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This two-disc retrospective touches on several phases of Ghanaian vocalist Pat Thomas' career, pulling highlife, swing jazz, Afrobeat, psychedelic rock, reggae, funk, and disco into his joyful orbit. | This two-disc retrospective touches on several phases of Ghanaian vocalist Pat Thomas' career, pulling highlife, swing jazz, Afrobeat, psychedelic rock, reggae, funk, and disco into his joyful orbit. | Pat Thomas: Coming Home (Original Ghanaian Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1967-1981) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22372-coming-home-original-ghanaian-highlife-afrobeat-classics-1967-1981/ | Coming Home (Original Ghanaian Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1967-1981) | As this compilation gets underway, with the Broadway Dance Band's big-band highlife number “Go Modern,” the first thing you notice is the enveloping ambient charm of the recording, which sounds closer to a 78-RPM record from the 1940s than the mid-’60s document that it actually is. The next thing you notice is that the guitar and the horns are out of tune with one another—just one of several small touches that give Coming Home its distinct personality, especially in its first half.
A two-disc retrospective that touches on several phases of Ghanaian vocalist Pat Thomas’ career, Coming Home presents Thomas fronting over a half-dozen different bands. Inspired at an early age by the likes of Nat King Cole, Miriam Makeba, and Stevie Wonder, Thomas was a more raw-edged singer and can be heard pushing the mic to distortion often on this set as he offers his own version of a Sam Moore-style croon.
Just as significantly, the sequencing retraces Thomas’ long-running musical relationship with guitarist/arranger/bandleader Ebo Taylor. Instrumental in Thomas’ career getting off the ground, Taylor had already established himself with the Broadway Dance Band for almost a decade before giving Thomas his break as the band’s lead vocalist. Taylor and Thomas fell into a comfortable creative rapport almost instantly, with Taylor writing the music but also coming up with song titles for Thomas to write lyrics for. The pair have worked on and off ever since (as captured most recently by Thomas & Kwashibu Area Band’s self-titled album from 2015). Aside from Taylor, the different groupings of musicians on Coming Home occupy the spotlight almost as much as Thomas does.
In the mid- to late-20th century, as African societies engaged in complex dances with post-colonialism and modernity, it was no coincidence that new strains of music began to sprout rapidly throughout the continent. A key aspect of the creative surges that swept through Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and elsewhere in the ‘60s and ‘70s was the willingness of homegrown musicians to embrace influences from the Western Hemisphere that owe their existence to Africa in the first place.
Of course, Coming Home reflects this dynamic, as Thomas and company navigate the confluence of highlife, swing jazz, Latin jazz, Afrobeat, psychedelic rock, reggae, funk, and disco. At times, the results veer a tad too close to ripoffs. The Pat Thomas and Marijata track “Brain Washing,” for example, sounds like an uninspired cover band trying to concoct a mashup of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” with Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Not only does the Marijata track come off as naive, it contains virtually no trace of the environment it was created in. There are other moments when Thomas’ choice to sing in his native Akan dialects of Fante and Twi isn’t enough on its own to truly set the music apart.
Luckily, this turns out not the case on most of the album’s 23 tracks. In fact, Coming Home includes four other tunes by Marijata that demonstrate the group’s range. All of the bands included here—Ogyatanaa Show Band, the Black Berets, the Sweet Beans, and The Big ‘7’—wear their influences on their sleeve, but they also manage to spice them up just enough. On “Revolution,” for instance, the Sweet Beans subtly re-invent reggae as a more limber, light-footed form, the song’s slippery bass line immediately recognizable as somehow more “African” than Caribbean.
Likewise, on “Set Me Free,” the Sweet Beans hint at but don’t quite dip all the way into Latin rhythms and horn textures, choosing instead to stay in a kind of limbo between Latin jazz and ragtime, with a snaking saxophone melody that betrays the music’s Ghanaian roots. It is at these moments, where the music doesn’t quite plant both feet in any one style, when Coming Home sounds most fresh. In fact, some of the combinations that Thomas and these bands come up with suggest that these musics are still fertile ground for new combinations.
The contrasts between the two discs are sharp, as disc one focuses on the ’60s and ’70s while disc two documents Thomas’ work as an exponent of the burger-highlife movement that took off in Germany in the ’80s. And, sure, the drum machine on the more modern track “Gyae Su (1)” speaks to its time period, but for the most part the second disc lacks the heavy recording coloration—and spunk—of the earlier material.
On the other hand, on tracks such as the nearly 15-minute lament “Mewo Akoma,” Thomas’ maturity shines through in his lyrics about familial estrangement. Appropriately enough, the twinkling guitar that defines highlife music gets traded in here for a significantly more subdued line that matches the song's weariness.
A mixed bag by definition, Coming Home could nevertheless have been sequenced to play more like an album and less like a guided tour. Of course, as a guided tour it inspires the listener to dig deeper into not only Thomas’ work, but the stylistic and cultural origins of his music. Which is to say: it succeeds. | 2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Strut | October 14, 2016 | 7.2 | c3c2536a-e2e4-444a-9b7e-16abf4870322 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Atlanta singer/producer Abra makes vintage, '80s-sounding R&B with the production values and aesthetic of bedroom pop. | The Atlanta singer/producer Abra makes vintage, '80s-sounding R&B with the production values and aesthetic of bedroom pop. | Abra: PRINCESS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22110-princess/ | PRINCESS | Approximately 300 hours of video is uploaded onto YouTube every minute. A significant portion of that 300 hours is probably made up of webcam videos and acoustic covers. It’s a hallmark of the site, a rite of passage for any teenager with an acoustic guitar. It’s also how Abra, an Atlanta based singer/producer got her start. Around six years ago, she started uploading covers of rap and R&B and indie rock songs onto her YouTube page. Her choices ran the gamut from Gucci Mane to Radiohead; in her most popular video, a cover Waka Flocka’s “No Hands,” she layers the song with multiple recordings of an a capella track of her own voice presumably playing from laptop speakers. She misses her cues, perhaps purposefully, giving the cover a cleverly messy style. Unbeknownst to her at first, these videos somehow got in the hands of Father, rapper and founder of Awful Records. They were both students at Georgia State at the time, and on the urging of him and the other artists in the Awful collective at GS, she started to pursue making original music.
She shared her first piece of original music two years ago, a YouTube upload called “Needsumbody.” The song was a shuffling ’80s- inspired piece of alt-pop, endearingly rough-and-tumble in quality. The mix was characteristically scattershot, her voice uneven but louder than the other elements, hissing ambient echoes and muted drums. Its muddy and moody quality recalled the acerbic gurgle of King Krule or the smeared-lens experiments of How to Dress Well. It’s not meant to sound beautiful in any way, but her music instead gathers together all the fraying signifiers of bedroom pop: essentially an Instagram filter for music that wants to be asymmetrical and fashionably color outside the lines.
This song, and almost everything she’s released (two mixtapes with Awful) since, has been self-produced, and recorded in her Atlanta bedroom closet. This includes her most recent release, an EP called Princess (her first major label release) which bears a strong stylistic quality to even her earliest work, including the acoustic covers of rap songs. A sense of perfect imperfection unifies all of her work, which, for better or worse is an attitude that doesn’t work for Abra.
Princess is a short piece of music, less than thirty minutes long. It’s more a progress report on Abra’s growth than a fully fleshed-out release. As such, its similarity to so much of her early work is, if not damning, then a little disappointing. From the opening moments of the EP to its closing second, what you can expect is a uniform sound built from bright, impressionistic drum machines and warm synths. In the EP’s opener “Come 4 Me,” she uses the same vocal layering technique she used in the Waka Flocka cover, albeit with more skill. In the next song “Vegas,” she ratchets up the ’80s facsimile, slathering on the 808 brushstrokes. Her voice gets lost in the murky collage of noises, and when brief snatches of her words bob up to the surface, they can be funny in their cliche (“If you wanna roll the dice on me okay/If you think you can afford it/Come play”).
Her music has been compared by critics in the past to Janet Jackson “demos,” a kind of backhanded compliment implying that the quality of her sound and skill is meant to live in a dusty archive until the light of day deems it necessary to be uncovered yet again. At its best, this EP looks like a creatively executed painting done by numbers. All the markers of homemade alt-R&B are colored in, but it makes the product at least a little rote. Those vintage sounds and the underdog spirit of bedroom DIY, are, at this point, aesthetic presets. Behind the nostalgic tropes, there is a confident and self-possessed artist waiting to get out. But it’s a little hard to hear in the cramped space of a bedroom closet. | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | True Panther | July 20, 2016 | 6.2 | c3c546ac-0380-42a9-811a-3e7cce982207 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Like Death Magnetic, Metallica’s latest is an attempt to revisit their early days. The only difference is that this time they sound like they’re actually trying, and maybe even having a bit of fun. | Like Death Magnetic, Metallica’s latest is an attempt to revisit their early days. The only difference is that this time they sound like they’re actually trying, and maybe even having a bit of fun. | Metallica: Hardwired...to Self-Destruct | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22629-hardwiredto-self-destruct/ | Hardwired...to Self-Destruct | The past twenty five years haven’t exactly been kind to Metallica. Ever since their mainstream-rock apotheosis on 1991’s Metallica, they’ve faced a quarter-century losing streak: the bloated hard rock of Load, Reload, and Garage Inc., the snoozy live album-cum-orchestral-experiment S&M, the migraine-inducing ineptitude of St. Anger, and the recycled rage of Death Magnetic. In 2011, they teamed up with Lou Reed for Lulu, a collaborative concept album regarded by many as music’s answer to The Room—if Tommy Wiseau’s classic was twice as ambitious and half as competent—and the band’s undeniable low point (and that’s even with the tell-all masochism of 2003’s documentary Some Kind of Monster).
Money, fame, age, a lack of passion: Critics have floated several culprits for the mediocrity of latter-day Metallica. But as drummer Lars Ulrich suggested in a recent Rolling Stone interview, the wellspring of the band’s foibles also forms the basis of Metallica writ large. “The thing that I love about Metallica is that we’re very impulsive,” Ulrich said, before tacking on a subtle mea culpa: “That impulsivity occasionally bites us in the ass, because we jump before we know where we're landing.”
And so, five years after hooking up with Lou, and eight years after their last album proper, Metallica have taken yet another leap with Hardwired...to Self-Destruct, a two-disc collection demarcated not by a leap into the unknown, but into the halcyon days of their youth nearly three decades ago during thrash’s primordial period, when “impulsivity” amounted to unpredictable fretwork, breakneck rhythms, and discarded pretenses. Like Death Magnetic, the record attempts a self-conscious return to form; the only difference is that this time the band sound like they’re actually trying, and–dare I say it–maybe even having a bit of fun.
Hardwired...to Self-Destruct is a rare Metallica album without any Kirk Hammett songwriting credits, a shift owed not to Some Kind of Monster-type bickering, but flat-out carelessness: The guitarist lost an iPhone containing roughly 250 riffs, leaving him with little to contribute to the think tank by the time Metallica began cutting the album. Temporarily demoted from puppet master to personnel, Hammett readily embraces–relishes, even–his role as primary ambassador for Metallica nostalgia. Hardwired… stands as the guitarist’s most extensive show of muscle since the self-titled days. From the soaring, bluesy triplets on “Atlas, Rise!” to the fleet-footed stampedes driving “Spit Out the Bone,” his playing strikes a winning compromise between precision and wildness, lending the otherwise one-dimensional mix (undermined primarily by the anemic drum tracking, which renders Ulrich’s bass kicks little more than footsie taps) some welcome textural spontaneity.
As for spontaneity on a broader level—don’t head into Hardwired... hoping for progressive surprises or unanticipated turns. Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights—“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance: “Confusion”’s dull roar proves practically indistinguishable from the slow-churning gyre of “ManUNkind” or “Here Comes Revenge,” and the clunky mainframe of “Murder One” borders on incoherent. Fortunately, they finish strong with “Spit Out the Bone,” a galvanizing, hyper-speed premonition of a world razed to the ground by man’s greed for shiny playthings (like, say, Hammett’s iPhone): “Plug into me and terminate/Accelerate, Utopian solution/Finally cure the Earth of Man.” A little less than three minutes in, the band automize fiercely, careening off the leaden path into a pummeling breakdown unheard since the glory days.
Elsewhere, James Hetfield redeems himself as Metallica’s growling figurehead with his strongest work in decades. The band’s 2014 tribute medley to fallen star Ronnie James Dio (which appears on the deluxe edition of Hardwired…) has clearly left a lasting impression on the 53-year-old, vocally and lyrically: whereas past releases found Hetfield howling the blues and roaringly introducing himself as literal furniture, Hardwired… marks a return to the matter-of-fact, staccato doomsday proselytizing of the band’s heyday. When he barks “We’re so fucked/Shit out of luck,” on the title track, teeth bared, fists clenched, we feel the pulse of his reckless youth ever-so-slightly—and for a second, the multi-millionaire feels like one of us, shaking in timely trepidation at the realization of the world’s greatest fears. And yet, even as he manages to rein in the cringeworthy wailing exhibited on St. Anger and the Load albums, he can’t resist backsliding into melodrama—obnoxiously extending out his syllables on “Now That We’re Dead” (“Now that we’re dead my DEEE-AHH we can be TOGETH-AHH”)–and on “Dream No More,” letting out a grunge-era whine that sounds like a failed impersonation of late legend Scott Weiland.
Make no mistake—Hardwired... is easily Metallica’s best album since 1991’s landmark self-titled LP, a victory on par with Weezer’s White Album for comeback of the year. But as was the case with Cuomo and company, the album fails to convince non-diehards what, exactly, we look for from Metallica these days. Even after repeat listens, one can’t shake the feeling that in 2016, the legends’ students have become their teachers in terms of both sheer volume and political gravitas; those looking for fresh thrash, in its purest, most primal form are better off listening to the likes of Vektor, Power Trip, or Iron Reagan, who wave the torch of their forebears with considerably more gusto. Still, the band couldn’t return at a better time: when you flip on the news and see a narcissistic, trigger-fingered, despotic cheetoh at the podium—a Metallica song come to life—there’s no denying that the accessible aggro makes for a surprisingly potent balm, not to mention an enjoyable form of escapism. | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Blackened | November 22, 2016 | 6.5 | c3cb0f21-6327-489e-a9c1-76292d4b07f0 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Billed as a country record, the San Francisco garage-rock hero’s eighth record with the Sunsets uses the genre as a means for chronicling the lives of lonesome men. | Billed as a country record, the San Francisco garage-rock hero’s eighth record with the Sunsets uses the genre as a means for chronicling the lives of lonesome men. | Sonny and the Sunsets: New Day With New Possibilities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonny-and-the-sunsets-new-day-with-new-possibilities/ | New Day With New Possibilities | Sonny Smith’s New Day With New Possibilities is billed as a country album, but really, the cult San Francisco garage hero’s output with Sonny and the Sunsets has always felt like country music, even though it hasn’t always been delivered with a twang and a sigh. His best songs, about long-lost loves and fringe-dwelling stragglers, tell classic stories populated with well-worn American archetypes: They’re country at heart, even if gilded with garage-rock harmonies or post-punk synths. Then, of course, there’s Sonny himself—a troubadour out of time, content to move through life more as a chronicler of others’ lives than his own. “Everywhere I go in this world, I see lonely men/Where do we come from, where does it end, the lonely men?” he wonders on the very first line of “The Lonely Men,” New Day With New Possibilities’ spare, Callahan-esque opening track. A scene-setting overture to an album about searching, deep-seated forms of loneliness, it could just as easily be applied to the rest of Sonny’s music—a career spent profiling “broken men behind, broken men ahead.”
Although New Day With New Possibilities, Sonny’s eighth record with the Sunsets, might hew closest in genre to the fan favorite Longtime Companion, the aesthetic feels as much like a means to an end as anything else. It always has with Sonny: The reason his early records cherry-picked sounds with abandon, and the reason he could so easily write 200 songs in every genre under the sun for his 100 Records project, is because he’s always been attuned to genre as a canny literary device. So while New Day With New Possibilities taps into country’s potential to chronicle the lives of lonesome men in the same way that Longtime Companion mined the genre’s usefulness for conveying lovesickness, it actually feels, in the scheme of Sonny’s oeuvre, more of a piece with 2013’s Antenna to the Afterworld, which, in its reckoning with grief and loss, also touched on isolation: “I had a visit from a dead friend/She told me not to wallow in the loneliness.”
As if to prove the point, “Palm Reader,” a highlight from Antenna to the Afterworld, gets a reprise here. Where the original felt bright and lovestruck, brought to life by its post-punk synths and Sonny’s wry deadpan, “Palm Reader” circa 2021 is resigned: When Sonny sings, “My loveline, it’s hard to see/But it’s still there underneath,” he’s nostalgizing an affair, rather than cementing it. The only love songs on New Day With New Possibilities take this approach, looking at lost loves from an impossibly far remove. Take, for example, “Love Obsession,” a classic Sonny and the Sunsets campfire sing-along: “Heartbreak is my profession/I teach the school of rejection/Memories of you won’t let me get away,” Sonny sings, stomping along with the ease of a man who knows the only way to get through is to accept singledom as inevitability. “Earl & His Girl,” another classic in Sonny’s catalog of weirdo biographies, follows a lonely bounty hunter who tries to strike up a connection with the girlfriend of an abusive man, only to find that she’d rather stick with her boyfriend and shoot kids and squirrels. He stays positive, even after his horse leaves him, through the remembrance of a mantra: “May there be a road that takes me to where I need to go.”
If it sounds bleak, that’s because it is: New Day With New Possibilities, although as lush and pleasant to listen to as ever, showcases a darker, rawer side of Sonny’s writing. It’s a bittersweet tonic after the one-two punch of 2016’s Moods Baby Moods and 2019’s Hairdressers From Heaven, albums produced by James Mercer and Merrill Garbus, respectively, that felt like they lacked something of Sonny’s pastoral outsider charm. And although New Day With New Possibilities skews dark, there’s still plenty of warmth to be found, if you know where to look. “Just Hangin by Myself,” the record’s centerpiece, radiates contentment, finding intense satisfaction in solitude: “I’m just hangin’ out by myself,” Sonny repeats. It’s a group singalong for one, an unassuming affirmation that’s quintessentially Sonny: He’s documented loneliness so thoroughly, he might just be on the verge of finding a cure for it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Piccadilly | August 4, 2021 | 7 | c3cf44fa-7de5-4b0b-86b5-27240198c000 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
On his fourth album as the Soft Moon, post-punk auteur Luis Vasquez finally breaks from a whisper into a scream. | On his fourth album as the Soft Moon, post-punk auteur Luis Vasquez finally breaks from a whisper into a scream. | The Soft Moon: Criminal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-soft-moon-criminal/ | Criminal | Over the course of the four albums he’s made as the Soft Moon, Luis Vasquez has slowly risen from a mire of his own making. His 2010 self-titled debut barely let his voice creep into the mix, focusing instead on pummeling post-punk rhythms, austere guitar riffs, and a bleak haze of distortion. The vocals were hardly the point; Vasquez rarely sang above a whisper, opting to drown the most obviously human element of his music in a miasma of deliriously goth instrumentals. Eight years later, he seems to be waking up from the nightmare. Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.
Written in a small basement studio in Vasquez’s current home city of Berlin, Criminal thrashes with an anger that the Soft Moon has never fully indulged before. “I’ve been spending the last eight years trying to heal myself, and it hasn’t been working, so [this record is] kind of an act of desperation,” Vasquez said in a recent interview. Like 2015’s Deeper before it, this LP grapples with the residue of childhood trauma, examining the shape a psyche can take when its formative years are toxic. Vasquez doesn’t use lyrics as a storytelling tool—his words come out in shards, not narratives—so there’s plenty of room to interpret the seething sentiments peppered throughout the album. “This guilt is a problem/You’re the ghost of my problem,” he chants in a steely monotone on “Like a Father,” a song he says is “about the father [he] never had.” While a few other lines direct their anger toward an ambiguous “you,” most of Criminal addresses a deep-seated self-loathing. “I wish I could be somebody else/Cause it burns,” Vasquez howls on charging opener “Burn,” his voice vaulting a tune that’s about as close to a traditional hook as the Soft Moon gets.
Vasquez’s melodies sweeten on Criminal, but their catchiness stands in contrast to the severity of the album’s texture and subject matter. It’s a trick wielded expertly by industrial-pop acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson: Load up an earworm with arsenic and let your listeners have their pleasure and pain at the same time. Yet instead of sounding like a deep cut from The Fragile, as Soft Moon tracks often did in the past, Criminal edges closer to the aggressive and delightful mix struck on Pretty Hate Machine. Vasquez begs masochistically for someone to “Take your time/Crush me right” on the stuttering, bass-heavy “Choke,” whose primary riff carries so much momentum it ought to be lapped up as soon as possible by a goth-adjacent rap act like Danny Brown or Vince Staples. And “The Pain” orbits a descending bass line that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Interpol’s radio-friendly compositions, the instrumental melodies counterbalancing the abject tone of Vasquez’s voice as he asks, “How can you love someone like me?”
Much of the music Vasquez has made to date has felt like a cocoon blocking out the world, hiding something impossibly dark at its center. Some of Criminal falls in that vein; there’s a superfluous instrumental called “ILL” lodged in its lagging Side B, and “Born Into This” masks his vocals to the point of near-illegibility. But the best of this album shows Vasquez piercing through his self-protective veil, exposing raw nerves and real pain. Inside all that darkness lurks a shuddering will to live. | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | February 7, 2018 | 7.2 | c3d45b6f-da3e-435c-9a51-2799f871b6e3 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
One of modern rap’s most well-oiled machines has officially ventured into film. And while their debut soundtrack doesn’t hit the highs of their studio projects, it continues the tradition of bolstering an under-represented city. | One of modern rap’s most well-oiled machines has officially ventured into film. And while their debut soundtrack doesn’t hit the highs of their studio projects, it continues the tradition of bolstering an under-represented city. | Various Artists: Griselda & BSF: Conflicted (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-griselda-and-bsf-conflicted-original-soundtrack/ | Griselda & BSF: Conflicted (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Griselda Records has earned a reputation for flooding every market they touch. The Buffalo collective’s six active members—nominal leader Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, Benny the Butcher, Armani Caesar, and latest signees Boldy James and YN Billy—released a combined seven projects in 2020 and have also exerted their influence in the worlds of fashion, sports, and wrestling. It’s no surprise, then, to see them extend their brand of gutter rap to the world of movies, like Roc-A-Fella and No Limit Records before them. Conflicted, the debut feature from the newly formed Griselda Films, is no Paid in Full, but its portrayal of life on and off the streets of Buffalo is earnest and heartfelt, the kind of DIY project you’d proudly buy in an unmarked case for around $10 from the corner-store bootleg rack. Even with its hometown love on its sleeve (the film is dedicated to DJ Shay, who died from COVID-19 complications last year), the film’s accompanying soundtrack, Griselda & BSF: Conflicted (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), does much of the atmospheric heavy lifting.
Naturally, the soundtrack lives and dies by the new-era boom-bap Griselda has made their name on since the mid-2010s. It’s a showcase for the group (with the exception of a notably absent Conway) and a handful of Benny’s Black Soprano Family affiliates, with special guests and audio clips from the movie sprinkled throughout. Songs like “Mobbin” and “Ain’t Hit Nobody” are standard fare, steely-eyed accounts of drive-bys and gold chains anchored by cold and unforgiving loops.
Gunn and Benny can churn out these kinds of songs in their sleep, yet they bring enough energy to occasionally dazzle. Gunn sounds as colorful as ever on single “The Hurt Business,” reminiscing on watching 106 & Park with his shades on while in federal prison. Benny’s standalone song “3:30 in Houston” is both a flex anthem and a bouncy rejoinder to the attempted robbery and shooting he experienced in a Walmart parking lot last year and the ensuing media circus (“Fuck all the bloggers, the niggas who shot me/Fuck all the opps and fuck Wendy Williams/Can’t trust nobody, it’s all smoke and mirrors”). The paranoia and opulence dovetail with the film’s own sense of encroaching dread.
While Griselda continues to hold it down—Boldy James and Armani Caesar never cease to amaze—the Conflicted soundtrack springs to life when outside voices take center stage. Underappreciated New York stalwart Lloyd Banks turns in career-best work on “Element of Surprise.” Black Soprano frontrunner Heem consistently stands out, particularly on the throbbing “Voices” (“My uncle told me use the gauge, no Boyz n the Hood/Leave you Ricky on the couch if that trigger get pulled”). Elcamino, Rick Hyde, and Smoke DZA ride DJ Shay’s blaring horns to victory on the roaring “Squaaaaad.” For all the highlights, though, there are a handful of fumbles. “Rank,” YN Billy’s first solo song on a Griselda project, has energy but lacks personality. Dave East’s phoned-in verse stalls the otherwise lively “Welcome Home DMX.” Armani Caesar’s solo cut “Nerve of You” feels more like a leftover idea from The Liz than a fully fleshed-out record. These songs fit the motif but feel undercooked by comparison.
At this point, Griselda is one of the most well-oiled machines in modern rap, their aesthetic and extended universe of collaborators perfectly suited to the world of soundtracks. Conflicted makes a game effort, offering a spattering of decent-to-good songs for FlyGods and young bulls alike. It may not hit the highs of their studio albums or mixtapes, but it continues the tradition of bolstering one of rap’s most under-represented cities.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Griselda | January 19, 2021 | 6.7 | c3d854a4-cd16-4f0f-9bd9-a4f06d4e9f9f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On his latest EP as the Soft Pink Truth, Drew Daniel of Matmos offers a luxe version of deep house that leans into the carnal qualities of club music. | On his latest EP as the Soft Pink Truth, Drew Daniel of Matmos offers a luxe version of deep house that leans into the carnal qualities of club music. | The Soft Pink Truth: Was It Ever Real? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-soft-pink-truth-was-it-ever-real/ | Was It Ever Real? | Comparing Matmos to Coil seems crass. They’re the two most famous gay male couples to make smart, sensual, experimental electronic music together, and for the most part, that’s where the similarities have ended. But when you’ve made a record as shudderingly sexual as Drew Daniel’s new Soft Pink Truth EP Was It Ever Real?, and you put a cover of “The Anal Staircase” by Coil on it, and you’ve been with one guy for 29 years: That’s when you start to wonder how much Daniel likes playing the John Balance to M.C. Schmidt’s Sleazy.
Was It Ever Real? gives the impression of a brawny, fulfilling eroticism. The title alone of “Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?,” not to mention the seductive moans and sighs that flutter throughout the mix like plumes of smoke, make the record’s preoccupations clear from its opening moments. Coil’s original 1986 “Anal Staircase” is a Stravinsky-sampling bruiser that seems to invite the listener to hitherto unknown pleasures, but Daniel replaces the unsettling laughter on the original with a smattering of lounge ambiance, and Balance’s screams simmer down to a close-mic’d whisper. This is a vision of sex not as something forbidding or forbidden but a healthy component of a comfortable life. The anal staircase is carpeted in velvet.
Daniel commits to a luxe version of deep house on these four tracks, ripe with vestiges of disco. The bass is big and plummy, and electric pianos mumble and splutter. The title track exists to flex this style. Acetone’s Mark Lightcap soars with a guitar lead that brings to mind the ‘70s-sleaze Shaft school of seduction, while a harpsichord performance from Tom Boram elevates the whole thing into the kind of orgiastic paradise-garden fantasy Prince conjured on the late-‘80s deep cut “Adonis & Bathsheba.” The pitch-shifted hi-hats, which seem to squelch through mud, impart a whiff of the peaty fertility of early-2000s albums by Matthew Herbert (whose challenge to Daniel to make house music led to the start of the Soft Pink Truth).
Much of the Soft Pink Truth’s catalog is devoted to provocative electronic tributes to genres like hardcore, black metal, and crust punk. This is his first project-length pastiche that isn’t a complete subversion, and it continues the turn away from “angry-white-guy music” that Daniel commenced on 2020’s beatific Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Like that record, Was It Ever Real? is a luxe, collab-heavy work that’s easier on the ears than most of his music. Unlike Sinning, this is a straight-faced genre experiment, leaning into club music’s carnal qualities without exaggerating them or sending them up, tunneling toward the center of classic deep house rather than scratching at its margins as Daniel did on his 2003 debut Do You Party?
As such, it’s the Soft Pink Truth release that’ll most comfortably fit into most DJ sets and road trips. (Daniel will elaborate even further on this style in October, when he’ll release a full-length called Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?) In the absence of the project’s usual puckish unpredictability, the appeal of Was It Ever Real? lies largely in hearing Daniel focus all his attention on a single sound while infusing it with a genuine eroticism that’s sexy not because it’s brazen, brash, or foul-mouthed, but because it’s lived. | 2022-08-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | August 19, 2022 | 7.6 | c3e8be77-9fe6-4a6a-9ed1-f97be36a7b18 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The Seoul producer and one-half of the electronic group Salamanda makes effervescent, maximalist music. Her new EP is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet. | The Seoul producer and one-half of the electronic group Salamanda makes effervescent, maximalist music. Her new EP is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet. | Yetsuby: B_B EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yetsuby-b-b-ep/ | B_B EP | Taking cues from ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura and Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, Seoul duo Salamanda conjure vivid fantasy worlds with richly tactile sounds: mallets striking, objects plunking, vocal cords pushing air through pursed lips. Yetsuby, one half of the duo, takes a similarly physical approach to sound in her solo work. But where Salamanda’s music often conveys a sparkling, childlike quality—call it the psychedelia of innocence—Yetsuby’s solo records have often been more chaotic. She twisted up synthetic sounds on 2019’s Heptaprism and leaned toward Two Shell-style overload on last year’s shuddering My Star My Earth. Her new EP, B_B, is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet. It sounds like a geyser of ball bearings, or a plasticine rainbow, or a marimba the size of a bridge.
Both Yetsuby and Salamanda have long displayed ambient leanings, but “Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place,” which opens the EP, is the closest she’s come to crafting something that might be filed within the genre. Softly rounded synth arpeggios bubble expectantly; chimes flicker across the stereo field; jagged streaks of tone occasionally resemble Jon Hassell’s prismatic horn. Still, despite the music’s incidental feel and the absence of drums or melody, the mood is anything but chilled. The moving parts are unpredictable and the placid, new-age tones are offset by metallic bursts and an overarching air of turmoil. The piece belongs to a contemporary strain of hyper-digital music whose organizing principle is gestural in nature, as though Yetsuby had reached into the virtual space of her DAW and smeared the sounds into a shimmery blur.
At five minutes long, “Who Swallowed the Chimes” is both the longest and the most formless of the EP’s six tracks. The rest of the record zigzags between streamlined rhythmic studies and maximalist amalgamations of IDM and hyperpop. But no matter the style, a sense of mischief reigns. The brief, percussive “If I Drink This Potion” traipses along at a relatively restrained 112 beats per minute, yet everything seems designed to make it feel faster and more hectic than it is: Drums explode into effervescent clouds, and the downbeat constantly shifts, lending the impression of a frantic jog across liquefying sand. Things settle down on “1,2,3, Soleil,” a 90 BPM head-nodder whose thumping log drums and elastic, dancehall-inspired syncopations could easily pass for a Salamanda track. But Yetsuby can’t resist her habitual impishness: Dappled flute accents soon cede the way to garish splotches of synth, and 32nd-note arps take off like a runaway train, tipping the groove toward singeli’s breakneck gait.
Yetsuby is at her most dulcet on “Maxilogue: Potion, Materials,” a sculptural assemblage of chiming synths and sing-song vocoder that gently swells to a full-spectrum climax—dissonant, but somehow soothingly so. She’s at her most intense on “Poly Juice,” piling tiny slivers of sound onto a snapping electro rhythm reminiscent of the early-’00s IDM of labels like Schematic, and topping it all off with sweetly robotic vocal processing. But ultimately, both tracks feel like two sides of the same iridescent coin. On both—and the same goes for the dreamy, Blade Runner-inspired closer, “The Sublime Embrace”—every iota of the stereo field teems with microtonal detail. In Yetsuby’s universe, categories like ambient and club music are largely a question of perspective. At the root of it all is a riot of motion, she seems to suggest: Zoom in far enough on even the most seemingly static object, and you’ll find a field of atoms whirling like dervishes. | 2024-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | all my thoughts | June 28, 2024 | 7.6 | c3ea6778-702b-4ba7-bbd8-281220e089c1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The cosmic country of the Brooklyn singer-songwriter is both wry and heartfelt, offering a kind of tongue-in-cheek spiritual audit for a modern age. | The cosmic country of the Brooklyn singer-songwriter is both wry and heartfelt, offering a kind of tongue-in-cheek spiritual audit for a modern age. | Dougie Poole: The Freelancer’s Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dougie-poole-the-freelancers-blues/ | The Freelancer’s Blues | Late in The Freelancer’s Blues, the second album from the could-be country singer-songwriter, Dougie Poole heaves out a confession that barely approaches hyperbole: “How sweet it would be to not have a brain.” This ability to approach mid-level malaise with empathy and a smirk sits at the heart of his songs—it’s a pleasure to witness. There’s the three overlapping protagonists on “Vaping on the Job,” each of whom turns to a pocket sacrament for relief on the clock, with thudding percussion mirroring the heavy sigh that accompanies such a move. The concept of workplace vaping is its own kind of “Take This Job and Shove It” for those too broke, tired, or burned out to make the rallying cry themselves; Poole’s salute makes for a woolier companion to Brandy Clark’s “Get High.”
The Freelancer’s Blues clocks on the spectrum of “cosmic country” with some extra synths thrown in for good measure. Poole’s loose approach gives him the ability to smudge and slip between the boundaries of AM-gold country and the wry modern observations of rapscallions like Joshua Tillman. It bears a covert spirituality that speaks to a larger sense of finding calm in situ. Poole’s philosophizing is humble and unobtrusive, braiding neatly with the album’s fuzzy scenery. And though country music has often been lumped in among the signifiers of white evangelical Christianity, Poole shares his own conclusions on how to connect with higher meaning without so much liturgical baggage. The idea powers “Buddhist for a Couple Days,” where Poole waxes about searching within over a bar-band shuffle. “All you gotta do is breathe and you can set those troubles free,” he promises.
Poole’s songs aren’t laments so much as lessons. His psych-lite arrangements create a more comfortable space for turning a bad ending into a new beginning. In assessing his worries, Poole recognizes that sometimes the only course of action is to shrug it off and keep moving. “Los Angeles” begins with an anxious guitar lick that parallels the opening tumble of “Jolene,” with Poole soon realizing that escaping to greener pastures won’t solve any of his problems. He finds ironic humor in pulling “California Here I Come” out of the Great American Songbook to soundtrack his turn away from a scuttled dream.
Even “Natural Touch” takes a unique angle on the awkward discomfort of encountering a fizzled-out fling in public. Rather than dwelling on the embarrassment of a not-quite-heartbreak, Poole celebrates how these incidents make room for something more fulfilling to come along. He brings back his philosophizing in a smooth croon, noting how “Sometimes you gotta be the bug, it’s true/But sometimes you’re the windshield, too.”
The most difficult element to square on The Freelancer’s Blues—which Poole’s tongue-in-cheek lyricism acknowledges—is that many of the problems rarely transcend mild to moderate discomfort. Its lack of urgency is as much a liability as it is a respite. Still, Poole’s genial attitude makes for a nudge of encouragement, channeling a quiet certainty that the sun will return from behind the clouds once again. Though it lands a bit light, Poole’s earnest vulnerability makes room for more profound reckonings to flourish in low stakes.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Wharf Cat | June 11, 2020 | 7 | c3f17488-e90b-43fe-9c81-754064bbe597 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Hip-O-Select reissues the famed Munich producer's most complete solo effort-- one of the greatest LPs of the disco era. | Hip-O-Select reissues the famed Munich producer's most complete solo effort-- one of the greatest LPs of the disco era. | Giorgio Moroder: From Here to Eternity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5639-from-here-to-eternity/ | From Here to Eternity | I didn't grow up with disco. Like a lot of kids, it was one of things kept hidden from me by my parents, along with my dad's Playboys and the truth about unicorns. And just as I proudly tried to convince my kindergarten colleagues about the existence of strange, horned horses, a significant part of my life has been under the impression that music made specifically for dancing was inherently crappy. Laugh now, but there are still many who believe this. My mother, for one-- of course, she also tends to say things like, "the 70s were the worst decade ever." She grew up in a different era, with different values, but she isn't the only one. We all know people who still shudder at the mention of disco (or prog or jazz or new age or any other suspiciously, popularly maligned genre of music), and for the most part, we give them their space. After all, different strokes, right?
My mother's contempt for disco has mostly to do with the fact that it (just like the decade of the 70s in general) usurped her generation's idea of "fun," transforming her into an outsider almost overnight. Sixties kids thought that having fun meant getting together with people you loved, listening to music that meant something to everyone there and looking forward to a world where a peaceful, open-minded community would have their day. To them, disco was just another reminder that materialism and obsession with self would never really go away, that their dreams weren't necessarily the way the rest of the world thought about things (even though, ironically, polyester-donned boomers were hugely responsible for disco's mainstream success).
However, I think this is different for today's kids. We grew up hearing about how bad disco was, but because we weren't actually there to decide for ourselves, most of the wisdom is second-hand. Thus, claims like "they don't even write their own songs" or "it's fake music," which were arguably valid prejudices (misguided though they sound to me) for a generation hopeful that peace, love, and understanding were universal values, mean something slightly different for us. When I say that uber-producer Giorgio Moroder was the first person to produce an entirely digital LP, it doesn't necessarily mean that his music was "fake"-- in fact, if anything, in light of most of what we listen to, it's a feather in his cap. Today's "rockists" (which is really just a fancy distinction for people who hold onto any particular set of values re: music at the expense of everything else) don't generally bring up truly interesting dichotomies of community versus self or majority versus minority. To them, music has a more abstract relationship to identity, one obscured by inherited judgments and not as easily penetrated.
Moroder is an interesting case because he sidesteps most "disco sucks" arguments due to the fact that he did write his own stuff, did produce it, and even went to so far as to design much of his studio. Like Kraftwerk, he had long been interested in the possibilities of electronic music in pop, and with partner Pete Bellotte, used his background in pop songwriting and arranging to forge one of the most successful production partnerships of the 70s. At their Musicland studios in Munich, Germany, the pair made their greatest claim to fame making records for Donna Summer, though Moroder also worked with Sparks, Blondie, and Japan, among dozens of others. His method, though behind-the-scenes as were most of the great disco producers, was hardly "fake" or dismissive of the history of recorded pop up until then; rather, like ABBA, Lee Perry, or the aforementioned Kraftwerk, he used available technology and his own ingenuity to make music as suited to its era (and beyond) as any artist could.
From Here to Eternity was Moroder's third solo LP (after 1972's underrated, if redundantly titled Son of My Father, and 1976's Knights in White Satin), and is a marvel for disco historians, and a perfect nugget of dance music for anyone else. Its opening sidelong mix predates house by almost a decade, yet would (and did) fit perfectly in the set of DJ aiming to keep people happy via Euro-centric electro beats and angelic vocoder-ized choruses. And that's the trick: there really aren't any choruses (or verses for that matter) on the first side of this record, it's a constantly evolving, perpetually changing suite of music-- which begs the question, "is this pop?" Maybe not. Or, maybe it's just one of the first visions of what pop would become for a generation of listeners who didn't necessarily need messages or refrains or catchy hooks to have fun.
Of course, given that the album opens with such a lengthy mix of music, you're better off diving in with the intention of getting lost for a while. The title track and its reprise mix now-classic Euro-house 4/4 pump (via digital kick-drum, I might add) with Moroder's distinctive, double-tracked tenor and a backing chorus of disembodied sopranos. Disembodiment was probably one of the reasons disco was supposed to suck for my parents, yet in the context of a decade when the boundless optimism and idealism of the 60s seemed suddenly, woefully inadequate, it-- along with punk's related undercurrent of disillusion-- was perfect. It was more than perfect; it was danceable! "Faster than the Speed of Love" brings the mood down from the opening track, segueing into the minimalist, ominous "Los Angeles", using a simple synth motif and striking harmony vocals to impart its momentum. "Utopia-- Me Giorgio" is more lush, with a percolating bass line and long, wistful backing vocals.
The second half of From Here to Eternity loses some of the charge, if only due to its comparatively conventional, disconnected structure. Still, the dark vocoder intro and rising intensity of soprano harmonies during the chorus of "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" is a interestingly compact specimen of Moroder's way with a pop song, and only suffers when you compare it to his work with Summer from the same period. I don't believe there's much point in doing that though, and if the "disco sucks" brigade taught me anything, it's that using pre-formed biases and ideals to judge this music usually misses the point. Different strokes and our own ideals, right? Sounds good to me. | 2005-02-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-02-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Casablanca | February 27, 2005 | 8.6 | c3ff471d-cbc6-46ca-b42c-7d1f3c49bb21 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
Like many ambitious indie bands before them, the Dodos enlist producer Phil Ek to help craft their rise to indie fame. | Like many ambitious indie bands before them, the Dodos enlist producer Phil Ek to help craft their rise to indie fame. | The Dodos: Time to Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13446-time-to-die/ | Time to Die | You could argue the wisdom of using something called "Fools" to sell a watery macrobrew, but when the Dodos' breakthrough song was used in a Miller Chill commercial, it went a long way towards illustrating what made its parent album Visiter such a treat-- Meric Long and Logan Kroeber kept a foot in the avant-garde with their astounding technical chops and an unvarnished recording of string buzz, drum rattle, and missed cues, all while keeping things grounded in a user-friendly acoustic pop format. At times, I wondered if I overrated it, but these days, I think it might be underrated-- if I told you Animal Collective-inspired music could be used to sell beer, what chance would you give it to turn out as good as the charmingly undecided Visiter?
Changes are afoot for this prototypical duo: Yet electric vibraphonist/percussionist Keaton Snyder isn't even the most noticeable addition to the fold on Time to Die-- producer Phil Ek is. and if you're thinking that Time to Die has a suspiciously similar sound to the Shins' Chutes Too Narrow or Fleet Foxes, now you know why. Look, Ek's call is one you gotta take if you're looking to make a leap to a new echelon of indie-fame, and the decisiveness of the album can be admirable when so many other quick turnarounds result in more of the same or guessing against a band's strengths. But while the Shins' James Mercer and Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold often use their backing bands as vehicles for vocals, but they don't have the Dodos' rhythmic force and this presentation initially plays like a misallocation of resources. Not that Long is a poor singer, far from it-- his voice remains convincingly boyish, even at its most cynical and he never loses control of his range. But as a wordsmith, he can be distractingly dodgy-- see: the anti-establishment sentiments of "Two Medicines" and "The Strums", too generic to have real bite despite featuring the record's most intriguing structure and a ingratiating, swooping chorus, respectively.
Opener "Small Deaths" begins with Long alone on guitar and vocals, and while that was the dominant sound on Visiter, there's a distinct makeover in presentation: His acoustic is more rounded, almost spongy, his voice coated with a warm, thin glaze of reverb. And then the drums come in-- Visiter crackled with the intensity of two monstrously talented musicians competing for the lead role (acoustic Lightning Bolt too much of a stretch?), but initially, it's "no, you go first." Over the wide-open chords at the start of "The Strums" you can practically hear a voiceover boasting "a new romantic comedy from the director who brought you..." "This Is a Business" bears more than a passing similarity to the ramshackle rumble of "Jodi", but it doesn't achieve the same frenetic lift-off. I've seen most of Time to Die performed live, and through that, answered the one question you'll probably have: Absolutely, these songs would sound much better if the drums were turned up.
All that said, the Dodos' charms are too strong to be held hostage by a bigger budget, even if you wonder what a guy like Brian Deck could do with it. If "Small Deaths" initially comes off as too tastefully restrained, it's only because the Dodos are allowing space between themselves and their most conventionally "epic" climax, a steady drum guiding as guitar and vibes steadily pace themselves in adding subtle fuzz tones. Likewise, early leak "Fables" may have sounded wanting for energy, but Kroeber shows a knack for a subtly ingratiating swing that emphasizes the Dodos' rhythmic gifts.
As Time to Die progresses, you slowly hear the Dodos growing more comfortable in their tonier territory. "Troll Nacht" is quite possibly the most gorgeous Dodos composition to date, an endearing and tender vocal performance by Long fitting its ease-into-Autumn glow, while the title track ends the record on a bobbing, bluesy note recalling their more Zeppelin III-inspired moments while incorporating a newfound look to harmonizing vocal loops.
So you really can't call Time to Die a disappointment, not when it actually improves on Visiter in some ways. It's not the full-out leap into "pop" that it would initially seem (for that, you'd need to hear the difference between Visiter and their self-released full-length, from back when they were called Dodo Bird), and for all its charms, Visiter wasn't exactly the tightest hour going. Time to Die bests it as far as consistency goes-- might not get a "Fools" here, but you won't get a "Park Song" either. And it's hard to envision Time to Die slowing the momentum of the Dodos' ascendance, not when their live performances are still thrilling as ever, but Time to Die comes off like a temporary decision to forgo made them lovable, flaws and all, and stress what makes them likeable. | 2009-09-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss | September 18, 2009 | 7.1 | c4097bfc-0eb1-4dbc-b892-cc42402a2198 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On this collaborative album with producer Neill Von Tally, Portland via Los Angeles rapper/singer The Last Artful, Dodgr displays her gifts for melody and realism. | On this collaborative album with producer Neill Von Tally, Portland via Los Angeles rapper/singer The Last Artful, Dodgr displays her gifts for melody and realism. | Neill Von Tally / The Last Artful, Dodgr: Bone Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22841-bone-music/ | Bone Music | In a genre as rooted in storytelling as hip-hop, nothing—not a way with words, or an ear for hooks—is as valuable as an interesting perspective. The Last Artful, Dodgr certainly stands out in that regard: she’s a queer black woman from Portland, Oregon—not exactly a city known for its hip-hop scene. However, she also draws a great deal of inspiration from her hometown of Los Angeles, the nucleus of west coast rap. Growing up in the Midcity neighborhood, Dodgr had a front-row seat to the turmoil of the L.A. riots, a fact that she nods toward in her stage name: it’s not just an L.A. Dodgers pun wrapped in a Dickens reference, it's also an allusion to dodging bullets.
Knowing this connection, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the L.A. rap landscape in Dodgr's music: Kendrick’s melodic moments, Vince Staples’ barbed delivery, the sing-songy cadence of Boogie. Still, Dodgr’s voice is a distinctive instrument, a sharp, nasal sound that she bends into a variety of shapes. More so than with her peers, it’s hard to draw a line between her rapping and singing—in her hands, everything feels guided by a strong sense of melody. For her second full-length, Bone Music, she’s partnered with Neill Von Tally, a Portland producer whose au courant beats draw a great deal of inspiration from the atmospheric moodiness of Noah “40” Shebib and Clams Casino.
Bone Music takes its name, at least in part, from the Soviet-era practice of bootlegging banned records using X-ray film. It’s a timely reference to censorship, not to mention a fitting title for an album whose focus on the alienation of labor is near-Marxist. “All you ought to do is work/Knee pad keep to the dirt/Mine all life long/Die young, then you die young,” Dodgr raps on “LLC" before instructing, “If I die, play my beats.” Even when she's stunting, her boasts are undercut by the realities of working-class life. “I made 24 dollars on my night shift...And I’ma spend it all/Spend it all on me,” she sings on the lurching “Bleu Replica,” wherein she tries to distract herself from a cheating lover by spending what little she’s made at the club.
In the world of Bone Music, sex and death are the only escapes available from the daily grind; accordingly, more than a few of these songs focus on the former. Take the lead single “Oofda,” an escapist bedroom jam (“Spoil ya baby/Explore your cravings”) cloaked in a darkly shimmering beat. The two-part “Good/Gravy” mines similar territory, segueing from a double-time rapping workout set to gated house synths to a back-half that sounds like the sparks thrown off by some futuristic machine. There’s romantic tension here too, most notably on the airy “Foreclosed,” which finds guest vocalist Natasha Kmeto playing Dodgr’s yearning foil (a different version of the song, sung by Dodgr, appeared as “Foreclosure” on last year’s Fractures EP).
With Bone Music, The Last Artful, Dodgr assuredly steps into a lane that’s hers alone. And while her perspective certainly sets her apart, she’s hardly leaning on her identity here. Rather, Bone Music finds Dodgr extending her viewpoint into an exercise in broader, more allegorical storytelling. In an era where most rappers appeal to their listeners’ aspirations, Dodgr aims instead for reliability, zooming in on harsh realities rather than well-heeled fantasies. It’s an unusually grounded mindset for a promising young rapper, one that will likely serve her well as her profile rises. | 2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | EYRST | February 4, 2017 | 7.2 | c409db17-bc14-4be1-8742-0822812c468c | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Chrissie Hynde brings back some old bandmates for a brisk record that acknowledges The Pretenders are best when they’re direct and unadorned. | Chrissie Hynde brings back some old bandmates for a brisk record that acknowledges The Pretenders are best when they’re direct and unadorned. | The Pretenders: Hate for Sale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-pretenders-hate-for-sale/ | Hate for Sale | Chrissie Hynde is the only constant in the Pretenders. In the early ’80s, she suffered the twin losses of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon. While her first official drummer Martin Chambers usually was by her side, serving as the anchor for a revolving series of guitarists and bassists, he occasionally took his leave. The pair were on the outs by 1986’s Get Close, but he returned to the fold during the recording of 1994’s Last of the Independents, and he has remained part of the Pretenders ever since, touring with the band even though he sat out every session since 2002’s Loose Screw.
Chambers returns to the studio for Hate for Sale, a brisk record that makes no apologies for relying on the flinty rock’n’roll the band has long since patented. In a sense, it’s a kindred spirit to Alone, the 2016 Pretenders LP produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. Auerbach encouraged Hynde to rekindle the swagger and sneer of the first two Pretenders albums, assembling a cracker-jack crew of professional musicians to back her. If you didn’t listen too closely, Alone sounded like a Pretenders album, but it didn’t feel like one.
Hate for Sale, by contrast, feels like a Pretenders album. Maybe it helps that it’s helmed by Stephen Street—a producer who has long specialized in making the workaday combination of guitar, drums, and bass sound extraordinary. Street previously worked with the group on 1995’s acoustic live album The Isle of View and 1999’s ¡Viva El Amor!, so he’s familiar with their strengths and quirks, realizing they’re at their best when they’re direct and unadorned. The no-frills sound of Hate for Sale could be called a back-to-basics if Hynde had ever budged from this sound to begin with. She’s sanded its edges to glide onto adult contemporary radio, and she’s flirted with passing trends, but she’s always centered herself with those ringing guitars.
Street gives six strings plenty of room on Hate for Sale. Hynde is back playing rhythm guitar, weaving in between the leads of James Walbourne, the guitarist who also co-wrote the album’s ten songs. Most of the sounds are familiar—“Didn’t Want to Be This Lonely” bops to a Bo Diddley beat, just like “Cuban Slide” did back in 1980—but the execution is smart and precise. Often, Hynde’s words match the sonic onslaught, particularly on the album’s venomous title track and on the glammy stomp “Turf Account Daddy,” but the lyrics aren’t the focal point. Maybe that’s a good thing: when the tempo slows and the guitars fall away, it’s too easy to hear Hynde taking a jab at emotionally aware modern women, as when she sings “Feminists claim that we’re all the same/But I don’t know a man who’s felt the same shame” on the bridge of the overwrought closing ballad “Crying in Public.”
Such callousness isn’t unexpected. Despite scoring a smash adult contemporary hit with 1994’s “I’ll Stand By You,” sensitivity has never been a strong suit of Hynde’s, either on record or in public, so it is a welcome surprise for the Pretenders to deliver one of their finest ballads on Hate for Sale in the form of “You Can’t Hurt a Fool,” a slow-burner with a Memphis R&B undercurrent. The track’s understated simmer comes courtesy of Chambers, whose presence is palpable everywhere on the record. Hynde responds to the drummer’s studio return not just by writing the band’s tightest rock record in ages but by thrusting the group’s interplay to the forefront. By doing so, she makes an effective case that the Pretenders are indeed a rock’n’roll band, not a singer-songwriter in disguise.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | July 22, 2020 | 6.7 | c40d800a-7c0a-45ca-bab8-f72eba41ba0d | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The Boston rockers’ third album wears its radicalism with confidence, and the untimely death of the band’s guitarist lends their late-capitalist protest unfortunate urgency. | The Boston rockers’ third album wears its radicalism with confidence, and the untimely death of the band’s guitarist lends their late-capitalist protest unfortunate urgency. | Somos: Prison on a Hill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/somos-prison-on-a-hill/ | Prison on a Hill | “From here on out we are Antifa-core,” Somos announced shortly after the release of Prison on a Hill. Their third album wears its radicalism on its sleeve: The title reappropriates the puritanical vision of their native Boston and Ronald Reagan’s sundowning American dream, while the cover utilizes anti-Nazi iconography. But more importantly, that’s what Phil Haggerty would’ve wanted. Somos’ guitarist passed away August 10 at age 28, and the band paid tribute by emphasizing his activism, posting local news footage of Haggerty ripping down white pride flyers.
