that moment still fills me with awe. It’s the sound of borders breaking, of traditions mingling, of a utopian closeness that so often seems so far away. | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | June 6, 2019 | 8.9 | c1a2ae10-81b8-43e8-9389-54437f8f680a | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. The ostensible concept behind this new record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago, a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title. | A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. The ostensible concept behind this new record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago, a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title. | Mekons: Mekons: Ancient & Modern 1911-2011 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15869-mekons-ancient-modern-1911-2011/ | Mekons: Ancient & Modern 1911-2011 | A third of a century into their collaboration, Mekons have wandered so far down their own path that they don't seem to have much in common with anybody else anymore. They're an art-and-literature collective that happens to play music too, a small community who used to be punks together, a hydra whose three heads each sing in a different voice. They've also effectively become process artists. The ideas that shape their songs, and the means by which they create them, are the important part; the songs themselves are basically just documentation.
That makes latter-day albums like Ancient & Modern very interesting in a contemporary-art context, and occasionally tough-going in a putting-on-recordings-and-listening-to-them context. If you're waiting for them to write another "Where Were You?" or "Memphis, Egypt" or "Now We Have the Bomb", don't hold your breath; it's hard to imagine most of these songs being the kind of thing grouchy old guys at Mekons shows yell for. (Mekons shows are heavily populated by grouchy old guys.)
The ostensible concept behind this record is drawing parallels between the present day and 100 years ago. It's a concept that would be entirely opaque without the album's title-- although, of course, with their ties to the art world, Mekons know that titles can carry a lot of weight. Opacity, though, is a persistent problem on Ancient & Modern. A lot of its lyrics might as well have been assembled exquisite-corpse style: "Calling All Demons" wanders from "a reptile thinking its first thoughts" to the head of John the Baptist to "a fan-club meeting down the steps on Briggate" to "ice cream, eggs and bread," and so on. A couple of its lines seem to allude to Oscar Wilde, but that's the only point of coherence to someone who wasn't in the room when it was written.
Still, Mekons know when they've come up with a good phrase, and how to build an arrangement around it. On the title track, it's "I had a minor breakdown," repeated as a refrain while a tiny, four-note figure loops and loops; on Jon Langford's splenetic rocker "Space in Your Face", it's "I was tempted to believe," howled by an ensemble with someone's devotional humming behind them; on the old-timey strut "Geeshie", it's Sally Timms ending some lines with "while there's still time" and others with "try to still time." (That last appears to be a tribute to Geeshie Wiley, the mysterious singer-guitarist who recorded her haunting "Last Kind Word Blues" in 1930. Again, the title's the only explicit cue.)
The other thing Mekons have picked up from contemporary art practice is the principle that, once you've established your voice, you can keep doing variations on the same thing indefinitely. Their lineup has been fairly stable for a couple of decades now, and it's hard to imagine a band more comfortable with each other's playing than they are. When they feel like it, they can conjure moments of disarming beauty. ("I fall asleep when I should pray," Timms and Tom Greenhalgh repeat together-- she's clear-voiced and reserved, he's quavering and sardonic-- and then the song briefly dissolves into a dubbed-out froth of piano and violin before resuming.) When they don't, they still sound like no one but Mekons: prickly, jovial, boozy, resistant to the bourgeois pleasures of rhyme and tune but sometimes seduced by them anyway. For anyone who's not already a Mekons enthusiast, though, this has to be an alarmingly forbidding, cryptic piece of work. | 2011-09-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-09-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Bloodshot / Sin | September 28, 2011 | 6.6 | c1a8b0c4-edcc-4431-b8bd-0b410d3f0469 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Expanded reissues of the Cars’ second and third albums capture the group running like a well-oiled machine, both refining and expanding upon their tightly wound new wave. | Expanded reissues of the Cars’ second and third albums capture the group running like a well-oiled machine, both refining and expanding upon their tightly wound new wave. | The Cars: Candy-O / Panorama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cars-candy-o-panorama/ | Candy-O / Panorama | It’s a tale as old as time: A band arrives on the scene with an album so fully formed, it seems impossible that they could improve upon it, let alone escape its gravitational pull. The Cars would seem to define this trope. Their eponymous 1978 debut contains so many classic rock staples, a modern listener could mistake it for a greatest hits collection. But the band is the exception that proves the rule: They managed to move forward from The Cars with a pair of albums that both refined and expanded their tightly wound new wave.
Those two records—1979’s Candy-O and 1980’s Panorama—received expanded reissues in July, 2017, roughly a year after the group’s entire catalog got boxed up by Rhino, and long after the debut received a double-disc deluxe treatment. Pairing the two helps escape the conventional wisdom that has reduced their respective reputations to a pair of blurbs. Candy-O is generally seen as the explicit sequel to The Cars, while Panorama is the dark detour that tanked on the charts. Both of these assessments have some grounding in reality, but the truth for both records is considerably more complex.
Take Candy-O, which followed their debut by almost exactly a year. Superficially, the album offers another dose of stylish, detached pop with hooks so finely honed, they may have come off an assembly line. Listen closely, though, and Candy-O boasts bolder production that emphasizes the band’s heavy attack and gives plenty of space for guitarist Elliot Easton to spin out composed solos. It sounds not just like new wave—the umbrella term for any pop-oriented counterculture music that arose in the wake of punk—but album rock. Indeed, Candy-O is where the Cars set up shop in the Billboard charts: It went all the way to No. 3 on the Top 200 (The Cars went no further than No. 18), and “Let’s Go” came close to breaking the Top 10, peaking at No. 14.
Despite this consolidation of mainstream success—something surely assisted by Ric Ocasek’s facility for pop hooks that feel at once icy and alluring—Candy-O pledges its allegiance to art rock and punk by slipping in salutes to the Cars’ peers on the margins. “Shoo Be Doo,” a snippet of dark, cloistered synths wedged in between two far more ebullient moments, evokes Suicide, while “Got a Lot on My Head,” assisted by the carnivalesque keyboards of Greg Hawkes, suggests the jittery, high-octane spite of Elvis Costello & the Attractions. But where Costello wears his bile on his sleeve, Ocasek and his co-lead vocalist Benjamin Orr specialize in dispassion. No matter how loud, furious, or, as in the case of “It’s All I Can Do,” lovely the band sounded, both singers—their timbres and phrasing so similar, it’s possible to play Candy-O a dozen times without realizing they’re swapping leads—rarely deign to convey anything approaching enthusiasm. This coolness gives the music a steely sexiness that suits the Alberto Vargas pin-up illustration gracing the album cover. This isn’t music for the heart: With its stylized surfaces, it appeals to the senses, offering satisfaction in its high performance.
Panorama doubles down on the Cars’ inherent disaffection, ratcheting up the precision of the rhythms to the point where they almost seem robotic. The introduction of synthesized drums enhances the impression that the band prefers mechanical movement to the swing and mess of rock’n’roll, which may be the reason why Panorama underperformed commercially: It went platinum upon its release, largely based on momentum, but its single, “Touch and Go,” barely scraped the Top 40, topping out at No. 37. By stripping away the stadium-rock affectations of Candy-O—thinning the beefy bottom end created by bassist Orr and drummer David Robinson, while pushing Hawkes’ keyboards over Easton’s guitars in the mix—the Cars wind up emphasizing their artiness while staying fixated on Ocasek’s sharp pop hooks.
In the context of Panorama, those hooks, whether guitar riffs or vocal melodies, don’t necessarily contribute to the kind of songs that would tear up the charts. Often, Ocasek appears to be writing meta-pop songs—“Don’t Tell Me No” and “Getting Through” even have passing lyrical allusions to oldies by Lesley Gore and Buddy Knox—as if he’s in the process of deconstructing pop to figure out how it works. That’s why Panorama feels like the logical conclusion to the Cars’ streamlined new wave: Even if it doesn’t deliver the pure pleasures of its predecessors, it captures the group running like a well-oiled machine.
Rhino’s expanded editions of Candy-O and Panorama, available both on vinyl and CD, are anchored by nice remasters of the original albums, but the bonus tracks are also noteworthy. Along with “That’s It” (a chipper B-side that sounds like a B-side), Candy-O is fleshed out with alternate, earlier versions that underscore the material’s harder rock edge. Conversely, the bonus material on Panorama—three previously unreleased songs (“Shooting for You,” “Be My Baby,” “The Edge”) plus the B-side “Don’t Go to Pieces”—offers further supporting evidence for the album’s dark charms. As welcome as it is to have these extra cuts, the truly valuable thing about this round of Cars reissues is how it shifts the focus away from the band’s enduring warhorses to the music that isn’t so well known. This lesser-heard material reveals what a smart, inventive pop group they were. | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 17, 2017 | 8.5 | c1a95da5-2329-4e9b-a15b-76c1883f28ce | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
The Welsh quintet's seventh studio release is its most straightforward "rock" album, a record on which the departures underscore the band's long-established strengths. | The Welsh quintet's seventh studio release is its most straightforward "rock" album, a record on which the departures underscore the band's long-established strengths. | Super Furry Animals: Love Kraft | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7605-love-kraft/ | Love Kraft | In the Super Furry Animals' world, each note, each word contains multitudes of meanings. So frontman Gruff Rhys's pre-SFA band name Ffa Coffi Pawb can mean either "Everybody's Coffee Beans" or "Fuck Off, Everybody." So 2003's "Venus & Serena" refers to the tennis sisters and/or two pet turtles beloved of a boy raised by wolves (sure, why not?). The recordings are pop, psychedelic, IDM, punk, funk, folk, soul, classical-- often all at once. "Citizens Band", a hidden track from the band's 1999 album Guerrilla required a liner-note glossary to decode its playful lyrics, as Rhys sang: "So many ways to communicate what you want to say."
Love Kraft, then, the Welsh quintet's seventh album in 12 years, may be an homage to the bands Love and Kraftwerk. It may signal the band's love for its craft, or acknowledge the eternal sense/sensibility, passion/prose, Speakerboxx/The Love Below dichotomy. Is it an expression of affinity for "master of the macabre" H.P. Lovecraft, whose novels sometimes took place in an SFA-OK "Dreamlands" setting and are familiar to Re-Animator fans? If you believe Rhys' press clippings, it's either a sex shop in Cardiff, Wales, or a "hovering vehicle"-- a fitting replacement for the band's Radiator-era "peace tank." Heck, maybe Rhys just really digs cheese.
Whatever its etymology, Love Kraft is a utopian epic, a sweeping musical argument for love in the time of Fallujah. In that sense, it's vintage SFA, with even its departures underscoring the band's long-established strengths. The leftist politics are less overt, but just as potent; the compositions more focused, but still mad as a Lewis Carroll hatter; the pop more rockin', yet probably more accessible to noobs. The splash that begins the album is at once a baptism and an immersion, and the band doesn't come up for air until High Llama Sean O'Hagan's final flitting string arrangement.
Politically, fury has given way to fantasy. Gone are direct polemics like antiwar parable "The Piccolo Snare" or Bush-burner "Out of Control", both from 2003's Phantom Power. With the world "slipping away"-- "Kiss me with apocalypse," Rhys mourns on opener "Zoom!"-- the Furries throw up their hands and invent a new one, full of dinosaurs, chickens, horsenappings, unwanted pregnancies, and, yes, love. The intergalactic Prince workout of lead single "Lazer Beam" proposes "no more romantic comedies" (take notes, Dems!) and a weapon to wash away evil-- as practical, when you think about it, as convincing certain voters they were misled into a downward-spiraling war. On "Frequency", Rhys' target is clear ("You say history will be your judge/ But the jury's whipped, gagged, and drugged"), but a sumptuous "Turning Tide"-style hook dilutes the venom. The songs are at once lovely and full of impotent dread; if you can't beat 'em, they seem to decide, beautify.
For the first time, four of the band's five members sing and contribute songs-- including keyboardist Cian Ciárán, ostensibly the force behind the band's past trackier, IDM-influenced efforts-- and together they grasp the narrative arcs that sometimes have eluded Rhys. The tripartite "Cloudberries", with its "Took a circle of friends to the village square/ Oh, love triangles" and samba-like midsection, ranks among the band's finest. Ciárán's "Walk You Home" starts as shy, string-laden Avalanches lounge before swelling into a delicate payoff. Drummer Dafydd Ieuan's "Atomik Lust" leads languid "Feel Flows" keyboards unwittingly into a radioactive wall of guitars; "I'd love to see the ending someday of Citizen Kane," Ieuan sighs. Guitarist Huw "Bunf" Bunford's Wings-esque road tune "Back on a Roll" is the lone disappointment.
"Lazer Beam" aside, the guitar-heavy Love Kraft may be the Furries' most straightforward "rock" album. Even as "Psyclone!" riffs on space invaders and tyrannosaurs, it boasts the most enormous na-na-na-na chorus this year-- Beck's "E-Pro" swathed in Moroccan samples and brazen strings. "Ohio Heat" steps from Phantom Power's Byrdsian twang to an America-esque trot, with harmonies and acoustic guitars spooning sugar onto lyrics involving a fictitious Welsh emigrant's 19th-century Midwestern suicide. Bunf's "The Horn" must be among the catchiest songs ever to prominently feature the dulcimer.
Even beyond the album title, everything Super Furry means more than it seems. "Atomik Lust" is apparently about Ieuan's fear of flying as well as "if-it's-not-love-then-it's-the-bomb" apocalyptic romance-- complete with "turbulence" sound effects. Jurassic, galactic goof "Psyclone!" can also be about Creationism, re-branded these days as "intelligent design." "Zoom!" was originally performed in a 2001 Peel session with inscrutable nonsense lyrics instead of its current ashen-faced wordplay.
On "Walk You Home", Ciárán sings, "The future ain't what it used to be." The line has been attributed to Yogi Berra, French symbolist poet Paul Valery, and Arthur C. Clarke. At its essence, Love Kraft is an assertion that the future-- and the present-- don't need to be that way at all; indeed, they can be however we imagine them. On album-closing "Cabin Fever", a piano comedown worthy of Dennis Wilson's overlooked Pacific Ocean Blue, Ciárán gets the last word, so refreshed, so clean: "The future now is wide open and clear." Anything's possible. | 2005-08-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | XL / Beggars | August 23, 2005 | 8.5 | c1bc0a01-f9ea-4d3c-9ab2-cb29befc6add | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Fresh off her hypnotic LP The Magic Place, Barwick collaborates on a live set with experimental music vet Ikue Mori. | Fresh off her hypnotic LP The Magic Place, Barwick collaborates on a live set with experimental music vet Ikue Mori. | Ikue Mori / Julianna Barwick: FRKWYS Vol. 6 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15538-frkwys-vol-6/ | FRKWYS Vol. 6 | Up to now, Julianna Barwick has not often engaged in collaboration. Her process, which involves layering her voice with a Loop Station, is defined by solitude; a feeling that comes across in her music with full force. So it was a nice surprise to hear that she would contribute to the Rvng label's FRKWYS series of 12" records, which pairs contemporary and classic electronic artists. Barwick drew Ikue Mori of the seminal no-wave band DNA, who has ably kept up with new technology, evolving from trap sets to drum machines to computer software. The four extended, improvised movements that compose FRKWYS Vol. 6 are familiar turf for Mori, but a whole new world for Barwick.
The music was recorded in New York's White Columns gallery last fall-- half with the musicians each isolated in a cubicle; Mori with her laptop and Barwick with her looping console. (A video documenting the performance can be found here.) Right away, with "Dream Sequence", fans of Florine and The Magic Place will find themselves in new territory. Barwick's voice is lightly scattered amid an array of computerized slide whistles and metallic resonance-- not an enveloping presence, but a thing among things. Several minutes elapse before she unleashes one of her trademarked melodious shrieks. Playing against Barwick's usual placidity, it's almost chaotic, but still has a clear build, climax, and resolution.
Mori's music comes from machines but evokes the natural world, pulling in sounds like dripping water, crackling electricity, and warped chimes. This is consistent across all four tracks, though each has a singular arc and feel once you get past the uniformly distressed surfaces. On "Stalactite Castle", Barwick's voice competes with mechanical vortices that call to mind Ellen Allien and Antye Greie. Then she takes a more leading and openly songful role on "Rain and Shine at the Lotus Pond" and "Rejoinder", with an almost choral home stretch bringing the record to an arresting close.
Barwick fans may feel an initial wave of disappointment that this doesn't bash you over the head with holiness the way her records do. And those who appreciate her music through the filter of Enya, rather than Brian Eno, may find Mori's haywire electronics simply indigestible. It's not the sort of thing you just throw on in the background, as The Magic Place could be. But taken on its own terms, it's a sneakily bewitching record that bodes well for Barwick's future. Until now, we knew that she was very good at one thing-- FRKWYS Vol. 6 is an encouraging sign that she's willing and able to branch out. | 2011-06-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock / Electronic | Rvng Intl. | June 16, 2011 | 7.3 | c1c027ce-9a15-4656-8a90-ca6ce79e24df | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On their debut album, twin sisters Inez and Ella Johannson are immersed in their own charming, sometimes too insular alt-pop world. | On their debut album, twin sisters Inez and Ella Johannson are immersed in their own charming, sometimes too insular alt-pop world. | 7ebra: Bird Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7ebra-bird-hour/ | Bird Hour | On the cover of Bird Hour, twin sisters Inez and Ella Johansson have their backs turned as they hunch over a sparsely furnished dollhouse, blissfully unaware of the camera. The music they make together as 7ebra is similarly insular, immersed in a secret language. Listening to the whispery sketches on their debut feels like peering over their shoulders as they work in communion, piecing arcane alt-pop tunes together out of rudimentary guitar riffs and odd turns of phrase.
Though slightly more legible than a hissy Sentridoh compilation or Secret Stars tape, several songs are built from similar blueprints as DIY tape releases from Shrimper Records or early Dirty Projectors albums. Plunking power chords and gentle fingerpicked arpeggios lock into hypnotic loops, while Ella’s organ wanders down aimless, freely associative paths. The twins’ short, cryptic lyrics act as wayposts through the ambiguity: “I could tell you we were born to care for each other,” they repeat on “Born to Care,” sometimes solo and other times in harmony. By keeping the backdrop relatively static, they move this shared truth around like furniture, offering different glimpses of its features as it’s pushed into new corners of the room.
The songs Bird Hour are simple but arranged with handcrafted intimacy. The percussion on “I Like to Pretend” is composed only of a digital kick and snare that Ella triggers with her feet beneath the keyboard when the duo plays live. “Tell me a story, I like to pretend,” the twins sing to each other in a cozy, Alex G-esque verse, prompting a whimsical keyboard riff. Here, the duo is a jam band on a microscopic scale, scrawling weird shapes. On “I Have a Lot to Say” and “Lighter Better,” they zap delicate pop tunes with a jolt of electricity. There’s a tongue-in-cheek charm to their blown-out guitar solos.
The Johanssons seem to take pleasure in toying with their audience, and their attempts at more conventional, wordier songs are still beguiling. “If I Ask Her,” driven by a simple, post-punk guitar line, first scans as an overheard argument. “Please,I love to fulfill your needs… you seem to think I enjoy to be unheard,” they sing sardonically. But the story’s details feel incomplete, as if the monologue is being rehearsed in front of a mirror. The anonymous figures that 7ebra pine for, fret over, or secretly resent across Bird Hour often appear out of focus: “Want to give you everything, but I know I can’t I cant give because there’s nothing in here,” they sing over the creeping arpeggios of “Stripey Horsey,” conjuring a state of vague anxiety. Within the charming, homespun sound they’ve constructed, there’s still plenty of room for the duo to flesh out their private world. | 2023-05-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | PNKSLM | May 5, 2023 | 6.6 | c1cead53-1a15-465b-8c0b-93b25d4af125 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
On their third album, the industrial noise-rock group Pop. 1280 get closer than ever to their Big Theme: the dehumanization at the core of the technological strides toward a Big, Bold, Bright Future, the rottenness and hollowness of a world which we’ve been told is full of promise, but in which all of those promises of economic stability and cultural prosperity are consistently broken. | On their third album, the industrial noise-rock group Pop. 1280 get closer than ever to their Big Theme: the dehumanization at the core of the technological strides toward a Big, Bold, Bright Future, the rottenness and hollowness of a world which we’ve been told is full of promise, but in which all of those promises of economic stability and cultural prosperity are consistently broken. | Pop. 1280: Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21438-paradise/ | Paradise | Pop. 1280 aren’t shy about their love for generic conventions, from the witty and nasty noir of their namesake to Cronenbergian body-horror lyrical material to consistent references to '70s speculative fiction. It is the dystopian landscape where these worlds intersect that makes this Brooklyn group's industrial noise-rock click and hum; it is vital in its grimness.
On their third album, Paradise, Pop. 1280 get closer than ever to the theme that unites these genres—the dehumanization at the core of the technological strides toward a Big, Bold, Bright Future, the rottenness and hollowness of a world which we’ve been told is full of promise but in which all of those promises of economic stability and cultural prosperity are consistently broken. In truth, this is less speculative fiction than the constant reality of our modern lives—less a warning than an observation. "Chromidia," the album’s second single, is a meditation on the constancy of surveillance—"Are you my best friend/ Are you the camera lens?" singer Chris Bug intones, the line growing more sinister upon each repetition.
They also hew closer to the conventions of mid-late '80s dancefloor industrial, more Front by Front than Songs About Fucking. Tracks like "Phantom Freighter" and "In Silico" wouldn’t feel out of place at all on the pre-TVT Wax Trax! roster. This is a deeply rhythmic record, as any exploration of the tension between man and machine must be, drum machines and samplers supplementing Andrew Chugg’s live drumming.
Good genre work requires a certain amount of heavy-handedness in order to be recognizable, and dancefloor industrial has always relied on obvious metaphor, big beats for stompy boots and a sizeable dose of relatively simplistic teen-style angst. Paradise certainly isn’t lacking in these ingredients but it makes up for dynamism what it lacks in subtlety. It is more skeletal and raw in places than their two previous albums, and more lush and thick with synth and guitar in others. This production is ultimately what makes Paradise such a standout; there are plenty of young industrial and noise-rock bands running hard on all cylinders, as Pop. 1280 did on their prior efforts. The extra gears and moving parts in their sound feel like necessary moves to avoid quick and certain burnout. | 2016-01-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | January 25, 2016 | 7.4 | c1cf24c8-3a0a-4328-8991-67e0d78e3bd2 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The Washington, D.C. trio make visceral, minimal punk that’s as stripped down as a roadkill carcass, and almost as gross. | The Washington, D.C. trio make visceral, minimal punk that’s as stripped down as a roadkill carcass, and almost as gross. | Knife Wife: Family Party EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knife-wife-family-party-ep/ | Family Party | Knife Wife’s music is not for the fainthearted. The Washington, D.C. trio make visceral, minimal punk that’s as stripped down as a roadkill carcass. Billed as the “diary of a teenybopper translated and recited by freaks,” their new EP Family Party envisions a teenage brain where boredom and escapism fuel macabre nightmares. Balancing unsettling lyricism and uncomplicated instrumentation, their thrumming basslines and crusty drum hits form the backdrop for ruminations on licking strangers and euthanizing friends. Much like being a teenager, it’s strange and weird and sometimes scary.
Across 10 tracks, band members Sami Cola, Nico Castleman, and Ruby Parrish rotate through guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Though their lyrics are hard to swallow, their compositions are solemn, rudimentary chord progressions that pile each instrument on top of the others. The ominous bass and breathy sighs of “Dogs” recall the seductive rock of LA’s Cherry Glazerr. Sometimes the band’s eerie, crawling guitars resemble a lo-fi version of the xx’s haunted minimalism. “Fruity Void” drops the standard rock band arrangement in favor of a surreal synth wormhole. This is music for rousing the darkest corners of the psyche and embracing abjection.
Like the films of Harmony Korine, Family Party goes out of its way to indulge its creators’ peculiar desires and demented fantasies. The earliest tracks explore infatuation turned to poisonous obsession: “Cut up photos of you and glue it in my eyelids,” goes the first verse of “Dreamland.” “Silly Pony,” the best-conceived track, pairs a single plucked guitar string against Parrish’s exhausted vocals. “You fucked my dogma,” she sings, the syllables barely escaping her throat. “I’ll collect your used Band-Aids/Until my infatuation fades.” During the chorus, her voice sounds like it’s traveling through a playground talk tube. There’s no affection, just a deranged search for validation.
Family Party is dotted with mentions of sickness, reminders of the human body’s frailty and mortality. Parrish uses morbidity to manipulate: “If I told you I was croaking, would you love me back?” she ponders on “Silly Pony.” On “The Dentist,” Castleman recalls the pleasures of a day spent hallucinating on nitrous. “God, I love this auto-immune disease,” they sing flatly. They’re hyper-aware of their body, but the lyrics spiral into abstraction; the mind on nitrous is hard to access. “Lobe” takes a darker turn, commanding listeners to “euthanize your friends” so Castleman can “snip off their lips.” “Feed me probiotics/I don’t wanna be sick,” they continue—perhaps a genuine moment of health anxiety, perhaps a sarcastic aside.
It’s the disconnection that’s most upsetting about Knife Wife’s music: They don’t react as you’d expect to discussions of animal strangulation or ass-licking, because they mostly don’t react at all. But throughout Family Party, the band seek contact with others—at least by proxy. Whether screaming about lobotomies on “Lobe” or dreaming of becoming someone else on “Fruity Void,” their obsession with bodies, illness, and the grotesque is really about escaping oneself. Underneath their apathy lies personal distress and confusion; Knife Wife just find darkness more palatable when it’s veiled in obscenity.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sister Polygon | August 1, 2019 | 7 | c1d4899e-7508-4453-b7ef-34ace68e812d | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The Ontario band Dirty Nil's Higher Power offers punk with high-end production values meant for big rooms. However antisocial they may get, the music here is intended to be a communal experience. | The Ontario band Dirty Nil's Higher Power offers punk with high-end production values meant for big rooms. However antisocial they may get, the music here is intended to be a communal experience. | The Dirty Nil: Higher Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21452-higher-power/ | Higher Power | As the name suggests, the Ontario band Dirty Nil are profoundly aware of their emptiness and impurity, and the only thing that rouses Luke Bentham and Dave Nardi out of their self-loathing is despising someone else even more. Maybe it was inspired by drinking alone in a dingy apartment, but Higher Power is punk with high-end production values, meant for big rooms. They’re professed classic rock fans and gear snobs and it shows, as Higher Power is an album that sounds like it expects to be paid for. However antisocial Dirty Nil get, the music is intended to be a communal experience.
They’re not really interested in the philosophical restrictions and elitism that often constitutes punk rock anyway. Dirty Nil released a 7” on skate-punk stronghold Fat Wreck Chords and played the Warped Tour—both tend to be a point of no return for bands deciding between a captive pop-punk audience and critical credibility. But it’s all rock'n'roll to Dirty Nil: They boast equal facility with PUP-style beer bongin’ with the devil ("No Weaknesses"), Dilly Dally’s knee-buckling dynamics ("Zombie Eyed"), and the hectoring sing-speak of tourmates Single Mothers and Greys. Higher Power serves as proof that the boundaries separating "indie," "pop punk" and "alt-rock" have collapsed as they’ve been drawn into closer quarters, and to send this point home, they do all of the above just within the first four tracks.
There isn’t really an original note here, but the massive hooks of "No Weaknesses" and "Zombie Eyed" are delivered with enough conviction that they end up sounding fresh anyway. As Higher Power progresses, Dirty Nil continue to expand their range, yet the sequencing makes it sound like a retreat. The satisfying brutality of "Fugue State" starts a run of three songs crammed into less than five minutes; the highs of Side A were bound to make Higher Power sound frontloaded anyway, but Side B practically vanishes before get-in-the-van anthem "Bury Me at the Rodeo Show" ends the record with the closest thing to a Dirty Nil love song.
Even when the music intentionally plays dumb, Bentham and Nardi are clever lyricists, and Higher Power could almost be a narrative concept record about salvation if you play it out of order. Throughout the album, Dirty Nil search for redemption in the usual places: sex ("Wrestle Yu to Husker Du"), drugs ("Zombie Eyed") and rock'n'roll. But they have too much fun with it all to even pretend that hitting rock bottom is actually a bad thing. "Friends in the Sky" aligns Bentham with Satan against Jesus, and it’s as close as he gets to divinity; later on, there’s no spiritual awakening, just an acceptance of what Bart Simpson called a "life of sin followed by the presto-change-o deathbed repentance." Bentham calls out to his higher power and admits, "And even though we never got along/ I’ll say I was wrong/ 'Cause you know we can be friends in the sky." Despite their protestations, only a true punk band would try to pull a fast one on God. | 2016-02-23T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-23T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Dine Alone | February 23, 2016 | 6.8 | c1dfe1d4-505c-4a1b-a722-b9f496f36c3f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Denver band’s debut is 19 minutes of galvanizing, accessible hardcore with a focus on queer community and uplift. | The Denver band’s debut is 19 minutes of galvanizing, accessible hardcore with a focus on queer community and uplift. | Destiny Bond: Be My Vengeance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/destiny-bond-be-my-vengeance/ | Be My Vengeance | Formed in 2021 with the goal of picking up where Dag Nasty and Faith left off, Destiny Bond make melodic hardcore that doesn’t sacrifice speed or authenticity. On their debut, Be My Vengeance, the Denver five-piece—comprised of singer Cloe Madonna Janzen, guitarists Emily Armitage and Amos Helvey, bassist Rio Wolf, and drummer Adam Croft—slash their way through galvanizing songs about fostering unity within their scene, reclaiming space for queer kids, and embracing your whole identity no matter what gets in the way. It’s 19 minutes of music that’s made to get stuck in your head.
Be My Vengeance is ripe with empathy and love. On “The Glow,” from which the album takes its title, Janzen sings like she’s lacing her fingers through yours: “Watch over me/I promise to watch over you.” Elsewhere, she speaks to the power of rejecting imposed social narratives, choosing family, and laying the foundations for one’s true home. Midway through “Harmony,” she tells a friend that scars represent healing and encourages them to practice forgiveness: “I hope there’s more love each new day you see/You’ll find all that you need.”
But don’t miss the fangs sheathed in Destiny Bond’s kind smile. Be My Vengeance barrels ahead with brute force thanks to the aggressive rhythm section, yet is full of little surprises: Croft’s last-second pattern change-up on “Mosaic,” the extended jam-turned-noise rock outro of closer “Harmony,” the open-chord guitar pluck and mid-song dip on “Kinetic.” “Pick yourself up off the floor, baby!” Janzen howls on the latter. “You’re taking on the world pound for fucking pound.” The song sounds like a garage rock record torn into pieces and reassembled by memory, all thick bass and distorted blues riffs, and she dances atop it with a type of defiant glee.
Be My Vengeance is a mix of polished and scrappy, the result of recording sessions that went south. The band tracked the majority of its instrumental parts with Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Jeff Rosenstock) at Oakland’s Atomic Garden last summer, but were forced to cancel studio time when three members came down with COVID-19. Once they recovered, Destiny Bond tapped Denver engineer Lucas Johannes to help them finish. The extra time encouraged them to add unexpected instruments from Johannes’ arsenal: mandolin, tambourine, shakers. But with Janzen’s voice still damaged from being sick, the recordings feel true to the harsh sound of classic hardcore in a VFW hall. Meanwhile, Armitage and Helvey’s guitars intertwine with slick production that heightens the album’s melodic songwriting, resulting in music that’s accessible even to those who don’t know their John Brannons from their John Josephs.
Destiny Bond are clear about how their lived experience informs their goal of cultivating a community fortified by love. “Blood Chokes,” a discordant song that’s harder and louder than any prior track, serves as their mission statement. Janzen first relays her experience of coming out as a trans woman to her parents before making a pact: “This is for all the trans kids/You’re mine, you’re mine/On my heart all the time.” Though her screams are scratchy and vociferous, the sincerity in her voice is comforting. “We will scream until we have been heard,” she adds later in “Worlds Unseen.” Be My Vengeance is catchy enough to keep that promise. | 2023-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Convulse | June 29, 2023 | 7.4 | c1e869a1-8704-4020-9efb-eb3fd8ea4561 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Rising Chicago DJ and house producer here also displays a considerable talent for creating experimental electronic music. | Rising Chicago DJ and house producer here also displays a considerable talent for creating experimental electronic music. | Kate Simko: Music From the Atom Smashers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13137-music-from-the-atom-smashers/ | Music From the Atom Smashers | Great science is full of intuitive leaps, but the producers of The Atom Smashers, a documentary about physicists at Fermilab, employed a strictly rational approach for the soundtrack: They sought out an electronic musician who already works in evanescent particles and focused beams. It doesn't downplay Kate Simko's considerable talents to say that she was born to make this score, although perhaps you could say that of any techno producer as steeped in ambient and modernist music as she. Music From the Atom Smashers simply gives her a template on which to do what she does: one that nudges her away from crisp dancefloor fare like "She Said", toward the mysterious realms of Steve Reich, Wolfgang Voigt, and Brian Eno.
In fact, almost half of the album expires before we hear the first real house track, "God Particle". This is the particle for which the physicists are searching, and appropriately, the song seethes on the verge of an epiphany, with a melodic feeling of anticipation and bass so elastic it seems to be trying to mutter a revelation. Only "Sociber", an intestinal tunnel with drums that whiz and ping, similarly threatens to move your body. On most of the album, Simko is instead more interested in moving your space-time continuum. It would be tautological to call this "pattern music," but it's certainly pattern-conscious. Outside of the dance tracks and the anomalous but excellent "The Creative Part", a Philip Glass-indebted composition for burnished ostinatos and piano sunbursts, Simko works in layered pulses, like she’s breaking billiards racks in slow motion. She makes you feel the weave, not the line.
A number of recurring motifs betray the record's soundtrack status: skittering palpitations, sifting shards of broken china, cosmic slide-whistles, shamanistic rattles, and striated rumbles roughing up bloops, snaps, crackles, and pops. A lot of Rice Krispies, to be sure, but Simko remembers to cut in plenty of fruit: warm blurs of melodica on the splintering dirge "Quiet Daydream", lingering symphonic chords on "Nature Surreal". More interesting than the sounds themselves are the intelligence and sensitivity of their deployment, the constant attention to weight, color, and direction. You never get the feeling that Simko cued up a few devices, hit record, and kicked back with a crossword puzzle. She hovers over the album, alert and meticulous, fitting a bass line with anti-gravity boots here, skewing the angle of a comet's tail there. As a result, the repetitive nature of the sounds subsides from your attention, as you marvel about how they penetrate sonic spaces you couldn't perceive until they were filled. | 2009-07-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-07-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | July 6, 2009 | 7.5 | c1eccb5a-828c-45cf-9a45-810aa624875e | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Mustard's latest full-length, 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1, is less star-studded than last year's 10 Summers, and less explosive than 2013's well-timed Ketchup tape. There's no need to overanalyze the tape's 17 passable-to-solid tracks; all you really need to do is dance to them a couple Mangoritas deep in a backyard. | Mustard's latest full-length, 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1, is less star-studded than last year's 10 Summers, and less explosive than 2013's well-timed Ketchup tape. There's no need to overanalyze the tape's 17 passable-to-solid tracks; all you really need to do is dance to them a couple Mangoritas deep in a backyard. | Mustard: 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20884-10-summers-the-mixtape-vol-1/ | 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1 | If there's been one constant in life since late 2011, when DJ Mustard got his big break via Tyga's sneaky crossover "Rack City", it's the comforting radio omnipresence of Mustard's sparse slaps and '90s-nodding ratchet&B. But four years may as well be 40, and the Mustardwave has long since crested. While the sound he pioneered has lingered well past the average trend life-cycle, "ratchet" as a buzzword has all but gone the way of the dodo; even the @DennysDiner social team has moved on to fleeker pastures.
If Mustard's latest full-length, 10 Summers: The Mixtape Vol. 1, sounds familiar, it's because it shares a title with his 2014 debut album. It's also because you've heard approximations of all these songs before, over and over, everywhere you go, for years. The central conceit of this mixtape series is that Mustard's dominance will ride out for a full decade, and if anyone could pull off that kind of endurance feat, it's the Dijon Don. But that claim's starting to feel like an empty gesture, even if it's not entirely unfeasible; does anyone really need that much Mustard on the beat?
To be fair, Mustardwave hitting critical mass was spurred on by opportunistic imitators as much as the producer himself. Aside from Omarion's still-buzzing 2014 single "Post to Be", the most Mustard-y Top 40 single right now is Jidenna's "Classic Man", which isn't actually his production at all: it's built around a sample from Iggy's "Fancy", the most high-profile, blatant Mustard rip-off to date. In other words, it's become impossible to tell the simulacra from the real deal. The Mustardwave singularity is upon us, and at this point, these beats may as well be self-replicating ad infinitum.
It's not that 10 Summers isn't good, per se. While it's significantly less star-studded than last year's album, and less explosive than 2013's well-timed Ketchup tape, the dip in quality isn't all that extreme. Besides, who wants to hate on low-stakes party music? There's no need to overanalyze the tape's 17 passable-to-solid tracks; all you really need to do is dance to them a couple Mangoritas deep in a backyard. But I want to believe Mustard has more up his sleeve than this: slight alterations of the same snaps, single-finger piano prods, and bassy synths, with a corral of just-fine Pushaz Ink rappers passing through. Even longtime muse YG's switched his style up post-My Krazy Life, with the Terrace Martin G-funk of "Twist My Fingaz".
YG doesn't show up at all on 10 Summers; the tape's highest-profile feature is the Game, which speaks volumes about the kinds of half-assed attempts at the zeitgeist here. There are a handful of pretty great guest spots, for what it's worth, mostly from L.A. locals. On "Trippin Off Hoes", Pushaz Ink affiliate and charming dirtbag RJ goes off like a bomb over the beat's guttural growl: "Gettin' rich though! She a trip though! Credit cards with somebody else info!" The track's only two minutes, but it doesn't need to be any longer; it's the type of efficient, mercenarial slapper Mustard redefined. "You Know It", the best rap song here, showcases buzzing Vallejo newcomer Nef the Pharaoh and houses the tape's best one-liner from relative unknown Big Mike: "On my money, I'm a opportunist/ Off my meds, I'm a orthodontist." But most of the project's first two-thirds passes in a forgettable blur, and if the overwhelming sense of facsimile wasn't enough, a rapper named DrakeO—DrakeO!—is prominently featured.
To be fair, Mustard's R&B production has easily outshined his rap production post-My Krazy Life, and 10 Summers is no different. Most of the tracks with any significant replay value here are the loose, wispy cabana R&B jams that comprise the tape's tail end. "Overdose", with TeeFlii, Iamsu!, and Choice, slides into an understated, liquid groove that draws from G-funk, yacht rock, and twinkly early-'00s Nelly ballads. "Ice Cream" channels the new jack slickness of Soul For Real's candy-coated raindrops. It's clear the guy still has ideas, and maybe he's saving the good ones for when the stakes are higher. Last week, he released "Why'd You Call?", a SoundCloud loosie featuring Makonnen and Ty Dolla $ign that exists somewhere between '80s electro and Based World, complete with Diplo-esque EDM breakdown. It's not necessarily the most inspired direction for Mustard, but at least he's venturing out of his comfort zone. That doesn't happen nearly enough on 10 Summers. | 2015-08-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | 10 Summers | August 5, 2015 | 6.3 | c1fa6f15-6c0c-4353-a4d8-26a61fe1b269 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The constant and destructive waves of noise make this decisively a Merzbow record, but its cosmic mood and rhythms prove that Sun Ra lives in its DNA. | The constant and destructive waves of noise make this decisively a Merzbow record, but its cosmic mood and rhythms prove that Sun Ra lives in its DNA. | Sun Ra / Merzbow: Strange City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22520-sun-ra-merzbow-strange-city/ | Strange City | Sun Ra’s presence on the latest Merzbow record is odd: blink and you might miss him completely, but squint and you can notice him almost everywhere. The only time it’s blatantly obvious that Masami Akita, the man behind noise legend Merzbow, is using Sun Ra’s recordings as source material comes in the first 10 seconds of Strange City. Opener “Livid Sun Loop” begins with overlapping saxophones and drums, but Akita quickly steamrolls those into a dense cacophony. For the rest of the album’s 103 minutes (66 on CD and 36 on LP, both titled Strange City but containing different music), he steadfastly maintains that busy din.
Yet focus your ears intensely on Strange City—preferably through headphones—and Sun Ra’s music peeks out through Merzbow’s noise wall. (The Ra estate gave Akita material from 1966’s The Magic City and 1967’s Strange Strings, which he remixed and treated while adding his own original sounds). Rattling drumbeats grow out of crackling static like weeds in a garden, bassy rhythms undulate beneath rolling roars like shifting tectonic plates, and pretty much every screech and squeal could pass for a wailing horn. Strange City is decisively a Merzbow record, but Sun Ra lives in its DNA.
Where Strange City stands in Merzbow’s massive discography is easier to suss out. Many of the strengths Akita has developed over roughly four decades of noise devotion are put to use here. He creates relentlessly forward-moving music with so much going on that it feels three-dimensional. During such lengthy tracks, your ears and brain accept and acclimate to Akita’s ruthless sounds, and his seemingly random noise eventually starts to feel normal.
Strange City is most successful on the two half-hour-plus tracks that make up the CD version. “Livid Sun Loop” is filled with destructive sounds and stabbing rhythms, but it also has a narrative arc developed through 32 minutes of sonic drilling. On “Granular Jazz Part 2,” Akita grapples most seriously with Sun Ra’s creative spirit. Devoted primarily to the trebly end of the spectrum, the piece subtly rides Ra’s rhythms while building a space-bound aura, a fitting way to grapple with an artist who claimed to come from Saturn.
The three tracks on the LP version of Strange City—all titled as parts of “Granular Jazz”—are less distinctive. In some places, Akita falls back on stock noise moves like firing-laser jolts and helicopter-style whirr. Something interesting happens on every piece, though, and the closer “Granular Jazz Part 4” is particularly fascinating due to its relative restraint. Surprisingly distant and subdued, it’s like Merzbow’s ballad of Sun Ra, an elegy for a virtual partner coming after 100 minutes of sonic boxing. You could call Strange City a Merzbow victory, but it couldn’t have happened without Sun Ra on his team. | 2016-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | null | November 5, 2016 | 7.3 | c2084cce-a86a-4a71-820f-278768e5a798 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The former múm frontwoman steps out with a set of airy, orchestral folk that resembles early Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom. | The former múm frontwoman steps out with a set of airy, orchestral folk that resembles early Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom. | Kristín Anna: I Must Be the Devil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kristin-anna-i-must-be-the-devil/ | I Must Be the Devil | Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir has been a quiet fixture in Icelandic experimental pop for more than two decades. An Aaron and Bryce Dessner collaborator and a former member of múm, she specializes in wispy, orchestral folk that seems to be dissipating even as it reaches your ears. 14 years ago, Valtýsdóttir began recording her own album, I Must Be The Devil, largely composed of piano and vocals. The result is gentle, lovely, and meandering to a fault.
Valtýsdóttir has a striking voice, both childlike and elvish. It sounds distractingly similar to Joanna Newsom or early Kate Bush, but her similarities to these two orchestral pop titans pretty much stop and start right there. While Valtýsdóttir clearly admires their renfaire aesthetics and baroque, winding song structures, I Must Be The Devil is a far more subdued effort than, say, Ys or The Kick Inside. It is also, unfortunately, much less interesting.
Take early single “Forever Love,” a thorny piano ballad. The piano meanders in and out, and Valtýsdóttir’s vocals take on an almost church-choir quality. Her lyrics are less important to the song than the pure sound of her voice, but focus on them and you nevertheless find yourself contemplating a slightly cringy forest-sex scenario: “In a frenzy/Saying what the fuck/The forest shields/That what other think/Our bodies naked/Are moving to the deep beat,” Valtýsdóttir sings. On “Heartly Matters,”Valtýsdóttir coos: “I do love/The way he sang/and I do love/The way we sounded.” There’s not much to hold onto here, and the music is weightless both in aura and content.
There are a few fully realized moments. “Star, Child” simmers in soft focus with the aid of velvety string flourishes. The album closer “Girl” is the record’s strongest offering. It gleams with compositional possibilities: the nine-minute song slowly creeps up on its listener, a vast expanse dotted with strange futuristic sounds, like a field full of AI-powered fireflies. The pacing is unhurried; Valtýsdóttir takes plenty of time to get to the point, and for the most part, it is pleasant enough to be along for the ride. You could say that this sentiment carries over to the rest of the album, which proves to be truly pretty, but doesn’t demand much attention. | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Bel-Air Glamour Records | April 17, 2019 | 6 | c2091221-c724-4d94-9fe7-599922ad43b6 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Wax Idols complete their transformation from sardonic post-punks to theatrical goth-rock storytellers on an album that dares to take pleasure in confronting death. | Wax Idols complete their transformation from sardonic post-punks to theatrical goth-rock storytellers on an album that dares to take pleasure in confronting death. | Wax Idols: Happy Ending | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wax-idols-happy-ending/ | Happy Ending | Since their formation in 2011, Wax Idols have migrated from sardonic, hard-nosed post-punk territory to sweeping gothic melodrama. It’s not an unprecedented move: Listen to the Cure’s discography from Boys Don’t Cry to Disintegration, or Cocteau Twins’ from Garlands to Heaven or Las Vegas, and you’ll hear a similar evolution. Historically, goth rock tends to bloom over time; the longer a band lingers in the darkness, the more likely it is that compact, incisive social commentary will open up into lush, indulgent storytelling.
On their fourth album, Happy Ending, Wax Idols fully commit to their new aesthetic. Vocalist and bandleader Hether Fortune sings from the perspective of someone on the threshold between life and death; on some songs she’s about to die, while on others she’s just crossed over. By inhabiting this ghostly protagonist, she leads the group into their catchiest, most accessible period, where the hooks are big and the story arcs even bigger. Happy Ending is the first Wax Idols album that could easily be staged as a rock opera. Its boldness and dynamism lend the band a newly theatrical bent.
In true goth fashion, Fortune seems to draw the most energy from the darkest subjects. Although she wrote it in the aftermath of a brutal divorce, 2015’s American Tragic contained the purest pop hooks the band had ever recorded. Happy Ending furthers that trajectory, its melodies skewing more sweet than bitter. Vocally, this is a productive place for Fortune. While Wax Idols’ early albums No Future and Discipline + Desire caged her voice within a relatively narrow range, the new record lets her cut loose. “Oh God, I’m falling,” she howls on “Too Late.” On “Scream,” she belts out, "I’ll scream your name/With the only breath I have left,” elongating the chorus’ last two syllables for dramatic effect. Around her, drummer Rachel Travers, bassist Marisa Prietto, and multi-instrumentalist Peter Lightning whip up the band’s gloomy sound into a frenzy. The drums rain down fast and snare-heavy. The bass is full and round. The treble-rich guitars dance through their chords.
Wax Idols have long drawn comparisons to the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, but the vocal strategies Fortune deploys here hew closer to Incubus’ Brandon Boyd or even Bono—singers who tend to emote by opening their throats wide and letting it all fall out. That singing style can sound inherently optimistic, as though stretching one’s voice to its limits were an act of faith, so a propulsive dissonance emerges between the fatalistic words Fortune sings and the bombast with which she sings them. The inevitability of death looms large over the record, yet Fortune pitches her voice upward in triumph, as though death itself weren't enough to erase her.
Even “Crashing,” whose lyrics orbit a suicide, sounds more victorious than despondent. “This life was never sweet enough for me,” Fortune sings, in a way that makes it easy to imagine her with a fist in the air—this existence is inadequate, so time to move onto the next one. On “Mausoleum,” she beckons, “Put your head upon my shoulder/And slide with me through my own slice of hell.” Her word choice here—“slide”—suggests a fluid, freeing afterlife, a sluice to the next state of being rather than a loop of perpetual suffering.