Their label, Tiny Engines, rush-released the album for a week to help defray funeral costs, donating the overage to the Heather Heyer Foundation. While Haggerty’s death lends an unfortunate urgency to Prison on a Hill, it doesn’t fundamentally change the album so much as emphasize what it already was: a band reaching a new level of confidence making songs about the human cost of late capitalism.
Many punk bands rail against the “same 9-to-5, 16-to-65” from a position of moral superiority, whereas Somos’ breakout single “Dead Wrong” saw it as a trap that most don’t have the privilege to avoid. The average desk jockey wasn’t complacent or weak, just struggling to maintain sanity in a system that saps whatever energy could be spent trying to improve the collective lot. “We have insufficient hate for an unforgiving place,” Michael Fiorentino sang on 2016’s First Day Back, which prophetically alluded to a violent decline led by right-wing demagogues or apolitical shitposters (“You can mock anyone/You can find humor in anything”). Turns out it was both, and now Prison on a Hill surveys the suffering that results when these viewpoints gain even the slightest public legitimacy. “What do you think they’ll do to us, once they are really on the move?” Fiorentino asks on “Mediterranean,” a song inspired by the rise of anti-immigrant movements in Europe.
While Somos’ political stance isn’t new, Prison on a Hill imagines it as a message worthy of thousands, rather than a few dozen in a basement. “Mediterranean” is a surefire, almost sweatless stadium-rock groove, the kind you hear from bands destined for beer commercials and an eventual gig opening for Foo Fighters. This is not the same band whose hiatus appeared permanent after their second album First Day Back, an album that managed to sound both demo-like and overproduced, alienating fans of their more rugged debut and failing to attract new ones. Throughout 2017, the group focused their energy on activism and other projects, but eventually returned to the recording studio with ideas to match their ambitions.
Somos now operate with a newfound sense of adventure, doing everything more than in the past. The timid synth washes of First Day Back are swapped for pianos and strings on “Iron Heel” and “Mediterranean,” achieving a symphonic grandeur that might’ve once seemed overblown. “My Way to You” equally recalls the Tinkertoy beat-making of Tanlines and palm-muted pyrotechnics of early Taking Back Sunday, and delivers the album’s most unintentionally heartbreaking moment. “Thank you for the best years of your precious life” feels like foreshadowing now, even if “My Way to You” is still a quintessential Somos song, one where a faceless, domineering entity offers some kind of trinket—a medal, a retirement watch, a severance package—in exchange for human capital.
Both dominant parties in American politics—the right and center-left—caricature Antifa as jackbooted extremists, rather than guys like Haggerty who fought racism on a street level and whose obituary noted how much he enjoyed the beach and the Boston Celtics. Prison on a Hill is also variously enraged, defeated, hopeful, and dreamless—but always empathetic, even for those who find themselves on the wrong side of history because they just didn’t see other options. The “heavily armed guards/Bored out of their minds/Desperately hoping for a chance to shoot to kill” on “Granite Face” and the shellshocked veteran on “Farewell to Exile” (“I was too young to see it all”) are treated in a way that targets the military-industrial complex, rather than the enlisted. Fiorentino has frequently utilized “the killing fields” as a metaphor in his lyrics, purposefully vague about whether he’s referring to a “war of annihilation” abroad or the simple fact that everyone is battling for an ever-dwindling amount of resources. “Iron Heel” takes its imagery from Mad Max, yet when Fiorentino sings “How did it feel to be born after the gold rush?” the post-apocalyptic wasteland might as well be the gig economy. Prison on a Hill is nearly 20 minutes longer than First Day Back, and its back half is subject to an occasional midtempo lull. But at its best, it’s like a Born in the U.S.A. for 2019: synth-gilded, blue-collar rock honoring people drafted into a war they had no part in creating. | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Tiny Engines | October 1, 2019 | 7.4 | c40e719c-d287-49be-a0e0-a9475f222948 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Having found unexpected happiness in her personal life, Mackenzie Scott approaches self-reflection with cautious optimism on her latest album, tentatively teasing the edges of her playful sound. | Having found unexpected happiness in her personal life, Mackenzie Scott approaches self-reflection with cautious optimism on her latest album, tentatively teasing the edges of her playful sound. | Torres: What an Enormous Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/torres-what-an-enormous-room/ | What an Enormous Room | What is there to mine, as a songwriter, when you’ve gotten everything you ever wanted? That’s been a central occupation of Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres, since her 2020 album Silver Tongue. The struggle to settle into settling down comes to the forefront on her latest record, What an Enormous Room. She approaches self-reflection with cautious optimism, the mark of someone who knows who they can fall back on when times inevitably get tough. “The dread doesn’t pay any rent money,” she observes on “I got the fear.” “But as long as it doesn’t get ahold of my honey/Think I’ll be alright.”
As she’s entered her thirties, Scott has taken on a second creative life as the muse and subject of her partner, the painter Jenna Gribbon, who she married in 2022. Gribbon, whose portraits of Scott graced the covers of Silver Tongue and 2021’s Thirstier, often depicts her in scenes of domestic bliss mid-action: pulling on a robe, reading a book while slouched on a camping chair, flipping channels on the TV with no pants on. That same desire to find beauty in banality—a collection of mundane moments that build up to the larger picture—permeates the songs on What an Enormous Room. Between “months of Sundays” and morning coffee, Scott can perceive loneliness, grief, and anxiety all lurking in the wings, but none of them feel quite as vivid as “the way you hold me way too tight when we sleep.”
From the glitching marching-band rhythm on Sprinter’s “Cowboy Guilt” to the lopsided ’80s pop-rock of Thirstier’s “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head,” Scott has excelled at adding a jagged, oddball edge to familiar rock structures. At its best, this album pushes further into the weird. “Life as we don’t know it,” describing a near-death experience where Scott and her stepson almost drowned, features a descending keyboard line reminiscent of the B-52’s, or a “game over” sound effect—a darkly funny representation of getting pulled underwater. (The evocative flair extends to one of Scott’s best lines to date: “Each time I looked for God, I drank a wave down every time.”) Forceful lead single “Collect” is classic Torres, pairing fuzzed-out guitar with a steadfast beat that commands attention, while opener “Happy man’s shoes” adds groovy bass and sparkling effects that turn menace into triumph. “I do not accept your shame,” Scott sings, determined as ever, now setting her sights on comfort and self-love rather than revenge.
After self-producing Silver Tongue, on Thirstier Scott returned to working with longtime producer Rob Ellis, whose ties to PJ Harvey have always made him seem like a natural match for Scott’s confrontational art-rock. But she shuffles the deck once again, co-producing the new record with Sarah Jaffe at the recently built Stadium Heights Sound studios in North Carolina. What an Enormous Room meanders more than past Torres releases; on more than a few songs, Scott’s searing guitar and punchy vocals are buried in muddy production. The standouts make it all the more obvious that “Ugly mystery” could’ve gone even harder, or “Artificial limits” might not need to drag past six minutes. Scott’s unique touch remains audible in her songs—even the scuzz of “Artificial limits” has cool ornaments, such as a Dracula-worthy organ—but it would be nice if it stood out more.
Continuing from Thirstier, Scott has traded the cynicism of her earlier work for sincerity, but that doesn’t mean she’s losing her edge. “Ugly mystery” and “Forever home” dig into the realities of codependent relationships and an impoverished childhood, and the ways expressions of care get compromised in nonideal circumstances. Still, Scott is committed to hope. On “Jerk into joy,” an ode to the nonlinear cycles of grief after tragedy, Scott repeats the mantra, “What an enormous room/Look at all the dancing I could do,” over a relatively spare arrangement of guitar, piano, and airy drums that let the entire thing breathe. You can imagine her in the proverbial space, getting her bearings, trying out moves. She’s aware of her own trepidation, but rather than fall into the abyss, she’s still game for pushing forward. | 2024-01-31T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-31T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 31, 2024 | 7 | c414a596-9879-430c-8029-d7f4d13d6d4e | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
Former WU LYF frontman Ellery Roberts returns with LUH, his new project with visual artist Ebony Hoorn. Produced by the Haxan Cloak, their debut is a vast, swaggering colossus. | Former WU LYF frontman Ellery Roberts returns with LUH, his new project with visual artist Ebony Hoorn. Produced by the Haxan Cloak, their debut is a vast, swaggering colossus. | Lost Under Heaven: Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21888-spiritual-songs-for-lovers-to-sing/ | Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing | British band WU LYF began their brief career in anonymity and burned out in a press storm. Frontman Ellery Roberts, then 21, was the architect of their spectacular demise: "WU LYF is dead to me," he declared in an open letter to his bandmates, complaining that their acclaimed debut, a kind of protest album for the disenchanted, had got his revolutionary energy all messed up. "The sincerity of ‘Go tell fire’ was lost in the bull shit of maintaining face in the world we live," he wrote. Roberts’ return a year later, a solo video for "Kerou’s Lament," which depicted a little girl drenching herself in gasoline and threatening to self-immolate, felt like a reprimand to anyone still unconvinced of Roberts’ grandiose sincerity. He doubled down last November, publishing a 1000-word manifesto for LUH (Lost Under Heaven)—his new project with the visual artist Ebony Hoorn—which seemed to rally for the downfall of western capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, LUH’s debut album, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing, is not an exercise in subtlety. Roberts’ embattled rasp still dominates, thrashing about like a blindfolded gargoyle. His lyrics, a fervid blend of self-seriousness and paranoia, pursue doomed dreams in the face of unnamed oppressors. For Roberts, music is a furnace in which to hurl the caution and humility he believes restrain us in everyday life. The result is a revelatory experience that requires no legible revelations: vocals of ecstatic defiance matched to music seemingly composed of pure magnitude; melancholic synths, sparse guitars, and bombastic strings and drums. The overall feeling is of an all-hands, against-the-odds triumph against staggering forces.
Roberts' ambition is vague enough to be limitless, and while reliably earnest, he’s uninterested in anyone’s approval. That mix could herald disaster, but Roberts, more restrained as a songwriter than singer, is smart with his flair. Produced by the Haxan Cloak, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing is a vast, swaggering colossus, imbued with waves of reverb and gothic flourishes that meet its frontman’s astronomical intensity. "Lost Under Heaven," a magnificent shoegaze thrash, climaxes with a euphoric call-to-arms—"And we all know that it’s bullshit/They say it’s just life, and we live it"—whose crude, cheap-seats sloganeering has no right to feel so poignant.
That being said, chasing crescendos is an exhausting hobby, and the hourlong LP is hard work. It’s unclear whether LUH see Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing as playful melodrama or realism in a doomed world; either way, they came equipped for an epic task. The record’s crux is the ravey "$ORO," in which Roberts gives voice to an unrepentant one-percenter: "Once I lived a life like you/Jealous of the ease of a privileged few/But I earned a life like this ... It is something that you’ll never understand/We are born free to exploit this land." The ensuing drop, a punishing gabber beat reminiscent of Björk and Arca’s "Black Lake," turns the record on its head, clearing the slate for a reflective, romantic closing suite.
The inspiration for that turnaround is Ebony Hoorn, who apparently restored Roberts’ dwindling faith in the human race the moment they met, in 2012, at his squat in Manchester. Her spotlight moment is "Future Blues," a gorgeous ballad of languid guitars, digitized chatter, and slow, sunrise synths: "I’m so bored of this reality/Of fearful men trying to limit me," she sings, poised between despondence and third-act redemption. On "Lament," the update of "Kerou’s Lament," Hoorn concedes, "There’s still a part of me that wants your love inside of me." Her soothing tones are a balm to listeners alongside Roberts’ arid growl, even as her presence lifts him into fits of rapturous defiance: "To the powers of hope/To the powers that be/You’ve fucked up this world but you won’t fuck with me!"
Roberts’ chronic nihilism, in WU LYF and since, often seems rooted in the ennui of aggressive individualism, where the only thing left to save is oneself (and even that’s barely worth it). "Lament" offers up a reprieve, as Roberts clasps onto love like a cliff ledge and clambers right back up, thankful for the air in his lungs. At the end of its video, the band’s initials are sentimentally repurposed: "Love Unites Humanity." From a man given to grand anti-capitalist screeds, it’s a disarmingly sweet touch. | 2016-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | May 11, 2016 | 7.8 | c414b5c5-6353-4951-957c-22ee70a96429 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Once again Carly Rae Jepsen’s B-sides are just as good if not better than her A-sides. | Once again Carly Rae Jepsen’s B-sides are just as good if not better than her A-sides. | Carly Rae Jepsen: The Loveliest Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carly-rae-jepsen-the-loveliest-time/ | The Loveliest Time | Like the heroine of a big-budget romantic comedy, Carly Rae Jepsen presents as an eminently likable everywoman, a casually self-deprecating dreamer whose composure is no match for a sudden explosion of emotional fireworks. What elevates Jepsen’s script beyond cliché is the degree of conviction she brings to the part: her fearless ability to scale the embarrassing edge of feeling and trust-fall into her music. Like Taylor Swift, Jepsen’s gift for summoning rapturous emotion is undercut only when canned sass and cringe humor take precedence over roiling passion or clear-eyed revelation. But where Swift’s every word deepens an already cultish personal mythology, Jepsen’s persona is more broadly sketched: less identifiable with a specific sound, look, or set of quirks than a sword-wielding mandate to honor the immediacy of your heart.
Her newest album, The Loveliest Time, is a companion to and loose thematic inversion of last year’s The Loneliest Time. The third in a series of B-side albums culled from Jepsen’s ultra-productive studio sessions, it is also a concentrated dose of Weird Carly, operating at the flamboyant edges of pop convention. Where The Loneliest Time was steeped in personal loss and pandemic malaise, The Loveliest is strutting and extroverted, drunk off new love and bracingly direct about desire. It is also one of the most musically diverse in her catalog, cycling through experiments that range from go-go to French touch to quasi-IDM. So long as she sings from the heart, The Loveliest Time suggests that Jepsen’s music can tolerate an enormous amount of artifice.
With a reliable set of returning collaborators including Rostam, Patrik Berger, John Hill, and Kyle Shearer, Jepsen dips into sounds that both stay the course and swerve wildly from anything else in her discography. “Kamikaze” and lead single “Shy Boy” are familiar offerings from Jepsen, slices of weapons-grade ’80s pop that roar to life off the back of muscular drum machines and spiraling Moroder synths. But The Loveliest Time also has fascinating detours. Opener “Anything to Be With You” rides a crisp go-go drumline shot through with electric guitar reminiscent of Amerie’s “1 Thing” and achieves a similar weightless groove. Buoyed by looping vocal samples and progressively massive French touch synths, standout track “Psychedelic Switch” is a glorious surrender to sensation. The strangest song by far is “After Last Night,” a glitchy piece of Rostam-produced baroque aughts pop in the vein of “Genie in a Bottle” that Jepsen transforms into a characteristic moment of starry-eyed romantic realization.
Actual loneliness on The Loneliest Time was more of a suggestion than a central conceit, and while The Loveliest Time mostly lives up to its promise of openhearted emotion, it isn’t entirely breezy. While it’s thrilling to hear the singer call the shots with a timid hottie on “Shy Boy” or lose her conscious faculties to sheer ecstasy on “Psychedelic Switch,” Jepsen’s giddy uplift is bookended by pockets of angst on mid-tempo tracks like “Aeroplanes” and “Put It to Rest.” And while they’re perfectly serviceable songs—with some incredible drumming on the latter—their inclusion affirms that this is indeed a collection of outtakes rather than a concept album. The dusky Tame Impala-style guitar on “Kollage” and car-commercial-sized synth of “Stadium Love” likewise feel out of place. Taken as a whole, though, The Loveliest Time is a solid counterpart to its sister album, trading quiet, introspective power for brassy, headlong joy. | 2023-08-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 604 / Schoolboy / Interscope | August 2, 2023 | 7.4 | c41e5623-b86b-489d-ae14-c6c23c72ba87 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
With stately ballads and choruses to shatter glass, the Nashville singer-songwriter’s debut builds into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified. | With stately ballads and choruses to shatter glass, the Nashville singer-songwriter’s debut builds into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified. | Katie Pruitt: Expectations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-pruitt-expectations/ | Expectations | Katie Pruitt wrote her debut album alone, but her music summons a community: bursting with drama, flourished with strings and organs, gathering to emotional crescendos that seem designed to draw a crowd. In a recent interview with The Boot, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter described how each track represents a turning point in her life: the moment she came out as gay, the hard conversations that followed, the resulting discomfort in the suburban Georgia Christian community where she grew up, the way it all affected her relationship with her girlfriend. The music reflects these personal trajectories. Her songs are patient but determined, navigating serious subjects with quiet familiarity.
Although she came up around Nashville country venues, Pruitt writes songs that feel more aligned with the last few years of indie rock. Her penchant for stately ballads with choruses to shatter glass recalls similarly introspective but explosive work by Julien Baker, while the title track pulses with the roller-rink soft rock of Jenny Lewis’ latest records. Though the label offered to pair her with bigger names, Pruitt chose to produce the album with her friend Michael Robinson, a collaborator dating back to her days playing the weddings-and-parties circuit in college. You can sense their trust in each other: Every track is given space to unfold, building into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified, in step with her contemporaries yet detached from any particular scene.
Along with the grand arrangements, Pruitt’s lyrics, written over four years, bind the album together. At times, she seems to respond to herself with a momentum that feels almost chronological. To the listless narrator in “My Mind’s a Ship (That’s Going Down),” there’s the casual pep talk in “Expectations.” For the painful dissonance that drives her to resent herself in “Normal,” there’s the emboldened push to follow her intuition in “Loving Her.” Giving voice to characters who feel left out by society, Pruitt occasionally runs into the same clichés that tend to box them in. But as soon as she echoes that received wisdom—say, a refrain about how the truth can set you free in “Searching for the Truth”—she exerts her own skepticism: “Everybody’s full of shit, there’s no denying,” she sings in the chorus. Many of her lyrics proceed this way, comparing lessons she thinks she should have learned by now to the ones she’s actually living day-to-day.
“I used to be ashamed to write a song that said her name,” Pruitt sings of a partner in her breakout single “Loving Her.” One of several songs that describes a struggle to feel comfortable around her own family and friends, it reckons the need to be heard against the lingering desire to hide. Her songwriting now makes no such concessions, and even her singing expresses a surging confidence; her voice could carry pop songs and torch ballads, but she instead pairs it with starker, slower narratives, highlighting characters whose doubt drives them as much as their convictions. It’s complicated subject matter from a young songwriter, and Expectations arrives with the great unburdening of saying how you feel after years of keeping it inside.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Rounder | March 3, 2020 | 7 | c4215a82-79c3-4bea-89de-362841450ad8 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Dan Bejar’s marvelously inscrutable songwriting reaches beyond meaning. On his most live-sounding record in years, he finds clarity when language recedes and the music takes over. | Dan Bejar’s marvelously inscrutable songwriting reaches beyond meaning. On his most live-sounding record in years, he finds clarity when language recedes and the music takes over. | Destroyer: Labyrinthitis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/destroyer-labyrinthitis/ | Labyrinthitis | Why Tintoretto? The 16th-century painter for whom Dan Bejar titled “Tintoretto, It’s for You,” the strangest and most electrifying song on Destroyer’s 13th album, was known for his furious brushwork, according to Wikipedia. It is, of course, a tacit admission of insufficient research to be quoting from the free encyclopedia in the second sentence of a review, but in this case a throwing up of hands seems in keeping with the spirit of the work. Bejar, Destroyer’s voice and mastermind, said in a recent Pitchfork interview that the reference to Tintoretto is inscrutable even to him, but that it has something to do with skewering his own youthful pretension: “a vague recollection of me throwing around Tintoretto as a painter I liked in my 20s, just such utter bullshit.” It would be just as disingenuous for a critic with no particular knowledge of Renaissance art to act like he’s capable of further demystifying the namedrop.
But I do understand what comes next, and so could anyone who’s ever headbanged or drummed on a steering wheel. Bejar whispers the title with the theatrical menace of a cartoon supervillain, and the band goes off like a bomb: a massive synth riff, a drumbeat that acts on your body with pure physical force. You may draw some tenuous connection between this cathartic burst and what you learned on the internet about some old Venetian painter’s visceral approach to the canvas. Or you may assume that “Tintoretto” is a bit of gibberish, or a character from Shakespeare, or the name of Bejar’s cat. Either way, I think, the mystery is part of the point. Surrender to not knowing, and—if you’ll allow a Bejarian allusive non-sequitur—let the sound take you away.
Bejar has always been a cryptic songwriter, but on Labyrinthitis he seems intent on piling on associations until they reach beyond meaning itself. (He chose the title, which technically refers to an inner-ear condition, in part because it “seemed insane,” he said in the same Pitchfork interview.) With one hand, the songs invite your attempts to decipher their myriad puzzles and tangents; with the other, they push you away, luxuriating in disorientation. “June” closes with two and a half minutes of coke-dusted disco and logorrheic spoken-word, its fragmentary images—“Scrapyard angel/Wings of brass/Ash/A river called trash”—made further disjointed by Burroughs-esque cut-ups of Bejar’s voice, with certain phrases trailing off and others looped into accidental refrains. “Fancy language dies and everyone’s happy to see it go,” he sings earlier in “June,” when it still resembles a conventional song. By the end, that line starts to seem like an omen. Bejar’s war on coherence continues through the dadaistic inversion of “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread,” an overstimulated groove over which he advises someone that “everything you just said was better left unsaid.” Maybe he’s talking to himself.
Like most Destroyer albums since 2011’s blearily triumphant Kaputt, Labyrinthitis takes the smooth and sophisticated studio-centric pop of the late 1970s and ’80s as its musical center. Certain tracks would fit right in on Kaputt, where Bejar first toned down his usual yelpy verbosity, becoming one with the strung-out grandeur of the arrangements: songs you could put on to heighten the languorous mood of a dinner party that stretches long into the night, their essential strangeness only revealing itself with focused listening. More often—as in the ending of “June,” and the explosion at the center of “Tintoretto, It’s for You”—Labyrinthitis delights in rupturing the elegance of its own facade. With four-on-the-floor rhythms and pulsating basslines, songs like “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread” and “It Takes a Thief” gesture in the general direction of dancing, but their tempos are just a hair too frantic to support the act itself. Try moving your limbs in time and you might end up looking like a pedestrian in an old-fashioned newsreel, jumpy and unnatural, moving faster than the frame rate’s ability to keep up.
Bejar and his collaborators recorded Labyrinthitis remotely, and its impossible lushness is surely the result of some tinkering from producer/multi-instrumentalist John Collins, who assembled these isolated tracks into an album. Despite this, it has the unmistakable feeling of having been performed by an actual band, more so than any Destroyer album since 2015’s Poison Season. The music’s sense of churning aliveness comes largely thanks to drummer Joshua Wells, who brings delirious high drama to every thwack of the snare, treating even the disco-inflected numbers as if they were just power ballads played way faster than usual. His fills provide the unambiguous emotional peaks that Bejar’s songs so often withhold: crashing triumphantly in midway through “It’s in Your Heart Now,” cascading across the sunlit bridge of “All My Pretty Dresses,” charging the instrumental breaks of “It Takes a Thief” with raw adrenaline.
Listening to Labyrinthitis feels like how it might feel to be a Thomas Pynchon character: journeying circuitously toward a goal you can’t quite apprehend, accosted by signs and symbols that may be of world-historical importance if they don’t turn out to be nonsense, haunted and comforted by the intuition that all this could easily be a big joke. “Tintoretto” is loaded with semiotic baggage, going back as far as the year 1518 and as recently as Bejar’s days as a young hipster, and it’s also just a word that sounds cool before a big synth breakdown. You have to make your own way through these songs, decide what’s important and what’s just set dressing, knowing your ideas might diverge significantly from the next listener’s, or even Bejar’s own. For me, the album is at its clearest when language recedes and the sound takes over, as in the long, fragile fadeout of “The States,” which is like the music icicles might make if they were capable of singing. I find a similar clarity in the title track, a collage of synthesizer, cut-up singing, and a young child’s nonverbal speech. Listen in the right mood and it is almost unbearably tender. But you’re lying to yourself if you think you can tell me what it means. | 2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | March 24, 2022 | 8.5 | c429d0e4-188f-476b-b307-c0bc9475c6d2 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The latest release from this Los Angeles-based Plug Research jazz-hop duo is missing something... or somebody. | The latest release from this Los Angeles-based Plug Research jazz-hop duo is missing something... or somebody. | Ammoncontact: One in an Infinity of Ways | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/455-one-in-an-infinity-of-ways/ | One in an Infinity of Ways | An album's closing track can spoil everything, as Ammoncontact's One in an Infinity of Ways demonstrates. Before the salt is tasted in the sugar, this L.A.-based jazz-hop unit unveils several nourishing, leftfield instrumental grooves. But when Sol Uprising's Lil Sci delivers a laser-cut rap on the record's final track-- one that would perfectly complement the opener, instrumental space-out "Dreamy"-- the absence of MCs becomes glaring and the album suddenly seems like a collection of missed opportunities. Or, as Lil Sci puts it: "That's why I don't judge until I hear the half of the half." One in an Infinity of Ways, indeed. In all fairness, the incomplete-art element is what Ammoncontact's Carlos Niño and Fabian Ammon are possibly reaching for on their second album, as hip-hop and psychedelic jazz instrumentals are often left 50% done for future remixing and rapping. However, when producers can neither afford a set of guests nor rhyme worth a damn, most of the music simply falls in the background-- for good or ill.
That said, "Dreamy" falls into the good, and it can leave one seeing purple, red, and orange spots everywhere the eye glances. Bedroom-techno dandy Daedelus supplies the bass clarinet thrumps and acoustic guitar licks that dart about while a flute sample melts the cortex. As previously mentioned, the inclusion of Lil Sci's laidback rhymes about keeping your chin up during adversity may could proven that psychedelica can sell almost any public service announcement. Unfortunately, other choice MC spots also turn up two cherries with each pull of the slots.
"Healing Vibrations" has a looped Afro-jazz beat that nearly rivals the Apache break before Niño and Ammon seamlessly let the music nod off into a 2 a.m. jazz trance courtesy of bassist/guitarist Greg Malone and skinsman Andres Renteria. It's one of many moments when Ammoncontact successfully blur the line between the sampler and live instruments. The three-part "Infinity of Rhythm Instrumental" knocks listeners awake with a bludgeon by conga before settling into a methanol haze with downtempo Rhodes funk. Other fine tracks include the P-Funk bounce of, ahem, "Fun Is for Funky" and the robotic funk of "Wu Woomp Whoomp", which struggles to escape the length of its two-foot power cord.
Prefuse 73's Scott Herren has called Ammoncontact's sound "machine funk," yet it's one that is devoid of poetry. Bare-boned throwaways "Through the Moon" and "Wu Wu Woomp" (you read right) drag a tepid hip-hop beat around in circles-- dying for the verses of any li'l Johnny who found God in the Gospel according to Emniem. "Like Waves of the Sea" has a swank Latin-jazz bass riff that sadly goes nowhere, while the staccato orchestral tease "Ballad of the Untitled" sounds too incomplete to even count as a lock-groove piece. The demand for an emcee savior is exacerbated with every listen.
The nagging title One in an Infinity of Ways implies that Ammoncontact are capable of greater good, and they would've left the listener with a remarkable batch of abstract sketches-- if Lil Sci hadn't exposed the nudity of it all. I can't wait for the remixes to hopefully correct things. | 2004-10-11T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2004-10-11T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz / Rap | Plug Research | October 11, 2004 | 6.9 | c42fd3fe-7042-4bd2-a95d-fa3fba086f7e | Cameron Macdonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-macdonald/ | null |
Revisions of the Past reissues two albums by Panopticon, the solo vehicle of Minnesota-via-Kentucky black metal musician Austin Lunn, here remastered by Colin Marston of Krallice, Gorguts, and others. | Revisions of the Past reissues two albums by Panopticon, the solo vehicle of Minnesota-via-Kentucky black metal musician Austin Lunn, here remastered by Colin Marston of Krallice, Gorguts, and others. | Panopticon: Revisions of the Past | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22205-revisions-of-the-past/ | Revisions of the Past | Panopticon, the solo vehicle of Minnesota-via-Kentucky black metal musician Austin Lunn, has created an identity for himself by never sticking to one template or root influence in his work. As of late, he’s fashioned himself to the closest thing America will get to mid-period Bathory, where Quorthon elevated black metal by bastardizing Wagner. He’s also one of the first American black metal musicians to embrace his own country’s folk traditions instead of mining Nordic lore, evident on his covers of traditional coal miner songs on Kentucky and the banjo-driven “The Long Road I: One Last Fire” from Roads to the North. Revisions of the Past collects two of his albums, On the Subject of Mortality (itself a collection of his splits with Skagos and When Bitter Sleeps) and Social Disservices, and gives them a beefed-up sound, forging a stronger bridge between Lunn’s current work and his beginnings. The results aren’t equal, though: Mortality underwent more surgery and the results dazzle, but Disservices still came out more fully formed.
Mortality take us back to when Lunn was starting out, another musician under the spell of Wolves in the Throne Room. Unlike Wolves, he’s more in tune with his punk past, seamlessly integrating the intoxication of swirling black metal with crust aggression. In “Living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death” and “Living Eulogy,” delicate melodies shine through the maelstrom. His transitions from loose dreaminess to blasting fury feel so seamless the two sensations nearly merge. Lunn had the ideas down, the execution still only halfway, which is where the new production job comes in. It makes the material rise above its origin as a series of splits, giving it the grandeur it deserves. The spoken-word and acoustic section of “Valley” feels less hollow here than on the original, and better flows with the song as a whole. Still, it’s clear that he hadn’t quite found his real voice yet.
Disservices doesn’t benefit as much from a new sheen, but that’s because it was the more compelling album to begin with, and the moment he really began to come into his own. Colin Marston originally mastered the record (and he did the same for this collection), and Disservices has an alien death metal influence that suggests a spiritual influence, too. It’s more akin to the oppressive wall-of-death sound of Impetuous Ritual than any black metal, where beginnings and ends get tangled in confusion. (The opening riff in “Patient” in particular applies Meshuggah’s robotic groove to black metal.) While the sonic upgrades may not be pronounced as those on Mortality, they do serve Lunn’s drumming, where Panopticon really stands out from the vast majority of USBM. He considers himself a drummer first, a quality he shares with fellow USBM visionaries Erik Wunder (Cobalt) and Jef Whitehead (Leviathan), and that attention gives cohesion to both Mortality’s beauty and Disservices’ utter chaos.
Disservices’ sound is only rivaled by its lyrical matter, a critique of American social services system. If it sounds lost and disjointed, it’s meant to capture the uncertainty seemingly tattooed on the people he’s singing about. Lunn rejects the notion that speaking on “real life” or “social justice” matters makes metal weaker; in making the plights of damaged children a legitimate lyrical topic, he subverts how metal usually speaks from a position of wanting power. “Subject” puts you in a terrifying position: “I own you: Trapped in a corner, fear in your eyes. I own you: Alone and terrified, crying in the dark. I own you: Slave to disorder, forever ensnared. I own you and no one will ever care.” Towards the end of “Subject,” there are riffs that sound more jubilant and hopeful, a precursor to the Bathory influence on his later records, and his drumming resembles his crust origins, trying to unleash a Tragedy-esque battle cry. It’s ultimately a defeated lament in disguise; what good is optimism if we’re fucking over the most broken among us? Lunn plunged himself into such bleakness on Disservices that he had no choice but to explore more majestic territories on the albums after this.
Lunn considers these to be the definitive versions of Mortality and Disservices, and there’s no reason to doubt him, as both are faithful to the originals and heightens their respective strong points. It’s not best taken at once, as both of the records are vastly different. Panopticon diehards would get something out of the new Mortality; Disservices is a much more broadly appealing record, one that shows that black metal can be used to teach compassion. | 2016-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Bindrune / Nordvis | August 6, 2016 | 7 | c4337a03-bc3b-42fd-a895-6f76d0c2c428 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Morbid Angel’s ninth album sets the death metal band back on course. Featuring Trey Azagthoth’s molten solos, the band rediscover what they did well across their career and double down on it. | Morbid Angel’s ninth album sets the death metal band back on course. Featuring Trey Azagthoth’s molten solos, the band rediscover what they did well across their career and double down on it. | Morbid Angel: Kingdoms Disdained | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morbid-angel-kingdoms-disdained/ | Kingdoms Disdained | Kingdoms Disdained, the ninth album from Florida death metal legends Morbid Angel, centers around the destruction and recreation of Earth, of a god stripping their creation from humans. In 2015, guitarist and sole original member Trey Azagthoth was facing the apocalypse of his own band, most notably vocalist and bassist David Vincent, who left to pursue a country music career in Austin. 2011’s Illud Divinum Insanus, the sole record from Vincent’s reunion, was so widely panned that it plagued their momentum long after its release. One could argue that the 2013 anniversary tour for Covenant, Morbid Angel’s 1993 breakout record, was as much about downplaying Illud as it was celebrating a classic. Vincent played the rockstar extrovert to Azagthoth’s shred nerd, and while his voice was in pristine shape, his ’80s metal theatrics stood in odd contrast to Azagthoth’s more serious approach.
Vocalist Steve Tucker, who first replaced Vincent in 1997, returned to the band following the mass exodus. Tucker’s delivery is lower and harsher, and his albums with Morbid Angel—1998’s Formulas Fatal to the Flesh, 2000’s Gateways to Annihilation, and 2003’s Heretic—accommodated. They picked up the speed and Azagthoth’s soloing went into further tripped-out, outré directions. Kingdoms follows the same path, although instead of making Morbid Angel more brutal than ever, it sets them back on course following a disastrous experimentation.
They rediscovered what they do well across their career and doubled down on it. “Piles of Little Arms” recalls both “Heaving Earth” from Formulas in its speed and macabre, almost black metal-like passages similar to those from their debut Altars of Madness. “The Pillars Crumbling” takes the more intricate stylings from Covenant and injects it with adrenaline, finding a sweet spot between both eras of the band. Even the tracks with groove holdovers from the ’90s—“The Righteous Voice” features a slew of tantalizing string bends, and “Declaring New Law (Secret Hell)” resembles sped-up Neurosis—they’ve never felt this alive or urgent.
With a fuller production and a renewed partnership with Azagthoth, Tucker sounds even deeper and gnarlier than he has in some time. Drummer Scott Fuller replaces Tim Yeung, and like his predecessor, he brings a technical, polished performance. It’s a contrast from classic drummer Pete Sandoval, who grew out of a more traditional approach, blasting with a more natural swing. Kingdoms is so blindingly fast that, most of the time, it works, though there is a slight sense that Sandoval’s touch could have served just as well. Azagthoth ran the risk of turning Morbid Angel into a faceless tech-death band by replacing Yeung with a younger, less recognized talent, but he and Tucker are dynamic enough forces that Morbid Angel is, well, Morbid Angel again.
Kingdoms is focused for a wandering spirit like Azagthoth, and yet it’s also pretty conservative by Morbid Angel standards. There is a tiny nagging sense that you want Azagthoth to fully freak out, to unleash a solo that would actually open a portal to every parallel universe over a drum pattern no man nor machine could pull off. Still, it is wonderful to see Azagthoth has again embraced lava, his term for his soloing. “My solos are not about technique,” he said. “They're about lava. About feeling without knowing.” As such, his lead work is both guided and free-flowing. His solo at the end of “Voice” dips into ever-sinking pools with brief spikes in ecstasy; “For No Master” sounds like if ravenous birds knew how to cry like Penderecki.
It’s been an especially fruitful year for death metal—Morbid Angel’s contemporaries Obituary and Immolation put out their strongest albums in years, and there is a slew of younger bands paying homage to classic forms with their own twists. It’s fitting that Morbid Angel’s new record provides a redemption narrative for 2017’s death metal bloom. Given our collective state of affairs, an album of “acid terror” where the all-knowing creator destroys us with bizarre guitar solos and double-bass drum doesn’t sound so absurd. | 2017-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Silver Lining | December 7, 2017 | 7.3 | c4351190-24a0-4174-b57d-782ae0e85c64 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
On an album created entirely using iPhone and iPad apps, the UK singer and producer trades his customary futuristic soul for the house and techno of his youth. | On an album created entirely using iPhone and iPad apps, the UK singer and producer trades his customary futuristic soul for the house and techno of his youth. | Steve Spacek: Houses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-spacek-houses/ | Houses | Steve Spacek’s career has never made many waves in the mainstream, but he’s a hero to the kind of music fan who worships Gilles Peterson and rare Japanese jazz records. In 2000 his band Spacek scored an underground hit with “Eve,” which was remixed by J Dilla and later sampled by the Roots, snagging the UK group an unlikely major-label deal. But their futuristic soul was too idiosyncratic to work in such a risk-averse setting, and the association was short-lived.
Two decades on, Houses is a record you could imagine a major label might happily work with. A distant cousin of Spacek’s smoke-infused psychedelia, Houses is a painless, largely unfussy album in which Spacek returns to the house and techno of his youth. The album’s 13 tracks play out over the steady tick of 4/4 drums; you can hear the influence of deep-house pioneer Larry Heard in the airy chords and spidery bassline of “Waiting 4 You” and Detroit techno originator Kevin Saunderson in the mottled, gnarly riff of “Love 4 Nano.”
Simplicity is baked into Houses’ production. Spacek recorded the album entirely on iPhone and iPad apps, and you can tell, for good and for bad. Bad because Houses at times feels oddly thin and underworked, more demo than finished article; and good because the album has an undemanding, even liberating, lightness that isn’t always present in Spacek’s more convoluted work. What sets Spacek apart from a legion of bedroom producers and their iPad presets is his distinctive voice, which occupies the glorious interzone between Marvin Gaye’s silky croon and Robert Wyatt’s troubled falsetto.
Lead single “Rawl Aredo” features a Latin-accented house shuffle and keyboard stabs—a not overtly challenging blend that legions of budding producers have created then discarded as they get to grips with their machinery—which he marries to jazz-influenced chords and a gloriously carefree vocal, the kind of semi-scat scamper someone might croon as they cycle down a sunny street. The vocal hook of “Waiting 4 You,” which follows, is absolutely undemanding and entirely catchy, a “Wild Thing” for the bedroom deep-house set.
This approach doesn’t always come off. “African Dream” sets a meandering, rather tuneless vocal against annoyingly stuttering production that even Spacek’s angelic tones can’t rescue, while the instrumental “Songlife” is far too flimsy, a collection of vaguely swinging electronic elements that have nowhere to go and no great hurry to go there. At times like these, you wish the album’s rare moments of eccentricity—the devilishly psychedelic ending to “Where We Go,” where the production sounds like it is being flushed down the drain—could have been more frequent.
And that’s the problem: Houses feels unadventurous by design. With judicious editing, the record’s frustratingly almost-there mix of unfiltered inspiration and sketchy production might have made a great EP; with more work it could have led to a decent LP. As it is, Houses disappoints as often as it delights.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Black Focus | February 11, 2020 | 5.7 | c4383666-00bd-4b21-b757-5fd3fd105203 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Dominick Fernow's new EP rumbles inexorably forward until it reaches a Big Crunch that sounds as apocalyptic as the one promised by some physicists. The five tracks here seem to be slowly shedding the trappings of music itself. | Dominick Fernow's new EP rumbles inexorably forward until it reaches a Big Crunch that sounds as apocalyptic as the one promised by some physicists. The five tracks here seem to be slowly shedding the trappings of music itself. | Prurient: Time's Arrow EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16006-times-arrow/ | Time's Arrow EP | "Time's arrow" is a lovely phrase to describe the seeming unidirectional progression of time, the sense that it's been traveling perpetually forward from the Big Bang to whatever the ending point of the universe will happen to be. It's also the cheeky title of Dominick Fernow's new Prurient EP, which itself rumbles inexorably and sometimes unbearably forward until it reaches a Big Crunch that sounds as apocalyptic as the one promised by some physicists. The five tracks here seem to be slowly shedding the trappings of music itself, all the dark-pop armature Fernow has grafted onto Prurient's old shriek-the-pain-away sound over the last few years, until all that remains is fearsome and formless noise.
On Time's Arrow, the comforts of familiar rhythm and melody are stripped back, track by track, to reveal the snarling, primal sound mass from which they were beaten into shape. With a jittery programmed beat that recalls Big Black at their most despondent and yet more sour synth squiggles that prove John Carpenter is the biggest influence on the darker end of electronic music in the 21st-century, the title track takes off from the creepy-but-clearly-defined hooks of Prurient's brilliant Bermuda Drain album from earlier in 2011. It's a possible contender for jam-of-the-year for all the ex-goths, one-time industrial obsessives, and collectors of soundtracks from obscure 1980s horror movies. But the rest of the EP sounds like it was made by a lunatic from one of those obscure 80s horror movies, as if that deranged slasher had somehow escaped into real world and been asked to record a few tunes for a cassette label. And you can imagine the sort of emotions such a jolly fellow would want to express through sound.
So the beat becomes a nearly arrhythmic clattering on "Let's Make a Slave". They keyboard melodies become cover-your-ears squeals of distortion, as if someone were jabbing a knife into an amplifier. Following the brooding but almost catchy "Time's Arrow", Fernow's most conventional song yet, order itself seems to be breaking down across the rest of the EP, a vibe brought home by the blasted, end-of-the-world atmosphere and Fernow's increasingly desperate last-man-on-Earth vocal perfomances. By "Maskless Face", his eerie monotone monologues have given away to frustrated howlings that express nothing but rage, and even that connection to human pain is severed by the EP's end. "Slavery in the Bahamas" plays like a rapid-fire tape collage of the ugliest sounds the post-industrial world has to offer-- the spluttering of downed power lines, the disembodied groans of information sluicing through a modem, buildings and machinery being crushed to nothing-- as if the whole show was coming to a swift and brutal end.
But Time's Arrow ends not in a deafening silence after the final track’s implosion. It's perhaps no accident that "Slavery in the Bahamas" ends with the faint sound of a lovely tune sneaking its way out of the squall. If you play the EP on a loop, this snatch of pleasant human music-making seems to lead quite naturally back into the title cut. Of course if you then play the EP straight through again, everything comes crashing down once more. With a kind of grim pleasure, Time's Arrow suggests that all that effort, writing songs and constructing coherent albums, will always eventually give way to the chaos that rumbles dangerously under any attempt to impose control over noise, if you just let go. | 2011-11-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-11-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hydra Head | November 3, 2011 | 7 | c43d3bb4-c44e-461a-9b83-ddca094f7cda | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The rising producer has made records with John Legend and Perfume Genius. On his new instrumental record, he expresses exquisite vulnerability at the intersection of ambient and modern classical. | The rising producer has made records with John Legend and Perfume Genius. On his new instrumental record, he expresses exquisite vulnerability at the intersection of ambient and modern classical. | Blake Mills: Look | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blake-mills-look/ | Look | Look begins with an exclamation mark, the silence broken by what sounds like a bell and a kettle drum struck simultaneously with Thor-like force. The sound hangs in space for an instant before slowly floating out like airborne debris from an explosion, captured in high-definition video and played back at a glacial pace. It unfurls into a drone, swaddled by soprano vocals and supported by electronics that groan like tectonic plates. For nearly eight minutes, “One” lingers here, seesawing between seraphic majesty and geologic force as digital curlicues and aerated guitars fade in and out of the background. Somewhere between Arvo Pärt and Sigur Rós, it marks a tremendous introduction to a surprising new voice at the intersection of sound design, chamber music, and post-rock: Blake Mills, a young star of the Americana-adjacent record-producing orbit with an audacious and personal approach to sound.
The clatter that launches Look is a requisite line in the sand, a jolting notice that this music is nothing like that of Mills’ past. A little more than a decade ago, Mills split from the band that would become Dawes, the country-rock stars who are now the proverbial creek cutting through the bottom of Laurel Canyon. Since then, he has steadily ascended to the rank of top-shelf session musician, having played with the likes of the Avett Brothers, Norah Jones, and Lucinda Williams. He’s also released two stunning albums that have tested the edges of what might be called millennial folk, his wide-eyed musical vision informing songs that still feel like homestead confessionals. Most notable, though, is his emergence as a top-notch producer: Nominated twice since 2015 for the producer-of-the-year Grammy, he has helmed records by Perfume Genius, Alabama Shakes, and John Legend. And he seems only to be getting started: “I think the questions I was asking made him suspicious of whether the record was done,” he recently told Pitchfork—about 4:44, after JAY-Z himself asked for his input.
But Look is a world away from the Carters or the Avetts; in fact, it’s a miniature world unto its own. For these five mesmerizing tracks, Mills began experimenting with 1970s guitar synthesizers, intricate systems that allow guitarists to alter their basic input infinitely and create, say, a choir or drone where there once had been a strum or a chord. These were private experiments with a technology he had once written off, but, as his amusement sublimated into infatuation, he began recruiting collaborators to help shape these pieces: experimental saxophonist Sam Gendel, hypnotic Weyes Blood singer Natalie Mering, hyper-collaborative violinist Rob Moose. Together, the ensemble built a suite of subtle instrumental beauties, all traces of Mills’ phosphorescent guitar wrapped and bound in a patchwork of soft yarn and tensile wire.
At least on its surface, Look bears the telltale signs of ambient music—long tones that seem to gradually splinter into minute particles, parallel senses of space and stillness, a meditative reverie that elicits a sort of cosmic wonder. If you push play and go about your day, you may notice its presence less than you notice its sudden disappearance, when its symphonic vanishing point actually vanishes. There are traces of Eliane Radigue’s immersive Adnos series, Keith Fullerton Whitman’s teeming Playthroughs, and Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s The Pearl, all genre touchstones perfectly in tow.
But lean in just for a moment, and Eno’s gentle maxim—“Ambient Music… must be as ignorable as it is interesting”—becomes untenable. These placid settings veil tugs of war between brittle timbres and romantic textures, blended into the backdrop like figures camouflaged inside wallpaper. “Three” puts a throbbing rhythm behind a luminous hum, pulsing somewhere between Dead Can Dance and Jon Hassell. But Moose’s strings and Mills’ guitar pull against the rhythm, temporarily forcing it off its axis and creating the terrifying sensation that the world has stopped turning. As dreamlike as it is, there’s always an undercurrent of corrosive dissonance just beneath the lip of “Five,” as when the strings flash like flare guns at the five-minute mark or a sample rips through the mix like a serrated blade early into the piece. Look into these emotionally and texturally turbulent compositions, and it’s hard to look away, to “accommodate many levels of listening attention” other than rapture.
On 2010’s Break Mirrors and 2014’s Heigh Ho, Mills seemed eager to let the listener into his world, to expose his vulnerabilities and worries without hesitation through country-rock tunes. “Don’t Tell Our Friends About Me” is a ruthlessly raw apology, “It’ll All Work Out” an unvarnished how-did-I-get-here manifesto. Maybe it seems surprising to consider wordless music candid, but Mills again appears to show us exactly what he’s feeling—the admixture of hope and unease that defines “One,” the calming perseverance of “Five.” And “Two” treats nostalgia like a childhood blanket, practically radiating warmth as it invites you into its pizzicato folds. As magnificent as Look sounds, that essential humanity—or the apparent sense that these instrumental abstractions are rooted as much in experience as aesthetic, if not more—is its masterstroke. Perhaps Mills, something of an enthusiast for artistic restlessness, never returns to this liminal space of drone and dream. If not, that’s OK; in these 25 minutes, he has said so much. | 2018-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | New Deal | December 10, 2018 | 8.1 | c44421c3-93d2-4ca3-afa3-5b8b605596cb | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Danish experimentalist turns toward singer-songwriter introspection, finding drama and yearning in melancholy, understated arrangements. | The Danish experimentalist turns toward singer-songwriter introspection, finding drama and yearning in melancholy, understated arrangements. | Astrid Sonne: Great Doubt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/astrid-sonne-great-doubt/ | Great Doubt | Astrid Sonne wastes no time getting to the heavy stuff on her third album, Great Doubt. After a vanishingly brief introduction—a 61-second prelude for flute and viola that starts off sweetly and turns unsettling in its closing seconds—she cuts to the chase on “Do you wanna,” the album’s first real song. “Do you wanna have a baby?” she asks, her voice cool and affectless over lumbering piano and a plodding, rickety drum beat. Then she twists the knife: “I really don’t know.”
Singing from a position of vulnerability is a shift for the Danish musician. For most of her career, Sonne avoided lyrics entirely. “I’m so awful at writing them, I would do anything to avoid it,” she told an interviewer in 2019. Instead, on her first few releases she struck an unusual balance between ambient electronics, trance arpeggios, 20th-century minimalism, and the stark, unadorned sound of her viola. On the rare occasion that she did include voices, they were just another layer of tone color. On 2018’s Human Lines, her debut, she smeared choral samples like daubs of oil paint; she closed 2019’s otherwise resolutely electronic Cliodynamics with a piece of chamber music that recalled Renaissance polyphony. On largely a cappella tracks like “Fields of Grass”—partially recorded in a parking garage—and “How Far,” the words were secondary to the songs’ whorled textures.
But Great Doubt is, in many ways, a singer-songwriter record, swapping electroacoustic abstraction for plainspoken intimacy. Second-person address bleeds into first-person introspection; Sonne can be unnervingly direct. On “Do you wanna,” her great doubt turns out to be trepidation about civilization itself, her interlocutor not a lover but herself: “I think to myself/Do you wanna have a baby/Do you wanna bring people into this world?” she muses, before repeating the word “people,” rolling it around in her mouth like a foreign object.
Tirzah’s hermetic brand of R&B is a clear influence on Sonne’s skeletal arrangements and carefully shaded portraits of ambivalence. On “Give my all,” the slow-moving drum programming is an uphill trudge, the strings sour and dirge-like, yet her voice—singing words borrowed from Mariah Carey—is radiant with longing, capturing lovelorn dejection with a songbird’s grace. “Almost” is similarly conflicted, filling in the outline of a breakup with a series of stark, simple images: “A woman passing by/Clouds moving across the sky/Warm rain on my face.” Her smoky alto resembles Sade Adu’s; for all the song’s inherent sadness, it’s weightless, a bittersweet nothing rendered in little more than voice and plucked strings, with a fadeout that seems to say, this too shall pass.
As on Sonne’s previous albums, the mood is somber and restrained, but what was once a heady remove has turned melancholy. A bit like her compatriot ML Buch, she finds unexpected drama in her low-key palette. Contrasts abound: canned string synths and real viola, booming 808s and acoustic drum kit, doomy pads and wistful harp-like plucks. “Overture,” a brief instrumental interlude featuring London saxophonist Ben Vince, sounds like Arthur Russell via ECM. “Boost,” another instrumental, provides a glowering counterbalance to the album’s wispy songs of yearning in its detuned synths and mazelike, stop-start structure. It also shows just how tricky Sonne can be: After two and a half minutes of latent violence and steely resolve, the sullen drumbeat cedes to a cotton-candied dream-pop swirl.
The album’s contradictions snap into vivid focus on a dovetailing pair of songs in the album’s back half. Musically, they’re nothing alike: “Everything is unreal” is a muttered meditation over droning string loops and a funereal beat, “Staying Here” an ethereal ambient-house anthem made with church organs and no drums. But despite their differences, the songs’ lyrics overlap: Each begins with a scene in a park—ground “soft and damp” in one, “sun swallowed by clouds” in the other, the narrator looking up at planes in the sky in both—before converging upon a shared chorus: “Everything is unreal/But I’m not going anywhere/Not going anywhere/Staying here with you.” One scene, two radically different treatments; one is gloomy and paranoid, the other ebullient and joyful. For a singer who once shied away from writing lyrics, this lenticular image is a remarkable trick—proof that Sonne’s pop instincts are every bit as singular as her soundscaping. | 2024-01-26T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-26T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Escho | January 26, 2024 | 7.7 | c44c7ea3-11c4-4e09-9a3f-5116ccc2a5d7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Like Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing has a great ear for odd, leftfield sounds and makes gorgeously haunted, glitch-y hip-hop. | Like Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing has a great ear for odd, leftfield sounds and makes gorgeously haunted, glitch-y hip-hop. | Nosaj Thing: Drift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13251-drift/ | Drift | Nosaj Thing is Jason Chung, a 24-year-old producer from California with loose ties to Flying Lotus and the L.A. glitch-hop scene. His gorgeously haunted debut Drift makes it clear that while he shares a lot with Flying Lotus-- a base of operations, like-minded compatriots, a deep love of hip-hop and a thousand strains of electronic music-- they're pretty far apart in terms of approach. Spatially speaking, Flying Lotus' music is like a cluttered studio apartment overflowing with interesting bric-a-brac-- hip-hop records, comics, pieces of modern art. Chung's music, meanwhile, is spacious and reverberant, every element echoing into the emptiness surrounding it. Drift came out on Alpha Pup, the label run by underground hip-hop producer Daddy Kev, and Nosaj Thing produced tracks on Busdriver's latest record, but Drift has little of anything that might be recognized as "hip-hop" on it, none of Flying Lotus' breakbeats or his analog-tape warmth. From a mood point of view, its gloomy beatscapes have a lot more in common with the bass-heavy London dubstep scene than anything his fellow L.A. laptop nerds are doing.
*Drift'*s dubstep influence is immediately apparent in the chilly minor-key synths and fractured, ghostly drum programming of "Us" and "Fog", which evokes Burial. Chung has a similar flair for atmospherics and fondness for dank spaces; the drum sounds on "IOIO" resemble both the dripping of leaky pipes and swarming, squeaking rats. He also shares a firm belief that great drum sounds come from everywhere. On "1685/Bach", for instance, they come from the peeling of masking tape and jingling change.
This magpie ear for odd, leftfield sounds is Drift's most explicit link to glitch-hop. The endlessly pinging synthesizer on "Light #1" seems to careen off every available surface, while it's companion "Light #2" builds from a prism of Tron-like laser blurts. Chung clearly relishes a good rug-pulling, and he plays a thousand little tricks on your senses throughout the record-- breathing sounds fluttering high in the mix, echoing, hall-of-mirrors synthesizers. Occasionally, things get a little too lava-lamp; I wouldn't want to listen to "Coat of Arms" while stoned, as I think the halting strobe-light effect might make me seasick.
Chung is clearly also fascinated by darkness and impenetrability, and Drift is filled with nighttime sounds. The brief moments of light, when they penetrate, feel slightly unreal; the woozy major chords of "2222" sound submerged, an impression reinforced by the sucking sounds surrounding them, similar to the noises you hear in your ears as you swim for the surface of a pool. At the two-minute mark in "Light #1" synths streak across the track like shafts of sunlight, and on "Lords", the final track, we're surprised by the late entrance of a rarely heard sound on the LP-- harmonized human voices, relatively untouched by filtering and effects, cooing wordlessly. It's a last dose of cold water to the face on a record full of such moments. There are sonic Easter Eggs for a thousand listens here, and it would take six pairs of headphones and an equal number of high-grade strains of weed to track them all down. Happy hunting. | 2009-07-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-07-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Alpha Pup | July 8, 2009 | 7.9 | c452279b-c610-4f2d-8c70-9eff29291cc2 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Ty and Denée Segall, along with the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, refine their abrasive sound on a record that writhes, swells, and undulates like the belly of a serpent. | Ty and Denée Segall, along with the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, refine their abrasive sound on a record that writhes, swells, and undulates like the belly of a serpent. | The C.I.A.: Surgery Channel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cia-surgery-channel/ | Surgery Channel | Ty Segall has spent the past 15 years building a vast discography of solo releases, side projects, and genre experiments branching into familiar yet distinct phenotypes of the California auteur’s strummy rock’n’roll. The C.I.A., however, is an outlier within the Segall-verse, expanding his scope rather than filling gaps. Formed in late 2017 by Ty, wife Denée Segall, and the Cairo Gang frontman Emmett Kelly, the trio emerged with a unique amalgam of threadbare electronics, tinny bass, and Denée’s snarling spoken word. While their 2018 debut occasionally drowned in its own marinade of squelching reverb and unbridled feedback, Denée’s charisma and the band’s playful rhythms dredged a solid record out of its still-forming ethos.
Returning five years later with Surgery Channel, the C.I.A. ditch the cavernous echo and zero in on the whirring, abrasive textures of a well-oiled torture device. It’s an upgrade in every sense, hitting harder and delving deeper into the band’s flickering modular synth work while cleverly detouring from their established post-punk blitz. Though the majority of Segall’s releases are identifiable by their twangy barre chords and distorted leads, no member of the C.I.A. wields a six-string guitar. Instead, Ty and Emmett both primarily play bass, splicing fragmentary riffs and gurgling bits of atonal synthesizer atop bare-bones drum machine loops.
There’s little in the way of melody on Surgery Channel. Instead, the band forms a curtain of fuzz that writhes, swells, and undulates like the belly of a serpent. Denée’s writing works in the same vein, communicating through quick rhythmic pulses. She layers disjointed phrases in a brusque fashion that’s opaque yet impressionistic, as if she’s covering a canvas in black paint and drawing attention to each brushstroke. After a brief salvo of hollow snares on “Better,” she conjures a series of images like an overstimulated brain scrambling to process its surroundings. “A flush within/A red upon the skin,” she mutters before offering herself empty consolation each time she reaches the chorus: “It gets better, it gets better, it gets better.” The band’s wriggling low end, which resembles the sound of a groan tube, adds a sense of urgency.
Denée’s range as both a writer and performer has expanded over the past decade, evolving from a garage-rock yawp to a more sinister, assured presence. On “Inhale Exhale,” she barks like a drill sergeant, while on “The Wait,” she bounces between a whispered verse and growled chorus that sounds downright inhuman against a short-circuiting bassline. Her ambitions in turn push Ty and Emmett out of their own comfort zones, especially on Surgery Channel’s second half, where the band gets creative with its drum programming and palette.
“Construct” is the surprise highlight of side two, repurposing the C.I.A.’s past studies of Dilloway-esque junk noise into a scuttling instrumental that vaguely resembles “Get Ur Freak On.” Denée’s stream of two-syllable phrases acts as an anchor for abstract improvisation, slivers of reversed strings, throttled synths, and syncopated kicks forming a terrifying backdrop. Though the more straightforward stabs at dance-punk like “Better” and “Impersonator” are catchy and effective, it’s more exciting to hear the band break from these eighth-note grooves and explore looser song structures at greater length. Surgery Channel’s closing tracks beyond the C.I.A.’s more obvious influences to carve out a niche all its own, building tension during “Under,” whose intro is comprised almost entirely of clean bass plucking, or plunging headlong into industrial atmospheres with atonal bursts of static on the closer, “Over.” Such experiments make Surgery Channel one of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound. | 2023-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | January 24, 2023 | 7.4 | c4565c76-1dab-4d95-bac4-5d1aecc3250b | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
Clinic asked Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin to mix their 2012 album, Free Reign, only to shelve all but two of his submissions. On this complete album overhaul, the Liverpool band reinstate Lopatin's mixes and rejig the sequencing to astonishing effect. | Clinic asked Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin to mix their 2012 album, Free Reign, only to shelve all but two of his submissions. On this complete album overhaul, the Liverpool band reinstate Lopatin's mixes and rejig the sequencing to astonishing effect. | Clinic: Free Reign II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17762-clinic-free-reign-ii/ | Free Reign II | Clinic have never been ones to heed conventional wisdom, the logistics of singing through surgical masks being but the first of many aesthetic hurdles they've erected between themselves and pop accessibility. After all, here is a band that, in an attempt to overcome the seven-album itch-- and possibly give themselves something new to talk about with interviewers after 15 years in the game-- turned to acclaimed sound-collagist Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never) to mix their 2012 release Free Reign, only to shelve all but two of his submissions. You could sense that second-guessing on the final product: While Free Reign saw the band stretching out more than usual, with its psychedelic drones and funkier grooves, the album was still quintessentially, claustrophobically Clinic, caught between competing desires to expand the band's sound without dramatically altering it.
But Free Reign's shortcomings aren't anything some corrective surgery can't fix. And so, just months after the album's release, we have Free Reign II, which is not so much a remix album or a sequel companion piece as a complete do-over-- the U.K. indie equivalent of Bobby Ewing suddenly turning up in your morning shower. Free Reign II reinstates Lopatin's original mixes (plus new ones for "Miss You" and "You", the two songs of his that made the previous cut) and resequences the album in reverse order. But while this may read like some egregious ploy to make fans buy the same record twice-- song titles are merely appended with a "II"-- they should be thankful Clinic are going through with the plan. In this revised form, Free Reign is elevated from an intriguing if flawed work into the band's most consistently illuminating and sonically adventurous album since 2002's Walking With Thee.
In Lopatin's hands, Free Reign's subliminal textural details take the starring role, smashing through the original's glass-ceiling containment to reveal a vaster sense of space and far greater dramatic tension. The album's low-key, wandering closer, "The Sun and Moon" is reborn as Free Reign II's deliriously disorienting opener, its Manzarekian organ pumps amplified into glass-shattering tremors and free-jazz sax squeaks heigthening the carnivalistic clamor. On the original Free Reign, the blissed-out reverie "Misty" gradually eased you into the record, establishing a slack, laissez faire tone; here, "Sun and the Moon II" violently thrusts you in, foreshadowing the more turbulent funhouse experience to come. Even the found-sound recordings of children at play that permeate "You" assume a more sinister, predatory tenor on "You II", their increasingly mutated voices fusing into the sheets of guitar noise that eventually consume the song. In this revamped context, the ascendant organ drone that rises above the song's fiery outro feels less like a simple Suicide tribute and more like a spacecraft escape from an exploding planet.
Lopatin can't rehabilitate every track-- "Cosmic Radiation" is still a scatterbrained psych-jazz scribble of a song. But his gnarlier mix and flipped-script sequencing do wonders for what was Free Reign's most rudimentary turn, "See Saw". Where the original overemphasized its temper-tantrum bashed beat and remedial, morse-code melodica riff to the point of annoyance-- its position as second-track nearly derailing Free Reign's momentum from the get-go-- the song is utterly transformed into Free Reign II's explosive side-two climax. It's the moment where all the strategic soundscaping Lopatin has exercised over the course of the record comes to a head: The drums stomp with crater-inducing force, the guitars turn several degrees thicker and nastier, Blackburn's impetuous vocal is reverbed into a more antagonistic scowl, and whole thing swirls and snarls like a fairground attraction spun out of control. And in its wake, "Misty II" finds its true calling as the album's comedown closer, sending us adrift on a billowy bed of analog-synth starbursts. (It's followed by a tacked-on bonus track, "Done and Dusted II" that hearkens back to the motorik bounce of early singles like "The Second Line", but doesn't quite fit with the album's droning, cerebral vibe; nor does it give Lopatin much opportunity to go crazy on the console.)
One can only imagine that Clinic's reticience to initially release this vastly superior version of Free Reign can be chalked up to misgivings about showcasing Lopatin's textural trickery at the expense of the group's performances. But Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over. Sadly, it's been brought to market as a secondary, supplemental release whose belated appearance may have bypassed the window of opportunity to recapture some of the considerable buzz the band enjoyed back at the turn of the millennium and re-stoke the interest of fans who may have tuned out since. At the very least, it puts lie to that old shampoo-ad slogan: sometimes, you do a get a second chance to make a seventh impression. | 2013-03-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | March 15, 2013 | 8 | c45c2db3-9d22-4d02-9ff5-3b803823638a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
One of rap’s most inventive stylists surfaces from his memories to reflect on himself and his vocation, transforming his latest record into a searing, soulful gem in his catalog. | One of rap’s most inventive stylists surfaces from his memories to reflect on himself and his vocation, transforming his latest record into a searing, soulful gem in his catalog. | Ka: A Martyr’s Reward | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ka-a-martyrs-reward/ | A Martyr’s Reward | The art of Ka is quiet. He raps in a smoky mutter, subdued yet trenchant, and over the last decade, his largely self-produced beats have molted into wispy, drumless loops. But listen closely and you’ll be rewarded with rich networks of detail that bore into the realities of a 49-year-old’s neglected Brownsville neighborhood. This music is often likened to audiobooks, literature, epic poetry, which is to say that it defiantly demands your full attention. And as the zeitgeist has centered steely, East Coast formalism the last couple years from the Griselda crew and the Alchemist, Ka seems to be receiving plenty of it.
On 2020’s world-weary Descendants Of Cain, Ka negotiated pathways to harrowing memories, casting jail bids upstate and “brothers killing brothers” in the frame of that doomed biblical allegory. The songs had a reporter’s eye—“I live this vivid shit, I ain’t that creative,” goes one line—but they felt like wounds healing. Through Cain and Abel, and Orpheus and the Sirens, he’s grappled with big, existential questions about what we learn versus what we inherit; how, in an environment designed to destroy your existence, family extends far past blood; and how traditional moral codes are stretched and distorted while living in the belly of the beast.
That symbolism builds itself into the intrigue of his music, which at times, can deflate without a compelling frame. But on his latest album, A Martyr’s Reward, Ka scales it back, instead coming to terms with his growing status as a leader and role model in hip-hop and his local community. One of rap’s most inventive stylists surfaces from his memories to reflect on himself and his vocation for a moment, transforming Reward into a searing, soulful gem in his catalog.
Where on past records, Ka would often play a slightly detached narrator, here he inserts himself into his own mythologizing as a kind of truth-bearer or guiding light, breaking up his dense lyricism with gnomic screeds and calls to action. This clarity allows Ka to twist his tales in compelling new directions. On “I Need All That,” he plainly unpacks everything that’s been stolen from Black people: “My braids, my waves, my gold/My chance, my dance, my stance, my soul.” This may come off as preachy in another rapper’s hands, but Ka stakes these claims on needing to rap to survive, seeing the world through the music he grew up on, losing friends who couldn’t turn a new leaf. He doesn’t sound grumpy; he sounds exhausted.
That tiredness sinks into the next song, the heaving “Peace Peace Peace,” which marries Ka’s mournful singing to the soul of Tennessee singer-songwriter Joi, famous for her work with the Dungeon Family. Together they sing of seeking peace, their voices swelling and soaring over a spare bassline and clattering drums, before Ka unspools line after line trying to make peace with his upbringing: “The saddest fact: they stole my youth, wish I had it back.” Joi’s contributions to spiritual songs like OutKast’s “Liberation” highlight one of Ka’s own strengths: his deep, almost religious reverence for culture, craft, and humanity. The best Ka songs feel like prayer, dirges, incantations, and A Martyr’s Reward is full of them.
This album doles out the meticulously constructed rap verses and dust bowl soundscapes you can reliably expect from every Ka album. Like a face-scrunching spitter from the New York mixtape circuit, he finds ways to coax science, rap history, animals, and whatever else he’s been reading about into dystopian images. “Cops got us under a microscope, to make sure we see cells/Know my first vitamin was iron, but I just wanted to be/beat/B 12,” he raps on “I Notice,” connecting ideas of crime, surveillance, and technology in one deft move. On that same song, he later cuts away all the fat to meta-analyze: “I noticed the onus was on me...to speak the truth.”
From early records like 2012’s dark Grief Pedigree onwards, Ka has gradually burrowed deeper and deeper into a more mystical, more intimate musical universe. You can hear the drums slowly melt into the background, and the synths and guitars froth a little more. On A Martyr’s Reward, the beats dissolve into some of his finest, serving his often breathless rapping as a Tibetan healing bowl might guide a meditation. Ka handles most of the production himself, veering between ominous tones and chintzy, major-key loops, but brings in long-time collaborator Preservation for the haunting “Subtle,” and Brooklyn rapper-producer Navy Blue for “We Livin’ / Martyr.”
Navy also delivers a staggering verse on that song about emerging from his darkest days, and their steady working relationship highlights the growing influence Ka exerts on a newer generation of underground rap. It makes every aside about going to sleep hungry, staying true to your art, and choosing brothers who’ll bleed with you feel like a lesson passed on. “Having nothing gave me everything,” goes the somber refrain of the final song, the sample glowing with the weird joy of something off Ghostface’s Ironman. It might sound romantic, but in context, A Martyr’s Reward reads as a spellbinding affirmation for a man who’s defied all odds, and a beacon for those who need direction.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Iron Works | August 21, 2021 | 8.3 | c46ac72a-c9d9-4294-ae20-05c9b51996aa | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
In a dozen somber, elegiac pieces for piano and electronics recorded in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, the Japanese composer reckons with his own mortality. | In a dozen somber, elegiac pieces for piano and electronics recorded in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, the Japanese composer reckons with his own mortality. | Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryuichi-sakamoto-12/ | 12 | In 2014, a medical diagnosis changed Ryuichi Sakamoto’s life. The pianist, composer, and Yellow Magic Orchestra member was told that he’d contracted throat cancer, forcing him to reluctantly cancel live performances while he underwent treatment. “I honestly don’t know how many years I have left,” he would later reflect in the 2017 documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. “I’m not taking anything for granted. But I know that I want to make more music. Music that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind—meaningful work.”
This sense of renewed ambition led Sakamoto to abandon an album he was then recording and begin anew with async, a somber, introspective release informed by his cancer diagnosis. The 14-track album channeled the melancholy reverence of Bach along with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, situating sparse piano pieces within electronic soundscapes imbued with a sobering weight.
Nearly a decade removed from his initial diagnosis and more than five years on from async, Sakamoto has continued making music, even as his battle with cancer persists. His latest album, 12, was written and recorded during the course of an especially difficult 13 months. After being diagnosed with rectal cancer at the height of the pandemic—“From now on, I will be living alongside cancer,” he announced—Sakamoto retreated from public life, and the disease escalated to stage four in 2022. Nevertheless, he began hosting occasional instrumental livestreams as part of his “Playing the Piano” series, for which he performed career-spanning material in short takes that were edited together into virtual concerts. Following his 2020 and 2022 livestreams—the former was later released as a live album—12 wades further into the emotional landscapes that defined async.
A collection of ambient etudes for piano and synthesizer, the album is strikingly minimal in its arrangements. Tracks are titled and sequenced in the order in which they were committed to tape, lending the album a diaristic feel. (Only the final cut, an atmospheric, minute-long recording of tinkling bells, is presented out of order.) The pieces move softly through space and time, emphasizing the reverberant textures of the room in which they were recorded. “20210310” opens with a bristling synth tone that grows and expands slowly, alternating between high and low notes that brush up against the thresholds of human hearing in each direction. The piece rises and falls with a clear contrapuntal arc that never resolves into a melody. Others, like “20220202” and “20220214,” are similarly atmospheric, made up of raw, unvarnished sounds; they feel more like demos than the focused interventions of Sakamoto’s past solo records.
In addition to the weight of the room around him, you can also feel the presence of the composer himself. A steady pulse of strained breathing persists across many pieces, driving home the image of Sakamoto seated at the keyboard. “20211201” begins with the sound before introducing a piano melody draped in a foggy reverb reminiscent of Harold Budd, and the sibilant texture continues across much of the album. Against the backdrop of his carefully sculpted piano lines, the inclusion of Sakamoto’s breathing feels deliberate, quietly reminding listeners of his health. The smallest details take on heightened significance as he returns to themes and ideas from throughout his catalog. Pieces like “20220207” and “20220307” build on the mournful, elegiac tone of his film scores for The Fortress and The Revenant, while “20220302 (sarabande)” looks to Sakamoto’s heroes—Bach, Chopin, and Debussy—in its warmth and melodic simplicity.
The chronological, piecemeal nature of the album means that the audio quality and execution are often inconsistent from piece to piece. Couched in an impressionistic, sketch-like feel, the pieces rarely develop as they unfold, and even when Sakamoto pursues more than one theme or idea, as on “20220302,” he avoids any dramatic, risk-taking gestures. Much like his friend and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence castmate David Bowie did with Blackstar, as well as Leonard Cohen with You Want It Darker, Sakamoto is staring down the prospect of his own death, meditating on the legacy that he will leave behind. But rather than mythologize his life in narrative songwriting or theatrical instrumental fireworks, he’s chosen a quiet grace, one more subtle and restrained than even his softest prior work. Rarely does an album this understated say so much. | 2023-01-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Milan | January 17, 2023 | 7.6 | c4760d5d-4e78-4940-b540-3c72e6d34ff8 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The Mid-Atlantic’s grindcore standard bearers have never done it better than they do on their sixth studio album, the strangest, strongest, and most accessible record in the band’s 20-year history. | The Mid-Atlantic’s grindcore standard bearers have never done it better than they do on their sixth studio album, the strangest, strongest, and most accessible record in the band’s 20-year history. | Pig Destroyer: Head Cage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pig-destroyer-head-cage/ | Head Cage | A Pig Destroyer album in the Age of Trump, huh? It feels too easy—a standing invitation to catharsis, complete with a return envelope and postage already paid. The Mid-Atlantic’s grindcore standard bearers have rarely been overtly political, but they’ve often been relentless with their social critiques. A mental health regimen meant to curb eccentricity, a power structure where shutting up advances résumés, a religious system where ideas are presented as directives: Especially during the last decade, Pig Destroyer have attached J.R. Hayes’ subtly poetic and explicitly scathing notions to music so meticulous and belligerent that it could drive you to enlist with whatever side he’s on. Now seems like the time for Hayes to rage, to make his coded frustrations loud and clear.
But Pig Destroyer are not the kind of band to fulfill expectations. During their 20-year career, they have morphed in stepwise, deliberate fashion from grindcore exemplars into subgenre subversives, interrupting tantrums with plunges into doom and coarsening their sound with sheets of noise. They’ve never done it better than they do on Head Cage, the band’s strangest, strongest, and most accessible album ever. The landscape it paints is of a planet more terrifying than a mere president or the politics he represents could ever be. Pig Destroyer sidestep political diatribes to build a world of sheer terror, where broken hearts sink into abjection and satisfaction is a quasi-religious myth. There is a scene of Lovecraft-like horror and another of apocalyptic gloom, all animated by music as uneasy as the tribulations these dozen songs portray.
Head Cage is a vivid compendium of modern crises, where the likes of Trump are symptoms of causes too complicated for a single impeachment to eradicate. Hayes lambasts social ills one at a time, an outsider criticizing the inner workings of systems he abhors. During “Army of Cops,” he rages that we enjoy the complacent glow of contentment too much to overrun the heavy hand of the state. On “Terminal Itch,” he notes that we’ll try anything to stay young and beautiful for now, even if it means an uglier death later. And in “Mt. Skull,” he laments how we exploit the places we love until we’ve choked them into wastelands. Hayes shifts briefly into fantasy for “The Adventures of Jason and J.R.,” where a run-in with deep-state operatives and “Dick Cheney in his Halliburton jet pack” ruins a trip to the hardcore show. Even ordinary nights get crazy now.
Pig Destroyer answer these odd times by ripping apart their grindcore fabric for good, twisting the threads into surprising chimeras. In the distant past, they could fit 38 tracks into less than 40 minutes. While they’ve slowed that pace, in general, they reverted to their more straightforward hustle as recently as 2012’s Book Burner. But these dozen songs are an unabashed detour. “Army of Cops” and “Circle River” are meant for shouting out loud, anthems waiting to be echoed back to the band by heaving, sweat-soaked clubs. Navigating a hangman riff, “The Torture Fields” moves from an invocation of lumbering doom to a sermon of circle-pit madness. Grand finale “House of Snakes” suggests Neurosis writing after epinephrine injections. This is as close to crossover approachability as Pig Destroyer have ever gotten.
As with 2007’s Phantom Limb, Pig Destroyer’s breakthrough with a wider audience and their earliest clean split with genre orthodoxy, the success of Head Cage stems in part from a new addition. A dozen years ago, it was Blake Harrison, whose squeal of squelch and samples added a terrifying depth to Pig Destroyer’s charge. This time, it’s John Jarvis, the band’s first-ever bassist and the cousin of drummer Adam Jarvis. He strengthens the sound, a back brace offering support for the occasional dead-ahead rumble like “Terminal Itch” and the thrash of “Mt. Skull.” And he supplies textural breadth for the high-treble attack, battling against Harrison’s ghastly noise during “Concrete Beast.”
More important, though, is his role as a musical pivot point, allowing the band to change directions in an instant and his cousin to stretch and compress time itself. The bass holds the center of “Dark Train,” for instance, while Adam occasionally leaps over the meter, only to splash back down in a blast beat, creating the continuous sensation of whiplash. It’s like watching Usain Bolt skip through the middle of a 100-meter dash before easily sprinting to the win. And in “The Adventures of Jason and J.R.,” Pig Destroyer slide steadily from a mid-tempo march to a breakneck onslaught around the time Dick Cheney arrives, the band translating the anxious spirit of the story into sound. A quintet now, Pig Destroyer are not only louder and bigger but also more dynamic and versatile, capable of bolder ideas and executions.
One of the year’s best and most urgent metal records, Head Cage is a fitting counterpart to another essential bit of 2018 heaviness, Thou’s Magus. Like Hayes, Thou’s Bryan Funck confronted our confounding times and walked away with complicated questions about what we’ve demanded from ourselves, our leaders, and our world. Both records place blame on responsible parties but also ask that we all try harder—or that we, as Hayes puts it, fight against our urge to be “kept down.” His and Funck’s respective bands respond in kind by using subgenre strictures as starting points, not finish lines. Like Magus, Head Cage attempts to wrestle ageless ideas from the specific stresses of our age without deigning to call them by name. | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | September 10, 2018 | 8.1 | c48d5f8d-1708-444d-af77-b00d122e84ac | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The lifelong Bohemian rubbed elbows with Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, and the Rolling Stones. His 1985 avant-disco LP, featuring Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Don Cherry, finally gets reissued. | The lifelong Bohemian rubbed elbows with Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, and the Rolling Stones. His 1985 avant-disco LP, featuring Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Don Cherry, finally gets reissued. | Brion Gysin: Junk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brion-gysin-junk/ | Junk | By 1985, Brion Gysin had been around. Born in 1916, he ditched his native Britain for Paris in the 1930s to make it as an artist. He hung out with Dalí and the Surrealist set, whose quasi-leader André Breton kicked him out of a major group show for being friends with the likes of queer hero Gertrude Stein; as the story goes, it was Gysin who developed the marijuana fudge Stein popularized as the Alice B. Toklas Brownie in her notorious cookbook. By the 1950s, he was in Tangier with good friend William S. Burroughs. There, as another story goes, he booked the Master Musicians of Joujouka to play at his café, the 1001 Nights, and introduced them to the Rolling Stones, kickstarting pop psychedelia. Later, back in Paris with Burroughs at the notorious Beat Hotel, he systematized a new randomizing literary technique, the cut-up, and with it made sound poetry recordings that used turns of phrases like samples, a tool Bowie would utilize in his Berlin trilogy. Gysin also invented, with some help from math wiz Ian Sommerville, a device called the Dreamachine, whose patterns of flickering, stroboscopic light—produced by a perforated shade spinning around a light source—are designed, when viewed through closed eyes, to stimulate the brain’s alpha waves. It casts shadows across lighting and set designs (and stoned student dorm rooms) to this day. By the early 1980s, Gysin had traveled the world, performing and recording his hypnotic poetry on stage and on record, making paintings based on studies of Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and generally living the cult hero life. What else could he do?
Make a disco record! Gysin had taken as an assistant a high school student named Ramuntcho Matta, whose brother was the influential New York artist Gordon Matta-Clark; when Gordon died suddenly in 1978, Ramuntcho returned and spent time working in Laurie Anderson’s studio. Back in Paris by 1980, Matta culled from the city’s famed club Le Palace a who’s-who of underground disco-not-disco luminaries, including Ze records chanteuse Lizzy Mercier Descloux, along with global figures like Senegalese drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang and jazz legend Don Cherry. Meanwhile, years of performing his demanding, loopy poetry had turned Gysin into a kind of ideal frontperson for this kind of jittery rhythm. They all got together and made Junk, first released in 1985 on the French label Mosquito, put out on CD in 1991 by Crammed, and now reissued in all its freaky, funky glory by Wewantsounds.
Opener “Kick (Disco Mix)” was recorded in 1980, the same year as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and the mood is similar: Matta’s guitar is as percussive as Niang’s supple beat and Jean-Pierre Coco’s talking drums. Gysin and Cherry inject the groove with various permutations of the phrase, “Kick that habit, man,” while Cherry sprays and squiggles with his pocket trumpet. It’s intoxicating. The reissue appends two very welcome versions, a “7" Alternative Mix” that’s essentially an edited vamp, and an instrumental dub; those jonesing for more should score “Kick That Habit Man,” a kind of cover made the same year by San Francisco industrial innovator Monte Cazazza for a 7" released by Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records.
With its bassy hook and chicken-scratch guitar, “Sham Pain” could be Chic, if their legendary fury at being turned away from Studio 54 soured instead of soared. “Insane, insane! Why am I always to blame?” Gysin screeches. Guitars make sounds of scrunched-up faces, the bass rolls its eyes. “Complain, complain!” he caterwauls. “I seem to recall we had some kind of ball/But for the life of me, darling/I can’t seem to remember your name/It was a long noble name….” The sneering tumbles out of him, bravura and effete. The title track punctures the druggie slumbers his demimonde too often mistook for a muse with literal alarm bells and a bassline that stumbles around like it’s trying to find the floor. “Junk is no good, baby,” Gysin proclaims, and backup singer Yann Le Ker, of French post-punkers Modern Guy, concurs with a catchy, “no good, no good, no good.” Gysin ponders various permutations of the sentiment, but the answer stays the same.
Two tracks explore the joys of queer sex. Whatever you think of primitivism as a fetish—and, given Gysin’s extensive academic work, including writing a history of slavery in Europe, as one of the very first recipients of a Fullbright, the racial politics can’t have been lost on him—the bounce of “Baboon” is undeniable, and his delivery outrageously winning, somewhere between the knowing flamboyance of Quentin Crisp and the louche menace of Grace Jones. “V.V.V.”, meanwhile, is a Sapphic celebration so insouciantly sexy that it seems impossible to believe that it slunk around for some forty years without attaining at least the underground anthem status of, say, Gina X’s “No G.D.M.” Let’s rectify that.
All parties end, of course. Junk concludes with a golden-hour meditation on nostalgia, with Matta voicing Gysin’s words. “Sometimes I’m close to tears,” he sings, guitars welling up behind him. Metronomic percussion counts down the hours. “All those years, for really nothing,” he sighs, “unless your face appears.” Gysin does appear; he sings himself off the stage in the album’s most astonishing moment, “Stop Smoking.” The lungs of the track are its circling rhythm, an Afropop-ish bop; above the beat, conch shells wheeze. “Isn’t the cough that carries you off,” Elli Medeiros of Stinky Toys sings, her clear voice a nag, a nursery rhyme. “It’s the coffin they carry you off in.” Gysin battled cancer for much of his life, and his vocals here are constantly interrupted, or perhaps punctuated, by wet, racking hacks. “Stop smoking? Ha ha ha you gotta be [coughs] joking,” he announces in a voice that makes Mark E. Smith’s ravaged larynx sound like Ariana Grande. “Nicotine is mean,” he manages to get out, a little awed. It’s like he’s playing the phlegm. A year after Junk released, he’d be dead of lung cancer, ashes floating on the breeze over the Caves of Hercules in Morocco like a conga drum finding its rhythm. The man who was everywhere was finally nowhere—but remembered forever on this wild, fabulous record. | 2024-01-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wewantsounds | January 30, 2024 | 8 | c49293d0-e902-4614-9901-137ef7b37022 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
L.A. art-rock quartet's debut LP is a nine-song seance of an album that's as subtle as it is disquieting. | L.A. art-rock quartet's debut LP is a nine-song seance of an album that's as subtle as it is disquieting. | Warpaint: The Fool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14801-the-fool/ | The Fool | When singer-guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman sing, "now I've got you in the undertow," on Warpaint's debut LP, the line comes off like a threat. It's not dramatic, though. The words come out serenely-- perhaps too serenely. "What's the matter?/ You hurt yourself?/ Open your eyes and there was someone else," they coo dreamily, shape-shifting underneath a fine mist of guitars and bass. True to its name, "Undertow" sinks in without hurry. Its ambient horror is in the realm of Rosemary's Baby or Heavenly Creatures or the first half of The Shining. Their thrills are far from cheap. And the same sense of ghostliness runs throughout The Fool, a nine-song seance of an album that's as subtle as it is disquieting.
In these days of solitary laptop acts and quick-fizzle pop-up bands, Warpaint's free-floating sound is largely dependent on the uncanny bond between principals and long-time friends Kokal, Wayman, and bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg. Live, each one is in her own zone, often with eyes shut and head loose. It's almost like watching them make up songs in real-time at every show, the tangling highs and darting lows frothing to a natural climax only to dissipate just as easily. Their chemistry is inexplicable and fascinating to behold. With Kokal and Wayman often singing on either side of a central Lindberg-- who commands attention with her spaced-out sway-- the live attack is engrossing. Together with drummer Stella Mozgawa, Warpaint speak a sultry, desert-rock language that no one else is privy to, but you can't help but want to crack it nonetheless.
And while The Fool doesn't fully capture their brain-melded performances, it's a worthy simulacrum. The songs on which Kokal takes lead duties tend to be a bit more sinister (when she sings, "Don't you call anybody else baby cause I'm your baby still" on spare ballad "Baby", the 10-mile-stare delivery is spooky), while Wayman's verses are more vulnerable. Off-kilter highlight "Shadows" has Wayman stumbling through tinted sidewalks: "I know I'm afraid/ I'm drunk and I'm tired/ And the city I walk in feels like it swallows." The song's unique, snare-based beat and lonely string plucks aptly re-create her confusion. Elsewhere, flashes of Stevie Nicks (at her most diffuse) and Jeff Buckley (at his most daydreamy) meander through. And while sonic comparisons to early Cat Power have been abundant, Warpaint's live prowess and band-oriented sound offer distinct differences, too.
In the middle of "Baby", a small bit of George Harrison's White Album favorite "Long, Long, Long" sneaks in. "How I love you," sings Kokal, and then the nod is dropped just as quickly. The group pulled a similar trick on "Billie Holiday", from their Exquisite Corpse EP, on which they worked some of "My Guy" into the track's fabric. Like the effortlessness that surrounds Warpaint, both references feel totally instinctive; it's as if they just happened upon them, took what they needed, and moved on. | 2010-10-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-10-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 29, 2010 | 7.2 | c4958c0b-6ee0-48d9-a5c5-c1109d58435d | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
This new compilation assembled by Numero Group functions as a highlight reel of Greek-born, San Francisco-dwelling composer Iasos' 30-year-plus career in new age ambient music, which emanated from a similar psychedelic discipline to Terry Riley. | This new compilation assembled by Numero Group functions as a highlight reel of Greek-born, San Francisco-dwelling composer Iasos' 30-year-plus career in new age ambient music, which emanated from a similar psychedelic discipline to Terry Riley. | Iasos: Celestial Soul Portrait | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18238-iasos-celestial-soul-portraits/ | Celestial Soul Portrait | When it comes to soothing tones and ethereal zone-outs, ambient and new age music often overlap. They are not the same game, though. If you read the back cover of Brian Eno’s 1975 album, Discreet Music, you’ll find a set of diagrams and instructions meant to explain the processes that the producer/composer/guru employed in creating the music. The record, which is often cited as one of the formative works of the ambient genre, contains a series of slowly evolving compositions that rely on slight variations (measure length, echo, equalization) of simple repeating melodic phrases to create a sense of movement amid static components.
That same year also saw the debut release by the San Francisco, California-based composer Iasos, who would become heavily identified with the then emerging new age genre. Though his compositions are shorter and draw heavy inspiration from spiritual jazz, there are plenty of similarities to Eno’s ambient music, particularly in the gauzy tones and glacial pace. The LP did not come with a score and even if Iasos had wanted to include one, the process might have been tough to explain to an outsider. According to the composer, his music was not written, but communicated to him by a trans-dimensional being called Vista.
The purpose of Discreet Music is to fade into the background, to become aural wallpaper that teeters at the edge of comprehension, hence the title. Iasos’ record, Interdimensional Music, requires direct attention. The sounds are not meant to drift on the edge of perception, but expand consciousness-- to transcend Earthly anxiety and envelop the listener in bliss. Like many new age musicians, Iasos was not shy about embracing hokey imagery-- rainbows, crystals, crystalline rainbows-- to get his point accross, and not every track that he cut can transcend the goofiness of his genre. Celestial Soul Portrait, a new compilation assembled by Numero Group, functions as a highlight reel, grabbing some of the sturdiest swatches from the composer’s 30-year-plus career.
Born in Greece and raised in upstate New York, by the late 1960s Iasos had moved to California to devote himself to music, eventually settling in Marin County, near San Francisco. He tried playing in a number of rock bands but found his peers a little too Earth-bound in their tastes. After purchasing a four-track recorder, he started experimenting with tape effects, treated sounds and, eventually, synthesizers, which helped him hone the celestial sound he had been reaching for. On “Rainbow Canyon”, which was taken from Interdimensional Music, Iasos improvises on a lap steel guitar, using an echo unit to smear his notes across the stereo field. Were you to dry it out from the effects, his riffing might just sound like a series of Eastern-tinged goofs, but the constantly sliding tones and delay trails give the music an unearthly quality-- soothing, but also seasick. “Cloud Prayer” congeals from a series of drones that the guitarist created using guitar feedback and a wah-wah pedal. It’s an ominous piece, building tension with the muted buzz of low tones.
The root of Iasos’ music is in late 1960s composers like Terry Riley, who came from a more formal university background, but who also temporarily embraced the current psychedelic moment, experimenting with drones, tape loops, and the structures of Indian music. The compositions on Celestial Soul Portrait carried those ideas forward, but from a folkier, less academic perspective. Still, the stakes were high for Iasos and his inter-dimensional writing partner. “Imagine creating symphonies by tuning up planets [to] create beautiful chords that echo through the galaxy,” explains Iasos in the compilation's liner notes. “That’s the game Vista is playing.” | 2013-07-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-07-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Numero Group | July 19, 2013 | 7.4 | c49bf357-dfb4-43b2-8e20-24b8e4a5350d | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The Three Lobed label celebrates 10 years in business with a comp including unreleased material from Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls, Comets on Fire, and more. | The Three Lobed label celebrates 10 years in business with a comp including unreleased material from Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls, Comets on Fire, and more. | Various Artists: Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15710-not-the-spaces-you-know-but-between-them/ | Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them | Quick: How many record labels can you name? Unless you work inside certain sects of the music industry, the answer, at most, is likely a couple dozen. Yet the number of working imprints in the world-- from the biggest corporate conglomerates to the upstarts young bands craft only so they can have a logo to put on the back of whatever they issue-- is incalculable because it's ever-changing. That is, running a record label is a risky business plan, where one mistake about the number of units you might move can torpedo the entire operation, where technological sea changes can wash the need for you and your product away. Labels, then, tend to memorialize every few years, commemorating every anniversary with a limited-edition box set, a spree of concerts, or an appreciative giveaway. However deserved it may be, this is self-congratulations of the purest sort, a proud proclamation that the brand has yet again made it to some arbitrary finish line.
To that end, Three Lobed Recordings' Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them is a different kind of birthday set. Meant to mark the 10th anniversary of the tiny North Carolina outsider music label, the collection subverts the usual order of such pieces, serving more as a celebration of the participating bands than the presenting brand. The packaging-- a hard paper box containing four LPs and liner notes, all designed by the instantly recognizable Portland, Ore., poster artist Casey Burns-- hardly mentions the anniversary. In fact, the label's name takes a smaller font than not only the bands included, like Sonic Youth and Sun City Girls, but also Burns himself. Inside, during an interview with Pitchfork contributor Marc Masters, label owner Cory Rayborn doesn't talk much about his happenstance journey into owning a label (he started it to release one Bardo Pond 10") or the stylistic confines of Three Lobed (from broken folk to pan-everything psychedelic explorations, there have been none). Rather, he spills his words about the acts involved, calling Steve Gunn "transformational," suggesting Johnny Cash would have covered Wooden Wand, and labeling Mouthus as "true auteurs." At least half of Rayborn's own short essay is spent thanking friends and expressing dismay that this is happening. Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them is less a Three Lobed trademark proclamation than an earnest and excellent offering from one of America's best little labels.
Most commemorative compilations like this simply stack a bunch of tracks from catalog artists side-by-side, reprising both the accomplishments of the label in question and offering a few selected gems that either never made it onto a release or have long been out-of-print. But Spaces smartly gives full LP sides to seven bands, essentially affording each act the opportunity to create an EP that's simply part of something bigger. None of this material has ever been released. Considered on its own terms, each contribution from each band is stunning, most often as a summary of what they've done best. Mouthus' two sprawls, for instance, are violent churns of sound, splitting the unexpected distance between industrial music, power electronics, IDM and singer-songwriter fare. A 21-minute, relatively seamless collage of Comets on Fire rehearsals reminds that they’re one of the most ferocious bands of last decade’s psych revival. "The Invisible Fire" is one of Bardo Pond's customarily immersive zones, with guitar riffs, electronic whirs, and the alternating flute and contorted moans of Isobel Sollenberger forming a sheet of sound as thick as smoke from a woodland wildfire. And the three live cuts from Sun City Girls, recorded in 2004 at the band's last American show, vividly capture the group's range-- their guitar bravado and brilliance; their mix of country, jazz, rock and Middle Eastern music; their almost-alien intercommunication; their humor; their interesting songs; their interest in exploring those songs' edges through improvisation.
But these are all reaffirmations by bands with status to spare: Not the Spaces is, at its best, about future heroes. In the liner notes, Rayborn says that guitarist Gunn doesn't realize "how ridiculously talented he is." His "The Lurker Extended" is a testament to ambition and narrative, plus a validation of the brilliance Rayborn suggest. Spiraling from slow, graceful licks to variations so fast and frenetic they seem to kick up sparks, Gunn's piece is the kind of statement that should make the unaware place him alongside the best acoustic masters, past and present. The young Pacific Northwest collective Eternal Tapestry has never sounded more forceful and convincing than they do on this alternate take of "Doing Your Own Being". With saxophone, bass, and guitars clinched in tidal unison, the band suggests the most triumphant soul-jazz of the 1970s, aggressively recreated by some stoned kids in a basement.
D. Charles Speer & the Helix actually split the last side of the third record with Wooden Wand, but their sets are different sides of the same sermon. Led by Dave Shuford of the No-Neck Blues Band, the Helix handles two country classics with a tight grip, giving Gene Clark's end-of-innocence tale "Shooting Star" a heartrending, Skynyrd-sized coda. Wooden Wand's three originals are ramshackle country laments, strummed and sighed with threadbare despair. His tunes are written with the same deep-seated gravitas that those Helix covers sport, showing that the blues don't necessarily depend on how they're offered. In his most polished country affectation, Shuford sings, "It's all very clear/ It's near and then gone." Wand later slurs an answer, unaware: "If this is a destination, call it No Survival Drive."
Surprising as it may seem, Sonic Youth supplies this set's most positive, apt metaphor. Lee Ranaldo has released a record through Three Lobed, as has Thurston Moore's side project, Bark Haze. Sonic Youth never has, but Moore's own label, Ecstatic Peace, trades in many of the same circles as Three Lobed. Playfully titled "In & Out" and "Out & In", Sonic Youth's dual contributions were recorded a decade apart from one another, so Jim O'Rourke-- who plays bass on one song but not the other-- had left the band and so that, after September 11th, they had moved their Echo Canyon studio from New York City to New Jersey. Together, these songs show the band's consistent excellence as patient textural explorers. "In & Out" is Sonic Youth at their most tempered; "Out & In", the earlier of the pieces, is one of the most ferocious Sonic Youth jams ever put to tape. What begins as a winding, discordant instrumental suddenly finds this three-guitar, five-piece configuration surging with a hardcore-punk intensity. Noise claws at the edges of the relentless beat. They sound scary.
The interval between these tracks roughly coincides with Three Lobed's lifespan. Given that Sonic Youth's career was really just starting at the 10-year mark, it serves as a promise of Three Lobed's continued vitality well past this landmark release. And considering the label's mostly spotless résumé and the incredible substance of this commemoration, it's difficult not to hope that suggestion holds true in this often anonymous, unstable industry. | 2011-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Three Lobed | August 12, 2011 | 8.3 | c49f73cb-e883-4ea2-931f-291f8c5e1c5b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
With singular grace and flair, Yaya Bey deepens her connection to homespun funk and R&B while transforming grief, insecurities, and depletion into a full embrace of life. | With singular grace and flair, Yaya Bey deepens her connection to homespun funk and R&B while transforming grief, insecurities, and depletion into a full embrace of life. | Yaya Bey: Ten Fold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaya-bey-ten-fold/ | Ten Fold | Losing someone close to you can feel like a rupture in time. How can the sun continue to rise? How can the world keep moving? The disorientation of being fundamentally altered in grief motivates Yaya Bey’s transcendent new album, Ten Fold. “My nigga left the world and the world ain’t stop,” she quietly raps on “yvette’s cooking show.” The Queens-raised artist recorded the album in the year following the death of her father, Ayub Bey—the emcee and producer Grand Daddy I.U., who was a member of the pioneering hip-hop collective Juice Crew and a towering figure in Bey’s life. Funeral costs compelled her to keep working and over the course of a year, she made music without any firm plans. The results, whittled down to 16 tracks, are snapshots of an artist moving through loss as she navigates financial and emotional precarity and the vicissitudes of romance. It’s a finely detailed portrait of grief that also celebrates the fullness of life.
The ripples of Yaya Bey’s day-to-day are small, but in her delicate hands, they are strikingly resonant. Ten Fold rarely dwells on the past, choosing instead to mark the passage of time by cataloging the feelings that sprouted along the way—sadness, defiance, joy, frustration, pride, love. Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are under three minutes) allow Bey to be as nimble as ever. After announcing the grief that “weighs heavy” on her, she briskly wipes her tears to celebrate her blooming potential on the pocket-disco song “chrysanthemums.” She finds “fly shit” at the thrift store on “east coast mami” to project the confidence needed to make power moves. Relationships fizzle and grow; rent remains too damn high. Collectively, the album sounds like a Black woman just trying to get by.
In keeping with her 2022 breakout album, Remember Your North Star, Bey pulls from the warmer colors of a Black musical palette—Soulquarians-style neo-soul, upbeat funk, house, and boom bap. The production, assisted by Corey Fonville of the genre-melding jazz-hop band Butcher Brown, feels cozy and self-soothing. She taps into familiarity, yet resists complacency. The album opens with the simmering melancholy of “crying through my teeth,” which like its spiritual ancestor “Didn’t Cha Know,” carries a world of feeling in the simplest of phrases. Where songs like “nobody knows” on North Star described vivid characters and scenes, Ten Fold’s stories are abstract, unfolding like an extended inner monologue. The spare house beat of “sir princess bad bitch” is demo-like, and its circular refrain (“The beautiful thing about me/Is every little beautiful thing/Is on its way to me”) sounds like the kind of made-up song you sing to keep yourself afloat. Directing the affirmations inward allows Bey to skillfully sidestep platitudes: feelings arise spontaneously and inconstantly from all across the emotional spectrum. Even the songs explicitly about other people feel insular, like the blooming romance of “slow dancing in the kitchen.” The sunny reggae cut has the gossamer quality of a daydream or a gaze directed toward a lover.
Self-love is a prominent lyrical theme, but its greatest manifestation is how Bey handles her voice. In her idiosyncratic tone, there are glimmers of the open-throated soul-jazz of Anita Baker, yet what sets her apart from her peers and foremothers in R&B is her quieter, more intimate approach. What she lacks in vocal pageantry, she makes up for in her stylistic range—singing, rapping, scatting, and humming. On the modern blues of “the evidence,” she reaches for the lowest notes of her range to scrape up the courage to “hold on,” communicating the enormous effort with just a gravelly hum. On the lighter love songs, like the wah-wah funk of “all around los angeles,” high notes abound, soft as cotton candy.
Her father Ayub’s voice is laced throughout the album, appearing via voice notes and samples. But it’s only in the final minutes, on “yvette’s cooking show,” that she addresses him directly. Over a simple piano loop, she speaks to her father in present tense, wishing him absolution and catching him up on the latest year of her life. She finally shines a light on the father-shaped hole at the center of the album, the one she’s been sketching around with all the quotidian details. Suddenly, everything we’ve heard prior has a different ring to it. Still, this revelation doesn’t feel like avoidance: It illuminates the transitory nature of grief, how it can come and go like everything else. Embracing that impermanence, which Ten Fold shows really means embracing all of life, points a way out of the pain. By the time she reaches the last song, “let go,” the question is no longer if the pain can be let go, but when. The question remains unanswered: Only time will tell. | 2024-05-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Dada | May 15, 2024 | 8.3 | c4bcd654-c2ba-4737-99ad-194dd4455866 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
With contributions from Santigold, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and members of TV on the Radio, the Malian duo clearly have genre fusion in mind on their latest. | With contributions from Santigold, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and members of TV on the Radio, the Malian duo clearly have genre fusion in mind on their latest. | Amadou & Mariam: Folila | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16435-folila/ | Folila | Amadou & Mariam are at this point firmly established international stars. They don't need people to explain their back story for half a review anymore, and they've become truly intertwined with a huge network of African and Western artists whom they've toured and recorded with, a list that ranges all over the place from Manu Chao to David Gilmour, K'naan, Damon Albarn, Bassekou Kouyaté and Santigold. With that fame comes a potential snag, though: it's much, much harder for them to surprise us now that they've defined themselves around a seamless synthesis of the music of their homeland and the music of the rest of the world.
They're trying to work around that. For Folila (which means "music" in Bambara), they took an unusual approach to making a record, essentially making the same album three times. They recorded it once in New York with a host of indie rock musicians helping out, and again in Mali with a group of musicians from Mali's popular and traditional music communities. And then they took it to Paris, where they took the two recordings, which were made with matched keys and tempos, and mixed them together into a very literal genre hybrid. Honestly-- and this is really my bias here-- I would've loved to hear them use their newfound fame to strip things back a little and reveal the sounds of their homeland to a newly invested audience, but the hybrid works pretty well for the most part, and I'm not going to hold it against them that they're doubling down on their established fusion.
That fusion pays off beautifully on several tracks. Opener and lead single "Dougou Badia", featuring a guest vocal from Santigold and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner mixing it up on guitar with Amadou, is about as good a result as you could hope for from the oblique recording process. Zinner and Amadou in particular have great chemistry, Amadou's staccato, tangled rhythm playing playing foil to Zinner's long, sustained tones. The chemistry is similarly strong with UK singer Ebony Bones, whose vocal turn on "C'est Pas Facile Pour Les Aigles" injects a huge burst of energy right into the heart of the album. Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe also contribute vocals, but stay in the background for the most part. Malone and Adebimpe fit so organically into the slinking funk of "Wily Kataso" that it makes me wonderful what a full album collaboration between the two bands might sound like, and Shears' addition of just a hint of disco camp to "Metemya" is about perfect.
The most prominent collaborator is French singer-songwriter Bertrand Cantat, who contributes vocals, harmonica and guitar on a few songs. Cantat was the longtime leader of Noir Désir, one of France's most prominent rock bands, and his contributions are fine here (well, he's definitely outshone vocally by the headliners, but he's not bad), but I can't help feeling a little weirded out by his presence. This isn't well-known in the States, but in 2003, Cantat beat his girlfriend, actress Marie Trintignant, in a jealous, drunken rage and put her in a coma-- she died days later. If he'd served all of his eight-year prison sentence, he wouldn't even have been available to record his parts for this record (he was part of the sessions that took place in Mali). As I said, his musical contributions are fine, but given that he's frankly someone the album could been made without, I rather wish they'd brought in someone else.
As off-putting as Cantat's personal history is, though, Folila is still a highly successful merger of the Malian duo's vision with the input of collaborators. There's nothing as immediately stunning as Welcome To Mali's "Sabali" or Dimanche à Bamako's "Coulibaly", but hearing Kouyaté's ngoni bubbling up through the guitars and Amadou's roiling guitar lines bump up against Zinner's textures is definitely enjoyable. Likewise, Mariam's vocal duets with Ebony Bones and Santigold are spirited-- they really feed off each other's energy. And when they do strip things back to favor the sparser Mali recordings on "Sans Toi", it becomes very clear very quickly just how strong the identity of Amadou & Mariam remains even amidst all the high-powered guests. Even if Folila is less surprising than the two albums that came before it, it still makes me look forward to seeing where they'll take this fusion next. | 2012-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Global | Nonesuch | March 27, 2012 | 7.4 | c4c48dcf-4191-4daf-8ba6-bd99a8844c97 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The legendary document of grunge celebrates its 25th anniversary with a reissue dominated by Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and fiction. | The legendary document of grunge celebrates its 25th anniversary with a reissue dominated by Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and fiction. | Various Artists: Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack-Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23306-singles-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-deluxe-edition/ | Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack-Deluxe Edition | Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March of 1990, rending his tight-knit Seattle music community. As often happens in creatively fueled local scenes, community members rallied and turned their grief into art. Wood’s roommate Chris Cornell recruited Wood’s erstwhile Mother Love Bone bandmates Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard to record some songs he’d been working on. With guitarist Mike McCready, Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, and recently relocated San Diego native Eddie Vedder, they called themselves Temple of the Dog, after one of Wood’s lyrics. Their eponymous album, released in April 1991, sold modestly thanks to Soundgarden’s profile—they were signed to A&M, in rotation on 120 Minutes, and toured with Guns N’ Roses.