By framing death not as a narrative-ending cataclysm but as a state of being that is potentially freer than life, Wax Idols cut a new facet on goth rock’s morbid fascinations. It’s rare that a band so fixated on the macabre gets to have so much fun; even Misfits’ raucous murder-fests asked you to identify with the killer, not the deceased. But Wax Idols tease out a liberatory streak in material where other acts might only find nihilism. The deaths they paint on Happy Ending don't inspire hopelessness. This isn’t a record transcribed from the raw edge of suicidal urges, and it doesn’t ask for direct sympathy with the desire to die. Instead, it shakes off the weight that accumulates around death when it is considered unspeakable. It confronts a culture that deals in death while refusing to acknowledge its reality. It lights up dark corners usually shadowed by fear, and in dancing inside the abyss, it grants permission to feel invincible. | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Etruscan Gold | May 21, 2018 | 7.1 | c220f1ee-cf8d-4c6f-a3dd-86763453a1cb | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On its third album, the Philadelphia quartet hones the studio techniques—as well as the knowledge of when to hold back—required to do justice to the group’s adventurous spirit. | On its third album, the Philadelphia quartet hones the studio techniques—as well as the knowledge of when to hold back—required to do justice to the group’s adventurous spirit. | Palm: *Nicks and Grazes * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palm-nicks-and-grazes/ | Nicks and Grazes | What is psychedelic music? The question has followed Palm since their beginnings in the college-town basements of Upstate New York, and has been thoroughly documented on albums like 2015’s Trading Basics and 2018’s Rock Island. With little formal knowledge of how to play their instruments when they first formed, the quartet—now based in Philadelphia, and made up of Eve Alpert, Kasra Kurt, Gerasimos Livitsanos, and Hugo Stanley—has followed the art-school impulse to question assumptions about how rock music is structured, building an alien system of its own. Showing a reluctance to be boxed into any single genre, the group has retained an openness to the possibilities of sound at its most elemental, using music technologies in strange and unorthodox ways that feel broadly in tune with the psychedelic moment of the 1960s. Palm tap into a cosmic excess bound up in the elaborate vocal effects and electronically treated guitars that are slathered across their albums, reclaiming psychedelic music as more than just a dorm-room backdrop for getting stoned. Their third studio album, Nicks and Grazes is dizzying and complex without losing sight of the progressive rigor that has guided the band since its beginnings.
To listen to Palm is to observe patterns in a foreign language, waiting for a logic to emerge. On Trading Basics, they seemed to consciously embrace a history of experimental tropes, grounding their music in a noise-rock lineage. Yet with each release, they’ve taken steps to replace this scaffolding with a new foundation of their own, with varying degrees of success. Recorded just two days after the release of Trading Basics, 2017’s Shadow Expert EP incorporated new studio techniques that built on the tight-knit feeling of the group, ping-ponging across stereophonic space as if to mimic dialogue and dialing in effect pedals with more precision than their earlier lo-fi efforts. But the endless changes and sustained hyperactivity made for a difficult listen, a feeling that would continue on their 2018 album Rock Island. Roughly four years later, Palm have finally developed the studio techniques and conscious sense of restraint needed to do justice to this adventurous spirit, creating an album that’s precise and exacting as it approaches new terrain.
Their organizing principles are as unconventional as ever. Babbling synths and wind chimes give way to controlled chaos on “Touch and Go,” as corkscrew guitars offset Stanley’s propulsive drumming. While they’ve long been invested in outlandish recording techniques, Palm now seem set on building out a studio sound that contributes to the forward motion of the project. In most cases, this means the addition of new electronic elements, like the metallic samples and synth pads deployed throughout “Touch and Go,” or the thumping synth bass on “Feathers.” The latter track is built entirely around the instrument, smoothed over with a soft counter-melody from Alpert before erupting with electrifying drums. Yet even as they approach something ostensibly similar to dance music, they can’t help but sound like a more realized version of themselves.
For many bands, the idea of a polished studio album has become synonymous with the big-budget techniques of the 1960s and ’70s, but Palm are rarely, if ever, nostalgic. Noise and art rock were always points of departure for defining a sound of their own, and while their use of steel-drum samples has long felt like a nod to the global diasporic genres they’re inspired by, the band has never set out to make the next great calypso record. The best comparison might be to the studio recordings of Yellow Magic Orchestra and their lasting influence on Japanese synth pop, but even then, the band is much more interested in melody than acts like Sympathy Nervous or R.N.A.-ORGANISM ever were. Decisions about arrangement and studio techniques emerge naturally from the band’s increasingly focused interest in sound design, establishing the central axis around which the album revolves.
Firmly uninterested in recreating the sounds of any historical era, Palm instead construct their own alternative to the studio-as-instrument philosophy of this midcentury period. Songs like “Away Kit” and “Tumbleboy”—a track which first appeared on Kurt’s split release with Ada Babar from 2017—feel like logical next steps for a group already so committed to rethinking how the band and the instrument should function. Roughly halfway through the ambient interlude “And Chairs,” a small voice asks listeners to follow them in guided meditation. “Just listen to what you can hear, you and your surroundings,” they say. Like this interlude, Nicks and Grazes asks us to reconsider foundational ideas about what music is, how it works, and what we expect of it at every step of the production process. It’s a totalizing vision for the band as an artistic unit, one that organically builds on everything they’ve done so far. | 2022-10-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | October 17, 2022 | 8 | c226d99b-e0ad-44eb-bf58-35ce31214875 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
Placing its faith in the healing power of animals and Auto-Tune, Alex Giannascoli’s most hopeful record stands out for its grounded patience and moments of sharp lyrical simplicity. | Placing its faith in the healing power of animals and Auto-Tune, Alex Giannascoli’s most hopeful record stands out for its grounded patience and moments of sharp lyrical simplicity. | Alex G: God Save the Animals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-g-god-save-the-animals/ | God Save the Animals | In his later life, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida trained his critical lens away from abstract conceptions of human language and toward his pet cat. How should he feel about returning his cat’s gaze? Should he feel ashamed to let his cat see him nude, vulnerable, on the toilet? If animals cannot express a moral code—if they don’t know that nudity is shameful—are they simply amoral? To Derrida, that’s the wrong question—it’s not whether animals can think, but rather if they can feel. Throughout his enigmatic discography, Alex Giannascoli, who performs as Alex G, has teased out these same thorny issues. On 2012’s Trick, his dog Rosie communicates with just her eyes. Two years later, on DSU, his dog Harvey “doesn’t understand what big boys do,” but Alex loves him anyway. And while the Philadelphia musician is adamant that his songs are not all about dogs, the animals in his life are proxies for his uneasy sense of good and evil. On his latest album, God Save the Animals, he wrings strange beauty from our non-human companions, grappling with innocence and its discontents through their saucer-eyed stares.
In a catalog littered with inscrutable poetics, God Save the Animals stands out for its moments of sharp lyrical simplicity. Rather than sketching out ideas through the barest of sentence fragments, Giannascoli writes with a sense of grounded patience, digging deeper and fleshing out the characters in his stories with extended conversations and commitments. Though his writing has always toed the line between autobiography and autofiction, on God Save the Animals it seems as though the players in his stories—fictional or not—are growing wiser with time. Over the stunning melodies of “Miracles,” he reaches into a whispy falsetto as he considers starting a family. In the past he might have given into despair, but now he warms to the idea: “After all,” he admits, “there’s no way up from apathy.” Across the album, his sense of responsibility is strengthened by the test of time: “You can believe in me,” he sings, warbled, on “Cross the Sea.” “Now you sit with me/I keep you safe,” he reassures on “Ain’t It Easy.” It’s a cautious calmness, interrupted by pitch-shifted vocals and ominous whispers. But even the alien voices lean into comfort rather than their usual eeriness, as on “Cross the Sea”’s repetitions of “I’ll take care of you.”
And then there are the animals. References to pets are more oblique here; names are scarce. But it’s not hard to find man’s best friend peeking out from between the lines. On “Mission,” the bleary-eyed pride of “I did good, I stayed out of the kitchen/I did good, I kept it on track” sounds like the confession of a weary but determined bloodhound. “Runner,” a stunning song about an endlessly reliable companion, tosses off the heartbreaking line, “They hit you with the rolled-up magazine,” a chastisement much more reminiscent of a pet than a human. Does he mean to imply that a person is being scolded like a dog? And if not, what does it mean that we brutalize dogs so casually? The purposely vague subjects on God Save the Animals—whose perspective is portrayed on “Cross the Sea” when he sings, “You see how I make you smile/You put your foot down and I run wild”?—blur the lines between animal and human motivations. There’s a shared ethics built from that ambiguity. Animals, Giannascoli suggests, can definitely feel—fear, loyalty, dignity—even if they cannot quite grasp the need to be saved.
Giannascoli has said that he sees himself more as a producer than a traditional singer-songwriter, and God Save the Animals encapsulates both the folksy quietude of Rocket and the ominous creep of Beach Music. Subtle instrumental embellishments elevate the record: the radiance of a Rhodes piano on “Early Morning Waiting,” the twang of banjo on “Forgive,” and the sharp percussive snap on “Headroom Piano” (named for the renowned Philadelphia studio where the song was recorded). “Runner” builds a simple guitar riff into a warm and gorgeous folk-rock anthem, a rootsy kind of alternative rock in the style of Wilco or the Wallflowers. The song stands out because it stands alone, uniquely straightforward and confident through its verses, gaining momentum without undercutting its earnestness.
There are still lurking surprises: The clear-eyed harmonies and pristine guitar make it all the more gratifying to hear Giannascoli veer off course as he confesses, “I have done a couple bad things,” louder each time, until it’s an unintelligible scream. On “No Bitterness,” he combines his penchant for vocal processing and electronic production with delicate finger-picked guitar and soft drums. Halfway through, the guitars give way to a breakbeat, fueling a hyperpop ballad that works despite its contradictions because of his commitment to being both sweet and maddening at once. If the sounds are blown out, as on “Blessing,” or if room tone leaks in, like on the intro to “No Bitterness,” it feels intentional, not accidental.
It would be facile to call an album with God in its name a religious body of work. An explicit mention of Jesus feels like a half-joke; there are no direct references to churches or holy books. But God Save the Animals does feel like a liturgy of sorts, one that encapsulates Giannascoli’s belief in the healing power of animals and Auto-Tune. It’s also by far his most hopeful record, the dark shadow of early death largely absent from his lyrics. There’s a sense of looking into the future rather than mourning the past: “Forgive yesterday, I choose today,” he sings on the contemplative closer “Forgive.” His voice heaves, as if on the verge of tears, and it sounds like faith. | 2022-09-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | September 23, 2022 | 8.4 | c2296f11-2f82-42e2-a214-48a1943da011 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The iconic songwriter offers a selection of tunes from across his catalog, performed live in his house and recorded with an iPad. It sounds as starkly homemade as you’d expect. | The iconic songwriter offers a selection of tunes from across his catalog, performed live in his house and recorded with an iPad. It sounds as starkly homemade as you’d expect. | Neil Young: The Times EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-the-times-ep/ | The Times EP | Neil Young’s live audiences this year have included a cat, several dogs, a barnyard of disinterested poultry, and Daryl Hannah. The actor, Young’s wife and quarantine partner, is also the in-house cinematographer for the Fireside Sessions, an endearingly homemade series of performance videos shot on an iPad in and around their Colorado home. These brief sets, uploaded to Neil Young Archives, Young’s personal website and idiosyncratic high-resolution streaming platform, effectively constitute his touring for the year. That makes The Times, which documents a July Fireside Sessions performance of topical and socially conscious songs from across Young’s vast catalog, something like his newest live release.
The iPad’s rudimentary digital recording capabilities give The Times a lo-fi but distinctly modern starkness that stands in contrast to Young’s longstanding fixation on sound quality and love of vintage (and expensive) analog gear. The raw sound, mixed and mastered to the fullest extent possible, carries a certain populist immediacy, capturing Young’s voice through the same consumer-level technology available to everybody else. After Young’s 50-plus years making records, The Times is a new kind of homegrown.
Listening to The Times feels a bit like checking in on a cool older relative’s social media feed to affirm they haven’t gone QAnon-level bananas during quarantine. Young mercifully has not. The collection’s two songs that he hasn’t previously released are “Lookin’ for a Leader 2020,” which updates 2006’s “Lookin’ for a Leader” with lyrics about Black Lives Matter, and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Though both affirm Young’s commitment to righteousness, neither hit particularly hard as music. “The Times” feels too vague, and “Lookin’ For A Leader 2020” too specific. Both are easier to appreciate as emotional windows into Young than statements unto themselves.
“Ohio,” Young’s 1970 protest song about the National Guard’s murder of four Kent State students that year, hits harder. A half-century later, as it becomes increasingly clear that “four dead in Ohio” is a tiny sliver of unceasing state-enacted violence on American citizenry, the song is as painful and real as ever. “Alabama,” originally released on 1972’s Harvest, is nearly as powerful. Young’s solo acoustic version plays like a black-and-white photograph next to the full-color harmonies by Stephen Stills and David Crosby on the original. Unlike the more aggressive “Southern Man,” also included here, “Alabama” is more imagistic than prescriptive, with “banjos playing through the broken/glass windows down in Alabama” before the white robes of the Klan flash by—a haunting open-ended quality that lends itself to the stripped-down treatment. The Times’ version of “Southern Man,” merely a smaller-sounding take on an otherwise powerful classic rock song, doesn’t transform itself in quite the same way.
Young is releasing The Times through his longtime label Reprise, and via an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music. Still, the EP's ramshackle documentary spirit is in line with the Neil Young Archives project, where the performance was first broadcast, and it feels most genuinely political when considered in that context. What began as a quest for high-resolution audio via the much-punchlined Pono player eventually resulted in Young’s own independent, self-updated platform, a full-service site for his music, writing, and videos. And if he loosened his anti-corporate stance by partnering with Amazon on The Times, he holds it strongly at the Archives. He recently announced he would be removing the option for users to log in via Facebook and Google (“Facebook is screwing with our election,” he wrote), further cutting off his corner of the internet from its dominant navigation platforms.
Young has said he chose to release The Times via Amazon “because no one delivers better sound to the masses,” and it’s possible to read some willful perversity into his decision to give them an EP he recorded on an iPad in less than an hour. Whether a sellout move, an ironic statement, or just another example of Young’s decades-long zig-zag through pop music, The Times feels genuine and unforced—an organic expression of whatever he was feeling at the time, in all its weirdness and contradiction. In other words, it’s prime Neil Young.
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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. | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | September 23, 2020 | 6.9 | c22e9955-6dce-44a3-b15a-b5a441eabb6b | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
The Dallas-based producer and musician sings an ode to the dissected self on their fully-formed debut EP, a metallic amalgam of trip-hop and electronic soul. | The Dallas-based producer and musician sings an ode to the dissected self on their fully-formed debut EP, a metallic amalgam of trip-hop and electronic soul. | Mattie: Jupiter’s Purse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mattie-jupiters-purse/ | Jupiter’s Purse | Dallas-based producer and singer MATTIE draws on electronic, soul, and hip-hop to carve out a woozy, nocturnal space to live. Their debut EP, Jupiter’s Purse, is co-produced by fellow Texas native Black Taffy, whose beats reinforce MATTIE’s voice in hazy, trip-hop-inflected architecture. Beguiling and menacing at once, Jupiter’s Purse announces an artist whose music braces with unreleased tension, keeping you balanced on the edge of volcanic emotion.
The five songs on Jupiter’s Purse are from the point of view of Mhuv, a character MATTIE uses to explore the duality of the self. The process of coming into their own is in constant flux across the EP, full of uncertainties and doubt that spider out into uneasy, eerie songs. The lurching beat and trembling bells on “Cellfish” form a chilling backdrop for MATTIE’s elongated vowels: “Why can’t I admit that I’ve been cell fish?/Why won’t I tell the truth?” On “Human Thing,” which sounds as though it were delivered by a pleading cyborg, they dial into the conflict of using money to maintain a strong sense of self, indicting an omnipresent culture of commodification: “It’s consuming us, I am a witness!” they conclude, voice cracking into a gasp.
MATTIE and Black Taffy form a unique bond here, as the latter amplifies MATTIE’s hefty alto voice with an unsteady mix of electronic and hip-hop music. Murky synth melodies and washes of string and woodwind samples dot these songs like constellations, with each diffuse element grounded by MATTIE’s commanding, charismatic pull, transmuted and pitch-shifted at will. Their voice filters into a gurgle of feedback on “Out This Bitch,” where MATTIE’s enunciation swiftly changes as they shift further into an anti-establishment mindset: “This world ain’t got nothing for us/Maybe that’s why it bores us/It was before your skin, that black that black that black…” they chant, the word “black” filtered out into a kaleidoscopic echo and a source of vital, ancestral strength.
MATTIE embraces self-dissection throughout the EP, using nervous howls and shrugged-off boasts to express their own inherent validity. On “Cloudts,” the EP’s centerpiece, they create an alien lullaby that shuttles by with a shimmering string sample that sounds ripped out of a Disney movie and dragged through the dirt. Though MATTIE generally uses their music to examine feeling uncomfortable in one’s own skin, here they allow a concession to a more hopeful future. “I didn’t know that rocks were valuable,” they sing over static pops and a glowering melody. “But I am a diamond and let me find out.” That image—a jewel glinting through chipped-away stone—is an appropriate one for Jupiter’s Purse, where even the most off-kilter moment is one of beauty. | 2022-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Leaving | March 1, 2022 | 8 | c237f626-fb70-4a82-998c-6eb77ad69919 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The funky and hypnotic fourth album from the Canadian trio coats a suite of warped synth-pop grooves in the lead singer’s slow-talking sleaze. | The funky and hypnotic fourth album from the Canadian trio coats a suite of warped synth-pop grooves in the lead singer’s slow-talking sleaze. | Freak Heat Waves: Zap the Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freak-heat-waves-zap-the-planet/ | Zap the Planet | Steven Lind, the singer for the Canadian trio Freak Heat Waves, has the kind of voice you might expect to hear from a talking turtle in a children’s movie. He drawls his words in a cartoonishly low monotone, elongating the last syllable of each line beyond reason (“prove it’s good,” in the song “Let It Go,” becomes “Prooove/It’s gooooood-uh”). In a normal band, a voice like this might seem to be a liability. But on their fourth album, Zap the Planet, Freak Heat Waves dispense with any illusions of the ordinary, concocting a suite of warped synth-pop grooves coated in Lind’s slow-talking sleaze.
It’s their best album to date, if not exactly the sound Freak Heat Waves first became known for. The trio emerged from the Midwestern Canadian prairies a decade ago, amassing a small following in Canada’s art-punk scene and soon performing alongside better-known peers like Preoccupations (then Viet Cong) and Odonis Odonis, with whom they share a label. Following some well-received cassettes, the band’s self-titled debut arrived in 2012, co-produced by the late Christopher Reimer of Women and sharing more than a passing likeness with that band’s serrated post-punk temperament.
On more recent albums, particularly 2018’s Beyond XXXL, Freak Heat Waves veered in the direction of goth rock and synth-heavy industrial. But the songs were often sludgy and a bit muddled, as though the band sought to mimic the texture of their singer’s vocals. Zap the Planet succeeds because of the odd tension between Lind’s dour delivery and the brightest, most exuberant grooves of the band’s career—a trick of contrast that their fellow countryman Leonard Cohen perfected on I’m Your Man. Tellingly, the least compelling tracks here are the two instrumentals, including opener “Off Axis,” a pleasant but perfunctory soundcheck of assorted synth textures. It’s not bad, but sounds like a mere warm-up for what’s to come.
The album apparently owes its vintage electro sound to the band’s increasing interest in analog synths and early MIDI technology. The result is an uncommonly funky and hypnotic album. Fizzy, dueling layers of synths lead the way on highlights like “Busted” and “I’m Zapped”; the tempos are crisper and the production clearer than before, all the better to foreground Lind’s devilish croon. On the album’s centerpiece, “Dripping Visions,” he’s at his best, brooding over an unsettling encounter as the band stacks drum machines and live percussion on top of each other to maximize the pulsating groove. The group sought an arrangement that would be “as groovy as it was off-putting,” and surely succeeded.
Freak Heat Waves’ affinity for sci-fi futurism has been a recurring element—the band routinely cites dystopian films like Robocop and A Clockwork Orange as influences and once described their 2015 song “Design of Success” (which is briefly sampled on Zap the Planet’s “Let It Go”) as a “strange and sexy look into an alien nightclub.” That aesthetic takes over on “I’m Zapped,” in which Lind narrates his descent into some peculiar, perhaps supernatural addiction: “It’s messing with my head/Zapped on my mattress/Zapped on my toilet.” Lyrically, it’s the kind of cheekily paranoid punk song you might expect to find on an early Cramps album.
Yet the record’s title flips it into an active verb—Zap the Planet. It’s a small gesture that crystalizes this band’s implicit mission of making the world a little freakier. Freak Heat Waves remain largely unknown to American audiences, but this album makes a convincing case for making their acquaintance.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Telephone Explosion | September 4, 2020 | 7.8 | c2391508-d7a9-4445-add5-98d52b80ff0a | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
As with all of his best work, the D.C. rapper’s latest finds him grappling with trauma, haunted by the specter of death at every turn. | As with all of his best work, the D.C. rapper’s latest finds him grappling with trauma, haunted by the specter of death at every turn. | Shy Glizzy: Covered N Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shy-glizzy-covered-n-blood/ | Covered N Blood | In cities like Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles, a rapper can achieve overnight success, flipping a viral single into 15 minutes of fame or more. In Washington D.C., the runway to stardom has always seemed longer. Artists like Wale and GoldLink spent years toiling in obscurity before their regional goodwill boiled over into the mainstream, while others, like Fat Trel and Tabi Bonney, stalled out despite considerable buzz. None, though, have been tipped as the District’s next breakout star for longer than Shy Glizzy. The southeast D.C. native has been making waves since at least 2012, when he jacked two of Chief Keef’s most iconic beats for his “3Milli” diss; in the following years, he scored minor hits with “Awwsome” and the morbid gospel anthem, “Funeral,” one of 2014’s best rap songs. Glizzy's presumed tipping point came with his acrobatic, show-stopping verse on Goldlink’s surprise 2017 hit “Crew”. But even with that platinum-selling single under his belt, he has remained perennially on the cusp, forever D.C.’s next big thing.
Why hasn’t Shy Glizzy’s career taken off? You could chalk it up to poor timing or bad luck, though there’s also the matter of Glizzy’s voice—a piercing, nasal croak—and his tendency to pulverize words into a slurry before they leave his mouth. There’s no other rapper working who sounds quite like him, but considering the success of unconventional vocalists like Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert, Glizzy’s moment may have finally arrived. Both of those stars appeared on Glizzy’s debut album—last year’s aptly-titled Fully Loaded—alongside a laundry list of ascendant celebrities, including Gunna, NBA YoungBoy and Smokepurpp. Just a few months later, Glizzy is back with the comparatively pared-back Covered ‘N’ Blood. Clocking in at just 38 minutes and two features, the album feels tighter, more personal, and closer to home than the splashy record that preceded it.
Where Fully Loaded was sleek, understated and occasionally a little sleepy, Covered ‘N’ Blood returns to Glizzy’s comfort zone: deeply pained street rap anchored by minor-key instrumentals and slippery vocal melodies. “Big Dipper” offers a representative sample: Glizzy opens the contemplative, piano-heavy track with the couplet, “I swear there’s too much pain here for one young nigga/Them niggas ain’t got aim, they just like to pull the trigger.” NBA YoungBoy returns for “Bang Bang,” wherein Glizzy compares the paint job of a car to eggnog, dines on “grouper with the head on” and builds a sticky hook out of a tragedy: "Ring ring, I just got a fed call/You know that must mean somebody is dead and gone” (both Glizzy’s collaborator Lor Scoota and close associate 30 Glizzy were gunned down in Baltimore in recent years). Covered ‘N’ Blood’s catchiest song, “Demons,” sounds like it was precision-tooled for car speakers, loud volumes and hot D.C. summers: the track consists of little more than a buzzing bassline, a blocky drum pattern and a distant string sample. It’s one of the most outright fun songs Glizzy has written and yet, even here, the chorus hints at an ever-lurking darkness: “I cut the lights off in my house and I see fucking demons.”
It’s only been a few weeks since the death of Nipsey Hussle, but somehow, Glizzy has already managed to pay tribute to the rapper on record. On “Ridin Down Slauson,” Glizzy rolls down the main drag in Hussle’s beloved Crenshaw neighborhood; struggling to find meaning in yet another senseless death, Glizzy reaffirms his commitment to his craft (“I do this for every young nigga in the hood”). As has been widely noted, Hussle’s legacy runs deeper than rap—his agenda of black ownership and self-determination redefined success for those who looked up to him. “I hope more people can learn from his example, being entrepreneurs and moving differently out here,” Glizzy said of Hussle in a recent interview. "I feel similar to Nipsey because I’ve always stayed around my people, stayed independent and everyone in the game wanted to sign me, just like Nipsey.” Shy Glizzy might not yet be a household name but on Covered ‘N’ Blood, he continues to soldier on, seeking success on his own terms. | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Glizzy Gang / 300 Entertainment | May 4, 2019 | 7.3 | c23b60ef-8fa5-4581-a189-81e7b2854130 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Jazz fusion, chamber pop, modern classical—if your awareness of Hornsby stops at the lite-FM radio dial, prepare to be disoriented. | Jazz fusion, chamber pop, modern classical—if your awareness of Hornsby stops at the lite-FM radio dial, prepare to be disoriented. | Bruce Hornsby: Absolute Zero | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-hornsby-absolute-zero/ | Absolute Zero | Sometime in the last decade, Bruce Hornsby nearly became hip. Give the credit (or blame) to Justin Vernon: After the man behind Bon Iver cited Hornsby as a formative influence, the pianist wound up playing the Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival in 2016, mingling with The National, Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis, and Will Oldham. Today, you can hear Hornsby’s influence in the work of wildly popular rock bands like The War on Drugs. For anyone who only associated the pianist with ‘80s heartland rock hits like “The Way It Is,” “Mandolin Rain,” and “The Valley Road,” his indie-rock renaissance might have seemed a little surreal.
Truth be told, Hornsby abandoned Adult Contemporary Rock almost the minute he hit the charts. In 1990—the last year he was a presence on Album Rock radio—he replaced the deceased Brent Mydland in the Grateful Dead, revealing both his jam-band roots and his extensive classically trained chops. Those elements won over a dedicated audience that sustained Hornsby through fallow years, allowing him to experiment with everything from bluegrass to jazz, usually with the support of his band the Noisemakers.
Although a few members of the Noisemakers play on this record, Absolute Zero is officially his first solo album since Spirit Trail, released way back in 1998. Hornsby seizes the opportunity for reinvention, packing Absolute Zero with everything from chamber pop to jazz fusion and modern classical. All of his myriad musical interests are explored here, usually with the assistance of collaborators. Vernon co-writes “Cast-Off”; Jerry Garcia’s old lyricist Robert Hunter pens lyrics for “Take You There (Misty).” Fusion legend Jack DeJohnette lends some asymmetrical rhythms to several tracks. The result is destined to confound anyone whose awareness of Hornsby stops at the lite-FM radio dial.
The DNA of these songs came from a series of discarded and reworked cues Hornsby wrote for the Netflix serialization of Spike Lee’s 1986 feature She’s Gotta Have It. It’s not the only evidence of Hornsby’s resourcefulness: For the album's title track, he repurposed a DeJohnette rhythm track recorded back in 2007 for Camp Meeting, a trio album between the drummer, pianist and bassist Christian McBride. “Echolocation” is dressed with spooky Appalachian stringed instruments and rumbles by on a backwoods thump, while “Never In This House” is the kind of stately ballad that could’ve graced any one of his records since 1986.
This elusiveness, a sly synthesis of past and present as well as acoustic and synthetic instruments, is the key to Hornsby’s music and why it endures. Listen closely to his big hits with The Range, and it’s clear that the rhythms are all electronic; even “Mandolin Rain,” whose very title conveys acoustic purity, rolls along to the crisp snap of a drum machine. From the outset of his career, Hornsby embraced modernity, which means the real difference with Absolute Zero is that he’s no longer exclusively interested in writing pop songs.
Melody remains essential to his music, but it’s threaded within dazzling cloistered chords and majestically eerie string arrangements. The lyrics are fractured and elliptical in a way that recalls Van Dyke Parks, borrowing imagery from science fiction and the natural world to evoke emotional disconnect. It is heady material, and in other hands it might seem overwrought or awkward. But Hornsby plays with elegance, at ease with both his traces of hipness and essential squareness. It's a confidence that arrives with both comfort and age and it's what unifies all the disparate elements of Absolute Zero, shaping the album into a testament to the full range of Hornsby’s gifts. | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thirty Tigers | April 23, 2019 | 7.4 | c23c792f-837b-4258-baa2-858e8e07a0ce | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Kurt Vile collaborator Steve Gunn was paired with transgressive folk-rock explorer Mike Cooper for the most recent installment of RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series. The seven-song result might feel at first like a grab bag, as the pair moves between a number of styles, techniques, and instruments, but Cantos de Lisboa isn’t nearly as sporadic or assorted as it initially seems. | Kurt Vile collaborator Steve Gunn was paired with transgressive folk-rock explorer Mike Cooper for the most recent installment of RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series. The seven-song result might feel at first like a grab bag, as the pair moves between a number of styles, techniques, and instruments, but Cantos de Lisboa isn’t nearly as sporadic or assorted as it initially seems. | Steve Gunn / Mike Cooper: Cantos de Lisboa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19442-steve-gunn-mike-cooper-cantos-de-lisboa/ | Cantos de Lisboa | Steve Gunn hadn’t been born by the time Mike Cooper decided he was done with folk-rock. After becoming one of Britain’s brightest young blues pickers and declining an invitation to join the then-fledgling Rolling Stones in the early 60s, Cooper made a string of singer-songwriter records for the British label Pye. That relationship both climaxed and closed in 1972, with the release of Cooper’s outlandish The Machine Gun Co.—the last in a series of three transgressive folk-rock explorations, where blooming free jazz and spiraling psychedelics disrupted any simple, sing-and-strum notions. Cooper lost his record contract and, during the next four decades, let his musical investigation and imagination run amuck. He still played the blues, yes, but he also mined electroacoustic improvisation and Hawaiian music, operatic composition and Brion Gysin-like cut-ups. Folk-rock? Nope. Cooper bequeathed that mantle long ago, only for it to be taken up in recent years by the young Gunn and scores of his peers. Once again, they’ve worked to expand the sounds that such a drab term might entail, picking up the antagonism that once made Cooper an outcast.
But late last year, despite the four decades and the ocean that separates them, Cooper and Gunn rendezvoused in a Portugal airport, launching 10 days of shows and a retreat in a Lisbon studio. The partnership came as a commission from RVNG Intl., the New York-based label that has issued a string of similar one-off encounters—Blues Control, meet Laraaji; Emeralds, meet Alan Howarth—as the aptly named FRKWYS series during the last five years. The edict was simple: Make some new music, and attempt to sort it into a record.
The seven-song result, Cantos de Lisboa, might feel at first like a grab bag, as the pair moves freely between a number of styles, techniques, and instruments. They’re both best known for their intimate voices and their intricate picking, but they sing very little here and surround their guitars with a host of distractions. While they begin with twin forlorn guitars on opener “Saudade Do Santos-o-Vehlo”, they shift to scraped gongs and scrambled electronics for “Song for Charlie”, or at least most of it. “Pony Blues” showcases two dexterous players, winding through lithe licks with the agility of the Shetlands of which Cooper sings. The focus of “Saramago”, though, is that of outré players, with scraped strings and manipulated notes, ruptured harmonics and dissonant strums suggesting the acoustic improvisations of Derek Bailey and Eugene Chadbourne.
Restless, career-long collaborators on their own, Gunn and Cooper twirl across the electrostatic cello lines of Helena Espvall during “Pena Panorama”. Gunn sings at the end, offering up a bucolic refrain about perseverance. It’s the closest the album comes to the folk-rock that serves as Cooper and Gunn respective calling card, but that most accessible bit comes bound to four minutes of impish abstraction—fitting symbols for both careers.
Beyond the sonics, though, Cantos de Lisboa isn’t nearly as sporadic or assorted as it might seem. In a brief introductory essay, Cooper notes that he and Gunn attended a concert in a Fado club while in Lisbon. The spirit of that wonderfully sad music pervades and links these numbers. It’s at times obvious; drifting invocation “Saudade Do Santos-o-Vehlo” takes its name from saudade, the emotional essence that bands Fado together. But you can hear that same doubt lingering inside “The Enchanted Moura”, a brief and bristling cut that creeps with uncertainty. Cooper, who lives in Rome, and Gunn, from Philadelphia, seem to offer a multilingual celebration of the blues—not as a musical style, but as a condition bound to the sounds of more than the Mississippi Delta or the Brits who salvaged that music. A feeling holds Cantos de Lisboa together where its music cannot.
Results of forced, paid-for collaborations like those on FRKWYS or the dormant In the Fishtank can be spotty, plagued by outside expectations and prevailing legacy. A curator hears something connecting two artists or ensembles on record, but in person, those aspects don’t sync into serendipity to make new music worth hearing. Within both series, examples of ideas that worked on paper and fizzled in person abound. But Cantos feels more like the start of a spark than a sample of a bankrupt idea. Gunn, 37, is an active collaborator, sure, from supporting songwriter Kurt Vile to exploring arid blues with drummer John Truscinski. He hasn’t had the time or the space to plunder far-flung genres and idioms the same way Cooper has. Here, the elder feels like the guide, leading an able and adaptive acolyte into moments that extend Gunn’s previous grasp. Cantos makes you want to know how far he will eventually go. There’s nothing quite as wild and discursive in Gunn’s catalogue as “Lampedusa 2013”, for instance, an abrasive philippic that might pass for Current 93. It’s one of this set’s most surprising and exciting bits, a moment that mostly makes you hope there’s more to come. | 2014-07-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-07-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Rvng Intl. | July 11, 2014 | 7.2 | c2411011-f04c-4ffd-92e2-6e088a3da1f1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Canadian composer’s first new material since the 2016 rediscovery of his 1986 LP Keyboard Fantasies is a joyous, hope-filled showcase of his singular voice and healing vision. | The Canadian composer’s first new material since the 2016 rediscovery of his 1986 LP Keyboard Fantasies is a joyous, hope-filled showcase of his singular voice and healing vision. | Beverly Glenn-Copeland: The Ones Ahead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beverly-glenn-copeland-the-ones-ahead/ | The Ones Ahead | The world has never been noisier. For people who grew up uncertain of being heard—and for people of color, queer people, and, most especially, Black trans folks, who grew up certain of being deliberately misunderstood, even silenced—not all the noise is good. But for more than half a century, Beverly Glenn-Copeland has been offering an alternate tuning.
His first two albums fused personal poetics to avant-jazz-folk; he spent the next 15 years or so split between playing in the house band of a beloved children’s television show and living deep in rural Canada, where his soundtrack was the woods. Meanwhile, the universe was feeding him songs through what he calls the Universal Broadcasting System. He made an album of them, 1986’s spellbinding, DX7-driven Keyboard Fantasies, whose mysteries found receptive ears when Invisible City Editions reissued it some three decades later. His groovy album Primal Prayer, originally released under the artist name Phynix in 2004, was reissued. There was also a reverent documentary, a career-spanning compilation, a live album documenting the astonishing strength of his versatile voice, a remix album proving few could better his originals, a Polaris Prize. His echoes were everywhere, old and ever new.
The Ones Ahead is the first album of new material since all this happened. It’s a remarkably assured statement of purpose. Crafted in collaboration with music director John Herberman, with chart arrangements by Carlie Howell and performances by Howell and other members of Indigo Rising, who back Glenn-Copeland on his rapturous live shows, the album is largely a staging ground for his vision and his voice.
And what a voice. “Harbour (Song for Elizabeth)” makes a warm bed of fretless bass and crisp, resonant piano. He confesses to his wife, “My heart aches/When your tears flow.” His vibrato is a blanket that stretches as he sings, then rumples as he sinks into a lower register: “But then spring breaks/And that’s all I know.” Love, queer love, is a force of nature. “Love Takes All” is darker, bolder. Drums rumble, a guitar slides like rain down trees. “What was grand or small,” he proclaims, as the word grand sounds like it’s stretching his throat into canyons, “love just takes it all.” Doesn’t it just. Doesn’t love just require everything to last.
Here, like Kate Bush in her Aerial days, Glenn-Copeland threads the quotidian and the mystical into knots. They secure him in “Lakeland Angel” as he and the titular siren trade serenades; the couple need each other, and tend to that need as simply as a hand splaying out across a keyboard, forming chords. The ties to Christian mysticism or Narnia LARPing might be a little too tight, for some, on “Prince Caspian’s Dream,” with its washes of cymbals and whistles. But these days, it might be forgiven to slip into dreaming of other worlds while dreaming up better versions of this one. One might, in the middle of a backlash summer in which friends are losing loved ones and enduring violence and wondering just how bad things might get still, experience a loneliness forgiven by Glenn-Copeland’s voice. Or at least I felt I was, while listening.
Elsewhere, Glenn-Copeland builds homes for himself and his loved ones in rhythm. Opener “Africa Calling” brings it home with call-and-response murmurings, lusciously recorded rustling percussion, and some lovely, bittersweet jazz piano toward the end. “Stand Anthem” is a rabble-rouser: A strident march begins, a dignified melody follows, and Glenn-Copeland leads a chorus towards action, articulating modern ills with confrontational earnestness. “People of the Loon” is more surreal, but no less committed to refusing cynicism. When I talked to him in 2020, he told a story of kayaking on a silent lake, and suddenly being surrounded by a circle of dancing birds. This song is itself a circle of mallet instruments, drums, streams of strings. “Come a little bit closer,” he and his group chant, “for each there must be room.” Like the best psychedelic visions, it’s a little silly, a little scary, equal parts pagan poetry and political organizing. (Get your samplers ready.)
The title track waltzes in with a gentle appeal for personal agency and collective responsibility intertwined with an almost biblical prophecy. “’Neath the starfields burnin’/I see the ones, I see the ones ahead/Circlin’ on the river,” he sings. “This world is our combined imagination/Your life, a personal creation.” Listen to other stories, then make up your own. In the astonishing closer, “No Other,” Glenn-Copeland refuses to accept the alienation this lousy world wants for him, for us. “I am a child of this world,” he proclaims. Amid martial drums and in marital bliss, and there’s that damn whistle again, he hears those who came before and he foresees us following his lead. It sounds turbulent and so sincere.
It’s deeply moving to witness Glenn-Copeland survive, to watch the next generations find their freedom in him. When the spotlight found him, it felt, in part, one of those rare moments when a true genius—a Black, Canadian trans man in his seventies who made one of the best electronic records of the 20th Century, who could coo like Billie Holiday and croon like Frank Sinatra and command like Buffy Saint-Marie and run like Beyoncé and probably even, if he wanted to, rip your soul in half like Diamanda Galás but instead chose to heal it like nobody else—was finally getting his due. Beverly Glenn-Copeland is an unprecedented talent who reminds us that each of us is rare. There’s so much more to hear, so many more of us to listen to. The Universal Broadcasting System is still switched on. | 2023-07-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Transgressive | July 28, 2023 | 8 | c2436d13-8279-41c2-b5e7-1e568e7c4420 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Warren’s complex, unwinding melodies shine on her latest album, and while the concept views love through an astrological lens, the lyrics expose life’s crushing banality. | Warren’s complex, unwinding melodies shine on her latest album, and while the concept views love through an astrological lens, the lyrics expose life’s crushing banality. | Johanna Warren: Gemini II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johanna-warren-gemini-ii/ | Gemini II | Johanna Warren sometimes seems like a psychic medium moonlighting as a songwriter. The Portland native makes dreamy folk music that sparkles and sprawls with new age flourishes and crystal shop percussion, inspired by tarot cards, metaphysics, and the monastic teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Even beyond her recorded work, Warren comes off like a person radiating with cosmic wisdom to the point that it starts leaking outward, seemingly unprompted. In an interview at SXSW last year, she offered this advice: “If you just make yourself really bright and shiny, everything around you becomes a reflective surface that shines back at you.” (The question she’s responding to—“How’s your South By experience so far?”).
Gemini II is the second album Johanna Warren has composed about a relationship (with a Gemini), and it mirrors its predecessor. Both feature nine interlinked songs, with Warren playing a wide variety of instruments including guitar, flute, mellotron, and synths. While the concept views love through an astrological lens, her lyrics expose life’s crushing banality—the things that make us look to the stars for answers in the first place. In “Cause or Effect,” she sings to a protagonist left bored and self-conscious when everyone at the party steps out for a smoke. “You got nothing else to do/Your phone is broken,” she sings as a rush of harmony enters, as if to mock the weight of such unglamorous ennui.
While recording prolifically as a solo artist, Warren has also developed a career accompanying folks like Julie Byrne and Iron & Wine, acts who’ve gained notoriety for just how unaccompanied their music sounds. You get the sense that Warren’s become a sought-after collaborator not for her ability to blend into the background but for her knowledge of exactly how to complement a song while maintaining its sense of solitude, tapping into an inherent aura. This skill makes the relatively brief Gemini II feel dynamic and sweeping and its songs consistently surprising.
In the moody opener, “Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me,” Warren textures a date night pep talk with gothic cobwebs of piano and guitar. When the drums kick in, they conjure the rush of road-trip indie rock, a subtle gust of familiarity and momentum. More straightforward songs like the strum-along ballad “Boundaries” also move in strange ways. With a melody that finds the middle ground between Red House Painters’ Songs for a Blue Guitar and Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, Warren breaks in and out of character, injecting its sense of calm with conversational asides. You are unlikely to hear a more beautiful song that also includes the phrase, “so fucking stoked.”
Both as a guitarist and a vocalist, Warren has a knack for complex, unwinding melodies. The subtle “Mine to Take,” with its weary double-tracked vocals, taps into the mystical Laurel Canyon sound of Judee Sill. British folk serves as an inspiration for the more ambitious compositions: the hypnotic “inreverse” and the closing “Was It Heaven.” Wise and stately, these songs provide the album’s major moments of resolution. “I hope you’ll fly again,” Warren sings in the closing lines of “Was It Heaven.” “With you, I was infinitely lost.” As the departing sentiment of her Gemini saga, it offers a sense of peace, but Warren knows most journeys don’t end so clean. We never stop searching for answers: It’s what keeps all our most trusted songwriters—and psychics—in business. | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Spirit House | February 24, 2018 | 7 | c24733da-72ad-40cb-bb36-0a5b990321f9 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Lindsey Jordan’s exquisite second album documents love in all stages, but mostly in disrepair. She takes on a larger and poppier sound while keeping her songwriting dazzlingly sharp and passionate. | Lindsey Jordan’s exquisite second album documents love in all stages, but mostly in disrepair. She takes on a larger and poppier sound while keeping her songwriting dazzlingly sharp and passionate. | Snail Mail: Valentine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snail-mail-valentine/ | Valentine | Lindsey Jordan’s second album as Snail Mail is for anyone who’s been bloodied by Cupid’s arrow. Offered up by a self-professed but seemingly unlucky romantic, Valentine documents love in all stages, but mostly in disrepair. Its palette extends beyond pinks and reds: There’s the envious green of seeing an old love with someone new, the consuming black of bottoming out, and, occasionally, the clear blue of weightless bliss, however fleeting. Throughout, Jordan adheres to the credo that she first announced as a rhetorical question—“Is there any better feeling than coming clean?”—on Lush, the searing debut that turned her from a suburban teenager with wicked guitar chops into a beloved indie frontwoman.
Jordan, now 22, says she fielded 15 different label offers while she was still in high school. After signing with Matador and releasing Lush in 2018, she became a public figure and a magnet for parasocial attachment, drawing hordes of fans who saw themselves in her queerness and keen sensitivity. Amid this whirlpool of attention, Jordan found that her personal boundaries were too permeable; the overexposure caused enough harm to land her in rehab last year, an experience she mentions offhandedly once on Valentine. Afterwards, she handed her social media accounts to an assistant and hired a media trainer to help her deflect prying journalists. “Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?” she sings over a foreboding synth in Valentine’s opening bars, pointing to the parts of success that give her pause.
But now that she has patched the holes from which her personal life seeped out into the public, her music, more than ever, functions as the release valve. The title track and lead single sounds like the inevitable eruption: Jordan blows up the chorus with an impassioned wail (“Why’d you wanna erase me, darling valentine?”) and surging guitar, her loudness proof that she will not be erased, damn it. Valentine retains the exquisite vulnerability that made Snail Mail’s first record so compelling, but Jordan’s sound is more forceful, her touchstones more varied, her writing more toned. On Lush, she explored the expressive but limited possibilities of a three-piece rock band; on Valentine, along with co-producer Brad Cook (Indigo De Souza, Waxahatchee), she flirts with pop—sharpening her hooks, reaching for the synths and strings. Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.
Swept up in the early-pandemic migration that sent scores of twentysomethings back to their parents’ homes, Jordan wrote much of Valentine on the floor of her childhood bedroom, the same place that she penned her early songs of longing and languishing. Now as then, love is an all-consuming force in her music, but she writes with a deeper understanding of its destructive potential and a willingness to articulate it in arresting terms. Romance and alcohol are twin toxins on Valentine, each amplifying the other’s damaging effects, each informing Jordan’s perspective on the other. “You wanna leave a stain, like a relapse does,” she sings to a ruinous former flame on “Ben Franklin.” On “Headlock,”she’s mid-bender and missing an ex, “drinking just to taste her mouth.” A wordless murmur of stacked, sighing harmonies breathes relief into the song, only to be followed by the album’s darkest material, a wrenching admission of suicidal ideation.
Valentine takes us fearlessly to these extremes. “I have a really hard time writing from any place other than complete honesty within myself,” Jordan said recently, noting the lasting impact of her childhood compulsion to confess. But talking about music strictly in terms of confession often erases the skill that undergirds it, particularly when that skill belongs to young women. To confess is to tell, yet conventional wisdom says it’s better to show; Jordan does both, painting vivid images and annotating them with earnest declarations. In a haze of thudding percussion and distortion on “Automate,” we find her unsteady at a party, fumbling to kiss a stranger and pretend it’s someone else. “I’ll never find another love like this,” she laments, a recurring sentiment in her music. On “Mia,” she walks us down Broadway and spots an ex preening on the way to her new partner’s apartment. “Lost love so strange,” Jordan warbles over orchestral swells, an assessment that feels profound in her gripping voice, always straining and seamed.
Some of Valentine’s best moments come when Jordan’s textures are as bold as her emotions. “Ben Franklin” is an infectious highlight; come for the sturdy bass groove and the delicious irony of “Got money/I don’t care about sex” in the verse; stay for Jordan’s bratty delivery of “huh, honey?,” her melody doubled by wiggling synth and backed up with guest vocals from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield on the chorus. The slinky “Forever (Sailing)” brings trip-hop atmospherics to a tale of betrayal, borrowing its chorus from a 1979 song by the Swedish pop singer Madleen Kane. “Doesn’t obsession just become me?” Jordan sings knowingly here, handing down her thesis statement.
Obsession has its upsides; resist its pull and you’ll miss delirious highs. “Light Blue,” a cozy daydream of close-mic’d acoustic guitar and glowing strings that stands apart as Valentine’s only unburdened love song, contains this tingling admission of affection: “I wanna wake up early every day/Just to be awake in the same world as you.” Though something of an outlier in both its simplicity and its sentiment, this song is a smart addition to the set—it demonstrates what’s at stake when Jordan sings about love that she’d die for.