On the night of Wood’s funeral, many of his friends and collaborators gathered at Mother Love Bone manager Kelly Curtis’ house, including director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart guitarist and Seattle native Nancy Wilson. Crowe had moved to Seattle several years earlier and fell in with the area’s incestuous network of rock bands, labels, college radio stations, and venues. Then 32 years old, he was already an ex-Rolling Stone features writer and accomplished screenwriter working on a new script for a romantic comedy that used Seattle’s burgeoning rock scene as its backdrop. On the night of Wood’s memorial, something clicked. “It was the first real feeling of what it was like to have a hometown—everybody pulling together for some people they really loved,” he told an interviewer in 2001. “It made me want to do Singles as a love letter to the community that I was really moved by.”
If Temple of the Dog were a spiritual origin of “grunge”—the name associated with the mainstreaming of Seattle-area indie rock and the culture it briefly spawned—then Singles (the film and soundtrack), was its commercial coming-out party. More than a year after duetting on “Hunger Strike,” Vedder and Cornell were merged into Matt Dillon’s Cliff Poncier character. Cornell appeared in the film as himself, fronting Soundgarden playing “Birth Ritual” in a club scene and, in the film’s most Wayne’s World moment, standing in stoned silence while Poncier blew out the windows of his girlfriend’s car with too much speaker wattage. While they were recording what would become Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, Vedder, Ament, and Gossard actually had lines in the film, playing Poncier’s backing band in Citizen Dick. In one of the few Singles scenes about band life, Vedder and Ament mumble through an alt-weekly pan of the band’s LP to protect Poncier’s feelings. Crowe cuts to a close-up of the review, which paints Poncier’s music as “pompous, dick-swinging swill” that comes from being a big fish in a small pond. If he moved to a bigger, more established city like Minneapolis, the review snarked, he’d be a nobody.
The Seattle that Singles was shot in during 1991 was a very different city than the one it was a year later when the film was released. Like Temple of the Dog, Singles was the product of a bonafide music scene that was starting to make mainstream impact (bands signing to majors, journalists sniffing around to write trend pieces on Sub Pop), but it was released into an absolute hype storm. Effectively, by late 1992, both could enjoy the rare distinction of pre-emptively canonizing a musical movement. They were “grunge” before grunge was even Grunge. At the very moment it achieved mass popularity, grunge not only had breakout stars and a fashion style guide (flannel, long underwear beneath shorts, stocking caps) but its own scene supergroup and a feature film in theaters.
Grunge “broke” thanks to Nirvana, an absent presence in the film and its soundtrack. In a Rolling Stone diary entry dated January 24, 1992, a couple weeks after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” peaked at No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100—the same day Nevermind became the No. 1 album in the country—Crowe noted that Warner Brothers, the studio that had been sitting on Singles for months, was now suggesting a new title for the film: “Come As You Are.” By April 1992, Singles the film still didn’t have a release date, but Epic was pushing to release its soundtrack to ride the ascendant grunge wave. By mid-year, A&M was aggressively re-promoting Temple of the Dog to radio and MTV, and Epic released the Singles soundtrack two weeks before Soundgarden and Pearl Jam played the main stage at Lollapalooza. It is impossible to underestimate how much that summer and fall were suffused with grunge. Soundgarden was big (Badmotorfinger peaked at No. 39), but Pearl Jam became massive—Ten was a slow-building success, that peaked at No. 2 on Billboard in late August, a couple weeks before Temple of the Dog entered the top ten as well. In September and October, when Singles was in theaters at the same time that “Hunger Strike,” “Outshined,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Alive” were omnipresent on MTV and modern rock radio, grunge felt like a small version of disco in the Saturday Night Fever moment: a mass-media cultural phenomenon and style sensibility that had as many haters as acolytes. By December 1992, SPIN was calling Seattle “to the rock’n’roll world what Bethlehem was to Christianity.”
Where Singles the movie was a romantic comedy with Seattle rock as its backdrop, its soundtrack, for anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest or the college radio universe, was a revelation. The 25th-anniversary reissue of the compilation revisits and further contextualizes this moment, with a bonus disc of demos, live versions, and other film ephemera never before issued on CD or vinyl. At the time, SPIN called the Singles soundtrack, “as close as possible to the ultimate Seattle music anthology…without sounding like a masturbatory Sub Pop collection.” Amid the hippest bands of the insurgent grunge moment and Mother Love Bone’s epic “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” (which also appeared briefly in Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything), Crowe was careful to include Seattle rock royalty (via a Hendrix deep-cut and a deeply faithful cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore” by Heart (as the Lovemongers), and hire Minneapolitan Paul Westerberg for the score and two prominent songs (his first two solo recordings, to boot). Through the Singles soundtrack, Crowe expertly situated grunge within the ’60s and ’70s classic rock pantheon while, through Westerberg, not testing the rom-com demographic by putting TAD or Screaming Trees on the trailer. It’s not a perfect fit: though Westerberg’s DNA as the leader of the Replacements winds through grunge, the chipper, raspy power-pop of “Dyslexic Heart” sits oddly aside Soundgarden and Alice in Chains on the soundtrack.
About that contrast: Crowe was deeply connected to Seattle’s scene, but despite casting several of its key participants in the film, he had no pretensions about its death-fixated, deeply ironic, drop-D metal-punk indie rock scene serving as anything more than a backdrop for his du jour romp: Linda, a “U-dub” grad student in environmental policy; Steve, a civil engineer whose dream is to revolutionize the city’s urban transport with a latte-serving high-speed train; Janet, a naïve, love-seeking (and Fountainhead-reading?!) barista played by Bridget Fonda. Apart from catching bands in clubs and the Citizen Dick narrative, grunge is as much a lifestyle backdrop for Singles as the city’s booming coffee market. Consider “State of Love and Trust,” which along with “Breath,” represent the earliest (and best) Pearl Jam music (and provide evidence of how immediately the band congealed). The song appears early in the film as the background soundtrack to the moment when lovestruck Linda realizes she’d been duped by the Spanish man to whom she’d given her garage door opener. She drags her friend outside and has a good cry, in front of a graffitied wall reading “LOVE BONE.”
The broader context of Singles shows how Crowe, like the bands on his soundtrack, was coming into his own. The movie hit theaters a few months after the debut of MTV’s Real World in May 1992, and predicted Friends, which launched on NBC in September 1994. Consider Friends through Singles: a cast of attractive late 20-somethings, all of whom (except Linda) live in the same apartment complex, date each other and…hang out at a coffee shop (Java Stop) when they should be working, with a popular soundtrack featuring…Paul Westerberg. An underrated aspect of Singles, even apart from freezing pre-grunge Seattle in celluloid, was Crowe zeroing in on an emergent audience demographic—late-20s/early-30s single white people—that television would capitalize on in the next several years, broadening the ambit of sitcoms past the workplace and family to the extended networks of young urban professionals.
Singles the film was successful, but the soundtrack was a minor phenomenon, cracking the Billboard Top 10 and eventually going double-platinum. Its success was enough to launch the career of one band: Screaming Trees. “They kept postponing the release of our album,” Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin remembered of the band’s commercial breakthrough Sweet Oblivion, “because the Singles soundtrack was getting all the attention.” Scene veterans from sleepy Ellensburg who’d signed to Epic in 1990, the Trees were filed under “heavy metal” and marketed as a hair band until grunge. Their anthemic single “Nearly Lost You,” powered by Mark Lanegan’s raspy baritone and a radio-friendly iteration of the band’s psychedelic power-sludge, made the soundtrack’s penultimate slot as a last-minute addition. Oblivion was finally released that September 8, and thanks to Singles it sold upwards of 300,000 copies, easily the band’s biggest seller.
As a commercial genre, grunge paved a lane through which bands like Screaming Trees could chase the rock mainstream. As a word, grunge was a perfect phonetic suggestion of how the music sounded and the musicians looked. The Trees were big, gruff guys—the kind of dudes who, per Mark Yarm’s essential grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town, got in a brawl with 10 club security guys in New Jersey the night before their national television debut on Letterman. They played “Nearly Lost You” with Lanegan sporting a shiner, after which Letterman admitted, “I’ll be honest with ya—I was kinda scared.”
The origin of “grunge”—which, though derided, is still as on-the-money as “punk” as a single-word encapsulation of music and attitude—is the stuff of legend. Sub Pop co-founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt had great ears for music and an even better knack for self-effacing promotion, and were obsessed with gaining credibility in the UK, which, in the label’s view, meant playing up the music’s blue-collar roots, occasionally to the cartoonish level of guitar-wielding loggers and lumberjacks (which Kurt Cobain hated). The word “grunge,” legend has it, was most prominently deployed by Melody Maker’s Everett True in a Sub Pop band review, though in Yarm’s book, Poneman claims True cribbed it from Pavitt’s description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone in Sub Pop’s mail-order catalog: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”
The mass media didn’t care about its provenance because grunge just worked. It allowed industry types to market music (and release films like Singles), and made the perfect peg for journalistic trend pieces, which often failed to sniff out the subcultural irony that defined so much of the Seattle scene. Most legendary in this respect is the sidebar to the New York Times’ “Grunge—A Success Story,” published two months after Singles’ theatrical debut, in which Sub Pop receptionist Megan Jasper created a one-woman hoax when prompted for a grunge “lexicon,” offering made-up slang like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop,” “lamestain” and “bloated, big bag of bloatation” which were reprinted verbatim in the paper of record (Jasper later fessed up in Doug Pray’s essential 1996 documentary Hype!).
Singles the movie doesn’t even remotely trade in this level of irony—that’s the opposite of Crowe’s thing—though the soundtrack’s incorporation of Mudhoney’s “Overblown” at least offers a sincere critique from the guy who many consider the linchpin of the entire scene (the soundtrack’s deluxe version includes a demo version). Opening with ur-grunge singer Mark Arm’s studio chatter, “Okay, grunge masters, he we go,” “Overblown” sounds like a mangled version of the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat,” as Arm deadpans, “Everybody loves us/Everybody loves our town/That’s why I’m thinking lately/The time for leaving is now.”
In a particularly great anecdote from Our Town, Truly guitarist Robert Roth recalls watching Nirvana debut “Teen Spirit” live at Seattle’s OK Hotel while “across the street, there was a private thing where they were filming Alice in Chains for Singles.” Notwithstanding the synchronicity of an actual historical moment in rock lore coinciding with Crowe’s simulacrum of another moment, these shows help to understand just how different the bands lumped in under “grunge” were. Alice in Chains played unrelentingly dark, metal-influenced sludge-rock, though the harmonized vocals of guitarist/songwriter/hesher Jerry Cantrell and the vampiric Layne Staley set them apart from their contemporaries. Their 1990 single “Man in the Box” was the early breakthrough of Seattle rock, bridging the Headbanger’s Ball and Buzz Bin crowds.
Alice in Chains appear twice in Singles, playing Facelift track “It Ain’t Like That” and “Would?” which kicked off the soundtrack. Though the compilation’s two non-Ten Pearl Jam songs made it commercially valuable, “Would?” is unquestionably its best song. Penned by Cantrell as an ode to Andrew Wood, “Would?” is more generally about making bold choices, ignoring doubters, and accepting whatever consequences might come. If any song of 1991-2 could be called pure, uncut “grunge,” this is it: starting with a menacingly low bass rumble that blooms into a slithering goth-metal groove, featuring the tense interplay between Staley’s acidic snarl and Cantrell’s placid vocal, the lyrics drenched with the kind of looming dread pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The song’s odd structure lends it a further disorienting effect, like a slasher movie cutting to black at the exact second the protagonist opens the door to the dark basement. The key change signals a reprieve, but there’s no resolution; just when the song veers to a new path in the final bridge, it drops off suddenly, leaving Staley screaming a question that’s equally alluring and terrifying: “If I would, could you?!” while everything just collapses under its own weight. “Would?” concluding with a musical bridge-to-nowhere is as good an encapsulation of grunge’s performative nihilism as anything Arm, Vedder, or Cobain could summon.
“Would?” remains the best song on Singles, but the 25th-anniversary reissue of the soundtrack is dominated by Soundgarden, especially Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and cinematic fiction. It was Cornell who suggested Crowe include “Drown” on the soundtrack, an eight-minute epic from Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins, who were still a year away from Siamese Dream. While Citizen Dick re-recorded Mudhoney’s epochal Sub Pop single as “Touch Me I’m Dick,” it was Cornell who actually wrote the songs for Poncier’s “solo album,” prompted by song titles jokingly devised by Ament.
Crowe loved the songs, especially the acoustic track “Seasons,” which recalled Zeppelin III and Pink Floyd circa Meddle and perfectly bridged the soundtrack’s past and present iterations of Seattle rock. Another song from what became the Poncier EP was “Spoon Man,” an ode to a quirky local street musician that appeared briefly in Singles and would be fleshed out into the lead single from Soundgarden’s magisterial 1994 LP Superunknown. The Singles reissue bonus disc contains Cornell’s original Poncier tape (along with some incidental music he composed for the film that went unused), including the stark “Nowhere But You” and the lilting, psychedelic “Flutter Girl,” both of which would reappear in more exquisitely produced form on the 1999 CD single for Cornell’s solo single debut “Can’t Change Me.” While Euphoria Morning marked a dramatic public shift for Cornell-the-solo-artist after more than a decade as Soundgarden’s howling frontman, these tracks reveal that he’d long had a quieter, more pensive side.
Cornell’s May 17th suicide after a Detroit Soundgarden concert came as a shock to rock fans and the Seattle community to which he meant so much, and, less importantly, provided a morbid coincidence for the 25th-anniversary reissue of the Singles soundtrack to which he contributed so much. As happens with rock star deaths, Cornell’s triggered countless appreciations of his significant contributions to 1990s hard rock, for which he was perhaps the single most prominent link to its 1970s and ’80s predecessors. It was also a reminder that of the five rock frontmen to emerge from that moment in rock history—Cornell, Cobain, Staley, Vedder, and Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland—only Vedder and Pearl Jam remain (they were feted in 2011 with a career-spanning documentary directed by Crowe himself). This is the thing about grunge: apart from its commercial success and validation of mass media hype, grunge-as-music was most often a very dark thing, populated by iconoclastic young men negotiating personal authenticity with unavoidable fixations on death, sickness, and pain. That many of those men sang passionately about the same things that led to their premature deaths is in the end, the legacy of that moment.
By definition, by stressing authenticity within the bounds of mainstream commerce, rock music has to die and be periodically resurrected. What made grunge—rock’s final mainstream “rebirth”—so potent and problematic was how it intertwined artistic tensions (selling out vs. staying true, community vs. commerce) with the musicians’ own deep-seated personal anxieties, fears, and sicknesses. That’s what made it feel real, what allowed for individuals to identify with it, and ultimately, what made it so commercially valuable. The music was often great, but more importantly, it was cast as the organic cultural product of a single city in the corner of a country, that, for many, marked an organic “victory” after years of post-punk indie rock bands slogging it out on college radio and vanning it between small clubs. For locals, on the other hand, grunge was an absolute hype nightmare that had little to do with music or community and everything to do with vulture-like industry encroachment and outsider social positioning.
Singles is often seen as a sui generis rock-historical document because of its ostensible realism. Crowe’s love letter to his adopted hometown—shot on site and cast with actual locals—was composed in the moments before Seattle became a synecdoche for rock’s latest rebirth, and was rush-released to coincide with a moment that it, in turn, further fueled. Twenty-five years later, when local scenes are inextricable from their immediate online hype and a churn of thinkpieces mourn rock’s latest “death,” Singles feels less like Hollywood realism and more like the conjured ghost of a dead moment. As in the early 1990s, so it is today: rock lies in wait, ready for its resurrection through some authentic commercial séance. Maybe Cornell knew best, growling on the Singles soundtrack: “The snake retreats/Admits defeat/And waits for the birth ritual.” | 2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sony / Legacy | May 23, 2017 | 8.7 | c4c5af22-afda-4c4f-826f-9aee3660759d | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The latest record from Glenn Donaldson chronicles the ups-and-downs of music industry lifers, searching for pockets of transcendence amid ennui. | The latest record from Glenn Donaldson chronicles the ups-and-downs of music industry lifers, searching for pockets of transcendence amid ennui. | The Reds, Pinks & Purples: The Town That Cursed Your Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-reds-pinks-and-purples-the-town-that-cursed-your-name/ | The Town That Cursed Your Name | Much of indie pop’s appeal stems from ephemeral pleasures. Some of the genre’s most formative practitioners were short-lived bands who pressed a few records, quietly dissolved, and watched as their influence spread across generations. Glenn Donaldson, on the other hand, has managed to rework this cycle of death and rebirth into an institution of his own. The San Francisco songwriter’s back catalog, which spans nearly three decades, is a vast family tree of pseudonyms and collaborations. Each new project slightly tweaks his ramshackle formula to extract hidden influences, whether he’s exploring gothic aesthetics as Horrid Red or weaving psychedelic folk tapestries in the Skygreen Leopards.
Since debuting in 2018, the Reds, Pinks & Purples has blossomed into Donaldson’s flagship project. Under this alias, he has released seven full-lengths of barebones, college-rock songs, interlinked with a visual shorthand of suburbanite artwork that allows fans a chance to stroll through his pastel-toned neighborhood. The lyrics take new precedence, stemming from the sort of unguarded internal monologues that take hold while taking a long walk or doing the dishes: fleeting thoughts that expand into a web of memories and self-examination. His records simply pick up where the last left off, like a series of Moleskines filled end to end. On his latest album, The Town That Cursed Your Name, Donaldson is preoccupied with industry ups-and-downs, crafting second-person sketches of bands on their last legs, casualties of scene politics, and owners of failed record labels.
Though the Reds, Pinks & Purples casts Donaldson as a lovable sad sack in the vein of Another Sunny Day frontman Harvey Williams or the Field Mice’s Bobby Wratten, his writing embodies the adolescent angst of Sarah Records from a more seasoned perspective. He maintains the foggy tufts of reverb and sing-song melodies of his predecessors, but his lyrics trade unrequited crushes for more practical pining. On “Life in the Void,” he struggles with feelings of futility, counting his blessings with a knockout dose of cynicism. “Just over minimum wage,” he sings. “I guess you’re lucky just to be employed/I guess you’re lucky it’s not worse.” Bleak as his outlook may be, there’s an undercurrent of optimism: verses shifting into choruses as gleaming leads peek through a canopy of feedback. “You don’t want to live like that, you don’t want to work that hard,” Donaldson adds during the coda, a reminder that living for art ultimately outweighs the adversity.
On “Mistakes (Too Many to Name),” Donaldson translates moping into celebration, juxtaposing a self-deprecating refrain with four-on-the-floor tambourine and snares and victorious, pealing guitars. “I made every mistake you could make,” he sings, and it sounds like a rallying cry until he interrupts the thought with a shock of dreamlike imagery: “Breaking down in the open fields of flowers that we found.” It’s a strange detour, but it reiterates the thesis of his solo project: Donaldson searches for pockets of transcendence within ennui. Occasionally, he leans too far into impressionism. “Burning Sunflowers” is a collage of imagery—summer skies, sun on skin, oddly attractive scraps of litter—that can’t coalesce without a larger narrative to guide them. Instead, the song feels as blurry as its instrumentation, its beauty too self-evident. Donaldson’s best work hides allure within a bigger picture, like a jangle-pop egg hunt.
The Town That Cursed Your Name is bookended with odes to bands that never made it. Opener “Too Late for an Early Grave” is classic Donaldson, a strummy mid-tempo tune that puts a frontman’s small bit of renown into sobering perspective. “Never climbed the charts, destroyed the stage,” he sighs, pitting these dreams against scenes of clocking in on sick days and grinding to pay the bills. It’s the most pessimistic entry on the record, but it sets the stage for Donaldson’s cast of nameless underdogs to rail against the drudgery of the work week. “Break Up the Band,” the final track, brings the narrative full circle, this time profiling the last days of a group, demoralized by microscopic streaming payouts and internal conflict. Most importantly, it’s a major stylistic pivot—a pop-kid pastiche of the Beatles’ “Good Night” that sidelines guitar for a winkingly melodramatic backdrop of piano and strings. The sound is unusually theatrical for a project so concerned with subtlety, but it pays off. In the world of The Town That Cursed Your Name, the tedium of dead-end work pales in comparison to the death of an artistic endeavor. | 2023-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland / Tough Love | March 24, 2023 | 7.4 | c4c763df-02cd-47dd-8aeb-5542e56856c0 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The experimental New York duo morph into a crack ensemble on their wide-ranging new double album, blurring genres and record-store categories. | The experimental New York duo morph into a crack ensemble on their wide-ranging new double album, blurring genres and record-store categories. | 75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/75-dollar-bill-i-was-real/ | I Was Real | Guitarist Che Chen briefly worked at New York’s beloved Other Music in the mid-’00s, and his subsequent duo with percussionist Rick Brown, 75 Dollar Bill, bears the stamp of the shop’s aesthetic. Their early music did a lot with a little—Chen’s guitar amp strapped to his back, Brown pounding out beats on a wooden box. They recalled Tinariwen and Group Doueh, as well as obscure favorites like Otha Turner and Henry Flynt, artists the store championed. Naturally, the band’s 2015 debut LP was released on the Other Music imprint, and when the venerated store closed for good in 2016, 75 Dollar Bill was part of the farewell parade.
On their new double album, 75 Dollar Bill expand from spartan duo to crack ensemble, with upwards of ten players. Equally attuned to raw world music and psych rock, country blues and drone, jazz and early New York minimalism, they push into a new terrain that blurs the distinctions and record-store categories. “Every Last Coffee or Tea” revisits a number from their very first cassette, amplifying the shifting 3-on-2 groove with viola, upright bass, and rhythm guitar. On “Tetuzi Akiyama,” Chen’s descending fuzz-guitar lick is closely shadowed by the fat, wide frequencies of Cheryl Kingan's baritone sax.
The title track, the longest in 75 Dollar Bill’s discography, spends half of its near-17 minutes carefully building up and the other half dying down. Karen Waltuch’s slow-bowed viola recalls John Cale’s drone work in the Velvet Underground, while Chen lazily circles around a few notes. Almost imperceptibly, the band draws everything back down, allowing the ambient noise of your environment—a buzzing AC unit, distant traffic, whatever—to expand into the growing silence.
Sprinkled throughout the album are a number of “WZN” tracks (a contraction of “wezin,” which in Mauritania and Northwest Africa denote the kind of dance songs played at weddings). On these, 75 Dollar Bill strip back to their earliest sound. “WZN #4” spotlights a heavily phased guitar and a riff like a turning screw, while “WZN #3” carefully overlays additional needling guitar lines. Such pieces may have their roots in Africa, but as each piece unspools, you might find yourself wondering about the band’s placeless sound. 75 Dollar Bill slyly nudges you beyond the familiar, so that—no matter your record-nerd knowledge—you’ll wind up someplace new.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commision form purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thin Wrist | July 2, 2019 | 7.6 | c4ca5100-093b-4719-9f2d-ccfda4a04cb6 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Neil Young turns 60 in November. In the last year he's survived an aneurysm and a greatest hits album ... | Neil Young turns 60 in November. In the last year he's survived an aneurysm and a greatest hits album ... | Neil Young: Prairie Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8855-prairie-wind/ | Prairie Wind | Neil Young turns 60 in November. In the last year he's survived an aneurysm and a greatest hits album. So why hasn't the man started to sound old? Sure, his voice quavers on some of the high notes on his ambitious new album, Prairie Wind, but he sounds remarkably preserved, showing the same age and wear he's shown for years: That voice-- alternately gentle and strident, tender and outraged-- has held up surprisingly well, gaining gritty authority with age. His few cracks and wrinkles just reinforce the sense of wistful nostalgia that suffuses Prairie Wind as well as almost all his other folk-rock albums since Harvest Moon, if not since Harvest.
Young has made this sort of no-surprises reliability a virtue. He long ago set the templates for his music, and while he's known for his itchy restlessness, late in his career he doesn't stray from that comfortable sound. The scope of his albums grows immodestly-- his previous, Greendale, was even accompanied by a film-- but his music, whether time-capsule folk like Prairie Wind or ragged-glory rock, remains the same size, exhibiting his confidence that a small voice can address enormous issues on a personal level. That constancy can be consoling, despite the themes of loss that haunts his songs.
There's something proudly old-fashioned about Prairie Wind, specifically in its simple visions of America, as in the title track's central image of a farmer's wife hanging laundry in the backyard. Even the title itself hopes for the possibility of more American frontiers, a new home on the range instead of a McMansion in the 'burbs. In other words, Young's concerns are deeply buried in the past, in a vision of history that seems simpler than the present. To his credit, he isn't another 1960s boomer insisting that everything was better back then, man-- his music hasn't changed that dramatically. There are a few moments of fuzzy nostalgia, as on "He Was the King", which takes liberties with Elvis's legendary exploits. But does anybody need to be reminded of Elvis's popularity when the same old songs are repackaged every holiday season? Or is that Young's point?
Still, Prairie Wind is best when Young indulges personal reminiscences, as on "Far From Home", which starts with a fond memory: "When I was a growing boy rockin' on my daddy's knee/ Daddy took an old guitar and sang 'Bury me on the lone prairie.'" Young's dad appears again on the title track, and a less earthly father appears on "When God Made Me". "This Old Guitar" reminisces over his long career, and on the album opener, "The Painter", he nods to old friends who are either long gone or still hanging around for another album. Several of the musicians on Prairie Wind have played with Young many times before, including keyboard player Spooner Oldham, guitarist Ben Keith, bassist Rick Rosas, and Emmylou Harris. For such a seasoned band, though, they sound maybe a little too familiar: They tend to let the songs drag out, clocking in at five, six, or even seven minutes (the tiring title track) when three would work just fine.
Intermingled with these private memories are larger concerns about Bush-era America, across which a cold prairie wind apparently blows. Yet Young's music is so rooted in the past, specifically the spirit of the 60s, that his stabs at contemporary relevance sound awkward and even curmudgeonly, as on "No Wonder" when he refers to "America the Beautiful" as "that song from 9/11" and quotes Chris Rock. Prairie Wind tries to gauge the present via the past, but there's a profound disconnect. But maybe Young is aware of it: "I try to tell the people," he sings on the title track, "But they never hear a word I say/ They say there's nothin' out there but wheat field anyway." He sounds pretty frustrated, but Prairie Wind mostly is frustrating. | 2005-09-28T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2005-09-28T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | September 28, 2005 | 5.8 | c4cd9fbe-4204-47a4-b338-2b268aa3db25 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Philadelphia/Baltimore duo recorded their 2021 debut remotely from their respective bedrooms, but the album—newly reissued by Carpark—captures the spirit of folk-pop at its most intimate. | The Philadelphia/Baltimore duo recorded their 2021 debut remotely from their respective bedrooms, but the album—newly reissued by Carpark—captures the spirit of folk-pop at its most intimate. | @ : *Mind Palace Music * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/at-mind-palace-music/ | Mind Palace Music | With Bandcamp as their roadmap to discovery and YouTube as their confessional, artists like Soccer Mommy, Clairo, and Jay Som represent a new breed of bedroom-pop musician: introverts who sing confessional lyrics into their Macbooks while turning hazy guitar melodies into earworms. And at first, @, the duo of Philadelphia guitarist Victoria Rose and Baltimore musician Stone Filipczak, appear to fall into that camp as well. As artists destined to collaborate but separated by 100 miles of highway, they swapped song ideas over iMessage before deciding to join forces—virtually, of course—to record a joint album from their respective bedrooms. But in sound, their music has an old-school feel rooted in acoustic guitar and rich vocal harmonies, sounding a little like ’70s-inspired teens hung up on the Mamas & the Papas. Originally released in 2021 and now reissued by Carpark, @’s debut full-length, Mind Palace Music, offers a tidy half hour of raw folk-pop straight from the heart.
The most striking quality of @’s music is also the most human one: their voices. The imperfectness of their singing is akin to Animal Collective’s exuberant tone on Sung Tongs, or the pristine vocal harmonies of girl groups like the Chordettes or the Ronettes if somebody slid them a glass of scotch to take the edge off. Filipczak enunciates each word and sings with a slight, high-pitched lilt that, in flashes, recalls John Lennon, giving a song like “Major Blue Empty” the uncanny air of a Beatles demo. Rose counterbalances with a warm, pure timbre, and the urgency of her delivery resembles emotions bubbling up. Compared to her solo work as Brittle Brian, particularly last year’s Biodiesel, she sounds unburdened as she draws out notes in “Star Game” or “My Garden.” The duo’s vocal harmonies are at once full bodied and delicate, off-key and in tune, merry and forlorn. On the opening “Parapet,” Rose and Filipczak’s evocative vocal harmonies are paired with fluttering piano in a way that perfectly captures the visceral feel of relentless longing.
At a time when most bedroom pop feels tethered to the online world, @ are making music that cuts the ethernet cable, no matter what their alias and origins might suggest. Each instrument on Mind Palace Music sounds well loved from years of jamming, lending the album an intimacy akin to the quiet sounds of a friend performing a song just for you: the buzz of a string vibrating against a fret, the hum of a microphone turning on, the tingle on the back of your neck when two voices intertwine. That human touch is audible in the spritely acoustic guitar and soft thumps of bongos on “Letters,” or the even-keeled flute in “First Journal.” Though the influence of cult favorite Vashti Bunyan is audible on the album’s best single, “Friendship Is Frequency,” the rustic tone of the duo’s guitar and Irish low whistle adds a personable, left-field signature of their own.
Mind Palace Music is an example of what happens when you take a poignant songwriter who’s careful about her chord progressions and introduce a fellow songwriter who knows the magic of no-frills arrangements. By the time Rose and Filipczak add more instruments into the mix, @ bloom into a kind of backyard folk-pop fit for Elephant 6. The album’s longest track, “Camera Phone,” begins quietly before evolving into a spontaneous flash of prog-rock complete with MIDI erhu. “My Garden” follows a similar trajectory, but this time Rose’s vocal cadence plays with meter to fake the dizzying effect of a shifting time signature. Even the driving percussion in standout “Cut From Toxic Cloth” can’t derail the intimate charm of @’s pop tendencies. “I don’t want intensity, no/Just a way to warmth and amity,” sings Rose. That’s exactly what the band finds on its humble debut. | 2023-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | February 24, 2023 | 7.5 | c4d26b5e-4652-4639-947d-0b56177e39c6 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Across six tracks channeling vintage freestyle, electro, UK garage, Baltimore club, and more, the Manchester producer pays tribute to dance music at its most joyful. | Across six tracks channeling vintage freestyle, electro, UK garage, Baltimore club, and more, the Manchester producer pays tribute to dance music at its most joyful. | Anz: All Hours EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anz-all-hours-ep/ | All Hours EP | For anyone who has ever slouched out of a nightclub in the inhospitable hours of the new day, wondering what on earth they were thinking, Manchester producer Anz’ All Hours offers ample justification that it was all worthwhile. Her debut EP for London independent powerhouse Ninja Tune pays jubilant homage to clubbing and club music with enough genuine joy that it’s enough to make you want to do it all over again, no matter the ringing ears and pounding headache.
Anz is fully qualified to tackle this Herculean task of rejuvenation. Not only is she from Manchester—arguably the cradle of the UK’s dance culture—but Anz has also proved herself to be the perfect bridge between dance music’s past, present, and future, a producer (much like India Jordan) who understands dance history without being in thrall to it, capable of producing both turbo hardcore throwbacks (like “Rave Casual”) and dazzling experiments in rhythm (2020’s “Gary Mission”).
The nightlife concept behind All Hours is explicit but not overbearing. Anz calls the EP “dance music for people who are up all hours,” and the record’s opening and closing tracks—“Decisions (AM Intro)” and “Quest Select (AM Outro)”—reflect their positioning in the theoretical small hours. The EP’s six songs surge and relax as the record traces the course of 24 hours in clubland, building from the contemplative welcome of “Decisions (AM Intro)” to the brutalist rave frenzy of “Last Before Lights,” and finally mellowing off into the nervous energy of “Quest Select,” a song that suggests tired, twitching feet and brain waves hovering between retreat and attack.
Within this loose framework Anz offers a freewheeling—and very entertaining—callback to the club styles of the last four decades. The giddy “You Could Be,” featuring George Riley, takes the listener back to the early days of Madonna’s career, when she was riding high on the New York electro-funk style of Jellybean Benitez; “Real Enough to Feel Good” nods to G-funk, UK garage, and Baltimore club, while “Inna Circle'' splits the difference by introducing Mantronix-style electro to Baltimore breakbeats. “Last Before Lights,” meanwhile, is a tribute to pretty much everything, throwing Beltram hoover sounds, staccato trance riffs, a chest-bursting bassline, and rousing Italo pianos at a track intended to capture that last, glorious surge of energy before the club lights come on.
While this genre pick ’n’ mix is not exactly standard practice for electronic producers, All Hours is notably less experimental than Anz’ 2020 EP for Hessle Audio, Loos In Twos (NRG). With the possible exception of “Real Enough to Feel Good,” the music on All Hours walks with a straight back and winning smile quite different from that EP’s wobbly strut. The production is bright and welcoming, like an unexpectedly friendly pat-down from security.
More importantly, All Hours brings to the forefront a melodic tendency that Anz has only hinted at in her previous work. The piano intro to “Decisions (AM Intro)” teases the kind of ambiguous emotional journey you might expect of a particularly winsome movie soundtrack, while “You Could Be” is simply a wonderful pop song, shining with romantic sass. The way that the EP’s six songs flow into each other, with sonic elements artfully bridging the divide between tracks, evokes a well-crafted DJ set. The twisting synth riff that connects “Decisions (AM Intro)” and “You Could Be” brings a smile to my face every time, a perfect sleight of hand that never seems to tire.
Like the very best nights out, this EP is simultaneously fleeting and impactful, a brief moment of joy that promises to resonate for years. All Hours feels like an effortless step up to the major leagues for a producer who can find magic in the murkiest nightclub corner.
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. | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | October 18, 2021 | 7.8 | c4d41636-c1ac-4beb-af7c-4b9a2c55666f | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Running influences from classic jungle, reggae, and R&B through pop music’s pithy filter, the Manchester producer is extending UK hardcore’s legacy to a new generation. | Running influences from classic jungle, reggae, and R&B through pop music’s pithy filter, the Manchester producer is extending UK hardcore’s legacy to a new generation. | Nia Archives: Forbidden Feelingz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nia-archives-forbidden-feelingz/ | Forbidden Feelingz | Let’s get the inevitable PinkPantheress comparisons out the way first. Both Nia Archives and PinkPantheress like a breakbeat. They’re both relatively young, and open in their admiration of mid-’90s UK dance music. PinkPantheress calls her style “new nostalgic,” Nia Archives goes with “future classic.” They both sing. They’re both women operating in dance-music spaces that have historically been sausage fests. And they’re both fueling a renaissance of the UK’s dance-music canon among curious, TikTok-enabled generations—which is why the comparisons are so tempting to make. But comparisons being inevitable doesn’t make them useful.
While PinkPantheress plumbs turn-of-the-millennium jungle and garage for curios and loops (and is open about her own freshness to it), Nia Archives is a studious devotee of the jungle scene. The Leeds native left home at 16 and came up playing basements and squat parties around drum’n’bass-loving Manchester, and she’s since been taken under the wing of the elders at foundational jungle imprint V Recordings as part of the EQ50 initiative, which aims to redress the scene’s historic gender imbalance. Her songs, along with diaristic lyrics about parties and problems, are stuffed with nods to junglist culture and its roots in big bass scoops. Her voice is indebted to the jazzy licks of Erykah Badu and Nina Simone, while she lifts a soulful lilt and lyrics from the sunnier sides of reggae music—all ingredients picked up, she’s said, from her West Indian upbringing. And then she pulls it all through pop music’s two-and-a-half-minute mangle, with mesmerizing results.
There’s a fine line between being devoted and sounding derivative, but Nia Archives traverses the divide with easy elegance. The title track—a standout among highlights on this fast-paced six-tracker—samples vintage TV for its punctuation (a neat setup from Columbo’s titular detective) and deploys the gnarly Reese bass that served as a bridge between jungle and its drum’n’bass fork in the mid-’90s. On “18 and Over” you get an instantly familiar reggae hook in the intro (Cocoa Tea’s “Young Lover”) and a sampled call to arms (“Give me a motherfucking breakbeat!”) that’s littered everywhere from Hardsequencer’s 1993 acid slammer “Some Motherfucking Breakbeat” to the gabber headrush of Hardliner’s “Motherfucking Breakbeat” from the same year, all the way up to 2020’s far more serene “Brand E” by John Frusciante. So far so familiar, perhaps. But then Nia Archives starts singing, and her voice spins, captivating, like a smoke ring. “Gud Gudbyez” will have you reaching in vain to the back of your brain to figure out where you’ve heard the trippy hook before. (Don’t worry, you haven’t.) She toasts like a soundsystem MC: churning loose words and cute phrases over and back, catching a second of delay here, lingering on a wispy vowel there, stepping over bouldering basslines and precision-tracked breaks. And everything fits just so.
Unlike those soundsystem MCs, Nia Archives can give the sense that she’s singing as much for herself as to her listeners. On opener “Ode 2 Maya Angelou,” she swaps her own voice in and out for the late poet-activist’s, drip-feeding lines from a recital of Angelou’s most famous work, “Still I Rise,” like a morning affirmation. “Luv Like,” with its thumbed bass and picked guitar recalling Roni Size’s “Brown Paper Bag,” appears, for all intents, as an adolescent love song—“To think that you could ever love someone like me,” she coos—before throwaways like “I’m far from perfection” reveal its meditation on the turmoil of dysmorphia. “Thank god I found a good in a goodbye,” she simmers on “Gud Gudbyez.” Extroversion turns inward. Comedown thoughts are soundtracked by music from the night before.
Nia Archives is clearly cognizant of the lineage she’s writing into, and she likes to show her work. But she’s never showing off. There’s nothing self-indulgent here: The half-time breakdown on “18 and Over” lasts just long enough (which is 10 seconds); “Forbidden Feelingz” bangs itself out just as it gets going, as if shy at its own wild performance. As the years roll round, every established scene finds claimants for a new generation at its porch. With songs like these—laser-sharp, as intimate and comforting as they are fresh and rollicking—Nia Archives won’t need to kick the door in. | 2022-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hijinxx | March 11, 2022 | 7.8 | c4d5d20d-2171-495d-a3c4-d232f6bf5ac9 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The Flint-raised, Houston-based rapper is known for his outrageous punchlines, but the engine of his raps is the personality-filled flow and the piano-driven Michigan beat. | The Flint-raised, Houston-based rapper is known for his outrageous punchlines, but the engine of his raps is the personality-filled flow and the piano-driven Michigan beat. | Bfb Da Packman : Fat Niggas Need Love Too | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bfb-da-packman-fat-niggas-need-love-too/ | Fat Niggas Need Love Too | Bfb Da Packman is not a comedian who raps; he’s a rapper who happens to crack a shitload of dick jokes. His breakout song and video, “Free Joe Exotic,” is one of the best and funniest singles to come out of the red-hot Michigan rap scene in the past couple of years. Every line is absolutely nuts: His thoughts on protection (“I’ll jump off a bridge ’fore I put my dick in plastic”), mid-sex musings (“She said she can feel it in her stomach, stop capping/Ol’ lyin’ ass bitch, my dick ain’t that big”), and self-deprecating digs (“I nut super quick and I be weighin’ down the mattress”). In the video, he rolls around on the ground and humps cars while wearing swim trunks, glasses that make him look like Bubble Bass from Spongebob, and a bright orange sweatshirt that reads “STILL HIV POSITIVE.” Guest Sada Baby, one of the most animated rappers in the Midwest, looks like the straight man.
Yet Packman’s debut album, Fat Niggas Need Love Too, isn’t consumed by the gimmick. The Flint-raised rapper, who now lives in Houston, can really spit: He tries to make a good Michigan rap song first and the jokes follow naturally. On “Wendy Williams,” Packman isn’t laugh-out-loud funny—except for maybe when he exclaims, “I got goals of eating Domino’s off Tika Sumpter’s ass”—but the engine of his raps is the personality-filled flow and the piano-driven Michigan beat.
The best Packman songs combine the spirit of a true Michigan street rap single with one-liners so dark and weird that the only reasonable reaction is to laugh and think, Why would anyone say that? “If Lizzo sold her coochie juice, ah, I wanna buy a swiggle,” raps Packman on “Bob and Weave,” followed by the sound of a drink being poured. On “Federal,” he lies, “Family full of hoes, even my granny got an OnlyFans,” a claim ridiculous enough to pierce the underwhelming guitar-based beat. On “Weekend at Solomon’s,” he attempts to boast, “Bougie nigga, just to beat my meat, bitch I get Jergens,” and later, “Man, I had a fat mama, how dare you niggas blame me.” He’s never afraid to clown himself—or his mom or his grandmother or his kids—and it makes his music so much fun.
If there are puns that don’t work for Packman, it’s the STD ones. Even if based in some truth, lines like, “When it comes to STDs, woo, I’m the mascot,” feel needlessly edgy in a way that his humor usually avoids. But the less enjoyable parts of Fat Niggas Need Love Too more often come from his guests: Wiz Khalifa is an awkward fit on the thudding instrumental of “Fun Time,” Coi Leray is fine but forgettable on “Ocean Prime,” and the Sada Baby reunion on “Big Bertha” is dissapointing, mostly because Sada continues to operate on autopilot like he has for much of the year.
The weirdest feature of all is Benny the Butcher on “Frenchmen,” where Packman raps about plugs on a brooding piano beat that sounds like it should be track 17 on a random Griselda mixtape. It’s a miracle that it isn’t a disaster and even moreso that Benny seems to embrace the ridiculousness of it all: “I hit Packman and said, ‘You nice, yeah, I’ll give you that’/Plus you gettin’ rich, can’t believe you ain’t fuck Lizzo yet.” But that’s Packman for you. He’s such a contagious personality that he can make even the most self-serious rapper of the most self-serious rap crew have some fun.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The Lunch Crew Company | June 30, 2021 | 7.2 | c4dea676-b4fe-4f8b-9371-155f99df7d0d | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Malian producer employs ngoni and other regional sounds in hip-hop-inspired fusions that, at their best, suggest a West African beat tape. | The Malian producer employs ngoni and other regional sounds in hip-hop-inspired fusions that, at their best, suggest a West African beat tape. | Luka Productions: Falaw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luka-productions-falaw/ | Falaw | Luka Productions crafts music that fuses global hip-hop styles with folktronica vibes. The brainchild of Mali’s Luka Guindo, a producer and vocalist who records in his home studio in the capital city of Bamako, the project is at its most potent when it mines a similar sonic tract to the productions Timbaland and the Neptunes served up for Missy Elliott, Clipse, and NORE around the turn of the last century—only with the sinewy sitar and synth riffs switched out for lines of ngoni, a West African string instrument. But when the 27-year-old Guindo moves on from the loop-based foundation of the album’s most infectious tracks and wanders into more musically expansive territory, the extra layers of instrumentation wind up skewering the appealing punch of his beats.
Falaw, whose title translates to Orphans, opens strongly: The introductory title track features lilting ngoni cushioning Guindo’s fleet yet tender vocals, which he recites in his native Bambara tongue in a sing-song flow. (Lyric translations are included with the album.) The run of tracks that follows contains the album’s gems. The raucous “Bbni” bubbles with dancehall-influenced rhythms and moody flashes of melody. “Foret” is even more addictive, with Guindo demonstrating his own brand of loop science by chopping up an acoustic ngoni like he’s working with an unearthed sample source. The sparse structure of the song is its charm: Vocals appear only briefly, in a call and response fashion, and when it locks into its repetitive mid-section, the track brings to mind a funky and absorbing West African beat tape.
Frustratingly, every time Guindo builds up a degree of cohesive momentum with pockets of songs like these, he can’t resist throwing in an oddly sequenced moment that derails the experience. This happens first with “Indienfoli,” whose four-to-the-floor rhythm and disco stylings come across as clunky rather than upbeat. This unfortunate dampening of the vibe repeats: The hypnotic “Djessou” pulls you in, but the grander, more fleshed-out “Sitanba” breaks the spell, sounding like an errant jazz-funk outing; the playful back-and-forth male and female vocals of “Damonson,” which features the endearingly sweet but husky voice of Rokia Kane, are swamped by closing cut “Dogonodoon,” which threatens to blast off into Detroit techno territory.
The core of Falaw ably showcases Guindo’s talent at hooking up ear-catching loops and channeling the traditional sounds of his region through a hip-hop lens, but he too often seems to become impatient or distracted; he muddles the mix by adding too much instead of letting his songs settle. Much like the tradition of crate-digging that inspired the album, Falaw shines brightest when Guindo narrows his focus on the magic of the groove. | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Sahel Sounds | May 30, 2019 | 6.2 | c4ebcd13-0de8-42a9-9b29-1334069504f7 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The starkly beautiful seventh album from the venerable singer-songwriter reveals more of her aged wisdom through winding narratives rich with humor and despair. | The starkly beautiful seventh album from the venerable singer-songwriter reveals more of her aged wisdom through winding narratives rich with humor and despair. | Laura Marling: Song for Our Daughter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-marling-song-for-our-daughter/ | Song for Our Daughter | There is a song on Laura Marling’s new album which bottles despair and keeps it airtight, like a storm cloud in a glass dome. “Fortune” is the kind of musical moment that can make you freeze in the deli aisle, rooted to the spot by Marling’s voice. It’s a spare lament about an unnamed woman who hopes to escape her unhappy life yet is powerless to make that change. The burden of sorrow is passed down from mother to child until, finally, the “unbearable pain” is absorbed by Marling herself, whose inspiration for the song was her mother’s never-used “running away fund.” Picture-perfect appearances, she seems to say, can hide a well of sadness deeper than we can imagine.
On her Grammy-nominated 2017 album Semper Femina, Marling used Classical-era imagery to add mythos to women-focused stories, but Song for Our Daughter, her seventh album, is guided by its own kind of far-reaching lore. Marling does away with her previous record’s occasional blues-rock grit and peels her sound back to its gleaming bones: pristine acoustic guitar, textural hums, a metronome click. She doesn’t need much else to frame her quartz pendant of a voice, which can reach Alpine altitudes as well recall a troubadour singing through chewing tobacco. Marling has described Song for Our Daughter as a rumination on modern femininity, and her tendency to leave lyrical narratives open and unfinished adds an evocative elasticity to her new music. You may find yourself wanting to fill in the spaces as if playing a particularly soul-searching kind of Mad Libs.
Marling—an avid reader who once visited her local book store several times a week—sketches her new heroines with a literary bent. The subject of the rousing album opener, “Alexandra,” is partially inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, an enigmatic woman who finds ”diamonds in the drain” and collects them with abandon. The metaphor implies the jewels are simple men that fall under Alexandra’s spell. “If she loved you like a woman,” Marling sings with a withering tone, “Did you feel like a man?” At other times, Marling is downright funny, rolling her eyes at the champagne socialism of the recently woke. “Girl, please,” she sings drily. “Don’t bullshit me.” Still, Marling has not quite forgotten her genteel upbringing in Berkshire, UK. “I won’t write a woman with a man on my mind,” she sings on the album, before worrying, “Hope that doesn’t sound too unkind.”
At other times, Marling sounds delightfully carefree. She sings the upbeat, folk-rock tune “Strange Girl” with a swaggering tone and a full band, calling to mind a group of journeymen busking with a bashed-up guitar case open at their feet. At one point in the song, a laugh creeps into her voice, as if she’d caught the eye of a mugging band member mid-sentence. And while “Held Down” describes the cruelty of abandonment over trundling bass guitar, Marling sounds about as stressed as a flower child singing to the moon, her vocals bathed in psychedelic coos. As much as she sings of unrest, Marling's tone suggests a serene clairvoyance for the future, as if she has an 8-ball telling her everything will be okay. She’s even able to bring an optimistic outlook to the starkly beautiful break-up song “The End of the Affair,” a co-write with Blake Mills. “I love you goodbye,” she sings, her voice rising to a falsetto before putting a decisive cap on the relationship. “Now let me live my life.”
Song for Our Daughter brims with peaceful reflections that, even though Marling herself is just grazing her 30s, could seem like the work of an artist in their twilight years. “I’ve lived my life in fits and spurts,” she sings at one point on the album; “Bruises all end up benign,” she offers elsewhere. She thinks about passing on that perspective to an imagined daughter in the elegant, bucolic title track, describing misogynist “bullshit” and predatory creeps. “You’ll cut your way through it somehow,” she sings with relief, a tone that suggests lessons learned the hard way. Marling caps the song by broadening its perspective further still, invoking the writers of “words that will outlive the dead.” It’s a class to which Marling also belongs. | 2020-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Partisan / Chrysalis | April 11, 2020 | 7.6 | c4f09c3a-61b7-42ac-9d88-df78010b43d3 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
For the Liverpool mainstays' fifth album, they've removed the cinder block that Velocifero applied to the gas pedal, opting for a floatier, airy feel that often sounds as if its creators' feet are barely touching the ground. | For the Liverpool mainstays' fifth album, they've removed the cinder block that Velocifero applied to the gas pedal, opting for a floatier, airy feel that often sounds as if its creators' feet are barely touching the ground. | Ladytron: Gravity the Seducer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15803-gravity-the-seducer/ | Gravity the Seducer | Seduction can be an evil art, and Ladytron are certainly capable of resisting it. The Liverpool mainstay's fifth album is titled Gravity the Seducer, but Newton's discovery clearly struggles to seal the deal throughout. During their dozen-year career, the band's refused to outright repeat themselves-- 2002's Light & Magic was a glossier, more robust update on the toy-store analog work of the previous year's debut, 604, while 2008's underrated, overstuffed Velocifero added a menacing stare and at-times mismatched experimentation to the void-creating shoegaze synths of 2005's game-changing The Witching Hour. For Gravity the Seducer, they've taken off the cinder block that Velocifero applied to the gas pedal, opting for a floatier, airy feel that often sounds as if its creators' feet are barely touching the ground. Hired gun Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails) returns to lend an extra hand, but his touch is less heavily felt than on Velocifero, where, more often than not, throttling industrial rhythms prevailed.
Change is good, right? Well, here's the rub: Ladytron aren't quite content to let go of the since-perfected Witching Hour sound that won them attention beyond the Cobrasnake crowd, so the push-and-pull between their new-look sound and the blank-eyed electrogaze of the past creates an unfortunate tension. "Ace of Hz" and "Mirage" are boilerplate, late-aughts Ladytron, right down to the charging synth melodies and vague political-naturalistic lyricism, and the former's shoulders-shrugged ordinariness is driven home when its melody is redone on the instrumental LP closer "Aces High". Earlier on the album, another sorta-instrumental rears its head in the form of "Ritual", a limp faux-rocker that, if nothing else, makes for an easy "Roxy Elevator Music" joke.
Unsurprisingly, the weightless pomp of Gravity the Seducer's fresher material is more impressive. Opener "White Elephant" is a sneaky-good song with a swaying melody that belongs in the Great Ladytron Songs canon, while the drum machine-kissed ballad "Ambulances" bucks the band's trend for blush-worthy, Tolkien-esque lyricism in favor of a worrying plea in the name of lost love. Still, even when Ladytron attempt to fully escape the past, it haunts them: the melodic structure of album highlight "90 Degrees", in all its glistening beauty, can't help but recall Witching Hour closer "All the Way...", a song that's of the band's most directly affecting works to date and certainly more substantial than the majority of what's here.