But obsession—whether you’re on the giving or receiving end—is also exhausting. On the same song, Jordan offers her partner a choice. “We can sail the ocean blue,” she sings, then gets real: “Or just lie down.” She shows a similar tendency toward rest in about half the songs on the album, most memorably on the delicate “c. et. al.”: “Even with a job that keeps me moving/Most days I just wanna lie down.” Jordan is hardly the first young star to write about the toll of her chosen path; Clairo, Jordan’s friend and an artist who is often spoken about in the same breath, did it on her own sophomore effort this year. But what’s exciting here is that fatigue has not muted Jordan or tamped her growth; instead of lying down, she shakes it off and keeps moving, chasing big sounds and big feelings. Even when she’s exhausted, Jordan is exuberant. | 2021-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | November 4, 2021 | 8.5 | c2474904-ec81-4528-ac34-4f682141e1c6 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
California native Morgan Delt is a homegrown musician whose debut evades convenient pigeonholing. The collection is a carefully built mosaic of jangly power pop, fuzzed out martian rock, and did-it-myself B-movie soundtracking that dissolves into a melted mess. | California native Morgan Delt is a homegrown musician whose debut evades convenient pigeonholing. The collection is a carefully built mosaic of jangly power pop, fuzzed out martian rock, and did-it-myself B-movie soundtracking that dissolves into a melted mess. | Morgan Delt: Morgan Delt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18904-morgan-delt-morgan-delt/ | Morgan Delt | Our world is an impossibly and perhaps unnecessarily connected one, a place where household cats have Instagram feeds and most details of a life turn up after a deep Googling. No matter how much one attempts to stay off the grid, eventually something comes up. For example: The second page of Google results for “Morgan Delt” includes a character page for Morgan Delt, the protagonist of an obscure 1966 Vanessa Redgrave-starring film called Morgan—A Suitable Case of Treatment. Wikipedia describes him as “a failed irresponsible leftist artist” who’s obsessed with Karl Marx and gorillas; a characteristic quote from IMDB is something like, “[places skeleton on bed] Man is born to sorrow…”
If this is not California native Morgan Delt’s chosen pseudonym, it’s awfully telling of an interesting upbringing. He’s a homegrown musician whose debut self-titled album (which includes much of an earlier limited-edition cassette release) evades convenient pigeonholing. There’s the deal with the name, and then there's this: In one of the few interviews with Delt, the interviewer asks him to explain a song called "Barbarian Kings". "I did have a story in mind with that song," he responds. "I don't want to say too much about it though because what people imagine is usually more interesting. Your version is better!"
So, let's go ahead and imagine. In this album it’s easy to hear a band like the Byrds, who dabbled with jingle-jangle proto-power pop, fuzzed out martian rock, genteel country lament, and more during a five-year stretch in which members were swapped in and out depending on the mood. Rather than split time between such distinct states, Delt takes his armloads of sources—beyond the Byrds, you might describe the field of influence as sunny and stoned—and blends them into a variegated, melted mess. The result is a carefully built and naturalistic mosaic—you can hear the influences dissolving into each other even as the resulting sounds are crisp and memorable, rather than the half-baked invention of someone with a killer record collection. Listen to the taped-together percussion on opener "Make My Grey Brain Green", which rides a scratchy bass line and flowers into something like the moment when Dorothy's black-and-white world goes RGB. There's the Morricone-meets-Jodorowsky acid drone of "Barbarian Kings", the cyclical wobble of “Little Zombies”, the way "Chakra Sharks" rattles and crashes through a hornet’s nest of guitars into a wailing refrain of "Bye bye, farewell." Throughout the album there’s a heightened, eerie quality to his vocals; the feeling is something like an asylum patient waving to a car as it recedes over the horizon.
That's what I hear, at least. The whole album is so impressionistic and free-floating that you'll likely hear something else, as Delt intended. Projecting where he might go from here, it's not difficult to think of a band like Tame Impala, who temper spacey sprawl with more accessible songwriting. Future development doesn't have to be the point, of course; this album is fully-formed from first listen and begs return trips. There's another interaction from that interview that seems relevant: Asked if he believes in God, Delt simply replies, "No." If the faithless create their own meaning rather than wait for divine guidance, consider this an album that forces you to create your own attachments and associations. Even so, the artist is always present, elevating Morgan Delt from a wispy whatever into a clear statement of intent: It might not be obvious what you're supposed to hear, but you're going to hear something. | 2014-01-27T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-01-27T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | January 27, 2014 | 7.6 | c2487ad5-1752-4f20-b003-7d51baddaf5a | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
The eclectic new album from French DJ and producer Joakim is unified only in its consistent oddity. He avoids conventional song structures, drawing inspiration from new age, funk, and krautrock. | The eclectic new album from French DJ and producer Joakim is unified only in its consistent oddity. He avoids conventional song structures, drawing inspiration from new age, funk, and krautrock. | Joakim: Samurai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23030-samurai/ | Samurai | For much of his career, the French producer/DJ Joakim has primed his audience for jarring stylistic switches. Scan his wide-ranging credit list: This is a man who has helped mix Cassius’ dance music as well as a tribute to atmospheric soundtrack master John Carpenter, who has reworked both Tiga’s lurid house and J.J. Cale’s adult contemporary. He’s covered William Onyeabor in addition to Neil Young. But despite Joakim’s mutability, the 40-year-old has always returned to a home base in the neighborhood of disco and rock on his recordings, grounding his capricious tendencies with a groove or a backbeat.
However, Joakim’s latest trick is to mostly abandon any expectation of straightforward dance-rock on Samurai. Some precedent for this could be cobbled together from his past albums’ subtler moments, which were occasionally overshadowed by overtly adrenaline-boosting tracks. These include the gurgling synth ramp-up “Chapter 1,” which kicked off 2014’s Tropics of Love, and especially “Peter Pan Over the Bronx,” “Palo Alto,” and “Tanabata,” three songs that defined the whimsical side of 2007’s Monsters & Silly Songs. Other clues about *Samurai’*s origins were provided by Joakim himself, who put together a Soundcloud mixtape of his influences, which he said “range from new age to yacht rock, from ’80s synth-based funk to Japanese electronic avant-garde, from krautrock to futuristic dystopian electronic music.”
Accordingly, the producer frequently avoids conventional song structures on Samurai. So don’t show up looking for the reassuring waves of most house or techno, or the comfort of verse-chorus-verse pop. There’s not much singing on the album, and the vocals are often hard to make out. This music is placid, uninterested in using speed as an easy gimmick to get your attention. Instead, dodges and destabilizations are common.
In “Mind Bent,” the synths level up slowly—imagine stretching and pulling Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” to the consistency of taffy—and a long tail of drums clatters and knocks about. This builds suspense, but Joakim never delivers a payoff. “Cannibale Pastorale” is filled with blipping, chirping noises, like a pack of gossiping dolphins or chattering R2-D2s. These begin to acquire a beauty of their own after a while, but then Joakim interjects a crass barrage of drums, souring the song’s peaceful qualities.
Though Samurai can sometimes feel like an art-school exercise in unpredictability, the majority of the music is easy on the ears. And it never stays in one place for long, so anything grating soon passes you by. There are rivulets of watery saxophone, and a handful of cheerful, bass-popping funk riffs that could have introduced segments on a local news channel in the ’80s. There are claps of distant thunder, bird sounds, and genial, wildly unthreatening metallic noises that suggest wind chimes and dinner gongs. Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity. | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Tigersushi / Because Music | March 21, 2017 | 7.2 | c24a8dea-aff4-4665-8104-7000c8f6e8fc | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
On his 13th studio album, Tricky translates newfound contentment into songs that fail to live up to the risk-taking example of his early work. | On his 13th studio album, Tricky translates newfound contentment into songs that fail to live up to the risk-taking example of his early work. | Tricky: ununiform | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tricky-ununiform/ | ununiform | The album of domestic bliss is notoriously difficult to pull off. We may wish our musical idols long and happy lives, but the shameful reality is that we generally prefer to hear the fruits of their struggles rather than their reflections on happiness. It comes as a particular surprise that ununiform, the 13th studio album from the British rapper Tricky, is billed as “a journey into happiness and contentment.” This, after all, is a musician whose debut album, Maxinquaye—a record he would later describe as his “fuck you to the world”—was inspired by his late mother, while his second official album, a record shot through with creeping dread and panic, lived up to its title, Pre-Millennium Tension.
It turns out that Tricky’s idea of happiness is rather different from the run of the mill, tied up both with the acceptance of death and the pursuit of financial freedom. References to death run throughout ununiform, notably on “Dark Days” and “When We Die,” and the album is the first in many years that Tricky hasn’t recorded quickly to pay off a debt. The result is 13 songs where gothic lyrical themes adorn ponderous electronic beats and spectral guitars, and Tricky’s own past features heavily. Martina Topley-Bird, whose eerily angelic voice had such an impact on those brilliant early Tricky albums, returns to add vocals to “When We Die,” while Tricky has referred to “The Only Way” as “Hell Is Round the Corner, Part 2.”
Tricky has more than earned the right to revisit his own past. He is better placed than anyone else to do it: His brilliantly recognizable voice—a guttural, catch-in-the-throat whisper that frequently sounds close to tears—means that no one else can do Tricky quite like Tricky does. And it is a joy to hear his contrasting interplay with Topley-Bird resurrected on “When We Die,” by some distance the best song on the album, and a hugely moving reflection on mortality.
The problem is that the production on ununiform struggles to match the raw, naive ingenuity of Tricky’s early music, instead suggesting the rather basic electronic beats of 2014’s Adrian Thaws. Tricky used to make music like no one else, whether that’s because he didn’t understand the fundamentals of production or simply refused to bow to its conventions. Mark Saunders, who produced Maxinquaye with Tricky, described his experience as “think of how to make a record, then forget everything you've learned.” ununiform, however, fails to live up to its convention-busting title, with production that is more likely to raise a shrug of the shoulders than a gasp of incredulity.
“Armor” could be the work of mid-2000s Goldfrapp (whose singer, Alison Goldfrapp, contributed vocals to Maxinquaye) or any of the glammy electro-pop acts who trailed in their wake, while the EDM-ish shuffle of “Same As It Ever Was” would raise few eyebrows if your younger cousin knocked it out in an early Ableton production session. Elsewhere, the specter of the xx—a band who, to be fair, would probably have been described as “post-Tricky” had they emerged in the late ’90s—looms large in the sparse guitar lines of “New Stole” or “Wait For Signal.”
At worst, Tricky doesn’t just sound uninspired, he sounds downright conventional. His cover of Hole’s “Doll Parts” (renamed “Doll”) is the absolute nadir: Tricky has a history of recording transformative cover versions, from the Cure’s “Lovecats” to Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me,” that re-write the internal logic of the song. But “Doll” is horribly misjudged, swapping the original’s splenetic rage for pretty-in-pink, wine-bar soul. “It’s Your Day,” meanwhile, uses the seemingly original tactic of employing a Kazakhstani rapper, Scriptonite, only to iron out any irregularities under an indistinct trap beat. The chorus, too, is painfully thin, with lines like, “It’s your day/Today/We’re here/We stay,” dragged out to imply a kind of significance that simply isn’t there.
For all this, ununiform is far from a lost cause. The lolloping “Bang Boogie” proves that Tricky can still program a head-nodding beat, and “New Stole” is transformed into a fine example of baroque electronic pop by a fantastically insouciant vocal performance from Tricky protégé Francesca Belmonte. But the best songs on ununiform are those where Tricky consciously relives his distant past: namely the tenderly haunting “When We Die” and “The Only Way,” a song whose billowing strings and jazzy piano licks suggest Tricky teaming up with Air for a supper-club career retrospective. These songs raise the intriguing idea of Tricky in his Paul McCartney / Tom Jones / Elvis Presley years, offering largely faithful, prettified takes on the music of his early period. It’s an unashamedly retro move, but it seems to suit Tricky well in his third decade as a musician. ununiform may come nowhere near to the jaw-dropping impact of those early Tricky albums. But buried deep in his 13th studio release, Tricky may just have sown the seeds of a new musical contentment. | 2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 / False Idols | September 20, 2017 | 5.1 | c24beea1-38f2-4e9e-a7b7-7457ac497c14 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Senegal’s legendary Orchestra Baobab return with their first record in a decade—a tribute to the group’s longtime member Ndiouga Dieng, who passed away late last year. | Senegal’s legendary Orchestra Baobab return with their first record in a decade—a tribute to the group’s longtime member Ndiouga Dieng, who passed away late last year. | Orchestra Baobab: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23021-tribute-to-ndiouga-dieng/ | Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng | When a new nightclub opened in Dakar, Senegal in 1970, its owners had prudence in naming the spot Baobab Club, after one of the world’s longest living trees. Members of the country’s famous Star Band broke off and settled in as the new club’s house band, and much like their namesake, Orchestra Baobab has enjoyed a similar longevity, now nearing the half-century mark. Percussionists Balla Sidibe and Mountaga Koite, bassist Charlie Ndiaye, and saxophonist Issa Cissoko have kept the core of the group intact ever since. (Though the group disbanded from 1987-2001 and only reunited at the instance of fellow Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour and World Circuit producer Nick Gold.)
Masters of Senegalese pop and mbalax, Cuban rhumbas, American jazz, and more during their heyday, their return in the 21st century was a welcome one. They were lauded as heroes, having the likes of Youssou N’Dour and Buena Vista All-Stars’ Ibrahim Ferrer lend their voices to the group’s comeback album—not to mention Dave Matthews and Trey Anastasio making a documentary about their pilgrimage to Africa to jam with them. Ten years after their last album, 2007’s Made in Dakar, Baobab returns with a tribute to the group’s longtime griot Ndiouga Dieng, who passed away late last year.
Opener “Foulo” shows the legendary group’s prowess in a manner that sounds effortless and unfussy. A rhumba beat gets bolstered with horn lines that gently lilt upwards and then corkscrew down with purpose, thanks to the two saxophones of Cissoko and Thierno Koite. Amid the group’s longtime movements, newly added kora player Abdouleye Cissoko nimbly matches the group’s balance, being buoyant and rhythmically durable at once. His kora—brought in to occupy the space left by guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, who is now a lawyer in Togo—then takes the lead on “Fayinkounko,” dovetailing with the timbales and bright guitar lines. On “Alekouma,” the kora opens with a blinding run, before slowing to provide a gentle shimmer to a ballad about fallen warriors, the lines a poetic nod to the passing of Dieng.
In 1979, potent Baobab vocalist Thione Seck left the fold of the group for superstardom of his own. Some 35 years later, Seck rejoins his old bandmates here, lending his telltale growl and plea to the slinking groove of “Sey.” In just a few reverberant notes, Benin guitarist Rene Sowatche (another new addition to the group) finds enough wiggle room amid the percussion and brass to suggest vast cosmic space.
Deep into their career, Dieng at times reveals the advanced stage of its players. The songs are taken a step slower, the rhumbas show a consideration for the pulse as well as the spaces between them, and the themes in some manner or another touch upon mortality. The easeful meter of “Caravana” gets punctuated by Balla Sidibe’s mournful lines, which are about an unmarried village woman whose death means a burial without ceremony in the bush. As the song draws towards its conclusion, Sidibe reminds us of a truth no matter our tongue or country: “Beauty cannot stop you dying/Success cannot stop you dying/Nobody knows their destiny/Death doesn't warn us.” But rather than wallow in such morass, it makes the rhythms of the group feel even airier in their joyful acceptance and defiance. | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | World Circuit | April 4, 2017 | 7.5 | c24fc1dd-063d-4da0-8670-581419b1c9f9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Information overload and its discontents inspire a guitar-heavy solo album that sounds more like a classic My Morning Jacket record than anything James’ band has released in the past 15 years. | Information overload and its discontents inspire a guitar-heavy solo album that sounds more like a classic My Morning Jacket record than anything James’ band has released in the past 15 years. | Jim James: Uniform Distortion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-james-uniform-distortion/ | Uniform Distortion | Roots music is, by definition, tethered to the land. It’s a naturalistic sound born of dust and dirt, and it’s a style that a young Jim James fully embodied when he emerged in 1999 as the frontman of Kentucky heartbreakers My Morning Jacket. But in the two decades since then, James’ approach to roots music has become less about preserving certain sepia-toned agrarian aesthetics and more about emulating what actual plant roots do with patient nurturing: They blossom into splendorous flora, sprouting toward the sky in unpredictable shapes and directions. As a result, the restlessly ambitious My Morning Jacket and James’ own increasingly prolific solo career have both flourished, yielding a dense thicket of work that becomes ever more difficult to disentangle as both acts continue to branch out.
But on his third solo album of original material, James prunes away the excess foliage. Pulling an abrupt 180 from the cinematic future-soul of his previous release, 2016’s Eternally Even, he conceived Uniform Distortion as a quick-and-dirty affair. The album finds James fronting a power trio, supported by old pals Seth Kauffman on bass and Dave Givan on drums, and capturing the action with all the corroded fidelity of a cassette bootleg of a live radio session. (The only embellishment comes in the form of alternately soothing and sassy backing vocals from L.A. harmony-folk trio Dear Lemon Trees.) After several years of studio-sculpted experimentation both within and without his main band, James has reclaimed the electric guitar like a lost superpower, making Uniform Distortion closer in spirit to a quintessential My Morning Jacket record than anything that band has actually released in the past 15 years. This is great news for anyone who, back in 2003, was hoping James’ band would become a 21st-century .38 Special, not an American Radiohead.
Uniform Distortion isn’t a simple back-to-basics move, however. Like any sentient being with a smartphone in 2018, James has been feeling overwhelmed by the daily avalanche of information at our thumb-tips, and the coarsening discourse that surrounds it. As he revealed on the podcast “Celebration Rock,” he even went off the grid for a week-long silent retreat in the Northern California woods to clear his head. The album’s front cover, a photo taken from ’70s eco-bible The Last Whole Earth Catalog, presents a this-is-your-brain-on-internet diagnosis—but the music within has a decidedly different tone from the grave, politicized prophecies of Eternally Even. Instead, James embraces simplicity and levity.
While the new album’s deliberately muddy mix foregrounds his squealing leads—taking them to beard-scorching extremes—the most telling sound that pervades this record is laughter. There is James, nearly flubbing the second chorus of the boisterous roadhouse rocker “You Get to Rome” due to a giggling fit, and launching into the Replacements-like chugger “Yes to Everything” with a throaty chortle. When he’s not audibly cracking up, he exploits his full vocal range to comic effect: “Too Be Good to Be True” may be modeled after a ’50s breakup ballad, but it’s hard not to smile when James drops into a bassy, Bowser-worthy serenade.
At times, irreverence can get the best of him: “Out of Time” doesn’t survive its impulsive transition from breezy freeway cruiser to sludgy stoner-metal jam, while the bluesy grind “No Use Waiting” is saddled with a goofy, Zappa-esque spoken-word hook. But Uniform Distortion is a deceptively lighthearted affair, as it taps into the doubt and discontent fueling all the carefree kicks. “Just a Fool” may roll in on a flatbed of boogielicious guitar licks, but it’s a drinking song that longs for a world where we don’t need the bottle to make it through the day. And while the melancholic power-pop missive “Over and Over” may not be a cover of the MC5 classic of the same name, it’s very much a spiritual successor, updating the original’s references to Vietnam and factory-worker unrest with allusions to drone strikes and building walls as it swaps out Rob Tyner’s incendiary rage for James’ weary resignation.
Uniform Distortion abounds with displays of James’ fiery fretwork, but he rarely wields his other signature weapon—that angelic croon that trembles with vulnerability yet can soar high enough to rattle satellites. In the fleeting moments when it does surface, the effect is doubly stunning. Atop the mesmerizing Crazy Horse drift of “No Secrets,” James uses that sky-high coo to summon mounting waves of guitar discord, as the song cycles through its lone verse and chorus with ever-increasing intensity. And in the beautifully crestfallen “Throwback,” a knowing title and a wistful lyrical hook—“When we were young”—serve a song that sounds exactly like the sort of stargazing backwoods elegy James would’ve written when he was young.
Since those early days, James has refused to be pigeonholed as the shaggy-haired Southern-rock revivalist many assumed him to be. Uniform Distortion shows he can easily revert to that mode when the mood strikes, but in this case, he’s conjuring the past as a means to take stock of our current condition. When he sings, “Throw back Thursday to the way that it was,” he’s yearning for a less complicated, more enriching way of life that can’t so easily be accessed through an Instagram hashtag. The ache in his voice says it all: This isn’t about nostalgia, it’s a cry for help. | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | July 9, 2018 | 7.6 | c257e936-ce2f-44e9-960e-898104cb9b5f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his ruminative and memory-haunted new album, the pianist and singer explores community and the ties that bind us. | On his ruminative and memory-haunted new album, the pianist and singer explores community and the ties that bind us. | Duval Timothy: Help | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duval-timothy-help/ | Help | The diaspora haunts the work of Duval Timothy, the multidisciplinary artist and pianist who splits his time between England (where he was born) and Sierra Leone (where his relatives reside). On his 2018 EP 2 Sim, Timothy blended WhatsApp voice messages and interviews from “family, friends and peers in Freetown, Sierra Leone” into minimal, piano-focused compositions. In a mix made for NTS Radio the same year, he interspersed these compositions with snatches of sounds captured from Instagram video— Cardi B ranting about racoons, Saul Williams urging young rappers to listen to Rachmaninoff—and grime and hip-hop tracks. On Help, his latest album, Timothy works with a number of collaborators from the London scene—Mr. Mitch, Vegyn, and Lil Silva to name a few—to create a piece of music that takes equally from modern jazz and UK bass. With their help, Timothy sings the song of a community that he carries within him, voicing their past oppressions even in his most abstract pieces.
Timothy constructs a vast castle out of his reference points making music that feels filled with the spectres of the past. “Slave” is a dark room constructed out of looping piano melody, furnished with guitar from Twin Shadow, and illuminated only by the song title, sung by his partner Ibiye Camp. Into this room enters a sampled Pharrell Williams, musing on the fact that it is common for record labels to own the masters of the artists they sign. Timothy is intimately aware of this practice; he only recently purchased back his own masters. To underscore Williams’ point, he hammers on the piano when Williams appears on the scene, as if registering his own assent. Its follow-up, “TDAGB,” goes even further; the title comes from a slowed-down and sped-up recording of Timothy’s sister saying, “Things don’t always get better, it’s not just a matter of time till everything works out.” The words are not a blanket dismissal of change as much as a clear-eyed reading of colonial history. Slavery may be over, but when Prince couldn’t get his masters back from Warner Brothers 30 years ago, he called himself a slave.
On Help, these troubled legacies guide him, prodding him to examine history and memory. On “Fall Again,” the pianist’s triplets are slowly surrounded by Melanie Faye’s wandering guitar, and as the two snake around each other, they are joined by Lil Silva. Reverb expands his voice, creating a choir of one. The lyrics sympathize with the loneliness of wanting to change when you are feeling “cold in the deep and you’re all alone.” Like the gospel songs it evokes, “Fall Again” posits that this feeling is nothing new; saints have made mistakes, too. Listen closely to the ghostly strains of “Like,” a quilt of layered vocals stitched together with piano; it’s a scrambled, halting monologue, degraded until you can only hear the titular word. Though the progressions he plays seem simple at first listen, he manipulates them by adding an extension to a chord here or a spare note there. It sounds like he’s feeling his way through the dark, trying to recover some elusive but crucial memory.
The motif of “Slave” guides Timothy through the ruminative back half of the album. Its rhythm is the basis for Timothy’s improvisation on “Ice,” its chord progression can be heard on “C,” and its theme can be heard through the digital mist of the Pat Metheny-esque “Morning.” The repeated motifs play into the album’s themes— of history, individuality, ownership. Timothy’s collaborative sensibility comes from a distinct sense of rootedness; the people who made him and the artists he’s listened to are the links that make up his music. He finds liberation in this inescapability and makes himself too expansive to be owned.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Carrying Colour | August 11, 2020 | 8 | c26041d5-d4a6-496c-8a0b-9a59525f9982 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
In early ’80s Dunedin, the Chills were at the forefront of an extraordinary little guitar-pop scene. This reissue of their debut—a major document of their early era—extends the album to 24 tracks. | In early ’80s Dunedin, the Chills were at the forefront of an extraordinary little guitar-pop scene. This reissue of their debut—a major document of their early era—extends the album to 24 tracks. | The Chills: Kaleidoscope World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22247-kaleidoscope-world/ | Kaleidoscope World | The Chills took seven years to make their first full album, 1987’s *Brave Words—*seven years of false starts, constantly shifting lineups, and one tragedy that nearly destroyed the band and ended up cementing its virtues. Singer/guitarist Martin Phillipps’ group was at the forefront of the extraordinary little guitar-pop scene in New Zealand in the early ’80s—connected to bands like the Clean, the Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, and Look Blue Go Purple—and Kaleidoscope World is the major document of their early era. It’s a Katamari of an album, picking up another few songs every time a new edition comes out; since its initial appearance in 1986, it’s progressively bulked up from eight songs to this version’s 24.
The early Chills were inspired by the garage rock of the mid-’60s—their trebly organ sound was usually right out front—and by Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. But they were gentler and sadder and persistently obsessed with mortality. Phillipps was a prolific songwriter early on, so the band had a substantial repertoire by the time they released their first records in 1982: a shared EP with three other bands from Dunedin, followed by the tormented but chipper single “Rolling Moon.” (“Please oh God don’t take us home,” the chorus went.)
A couple of weeks after “Rolling Moon,” they recorded a basic track for the haunted, keening “Pink Frost,” as part of a proposed EP of songs with colors in their titles. Phillipps was dissatisfied with the results, but before they could re-record it, the Chills’ new drummer Martyn Bull fell ill, and the band went on hiatus. Bull died of leukemia a year later; subsequently, Phillipps completed that original recording, exquisitely, and assembled a new version of the Chills. “Pink Frost” became their best-known song, inspiring the names of a band and a Fugazi song. And, although Bull had really only played with the band for a couple of months, his death became the specter haunting the rest of their existence, and the muted, cavernous tone of “Pink Frost” carried over to their next few records.
“Pink Frost” actually made the Top 20 in New Zealand—not bad for an indie band—and so did its follow-up, “Doledrums,” a cheerful readymade about life on unemployment. That’s where the first iteration of Kaleidoscope World ended, as a brief set of eight songs by a curious little band with an impressive live reputation. Over the next few years, other material from the same era started getting tacked on to it: some live tracks, The “Lost” EP (six featherweight songs from the “Doledrums” period), and “I Love My Leather Jacket,” a 1986 glam-stomp single about Phillipps’ keepsake from Martyn Bull. The new additions to the album’s 2016 incarnation are a brief piano instrumental called “Martyn’s Doctor Told Me,” the frazzled rocker “Smile from a Dead Dead Face,” and early takes of a pair of songs the Chills re-recorded later on, including another premonition of doom, “Dan Destiny and the Silver Dawn.” (All four are flown in from 2001’s Secret Box, a three-disc collection of live stuff and oddities.)
Phillipps had evidently been saving his more “writerly” songs for an album—Brave Words and 1990’s lush major-label follow-up Submarine Bells foreground his voice and lyrics much more than these songs do. In fact, the remarkable thing about Kaleidoscope World, given the band’s subsequent reputation as a singer-songwriter vehicle, is how much more of its focus is on the Chills’ sound than on Phillipps’ songwriting. “Purple Girl” is a near-instrumental in the mode of some of the Clean’s minor-key jams; “Bite” is a ridiculous jeremiad directed at an overeater (“You gotta bite that food! You gotta get it inside you!”). “Hidden Bay” is a tiny sliver of a song (written and sung by bassist Martin Kean, who passed through the Chills on his way to Stereolab) that mostly just flexes the band’s live muscle.
That kind of silliness and spontaneity would mostly be absent from the Chills’ later recordings; Phillipps’ growing earnestness served the band magnificently for a few years, but then over-ripened. As he was ravaged by drugs and illness, his output slowed to a drip. The Chills have, surprisingly, had a stable lineup since 2009, but last year’s Silver Bullets was one of only two full-length albums of new songs that they’ve managed to complete in the past two decades. They weren’t able to live up to the promise of Kaleidoscope World in the long term, but its playful melancholy and somber chime still glisten like sunlight on weathered ice. | 2016-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flying Nun | August 13, 2016 | 8.2 | c2676a73-93c8-4503-a112-8f8c14765dd3 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The duo’s first album in 17 years is a surprisingly practical gesture, a career-spanning live album that connects the accessible and impenetrable extremes of the Trux discography. | The duo’s first album in 17 years is a surprisingly practical gesture, a career-spanning live album that connects the accessible and impenetrable extremes of the Trux discography. | Royal Trux: Platinum Tips + Ice Cream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23325-platinum-tips-ice-cream/ | Platinum Tips + Ice Cream | When long-dormant bands reunite, there’s a natural fear that they’ll be unable to recapture the essence of what they once were. But with Royal Trux, that’s not a worry, because that essence was in a perpetual state of flux. In the subterranean sandbox that was ‘90s indie rock, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were like those weirdo kids who could flip their eyelids inside out—without warning, they could transform something benign into something grotesque. They would make overtures toward radio-ready boogie-rock one moment, and then expose its innards the next, peeling songs apart into a tangle of feedback, drum-machine spurts, and scrambled voices that sound like they’re coming from a shortwave radio caught between two stations.
Even at the height of ‘90s indie-rock reunions earlier this decade, a Royal Trux reboot seemed highly unlikely. Prior to splitting up at the turn of the millennium, Hagerty and Herrema weren’t just creative partners, but romantic ones, too, a facet that potentially adds a layer of complication to any reconciliation proceeding. And their interim pursuits couldn’t have been any more different: while Herrema has pushed Royal Trux’s sleaze-rock side into the digital age with Black Bananas and embraced her status as grand dame of the underground, Hagerty has decamped to Denver and turned his project the Howling Hex into the world’s strangest norteño band. Even when Hagerty deigned to revisit Royal Trux’s 1990 avant-rock touchstone Twin Infinitives for a full-album performance in 2012, he recruited a ringer to perform Herrema’s parts.
But if Royal Trux’s conspicuous absence from the reunion circuit seemed consistent with their non-conformist legacy, the only way to up that ante was to reunite once everyone had totally given up on the idea. Likewise, the duo’s first proper album in 17 years is a surprisingly practical gesture: Platinum Tips + Ice Cream is a career-spanning live album that connects the accessible and impenetrable extremes of the Trux discography into the same woofer-blowing frequency.
On their ‘90s albums, Royal Trux ran roughshod over classic-rock convention; here, they take the same sacrilegious approach to reinterpreting their own catalog. On the 1992 acoustic elegy “Junkie Nurse,” Hagerty painted a portrait of addiction so stark and unflinching, you could practically feel him get the shakes. On Platinum Tips + Ice Cream, Royal Trux treat the song like a mechanical bull they can hop on and grind for a joyride, blowing out its intimate dimensions and turning it into a meaty, cowbell-clanging southern-rock workout. Feeling strung-out has never sounded so fun.
Platinum Tips + Ice Cream compiles performances from some of the band’s initial post-reunion performances at Berserktown II in California and at New York’s Webster Hall, with Hagerty and Herrema supported by drummer Tim Barnes and bassist Brian McKinley. At times, the in-the-red recording quality, muted audience noise, and improvised, half-remembered lyrics make it sound like you’re actually listening in on a first rehearsal guided by the loosest of muscle memories. But in Royal Trux’s case, being out of practice isn’t exactly a liability, given that their greatest work always felt like it was on the verge of falling apart. Even on “Sewers of Mars”—a choogling highlight from their spit-shined 1995 major-label debut, Thank You—Hagerty and Herrema’s sandpapered harmonies scuffed away at the song’s sturdy, Stones-y foundation. The version here feels like revisiting the same site after almost two decades of rot and decay.
But if Platinum Tips + Ice Cream sees Royal Trux turn their most solid songs into something more collapsible, it also works the other way, transforming early lo-fi singles like “Red Tiger” and “Mercury” into the sort of swaggering, heavy-grooved rock jams the crudely recorded originals only implied. And, in the most radical revision, they manage to rebuild Twin Infinitives’ “Ice Cream” from the maracas up, melting down its arrhythmic discord into a simmering hypno-soul worthy of a Blaxploitation flick’s closing credits roll. Alas, such revelations may be lost on Trux newcomers, who’d be better off tuning into the sleazy psych of 1993’s Cats and Dogs or the alien arena-rock of 1998’s Accelerator for a more immersive introduction to the band’s surreal sound world. But in true contrarian Trux fashion, Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards. | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | June 10, 2017 | 7.3 | c26a46cf-506e-46b7-80af-1ca618804ccb | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The British-Barbadian jazz saxophonist and his South African players narrate the apocalypse from a distant future, suggesting that in order to build anew, some things will first need to burn. | The British-Barbadian jazz saxophonist and his South African players narrate the apocalypse from a distant future, suggesting that in order to build anew, some things will first need to burn. | Shabaka and the Ancestors: We Are Sent Here by History | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabaka-and-the-ancestors-we-are-sent-here-by-history/ | We Are Sent Here by History | In West Africa, histories have been passed down through generations by griots, storytellers who collect the wisdom of the past in order to help shape our fates. Even after the advent of the written word, such storytellers were the safest manner of recording knowledge—scrolls could be lost, and libraries could burn, but oral histories were shared by the collective consciousness, written in our genes, able to survive individual tragedies to persist through time. In that sense, griots are more than just historians—they’re the library.
We Are Sent Here by History, the second album from Shabaka Hutchings and the Ancestors, is a record steeped in that tradition, a living history looking backward in time from a not-too-distant future. Coincidentally released amid the proliferation of a global pandemic, it takes on new meanings: a collective record of the apocalypse, a sonic time capsule left to be found buried in the sand by some future explorer. The group’s first LP, Wisdom of the Elders, served as a warning of things to come, but this tale reads as a statement of fact, a record of the wrongs and missteps that led to our own demise.
The Ancestors are just one of several projects helmed by Hutchings, arguably the brightest star of London’s surging jazz scene. This group, which mostly hails from South Africa, is a space-age jazz sextet that connects the dots between the various corners of the African diaspora. There’s evidence of Hutchings’ Afro-Caribbean heritage in his sax’s soca stylings (“They Who Must Die”), and Ariel Zamonsky’s double bass—the record’s backbone—claims ancestry from Hugh Masekela’s South African township jazz. The phrasing of the reeds, from Mthunzi Mvubu’s alto sax to Hutchings’ tenor and clarinet, often resembles a tag-team rap duo, with bars intertwined like twisted rope. The performances are virtuosic but sometimes primal, like the horns’ bestial screams on “The Beasts Too Spoke of Suffering” that extend the album’s scope beyond humankind.
But the record is at its most compelling when it explores our humanity, whether examining the roots of misogyny (“We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)”) or making space for plaintive introspection (“Teach Me How to Be Vulnerable”). At its heart lies the poetry of South African performance artist Siyabonga Mthembu; the song titles and concept are rooted in his words, which are sung in Zulu, Xhosa, and English. The lyrics are delivered calmly amid a storm of righteous rage, a calm narration to the immolation of Rome. “You’ve Been Called” opens with an extended verse from Mthembu: “We are sent here by history/The lighter gave fire, and was present at the burning/The burning of the republic/Burnt the names, burnt the records, burnt the archive, burnt the bills, burnt the mortgage, burnt the student loans, burnt the life insurance/An act of destruction became creation.” It’s less a metaphor than a recipe for a strong foundation, with the understanding that to build something new you must first excise what is rotten.
We Are Sent Here by History is Hutchings’ third release for the Impulse! label, following Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile and The Comet Is Coming’s Trust In The Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery. The label was responsible for putting out some of Hutchings’ formative influences in the 1960s and 1970s, including John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders. But this record lies in direct opposition to Sanders’ optimism. The Ancestors are no longer attempting to advise us on how to avoid the apocalypse; instead they ask, now that it has arrived, what will we do next?
As the world reels from the repercussions of the novel coronavirus, We Are Sent Here by History might feel particularly timely, particularly for those in the West typically shielded from the brunt of capitalism and the brutality of colonialism. But the album, recorded in Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2019, is not so much prescient as it is broadly in tune with the plight of the marginalized. As Hutchings has said, “For those lives lost and cultures dismantled by centuries of western expansionism, capitalist thought and white supremist structural hegemony the end days have long been heralded as present with this world experienced as an embodiment of a living purgatory.”
Despite its ominous tone, We Are Sent Here by History is only partially fatalist; even if it accepts the apocalypse as inevitable, it offers a path away from a “tragic defeat.” It’s a reminder that any redemption must first reconcile the lessons of our history, to learn from the mistakes that led to misfortune. It’s also a testament to the beauty of resilience; as an indictment of power, it elicits inspiration rather than depression. This is music that makes you feel less alone in your rage, a chorus to join with your anger and frustration, a funnel to channel that energy. Because as with any future, Hutchings’ foreordained outcome is merely one possible—if likely—fate. If our genes are a record of where we’ve been, then We Are Sent Here by History asks where we want to go. Because even viruses leave records in our genes; Hutchings and the Ancestors make the case that the future will be defined by what we do with them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | March 28, 2020 | 8 | c270cd4d-04b5-4e40-9a45-634962aa7484 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The perfectly fine debut from the London R&B singer offers a grip of retro, snappy jams without sounding like a pastiche. | The perfectly fine debut from the London R&B singer offers a grip of retro, snappy jams without sounding like a pastiche. | Ella Mai: Ella Mai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ella-mai-ella-mai/ | Ella Mai | No one could have sung “Ooooh/Now I’ll never get over you” with quite the same starry-eyed naiveté that Ella Mai does on her unapologetically sprung summer smash “Boo’d Up.” It was a song that both Stevie Wonder and toddlers found easy to love, a four-minute reverie during which everything slips out of focus apart from you and your boo.
Mai has been signed to hip-pop hypeman DJ Mustard’s 10 Summers imprint since 2016, putting a decisive point of view on likeable, if not particularly individual, trap-leaning pop beats, with songs centering on agency, desire, and her early-morning appetite to receive a, kind of, breakfast in bed. Mai’s finger-snapping, perfectly fine debut is billed as a “throwback R&B album,” with dutiful Easter eggs for the genre’s aficionados: a “no no no” reference here, a “little secret” wink there, and a “writing’s on the wall” hat-tip elsewhere. Despite a few obvious reference points, Mai avoids pastiche, although a tightened tracklist would have provided focus to this over-long collection of 16 songs.
Executive produced by DJ Mustard, Ella Mai pays homage to ’90s commercial R&B and Mustard’s own hip-pop signatures while bringing in new sounds, from aerated beats punctuated with the sound of teeth-kissing (the Nana Rogues-produced “Good Bad”) and Majestic Casual-ready synth swashes (“Cheap Shot”). The throbbing “Dangerous” transposes the conceit of the Shangri-Las’ ode to bad boy allure, “Out in the Streets,” into squelchy G-funk with double-time harmonies which cascade like heart flutters.
Ella Mai never quite scales the heights reached by her skippy single “Trip,” or the pristine “Boo’d Up.” Yet Mai’s songwriting can be deft and unexpected, refining the attitude that once led her to declare, on an early EP, “I hope the next girl you love ends up fucking you over” into more nuanced examinations of knotty relationships. Her words are scathing over a partner who’s “chewing with [their] mouth wide open,” but she lays her own flaws bare, too. The acoustic bonus closer, “Naked,” is a challenge for a lover to accept her, “resting bitch face” and all. “Can you love me naked?” she asks, in a song that distances nudity from the context of R&B seduction and reframes it to vibe more with body positivity and mental health.
Not all Mai’s efforts to open up are as successful. The album is threaded, like Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope or TLC’s FanMail, with earnest interludes that riff on her full name (“E” is for emotion, “L” for lust, etc...) which can tend towards vague Hallmark-isms. One of the album’s strongest tracks, the simmering relationship ultimatum “Shot Clock,” ends with a whimper, as Mai intones “Love...full of chuckles and cuddles and sometimes eye puddles,” a saccharine sentiment that should have remained stitched on the gas-station teddy bear it was lifted from.
Perversely, the most immediate song on Mai’s album is “Whatchamacallit,” a peppy two-hander with Chris Brown which essentially copied the Nic Nac-produced beat of Brown’s own “Loyal” to create a carefree-feeling bop. With a different collaborator, “Whatchamacallit” may have brought a welcome, blithe sense of fun to Ella Mai. But, as pop artists are rightfully being held accountable for being complicit with abusers, Mai’s inclusion of Brown raises questions about her own artistic values. It’s tough to swallow Mai’s pro-women message, given her association with an artist who has repeatedly treated them with violence.
R&B is crowded with young artists who use nostalgic soulful sounds as a baseline for their individualistic music, whether H.E.R.’s velveteen soul, Daniel Caesar’s fraught blend of gospel and R&B, or the stately self-interrogations of Jorja Smith. Ella Mai’s raw talent and likeability, and showcased in her spontaneous-feeling Instagram cover versions, got her noticed by DJ Mustard in the first place. But on Ella Mai, her abilities don’t always find an assured direction, and it calls into question just how quickly this record was put together in the wake of “Boo’d Up”’s summer dominance. Mai’s album will likely bring her a couple of radio hits—“Sauce” is an undeniable heater. But a lack of focus means that, on her debut, the instant, infectious rush of Mai’s warm personality proves a little more elusive to find. | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 10 Summers / Interscope | October 15, 2018 | 6.6 | c27a203f-5145-4cf8-adde-8a1f4d58d63f | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
The Austin-based duo don’t shy away from signifiers of the past, conjuring the sounds of the late 1960s and early 1970s without succumbing to pure nostalgic pandering. | The Austin-based duo don’t shy away from signifiers of the past, conjuring the sounds of the late 1960s and early 1970s without succumbing to pure nostalgic pandering. | Black Pumas: Black Pumas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-pumas-black-pumas/ | Black Pumas | Black Pumas sounds like a band name coined at the twilight of the soul era, when R&B turned grittier, trippier, and funkier. It’s a name that evokes that of the Black Panthers, the African-American activist group who defined militant protest during the late 1960s and early 1970s—which is not coincidentally the period that the Austin-based duo of guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada and vocalist Eric Burton consciously conjure on their eponymous debut album.
At no point on Black Pumas do Quesada and Burton shy away from signifiers of the past. Rhythms roll with the tight precision of the Hi Records rhythm section, “Fire” is punctuated with horns straight out of Stax, “OCT 33” finds Burton obliquely nodding at Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” the title of its opener “Black Moon Rising” echoes Creedence Clearwater Revival’s doomsday classic “Bad Moon Rising.” Black Pumas are too clever to succumb to pure nostalgic pandering, though. They pointedly avoid the pitfalls that plague well-intentioned retro-soul records, favoring feel over authenticity, playing as much for the head as the heart.
Chalk much of this heady aesthetic up to the duo’s origins as a studio project. A longtime Austin fixture—he played guitar in Grupo Fantasma, who won a Grammy for Best Latin Rock Album in 2011—Quesada started assembling tracks at his studio Electric Deluxe, casting a net for a suitable singer once his ideas took the shape of a song. Friends connected him with Burton, a singer/songwriter who busked his way through the West Coast before settling in central Texas.
Possessing a voice that can slide into the slipstream with ease, Burton lends an elegant elasticity to Quesada’s tightly layered productions. Occasionally the producer/guitarist performs this trick in reverse—“Sweet Conversations,” the album’s dreamy denouement, draws upon a demo Burton recorded at home—but the core of the album lies in how the singer helps shape aural paintings into songs, providing them with warmth and a slight trace of spaciness.
Burton may command attention with his sweet, plaintive voice, but Quesada’s densely woven tapestries are the key to Black Pumas. Inspired by RZA’s crate-digging productions for the Wu-Tang Clan extended universe, Quesada relies on scratchy drum loops, hits of strings, funky electronic pianos, and fuzz guitar. Actual samples may be rare but the fact that the guitarist cobbled together all of this on his own is admirable, particularly when he marshals all of his skill on one cut. The minor-key march “Fire” gains gravity from its blend of ghostly organs and guitar twang, “Stay Gold” shimmers with the sultriness of a heat wave, and “Black Moon Rising” unfurls with a hushed sense of spectacle.
At these moments, which are the best Black Pumas has to offer, the duo’s flair for drama is so stirring, they can seem acutely cinematic. As appealing as this Technicolor sound may be, it can’t quite hide the seams created when the duo stitched their two sensibilities together in the studio. Burton’s misty introspection can give Quesada’s soulful prowess an ethereal edge, yet it can sometimes suggest the whole enterprise is little more than snazzy pastiche. While there may be pleasure in such a patchwork of sound, particularly when it’s done with such style and verve, the assemblage bears a pointed sense of insularity. Burton sings about interior voyages and the tracks were usually constructed by no more than two musicians; it’s music made at home, for home listening. That’s all well and good, since the duo has considerable skill, but this existential lonerism underscores a chasm between the pair and their influences. Unlike the icons of the era they find so inspiring, Black Pumas rarely look outside of themselves.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | July 1, 2019 | 7 | c27cb255-9137-4736-94f5-143b36aa9dfb | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Hearkening back to her queer nightlife days, the xx singer and guitarist pays homage to the euphoric dance-pop of the 1990s and 2000s. | Hearkening back to her queer nightlife days, the xx singer and guitarist pays homage to the euphoric dance-pop of the 1990s and 2000s. | Romy: Mid Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/romy-mid-air/ | Mid Air | As a teenager, Romy Madley Croft burned CDs to play in gay clubs, loading them with unabashed floor-fillers like Ultra Naté’s cathartic house hit “Free” and Ian Van Dahl’s elegiac Euro-trance anthem “Castles in the Sky.” She later went on to become guitarist and co-lead singer of the xx, the influential indie band she founded with her school friends Oliver and Jamie. Together, they were masters of the spaces in between, their intimate ballads built around sparse guitar riffs and fleeting tableaux. But she cast her mind back to her queer club days—when pop was appreciated “without cynicism or irony”—after she started writing for stars like Dua Lipa and Halsey, in collaboration with EDM collagist Fred again.. (real name Fred Gibson). Somewhere along the way, she began to realize that she wanted to keep some of these euphoric hooks for herself.
On her debut solo album Mid Air, Romy works with Gibson and Stuart Price, the producer best known for his work on Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to capture some of the heady magic of those early nightlife experiences. The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital. Jamie xx reunites with his former bandmate for the ebullient come-up of “Enjoy Your Life,” a Beverly Glenn-Copeland-sampling banger that might also have sounded at home on his own 2015 debut, In Colour. There are thumping Euro-trance homages in the form of “Strong” and “Did I,” where wisps of Romy’s vocals dovetail with acidic synths. Elsewhere, over the mournful Balearic pulse of “The Sea,” her sighs stretch out like glimmers of light on the surface of the Mediterranean.
Romy’s translucent vocals are the connecting thread between the xx’s vulnerable emo-R&B and the dance-pop of Mid Air. They often evoke the rawness of Cassandra Fox or Everything but the Girl's Tracey Thorn, carrying a humanity that roughens the glossy sheen of the production behind it. On “Twice,” her voice is sumptuously layered as she urges: “Pull back the covers/Let me feel the warmth of your skin.” It’s at once fragile and strong, her tactile delivery foregrounded over the insistent, choppy beat behind it. In moments like these, simple lines are elevated to something piercingly real. At other points, the record comes off clunky, like on the U-Hauling anthem “Weightless,” where she sings awkwardly of “Bending over backwards/Under my skin” and hurries to fit unwieldy longer phrases into a breath.