So Gravity the Seducer is a transitional album bearing the growing pains and separation anxiety that we usually associate with bands that are in between periods of true inspiration. It's not a bad record, but it is an upsettingly uneven one, especially considering the flashes of greatness that Ladytron are still capable of. I'm tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt, though, based on their longevity alone. In his review of last year's greatest hits collection, Best of 00-10, ex-Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef made an excellent case for why Ladytron demand more than a light dismissal-- and, let's face it, considering the flash-in-the-pan electroclash "movement" that first gave them recognition, it's a pleasant shock that they've stuck around this long and still manage to evolve. "Points for showing up" usually carries negative connotations, so how about we give Ladytron "points for surviving." After all, simply sticking around without growing totally stale is a feat that's not easily pulled off these days. | 2011-09-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-09-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nettwerk | September 14, 2011 | 6 | c4f2f5a1-c5dd-4fd3-bd09-61de40b593f1 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The experimental rapper remains an impish writer and an athletic vocalist on his latest album, one that lays bare the sprawling collage in his fiery, fascinating brain. | The experimental rapper remains an impish writer and an athletic vocalist on his latest album, one that lays bare the sprawling collage in his fiery, fascinating brain. | JPEGMAFIA: All My Heroes Are Cornballs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jpegmafia-all-my-heroes-are-cornballs/ | All My Heroes Are Cornballs | From the DC Universe to the internet writ large, JPEGMAFIA’s heroes span genres and mediums. The producer and rapper’s pantheon is expansive and colorful, a bustling splash page of influences and pop culture totems. While JPEG has never downplayed the prominent roles that anime, video games, and wrestling play in his music, the adrenalized politics of his past projects sometimes obscured that scope. Listening to a song like “I Just Killed a Cop Now I’m Horny,” for instance, the morose Ai Aso sample always felt overshadowed by the flamboyant title and JPEG’s anti-cop lyrics. All My Heroes Are Cornballs adjusts that imbalance by laying bare the sprawling collage in his brain and showcasing how seamlessly it all fits together. The record feels like a public access show on an interdimensional cable channel: unhinged and trippy, but still deeply earnest.
All My Heroes is a significant departure from his earlier work. But for as dense as it sounds, there’s a quiet accessibility to how JPEG performs and structures these songs. He adopts gendered terms like thot, slut, and girl, leaning into Peggy, his feminine nickname, and stages a few songs from the perspective of a woman. It’s unclear what they might signify about his own identity, but they further the idea that his fearlessness is his superpower. As a producer, he builds his hyper-syncretic songs around concord rather than contrast. The distorted guitar riff on “Rap Grow Old and Die x No Child Left Behind” acts as a springboard for the vocals and other instruments, converting all the friction into motion. The crackle of a recorded fire on “DOTS FREESTYLE REMIX” fills the spaces between JPEG’s boasts and the cutesy synth tune. He’s adept at making disparate sounds and images cohere without sacrificing texture or invoking an exaggerated sense of audacity. In a year full of nods to diaspora and lineage, his productions are a reminder that even randomness can be personal.
Sounds and sequences that would have been codas or flourishes in his past music are allowed to fully blossom, even in passing. “Kenan Vs. Kel” shuffles through keyboard melodies before settling on a riff that morphs into a dusty beat. Then, halfway through, a crunchy power chord shows up and is stretched like sheet metal as it’s hammered with percussion. JPEG raps on both parts, and as busy as that sounds, the shifts are effortless, like swiping between smartphone apps. “Grimy Waifu,” a gun ode with a gorgeous downtempo backbeat, folds in flute spirals and acoustic guitar riffs as JPEG sings in AutoTune of his weapon’s commitment to him. It’s as ridiculous as it is dazzling.
Amid all the chaos, his rapping remains his greatest tool. JPEG is an impish writer and an athletic vocalist. He can slither in and out of rhythms and hopscotch through the densest arrangements without losing momentum. Here, he raps in compact spurts, volleys, and streams, his words slurred, stretched, and compressed as he channels his heroes and roasts his enemies. His references are personal and evocative. “BBW” is named after the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (JPEG claims to be his black counterpart). On “Post Verified Lifestyle,” he likens himself to DOOM, Beanie Sigel, the Beatles, and 98 Degrees. The first half of “Rap Grow Old and Die x No Child Left Behind” uses Bobby Brown and Michael Jackson to skewer music industry whitewashing in the chorus, and ends its second verse with a shout out to Tom Hardy’s Bane.
What’s striking about all these name drops is their constant sense of dimension. JPEG threatening to turn former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon into Steve Hawking on “PRONE!” is incredibly brash and aggro and ableist, yes, but it’s also a sincere expression of rage against a propagator of white nationalism. Similarly, JPEG’s reference to The Dark Knight Rises alludes to the album’s title while conveying his genuine belief in armed revolt against cops. As nerdy and gushing as this album is, it’s no less unabashed about JPEG’s political stances. He may want to be your girl (“Thot Tactics”), but he’s still blasting the alt-right (“Beta Male Strategies”) and incensed by police brutality (“PTSD”). There’s no hierarchy to his touchstones or his tactics; his idols coexist with his ideals.
Given the record’s wild song titles and manic energy, it’s tempting to attribute that equivalency to the internet, but JPEG’s fluency feels more tied to his life experiences than his web history. He’s lived across the world and country as an airman, artist, and black man (“I been everywhere around the world and nobody likes niggas,” he once observed). He grew up listening to reggae singer Michael Prophet (“Free the Frail”) and has recorded sincere covers of Carly Rae Jepsen and now TLC (a dissonant cut of “No Scrubs” appears as “BasicBitchTearGas”). “Don’t rely on the strength of my image,” he sings on “Free the Frail.” It feels like a public warning as well as a personal mantra.
In balancing the stridence of his politics with the aesthetic overload of his many influences, All My Heroes reintroduces JPEGMAFIA as an imagineer as well as a provocateur. He remains a hellraiser, but also comes across as bubbly and inventive, technicolor and cyberpunk—real anime supervillain shit. In a scattered .txt file titled “thoughts” included with his previous album Veteran, he wrote, “U can never make a type beat for me I’m to [sic] varied.” Back then, the statement rang true mostly for his boisterous, glitchy beat-making. All My Heroes shows that it applies to his full skill set. Get this man a shield. | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | EQT | September 18, 2019 | 7.6 | c4f8408b-d7d7-40d2-b2fb-32924cb49cce | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On their debut album, the Los Angeles hardcore band explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence. | On their debut album, the Los Angeles hardcore band explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence. | Militarie Gun: Life Under the Gun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/militarie-gun-life-under-the-gun/ | Life Under the Gun | Militarie Gun originally started as a solo side project for Ian Shelton, the drummer and vocalist for the Seattle powerviolence group Regional Justice Center. Across three early EPs, it felt as if Shelton was stuck in a state of perpetual metamorphosis. It was tough-guy-sounding punk songs injected with brief sections of jangly acoustic guitar or gentle harmonics, at times sounding like several insoluble ideas trying to be whisked together.
But increasingly, he had his sights on inverting the formula in pushing pop to the forefront. He got a band together—including guitarist Nick Cogan from Drug Church and drummer Vince Nguyen from Modern Color—that finally does just that on Militarie Gun's debut full-length. Life Under the Gun explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence. The noise of their earlier EPs has become rich and lush, their rhythm section tight and crisp. It’s the first time Shelton’s voice is allowed to completely seep through—cracked, damaged, and sweetly heartbreaking.
The epiphany appears to date back to the band’s collaboration with James Goodson’s project Dazy last spring on the song “Pressure Cooker.” It’s an airy pop gem that deftly balances a Stone Roses-style rhythm section, grungy guitar licks, and an anthemic earworm of a chorus punctuated by Shelton’s signature “ooh ooh” grunt. He still wields a primal growl when necessary, but he is even more effective when his voice has some melody to it. Goodson is all over Life Under the Gun as a background singer, subtly lifting Shelton up, whispering in his ear that it’s sometimes OK to smash the off button on the Big Muff pedal.
The evolution is most easily heard in “Big Disappointment,” re-recorded for the full-length after first appearing on the EP All Roads Lead to the Gun II. It charts a similar course: a mid-tempo, chug-filled rock song that employs a bass drum stutter to hammer home Shelton’s frustrations—“Addicted to rage/Can’t get out of the way”—with a brief, spacey interlude before raging to a close. The repeated closing line, “And it stains,” sounds punctuated with a question mark on the EP. Here, Shelton confidently tosses on a couple exclamation points for emphasis, his last word encompassing a second, lower note instead of being shouted flatly. Even the “burned, beaten, bludgeoned brain” that Shelton describes in his staccato yelp glows vividly in the mind’s eye.
There are moments when Life Under the Gun feels a bit too simple for its own good, as if the pendulum swung back too far. Whereas most of the record employs shimmery, dense melodies, “Seizure of Assets,” a lament about the narrator’s car being repossessed, sounds a little stripped for parts. Luckily, detours like this are rather brief and are vastly overshadowed by something like “My Friends Are Having a Hard Time,” the album’s centerpiece, and thesis for the new big beefy Militarie Gun. “I can’t do anything/For anyone, not me” Shelton sings in the chorus alongside Goodson. The song tumbles toward, the harmonies expand, the time signature gets weird, the guitars and bass volley riffs back and forth. Goodson returns to the chorus and Shelton plows forward, singing “I wish I could help,” his fatalism at an all-time high. It’s heart-rending, arresting, a sound and feel that Militarie Gun can finally call their own. | 2023-06-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | June 27, 2023 | 7.4 | c4f91d01-eed0-496d-992e-71bc841085b2 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Matthew Cooper's second solo piano record in 15 years glows with a childlike wonder underscored by mature regret. | Matthew Cooper's second solo piano record in 15 years glows with a childlike wonder underscored by mature regret. | Eluvium: Pianoworks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eluvium-pianoworks/ | Pianoworks | In 2004, Matthew Cooper released his second Eluvium album, An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death. The electronic ambient of his debut ceded the stage to unaccompanied piano, a choice that marked him as an artist who understood the true nature of the instrument. The piano is memory incarnate, an instrument made for remembering true things, which you can’t do without forgetting false ones—one track was called “Nepenthe,” a mythic elixir of amnesia. Since then, he’s tacked between electronic drone, quasi-chamber music, ambient pop, post-rock, and points outlying. But the piano has remained a stabilizing presence, holding up some of Cooper’s most memorable tracks, like the Philip Glass pastiche “Prelude for Time Feelers”. Pianoworks is his second solo piano record, and, considered alongside its 15-year-old predecessor, it reflects how he’s changed and how he hasn’t, as any mirror worth its magic should.
Most obvious is Cooper’s growth as a player and a recording artist. An Accidental Memory sounds like someone sunk an old upright in the Pacific Ocean for a while, then hauled it up and stuck a microphone in it. Cooper’s unadorned etudes are as winsome and lulling as a baby’s mobile, which accounts for their classical-gateway-drug charm. But Pianoworks is clearly a more professional recording, with a broad, pearly sound, softly curved instead of flat and shrill. The compositions are consummate Eluvium, but the signature childlike wonder is underscored with mature regret and intellect. It is as if a musician once governed by stark emotions can now feel one thing while thinking another, in the middle of life, tugged by the immediacy of youth from one end and the mysteries of mortality from the other.
Cooper has been tinkering with this record for years, and happily, it sounds like he spent much of that time paring it down. There’s no grandstanding in his playing, nothing inessential, nothing hidden in the fixed but flexible figures. Not every track earns its spareness: “Transfiguration One” feels static. But usually, Cooper’s tunes find the edge where memory blends into dream and linger there, their opening intervals stirring echoes of near-recognition (the first four notes of “Paper Autumnalia” nearly quote “Silent Night”) that isn’t broken when they take their own course.
Eluvium is defined by instant legibility, and at worst, it can feel effective but easy, confected from the surface froth of 19th-century impressionism, 20th-century minimalism, and modern indie classical. You could say Cooper’s virtue and vice are the same: simplicity. But I’m not sure we’d have it any other way, and Pianoworks, retaining the virtue while dispersing the vice, hints that the farther he gets from the almost-remembered paradise he seeks, the richer his music is going to become. | 2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Temporary Residence Ltd. | June 3, 2019 | 7.6 | c4fd49fd-7e2b-4970-bc86-6cf7d41c636f | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The first full-length project from the Bronx’s Sie7etr3 collective showcases its leader’s elastic flows and artful delivery over minimal but effective beats. | The first full-length project from the Bronx’s Sie7etr3 collective showcases its leader’s elastic flows and artful delivery over minimal but effective beats. | Chucky73: De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chucky73-de-chamaquito-siempre-cabezu/ | De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu | Every rap crew needs a cocky ringleader, and Chucky73 gleefully stepped up to the challenge for Sie7etr3. Over two years, the Bronx label and collective has flourished thanks to its Uptown twist on New York drill. The crew racked up YouTube views and Instagram followers, dropped loosies and EPs; meanwhile, Chucky charmed us with his unflappable flow and toothy smile, emerging as the group’s cherub-cheeked playboy. It’s fitting that the first full-length project from Sie7etr3, the just-released De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu, comes from the collective’s loveable lothario.
On his debut album, the New York rapper confronts some familiar challenges for newly crowned regional rap royalty: the pressure to expand an already buzzy profile and reach new fans without abandoning the beloved local style that made him blow up in the first place. Luckily, Chucky mostly avoids that fate. Rather than trend-hopping and watering himself down, he chooses organic collaborations in the broader Latin trap landscape, flaunting his elastic, agile flows and artful delivery over minimal but effective beats.
The crew’s penchant for simple, sturdy productions shepherd the album, as does their fondness for onomatopoeic, four-letter track titles. Robust horns on “Fiti (lili part3)” and “Chassy” recall the maximalism that made Dipset New York legends. On “Zili,” Chucky rides the lurching bass and skittish violin hook, dropping playful but hard-edged bars in short, pummeling bursts. Sparse production accumulated in the low end is an ideal setting for Chucky’s songs of triumph; his polysyllabic bars feel muscular, making his presence known with straight-talking tigueraje. Sie7etr3 member Fetti031 and Puerto Rican lyricist Myke Towers also lend vocals to “Zili”; Towers drops a breathless verse that serves as a reprieve from the more melodic fare he typically showcases on mainstream pop-reggaetón records.
Throughout the album, Chucky sets the tone for his guests, many of whom are Latin trap or reggaetón artists. Guests like Chilean trapero Pablo Chill-E, Dominican emcee El Pollito Trapper, and reggaetón legend Ñengo Flow are compelled to get on Chucky’s level and actually rap—or admit embarrassing failure, like Jon Z’s sophomoric attempt at a drill flow on “Tutu,” a track that otherwise sounds like an homage to Pop Smoke. It’s a shrewd choice; Chucky invites his guests into his world while reminding them that the bland reggaetón- and trap-lite that currently dominates the Latin pop charts just won’t do here.
Tracks like “Dominicana” show off Sie7etr3’s irresistibility; the addictive, clanging beat demands some ass-shaking in the mirror, preferably with a Henny colada in hand. Chucky drops a handful of deadpan, laugh-out-loud couplets that capture the goofiness he’s beloved for, and though the Mr. Freire production almost too closely resembles the synthetic horns and bells on Sie7etr3 EP’s “Brazilera” and “Colombiana,” the track still harnesses the jocular sensibility that makes the Bronx crew stand out from their peers in other boroughs. It’s a reminder of how they’ve resuscitated the Latin trap scene and embraced a sense of vivacity in the otherwise ominous New York drill movement.
De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu has its valleys. Chucky has faced criticism for repetitive flows, which he dismisses with cheeky wordplay on “Palos”; changing up his style would be like telling El Alfa to abandon dembow, or asking notoriously incendiary radio host Alofoke to cut the drama, he says. His laid-back flows are a central part of his magnetism and something he’s not willing to sacrifice so easily. But he does harbor some writing crutches, and when Chucky crafts punchy lyrics, he tends to fall back on them. “Wigi’”s chorus includes a line about packing a 40 in Dora the Explorer’s backpack, but it’s repeated so many times the joke deflates when the song comes to a close. Those seeking respite from all the flexing and sex talk might tap in to “Rosario” or “Desahogo,” but these trap baladas suffer from trite lyrics about the come-up and clichéd voicemail samples from Chucky’s mom.
Yet even Chucky’s most uncomplicated songs are made interesting, either through minimal, potent productions or sticky Dominican palabreo–a language of survival that revels in improvisation and orality, always refusing the colonial imposition of proper Spanish. Dominican Spanish has long been dismissed as low-class or too culturally specific; today, white, non-Caribbean Latin American artists frequently don accents or pepper their songs with island slang, cashing in on the cultural and racial currency of Afro-Caribbean speech and performance. Chucky doesn’t have to posture as something he’s not; the songs on De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu announce his arrival with fearless opacity, and he couldn’t care less whether you understand. He may have traded his low-budget videos for flashy hotels and high-profile collabs with Rich the Kid and Fivio Foreign, but De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu suggests he’s set on remaining the movement’s irreverent, self-assured torchbearer.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Sie7tr3 the Label / Caroline | November 2, 2020 | 7 | c5019139-1d11-4ec7-b626-10cfbc5483b9 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
This four-song EP came about when Radiolab asked the self-sufficient Hudson, NY, duo to cover New Order's "Blue Monday" for a compilation, which led Buke and Gase into trying to write a song a day for a week. | This four-song EP came about when Radiolab asked the self-sufficient Hudson, NY, duo to cover New Order's "Blue Monday" for a compilation, which led Buke and Gase into trying to write a song a day for a week. | Buke and Gase: Function Falls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17189-function-falls/ | Function Falls | It makes perfect sense that Hudson, NY's Buke and Gase chose Wired to host a stream of their new EP, Function Falls, even though as gase-ist Aron Sanchez explained to the tech magazine, "Nothing [on it] was created in the computer." I visited the band's studio in the Red Hook neighborhood last spring, and it was the closest I'd come to a physics lab since leaving school; a basement full of what Sanchez termed "cannibalized" instruments, shedding or absorbing new components on their path to becoming something else entirely. As Joshua Love explained in his review of their debut full-length, 2010's Riposte (made under a different spelling of their name), their inventing new instruments arose from necessity; finding one that would accommodate Arone Dyer's carpal tunnel syndrome, and making two people sound like a full band. Buke and Gase solved musical problems using Sanchez' background in making mad instruments for the Blue Man Group and Dyer's experience building bikes. With such a bold self-sufficient streak, it's not surprising to know that their last single, May's "Hiccup", was released in "sympathy" with the Occupy movement.
Solution found, on this new EP (there's a full-length to follow early next year), Sanchez and Dyer set about executing control experiments, working within limitations that unexpectedly prove both fruitful and poignant for a band whose previous raison d'être had been making maximalism from within minimalist confines. Function Falls came about when Radiolab asked the band to cover New Order's "Blue Monday" for a compilation, which led Sanchez and Dyer into trying to write a song a day for a week. Their cover of the dance staple sounds as though it predates the original-- made in the bracing, clanking austerity of the industrial age rather than the burgeoning glamor of the early 1980s-- and the classic's insistent synthesizer line proves the perfect mettle for Sanchez's gase (a guitar strung with bass strings). Those steady, tugged bass parts underpin the other three songs here, a far cry from the bungeeing bottom-end bounce that defined Riposte and 2008's mini album, +/-. Instead, Function Falls stands on the lip of the bridge, deciding whether to jump.
Where Buke and Gase's early releases were bristling and joyous-- doesn't "[waking] up in a bundle of orgasm" sound like fun?-- it's much harder to parse the emotion here. The band have described how the words to the opening song, "Misshaping Introduction", were improvised, "resulting in a slight lyrical disintegration," and true to form, the only part that's easy to pick out without a lyric sheet is "Don't clear the air/ Better to love first." The song's steady mechanical clank and the way Dyer sings in a downcast, quieter tone, all former yelps expunged, give the impression that the whole thing could go off at any second; it reminds me of the danger present in Annie Clark's work, particularly when she's playing dead in a visual. You stoop over, duped into concern, and bam!, she's got you by the throat.
"Fussrate" puts out a little more easily, starting with a familiar monochrome tug-- they share a similar palette to Shellac, and it's no surprise that Bob Weston has mastered their forthcoming full-length. Then one bastardized instrument or other poses as a Moog, making for an elegant segue into a regimented orchestral cacophony halfway between the most in excelsis parts of a Rhys Chatham composition and Battles circa Mirrored.
Despite all this control, there's a danger present in the kind of industrial mechanical sound that Buke and Gase mine-- the tambourine in "Tending the Talk" sounds as if fashioned from a wreath of shivs, the effect on the guitar lending it a dull glitter, like a jagged piece of quartz lagged in dust. It's the brightest song on the record, but Dyer sings at her slowest and most soulful, repeating, "this heart ain't too hard to guarantee," as half statement, half plea for understanding. She reaches a depth and insidiousness in her vocal that more than makes good on the band's excellent Fugazi covers for the Our Band Could Be Your Life concert that took place in New York earlier this year. Even though it was the starting point for the record, their cover of "Blue Monday" sits at the EP's end, where Dyer's processed, neutered cries of "How should I feel?" seem to act as a kind of emotional release for the questioning tone and linguistic disintegration that came before.
On each of their releases to date, Buke and Gase have never been anything less than absolutely thrilling-- even if some of those thrills were a bit more firecracker-on-your-chair than others-- and it speaks volumes that, whether they're going for maximalist madness or something more contained, both tacks still pack the same exhilarating punch. In their case, letting function dictate form hasn't limited any of their expression; rather, it's just shown off another side of their considerable arsenal. It's rare to find a band that triumphs in aggression, emotion, and innovation. Their controlled experiments have elicited a rare alchemy. | 2012-09-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-09-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Brassland | September 21, 2012 | 7.8 | c5096a05-0fed-4f90-b1bf-c52b94458420 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
*Coconut Oil, *Lizzo's first release under Atlantic, is her ode to body positivity, self-love and the trials of getting to the point where you believe you deserve it. | *Coconut Oil, *Lizzo's first release under Atlantic, is her ode to body positivity, self-love and the trials of getting to the point where you believe you deserve it. | Lizzo: Coconut Oil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22511-coconut-oil/ | Coconut Oil | Lizzo is having a good year. The ink is dry on her deal with a major label, one of her songs got the silver screen treatment and she’s gracing the airwaves too, as a host of Wonderland—MTV’s new live music program. She found time in between all of this to finish Coconut Oil, a six-track EP that marks her official debut for Nice Life Recording Company, an Atlantic Records imprint.
This busy stretch for the Detroit native coincided with an intense period of reckoning for the world at large. Every week brought renewed potential for despair, as images of war, humanitarian crises and police brutality were plastered across our TV, computer and phone screens in stunning high definition. Faced with this seemingly relentless stream of horrible news, and short of going off the grid completely to avoid it, taking time to look after your physical and mental wellbeing is a matter of survival. Coconut Oil is Lizzo’s ode to body positivity, self-love and the trials of getting to the point where you believe you deserve it.
The perception of coconut oil as a cure for all of life’s problems has achieved legendary, and therefore meme-able, status. It’s now hailed as a balm to alleviate everything from the pain of heartbreak to the pressure of student debt. As an integral part of many skin and Afro haircare rituals, it has come to represent something very important for black women in particular, who rally around its power to heal from the outside in. From acknowledging this in the EP’s title down to making songs that speak directly to the lived experience of this demographic, Lizzo is both channeling and fuelling the zeitgeist under which black women’s oft-ignored specificities are being celebrated in popular culture.
In some circles the substance that inspired the EP’s name is used with an almost religious fervor. Lizzo honors this sentiment by taking us to church on the title track, crooning “I thought I needed to run and find somebody to love, but all I needed was some coconut oil” against a backdrop of organs. It’s a light-hearted retelling of the journey from youthful insecurity (“I remember back, back in school, when I wasn’t cool”) through to hard-earned confidence, with a nod to the experiences and people that helped shape her along the way – especially her mother. Saved for last in the play order, “Coconut Oil” the most reserved and lyrically modest effort on what’s otherwise a very spirited collection. Over the five songs leading up to it, she pushes to the upper reaches of her vocal range, quite literally belting out her own praises with no hint of shyness.
The twinkly opening keys of “Scuse Me” give you just enough time to prepare for the impossibly long bass drops and frantic drum sequences to follow, over which she explains just how much she’s feeling herself. Her pre-chorus line “Feeling like a stripper when I’m looking in the mirror, I be slapping on that ass getting thicker and thicker” plays out like a 2016 rewrite of “Oops (Oh My)” turned up to 11.
Two promotional singles from earlier this year found a home on Coconut Oil. “Good As Hell,” featured in the latest installment of the Barbershop series, is brassy encouragement for anyone who is worn out from giving more than they get in a relationship. “Phone” is pure MPC and bassline magic, on which the existential dread of losing both your cellular device (“Where the hell my phone?”) and your friends at the club is somehow turned into a danceable moment.
Weaving in and out of sung and rap verses on all but one song, it’s clear that Lizzo feels at ease in both of those spaces. Still, the EP as a whole doesn’t reach its sweet spot melodically. The mambo-inspired horns on opener “Worship,” give way to a chorus that drifts into show tune territory, leading into two very different syncopated dance rhythms before getting to “Deep.” If neither “Phone” nor “Good As Hell” brought you to this EP, “Deep” would likely be quick to standout as a club-ready dance tune with its soukous-inflected guitar riffs. There is nothing wrong with these elements individually, but it’s hard to know which thread to follow when they’re all packed into a running time of under twenty minutes.
Lizzo’s career and sound have already been through many transformations: from rocker, to electro-soul crooner, to rapper and singer by way of on-air talent. Perhaps Coconut Oil works best when considered as a statement of intent—an inventory of all the things she’s good at, and a testing ground for how best to blend them in the future. | 2016-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Atlantic / Nice Life | October 15, 2016 | 6.1 | c50bf3d1-cf66-4f11-9706-ac2612b67caa | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
Josianne Boivin’s full-length debut gestures toward space opera, but her lonely disco and lo-fi aesthetic are better suited for sleepy introspection about your place on Earth. | Josianne Boivin’s full-length debut gestures toward space opera, but her lonely disco and lo-fi aesthetic are better suited for sleepy introspection about your place on Earth. | MUNYA: Voyage to Mars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/munya-voyage-to-mars/ | Voyage to Mars | Josianne Boivin—the woman behind MUNYA—isn’t particularly alien. A Canadian with a background in opera and a Parisian instinct for delicate production, Boivin is the image of a musical cool girl: gifted in aesthetics (she draws most of her album covers), bittersweet in her lyrics, elegant in her floaty synths. The most unearthly thing about her is probably her fascination with Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, a theme her debut full-length, Voyage to Mars, tucks between its chiffon layers like an odd, precious egg.
This reference hangs around like an ugly cousin, but it’s impossible to ignore completely. It’s in the title, a rose for Musk’s purported mission to bring humanity to Mars. It’s in many of the songs, which cover sci-fi-adjacent territory like aliens, moons, and Boca Chica, Texas, where the SpaceX launch site is located. Regardless of your interest in these topics, it’s not exactly a great time to be a French Canadian musician with Musk tendencies. Thankfully, Voyage to Mars avoids the Twitter antics and the billionaire propagandizing in favor of the simple admission that, hey, space is pretty cool.
As sugary soft pop, Boivin’s songs make convincing invitations to roll your shoulders back and take a dip. “Cocoa Beach” cycles through melodic guitars and basslines with the soft, lazy glitter of snow. Boivin’s voice, mellow and good for telling a fairytale, swishes through watery riffs on an understated cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” The orange-peeled guitar of “Voyage” calls back to 2010s indie pop-rock (think Two Door Cinema Club), but encased in a cloud of drowsy, SoundCloud-esque reverb, it doesn’t sound so dated. Boivin’s lonely disco, lo-fi aesthetic, and Quebecois intonation make a perfect backdrop for sleepy introspection about the planet and your place on it.
But despite the prominent space motif, Voyage to Mars is mostly content to explore the weirdness of our current existence, working through typically earthly concerns like listlessness, boredom, and romantic dissatisfaction. Boivin constructs swirling vocal layers, wrestling herself with teary ahs on the breathless “Pour Toi” and the lovesick “Captain Ron,” where she sounds like she’s sleepwalking as she begs a lost love to “show me the light so I can find my way.” On “Perfect Day,” a banal observation feels restless: “Two by two/How do we make it through?” she asks, urging you to reconsider the basics of human companionship against a curl of custardy guitars.
This sort of emotional quandary can’t be resolved by imaginary trips to the moon or rendezvous with aliens, though it doesn’t seem like Boivin is particularly interested in finding solutions to ennui. The songs are too vague, too gossamer to accomplish that. Instead she throws her displeasure on the table—Here it is, the human condition—to make room for more imaginings. As Boivin dreams for Mars, channeling constant disappointment into momentary entertainment, you might start to think of everything you hold onto when you’re dissatisfied, too.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Luminelle | November 29, 2021 | 7 | c50bf610-22d7-4ad2-bc5f-f4179dfdbbb5 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Remember the future? How futuristic it was going to be? Cripes, yo, it's 2002-- weren't we supposed to ... | Remember the future? How futuristic it was going to be? Cripes, yo, it's 2002-- weren't we supposed to ... | Ladytron: Light & Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4631-light-magic/ | Light & Magic | Remember the future? How futuristic it was going to be? Cripes, yo, it's 2002-- weren't we supposed to have brainphones and hover-beers by now? Weren't we supposed to be able to seduce our relatives and combat Biff by time-traveling in Deloreans fueled by sewage? Wasn't the government supposed to be teleporting the homeless to Haiti while they sleep? Where are my in-foot skates?
Ladytron certainly remembers the future, and they've grasped that it will be symbiotically reliant on the technological dreamwaves of the past-- namely old synth textures. As major playaz in the key-heavy, retro-progressive Genre That Hath Too Many Names, these four Brits knew that stakes was high for their sophomore slab. Anyone expecting the warm organs of 604 will be stung by this disc's stark, arch tones; the band's no longer sittin' on the dock of the analog bay. The distant, bloodless Light & Magic is club-fodder for some Kubrickian half- or post-human future in which android scum mimic the moves of the mammals they were built to replace.
Those who dismiss Ladytron releases as "More Songs About Fashion and Dreck" get subjected to the circular logic of the Ladytron fanatics who insist that anyone who doesn't get it simply doesn't get it. Despite Ladytron's popularity (congrats on the car commercial, gang, that industry really needed more stylized fetish-marketing!), these satin-jacket-and-secret-handshakes fans act as if the group is still their hidden prize. They also claim that Ladytron are the arbiters of some savvy cultural criticism. Call me thick, but I don't hear it-- and I promise I'm listening for it, as one of the few eager listeners aware that at the peak of boredom perch those who act bored by cult-crit. But where is the sly commentary in songs such as "Blue Jeans", "Cracked LCD", and "Black Plastic", which are about blue jeans, cracked LCDs, and black plastic? And how, on other tracks, can these dashing primpers bemoan the tyranny of fashion? That's like self-arresting inmates, or anti-potassium bananas, or...
So you're all, "Let's 'Tron again/ Like we did last summer," only to realize that camp is never as good the second time around. And of course, Ladytron's camp is fussily campy. "Turn It On" might be daft, but it's a classic guilty pleasure, reeking of roller-rink digi-breeziness and reminiscent of certain Mantronix/Salt-N-Pepa/Herbie Hancock unmentionables. In fact, more than a couple of these tracks evoke a strange, reverbed collaboration between Yaz and Sir-Mix-A-Lot. Ladytron fans with CDR's full of "Playgirl" remixes had better recalibrate their ometer-ometers to withstand the shock; we're a long way from their cover of Human League's "Open Your Heart". I draw the kitsch line at "Flicking Your Switch", though-- any sophistos laboring to trace Ladytron's roots to aggro-dance greats will hopefully acknowledge that this thin riff summons only, er, (cough) Technotronic.
If you're insecure about how these frozen jams polarize your mind, ask people in proximity to you for their reactions: someone whose opinion I value, who is usually tolerant of my stereo worship, demanded that I stop Light & Magic, citing the repetition and the buried vox as key irritants. A pretentious idiot told me that the album was "post-millennial", whatever the ass that's supposed to mean in the year 2002. (Man, that was a post-millennial "Everybody Loves Raymond" last night.) The non-idiot had a point: this album repeats itself exponentially. I know the songs go nowhere on purpose; that's part of the robo-statement, etc. But I promise you'll want out of this antiseptic defertilization ward unless you're planning a stasis-themed party at the old warehouse out on Cellphone Tower Ave.
Mixed signals abound and obtain and endure: the album is by turns ominous and playful; for every passage that feels like ghosts haunting the intercoms at an abandoned airport, there are stretches like "Seventeen", which, be warned, is the only thing in the world catchier than Quincy Jones' "Sanford and Son" theme. I won't even type its chorus for fear of its voodoo. For every blatant genre flirtation, you get an ice-pop turn like the bouncily experimental "Re:agents", which lays claim to a killer flute loop and even dares to meander during its breakdown. The disc's vocals approximate Kim Deal's at welcome intervals, and some Faint-ish noise-blasts emerge, betraying the sheepish control booth.
Don't judge this beast by its look-at-me packaging, which reads like one of those salon samplers you "read" while waiting for your haircut at 3:15 while your stylist and her 3:00 commiserate about their junkie boyfriends. Ladytron has succeeded at programming a record so distant that you'll wonder just what comprises the wind beneath their wires. | 2002-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Emperor Norton | October 8, 2002 | 7.1 | c51b678c-5057-463c-860e-9b3a064f8a2a | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
The UK producer now best known for contributing to Yeezus returns with an EP that finds his music sounding bigger in every way. This is essentially big-stage EDM, with colossal surges of bass and thick, serrated synth lines. | The UK producer now best known for contributing to Yeezus returns with an EP that finds his music sounding bigger in every way. This is essentially big-stage EDM, with colossal surges of bass and thick, serrated synth lines. | Evian Christ: Waterfall EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19118-evian-christ-waterfall-ep/ | Waterfall EP | In late 2011, a handful of instrumental tracks under the account name Evian Christ showed up on YouTube. A random, anonymous person putting music online is something that happens thousands of times a day, but Evian Christ’s productions got around, quickly, on the strength of “Who is this?” raves from publications like Dummy and a number of blogs. Returning to them more than two years later, these early tracks, especially the startling and forceful “Fuck It None of Y’all Don’t Rap”, hinted at serious potential, even if they didn’t quite congeal into a distinctive voice. But one important person heard something in them: Kanye West used some of Evian Christ’s music to construct “I’m in It” from Yeezus, and suddenly, the kid who posted beats to YouTube had a hand in one of the most sonically adventurous records of the year.
Shortly after that initial burst of interest, Evian Christ (real name: Joshua Leary) signed to Tri Angle, who assembled his early tracks onto an EP. The label was the logical home for his music in part because his path was similar to that of Tri Angle’s Clams Casino. But while Clams Casino sent his tracks to rappers and only later presented himself as an instrumental auteur, Evian Christ, despite the contribution to Yeezus, has been perceived more as producer of standalone electronic tracks. The Waterfall EP, his first release of new music constructed while people actually know who he is, finds him straddling the worlds of the functional collaborative production and discrete statement.
What’s most striking about Waterfall, hearing it next to those earliest tracks, is how much bigger his music has become. The early tracks eventually collected on the Kings and Them were nimble and spacious, touching on genres like two-step that allow for tricky stop-start programming. From Waterfall’s opening “Salt Carousel” forward, it’s clear that Leary is trying to rattle all the way back to the cheap seats. The is essentially big-stage EDM, with colossal surges of bass and thick, serrated synth lines evocative of the maximalism of TNGHT and Hudson Mohawke. It’s the type of music that makes most sense at massive volume, with builds and drops whose meaning becomes clear only when the sound is completely overwhelming. And in terms of sound design and construction, Waterfall has much to admire. The music is bursting with color and the surges are palpable, and you can almost see the legions of head-banging festival-goers whenever tracks hit a big peak.
The problem is that the four tracks here have a total of about three ideas. Three well executed ideas, no doubt, but it’s still not enough to make the record feel like a complete experience. Once you’ve heard one track—and each is in its own way a banger—you’ve heard all four. So when experienced outside of the massive soundsystem and communal experience of a live event, Waterfall comes over as something closer to a beat tape—when listening to it, I even find myself unconsciously inserting the ghost of a Danny Brown verse, something to transform the Grade-A sonics into a track with an arc and some tension, a piece of music with a few surprises or twists. Impressive as it can be in small doses, Waterfall as a whole plows ahead like a WWI-era tank, heavy and lumbering and powerful but pretty much limited to a single direction. | 2014-03-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-03-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tri Angle | March 21, 2014 | 7.3 | c52ab9f3-e4c3-4be5-9d3e-f809656f2a47 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Freddie feels like a pure and reckless purge from Gibbs, a collection that finds him at his wildest and most essential. | Freddie feels like a pure and reckless purge from Gibbs, a collection that finds him at his wildest and most essential. | Freddie Gibbs: Freddie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freddie-gibbs-freddie/ | Freddie | The trailer for Freddie Gibbs’ latest tape felt beamed in from the half-lucid world of late ‘80s dead zone TV—the kind of commercial that roused you from the couch at 3 a.m. with Luther Vandross’ face superimposed on a sunset. “Are you ready… for Freddie?” Gibbs purred, rapturously stroking a keyboard as a toll-free number flashed. (I called and found myself taking a survey to win a Caribbean cruise.) Over his prolific past decade, the Gary, Indiana rapper’s made just about any style work for him, from Madlib’s weirdo breakbeats to MoMA PS1-core bangers. But Freddie, whose impeccably campy cover art nods to Teddy Pendergrass’ 1979 self-titled album, came straight out of left-field—was Gangsta Gibbs really about to go full quiet storm?
Well, no. And while that may disappoint those who’d envisioned a full album of “Slangin’ Rocks,” it’s hard to be mad: Freddie is the hardest Gibbs record in years, and the most fun he’s sounded...maybe ever? Back when he first emerged, Gibbs quickly earned a reputation as a gravely serious rapper in terms of skill and of subject matter; Eastside Gary served as a perfectly bleak backdrop for his sobering narratives. Writerly but straight-shooting, his gangsta revivalism earned its share of critical acclaim but at the expense of personal style. In the nearly 10 years since, Gibbs has gotten looser, more experimental, without sacrificing the graphic imagery or razor-sharp wordplay—and in a weird twist, it’s wound up taking him closer to the sounds of popular trap than ever. But Freddie is hardly a bid for crossover appeal: it’s a capsule collection of Gibbs at his wildest and most essential.
At 10 tracks, nine of them under three minutes, it’d be tempting to chalk up Freddie’s slightness to this year’s trend of short songs and micro-albums. But Gibbs was ahead of this curve with last year’s eight-track You Only Live 2wice. (“I want you to keep playin’ this shit back-to-back-to-back-to-back,” he said in an interview last year. “Short, concise projects is what you’re gonna get from here on out with me.”) I imagine part of that impulse comes from an urgency sparked by three months in an Austrian jail in 2016, for which he was ultimately acquitted; he wrote YOL2 in his cell. That album, a clear-eyed stock-taking of his post-jail surroundings, felt like a fist slowly unclenching. Freddie, a year later, is a triumphant counterpoint—a record that feels like pure, reckless release.
For that, Kenny Beats is due significant credit; the producer, who contributed to half of Freddie’s tracks, has had a hand in some of 2018 rap’s best releases, from Key!’s 777 album to Rico Nasty’s mosh-inducing “Smack a Bitch.” Here, his beats exist in a similar universe as the blown-out productions of Pi’erre Bourne or the trap-noir of Southside circa 56 Nights, but rawer and hollowed-out. On “Automatic,” Gibbs clears a path through bass as immersive as fog, and “Toe Tag” is the tape’s most sinister moment: “Fuck the club, I’m in the basement with the pack, bagging up,” he spits over a gunfire-laden, sing-song melody that had me subconsciously gritting my teeth. Kenny’s best work, and Freddie’s highlight, is “Death Row,” a brilliantly unsubtle “Boyz-n-the-Hood” homage with L.A.’s just-incarcerated cult hero 03 Greedo in the role of Eazy-E. Through all of it, Gibbs’ delivery feels more in-the-pocket than ever, rowdy and limber but never veering off-course.
Which isn’t to say that fans of Gibbs’ subdued side will come up empty-handed here: “Triple Threat” dips back into his smoky, soulful mode, its hook half-sung in that familiar Midwestern baritone. And while Freddie might be lighter on standout lines than usual, Gibbs saves the album’s lyrical gut-punch for its last track, “Diamonds 2”: “I can’t lie, still get high on prescriptions/Sometimes I go weeks without no sleep, I’m in the fifth dimension/I just caught a body, Luca Brasi, he sleep with the fishes/Fucked up part is when I go to sleep, I see this nigga image.” Those are four incredibly loaded bars, the kind of writing that reminds you that very few people are rapping on the level of Freddie Gibbs right now. And none of them while wearing a “Miami Vice” suit. | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ESGN / Empire | June 29, 2018 | 7.8 | c52fbb8e-09fc-4d01-b159-2ba58cb2246a | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
The avant-garde icon Scott Walker scored this film about a fictional 9-year-old dictator, and it's one of the best things Walker has done since the still-unsettling The Drift. | The avant-garde icon Scott Walker scored this film about a fictional 9-year-old dictator, and it's one of the best things Walker has done since the still-unsettling The Drift. | Scott Walker: The Childhood of a Leader OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22248-the-childhood-of-a-leader-ost/ | The Childhood of a Leader OST | To call Scott Walker’s orchestral score for Brady Corbet’s debut film The Childhood of a Leader “invasive” would be an understatement. At points, it makes the There Will Be Blood soundtrack look like A Charlie Brown Christmas. Walker is responsible for the ominous, bow-shredding string figures and obscene woodwind bleats, but the young American actor/director Corbet—a familiar face from Martha May Marcy Marlene, the Funny Games remake, or, perhaps, 24 — claims to have lobbied for the mix to be raised “5% louder” than the theatrical standard. This provides a glaring contrast to the movie’s largely-murmured dialogue, glacial pacing, and aggressively dim composition, which recalls the famous candlelit atmosphere of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon done on budget.
In other words, it turns out the ambitious 28-year-old filmmaker and 73-year-old avant-garde music luminary are a good pair. Corbet manages to take his film—a period piece examining the broken family life of Prescott, a fictional 9-year-old fascist dictator in the making—to the same dynamic extremes Scott Walker has favored in his music since his 1995 watershed Tilt. Often, Walker’s writing threatens to overpower the movie, building up near-absurd levels of tension at moments where there might otherwise be none: Prescott and his remote mother (Bérénice Bejo) walking woodenly to Mass, or pacing around their cavernous home in the French countryside.
But elsewhere, Walker follows the script sensitively, indicating his respect for the complexity of Corbet’s vision. Piercing, stratospheric tone clusters underscore Prescott’s most destructive episodes—the film is divided into “tantrums”—as if we’re hearing the ringing in his ears. Murky tidepools of manipulated strings surge as he dreams of the brutalist, pre-WWII future he will help define (“Dream Sequence”).
When that future eventually comes—in the film’s epilogue—Walker-trademarked, custom-made industrial percussion arrives (see also: The Drift's meat-slab paddywhacking, the saber-scraping and farting of 2013’s Bish Bosch, the virtuoso whip work on 2014’s Sunn O))) collaboration Soused), mimicking the mechanics of a propaganda-generating printing press. This kicks off an ambitious suite of music, one which manufactures the better part of the drama in the last ten minutes of the film, in which The Leader’s staff and public prepare for his arrival in a crowded city courtyard. Walker recapitulates all the major musical motifs from earlier in the film in distorted, vituperative snippets. Military drums stutter out of time; a slithering violin emulates an air-raid siren. It’s one of the best things Walker has released since The Drift**. Like the composers this music most closely recalls (Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti, Bernard Herrmann) Walker manages to play his fully-sized orchestra like one huge, terrifying instrument here.
The Childhood of a Leader is a clear high water mark for Walker in terms of instrumental writing, but it is also, in many ways, an apt extension of textural ideas Walker has explored on his past two albums—as well as in his previous scores for Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola X and dance piece And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? Leader highlights Walker at a late-career stage of both creative abundance (this is his third release in four years) and stasis. “I just work in my own sound world now,” Walker explained to The Quietus in 2014. “I’ve established a sound world and developed certain tropes and things that I understand.” After decades of painstaking experimentation, he seems content tinker around in the same haunted toolshed for the foreseeable future. But don’t call it career-twilight complacency: Judging from the depth of vision in *Leader’*s half-hour of music, there's plenty of exciting possibilities left for Walker’s musical lexicon, which continues to go unused by anyone but him. | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | August 22, 2016 | 7.9 | c53414f1-f0a1-4c64-8570-31d29f47fc69 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Yoni Wolf and his band switch up their approach with bite-sized songs, a visual album, and an uncharacteristic focus on the past. | Yoni Wolf and his band switch up their approach with bite-sized songs, a visual album, and an uncharacteristic focus on the past. | WHY?: AOKOHIO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/why-aokohio/ | AOKOHIO | For all of the neuroses he’s examined on record over the years, Yoni Wolf has never seemed like one for nostalgia. During his two decades spent fronting cLOUDDEAD, Hymie’s Basement, and WHY?, Wolf could usually be found either over-analyzing the present moment or lost in some dark, near-future reverie. It’s surprising, then, that following a creative dry spell and a relocation to his native Cincinnati, Wolf has turned to his past for inspiration. The album art for AOKOHIO draws from home movies Wolf made with his older brother (and WHY? member) Josiah Wolf, and its lyrics make frequent mention of their family and early life. Given the younger Wolf’s Freudian fixations and how incisive he can be when voicing his internal monologue, you’d think all this rooting around in his childhood would turn up something interesting. And yet, the verbose rapper and singer has never sounded like he’s had less to say.
AOKOHIO, it turns out, is the product of creative malaise. “I wasn't feeling the idea of going back in and making another ten or twelve song album. It felt arduous,” Wolf said. “So I wanted to pare the process down and make it manageable.” Hence, an album with 19 songs spread across 33 minutes and six “movements,” each of which is being released independently and as part of this collection. Only five of these songs break the two-minute mark; the rest sound like fragments, field recordings, or some combination thereof (WHY? records have always included tracks like these, though they’ve usually served as bumpers). There’s also an accompanying visual album, made in partnership with—no joke—a director who randomly DM’d Wolf on Instagram. If all of this sounds like an effort to jump-start a stalled engine, it wouldn’t be the first time. But as with 2013’s fan-service exercise Golden Tickets, it feels like Wolf never commits to his own conceit—nearly all of the songs on AOKOHIO feel underdeveloped, if not unfinished.
Album opener “Apogee” is in many ways a typical WHY? song: Over gentle washes of guitar and piano and a dance beat, Wolf fires off a series of curious observations in a resigned sigh (“Standing in the mirror thinking, ‘I wish I was a chocolatier’/Fat but happy at the apogee of life”). But just as the song begins to hit its stride, it’s over. “Peel Free” attempts to locate the source of Wolf’s angst at the time of his birth, but amid the horns, chimes, and weighty piano chords, he comes up empty-handed (“I’ve been shaking off a shadow all my life,” he shrugs on the chorus, backed by a choir). On the surface, “Deleterio Motilis” sounds like it could have been left off of the band’s high-water mark Alopecia; it even opens with a signature Wolf move, a self-deprecating reflection on his treatment of women. But unlike WHY?’s best work, everything feels half-hearted, the punchlines and uncomfortable confessions lacking their usual bite.
Originally Yoni Wolf’s solo rap project, WHY? has been a bona fide indie rock band for close to 15 years now, one that’s more than capable of making elegant and affecting music. But even these talents go to waste on AOKOHIO. “Rock Candy” overplays the band’s signature glockenspiels, and the result sounds like a cat-food commercial. With its horns, choir vocals, and stargazing melodies, album closer “Bloom Wither Bloom (for Mom)” overshoots poignancy and lands in schmaltz. WHY? has never been a subtle band, but they’ve also never been this overwrought.
About halfway through the album, we hear a bit of something promising in “Mr. Fifths’ Plea.” It has all the hallmarks of a fan favorite: twinkling instrumentation, a title that references one of the band’s best-loved songs, a catchy chorus that doubles as a plea (“Someone would you save me from myself?/Someone would you help me be a healthy human being?”). And yet, we never really get to hear it. The song plays faintly underneath a recording of Wolf and his brother conversing with a taxi driver and cuts off at the 45-second mark. This attempt at self-sabotage might sound interesting on paper. But in practice, it’s emblematic of a larger trend in Wolf’s songwriting over the last decade: lots of experiments, few results. | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Joyful Noise | August 7, 2019 | 5.3 | c539581c-31f8-49cd-88ce-0fccdecc3c50 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
The seminal label celebrates its 10th year with a new Total comp, featuring the Field, Reinhard Voigt, Ada, Gui Boratto, DJ Koze, and Justus Köhncke. | The seminal label celebrates its 10th year with a new Total comp, featuring the Field, Reinhard Voigt, Ada, Gui Boratto, DJ Koze, and Justus Köhncke. | Various Artists: Total 10 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13344-total-10/ | Total 10 | Man, 10 years of Kompakt. It doesn't feel like long ago that I first discovered the label-- the way many others did, through its classic Total 3 compilation, which opened my rock-leaning ears to a new strain of dance music that I instantly fell for. Minimal techno! How had I been unaware of this? That was 2001, three years after Wolfgang Voigt founded the Cologne-based imprint, and since then it has, of course, grown substantially in size and cultural import, breaking artists like the Field and Gui Boratto and establishing itself as a one-stop shop for all things minimal via its physical storefront in Cologne and distribution house. But in 2009, one wonders where Kompakt stands artistically. This year, it released a very nice Ada mix, but it's been a few years since the label presented an exciting new artist, and its last truly essential LP was 2007's breakout From Here We Go Sublime by the Field. So, does Kompakt have the juice to go another decade?
Total 10, the label's latest collection of exclusive cuts and recent hits, provides a timely opportunity-- an anniversary edition of sorts-- for its makers to address that question. More so than previous installments, which have gradually dipped in quality over recent years (the last great Total comp being the sixth, in 2005) but still remained mostly enjoyable, this year's Total carries with the weight of increased expectations, and even the record sleeve's regal purple and gold coloring seems to suggest legacy, or at the very least continued relevance. So does it deliver? Well, that depends on which portion of the jam-packed, two-and-a-half hour house-and-techno cornucopia you're talking about.
Minimal techno lends itself to slow builds, long stretches where the beat repetition becomes a continuous throb, and Kompakt comps generally aren't known for their brevity. But Total 10 is a monster even by those terms, with an average track length of around seven minutes, and the best way to think about it is in two distinct parts-- Discs One and Two, conveniently. The first is easily the better of the pair, and it opens with a bang-- or, well, a serve. DJ Koze, one of the label's more underrated producers, kicks things off with "40 Love", a blippy Nintendo-style cut built from live tennis-match sounds (no, seriously)-- a forehand and its return, crowd gasps, and a Monica Seles-like grunt to boot. He uses the crisp pops and dramatic oohs and ahhs as pieces of his arrangement, and what should sound like a gimmick is simply fun and oddly compelling. The rest of disc one, heavier on undulating grooves than we're used to from the label, matches Koze's winner in quality and playfulness.
Previous Total collections have separated new and already-released tracks into dedicated discs for each, but this year Kompakt has wisely jumbled the two. It makes for a more balanced overall listen, even if most of the best songs reside on the first CD. Here, you've got Dirk Leyers' fantastic mix of Justus Köhncke's "(It's Gonna Be) Alright", an epic, minimal disco-funk piece replete with chopped-up vocal samples and whiny guitars that annihilates just about everything on the Juan MacLean's similar-sounding LP from earlier this year. There's "Lovestoned", a standout track from Ada's Adaptations mixtape, which provides probably the best example of her unique balance of texture, danceability, and smoothed-out sultriness. New jams favor deep-house wallop over glitch and restraint, and thumpers such as Thomas/Mayer's "Total 9" and Nicolas Stefan's "Closer" explore club-friendly possibilities with zany basslines, insistent snares, and ramped-up BPM.
If Total 10's first disc has you convinced of Kompakt's longevity and ability to reinvent itself outside of established microhouse norms, then the second will likely call that into question. It's here where the compilation starts to sag under the weight of its own bulk and relies too much on the type of repurposed tracks that ultimately did in the largely disappointing Kompakt 100 from 2004. Even those of us who pay very close attention to this type of thing almost need a legend to sort out its various tag-team contributors (Mayburg = Michael Mayer and Jörg Burger; It's a Fine Line = Ivan Smagghe and Tim Paris), and the remixes included don't improve upon their originals in most instances (case in point Thomas Fehlmann's take on the Field's "The More That I Do"). Add to that a few head scratchers such as Jürgen Paape's circus-y "Ofterschwang" and Pachanga Boys' utterly bizarre Mexican-pop closer "Fiesta Forever", and it begins to feel like a decidedly lopsided compilation.
But-- and this is a big but-- scattered among Total 10's generally lesser second-disc material are a few really great songs, the kind that save the album from becoming an unnecessary, why-do-I-need-another-Kompakt-comp kind of release. One of those is Matias Aguayo's "Walter Neff", which, come to think of it, is also the best track of the whole collection. With the finest hand claps-and-cowbell arrangement I've heard since the last LCD Soundsystem LP, it's ostensibly modern disco, but more than that it's a future-pop number as good or better than anything being done by YACHT, Neon Indian, or any other recent techno-savvy whizkids messing around with dance beats and pop sensibilities. The darn thing sounds so fresh and of-the-moment, and next to a dozen or so other similarly strong cuts here, it makes me think that, yeah, even 10 years in and literally thousands of minimal tracks later, Kompakt's still got plenty of gas left in the tank. | 2009-08-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Kompakt | August 13, 2009 | 7.1 | c542b6d9-9e5e-4744-b027-bf07f9c316eb | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
On his latest project, the German electronic musician blends piano, percussion, and dying equipment into his moody ambient-dub. | On his latest project, the German electronic musician blends piano, percussion, and dying equipment into his moody ambient-dub. | Pole: Tempus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pole-tempus/ | Tempus | Stefan Betke has hit higher highs and lower lows than most electronic artists. But what makes his output as Pole uneven is also what makes his career so exciting to follow: a fearlessness in applying his considerable skill as a producer in new, untested directions. “I like to have a concept in my work,” he explains, “but I do not like to expand it into an endless repetition of itself.” Lately, his focus has been the passing of time. The German musician recorded 2020’s Fading in response to his mother’s memory loss due to Alzheimer’s, and its elegiac tone mourns the lost past that dementia entails. Tempus, his latest album, shares the melancholic mood of Fading, extending that album’s musical palette with decaying percussion and piano that sound like artifacts of the past struggling to remain in the present.
Whereas Fading was full of punchy bass and crisp percussion, Betke’s dub effects on Tempus stretch components of the rhythm section into long tails of staticky ambience that pan across the sonic field. This backwards pull can make it difficult to determine where the momentum comes from in a song. The opener “Cenote” moves forward with a modest, repeating bass groove through spacious synth pads while a resonant, reverbed cowbell brightens the track like a streetlamp rhythmically flashing. “Grauer Sand” begins on more solid ground, with uptempo percussion hurrying underneath hints of melody that flash and sparkle in the upper registers. The meandering “Alp,” on the other hand, loses this momentum with a too-tentative bassline that seems unsure of its destination. Its atmosphere evokes a city at night, but across its six minutes, a suspicion arises that you’ve been going in circles through confusing backstreets.
From Pole’s inception with the broken Waldorf 4-Pole filter that gave his early releases a crackly lo-fi veneer, Betke has used the project to explore the limitations of technology. In “Stechmück,” he revives that spirit, choosing to keep a take in which his Minimoog was dying. Over growling bass and sharp drum blasts, a chaotic buzzing swirls like an out-of-control RC airplane. Its incongruity risks ruining the track but instead makes it the most memorable on the album. Just as his electronic keyboard dies, Betke reaches for an acoustic piano for Tempus’ last two tracks, an unusual move in the Pole oeuvre despite Betke being a trained pianist and jazz musician. The title track is the busiest here, but through a bluster of overlapping percussion and darting synths, the piano provides surprising emotional ballast. The bassy “Allermannsharnisch” is lifted by exploratory piano chords that lend it a jazzy feel before increasingly loud synth drones overtake the song. The last sound on the album is a somber piano chord fading out—a reminder of how much Betke has yet to explore.
For over 20 years, Betke has created electronic music ranging from ultra-minimalism to wide-screen maximalism. His early trilogy 1, 2, 3 introduced glitch to understated, fuzzy dub and inspired a legion of sound-alikes, while 2007’s Steingarten showcased a more dynamic take on bass music that remains the highlight of his career. Fitting for an album about the passage of time, Tempus looks to these past approaches, combining their moody atmosphere with the clean production and dense textures of his later work. It’s the sound of an artist drawing from his repertoire while demonstrating that he is still looking to the future. | 2022-11-18T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-18T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mute | November 18, 2022 | 7 | c54408b2-a0c7-4db4-ad02-4252321d84c9 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The Philadelphia musician’s new album resembles the indelible emotional resonance of a dream, allowing his idiosyncrasies as a storyteller to shine. | The Philadelphia musician’s new album resembles the indelible emotional resonance of a dream, allowing his idiosyncrasies as a storyteller to shine. | Ylayali: Separation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ylayali-separation/ | Separation | It was Francis Lyons’ therapist who suggested his dreams might have something to say that he didn’t. Not unprecedented psychological phenomena, but a breakthrough in his musical project, Ylayali. After a blur of three albums in three years, as well as some heavy self-reflection, the well felt dry. So for his new album Separation, Lyons—a Philadelphia artist who plays drums in bands like 2nd Grade and Free Cake for Every Creature—suspends himself in a dream state. The entire album is laid out as an interaction with a character from this dream, a nameless man who acts as a spiritual guide of sorts, one that vacillates between the sinister and the paternal. It’s an exercise that works well for Lyons, allowing him to nudge the surrealism and experimentalism that marks his music into a more purposeful, potent framework.
The album begins in media res, a jarring choice that sets the mood for the rest of the project’s heady, winding odyssey, and Lyons’ larger goal of melding musical storytelling with his own private introspection. The saga opens with “Green Walls,” in a truck driving through cornfields, the man at the wheel and the narrator sitting shotgun. It’s as if our narrator is an abductee, suddenly waking up in unfamiliar surroundings. To orient himself, he focuses mostly on the view. On the next track, “Burnt Axiom,” the narrator’s attention turns to the nameless man. “Sorta has my father’s eyes,” he observes. “He knows my needs, he sees them all well before me.” Neither of these things are comforting; his gut is turning.
There is something distinctly oneiric about the music itself, in part due to Lyons’ unorthodox yet compelling sense of melody, which is one of the album’s highlights. The melodies here strike a balance between the cerebral and the playful, and for the most part, they don’t shift over the course of entire songs. Everything is built around repetition: Synths, basslines, and tambourine jangles are bedrocks for songs from start to finish. All of these maneuvers produce a feeling of hypnosis, trance, and an eerie sense that we’re moving but not going anywhere. Instruments—guitars, bass, drums, synths, sometimes violins and harps—are vivid and sharp, but vocals are distorted and buried, like they’re penetrating through layers of sleep. These choices are immersive and dynamic, and they allow the narrator’s fuzzy point of view to come into fuller focus.
There’s a narrative to this album the way there is one to a dream—it’s hazy and erratic, but it makes perfect sense while you’re in it. Lyons’ omission of concrete information builds its own meaningful internal world, grounded in the genuine poignancy of the music. On “Nobody Knows,” the man offers the narrator advice, though to us it’s unintelligible; on “Not Yer Spade,” he dips, having imparted the knowledge he needed to, and the narrator is left with the aftermath on “He Needs Me,” a gentle song featuring violin and harp, as the narrator reflects on being abandoned. We barely understand anything about the man or his relationship to the narrator at this point, and neither, it seems, does the narrator himself. But the whole album is about the process of learning a lesson, but not the lesson itself. This is what really makes a mark on a person, it suggests. It also removes any firm barrier between the narrator’s experience and the listener’s, leaving you with the feeling that the journey was your own, though you didn’t quite hit the end of it yet.
As the album progresses, Lyons’ lyrics unravel into opacity and absurdity; the earlier songs are more or less straightforward narrative, while the closer “Air” is just a list of disconnected phrases (“hot box, terranaut, knuckleball, twisting top”). Instead of a resolution, it offers gradual fragmentation, a twist in the album’s construction that again evokes the path of a dream. The looser the imagery becomes, the more affecting it is. There’s beauty in untethering to reality: The words resemble unmolded clay, or stems not yet ripe, their meaning still only potential.
The way Lyons sketches his characters, leaving their presence full of abstractions and contradictions that only heighten them, reveals him as an impressive storyteller. With this approach, his idiosyncratic voice as a lyricist and musician shines. Mostly, Separation succeeds in how it replicates the sensation of a dream; when it’s over, you feel affected for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. If Lyons is never done wrestling with his own subconscious, he’s at least conquered the creative challenge that he needed. | 2022-09-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dear Life | September 6, 2022 | 7.3 | c55d9d96-b4ad-4788-8943-d8fc0b02a1a6 | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
Look Mexico's Uniola is a caffeinated kind of indie rock that works to the rhythm of daily life, while their lyrics treat soul-searching as natural, inescapable part of living. | Look Mexico's Uniola is a caffeinated kind of indie rock that works to the rhythm of daily life, while their lyrics treat soul-searching as natural, inescapable part of living. | Look Mexico: Uniola | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22063-uniola/ | Uniola | Look Mexico covered Jimmy Eat World’s “A Praise Chorus” at last October’s Fest 14 and basically spoiled the entire plot of their LP *Uniola *with one lyric: “Are you gonna waste your time thinking how you’ve grown up or how you missed out?” In a word, absolutely. “My 20s were a stressful vacation, most expenses were deferred, costly lessons,” Matt Agrella sighs on “You’re Lucky You Didn’t Lose an Arm,” and yeah, call ‘em First World Problems, but they’re every bit as real as that student loan bill arriving every month, or the quarterly review for a job you barely want to keep.
This isn’t truly *heavy *stuff, just things that weigh on people. Agrella’s lyrics here are primarily focused on “marriage, kids and life in general,” also likely the top three reasons being in a band becomes impractical in your 30s. It’s safe to assume that Look Mexico did not spend the past five years with a deadly serious and singular dedication to the making of *Uniola: *Obsessive tunnel vision is an ideal a(and a luxury) of legendary, *cool *artists and that’s not what Look Mexico are about: Prior to the stylized, gorgeous shot gracing *Uniola, *every Look Mexico cover could’ve passed for a Torche tour poster and every song title in their decade-deep discography is a line of Vin Diesel film dialogue. Agrella spends long stretches of *Uniola *having discussions with himself, in a voice that’s somehow more nasal than the one he uses to sing. Look Mexico could reasonably be described as “math-rock” if that term meant the literal class; in “Ok, Ok, I’ll Turn Down the Music,” there’s a TI-83 joke.
But whether Look Mexico come off as lyrically clever or instrumentally proficient, there’s never a sense that they’re trying to make a big deal about it. *Uniola *is playful, not clever—similarly, it’s not dance music, nor are Look Mexico a jam band, but they do have elements of both. From their earliest days, Look Mexico were an evolutionary spawn from a point where indie rock’s avatar had shifted from the collegiate slacker to a tightly wound, high-achiever who owns their awkwardness. It’s a caffeinated kind of indie rock that works to the rhythm of daily life, seatbelt-constrained air drumming, the tapping of fingers on a desk, feeling the effect of the first cup of coffee in your cubicle.
But Look Mexico have played enough basement and bar gigs to know what works in a small room of drunk people: while “Well, Kansas Ain’t What it Used to Be” constantly shifts tempos and flow, it’s centered by a feel-good riff that rivals anything on the new Diarrhea Planet album. “My Superman Seat-Grab Barrel Roll? I’m Still Working On It” grooves under Agrella’s buried soliloquy about discerning the true meaning of compassion before exploding into a forthright, cathartic call-and-response that could be a sequel to the Dismemberment Plan’s chest-beating “What Do You Want Me To Say.”
The lyrics are full of soul-searching, but not in a painful or self-excavating way. Agrella sees regret as a natural, inescapable part of living that can be the source of purposeful introspection rather than morbid reflection and self-pity. “You haven’t done all you wanted to/Now you think it’s abandoned you,” Agrella sings on “I Even Got This Scar to Match” before his bandmates shout away any self-doubt: “You are just the same!” Thinking about how you’ve grown up or missed out *isn’t *necessarily time wasted.
As with Braid’s 2014 comeback *No Coast *and Mock Orange’s Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse, Uniola is the work of a band that’s been around long enough to have some perspective. Look Mexico have returned to Tiny Engines eight years after their *Gasp Asp *7” served as the label’s inaugural release. It was only in 2014 when the Carolina imprint started to make a national impact with the releases from Dikembe, Beach Slang, Cayetana, Somos and the Hotelier’s classic Home, Like Noplace Is There**. Look Mexico have also frequently appeared at the Fest in nearby Gainesville, which has evolved from a local phenomenon to a definitive, renowned locus for divergent variants of popular punk rock that generally went ignored by mainstream media until recently.
Even with the increased visibility of their scene, Look Mexico know damn well they’ve dedicated themselves to a style of music that has made nobody rich and *definitely *hasn’t made anyone look cool. It’s easy to be dedicated to craft when it’s the only thing, but to paraphrase the longest title here (taken from the $2.6 million-grossing Find Me Guilty), *Uniola *is about recognizing where your loyalties lie under difficult circumstances. “Sometimes perseverance barely even makes a sound underground,” Agrella sings on “We Are Groot.” And that’s fine with Look Mexico, as long as someone is listening. | 2016-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | July 2, 2016 | 7.4 | c5608c23-cf7a-4f0e-af81-17c6a68ff00c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Recasting Y2K British alt-pop for a new generation, the South London singer-songwriter’s debut tackles heartbreak and loss with humor and conviction. | Recasting Y2K British alt-pop for a new generation, the South London singer-songwriter’s debut tackles heartbreak and loss with humor and conviction. | Rachel Chinouriri: What a Devastating Turn of Events | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rachel-chinouriri-what-a-devastating-turn-of-events/ | What a Devastating Turn of Events | Professional declutterer Marie Kondo operates by a simple principle: Every item in her home must “spark joy” when she holds it. If not, it’s on the chopping block. The Japanese term for this now-popular phrase is “tokimeku,” which also literally describes a fluttering heart. Zimbabwean-English artist Rachel Chinouriri dedicates a song to Kondo on her debut, What a Devastating Turn of Events, now released in a deluxe edition. “I’m getting rid of everything/Starting with you,” she declares, her husky voice barely breaching a whisper. Throughout the album, Chinouriri is taking inventory—chasing the tingly feeling that comes with upending the status quo.
“The kids are throwing up in the Garden,” she sings of regretful alcohol-filled nights in opener “Garden of Eden,” commencing the album’s theme of purging. The audible click of a cassette tape sets a nostalgic mood: With Sugababes and Lily Allen-inspired kiss-offs (“Never Need Me,” “It Is What It Is”) and thunderous production reminiscent of Coldplay (“The Hills,” “Cold Call”), Chinouriri reveals herself as a fan of the British pop and alternative artists of the noughties. Her neo-soul vocal modulations, internet-age references, and lyrics that center the experience of a dark-skinned woman—“I love myself/I love my skin”—separate her from predecessors. The 25-year-old musician developed a subdued singing style to pacify her family, who would periodically shush her during recording sessions. As grungy whirlpools of guitar threaten to drown her out on “The Hills” and “Cold Call,” she sounds like someone learning to yell for the first time in her life.
What a Devastating Turn of Events documents a distinctly Black working-class experience of British life. On the cover, Chinouriri and her guitar stand in front of a council estate row house draped in miniature St. George’s Cross flags. “Really easy for you to pick and choose a woman worthy of your flat in West Croydon with those roadman shoes,” she taunts someone from her South London hometown. With their fluting vocals and bird chirps, her songs could fit on the soundtrack of Michaela Coel’s sitcom Chewing Gum, about a 24-year-old British-Ghanaian woman trying to lose her virginity. Through humor, pop hooks, and scenes of emotional intimacy, both works juxtapose the vibrancy of life with the drab realities of public housing.
In her lyrics, Chinouriri tackles heavy themes of suicide, eating disorders, and depression without succumbing to internet brain rot. “Dumb Bitch Juice” may be a social media catchphrase, but Chinouriri’s bluesy tone of voice seems to emanate from an earlier era. “I’ll end up the one/Who pays all of the bills/While your family call me unstable,” she prophecizes, imagining herself giving up a bright future for the validation of a no-good man. She sings with a weariness like she’s lived this dynamic in a past life; more likely she’s simply witnessed it among an older generation. Deluding yourself into thinking you can turn a loser into a supportive partner happens to the best of us, as the accomplished BBC Radio 1 host Clara Amfo affirms in a closing radio drop.
“Never Need Me,” the lead single, is Chinouriri’s electric farewell to wastemen and to the version of herself who thirstily laps up their approval. When a former lover comes crawling back, she’s tempted but responds with a shrug: “If you can’t change, I doubt that I can help you.” She’s pettier on “It Is What It Is,” where her monotone delivery conveys pure annoyance: “I know you won’t text or anything, I know what you’re like/Hot and cold, hit and miss, up and down/And a bit of a prick, really.”
As lighthearted as the breakup tracks are, Chinouriri conveys just how dangerous patriarchal ideals can be. Title track “What a Devastating Turn of Events” recounts the depressive spiral and eventual suicide of Chinouriri’s cousin in Zimbabwe. After she discovers she is pregnant, her once-adoring boyfriend abandons her and their unborn child. “Out of wedlock which her family despise/But if she lost it, it would still be a crime,” Chinouriri narrates. The women in her extended family did not have the same choices that she enjoys, but Chinouriri recognizes that real, life-altering change requires even more: It means being willing to sacrifice communal approval. “No point in trying to prove yourself to them/Why question who you are from deep within?” she declares on “Garden of Eden.” With tears, feeling, and the occasional fit of vomiting, she salts the soil she once tended.
Anyone in need of help can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or SuicidePreventionLifeline.org to chat with someone online. | 2024-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Parlophone | May 21, 2024 | 7.5 | c5661573-c9ce-46f7-9cc9-8776bf9d433c | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
A new compilation looks back on the storied New York drag ensemble where ANOHNI got her start, placing the troupe in a lineage of queer artists who treated drag as a means of accessing selfhood. | A new compilation looks back on the storied New York drag ensemble where ANOHNI got her start, placing the troupe in a lineage of queer artists who treated drag as a means of accessing selfhood. | Various Artists: Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants - Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992–1995 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-blacklips-bar-androgyns-and-deviants-industrial-romance-for-bruised-and-battered-angels-1992-1995/ | Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants - Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992–1995 | New York is always dying, pricing out longtime residents and shuttering beloved haunts. One recent casualty is the iconic Pyramid Club, an East Village night spot that hosted RuPaul, Madonna, and Lydia Lunch in the 1980s and early ’90s. A jumble of drag personalities, hardcore kids, graffiti artists, and gay locals, the Pyramid community was decimated by AIDS, and the 2022 closure of their common ground marks a definitive rift with the past, dispatching the memory of the hub’s late habitués to oblivion.
Even decades ago, the venue could function as a space for mourning, transforming the mood from debauched to lamentful over the course of a single evening. In 1992, elegiac auteur ANOHNI and kindred spirits Johanna Constantine and Psychotic Eve, all barely 20 at the time, formed Blacklips Performance Cult. Appearing at the Pyramid during the graveyard shift on Mondays, the troupe of 13 or so drag queens and fellow travelers wrote and performed short plays with irreverent names such as “The Swiss Family Donner Party” and “The Birth of Anne Frank.” The cast did all of its own make-up and costumes, relying on the genius of budding talents like future Michael Jackson and FKA twigs collaborator Kabuki Starshine. They used one microphone, to ragtag comedic effect, and straddled goth and drag cultures, reaching for both fabulous and macabre aesthetics. Troupe members vomited on the corpse of Jack the Ripper, pelted their audience with animal organs and tore a bloody fake fetus from the belly of cast member James F. Murphy. Then, they belted into song, and while the numbers could be as funny as the self-consciously inept acting, they were sometimes devastating and truthful, shot through with the inescapable horror of AIDS’ peak.
A new ANOHNI-curated compilation, Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants — Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992 - 1995, places Blacklips in a lineage of queer music, nightlife, and politics. Released in conjunction with a book of photographs, scripts, interviews, and essays, the 90-minute compilation coalesces around the group’s predecessors and some surprising documentation of their own songs, effectively showing how Blacklips laid the groundwork for ANOHNI’s subsequently skyward career. Original tracks by the cast—including an early version of ANOHNI’s “Rapture,” which would appear years later on her first record backed by the Johnsons—coexist with heartfelt covers of glam-rock forerunners such as Lou Reed. Vocal clips, which range from an interview excerpt with AIDS activist Vito Russo to a jokey advertisement for a Halloween show at the Limelight, play off selections from Blacklips DJ sets, chosen by Johanna Constantine. From the perspective of performance art, Blacklips seemed to arrive just after the peak of a polymathic Downtown scene that blurred drag, cabaret, theater, and activism. Musically, their capacity for earnestness separated them from precedent, imbuing their mourning with an openhearted, connective consonance that would become more common in the post-9/11 era.
Of course, the album sets us in a much earlier period—one of punk, camp, and the fury of ACT UP. The record’s generous sprawl encompasses a couple of tracks by late players in John Waters’ Dreamlander ensemble, Divine and Edith Massey. The latter charms her way through “Punks, Get Off the Grass,” one of the spirited, magnetic singles she released with her novelty band the Eggs. There are club-kid acts from the influential 1988 film Mondo New York, which inspired ANOHNI and Johanna Constantine—these include ubiquitous drag artist Joey Arias and queercore pioneers Dean and the Weenies, whose defiant, sax-laden “Fuck You” is one of the record’s hilarious highlights. Inimitable frontman Dean Johnson insults an unnamed nemesis: “I wish you’d choke on a fashion accessory,” and later, “You’d look cooler if you wore a Frigidaire.” Other tracks harness the era’s agitprop energy, among them Diamanda Galás’ virus dirge “Double-Barrel Prayer” and Vito Russo’s exhortation for gays to take political action without worrying about appeasing straight people. Many of the selections seem like intimate moments in ANOHNI’s own tale of self-realization: Russo, for example, was a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1990 while ANOHNI and Johanna Constantine were undergrads. Mere months before he died of AIDS, Russo encouraged ANOHNI to move to New York.
The tracks by troupe members are often doleful, thanks to a considered curatorial agenda. ANOHNI dispenses with Blacklips’ parodies of songs from movies, recognizing that ironic takes on Hollywood weren’t their most singular contributions to the world of drag performance. Instead, we have Ebony Jet’s “Satellite of Love” and Sissy Fit’s “Sister Morphine,” two haunting covers that draw out real desperation from the outlaw perspectives of their source material. ANOHNI’s originals highlight her mature style, ignoring the haphazard spoofs for which one can find video evidence online. Her wordless humming elevates the Johanna Constantine duet “The Yellowing Angel” into a near-religious paean to finger-fucking, while the brief “People Are Small” is a virtuosic display of her upper range. Organ-driven “Love Letters,” a 1961 Ketty Lester hit that ANOHNI performed under her drag name Fiona Blue, rises out of camp’s confines, leaving familiar terrain behind. Her singing reminds us of how Blacklips, at their most progressive, treated drag: not as something humorous, arch, or pop cultural, but instead sincere and introspective, a means of accessing selfhood.
The group’s final play, 13 Ways to Die, produced on March 13, 1995, pushed their interior melancholy outward, connecting it to the AIDS pandemic and a changing city and world. Androgyns and Deviants impressively captures elements of the evening, sequencing them into a short suite near the compilation’s end. We hear an introduction from Dr. Clark Render, whose comic monologues opened the troupe’s shows for years; a soundtrack of Minty’s dance cut “Useless Man,” which features commanding vocals from the sensational Leigh Bowery; and lastly “My Final Moments,” a poignant soliloquy by Kabuki Starshine. “Dear X,” Kabuki recites: “You understand it’s nothing personal against you/and I must apologize if you feel abandoned/but we’ve all got to go some time or another,/so it may as well be now.” After, the entire cast staged their own deaths, and as the companion book shows in a series of images, “RIP NYC” was scrawled on one character’s buttocks.
Back in 1995, the writing was on the wall. Later that year, ANOHNI brought a couple of her plays from the Pyramid to another East Village venue, PS122, where the vibe was a bit tamer and the programs started much earlier in the evening. But soon after, she began focusing on songwriting, and her comrades similarly dispersed into their own specialties, becoming make-up artists, DJs, and drag performers. The life of artists in New York, and the Downtown performance scene in particular, have only grown more imperiled in the years since. But Blacklips was the rare collective that understood exactly where they stood in relation to the history of their city and culture, and their pessimistic certitude rings as true today as ANOHNI’s searching, hopeful voice: This group of queer misfits was sure that they had arrived after everything and everyone was already dead. | 2023-03-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | null | Anthology | March 14, 2023 | 7.6 | c5681ec8-3976-41f0-be6b-a489f6bcb6d1 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
On a 21-track double album recorded live in the studio, Wilco embrace a simple, buoyant approach that hearkens back to Jeff Tweedy’s earliest work. | On a 21-track double album recorded live in the studio, Wilco embrace a simple, buoyant approach that hearkens back to Jeff Tweedy’s earliest work. | Wilco: Cruel Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-cruel-country/ | Cruel Country | Cruel Country is an album title that cuts two ways, the “country” referring either to a nation or a musical genre. The duality is deliberate, as Wilco are grappling not only with America's tumultuous present but also the band’s fraught legacy with country music. Jeff Tweedy cut his teeth as part of Uncle Tupelo, the pioneering alt-country group that sowed the seeds for the Americana movement early in the 1990s. When he formed Wilco in the wake of Uncle Tupelo’s dissolution, Tweedy bristled when his new band was pigeonholed as “country-rock,” a designation that suited their 1995 debut A.M. Beginning with its sprawling successor Being There, he methodically pushed Wilco into uncharted territory, transforming their image from Americana troubadours into a restless, adventurous rock band.
Wilco’s thirst for experimentation was bound to lead them back to their beginning, which is precisely what happens with Cruel Country. In a letter accompanying the album’s release, Tweedy writes, “In the past, it was always valuable and liberating for us to steer clear of the ‘country’ moniker. It helped us grow and keep our minds open to inspiration from near and far.” But when Wilco reconvened after a pandemic-inspired hiatus, the sextet decided to shelve a collection of art-pop songs they started prior to the onset of COVID-19, and they were drawn instead to simple, direct material that sounded “country” in a way the group hadn’t since their formation.
Tweedy started writing some of the Cruel Country tunes during the sessions for Love Is the King, a 2020 solo album cut during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Where that record had the trademarks of being created in isolation—Tweedy largely worked alone, assisted by his drummer son Spencer and producer Tom Schick—Cruel Country is clearly and proudly the work of a band. All six members of Wilco recorded live in the studio for the first time in over a decade, letting their instruments bleed into each other as the rhythms breathe and sway. The song isn’t necessarily placed at the forefront so much as the group’s collective chemistry: After their prolonged absence, they sound happy, even relieved, to be creating a joyful noise once again.
As buoyant as the interaction fueling the music may be, Cruel Country isn’t a particularly raucous album. The tempos rarely break a sweat, the volume is restrained, and the spirit is hushed. The quiet nature is born of a shared space where every member of Wilco feels at ease. Cruel Country is a communal album, but it’s a small community: a group figuring out a path of deliverance from a bleak time. Tweedy spends a good portion of the album ruminating about a world gone wrong. He admits that, despite the stupidity and cruelty, he loves his country “like a little boy,” pondering the notion that “reality ruins everything,” while realizing that “I’ve been through hell on my way to hell,” a sentiment that conveys how he relies on his gut with his social commentary.
Darkness looms on the fringes of Cruel Country, yet the band’s warmth keeps the album from wallowing in gloom even when the proceedings are slow and quiet, which they often are. Wilco don’t traffic in the grit of honky tonk or the glitz of Nashville. They favor plaintive, rustic ballads, taking the occasional detour to savor the electrified twang of Bakersfield country, the hippest country sound of the mid-20th century. That propulsive train-track rhythm and chicken-picking is all over “Falling Apart (Right Now),” one of only a handful of songs to feature a guitar solo, played by Pat Sansone. The recessive role of guitarist Nels Cline on Cruel Country highlights how each song feels as if the band is drawing a collective breath. Occasionally, Wilco conjures a sense of majesty that feels like a rustic spin of their full-flight experimentations: “Many Worlds” gains cruising altitude halfway through its eight minutes, while the mini-suite “Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull” hums at hypnotizing low thrum, cascading to a jangling crescent before washing away again. Such consciously country cuts “Tired of Taking It Out on You” and “A Lifetime to Find,” provide a pulse and a bit of a backbone to Cruel Country, anchoring an album that otherwise amiably meanders through the weeds, taking time to explore every twist and turn.
Often the spare arrangements hearken back not just to the quietest moments on early Wilco records but to the stark settings of Anodyne, the last album by Uncle Tupelo, providing supporting evidence to Tweedy’s claim that he wrote these folk and country songs as a “comfort food to really just focus my writing within these narrow limitations.” Certainly, Cruel Country offers its share of comfort: Its unhurried nature is a big part of the reason it feels so warm and inviting, especially as it strolls at its own pace, divorced from the digitized rush of modern life. Occasionally, it can feel like an overindulgence of comfort food. There may be a gentle current flowing through its 21 songs, but the sheer abundance can also feel overwhelming. As lovely as they often are, the songs seem to drift and float, and Cruel Country plays less like a sculpted double album than a vividly detailed snapshot of a particular moment in time.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review attributed the guitar solo in “Falling Apart (Right Now)” to Nels Cline. It was played by Pat Sansone. | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | May 27, 2022 | 7.2 | c57002c6-7432-47e5-b0e6-5481833e2329 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Ever attuned to the nuances of grief, the Melbourne singer-songwriter tackles somber subjects with her typical gravity, but there’s a newfound lightness in her step. | Ever attuned to the nuances of grief, the Melbourne singer-songwriter tackles somber subjects with her typical gravity, but there’s a newfound lightness in her step. | Sarah Mary Chadwick: Please Daddy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-mary-chadwick-please-daddy/ | Please Daddy | Sarah Mary Chadwick has spent a lot of time mulling heavy questions. In interviews over the past few years, the Melbourne singer-songwriter has discussed the immense pain of grief, the weight of religious symbology, the inner workings of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the ways that watching Friends makes her think of her own mortality. She approaches such subjects with good humor, but the thoughtful way she dwells on them shows the kind of thinker and songwriter she is, with a sparse, quiet way of tackling grand philosophical concerns. Alone, often accompanied by just a piano, she stares at the sky and demands answers from a higher power that may or may not be listening.
The Queen Who Stole the Sky, Chadwick’s 2019 album, embodied this style of songwriting more fully than any of her previous efforts. She was commissioned by the city to write for a 147-year-old pipe organ in the Melbourne Town Hall, and the resulting pieces were extraordinarily stark and piercing, even by her standards. Grappling with the respective deaths, in quick succession, of her father and a former partner, the songs are all weary sighs, the sound of a person flailing for a handhold in a slippery world. Because the music is composed of just her voice and the organ, every word she sings takes on a near-religious gravity. In interviews around that record, she worried that she might have trouble following it up. “After the organ record, I was flummoxed what I’d write about because I didn’t have access to grief for the first time in three years,” she told Bandcamp.
But Chadwick’s Please Daddy picks up pretty much exactly where its predecessor left off. The very first track is called “When Will Death Come,” and in its first verse, Chadwick admits that she’s back in the same rut she often dwells in: “I thought I was [past] this, but I’m losing it.” On the title track, she sings of the dissociative creep of anhedonia, describing how she feels “amputated from my personality.” Elsewhere, she wonders what life would be like if the sun ceased to shine, and if her tears never dried. It’s a record of immense emotional pain, full of the sort of stinging, bitter songs she’s been writing her whole career.
But part of what makes Please Daddy so moving is that you wouldn’t necessarily guess how heavy it is if you weren’t paying close attention to what she’s saying. The arrangements have the kind of swing that her music hasn’t made much room for before. Her songs are still pretty minimal and morose, but relative to the grayscale organ dirges of her last record, there are some positively vibrant moments. “If I Squint,” like a lot of her songs, is built around the sobbing rhythm of her languorous piano chords, but glimmering flute melodies and gilded horn flourishes color in the margins. Chadwick has even said that “When Will Death Come” was her attempt at capturing the louche self-indulgence of late-period Elvis Presley, which is telling of her approach. She doesn’t necessarily want these songs to feel like downers, even though they are.
That split between sound and spirit lends another layer to the forlorn songs she’s been singing her whole career. In the genteel melodies and floating arrangements, she suggests that it’s still possible to find meaning when you’re weighed down by these feelings. Grief, existential turmoil, and religious doubt may never leave you, but life always trudges on.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sinderlyn | January 23, 2020 | 7.4 | c58b83ee-1344-493f-8653-ef0d78b39e7a | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Two tree planters ventured into the forest and emerged as a folk-pop duo. Inspired by ’70s radio and Jungian philosophy, their new album is a breezy meditation on spirit and belonging. | Two tree planters ventured into the forest and emerged as a folk-pop duo. Inspired by ’70s radio and Jungian philosophy, their new album is a breezy meditation on spirit and belonging. | Loving: Any Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loving-any-light/ | Any Light | Loving’s origin story sounds like a myth, or a joke—Jesse Henderson and David Parry walk into the woods separately (as tree planters in Western Canada) and a little while later, a folk-pop brotherhood emerges from the forest. Inspired by voice memos, poems, and James Hollis’ Jungian treatise The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, the songs on Any Light are breezy, mystical meditations on spirit and belonging—love songs that look inward, upward, and skyward in their pursuit of existential answers.
One part George Harrison and one part Kings of Convenience, Any Light is all looping acoustic guitar and plinking keys, an endless journey guided by warm melodies. “Medicine” is a less jocular take on Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin.’” “On My Way to Loving You” amplifies face-pressed-to-the-window wistfulness with Hammond organ. “When I first met you,/Time was measured/By the moon on your body,” Henderson sings on “Blue,” slide guitar wailing plaintively in the background. “No Mast” is as sweet as a candy heart, an ode to the illusion of permanence in love built on ’70s radio chord progressions and tambourine shaking like a fluttering pulse.
Often, the “you” in the album’s lyrics gestures at an unseen other, some entity that would offer completion or absolution, whether that’s a god or a lover. In “On My Way to You,” Henderson describes “following in your footsteps…/Trying just to be/Like a melody/You sing,” before stepping outside of love to watch it flow “like a river follows the landscape.” “Medicine,” loosely based on a friend’s experience with psychedelics, turns almost completely allegorical, its protagonist announcing a few seconds into the song: “I don’t want something already made,/I want to be the image not on display,/I want to be set free.” The song is just charming and self-aware enough to skirt the “hey man” variety of mushroom-induced revelation, but elsewhere, the musings are more grounded, easier to take seriously. The titular opening track is a tone-setting highlight that guides us like Virgil through this peripatetic folk journey. “I’ve been waiting so long,” Henderson sings in wonderment. “How I had it all wrong./Never have I seen you,/With open eyes,/With any light.” There’s that platitude about missing the forest for the trees, but Loving toggle between a bird’s-eye remove and an intimate closeness, from high above a river to a shaft of moonlight falling on a sleeping form.
Sonically, this balance sometimes lacks. There are few extremes; the record is one meandering slog through a wintry landscape, pleasant and Quaaluudy to the point of occasional somnambulance. Songs like “Gift” barely register, especially relative to the bright punch of “Any Light” or “Uncanny Valley.” “Ask Directions” begs for a build, a moment of heightened stakes, but languishes instead in contemplative lethargy.
In the Jungian interpretation, myths are part of our collective unconsciousness, both the thoughts we have and the way we think them. Rife with dream imagery, Any Light interrogates the gulf between the promise of love and its reality, the stories we tell ourselves about divinity and the way it humbles us the closer we get. Men journey into the woods for plenty of reasons, from self-discovery to solitude. When they’re lucky, they come out with a musical other, if not a magical one. | 2024-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Last Gang Records / MNRK Music Group | February 22, 2024 | 7.1 | c5919f83-9973-465f-a1ce-8dcebd98eb6b | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
New York hip-hop godfather Pete Rock joins forces with Smoke DZA on an album of uptown cool and crisp soul. | New York hip-hop godfather Pete Rock joins forces with Smoke DZA on an album of uptown cool and crisp soul. | Smoke DZA / Pete Rock: Don’t Smoke Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22699-dont-smoke-rock/ | Don't Smoke Rock | Don’t take your eyes off Pete Rock. The early-‘90s albums he produced with rapper CL Smooth still live in legend; recent reports suggest the New York duo are reuniting for their first new music since Nas dropped Illmatic. This pair, like their contemporaries A Tribe Called Quest, weren’t about to go back into the studio just because fans wanted them to. Rock may be the golden-age god whose snap-n-crack boom bap helped spawn J Dilla, Mark Ronson, and Kanye West, but take a look at the names that make up Rock’s recent client list—Torae, Grafh, Snyp Life—and it’s clear that he’s less interested in collecting checks than he is crowding his orbit with hard-nosed hip-hop.
On Don’t Smoke Rock—Rock’s first full-length collaboration since 2011’s Monumental with Smif-N-Wessun—his anointed partner is Smoke DZA. Their album plays like a wintertime drive through Harlem in a Bentley with black-tinted windows, and they swerve together with pure confidence. It especially suits DZA; a prolific working MC with blunted flow and to-the-point storytelling skills, he has struggled to distinguish himself in the crowded world of NYC street rap revivalists. Though he might not possess the crackling lyrical loops of Action Bronson, the bitter wordplay of Ka, or the flashy sheen of brothers Westside Gunn and Conway, the Harlemite’s throwback cadences are a solid foil for the uptown cool of Rock’s crisp soul samples and tough drums.
On “Wild 100s,” the producer takes the kind of double bass that Brian Wilson once harnessed in his pop symphonies, and he compresses them into a tense, energetic rap beat. “Hold the Drums” deletes all percussion; Rock instead fills the soundscapes with an angelic piano and voice sample on top of some skilled record scratches, as DZA wistfully nods to the past (“Mama had me rockin’ bucket hats when I was a year old”). His boasts can sound off-the-shelf (“Hop on a joint with me, it’s manslaughter,” he spits on “Wild 100s”), but his flow has charm and anchors Rock’s instrumentals. “Show Off” is the kind of New York anthem Jay Z sketched out on The Blueprint, and the peppy horns of “Dusk 2 Dusk” reimagines uptown as an off-the-billboard utopia.
The project is bolstered by some well-deployed guest spots, too. Cam’ron delivers one of his strongest verses in years on the drug tale “Moving Weight Pt. I,” a scene straight out of a David Simon TV drama. Spotting cops on the corner, Cam considers the possibility he may need to blast his way out of trouble. He feels for his pistol and rubs the bulletproof vest under his cardigan, pausing to deliver some tongue-twisting surrealism (“Bad bitches in the tub, tell ‘em they all luck-ay/Grab me a condom, gave her the rubber duck-ay”). Rick Ross seems an unlikely pick for Rock’s natty stylings, but his husky voice isn’t its usual wrecking ball on the opulent strings of “Black Superhero Car.” And while Jadakiss and Styles P have a spotty history on other people’s tracks, they’re effective on the bitter ballad “Milestone,” slipping into the role of two salty veterans sadly surveying the past.
This year, Tribe made an album that was grandiose, politically engaged, haunted by loss, and one of the year’s finest. But Pete Rock and Smoke DZA have forged something we still need, too: a great, modest New York rap album of concrete beats and blood-in-your-mouth bars. We await the reunion with CL Smooth with interest. | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Babygrande | January 2, 2017 | 7.4 | c59265a3-5cb0-42c1-9140-acd3ea09cd71 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
Collaging field recordings and instrumental scraps, Grouper and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma construct an elegatic tribute to the life and work of their late friend, filmmaker Paul Clipson. | Collaging field recordings and instrumental scraps, Grouper and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma construct an elegatic tribute to the life and work of their late friend, filmmaker Paul Clipson. | Raum: Daughter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raum-daughter/ | Daughter | When Grouper’s Liz Harris performed at Krakow’s Unsound festival in 2014, sitting barefoot and cross-legged against a backdrop of visuals by the filmmaker Paul Clipson, the sound of the film projector was nearly as loud as her music. As wispy drones rose from her guitar pedals and abstracted shapes danced on screen, the steady rattle of the Super 8 auteur’s reels felt as much a part of the performance as his dreamlike imagery.
The whir of Clipson’s film projector returns, fleetingly, on Daughter, the second album from Harris and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s duo Raum. A few minutes into the opening track, “Walk Together,” it rises from a watery pool of piano and voice and hovers, flickering, like a dragonfly. That telltale clatter of spinning gears can be charged with deep emotional resonance. It might summon memories of grade-school movie screenings, midnight Rocky Horror showings, or maybe, for someone younger, simply a sepia-tinged vision of the past—a sense memory of obsolete tech, a faint echo of a vanishing world. On Daughter, the sound speaks to a more particular loss: Clipson, a friend and frequent collaborator of both musicians, died in 2018. These recordings date from two years prior, when Harris and Cantu-Ledesma met up with the filmmaker for an audiovisual performance at Marfa Myths, Mexican Summer’s annual festival in the Texas art destination. It was the last time that all three were together.
Clipson’s absence hangs heavy over Daughter. The record is dedicated to him, and in a note accompanying the album, Harris describes it as an expression of grief. The week of the Marfa performance, Harris and Cantu-Ledesma went into the studio together, but to hear her tell it now, it was a period fraught with anxiety and personal upheaval. The building was haunted; ghosts kept Harris up at night. Some days were productive, but others were a total wash, and when they finished, they shelved the tapes. Over the years, Harris and Cantu-Ledesma tried to complete the music, but “a big piece of the record only made sense after sitting with the loss of Paul,” Harris writes. “The recordings took on a special resonance.”
The sound and shape of Daughter will be familiar to anyone who has heard Raum’s 2013 record Event of Your Leaving. Across seven long tracks, the two musicians sculpt loops of piano and guitar into broad, shimmering vistas crusted with distortion and occasionally punctuated by Harris’ high, plaintive voice. The piano’s sustain pedal remains pressed flat to the ground; the reverb is seemingly endless. It’s easy to hear how Raum, like Helado Negro when he recorded in Marfa, were influenced by the vastness of the sky and desert.
A powerful sense of place permeates the album, which is sequenced as an unbroken suite of interconnected songs. Birdsong and the cries of mourning doves are threaded subtly through long stretches; footfalls trudging through dry desert chaparral lend an unsteady rhythm to long portions of “Sunlight Crying” and “Revolving Door,” grounding the duo’s otherwise celestial tones firmly in the dust. Layering indistinct field recordings with instrumental scraps and bits of stray tape, the two musicians achieve a collage effect evocative of Clipson’s own work.
Shooting entirely on film, and typically editing in camera, Clipson wove all manner of objects and shapes—natural forms, architectural lines, blown-out bokeh, kaleidoscopic arrays of lights—into dreamlike assemblages that pushed beyond narrative and representation. His use of rhythm, color, texture, and abstraction achieved a quality akin to visual music, which is precisely what made his collaborations with artists like Harris and Cantu-Ledesma so satisfying; each drew new depths out of the other’s work, even when musician and filmmaker had no idea of what the other would be doing on stage.
“The films are a personal recording, like a diary or essay, rendering color, light, focus and shadow in many forms, in the hope of allowing for un-thought, unexpected elements to reveal themselves,” Clipson once said of his practice. You can feel that philosophy permeating the long closing track, “Passage.” It is the simplest of the album’s songs: Here, at last, there are no obvious field recordings, no snapshots of the Marfa landscape, just a ruminative piano figure and a hint of Harris’ wordless voice. The piano pattern loops round in long, sluggish circles; its rhythm suggests a rope slapping against a flagpole. It carries on for almost 23 minutes, reverb and distortion thickening almost imperceptibly. It is minimalist in the fashion of Arvo Pärt; it conveys the stillness of a statue lying at the bottom of a deep, clear lake. It is almost unbearably mournful: a few simple lines gently twined into an unmistakable expression of melancholy. | 2022-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Yellow Electric | February 7, 2022 | 7.4 | c5a05fa5-acf3-4440-98a6-09209091b73d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The eclectic new album from L.A. indie outfit Holy Shit is also the first musical offering from Semiotext(e), the publishing house run in part by I Love Dick author Chris Kraus. | The eclectic new album from L.A. indie outfit Holy Shit is also the first musical offering from Semiotext(e), the publishing house run in part by I Love Dick author Chris Kraus. | Holy Shit: Solid Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holy-shit-solid-rain/ | Solid Rain | Solid Rain is the Los Angeles indie outfit Holy Shit’s first full-length release since Stranded at Two Harbors came out in 2006. At that point, the band was made up of Matt Fishbeck and Ariel Pink, and their songs were a dark-edged take on the sort of blown-out, acidic pop prevalent at the time. In the years since, Holy Shit—becoming more or less Fishbeck’s project—has included input and appearances from the likes of John Maus, Geneva Jacuzzi, Janet Kim, and Girls’ Christopher Owens. Yet in comparison to these indie-rock peers, the project’s output has been unpredictable and hard to track. It’s somehow erratic in its marketing and the rhythm of its releases, and aesthetically, Fishbeck’s music possesses an unraveled quality, its pop elements never quite cohering into the smooth vehicles Pink or Owens are known for.
In keeping with these idiosyncratic leanings, Solid Rain is the first musical release from Semiotext(e), the publishing house run by Sylvère Lotringer, filmmaker and I Love Dick author Chris Kraus, and Hedi El-Khoti, whose offerings tend toward critical theory and experimental fiction. Kraus took an interest in Los Angeles’ underground music scene in her 2011 essay collection Where Art Belongs, published by Semiotext(e), which opens with a piece charting the Echo Park alternative art space Tiny Creatures within the flux of a gentrifying city and its drifting art community. Fishbeck plays a key role in this history (at one point, he’s described by artist Jason Yates as the “Malcolm McLaren” of the scene), and for all its unevenness, his music seems to make more sense in the context of this unruly arts ecosystem than it does alongside its indie-rock peers. The city is, in a sense, both a setting for and an active antagonist in the vaguely-drawn scenes that comprise Solid Rain.
Where Fishbeck’s collaborations with Pink were obscured by a narcotic AM-radio fuzz, those textures have dissipated here, allowing the cinematics of his songwriting to come into focus. Solid Rain moves between styles, sometimes jarringly so, but in a sense that movement propels the record: a Vangelis-lite synthesizer interlude (“Takes Me by Surprise”), a syrupy noir ballad (“Who Am I”), or a brief, dramatic string piece (“String Thing”) fold in performative drama—and maybe wink at the ways we’ve learned to tell stories about our own lives from Hollywood.
But grounding Fishbeck’s stylistic play is a very real heaviness. In his lyrics, loss recurs as a series of relentless micro-narratives—not necessarily the loss of a single person or thing or place, but of a sense of self or way of being with others. “Every morning we’re infinite/And every night I’m a little blue,” he sings as a near-aside in “Who Am I,” writing a sinking sensation into daily routine. On the sparse track “Marriage Monologue,” in which a rounded xylophone-like melody plods atop a jazzy snare, he charts a dissociative relationship to relationships themselves: “Funny how it seems/like we just get cast in scenes/Who’s in charge?/Cause it just feels like I’m playing the part of me.” Fishbeck performs with a deadpan flatness; meanwhile, the music spreads out underneath, making its own ambivalent time.
Per Kraus’ account, the Tiny Creatures era was characterized by a frenetic, up-all-night-to-make-something creative energy; with age, and with an ever-mounting struggle to find space and resources, it makes sense that artists would find themselves worn out. The passive pacing of Solid Rain is one of its most quietly distinctive aspects. Rhythmically, songs occasionally achieve an agitated percussive shuffle, but more often are driven by the lilt of fingerpicked guitar. The album’s best moments roll in like storm clouds: the mournful acoustic ballad “I Wonder Why” follows a swell of strings, achieving intense emotional clarity through a mumbled, unfinished account of the generic malaise that can accompany change. “I wonder why the sun don’t shine like it used to on everyone I know,” goes its wrenching opening line.
Ultimately, however, Solid Rain’s cultural atmospherics don’t leave the listener situated anywhere particularly well-defined, and something about this makes it feel like an honest account. Fishbeck provides a rare example of contemporary indie music bluntly describing the present, rather than creating a well-packaged buffer against its harsher realities. | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Semiotext(e) | July 20, 2017 | 7.2 | c5a4899c-92a5-4f20-9517-320217c0be84 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The 28-year-old producer André Bratten records in the same Oslo studio as Todd Terje, Prins Thomas, and Lindstrøm, but his new album Gode bears darker influences: Aphex Twin, Andy Stott. It is insular and experimental, and also his most ambitious work to date. | The 28-year-old producer André Bratten records in the same Oslo studio as Todd Terje, Prins Thomas, and Lindstrøm, but his new album Gode bears darker influences: Aphex Twin, Andy Stott. It is insular and experimental, and also his most ambitious work to date. | André Bratten: Gode | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21299-gode/ | Gode | Some of Norway's best producers seem to compensate for the region's chilly climate by gravitating toward sunny sounds, from Todd Terje's escapist lounge-house to Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm's psychedelic nu-disco. This can't be said for 28-year-old producer André Bratten. Although he records in the same Oslo studio as Terje, Thomas, and Lindstrøm, Bratten's new album Gode is insular and experimental, from conception to execution. Gode is Bratten's second proper full-length record, following 2013's inventively titled Be a Man You Ant and this past summer's Math Ilium Ion EP. It's also the most ambitious work of his career, tackling social and historical injustices of the past—namely the serf-like arrangement between farmers and landowners in early 20th-century Norway.
Now, if you're thinking that a double LP about the pre-industrialized Norwegian agrarian economy isn't going to get club kids on the floor, you're right. But this time around that's not Bratten's goal. He wants to tell a story with specific historical context within electronic music, which is an inherently difficult task: A synth stab, field recording, or a programmed drum pattern, however well-conceived, doesn't translate to "meditation on the darker days of Norway’s past, before the country discovered its oil wealth," as Bratten has said.
But even if you'd never guess the album's larger themes without reading about it, it's clear from the music that he's attempting something more evocative and wide-ranging. Bratten's production can recall everything from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works to Andy Stott's murky experimentalism. He's cited Brian Eno as an influence, as well as 20th century classical musicians like Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi—known for creating music that plays off a single pitch that generates almost imperceptible microtonal oscillations. Bratten is resourceful at assembling whatever sounds or styles needed to fit the need of the moment: "Primordial Pit" uses mostly live instruments to create a sweeping, post-rock-like grandeur, while "Ins.", the album's shortest track, is a dissonant string arrangement that is as beautiful as it is unnerving.
For all this wandering, the most overtly pleasing songs on Gode are the ones that call back to Bratten's roots. "Space Between Left & Right" has a techno pitter-patter that a patient nightclub crowd could easily appreciate, while the album's title track evokes Boards of Canada at their prettiest. Another clear highlight is "Cascade of Events", which features the Norwegian pop singer Susanne Sundfør, who Bratten had previously remixed, her voice shrouded in an analog haze. Having a voice like Sundfør, who has had multiple number one albums in her home country, gives Bratten an anchor to chain his more experimental inclinations to; it'd be fascinating to hear Bratten paired with Sundfør for more than one track.
Given the intentions that Gode comes packed with, it's tempting to view its success in terms of that story. Does Gode accomplish Bratten's goal of creating a tribute to the farmers who never had the opportunity to make art because of their circumstances? Quite possibly! But like a museum plaque explaining abstract art to a layperson, background is only a tiny piece of a mostly visceral experience. What's easier to glean, and more universal, is that Bratten has made an expertly produced, emotionally honest record that defies genre and expectation. To understand that requires no homework. | 2015-11-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | November 24, 2015 | 7.4 | c5ab696a-1190-442b-80e6-07b544c35b9a | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Brooklyn’s Barrie Lindsay makes lush, dance-inflected indie pop whose unorthodox influences and imaginative twists shine brighter than the lyrics. | Brooklyn’s Barrie Lindsay makes lush, dance-inflected indie pop whose unorthodox influences and imaginative twists shine brighter than the lyrics. | Barrie: Barbara | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/barrie-barbara/ | Barbara | Barrie Lindsay is a consummate producer in search of an ideological north star. In sound, the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based musician’s self-produced and self-recorded second album, Barbara, is lush and refreshingly unorthodox: harp and horn parts mingle with breakbeats, baroque synthwork, hazy vocal fragments, and warped, Alex G-style guitarwork. In a sea of avowedly traditionalist indie rock and barely veiled emo revival, it’s a refreshing palette cleanser. But as a whole, the record can feel vexingly incomplete, like a sumptuous oil painting whose foreground has been hastily sketched in. Lindsay’s sweet-but-vague lyricism rarely feels fueled by the same gonzo instinct that guides her deft production.