The album soars where it manages to elegantly contrast Romy’s vulnerability with the mirrorball dazzle of the production. This is the case on Mid Air’s two best songs: the sultry piano house opener “Loveher” and the unreservedly joyful disco closer “She’s On My Mind,” produced with techno experimentalist Avalon Emerson. On the latter, Romy tells a familiar story of being hopelessly in love with a friend, and in the song’s final act, the instrumentation drops to a murmur as Romy delivers a twist: The friend confesses her love, too. The arc of the song is simple, sweet and effective, and it highlights what is missing from some of the record’s less satisfying floor-fillers. Just as its music video holds steady on a single image (Romy hugging her cousin, both of them united in a shared experience of grief), the pounding “Strong" clings to one repeated lyrical idea (“You don’t have to be so strong”).
Romy is at her best when her songs—rather than radiating one straightforward, effusive emotion—have some element of contrapuntal friction, similar to that of the xx’s earliest sketches. On “Loveher,” she sings of holding hands with a lover under the table, not because of shame, but because “some things are for us.” These delicate, whispered lines oscillate between the competing desires to stand proud in your identity and to keep your intimacy intimate. While writing for the xx, Romy avoided using gendered pronouns in her songs—it’s notable that she not only uses them, but makes them central to the songs on Mid Air. In the UK, we are living through a period of increasing bigotry, with anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes on the rise, and transphobia poisoning the well of the government and mainstream media. Romy's voice may be hushed, but in this climate, her message is loud and clear. | 2023-09-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Young | September 12, 2023 | 7 | c27cd653-3d78-4839-8603-2aa67b0b3156 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Southern Florida rapper’s new mixtape is a zippy distillation of his regional roots, mixed with a few standout wrinkles. | The Southern Florida rapper’s new mixtape is a zippy distillation of his regional roots, mixed with a few standout wrinkles. | Trapland Pat: Trapnificent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trapland-pat-trapnificent/ | Trapnificent | Until 2018, Trapland Pat’s dream was to be a football star. But a drug charge led the small Indiana college where he played wide receiver to revoke his scholarship, sending him back to his hometown, Deerfield Beach, Florida. Eventually, he picked up rap, and in early 2021 scored a modest breakout with the gleefully chaotic “Big Business.” A part of Pat’s appeal was his wild-ass look. Bonks, a hairstyle popular in South Florida’s massive Haitian community, sprout from his head like tree branches; his eyeballs damn near pop out of the sockets like a real-life Looney Tune. This larger-than-life image was offset by grounded raps largely centered on memories of running around the streets of Broward—memories that were rarely cartoonish, and almost always based in reality.
Of the multitude of musical styles fashionable in the state right now—Jacksonville’s drill-leaning scene, Rod Wave–like heavy-hearted crooning, Michigan-inspired punchline heat checks—Pat’s music is most indebted to the croaky melodies of Kodak Black. His newest mixtape, Trapnificent, is a distillation of his South Florida roots, mixed with a few wrinkles that make him stand out from the many other Kodak descendants existing in the area. The bounce of the beats and the way Pat casually delivers hardened street tales can be traced to late ’90s B.G. and Mannie Fresh records: “Free All My Zombies” is an exciting glimpse at that influence, with his vocals switching between plain-spoken and lightly melodic over sputtering percussion and a funk bassline.
It’s a well that Pat goes back to again and again with good results, whether solo or with like-minded rappers in his orbit. His rapping is sharp on “Put That Shit On,” swinging back and forth between designer-flaunting and wistful recollections, all delivered over a slinky instrumental. “4 & a Baby” is similarly full of color, dropping listeners right into one of his former days on the corner. He bonds with Baton Rouge’s Fredo Bang on the hard-hitting “Astronaut Status,” as they thread together their mutual influences and coast on charisma.
What holds Pat back, though, is that he isn’t a consistent lyricist. His stories of drug dealing and fast money occasionally suffer from poor scene-setting and lyrical banalities. Tracks like “Mad” and “Hellcat,” the weirdly out-of-place collaborative track with Brooklyn drill artist Eli Fross, are so generic that it would be impossible to tell where he hails from if you didn’t already know. On the best Trapland Pat songs, it’s easy to identify that he’s a South Florida rapper even if outside influences are in play. Usually it’s a small touch: the smooth interpolation of Rick Ross’ “Stay Schemin’” on “Motions,” or the way his Florida drawl becomes more pronounced during the woozy lilts at the end of “Losses.”
But, for the most part, what gives the tape its hyper-specific regional feel is fellow Broward County–bred Haitian Pepperjack Zoe, who produces a bulk of the project. His beats incorporate the Cash Money–inspired grooves and piano-driven elements popular in the South, but the most memorable ones have a bright, twitchy feel that recall kompa rhythms. On “Dream,” it’s the fast, danceable tempo; on “Boondocks” it’s the way the synths merge with the skittering drums. Rapping over these beats, Pat sounds at ease unloading Kodak-inflected tricks—the signature singsongy flow, the moody lyrics paired with breezy vibes. It’s extremely regionally and culturally specific, like so much exciting and promising new rap music. It may not be football stardom, but it’s a good pivot. | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bang Biz Ent. / Alamo | June 16, 2022 | 7 | c293a12d-6c05-4bba-aeca-bee96756c680 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A double reissue of late-1980s albums by the Can co-founder and the synth-pop savant finds them laying the groundwork for years of ambient music that would follow. | A double reissue of late-1980s albums by the Can co-founder and the synth-pop savant finds them laying the groundwork for years of ambient music that would follow. | David Sylvian / Holger Czukay: Plight & Premonition / Flux & Mutability | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-sylvian-holger-czukay-plight-and-premonition-flux-and-mutability/ | Plight & Premonition / Flux & Mutability | When David Sylvian set about making his first solo album, 1984’s Brilliant Trees, he enlisted a handful of former collaborators, including Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as his Japan bandmates Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri. The most crucial contributions, though, came from an artist with whom he had never worked before: Holger Czukay.
Surprisingly, Sylvian’s interest in the German artist’s work derived not from the latter’s tenure in the pioneering krautrock band Can but from his solo albums, particularly his 1979 release Movies. There’s a clear connection between the warped rhythms of that record and the equally off-balance funk of Brilliant Trees’ “Pulling Punches” and the fluid pop of “Red Guitar.” Czukay’s contributions—guitar, vocals, and samples played on old dictaphones—added just the right touch of tumult to Sylvian’s generally straightforward tunes. Where Czukay left his most lasting mark was as an improviser. As Sylvian told the British publication Fourth Door Review, “Holger’s approach was… joyful enthusiasm, wild invention, much paint thrown at the canvas to see what sticks.”
Those qualities, and the two men’s friendship, kept their paths intersecting through the 1980s. After expanding upon their freeform compositional ideas on 1985’s Alchemy - An Index of Possibilities, Czukay and Sylvian went on to collaborate on a pair of fantastic albums—1988’s Plight & Premonition and 1989’s Flux & Mutability—that presaged not only the more experimental turn Sylvian’s career would take in the 2000s but also the ambient strains taken up by 21st-century artists like Loscil and Grouper.
Those albums, newly remastered and re-released as a single two-disc package by Germany’s Grönland Records, each feature two long instrumental works built around drones from a synthesizer or guitar interrupted by random shortwave-radio intrusions and occasionally disorienting tape edits. But in keeping with the dynamic nature of the two musicians’ artistic relationship, the sessions for each record, and the moods they conjure up, were dramatically different.
In the case of Plight & Premonition, Sylvian initially visited Can Studio in Cologne under the pretense of recording a vocal for Czukay’s 1987 solo album Rome Remains Rome. Instead, the two men spent a pair of long nights improvising. Sylvian held court in the main recording space, teasing out melodies and drones on harmonium, synthesizer, piano, or guitar, while Czukay played loops and samples for him to respond to. Whenever Sylvian started falling into a pattern or found a hook, Czukay would encourage him to try something else. As Sylvian recalls in David Toop’s liner notes for this reissue: “He’d only wanted the process, the uncertainty, the ambiguity of the searching out of ideas.”
“Plight (The Spiraling of Winter Ghosts)” reflects that recording experience. The track starts in medias res with a harmonium and a bit of tape both coming to life. Some interwoven drones and a small piano figure float by before a brief sample of what sounds like a chorus line of cartoon skeletons collapsing in a heap bursts through. It’s a jarring moment, but it sets the tone for the piece, which feels meditative yet active—like listening to an ambient record on headphones at such a low volume that the background noise of the metropolis bleeds through. Floating chords and long stretches of chilling beauty find a rough harmony with police sirens and bits of radio broadcasts.
“Plight” benefits from Czukay’s judicious tape edits and processing. “Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel),” which takes up the B-side of the album, is beautiful but far less exciting. Recorded as it was performed, the 16-minute track rolls steadily by with more radio sounds and little swells of electronic noise interrupted by Sylvian’s piano embellishments that are pleasant but almost intrusive to the otherwise enrapturing atmosphere.
Flux & Mutability was another collaborative effort—after a fashion. “‘Flux’ is Holger’s piece and ‘Mutability’ is mine,” Sylvian told The Wire’s Richard Cook in 1989, meaning that while the two men worked together on the album, each took conceptual charge of one sidelong track. Czukay’s side is the more active of the two. Driven by a small drum pattern played by Can percussionist Jaki Liebezeit, the piece is evocatively subtitled “A Big, Bright, Colourful World.” Its light synth drones and radio noise are illuminated by the lens flares of Markus Stockhausen’s flugelhorn and then slightly darkened by some fragmented guitar figures added by another Can member, Michael Karoli.
Sylvian’s side of the album is, again, not as impactful or challenging in comparison. It feels of a piece with the work that he and his collaborators had created for his solo albums Gone to Earth and Secrets of the Beehive—lovely washes of melody played on synth and guitar that drift to the surface before slowly sinking into the depths again—but with the pop elements stripped away. The subtitle (“A New Beginning Is in the Offing”) is apt, however. Looked at within the span of Sylvian’s 40-year career, the piece marks a turning point. He would better realize some of the same free-flowing ideas that he cultivated with Czukay into his next recordings, including Rain Tree Crow, his reunion with three of his Japan bandmates, and his work with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.
Much of Sylvian and Czukay’s respective work, either as solo artists or in collaboration with other musicians, has been re-released or cherry-picked for compilations in recent years, but somehow this material never seems to make the cut. The albums’ return to print feels like a footnote to Czukay’s death in 2017 and the career-spanning box set Cinema earlier this year. The albums aren’t treated poorly; Grönland has remastered them warmly and wrapped them both up in new packaging that emphasizes photos of the two men together. But hearing them now and sensing the connection these records have to similarly minded modern efforts by Mirrorring, Liz Harris and Jesy Fortino’s dream-folk project, and Brian Eno’s recent studio collaboration with pianist Tom Rogerson, this reissue, while welcome, highlights the ways in which many of these ideas were more successfully executed by subsequent artists. | 2018-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Gronland | July 7, 2018 | 6.7 | c2a0d697-54fd-4954-919d-7d9361f292f4 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The hermetic Swedish bedroom-pop auteur spins out songs of electric uplift and dreamy solitude on his first international release. | The hermetic Swedish bedroom-pop auteur spins out songs of electric uplift and dreamy solitude on his first international release. | Daniel Norgren: Wooh Dang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-norgren-wooh-dang/ | Wooh Dang | You probably haven’t heard of Rude, Sweden, a sylvan enclave several hours north of Stockholm, and that suits Daniel Norgren just fine. You probably haven’t heard of Daniel Norgren either. Depending on who you ask, the 35-year-old Swede is some kind of hermit, mystic, bedroom-pop musician, or all of the above. With multiple home-recorded LPs released on his own Superpuma Records over the last decade and countless shows played across Scandinavia and Western Europe, Norgren happily exists as an outsider among outsiders, and he weaves the joy he finds in isolation and in nature into his songs.
His latest, Wooh Dang, is his first international release, and it demonstrates the same unadorned simplicity as all of his work. Norgren’s first musical love was Blind Willie McTell, whose pre-war blues he discovered on imported vinyl, and though he brings a range of instrumentation to Wooh Dang, the album shares a sense of rustic refinement wrought from self-imposed limitation. Norgren incorporates blues, folk, country and psych rock into his quietly profound songs, and Wooh Dang plays like secular worship music, or maybe animist gospel.
Like the bulk of Norgren’s catalog, Wooh Dang contrasts concise, poignant songwriting with abstract, ambience-setting sketches. “Bummin’ ‘round, trying to find the flow,” Norgren sings on lead single “The Flow,” laying out his mission statement with a voice seemingly liquified via a Leslie amp. He’s deployed “The Flow” in his live shows for a few years, and here it feels live, too, the sound of the room—a century-old farmhouse close to Norgren’s house—delineating the song's sonic space.
“Something is waiting down the line,” Norgren sings in “The Power,” “waiting to find you and show you what you are.” It's a song of affirmation, like the subsequent “Rolling Rolling Rolling,” both of which stand among Wooh Dang’s strongest. “Let Love Run the Game”—quite possibly an optimist’s rejoinder to Jackson C. Frank’s indelible “Blues Run the Game”—is a chant of electrified uplift, Norgren singing the story of walking in the woods and hearing a bird impart the titular words of wisdom.
When Norgren works in standard verse-chorus-verse structure, his songs move from mesmerizing, genre-less impressionism to sharply defined, soulfully rendered declarations. On Wooh Dang he spans the spectrum. Singers have sung about nature’s power and the curative transcendence of love since songs were invented, but Norgren’s perspective somehow feels brand-new. | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Superpuma | April 24, 2019 | 7.5 | c2a44457-e3de-483d-a1cc-bf108126e422 | Jonathan Zwickel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-zwickel/ | |
The Kingston-based dancehall crew’s fourth album presents a world of inside jokes and outsize characters set to slyly experimental beats. | The Kingston-based dancehall crew’s fourth album presents a world of inside jokes and outsize characters set to slyly experimental beats. | Equiknoxx: Basic Tools | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/equiknoxx-basic-tools/ | Basic Tools | Following solid solo efforts from members Gavsborg, Time Cow, and Shanique Marie, Equiknoxx’s Basic Tools is the fourth full-length from Jamaica’s most endearingly experimental ensemble since Ward 21. While not as outré as Time Cow’s Glory—a remarkable EP released in June with vocalist Craig “Giark” Dixon, bringing Jamaica’s outernational forms back home by mixing up post-punk, Compass Point grooves, and steppers-style reggae—Basic Tools finds the group back in a comfy pocket: distilling studio vibes and creative camaraderie from Kingston to Manchester, Birmingham to New York. Buttressed by additional vocalists Bobby Blackbird, Kemikal Splash, and a host of guests, the crew’s members all take their turns and let the seams show, leaving studio banter and mis-cut samples in the mix, and going with inspired, single-take vocal performances in order to evoke the excitement and back-and-forth of classic dancehall and hip-hop mixtapes. But while the album may have an off-the-cuff quality, the “offness” always seems deliberate and the cuffs are crisp.
Working their wry humor into the sort of deadpan affect so common in dancehall, Equiknoxx’s latest presents a world of inside jokes and outsize characters, of hilarious if nearly inaudible ad-libs, of the joys of turning language and sound into music through bare repetition. Take, for instance, “Was Not Initially Called Make iT Stop,” which leads with the funny premise that a sample of a voice saying “stop” every two beats can drive a song forward. An extended metaphor from Groundhog Day points back to the repeated “Good morning!” that opens the song, using Bill Murray’s cursed plight to riff on pandemic life (and sex). This accompanies a straight-faced proclamation of being “the new Jacobins” with “revolution hidden in hymns,” while what seems like a sly allusion to Papa San’s classic “perdominant” fast-chat routine winks from behind a rhyme scheme that spans “permanent chill,” “bourbon is chilled,” and “suburban appeal.” It’s an impressive turn on the mic from Jamaican filmmaker Storm Saulter, and such multilayered moments typify the group’s irreverent referentiality, often aimed right at the top of listeners’ heads and threatening to sail right on over.
Through the Equiknoxx looking glass, a “thing”—a favorite lyrical conceit—can become a girl or a gun or a pun, and it’s never all that clear when a banana is just a banana. The album begins in medias res, to say the least, halfway through a sentence broadcast on Kingston’s Irie FM, triggering group snickering before the beat drops. An odd inclusion—never mind introduction—it’s inexplicable and a tad unsettling, and it sets the table for all manner of truncated samples to pop across the album, zero-crossings be damned. The next vocals we hear insist, with unremitting repetition, that “you (and crew) nuh keep it real,” which seems a plausible charge even after the verses give us amusingly stuttered d’s (“You be dead-d-d-ded… Gwaan in your bed-d-d-ded… Baldhead or dread-d-d-ded, we have something for you all, copper, lead-d-d-ded…”) and mildly threatening chants of “shala-mala-moo, shala-mala-ma… calla-lala-loo, calla-lala-la.” Between each verse lies a dead-on Drake impersonation, right down to the muted drums, washy synths, and Auto-Tuned moans.
Balancing out the looser, liver elements on Basic Tools is an attention to sonic detail that underpins the Equiknoxx approach, and it sets up some of the album’s best, if subtlest, punchlines. On “Urban Snare Cypher,” it’s not clear whether the snare we hear is the same as the one ridiculed in the lyrics (“I can bet say your snare named ‘urban’…”), but it pops out of the beat’s spartan texture, dripping with reverb in contrast to a clipped, unhurried guitar loop. “Thingamajigama” walks a line between humorous and haunting. The song’s playfully stylized but violent lyrics find funereal accompaniment in the form of sampled choral singers, chopped and reversed into dirgelike loops. In the final seconds, the sample plays out straight, revealing a melodic fragment from the old spiritual “Go Down Moses” set to the literary cliché “It was a dark and stormy night.” What sort of revolution hides here, we can only wonder. Is it a joke about rum drinks too? And how does the tongue-in-cheek send-up of “Jerk Pork Reggae”—a pitch-perfect parody, if a little undercooked—help us to parse what all of this means?
Equiknoxx never let up in the ways they play with powerful sounds and symbols. And cymbals! Stuttering, unquantized cymbals. Flams abound on Basic Tools, played on drums and guitars and other sonic objects, bringing Dilla-esque touches to bear on classic dancehall minimalism. In fine Jamaican style, Equiknoxx draw on a fluency in global currents and cutting-edge production techniques. Propelled by a buoyant bassline and some swinging 2-step drums, “Basic Tools Live” is a convincing UK garage outing, placing Jamaican accents at the center of things once again. “This Song iS Not About Labeling Cables,” meanwhile, combines a bubbling synth line that recalls Cajmere’s immortal “Percolator” riff with a slinky bassline straight out of early ’90s dancehall anthems like Terror Fabulous and Nadine Sutherland’s “Action.” The combination suggests an entire subgenre possibly worth pursuing, even if it’s just an afternoon’s idea that might have as easily been scrapped.
Observing reggae tradition, the album is filled out by the “versions,” or instrumentals, for each of the eight vocal cuts. These sparse tracks hold their own, showing their quirks more clearly, and though as standalones they might have benefited from a little more active dubbing, they reveal a group with a firm sense of its sound. While the Equinox crew continues to expand its musical remit through the members’ individual projects, Basic Tools captures the spirit of this slyly unconventional group as a whole—and the magic that happens when they stick together.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Equiknoxx Music | August 18, 2021 | 7.8 | c2bbdb01-95c4-4557-8836-bb69b1191779 | Wayne Marshall | https://pitchfork.com/staff/wayne-marshall/ | |
The new album from singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott is her most ambitious work by an order of magnitude. It’s an electric-electronic hybrid that is lush, physical, and full of contradictions. | The new album from singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott is her most ambitious work by an order of magnitude. It’s an electric-electronic hybrid that is lush, physical, and full of contradictions. | Torres: Three Futures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/torres-three-futures/ | Three Futures | “Writing just to save my life/You stretch barelegged across each line/What ghost crawled inside my guitar?” sang Mackenzie Scott on her debut album as Torres, cutting a familiar figure: a singer with a thing for stripped-down arrangements and a propensity for autobiographical brooding. She slotted her bruises and her confessions into a singer-songwriter mode with a distinctly 1990s air—snaky guitar figures, smoldering feedback, the intensity of an interlocutor laying a sudden hand upon your forearm—and on the follow-up, Sprinter, she grew into that mold, perfected it. Her indie-rock sound filled up and spilled over; her private ghosts cavorted with wisps of Nirvana and PJ Harvey, and she even picked up a few of the latter’s collaborators to help her achieve her vision. She got more ambitious with her songwriting—trying on new personas, folding in literary references, even daring to assume the voice of God (no small thing for a young woman raised Baptist in Macon, Ga. who still professes to follow and fear her Creator). She got more ambitious with her voice, too: exploring its strength and its frailty, learning her way around its pockmarks and potholes, soaring one minute and in the next, treating a cracking note as gingerly as a tree climber might tread upon a broken branch.
More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives—In “Three Futures,” she’s a tumescent teenaged boy getting “hard/In your car/In the parking lot”; in “Righteous Woman,” she’s an “ass man” spreading her knees wide on the subway—and her writing is more vivid than ever. In the opener, the Brooklyn-based singer finds her Southern roots in “A peach cobbler sunning/Belly-up on the granite/The kind that’ll make your/Tongue slap all your brains out.” And her penchant for frank self-analysis has gotten less prosaic and more probing. Throughout Three Futures, you can hear her rethinking what kind of artist she wants to be, and she has evidently arrived at the decision that “singer-songwriter” need not be synonymous with fingerpicking and first-person testimonials. The opening song crests like an orange sunrise, and over the course of the record, that luminous sound envelops you in a mantle of buzz and shimmer, an electric-electronic hybrid that is lush, physical, and full of contradictions.
Torres has typically written about relationships—romantic ones as well as the bonds between daughter and family, between supplicant and God—but this time out, she says, she had bodies and pleasure on the mind, and Kraftwerk and Can on the stereo. It’s an unexpected plot twist, but the shift is immediately apparent in the programmed drum machines and ruminatively looped floor toms. Scott says that she actually plays more guitar on this record than ever before, but you’d never know it—the white-hot filaments of tone snaking through the frame might be guitars masquerading as synths, or vice versa. PJ Harvey’s percussionist and producer Rob Ellis, who co-produced Sprinter, is back, but little of that record’s indie-rock naturalism has been carried over. There are glitches that sound like Oval and supple synth melodies reminiscent of Music for the Masses-era Depeche Mode. This is music that cloaks its sources, that revels in the possibilities afforded by the recording studio.
“Fun” is not a word anyone would attach to Torres’ previous albums, but you can tell that Scott and her collaborators had a ball making this one. “Helen in the Woods” is a hoot: The story of an unhinged stalker and the small town agog at whatever must’ve “made her whiskers curl,” it looms as large as a Hollywood adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Shouting and spitting, Torres might be a heavy metal singer or a speaker-in-tongues—savor the way she dredges the bottom of her range as she rumbles, “Helen’s funny in the head.” Elsewhere, she attacks breath like a sculptor might marble, chips flying as the words take shape beneath her chisel. It’s hard to overstate how much pleasure they’ve baked into the production—the strobing helicopter noises that lend “Helen” its silver-screen excess; the Brian Eno-like guitar filigree that fills the second half of “Marble Focus” so seductively, you barely notice her voice has gone quiet.
The sumptuousness of the record is such that it carries you even when her lyrical conceits fly wide of the mark. Some of her imagery is so specific that it can feel like paging through a journal that has been written largely in code. And sometimes, in her desire for drama, she oversells it: Her cock-rock inflections on “Righteous Woman” only point up the slightly underwhelming subject matter—long-distance booty-call fantasies that don’t merit the overblown treatment. But when she nails it, she really nails it. The languid, tentative title track would be beautiful no matter what the lyrics; that it turns out to be the rarest kind of love song—one addressed to a lover she abandoned—and is so full of regret and empathy (“I hope what you will remember/Is not how I left, but how I entered”) only makes it that much more awe-inducing.
As ever, she saves the best for last. The closing song, “To Be Given a Body,” is a quiet tour de force. Over a soft, ambient flutter, she takes one of the album’s most intensely personal memories—a succession of snapshots, a suggestion of paths taken being measured against paths not—and spins it out into one of the record’s most universal sentiments. “To be given a body is the greatest gift,” she intones, and then, a few lines later: “Laugh until I can’t breathe/Laugh until I can’t breathe.” She has said that it was the last song she completed, “as it was the one I was avoiding writing the most,” and you can hear that hesitant reckoning in her faltering voice. “I start to write once I’ve been made to feel powerless in some way,” she said around the time of Sprinter; “I like to subvert that and have the last word.” Here, though, it sounds like she is tiptoeing beyond that need for control. Torres ended with a would-be jumper asking a waterfall if it ever regretted taking the leap; Sprinter found her drowning under her own fear of mortality. But this, a song about bodies that verges on disembodiment, feels like letting go. Here, at the end of a daring and remarkable album, it feels like she’s earned it. | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 11, 2017 | 8 | c2c32a13-f49b-4c0c-9482-0f0dcf6f8074 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1987 goth rock masterpiece, a dramatic and winkingly macabre record from the mind of a man who thought it was all sort of a joke. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1987 goth rock masterpiece, a dramatic and winkingly macabre record from the mind of a man who thought it was all sort of a joke. | The Sisters of Mercy: Floodland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-sisters-of-mercy-floodland/ | Floodland | The Sisters of Mercy were pure evil right from the jump. Their sound was so identifiable, so simple and evocative, that it formed its own strand in the DNA of goth music. After a run of increasingly well-crafted singles and EPs, the Leeds band’s 1985 full-length debut, First and Last and Always, crystallized this identity: a drum machine that plinked like icicles dripping on a cave floor; warped guitar riffs that seemed beamed in from ’60s psychedelic rock; menacing basslines that were as memorable as the guitar parts; lyrics of alienation sung in a vampiric yawn that could seduce and mock and yearn.
Where do you go next? Fire the whole band. Bring on Meat Loaf’s songwriter and the guitarist who shredded on “Addicted to Love.” Incorporate a 40-person choir and a climactic sax solo. Write a piano ballad about childhood. Treat the drum machine so that it sounds like Rocky hitting the punching bag. Shoot an expensive video in the desert so that the Sisters of Mercy look like rock gods, wandering the earth in search of a sweeping vista to suit their newfound ambition.
On paper, Floodland should be a polarizing cautionary tale: an act of hubris that rejects the humble, visionary qualities that endeared a loyal audience to an underground, artsy group of misfits. Instead, it’s the masterpiece that defines them. Andrew Eldritch, the band’s sole remaining member by the time of its release in the fall of 1987, was driving himself nuts poring over demos alone in his adopted home of Hamburg. Driven by a burning desire to prove himself—and to propel his story beyond his old friends and new nemeses—this album had to be a grand gesture. Something undeniable.
An auspicious turning point for a band that started as a joke. “A very, very, very, dry joke,” Eldritch clarified to an interviewer in the early ’80s. His idea back then was to embrace the most ridiculous aspects of strung-out rock showmanship and marry them to music so exasperatingly bleak that it formed a meta-commentary on making art in an inhospitable world. The sense of humor came through their sulking covers of unlikely songs—say, ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”—and their occasional insistence on style over substance. Here was a band who crafted their own logo and merch before ever recording a song. (“I thought T-shirts were the key to this,” Eldritch reflected in 2019, “and I have not been proven wrong.”)
Of course, Eldritch’s self-deprecation was always part of the act, and the truth was that the Sisters of Mercy were significantly more talented and devoted than they let on. Their live shows were emotionally draining, and their recordings were meticulous and full of atmosphere: a sound often imitated but never matched. And yet, it’s the songwriting that helped distinguish them from their peers. Breakthroughs like 1983’s “Temple of Love” showcase Eldritch’s studious attention to the structures and melodies of the classic rock era while expressing the necessary gloom to fit in with the post-Joy Division post-punk boom.
Eldritch refined his songwriting by drawing common threads between all acts of barbarism, whether artistic or romantic or political. The band’s most recent album, 1990’s Vision Thing, is named after a term George H.W. Bush floated to describe the elusive quality that makes a candidate’s platform feel marketable. Eldritch—whose plan-B if the music thing didn’t work out was to study language at Oxford—always seemed attuned to this type of rhetoric. The group’s first greatest hits collection was called A Slight Case of Overbombing, his attempt at nailing the tone himself: the way that overly confident people present their dangerous ideas to a receptive audience.
Or, in other words, rock’n’roll. “We are the children of Altamont,” Eldritch has said of the Sisters of Mercy, which pinpoints their genesis to the very moment when things started falling apart: hippy utopia ushered out by actual violence; rock stars positioned as ill-equipped spokespeople for the chaos in their audience. If there’s an aspect of the Stones that the Sisters of Mercy internalized—outside of their ice-cold cover of “Gimme Shelter—it’s Mick Jagger standing on stage at Altamont, interrupting “Sympathy for the Devil” to urge his fans to “just cool out” as pandemonium spread. The disenchanted look on his face in the accompanying documentary says it all. The ’60s were over; the damage was done.
“There was a time,” Eldritch sang in the ’90s, “but it’s long gone.” Here is the perspective from which he writes best. Bars are always closing, the heat of the night fades into the heat of the day without distinction. Floodland represents the apex of Eldritch’s voice as a writer. He quotes T.S. Eliot, Percy Shelley, and Bob Dylan; he refers directly to the ongoing Cold War and indirectly to an oncoming apocalypse; he makes numerous barbs at his former bandmates and a couple devastating pleas to an ex. Sandwiched between their original classic lineup and the beefed-up rock band he assembled the following decade, it’s the closest thing to a solo album he made—an expression of his solitary vision. He played no shows to support it.
Because Sisters of Mercy have only made three albums—“three very good albums,” Eldritch interrupted a journalist to specify—there is a lot of weight on each one. I’d pinpoint Floodland as their greatest, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact many feared the story had ended when the band disassembled years before its release. Guitarist Gary Marx left to form Ghost Dance; Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams formed the Mission. Eldritch now stood alone (or alone with the drum machine, which he named Doktor Avalanche). In the UK press especially, the breakup was documented with a venom that painted their work firmly in the past tense. “We’d done what we wanted to achieve,” Hussey said. “In doing that we’d lost the original essence of it…. We’d lost the joke of it. Because that’s what it was originally meant to be. A joke.”
Floodland is no joke. But there is a kind of humor to the way the whole thing played out. Prior to its release, when Eldritch heard that Hussey and Adams were starting a new band under the very cool and very official-sounding name the Sisterhood, he had no other choice but to rush out an album under this moniker before they could. And so the true predecessor to Floodland is actually 1986’s Gift, Eldritch’s sole album as the Sisterhood. It is nobody’s favorite record in his catalog, and it’s what Larry David might call a “spite album,” a project whose entire purpose is to inconvenience someone else.
And yet, Gift did introduce some important characters into Eldritch’s work. One is Patricia Morrison, the Gun Club bassist who played on the record. She appears on the cover of Floodland and all its accompanying videos despite allegedly not playing a note on the actual record. There is also the music of Gift itself, which was hastily assembled but formed a crucial part of Eldritch’s evolution. With less focus on the guitars, he favored a murky, synthy blend that placed John Carpenter’s horror scores alongside his personal canon of Motörhead and the Stooges. This would become the bedrock of Floodland, an album that swells and sweeps in one long suite, songs interconnected by bursts of feedback and recurring lyrics. Two songs—“Flood I” and “Flood II”—appear on either side of the record, spinning an imagistic vision that makes you imagine the whole record as some grim fantasy in the bedroom as the world spirals out of control outside the window.
The whole record flows beautifully, and there’s no track that doesn’t add to its majestic stature. But when we talk about Floodland, we talk about three songs. One, of course, is the eternal “This Corrosion,” the closest thing the album had to a hit single, and an idea that originally emerged around the time of Gift. But as the song evolved—with its neverending build and incessant, singalong chorus—Eldritch realized it was a card he should keep up his sleeve for maximum impact. This was the composition that encouraged him to set up shop at New York’s state-of-the-art Power Station studio, where he enlisted a team of session musicians, backing vocalists, and Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman—the crowd-pleasing writer of Bat Out of Hell and “Total Eclipse of the Heart”— to polish his missive into a full-on dancefloor-filler.
The second single was “Dominion/Mother Russia,” which opens the album as a call to arms. Its seven-minute runtime introduced Eldritch’s new favored mode of songwriting: patiently riding a groove like a surfer on a towering wave, finding little slivers of quiet to squirrel away each clipped phrase. In the second half of the song, he builds tension with an almost spoken delivery, gaining momentum as the words start to avalanche, all set to a pounding, insistent rhythm that shows why, a few years later, Public Enemy would seem a natural fit for tourmates. (“America still has a big problem with white crowds and Black crowds in the same place at the same time,” he explained after the tour’s abrupt cancellation. “In addition to which, our record company is thoroughly useless and doesn’t like Black bands.”)
And then there is “Lucretia My Reflection,” the closest thing Eldritch ever crafted to his own classic rock anthem. It’s got the single best riff in his songbook—played on the bass, of course—and some of his most unforgettable lyrics. “I hear the roar of the big machine,” he announces, all bravado and momentum and impending disaster. Each chorus culminates with an invitation to “dance the ghost with me,” sung just before the song whips into a fiery, electric groove that still lights up the crowd at every festival this band plays.
Which is to say, 30-some years later, Andrew Eldritch is still playing festivals as the Sisters of Mercy. Which means Floodland worked. It allowed him to record and tour and keep the story going on his own terms, a boon for an artist who always fought against being seen as a cult act. But it also brought new trials. As the ’80s switched to the ’90s and alternative rock became a catchall term to replace the hyper-specific regional scenes from which he emerged, Eldritch felt boxed in by his reputation. He felt inspired by R.E.M.’s slow, shapeshifting ascent toward mainstream success: “But I can’t get my record company… to understand that I am Michael Stipe and not Ozzy Osbourne,” he said in 1993.
In the decades since, Eldritch has given up being Michael Stipe or Ozzy Osbourne; sometimes he doesn’t even seem like he wants to be Andrew Eldritch. He regularly writes and performs new material in concert, some of which his fans hail alongside his best work, but has yet to make another album. (“I’ve got other stuff to do, man,” is how he recently justified the decision. “I’ve been watching a lot of anime.”)
As someone who has studied the rise and fall of so many rock heroes before him, Eldritch sometimes gives off the impression of a dedicated music snob who somehow gained entry into the kingdom. In the mid-’90s, he got the chance to interview David Bowie, one of his heroes, around the release of Outside, the Brian Eno collaboration that many fans and critics saw as a daring return-to-form. Eldritch was unconvinced.
They engage in several long back-and-forths that endear you to both artists despite their firm differences. On one side is Bowie, endlessly inspired by youth culture and filled with optimism for the future; on the other is Eldritch, so tethered to his specific set of aesthetic principles that even entertaining the idea that Nine Inch Nails were worthy of attention seems to fill him with ire. Finally, Eldritch sums up his line of inquiry with a loaded question: Let’s say Outside is as good as everyone says it is. Do you suspect it could have the same impact as your ’70s work? Bowie admits the answer is probably no. Eldritch: “Then why put it out?”
Here is the defining principle of the Sisters of Mercy: to move people, to change the atmosphere in a room, to redefine yourself every time you step to the mic. To win. And if you can’t do that, what’s the point? In Mark Andrews’ essential biography, Paint My Name in Black and Gold, ex-member Gary Marx tells the story of his first time hearing the 10-minute version of “This Corrosion” blaring over the PA at a venue before his new band was supposed to go on stage. From the sounds of it, Marx knew right away it would become a hit. “Other people in the dressing room looked on wondering how I might react when it ended, if it ever ended,” he remembers. On one side of the curtain, Marx and his bandmates were getting a terrifying glimpse of the new competition; just outside their reach was an audience in pure rapture. And through the speakers was Eldritch, living his dream: a disembodied voice with a message that could echo through the ages, a ghost that would haunt whoever it reached, a dark joke that would only become darker and funnier the longer it went on. | 2023-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merciful Release | October 29, 2023 | 9.1 | c2c7aea5-f955-45f6-8f8d-d0419c3aaef1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Will Oldham's latest could be the evil twin of the singer/songwriter's career peak, 1999's I See a Darkness: If that 90s record plumbed the bleakness of life, Lie Down in the Light finds peace in the modest pleasures of friends, family, and music. | Will Oldham's latest could be the evil twin of the singer/songwriter's career peak, 1999's I See a Darkness: If that 90s record plumbed the bleakness of life, Lie Down in the Light finds peace in the modest pleasures of friends, family, and music. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Lie Down in the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11549-lie-down-in-the-light/ | Lie Down in the Light | Dependable isn't a glamorous adjective for a musician, and reliability doesn't sell a lot of records, but Will Oldham, through his arsenal of aliases, has been creating consistently good music for nearly two decades. At least once a year, he releases an album, EP, mini-LP, or collaboration-- and it's almost always worth hearing. At his worst, he drops a bomb like The Brave & the Bold, his covers album with Tortoise; at his best, as on his defining 1999 album I See a Darkness (recorded under the name Bonnie "Prince" Billy), he completely uproots American musical traditions. The upside is a career with an even trajectory-- rising only slightly but never falling off-- and the freedom to chase any rabbit he wants. The downsides: His albums all sell about the same; his audience, while loyal, neither grows nor dwindles; his followers (Iron & Wine, Pinetop Seven) sometimes surpass him; and his presence within indie rock generally comforts rather than excites.
At first blush, the most interesting aspect of Oldham's latest album (another as Bonnie "Prince" Billy) is its Raconteurish release strategy. Emphasizing digital downloads over jewel-cased CDs, Drag City rushed it to stores with little warning and nothing in the way of a promo blitz, bypassing critics' previews, promotional mp3s, and all the rigmarole that typically sells an indie album. Similar endeavors by more mainstream acts have yielded disappointing returns, but Oldham's audience will seek him out. And while Lie Down in the Light may not actually change his career arc, it should find a very loyal listenership beyond his fans.
For such a reliable artist, Lie Down in the Light is good enough to be actually exciting, perhaps Oldham's best since Darkness, which could be its evil twin. If that 10.0-worthy record plumbed the bleakness of life, Light finds peace in the modest pleasures of friends, family, and music. "I like the places where the night does not mean an end," he sings on "You Remind Me of Something (The Glory Goes)", "Where smiles break free and surprise is your friend/ And dancing goes on in the kitchen until dawn/ To my favorite song that has no end." At times on this album, Oldham sounds like he's found just that place.
Musically, these meticulously crafted songs-- produced by Mark Nevers of Lambchop-- give the impression of front-porch spontaneity, their purposefulness made to sound like serendipity. Oldham mines many of the same musical veins as he has on previous albums-- these songs are heavy with old gospel, country, folk, and other Americana sounds-- but he tweaks them in new ways, adding twists and turns that even some of his most ardent fans may not expect. The free-wheeling "Easy Does It" opens the album with a churchly jangle in which Oldham's band (which includes mainstays Paul Oldham and Emmett Kelly, along with scads of Nashville musicians) trade solos. A Bakersfield guitar passes the plate to a barrelhouse piano, which yields to a melodica, and all the while Oldham hums like he's in a jug band. It's as if the instruments were introducing themselves so you'll recognize them in later songs, but that doesn't account for the clarinet that goes off on a wild tear on "For Every Field There's a Mole", adding a jazzy element that sends the song careering in a new direction, namely a rewrite of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ("To every thing there is a season..."). Similarly, a mournful pedal steel punctuates "You Want That Picture", and the ambient woodwinds and percussive acoustic guitar give "(Keep Eye on) Other's Gain" an almost psychedelic sensibility.
Lie Down may be Oldham's most country record of new songs in years, and it's also one of his most accessible and least academic records. In its loose narrative-- of a relationship forged and broken, and of lives reassured-- the Loretta Lynn to his Conway Twitty is Ashley Webber, whose full-throated, feminine roar contrasts with Oldham's old-man croon. "So Everyone", with its solemn horns and ratchety percussion (either a washboard or spoons), relates the excitement of new love through a plea for public oral sex, but there's neither a giggly nudge nor an admission of transgressiveness. In fact, the song sounds positively romantic. Of course, their second duet, "You Want That Picture", portrays a romance in shambles, each accusing the other of betrayal in a he-said/she-said dialogue.
Oldham certainly sees a darkness, but Lie Down ends basking in holy light. A Baptist organ illuminates the hymnlike closer "I'll Be Glad", a paean to God's own reliability. As it reaches its final refrain, a full choir joins Oldham for a few short, sweet chords that serve as a sort of benediction. Coming at the end of an album full of moral, romantic, and sexual gray areas, those closing notes sound genuinely redemptive-- not just a preordained conclusion, but a powerful and hard-won finale. If Lie Down in the Light sounds like the distillation of the themes and sounds Oldham has been tinkering with throughout his career, the result, as he sings on "Easy Does It", is "good earthly music singing into my head." | 2008-05-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-05-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | May 27, 2008 | 8.7 | c2d9665a-d935-4d5c-a75a-3deb7a769b13 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The newly reissued 1989 collaboration between Liza Minelli and the Pet Shop Boys is a fascinating, addled mix of show tunes, strings, and 808s that coalesces in a mood of chic Upper East Side regret. | The newly reissued 1989 collaboration between Liza Minelli and the Pet Shop Boys is a fascinating, addled mix of show tunes, strings, and 808s that coalesces in a mood of chic Upper East Side regret. | Liza Minnelli: Results | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liza-minnelli-results/ | Results | At the height of their 1987-1988 imperial phase, Pet Shop Boys had a surplus of material awaiting the proper vessels. The first were Eighth Wonder, fronted by model/actress Patsy Kensit. Thanks to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s “I’m Not Scared,” the quartet scored their first British smash in the spring of 1988. What a delightful thing it was too: a staccato sample of Kensit singing “ah-ah-ah,” clouds of Europop synths, a rat-tat-tat beat and Kensit herself telling somebody to take these dogs away from her—I hope Liam Gallagher heard her loud and clear in divorce court a dozen years later.
Buoyed by its success, Tennant and Lowe moved to their next client. Liza Minnelli might have been a charming Oscar-winning actress and a singer with a physical and emotional range as considerable as her mom’s, but she had never shown interest in pop. It was her pal Gene Simmons of KISS who took credit for nudging her to the Pet Shop Boys. She considered it; she had liked their 1987 UK hit “Rent.” The Boys accepted the challenge. “I went into the studio, but there were only Neil, Chris, Julian and me,” she said at the time. “I asked when the musicians would arrive. And Neil said: ‘Are you mad? There are no musicians: it’s all machines, darling.’”
An addled mishmash of show tunes, covers, original material, strings, and the polite wobble of 808s, Results is 1989’s most conspicuous outlier—nothing sounded like it—yet it was the quintessential Pet Shop Boys album. They might’ve assumed, correctly, that Results would be a hit on fumes alone, but they programmed the garish effects and wrote the purple lyrics that market calculations forced them to omit from their own work. And Minnelli, strutting always like the biggest hen on the farm, inhabits what Tennant called in an interview the “power woman” tropes that the Boys wrote for her. Bringing years of syllabic precision learned at concert halls across the globe, Minnelli sounded like no one in transatlantic pop: too florid for Paula Abdul material, too light for theater. Now that Results exists remastered and expanded with several acres of okay remixes, fans who’ve carried the thin-sounding original CD around for years can appreciate the labor.
Exposed yet committed to surfaces, Minnelli is fascinating in Cabaret; she was a more volatile Sally Bowles than Christopher Isherwood envisioned. The Minnelli of 1972 wouldn’t recognize the Minnelli of 1989. Keep that in mind when listening to British top ten “Losing My Mind,” written by Stephen Sondheim for Follies, released a year before Cabaret. Over an ebb-and-flow electronic backdrop, Minnelli nails the tumult of romantic obsession. The telling moment occurs at 2:37, during which Tennant and Lowe add a high keyboard squiggle straight out of Italo disco. She doesn’t sound upset—she sounds like someone acting upset, which makes all the difference. The same goes for the thwacking “Don’t Drop Bombs,” in which Minnelli dishes out tough talk about a boyfriend taking out other girls on his expense account: Results is about and for the 1 percent. Tennant and Lowe sneak in two climaxes: a refrain with rising synth string chords centered around the couplet “When you’ve erupted/You’re totally destructive”; and Minnelli’s high notes as she sings the five-note keyboard hook. The switch in tones and colors, dictated by the arrangement, is wizardly; this was the risk Tennant and Lowe took hiring a professional, and it paid off.
The centerpieces draw upon the full reserves of Minnelli’s strengths. A despairing lyric set to a major key chorus, “So Sorry, I Said” shows a comity between performer and material so hushed and intimate that it’s like walking in on a nude person dressing. In typical Tennant fashion, “So Sorry, I Said” builds to the tossed-off inversion of subject and verb. Covers of the Pet Shop Boys’ own “Tonight is Forever” and “Rent” and Tanita Tikaram’s “Twist in My Sobriety” deepen the mood of chic Upper East Side regret—of confidences exchanged in private cars inching north on Lexington Avenue. Benefitting most from the aural upgrade is “If There Was Love,” a six-minute-plus take on the acid house lite with which the Pet Shop Boys had experimented on B-sides like {The Sound of the Atom Splitting.” In keeping with Chris Lowe’s ew-gross-guitars approach, Courtney Pine contributes a hysterical soprano sax solo.
In retrospect, the clues were easy to spot, but the best indication that Lowe and Tennant weren’t straight was their choice of clients. Thanks to “Opportunities” and “Shopping,” fools thought that by mocking the young male characters addicted to Issey Miyake the Boys weren’t also sympathizing or envying their shallowness. A star as huge as Liza Minnelli was the proper emulsifier. A career in decline lent Results the requisite air of ravaged grace—a Marianne Faithfull who really had been in every VIP room from Bali to Boston. She committed to the project, she said, because Pet Shop Boys material often sounded “poetic and vaguely cynical and Aznavourian.” She knew what she wanted. After Results, the Boys returned to Dusty Springfield; Minnelli moved on to Stepping Out. As their album’s prophetic title indicated, a reprise was unthinkable. | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | SFE / Cherry Red | August 31, 2017 | 7.4 | c2de0a89-e039-4bda-9d68-8fc099016c88 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Instead of a reinvention, the London band’s latest album jumps at the chance to blend in with every other rock act on the festival circuit. | Instead of a reinvention, the London band’s latest album jumps at the chance to blend in with every other rock act on the festival circuit. | Palace: Shoals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palace-shoals/ | Shoals | Can I be sure that Palace didn’t share an NME cover with Elbow and South in 2001? Did they not arrive in America as an opening act for Travis or Doves? I swear they could’ve gotten into a minor press beef with Embrace or Athlete, or maybe it’s a foggy memory of spinning “Heaven Up There” alongside Starsailor at the Sam Goody listening booth. It’s been nearly 20 years since the UK was flooded by bands with similarly functional names that sounded a lot like Palace: lush, languid, lovelorn, and satisfying ongoing demand for Jeff Buckley-esque falsetto flourishes after Radiohead discovered the Warp catalog. Palace have mostly had this space to themselves since their 2014 EP Lost in the Night fast-tracked them to endemically UK forms of hype: getting handpicked as an opener for Jamie T’s comeback show, playing the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury months before their first LP was released. But with their third album, Shoals, the London quartet undertake an admirable and ultimately pyrrhic quest to blend in with every other British rock band on the festival circuit right now.