Barbara is Lindsay’s second album, but it might as well be her debut. Happy to Be Here, a 2019 album released under the same moniker, was actually the work of a five-piece band featuring Lindsay; the group disbanded in the time between that record’s release and the creation of this one. Though the project’s ethos remains the same—Barrie the band once said they aspired to make “a well-crafted pop song that’s a little bit fucked up”—Barbara clarifies the execution. Where the Jake Aron-co-produced Happy to Be Here was a collection of sync-friendly, ultimately forgettable indie pop, the most engaging moments on Barbara can be genuinely disorientating. On the best song, “Concrete,” mesmerizing, harpsichord-like synths arpeggiate and undulate as Lindsay sings about the “cowboy of the mind,” before the song hastily switches gears, eventually becoming a sleek, intriguingly austere dance track. The faintest hint of tabla surfaces here, Barrie’s multi-tracked vocal glides there—the whole thing feels mysterious and somehow out of time. “Basketball” takes a similar approach, allowing dubby vocals and an intermittent, footwork-like beat to float unmoored among an otherwise arid palette. Both songs deal with Lindsay taking control of her sense of self (“Come on, Barrie, do it right,” she sings on “Basketball”) and they’re the rare moments on Barbara where her lyricism is as vivid and impactful as the production itself.
For the most part, though, Lindsay’s songwriting on Barbara feels perfunctory. “Jersey” is all exposition (“I’m doing sprints on the lawn outside your place … Shouting ‘All magicians are liars’”) with a locus point that reveals nothing about its protagonist’s interiority: “I’m crying outside/I’m gonna crack the back step/Got some things on my mind.” Quippy one-liners that call out for revealing detail don’t arrive with the wit or sparkle that they probably should: “You keep on asking/My favorite song by the Doors/And I don’t care about Star Wars,” she sings on “Bully.” Lindsay writes simple lyrics and delivers them with a sweet, lilting cadence, qualities shared with songwriters like Helena Deland, Soccer Mommy, and Jay Som, but while those artists use the softness of their voices as a kind of comparative tool—Soccer Mommy and Deland each singing sweetly about abject nihilism—Lindsay’s lyricism rarely has an equivalent edge. Occasionally, the simplicity works. “Jenny” is a plainspoken, openhearted love song whose evocative scene-setting is counterbalanced by lyrics that articulate both the rush and the insecurity of new romance: “Jenny, I don’t know where to love from,” Lindsay sings. “Never had to hold myself true to someone.”
It’s hard not to hear Barbara’s sumptuous production and wish there were just a little more to cling on to. Although Lindsay’s musical approach seems to reference everyone from Robyn to Joanna Newsom to Daphni, her assured hand means the range rarely feels random. Her songwriting would benefit from similar clarity of vision. As it stands, Barbara feels like a meticulously carved treasure box to which one has lost the key—magnificent to behold, impossible to unlock. | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Winspear | March 31, 2022 | 6.2 | c5af615e-8e58-4cfd-a374-05abfa8197fb | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The Berlin-based songwriter’s bleak and coruscating new album feels like a call to hold fast and love hard. | The Berlin-based songwriter’s bleak and coruscating new album feels like a call to hold fast and love hard. | Dean Roberts: Not Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dean-roberts-not-fire/ | Not Fire | Not Fire is the first album from Berlin-based songwriter Dean Roberts in 12 years, and his comeback arrives during apocalyptic times. It’s not an album about someone who’s found hope or love despite everything; Roberts sounds exhausted, and his album is as ugly and as bleak as life often is. For those who’ve been in the pits and succumbed to self-destructive nihilism, Not Fire is a reminder of how hellish it all can be.
Sonically, Not Fire is murky and battered and melancholy. Guitars clang incessantly, drums lurch without vigor—there’s hardly a moment where one doesn’t feel placed in a barren wasteland, left to wander aimlessly. On “Say After Me,” a melange of noisy guitar strums and plucks constantly ring out without any impression of oncoming closure. In the song’s final passage, Roberts slides his pick down a guitar string, the resulting sound a thunderous roar, the final bellowing of bottled-up feelings. Not Fire can sound a lot like a pained desire for release, a wish to scream into the emptiness like Roberts does on the album cover.
Nothing here feels cathartic, however. If anything, every note just propagates uneasiness, something that’s fiercely evident on the nearly 10-minute centerpiece “Heron.” Reed instruments and wolf-like howls imbue the piece with anxious tension. Frightening as the music may sound, Roberts sings of acceptance (“There is no blistering sun ’cause the summer’s just gone”). The song’s final third is wordless, but you can still sense his mournful presence.
Even when the songs aren’t harrowing, Roberts’ weariness and irascibility are clear. On the bluesy folk song “Paul,” he speaks of the titular person as a thorn in his side—a burdensome figure who’s always there at the worst of times. He concludes with a confession: “I always run into you Paul/And say I’ll call/But I don’t want to.” This longing for solitude becomes an unwelcome reality on “Kids,” where he talks about the crumbling of a long-term relationship. “Would it have changed anything if we’d had kids?” he wonders. You can tell, from his wavering voice, that he doesn’t think so.
Throughout Not Fire, Roberts feels numb. A summation of his downward spiral appears on the title track. “It’s not fire; love is something else” he moans. His voice quivers amidst droning feedback and heaving drums, the song exuding the shut-in mystique of Jandek’s early works. As the song builds, Roberts never finds healing; he only sounds tormented, broken.
There is one hopeful song on Not Fire. With “My Diviner,” Roberts delivers anguished expressions of gratitude. The mythical figure of the title leads him to water in a period of drought, and proves to be a steady light in his life (“You’re not one to quit, that ain’t how you live”). The sweetness is a salve from the misery that looms over everything else. In a time when gods feel ever-absent, when futures seem increasingly dim, “My Diviner” serves as a thoughtful reminder: life’s shittiness is promised, but so is the nourishing comfort that comes when receiving persistent care. It sounds like a call to hold fast and love hard. | 2020-03-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erstwhile | March 9, 2020 | 7.6 | c5b1464b-a022-4afd-bddc-4668dcc1ff17 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
On their masterfully knotty fifth album, Vampire Weekend go on a self-mythological journey into old sounds, old haunts, and old cities to find something new within. | On their masterfully knotty fifth album, Vampire Weekend go on a self-mythological journey into old sounds, old haunts, and old cities to find something new within. | Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vampire-weekend-only-god-was-above-us/ | Only God Was Above Us | Ezra Koenig begins Only God Was Above Us speaking, it seems, to just one person. Against a blur of amplifier hum and a tentative guitar strum, he sounds thin and reedy, almost petulant, a little bit doomy. “‘Fuck the world,’” Koenig sings softly, “You said it quiet/No one could hear you/No one but me.”
This hushed distortion opens Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, where Koenig and his bandmates, Chrises Baio and Tomson, gaze longingly at the past to find more questions than answers. A chief concern is history, and where to fit within it, but, ultimately, Vampire Weekend itself is the focus of Only God Was Above Us. It is the band’s most overtly self-referential release, a collage of signature sounds and motifs dotted with allusions. It feels new and comfortable, regularly elegant and charming, calm and comforting, and, at times, foreboding. And just a bit worried.
This is to say that Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way. Take the two obvious callbacks on “Connect,” which recreates Tomson’s “Mansard Roof” drum fill and fits in keyboards that call to mind Contra’s runaway hit “Holiday.” The song is a lively reverie about lost days in New York, but slightly askew in its memories and mood. Koenig and co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid capture the strangeness with a track that takes the signature Vampire Weekend sounds and twists them to be a little jazzy, sometimes a little electronic, a beat away from melting down entirely. The result is something like indie deja vu, the sense that we’ve heard this before but can’t at all place it.
Though the band members themselves have long lived in Los Angeles, New York still looms large for Vampire Weekend. Koenig, Baio, and Tomson all grew up in or around the city and, with ex-bandmate but current contributor Rostam Batmanglij, famously coalesced at Columbia University. Being away from New York, however, offers a new perspective: From a distance, the city appears as a decaying giant, inescapably beholden to its past and all the ghosts who’ve passed through. Simply by naming New Yorkers of old—the late Russian-born journalists Henry and Ludmilla Nikitina Shapiro, their daughter, Irina Shapiro Corten, the famed gallery owner Mary Boone, even a defunct tie shop—Koenig’s always-vibrant world of name-drops observes the strangeness of living in vast shadows.
Vampire Weekend previously portrayed New York at its bleakest on “Hudson,” a rotting dirge about the passage of time. The Modern Vampires of the City song now has a spiritual successor in “Gen-X Cops,” another rare minor-key entry that the band has been trying to make work since 2012. On “Hudson,” Koenig looked at place names and real estate listings and recognized the immense consequences of prior generations’ actions. On the upbeat yet dour “Gen-X Cops,” he reckons with the idea that he’s becoming the old guard now. “Each generation makes its own apology,” he sings, knowing it’s only an excuse for whatever trouble he’s destined to cause, the pearls he’s bound to clutch. The shift in perspective represents, perhaps, that of Koenig and his bandmates as they age: no longer youthful idealists critiquing the world around them, but resigned adults grappling with their places within it.
It may seem tedious to draw lines from the new songs back through the Vampire Weekend catalog, but that’s much of the point. Only God Was Above Us focuses often on legacy, history, and days of yore, and the songs are also meant to sound familiar: “Gen-X Cops” fills the role of the ska-influenced romp (“A-Punk,” “Cousins,” “Diane Young”); “Mary Boone” brings back the choral ambitions of “Ya Hey”; and “Prep-School Gangsters” shares the pensive, baroque stylings of “Taxi Cab,” to name a few. When Koenig sings, “You’ve never seen a starry night/You saint,” on “The Surfer,” it’s impossible not to think of the “Ya Hey” lines “Oh, You saint/America don’t love You.” Even the instant-classic refrain of “Classical”—“Untrue, unkind and unnatural”—might leave you singing: “Peter Gabriel too.”
As much as the album embraces the past, it’s also about how hard it is to really get your arms around it. The band’s first album was jubilant: young men in boat shoes encountering a world of privilege, enjoying its spoils with a crooked eye. On Contra, they were even more suspicious of the world of excess, wondering what it was all for. By Modern Vampires of the City, Koenig had moved on from mere materiality and wanted to get to the bottom of everything. And, after some time away from such heavy and heady questions, he returned as a proud Grateful Dead disciple, jamming about the Earth and love on Father of the Bride. Here, he asks, “Now is it strange I can’t connect?” He and his bandmates answer the question musically, suggesting that you can come close, but you can’t ever go back.
It helps that this band is so ripe for self-mythology; it’s long been impossible to discuss Vampire Weekend without “discussing Vampire Weekend,” and all the commentary on privilege, appropriation, and identity that’s come with it. Now, they’re the ones “discussing Vampire Weekend,” but on their own terms, making songs about history and who writes it (the cruelest among us), who determines class ascension (the people who lock the door as soon as they get the keys to the penthouse), and what happens when you’ve gotten everything you thought you wanted (you’re still pretty empty).
The one song on Only God Was Above Us with no true precedent is the foreboding, epic, eight-minute closer, “Hope.” It’s the band’s longest song, and it sounds almost nothing like anything else Vampire Weekend have recorded. Koenig’s “Hope” lyrics are wrathful—“The embassy’s abandoned now/The flag that flew is on the ground/The painting burned, the statue drowned,” goes one verse—but his gentle voice brings contrast, making the whole thing sound like a campfire melody. Tying the track together is the tender plea, “I hope you let it go.” From a younger band, it could sound naive, an abdication of duty. With age, it’s more like forgiveness.
The final song of Only God Was Above Us feels of a piece with the album’s opener, “Ice Cream Piano,” as they both deal in “I” and “you” and come off as conversations Koenig is having with himself. “We’re all the sons and daughters/Of vampires who drained the old world’s necks,” he sings, still searching for a peace that’s yet to come. The band’s name, of course, is not especially Draculian, just a nod to the title of a home movie that Koenig made one summer and repurposed for the quartet, another in-joke in a history full of them. Nevertheless, there is something poignant about invoking the bloodsuckers to examine who they have been. The past is what it is, in all its richness and stature; acknowledge it and discover something new within. | 2024-04-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | April 4, 2024 | 8.6 | c5bd123e-e140-42f5-bd7a-702033812f52 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Woods founder Jeremy Earl and Americana veteran Glenn Donaldson team for an effortlessly warm debut that feels alive with a sense of mutual discovery. | Woods founder Jeremy Earl and Americana veteran Glenn Donaldson team for an effortlessly warm debut that feels alive with a sense of mutual discovery. | Painted Shrines: Heaven and Holy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/painted-shrines-heaven-and-holy/ | Heaven and Holy | Even in the inchoate early days of Woods, the sweet coo of founder Jeremy Earl turned his most elliptical lines into ready hooks. But like the collectives Elephant 6 or Lambchop a decade earlier, the amorphous band around Earl treated songs like playhouses, spaces where they might try anything. Harmonies spilled out through a mess of tape hiss; guitar solos curled like question marks. This casual idiosyncrasy was charming, a timely counter to indie rock’s burgeoning professionalism. In the decade since, however, Woods co-founder Jarvis Taveniere has become an adroit producer, and Earl has built a homespun empire of like minds through Woodsist. The stakes now sound higher on Woods records, with textures and a tightness beyond their reach during their broke Brooklyn days.
That’s why, at least in part, Painted Shrines feel like a time machine. The debut from the duo of Earl and psychedelic Americana veteran Glenn Donaldson, Heaven and Holy recalls the casual thrills and relaxed esprit of those fetching early Woods albums. In 30 minutes, Painted Shrines sashay through a dozen modest but endearing tunes about love, hardship, hope, and the prelapsarian joy of sharing riffs with friends. Though this record has been in the works for at least three years, it is happily nonchalant, more concerned with a sense of warmth than perfection; that effortless allure makes Heaven and Holy addictive.
Donaldson spent his formative years flitting about Jewelled Antler, the boundless psychedelic collective he co-founded; his songs in the discursive duo Skygreen Leopards were some of the most winsome of what became billed as New Weird America. But in recent years, he’s made lush, considered power pop as The Reds, Pinks & Purples. He brings both mindsets to the seven songs Earl sings on Heaven and Holy, adding soft harmonies and sharp riffs while muddling the surface with distortion and labyrinthine guitar lines.
Indeed, the best tunes here find a comfortable spot on the line connecting the Byrds and the Go-Betweens, then burrow underground. Earl purrs on “Saturates the Eye,” an anthem for accepting a relationship’s inevitable hardships. The screeching guitars beneath the chorus, though, convince you he sings from experience. He and Donaldson warble together over a Mellotron during “Heaven and Holy,” a song about cosmic exasperation. Without the instrumental caterwaul that traces their voices, it would sound saccharine.
The other half of Heaven and Holy collects five miniature instrumentals, each clocking in around two minutes. Deliberately unfussy, each piece is an efficient expression of a single motif. Most every guitar line of “Soft Wasp” lingers long enough for the next one to catch up, so the hazy notes and hand-drum patter merge into a low, broad cloud. Named for Donaldson’s California studio, “The BZC” is a simple drum-and-guitar duo, Donaldson chasing an earworm through a basic beat. It’s like Chet Atkins, scoring a podcast on a budget rather than a vintage Hollywood blockbuster. And you can imagine Earl and Donaldson dancing around the room after tracking “Panoramic,” a lithe wonder. There are some extra layers here and overdubs there, but the prevailing sense is of being in the room alongside Painted Shrines, watching them indulge in mutual discovery.
Donaldson and Earl recorded these dozen little tunes during a week-long soiree in 2018. The sessions sat shelved. Woods began tracking their own refined Strange to Explain and backing David Berman for his tragic benediction as Purple Mountains; Donaldson began releasing his own solo power pop work. But the unexpected downtime of COVID-19 lockdowns afforded the pair a chance to finish these songs, passing files back and forth like pen pals renewing a relationship.
If there have been any silver linings to this last anxious year of canceled plans and premature deaths, that may be one. Due to financial exigency or mere idle time, many artists have picked up projects they may never have finished otherwise, from live albums offloaded for Bandcamp Fridays to side projects that had been sidelined. Even when these songs bend toward bittersweetness, Painted Shrines revel in this low-stakes atmosphere, where there’s no reason not to finish what you started. “It’s the fog that creeps on in in the early morning,” Earl sings during the opener’s surging hook. “The same fog that burns right off by the afternoon.” Given the circumstances, Heaven and Holy feels like a celebration of perseverance and friendship, or of delighting in the basics because that’s all you have on hand.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Woodist | March 8, 2021 | 7.5 | c5be7aff-7428-4a28-a424-fd3bf75857d1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
A casual approach gives rise to some of the English electro-indie band’s best songs in years. But for anyone not already misty-eyed with nostalgia, a meandering 17-track album is a hard sell. | A casual approach gives rise to some of the English electro-indie band’s best songs in years. But for anyone not already misty-eyed with nostalgia, a meandering 17-track album is a hard sell. | Metronomy: Metronomy Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metronomy-metronomy-forever/ | Metronomy Forever | Metronomy Forever would be a braggadocious title if the music weren’t so self-deprecating. The sixth studio album from Devonshire musician Joe Mount is a tangled and tongue-in-cheek meditation on legacy, ending on a sparse postscript titled “Ur Mixtape,” which functions as a sort of punchline. Speak-singing his way through the memory of a fumbled young romance, Mount describes running into his crush’s brother, years later. The brother, recognising Mount, enthusiastically tells him how much he cherished the mixtape that Mount made, a decade earlier, to impress his sister. It’s a wry ending to an album that grapples with the question of how you’d like to be remembered: Even if you dedicate your life to crafting a legacy—in Mount’s case, a successful career at the forefront of ’00s and ’10s British electro-indie—you can never really control other people’s memories.
The sardonic bait-and-switch characterises the mood of Metronomy Forever. Having co-written and co-produced Robyn’s cathartic 2018 record Honey, and moved to a house in the English countryside with space to build his own studio, Mount made this album alone, just for the heck of it. (The live band includes drummer Anna Prior, bassist Olugbenga Adelekan, and Oscar Cash and Michael Lovett on keys and guitars.) You can hear this lack of inhibition in the directionless psychedelia of the instrumental interludes, and in some wilfully shallow lyrics: “She’s like a dream/Salted caramel ice cream” is a hook as delicious, and as meaningless, as its subject matter.
With Mount content to simply get in his groove, the casual approach gives rise to some of Metronomy’s best songs in years. The dreamy surf guitars, funk bass, and taut drums of “Whitsand Bay” hark back to their 2011 hit “The Bay” in more ways than one. “Salted Caramel Ice Cream” is a dancefloor stomper drizzled with zany synth melodies, plus a hint of the güiro that made a playful appearance on “The Look.” On the daft yet lovable “Sex Emoji,” Mount duets with himself in a coy falsetto over blown-out electro-funk; meanwhile, dance interludes like the twilight creep of “Miracle Rooftop” provide moments of introspection alongside the bombast (and a heady reminder of his skills as a producer).
These retreads of Metronomy’s best bits are not all nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake—instead, subtle changes indicate an older, wiser band with new emotional maturity. On “Insecurity,” a song dripping in macho swagger, Mount sings about the harmfulness of masculine posturing. In front of the blindingly bright synths of lead single “Lately,” his plain, unadorned singing about the hard work of love has a real pathos.
For anyone not already misty-eyed with nostalgia for Metronomy, however, a meandering 17-track album is a hard sell. As one instrumental interlude is titled, “Forever Is a Long Time”—and Metronomy Forever is a long album. At times, it’s difficult to determine whether the recycling is deliberate. “Wedding” kicks off the album with a grandiose, church organ sweep, but later, on the plodding “Wedding Bells,” Mount delivers a “gotcha!” by revealing that the titular bells are “not for me.” This at least seems like a choice, while his use of both “Insecurity” and “Insecure” as track titles scans as a rehash.
The decision to keep all these short, unfulfilled song ideas is either carefree or cynical, depending on your perspective. “Now, basically all music is ambient music, or can be. I think it gives musicians a load of freedom,” Mount told Dazed. “Drake records are, like, one hundred tracks long? And half of it’s awful—but it’s wicked.” Intentionally making musical wallpaper doesn’t sound like an exciting prospect, but Mount seems invigorated by abandoning the pursuit of the perfectly structured 10-track record. Perhaps it’s this liberation that allowed him to write a handful of brilliant new entries in the Metronomy catalog—comfortable in the knowledge that listeners who missed the band’s first wave are most likely to discover their work in fragments, regrouped and playlisted in the context-free world of streaming platforms. There, “The Bay” will slide timelessly into “Salted Caramel Ice Cream,” strutting on and on, forever.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | September 17, 2019 | 6.7 | c5c072f9-b075-49e9-84cf-dd6d7cdf61e5 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The London pop duo’s impulse to pare down seems admirable, but the songs can be monotonous. | The London pop duo’s impulse to pare down seems admirable, but the songs can be monotonous. | Oh Wonder: No One Else Can Wear Your Crown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oh-wonder-no-one-else-can-wear-your-crown/ | No One Else Can Wear Your Crown | On the best-known song to feature Oh Wonder, you can barely hear them. The London duo lilt under the chorus of Lil Uzi Vert’s “The Way Life Goes,” a sample that morphs their original track “Landslide” from a hazy flicker into a surging, snaking beat. It’s a reminder of what’s missing in a lot of Oh Wonder’s own music. They engineer delicate vocal electro-pop tracks, sleeker than bedroom pop, with an earnestness that separates them from algorithmic chillwave. On their latest album, No One Else Can Wear Your Crown, their elegant, muted production seems destined to be background noise; the stray lyrics that do catch the attention can be treacly. Each song is a pleasant listen that dissolves forgettably into the next.
This may be because the singers fail to translate their intentions. “Dust,” the album’s opener, is meant to represent “the state of the world and the craziness of capitalism,” the duo told Billboard. Instead, the lyrics sound like a hotboxed dorm room: “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny, the way we spin across the sun?” they sing. “We’re all made up of each other, from dust to dust to dust.” “Hallelujah” builds on yawning violins, ready to soundtrack Disney’s next princess movie: “There’s a crown, covered in glitter and gold/I’m going to wear it, whether you like it or not.” The cloying statements make you want to tune out, and the liquified pianos and fluttering drums don’t offer much interest, either.
That spareness is intentional: These songs aren’t hollowed out, but purposefully small. “We will write a song on the piano, take it into the studio, and then layer it up with as many as 200 sounds, strip it back to maybe 10 and that’s the finished album,” band member Josephine Vander Gucht once said of their songwriting process. The impulse to pare down seems admirable, but the songs can be monotonous—tightly constructed loops of synth and kick drums, skeletal pulses that brace flurries of light instruments. The record swishes from track to track, building the kind of soundscape most often associated with coffeeshops or lo-fi beats playlists. When the synthetic strings do break through, they can overpower the dominating quiet: “I Wish I Never Met You” and “Happy” suffer from similar onslaughts of violin.
The best moments of songwriting reach for nuance and maturity. “Happy” is a gauzy, piano-flecked ode to an ex’s new relationship: “It’s good to see you loved/Let’s call it even,” the duo coo. “Better Now” conjures concrete images to tell the story of a family member awaiting a difficult childbirth: a hospital vending machine, cups of cold coffee, the endless bleeps of machines. Oh Wonder’s musical project works when the simplicity of the writing matches the simplicity of the sound. When the former element tilts out of sync—gaudy, cliché lyrics about holding cards to chests and feeling “blindsided by love”—the record caves in on itself. | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | February 12, 2020 | 5.7 | c5d025a2-2dae-47fc-bb64-91bbced5ef05 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
God Don’t Never Change is an 11-song ode to the great blues howler and gospel progenitor Blind Willie Johnson, including contributions from Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, and more. | God Don’t Never Change is an 11-song ode to the great blues howler and gospel progenitor Blind Willie Johnson, including contributions from Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, and more. | Various Artists: God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21639-god-dont-never-change-the-songs-of-blind-willie-johnson/ | God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson | What's the point of a tribute album? Is it to show how the influence of an icon has spread, seeping into and informing far-flung styles that then sprawl from the center like branches of a healthy family tree? Is it to use the star power of gathered singers and bands to raise the reputation of some underserved idol, giving a second chance to the perpetually overlooked? Or, more cynically, is it a label-based attempt to package together a potpourri of disparate artists and capitalize on their disconnected fanbases and that of the tribute subject?
God Don’t Never Change, an 11-song ode to the great blues howler and gospel progenitor Blind Willie Johnson, feels a little like all of those at once. Produced by tribute-compilation veteran Jeffrey Gaskill, powered by an ambitious crowdfunding campaign, and issued by roots imprint Alligator Records, God Don’t Never Change attempts to grapple with Johnson’s impact on popular artists and genre purists alike. Crossover giants such as Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, and Sinéad O’Connor share the tracklist with gospel- and blues-based acts, from the institutional Blind Boys of Alabama to North Mississippi Allstar leader Luther Dickinson. It is, as with almost all tribute records, an uneven listen. Still, it's a fine homage to Johnson’s brutally honest, occasionally inspirational songs that leaves some deep questions about how far his influence goes.
Many of these interpretations are excellent, reflecting music’s evolutionary arc since Johnson’s time and the idiosyncratic styles of these performers themselves. Waits, for instance, is perfect for "The Soul of a Man," a song that questions why we’re here and what "we" even are. Backed by childlike harmonies, parlor piano, and heavy handclaps, it's a joyful lecture delivered under the auspices of a sweltering summer revival. (His junkyard moan through "John the Revelator," however, is so melodramatic it seems glib.) And exalting above his ragged slide work and the dainty whistle of a fife, Dickinson sounds like the Delta doppelgänger of Devendra Banhart, his voice curling skyward. It’s an exquisite, personal update.
The real highlight arrives with Sinéad O’Connor’s "Trouble Will Soon Be Over," a song that’s a sermon about how the struggles of this life will sublimate into redemption when it’s over. O’Connor sings of death as sweet relief here, her resilient voice rising over a guitar line that drones more like the blues of West Africa than those of Johnson’s central Texas. That subtle transnational nod is a sharp tribute to the durability and relevance of these songs. Nearly a century after many of these numbers were written, we’re still grappling with the worries of Johnson’s world, which he articulated with such grace and aired with such grit.
That realization is a damning one for God Don’t Never Change, a collection that leaves so much on the table in terms of possibility. Many of these selections are too on-the-nose, kowtowing to Johnson’s legacy as though kneeling before his corpse at a wake. Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks simply redeliver "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning," while Maria McKee belts "Let Your Light Shine on Me" as an act of historical anachronism. God Don’t Never Change ends with the impression that there’s work to be done, interpretations yet left to hear. Johnson’s songs were often elliptical and vague; see, his largely instrumental masterpiece, "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground." But God Don’t Never Change never really opens itself up beyond obvious Americana. What does rap in 2016 have to say about Blind Willie Johnson? Or metal? Or a sample-driven producer? Plenty, I’d wager. It’s reflexive and naïve to think his influence ends here.
The paleness of the entire enterprise only exacerbates that feeling. Yes, the Blind Boys ease their way through the emotional turmoil of "Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time," but every other player of color here (and there are very few) is tucked into the background, like the hand-clapping Mike Mattison or the fife-adding Shardé Thomas. The only black-led act is the most polite and polished of the entire set, with Waits and O’Connor left to raise the set’s real ruckus. If the point of a tribute album is to show how an artist’s work has metastasized and impacted others, God Don’t Never Change allows a too narrow of a window for doing so. | 2016-02-29T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-29T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Alligator | February 29, 2016 | 5.8 | c5d57597-479c-4ade-b8bf-2699d6616522 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
An all-star cast pays tribute to the glam-rock icon, but their interpretations too often read angst and torpor in place of the singer’s pomp and frivolity. | An all-star cast pays tribute to the glam-rock icon, but their interpretations too often read angst and torpor in place of the singer’s pomp and frivolity. | Various Artists: *Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-angelheaded-hipster-the-songs-of-marc-bolan-and-t-rexandnbsp/ | Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex | During his brief, glorious early ’70s peak, it seemed that Marc Bolan could send seismic tremors through the universe with delectable nonchalance. He switched from Tolkien-esque freak folk to Chuck Berry boogie in the span of an album. On a whim, he dabbed some glitter on his cheekbones before a Top of the Pops performance that was—per Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy—“the spark that ignited the glam explosion.” His greatest singles feel tossed off with all the deliberation of a shake of his curly locks.
By comparison, the long fermenting Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex feels far more studied, pondered, and brooded over. Even with big names like Kesha, U2, Elton John, Father John Misty, Joan Jett, and Nick Cave swelling out this two-disc set, it sounds oddly anonymous. Overseen by pop music’s great magpie, the late Hal Willner, it follows in the producer’s style of pulling together an eclectic roster of talents to highlight nearly forgotten artists like Nino Rota, Kurt Weill, and Harold Arlen, proffering a gateway drug to curious listeners. He could dig deep for talent: A 1988 tribute to the music of vintage Disney films featured Tom Waits, the Replacements, and Sun Ra offering unorthodox takes on those intimately familiar songs. A Hal Willner compilation was, in the words of one estimation, “a place of scary, monumental meetings [that] Willner... made a career of turning into art.”
The “monumental meetings” underpinning Angelheaded Hipster had been underway for some time. Arriving almost five months after his death from COVID-19 complications, the set was first mentioned in a 2017 Times profile of Willner, with him in the studio with Marc Almond and Foetus’ J.G. Thirwell. The story finds Almond “worried” about the end results, but the former Soft Cell singer delivers a dramatic reading set against a backdrop of beatnik walking bassline, quivering strings, and outbursts of tango. Risk-taking, insouciant in its mashing of genre, this version of “Teenage Dream” is a classic Willner soundclash.
That daredevil spirit is in short order elsewhere. Hoping for “TiK ToK”-era Kesha to nail a frothy couplet like “I drive a Rolls-Royce/’Cuz it's good for my voice,” we instead get heavy-metal karaoke Kesha on the plodding and overwrought “Children of the Revolution.” Despite the teaming of two of the biggest dynasties in pop and rock, U2 and Sir Elton John (a pal of Bolan and early glam apostle) give a flaccid read of “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” Between Bono’s low-energy vocal and John’s piano serving as mere backdrop, they turn one of glam rock’s crunchiest singles into solemn porridge. The less said about Todd Rundgren and David Johansen’s contributions, the better.
The most intriguing wrinkle of the set is the influx of country, as on Lucinda Williams’ twangy take on “Life’s a Gas.” Joan Jett does “Jeepster” as a full-on honky-tonk number, with Jett delivering all the sexual menace of the kicker “I’m gonna suck ya!,” and King Khan keeps “I Love to Boogie” firmly in the roadhouse. Gentle interpretations like Devendra Banhart’s dreamy “Scenescof” and Gabby Moreno’s exotica-tinged “Beltane Walk” also add nuance to the man’s music. Emily Haines delivers a haunted “Ballrooms of Mars,” but the version is derailed by a baffling intrusion of Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from The Planets.
But the oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. Beth Orton sings each syllable of “Hippy Gumbo” like she’s wringing out laundry. Nick Cave is well suited for the poignant ballad “Cosmic Dancer,” but where Bolan grows increasingly lithe and light as the song takes flight, Cave remains leaden in his delivery, singing the word “balloon” as if attaching an anvil to one. And how did Father John Misty pass up the chance to refer to himself in the third person? Instead he stays true to “Bolan likes to rock now” on a version of “Main Man” that’s more Jackson Browne than Bolan.
In the same Willner profile, he admits: “I don’t know what inspires people now. Do these last two generations have heroes? I’m not sure they do.” The packed roster shows that Bolan remains a hero to musicians and a tragic icon, dead before the age of 30. Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject. Angelheaded Hipster suggests that digging into Bolan’s depths might ultimately be a fool's errand; the singer’s genius was in laying everything out on a coy, glittery surface, making it all sound so effortless.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | BMG | September 16, 2020 | 4.3 | c5ded6a2-7af7-4215-96fa-b1f96afaefc2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
French-British producer Jean Cousin draws despair and wonder from within the vast unfeeling of digital communication. | French-British producer Jean Cousin draws despair and wonder from within the vast unfeeling of digital communication. | Joni Void: Mise En Abyme | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joni-void-mise-en-abyme/ | Mise En Abyme | “You are, and will always be, your depression,” intones a computer-synthesized voice on Joni Void's song “Deep Impression.” It's the exact opposite of what you'll hear in therapy, where the goal, more or less, is to separate what you feel and what you are, so that you might more easily bear the former. But there is value, and humor, in naming the wrong thing, the deep and abiding fear, especially when you force a robot to speak it.
Mise En Abyme, the second album Jean Cousin has released as Joni Void, liquefies many of the jagged edges jutting up from 2017's Selfless. The Montreal-based producer still collages—the album is constructed from sound sources both intimate, like home movies, and nonspecific, like dial tones—but the rocky, queasy slosh that characterized the project's debut abates. Selfless sounded like it was gnashing its teeth, a fantasyland of tension and bruxism. Mise En Abyme subsumes that anxiety into a series of songs that court despair and wonder with equal fervor.
Vocals abound on the album's first side, giving the ear something to grip even when they add more texture than narrative. "Dysfunctional Helper" layers a wordless melody sung by Ayuko Goto (also known as Noah, who appeared on Selfless) over a squeaking industrial beat, emphasizing the sanctuary that the voice and the act of singing, even idly, can create in the mind. The percussion suggests urban chaos, while the voice induces calm. "Lov-Ender" braids samples of Montreal musician YlangYlang's voice into psychedelic polyrhythms. Both songs find their beat over time, rather than being led by it. Human noise directs the machine sound, instead of the other way around.
The most striking vocal moments on Mise En Abyme come during "Abusers," a song featuring the voice of Montreal-based experimental harpist Sarah Pagé. She sings diffusely, like Goto and Debard, but approximates words that can't quite be made out. Consonants border vowels, daring the ear to tease out language, but language doesn't come. Pagé's performance grows more agitated over her gentle accompaniment until it peaks in a ragged scream, a non-verbal middle finger to the pervasive trend of using women's voices as set dressing in electronic music. She refuses to be pleasant decoration; she strains against the song until she breaks open its mold.
If the record's first half concerns vocal communication, side B stages its breakdown. On "No Reply," Joni Void samples answering machine messages, dial-up modems, and the unmistakable glitchy static old cell phones used to cast across nearby speakers just before receiving a call or text. These are obsolete sounds of anticipation and disappointment, sounds heard playing phone tag on a landline or picking up the receiver while someone else in the house tried to connect to the internet. Maybe they sound like alien noise to someone who's only known one millennium, but Joni Void doesn't aim for nostalgia here; "No Reply" doesn't fetishize these sounds, but attempts to locate the self within their milieu, pinging old memories and tracing them forward to the present. What bodily response does a busy tone prompt? What old tension or melancholy does it dredge up in the nervous system?
Cousin’s own voice appears on "Voix Sans Issue," a piece that spills vocal notes into a Shepard tone swoop, but it's that text-to-speech track "Deep Impression" where the producer's presence is most acutely felt. There's something deeply funny about loading lyrics into a Vocaloid; Joni Void's words rhyme like they're meant to be rapped, and yet a simple voice program cannot rap, cannot place extra emphasis on given words or swing them around the beat. The computerized performance is clumsy, lacking spontaneity and specificity, yet it remains vulnerable, a frank confession of pain distanced by ventriloquism.
Within the robotic monologue, Joni Void preempts this very review: "I don't have time for you critics/Whatever you think of this song/It's absolutely wrong… You're giving a rating to my suffering." I am, and I'm sorry. Here we are in hell, a place where we offer our traumas to advertising companies and hope we reap enough reward to pay rent. But between the measurements of technocrats, there is still space, I think, for genuine communication. There's the chance to hear data transformed into music and feel music ring in the body, where the trackers can't yet reach. There is still experience that can't be atomized and analyzed, however slippery it may be even to those feeling it. Mise En Abyme hunts that sensation of flux and liminality, unearthing warmth in a landscape of paranoia. | 2019-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Constellation | April 1, 2019 | 8 | c5e1980d-b02b-41c5-b470-5372adcab5d1 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Gone is Gone is a power trio made of key members from Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age, and the recently reactivated At the Drive-In. | Gone is Gone is a power trio made of key members from Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age, and the recently reactivated At the Drive-In. | Gone Is Gone: Gone is Gone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22099-gone-is-gone/ | Gone is Gone | “It’s not a supergroup!” is the “it’s not a tumor!” of the rock world—a denial delivered instinctively and vociferously whenever preeminent players band together. In the case of Gone Is Gone, you have members of three of this millennium’s most significant crossover bands in the realm of metal, hard rock and post-hardcore: bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders of Mastodon, guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age, and drummer Tony Hajjar of the recently reactivated At the Drive-In. Perhaps they’re not the most marquee members of their respective units, but in terms of collective experience and strength, they’ve certainly earned the right to wear capes.
But in advance interviews, Gone Is Gone predictably downplay any such self-aggrandizing descriptors—for them, this group is simply an opportunity for some old pals to finally make music together free of deadline pressure and promo-cycle demands. Gone Is Gone is the long-gestating byproduct of Hajjar’s day job composing video-game and movie-trailer themes with keyboardist/guitarist Mike Zarin. (Perhaps you’ve blown up a city in Splinter Cell: Blacklist to one of their dystopian synthscapes.) When the duo invited Van Leeuwen to embellish some pieces they had been working on, they saw the potential to turn the project into a proper band. But while Sanders was actually the last piece of the puzzle to be placed, his imposing presence sets the angst-ridden tone for the band’s debut mini-LP.
In Mastodon, Sanders is one of three vocalists fighting for space, and on that band’s most recent records, he’s been winning. So while Gone Is Gone’s soundtrack origins may lend it a different, more atmospheric feel than a Mastodon record, it’s a logical extension of the accessible, artfully rendered alt-metal Sanders’ main band has been inching toward in recent years. Essentially, Gone Is Gone’s relationship to Mastodon is akin to that of A Perfect Circle to Tool, or Audioslave to Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine. In other words, it’s easy enough to identify the pedigree involved, but everything is more meticulous and controlled—and, ultimately, too willing to play by the modern-rock radio playbook.
Sanders, naturally, doesn’t scream with the same guttural intensity he did 15 years ago, but his vocal cords nonetheless bear the battle scars of someone who has been screaming for 15 years. And while the opening “Violescent” shows he’s still most at home growling atop plutonium-grade riffage, his voice is made more pliable through Van Leeuwen’s mercurial, Cure-like guitar ripples and destabilizing solos (like the shortwave-frequencied fretwork that drives the song to its earthquaking climax). But without a Brent Hinds to out-shout, or a more tuneful foil like Brann Dailor to gild the melodies, Sanders’ voice strains as he tries to push pained power ballads like “Starlight” and “This Chapter” into the stratosphere. The songs only achieve true lift-off when Sanders frees himself of that burden and the band flex their instrumental muscle on the crescendoing codas.
Gone Is Gone boasts other such jolts of exhilaration—like the industrialized throb of “Praying From the Danger” or the berserker mid-section of “One Divided.” But that’s ultimately all they are: fleeting, pulse-boosting moments that inevitably recede into the album’s morose, monochromatic mood. The attention to texture and narrative devices (in the form of two ambient, spoken-word interludes) suggests the principals have designs to make GIG more than just another gig. But while they’ve successfully siphoned the musical and conceptual heft of their source bands, they’ve forsaken their mastery of momentum. In lieu of Mastodon’s restless, village-pillaging gallop, QOTSA’s motorik charge, or At the Drive-In’s convulsive energy, the songs here mostly chug along in a mid-tempo, dubwise gait that keeps the chaos contained even as the levels shoot into the red. For all the champion horsepower in their stable, Gone Is Gone just never really gets going. | 2016-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Rise | July 12, 2016 | 5.3 | c5e33818-20bf-4a9d-8c1c-06ab61023594 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
After eight albums of solid if predictable psych-folk, Woods shake up their pastoral sound a bit, introducing notes of reggae and African jazz. | After eight albums of solid if predictable psych-folk, Woods shake up their pastoral sound a bit, introducing notes of reggae and African jazz. | Woods: City Sun Eater in the River of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21750-city-sun-eater-in-the-river-of-light/ | City Sun Eater in the River of Light | After eight albums of solid, if ever-more-predictable, psych-folk in about as many years, do Woods have anything new to offer? The band answers that question before anybody can ask it on City Sun Eater in the River of Light, which opens with the most surprising departure of their entire discography: “Sun City Creeps,” a detour into reggae and African jazz, complete with island horns, trebly guitars and the loose, first-take feel of an early Studio One session. It’s a knockout song, even before the pace quickens during its jammy payoff stretch, yet the group adopts these tropical sounds so naturally that it never feels like they’re showing off. You can count on one hand the number of American rock bands that could tastefully pull off this sort of stylistic gambit—Calexico; maybe My Morning Jacket. Turns out Woods is one of them.
An opener like that stirs real excitement, and the assurance that the band hasn’t grown complacent is particularly well-timed, coming as it does after 2014’s With Light and With Love, a characteristically enjoyable but familiar-on-arrival LP that left even many Woods loyalists longing for a shakeup. To be sure, City Sun Eater isn’t a complete reinvention, either—it’s largely rooted in the same '60s pop and druggy Americana that’s defined all the band's records—but periodic shadings of reggae give the record a character of its own. Dubby organs lead “Can’t See At All,” which breathes like a classic Lee Perry track. Some moaning backing vocals are tracked so closely they sound like a wailing electronic gizmo, exactly the kind of lo-fi studio trickery that dub producers played with on their early efforts. Stately horns add gravity to the bongo-guided “The Take,” another number that patiently builds to a tweaked-out climax.
All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before. And like all of Woods’ recent albums, City Sun Eater is generously packed with pop songs, too. With its delirious wah-wah guitars, closer “Hollow Home” imagines what a George Harrison cover of “Just Like Heaven” might have sounded like (utterly joyous, as expected). The song most guaranteed to make audiences twirl in the mud at their live shows, “Politics of Free” pairs the album’s pluckiest guitars and cheeriest tempo with a parade of uplifting aphorisms: “Find the time to separate your work life from relief/ Constellations in the summer sky/ In a world of shit/ Let’s tune out.”
For most acts, “Politics” would be the clear single, but Woods have never been much of a singles band. They don’t have much to gain from them, since singer Jeremy Earl’s thin voice still makes them a hard sell for wider audiences. On the group's scrappy early efforts it was easy to write off that untrained voice as part of the group’s rumpled charm, but as their albums have grown more deliberate, his anemic falsetto has become more of a nuisance—it’s the only one-note instrument in an act that otherwise wrings so much nuance out of all the other ones. Nine albums in, Woods are still turning out great tunes while tapping new muses, and that’s worth celebrating. But how great would it be if they had a singer who could really do them justice? | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | April 7, 2016 | 7.6 | c5ed5e61-0cf2-46fb-aff7-97ddf0d3cdb6 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Another tentative comeback album from the 90s giant, Mixed Race's best moments look back to Tricky's bleak peak-period work. | Another tentative comeback album from the 90s giant, Mixed Race's best moments look back to Tricky's bleak peak-period work. | Tricky: Mixed Race | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14677-mixed-race/ | Mixed Race | The frustrating thing about being a Tricky fan is that he's a guy who knows damn well where his talents lie, and yet he chooses to ignore them. The list of things Tricky does poorly (rock, house, singer-songwriter pop, ska, disco, etc.) is much longer than the list of things he does well (which basically amounts to the sound he invented and perfected on the music he released between 1995 and 1999). For 10 years, he's refused to accept that an inimitable style can be a strength as much a limitation, a foundation to build from rather than something to reject as predictable. His music's suffered horribly thanks to many, many failed attempts to show off a versatility that just isn't there.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Tricky decided to ditch his dank, anxiety-ridden, and reputation-making brand of UK hip-hop. Critics had been carping that he'd devolved to pastiching himself on records like 1998's Angels With Dirty Faces. Fans wondered if his relentlessly bleak sound had anywhere left to go. Stretching the formula might not have been such a bad idea. Unfortunately Tricky's reinvention was a little more scorched-earth than anyone expected. On 2001's execrable Blowback and 2003's ever-so-slightly-less-awful Vulnerable, he flipped both middle fingers at his audience while running straight into the worst music of his career, a sad stew of lazily executed alt-rock and dance-pop clichés. Tricky had often been blasted for having a one-note sound, but these failed attempts at schizoid genre-mixing proved that at least he'd really believed in that one note.
On 2008's Knowle West Boy and the new Mixed Race, the two tentative comeback albums he's released since the Blowback/Vulnerable fiasco, the standout tracks continue to look back to Tricky's bleaker (and better) 90s records. His music sounds as visceral and committed as ever when he's working with materials he's mastered: hip-hop, dub, urban dread. And a few Mixed Race tracks do give up the goods: The ravaged voice that sounds both sexy and sinister; the oppressive atmosphere he can still conjure effortlessly; the way his slow, bleary rapping meshes so beautifully with low-key female vocalists. On opener "Every Day", he adds a new and blessedly subtle country blues vibe, and it suggests that, hey, maybe he really can expand his music without totally ditching what makes it special.
But no, he'd still rather try his hand at spacey Kompakt-esque techno-disco ("Really Real") or Middle Eastern music ("Hakim"), even though the evidence suggests he's got very little feel for either. And those are the album's more successful stabs at style hopping. There's also the anemic riff on Daft Punk ("Kingston Logic") and the lifeless hip-house track he flogs with a big cheesy hunk of Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme" ("Murder Weapon"). True, these missteps aren't as embarrassing as the ones on Blowback or Vulnerable. For one thing, there's no Alanis Morissette collaboration, and Tricky seems to have at least accepted that his music only works when he goes for darkness, eeriness, creepiness, whatever. But his attempts at rock or club music invariably have the touchy-feely quality of a dabbler who's moved out of his comfort zone but lacks the craft or confidence to pull it off. At this point, he's released enough terrible-to-mediocre records that releasing a strong ten-track album in the vein of his old stuff wouldn't be blasted as backpedaling. It'd be hailed as a return to form from the long-suffering. Until he realizes that, we'll continue to get albums like Mixed Race: Mostly a failure, but with enough glimmers of a true comeback to tease fans into checking out the next one. | 2010-09-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | September 27, 2010 | 5 | c5fce0cf-4acd-4c71-8e06-fd6b891acb8d | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The sixth album from Ian Svenonius’ rock group Chain and the Gang could be his sharpest set of ironic arguments yet. Svenonius’ hot-wired backing band whips his clever tunes into tornados. | The sixth album from Ian Svenonius’ rock group Chain and the Gang could be his sharpest set of ironic arguments yet. Svenonius’ hot-wired backing band whips his clever tunes into tornados. | Chain and the Gang: Experimental Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chain-and-the-gang-experimental-music/ | Experimental Music | Irony can be too ironic. Pile it on thick and it can blur meaning, or become a fake cover for meaninglessness. This has never been a problem for Ian Svenonius. As a singer and songwriter, he’s often an ironist, but his lyrics have clear, pithy messages, with few extraneous musings or puzzling tangents. Whether he sincerely believes his messages remains an open question, and that gray area deepens his often-simple songs. But what his words are about is rarely a matter of confusion.
Experimental Music, the sixth album by Svenonius’ group Chain and the Gang, could be his sharpest set of ironic arguments yet. Every track has a solid thesis that Svenonius explicates through laser-focused verses and bold choruses. Most of his theses are small, clever tweaks of clichés that rebuke conventional wisdom. In some cases, these inversions are just fun novelties. In “Temporary Insanity,” Svenonius flips the meaning of impermanence: “I’m temporarily insane since I don’t know when... In the daytime I’m a nutcase/At night I’m a mental disgrace/Been this way my whole life.”
But more often, the songs on Experimental Music use simple subversion for broader profundity. By changing just one word in a historical adage, Svenonius turns “Rome” from a song about ancient times into an anthem for action during dire political eras. “Rome wasn't burnt in a day...It took a lot of time; people had to bring their fire,” Svenonius insists. “It took persistence, it took resistance.” Though the song was written before the 2016 election, it’s easy to hear it as a contemporary call to arms—“It’s time to take a match!/It’s time to return!”—and a reminder that even our current empire can be conquered if we stick to it.
As Svenonius fans the flames, these fires are lit by one of the hottest Chain and the Gang lineups so far. He’s always treated the group like a small-scale version of Mark E. Smith’s the Fall, enlisting whomever can bring the proper racket to his primal tunes. But this configuration might be his platonic ideal. The six-piece band features vital players from Detroit’s current underground, including Fred Thomas and Shelley Salant of Tyvek, and Danny Kroha of the Gories. Recording live to four-track tape, they whip Svenonius’ tunes into tornados, their banged-out beats and red-bleeding solos forging classic garage-punk in the vein of the Oblivians or Billy Childish’s Thee Headcoats (a direction hinted at on June’s Best of Crime Rock, a reworking of previous Chain songs by a different lineup).
The music this lineup cranks out is so hot-wired that Svenonius can easily mine it for ironic tensions. Take the title track, one of the funniest things Chain and the Gang has ever done. Svenonius treats the avant-garde like a teen idol—“Experimental music made me feel so free/Walking down the beach with my baby”—as the band doles out peppy 1950s pop. There are some obvious punchlines, like when Svenonius calls out “it goes like this!” and keyboardist Amber Fellows responds with a solo barely deviating from the base melody. Yet praising experimental music’s rejection of the marketplace clearly falls in line with Svenonius’ political stances. Is he celebrating or mocking? At best, he does both with equal conviction, resolving opposites by fully committing to both sides.
Still, Svenonius can also pick a team, and throughout Experimental Music he sides with outcasts and nonconformists. In “The Logic of the Night”—heard previously in a mellower mode on Best of Crime Rock—he pits day-job drones against dark-dwelling subversives. Meanwhile, during “I Hate Winners,” he proudly assumes the mantle of loser: “I promise you baby I’ll only lose/I’ll never win, I’m not one of them.” And over the rolling piano notes of “Don’t Make Me Dream,” Svenonius rejects the entire concept of ambition. “They said you can be anything you wanna be,” he sings with a skeptical snarl. “But I don’t wanna, no don’t make me dream.”
The most moving track on Experimental Music turns all his irony into real emotion. On “Don’t Scare the Ghost Away,” Svenonius encounters a ghost who’s frightened of him, a victim of chronic depression who killed himself and his family. “Now he stalks the Earth trying to hold on to that pain for eternity,” Svenonius sings. “I tried to get near to say, ‘It’s ok’/But when I got too close, that ghost went away.” It’s a rare sentimental note, and it feels sincere, despite being about someone who doesn’t actually exist. Which is pretty ironic, if you think about it. | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Radical Elite | September 28, 2017 | 7.7 | c6032be5-7668-410d-a291-8e9afb95500b | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The Portland power-pop artist covers a set of previously unreleased Jon Brion recordings that showcases the producer/composer’s underrated songwriting chops. | The Portland power-pop artist covers a set of previously unreleased Jon Brion recordings that showcases the producer/composer’s underrated songwriting chops. | Mo Troper: Troper Sings Brion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mo-troper-troper-sings-brion/ | Troper Sings Brion | “Why finish a song when you can start a new one?” Jon Brion once quipped to the New York Times Magazine. It was 2003, and he was wrapping work on Fiona Apple’s as-yet unnamed third record. Once that was complete, he told the interviewer, he would focus on his own music. A couple years prior, he had self-released his solo debut, Meaningless. The album featured his unshowy mastery of vintage instruments and a compositional sense indebted to the legendary singer/songwriters of ’70s Los Angeles: the exact qualities that had made Brion an in-demand session player, writer, and producer. But his label declined to put it out. Some combination of that experience, his perfectionism, and a steady stream of outside work kept him from ever releasing a follow-up.
But new Brion material did appear, in a sense. In 2006, a collection of his demos hit the blogopshere. They were purportedly recorded in 1991 and 1995, before and after he moved to Los Angeles. A loose and lo-fi set of earnest, harmonically sophisticated pop-rock, the demos were revelatory to devotees of what Brion himself termed “unpopular pop.” Portland musician Mo Troper—who first encountered Brion via his hired-gun guitar on Jellyfish’s 1993 cult LP Spilt Milk—is one of those devotees. His latest album, Troper Sings Brion, is a tribute with a twist: These are all songs that Brion never officially released. Troper’s recent output has tended toward deconstruction: 90-second doses of pitch-shifted and saturated power-pop. But here, he plays things mostly straight. Like Harry Nilsson did on the LP that this album’s title and Emma Parry’s cover art riff on, Troper puts his idiosyncrasies in service of the material. In doing so, he posits Jon Brion not as a composer or vibes merchant, but as an L.A. songwriter of the first order.
Troper comes out swinging with “Into the Atlantic,” Brion’s sardonic tour of the recording-industry hellscape. There’s no demo recording of this song available, just a few stripped-down live bootlegs, so Troper weaves a pocket symphony around Brion’s quarter-note piano: Harp, Mellotron, and squeezebox dip in and out of the mix. The result would fit snugly on a record by Aimee Mann, who fought the same label battles as Brion in the ‘90s, sometimes alongside him. Here, the song’s ambivalence about its own fate makes it the ideal intro for a set of unreleased tunes: “And when it's time to baptize your own baby/Never mind that dorsal fin/And throw the little morsel in.”