Had Palace started as a typical, trend-conscious buzz band rather than a Y2K throwback, they might have ended up here a decade later anyway. Lead single “Gravity” tipped their hand: “I’ve got sleep deprivation,” Leo Wyndham moans as Palace somnambulates through five minutes of psychedelic soul pumped with quaaludes and dry ice. It would’ve filled the gap left by Darkside in the eight years since Psychic had an actual Darkside album not shown up one month earlier. “Fade” veered in a different direction, a brisk krautrock/dream-pop hybrid clearly modeled off DIIV, though infused with a magisterial vocal and production aesthetic that’s otherwise the polar opposite of Oshin. Taken together, “Gravity” and “Fade” demonstrate the range and the boundaries of Shoals, a modernized but familiar variety of the heavy-lidded strains of R&B and vibey rock that serve as the working definition of “indie” on most Spotify playlists.
These updates on their sound still don’t address the main shortcoming of Palace’s two previous albums: For a band of their stature, they are curiously averse to big chunes, and Wyndham’s windblown delivery inflates their meandering melodies to a tenuous grandeur. That’s still the case on Shoals, where the festival flag-wavers are equally sedative as the songs where the vocals stretch into pure texture. Leo Abrahams’ stylish production steers the discussion toward his previous work with Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins, even if Shoals just as often makes me think of a weighted blanket or paint roller soaked in aloe vera.
This outcome is likely preferable to Palace “fearlessly embracing our pop side” or whatever bands say before their synthy pivot, since the album’s most grating moments arise from the dissonance between Wyndham’s maudlin vocals and his increasingly conversational lyrics. He spends much of Shoals in that half-falsetto, half-chest moan that makes voice coaches wish James Blake and Bon Iver never made it past 2010, an approach suited to the self-explanatory “Friends Forever,” “Lover (Don’t Let Me Down),” or rhyming “insane” with “pain” on a song called “Give Me the Rain.” It also turns Shoals into unintentional parody whenever its lyrics sheet reads like a gooey IG caption: “You elevate the heart of me/You’ve ghosted my negativity.”
More than any new musical influence, Palace have found inspiration in the pandemic, probably the album’s most contemporary aspect. While the massive success of their first two records could easily be taken for a mandate for more of the same, the quartet were given the opportunity to rethink a process they’ve kept in place since they formed as 13-year-olds. Wyndham contracted COVID and had legitimate concerns that he would never sing or even breathe normally again: As he told NME, “When music was taken away, I started to wonder what my purpose was,” and he tried to put aside simple love songs to reckon with existential dread, childhood trauma, and mental health. Palace now quote Nelson Mandela in their press materials and describe the band as a union of four autonomous artistic entities. Opener “Never Said It Was Easy” is the boldest evidence of Palace’s ambition, as Wyndham traces his path from the physical maladies of his youth to his mental struggles of today over layers of sampled, unquantized piano and textured harmonies. The best song on Shoals follows immediately: “Shame on You” is the kind of sweeping, weeping power ballad that Coldplay perfected and then spent the past 20 years trying not to write anymore. This is what makes Shoals truly a product of its time: Instead of seizing the opportunity for a complete overhaul, Palace jumped at the chance to get back to normal.
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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. | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Avenue A / Fiction | January 28, 2022 | 5.6 | c2e25a3f-902c-4ff6-8c98-c03e17ca424d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The latest from free-folk journeyman Matt Valentine delves into lysergic funk and psychedelic self-reflection. | The latest from free-folk journeyman Matt Valentine delves into lysergic funk and psychedelic self-reflection. | Wet Tuna: Warping All by Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wet-tuna-warping-all-by-yourself/ | Warping All by Yourself | Matt Valentine and Erika Elder are the picture of domestic psychedelic bliss, steering their country-fried caravan MV & EE from a log cabin deep in the Vermont woods, where they also raise a young daughter. Two decades into their career as madcap folk songwriters and kaleidoscopic jammers, the couple continues to release music at a prolific rate, largely through their in-house Child of Microtones CD-R imprint. Occasionally, the pair will poke their heads above ground with releases on higher-profile labels. Such is the case with Warping All By Yourself, the latest album from Wet Tuna, the project initially formed by Valentine and guitarist Pat “P.G. Six” Gubler. Working with the psych-focused label Three Lobed, Valentine pours a generous splash of funk into the homebrewed elixir, offering one of his most accessible entry points in years.
Valentine started on this path immediately after high school, co-founding indie/shoegaze group The Werefrogs in the late 1980s. This began his collaboration with Gubler in experimental configurations such as the Tower Recordings, Memphis Luxure, and most recently, Wet Tuna. Oddly, Gubler doesn’t appear on Warping All By Yourself, but the music exists firmly in the territory they charted together as innovators of the genre that became known as “freak folk.” In 2003, Valentine launched the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival, where Crazy Horse guitar jams, raga drones, and spiritual jazz could meet in an ecstatic embrace. Since then, Valentine has compared his ceaseless pace to author Philip K. Dick, who maintained a steady output whether or not he achieved financial success. By releasing proper albums alongside the jammier outtakes, the patterns in Valentine’s vast constellations have become increasingly lucid.
One of Valentine’s latest fixations is lysergic funk, an influence that has colored recent highlights such as “Disco Bev” from Wet Tuna’s 2019 LP, Water Weird. Warping All By Yourself is bookended by two versions of “Raw Food,” an ode to avoiding cheeseburgers, featuring violinist Samara Lubelski. Valentine borrows a few tricks from Don Cherry’s Brown Rice in these songs’ mesmerizing, slow-motion grooves, and near-whispered delivery. With backing vocals from Mick Flower and Doc Dunn, “Ain’t No Turnin’ Back” includes some of the album’s funniest lyrics, as these reclusive weirdo artists sing about what it’s like to be a reclusive weirdo artist: “Free folk is a motherfucker/Shit, you’re a big freak/So many reamers let me be/So many punishers in between.”
“Sweet Chump Change” is the album’s funkadelic crown jewel, a duet featuring the sundazed intonations of Erika Elder. Its lyrics are a free-associative stream of rhymes (“Unicorn blood/Down at the pub” and “Dankazoid jam/Dial-up scam”) that could become grating if you’re not used to hearing a middle-aged dad rapping in the woods. As Valentine lays down slinky keys, hand percussion, and soaring guitar solos, it starts to sound like Herbie Hancock covering the Sopranos theme song—in the best way possible.
Warping By Yourself drifts to a close with the languid ambience of “Been So Long” and a reprise of “Raw Food,” drizzled with Stevie Wonder-style clavinet. These elements, borrowed from funk and soul, are strikingly different from the country-folk side of MV & EE’s extended universe. At the same time, Valentine has always worked like a voracious record collector, looking to expand upon his old staples. No matter who’s along for the ride, each new release dives deeper into his obsessions, and these warped grooves are a perfect place for newcomers to wade in. | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Three Lobed | April 11, 2022 | 7.3 | c2e29a3b-1f66-4d39-b9d7-29138c0d0b99 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The surprise release collects unheard material originally meant for “Twin Peaks: The Return”; though slighter than this year’s Digital Rain EP, it might be Jewel’s strongest soundtrack work yet. | The surprise release collects unheard material originally meant for “Twin Peaks: The Return”; though slighter than this year’s Digital Rain EP, it might be Jewel’s strongest soundtrack work yet. | Johnny Jewel: Themes for Television | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-jewel-themes-for-television/ | Themes for Television | The air of mystique surrounding Johnny Jewel often means that, when it comes to his musical output, nothing is quite what it may seem. That’s certainly true of Themes for Television, a surprise release that dropped at the beginning of this week. The 56 minutes of music collected here were allegedly meant for David Lynch and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Jewel reportedly composed 20 hours of music for the show and submitted somewhere between five and seven hours to Lynch for potential use.
But despite being billed as a collection of unreleased music taken from those sessions—Lynch ultimately decided not to use Jewel’s work, save for the title track to last year’s Windswept—some of Themes for Television has appeared elsewhere in other forms. Besides a “minimal” edit of “Windswept,” there are also alternate versions of “Shadow” and “Saturday,” two songs that Jewel’s Chromatics performed in “Twin Peaks”’ iconic Roadhouse venue; the twinkling theme of “Shadow” is sorta-reprised on “Waking Up,” which itself bears close resemblance to Windswept’s “Heaven.” Similar to the streaks of nostalgia that occasionally emerged in “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the general makeup of Themes for Television elicits pangs of familiarity noticeable only to those who paid close enough attention in the past.
Despite these shared traits, it’s perhaps best (and, considering the inimitable Angelo Badalamenti’s contributions to the series, fairest) to experience Themes for Television through a sonic lens divorced from Lynch and Frost’s beautiful and terrifying creation. Think of this release as another window into Jewel’s approach to score composition—a vista that, granted, listeners are more than familiar with at this point. Over the past four years, Jewel’s soundtracked Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, as well as the 2016 Belgian drama Home and the previous year’s A Beautiful Now. (This isn’t counting his appearances on the iconic Drive soundtrack, or “imagined soundtrack” releases like Windswept, the 2016 EP The Key, and “The Other Side of Midnight” from 2015—documents not explicitly attached to other properties, but all bearing the “Film” logo on their cover art.)
Although it stands as comparably slight when measured up to Jewel’s lovely, ambient Digital Rain LP from earlier this year, Themes for Television might be the strongest collection of Jewel’s score work to date. Fans of his work know what they’ve come for—rippling synths, dark ambience, the occasional melodic swell, and a mournful saxophone line or two—and Jewel certainly does not disappoint.
The “(Opening Titles)” edit of “Shadow” emphasizes the original’s triumphant elegance, Chromatics’ performance of which served as a dazzling stinger to the second episode of “Twin Peaks: The Return”; the scorched static of “Caffeine” gives way to John Carpenter-esque tick-tock tones, while the synthetic bath of “Self Portrait” possesses a weightlessness that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2010 breakout Returnal. The relative brevity of these tracks (most of which not pushing past the three-minute mark) means that their staying power depends almost wholly on the listeners’ predilection for atmosphere. But while they’re in the air, it makes for a nice sonic space to live within.
Themes for Television’s highlights effectively double as a showcase for Jewel’s impressive sense of arrangement and mood-setting. “Windswept (Minimal)” is anchored around placid keys and close-mic’d woodwinds, every figurative breath echoing throughout the track’s mix to create a truly chilling feeling, while “Embers” breaks into a skyward major-key ascent before settling beautifully on a minor chord, like a feather hitting hard ground. The latter is a simple and subtly devastating trick that, in others’ hands, would risk approaching cliché; in Jewel’s hands, the approach retains power in the purity of its straightforwardness.
It’s possible that Themes for Television’s strengths originate from Jewel’s own intimate personal connection to the “Twin Peaks” franchise. Last year he told Consequence of Sound that he stopped following the original series during its early-1990s run after a friend he watched it with committed suicide; he didn’t return to it until moving to Montreal and meeting a band member from Italians Do It Better outfit Desire years later. So besides being a fine placeholder release as Jewel’s fans wait for that record, perhaps Themes for Television is best viewed as an invitation into the mind and heart of an artist who, like “Twin Peaks”’ enigmatic co-creator himself, is content to remain just far enough out of reach. | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Italians Do It Better | May 25, 2018 | 7 | c2ea4f9c-a4e2-417c-a946-80478c166fd3 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The Texas-born Nashvillian previously proved herself a natural translator of honky-tonk’s emotional entanglements; on her long-delayed third record, she makes a complete song cycle out of them. | The Texas-born Nashvillian previously proved herself a natural translator of honky-tonk’s emotional entanglements; on her long-delayed third record, she makes a complete song cycle out of them. | Caitlin Rose: CAZIMI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caitlin-rose-cazimi/ | CAZIMI | Nine years ago, Caitlin Rose released her second album, The Stand-In. The title spliced a couple inside jokes from the first record’s tour: The months onstage had her feeling like an impostor; when she felt like herself, she longed for an understudy. But in the album’s wake, a good number of interviewers and critics turned her into a stand-in for country music: If she wasn’t an alternative to Taylor Swift, maybe she was the inheritor of Loretta Lynn or Emmylou Harris. You can see where they were coming from. Rose is a Texas-born Nashvillian—with all the twang that combo implies—and her parents (a label executive and a songwriter who’s won Grammys for writing with, well, Taylor Swift) are Music Row stalwarts. From the outset, she was a natural at depicting the gnarled emotional entanglements of classic honky-tonk—the misspent desire, the loneliness at the heart of the party—but her interiority was more suited to plaintive indie pop. Monologues, not playlets.
CAZIMI, Rose’s long-delayed third record, makes a complete song cycle out of those entanglements, with each cut reflecting the proper amount of neon. Pick a track: someone’s either breaking apart or barely holding it together. If anyone actually gets through the door, they pull the house down behind them. It could make for a heavy listen if Rose treated these situations weightily, but that’s never really been her approach. “Star-crossed and ridin’ on heaven’s horses/I’ve had enough of these cosmic divorces,” she shrugs on “Modern Dancing,” a blithe and, from the sound of it, severely capoed strutter that plays like “Soak Up the Sun” for nihilists. (Or, I guess, like the Magnetic Fields.) On “Holdin’”—Rose’s second or third contribution to the lamentably small canon of country power pop—her narrator alternates grandiose threats with seething retreats, then gets chased by a lovely jangly counterpoint. “Nobody’s Sweetheart” is a chiming concern troll with a crushing descending figure that recalls ’70s AM gold; fragments of its chorus carry into “Lil’ Vesta” (which crosses the sure-stepping pop of Adam Schlesinger with the romantic fatalism of, honest to God, early Toby Keith) and “Blameless” (the real weeper here, with a chorus that carries as much resigned faith as an evangelical worship ballad).
There’s a convergence between how Rose (who co-produced the album with Jordan Lehning) tinkers with genre and the way she turns her characters’ situations over like a snowglobe. It’s fascinating to compare CAZIMI with her 2010 debut, Own Side Now, which she reissued in September. With the exception of the Northern-soul-inflected “Shanghai Cigarettes”—when Rose appeared on Rhett Miller’s podcast last month, he named it one of his all-time top five—Own Side Now hewed closely to folk-pop convention. The observations were sharp, but they were snugly sheathed in the arrangements. Any stylistic deviations tended toward the self-consciously retro: barrelhouse shuffle, pop-soul balladry, po-faced folk ramble.
Now, she’s pulling off things like lead single “Black Obsidian,” which puffs up the glammy dread of prime Suede with a bell-tolling gothic sensibility, while still making time for twangy turnarounds. “Why in the hell do we keep looking back/With the devil always running after us,” she wails, and the band stops on a dime before unfurling their capes. Or “All Right (Baby’s Got a Way),” a twinkling lullaby of condescension that unexpectedly deploys a full-band middle eight—like a landmine constructed from All Things Must Pass vinyl—at the song’s midpoint. “Why don’t you get up off the ground,” Rose taunts, “If it isn’t where you wanna be?” The lullaby continues; the eruption is ignored, for better or worse, like a partner’s outburst.
In astrology, when a planet’s path takes it too near the sun, it’s in combustion. But get a little closer than that, and that’s cazimi: a brief encampment at the sun’s heart. The light and heat amplify, rather than destroy. One of the bonus tracks on the Own Side Now reissue was a newer tune, a resigned breakup ballad called “Only Lies.” It sounds like a Memphis-era Cat Power demo: The snare has a hitch in its step; Rose wanders into a fog of synth strings and easy-listening piano trills. Revisited here and slotted as the closer, it’s completely rebuilt. Rose and Lehning twist the song around a bottle rocket: a full complement of guitars frantically strumming and digging over a four-on-the-floor kick. At this speed, a split feels like a physical law. “And you ask/How could I be so cruel/To leave you in your cryin’,” she spits, then collapses into a shrug: “Well, we’re only lovers/And/They’re only lies.” It’s resigned and callous and empathetic all at once, an auspicious alignment charted by one of our great songwriters, back at last. | 2022-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Missing Piece | November 18, 2022 | 7.5 | c2ec2a4b-f12b-4647-8267-21ca4beea866 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
This collection, an audio companion to Brett Morgen’s acclaimed documentary Montage of Heck, assembles half-songs, collages, and spoken word material from Kurt Cobain's home recordings. | This collection, an audio companion to Brett Morgen’s acclaimed documentary Montage of Heck, assembles half-songs, collages, and spoken word material from Kurt Cobain's home recordings. | Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21157-montage-of-heck-the-home-recordings/ | Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings | Watching Brett Morgen’s 2015 documentary Montage of Heck, assembled from Kurt Cobain’s own journals, home-taped monologues, and family home videos, you felt a profound sense of intimacy, even violation. Eavesdropping on Cobain has been a lurid national pastime for nearly 20 years now, from 2003's Journals to the scraps collected on the With the Lights Out box, but Morgen took us closer than even the most brazen imagined we should be allowed to go: Courtney and Kurt, naked and bantering in the bathroom on home video about who gets to play the Reading Festival that year (Courtney, pregnant with Frances, complains jokingly about having to stay home and “get big and fat”). Cobain, nodding off and holding his toddler. Footage of the three band members, teenagers, thrashing around in an Aberdeen shack, watched by two profoundly bored audience members. The very idea that this footage exists, and that we might be given such unfettered access to it, lends the film an uneasy voyeuristic charge.
Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings carries the same unsavory aftertaste as the film, with none of its attendant illuminations. The scraps here were dredged by Morgen and used to wallpaper the film, and he’s rounded them out with some home recordings that didn’t make the movie. Home tapes by iconic artists are a tricky business. They can be revelatory, but they always carry a question: Did we learn enough to justify the intrusion? In the context of the film, the audio was an essential part of the film’s sometimes-unclean sense of immersion. Divorced from the images, the sounds on these tapes are little more than lint emptied out of the last pocket of a life.
"Kurt’s brain was always on,” his sister Kim says early in the film, and Home Recordings sounds exactly like that: What a brain is like when it is on, but not necessarily thinking anything. It’s not like listening to Kurt Cobain’s music; it is like submerging yourself in (what you imagine to be) his mind, with all of the bored fidgets, silly voices, jokes made to oneself, and half-hearted guitar strums this implies. In the film, his first girlfriend Tracy Marander recalls that while Cobain was living with her, he was unemployed and would watch television for hours, strumming his guitar abstractedly. You can imagine that a few of these tracks were recorded in similar states. “Burn the Rain” could have been a song he never finished, or it could just be a blurry version of a bunch of different songs he would eventually write, something he committed to tape and never thought about a second time.
This hits upon the main issue with releasing Cobain's home-tapes: As King Buzzo of the Melvins noted of this film, Cobain was "a master of jerking your chain." These tracks mostly feel like an antic mind entertaining itself, and to enshrine them in this way is mystifying. Consider: There’s a track called “Beans” here, and it’s a minute and 20 seconds of Cobain thumbing two notes and singing about eating beans in a shrieking cartoon voice. There’s another called “Rehash” that consists of him hollering silly songwriter words—“rehash,” “chorus,” “solo”—as he plays some power chords. There are brief audio clips of him playing with sped-up and slowed-down voices. The few early demos—"Sappy", or "Frances Farmer", strummed and mumbled as he worked out the song's skeleton—are so inchoate that lavishing any kind of attention on them feels perverse. They serve to remind us that ephemera provide mute testimony of a life’s existence, but say little about its meaning.
There is a precedent for this sort of release, especially with artists who died young with a slim catalog: 2007’s Family Tree gathered together all of the home recordings of Nick Drake, an artist with a similar predilection for committing all his guitar fumbling to tape and even to recording emotionally revealing monologues. Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.
Cobain fan sites have complained that the Home Recordings crosses the line into exploitation, but this line was crossed years ago, and has been obliterated and trampled many times since. The Home Recordings marks the point where that exploitation enters the absurd. It’s a sad bookend to a captivating film, and an ignoble use of a trove of material. Its purpose isn’t to give us any new music, but to give us one last grasp at his fading spirit. For most people, this is the last phase of a breakup, or of grief—when you smell the t-shirt, and register sadly that the essence is gone. | 2015-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 12, 2015 | 4 | c2ed25e3-fee8-4234-9876-1248ea19ebe1 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The jam-heavy live set captured between Walker’s four-piece band and the Japanese psych-prog quintet is a heady meeting of the minds. | The jam-heavy live set captured between Walker’s four-piece band and the Japanese psych-prog quintet is a heady meeting of the minds. | Ryley Walker / Kikagaku Moyo: Deep Fried Grandeur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryley-walker-kikagaku-moyo-deep-fried-grandeur/ | Deep Fried Grandeur | Ryley Walker’s got jokes. By now, the songwriter might even be as known for his witty, self-skewering online presence as for his increasingly weird, increasingly excellent psych-folk. But one of his recent gags has nothing to do with the former and everything to do with the latter. In 2019, Walker launched Husky Pants Records, a “joke record label” (his words) for a series of minor releases. Was it really just for kicks? Or is Walker deflecting, setting a low bar to relieve some pressure before releasing honest and vulnerable music out into the world? He has blurred that line before.
Either way, Walker’s having the last laugh with Deep Fried Grandeur, which was released on Husky Pants after multiple labels passed on it; the record recently hit No. 1 on Bandcamp’s best-selling list. The album, a live collaboration between Walker’s four-piece band and the Japanese psych-prog quintet Kikagaku Moyo, documents their set from the music festival Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2018; the album’s title is how they appeared on the festival’s bill. The organizers had asked Walker to choose another artist for a one-time jam, and his pick was no head-scratcher. Walker’s Deafman Glance and Kikagaku Moyo’s Masana Temples, both released earlier that year, shared similar cycles of gentle dis- and re-orientation, a sense of constantly interrupted traction, like getting lost in a huge cavernous art museum and passing through vastly different soft-lit rooms while repeatedly finding and losing the exit route. With only one afternoon to rehearse, the two bands hit the stage and hit it off.
Deep Fried Grandeur, split into two halves for vinyl purposes but really a product of about five independent movements, is an instrumental, krautrock-ish noodle journey that spans the spectrum from tactile texture-crafting to supercharged drives. In the first half of part two, “Shrinks the Day,” the scenery changes dramatically around a hoedown pulse. Ryu Kurosawa’s scorpion-like sitar pierces the quiet, but soon it takes off sprinting into a wide-open field, flipping into a major-key. The pile of sounds from these nine musicians were touched up for the album by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas and CAVE, and comparing the final version to a bootleg of the actual performance reveals modest but shrewd edits: a guitar effect is enhanced here, a transitory section shortened there. It’s still a faithful document, and it sounds better trimmed and toned.
What Deep Fried Grandeur doesn’t have is that back-pocket compass of the best semi-rehearsed, semi-improvised jams, the kind where you have no idea where it’s headed but still give yourself over to it. It’s more like hopping in their backseat while they cruise through some hilly countryside roads that nobody knows intimately well, but aren’t brutally tough to navigate. The shifts are gradual, never on a dime, and the ride doesn’t toy with your memory by returning to melodic motifs after long, digressive stretches. Deep Fried Grandeur has a certain shelf life, but then again, the spirit of its origins was all about bright, short-lived sparks. You savor the brief chemistry, and then part ways, remembering it fondly.
Above all, Deep Fried Grandeur is just a joy to visualize. It’s nice enough to imagine yourself at the scene of two touring-calloused psych bands from opposite sides of the globe colliding on a third continent and immediately having a long, advanced conversation in a shared language. But it’s just as fun to picture the Can, Blue Cheer, and Grateful Dead songs that probably reached their headphones and car stereos at a similar time in Tokyo and Rockford, Illinois, years and years ago, setting the crash course into motion.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Husky Pants | February 10, 2021 | 6.7 | c2f29066-9955-4bcb-8c63-dcef69d32223 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Kim Gordon's noise project with surfer Alex Knost shares some qualities with her band Body/Head. In a sense, it's the sound of the most New York woman to ever live returning to her West Coast roots. | Kim Gordon's noise project with surfer Alex Knost shares some qualities with her band Body/Head. In a sense, it's the sound of the most New York woman to ever live returning to her West Coast roots. | Glitterbust: Glitterbust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21665-glitterbust/ | Glitterbust | Who is Alex Knost and how did he end up in a band with Kim Gordon? Among the many questions raised by Glitterbust—the debut noise guitar record from this California duo—the most pressing one is also, at least partially, the easiest to parse using Google. Knost is a 31-year-old pro surfer from Costa Mesa, Calif. "I thought surfing was cool because it was an art form and a subculture," Knost once told an interviewer, and he has referred to his single-fin longboard as an art piece itself. Surfer magazine has called Knost "unlike any other surfer in the world," drawing from '60s and '70s technique for a poised, imaginative, eccentric form. "Alex looks like a beat poet," one journalist wrote in 2008, comparing his surf style to "a 1984 Fender Stratocaster about to be beaten against a Marshall stack. In a good way."
Before she became the loft-dwelling, paint-splattering, flip-up-shades-donning embodiment of Warholian, Downtown cool, Gordon was raised in California (where she smoked weed, hitchhiked to Big Sur, and saw the Dead in San Francisco). In a sense, Glitterbust is the sound of the most New York woman to ever live returning to her West Coast roots. The record's five compositions have the corrosive edge and arty temperament that distinguish all of Gordon’s projects, but this impressionistic noise is often mellower, more spacious and atmospheric. Glitterbust has nothing to do with classic surf music, but you could imagine its ritualistic drones and white-heat mantras soundtracking a séance on the beach.
Gordon and Knost have provided no context for Glitterbust. They quietly played a first show at a festival last fall, and they are ostensibly named after a blistering, alarming Royal Trux song (you could imagine "Glitterbust" alongside "Talk Normal" and "Secret Abuse" in Gordon's "Noise Paintings" series, in which she renders the names of noise bands in acrylic on canvas). Knost has played in more conventional rock groups, such as Tomorrows Tulips (also of Burger Records, perhaps explaining the curious label choice for Gordon), but his primary medium is not music. And maybe Gordon—who has often said she considers herself a visual artist first—found a kindred spirit in Knost for this reason. In limitations, they find a world.
Most of these pieces (not all quite songs) use just a few primitive chords; there is a recurring air of dread. Sounds pan dramatically, filling frames like full canvases. Bits of piercing noise drill into your skull and install hooks. The grating dream logic of the dense, windy 11-minute "Repetitive Differ" sounds like destruction and regeneration underwater, like notes swimming at the seafloor while Gordon treads above. Its heavy, enveloping drones are busy with overdriven details that shoot into the red.
The music unspools slowly. This is ambient abrasion, like no wave directed by the cycles of the Sun or Moon. The LP's nine-minute highlight is "The Highline," the most conventionally composed piece here, like a collage of song fragments. It's also the only track to foreground Gordon's painterly, almost-mystical singing voice. Underscoring the whole record's shadowy mood, at the "chorus" Gordon and Knost speak-sing in unison of a "shadow behind the buildings," their voices blending effortlessly. There are bits of spoken word on most of Glitterbust, but you can rarely make them out—"Sometimes I think words are not her primary language," Gordon’s astrologer, Peter Smith, once told The New Yorker, and that's not hard to believe here. "The Highline" shares a name with the touristy park in New York housed within a former above-ground subway platform, which now runs parallel to Manhattan's austere gallery district—the song likewise combines the industrial and the organic, with its blown-out guitar manipulations and wide-open vocal phrasings.
Glitterbust is not unlike Gordon's other recent duo, Body/Head, though less bold. Still, it feels like a gift to spend time in the oceanic space Gordon and Knost summon, letting its nuances wash over you. The experience, like all great noise music, is at once dissonant and, in a peculiar way, meditative and serene. In his epic 2015 surf-memoir, the journalist William Finnegan writes that, "Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls." On Glitterbust, you hear a sonic equivalent—two professional outsiders in total communion, knowing and understanding the crest of a wave, becoming inseparable in the process. | 2016-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Burger | March 9, 2016 | 7.8 | c2f3302d-a646-4861-b9e4-b44a4c4416e2 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The debut from the Chicago post-hardcore group revels in playing with teeth-gritting tension and dynamics, defining their sound by its restraint as much as its rage. | The debut from the Chicago post-hardcore group revels in playing with teeth-gritting tension and dynamics, defining their sound by its restraint as much as its rage. | Slow Mass: On Watch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slow-mass-on-watch/ | On Watch | There’s only a brief glimpse of true, ear-curdling ugliness on Slow Mass’ debut album On Watch. Picture someone rushing off to work after sleeping through their alarm, and five minutes into their drive, paralyzed with fear: “Did I forget my phone? Is the oven on? Am I wearing two different socks?” It’s like this as Dave Collis gets cut off between notes while retuning his guitar prior to “Suburban Yellow.” There’s a sense of resolution as Slow Mass pick things up, but there’s still the stress of feeling something similar the day before and the day after this. Its nagging, persistent chorus is as if Collis and singer Mercedes Webb are roleplaying Jack Torrance in a Slack chat: “There’s nothing like getting up before dawn to start wasting your life.” All work, no play—On Watch trades in that kind of misery, the kind where you gotta work to be this miserable.
The Chicago quartet proudly tout “no shortcuts” as the operating principle on their long-gestating debut—whatever came easiest was just as quickly dispatched until they were “ten moves away from [our] initial instinct.” This is an artistically admirable method that runs the risk of causing a post-hardcore band to go against their audience’s interests, and thus their own—too much AP Calc, not enough phys ed. Slow Mass know the value of fast-twitch violence and also the impact of frontloading it—“Gray Havens” and “Schemes” work in debilitating, disorienting dynamics, reeling from their introductory power drill riffs. And if the screamo-adjacent “E.D.” and “Like Dead Skin” are the result of persistent counterprogramming, Slow Mass’ initial instinct must’ve been something closer to Napalm Death’s “You Suffer.” Both function as necessary release valves—Slow Mass spend most of On Watch in teeth-gritting tension, defined by its restraint as much as its rage.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a post-hardcore album as quiet as On Watch. While Slow Mass occasionally honor the post-everything experimentations of their city (check the credits to see the flute flutters of “Tunnel Vision Quest” are sampled from Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois), the stereo-panned drummers on “The Author” crystallize the prevailing tone of On Watch: when Collis and Webb harmonize, it’s uncannily like hearing slow-core greats Low covering Fugazi’s The Argument in its entirety (or vice versa).
Nearly everything here can evoke similarly breathtaking comparisons from the past 25 years of aggressive indie rock, but part of that is due to Slow Mass not revealing much about themselves beyond their process. In the video for “Blocks,” producer Neil Strauch throws on the vinyl and sits motionless for four minutes, eventually throwing it into the trash—a “Portlandia” gag via Drag City. But there’s a kernel of truth in this video, as the lyrics of On Watch are just as austere and rarely leave a deep impression.
Slow Mass are a photo negative of the fourth-wave emo bands with whom they share stages and contributors—Strauch has engineered numerous projects from Tim Kinsella, while former drummer Josh Sparks lent On Watch the same nimble, stutter-stepping beats once provided to Into It. Over It. before taking a gig with Minus the Bear, whose looping harmonics serve as a comparative point for the “On Watch” interludes. The momentous, overwhelming choruses of “Suburban Yellow” and “Blocks” share that wave’s most potent communal and cathartic stylistic aspects, the accomplishment felt when a half-dozen people finally push a pickup out of a mudhole. If it isn’t joy, it’s at least the camaraderie when misery finds company. | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | LandLand | May 14, 2018 | 7.5 | c3032827-30b5-4838-8590-273b2420c4ac | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On her second album, the L.A. musician grapples with the death of her mother, placing her playfully experimental approach to sampling and sound design in the service of a more meaningful vision. | On her second album, the L.A. musician grapples with the death of her mother, placing her playfully experimental approach to sampling and sound design in the service of a more meaningful vision. | Katie Gately: Loom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-gately-loom/ | Loom | Katie Gately’s second album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. The Los Angeles artist had nearly finished an entirely different record, with a different working title, but after receiving the devastating news that her mother had been diagnosed with a rare form of terminal cancer, Gately left that album behind.
For a while, she left her life in L.A. behind too, moving back to her family home in Brooklyn to help care for her mother. Wracked with grief and suffering from insomnia as she watched her mom slowly slip away, Gately began work on a new album, one centered around “Bracer,” a song that her mother had identified as a favorite.
Gately’s mother passed away in 2018, and Loom was finished in the months that followed. It’s an album about death, loss, and saying goodbye; it’s also the finest thing that Gately has ever done. The new LP takes a dramatic turn away from Color, her impressive 2016 full-length debut for Tri Angle. That record was a ball of kinetic energy, a collection of brightly shaded, hyperactive pop flirtations that reflected her background as a sound designer. Rapidly cycling through various moods, samples, effects, and sound palettes, Color at times sounded like Gately doing her best to express 10 different ideas simultaneously, but there was something inviting about its mania.
Loom is noticeably more focused, although it’s not without its twists and turns. Sound design still plays a major role; the LP features samples—many of them heavily manipulated—of earthquakes, screaming peacocks, howling wolves, a car crash, shaking pill bottles, a coffin closing, a shovel digging, and more. There’s even audio from her parents’ wedding. Gately’s compositional approach is just as idiosyncratic. “Bracer,” the album’s centerpiece, clocks in at more than 10 minutes and is something of a rollercoaster, opening with little more than her solemn voice and ending with a towering, grief-stricken crescendo of soaring synths and hammering percussion. Along the way, it also winds through a passage of what sounds like haunted carnival music and another movement that evokes the brooding piano lounge of bands like Black Heart Procession.
This could make for a disjointed listen, but “Bracer” (like Loom in general) has the advantage of following a very specific vision. Where Color was fueled by a playfully experimental spirit—listening to the album, it’s easy to imagine her repeatedly asking, “What would happen if I tried this?"—Loom puts her personal narrative front and center. Her production chops and intense attention to detail are still there, but they’re no longer ends in themselves; instead, they act in service of both the music’s heavy emotional core and Gately’s vocals, which have become more prominent in the mix.
It’s easy to draw comparisons between Gately and contemporaries like Zola Jesus and Holly Herndon, but on Loom her voice sounds a lot more like Kate Bush or PJ Harvey. She’s not a trained singer, but there’s a dark, bedazzling quality to her vocals; during the closing passage of “Waltz,” Gately almost seems to be channeling the famous “Song of the Witches” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A similar sort of necromancer vibe emanates from the swirling chorus of “Tower,” a pomp-filled song written from the perspective of her mother’s cancer medicine. Elsewhere, Gately’s voice takes on a reverent, almost religious timbre, most prominently on “Allay” and “Flow,” both of which weave her vocals into rich, soaring choirs.
Sacred music was a familiar part of Gately’s upbringing. Her mother was a former nun, and though she’d left her calling (and religion in general) after meeting Gately’s father and growing disillusioned with the Catholic church, she nonetheless filled their household with Gregorian chants and other spiritual sounds. Some of that aesthetic has clearly seeped into Loom, which contains numerous nods to religion (and her mother’s former life). Interludes “Ritual,” “Rite,” and “Rest” form a sort of devotional triptych, while “Bracer” gets a bit more literal with refrains like, “Sin sin sin sin sin for the win” and “Take my sin and shove it into yours."
Gately has often commented on her struggles with depression and anxiety, but on Loom she sounds confident and self-assured. Her mother is all over the album, but Gately herself is the main character here, and the journey she takes is riveting. It’s her pain, her sorrow, and her memories—both good and bad—that fuel the record, and though the experience of her mother’s passing must have been harrowing, death does have a way of underlining what’s really important. Loom feels like the first time that Gateley’s technical prowess and songwriting are fully on the same page. The album may be rooted in loss, but Loom’s success lies in the clarity of vision that she has found.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | February 14, 2020 | 7.7 | c303be72-6603-4a41-9005-786eaad2c182 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
In just three years, Lamont “Bim” Thomas, who's played drums in V-3, Bassholes, This Moment in Black History, Puffy Aerolas, and others, has cranked out three albums plus EPs and singles as Obnox, pouring his energies into burning-red noise-punk blasts. His newest, the blazing Louder Space, is the first he recorded in a studio. | In just three years, Lamont “Bim” Thomas, who's played drums in V-3, Bassholes, This Moment in Black History, Puffy Aerolas, and others, has cranked out three albums plus EPs and singles as Obnox, pouring his energies into burning-red noise-punk blasts. His newest, the blazing Louder Space, is the first he recorded in a studio. | Obnox: Louder Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19104-obnox-louder-space/ | Louder Space | Ohio has produced so many good garage and post-punk bands in the past few decades, picking a list of the best would be close to impossible. But one thing’s certain: Lamont “Bim” Thomas would show up a lot. He’s played drums in V-3, Bassholes, the Unholy Two, This Moment in Black History, and Puffy Aerolas; the latter two still enlist his services regularly. But his most important project is turning out to be one he does on his own. In just three years he’s cranked out three albums and a bunch of EPs and singles as Obnox, pouring his experiences, influences, and considerable energies into burning-red noise-punk blasts.
Obnox has been prolific because Thomas works quickly. His 2011 debut I’m Bleeding Now was recorded on his own four-track in a week, and subsequent releasess have followed suit. ("I just bang it out fast, like the record business used to be,” he once said.) I’d bet it didn’t take him a ton of time to put together Louder Space either, but there was one significant difference in the way it was made: as the title implies, Thomas recorded for the first time in a studio, Columbus’ legendary Musicol.
The timing of this move was perfect, as Thomas’ songs have gotten wider and deeper, and thus ripe for being rendered in finer detail. In other words, he was ready for his close-up. But sharper clarity doesn’t lessen the abrasive thrust of Obnox’s attack. He’s still painting in, as he describes it, “sheets of rhythm,” and Louder Space is piled high with them. Those layers are even more powerful when you can sift through them carefully. Part of the fun of listening to Obnox in higher-res is how easy it is to focus on a blazing guitar line here or a detonating drum beat there, without losing sight of Thomas’ forest-sized din.
That din is more surprise-filled than before, due to Thomas exploring more of his musical obsessions. Louder Space is based in punk rock, but he continually leaps from that center toward less expected modes. So on “Red I”, soulful horns are buried under guitar fuzz; on “Molecule”, chopped-up metal chords buttress a chant; and on “Raindrops”, grunge riffs slide under sugared vocals. Most noticeably, Thomas’ love for hip-hop and R&B shines through all the buzzing churn. The wiry guitar loop of “How to Rob (The Punk Years)” could circle a Public Enemy tune, while “Bitch! Get Money!” hides a funk saunter inside its frantic amp-bleed. There’s even a gospel tint to the album’s only slow song, a near-ballad bluntly titled “Feeling Real Black Today.”
Thomas’ style-melding is so smooth, it gives Louder Space a sheen of confidence. His music has never exactly been shy, but here he sounds like he knows he’s reached a new plane and isn’t afraid to say so. “You never find a fuckin’ ounce of fat on me!” he insists at one point; later, he chants posi-mantras in “Mecca Son Shine”—“Gotta chase my own glory/ Gotta write my own story/ Gotta grind my own dollars/ Gotta solve my own problems”—as if his brain is pumping iron. His throat does calisthenics too: Thomas jumps his voice through hoops, crooning, rapping, and ranting in perpetual call-and-response with himself.
All of this may make Louder Space sound like brazen boasting, and at times it is. But Thomas’ boldness is more about assured self-confidence—more about belief in his own sonic mission—than vain puffing of feathers. And besides, he's earned the right to stick out his chest a bit. Louder Space transcends not only his previous work, but much of the scene that he’s ensconced in. That makes it something worth bragging about. | 2014-03-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-03-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | 12XU | March 24, 2014 | 8 | c31acb44-4a55-4092-93cf-0ce299bd807a | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Joined by his brother, father, and the Vietnamese musician Minh Nguyen, Ruban Nielson throws off his habitually weighty themes and digs into a refreshingly raw, heady session of psychedelic rock. | Joined by his brother, father, and the Vietnamese musician Minh Nguyen, Ruban Nielson throws off his habitually weighty themes and digs into a refreshingly raw, heady session of psychedelic rock. | Unknown Mortal Orchestra: IC-01 Hanoi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/unknown-mortal-orchestra-ic-01-hanoi/ | IC-01 Hanoi | Over the past two Unknown Mortal Orchestra albums, Ruban Nielson has tackled thorny topics that fall well outside the scope of most indie-rock outfits: primal urges, modern alienation, consumerism, and most notoriously, polyamory. At times, these investigations produced some of UMO’s most fetching music to date, though they also resulted in a discomfiting sense of nakedness. Nielson’s emphasis on these themes in his songwriting, along with forays into genres like soul and R&B, at times overshadowed his formidable talent for conjuring psychedelic realms with his six-string and an array of effects.
While recording Sex & Food in far-flung locales like Auckland, Reykjavik, Seoul, and Portland, Oregon, Nielson, brother Kody, and father Chris (as well as UMO member Jacob Portrait) also spent a period of time in Hanoi. Holed up in Phu Sa Studios, one July night they all jammed with local musician Minh Nguyen. IC-01 Hanoi presents a visceral, smoky, casual session that cooks together fairly tumultuous moods over the course of its concise runtime.
You can hear the steam being blown off in the roiling opener “Hanoi 1” as Nielson shreds with a newfound sense of freedom, no longer hemmed in by his own songs and arrangements. If only such rage lasted longer than 80 seconds. From there, UMO and Nguyen amble through many different moods. “Hanoi 2” moves like a post-meal stroll, giving plenty of space for Nielson’s wah-wah-heavy exploration. His playing here feels less like a solo and more like a soliloquy, toggling between earthy and spacy. On the disco strut of “Hanoi 4,” his string scrapes become another rhythmic and textural element.
That the press sheet cites electric-era Miles Davis is no surprise, as Nielson’s guitar throughout hews closest to the former’s muted trumpet tone: fuzzy, smeared, yet also oddly tactile. At certain points, his guitar tone lacerates like some lost session from A Tribute to Jack Johnson. And when it’s not Nielson’s guitar doing the heavy lifting, then it’s Chris Nielson who sends his saxophone and flugelhorn through a battery of effects (as on “Hanoi 5”), creating a swirling, disorienting soundworld. Beyond the horns and effects, the band also emulates Davis and his penchant for exploring brooding, fulminous moods. Nguyen’s eerie sáo trúc solo on “Hanoi 3” even brings to mind the flute-laced dark ambience of Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly.”
That brief entrance of sáo trúc also reveals that IC-01 Hanoi goes well beyond the basics of the pat East-meets-West cultural exchange (see any 1960s rock album with a sitar thrown on top). Even when Nguyen switches to the bullfrog twang of the đàn môi, it’s not to showcase another exotic sound against the UMO psych-rock backdrop, but to add a strange and swampy depth to the proceedings, pairing well with the shrieking saxophone and thrumming bass at the furious climax of the epic exploration “Hanoi 6.” While not necessarily essential to the UMO catalog, Hanoi finds the band reveling in its psychedelic roots and exploring a primeval darkness that their songs often only hint at. | 2018-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | October 29, 2018 | 6.5 | c31f3c56-1635-4867-9b6e-d52b692d1a45 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Following Music From Memory’s Outro Tempo, a collection of Brazilian obscurities, the label turns the spotlight on a forgotten composer who fused cello and guitar with the sounds of the rainforest. | Following Music From Memory’s Outro Tempo, a collection of Brazilian obscurities, the label turns the spotlight on a forgotten composer who fused cello and guitar with the sounds of the rainforest. | Priscilla Ermel: Origens Da Luz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/priscilla-ermel-origens-da-luz/ | Origens Da Luz | Even the most committed students of Brazilian music might not have been familiar with the work of composer Priscilla Ermel until 2017. That was when Music From Memory released Outro Tempo: Electronic and Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1978-1992, introducing a number of obscure Brazilian artists who were making music at the tail end of the country’s military regime. Ermel described that era as not just “another time” but “another tempo,” inspiring compiler John Gómez to title the anthology after her phrase.
Ermel has called recordings from that period “portals through which stories, people, and cultures can be revealed.” It’s an apt metaphor for the uncanny soundworlds glimpsed in Origens Da Luz, a crucial compendium of Ermel’s singular work, drawn from the four albums she released between 1986 and 1992. Born and raised in São Paulo, Ermel, who studied cello and guitar, was reared on Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and bossa-nova master Tom Jobim, and both sensibilities filter down to her own music. Just as crucially, while researching for her master’s thesis, Ermel traveled to the Amazon rainforest to study the songs of the indigenous Cinta-Larga and Ikolem Gavião people, for whom music is inextricable from storytelling.
A similar sensibility runs through Ermel’s astonishingly layered work, whose arrangements unfurl more like short stories than pop songs. “Luar,” which opens the compilation, begins with the sounds of birds and chirping insects, situating us in a twilit landscape. Ermel’s strong, clear voice crests at the midway point, and as she falls silent, her guitar and melodica are rejoined by the sounds of the rainforest. Those chirps and calls are present in many of the songs, turning any negative space in the music into an open window—as though to suggest that the natural world is ever-present, and one need only become silent to become aware of it. Even when she isn’t directly incorporating the ambient chatter of the wilderness, the rattles and bamboo flutes that Ermel deploys emulate natural sounds; on the title track, so does her own wordless voice, whose squawks, howls, and purrs sound almost primal.
It often seems as if Ermel is striving for an equilibrium between her own music and the beautiful, chaotic density of the rainforest. But even in the absence of field recordings, her songs are strongly evocative of a sense of place—even if no such land exists anywhere but in her own music. “Meditação,” featuring her gorgeous cello, piano, and acoustic guitar, starts off like an English folk ballad before wandering further afield, while “Campo De Sonhos” conjures two worlds at once: The synth line moves like Indonesian court music while the cello is worthy of a modern classical recital. An elegant braiding of piano and keyboards, “Cristal De Fogo” toggles between smooth new age and soap-opera soundtrack.
The gem of the original Outro Tempo, the masterwork “Corpo Do Vento” is also the highlight of Origens Da Luz. Translated as “Body of the Wind,” it remains the finest amalgam of Ermel’s classical upbringing and ethnographic studies. Atop bombo and cultrun drums, Ermel adds ocarina, Chilean chirimia, and Nepalese flute; after letting the piece build for five minutes, she introduces piano and viola caipira, a Brazilian 10-string guitar, playing themes redolent of modern classical composition. By the third act, the hand drums and woodwinds return, quickening to a ritualistic climax. It feels like a condensation of the Brazilian composer’s own story into 16 spell-binding minutes—and a portal to another world.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Music From Memory | March 18, 2020 | 7.7 | c325159c-6893-432b-8316-ceea7b16690a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On the final and best album from the acclaimed producer and overlooked singer/songwriter, a new intensity and urgency line even the most upbeat songs. | On the final and best album from the acclaimed producer and overlooked singer/songwriter, a new intensity and urgency line even the most upbeat songs. | Richard Swift: The Hex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-swift-the-hex/ | The Hex | Fearless exploration defined the work of Richard Swift as a producer and collaborator. Working mostly at his National Freedom studio in Cottage Grove, Oregon, he guided singer/songwriters toward their most otherworldly music (Damien Jurado, Kevin Morby) and helped more whimsical acts evolve into wilder forms (Foxygen, the Shins). The records he released under his own name, though, were more straightforward and solitary, if not necessarily somber. Playing nearly everything himself and singing through stoned, self-deprecating asides, Swift cracked jokes about his record collection, his frustrations with the industry, and how his Quaker upbringing might have doomed him from the start. Swift’s immersive and ornate indie pop suggested he saw himself as a tragic soldier facing a battle larger than himself. Since his death in July at the age of 41, the lyric that’s echoed in my head rings like an epitaph: “My name will go missing/But the songs will be here.”
The Hex, the final album Swift completed before he died from causes related to alcohol addiction, is no different in its grim scope: He’s said goodbye to us before, but it’s rarely felt so definitive. Swift’s signature sound often reminds me of a tie-dye swirl of black-and-white, or perhaps Super 8 footage of a tornado. There’s a feeling of a truncated transmission, like he can only offer us this darkened glimpse of the real colors in his head. His voice—which recalls Daniel Rossen’s mannered ghost-story howl in Grizzly Bear—comes layered in whispers and falsettos over clipped instrumentals and crisp drums. As he simultaneously shares his darkest thoughts and shades them with psychedelic soul, the music sounds like a coping mechanism.
What makes The Hex Richard Swift’s strangest—and, ultimately, strongest—record is its intensity. There’s a cumulative feeling as he collects his various modes, from warped girl-group nightmares (“Wendy”) to sprawling psych-pop (“Broken Finger Blues”) and pensive ballads (“Sept20”). Suddenly, everything is more urgent, less tentative. Take “Dirty Jim,” the most upbeat song here. Its arrangement shares a thread with the 2007 rallying cry “The Songs of National Freedom.” But where that song’s darkness was cut with messages of hope, “Dirty Jim” sees no way out. The bouncing ragtime melody conveys the weight of inevitability; life goes on, but our troubles don’t budge.
The Hex is often not an easy listen. The deaths of Swift’s sister and mother inform the closing suite, anchored by the emotional climax of “Nancy.” Swift sings over drums that crash like a thunderstorm with the power to shatter windows and keyboards that quiver like candlelight in that storm’s wind. In the chorus, Swift reminds himself over and over again, “She’s never coming back.” The two mostly instrumental tracks that follow suggest that the breakdown has left him speechless, somewhere far away. On an album predestined to be understood in the context of Swift’s death, it’s eerie to hear him working through his own grief, showing us how loss can sound inconsolable and ever-growing.
Swift announced The Hex in May through his final Instagram post, referring to it as “11 songs performed by me for family and friends.” It’s a classically Swift kind of joke, implying the music was a tribute to his community while also acknowledging the baggage of dedicating something so wounded to those who care for him. For those new to his work, The Hex serves as a fully realized glimpse of the universe he spent his career mapping. But there’s also a sense he’s speaking directly to a select few. The album ends with a sparse piano ballad, written to his wife on the occasion of their 21st anniversary this month. “Death do us part, sickness and health,” he sings sweetly, pledging to fix himself and his outlook. “All the angels sing/Que sera, sera,” he sighs at the end. His playing hushes, like he wants us to listen closely. Then, silence. | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | September 26, 2018 | 8 | c328ef5c-93f7-4604-9bac-49a02eb26080 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Holographic Violence is the third album in six years from Seattle’s Grave Babies, and it amounts to a costume change for their usual reverb-drenched, hollowed-out guitar noise: They've gone from garage to gothic. | Holographic Violence is the third album in six years from Seattle’s Grave Babies, and it amounts to a costume change for their usual reverb-drenched, hollowed-out guitar noise: They've gone from garage to gothic. | Grave Babies: Holographic Violence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20863-holographic-violence/ | Holographic Violence | Holographic Violence is the third album in six years from Seattle’s Grave Babies, and it amounts to a costume change for their usual reverb-drenched, hollowed-out guitar noise: They've gone from garage to gothic. And we’re not talking a subtle nod to the Sisters of Mercy or Killing Joke sprinkled here or there. No, this would be candle-lit-bat-cave, Peter-Murphy-drinking-merlot-out-of-a-human-skull levels of goth. Generally, this switch serves the album well, as Grave Babies' earlier work felt a bit lost in the shuffle of the Bay Area garage rock revival of the late '00s. However, with song titles like "Pain Iz Pleasure" and "Punishment (Only a Victim)", it's not so clear where appreciation ends and pastiche begins. That's not a dig, actually—few scenes are more susceptible to parody than goth music, and for good reason; it can always feel embarrassing to celebrate negative emotions, but that's also what makes it deliciously indulgent.
Grave Babies' music has always flirted with darkness, but the alienation and misanthropy of Violence feels new. Part of this shift may be attributed to personnel: Sometime between the releases of Crusher and Violence, frontman and songwriter Danny Wahlfeldt overhauled Grave Babies' permanent roster with Bryce Brown of Crypts on bass, Claire Haranda on synths, and the key addition of Mark Gajadhar from cult post-hardcore poster boys Blood Brothers on drums. Gajadhar duly takes his place as Violence's MVP, his precise, no-nonsense style (intertwined throughout the album with drum machines) propulsing everything forward, step by step, as Wahlfeldt's controlled chaos shudders and swirls around him.
Violence opens with the near-shoegaze distortion of "Eternal (On & On)", with layer upon layer of guitars and synthesizers washing over Wahfeldt's echoing, distorted baritone: "A life that leaves without a purpose/ And on and on and on it goes..." It would be easy to imagine it as the soundtrack to a sci-fi film where teenagers in bondage gear roam a dystopian wasteland. "Try 2 Try" brings the tone even lower with heavy, syncopated guitars swamping through the mix as Haranda's keyboard line struggles to pop through. It works, giving the music the needed edge to create density without slog. "Something Awful" owes a whole lot to Disintegration-era Cure, or even Peter Hook, as Brown's buoyant bass takes center stage, carrying the album into its middle stage, which, like with many goths themselves, can get awkward. It's not a lack of direction, or even musicianship, that causes Violence to ultimately lag. It's perhaps not even a lack of tunes, as "N2 Ether" and its warbly vocal hook make for a welcome pick-me-up further down the tracklisting.
It's just at some point, the album loses its flavor, and songs begin to mash and bleed into each other in a not-exactly-purposeful or interesting way. It's not unlistenable, far from it, it just gets slowly (very, very slowly) bogged and drowned under its own ideas. In a landscape where bands are encouraged more and more to play it safe and appeal to their same couple thousand Twitter followers over and over again, it's commendable that Grave Babies took this leap of faith and changed their direction so drastically. In the end, though, Violence comes off as transitional, a building block for a bigger, darker, blacker record that may be in Grave Babies' future. | 2015-08-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | August 4, 2015 | 6.4 | c32c0146-26f1-4f6e-a88a-78133596f9b0 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The eternally youthful McDonald brothers celebrate their band’s 45th anniversary with a signature blend of pristine melodic craft and garage-band insolence. | The eternally youthful McDonald brothers celebrate their band’s 45th anniversary with a signature blend of pristine melodic craft and garage-band insolence. | Redd Kross: Redd Kross | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/redd-kross-redd-kross/ | Redd Kross | If there’s one thing Redd Kross are famous for, it’s having famous fans. Years before Sonic Youth made Madonna their own, brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald were showing Kim and Thurston how pop culture pin-ups could be reframed as punk iconography. They got Sofia Coppola to pose nude on an album cover and inspired her brother Roman to essentially build a feature film around their kitschy ’70s style. They illuminated the path for Stone Temple Pilots to move beyond mosh-pit machismo toward glammy swagger. They reissued their ’90s catalog through Jack White’s Third Man imprint. And Jeff married a Go-Go. There is, however, one notable alt-rock star who resisted Redd Kross’ charm offensive.
You’d think Redd Kross would’ve been right up Kurt Cobain’s alley: Both he and the McDonalds came of age with record collections where the Beatles were filed next to Black Flag, and both were charter members of the American Shonen Knife fan club. But according to mutual friend Dale Crover (the one guy who’s drummed for both Nirvana and Redd Kross), an unimpressed Cobain walked away from a 1987 Redd Kross gig in Tacoma complaining that the McDonalds seemed “too happy.” After seeing Crover tell that story in an early cut of director Andrew Reich’s new Redd Kross documentary, Born Innocent, Steve McDonald wrote “Way Too Happy,” a bittersweet power-pop number that appears deep into Redd Kross’ new self-titled double album. “What did he mean?” Steve asks with audibly wounded pride, before responding with an uncannily Cobain-esque sneer, as if he were still being taunted from beyond the grave. But the McDonalds aren’t looking to reheat old beef—rather, “Way Too Happy” serves as a renewed mission statement for a band that has always embraced joy as its superpower.
As indie rock’s original poptimists, Redd Kross elevated fandom to an artform, imagining a world where ABBA and the Partridge Family could be placed on equal footing with Germs and the Stooges. But after decades of plundering rock’n’roll’s past like a thrift-store discount rack, Redd Kross are now fixing their retro-gazing lens on themselves. Redd Kross is part of a 45th-anniversary celebration campaign that includes Reich’s documentary and an upcoming memoir (Now You’re One of Us), and it’s a self-reflexive exercise in every way, from the cover art (a ruby-tinged makeover of the Beatles’ White Album, the first record Jeff bought as a kid) to the uncharacteristically wistful, introspective songwriting. But seeing as Redd Kross are the rare band who can celebrate 45 years in showbiz while one founding member is still in their 50s, the eternally youthful McDonalds are still committed to chasing new glories. They may no longer resemble the androgynous provocateurs of old, but their pop savvy remains.
Redd Kross provides a thorough immersion in the McDonalds’ multi-dimensional sound world, giving equal airtime to sleazy rockers (“Stunt Queen”), glamtastic power ballads (“The Witches Stand”), and jaunty pop numbers that sound like the theme song to some saucy late-’60s British sex farce (“The Shaman’s Disappearing Robe”). While the White Album framework may suggest an anarchic, free-ranging pastiche, Redd Kross aren’t radically reinventing themselves here: Listening to the record feels more like rifling through a cherished collection of classic 45s. Recorded in collaboration with ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer (who produces and plays drums for a recuperating Crover here), Redd Kross is a hit parade that perpetually walks the tightrope between the McDonalds’ pristine melodic craft and their innate garage-band insolence.
Even when limiting themselves to pop-single proportions, Redd Kross can traverse entire universes. A rare duet between the brothers, “The Main Attraction,” begins as an existential acoustic lament before hotwiring their voices together and using their natural harmonic power to launch the song into space. If Redd Kross are the definition of a cult act, then “Good Times Propaganda Band” is their indoctrination theme, a tiki-lounge psych-pop excursion that suddenly drifts into KISS pyrotechnics. And in just over two minutes, the softcore porn-inspired “Emanuelle Insane” uses a backward loop of Redd Kross’ 1981 circle-pit standard “Annette’s Got the Hits” to forge an unholy alliance between groovy ’60s sitar-psych and brooding ’80s post-punk.
But Redd Kross is ultimately a testament to what one song refers to as the “Simple Magic”: “Three sacred chords,” Jeff sings, “Their power shouldn’t be ignored!” And so the McDonalds spend the bulk of Redd Kross kicking out the jangly jams with the effortless expediency of the Beatles if they cut their teeth in the late-’70s L.A. hardcore scene. (AI technology will do no better job of recreating the voice of John Lennon than Jeff McDonald does on the rousing “What’s In It for You?”) But Redd Kross spikes the McDonalds’ well-worn cheeky attitude with a healthy dose of sincere gratitude, particularly on the album’s closing autobiographical anthem “Born Innocent.” An origin-story myth set to windmilling Pete Townshend riffs, the song suggests that if the brothers aren’t satisfied with the documentary and memoir, they already have the anchor track for a Redd Kross jukebox musical.
“Born Innocent” is, of course, named after Redd Kross’ 1982 debut, an ironically titled document of corrupted youth that opened with a song about a former child star busted for cocaine possession. As the Born Innocent documentary illustrates, the McDonalds have endured a lot of crazy shit that could irreparably break less sanguine spirits, from a 13-year-old Steve being abducted by a woman nearly twice his age, to Jeff’s substance abuse in the ’80s, to their band’s chronic commercial misfortune. But on Redd Kross, the McDonalds are still very much those Hawthorne kids getting their minds blown with each flip on the turntable, forever gazing at the Paul McCartney and Paul Stanley posters in their bedrooms and dreaming of one day hanging alongside them. “We are all born innocent,” the McDonalds declare in unison, and after nearly a half-century of making music together, they’ve magically managed to stay that way. | 2024-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | July 6, 2024 | 7.8 | c32f31ba-029f-4e8f-aeff-16b124f4519e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Dan Snaith’s joyous new album as Daphni lets its first-thought-best-thought spirit shine. Bar for bar, this might be the most fun there is to be had on a dance record this year. | Dan Snaith’s joyous new album as Daphni lets its first-thought-best-thought spirit shine. Bar for bar, this might be the most fun there is to be had on a dance record this year. | Daphni: Cherry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daphni-cherry/ | Cherry | Daphni was born out of necessity. Back in the late 2000s, when he wasn’t out on the road as Caribou, Dan Snaith was spinning marathon DJ sessions, and he needed tracks to flesh out his setlists. Taking a page from artists like Theo Parrish, he’d chop up bits of funk or Afrobeat into breezy floor-fillers. But unlike a lot of the material produced during the edits craze of the 2000s and 2010s, Daphni tracks never felt overly derivative of their source material. Even when the sample was obvious—as in his mix of the 1973 single “Ne Noya,” by the obscure Togolese group Cos-Ber-Zam—his edits were more like epiphytes than parasites, blossoming into colorful and extravagant forms that rested elegantly on the branches of the originals.
Cherry is Snaith’s third full-length under the alias, not counting a 2017 Fabriclive mix built largely out of tracks that followed a few months later on Joli Mai, the most recent Daphni album until now. He’s moved on from the edits of the early years, but Daphni tracks remain sketch-like in form. The Canadian-born, London-based producer makes a habit of whipping up one or two rudimentary loops every day: He estimates that he worked from a folder of some 900 snippets to create 2020’s Suddenly, the latest Caribou album. In Caribou productions, the initial loop may be little more than scaffolding that’s eventually stripped away to reveal a fully composed piece of music, but Cherry’s songs let their first-thought-best-thought spirit shine. Many of the most thrilling tracks are cobbled together out of the merest handful of ideas—but what fascinating ideas they are.
Take the album’s eponymous lead single, which arrays rickety FM synths over a bare-bones house shuffle. The drums are a model of efficiency, yet the arpeggio teeters around the beat as though it could go off the rails at any moment, imperiling the smooth-sailing groove with every stumble and lurch. From the haphazard timing, it sounds like Snaith might have banged out the off-kilter pattern in a matter of seconds and then, instead of fixing what another producer might consider a fuckup, just left it alone. Yet the irregularity and the spontaneity are precisely what make it so gripping. “Always There” is even simpler—just a sampled loop of Latin jazz, sped up so fast that it makes Alvin and the Chipmunks sound like trip-hop. The effect is part diggers’ epiphany, part gonzo flourish: The pumping chords carry a hint of Underground Resistance’s silvery menace, yet an extended horn solo sounds almost cartoonish, like a musical mosquito. It’s audacious, yet the ferocity of the groove that Snaith layers underneath makes it clear that he’s not fooling around.
Most tracks barely make it past the three-minute mark, and some are positively skeletal: “Crimson,” a pinging arpeggio stretched across a wispy suggestion of white-noise hi-hats, sounds like a club anthem that’s been sun-bleached until only the faintest streaks of color are left. “Falling” loops a four-bar snatch of what might be ’80s soul, a little bit like one of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Chuck Person jams, but a rolling filter sweep wrings hidden harmonics from the sample; starting out high and hissy, it plunges to deep, chest-massaging sub-bass. Every time the sample loops, the kick drum makes itself felt exactly once, and it’s hard to overstate how satisfying it is when it hits home. Even on the simplest songs, Cherry’s sound design is uniformly stunning, with worlds of detail lurking in the shadow of every hand-carved break and modular gurgle.
The mood is overwhelmingly upbeat; bar for bar, this might be the most fun there is to be had on a dance record this year. “Mania” flips Todd Edwards-style vocal chops and a fidget-house beat, of all things, into beatific dub techno. “Cloudy” drizzles on jazz piano runs like maple syrup, recalling the quicksilver Rhodes soloing of Daft Punk’s “Disco Cubizm” remix. “Take Two,” a highlight, is a thundering filter-disco anthem greased by bent notes and propelled by hip-hop crowd chants of “Go! Go! Go!”—an unexpected grace note that tips the mood from euphoric to outright giddy. The lush keys and dandelion-tuft vocal loops of opener “Arrow” would have made a lovely, if unsurprising, downtempo ballad. Instead, Snaith opts to push the BPMs and lace the rhythm with lacerating hi-hats. Cherry is often as sweet as anything Snaith has recorded under either alias, but it’s clear that for now, energy is front of mind. Unlike club music meant for DJ mixing, whose patient intros and outros are wont to prod home listeners to reach for the skip button, these bite-sized pieces invariably leave you wanting more.
A lot of electronic music, even when it’s made for dancing, is complex, byzantine, knotted up in heady concepts. Cherry is none of these things. A tour de force of dancefloor intuition and emotional release, it has no point to prove; pleasure is the chief, perhaps the only, concern. The music is breathtakingly simple but also sneakily and refreshingly adventurous. Listening to the carefully wrought songs on Suddenly, I wished that Snaith had given freer rein to his experimental instincts. On Cherry, he cuts loose. | 2022-10-10T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-10T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Jiaolong | October 10, 2022 | 8.2 | c3382bfb-ec94-47a8-b982-a31b110d48b3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Beth Jeans Houghton’s second album as Du Blonde sorts through the messiest aspects of desire and revulsion with cathartic finesse, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact. | Beth Jeans Houghton’s second album as Du Blonde sorts through the messiest aspects of desire and revulsion with cathartic finesse, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact. | Du Blonde: Lung Bread for Daddy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/du-blonde-lung-bread-for-daddy/ | Lung Bread for Daddy | “There’s a sick pleasure to be found in writing honestly and grotesquely,” Beth Jeans Houghton has said, and it rings true: On the unflinching and uneasy Lung Bread for Daddy, the truth will set you free and make you queasy. More than ever before, the Newcastle singer-songwriter grubs around in the messiest, muckiest moments of her own past and digs up the kind of ugly memories most people would rather leave buried underground forever: the doomed relationships, the grisly fights, the moments of weakness when you should know better. On the cover of her last album she wore nothing but a fur coat and merkin, but it’s on these songs that she feels truly exposed.
Houghton suffered a nervous breakdown in 2012 after releasing her otherworldly psych-folk debut, Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. She scrapped an album, ditched her band, and was eventually reborn as the punky, puckish Du Blonde on 2015’s Welcome Back to Milk. Its songs were often sleazy and messy, and she sang them with a hell-raising gusto, like she was telling juicy war stories at a dive bar. The self-produced Lung Bread for Daddy is grubby but less gleefully lurid, that fuck-you fury now curdled into something sourer. “Pull over babe, I want out,” she sings on the dingy opener, “Coffee Machine,” yet her zombie-ish drawl betrays how little stomach she has for the fight. She howls with frustration, only for the noise to stick in her throat; her guitar explodes into a ratty solo that tramples over everything in its path for 90-odd seconds, until it sputters to a stop. Even when you want out, it doesn’t mean you’ll actually make it.
The first few songs on Lung Bread feel slightly rough and squalid, the sonic equivalent of battling through the fug of a hangover. The hilarious and horrifying “Holiday Resort” dumps Houghton in a late-twenties crisis: Romance is a crock, her doctor says her eggs are dying, she can’t even drive. “I spend my days in the solace of my room,” she sings over a gnarled, fuzzy riff, “pulling pubic hairs from the crotch of my swimming costume.” Not for the last time, she’s lonely and longing for a deadbeat old boyfriend—the men here are as wretched as Milk’s rogue’s gallery of exes but harder to leave in the past, even though she knows the pitfalls of going back for more. When she lusts after a former lover on “Peach Meat,” there’s little comfort, just seedy memories and throbbing synths so filthy you’ll want to bathe in bleach.
A clumsier artist might turn this self-excoriating streak into something brutally caustic, stripping back the layers until only rawness remains. Houghton resists that impulse on Lung Bread’s later songs, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact. “Baby Talk” is filled with the spooky wail of a haunted-house organ, as if she’s being chased by an old flame’s malevolent spirit, while “Heaven Knows” mixes her smoky vocal with lavishly doomy strings, like 1960s bloody-chamber pop. On the poisonously pretty “Acetone” she reveals the misery behind a Stepford Wife smile, the sugared melodies jarring against the image of her scrubbing at her wounds in a tub of blood and chemicals.
Thankfully, though, Lung Bread is not without epiphanies. Roughly halfway through, there’s a quick one-two punch that leaves Houghton reeling but clear-headed. First is “Angel,” a petulant and grungy blast of noise that shocks her into realizing her sweet-talking boyfriend’s big promises were bullshit and blarney; it’s followed by the dirty chug of “Buddy,” which finds her trying to save a dying relationship but ultimately scornful of his suggestion that they remain friends. They might sound like small victories, or pyrrhic victories, or barely even register as victories at all, yet they’re grasped like hard-won prizes, a reward for wading through the mire. When you’re struggling to see past bad mistakes and worse memories, those moments when the scales fall from you eyes are to be savored. | 2019-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | February 25, 2019 | 7.6 | c3383e2c-544b-490a-aae9-0258fe88ec45 | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
Since the White Stripes split, Jack White's work has become fuller, but his idiosyncrasies have dimmed a bit, too. Lazaretto, then, makes all of his other projects sound a bit scrawny by comparison. It’s the densest, fullest, craziest, and most indulgent that White has sounded with or without Meg. | Since the White Stripes split, Jack White's work has become fuller, but his idiosyncrasies have dimmed a bit, too. Lazaretto, then, makes all of his other projects sound a bit scrawny by comparison. It’s the densest, fullest, craziest, and most indulgent that White has sounded with or without Meg. | Jack White: Lazaretto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19420-jack-white-lazaretto/ | Lazaretto | Whenever he talks about the White Stripes, Jack White always stresses Meg White’s importance to the band—and how could he not? She was the only other person up on stage. In the current issue of Rolling Stone, he says, “I would often look at her onstage and say, ‘I can’t believe she’s up here.’ I don’t think she understood how important she was to the band, and to me and to music. She was the antithesis of a modern drummer. So childlike and incredible and inspiring.” That quote is a bit uncomfortable in its patronizing and primitivizing attitude toward Meg, but the White Stripes emphasized the “childlike” in nearly every aspect of the band, from their red-and-white wardrobe to their imaginative videos, to songs like “We’re Going to be Friends”.
Her chops might have been rudimentary, but Meg kept Jack’s guitar virtuosity in check and kept their music from being merely a display of technique. He soloed frequently but never pointlessly, and indulged none of the ostentatious jamming that defines blues rock: no white-boy blues face, no standing at the lip of the stage, no look-how-deeply-I-am-feeling-these-notes bullshit. That playful sound is what made the White Stripes so revolutionary in the 2000s. The blues has always prized instrumental prowess, but blues rock typically equates that trait with authenticity of emotion. After so many generations of Eric Claptons and Jonny Langs, it was refreshing at the turn of the century to hear someone have fun with the form again. Like first-gen punks, the White Stripes proved you didn’t have to be good to be great, that your limitations could enable rather than hinder expression. Theirs was a little room, as Jack sang on White Blood Cells, but they still found many corners.
Since the White Stripes split, however, Jack moved into a bigger room, surrounded by musicians who are capable in the traditional sense of the word. His work has become fuller, of course, more elaborate and more conventionally ambitious; his idiosyncrasies have dimmed a bit, too, so his music is less subversive, less culture-shaking, less special. Despite their pedigree, the Raconteurs never really figured out their mission (although hiring country singer Ashley Monroe might be mission enough). The Dead Weather can be admirably heavy and darkly savage, but also dour and claustrophobic, as though the riffs are closing in on you. White’s debut album, 2012’s Blunderbuss, reportedly inspired by his divorce from Karen Elson, sounded uncharacteristically bilious, especially from the man who wrote “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”. In fact, nowadays White might be most compelling as a label impresario who releases new singles via balloons and coaxes Neil Young to record a covers album in a modified phone booth. It’s the one role where he displays the same sense of childlike whimsy that motivated the White Stripes.
Lazaretto makes all of his other projects sound a bit scrawny by comparison. It’s the densest, fullest, craziest, and most indulgent that White has sounded with or without Meg—almost pointedly so, as though he’s trying to shake the minimalism that defined the White Stripes. It’s an almost self-consciously busy-minded album, chockablock with ideas and sounds, all colliding violently and sometimes brutally. There’s a lot of pedal steel, a lot more barrelhouse piano, some folksy strumming, some rock-rapping, and the persistent buzz of White’s guitar. The most decorous and over-the-top song on Lazaretto (and arguably the standout) “Would You Fight for My Love?” plays like an exquisite corpse: It opens with a low, Lynchian hum, the kind you hear in your bowels, then morphs into something like a rock ballad, with Ikey Owens pounding out power chords on the piano. With its flatulent bass, the bridge sounds like Goblin scoring a murder scene, complete with spooky disembodied vocals. The song ends up in a Celtic honkytonk, somehow.
The instrumental “High Ball Stepper” is loaded with Bernard Hermann anxieties, while “Temporary Ground” elaborates gently on rural folk music, opening with a violin dancing gingerly around Maggie Björklund’s pedal steel (the song was reportedly inspired by gigantic lily pads that can support a man’s weight). “Just One Drink” plays like a Coca-Cola jingle; “Entitlement” is stately C&W. Not everything fits together fluidly, but that might just be the point: These disparate sounds are not just accessories to be applied to blues rock, but rich veins of tradition that compete for primacy on Lazaretto. White invites us to see the craft here, to notice the seams, to consider the contrasts—not necessarily out of any self-congratulatory impulse, but out of awe for the endless permutations of American popular music.
White comes across like a man out of time on Lazaretto, a role that proves more sympathetic and relatable than the embittered lover he played on Blunderbuss; he seems to be having a lot more fun yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. “There are children today who were lied to, told the world is rightfully theirs,” he sings on “Entitlement”, a countercultural anthem that political midpoint between “Signs” and “Okie from Muskogee”. “Don’t they feel like they're cheated somehow? I feel like I've been cheated somehow.” His is not necessarily a generational complaint, though; instead, he just can’t understand why something given could ever be as precious as something earned.
In its volleys of nimble-fingered riffs and its willy-nilly combination of styles, Lazaretto is all about virtuosity, with White reverting back to the idea of blues rock as a form of emotional confession: a space where you can project feelings and re-enact age-old dramas. Yet, White sneaks in a few jokes at the idea. Witness this scene from “The Black Bat Licorice”: “She writes letters like a Jack Chick comic, just a bunch of propaganda/ She makes my fingers histrionic, like this [paint-peeling guitar riff] and this [paint-peeling guitar riff]!” It’s a funny little moment in a song that otherwise sounds leery of desire, wary of love, simultaneously burdened and freed by sex. Somehow, even with White rapping his lyrics like leprous carnival barker, it’s a great, nervy track, both sugary and sour. Still, the song provides another reminder of White's past glory days, as it might sound better stripped down to guitar and drums. | 2014-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | June 9, 2014 | 7.1 | c33c80a7-37ef-4019-96b6-d7d74975744a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
A speculative-fiction multimedia project imagines the future sounds of South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, using an apocalyptic future to pay tribute to the border region’s resilience. | A speculative-fiction multimedia project imagines the future sounds of South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, using an apocalyptic future to pay tribute to the border region’s resilience. | Futuro Conjunto: Futuro Conjunto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/futuro-conjunto-futuro-conjunto/ | Futuro Conjunto | What might our future look like viewed through the lens of the past? For scholar Jonathan Leal and producer/filmmaker Charlie Vela, both musicians and natives of the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, it looks like Futuro Conjunto. A sci-fi narrative “transmedia” project set 250 years hence that features audio, video, animation, and fictive found objects, Futuro Conjunto focuses its gaze on the RGV, a 100-mile floodplain along the Texas-Mexico border that follows the Rio Grande to its terminus at the Gulf of Mexico.
Packaged in a multimedia website and accompanied by a digital album available on Bandcamp, Futuro Conjunto tells the story of a young man seeking, finding, and listening to a damaged bootleg recording of a concert that took place in 2120 in an abandoned rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The concert was produced by a mutual-aid network formed during the Second Mexican-American War, which began in the wake of a massive hurricane that reshaped the Rio Grande, and in turn, the U.S.-Mexico border. In the year 2200, a young man visits a repository of knowledge called El Centro Conmatizque looking for information about a concert that, according to family lore, his great-great-great-great-grandmother once played. It’s there, at the ECC, that the narrative begins.
Futuro Conjunto’s speculative sci-fi is rooted in plausibility, its story driven by events that feel like fiction only because they haven’t happened yet. The website offers an expository timeline that places the record within its context; the fictional group MUNDO’s song title “Futurasquache” is explained as the philosophy of the Colonia Cosmica, a sustainable self-governing settlement that recycles technology; breakthroughs in “tachyon modeling and quantum computing” lead to an AI revolution that includes AI musicians, one of whom, JUL/3Z, performs on “The Run Pt. II.”
It’s all incredibly nerdy, with the kind of attention to detail and historical nuance expected of a postdoctoral fellow studying “race and ethnicity through intersections of literary criticism, ethnomusicology, and performance studies.” At Stanford for his Ph.D, Leal first reached out to Vela after seeing As I Walk Through The Valley, the documentary Vela made with Ronnie Garza on the RGV’s musical history. Skeptical at first—having fielded plenty of suspect requests for access to Valley musicians after the release of his film—Vela eventually opened up once he realized that they could use academic grants to support his local scene. Their first project together, Wild Tongue, was a compilation of local acts that served as a snapshot of the area’s music scene—hip-hop, electro pop, country, indie rock, tejano, and rancheras—rooted in the artists’ experiences in the Valley.
Futuro Conjunto’s music was largely written and performed by Leal and Vela themselves, who then brought in many of those same musicians to perform as members of the fictional bands they created. Their influence on Vela and Leal is undeniable; you can hear echoes of Wild Tongue in Futuro Conjunto, projecting the POV of the Valley’s artists, scholars, and activists onto an imagined pseudo-apocalyptic future.
Though marked by tragedy, that future is far from dystopian; it’s marked by an underlying current of resilience, an enduring hope that there will always be a resistance. “Futurasquache” champions the Colonia Cosmica’s “Basura Bandits,” who hijack garbage trucks and dump their toxic contents on the doorstep of the elite gated community whence it came. Amid squealing guitars and electronic feedback, they find truth in the trash, building an entire worldview from recycling refuse. “When they tried to bury us/They didn’t know what we’d dig up/We know the truth because we’ve seen the past/It’s out there, buried underneath a hundred thousand plastic commemorative Selena cups!” Considering the Valley’s long-running intersection between activism and music, it’s fitting that the first song we hear would be a fiery missive from eco-bandits that battle the rich and powerful.
Despite the tone of that opening track, there’s a cheekiness throughout Futuro Conjunto that hints that its creators don’t take themselves too seriously. And it’s not immune to some mild cheese, either: CODEX’s “The Run Pt. II (ft. JUL/3Z)” is an overt nod to El-P and Killer Mike’s hip-hop buddy comedy, doing their best to ape El Producto’s SkyNet battle hymns, an admittedly impossible task. And the hurricane that decimates the Valley, re-shaping the landscape and setting the stage for a second Mexican-American war? Hurricane Narciso, as in Martinez, the father of conjunto music; La Mosca No Muere pay tribute to him with a song titled after his affectionate nickname, “El Huracán del Valle.”
The album’s strongest tracks are less overtly tied to the fictional universe, yet still speak to the Valley’s past and present. Simonada’s “Heatdeath” uses gorgeous multi-part harmonies and a chirping horn to channel Beach House’s melancholic malaise. And XXochitl’s ”La Madre de las Estrellas” features a prominent accordion melody from the son of Valley legend Esteban Jordan. The only song not written by Leal and Vela is a choral rendition of Fernando Z. Maldonado’s classic “Volver, Volver,” which serves as a coda to the fragmented livestream bootleg, arriving just before the police break up the concert.
Even removed from its narrative context, Futuro Conjunto still serves as a time capsule for the thriving independent arts and music scene in the Rio Grande Valley. The perspective is Leal and Vela’s, but few others are as well positioned to document this particular moment in time, and Vela’s studio has served as a creative hub for many of the Valley’s musicians. More importantly, each of the fictional events that make up “The Flickering Century”—the 100-year period from 2020-2120 that the project covers—is rooted in a fundamental understanding of history, the Valley, the U.S., and humanity at large.
The timeline ends with measured hope: While the war ended with a cynically named “Treaty of Unbinding Illusion,” the citizens on each side of the re-shaped river form a new cross-border community called Rio Cristal, and a communal decree establishes El Centro Conmatizque, founded with the intention of retaining every piece of submitted data in perpetuity. It’s what allows the seeker to find the recording of the concert, spurred by a memory passed down to him through generation after generation. In the indigenous Nahuatl language, Conmatizque means “They will remember.” Futuro Conjunto represents the hope that our future salvation might be found in the remnants of our own history.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Folk/Country / Pop/R&B / Rock | Conmatizque | July 7, 2020 | 7.2 | c33cbd90-8d17-4d8c-805e-22101ba9ee9f | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Featuring the groundbreaking pop hits ”Smalltown Boy” and “Why,” the 1984 debut album from the British synth-pop group was a transgressive moment—defiant, queer, and full of hooks. | Featuring the groundbreaking pop hits ”Smalltown Boy” and “Why,” the 1984 debut album from the British synth-pop group was a transgressive moment—defiant, queer, and full of hooks. | Bronski Beat: The Age of Consent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bronski-beat-the-age-of-consent/ | The Age of Consent | To watch Britain’s music program “Top of the Pops” in 1984 was to witness masculinity wipe off the last of the spit and sawdust. You had blond, black-gloved geeks like Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones, bouffy matriarchs Queen and Ozzy Osbourne, white-teethed go-go boys Wham!, leathered-up imps Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and slinky queen Boy George—not a donkey jacket between them. When Bronski Beat made their “TOTP” debut on June 7, 1984, they were radical because they looked so normal—behold 22-year-old singer Jimmy Somerville’s green polo shirt and severe army-issue haircut. The last thing anyone would have expected from Somerville’s cartoon good-boy face was a diva-strength lament for runaway gay youth. Add in Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek’s HI-NRG rhythms and desperately forlorn keyboard motif, and their debut single “Smalltown Boy” was kissed with the melancholy transcendence of its disco forebears: Sylvester in suburbia. It was perfect.
Somerville looked awkward on that “TOTP” appearance, singing live and holding his arms stiff until a tentative boogie during the reprise. But when Bronski returned to perform their second single “Why?” that September, they knew what to do. Most acts still lip-synched on “TOTP,” so this time Somerville focused on performing, rather than sustaining his fierce cri de coeur about pride in the face of a hate crime. With the camera at crotch height, he seduced viewers at home and pointed saucily down the lens, perhaps emboldened by the band’s discovery of the BBC’s alleged basement glory hole toilets, which Bronski claimed to have visited whenever they played “TOTP.” The moment hasn’t been memorialized the same way as Bowie’s iconic visit on the show 12 years earlier, but it had to be a “Starman” revelation for at least a few hundred closeted British kids who couldn’t relate to the more outlandish subversions of masculinity rampaging elsewhere on the show.
British pop had never been queerer. In January 1984, Frankie’s “Relax” had been yanked off air by a BBC Radio 1 DJ who suddenly realized what it was about. Receptive fans yearning for signals in the dark were wise to the implications of the Smiths’ “Hand in Glove,” released a year earlier. But there had never been a band as plainspoken about their sexuality and its political ramifications as Bronski Beat, which SPIN deemed “perhaps the first real gay group in the history of pop.”
By age 23, Jimmy Somerville had been born three times: In Ruchill, Glasgow, to parents who were actually quite understanding about their son’s sexuality, given the era; in a local club called Shuffles, dancing alone to Donna Summer’s A Love Trilogy as a 15-year-old, a pilgrimage that made him so nervous he vomited on the bus there, and in 1979, when, fed up of Scotland’s limited gay scene, he bought a one-way ticket to London. He sold sex around Piccadilly Station and joined LGBTQ advocacy groups where he met fellow Glaswegian Steve Bronski and Hackney’s Larry Steinbachek, all working-class gay men. In 1982, they participated in the London Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project’s documentary about Londoners’ perceptions of homosexuality. Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts needed a soundtrack, but as the group couldn’t afford licensing fees, Somerville recorded a short piece about how society’s judgement, his desire, and confusion made him want to scream. He never actually screams on the raw, mumbled track—which sounds almost like a Gavin Bryars piece—but it unlocked something inside him, and his new friends suggested that they should give this music thing a go.
Named as a riff on Roxy Music, Bronski Beat played their first gig at the gay benefit September in the Pink in fall 1983, and performed just eight more times before being signed by London Records in 1984. Producer Trevor Horn and journalist Paul Morley’s Zang Tuum Tumb had also offered them the treatment that Frankie Goes to Hollywood got when Bronski said no. “Morley’s idea was to have us wear and market t-shirts that basically said that we were gay, because they’d have words like ‘QUEER’ or ‘POOF’ printed on them,” said Somerville, who was uninterested in controversy or reductiveness. For Bronski Beat, singing candidly about their sexuality wasn’t a means of provocation, but drawing attention to the still-very-real oppression that pervaded public life under Margaret Thatcher’s government. They valued activism over agitprop, and knew that the personal was political, qualities that made their first two singles their most urgent and enduring.
”Smalltown Boy” remains a perfect song. It is nimble and crushing, forlorn and relieved, frail yet determined. In just a few lines, Somerville sketches the plight of the young queer kid in suburbia, beaten up by bullies but refusing to cry in front of them; concerned about how his mother will respond to his disappearance, but certain that he has to save himself first. Steinbachek and Bronski briefly slow the tempo, trapping the listener in the sense of purgatory that Somerville distills, but then add a hand-slapped congo that hits like a rush of adrenaline as a new life comes into view. Although Somerville’s liberation is palpable, he’s not interested in happy endings: The song ends with him repeating the line about leaving in the morning “with everything you own in a little black case,” acknowledging the thousands of young people who would make the very same journey. The inner groove of the 12-inch was etched with the number of the London Gay Switchboard.
If “Smalltown Boy” is about running away, then “Why?” is about firmly standing your ground. It’s Bronski Beat’s response to the proposed Police and Criminal Evidence Bill of 1984, the “sus law” that would give police enhanced powers to apprehend anyone they deemed to be disturbing the peace. Young black men were arrested simply for driving cars (to name just one absurd example), and gay men for embracing in public. Somerville casts the gaze that he would later wield on “TOTP” in two directions, at the perpetrators of hate crimes and criminalization and his lover and brothers in arms. The two sides meet, for a second, in a single glorious line: “Never feel guilty, never give in,” he purrs, a lustful celebration of defiance and desire. Bold horns mirror his raunchy delivery, a whirlwind of ricocheting marimba channeling his exhilaration. But nothing in Steinbachek and Bronski’s arsenal is any match for Somerville’s piercing scream, which demands “WHY?” as if sheer force could elicit the answer. Although he was a natural falsetto, you can hear every nerve clenched in the service of his protest.
According to the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill, Britain’s outdated consent laws, and the impending Section 28 legislation (which forbid the so-called “promotion” of homosexuality in schools), the simple act of loving in public made gay men into potential aggressors. So Somerville turned his voice into a weapon, a weedy Scottish boy’s superpower that made him seem 100-feet tall. He’s said that his only vocal training was singing along to Donna Summer and Sylvester records. Apparently, this was strong enough to turn a short redhead from Glasgow into a bona fide diva, who recognized the transgressive potential of reclaiming this style from the female singers who made gay culture unthreatening to the mainstream. Not that it stopped Bronski Beat from crashing it, too: “Why?” peaked at Number 6 in the UK, and “Smalltown Boy” at Number 3.
Given Somerville’s vocal distinction, it’s strange that Bronski Beat’s subsequent debut, The Age of Consent, lacks more of their trailblazing belters. It’s a strange, small record, its curious choice of covers and influences, and sledgehammer politics, speaking to either an unrealized concept that lingers just out of reach, or a hasty race to capitalize on their singles. There’s nothing else like “Smalltown Boy” or “Why?” here; the closest to their personal tumult is “Screaming,” a finished version of Somerville’s song for Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. It’s gloomy and art-damaged, primal therapy rather than pop statement, and stretches the limits of Bronski and Steinbachek’s innovation as producers.
Britain’s queer activists of the 1980s recognized that their fight had to be intersectional, understanding the common oppression between their community and people of color under the sus laws, and Thatcher’s determination to villainize LGBTQ people and striking miners alike. Bronski Beat were standard-bearers for these causes, speaking out in interviews, performing at benefits, and listing international ages of consent in their record’s liner notes to show how backwards Britain was. But they were far less successful at putting them into song on the rest of the album, where they seemed to forget the personal intimacy that gave their singles such insurrectionist stake, opting instead for some surprisingly bland sloganeering.
The shadowy, muted “No More War” lacks all the defiance of “Why?” and meekly requests an end to conflict—which one is unclear—by asking “please,” a word that has no place in a protest song. The production of “Junk” is overly dramatic compared to its obvious message linking drugs, television, and processed food, and sounds sillier still when a sample of an American dog food commercial pipes in, promising “beefy bits and bits of egg.” There’s more aggression in “Love and Money,” assets that Somerville ties directly to pain and exploitation. Again, it’s fiercely simple, but Steinbachek and Bronski’s sultry backing makes the allure of these toxic quantities plain, and Somerville’s experiences with sex as currency for survival darken its hue.
More subversive are Bronski Beat’s songs about desire, each delivered in a distinct feminine mode. “Ain’t Necessarily So” is a cover of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess song about doubting the bible—the implication here obviously being its statements on homosexuality—reinterpreted as a slice of sophisticated percolation more akin to fellow 1984 breakout star Sade than gritty British synth-pop. “Heatwave” finds Somerville playing at being Peggy Lee (another of his childhood obsessions), updating “Fever” as a steamy come-on fit for the beaches of Fire Island or Venice. It sounds a million miles from London’s dank clubs and Glasgow’s damp streets, a sheer fantasy that makes Somerville an agent of lust, rejecting yearning diva worship with its nose pressed up against the glass.
The Age of Consent ends with Somerville’s ultimate act of centering gay desire, with covers of Donna Summer’s “Need a Man Blues” and “I Feel Love.” A year earlier, Summer, a born-again Christian, had allegedly denounced her mammoth gay fanbase at a gig in Atlantic City. She would dispute this, but the damage was already done, and gay fans rejected her right back. Bronski Beat got flack for doing these songs, but described their covers as an act of reclamation, a two-fingers-up at a star who seemed to think she could sanitize her own legacy. The symbolism, however, is stronger than the covers themselves.
Two copper-bottomed bangers aside, perhaps that’s also true of Bronski Beat. The Age of Consent was released in the UK on October 15, 1984, and would be their only album to feature the original line-up. An unexplained fallout led Somerville to leave the band in early 1985 and form the Communards with Richard Coles. We can lament the missed opportunity for them to develop their sound together: Steinbachek and Bronski becoming more sophisticated producers, Somerville coming into his power as a vocalist and spokesman alongside his formative allies. But despite the roughness of their debut, they more than fulfilled their function. Bronski Beat formed to play a benefit, raising money for LGBTQ charities’ defense costs. Over the original trio’s year in the public eye, they gave queer kids who were alienated by society and extroverts alike their own subtle form of armor. | 2017-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | London | November 26, 2017 | 7.2 | c342f57e-b1ee-4039-b1f5-6d31bce2c0f2 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Irish folk-pop artist Conor O'Brien is getting a lot of NPR/mainstream attention for his emotionally nourishing music. | Irish folk-pop artist Conor O'Brien is getting a lot of NPR/mainstream attention for his emotionally nourishing music. | Villagers: Becoming a Jackal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14322-becoming-a-jackal/ | Becoming a Jackal | Conor O'Brien, slight-framed leader of earnest folk-rock project Villagers, tells his publicist he's "terrified of bands." No wonder: The Dublin-based singer and songwriter's former group, the Immediate, imploded three years ago over "existential differences." In February 2009, hometown label Any Other City released Villagers' The Hollow Kind EP. There's a YouTube video from around the same time where O'Brien can be seen fronting at least a quartet, and the performance is stirring, though the guy looks a bit like Conor Oberst and Tracey Thorn in a "how would their kids be?" Photoshop mash-up.
Much as Oberst has wrestled with his own identity crises, shifting from Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos to his given name, Villagers' debut album obsesses over the gap between electric band and acoustic troubadour. In a recent appearance on "Later... With Jools Holland", O'Brien performed solo; in fact, he plays almost every instrument on Becoming a Jackal, and his portentous lyrics, falsetto-prone quaver, and Simon & Garfunkel tunefulness are essential to the album's appeal. At the same time, the record is a bit more varied than the typical singer-songwriter drabness-- check the Battles-battling drum break at the end of mask fable "Ship of Promises", the bossa nova lilt to the Leonard Cohen breakup of "Set the Tigers Free", or the jarring crash that ends orchestral-pop opener "I Saw the Dead". O'Brien promises to "meet you in between what I say and what I mean," and he's savvy enough to know the difference.
It seems significant that Villagers signed to Domino, a label better known for Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, and Animal Collective; O'Brien recently told Brooklyn Vegan that Cass McCombs, another singer-songwriter with indie-rock appeal, was the matchmaker. So sure, O'Brien's falsetto-prone quaver suggests the righteous sincerity of Irish vocalists from Bono to Damien Rice and Glen Hansard, but Becoming a Jackal's title track-- also its first single-- keeps 21st-century disillusionment beneath its sepia-toned teenage dreams: "Before you take this song as truth/ You should wonder what I'm taking from you." In a recent Resonant Frequencies column, Pitchfork's Mark Richardson talks about the thin line between maudlin and sublime, and to be sure, effort-laden over-seriousness occasionally combines with a tendency toward lazy rhymes here to put dirges like "The Meaning of the Ritual" and "To Be Counted Among Men" slightly on the wrong side of that divide.
Still, if you're willing to follow O'Brien over the top, there are glimmers of I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, or even that fleeting moment on Funeral when the Arcade Fire break out into a Motown bounce. "Pieces", the song Villagers perform in that old live YouTube clip, reappears on Becoming a Jackal, still exploring that line between band and balladeer, but also person and persona, emotion and cheap sentiment. Amid doo-wop piano and lofty strings, O'Brien describes the dilemma of the public artist who airs private confessions: "There's a way down/ That I wish I had not found/ You split yourself in two/ One for them and one for you." Shoring these fragments against the ruins of modern-day romance, O'Brien before long starts howling like a wolf, or a jackal, or a singer-songwriter, or a band leader. It's worth watching to see what he-- and Villagers-- will become next. | 2010-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 11, 2010 | 6.9 | c34858d6-b149-495a-945a-8121c29ddb66 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The K-pop superstars’ second album of new material in 2020 fixates on the frustration and grief of life in quarantine, sifting through the blurry days to construct a new form of intimacy. | The K-pop superstars’ second album of new material in 2020 fixates on the frustration and grief of life in quarantine, sifting through the blurry days to construct a new form of intimacy. | BTS: Be | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bts-be/ | Be | You have to at least want to root for BTS. The supergroup’s global dominance has been a rare constant in a year of upheaval, a pulse of pure joy through all this muck. There they are on The Late Late Show With James Corden, handing each other presents while crooning into their hand mics. There they are on TikTok, plopping a bouquet in a hand-lettered vase and offering it to their fans. BTS has broken so many records, at such a frantic pace, that any effort to tally them becomes almost instantly obsolete. Their new album, Be, devotes a full three-minute skit to celebrating the rise of “Dynamite,” their first all-English single, to the top of the Billboard charts. (“Don’t you think this is what happiness is like?” RM asks.) By the time the album itself was released, its first track had also reached the top of the U.S. charts, making BTS the first K-pop group ever to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 100.