Troper Sings Brion teems with ambivalence, whether it’s toward the recording industry or a romantic relationship. (After enough listens, the two subjects start to blur.) The phenomenal “Love of My Life (So Far)” is another track that Troper arranged based on an old bootleg. He transforms it as uptempo, intricate power-pop without a single seam showing. He applies his trademark vocal varispeed until he’s dancing on the ceiling, luxuriating in Brion’s lyrical switchbacks and internal rhyme. “Love is great when there's no restraint/And it's not for the faint of heart,” he sighs. It’s followed by “Any Other Way,” a buzzy recessional about the embrace of suffering. “When it's words that I hope for/You've got nothing to say,” Troper sings, doodling little Brian May-style figures, “And I wouldn't have it any other way.” He sounds like he’s on a parade float.
It’s not the kind of pose Troper typically hits. On 2022’s MTV, he jammed his power-pop formalism into an overloaded circuit, resulting in a blown-out bedroom-indie record that veered from aching intimacy to prickly distance: Nilsson and Newman, fighting over the steering wheel. But Brion’s compositions permit Troper some patience. And in return, he brings an immediacy to these decades-old songs. Not that this bargain always pays off. The dour “Not Ready Yet” was a slog when Eels first recorded it for 1996’s Beautiful Freak (which Brion co-produced). Troper’s seven-minute version—still shorter and less splenetic than Brion’s demo—ends up stuck in the same tar pit as its predecessors. And while the torch song “Through With You” has its charms (particularly the hesitant piano, like he’s sight-reading the chords), the bridge—which ends on the line “I hear you don’t like men”—feels like a transplant from a darker character study.
But elsewhere, that patience is rewarded. “Stop the World” replaces the demo’s New Age electric piano with acoustic guitar, transplanting Brion’s gorgeous topline into a campfire ballad that could be a Figure 8 B-side. Troper’s version of “No One Can Hurt Me,” originally released in 1994 by Brion’s short-lived band the Grays, takes Brion’s psychedelic guitar motif as license for power balladry, tracking a dual-guitar solo that rocks sincerely. It’s these excursions that make his returns to home base—the lovestruck jangle-pop of “Citgo Sign,” the glee-club Beach Boys homage “Pray for Rain”—that much richer. Just like Brion, the prolific Troper knows the joy of starting a new song. But finishing some is pretty great, too. | 2024-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Lame-O | January 3, 2024 | 7.4 | c60c2260-75ee-4cfd-a6e4-379776362976 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
YYYs- and blogger-approved Montreal band finally has its muscular 2006 EP issued in the States. | YYYs- and blogger-approved Montreal band finally has its muscular 2006 EP issued in the States. | Land of Talk: Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10029-applause-cheer-boo-hiss-ep/ | Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP | They don't make many bands like Pretty Girls Make Graves anymore. The Seattle quintet probably stopped being cool in a trendy sense around the time I got turned onto them, a bit after 2003's The New Romance. As great as that record was, it showed a band mellowing and growing up in a way that made their frantic 2002 debut, Good Health, sound even better. Third album Elan Vital was even more mature, and now, this June, one of indie rock's best-named groups is set to break up. And I think I'm starting to go bald. Pretty fucking depressing.
But still not as depressing as all the limp indie pop copyists filling the Pitchfork mailbox. Good thing there's Montreal trio Land of Talk to keep rocking out in PGMG's harried post-hardcore idiom. Frontwoman Elizabeth Powell's smoldering, harmonically complex fretwork and assured vocals help distinguish Land of Talk from the multi-layered massiveness of their city's best-known indie collectives. Instead, think Toronto's Tokyo Police Club with less treble and no handclaps, the Strokes, or sci-fi. Originally released in Canada last year, Land of Talk's blogger-beloved debut mini-album should finally hit U.S. stores like an unseasonably hot North wind.
While the Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP is a muscular record with gut-level riffs and fist-pumping choruses, it gets there anything but directly; you know you like it long before you know why. See, it's tough to know what Powell's saying half the time, and her guitar-playing overloads on melody so that it ends up communicating mostly mood-- in a year without Marnie Stern and Charlotte Hatherley, her chops might've been the story. The rest of the band stands out most clearly when the songs downshift from urgent release to tense restraint: drummer Bucky Wheaton's portentous cymbal falls and bassist Chris McCarron's undulating groove on finale "Street Wheels", for example.
More often, Land of Talk storm ahead with the night at their heels, escaping lethargic beginnings on "Sea Foam" and getting buffeted by wind sound effects on "Breaxxbaxx". Somehow Powell finds a way to balance early Cat Power fragility and PJ Harvey volatility; whether mumbling indecipherably or singing about "fuckin' around," girls who "still piss their pants," or the dangers of drinking when already tired, she's always in command. Hard to believe she used to sing in a whispery pop group called Ele_K*. Then again, if Alanis Morissette taught us anything, it's that Canada is a land of reinvention. As PGMG's Andrea Zollo once observed, "When I turn it up loud/ Yeah, nothing else matters." | 2007-03-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-03-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Dependent | March 28, 2007 | 7.5 | c60e0907-aeed-4627-a569-9aae1ee9f16c | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On his poignant second album, the multitalented singer-songwriter gives voice to the self-doubts that manifest in the wee hours of the morning. | On his poignant second album, the multitalented singer-songwriter gives voice to the self-doubts that manifest in the wee hours of the morning. | Elliot Moss: A Change in Diet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elliot-moss-a-change-in-diet/ | A Change in Diet | In an interview from 2017, a 23-year-old Elliot Moss told Billboard he liked to work “after the world’s gone to bed.” On A Change in Diet, his second full-length album, the multitalented singer-songwriter gives voice to the creeping whispers of self-doubt that show up unannounced in the wee hours of the morning. Moss makes subdued electro-pop with a deceptively dark, almost despondent, bent — music that leans into the stark reality of those late-night ruminations, when the world seems dark and dreary and even the most innocuous details take on a foreboding significance.
For Moss, letting his mind wander is an opportunity to reflect on relationships, both past and present. On “Bodyintoshapes,” Moss repeats the titular refrain over softly pulsing synths, addressing a significant other he can’t get out of his head. “My mind is a razor,” Moss sighs, “and you’re looking like a thread.” The lyrics occasionally deviate into broad ambiguities or the platitudes of bad spoken-word poetry, as on album opener “July 4th” (“You and I, we’re a couple of fireworks/Falling from the sky”). But when the writing is specific, it’s often sharp and deftly evocative, particularly when Moss draws from personal memory, as on the plaintive, sparsely produced “A Change in Diner”: “We order coffee in a loud diner/Fitting words in between plates/And we brace/Wondering who'll be the one to stay.”
If the album suffers from any overarching issue, it’s a sense of sameness: Moss wrote and produced each song, and it sometimes seems like he’s not pushing himself far enough. Tracks build towards a climax that never materializes, often ending abruptly or tapering off lamely. Moss’ singing voice is pleasant enough, but not particularly strong, and he makes little effort to test its limits, preferring to rely on standard vocal processing tricks and his formidable ear for production. Moss’ other stylistic experiments fall a bit flat, like on “Smile in the Rain,'' a folkish indie anthem that sounds like a track from a completely different album.
But on the standout “Silver + Gold,” all of Moss’ considerable talents coalesce around a richly textured beat and soulful, straightforward lyrics (“Before us, I took a wrong turn down the wrong road/I closed my eyes and I gave up control”). Moss enjoyed a well-deserved bump in popularity in 2015 when a dance video set to his song “Slip” went viral, and he understands the power of thoughtfully produced visuals. In the video for “Silver + Gold” (Moss has a co-directing credit), he makes clear the themes of lost innocence and longing for simpler times he hints at on the album: in the final shot, a young man sheds his ski mask after breaking into his childhood home and grabs a miniature toy plane from his closet for one exultant last hurrah around the neighborhood. “I gave up control, I gave up control,” Moss croons repeatedly, as the camera pans to the character running through the streets in slo-mo and synths in the background settle down to a shimmer. He sounds like he’s comforting himself, finding solace in loosening up and letting the chips fall where they may. For better or for worse, he sounds resigned to his fate.
Buy: Rough Trade
*(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Grand Jury | January 25, 2020 | 6.7 | c61137f0-fd5a-4c6b-88e3-bf6cc8a1bcb6 | Avidan Grossman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/avidan-grossman/ | |
The prog metal band’s fifth album is exactly what you’d expect from a project over a decade in the making: a more mature, sometimes exciting collection that feels both overworked and undercooked. | The prog metal band’s fifth album is exactly what you’d expect from a project over a decade in the making: a more mature, sometimes exciting collection that feels both overworked and undercooked. | Tool: Fear Inoculum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tool-fear-inoculum/ | Fear Inoculum | Tool are just King Crimson in Joker makeup. They thrive in an enormously popular world of polyrhythms and prurience; of Jungian philosophy and Bill Hicks memes; of pewter dragon statues with orbs in their mouths and guys telling you that DMT is actually a chemical in your brain. Forged in the mad-at-my-dad fires of ’90s post-grunge and nu-metal, the progressive metal quartet has sustained a decades-long career on equal parts technical precision and psychedelic bullshit. Their multi-part songs are loosely about embracing pain, grief, desire, transgression, until all your chakras are open and you know exactly why the pieces fit. They’ve been a punchline for years.
But ever since hiding a song at track 69 of their 1993 debut album, Tool have always been sort of in on the joke. A song on their second album Ænima dramatically recited the recipe for weed cookies in German, they have pulled many exhausting April Fool’s jokes on their fans, including one that claimed they were in a horrible bus accident and one that stated the famously apostatical lead singer Maynard James Keenan had quit the band and found Jesus. It’s just that these edgy, twisted, “funny” parts of Tool are empirically stupid. Sure, Keenan has a versatile, emotive voice that granted Tool an audience beyond metalheads. But what he’s actually singing about is and has always been the province of pseudo-spiritual stoners and gamer intellectualism. You see, “Forty Six & 2” is about the Jungian concept of the shadow, and “Rosetta Stoned” is about tripping out and seeing aliens. His trickster humor has curdled of late, culminating in Keenan writing a song in response to a bad Yelp review about his winery.
In recent years, Keenan has spoken to the press far more about his Arizona winery than Tool’s music. (Keenan is a very serious winemaker who, nevertheless, named his vineyard after a pubic wig.) Recording sessions for the band’s fifth album, Fear Inoculum, revolved around his grape harvesting schedule. His wine, his other bands Puscifer and A Perfect Circle, and his restless and enigmatic nature are, in part, the reasons behind the 13-year break between now and Tool’s previous album, 10,000 Days, a gap made almost mythic by the band’s absence from streaming services until earlier this year. The band’s discography roared back into the digital marketplace, smashing Billboard records in the process. Fear Inoculum arrives at a moment of high demand for Tool’s music, filling a vacuum they themselves created.
If there’s one thing that the 86 minutes of Fear Inoculum provides, it is the sound of four people making long, complicated songs together. There are hardly any overdubs, production flourishes, or additional instrumentation, just Keenan’s delicate howl, bassist Justin Chancellor, guitarist Adam Jones, and one of the most lauded drummers in modern rock, Danny Carey. The stripped-down purity of sound here means that everything hangs on the songs themselves, all of which run over 10 minutes, save for a few ambient interludes and a palate-cleansing, nearly five-minute Carey drum solo backed by a giant custom synth. You get what is expected of an album over a decade in the making: a more mature, sometimes exciting collection that feels both overworked and undercooked.
It is hard to parse the difference between which choices here are wise (Keenan taking a back seat to showcase the interplay of the band more) and which are stale (for all the band’s rhythmic exploration, they couldn’t find one new harmonic mode to play in?). One of Tool’s problems on Fear Inoculum is that, with few exceptions, the songs feel static and brittle. They don’t have the live-wire feel of 1996’s Ænima or 2001’s Lateralus, the album that Fear Inoculum sounds most in thrall to. Songs like the opening title track feel long because they exist in protracted straight lines of mechanical riffs, as if assembled through an instruction manual. The hybridization that made Tool so popular on the radio in the late ’90s has rusted: They are part stoner metal, part prog rock, part mainstream metal, all working in ignorance and opposition to each other.
Things do come together a few times. The 15-minute closer “7empest” brings the biggest fireworks from Carey and Jones, the two undoubted stars of the album, adding alluring melody and texture to these bloated epics. But the highlight far and away is “Invincible,” with Keenan singing a revealing refrain about a struggle to “remain relevant” and “consequential.” It feels vulnerable in a new way, a lyric that finally doesn’t come from a defensive, get-off-my-lawn stance. And yet there’s still that Morrissey-level smugness when looking back at his glory years: “The things we’ve done/Caligula would grin.” That line lands poorly in light of a 2018 allegation from a woman on Twitter who claimed Keenan sexually assaulted her in 2000 when she was 17, an accusation that Keenan has denied.
“Invincible” builds to a climax where all the polymeter comes together in a mezzo unison that feels like “Forty Six & 2” with a mute on it. The fact that the ending of “Invincible” doesn’t try to kick you in the ribs points to the larger issue: When Tool think they are using time as a psychedelic additive, it comes off as simple riff-repetition from a band that sounds tired. The stoners of Sleep or the experimentalists of Sumac own this lane of daring, hypnotic metal songs because they bring stakes; you hear people moving in on the instruments and ripping out the notes. Save for Jones’ slide guitar solo, the 23 minutes that make up “Descending” and “Culling Voices” feel so barren and overwrought, you can practically see the band sitting on cushioned stools in the studio, quietly counting out the meter with polite head-nods.
What does the third decade look like for a band whose hit singles include “Prison Sex” and “Stinkfist”? It looks like an aging quartet betting on being calculating and precise, carefully reining things in and keeping everything familiar. Fear Inoculum could have come out any time in the last 13 years, or even the last 20 years. Above all, Fear Inoculum pays homage to Tool itself, a long-delayed encore that has fans racing back to the arena. In a recent interview, Keenan said that one of the main reasons this album took 13 years to make was fear, crippling self-doubt, and constant second-guessing. There’s no joke there, just a bit of self-reflective honesty, which is the one thing that helps keeps this hulking record afloat.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | RCA | September 5, 2019 | 5.4 | c61916f5-62c5-4351-8389-4ab31fe22aeb | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
On their first full-length for Rough Trade, the clattering duo Sleaford Mods remain bards of a Great Britain that is not in fact great, but sloppy, self-important, and wholly lacking in taste. | On their first full-length for Rough Trade, the clattering duo Sleaford Mods remain bards of a Great Britain that is not in fact great, but sloppy, self-important, and wholly lacking in taste. | Sleaford Mods: ENGLiSH TAPAS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22943-english-tapas/ | ENGLiSH TAPAS | English cuisine is hardly the horror show that it was in the 1970s—the British Isles are no longer a Michelin Star free zone—but the title of Sleaford Mods’ new album still raises a smile of recognition. For ENGLiSH TAPAS, they’ve upsized from Nottingham imprint Harbinger Sound to one of the most storied independent labels in history, Rough Trade. But vocalist Jason Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn still keep their gaze fixed in the direction of the discount aisle, bards of a Great Britain that is not in fact great, but sloppy, shallow, self-important, and wholly lacking in taste.
When Sleaford Mods broke out around 2013, Britain was in the grip of austerity, an economic philosophy applied by the Conservative-led government that seemed to inform both the duo’s downtrodden lyrical content and the pared-back clatter of their music. Those days, though, feel insipid compared to 2017’s geopolitical realities, this slow mudslide into state-sanctioned cruelty and small-minded authoritarianism. ENGLiSH TAPAS contains a few fleeting references to the state we are in, like nods to Brexit in “Cuddly” and “Dull.” A breathless rockabilly lurch, titled “Carlton Touts,” finds Williamson mock-mourning the dislodged elites that his lyrics once vilified: “Bring back the neolibs, I’m sorry/I didn’t fucking mean to pray for anarch-eh!” But it would be an overstatement to call this Sleaford Mods’ Brexit LP. Instead, ENGLiSH TAPAS mostly finds Williamson further honing the contours of his singular East Midlands vernacular, with special attention paid to the lifestyles of the tragic and washed-up modern male unable to meet even the low expectations that have been set for him.
“Army Nights” sets the tone, a bumptious opener sending up the special brand of idiocy that occurs in mess halls, stag dos, locker rooms—any place that men congregate without women. Elsewhere, Williamson returns over and over to the topic of alcohol and substance abuse—specifically, to the impulse to get out of one’s mind as a way of ignoring the misery of existence. “Messy Anywhere” is a lads-on-the-town chant that ironically undercuts itself at every stride. “Drayton Manored”—rhymed with “spannered,” meaning “extremely drunk”—is a lurid tale of home drinking, punctuated by the occasional taxi journey to restock, which Fearn mischievously illustrates with a supermarket checkout bleep. Williamson doesn’t hold back in his writing—quite the opposite. But he is never merciless, and his character sketches are shot through with a been-there wisdom, a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I.
Williams is often typecast as a ranter, but ENGLiSH TAPAS is at least as funny as it is angry. Words erupt out of him with stray lines that stick: “Ya so dead in the head you got a job-facing life” (“Messy Anywhere”); “Car crash into the void of the Magna Carta” (“Snout”); “I had an organic chicken it was shit” (“Cuddly”). “Carlton Touts” boasts a chorus that somehow crams four good jokes into as many lines. But for all the humor, there is a palpable sense of desperation, a yawning emptiness that lies just beneath the surface. “Time Sands” muses on the drudgery of existence, the “quiet hell/Of cigarettes and trains and plastic and bad brains,” while “Dull” is utterly chilling, its dubby murk evoking cold English suffering as bleak as anything on PiL’s Metal Box.
Has success changed these perennial underdogs? A little, perhaps. “Just Like We Do” is one of the weaker tracks here, a swipe at experimental music snobs who hate the Mods just ‘cos they’re famous (although Williamson does have the grace to acknowledge that he “used to be one of ‘em”). But there remains an essential morality that runs throughout Sleaford Mods’ music, a reflexive siding with the oppressed. The album’s lead single “B.H.S.” addresses the disgraced tycoon Philip Green, who asset-stripped the department store he owned and fled to the Med leaving his staff without pensions. Williamson and Fearn conduct it as a jerky chicken dance, the sort of thing Pan’s People might have jigged around to on an old “Top of the Pops.”
Sleaford Mods remain literally unique. By turns, ENGLiSH TAPAS reminds you of acts as remote as Happy Mondays, Pet Shop Boys, and Crass, while never sounding anything like any of them. The closing “I Feel So Wrong” finds Williamson switching things up, his scattershot rant softening into a lightly weathered croon. It harkens back to some of the stylistic departures on 2015’s Key Markets—probably Sleaford Mods’ high-water mark to date, a record that opened up a few avenues that remain unexplored here. Still, if ENGLiSH TAPAS at times veers towards formula, it’s at least Sleaford Mods’ own formula, and one that continues to serve them well. | 2017-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | March 6, 2017 | 7.9 | c619d3a5-b221-4096-82dd-88a70f7cfee0 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The Australian singer-songwriter’s new album is a collection of hooky, blistering break-up anthems. | The Australian singer-songwriter’s new album is a collection of hooky, blistering break-up anthems. | Alex Lahey: The Answer Is Always Yes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-lahey-the-answer-is-always-yes/ | The Answer Is Always Yes
| Alex Lahey made her mark with 2017’s “Every Day’s the Weekend,” a sublime surf-rock ode to calling in sick and making out all day. The mood is buoyant, caution-to-the-wind; still, at the chorus, seconds before letting out a millennial whoop, she wonders aloud: “Are you leaving me?” Two years later, on 2019’s Best of Luck Club, she appeared smitten with a Pontiac-maintenance expert named Isabella, begging the girl, “Don’t you run out on me.” Even at her most joyful, Lahey was the poet laureate of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This time it did. On the blistering breakup album The Answer Is Always Yes, Lahey is “a bit fucked up,” “drained,” with “blood filling [her] mouth”—and that’s just the first song. Isabella is evidently no longer in the picture, as indicated by the venomous lead single “Congratulations,” a reflection on a real-life annus horribilis in which not one but two of Lahey’s exes got married. She writes about indulging in ill-advised coping mechanisms and takes an ”unscripted vacation” at her mom’s place. The general vibe is best summarized by the Real Housewives’ Dorinda Medley: “I’ll tell ya how I’m doing: not well, bitch!”
Lahey’s fury is most convincing on “You’ll Never Get Your Money Back,” three minutes of power-pop perfection where she seethes over the indignity of an ex who mooches off her Netflix and still owes her rent. But along with the costs of moving out and splitting up belongings, the breakup saddles Lahey with spiritual debt. The slow-burn ballad “Permanent” spells out her newfound pessimism toward love: “Don’t want to get used to this/In case it’s something that I’ll miss.” And the gutting recollection of queer teen isolation on the grim, goth “They Wouldn’t Let Me In” lends real poignancy to the album’s bitter breakup anthems. Suppose you come out and suffer exclusion from group chats and school dances in hopes of one day marrying a woman. Then she dumps you. Goes on to marry some other woman. What was all that struggle for?
Sometimes the writing on The Answer Is Always Yes is more generic than you’d expect from Lahey. “I let you fake it ’cause I can’t take it,” she sings on the tepid “On the Way Down.” What’s more, her prior work can tower over these new songs; “Shit Talkin’” tries to milk mosh-pit catharsis from the familiar paranoia of “Do my friends hate me, or do I just need sleep?” but it simply doesn’t beat 2019’s “I Don’t Get Invited to Parties Anymore.” But Lahey’s gift for imagery shines on songs like the hazy acoustic trip “The Sky Is Melting,” a rowdy story of misadventure: She spars with a deadbeat pal while high on melted weed gummies, trading conspiracy theories and belting out corny yacht rock before vomiting into a ravine. As she contemplates the world through “eyes wider than dinner plates,” the texture of her unraveling is palpable, disquieting.
Closer “The Answer Is Always Yes” sets an equally skillful scene: Lahey’s sucking on a vape pen in the backseat of a car, on her way to her parents’ house for that aforementioned vacation. It’s a world-weary shrug of a song: better to have loved and lost, nothing ventured, etc. All that’s left is the meager assurance that tomorrow might be better: No, your friends don’t hate you. Yes, you need to sleep. Even when the second pillow’s vacant. | 2023-05-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Liberation | May 22, 2023 | 7.5 | c62e4f98-735f-4658-bb4a-6b60c633f087 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Mike Ladd's contribution to Thirsty Ear's Blue Series takes its title from and is inspired by the writings of Petrine Archer-Straw. | Mike Ladd's contribution to Thirsty Ear's Blue Series takes its title from and is inspired by the writings of Petrine Archer-Straw. | Mike Ladd: Negrophilia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4624-negrophilia/ | Negrophilia | Mike Ladd is one of contemporary hip-hop's great innovators, even though he often either operates on the very fringes of the genre or leaves it completely. He has a warm, versatile voice, and impressive flow, but more importantly, he has a lot of ideas. There are times when Ladd's vision and reach are so broad that his music can't quite keep up with it, but he's skilled enough to consistently produce satisfying albums-- twice creating absolutely brilliant ones: Welcome to the Afterfuture and Majesticons' Beauty Party.
Listening to Ladd, it's clear that unifying concepts-- such as the underground vs. mainstream rivalry/soap opera of the Infesticons and Majesticons projects-- are important to him, and his first entry in Thirsty Ear's Blue Series is no exception. Negrophilia takes its title from and is inspired by the writings of Petrine Archer-Straw, who wrote a boom with the same name (subtitled Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s). Her tome expounded upon the Paris art world's embrace of black American and African ex-pats-- and its co-option of their art and culture, which played heavily into Art Deco, cubism (earlier in the century), and Euro-jazz.
Now, if most artists were to say their album was influenced by a particular work of non-fiction, you might notice the influence in one song or a title or the cover art, but Ladd is serious. He weaves examinations of the book's themes-- as well as civil rights-related sound clips and references to both military and cultural imperialism and conflations of early 20th Century European art and modern American pop stars ("Brancusi sculpting Beyonce in Gold lame/ Blond negress")-- into his open-ended, heavily chopped and diced songs. The musical approach\xD0heavy improvisation revisited, reconfigured and reconstituted into dense sound collages yields plenty of interesting moments, but it also unfortunately marginalizes Ladd's rapping and also opens the door to passages that grow unfocused or cluttered.
Ladd does have a crack band at his disposal, with drummer Guillermo E. Brown (a frequent David S. Ware collaborator) helping to shape the record through editing and electronics, Vijay Iyer adding keyboards, winds by Andrew Lamb, Roy Campbell on trumpet, and Bruce Grant on tape loops. They set a promising tone with "Fieldwork (the Ethnographer's Daughter)", opening with dry hand percussion and acoustic guitar to simulate a field recording and settling on an ominous groove for Ladd to drop a few lines over, manipulating his voice even as it's attacked from all sides by squirming loops and fluttering woodwinds and horn. "Shake It" runs away with the show, though, with its off-kilter, lurching beat, outbursts of sax and trumpet and Ladd's tense flow.
"Worldwide Shrinkwrap (Contact Zones)" comes close to the glory of "Shake It", but questionable vocal processing-- including annoying pitch-shifting-- keeps it from getting there. That's indicative of the problems with the album's weaker tracks-- they wander through lengthy passages of wet noodle electro-jazz. Fortunately, the LP also has luxurious instrumental sections, such as the remarkable bassoon and trumpet duel of "Back at Ya," or Iyer's piano meditation and Campbell's dusty solo on "Sam and Milli Dine Out".
It's a shame that the disc isn't more laserly in its focus, because its best moments are stellar and exhilarating. We know from history that Ladd is very capable of making instrumentals that feel like they're going somewhere, so it's something of a mystery as to why he gets such mixed results here, but even great musicians aren't fail-proof. | 2005-01-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2005-01-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Thirsty Ear | January 30, 2005 | 7.2 | c64d0a2a-82ce-4dab-8958-918f29c89638 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 album, a sorrowful and prescient appraisal of the Black experience. | 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 Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 album, a sorrowful and prescient appraisal of the Black experience. | Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-pieces-of-a-man/ | Pieces of a Man | In 1971, Gil Scott-Heron observed the gradual demise of a man in his neighborhood who was driven over the brink after being let go from his job without warning. What came of Scott-Heron bearing witness to that unraveling is “Pieces of a Man.” For the song, Scott-Heron replaced the neighbor with a fictitious account of his own father: Before this downward spiral, he appears to be a decent person with a solid grip on life. As the story progresses, different encounters with the man suggest that he’s wearing thin from misfortune. Scott-Heron’s melodies grow more and more agonizing as he watches his father, his neighbor, his fellow man become a shell of their former selves.
Twenty-six years after the song was written, New York City hip-hop renaissance man Bobbito Garcia interviewed Scott-Heron at his apartment for Vibe. Discussing a few standouts from his catalog, Scott-Heron, 47 years old at the time, said that he listened to “Pieces of a Man” every morning in order to clear his mind. He elaborated on the ritual: “Everywhere I’ve traveled, [people outside the U.S.] are concerned about Black Americans cause we’re still not welcome in the U.S. and we’re still here—standing. I put that in my music. You’re living where people obstacle everything you do. So if a man survives and comes back the next morning, then God bless, brother, and good morning to you.”
The album that song belonged to, 1971’s Pieces of a Man, was Scott-Heron’s first go at championing that resilience through music. The year before, he released Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a live poetry album featuring congas and some sparse singing. It housed the original spoken-word version of his most well-known song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” where, through a staggering number of 1960s pop-culture references, he cautioned fellow Black Americans that sitting idle and settling for scraps wasn’t gonna bring about any meaningful change.
Small Talk also called out Black people who thought their fashionable displays of Afrocentrism gave them license to look down on “common folk.” It comically lamented the U.S. government for pumping millions into a moon landing instead of the well-being of its Black population. And it gave Scott-Heron the space to express that no level of liberal outlook from white people would wipe away their centuries of wrongdoing—or his right to be angry. Its power rested in Scott-Heron’s candid criticism of his country and the frustration of realizing that change was hard to come by. Pieces of a Man shares this urgent appraisal of the Black experience, but it draws mainly on pain and sorrow rather than rage.
The album’s title track masterfully peels back the layers of a person’s psyche through strife and that attention to detail is mirrored throughout the remaining songs. A full band—led by Scott-Heron’s career-long collaborator Brian Jackson—brought something out in his poetry that congas alone couldn’t quite achieve. “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” feels like an intergenerational biography of someone who fled their cookie-cutter hometown for a big city, haunted by the trauma that resurfaces when they go back to visit. Like much of Scott-Heron’s early work, it also centers the experiences of people dealing with addiction, flipping the script on those who are quick to judge: “You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it. God, but did you ever try/To turn your sick soul inside out. So that the world, so that the world. Can watch you die?” On “Lady Day and John Coltrane,” he sings the praises of two jazz deities whose music can soothe the grave realities of life. Jackson’s piano and Ron Carter’s bass, when given time to exist without vocals, emphasize the grief in Scott-Heron’s cries of a downtrodden existence on “A Sign of the Ages.”
The feelings expressed on Pieces of a Man are those of someone processing grief in real time. Scott-Heron spent his formative years watching the assassinations of Black American liberation fighters. Less than two years before the album was released, the 21-year-old activist and Black Panther Party deputy chairman Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep by Chicago police. Hampton was just two years older than Scott-Heron and, like the singer, had the heart to not only hold the U.S. accountable for its crimes against its Black citizens in his work, but to take an active part in building the world that he wanted to live in (the message Scott-Heron was pushing in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”). Scott-Heron is also grieving the deterioration of the people who are still hanging on here. The influx of soldiers returning home from the Vietnam War to empty promises of upward mobility and new heroin addictions was also taking a toll on Black communities at this time. Years before his own struggles became apparent, tales of addiction were already a fixture in Scott-Heron’s music. The pain-filled melodies in Pieces of a Man are a response to feeling like the world is caving in on you.
Though Scott-Heron’s music dealt chiefly with the woes of American imperialism and oppression, he was part of a class of artists across the African diaspora who were growing tired with their nations’ politics and human rights policies. Down in Jamaica, Bob Marley and Wailers’ music became increasingly political in the early ’70s, in comparison to the easygoing ska they made in the ’60s. The island’s independence from Britain in 1962 did little to change the lives of its majority Black citizens and as political turmoil took shape, songs like “Get Up, Stand Up,” “400 Years,” and “Burnin and Lootin’” became the soundtrack of unrest and violence. At the same time, the Nigerian songwriter Fela Kuti, after years of studying and performing abroad—and familiarizing himself with Black American liberation movements like the Panthers in California—returned to his country to use his music as a tool to criticize the Nigerian military and governmental corruption that followed a three-year civil war. A few years later in South Africa, jazz pioneer Hugh Masekela released “Soweto Blues,” a tribute to children murdered by local police at a protest against the apartheid government’s institution of Afrikaans as the official language of schools. Masekela would continue to position himself as a leading artistic voice for the anti-apartheid struggle for the rest of his career.
This global Black frequency formed symbiotic relationships between artists who knew that they deserved better. Following in the footsteps of Black leaders across the diaspora who pushed for freedom and independence from colonial powers in the 1960s, their collective shouts suggested that the respective struggles they faced were microcosms of a larger, worldwide issue with white supremacist structures. But what those artists had in their work was what we’ve been conditioned to believe is the most effective way to inspire a revolution through music—grandiose rallying cries composed of chants, horns, or thumping drums (conventions that hold decades later in, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”). It’s the type of music you can see yourself marching to battle to, chest swelled with emotion. Even Scott-Heron’s celebrated 1973 album Winter in America was a conceptual, straightforward attempt at assessing the country's political climate and its effects on Black people. Pieces of a Man stands out because its approach is more existential: Scott-Heron details the ways that he, and those he’s observed, are coping in an unkind world that was unkind to their elders, and would surely be unkind to their unborn children. It’s Scott-Heron taking in the horror he’s witnessed across decades of his young life, morbidly staring at the casualties of those battles.
There are flashes of optimism when Gil Scott-Heron looks to the future, though. On “Save the Children,” accompanied by Hubert Laws’ buoyant flute, he sings of taking an active role in changing Black people’s reality before innocent youth have to grow up to the same bullshit. “Or Down You Fall” is a personal pick-me-up that cautions against stagnation. He presents his most poignant set of questions on “I Think I’ll Call It Morning,” a song about intentionally claiming good days for yourself. There, Scott-Heron posits: “Why should I survive on sadness? And tell myself I’ve got to be alone? Why should I subscribe to this world’s madness? Knowing that I’ve got to live on.” Even at his most unsure, Scott-Heron knew that this fight wasn’t just for right now. “Revolution isn’t an overnight thing,” he said in an interview with Players magazine (sometimes called the Black Playboy of its time) in 1975. “Like some people jumped up in the ’60s and said: ‘Revolution,’ and then in the next three or four years it didn’t happen, everybody said: ‘Naa, there ain’t no revolution.’ Revolution is a constantly building process, a constantly developing process.”
Pieces of a Man is a young Scott-Heron coming to terms with his world, disappointed in how unfair it is, scoffing at people who choose distraction over contribution to solving the issues, and admitting a genuine fear of what we’ll leave to the children we’re raising. Because the majority of our most adored anti-establishment music has been characterized by force and rage, hearing an artist exhibit their vulnerability to that ongoing assault through sadness is an illuminating experience. Anger is one of humankind’s most easily accessible emotions. And in American culture, it’s especially acceptable as a social device for men to establish and maintain their dominance—over enemies and their own families, equally. But anger is often linked to depression and suppressed feelings of sadness. On Pieces of a Man, while markedly painful to witness at times, Gil Scott-Heron’s election to process that unhappiness is a step in the right direction of destigmatizing what it means to publicly shed our skin. It teaches the listener, the activist, and the fighter that there’s ample space for every emotion. And it’s often in those moments of uncomfortable exposure that we go on to grow into better versions of ourselves.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Flying Dutchman | December 13, 2020 | 9 | c650e120-cb5f-455e-9c14-32cca1818733 | Lawrence Burney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lawrence-burney/ | |
Injecting blastbeats and mosh-worthy riffs with classic soul and reggae samples, the Los Angeles hardcore band’s debut insists on a complex and irreducible vision of Blackness. | Injecting blastbeats and mosh-worthy riffs with classic soul and reggae samples, the Los Angeles hardcore band’s debut insists on a complex and irreducible vision of Blackness. | Zulu: A New Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zulu-a-new-tomorrow/ | A New Tomorrow | Zulu have no time to waste. In the five-second gap after “Africa,” the reverent orchestral introduction of their debut album A New Tomorrow, but before the forceful drop-tuned power chord buzz of “For Sista Humphrey,” the Los Angeles-based powerviolence quintet raises a quick question: “Ayo, it’s Zulu in this bitch, what y’all niggas on?” The music drives forward, anchored by drummer Christine Cadette and bassist Satchel Brown, who back a chugging riff played by guitarists Braxton Marcellous and Dez Yusuf. Then comes a death metal growl from vocalist Anaiah Lei, and the band’s full-length debut A New Tomorrow takes off on a trajectory that cannot be predicted or contained.
Lei is a multi-instrumentalist who got his start as a teenager alongside brother Mikaiah Lei in the indie rock band the Bots and went to play in California punk bands DARE and Culture Abuse. He founded Zulu in 2018. Two early EPs, 2019’s Our Day Will Come and 2020’s My People… Hold On, solidified the band’s signature style: blastbeats and mosh-worthy grooves injected with samples of classic soul and reggae artists who sing of fortifying Black community. If the EPs were experimental studies, then A New Tomorrow holds nothing back, sounding confident and all-encompassing. The record has a mind and a memory that examines all angles of Black legacy while working to define the future without fear or strife.
In a recent interview with NPR, Lei expressed disinterest in writing lyrics that only address suffering. “When people think about the pain of exclusion, they think about Black people. And then we end up getting tokenized one way or another,” he said. A New Tomorrow confronts prejudice, alienation, and anger on its own terms. “52 Fatal Strikes,” updated from Our Day Will Come, is two-stepping hardcore that speaks of racial injustice: “I’ve done nothing/I just exist/Don’t front/I know you wanna kill me.” The lyrics are forward and fluffless, even on softer tracks like “Crème de Cassis,” a spoken-word critique of a nation that fixates on Black people’s pain without providing space to celebrate their resiliency. “Why must I only share our struggle/When our Blackness is so much more?” asks vocalist Aleisia Miller over piano accompaniment by Precious Tucker. “We’re favored by the sun from the moment we’re created.”
The dynamic force of powerviolence isn’t the loudest part of A New Tomorrow: It’s the way the album juxtaposes the sludge and the shrieks with songs performed in styles popularized by Black people. At times it is poignant and reverent, like the tearful little prayers of the layered voices that ask “Must I only share my pain?” on the mid-album interlude of the same title. Zulu are at their most confrontational in this mode, revealing vulnerability while daring hardcore purists to try to enforce a distinction between Lei’s guttural roar of protest on “Music to Driveby” and the sampled croon of Curtis Mayfield that follows. By refusing to be flattened, Zulu make clear that working within genre lines is far less meaningful than a commitment to the history of Black music, Black love, and Black might.
A New Tomorrow is a record surrounded by infinity mirrors, seeing the traumas of Black people for generations past and present while choosing to rejoice in the rich culture that has sustained the soul and spirit of its communities. With their debut, Zulu position themselves firmly within that legacy, reifying the connection between icons like Mayfield and Nina Simone and peers like Soul Glo’s Pierce Jordan, who appears alongside Playytime’s Obioma Ugonna on “Where I’m From.” “Won’t ask for what’s mine/I’m anointed,” they howl. At the heart of A New Tomorrow is the purest form of joy and unwavering strength. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “No, I do not weep for the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” A New Tomorrow trades the oyster knife for brutal guitars, double-kick drums, and hands cupped around a microphone. For Zulu, joy is heritage and heritage is resistance. | 2023-03-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Flatspot | March 16, 2023 | 7.8 | c652db7b-d47b-4922-8b6f-a68282a492eb | Lindsay Temple | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-temple/ | |
Shaped around a loose narrative, the Birmingham drill rapper’s debut album paints an immersive picture of everyday brutality with gripping beats and detailed imagery. | Shaped around a loose narrative, the Birmingham drill rapper’s debut album paints an immersive picture of everyday brutality with gripping beats and detailed imagery. | M1llionz: Provisional License | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m1llionz-provisional-license/ | Provisional License | M1llionz knows to listen to his mother. “Mum said” forms a recurring refrain throughout Provisional License, the Birmingham drill rapper’s debut album, as he repeats his mother’s advice on everything from commitment and settling down (“Mum said bitches ain’t going anywhere,” on “Hometown”) to feeding your ambition (“Mum said surround yourself with winners,” on the title track). These interjections represent an appeal to the one authority M1llionz recognizes. They also form a bridge between domestic comfort and a brutal outside world that most will never witness. It’s a world that M1llionz conjures with greater skill and precision than any other rapper working out of the UK today.
Provisional License is shaped around a loose narrative. M1llionz assumes the protagonist’s role on a risky trip up the motorway with a suspicious package in the footwell and a female partner in the passenger seat. They’re pulled over by police, but M1llionz—driving without a full license—speeds off rather than stepping out of the car for a search. The near-miss gives him flashbacks to time spent imprisoned, where his thoughts consume him.
M1llionz uses small brushstrokes to paint expansive, immersive pictures. Apparently banal observations scale up to striking vistas: He scrapes toothpaste remnants from a flattened Colgate tube (“Intro”), and he hides a SIM card under his foreskin to avoid detection on “Jail Brain.” A groan at the prospect of having to find a drill to replace the phony registration plates on a stolen car (“the sticky plates falling off of the dinger”) upends clichés of glamorized gangsterism on “Pedestrian.” On “Bando Spot,” he playfully interpolates 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”; but where 50 thrives on lyrical euphemism, M1llionz only trades in the most acute details: ANPR cameras, delivery charges, and crumbs of cocaine scraped from the sides of a crack pot. These dashes of color elevate his songs from an otherwise familiar drill canvas of skippy hi-hats and sliding 808s. (That being said, M1llionz also has a knack for picking gripping beats: The stuttering kicks on “Badnis” and the moody mid-point switch-up on “Intro” are two examples of this facility.)
Elsewhere, he grounds his street occupation in the language of the boardroom—to sometimes comic effect. “The last yute resigned, now I’ve got no staff,” he bemoans on “Badnis”; last year, with his blockbuster call-to-arms “Lagga,” he became the first rapper to slip the phrase “statutory sick pay” into a song about slinging crack. His testimony merges worlds, highlighting the invisible lines that separate communities in the UK’s modern cities, where million-pound mortgaged homes tower alongside terraces, and the down and out shelter in the doorways of steel-and-glass monuments to global capital.
Inventive flows and the disarming lilt of his West Midlands accent give M1llionz further distinction. He raps like a veteran racing driver: calm and completely in tune with his vehicle. His multi-syllables create rushing run-ons, his hard consonants stamp full stops, and sometimes, like on “Regular Bag,” he flows for so long you wonder whether he’ll pass out for lack of oxygen. It amps up the stakes, making his stories more immediate. And on an increasingly busy starting grid, it’s this mastery of his tools that sets M1llionz apart. An open road awaits.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ten Percent Music Elite Group | September 28, 2021 | 7.7 | c65f0703-a6a9-4c52-969d-f6b6a36bf5b6 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
After an extended search for inspiration, the New Zealand singer/songwriter uses color and newly adventurous song structures to explore definitions and limits of freedom. | After an extended search for inspiration, the New Zealand singer/songwriter uses color and newly adventurous song structures to explore definitions and limits of freedom. | Tiny Ruins: Olympic Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tiny-ruins-olympic-girls/ | Olympic Girls | Though extended spans between albums from a beloved musician can be worrisome or even infuriating for fans, it can be a sign of necessary inspiration, too. Such is the case for New Zealand singer/songwriter Hollie Fullbrook, who has released records under the name Tiny Ruins since 2010. Four years ago, after the exhaustive touring cycle behind 2014’s already heavy-hearted Brightly Painted One, Fullbrook felt depleted and numb. “I remember just being like, ‘I’m empty. I’m completely empty,’” she says. “It took a few months to find stuff that I was excited about again.” After foraging for a new creative fix, Fullbrook seems to have found something special: Olympic Girls, the third Tiny Ruins album, embraces lyrical nuance and compositional evolution in compelling fashion.
From the circus-like melodies of “One Million Flowers” to the fractured luminosity of “Holograms,” these 11 tracks take curious turns down hidden paths, especially relative to the more straightforward, muted folk of Tiny Ruins’ past. Fullbrook’s voice is silvery, with a controlled grain, the texture imparting a sense of trust as she guides us through muddied trails of melancholy and bright grottos of psychedelia. One of her initial inspirations when writing these songs was a book of Van Gogh paintings. Compelled by his large brushstrokes and lush colors, her lyrics are replete with motion and vivid imagery—flowers “dash for the natural light” during “One Million Flowers,” while a woman rushes through the doors of a blue laundrette on “My Love Leda.”
Fullbrook uses these colors to express quests for freedom. White walls symbolize oppressive austerity on “School of Design,” for instance, Fullbrook detailing an empty institution that sits too perfectly manicured and still. The feeling urges her to “Bust through the ceiling/Raise glass to the sky.” Fingerpicked guitars descend over her vocals like a drizzle of rain; climbing vibraphone scales impart eeriness. Fullbrook seeks the hue of a chaotic impulse.
She captures similar luster and energy on the title track, a surprising and poignant confession from an ex-prisoner. “You only had your Olympic girls/The frosted sheen of leotard twirls/Running revolt and winning gold,” she sings, conjuring athleticism in Technicolor. The song comes from an exchange Fullbrook had with a man during a 13-hour bus ride from Dallas to Chicago when she was a teenager. He watched the Olympics on TV with fellow inmates “before being led back to the cells,” she remembers. The image captures a painful irony—watching the freedom of pure athleticism while being bound behind bars. Fullbrook smartly pairs this tale with music that seems to bloom—from a tender acoustic start to a gilded electric beauty and, finally, into a liberating moment that suggests some fancy Vampire Weekend outburst.
Fullbrook consistently explores the definition of liberty through varied perspectives here. “Bounty” reverses the previous liberty/imprisonment dichotomy, as a protagonist awaits inevitable capture. During closer “Cold Enough to Climb,” Fullbrook sings in a languid drawl about a “smoker pink” sky and a seven-hour car ride. In her mind, she settles inside the crevices of another’s arms—for a moment, at least, free from pain. Sometimes these songs are wistful; other times, they fight outcomes as inevitable as death itself (“I saw the grim reaper/And I gave him the slip”). Set to music that looks toward new horizons, Olympic Girls is a gentle study into freedom’s precariousness. The quest can be exhausting and frustrating, but, here, Tiny Ruins relish its brief embrace. | 2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing / Milk! / Marathon Artists | February 9, 2019 | 7.4 | c66547e4-23ff-411a-bfeb-5a4f4047f55e | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
After two albums of instrumental guitar pieces that drew comparisons to steel-string greats, William Tyler tries for a completely different musical atmosphere: that of a standard-issue rock band playing live in a room. Among the three tracks are a Michael Rother cover, providing an unusual kraut-country hybrid. | After two albums of instrumental guitar pieces that drew comparisons to steel-string greats, William Tyler tries for a completely different musical atmosphere: that of a standard-issue rock band playing live in a room. Among the three tracks are a Michael Rother cover, providing an unusual kraut-country hybrid. | William Tyler: Lost Colony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19294-william-tyler-lost-colony/ | Lost Colony | Nashville guitarist and composer William Tyler’s new 12” Lost Colony marks a significant departure from his two solo albums, both of which were collections of sparely orchestrated, virtuoso guitar instrumentals. His debut, 2010’s Behold the Spirit, was a workbook’s worth of tricky exercises in rapid-fire fingerpicking, cluttered harmonies, and expansive open tunings. With the help of song titles like “Terrace of the Leper King” and “The Cult of the Peacock Angel”, the comparisons to John Fahey rolled in. On his follow-up, Impossible Truth, Tyler rebelled modestly against that designation, peppering the album with bristlier psych-Americana pieces for electric guitar and drones. Now, across Lost Colony’s three tracks, the guitarist seeks to capture a completely different musical atmosphere: that of a standard-issue rock band playing live in a room.
The main attraction on the EP is the first track, the 13-minute “Whole New Dude". It's essentially two movements punctuated by a recurring string of overdriven electric guitar chords which conjure up the image of hurtling towards a Midwestern skyline on an open, mildly potholed highway. The interest of the track is mostly in the changing rhythmic emphases of Tyler’s finger-picking against Jamin Orrall’s unwavering, muscular drumbeat. Tyler switches between a few basic riffs, which he plays in a cyclical progression like a regimented Indian raga. Though it’s extraordinarily involved playing, the band runs the arrangement down like they do it a few times every day, and the ritualistic nature of their performance gives the song a compellingly static, meditative quality.
The EP’s second track, “We Can't Go Home Again”, is also on Impossible Truth. There, it's an acoustic guitar solo redolent of the English folk scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s, building in intensity as Tyler adds increasingly detailed ornamentations and internal melodies. Lost Colony’s full-band retake sounds more like a jangly Big Star instrumental augmented by steel guitar swells. It's easy to see why Tyler decided that this version was worth a separate release—the arrangement transforms the character of the song entirely, but it also doesn’t add anything to it. Instead, the full-throttle treatment obscures some of the finer points of the guitar playing and reduces the piece’s dynamic range. If the original was a beacon of clarity after Impossible Truth’s comparatively sludgy first half, it feels inconsequential on Lost Colony, an intermission between two pieces with more inventive musical aims.
The second of these is an odd, playful cover of “Karusell”, a model kraut-shuffle from Neu! founder Michael Rother’s 1977 album Flammende Herzen. The appeal of Rother’s original is its compressed, streamlined flatness—the modesty of the grainy synth, lightly chugging rhythm guitar, and dry, muted drumkit. But the ornate details count in Tyler's version. The ping-ponging delay and fuzz on the guitar build up until the band fades out still blaring, the "carousel" spinning out of control in a way that the original never does.
On the whole, Tyler’s move toward a full ensemble feels inspired. It is gratifying to see such a gifted artist broadening his palette to accommodate new influences. If Lost Colony is a testing ground for ideas for a new full-length ensemble effort, it's an auspicious beginning. But it remains to be seen whether an entire album of kraut-country—Tyler has hinted at the idea—or even a record without solo guitar will play to his well-tested strengths for subtlety and complexity. | 2014-05-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-05-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | May 1, 2014 | 7.3 | c66d9c1b-2781-4bbb-97a1-534e5472414d | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
On his 32nd studio album, Elvis Costello treats the traditional rock quartet as the ideal medium for delicacy, concision, wit, and the occasional harangue. | On his 32nd studio album, Elvis Costello treats the traditional rock quartet as the ideal medium for delicacy, concision, wit, and the occasional harangue. | Elvis Costello / The Imposters: The Boy Named If | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elvis-costello-the-imposters-the-boy-named-if/ | The Boy Named If | Consider Elvis Costello as the musical equivalent of the Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges’ term for “one of the points in space that contain all other points.” George Jones, Allen Toussaint, Stax, and classical music, sure; also, ABBA and Dusty Springfield. Costello’s monstrous appetite for genre has occasionally led him to believe he has mastered every genre. But his own instincts can get in the way: A punnery as dense as zircon has often interfered with the simple pleasure of a band as tight as the Imposters (aka the Attractions, with bassist Davey Faragher replacing Bruce Thomas in 2001), especially when Steve Nieve’s array of keyboards wheezed and squealed, mocking Costello’s objects of derision.
Costello fans will find many delights in The Boy Named If. For one, his 32nd studio album sounds smashing. Sebastian Krys’ mix stresses the textures of acoustic instruments without walloping listeners; Costello’s guitar, as restless as a child at a symphony even on solid albums like When I Was Cruel and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, burrows right between Faragher’s bass and Nieve’s keyboards, enunciating hook after hook. A book written and illustrated by Costello himself accompanies the deluxe edition, but one needn’t own it to understand how the album unfolds as a series of scabrous vignettes recorded during the pandemic. The mood is splenetic, but not maliciously so, like an old codger telling decades-old dirty jokes for an imagined audience. Toughening his early gusto with decades of those genre experiments, Elvis-as-Aleph treats the trad rock quartet as the ideal medium for delicacy, concision, wit, and the occasional harangue.
An artist recording since the dawn of punk must regard new material as a set of points containing all other points. “The Death of Magic Thinking” sports the deathless Bo Diddley rhythm with which he experimented on 1981’s “Lover’s Walk.” Echoes of Spike’s song-length conceit “God’s Comic” reverberate on “Trick Out the Truth,” as approximate to the garrulous Costello of yore as the album gets. Listeners might even hear bits of 1991’s Paul McCartney co-write “So Like Candy” in the aggressive ballad “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” not to mention “Brilliant Mistake,” the 1986 quasi-country chestnut where Costello revealed his attempts at ridicule as a species of self-ridicule.
Costello has tinkered for decades with a paradox: He’s most delightful when disillusionment is the subject of his formal obsessions; he’s happiest playing a cynic who needs talking off a ledge (he names one new song “Magnificent Hurt,” of course). The superbly titled “The Death of Magic Thinking,” given added resonance by arriving mere weeks after Joan Didion’s death, wastes not a second: Pete Thomas kicks up a churn on percussion that’s almost as much a lead instrument as Costello’s stun guitar, while the singer admits how his muse—a “machine that can turn ink stains into words”—requires the “spark” of frustration, sexual and otherwise. Sometimes, anyway. “The Man You Love to Hate,” one of The Boy Named If’s more plodding moments, has Costello huffing and puffing like Laurence Olivier’s fourth-rate vaudevillian in The Entertainer.
The Boy Named If has at least two classics: “The Death of Magic Thinking,” certainly, and a ballad called “Paint the Red Rose Blue,” its strong melody sung with impressive plaintiveness. Perhaps “The Difference,” a rocker based on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, with a repeated “do ya know?” hook hounded by Nieve’s embellishments. That’s three more than on near-misses like the Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost. Competing with a back catalog as mighty as Costello’s repertoire must suck—“history repeats the old conceits,” he acknowledged long ago. But to don “Elvis Costello” drag and record work as vital The Boy Named If after four decades shouldn’t impress this deeply. Convincing audiences that role playing is an expression of self has been Costello’s subtle lesson all along.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol / EMI | January 19, 2022 | 7.5 | c6703f19-6556-4b51-b380-c4c19500b7c8 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ |
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