That level of fame has not come without its costs. As a band—and a brand—that prizes authenticity, BTS haven’t shied away from addressing the tolls of megastardom and growing up in general. They’ve trained their pristine pop machine on sweeping philosophical ideas—the Jungian concept of the soul, a Herman Hesse bildungsroman—with varying degrees of success. On Be, the Bangtan Boys fixate instead on life in quarantine. In a year when profundity is woven into the mundane, when the rote tasks of getting through the day have taken on new intensity, BTS soften and shine.
“The entire year got stolen,” Jimin croons in Korean on the shimmering “Fly to My Room,” before the group lilts about lying in bed with a bloated stomach, a pile of takeout containers, and the constant blare of a TV. Frustration and grief animate these songs, but it’s their simplicity and specificity that make them compelling. On “Blue & Grey,” Suga wonders if “that hazy shadow that swallows me up” classifies as anxiety or as depression. “I just want to be happier,” the group cries over delicate, bleeding strings, their voices whittled down to pleading rasps.
The record’s thematic center is “Life Goes On,” a flickering prayer for pushing past 2020. Artists have struggled with how to construct a record about self-isolation—Charli XCX opted for the glitch and quiver of How I’m Feeling Now, while Drake danced alone through his massive, frigid house. BTS pluck minutiae from the blur of days trapped inside: “On my pillow, on my table,” they sing, “life goes on.” In the past, BTS have used their songs as vehicles for feel-good messages (“I love, I love, I love myself! I know, I know, I know myself!” they shouted on Wings’ “Cypher 4”); here, they build hope in real time. Each gradual glimmer of layered vocals, every lush harmony that streams over the delicate backbeat, stitches together an intimacy. I kept the song on repeat while I churned through my daily tasks—I pruned my inbox, pushed a Swiffer across my floor. By the seventh or eighth play, I realized I’d been crying.
That intricate balance of confession and consolation dissipates later in the album. RM, the group’s unofficial leader, worried that “Life Goes On” would sound “bland,” and other parts of the record try to compensate with aggressive sheen. The raps on “Dis-ease” shuffle over a mellow hip-hop beat, breezy and infectious but flimsy compared to the harder-edged juggernauts of past songs like “UGH!” The neon-drenched “Stay” meanders into middling EDM, with twitchy drum kicks and a siren-like blare; the beats sound like they were ripped from Steve Aoki’s hard drive in 2010.
“Stay” ends with a flourish of reverb that glides into the gloss and throb of “Dynamite,” a song that, on its own, achieves slick competency: a jumble of funk and handclaps and eminently palatable one-liners. (“Cup of milk, let’s rock and roll!”) Of course, “Dynamite” also functions as a monument to BTS’ global reach, but to the group, it’s more of a gift to fans. “We call this our own recharge project,” RM told NME about the single, “and we hope that it will be able to recharge your own batteries, even if it’s only for a moment.” That’s part of the fun of BTS—you get the sense that they earnestly want to root for you, too.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Hit | December 5, 2020 | 7 | c359dbce-6c1c-47ba-8007-62a073be5ddf | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Accompanied by a wide range of verdant textures, the Kentucky songwriter deepens the emotional landscape of her earthy, reflective folk music. | Accompanied by a wide range of verdant textures, the Kentucky songwriter deepens the emotional landscape of her earthy, reflective folk music. | Joan Shelley: The Spur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joan-shelley-the-spur/ | The Spur | Joan Shelley takes modernity in microdoses. Her lean songs, which share genetics with Kentucky mountain music and its Irish-Scottish-English tributaries, have blossomed over the past decade in impressionist increments, all firmly rooted in her voice—a dazzlingly bright, peaty contralto—and her similarly earthy poetics. Even her visuals admit newness sparingly: The charming video for “Amberlit Morning,” a highlight of her latest album, The Spur, is set in present-day Brooklyn but counterweighted with references to Georges Méliès 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon, complete with black-and-white intertitles and a planetary satellite that’s clearly as handmade as the music. In Shelley’s world, old magic is often the best magic.
On The Spur, the singer-songwriter uses an uncharacteristically wide range of textures, each careful brushstroke of strings, horns, and vocal harmony deepening the emotional landscapes of songs that quietly savor their own instability, weighing change as a route to renewal, and shifting concepts of home. These ideas coincided with the birth of a child, Shelley’s first, with partner Nathan Salsburg—a fingerstyle guitarist-archivist who shares with her a similarly rangy attitude towards folk tradition (a recent solo LP, Psalms, was an exploration of ancient Jewish texts). Their uncanny melodic connection can seem the product of a single mind, recalling the voice-and-guitar telepathy between Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Like co-parenting itself, The Spur is grounded in the partnership while expanding it.
Some of this new breadth is in the vocal arrangements. “Completely,” a skeletal conjuring of mid-century R&B that Otis Redding might’ve done wonders with, employs Shelley’s multi-tracked voice, adding ghostly backup vocals as she offers wise comfort. On “Home,” Shelley works a word that’s done yeoman’s duty in American music, from “Home on the Range” to “This Must Be the Place,” echoing the Sanskrit mantra it phonetically resembles, leaning into its rhyme with the word “overgrown,” considering the place that formed her, the people who “sweetened and flawed” her, and harmonizing with herself in an aural hall of mirrors. A reliable highlight of Shelley’s LPs has always been hearing how her vocals play with others. On “Amberlit Morning,” her voice is a glowing ember alongside the crackling log of Bill Callahan’s, in beguilingly imperfect harmonies that recall her exchanges with her Louisville-area neighbor Will Oldham—whose voice is nearer her range—yet manifest even further out of sync, with elusive and hard-won flickers of connection.
The string and bass arrangements, by producer James Elkington, are equally striking, sympathetic, and illuminating. On the opening track, “Forever Blues,” Shelley frets over notions of loss as layers of violin and viola roll in like storm clouds, a backdrop recalling the lush string arrangements the late Robert Kirby provided for Nick Drake—an artist Shelley has covered—on Five Leaves Left. “When the Light Is Dying,” a slow processional with brass swells and swooping string stabs, conjures another of Shelley’s forebears, Leonard Cohen, channeling his gallows humor, clear-eyed acceptance, and eternal flirtiness: “I traced the black outline of every stubborn human thing/Alone on the horizon; ‘You want it darker?’ Leonard sang/Well, the light is dying/Darling, come inside.” “Bolt,” loamy with brass and strings that swell magnificently near the end, considers death’s flipside in an uneasy meditation on fertility, its title referencing plants gone too soon to seed and also, faintly but unavoidably, the urge to flee.
It’s satisfying to hear Shelley’s sound growing more verdant, the way carefully tended topiary fills out in spring. But the words and her phrasing remain the heart of what she does, and the judicious spaciousness of these settings feels both admirable and essential, crafting austerity that’s as much bounty as balm, and as celebratory as it is reflective. On “Between Rock and Sky,” the album’s penultimate song, we hear nothing but a handful of piano chords and her voice, pondering the phenomena of birth, the brevity of life, and above all, the importance of celebrating it in song, with glasses raised high. | 2022-06-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | June 29, 2022 | 7.8 | c35f5252-57f4-41cd-a152-bf1bdec118b8 | Will Hermes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-hermes/ | |
Even though this collection of unreleased songs and rarities is slight, it testifies to the enduring power of the Microphones, and how they represented a thriving part of Pacific Northwest indie. | Even though this collection of unreleased songs and rarities is slight, it testifies to the enduring power of the Microphones, and how they represented a thriving part of Pacific Northwest indie. | The Microphones: EARLY TAPES, 1996-1998 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22695-early-tapes-1996-1998/ | EARLY TAPES, 1996-1998 | It’s been nearly fourteen years since we last heard new music from beloved K Records heroes the Microphones. After following up their 2001 classic The Glow, Pt. 2 with the challenging and somewhat inscrutable Mount Eerie, they dissolved abruptly before the band—more or less the work of Anacortes, WA resident Phil Elverum and a rotating band of collaborators—confusingly re-emerged a year later as Mount Eerie, having ditched the Microphones moniker in exchange for the name of that final record. Though Elverum has gone on to release more than twelve records over that span, and much of that music covers some of the territory his former band walked, the precise spirit of naive quirkiness of the Microphones has never quite since been replicated.
Now in 2016 Elverum has decided to reactivate that old appellation, on a release of twenty-year-old material likely to be unfamiliar to even fans of the band. Titled EARLY TAPES, 1996-98, it’s exactly as stated—a compilation of sixteen songs either previously unreleased or taken from limited release tapes from Beat Happening guitarist Bret Lunsford’s Knw-Yr-Own cassette label.
Many fans of the band eager for more Microphones may have had hopes, but to be clear, EARLY TAPES is no “lost classic”; it’s about as definitively a “for the fans” release as you can get. As Elverum himself admits, “Listening back to this music now is mostly embarrassing to me.” And as to why he’s dug finally them out now: “I am still basically an overgrown teenager postponing a real job.” It’s both a completely reasonable motivation for a musician trying to make it in 2016, and still, despite the limited quality of the contents, a valuable exercise for fans of either the band or the era.
The value of EARLY TAPES, slightness of the output notwithstanding, is testament to the enduring power of the Microphones and the way they stood in to represent a thriving part of Pacific Northwest indie. Even the album’s first track, the previously unreleased early-days cut “Teenage Moustache”—the album’s silliest moment if not its slightest—manages to conjures a nostalgia not just for the innocent sweetness of early Elverum/Microphones, but also wooly ’90s DIY indie rock (especially of the K Records variety) and the exploding sense of total possibility in the late pre-internet age. The semi-tuned thriftstore guitar recalls the more ramshackle ditties of Beck’s One Foot in the Grave and Stereopathetic Soulmanure, and the vocals recall the teenage warbles on Modest Mouse’s Sad Sappy Sucker. It’s not a great song by any stretch, but there’s something powerful and pleasant about it.
Thankfully, it’s not all just nostalgia. There are at least a handful of noteworthy new arrivals on EARLY TAPES. Chief among these is the heart-tugging “Compressor,” which unsurprisingly also serves as the album’s teaser single. A simple concoction of a drummer-boy snare shuffle, two-note guitar lines, and a rhythmic tattoo of a chorus, it resembles a Notwist Neon Golden outtake “ft. Phil Elverum.” The six-minute epic “Wires and Cords” is equally strong, the lone track here that points directly to the force they would become. Elverum also answers a longtime mystery in the song’s liner notes by explaining the original meaning of the band’s name, and why he abandoned it: “My music project was about recording and the terminology around it, vaguely trying to say emotional human stuff using this equipment as a vocabulary....This is towards the end of me trying to use recording technology metaphors and the beginning of the irrelevance of my band name.” An ode of sorts to one of Elverum’s obsessions, Stereolab, this organ-driven love note to former girlfriend and bandmate Bronwyn Holm shows Elverum beginning to look beyond sound sketches and imagining the great possibility of songs as storybooks. Both “Microphone, Pt. 1” and especially the Rentals-en-français “Microphone, Pt. 2” are low-key winners as well.
Many of the other inclusions on EARLY TAPES really are of the throwaway variety—go-nowhere instrumentals like “For Kaye June 6” or “(Bass)” whose mundanity suffers further for lacking at least the gut-warming tickle of Elverum’s frail voice. But there’s a wide enough variety to keep the proceedings from dragging and even the weakest moments offer at least a little charm, such as “The Creeps”’s calliope-style noir or “Rebirth on Tape Deck Mountain”’s meditative circular guitar melody.
It’s understandable why Elverum felt he had to leave the Microphones behind; sometimes, it’s hard to feel like you’re really growing without a conscious decision to shed your skin, even if the snake underneath is ultimately the same. It’s a testament to that original band’s lasting power and impact that something EARLY TAPES even has an audience at all. The Glow, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, and *Don’t Wake Me Up *will all remain higher listening priorities than EARLY TAPES, but it’s nice to know this exists. | 2016-12-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | December 27, 2016 | 6.5 | c367b0f3-0736-4898-a940-41b734637d1d | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Completed in 2017 and shelved for almost a year, Pinegrove’s third record is smaller, softer, and closer to the chest. | Completed in 2017 and shelved for almost a year, Pinegrove’s third record is smaller, softer, and closer to the chest. | Pinegrove: Skylight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pinegrove-skylight/ | Skylight | A year ago, it looked like Pinegrove’s next move would almost certainly cement their status as indie rock heroes. Formed in Montclair, New Jersey in 2010 by friends Evan Stephens Hall and drummer Zack Levine, Pinegrove spent the next six years honing their folky math rock in increasingly packed basements. With their 2016 record, Cardinal, they magnificently captured the everythingness of being alive. It was a small record that did big things, reaching wide swaths of listeners by embracing the sentimentality of emo, the catchiness of power-pop, and the twang of country, creating a universe that felt welcoming and sincere. When the size of the crowd at Pinegrove’s early evening set at last year’s Pitchfork Music Festival dramatically eclipsed that of their emo forefathers, American Football, who occupied the same stage later that day, it was clear that a torch had been passed.
But three weeks after the November 2017 release of a glorious and cathartic single, “Intrepid,” everything came to a standstill. As Hall explained in a long, confusing Facebook post, he had been accused of “sexual coercion” by a woman he had been in a relationship with. In accordance with the alleged victim’s wishes, Hall and the band shelved Skylight, canceled their U.S. tour, and disappeared. So did many of their fans, who immediately denounced Pinegrove. Ten months after the Facebook post, in a story detailing the situation, Hall told Pitchfork, “I take consent seriously. All of our encounters were verbally consensual. But, OK, certainly this isn’t from nowhere. If she came away feeling bad about our encounter, feeling like she couldn’t express how she was feeling honestly at the time, that’s a huge problem.” He added, “We are thoroughly in favor of the dismantling of patriarchal structures, and the movement right now to elevate survivors and victims of abuse. And we are not interested in a listenership that doesn’t care about that.” Skylight, their third record, was originally meant to come out on Run for Cover, like Cardinal. The band and label mutually agreed that Pinegrove would self-release Skylight and donate the proceeds to charity.
There is no “right” way to return from such serious allegations; some feel there should be no return at all. It is impossible to ignore the accusations against Hall while listening to Skylight. At times, the album can feel subconsciously remorseful, but this is almost a twisted coincidence. The band insists that Skylight has hardly changed since it was mastered in October 2017, and some songs date back to at least 2015. Skylight opens with “Rings,” an optimistic but cautious declaration of new beginnings and accountability. “I draw a line in my life/Singing, ‘This is the new way I behave now’/And actually live by the shape of that sound,” Hall declares. Though “Rings” quickly continues the self-mythologizing of Cardinal, with references to Pinegrove iconography like ampersands, wings, and geometric shapes, it’s clear that empathy is not so effortless.
Recorded and produced by Hall and guitarist Sam Skinner at a house in upstate New York, Skylight focuses on atmosphere and abstraction. While Cardinal was defined by anthemic eruptions of longing, these 11 songs move patiently and often disregard verse-chorus song structures in favor of loose vignettes. “Paterson & Leo”—which originally appeared as a bonus track on Cardinal’s European re-release that same year—is a wisp of a lullaby about a friendship between two men adrift in their lives. Every instrument, from Levine’s drums to Adan Carlo’s bass slows to the stillness of morning, while Hall and keyboardist Nandi Rose Plunkett’s twin harmonies build with each verse until they take flight. (Plunkett, who left Pinegrove’s full-time lineup after Cardinal to focus on her own project, Half Waif, is a brilliant presence here.) In divine moments like “Paterson & Leo” and later, on “Amulets,” each slight note has a defined voice.
Little on Skylight merits the emo-revival label that has trailed the band since their inception. Instead, the group leans into the country tendencies that permeated Cardinal. On the closer “Light On,” Hall’s impassioned yelp melts into a full-on drawl, while a lap steel courtesy of Joshua F. Marré paints a rich wash beneath him. With much of the singalong hooks of Cardinal stripped back, Hall attempts to translucently dissect his limitations here. “I wanna talk about/All the ways/Every example of/The shapes/We use to communicate,” he intones on “Portal.” The recording is distinctly raw with few overdubs, evoking dusty alt-country or an indie-folk record from the early aughts. The effect is modest and discrete, especially on tracks like “Darkness,” a wandering meditation reminiscent of Sheryl Crow in her ’90s prime. On “Angelina,” a fan favorite that has appeared on compilations and live records, the desire gets tangled, but the passion rings clear.
At her 2015 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Yoko Ono built a free-standing spiral staircase titled “To See the Sky.” As visitors took turns climbing the steps toward a glass skylight—symbolizing infinite promise—the structure rattled. Each quiver seemed to suggest that transcendence never comes without risk. Despite our efforts, Ono explained, “We are not tall enough to touch the sky.” How easy it is, then, to sing about friendship, love, and community, to realize that art cannot account for your actions, to know we are not tall enough to transcend. Skylight closes with Hall looking upwards on the ballad “Light On,” as the band sways from one measure to the next. His voice stretches to a falsetto as he considers a real solution: “I wanna do much better.” | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 29, 2018 | 7.5 | c368a7bc-63cf-4881-a81f-712f91abec3c | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
On her debut album, the New York singer-songwriter grapples with the big feelings and small details of young adulthood over appropriately cinematic backdrops. | On her debut album, the New York singer-songwriter grapples with the big feelings and small details of young adulthood over appropriately cinematic backdrops. | Margaux: Inside the Marble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margaux-inside-the-marble/ | Inside the Marble | Sometimes you go through a breakup and feel like you could just wither away; sometimes you read the news and are reminded that one day, the sun really will just wither away. Regardless of their respective scales, both problems can feel equally real. But the collision of these micro and macro heartaches can be destabilizing. “If I change my life/Will I die?” singer-songwriter Margaux Bouchegnies, who performs mononymously as Margaux, wonders on her debut album, Inside the Marble, pondering quandaries both personal and existential against dreamy, imaginative soundscapes.
Bouchegnies is a recent graduate of the New School; since finishing her studies, she’s become a fixture in the Brooklyn music scene, touring as a bassist with acts like Katy Kirby and Dougie Poole. Inside the Marble was crafted in the throes of that uncertain moment when the structures of academia fall away and you’re thrust into the so-called real world. It builds on her debut EP, 2019’s More Brilliant Is the Hand That Throws the Coin, which established her as an artist who could deftly capture the tumult of young love. You can hear the fruits of her coursework in her songwriting; she quotes Susan Sontag on More Brilliant’s “Faced With Fire,” and later released a set of songs inspired by the life and work of Emily Dickinson.
Bouchegnies has said that Inside the Marble is about “making sense of big feelings,” and she constructs appropriately cinematic backdrops for each of them. The moody “Midnight Contact” starts downbeat and minimalist, then builds to dizzying heights; it sounds like it could soundtrack the moment in a coming-of-age film where the wistful protagonist makes a life-altering decision. The songs are layered and dense—Bouchegnies plays guitar, bass, Mellotron, glockenspiel, Farfisa, Wurlitzer, and piano, while producer Sahil Ansari adds percussion and tape loops; other collaborators contribute trombone, violin, and clarinet. The arrangements are lush and naturalistic, filled with charming, well-placed details: the swooping strings on “Picture It,” a touch of pedal steel on “Dissolve / Resolve,” ghostly backing vocals on “Sadie Something.” The overall effect, though, remains surprisingly gentle, thanks in large part to Bouchegnies’ voice, which floats above the arrangements and rarely ever strays from its steady, self-assured delivery.
Her emotions range from the quotidian to the universal. On “Ships,” heartbreak is like a storm at sea, threatening to knock her overboard; later, on “Make the Move,” she’s reaching toward new love, sounding positively smitten over plucked acoustic guitar and steady percussion. On propulsive tracks like “Picture It” and “Sadie Something,” she contemplates time’s endless march towards oblivion: “Everybody/One by one takes/Off into the great unknown,” she declares on the latter. Intellectually, we might understand that not all anxieties (the social awkwardness she details on “What Could I Say?” or the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life paralysis of “I Can’t Decide”) are equally consequential. But it doesn’t always feel that way—especially in young adulthood, when our norms and values still have some settling in to do. It’s charming to hear Bouchegnies consider all these big feelings deeply, drawing an entire universe out of them before moving on, curiously and carefully, to the next. | 2024-06-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Massif | June 10, 2024 | 7.1 | c37ba4c6-d7b0-43db-b017-f8ceb695e340 | Marissa Lorusso | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/ | |
They were outliers when they started, but by the time their classic debut arrived in 1982, Misfits’ gleeful, ghoulish punk rock was exactly in tune with the national mood. | They were outliers when they started, but by the time their classic debut arrived in 1982, Misfits’ gleeful, ghoulish punk rock was exactly in tune with the national mood. | Misfits: Walk Among Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/misfits-walk-among-us/ | Walk Among Us | In 1982, America hungered for horror. As the president yanked the country to the right and tensions with Russia portended mutual assured destruction, fans flocked to see George A. Romero’s Creepshow and John Carpenter’s The Thing—two films that uniquely revived 1950s scares for the new nuclear age, using goofy camp and gruesome social commentary to speak to a terrifying reality. Into this fraught atmosphere, Misfits dropped their magnificently malignant debut full-length, Walk Among Us.
When they formed in the late ’70s, Misfits were the wrong band at the wrong time. Frontman Glenn Danzig was a working-class kid from Lodi, New Jersey; he and bassist Jerry Only were directly inspired by the British punk movement of a few years earlier, particularly the fiendishly dressed crooner Dave Vanian of the Damned, as well as the unhinged New York punk of the Cramps. But there were also traces of Kiss, a decidedly non-punk New York outfit, in Danzig’s emerging theatricality. Misfits’ look incorporated face paint, skintight costumes, Halloween-worthy paraphernalia, and hair sculpted into “devil locks,” a radical deconstruction of the ’50s rockabilly quiff. They struggled to find footing in New York, caught in the transition from the punk class led by the Ramones circa ’77 to the nascent hardcore moment that followed. Where the first clique had been artier and open to outrageous stagecraft, it wasn’t receptive to a bunch of upstarts from the wrong side of the Hudson who dug sports and had the physiques of bodybuilders. The up-and-coming New York hardcore kids, on the other hand, embraced a spartan approach that attacked society head-on and held little affinity for vintage horror movies or glam.
Despite being pop-culture fanatics in a scene that wanted to divorce itself entirely from pop culture, Misfits soldiered on, finding an audience on punk's fringes by touring and releasing records on their own Plan 9 Records (named after Ed Wood’s infamous 1959 sci-fi/horror movie Plan 9 from Outer Space). Andy Wendler from Detroit’s hardcore heroes the Necros recalled in Steven Blush’s American Hardcore that by 1981, Misfits “were considered a dead band...Hardcore was so real, and these guys had this ghoulish imagery.” They weren't entirely alone: Around the same time, a crop of dark punk bands on the West Coast, including T.S.O.L., 45 Grave, and Christian Death, were making waves using horror-themed imagery that Misfits had pioneered. Danzig’s group, meanwhile, had twice attempted—and twice failed—to release a debut album by this point. At last, five years into their existence, and looking a little like latecomers to their own party, they finally unleashed Walk Among Us.
The core of the album was pieced together, Frankenstein-style, out of the abandoned scraps of their unreleased 1980 effort 12 Hits from Hell. Six of those songs—“Vampira,” “I Turned Into a Martian,” “Skulls,” “Night of the Living Dead,” “Astro Zombies,” and “Violent World”—became demos, and from that skeleton the band fleshed out a shambling monstrosity of gore-smeared hooks and schlock imagery. “I Turned Into a Martian” rummages through the dumpster of black-and-white sci-fi cinema with savage grace, picking random bits and stitching them into a narrative, like some kind of patchwork comic book. “Not the body of a man from Earth/Not the face of the one you love,” Danzig moans, imagining an alien invasion from the point of view of a possessed human. There’s a strange kind of empowerment to becoming an instrument of Armageddon, rather than a victim: “I walk down city streets on an unsuspecting human world,” the narrator goes on, electrified by his newfound evil.
Throughout Walk Among Us, dark powers take the form of trash from the past and fears of the future. When Danzig sings, “Death machine and man in love” and “Rocket-blast fury with a manual sex drive” in the track “Nike-A-Go-Go,” he’s citing the Nike missile project of the ’50s while straddling the phallic overlap between J. G. Ballard’s Crash and Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove. Like the Ramones, Misfits leaned heavily on the ’50s and ’60s for inspiration. But where the Ramones drew from sock-hop boppers and the British Invasion, Misfits drew from Elvis Presley and the Doors—the side of midcentury youth culture that seethed with psychosexual energy.
None of this would pack as much impact if Walk Among Us wasn’t so insidiously catchy. On “Vampira,” the B-movie star of Plan 9 from Outer Space is glorified as a pop-culture deity: “Black dress moves in a blue movie/Grave robbers from outer space.” The song’s sultry verse gives way to a chanted, gang-vocal chorus, the norm on an album where every track comes across as a potential hit single. Even “Braineaters,” by all appearances a throwaway song, gets lodged in the gray matter thanks to a sick cannibalistic punch line: “Brains at every single meal/Why can’t we have some guts!” By caricaturing the anxiety, ugliness, and chaos that lurked behind the thin membrane of civilization—rather than simply listing the symptoms, as most hardcore bands did—Walk Among Us taps into an unsettling, visceral sense of humor. Danzig, a fan of George Miller’s Mad Max movies and their mirroring of the era’s apocalyptic absurdity, recognized the cleansing power of this sort of horror.
Embedded in Walk Among Us is the methodology of mass worship that anti-rock crusaders of the time railed against, as if a slap in the face to the idea of moral policing. “Broken bodies in a death rock dance hall,” Danzig sings with ritualistic ecstasy on “All Hell Breaks Loose,” before boasting of his ability to contort young minds toward the dark side: “I send my murdergram/To all these monster kids/It comes right back to me, and it’s/Signed in their parents’ blood.” He goes further on “Astro Zombies,” an exultant anthem in which Danzig brags, “With just a touch of my burning hand/I send my astro zombies to rape this land/Prime directive, exterminate/The whole human race.”
“There is no compassion shown for anything here except for death, hate, and complete annihilation,” the fanzine Terror Times said of Walk Among Us in 1982. That was intended as the highest of praise. The same year, in a concert review, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner said Misfits “make the morbid nihilism of hardcore punk seem playful and ingratiating,” pointing out the band’s “boyish dress-up games and gleeful gross-outs.” Danzig, of course, didn’t literally advocate hate and destruction, as violent as their live shows often were. It’s clear from “Hatebreeders,” one of Walk Among Us’ most unshakable songs, which luridly portrays America’s Cold War youth as victims—raised as puppets and programmed to attack on command. “Next stop, annihilation/They bred the hate right in your fuckin’ bones,” he rages.
This album is a work of feverish imagination, but it’s in no way escapist. In its original press release, Danzig wrote, “People think we’re making all this up. We’re not. It’s out there. Every day’s a horror to me.” On “Skulls” and “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?,” he sings of butchering people and keeping their body parts even as the names Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy sent chills down the spine of a nation. Elsewhere, amid the bone-saw guitar of Walk Among Us’ high point, “Night of the Living Dead”—named after Romero’s iconic 1968 zombie film—Danzig offers a glimpse of the man behind the blood-soaked curtain: “You think you’re a zombie, you think it’s a scene/From some monster magazine, well/Open your eyes too late/This ain’t no fantasy, boy.” Neither glorifying nor condemning, Misfits simply distilled the anxieties of the early ’80s into a putrid elixir.
Walk Among Us was a triumph for the band, solidifying their following and codifying their ominous image. But it marked an ending, not a beginning. Their next album, 1983’s Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood, was a huge shift away from their catchy, melodic, Ramones-influenced howl-alongs and toward the more scathing blitzkrieg of hardcore. As if to symbolize this metamorphosis, drummer Arthur Googy was replaced by Robo of Black Flag. The dramatic transition was lyrical as well, with Danzig drifting further away from the thrills of vintage sci-fi and toward a more apocalyptic view of the world as it truly appeared, with its Reagan-era specters of economic injustice and nuclear war. Like so many other bands at the time, up to and including Bruce Springsteen and U2, Misfits had decided to become, in their own perverse way, socially relevant.
By Halloween of 1983, Misfits were no more. Danzig’s public persona in the years to come took itself with grim seriousness; for a long time, it seemed the only laughs he would evoke would be unintentional ones. Yet the joyful, campy heights he hit on Walk Among Us have continued to loom over his work, becoming a yardstick against which he’ll always be measured. The more he tries to earnestly paint himself as a creature of the night, the more he seems like the punk-rock Romero or Carpenter he was on Misfits’ debut—a shaper of shadows with an impish dimension. “Anything that makes you feel good is happy and positive,” Danzig told me with a laugh in 2007, implicitly summing up the hybrid of glee and gloom that has underpinned his creative identity for decades now. “I’ve always been the person who likes to take negatives and turn them into positives. And if they stay negatives, that’s okay, too.” | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Ruby Records / Slash | October 31, 2017 | 9.4 | c37d8e8b-65ed-4798-94cb-551f5bc55356 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | |
Having traded K-pop’s regimented model for an experimental sound merging modular synthesis with vocal manipuation, the Tokyo-based Yeohee Kim finds a new degree of artistic freedom. | Having traded K-pop’s regimented model for an experimental sound merging modular synthesis with vocal manipuation, the Tokyo-based Yeohee Kim finds a new degree of artistic freedom. | machìna: archipelago | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/machina-archipelago/ | archipelago | True artistic freedom is a rarity, but Yeohee Kim knows its inverse all too well. The Korean artist nabbed viral attention in 2010 thanks to a pair of YouTube videos she uploaded under the name Apple Girl, covering Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” using only iPhone apps as instruments. This techie-baiting twee springboarded Kim to a career in K-pop, an industry known for its dazzling and genre-bending songs but not particularly celebrated for yielding creative control to performers. She’s said that dealing with the demands of others proved problematic for her early pop days. “I always thought about what people thought about me,” Kim told Harvard’s WHRB radio station in 2018. “I had to find this thing that I could not give up, I had to find the thing that I had to do before I could start saying ‘no.’”
Kim found just that by decamping to Tokyo, adopting the artist name machìna, and going independent. She also gradually shifted from the bouncy sound of her early years to an electronic palette that gives her music a newfound sense of unease. She’s come a long way from quirky YouTube uploads. She now performs partially improvised sets and has appeared alongside the wonky experimental producer Foodman. archipelago is her most fully realized work to date. The smartphone smoothness of her pop days has been replaced by a pivot to songs that use modular synthesizer as their foundation and are unafraid to move in all sorts of directions.
Earlier machìna releases retained their pop identity, with electronic elements merely rippling along the edges. Her new analog focus defines archipelago; the touches that once nudged her music towards the Pomplamoose-ian are twisted into new forms, adding tension throughout. Opener “moog, monk, modules” sets the tone for what’s to come, with mutating synth squiggles wrapping around a locked-in beat while ethereal vocal samples whizz by, upping the wooziness. Something feels off about the way it clambers ahead, but it still pulls you in.
Kim has said her fondness for modular synths derives partially from how they capture the feeling of a specific moment, and archipelago’s best stretches sound like they’ve been improvised on the spot. “315 Heda” begins as a kind of chilly minimal techno, climaxes with bursts of synth melodies spraying over the beat, and ultimately wriggles back to sparser terrain. She pursues a similarly morphing approach on both busy tracks, like the fizzy “Reboot,” and more skeletal ones, like the creeping “I Don’t Love You.” The few times machìna misfires are when she lets passages burble for too long without any sort of payoff: “Inujima Echo” builds from soft to slightly less soft, and then just settles for its duration.
That song is one of the few where Kim’s singing is relatively restrained; archipelago is more captivating when she adopts more inventive techniques. After placing the emphasis squarely on her vocals in her K-pop days, and continuing to put them front and center on initial machìna releases, she’s found a balance between blending in with her synthesized churn and soaring above it.
In “Past”—a song, she says, about the loneliness of a trip to Paris, fleshed out with field recordings from the city—she complements the song’s industrial chug by pitch-shifting her vocals, lending to a pervading sense of alienation. Kim frequently manipulates her voice like this, a tactic that only ups the headrush of busy cuts such as “XXX_patchwork,” though she’s also happy to present it unadulterated: On “Murasaki,” her higher-pitched singing breaks through thick layers of synth, to great dramatic effect.
All of machìna’s elements coalesce on “Neon,” a highlight of the album. She sets an uneasy musical backdrop with scratchy blasts of white noise and tumbling polyrhythms; her own singing begins simply, then grows distorted, throwing off a strange glow. Finally, she shoots up a register to deliver archipelago’s finest and most intense moment—proof positive that Kim has truly found her own voice. | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | March 9, 2019 | 7.4 | c37ed01b-ae0b-4f5a-a21a-af6674478f58 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | |
With his latest, the Brownsville rapper cements himself as a preeminent stylist, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and few drums. | With his latest, the Brownsville rapper cements himself as a preeminent stylist, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and few drums. | Ka: Honor Killed the Samurai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22267-honor-killed-the-samurai/ | Honor Killed the Samurai | There’s this story in *The New York Times Magazine *where the writer asks his subject, Jerry Seinfeld, why he still spends months on the road. The comedian, worth nearly a billion dollars, could retire with his family to a private beach somewhere; if he wanted to chase some grand artistic dreams, he could surely land an unlimited budget from any number of movie studios. Instead he tinkers away in theatres, dark clubs, and at tiny private gigs, making minor variations on jokes that sometimes take years to perfect. “The smaller something is, the harder it is to make,” Seinfeld said, gushing over the careful click of a closing door from one of the “few dozen” Porsches he owns. He’s drawn to the arts that require precision, he explained, like calligraphy—“or samurai.”
Halfway through his brief, brilliant new album, Ka sneers: “How many cars you need?” With *Honor Killed the Samurai, *the Brownsville craftsman cements himself as one of this generation’s preeminent stylists, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and very few drums. Beginning in earnest with 2012’s Grief Pedigree, Ka has peeled away every extraneous layer from his work, tinkering like the Porsche designer until each part fits within another just so. Now he’s arrived at its core, where each syllable is purposeful and every piano key is in its right place.
And yet the genius of Ka’s music is that the form follows function. On “$,” the song where he questions how many cars one man can drive, he also raps: “Watch me blueprint rec centers/I’m trying to inspire.” So much of his past, his worldview, his creative style is packaged into that one couplet, be it the deserted Brooklyn of his youth, his unerring loyalty, his economy of language. It’s the sort of line that unlocks whole sections of an artist’s psyche for the audience, all in fewer than ten words. As he says earlier on the song, “Could battle hard against catalogs with one leaflet journal.”
The irony of Samurai’s title is that, while the window dressing recalls feudal Japan, you rarely have to look back further than Giuliani’s New York to see the kinds of fiercely fought, morally fraught battles that rage in the background. By now, Ka’s story is well-worn—the Golden Age also-ran who walked away then, when the itch came back, locked himself in a bedroom until all the swords were sharp. He was a member of Natural Elements, a group that eventually landed on Tommy Boy but made little impact; when he resurfaced, it was in 2008 with a quietly show-stealing verse on GZA’s Pro Tools. He’s not a revivalist—in his time away he blended fury and control in a way that would be nearly unrecognizable in any era—and so his writing has an irresistibly fuzzy relationship to time.
See the passage on “That Cold and Lonely” where he raps, “With no clear winner, still appeared thinner/Don’t howl like I’m holier than thou, I’m a mere sinner/Wasn’t blessed to be resting in the ‘burbs/I was stressing, wrestling with the scourge.” That could be an origin story or a sad denouement; either way, he “tried years for these ideas to gestate.” On “Finer Things/Tamahagene,” the vocal layering is both well suited to fill out the mix and mimics someone’s own paranoid self-doubt. But more importantly, Ka wrings his hands over fulfilling his vast potential: “They say it’s royal in my blood*.*”
In the first verse of “Mourn at Night,” Ka says, simply, “My scars last.” That might be the best way to put it. Even setting aside the obvious detour his creative life took, the man’s work is littered with past moments of trauma that have, by this point, settled into his bones. The hours spent making himself one of genre’s greatest songwriters, the dollars lost to broken security deposits—they all add up to a life made for viewing through all the grimy, shattered lenses Ka has at his disposal. Because no matter how the borough shifts around him, he’s somewhere in a dark room, working and re-working the details until he gets it just right. | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Iron Works | August 20, 2016 | 8 | c37f8379-c0d8-41dd-9a76-f95d974510d5 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The rap trio’s latest, like its predecessor, can become a slog and at times seems shoddily constructed. But at its best, the album is a callback to their inspired peak. | The rap trio’s latest, like its predecessor, can become a slog and at times seems shoddily constructed. But at its best, the album is a callback to their inspired peak. | Migos: Culture III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/migos-culture-iii/ | Culture III | In her 2018 review for Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey noted that at the time of Culture II’s release, the Migos’ official Spotify profile directed fans not to the album page on that streaming service, but to a 72-track playlist that repeated Culture II three times over. This, like the record’s 24-song, 106-minute runtime, was thought to exploit then-recent Billboard and RIAA rule changes that privileged discrete song streams when measuring album sales and chart performance. (For example, a 60-minute album split into 20 songs would chart higher than a 60-minute album that was split into 15 but streamed the same number of times front-to-back.) The Migos were not alone in evidently bending to these new market forces; by the end of the Obama years, rappers up to and including Drake had bloated their releases past any sense of decency or discretion.
In truth, Culture II contains plenty of acrobatic rapping and buoyant absurdity, though much of this is buried in the data-dump onslaught. So it was fair to be skeptical when a follow-up, Culture III, was announced—a 19-song, 75-minute tome including not only a mediocre collaboration with the Baton Rouge rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, which would be 13 months old by the album’s street date, but features from two recently deceased rappers, Chicago’s Juice WRLD and Brooklyn’s Pop Smoke. Fortunately, those latter two collaborations are executed with a respectful touch. (The Juice WRLD song, “Antisocial,” meets the young rapper on his bleeding-heart level, and “Light it Up” is a wholescale attempt to integrate the Migos’ style into the Brooklyn drill sound that Pop Smoke and his go-to producer, 808Melo, helped codify.)
More importantly, both songs reflect what made the Migos exhilarating when they debuted, and durable over the long run: a playfulness that invites experimentation and an underlying earnestness that balances the trio’s goofier, more outre cuts. Like its predecessor, Culture III can become a slog, and at times seems shoddily constructed, its commercial ambitions ill-considered and to the album’s detriment. It’s also girded by songs that recall the Migos’ inspired peak—and a couple that rank among their best.
There are a handful of frustrating misfires. The Justin Bieber-assisted “What You See” is the worst song across any of the three Culture installments, an insipid bit of mopey bullshit, though it’s Culture III’s other foray into Canada that threatens to derail the record before it truly begins. Its second song, “Having Our Way,” cedes its first two and a half minutes to a half-formed hook and verse from Drake, a turn so drab and interminable that it suggests a stolen thumb drive more than an album sequenced by humans. That early lapse is mirrored toward the album’s end, with a four-song stretch (beginning with “Why Not” and continuing through “Time for Me”) that should have been excised entirely.
And yet, what “Having Our Way” and that B-side suite bracket is consistently, sometimes deliriously fun. Take “Jane,” a song whose hook is simply Takeoff rapping “She want a Birkin/I told her ‘Work it’” eight times, recalling the group’s hypnotic beginnings (their 2013 breakthrough mixtape hinges on songs where a single word or phrase—“China Town,” “Versace,” “Hannah Montana”—gets repeated to the point of abstraction). The Future collaboration, “Picasso,” is the most invigorated he has sounded since his January 2019 album The Wizrd, and the eerily metronomic “Modern Day” imagines a club walkthrough as something more sinister. That sense of abandon underscores much of the album’s middle: Despite being one of the more famous acts in pop music over the past decade, with at least Quavo and Offset verging on genuine solo stardom, verses here are often preceded by an ad-lib announcing the next rapper’s name, as if they were eager emerging artists and/or beamed in from 1986.
In the time since Y.R.N., the Migos’ vocal style—that staccato, triplet flow repurposed from old Memphis records—passed into, then out of vogue. The rap records that dominated the late 2010s and early 2020s in Atlanta, and by consequence on national radio, have taken a softer shape. And so, despite their ability to chart at will, the group has been pushed slightly from the genre’s center and recast as technical specialists. (The comparisons to Das EFX were unfair to both Migos and Das EFX, but you can see why they were made.) This suits them. Quavo did not become the breakout star some predicted after “Versace,” but when he barrels into a song the way he does halfway through the Polo G collaboration “Malibu,” he is a revelation: precise but with some bend to his voice, tightly wound but threatening to unspool into something more melodic. As industry reporting goes, the Migos make for dull work. But inside the clumsy, clamshell packaging, there’s still something singular enough to purchase.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown | June 16, 2021 | 6.9 | c387479a-2954-41c8-9579-93b928f94a23 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The new album from pop balladeer Jilian Medford unwinds the emotional pressure, leaning into high-adrenaline hooks and poignant moments of self-reflection. | The new album from pop balladeer Jilian Medford unwinds the emotional pressure, leaning into high-adrenaline hooks and poignant moments of self-reflection. | IAN SWEET: Sucker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-sweet-sucker/ | Sucker | Ian Sweet’s new album, Sucker, opens with mortal fear. “What if I die?” Jilian Medford wonders; after a piano chord rings out for a moment, she continues: She’s afraid she’ll pass “with this song in my head,” that she’ll “never get to sing it.” Medford is no stranger to high-stakes songwriting: She wrote most of 2021’s ambitious and emotionally rich Show Me How You Disappear after spending two months in an intensive outpatient mental health program. Writing that record, Medford told Rolling Stone, was a process of “sifting through the weeds, grasping onto things, like, ‘I hope this lyric will help me literally to survive.’”
But despite its opening lines, Sucker doesn’t reprise that make-or-break intensity. Instead, Medford dials down the pressure, turning her attention to more mundane crises: letting herself fall for someone who will probably break her heart; the quiet aftermath of a breakup; cutting her bangs even though she swore she wouldn’t. Retaining her commitment to emotional transparency, she leans into high-adrenaline hooks and poignant self-reflection with confidence and grit.
Medford produced the record alongside Alex Craig and Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger, working at an artists’ residency at the Outlier Inn, a Catskill Mountains establishment where 24-hour studio access offered them space for experimentation and spontaneity. The songs are tightly constructed, but don’t feel buttoned-up; even when they deal with bruising emotions, there’s a current of lightheartedness and fun. The propulsive and fuzzy “Your Spit” reflects on the doubt that accompanies new relationships, but it’s also just about the thrill of making out. Her voice, which starts near a whisper, becomes a shriek of joy when the big synths kick in.
“Emergency Contact” and “Sucker,” with their shoegaze guitars and catchy hooks, are a deft synthesis of Ian Sweet’s indie rock beginnings and Medford’s playful pop instincts. Across the album, she tweaks a classic quiet-loud recipe just enough that songs like “Smoking Again” and “Your Spit,” with all their swerves and eruptions, feel like joyrides. Towards the back half, that catharsis can verge on predictable, but smart production flourishes—the creaky synth line on “Clean,” the corroded climax of “Hard”—continually push the music into stranger, more inventive territory.
Medford grounds her lyrics in memorable, off-kilter specificity: the melodic hum of power lines during a long drive, the salty taste of a kiss, an ex who always misspelled her name (“Two Ls when there’s only one/And a G instead of a J”). She takes herself to task, copping to mistakes with a self-deprecating wink. “I run my mouth/Like I run away/From everything,” she sings on the understated “Comeback.” When romantic trouble arises, she’ll say she had it coming. “I’m a sucker for the pain/And heartbreak,” she admits on the title track. If Show Me How You Disappear was a testament to perseverance and self-reliance in tremendously challenging times, Sucker is evidence that those skills still enrich us even when circumstances aren’t so dire. There’s palpable joy in the songs’ anthemic structures and Medford’s bright, confident delivery, even though there are reminders that this self-awareness was hard-won. Medford makes the crying and bleeding sound fortifying nonetheless. “It’s just a cut,” she sings on “Clean,” “and baby, I’m tough.” | 2023-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | November 8, 2023 | 7.3 | c38ab3ef-bf75-4233-bd85-6e7c56d5fd1c | Marissa Lorusso | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/ | |
With a persona modeled after Eminem’s, the Michigan-born star of Christian rap recently notched his second No. 1 album. But to most of the secular world, he’s a ghost. | With a persona modeled after Eminem’s, the Michigan-born star of Christian rap recently notched his second No. 1 album. But to most of the secular world, he’s a ghost. | NF: The Search | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nf-the-search/ | The Search | While most of the hip-hop universe spent last week breathlessly debating Chance the Rapper’s event album The Big Day, that record was quietly outsold by an act almost completely off the radar of the general public: Michigan rapper NF, whose The Search became his second consecutive No. 1 album. NF has cemented himself as the biggest Christian rap star since Lecrae, and yet even with a No. 1 pop song under his belt—his sentimental 2017 crossover hit “Let You Down”—he’s a ghost to most of the secular world. Rap radio doesn’t play him. The music press barely acknowledges him.
It’s no mystery where NF’s following comes from. He’s a lyrical, white, and Christian rapper in an industry where all three identities can provide a fast track to a devoted audience. It doesn’t hurt that he models himself after perhaps the most successful white rapper of all time: Eminem, whose brooding persona and twisty delivery NF copies with the reverence of a 16th-century Japanese painter replicating the masters. Like Eminem, NF draws from his traumatic childhood, never shying from ugly thoughts or inner demons. And like Eminem, he’s from the technical school of rap, where the height of artistry is cramming as many syllables and as much internal rhyme into each bar as possible, nuance be damned. The only real daylight between the two is that NF doesn’t swear.
NF also shares Eminem’s shrillness and distorted sense of volume, rapping like he’s putting on the world’s loudest Punch and Judy show. He spends much of The Search darting in and out of an overbearing rappity-rap snarl-yell that can cut right through you if you don’t relate to his roiling anger. “Last year I felt suicidal, this year I might do something different like talking to God more,” he roars on “Change,” as the track unleashes sheets of Imagine Dragons-esque thunder, swelling like a gospel song. Later, “I Miss the Days” makes the gospel connection explicit with an actual choir.
The Search is a dark record. NF may be a Christian rapper, but his primary muse is misery, not faith, and although he uses too many words, he doesn’t mince them: His struggles with mental illness are life-threatening. On “Hate Myself,” he pictures himself in hell, where he belittles his own corpse: “You ain’t nothin’ but poor and weak.” On “Leave Me Alone,” he’s undone by obsessive-compulsive thoughts, like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. And on “Like This,” “Trauma,” and a few other somber tracks where he isn’t scream-rapping, NF begins to sound less like Eminem and more like Mac Miller circa Swimming, maybe the last major rap record that was this blunt about its creator’s longing to escape his suffering.
And like Swimming, listening to The Search induces a feeling of powerlessness: How are we supposed to respond to an album that often reads like a suicide note? At least some listeners are finding comfort in this music. On a Reddit forum dedicated to the rapper, a small community of fans post about how seen and comforted NF makes them feel, sharing hopeful memes and heartfelt testimonials. If nothing else, it’s a relief to see that something constructive has come from his pain. But the considerable chunk of the listening public that remains unaware of NF’s music may want to stay that way. The Search is an unpleasant ride.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | NFREALMUSIC / Caroline | August 10, 2019 | 4 | c38d59d9-5aca-430a-ab5b-9af07278d18f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Ambient music is about the creation of aural environments, and one of the most popular constructions is the womb. The ... | Ambient music is about the creation of aural environments, and one of the most popular constructions is the womb. The ... | Loscil: Submers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4867-submers/ | Submers | Ambient music is about the creation of aural environments, and one of the most popular constructions is the womb. The womb is the place where we all imagine ourselves at peace and feeling good. Your body floats in warm, liquid space, and your senses are at rest. If you could experience light in the womb, it would only be the dimmest flesh-colored glow. Maybe your folks pump the Raymond Scott records and the Mozart into your Mom's belly, but the only thing you hear are soft, indistinct noises run through a low-pass filter. A friend of mind used to drink cup after cup of TheraFlu when nursing a hangover. He claimed the medicine put a five-inch thick layer of warm cotton between him and the world. And that's how I imagine the womb: A tuned-out heaven perfect for dreaming.
With Submers, Vancouver-based artist Loscil (Scott Morgan) practices the art of the aural womb. This is music without sharp edges. The synth textures are warm, deep and viscous as amniotic fluid, and like Wolfgang Voigt's legendary Gas project, Loscil knows that you can't live inside the body of another without hearing a distant heartbeat. So a delicate 4/4 thump drifts in on occasion to remind us of the source of this safe and wonderful place. Calling Submers "The Best Album to Fall Asleep to in 2002" (it came out late last year) might seem like a backhanded compliment, but this is seriously gorgeous stuff that just happens to be the right sort of thing for drifting into another consciousness.
Submers has a concept: All of the tracks are named for submarines. And if "womb-like" is one apt description for Submers, "aquatic" is another. In additional to sounding a bit like Gas, Loscil also reminds me of Japanese ambient collective Neina in his focus on textures so complicated and detailed they can pass for nature. The drones in "Argonaut I" are piled at least four layers high, enough to get lost in, as a glowing edge of higher pitched sound twists around something deeper and harder to fathom. "Gymote" adds the slightest wisp of static and gentle, almost bell-like tones as rhythmic accompaniment, and then sends the whole thing on its way with a speedy, steady bass drum. "Diable Martin" has a similarly quick pace, but something about the distance of the thump makes tempo matter little. It still feels like a drone, even if the BMP is technically over 100. "Diable Martin" has a few other techno bits to it, a quivering synth sequence and light taps of percussion, though these elements don't disturb the reverie.
But the delicate touches are what really make it. The unsteady drone in "Resurgam" is fragile as hot glass blown to its bursting point, such a beautiful sound that could possibly fall apart at any moment. "Triton" adds the slightest bit of tension and dub undercurrents, along with a ghost of an orchestral sweep, and though it seems less tied to the theme it's one of the best tracks here. Finally, "Kursk", a tribute to the lost Russian sub, ends the album on an ominous tone, with the kind of mid-bass cello-like drones that Stars of the Lid dream about. Then comes silence. It's time to open your eyes, walk slowly to the CD player, and press "play" again. | 2003-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kranky | February 11, 2003 | 8 | c39246f5-974c-41c3-bb2e-40e078928dd6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The here-then-gone-again collaborative Gucci/Future mixtape *Free Bricks 2 *is the sound of two superlative talents working without boundaries. | The here-then-gone-again collaborative Gucci/Future mixtape *Free Bricks 2 *is the sound of two superlative talents working without boundaries. | Gucci Mane / Future: Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22647-free-bricks-2-zone-6-edition/ | Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition | It’s not clear whether Free Bricks 2: Zone 6 Edition is supposed to exist. Future and Gucci Mane’s new six-song exercise has been scrubbed from the Soundcloud page that birthed it and left to kick around in inconspicuous tracks bundles or in the YouTube ether. It came with no warning and left with little fanfare, a nineteen-minute exhale from two of the most visible and, probably, overworked rappers in the world. Unless one of these songs pops off under new packaging, Free Bricks 2 is probably going to come and go (The Return of East Atlanta Santa in stores December 16). Which is a shame, because Free Bricks 2 is pretty potent dose of what makes Future and Gucci Mane so magnetic.
Written and recorded in less than 24 hours, the sequel to 2011’s Free Bricks is fresh to a fault, with a few cadences that could have been smoothed out, a few points where Gucci still sounds as if he’s getting his post-prison footing. (Speaking of timeliness and Terre Haute, an otherwise unmemorable line about Monica Lewinsky from opener “RR Trucks” sticks in your brain because of Gucci’s heart-wrenching get out the vote speech from earlier this month.) Also endearing: two cult heroes decide to open their new record with a song about maybe, at some indeterminate point in the future, buying a new car they’ve heard about.
“Selling Heroin,” which Southside furnishes with a beautiful bounce is, decidedly, a Gucci Mane song. This proves to be a freeing thing for Future. Since Honest was received coolly by his hardcore fanbase, the preposterously good-looking Atlantan has retreated to his wheelhouse. The career-defining run that began on Monster, became codified on 56 Nights, and culminated with last July’s DS2 was built almost exclusively on songs that forewent the joy or R&B experimentation of his first two LPs. Here, Future comes unhinged just a little; most importantly, he sounds like he’s having fun.
As for Gucci, he’s been on a slow ramp up since his release from custody. This summer’s Everybody Looking was solid, but would have been unremarkable if it came out during his storied mixtape run; last month’s Woptober has more world-class rapping than its predecessor, but no songs that will significantly alter the Gucci canon. While his pen seems mostly intact, the Zone 6 legend can’t quite find the right vocal register, what with the massive weight loss and newfound sobriety. This is likely to be sorted out soon, but in the meantime there are moments when he sounds like he’s searching. There are also brief passages where Gucci’s vocals come unmoored from the beat in a way his more laconic early-Obama self seldom did.
But Gucci finds the pocket frequently on Free Bricks 2, and the result is always a joy. On “Die a Gangsta,” he raps: “They call me East Atlanta Santa, I’ma fuck up the profit/I’m the Grinch that stole Christmas, I might go in your stocking/I’m talking, too cocky, I got so much juice/My wrist is too rocky, they done let Wop loose.” Even if Future’s cool disaffect is en vogue, Gucci is the record’s emotional center, and when he’s booking luxe hotel room penthouses for shooters or buying his sixteenth Bentley, he’s the only rapper in the world you want to listen to. That’s the insane gravitational pull that Gucci’s somehow managed to harness: when he’s on, not only is he endlessly listenable, he renders his fiercest competition an afterthought.
Free Bricks 2 benefits from a superb production lineup—Southside and Metro Boomin split duties, except for when they pass the baton to Zaytoven, who’s played a crucial role in ushering each rapper into the limelight. Zay helms “Kind a Dope,” the record’s highlight, where Gucci channels Ridin’ Dirty and raps, “When you was playing basketball, man, I was playing Pimp C.” This little piece of Gucci's legacy is forgotten, and it’s the crux of why a tape like this can be so impressive; even if Future and Gucci Mane are cast as instinctive, impulsive savants, each is drawing on a wealth of musical knowledge that informs their work. Free Bricks 2 will likely get lost in the shuffle, but it’s the sound of two superlative talents working without boundaries. | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 23, 2016 | 6.9 | c3936d8f-84cb-448b-9863-34aeb6958f43 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
L.A. singer-songwriter Shannon Lay’s new album is a work of plainspoken mysticism that goes to the small, bright truth of things, showcasing her unusual songwriting and quietly commanding voice. | L.A. singer-songwriter Shannon Lay’s new album is a work of plainspoken mysticism that goes to the small, bright truth of things, showcasing her unusual songwriting and quietly commanding voice. | Shannon Lay : Living Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannon-lay-living-water/ | Living Water | A plainspoken mysticism rules heaven and earth on Shannon Lay’s remarkable Living Water, a quiet, mostly acoustic album that is bigger and stranger than its hushed dynamics and finger-picked sparkle might suggest. Crack open the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s unassuming lyrics and you’ll find pearls of unconventional folk wisdom scattered throughout. “All it is,” she sings on “Orange Tree,” an early highlight, “is simple small and true/You and all connected at the root.” In “Caterpillar,” she contemplates the oceanic dimensions of a life force that “either creates destroys or delivers.” She has a tendency, when grappling with the Big Questions, to follow her train of thought to a place where sung or spoken meter can’t quite keep up (“Life is like the sea/Ever changing in itself and in all of its surroundings”), but what might look chaotic on the page flows as naturally as water when she sings. The sweetness of her voice, with its faint vibrato, along with a trace of placeless accent the Redondo Beach native might have picked up from listening to folk singers from across the Atlantic, smooths her words as they tumble out. She’s best when she goes straight to the small, bright truth of things: “We ask the sky when the answers are right below our feet”; “Life is confusing and we are asleep.”
Lay’s sound is not a novel proposition. You can hear affinities with a number of acoustically tinged projects of recent years—Julie Byrne, Big Thief, the Angel Olsen of Half Way Home, as well as a wide range of canonical singer-songwriters: Elliott Smith, Karen Dalton, Nico, Nick Drake. Lay also plays in a garage-punk band, Feels, but there are no echoes of their fuzzy ferocity here. Solo, she sings soft, often melancholy songs accompanied by her own acoustic guitar; a few songs on Living Water feature violin and cello, and there are hints of standup bass in the mix. But her captivating music is distinctive in ways that are hard to put your finger on.
The album was recorded by the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, who also worked on Half Way Home. And instead of the watery reverb of Lay’s debut, All this life goin down, or the close confines of her demo collection, Holy Heartache, he has opted for stark, wide-open atmospheres aching with empty space. (Though Lay’s official debut came out earlier this year, this feels like her de facto introduction to the world, thanks in part to the efforts of Kevin Morby, who is releasing the album on his new Mare imprint, a sub-label of Woodsist.) With few bells or whistles and little studio trickery, the recording puts a primacy on her unusual songwriting and her quietly commanding voice.
The haunting opener “Home” offers a good glimpse of what makes Lay’s music special. A thin stripe of violin sets the scene; chiming open fifths move in parallel against a steady, finger-picked ostinato. That repetition, combined with unexpected shifts between minor and major, has a way of bedeviling the usual verse/chorus structures. (She has a knack for forms that leave you feeling slightly off balance without quite knowing why: Another song, “Orange Tree,” is in 6/8 time but is structured in 10-bar phrases.) “Home” is about feeling lost and trapped, yet her chord progressions move as unfettered as weather. She’s not a powerfully melodic singer; she tends to mull over the same notes, alternating high, clear tones with careful melisma. But she is expressive in her dynamics, sliding from forceful to hesitant within the space of a few lines, and the zip of her fingers against the strings accentuates the faintly breathy edge of her voice. It’s a strong choice for an opening statement. It’s unsettling; it leaves you slightly on edge.
She has more dulcet modes. “Always Room” could almost be a children’s lullaby, though its whimsical opening refrain—”There’s always room for a little more/And there’s always reason for a little less”—might puzzle even adult ears; I hear it as a kind of bargain struck between frivolity and frugality, pleasure and sense. “The Moons Detriment” is bright-eyed and hopeful, a song about a love that surges “Like an eager new river channel”; “The Search for Gold,” another near-lullaby, promises rebirth “in the grass of a warm summer night.” The image is so sweet, it’s easy to miss the way the next line (“Good and evil through and through”) falls like a shadow over her moonlit reverie.
Those shadows are never far from even her most tranquil songs. The nostalgic “Asa” cradles the hope that our best days are not behind us; the dirge-like “Coast” is as turbulent as the conflicted emotions that shape its churning drums and electric feedback. When she wants to, she can be straight-up heartbreaking. On “Recording 15,” she addresses a loved one who is far away—estranged, abroad, maybe dead. “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” she pleads, and then she strikes a nerve so raw, it chills: “I have lived without your touch/For so long that it fades from my memory/I’m so hungry for your touch.” An unflinching portrait of loneliness and desire, it is the most direct of all Living Water’s songs, and also the album’s most unsparing emotional gut-punch.
It’s a testament to her restraint that even here, bittersweet never turns maudlin or morose. And maybe it’s a testament to her spirit, too: Living Water is shot through with a kind of ragged hope—not optimism, exactly, but a determined belief in the power of that life force to pull us all toward something like transcendence. It’s there in “Orange Tree,” in the image of the singer finding answers right beneath her feet; it’s there in the title track, an almost animistic snapshot of the Southwestern landscape, where “living water” brings both destruction and salvation. And it’s there in the staggeringly beautiful country blues of “Come Together”: “There’s so much pain dwelling within us all/Don’t go spreading yours around/Oh lord knows/We all have enough,” she sings, in what is one of the record’s truest and most resonant lines.
Then a startling thing happens. An electric counterpoint explodes into the frame and her voice fractures into joyous multi-part harmony: “Come on, shake your broken shoulders/Come on, move your broken shoes.” A life-affirming celebration of the wounds we all wear, it perfectly exemplifies Living Water’s seductively deceptive form. Like a late-summer sky the color of robin’s eggs, the album’s outward simplicity masks the vastness of what lies behind. | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Woodsist / Mare | September 25, 2017 | 7.8 | c39f8371-c95c-4599-8cf2-e2227d3b1594 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Radiohead offshoot’s new live album is both an unexpected treat and a flex, proving the trio can replicate its gnarliest, most thrilling material onstage and sans studio trickery. | The Radiohead offshoot’s new live album is both an unexpected treat and a flex, proving the trio can replicate its gnarliest, most thrilling material onstage and sans studio trickery. | The Smile: The Smile (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, July 2022) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smile-live-at-montreux-jazz-festival-july-2022/ | The Smile (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, July 2022) | Some live albums arrive in the thick of a band’s imperial phase and feel like a victory lap. Others are transparent cash-ins (you know who you are). The best ones serve as historic artifacts, commemorating a gig of rare significance: a star-studded farewell concert, say, or an extraordinary songwriter exorcising private grief in a public forum.
The Smile’s new live album does not fit these categories. It’s more like a proof of concept, a flex. See? it tells you. It’s not studio trickery. These three blokes really can replicate this stuff live. Indeed, the band lock in to the wobbly 7/8 meter of “Pana-Vision,” recreate the wooly, tablature-resistant riffs of “Thin Thing,” and nail the careening intensity of “You Will Never Work in Television Again” (here rendered at a more breakneck pace) without breaking a sweat.
Comprising Radiohead veterans Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood alongside Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, the Smile emerged as 2022’s little supergroup that could. While Radiohead have long been ambivalent about the live album format, giving us just one (2001’s I Might Be Wrong) across a 30-year recording career, the Smile operate differently. Seven months after its excellent studio debut, A Light for Attracting Attention, the trio released its set (or part of it, at least) from last summer’s Montreux Jazz Festival.
Since the beginning, the Smile have been dogged by an eminently reasonable question: How is this not just two Radioheads stacked in a trench coat? The answer is right there in the title of this release: This band plays jazz, see. They play at jazz festivals and have a jazz drummer. They recorded this live album at the long-running Swiss festival, just like Miles Davis and Nina Simone once did. They’re only one degree of separation from the legendary Impulse! Records.
These eight songs—all from their studio debut—don’t sound drastically different here, but Yorke and Greenwood seem invigorated by their drummer’s jazz pedigree. On the elegiac “Speech Bubbles,” Greenwood achieves the herculean task of plucking a harp with one hand while playing keyboard with the other, embellishing the song with an anarchic piano solo that faintly echoes the mother of all anarchic piano solos, “Aladdin Sane.” On “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” they are joined by saxophonist Robert Stillman, whose shrieking accompaniment lurches towards a punk-jazz hybrid that’s more Nation of Ulysses than “The National Anthem.”
Greenwood, as ever, brings new meaning to the word multi-instrumentalist; you may need video accompaniment to appreciate his mid-song leaps from piano to bass to manipulating said bass with a bow during “Free in the Knowledge.” On A Light for Attracting Attention, that haunting lullabye to self-delusion and “A Hairdryer” were two distinct tracks. In this performance, they are conjoined by an extended avant-noise segue, a fine overture for a rendition of “A Hairdryer” that’s sharper edged and more kinetic than the studio version by far. With Yorke on gloriously fuzzed-out guitar and Skinner unleashing a torrent of pitter-patter syncopations, it’s like the evil stepchild of “Optimistic.”
It’s a Radiohead tradition to test-run new material on tour, sometimes years or decades before properly releasing it. (Recall the embryonic “True Love Waits” that appeared on I Might Be Wrong.) With just one album to their name, the Smile have embraced this tradition by necessity. At Montreux, the group performed four new songs, including a woozy slow-burner called “Bending Hectic,” which Yorke claimed to have completed half an hour earlier.
Disappointingly, this live release omits the new songs. Perhaps Yorke and co. view them as works in progress. At 35 minutes, it’s more a sampler than a full set—essentially a bonus feature for one of the year’s finest rock albums. You already know that these three musicians have forged a thrilling chemistry amidst the chaos of the pandemic. That this live album exists indicates that they know it, too. | 2022-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | XL | December 28, 2022 | 8 | c3a02a1c-833e-4c99-9fff-10012395ab5c | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson’s debut as Plains sends it back to the ’90s with a thoughtful, personalized interpretation of old-school country-pop. | Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson’s debut as Plains sends it back to the ’90s with a thoughtful, personalized interpretation of old-school country-pop. | Plains: I Walked With You a Ways | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/plains-i-walked-with-you-a-ways/ | I Walked With You a Ways | Maybe the term “’90s country” means nothing to you; maybe it invokes your entire musical upbringing. Whatever the case may be, that decade of country music—which encompassed everything from the exquisite Car Wheels on a Gravel Road to the novelty “Achy Breaky Heart”—is often looked back at nowadays with heavy sentimentality by those who remember it, a rose-tinted counterpoint to the slick, snap-track country-pop that’s become Nashville’s cash cow. The biggest stars of that era—Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, Martina McBride —were able to meld three-chords-and-the-truth narratives with big-stadium affability on a scale that hasn’t been replicated since. It was also a time before country music was burdened by post-9/11 jingoism, and when the industry arguably made greater strides towards gender parity than it does today—all compelling reasons to ache for its return. “Why don’t we all just start putting our ’80s and ’90s records on and let’s figure out, what is country music?” Kelly Clarkson declared in a 2019 slam against modern country radio. “What is the sound we like again?”
You could do worse than to ask Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson, daughters of Alabama and Texas, respectively. Their new album, I Walked With You a Ways, their first as the duo Plains, is not an exact pastiche of Trisha or Shania or any of the other women who commandeered country airwaves while Crutchfield and Williamson were young. Nor is it a vague homage to those artists, either; this is a thoughtful, personalized interpretation of old-school country-pop that only two musicians intimately familiar with its sounds and sensibilities could produce. “We came back to it almost inevitably—like, it’s in us,” Williamson has said. I Walked With You a Ways is a nostalgic yet clear-eyed endeavor, rife with wistful memories and fresh starts. The fact that both members of Plains began their careers running away from these roots, making their names as indie acts before circling back to something folksier during the pandemic (Crutchfield with Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud, Williamson with Sorceress), only deepens this album’s feeling of homecoming.
Produced by Brad Cook, who also assisted Crutchfield on Saint Cloud, the songs take on the same graceful warmth and sauntering pace. The two singers trade lead vocals and songwriting credits, linking the two halves together through their splendid harmonizing. A track like “Hurricane” might’ve fit well on Saint Cloud as another one of Crutchfield’s methodical, solitary musings on incongruous relationships, but paired with Williamson’s backing vocals, it takes on a new level of grandeur. Conversely, Cook’s production strips back the polished reverb and glittering embellishments that Williamson utilized on Sorceress. Her twang is on full display here, wringing sorrow out of the album’s centerpiece weeper, “Abilene,” and fitting right into the tradition of crystalline country vocalists of Dolly Parton and Margo Price. It makes you wonder why she hasn’t been singing like this for longer.
In Crutchfield and Williamson’s world, breakups are a fact of life, as commonplace and mundanely tragic as the rundown gas stations on a two-lane highway. Their songwriting is more direct than their past work, favoring simpler phrases and evocative still lifes (pink carnations, a cigarette butt in a potted plant). But both artists still relish a circuitous way of storytelling, drawing out a single moment of revelation across a whole song. Take “Summer Sun,” where Williamson offers a meandering apology to someone she dated while old wounds were still fresh: “You had no reason to be afraid that my heart was hidden behind a wall that came before you.” Across her songs, Crutchfield advocates for a partner to rise to her high standards, calling them out on their avoidance and dishing out hard-earned sage advice. “You know you can’t lose a fight if you take cover or abandon it,” she intones, not unkindly, on “Easy.” They make space for the disappointment and heartache while keeping empathy for whoever’s on the other end.
Like all albums birthed out of a particular music fascination, the influences on I Walked With You a Ways are widespread and a joy to uncover with each listen. “Line of Sight,” with its wandering dobro and humming Wurlitzer piano, recalls the Chicks both in their ’90s heyday and their darker, alt-pop turn on 2006’s Taking the Long Way. Williamson covers “Bellafatima,” by contemporary Texas singer-songwriter Hoyt Van Tanner, and transforms it into a waltz that sounds as old as the prairie itself, the kind that Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt might have included on their pair of Trio albums. These callbacks are subtle enough to never upstage the main heartlines running through the album; a mournful guitar solo might sneak in for a moment between chorus and second verse, or an organ might take up a call-and-response melody on “No Record of Wrongs,” only to fade back into the cozy backdrop of acoustic strings and drum brushes.
Outside of the mainstream, more artists as of late have donned their cowboy hats and done their best spin on vintage Americana. Call it the Spotify Indigo breed of country, if you must. Cult favorites like Price, Tyler Childers, and Sturgill Simpson imbue their traditionalist leanings with an anti-authoritarian streak. Others, like Orville Peck or the “Merle Haggard with a Pax” outlaw Dougie Poole, tap into gimmicky yet sincere subversions of a modern country star’s subject matter. Plains, by comparison, feels much less weighty, a logical conclusion to two girls who wore out CDs by Deana Carter and the Judds. Country has been their guiding north star, and it’s a privilege to finally get to see it shine. | 2022-10-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | October 19, 2022 | 8 | c3ad7e9e-c137-4f93-9c67-4b0af310f1bb | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP. | A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP. | Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors / There Is No Beginning to the Story EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16532-bright-eyes-fevers-mirrors-there-is-no-beginning-to-the-story-ep/ | Fevers and Mirrors / There Is No Beginning to the Story EP | No album we review here is exempt from getting a numerical score, so just believe me when I say I did the best I could up there. Because isn't Fevers and Mirrors ultimately critic-proof? After all, while reviewing it 12 years ago for Pitchfork, Taylor M. Clark questioned whether Conor Oberst's mortal frame could withstand his all-consuming ambition, called the vocals "hypothermic," and debated whether the record was more narcissistic or solipsistic. I actually agree with him-- I just also happen to think those are some of Fevers and Mirrors' most uniquely compelling qualities. And how can you account for the emotional attachment listeners have to this thing? The symbolic significance of Fevers and Mirrors' title boils down to how, in self-reflection, we reveal only the ailments which we project. And if this is somehow your first experience with Bright Eyes, I'd suggest you take a gander at songmeanings.net, where the dozen songs here are among the most commented-upon in the site's archives. This thing causes our internal mirrors to reflect some fucked-up fevers.
As such, there's the temptation to use this, the culmination of Saddle Creek's reissue of Oberst's earliest Bright Eyes material, as a review of memories rather than music. The worry is that this will somehow be ineffective without my giving you a couple of Facebook pages of girls I knew in college and my scratched CD which skipped about two minutes into "A Song to Pass the Time". But, nah. Fevers and Mirrors isn't degraded from being removed from the bullshit of your youth, and in any context it's a tremendous record that is "critic-proof" in the same way Violent Femmes, Pinkerton, and, yes, the Smiths are. Scoff if you must, but let me ask you this: How many people do you know got into Morrissey as teens? Okay, now how many got started in their 30s?
That said, Oberst and I are the same age and neither of us has outgrown Fevers and Mirrors: On his end, you'll never hear a live performance of "The Calendar Hung Itself…" as something done out of obligation. And in light of recent releases as divergent as Death Grips' The Money Store and Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I've come to understand Fevers and Mirrors' magnetism as an example of how I'm drawn to records where something really feels like it's at stake, records that sound unstable. That's certainly the case here. Up to this point, Oberst had released some decent material culminating in Letting Off the Happiness (his On Avery Island to Fevers' In the Aeroplane Over the Sea), but beyond that, his work as Commander Venus and solo was mostly notable for the youth of the person who made it. It was all very precocious and little of it stands up now.
Still, in 2000, it put Oberst at the center of concentric, radioactive areas anticipating their impending "moment": oversharing culture, emo, Omaha, Saddle Creek, Bright Eyes. It's here where the weight of being essentially synonymous with Bright Eyes starts to dawn on Oberst, and fortunately for the listener, there was no separation between where he was an artist and as a person. Yes, it's a record about breaking up (that is, if your affections are requited in the first place), unfulfilled dreams, real nightmares, the burden of talent, and the encroaching dread of a future where nothing substantial ever changes within you. All of the things that get judged as #whitepeopleproblems by other white people who apparently had their shit together before they could legally drink. Play Fevers and Mirrors for someone who served in a war or underwent a serious medical procedure, and they'd probably tell Oberst to snap out of it. Indeed, you learn later in your years that, as Morrissey put it, "there are worse things in life than never being someone's sweetie," but in the thrall of Fevers, sometimes these are the kind of things that do feel like the end of the world for at least an hour.
Focus on his imperfect pitch, and, yes, Oberst isn't a technically proficient singer. But on Fevers, he became remarkable at controlling how he wants to express himself while appearing no more capable of controlling what he's feeling than he is the sun-- another symbol used throughout Mirrors, mostly envied for the pathetic predictability of its rise and fall. Like many of his LPs that would follow, Fevers begins with a very long and quiet solo performance overlain by sampled dialogue, and within five minutes, Oberst has no idea why he's even bothering, heavily sighing through one of the many perfect syntheses of thought and tone: "Once the page of a calendar turns it's no more/ So tell me then what was it for?" This demonstration of nihilism is short-lived obviously, and the rest of Fevers is spent purposefully thrashing within the straitjacket of one's self.
It's unfairly criticized as one-note whining, but on the contrary, Fevers is a record where seemingly every form of self-loathing is in play. It starts immediately after Oberst's premature epitaph with "The Calendar Hung Itself…", a streaking, disintegrating comet of emotional immolation. I don't think Oberst ever got as purely angry as he did here, and no matter what vitriol he spewed at the government, the social contract, or an errant lover from there on out, nothing could compare to the hatred he turned on himself. There's a bit of Elliott Smith's plainspoken catatonia on "Something Vague", where Oberst sighs, "now and again, it seems worse than it is/ But mostly the view is accurate." By "Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh", he manages a chuckle at the futility of trusting in another, but sarcasm proves to be a terrible defense mechanism; a friend tells him on the phone, "no, it's just some guy she's been hanging out with/ I don't know, the past couple weeks I guess," and in repeating those words, Oberst's voice cracks with the quiver of a young man having to carry on a conversation as if he's not being slowly robbed of his will to live.
So, absolutely-- Fevers and Mirrors is the kind of record you're meant to commiserate with, or at the very least, let its misery make your own seem kinda manageable. But let's be perfectly clear that there's actual music on this thing too, and rarely is it less than fantastic. Thus far, Oberst's career has been bookended by an ambition to tap into the eternal truth of folk music, and there are vestiges of public-domain melodies that can't help but pour out when using a certain progression: "A Song to Pass the Time" sidles awfully close to "The Gambler", "Something Vague" morphs into a close reading of "No Woman, No Cry". And yet Oberst, his band, and house producer Mike Mogis create something wholly identifiable as a "Saddle Creek sound," testing their capabilities for a deceptively diverse and always engaging sonic experience.
Looking back, what stands out is how little relation it has to emo or just about anything. There is no Fugazi in Bright Eyes, no Sunny Day Real Estate, no punk rock, to be honest. And there's no Bob Dylan either and crucially much less Jeff Mangum than in the past, at least musically. Some songs here ride a single melody for their entirety in service of Oberst's words; others explode into nimble choruses, and the arrangements are every bit as volatile as the narrator: "The Calendar Hung Itself…" moves in lockstep with Oberst's breathless and nervy howling, its Latin churn interrupted by buzzing G-funk synths, clinking percussion, and before its climactic verse, what sounds like Q-bert falling to his death. "Sunrise, Sunset" predates Beirut's fixation with klezmer but finds little comfort in nostalgia, punctuated by distorted pummeling and rupturing Fevers' quieter second half. The opening line of electric piano on "The Movement of a Hand" undergoes subtle mitosis throughout its four minutes, accumulating an unnerving alien beauty as it layers over itself. Though hardly a big-budget affair, Mogis' production sounds absolutely perfect in recreating the scenes set by Oberst's lyrics, warm and tactile but with an unsettling cabin fever effect-- long overdue for this vinyl reissue. Intoning, "this barren land is alive tonight," "Arienette" reimagines the Omaha plains as a claustrophobic hell filled with bloodthirsty predators and paranoid prey, "Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh" mills about a disheveled apartment, "When the Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass" bangs at a piano in drunken disgust. Like many other teen headphone symphonies, from Dark Side of the Moon to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Fevers and Mirrors is a world unto itself, even if it just happens to be a somewhat large city stuck in the middle of Nebraska.
While we're on the subject of how Fevers creates its own universe, at this point, we must talk about "An Attempt to Tip the Scales". The song itself is perfectly fine, if one of Fevers' least substantial. Nah, this is all about the radio interview. I debated whether or not to put that in quotes because I think there is value to the fact that some listeners continue to believe it's real. But, spoiler alert: Knowing that the DJ is actually Matt Silcock of labelmates Lullaby for the Working Class and "Conor Oberst" is played by Todd Fink of the Faint rightfully puts it alongside "The $20 Sack Pyramid" and "Welcome to Purple Haze" as one of the funniest skits ever put to tape. The rapport between the sycophantic, unprepared DJ and the pissy, entitled artist gets increasingly more hysterical as it goes along, and for the ease of transcription, I'll quote only the jokes made at Oberst's expense, of which there are many: "My mother drowned one [brother] every year for five consecutive years. They were all named Padraic… they all got one song," "I want people to feel sorry for me. I like the feel of the burn of the audience's eyes on me when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone." It drives home the point that, like most young adults, Oberst can sense the ridiculousness of his own bullshit even while in progress; earlier on "The Center of the World", completely dumbfounded by his own inability to cope with seemingly trivial circumstances, he's left to scream "THIS ISN'T HAPPENING! HAPPENING! HAPPENING!" It bears repeating: on a record often accused of taking itself too seriously, its creator allows his friends to conduct what's basically a five-minute roast. As such, it's the ultimate embodiment of the record's title, holding a mirror up to Oberst's critics who said he needs to get over himself.
The There Is No Beginning to the Story EP is included in this reissue, and it functions less as an appendage to Fevers than a commencement speech on a stage of Oberst's artistic development. In very tangible ways, it sets the stage for Lifted-- for one thing, its title and several lyrics sprinkled throughout are quoted later on, and most obvious is "From a Balance Beam", the first song on There Is No Beginning and one that would also appear on Lifted. Though undoubtedly the work of Conor Oberst, it wouldn't fit on Fevers at all-- the production sounds noticeably more expensive, with Mogis learning how to apply a cool shimmer to mandolins, field snares, and most crucially Oberst's voice. More notably, "From a Balance Beam" is every bit as wordy and fatalistic as what came before, but whether it's the melody (one of the best Oberst has written) or just the breezy ambience, it actually sounds incredibly optimistic.
It's by and large the best thing here, which isn't to say the EP's not worth your time. There Is No Story just can't help but be dwarfed by its immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, it does give insight to the places where Bright Eyes would go in the future-- "Messenger Bird's Song" anticipates the overreaching, tremulous intimacy of I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, while "We Are Free Men" indicates the deeper, more theatrical vocals Oberst would experiment with on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. It also contains seedlings for a couple of melodies he would incidentally reprise. "Loose Leaves" is a rare time where he obscures his words with a distorted microphone, which is a shame as the lyrics point toward an incisive snark that outward-looking records like Cassadaga and The People's Key couldn't quite manage without sounding pedantic. It closes on a Neil Young cover, which is less important for how it's executed than what it meant: Oberst was starting to place himself within the lineage of rock royalty and deal with the expectations that came from outside his immediate group of friends and collaborators. It's the fissure that ultimately separates everything that came before and after for Bright Eyes.
So is Fevers and Mirrors the best Bright Eyes record? Some days I think it is, but the important thing is that Oberst gives you options, and just about everything he's done since-- even the hamfisted political punk of Desaparecidos and the misguided democracy of the Mystic Valley Band-- is at the very least an attempt not to repeat himself. He's become oddly undervalued even if I doubt whether he has another masterpiece in him. Depending on my mood, I prefer the monomaniacal scale of Lifted or the electro-goth narcosis of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, and I get what others see in I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, a record I find to be highly overrated on account of its playing by someone else's rules for once-- it was there where Oberst really attempted to be the "next Dylan" or "next Gram Parsons" rather than the only Conor Oberst. Which is exactly what we got on Fevers and Mirrors, a record steeped in roots, yet wholly of the moment, intelligent but prone to indefensible emotion, a very personal work made amongst talented friends. Most people discover Fevers and Mirrors at a time when they're being bombarded with the canon, and the recognition of something that feels utterly yours instead of received wisdom created a true cult of admirers and imitations who had the same white-light experience as myself: When I first heard Fevers and Mirrors, it sounded exactly like the kind of music I'd want to make. Thankfully, Bright Eyes did it, so I didn't have to. | 2012-04-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 30, 2012 | 9 | c3aee1aa-2d51-4a67-b99a-2f21d3e8de89 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Just as he did for his 1978 film, John Carpenter provides the score for Halloween’s 2018 reboot. But this time, the synths have been cleaned up and dread is occasionally outweighed by winking nostalgia. | Just as he did for his 1978 film, John Carpenter provides the score for Halloween’s 2018 reboot. But this time, the synths have been cleaned up and dread is occasionally outweighed by winking nostalgia. | John Carpenter / Cody Carpenter / Daniel Davies: Halloween: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-carpenter-cody-carpenter-daniel-halloween-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Halloween: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | John Carpenter’s Halloween theme is so terrifying, so instantly iconic, that it makes you forget certain things about the original movie. Like the fact that Michael Myers spends at least a third of the film driving around town slowly in a tan Buick, for example. This is to say nothing of balding shrink Dr. Loomis—lurking in a trench coat and catcalling children from behind the bushes on Halloween night, he disturbed me upon rewatching nearly as much Myers. But those finger-stabbed piano notes burn all of the campiness off of the entire Halloween enterprise. They are ingenious in the way that the movie’s premise—random man in mask murders babysitters for no reason—was ingenious. The movie was a big clean table with only a few well-placed objects on it, and it showed the world what you could do in a horror film with meager resources and a whole lot of taste. Those little piano notes are an entire philosophy of art given marching orders.
Carpenter wouldn’t say such high-flown things about his work, though. Even though his name is on all his movies, he works less like an auteur and more like someone cooking chili for 20 on game day—toss everything we need into the pot, make sure there’s enough. He scored Halloween himself because, he says, “I was the fastest and the cheapest I could get.” He made all the music in three days, working without the benefit of the finished movie to work against, and he often didn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to tune the synthesizers properly.
The new movie, directed by David Gordon Green, is better lit, better acted, scored more richly then the original. There’s a lot more money, and time, to burn on the effort, and you can feel all of that love lavishing itself on the screen. This isn’t a B movie, like the original: It’s a B+ movie. But some of that fine-tuning and focus-sharpening scrapes off the no-budget dirty fuel that the Halloween engine is supposed to run on. The first thing you notice about the new Halloween score, which Carpenter rewrote himself and updated with modern synths and blasts of NIN-style digital guitar, is that the synths are tuned now. That’s right—tuned. Who’s afraid of a goddamned tuned synth? Frankly, the out-of-tune analog synths were better, creepier, more reflective of the movie’s weird insularity. Updated and polished, they sound merely brisk, like Myers is putting some time in on the elliptical in the off-season.
As everyone knows, Jamie Lee Curtis reprises her role as Laurie Strode, the sole survivor of Myers’ original massacre and the first hallowed Final Girl in all of slasher-moviedom. (The other sequels, including the weird and fun Season of the Witch, are jettisoned like a bunch of bodies over a bridge.) Now, Strode is haunted, a doomsday prepper, and Carpenter gives a neat twist to her own theme to suggest her desolation—those iconic three notes, but with mournful chord progressions poured beneath them. There are fun little grace notes like this everywhere in the score, a sign that Carpenter is engaging with his source as eagerly as next-generation director David Gordon Green.
One of the best decisions Carpenter made in the original movie was to leave out music almost entirely—you spent a lot of time just listening to wind in the trees and watching a Steadicam stare at houses. The new movie recreates this woolly blankness, so when the themes do poke through—that icy-needle sonar ping that signals Michael Myers is watching, the little lawn-sprinkler percussion that undercuts the main theme, telling your lizard brain that Myers is on the move—the jolt they give, both nostalgic and dramatic, is more delicious.
A funny side effect of Carpenter’s ubiquity, though, is that even in his most memorable work, he gets a little lost among his many imitators. Forty years on, “John Carpenter horror music” is its own genre tag, its own minor zip code. Listening to his updated score, you don’t come away marveling at how one-of-a-kind his vision is—you mostly catch yourself making mental lists of other John Carpenterish artifacts. The work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the theme to “Stranger Things,” the entire career of AraabMuzik—it can be difficult to remember that you are actually in the presence of an originator.
But that’s fine. Carpenter is working in service to his own nostalgia, and he understands intuitively what his score is here to do. It is not meant to be frightening. It is meant to make you feel warm and fuzzy things about John Carpenter, about the first time you saw the original Halloween. Nostalgia makes for a funny complement to horror, in a way: It reminds you of all the times you felt safe and loved. Horror—or true horror, anyway—is supposed to render you helpless and alone. It’s hard to be terrified when you are grinning in recognition. | 2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 30, 2018 | 7.4 | c3b7124e-23f7-4997-99ad-d0dd11286e5e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Russian producer better known as Buttechno applies his gonzo sonics to psychoactive ambient miniatures and joyfully off-kilter club tracks. | The Russian producer better known as Buttechno applies his gonzo sonics to psychoactive ambient miniatures and joyfully off-kilter club tracks. | Pavel Milyakov / Buttechno: La Maison de la Mort/Minimal Cuts EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pavel-milyakov-buttechno-la-maison-de-la-mortminimal-cuts-ep/ | La Maison de la Mort/Minimal Cuts EP | Buttechno is not a put-on. Despite the seemingly silly handle that Russian producer Pavel Milyakov deploys, the thrilling and exhausting array of tracks he’s dropped since late 2015 is without peer, be it in his home country’s own burgeoning scene or in the electronic music underground at large. Across music for Gost Zvuk, his own Johns Kingdom imprint, the Cititrax label, or Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy’s fashion shows, Milyakov often seems to try his hand at just about everything but techno. He’s liable to careen from screwball electro to lo-fi pop, wicked acid to cartoonish dubstep. Then again, he does drop heart-squeezing techno bangers with the best of them.
La Maison de la Mort emphasizes his minimal ambient side, which will no doubt only bring more comparisons to Aphex Twin. The album’s 16 tracks alight on weird dubs, hushed études, lashing noise, and what could pass for a lost theme from Stalker. The title stems from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem of the same name, which you can hear recited in Russian on the opening track, setting the tone with allusions to cemeteries and the underworld. Milyakov adds just a hint of drone to the piece before it cuts off. “Bolotniy” has a pulse, but the sonics are otherwise skeletal. Milyakov sustains the mood with just a modulated bass and an ungrounded wire’s crackle to serve as a beat, redolent of the work of the late Mika Vainio.
Working with so few elements and instead letting his prowess for electronically manipulating sound come to the fore, Milyakov’s gradually shifting repetitions give the album a psychoactive feel. Long tracks like “Moon Pad” and “Flights” revel in their echo and decay, imparting a sense of melancholia. And while the bubbling arpeggiations and EKG thump of “Synthetics” don’t do much on their own, Milyakov suddenly scribbles feedback across it all like a 2-year-old with a crayon. The slowly-plucked strings of “May Guitar” lead into some slinking static before suddenly dropping us into the razor wire shrieks that comprise “Virus Saw.” But such restraint at times makes the tracks stagnate. “Octa Amb Plucks” gurgles upward and back down, but one might wish that the bits of hi-hat sprinkled in midway through might have taken the track elsewhere.
Milyakov returns to his Buttechno alias for a four-track EP on Anthony Naples’ Incienso label. While minimalism remains the modus operandi, the ends results couldn’t be more different: Minimal Cuts is geared towards the club rather than a desolate interior headspace. Even when making dance fare, Milyakov always keeps some discombobulating quirks in the mix, never quite letting the tracks align with the grid. A chirrup of cheap electronics gives “Rz Bass” a screechy edge to its first half before Buttechno lets the body-jacking groove take over. He dabbles in the squelching frequencies of a 303 for “Orient ACD,” but holds those queasy tones for an extended time, triggering extra drums a hair early. It’s slight but just enough to throw you off. “Dubber Funk” is erected with some scraped guitar bits and globs of bass to ricochet all over the beat. It’s a dub techno track in the Basic Channel vein, but Buttechno pushes the echo and delay to a ludicrous extreme, the peak of the track feeling like a bouncy ball in a hall of mirrors. “Dub Hole Funkin” also uses a sliver of guitar—this time with some wah wah thrown in for added wobbliness—as well as a drum sample clipped too soon and what sounds like exhaling through a straw. No matter the sonic minutiae in his hands, Buttechno pushes them all towards a sense of maximum joy. | 2019-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | January 29, 2019 | 7.4 | c3b80589-f350-4099-9df0-a0878613e4c0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The hyped-up mixtape from the UK rap crew is without narrative and full of static posse cuts, but its production is terrific and it is a respectable capitalization on their rabid fanbase. | The hyped-up mixtape from the UK rap crew is without narrative and full of static posse cuts, but its production is terrific and it is a respectable capitalization on their rabid fanbase. | Section Boyz: Soundcheck | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23114-soundcheck/ | Soundcheck | There’s an energy bursting out the UK rap scene that demands recognition; a swarm of underground producers and hungry MCs spitting furious anger on mixtape after mixtape, propped up without radio play, major label support, or even much recognition from the old guard of grime—just millions and millions of YouTube views.
Now that Stormzy is an (unsigned) household name in the UK and making records with Ed Sheeran, he’s proven that the road to success from the underground doesn’t run through a record label. And the (also unsigned) Section Boyz, his mates from Croydon, have emerged from the same YouTube Coliseum that elevated him to stardom, riding high off their Don’t Panic mixtape and its hit single “Lock Arff” and a high-profile collaboration with Skepta (“#Worst”). And earlier this year, they were blessed with the career Miracle-Gro that is a Drake co-sign, sharing the stage with the World’s #1 Rap Singer at both clubs and arenas in London. So now that they’ve got the mic (and our attention), what do they have to say? Despite the depth of their six-man crew on their latest mixtape, Soundcheck, the answer is surprisingly little.
Of course a seasoned culture vulture like Drake would be attracted to some real-life Top Boys; Section Boyz’s gangsta posture certainly feels authentic, their hood tales of trapping, shooting, and smashing believable enough. But you won’t find a single coherent narrative among the record’s bloated 19-song tracklist, just a string of posse cuts loosely connected by a general theme of thuggishness. As a format, the posse cut generally rewards wordsmiths, eschewing pop structures in favor of a raw platform from which to demonstrate lyrical prowess. But for these lyrical lightweights and their rudimentary rhyme schemes, it’s like skydiving without a chute—their banality laid bare for all to see.
The vocals on Soundcheck, filled with English slang and Caribbean patois colored by thick accents, are distinctively British. But much of the production—pulled from more than a dozen mostly unknown up-and-comers—has more in common with Chicago drill (“Me Too”) or Atlanta trap (“OMDs”) than anything from the UK. And lyrically, Section Boyz are at least as talented as some of those scenes’ more popular mediocre rappers—such as Chief Keef or Lil Yachty—though the cultural divide of the Atlantic ocean may prove too large for them to achieve similar success stateside. That being said, the tape is filled with beats that knock, serving as a showcase for some of the underground's more promising young producers, such as London teen Mikabeats (“Loading”), the production trio HeavyTrackerz (“I Like” and “Mee Too”), and Australia’s Keanu Beats (“Good Stuff”), who just landed a track on the new Migos record Culture.
Soundcheck is at its strongest when the group works within the traditional 140 bpm grime structure, like the rousing “Army,” built from ominous strings laced with automatic gunfire. When considered in the context from which it sprung—the online rap battles between scores of hungry MCs—the mixtape is a respectable capitalization on a rabid fanbase that propped the Section Boyz up as their chosen champions. On its own, it’s considerably less impressive, a hollow tone poem that evokes the spirit of a South London housing estate without stating anything particularly urgent or interesting. It sounds best from the middle of a mosh pit at a club, or blasted through open car windows from a fiberglass-rattling system—any situation in which the beats trump the bars, where getting hyped is paramount. | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 13, 2017 | 6.6 | c3b97835-3e7e-4e74-b4fc-ee2f35c2f098 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
Shapeshifting UK veterans abandon electronics and krautrock for another excursion into trad-rock and garage-blues. | Shapeshifting UK veterans abandon electronics and krautrock for another excursion into trad-rock and garage-blues. | Primal Scream: Riot City Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9082-riot-city-blues/ | Riot City Blues | It's not totally impossible that sometime in the future, some intrepid soul might be able to sing a lyric like "there's no sun in the sky, no love in my life/ Since I lost my baby, all I do is cry" over mandolins and honky-tonk pianos and manage not to sound like a complete dipshit. But chances are that person isn't going to be a white middle-aged British ex-raver rockstar with a fake American accent and an affected garage-rock yelp.
Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie has made a career of stacking genres on top of each other into huge messy glorious piles of acid-house and krautrock and shoegaze and Stooges, and that approach has given us Screamadelica and Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR. But whenever he dips his toe into trad-rock formalism, that adventurous streak dries up right away and mutates into stifled reverence. 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up was the first time he humped the desiccated corpse of garage-blues, and it resulted in Primal Scream's artistic nadir, but it had a certain horn-tinged exuberance and a couple of good hooks.
Riot City Blues, Gillespie's new trad-move, on the other hand, is flat and dead. It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.
"Nitty Gritty" is straight up circa-2003 garage-rock pastiche; it shoots for the Stones and ends up with the Datsuns. "Dolls" is a desperate grab for handclappy glam-rock stomp-sniff hedonism so forced and clumsy that it should be in a Sparks commercial. "Boogie Disease" includes the lyric "I'm the garbage man, I'm the garbage man/ Stick my fingers in your trashcan," which is especially ridiculous because everybody knows British people say "bin." The album is packed to the gills with empty signifiers: yelps and sneers and party-up exhortations, but it's so limp and defeated that it's impossible to hate; you just end up feeling sorry for it instead.
Even in its relatively ok moments, the album fails. The decent forbidding-throb bassline of "When the Bomb Drops" makes me feel bad for Scream bassist Mani, who has now been roped into the second retro-rock disaster of his career after already weathering the Stone Roses' Second Coming. "Country Girl" has a nice little guitar-and-mandolin bite that reminds me of Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene", but it just makes me wish I was listening to "Kerosine". And the six-and-a-half minute breathy monolithic psychedelic-flute drone of "Little Death" reminds me how welcome it is to have Espers around doing this sort of thing without all the cheesed-out garage-rock moans and sneers.
Primal Scream's last album, 2002's Evil Heat, wasn't great, but its scratchy blissed-out electro-clangs yielded a few powerful moments. Gillespie always manages to come up with something interesting when he errs toward hazy rave-casualty fuzz-bombs instead of the blooz-rawk yelps that not even Jack White can pull off properly anymore. After Riot City Blues, someone needs to point a Men In Black memory-eraser at him and make him forget the Mississippi Delta ever existed. | 2006-06-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 6, 2006 | 2.3 | c3c08617-00c0-48c8-92eb-6e803e4737f3 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Subsets and Splits